Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries – whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Titles include: Scott Black OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Claire Brock THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750–1830 Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 E. J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Elizabeth Eger BLUESTOCKINGS Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (editors) BOOKISH HISTORIES Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 George C. Grinnell THE AGE OF HYPOCHONDRIA Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness Ian Haywood BLOODY ROMANTICISM Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832

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Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Stirling; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Cambridge

Michelle Levy FAMILY AUTHORSHIP AND ROMANTIC PRINT CULTURE April London LITERARY HISTORY WRITING, 1770–1820 Robert Miles ROMANTIC MISFITS Tom Mole BYRON’S ROMANTIC CELEBRITY Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy Nicola Parsons READING GOSSIP IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Erik Simpson LITERARY MINSTRELSY, 1770–1830 Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish and American Literature Anne H. Stevens BRITISH HISTORICAL FICTION BEFORE SCOTT Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789–1832 Esther Wohlgemut ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM David Worrall THE POLITICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY, 1787–1832 The Road to the Stage

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Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN’S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature

April London

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Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

© April London 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. 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 978–0–230–24813–7

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For the three generations: Walter, Keith, Neil, James

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Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Section I: Writing and Rewriting Lives

9

1 Writing Lives Addison and the history of literary criticism Ordering “Lives” after Johnson Literary history and opinion

13 13 16 24

2 Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy Before and after the Revolution Literary history and the politics of rationalization Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips

27 28 32 37

Section II: Literary History and Books

47

3 Bibliomania and Antiquarianism The “rational antiquary” Antiquarianism and Warton’s History of English Poetry

49 49 54

4 Literary History and Literary Specimens George Ellis and the “opinions and prejudices of mankind” Southey’s “sneering at the reader” in a history of modern taste Thomas Campbell and the “national mind”

59 60 66 72

Section III: Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History

81

5 Apostasy and Exclusion “What often is not in history”: conservative iconoclasm and writing from outside “The historian of the human mind”

85

6 The Structures of Opinion Opinion, secret history, and anecdote Literary history and An Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First

vii

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85 89 97 97 104

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Contents

Section IV: The Genres of Literary History

111

7 The “whole mind of the nation” “Our Ancient Literature” History, biography, and the “mind of the community” Writing literary histories of “domestic and civil life” Literary histories in and of the novel

113 113 115 118 124

8 Literary History, Periodicals, Lectures The hypercritical tribe John Corry’s View of London The Cockneys and the Lakers Institutional lectures and literary history

134 134 138 143 148

Conclusion

157

Notes

161

Bibliography

201

Index

219

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viii Contents

Many friends and colleagues have contributed to making the research and writing of this book a pleasure. Robert Folkenflik responded generously to numbers of questions, while Philip Connell, Tim Stewart, Lilach Lachman, Susan Hitch, Naomi Segal, Donna Kearns, and Ina Ferris variously provided scholarly advice, support, and stimulating conversation. Annabel Patterson once again offered vigorous critical direction in the final stages of writing. For his careful and perceptive commentary on large portions of the book, I am grateful to Mark Phillips. Keith Wilson read the whole with unfaltering patience and intelligence. Thanks to The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, for the cover image from Rudolph Ackermann’s The Microcosm of London. For a grant that enabled research in Great Britain and the United States, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Johnson’s Lives and the Genealogy of Late Eighteenth-Century Literary History,” in Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History, ed. Philip Smallwood (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004). Portions of Chapters 5 and 6 appeared in “Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History: Opinion, Anecdote, and Secret History in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Poetics Today 26: 351–86, Copyright 2005, Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. My thanks to both Presses for permission to reuse material and, more particularly, to Meir Sternberg and Robert Griffin, Editor and Associate Editor of Poetics Today.

ix

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Acknowledgments

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“Is literary history possible?” (David Perkins) “Is literary history the history of everything?” (David Simpson) “Literary history used to be impossible to write; lately it has become much harder.” (Lawrence Lipking)1 As both questions and quip suggest, “literary history,” or writing the history of literature, now seems a problematic form, both unavoidable and beyond our competence. The “now” in this sentence, and the fact that all three quotations in my epigraph are from twentieth- to twentyfirst-century critics, speak to the fact that the enterprise has come to seem more elusive and contested even as it has become more sophisticated and self-conscious. The late nineteenth-century certainties of Edmund Gosse, John Morley, and George Saintsbury seem positively naïve after the successive challenges of new criticism, deconstruction, structuralism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, not to mention the strong paradigms created by Harold Bloom (the anxiety of influence) and Jerome McGann (Romantic ideology). Hardly surprising, then, that the goal of a new and complete literary history, while attractive, appears unachievable. This book takes a step back from the construction of such an inclusive, teleological narrative. Instead, it concentrates on a fairly narrow slice of time, 1770 to 1820, and considers the interest within that period in the writing of histories of literary history. In the half century on which I focus, the production of “literary history” has 1

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Introduction

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

been both understudied and misunderstood. Interest has been shut off by the standard modern assumption that for contemporaries its goal was simply the formation of a transcendent canon, a register of enduring works of “original Genius of a high order.”2 While the redirection of critical attention beyond the once normative six “Romantic” poets has broadened the literary field more generally, these revisionist energies have not touched the domain of literary history writing, leaving intact the view that between 1770 and 1820 its functions were principally consolidating and conservative ones. Even the recognition that the current “turn to history” recapitulates characteristic features of the early nineteenth century has not prompted investigation of how such an insight might affect our thinking about the very modes within the period that worked to conceptualize the literary past.3 As this book will show, literary history in the period took many different forms, and exhibited several agendas. Generically, it included collective biography, autobiography and memoir, antiquarianism, bibliography, and what were called at the time, “specimens,” “anecdotes,” and “secret history.” Culturally, these varied forms allowed for the development of adversarial positions as well as consensus, multiple readerships as distinct from the cultivated class, provisionality along with the search for certainty, and historical locatedness as a foil for the idea of transcendence. Moments of significant contemporary change in two overlapping spheres, both of which had far-reaching consequences for literary historical representations, establish the boundaries of this study. On the one hand are the changes in print culture – in the 1770s, the ending of perpetual copyright with the House of Lords’ 1774 ruling on Donaldson v. Beckett, “the most decisive event in the history of reading in England since the arrival of printing 300 years before” by virtue of its freeing for publication vast stores of materials formerly controlled by the London publishing cartels; in the 1820s, the onset of widespread mechanization, the focused targeting of stratified classes of readers (particularly through newly dominant periodical forms), and the end of the “poetry boom.”4 On the other hand, are the changes in political culture in a period marked by recurring moments of civic, national, and cultural crisis – of revolution, counter-revolution, recuperation, and revision. The close connections between the Donaldson v. Beckett decision and the print revolution it initiated have recently been carefully documented, most notably in William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. One important consequence of the “reading boom” that occurred in the wake of 1774 was its highlighting of an existing categorical instability in relation to both “history” and “literature,”

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noticeable since at least mid-century in the proliferation of genres and audiences, but reinforced by the sharp late-century increase in publications.5 To provide contexts for the “heterogeneity of writings” that this expansion of print and loosening of formal protocols made possible, I consider in the book’s four main sections representative instances of cross-generic negotiation that knot together central elements in contemporary thinking about the role and meaning of literary history. In doing so, I hope to recover a fuller sense of the agency of literary history writing within the period in which it began its slow migration from historiographical affiliate to lesser branch of literary criticism.6 The first two sections, “Writing and Rewriting Lives” and “Literary History and Books,” contest the standard modern view that Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets and Warton’s History of English Poetry had by the mid-1780s regularized literary history by identifying its mandate with canon formation. The evidence of poetry series, anthologies, biographies and memoirs, of antiquarianism and “bibliomania,” and of the paratextual commentary to collections like the Specimens of George Ellis, Robert Southey, and Thomas Campbell suggests that, far from enshrining an enduring consensual view of the past, Johnson’s Lives and Warton’s History provoked intense politically inflected debate about its representation and reception. In Section I, these debates are pursued through a series of texts centered on literary lives and addressed to a broad spectrum of readers. The first chapter traces attacks on Johnson’s commentary as skewed by personal and editorial biases through the collective biographies that succeeded his Lives of the Poets. In their paratextual essays, his successors, Henry Headley, Robert Anderson, and Alexander Chalmers, invoke Johnson’s idiosyncratic judgments as foils to their own literary histories and then argue that because their accounts are more disinterested than literary criticism and more attuned to the everyday than classical histories, they can offer readers informed perspectives that encourage active, speculative engagement with the past. The second chapter turns to more overtly partisan forms of “Rewriting Lives” in the individual biography, autobiography, and memoir, respectively, of Robert Bisset’s Life of Burke, and William Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton, William Beloe’s The Sexagenarian, and Samuel Egerton Brydges’ Autobiographical Memoir. All of these refer, directly or obliquely, to the revolutionary decade and, despite their diverse ideological orientations, each presents literary history as an intellectually credible alternative to the current damaging preoccupation with factional politics.

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Introduction 3

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

Section II investigates the role of literary history in the late-century transformation of antiquarian studies that begins with Warton’s History of English Poetry and achieves its most tendentious expression in the early nineteenth-century “bibliomania” controversy. While Warton’s History and Dibdin and Brydges’ writings on bibliomania seem to mark contrary poles of detached scholarly knowledge and callow selfpromotion, both stimulated interest in questions of reception by raising the issue of increasing access to rare books and manuscripts. This attention to reception enabled a theorizing of literary change that ran exactly counter to that envisioned by Coleridge’s description of a clerisy, the keepers of national culture able to recognize genius and hence “to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past.”7 The opposing view, widely explored in the period, held that comparative study of past and current readers reveals their mutual engagement in actively making as well as retrospectively understanding literary history. In response, as the third chapter documents, numbers of commentators argue for the inclusion of “popular taste” as well as authorial achievement in charting the dynamic interrelations between literary, social, and political development. Chapter 4 examines the ensuing contest over this enlarged understanding of opinion within a particular mode, a series of Specimens accompanied by histories of poetry that begins with George Ellis’ in 1790 (with substantially enlarged editions in 1801, 1803, and 1811) and continues with Robert Southey’s in 1807 and Thomas Campbell’s in 1819. The Specimens reveal the markedly different responses made possible by a combined focus on reception and creation. In their varied representations of opinion, the authors of the Specimens locate the political influence of print across a spectrum that sees books at one extreme as agents of reformation (and, on occasion, revolution) and at the other as foundational to the preservation of existing institutions. The third section brings together these two spheres of genre innovation in biography and antiquarianism and reads them through the lens of a transformed politics by focusing on the long career of Isaac D’Israeli, a writer whose interpretations of both lives and books were sharpened by disillusion with political and social changes over the course of the revolutionary decades. For him, as for numbers of his peers, the renunciation of radicalism – whether experienced personally or observed by those still sympathetic to its terms – altered the sense of the reading public and stimulated a rethinking of the categories for knowing and conveying both the texture of the past and its relation to present concerns. The current critical inclination within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century

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studies to see literary history as a subdivision of canon formation – the assembling, variously dated, of a class of “great authors” – has worked to obscure those like D’Israeli whose investigations into literary culture were pursued in contextual and comparative, rather than linear and teleological, terms. Eighteenth-century scholars, in particular, have assumed that the distinction of “creative” or “expressive” writing from other discursive forms provided the occasion for the consolidation of literary history and set the conditions for its evolution.8 These were not, however, D’Israeli’s premises. For him, the possibilities of literary history emerge as part of a critique of dominant historiographical practices, offering a means for moving beyond the current tendencies toward theoretical abstraction in radical and conjectural histories, to barren particularity in antiquarian writing, and to the privileging of the public and political (at the expense of the private and social) in classical histories.9 His intellectual acuity, self-awareness, and close involvement in political and discursive debates make D’Israeli a figure central to the period, enormously popular in his own time and deserving of more sustained study in ours. As a conservative often in the vanguard of genre re-formation, he reveals in his writing the proximity of contrary impulses toward narratives of progress, on the one hand, and of more static, archival, and nationalist constructions, on the other. Drawing on the resources of opinion, anecdote, and secret history – elements of contemporary history writing that undermined classical norms – D’Israeli invests literary history with a skeptical agency that allows works like his Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First to advance important questions about the construction, recovery, and reception of authors and texts. In their licensing of such revisionist impulses, literary historical writings within the period provide a strong localized instance of what Ralph Cohen describes as “regenerated genres” – ones that “make us question the generic combinations we have come to accept, and our consciousness of history as a given.”10 As a regenerative form, contemporary literary history adapted and assessed features of other genres that were themselves undergoing substantial revision, some as a consequence of their recent emergence (as with literary criticism), others because of perceived inadequacy (as with classical political history), and still others because of a process of specialization that led ultimately to disciplinary division (as with the refinement of “literature” to belles lettres and then to “imaginative” literature distinct from history, the latter undergoing its own subsequent separation out into sociology, anthropology, and economics). The cumulative effect of such questioning was a hardening of genre borders and ultimately (and ironically) an undermining

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Introduction 5

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

of literary history’s interlocutory powers. The fourth and final section attempts to account for the sudden crumpling in the late 1810s of the mode’s extraordinary agency. For fifty years, literary history writing had provided an important medium for articulating diverse positions, positions that variously challenged and supported traditional beliefs and usages, genre conventions, and issues relating to the cultivation of opinion and enhanced access to the literary past. Originating in opposition to Samuel Johnson – target equally of conservative and liberal commentators – the genre subsequently adapted to changing print and political issues by retaining its instrumental usefulness to a broad spectrum of writers. Over the course of the Regency period, however, a slow erosion of its powers can be observed. The opening chapter of Section IV surveys the presence of literary historical elements in a range of established and emergent modes – “regular” history, novel, biography, history of women, pedagogical texts – and argues that after 1800 the gradual devolution of literature into specialized spheres of knowledge was accompanied by increasingly restrictive attitudes to readers deemed inexperienced, naïve, or innately limited. The chapter following focuses on the ideological repercussions of these altered notions of genre and audience. It considers two of the most powerful venues for shaping opinion in the period, periodical reviews and institutional lectures, using as an exemplary instance of their interdependence the controversy played out in John Gibson Lockhart’s attacks on the “Cockney School,” John Wilson’s defense of the “Lake School” and William Hazlitt’s “Lectures on the English Poets.” Over the course of this debate about access to and representations of the literary past, Lockhart and Wilson manage to effect a crucial shift in the grounds of the conflict, moving it away from constituencies of readers and texts and toward constituencies of commentators. In doing so, they make the defining point of the dispute an argument about who is most fit – by birth, political disposition, or aesthetic and moral sensibility – to describe a transcendent canon of works of genius. With this ascendancy of literary critical issues and personalities, literary history becomes diminished and flattened. No longer marked by its mediation of historical and cultural perspectives, it begins to assume its Victorian contours as a lesser, even journeyman, branch of literary criticism. From the beginning, the transformative power of literary history had been identified with the expansion and diversifying of reading audiences. One of the earliest modes of literary history after the 1774 decision – the introductory essays to series such as Johnson’s The English Poets and the subsequent Lives of Headley (1787), Anderson (1795), and

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Chalmers (1810) – thus appeared with what William St. Clair describes as “the first truly national literature, available not only to men and women of the traditional reading classes but to a rapidly growing constituency who could choose to find sixpence (0.5 shillings) from their income to buy a book” (138).11 The consequences across class boundaries of this access to sources of knowledge formerly closed to all but the privileged were momentous. The interest in the accumulative and comparative spurred by the glut of collective biographies, anthologies, miscellanies, and specimens conditioned a mentality that Heather Jackson contends saw books as “provisional, not permanent structures, built up from discrete parts and consequently susceptible of similarly piecemeal revision and improvement.”12 These newly accessible print forms, by encouraging high levels of engagement on the part of their readers, made possible the widespread perception that literature itself was constitutive to the making of individual and social identity.13 While this study focuses on the period from 1770 to 1820, arguing that the conjunction of print and political revolutions with genre instability encouraged the efflorescence of a diverse range of literary historical writings, other contributing factors reaching well back into the eighteenth century were also significant. Among the formative conditions evident from the turn of the eighteenth century onward could be included: the transition from a patronage culture to one in which authorship was professionalized and writing increasingly imagined as a commodity; the exploration of literary genealogies in genres like the progress poem; advances in the production and marketing of books; the stimulus to regulation of the literary field provided by conflict in the Americas; the rise in criticism that by the early nineteenth century had triggered a widespread “hermeneutic anxiety” centered on the issue of reception; the self-fashioning for promotional purposes of individual authors like Alexander Pope, Henry Mackenzie, and Laurence Sterne; the emergence of an “intellectual vernacular” for the language of political commentary; the growing appetite for literary works in schools, dissenting academies, and Scottish universities; the taste for the Gothic encouraged by Richard Hurd and Thomas Warton; the gradual distinction of an aesthetic domain evident as early as Addison’s Spectator essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination and Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and widely popularized in Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787); and the promotion of empathetic reading made possible by the reinvigoration of “antique” modes by mid-century poets like Thomson and by the critical commentary of scholars like Thomas Warton.14 It was the expanded access to the

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Introduction 7

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

literary past after the mid-1770s, however, that gave point and direction to speculations about the varied contexts for understanding and acting upon these changes in literary culture. In the Preface to Quarrels of Authors; Or, Some Memoirs for our Literary History, Isaac D’Israeli concurs with the view of information and inquiry as reciprocally enhancing: the “multiplied means of our knowledge now opened up to us,” he comments, “have only rendered our curiosity more urgent in its claims.”15 For him, the genre best suited to discern these “multiplied means of knowledge” and to satisfy “curiosity” was literary history. It alone could trace the “history of the human mind” because it had the capacity “to record opinions as well as events – to discuss as well as to narrate – to show how accepted truths become suspicious – or to confirm what has hitherto rested in obscure uncertainty, and to balance contending opinions and opposite facts with critical nicety” (232). This book documents the alacrity with which his contemporaries across the political spectrum developed these possibilities.

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The implicit homage that has been payed to the edicts of this magisterial dictator shows that we live not in an age of literary investigation, and inquiry; shows with what a laxity of mind we read; and that we too easily catch, repeat, and respect, the echo of the day. I am sorry that truth, essential to my present endeavours, obliges me to say, that [Johnson] ... hath, in his Lives of our English Poets, treated men greater than himself, with an unwarrantable superciliousness, and contempt.1 Percival Stockdale’s acerbic response to both Johnson and his readers twenty-five years after the publication of the Lives of the English Poets (1779–81) testifies to the continuing currency of Johnsonian biographical practice from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century.2 John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (109 volumes, 1776–82) may have been the first multi-volume poetry collection fully to realize the commercial potential and status implications of including prefatory lives. But as Thomas F. Bonnell notes, Bell “did not hire a literary celebrity to write them.”3 Nearing the end of a distinguished career, Johnson enhanced his already considerable fame with the biographical and critical prefaces he supplied to the consortium of London booksellers anxious to undermine Bell’s success by publishing their own purportedly definitive edition of The Works of the English Poets (prefaces subsequently published in 1783 in a revised free-standing edition as Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their works).4 While the enduring critical, biographical, and historical implications of Johnson’s collective biographies have been carefully 9

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Section I: Writing and Rewriting Lives

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

detailed, Stockdale’s remarks point to a more immediate consequence, one distinct from the Lives’ intrinsic value and closely related to the late-century commerce in books.5 The timing of his comments is important: they date to the year before the brief copyright window that had opened with the defeat of perpetual copyright in 1774 closed in 1808, a span in which “a huge, previously suppressed, demand for reading was met by a huge surge in the supply of books.”6 It might be assumed that Johnson’s fame, contributing as it did to the rising cultural authority of literary commentary, would establish his Lives as a positive touchstone for the burgeoning numbers of collections that followed his. But as Stockdale’s censure suggests, hostility rather than admiring emulation of the “magisterial dictator” and his canonizing activities was more often the driving force behind allusions to this work. Richard Terry’s astute speculation that it may be “the reception of the Lives, rather than the Lives themselves, that constitutes the real landmark” acquires additional resonance when considered in the context of such opposition.7 From this perspective, the contemporary significance of Johnson’s collective biographies depends on their providing a standard against which his successors defined their own efforts. Antipathy to Johnson generated counter-narratives that as early as the 1780s began to cohere as distinct positions organized around questions of readers, politics, and the management of opinion, questions shaped in large part by casting his writing as tendentious, his personality as dictatorial, and his politics as high Tory.8 In what follows, I argue that resistance to Johnson’s representation of the English literary past inaugurated a far-reaching process of genre adjustment from which literary history writing emerged to mediate the competing claims of literary criticism, politics, and historiography. The first chapter of this section considers revisions to Johnsonian principles in biographical narratives directly indebted to his: Robert Bisset’s and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s reworking of a distinct Life in their discussions of Addison, and Robert Anderson, Henry Headley, and Alexander Chalmers’ comprehensive introductions to the multi-volume poetry collections they edited. Identifying Johnson with a narrowly literary critical perspective and a tendency to hector, these writers suggest that the interplay of the literary and historical in their own work offers unprecedented opportunities for readers to cultivate opinion by pursuing directions supplied by their editorial commentary. The second chapter opens by investigating another fertile source of literary historical writing in the period: the lives of individual subjects, as recorded in the biographies and autobiographies of Samuel Egerton

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Brydges, Robert Bisset, and William Beloe. While Johnson remains an important point of reference for these authors, they abandon the wide-angled view, liberal commentary, and extended historical range of the works surveyed in Chapter 1. Instead, gripped by the experience of the revolutionary decades, they argue for a necessary distinction between literary and political discourse. Overtly reactionary both in their anti-Jacobinism and in their contempt for all but elite readers, their literary histories express a broad cultural anxiety about the supposed “laxity of mind” that makes readers willing to pay “implicit homage” to the fashionable “echo of the day.” Like Percival Stockdale, they suggest that the solution to the dangers of an “unreflecting publick” lies in the construction of a timeless canon that in “excit[ing] a glorious national pride” shapes popular literary culture in terms consistent with Linda Colley’s account of the late-century forging of a distinctly British identity.9 Henry Headley, writing in the 1780s, viewed the pre-emptive gestures essential to canon making as reprehensible in their tendency to “deprive the reader of the pleasure every one feels, and of that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself.”10 The inclination of modern critical commentary to elide literary history and canon formation suggests that it was something close to Stockdale’s representation of the genre’s conservative potential that finally prevailed. But Headley’s emphasis on the cultivation of individual opinion provides an alternative model that locates the emergence of literary history within a progressive culture of self and social improvement. The final work discussed in Chapter 2, William Godwin’s 1815 Lives of Edward and John Philips, contributes to that paradigm by insisting that the full significance of Milton’s nephews (one of whom is credited with inventing the Lives model) can be grasped only by foregrounding the relation of politics to literature, in both contemporary and modern eras. Hazlitt’s 1828 comment that public opinion “is the atmosphere of liberal sentiment and equitable conclusions; books are the scale in which right and wrong are fairly tried” confirms that this understanding of opinion (with its corollary antipathy to “institutions” and its commitment to making learning accessible) retained a vital currency across the period.11

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Section I: Writing and Rewriting Lives 11

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Addison and the history of literary criticism Comparison of Johnson’s brief history of literary criticism in the Life of Addison, Robert Bisset’s revisiting of the subject in his 1799 edition of The Spectator, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s in her prefatorial essay to the 1804 Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder reveals both the tenacity of Johnsonian principles and the attempts of his successors to differentiate their work from his by emphasizing historiographic themes and conventions. In the Life of Addison, Johnson suggests that the current fall from favor of Addisonian criticism generated by “taste,” and its replacement by a criticism decided on “scientific ... principles,” must be understood both in relation to the comparative ignorance of early eighteenth-century readers, and to Addison’s own correction of the “too scholastic” Dryden.1 In Johnson’s revisionist view, when Addison made literature accessible to his contemporaries, he became himself an exemplary figure of his own culture’s assumptions and an agent for the progressive transformation of that culture. Johnson acknowledges that his immediate audience may find Addison’s comments on Paradise Lost superficial, but, he points out, at the time of their writing, they excited an “emulation of intellectual elegance” (III.37) among those “not ashamed of ignorance” (III.36) and thus, ironically, contributed to the sophistication of the very readers who now disparage him. Johnson’s register of the changing orientations of literary criticism, first to “rules,” then “taste,” and finally “scientifick” principles, depends on a sense of easy compatibility between historical and biographical imperatives. In filtering his narrative through the genre of biography, Johnson makes Addison a pivotal figure whose reformative agency relative to contemporary readers anticipates his own. While in particular 13

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details, in other words, he sees the writer’s bearing on his culture as differing over time, biographical criticism confirms that a Dryden, Addison, or Johnson will consistently epitomize and direct that culture. In Robert Bisset’s 1799 edition of The Spectator, history has a more problematic status relative to biography. No longer collaborative markers of affiliations between individual greatness and social progress, the two genres are instead assigned – at least initially – adversarial roles: No species of writing combines in it a greater degree of interest and instruction than Biography. Our sympathy is most powerfully excited by the view of those situations and passions, which, by a small effort of the imagination, we can approximate to ourselves. Hence Biography often engages our attention and affections more deeply than History. We are more concerned by the display of individual character than of political measures, of individual enjoyment or suffering, than of the prosperity or adversity of nations. Even in History, the biographical part often interests us more than any other.2 Bisset’s diminishing of history in favor of biography accords with the unsettling of the “traditional hierarchies of public and private knowledge” that Mark Phillips identifies with increasing contemporary interest in the “domain of the social.”3 Yet, strikingly, in Bisset’s subsequent account of Addison, he steers away from the “display of individual character,” and chooses instead silently to adapt historiographic conventions to his own ends (even as he avoids reference to the “political measures” that he identifies with “History”). This gap between prescription and practice suggests that while Bisset feels compelled to respond to the powerful rivalry between history and other narrative forms by asserting biography’s priority, he nonetheless draws on history’s prestige to heighten the value of his own construction. A crucial shift in the terms of his account of The Spectator makes evident this ambivalence: while the “Preface” begins by closely following Johnson’s account, Bisset subsequently departs from his predecessor’s setting of Addison’s comments in a larger history of literary criticism. More specifically, Bisset follows Johnson in seeing Addison’s comments on Paradise Lost as socially momentous, both domestically in the improvement of manners that his criticism more generally provoked, and discursively in the recovery of Milton that they made possible. But he does not continue from this point to reproduce the next stage of Johnson’s argument, that is, the narrative of Addison as the corrector of Dryden. Indeed, Bisset mentions Dryden and Johnson only in passing. He chooses instead

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to advance Addison as the founder of a philosophical criticism concerned with the “operations of the mind” (I.24). The figures he substitutes for Dryden and Johnson – Hurd, Kames, Gerard, and Campbell – establish a line of inquiry that affiliates literary criticism with aesthetics and with philosophical history. In amending the Johnsonian literary critical narrative (Dryden begets Addison begets Johnson) in ways that emphasize the connections between criticism and historiography, Bisset reorientates Johnson’s capsule critical history in the Life of Addison, effectively making it a literary history. In it, he traces the complementary progress of England and its literature forward from Paradise Lost, described here as “the first poem of modern times” (I.31). Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in turn, in the “preliminary essay” to her 1804 edition of Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder, follows Johnson and Bisset in commending Addison’s recuperation of Milton, and in pointing to the ironies of changing literary fortunes that both their careers reveal.4 For her, as for her predecessors, the progressive disciplining of readers by writers like Addison helps to make obsolete the very works that once formed popular taste. But, largely because of her more finely differentiated consideration of readerly responses, Barbauld’s literary history differs from Johnson’s and Bisset’s in its degree of complexity. While a narrative of progress aligns literary, social, and political history in Bisset’s account, Barbauld introduces a series of further complicating variables, including gender, fashion, consumerism, and, most significantly, canon formation: [T]he fame of writers is exposed to continual fluctuation ... Books that were in every one’s hands, and that have contributed to form our relish for literature itself; these are laid aside, as philosophy opens new veins of thought, or fashion and caprice direct the taste of the public into a different channel. It is true, indeed, that a work of the first excellence cannot perish. It will continue to be respected as a classic: but it will no longer be the book which every one who reads is expected to be acquainted with, to which allusions are often made, and readily understood in conversation; it loses the precious privilege of occupying the minds of youth: in short, it is withdrawn from the parlour-window, and laid upon the shelf in honourable repose. It ceases to be current coin, but is preserved like a medal in the cabinets of the curious. (ii–iii) Barbauld’s metaphorical assignment of books “of the first excellence” to a rarefied cabinet of curiosities tacitly marks out the limits of any literary history that would draw exclusively on canonic texts for its

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formulations. The exemplary status of such “classic” texts potentially suits them to the commentary provided by literary criticism, but finally puts them at odds with the social impulses underlying historical investigation. As coins are to museum medals, so contemporary literatures are to canonic texts; so too, she will later suggest, is history to antiquarianism: change and process are the animating motives that define the first set of terms, codification and aesthetics characterize the second. For Barbauld, the particularities of reception offer especially rich possibilities for historical understanding because they invite us to consider in relational terms why “new authors are continually taking possession of the public mind, and old ones falling into disuse, new associations insensibly tak[ing] place, and shed[ding] their influence unperceived over our taste, our manners, and our morals” (i–ii). Starting with the premise that “[b]ooks influence manners; and manners, in return, influence the taste for books” (i), she develops a dialectical model in which literature provides access to an understanding of the past through the present, and the present, in turn, is illuminated by awareness of how we construct the past. As a case study in changing sensibilities, she contrasts her own youthful pleasure in reading The Spectator with the present generation’s lack of interest in Addison. For this difference in response, she adduces a number of explanations that range from the material, through the ideological, to the aesthetic: changes in publishing, in party affiliations, in class structures, in questions of taste and manners, in “general cultivation” (xiii). Literary history, in other words, appears here not as an exercise in codification, but in social understanding; it gives her a way of thinking about the past that filters large cultural and political issues through the medium of individual responses, both her own and others’. As history, the mode accounts for patterns of difference and likeness over time; because its raw materials are textual artifacts and individual readers’ changing responses to them, literary history also attends to the vital role of opinion in the making and unmaking of reputation.5

Ordering “Lives” after Johnson The summary of genre transformation contained in this brief review of three “Lives” of Addison suggests that Johnson’s account stimulated literary historical thinking by inviting comparative appraisal of the bordering modes of history, biography, literary criticism, and antiquarianism. As a focus for period anxieties about the workings of opinion, Johnson himself exerted another, more local pressure that also affected the constitution of genres. Charges of his egregious personal biases opened

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opportunities for other commentators to claim a deeper knowledge of the history of English literature, a greater susceptibility to a wide and varied readership, and more disinterested critical views unmarked by political and religious prejudice. While Johnson’s celebrity provoked an immediate rash of such counter-claims, the longer-term consequences of the Lives controversy can be seen in the continuing tendency for literary histories to be structured in adversarial terms. As we will see, just as Anderson and Stockdale position themselves as Johnson’s antagonists, so too do Headley and Hazlitt establish their stakes through hostile references to Oliver Goldsmith and Vicesimus Knox. The perception of The Lives of the English Poets as an aggressively tendentious work emerged very early, with a sense of something like wonder in the face of Johnson’s presuppositions. The poet John Scott thus writes in 1782 to James Beattie: Did I mention Dr. Johnson’s prefaces? My friend has doubtless seen that fund of entertainment and information; of striking observations, and useful reflections; of good sense, and of illiberal prejudices; of just and of unjust criticism. That a mind, so enlarged as Johnson’s in some respects, should be confined in others, is amazing. The titled scribblers of the last century; the prosaic Denham, the inane and quiet Yalden, and even the Grub-street Pomfret, meet with all possible favour. Every man who expresses sentiments of religious or political liberty; every man who writes in blank verse, or writes pastoral; and every man contemporary with himself – is sure to meet with no mercy.6 The prefatorial rationalizations of two of the most successful poetry collections to identify Johnson’s as precedent, Robert Anderson’s 1795 Works of the English Poets and Henry Headley’s 1787 Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, give central place to this charge that their predecessor’s “illiberal prejudices” produced a confusing mix of “just and unjust criticism.” Emphasizing his supposed idiosyncrasies, they intimate that their broader literary historical sensibility supplies a disinterestedness he lacked. In the process, both also, like Barbauld, define their thinking as habitually social and comparative. Johnson thus becomes for them a provocation to the mobilizing of the claims of literary history relative to more established modes, including literary criticism, political history, and antiquarianism. Within this constellation of alternatives, literary criticism occupied a notably secondary status, since for many it carried the taint of partisanship. In their prefatorial commentary, Anderson and Headley link deprecation of literary criticism with a slighting of Johnson’s

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personality, effectively equating the genre with his leading character traits. As they work to reinforce their ties to the more prestigious forms of history, the editors thus make Johnson central to the jockeying for position that helps to shape literary history’s complex late-century relation to what was often represented as its most direct rival, literary criticism. In the opening of his 1795 Works of the British Poets, Robert Anderson rapidly surveys editors with essentially antiquarian interests from Totell through Cooper and Headley to Ritson, enumerates collections of “minor Poetry” such as Dodsley’s and Nichols’, and then turns to what he sees as his own more immediate antecedent, the “first collection of English Poetry … formed by Dr. Blair, and printed at Edinburgh.”7 Blair is dismissed as one who “multipl[ies] books to no good end” (I.2) because he ignores what Anderson sees as the complementary objectives of poetry collections: on the one hand, to make accessible older works that redound to the “honour of the nation” (I.3) and, on the other, to stimulate the reader’s critical faculties. The latter objective is construed in distinctly historical and relational terms. Plagiarizing from Henry Headley’s 1787 Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, Anderson comments that the emphasis on the modern in Blair’s edition, “deprives the reader of that pleasure which every one feels, and of that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself” (I.2). Blair’s acts of selection, in other words, seem to Anderson to hobble the free exercise of the reader’s judgment and so preclude a fully historical understanding of a national literature.8 One other possible competitor, John Bell’s 1776 edition, is mentioned only in passing, for although it includes the older poets that Blair’s scants, Anderson claims that “we seldom see it entire, but meet with its contents wandering separately, and disjointed in every catalogue” (I.2).9 He then turns to a lengthy analysis of his more immediate rival, Johnson, who is accorded some back-handed praise and subjected to much fault-finding. In his efforts to establish the distinctiveness of his own work, Anderson notes many of the characteristics to which Scott alludes in his letter to Beattie: unlike Johnson, Anderson claims not to be a creature of party, not blindly partial to certain verse forms, not anti-Scots. But occasionally, he adopts the more complex strategy of extending his predecessor’s practices, effectively charging Johnson with refusal to act on his declared principles. Questions of reputation, or what we might see as debates about canonic status, are particularly prone to this strategy: Considering Dr. Johnson’s peculiar turn of mind, there is no wonder that he should deny nature to Hammond, and find no melody in his verse. The general opinion is much more favourable. That he

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has been much read, and greatly admired, serves to contradict the assertion of that too-rigid critic, and establishes his claim to some portion of tenderness, and harmony; for by the judgement of the common, unprejudiced unpedantic reader, the merit of every poetical composition must be ultimately determined. (VIII.586) The failure of Johnson to realize his own claim in the Life of Pomfret that “he who pleases many must have some species of merit” is turned by Anderson into evidence of his inability to construe a reader who is not in his own image.10 By this measure, only rarefied, prejudiced, pedantic readers will defer to Johnson’s decrees. Anderson’s riposte to Johnson may well have originated in the desire to distinguish himself from an eminent precursor. But construing Johnson as a martinet and correcting his authority by orientating editorial practices toward readerly needs also has the effect of investing literary criticism with a narrowly partisan political intent, in contrast to which literary history can be made to appear more liberal, or at least less interested. In part, this liberal mandate rests on a language of empowerment, evident in the passage Anderson plagiarizes from Henry Headley – the “right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself.” Such expressions infuse the whole of Headley’s Preface to his Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry. In his Preface, Headley carefully designates his audience as “occasional readers to whom business is the occupation of life” and whose circumscribed leisure calls for a discriminating “miscellany” from which all but the most pithy of works have been excised.11 Turning reading into a brief respite from business, as his own metaphors suggest, however, inevitably introduces notions of consumption and commodification: To those who set a value on their hours an accidental fascinating line, or a happy expression, is no compensation for the loss of them: for such readers, many authors must be mangled in order to be read; the cost of working some mines is more than the gold extracted will sometimes repay. (xi) The ambiguity of the language here accords with Headley’s somewhat equivocal representation of his editorial role. His dedication to his prospective audience whom he distinguishes from the “literary Quixotism” of antiquarians and from the “classically educated whose minds are become pampered with the luxuries of Rome and Athens” (vii) is unwavering. But tugging against his commitment to these newer readers is

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... in thus playing the anatomist, every one who has sensibility, must, more or less, feel a melancholy reluctance at rejecting too fastidiously ... [The act of editing] affords an irresistibly affecting specimen of the instability and hazards of human expectations. With the “disjecti membra Poetae” before me, let me be pardoned then, if I have sometimes, as I fear I have, listened to the captivating whispers of mercy instead of the cool dictates of unsentimental criticism. (xi) Despite these misgivings, Headley continues in the Introduction that follows the Preface to expand on the formative role that new readers – both past and current – play in the recognition of literary greatness. Significantly, he structures his argument as a history, turning first to a comparative analysis of the place of literature in the “ancient” phase of nationhood. The Introduction thus opens with a comparison of Homer and Shakespeare that leads him to question why both “manifest a degree of excellence in some respects unequalled, and in others unexceeded, by our later writers” (xv). His answer, at least initially, is expressed through an entirely conventional set of analogies: as body is to mind, so age brings weakness to both; as the husbandman labors successfully in the morning, with noon bringing lassitude, and night cessation, so the earliest efforts are the strongest and most compelling. In developing his account of Elizabethan literature, however, another set of formative conditions emerges, ones that are incipiently historical and variable, rather than unchanging expressions of a “natural” order: ... we constantly find a period in the annals of every country, at which its people begin to be sensible of the shame and the ignominy of ignorance: this no sooner becomes perceived than it is deeply felt; the mind, stimulated by a forcible impulse, catches the alarm, and hastens at once to renounce its slavery; in the struggle and collision that ensues, the Genius of the people frequently take astonishing strides towards perfection. (xvi)12 This suggestion that the popular mind can effect its own revolutionary reversal into “Genius” recalls Headley’s prefatorial pledge to attend to readers ignorant of their national literature. It also anticipates his later explanation that this lack of awareness originates in a mass forgetting induced by the “sway of Pope”: “the minds of the Public since

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a plangent sense of what is lost in culling the past to minister to the “large and respectable body of the public”:

his day [have been] … so strangely enchanted with the studied and uniform flow of his harmony, that they have not only grown indifferent, but in a great measure insensible to, the mellifluous yet artless numbers of Spenser, Shakspeare, [sic] and Fletcher” (xxii). The reference to the “annals of every country,” in short, has both an explanatory and a predictive force. In relation to Elizabeth’s reign, he can point to evidence that “the temper of the times was happily and singularly disposed for the reception and cultivation of the classics” once the “dark and long-impending clouds of barbarism” were registered as a national shame; in relation to his own generation, he can suggest that renewed acquaintance with the “ancient English poetry” offered in Select Beauties may incite a parallel awareness of the “ignominy of ignorance,” and through “shame” inspire a future renewal of the “Genius of the people.”13 Like so many of his contemporary anthologists, however, Headley shifts the blame for the current parlous state of English readers from literary fashions to editorial practices. Typically, the Lives are held up as the chief offender. If deference to Pope’s “clockwork construction” explains the initial depression of late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury poetry among early eighteenth-century audiences, it was “the incomplete and careless edition of the English Poets, commonly called Johnson’s Edition” (xxx) that prolonged the period of inattention. Headley’s version of Johnson is not so uniformly negative as to approach the crankiness of Stockdale’s, but he does identify “dogmatical and unjust censures” (xxxii) as a key fault of the Lives and, like Anderson, concludes that they express a “turn of mind” that made it impossible for Johnson to convey to the “generality of readers,” as he should have, “judicious and impartial critiques on the merits of the respective writers” (xxxii–xxxiii).14 This positive valuation of both public opinion and the commentator’s regard for its cultivation is characteristic of the period. Two generations later, in contrast, Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins in 1824 retains the attack on Johnson’s imperiousness, while reversing Anderson’s and Headley’s concern for the “common reader”: “The Lives of the Poets was the portion of Johnson’s works for which the public had the greatest relish. ‘Tell us what to think,’ is the silent request of so many readers, that the success of them was secure.”15 From a perspective hostile to the “generality of readers” cultivated by earlier editors, she dismisses the Lives as entirely alien to those “of a higher class” (I.166). The difference between mid- and late-Georgian responses, at once striking and typical, relates to the changed political circumstances of the post-revolutionary decades, discussed below in Chapter 2.

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Alexander Chalmers’ 1810 Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper develops in more fully historical terms the affective orientations toward their reading public characteristic of both Headley and Anderson. Chalmers wastes little time considering the debates about inclusion that so engrossed his precursors (possibly because his edition in fact built on Johnson’s and was itself entirely characteristic of a career formed on the principle of enlargement: he not only published the works of, among others, Fielding, Bolingbroke, Addison, Pope, and Warton, but also the thirty-two-volume General Biographical Dictionary, containing an Historical and Critical Account of the Lives and Writings of the most Eminent Men in every nation, particularly the British and Irish; from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Times [1812–17]). In the Introduction to the 1810 Works, he asserts that “revolution[s] in taste” make reputation an essentially contingent matter, and literary eminence thus needs periodically to be addressed by referring to the “relative rank” an author possesses among “his brethren.”16 Two mutually exclusive standards, value and popularity, have conventionally governed such editorial decisions, but neither can be deemed successful: the first, “will unavoidably involve all the disputed points in poetical criticism, and all the partialities of individual taste”; the second depends “on circumstances very remote from taste or judgment, and, unless in some few happy instances, a mere fashion” (I.vi): both, in other words, are ultimately subjective standards, despite their being aligned on the one hand, with aesthetics, on the other, with consumerism. The best alternative, he concludes, is “a mixed rule”: he will screen more recent authors by popularity, older poets by implicitly literary historical criteria: “in selecting from this [latter] class, it was the Editor’s object to give such a series as might tend, not only to revive genuine and undeservedly neglected poetry, but to illustrate the progress and history of the art from the age of Chaucer to that of Cowley” (I.vi–vii). Chalmers reaches here for literary historical criteria as an antidote to the vagaries of fashion (although, of course, history can only trump subjective choice if the reader agrees to exempt editorial acts from the realm of personality). Literary history by this account requires distance from the present, a model of literary change that is progressive, and a segmenting of one’s audience. Chalmers clearly establishes that he makes his appeal to general “readers” of poetry as opposed to specialist “students” whom he advises to consult instead “antiquarians and critics”: “the Wartons, the Ritsons, the Ellis’s, the Parks, and Hazlewoods, and the Brydges” (I.viii).17 By carving up the reading public in these terms, Chalmers (like Anderson before him) makes the antiquarian and the literary critic

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into something like disciplinary experts; literary historians, by contrast, situate literature in social, cultural, and national contexts available to all. This coordination of different imagined audiences with alternative kinds of commentary develops over the course of the individual Lives into a guiding principle of discrimination. The result is a defining of critical practice according to the same historiographical principles on which Chalmers relies to chart his model of literary progress. Chalmers establishes his terms of inquiry early in the Introduction in his comments on the “barbarous” heterogeneity of medieval audiences: “In Chaucer’s time, there was indeed no public, because there was little or nothing of that communication of sentiment and feeling which we owe to the invention of printing” (I.xiii–xiv). In the subsequent Lives, readers and critics who are orientated toward these affective contexts of “sentiment and feeling” are ranked above those whose judgments are directed by extrinsic or speculative factors. The latter predictably includes “superficial readers” who, knowing “neither the history nor the principles” of literature, “are content with what is new and fashionable” (V.641). It also, and more intriguingly, refers to critics like Hurd, whom Chalmers treats with piercing irony: … in considering the objections of Dr. Hurd [to Davenant’s Gondibert], allowance is to be made for one who is so powerful and elegant an advocate for the authorised qualities of the epic species, and for arguments which, if they do not attach closely to this poem, may yet be worthy of the consideration of those whose inventive fancy leads them principally to novelty of manner, and who are apt to confound the arbitrary caprices with the genuine powers of a poet. (VI.344–5) Hurd’s position here as foil to Chalmers’ ideal, liberal reader, parallels Anderson’s and Headley’s earlier casting of Johnson as autocrat. But Chalmers not only invokes the negative context of Hurd’s despotic prescriptiveness; he also advances a positive counter-example in his echoing of Headley’s cultivation of “principles of taste and feeling.” All three commentators, in other words, understand critical evaluation as relational and adversarial. The distinction between what amounts to two schools of critical thought then allows Chalmers to define his own literary historical objectives. Literary history provides a framework for evaluating a sequence of writers in ways that encourage his audience to become critical readers in their own right, guided in their judgments by the evolutionary terms of development he outlines.

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The interest in enlarging readers’ informed ownership of the past traced through these prefatorial literary histories confirms Leah Price’s and Barbara Benedict’s interpretation of the anthology as “a rather less conservative institution” than conventionally assumed.18 As Benedict notes, through their use of “metaphors of plenitude, diversity, and feasting, collections celebrate the wealth of the culture from which they draw and encourage readers to consume it.”19 Both Price and Benedict, however, define this variability as an early eighteenth-century phenomenon. After 1774, they maintain, the work of the anthology turns instead to the task of “recontextualizing literature to neutralize political messages, elevate style as morality, and ... package literature as a consistent, moral narrative available to the solitary reader,” a task they identify with canon formation and label as “literary history.”20 Price’s choice of Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts to illustrate the supposed late-century turn to widescale codification helps to explain her eliding of literary history and canon formation. A brief digression to identify the problems with the evidence cited to support this identification will, I hope, help to clarify why the period is more fruitfully seen as one in which literary history, far from being complicit in the silencing of opinion, actually stimulates wider and politically more various expression of it. Knox’s Elegant Extracts, or Useful and Entertaining Passages in Prose (1783; 10th edn, 1816) and his Elegant Extracts ... in Poetry (1789, 8th edn, 1816) were in many ways counter-indicative texts, designed “FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS” and, as pedagogical aids, occupying a margin of prescriptiveness that is more exceptional than normative. Pledging to reproduce only those works “publicly known and universally celebrated” on the understanding that “Poetry has ever claimed the power of conveying instruction in the most effectual manner, by the vehicle of pleasure,” Knox aligns himself with Johnson’s commitment in the Life of Gray to the “common reader.”21 In this Johnsonian obeisance to “public judgment,” Price maintains, the editor ultimately “dwindles to a vanishing point” (68) and melds into the “undifferentiated passivity of the reading public” (69). After 1774, she concludes, the doubling of editorial impersonality and readerly quiescence authorizes an understanding of canon and literary history as mutually constituted ordering systems. This is a compelling and carefully argued model, but it has important limitations that become apparent when tested against contemporary genre formations and literary practices. In relation to the former, the typicality of the Extracts seems questionable once they are compared

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Literary history and opinion

to works intended for a wider “reading public” than “young persons.” Knox’s own Essays, Moral and Literary, for example, develop views closer to Wordsworth’s contempt for general audiences than Johnson’s compliance. Essay V, “On Modern Literature,” thus deplores the “depraved taste” of contemporaries, identifying readers as a leading “cause of the degeneracy of writers”: They who write for the public must gratify the taste of the public ... In an age when the taste for reading is universal, many works, contemptible both in design and execution, will be received, by some readers, with distinguished applause. The want of the merits of just reasoning and pure language, is with the greater part, the half-learned and the ignorant, no objection. In truth, unconnected thoughts, and superficial declamation, are congenial to minds unaccustomed to accurate thinking, and insensible of the charms of finished excellence. Hence writers, of acknowledged abilities and learning, have been known, when they aimed at popularity, to relinquish real excellence, and adopt a false taste, in opposition to their own judgment.22 Wordsworth’s attack on Johnson in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815) similarly condemns deference to readers’ opinions, arguing that popularity in fact operates as a reverse measure of literary value that forces the genuine poet to “reconcile himself for a season to few and scattered hearers” (III.83).23 Wordsworth claims here not to be arguing against the “judgement of the People” but against “the clamour of that small but loud portion of the community, ever governed by factitious influence, which, under the name of the PUBLIC, passes itself, upon the unthinking, for the PEOPLE” (III.84). In his famous assertion that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” (III.80), he effectively disenfranchises both literary history and criticism, centering all possibilities for genuine understanding in “that accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past and a prophetic enunciation of the remotest future” (III.83), that is, the transhistorical “genius of the poet” (III.82).24 Neither Wordsworth in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” nor Knox in Essays, Moral and Literary is arguing, of course, against acknowledgment of canonic greatness. Their motives for articulating the literary histories they provide, however, are defined by their sharp rejection of, rather than compliance with, “public judgment.”25 This adversarial posture qualifies what Price represents as a late-century cultural shift

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Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

toward an unproblematic identification of canon formation with literary history. Moreover, the conservatism informing such identities emerges not only in reaction against previous codifications – as with Wordsworth’s attacks on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets – but also in response to a vibrant contemporary strain of liberal commentary committed to extending ownership of the literary past to “new” readers – as with Headley, Anderson, and Chalmers. The complexity of these interrelationships undercuts the authority of a developmental paradigm that would see, for example, Wordsworth’s critique of Johnson as conclusive and the entrenchment of the Romantic poetic of individual genius as at once inevitable and uncontested. Instead of consensus about the practice of literary history, we find instead distinct and highly interested versions, most often mapped against a named adversary and composed for a specified reading public. The persistence of this pattern can be seen in William Hazlitt’s Select British Poets, Or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time (1824). As the running title and Preface suggest, Hazlitt’s text positions itself as alternative to Vicesimus Knox’s. By “leaving out a great deal of uninteresting and commonplace poetry” included by Knox, Hazlitt declares himself better able “at once [to] satisfy individual curiosity and justify our national pride” by choosing poems of “sterling excellence.” And in order to guard against such principles appearing to underwrite literary elitism, Hazlitt puts them to the service of inclusiveness, arguing that “possess[ing] a work of this kind ought to be like holding the contents of a library in one’s hand.”26 The structure of Select English Poets also accords with that of earlier, more liberal collections. As we have seen in Headley’s Select Beauties and in Anderson’s and Chalmers’ collections, editors frequently drew on the narratives of progress familiar from Enlightenment philosophical histories. Hazlitt, too, justifies his alteration of Knox’s thematic organization in the Elegant Extracts to a chronological one in Select Beauties on the grounds that “[by] this method, the progress of poetry is better seen and understood” (ii). Even in the very brief compass of his introductory essay to the Select English Poets, Hazlitt attempts to coordinate issues relating to national identity, historical advancement, self-cultivation, individual taste, and social consensus.27 This is not a conservative exercise in canon formation, but a strong demonstration of the complex vantage points afforded by literary history writing in the period.

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Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy

To map the “progress” of poetry “from the age of Chaucer to that of Cowley” and beyond, Headley, Anderson, Chalmers, and Hazlitt call on historiographical conventions to explain literary developments.1 Attention to patterns of cultural evolution helps them to meet readerly expectations of clarity and comprehensiveness, while also offsetting what each represents as the idiosyncrasies and even tyrannies of commentators like Johnson, Hurd, and Knox. Similar motives shape accounts of the lives of individual subjects – biographical and autobiographical – another fertile source of literary historical thinking in the period, although one focused more often on specialized detail than on the wide-angled view encouraged by the extended chronology of the Johnsonian sequence. Charles Mahoney has suggested that “much ostensibly political writing from these years is distinctly literary while much writing advertised as literary is decidedly political.”2 Individual biographies support this insight more overtly than the collective ones considered in the previous chapter, in part because of their distinctive orientation toward present circumstances. While the largerscale sequential biographies establish their distance from criticism by highlighting their proximity to historiography, the writers of individual lives tend to refer to immediate political contexts in vindicating (or censuring) their subjects. This preoccupation with the overlap between literary change and politics – both formal and attitudinal – can be seen in the constructions of literary history, representations of readers, and renderings of the forces of public opinion in the four texts considered in this chapter: Samuel Egerton Brydges’ Autobiographical Memoir (c.1826), Robert Bisset’s Life of Burke (1800), William Beloe’s The Sexagenarian (1817), and William Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815). 27

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Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

These authors represent a full spectrum of contemporary responses to radical principles, from anti-Jacobin (Brydges and Bisset), to early support (Beloe), to ardent sponsor (Godwin). Despite these ideological differences, all grasp the opportunities literary history writing affords to analyze the discursive crises of the 1790s and their aftermath. Brydges and Bisset, whose conservatism was long-standing and opposition to the Revolution unwavering, counter the contamination of literature by politics by advocating a sharp distinction between the two realms and charging literary history with the task of identifying works of transcendent genius. For Beloe and Godwin, in contrast, literary history provides a structure for thinking through the personal and cultural implications of an apostasy that saw both writers, albeit unevenly, withdraw from the radical circles they inhabited in the 1790s. Beloe’s renunciation of his own early sympathies leads him to discount the possibility of literature operating as an agent of social change and to turn instead to the loyalist tactic of severing the “imaginative” from the experiential. Godwin, however, seeks out new forms for investigating the reciprocities between literature and politics. In the Lives of Edward and John Philips, he advances something close to Ann Rigney’s model of an “imperfect history,” one whose constitutive features of “[c]ompromise, failure, provisionality, [and] dissatisfaction” draws into fruitful conjunction seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century post-revolutionary moments.3

Before and after the Revolution Early in his Autobiographical Memoir, the antiquarian Samuel Egerton Brydges claims as one of the few “living authors whose minds and habits of composition were formed before the French Revolution,” the status of cultural commentator: ... he who carefully watched the whole of the last 45 years in combination, has had a singular opportunity of comparing the opinions and events contrasted in the most surprising manner! The Peace which followed the American War, had features peculiar to itself! Then the fiery principles which formed the soul of the French Revolution went for a time to derange and unhinge all the settled opinions of the human mind, and all those habitual feelings of society which formed a second nature ... [E]ven the pure fire of Burke could not clear an atmosphere now loaded with all sorts of destructive vapour. A new aera took place in literature, as well as in politics. It was said that the human mind was let loose, like a giant from its chains, to run

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his course. It was, then, a giant which, like a sudden and impetuous flood, continually overran its limits! It became at length tamed in its progress, and more rational and considerate in its objects. But literature did not recover its ancient simplicity, equality of pace, classicality, and order; nor fall back (as the advocates of the new taste would say,) to its ancient tameness! The elevation of Napoleon to the Empire totally changed the political principles of France; and the restoration of the Bourbons brought them almost to the old principles of England! But literature has not come back to the ancient models!4 Once stripped of its hyperbole, this passage advances a reading of the post-1770 period that closely resembles mid-twentieth-century romantic poetics and the literary history that was its institutional complement. Brydges aims to distinguish a series of defeated political revolutions from a continuing (and by him despised) literary one. In his account, the metaphors of “natural” devastation – fire, flood, destructive vapors – that evoke the unhinging of existing orders ultimately allow the completed sequence of violent changes to be resolved through a return to the “old principles.” But while the American, the French, the Napoleonic, and the Bourbon revolutions are recognizably iterative in terms that make political “recovery” possible, the literary sphere is exempted from any such culminating reversion. As in his antiquarian writing, Brydges blames the attrition of the once normative classical ideals on the “modern rule” of new reading audiences whose “vulgar tastes and apprehensions” have undermined “pre-eminence of merit.” While 1814 brought the restitution of order in terms of public governance to both France and England, politics and literature remained mutually embroiled in the confusion into which they were initially tipped by the French Revolution. In fact, he claims, subsequent decades saw a deepening infiltration of literature by the “new politics of Europe, which are seeking to bring about an universal change of institutions and opinions” (3). From a contrary ideological position, his view here echoes Hazlitt’s assertion that “the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.”5 For Brydges, literature in its current state continues to foment the unsettling of “institutions and opinions” that embattled governments are charged with protecting.6 In his representation of literary history as custodian of an eclipsed classical inheritance and bulwark against the destabilizing effects of public opinion, Brydges exempts the genre from what he sees as the late-century devaluing of aristocratic culture by an aggressively commercial one (and, more specifically, of literature and literary

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criticism by popular politics). Over a range of works, he reinforces the elite affiliations of literary history, aligning it with amateur antiquarianism and against “professional critics” who pander to “the dull and gross appetite of the Mob.”7 The kind of Toryism that has him declare in his semi-autobiographical novel Arthur Fitz-Albini (1798) that “[w]ealth is now the sole god of our idolatry; and trade is held in the highest reverence, because it brings us nearest to that selfish, insolent, immoral, corrupt, sensual, blood-stained, altar” locates him at the far reaches of reactionary thinking.8 But Brydges’ extreme stance helps to bring into focus the shared tendency of many of his contemporaries to represent literary history as an important antidote to politically motivated factionalism. This conservative interpretation of the genre is thus doubly reactionary: loyalists of the 1790s and beyond write against an existing liberal strain of literary history writing that encouraged the cultivation of opinion, and in doing so, they argue for an imaginative realm of transcendent “genius” distinct from the domain of politics. Robert Bisset’s Life of Edmund Burke (1800), like Brydges’ Memoir, makes the complicity of literature with politics a signature for loss of integrity. Instead of registering this in epochal terms, however, he uses it to explain what he sees as Burke’s personal and ultimately literary failures. The Life opens with a two-fold defense of Bisset’s method that marks his historiographical bearings: first, (with a nod to Baconian empiricism) of biography as a form of “inductive history” that draws on “facts to establish general principles”; and second, of his work as part of a larger project of amassing a “Diversity of narratives” for future historians.9 Secret and anecdotal histories of the period similarly claim the authenticity of private sources over public documents, but Bisset justifies his practice not as a retrospective uncovering of a hidden past, but as an anticipatory gesture to later historians: “should any future Johnson arise to write the history of Genius ... [f]rom several writers [of biographies of Burke], a much greater quantity and variety of important information is transmitted to posterity” (I.4). The defining feature of Burke’s life, one that Bisset struggles to explain and that in prospect he thinks will require just such a “diversity of narratives,” is his appointment as Rockingham’s secretary: From that time he may be considered as a PARTY MAN. Burke OUGHT NOT TO HAVE STOOPED TO BE THE OBJECT OF PATRONAGE. Like his friend Johnson, he should have depended entirely on his own extraordinary powers ... In this part of their conduct, Johnson and Hume, the only two literary characters of the age who can be placed in the same rank with Burke, acted more worthily of

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Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy 31

Burke’s descent into politics in 1765 just precedes the development in England of “the three great departments of genius – poetry, history, and philosophy – [that were] … collectively equal to any that had ever been made in any age or country” (I.447). Despite his possession of the “greatest degree of poetic genius,” Burke’s choice prevents his fully realizing his potential, a loss Bisset emphasizes by providing a detailed literary history of the late eighteenth century that serves as foil for his subject’s lesser achievements. The longer-term consequences of his apostasy are just as significant. Since the efforts of Johnson or Hume were directed “to objects of more permanent importance” than the “extrinsic circumstances” that underpinned Burke’s “propagation of party creeds” (I.194–5), not only their present, but also their future place in literary history will surpass his. Embroiled in faction, Burke was excluded from full participation in his century’s defining literary accomplishments, a result of misdirected energies that Bisset assumes posterity will judge as harshly as he has. At the end of the first volume, however, he draws our attention to the pathos of this waste of talent by projecting a speculative biography that imagines what would not have been accomplished by Burke’s contemporaries had they too fallen into politics: had Johnson bestowed on parliamentary contention that force and labour which gave to the world the Rambler, the Idler, the Lives of Addison, of Pope, of Savage, Dryden, Milton, and the Preface to Shakespeare; had Hume spent in the House of Commons, and in political factions, those hours which produced the History of England, which unfolded the progress of man from barbarism to civilization, which raised an illustrious monument, shewing what was right and wrong, wise and unwise, the loss to society might have been somewhat equivalent to that which it has sustained from the direction to party of a mind fitted to grasp the universe. (I.450–1) For Bisset, as for Brydges, politics signifies incoherence and division, literature the contrary generative possibilities of contributing to the “unfold[ing of] the progress of man from barbarism to civilization.” Brydges’ Autobiographical Memoir aligns classical literature with antiquarianism, sets it against the literary politics of the present, and makes

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the superiority with which they were blessed by nature. THEY ATTACHED THEMSELVES TO NO GRANDEES: THEY DID NOT DEGRADE THE NATIVE DIGNITY OF GENIUS, by becoming retainers to the ADVENTITIOUS dignity of rank. (I.105–6)

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

literary history the vehicle for its memorializing; Bisset’s Life of Burke uses literary history to measure how Burke’s contamination by politics exempted him from sharing fully in the “constellation” (I.447) of greatness formed by Johnson, Sheridan, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, a constellation to which Burke was innately fitted, but which he squandered, to the “loss of society” and his own enduring fame.10 For Brydges and Bisset, an essential condition of literature and of the literary history that narrates its unfolding is detachment from the quotidian, the factional, and the popular, a detachment that enables strong assertions of literary value based on the endurance of key works. The argument in certain aspects resembles that made by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, suggesting that the eventual stabilizing of literary history as a commemorative, high cultural mode naturalized the ascendancy of a particular strand of loyalist thought whose inception in the mid-1790s was at that point marked by defensiveness and, on occasion, self-exculpation. William Beloe’s Sexagenarian; Or, The Recollections of a Literary Life incorporates, often unselfconsciously, the constitutive features of this loyalist paradigm: a separation out of “imaginative” literature from its former more inclusive sense, a renunciation of early radical sympathies, a widening and deepening negative identification of politics with factionalism, and a conceptualizing of literary history as virtually identical with the naming of unique and unchanging works of individual genius. From this nexus of conversion, denial, and demarcation can be traced the dominant mid-nineteenth-century understanding of literary history as a narrative of canonicity and national consciousness. But the revocation of youthful radicalism did not necessarily lead down the loyalist path toward the institutionalizing of a transcendent national canon. William Godwin is one of a number of writers whose disenchantment with Enlightenment idealism was expressed not in the division of literature from politics, but in increasingly sophisticated arguments for their mutual definition. I argue in what follows that the branching of post-1770s liberal commentary into such ideologically contrary texts as Beloe’s 1817 Sexagenarian and Godwin’s 1815 Lives of Edward and John Philips reflects the flourishing of literary history writing as a politically flexible mode that at once responded to and nurtured genre re-formation in the early nineteenth century.

Literary history and the politics of rationalization The bibliophile William Beloe’s loyalist credentials became fully evident with his 1793 co-editorship with Robert Nares of the British Critic and

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were generously rewarded with the Living of All Hallows, London Wall (1796), prebendary status at Lincoln Cathedral (1797), and the position as under-librarian at the British Museum.11 The Sexagenarian; Or, The Recollections of a Literary Life, his posthumously published memoir, rather circuitously documents the self-exculpatory maneuvers around his radical connections that his apostasy made necessary, revealing in the process the meshing of biographical revisionism with a distinctively conservative representation of literary history. The moment of its appearance, 1817, is significant, just months after a pirated edition of Robert Southey’s previously unpublished 1794 Jacobin drama Wat Tyler. The release of Southey’s juvenile play was carefully calculated to embarrass the Poet Laureate for the apparent opportunism of his recanted radicalism; the controversy that followed in which Coleridge defended Southey from the attacks of Hazlitt, Byron, Cobbett, and Hone, and in the Commons, from Brougham and William Smith, was as Charles Mahoney details, a “pivotal moment ... in the structure of and rationale for postrevolutionary apostasy” (126). While clearly related to this larger discourse, Beloe’s Memoir pursues its efforts at self-exoneration apart from the charged atmosphere that defined the unfolding Southey scandal. In the absence of the vitriolic particularities of Southey’s Letter to William Smith or of Hazlitt’s rejoinder, we can see more clearly how in Beloe’s “literary recollections” biographical revisionism meshes with a distinctively conservative representation of literary history. His efforts to excuse his embarrassing youthful affiliations generate a narrative whose peculiar turns match up in interesting ways with powerful Romantic explanations of a distinctly literary sphere and of the “clerisy” that sustains it. In keeping with Beloe’s bibliographical interests (evident in the Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, a work he began before being dismissed from his position at the British Museum), The Sexagenarian adapts the eighteenth-century convention of the rescued manuscript.12 The opening pages offer a carefully detailed provenance of the text: a friend of the deceased author purchased, at an auction of his effects, a Commonplace book in a hand so difficult “Porson would sooner have unravelled an Ethiopic manuscript”; with the help of the late Sexagenarian’s printer, the fragments were assembled into a publishable narrative.13 The allusions throughout to the “manuscript of our friend” (I.306) reinforce the collaborative nature of their efforts, while reference to “pages of erasure,” “scraps not exactly intelligible” (I.80) and “loose memoranda, which he evidently intended, at some period or other, to arrange and methodize” (II.16) emphasize an antiquarian interest

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in the materiality of the text and apparently confirm its authenticity. But a Postscript exposes the legitimizing device as in fact a rhetorical conceit designed to entice the reader: “wishing to engage the attention more deeply in his narrative, and to relieve it of the egotism attached to self-biography, the Sexagenarian had adopted the third person instead of the first in many parts of the work” (II.386). Beloe, we are told, corrected the page proofs, without knowing “how prophetic was his plan, and that on his own death-bed he should in reality entrust to a friend that office, which in fiction he had supposed to have been committed to his care. To present these Memoirs to the world, and explain the peculiar circumstances under which they are published, was the dying request of the Sexagenarian to one who knew and valued his worth” (II.384). In short, what began as a sentimental literary contrivance proved in the end a matter of fact, a turn of events fully acknowledged only in the closing pages of The Sexagenarian. The details assembled to justify the original deception – a death-bed request, a wariness about egotism, an attention to readerly need – make no reference to an alternative reason for the third-person fiction: the chosen point of view serves as a formal analogue to the detachment from events and individuals of the late 1780s and early 1790s that Beloe’s subsequent anti-Jacobinism made him eager to establish. This avowal of distance – rhetorical and ideological – echoes related techniques of dissociation throughout the text, but particularly evident in his treatment of radical writers and militants. Embedded in the Recollections are biographies of friends, considered both separately and collectively, whose politics he once shared and now rejects. The return to them in the memoir serves as a form of elaborated and repeated repudiation, with the magisterial third-person adding to the implication that while he moved beyond youthful error, they failed to progress. Although Beloe’s apostasy involves a shift in political sympathies, rather than the “fall” into politics with which Bisset charges Burke, and Brydges virtually all of his contemporaries, the three authors share the habit of regarding the past in highly emotive terms. The process of renunciation does, however, include degrees of discrimination. The elegiac lens of lost potential and thwarted genius through which Beloe views certain of his former friends and colleagues allows him to distinguish those who were tragically betrayed by their revolutionary sympathies from those whose opportunistic actions confirm their intrinsic baseness or weakness. In sentimentalizing the radical Joseph Gerrald, for instance, he makes him both an exemplary figure of delinquency

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Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy 35

soon gave proofs of the greatest abilities, and had he, fortunately for himself and the world, pursued his natural propensities for literary pursuits, he would, beyond all doubt, have shone as a star of the first magnitude, and avoided the miserable fate, which at a premature period, removed him from the world. But he was all fire – a real child of the sun – without deliberation of reflection, without care or thought of remoter circumstances, he yielded implicitly to the first impulses of his mind, and was too proud and too lofty to retract or recede. Most unluckily, at the moment when G**** was beginning to feel the consciousness of his intellectual superiority, the poisonous and malignant seeds of the French Revolution had shewn their germs above the surface of the earth, and were advancing to ill-omened maturity. (I.258–9)14 Having reached (like Brydges) for metaphors of natural destruction, Beloe emphasizes (like Bisset) the adverse consequences of abandoning literature for politics: Gerrald’s preoccupation with “conventions, corresponding societies, committees, delegates, &c.,” meant that his “former and natural love of literature was totally forgotten, or rather absorbed, by the boundless prospects presented to his political ambition” (I.260). In a stronger version of Bisset’s conjectural biography of Burke (quoted above), Beloe ends his account on a pensive and speculative note that displaces the earlier language of sublime political excess: “Here be it permitted to pause awhile, and lament the waywardness of this man’s mind. There was no eminence in any profession to which he might not have aspired, and had he pursued any other path but the delusive one which obtained his partial preference, he might have lived in dignified independence, and left a revered and honoured name behind him” (I.260–1). The account of Gerrald is important not only for its careful discrimination of literary and political discourses and its sense of squandered potential, but also for its anticipation of the vocabulary Beloe summons in the second volume to describe how he himself first became “dazzled with the name of liberty” (II.17) during the American Revolution. While he insists that he was “rather the instrument than the operator,” he does haltingly admit “with a sort of shame and compunction, [to] having been, sometimes, the means of circulating ingredients, of the full tendency of which he was then unconscious, but which he has since ascertained to have developed some of those poisonous seeds, the pernicious effects of which, Europe, nay the whole world, has for the last five

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and a foil for his own literary success. His account opens by noting that as a child, Gerrald

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and twenty years experienced.” In exoneration, he aligns himself with many of the “best and ablest” of his generation who, unwittingly led by a “chain of fortuitous circumstances,” fortunately “discovered the illusion in time, and retracted their errors” (II.17–18). The contrast between the fallen Gerrald and the redeemed Beloe is mediated by an intervening, more sustained consideration of radicalism that appears in a chapter ostensibly dedicated to women writers of the 1790s. Here the “calamity of the Revolution” is envisioned as a watershed in social and literary relations. Before 1789, “individuals of all parties and persuasions, political and religious, used to meet in easy and agreeable familiarity” (I.345).15 But this unfallen world of intellectual converse and shared delight in writing and literary inquiry abruptly collapses when women, stimulated by the onset of the Revolution, abandon their “natural” character and define themselves in inappropriately public and political terms: The most extraordinary thing, with respect to each and every one of these doughty females, appears to have been this: – The very moment that they had made up their minds to acknowledge the wisdom of the French Revolution, the goodness of its leaders, and the felicity of its operation, they fancied themselves (as by some magic charm, some irresistible power of enchantment) converted into grave, subtle, and profound politicians. They knew everything which was involved in the great questions of law, and right, and equity, as it were by intuition, and they pronounced their fiats ex Cathedra, as if it were both impious and treasonable at all to question their wisdom, their knowledge, their sagacity. They became all at once, in their own foolish conceits, as subtle as Machiavel ... [and as] learned as Selden. (I.363–4) Numbers of these women, he continues, became “so intoxicated with the Circean draught, that the phrenzy remained incurable and unalterable. They determined to drink at the fountain-head, so up and away for Paris. We have heard of the Englishman at Paris, his prodigality and folly, but heaven bless us! our English women at Paris beat their countrymen hollow, or, to use a homely phrase, ‘out and out’” (I.365). The Englishman at home in London, his account goes on to argue, could hardly avoid temporary seduction. But the lesson has now been learned: scrupulously gendered divisions of knowledge and a coherent literary domain presided over by men will prevent any future spectacles of women masquerading as historians and politicians. Beloe’s efforts at self-exoneration generate a literary history that, considered in isolation, appears transparently opportunistic. Eager to

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align himself with institutional forces, he asserts that the French Revolution exposed the English to the terrible consequences of enlarging access to privileged domains. In his account, the result is a permanent disabling of the collective liberal ideal enacted through the unfettered exchange of conversation. But the literary historical paradigm generated by Beloe’s rationalizations has an interest beyond the local evidence it provides of loyalist regrouping. Its meshing with a traditional understanding of an exclusively masculine Romantic canon suggests additionally how artificial interventions like his may acquire over time the force of “objective” historical explanation, a suggestion corroborated by the way in which his naming of 1789 as definitive aligns with long-standing representations of the revolutionary debate.16 Unsurprisingly, this particular “historical” explanation writes out of the account those readers whom liberal commentators, including Headley, Anderson, and Chalmers, had since the 1770s attempted to engage by expanding access to the literary past.

Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips Beloe’s strategic conceding and then dismissing the place of politics in literary lives coheres with the practice of other conservative biographers, including Robert Bisset in his Life of Burke and Samuel Egerton Brydges in his Autobiographical Memoir. Typically, they initially acknowledge the immediate importance of politics – most often in negative terms – and then deny its lasting influence through a gesture of repudiation that assigns value to literature alone. In the Life of Burke, it is the biographer and not the subject who effects this division of politics from literature; when Bisset suggests that Burke’s “fall” into politics hinders the full realization of his potential as author, he confirms the ideal integrity of the literary sphere and its status as arbiter of continuing fame. Beloe, in turn, surveys the pre-revolutionary salon culture of his youth, identifies its envelopment by radicalism as regressive and corrupting, and rejoices in his escape by way of the gentlemanly pursuit of bibliophilia. The change in direction signaled by the mid-life severing of political from literary pursuits (or in the case of Burke, the embrace of partisanship so lamented by Bisset) complicates the biographers’ task of assessment. Both Beloe and Bisset attempt to explain the breaks in their subjects’ lives by bracketing off political questions and emphasizing instead literary achievements, both actual and (in the case of Burke) imperfectly realized. Eager to avoid the appearance of partiality, they align their biographical narratives with historiographic ones, borrowing

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from the latter the aura of dignity necessary to maintain a balance between retrospective survey and impending evaluations of their subjects’ lives. This emphasis on enduring reputation, by discounting the immediate significance of public opinion and focusing instead on literary accomplishment, works again to deflect attention from political entanglements. William Godwin’s Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (1815) overlaps in important ways with the early nineteenthcentury biographical practices outlined above. But in his narrative, the defining structures – of apostasy, nostalgia, disenchantment, national genius, public opinion, and reputation – support a liberal rather than conservative account. Instead of segmenting literary and political issues, he makes their mutuality central to his reading of the seventeenth century and, by extension, his own period. The opening paragraphs of the Preface, in all their blunt assertiveness, establish this reciprocity as central to the literary history to follow: The character of Milton is one of those which appears to gain by time. To future ages it is probable he will stand forth as the most advantageous specimen that can be produced of the English nation. He is our poet. There is nothing else of so capacious dimensions in the compass of our literature (if indeed there is in the literary productions of our species), that can compare with the Paradise Lost. He is our patriot. No man of just discernment can read his political writings, without being penetrated with the holy flame that animated him. And, if the world shall ever attain that stature of mind as for courts to find no place in it, he will be the patriot of the world.17 In the context of his contemporaries’ advocacy of a distinct literary sphere, Godwin’s contention that Milton’s greatness encompasses his political writings is striking.18 Adapting the loyalist vocabulary of national identity to celebrate a republican icon as “our poet,” “our patriot,” and, in defiantly cosmopolitan terms, as the potential “patriot of the world” presses further the subverting of conservative tropes.19 As this prefatorial passage makes clear, affirming Milton’s future influence and reputation is just as important as declaring his past and present authority. Godwin’s “Of History and Romance” had earlier suggested (using the same conjunction of fire metaphor and prospective view) that the “individual history” exemplified by the “contemplation of illustrious men ... kindles into a flame the hidden fire within us,” and in so doing allows us “to add, to the knowledge of the past, a sagacity

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that can penetrate into the depths of futurity.”20 These revelatory possibilities of biography are almost immediately eclipsed by the claim that the “writer of romance ... is to be considered as the writer of real history” (372), an idea in turn qualified by the acknowledgment that the “sublime license of imagination” forces the romance writer to be “continually straining at a foresight to which his faculties are incompetent” (372). The essay’s ultimate subversion of romance as an alternative to the “generalities of historical abstraction” (363) leaves unresolved the question of how to convince readers, as he maintains in The Enquirer, that the “cause of political reform, and the cause of intellectual and literary refinement, are inseparably connected.”21 Writing a literary history of Milton through the oblique medium of an account of his nephews returns Godwin to these undeveloped possibilities of “individual history,” invoked and then abandoned in “Of History and Romance.” Considered together as case studies of monumental and nearly extinguished reputation, Milton and his nephews allow for the reconstruction of an era critical to the nation’s character and provide a glimpse into a futurity that includes Godwin’s own early nineteenth-century moment. But why not choose a more straightforward biographical mode? Tilottama Rajan argues for the exceptional status of the Lives when she suggests that “Godwin’s strange approach to Milton through his nephews is in fact a study of what today is called mediation.”22 As the work of Beloe and his contemporaries confirms, however, obliqueness of approach was a favored means for negotiating the problematic relation of politics to literature. If politics is broadly understood as a calculated set of responses to institutional expressions of authority, most latecentury biographically ordered literary histories engage politics through various forms of mediation: Headley, Anderson, Chalmers, and Hazlitt when they represent their commentary as a form of liberal resistance to the tyrannical hierarchies of Johnson, Hurd, and Knox; Brydges, Bisset, and Beloe when they claim that their mature achievement of a disinterested perspective depends on the prior repudiation of factionalism, partisanship, and revolution. Godwin’s tactics are consistent with this practice. And as comparison with Beloe – the writer with whom he shares key interests despite their ultimately contrary politics – suggests, mediation allows both authors to consider the complexities of apostasy from variously distanced vantage points. In developing his biographical conceit in The Sexagenarian, Beloe treats his younger self as discrete and unconnected to his present character. The radical ties of that younger self, he asserts, were purely accidental,

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the consequence of a Dissenting background (now repudiated) and the exigencies of a literary life that made him “rather the instrument than the operator,” inadvertently responsible for “circulating” (II.17) revolutionary precepts. Beloe’s shameless indictment of fellow travelers excited much contempt, with his recanting of a self-declared passive radicalism being dismissed as venal and highly interested.23 But the developmental paradigm he charts supports a powerful double reading of literary history: since most of the “revolutionaries” attacked are writers (and of these, the majority are women), he can frame his account as a history of both individual authors and a whole period, with rejection of radical sympathies and the reinscription of gender distinctions serving as the necessary conditions for progress in private and public spheres. Godwin’s treatment of apostasy is considerably more subtle in its register of what is lost as well as gained in turning from the radical idealism of one’s youth. This temporal and individual layering of deflections profoundly affects his literary historical outlook, enabling a sophisticated historicism that far exceeds Beloe’s self-protective retreat from the failure of Enlightenment principles. In the opening paragraph to the Lives, Godwin echoes with some irony his earlier prefatorial characterization of Milton’s legacy, setting the uncle’s reputation “which appears to gain by time” against the near extinction of the Phillipses’: The nephews of Milton were both of them authors by profession. They appeared before the public in this character repeatedly in the course of fifty years, and in that time issued from the press more than forty different productions. In the age in which they lived they were to the full as well known, and as much objects of attention to literary men, as almost ever falls to the lot of authors of subordinate talent. Much light may therefore be thrown upon the life of Milton, by an examination of the transactions and writings of these men. Yet by no one of the numerous biographers of the poet have they been considered with the slightest degree of attention. (1) 1814, William St. Clair notes, was the “worst year” of Godwin’s life: “Obsessed now with the imminence of his own death, he rushed out The Lives of the Philipses as another final offering before the end” (390). Perhaps as a result, biographical and autobiographical elements exist in close proximity in this work: in the Lives’ remembering of Edward and John Phillips, in the “better” nephew’s latter-day honoring of his uncle, in Milton’s continued loyalty to republican ideals, we find displaced

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versions of Godwin’s own anxieties about his enduring legacy and his retreat from the confident rationalism of the 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. While the impulse to recover and preserve – both the author’s and his subjects’ – is key to Godwin’s mode of cultural inquiry, it is itself carefully scrutinized. In identifying each of the political, religious, and generational transitions considered in the Lives of Edward and John Philips as a form of apostasy, he foregrounds the tension between commemoration and skepticism: Milton turns against the Puritan cause when he adheres to Cromwell, Edward and John Phillips against Milton, “their more than father” (40), when they support the Cavaliers, Edward against the royalists when he subsequently reaffirms his connection to his uncle. In every instance, we are urged at once to register the particular betrayal and to acknowledge the moral impossibility of uninflected condemnation. Such undercutting of absolute judgment concurs with Jon Klancher’s analysis of Godwin’s attraction to the contingent as a partial response to the late-century “crisis of historicity.”24 But there are significant distinctions between the ways in which the uncle’s and nephews’ apostasies are represented. Most broadly, when considering Milton, the complicating variables tend to be extrinsically defined, while with the nephews inward factors predominate. Historiographic and political issues are thus stressed in gauging Milton’s culpability: not only does “distance in time” make it impossible “to appreciate the merits of Cromwel’s conduct” (28), but more pressingly, “the restoration of the Stuart family, of Stuart morals, and Stuart policy” was “the one thing [Milton] feared much more than the ephemeron usurpation of Cromwel” (30). While Milton’s apostasy is made to appear a principled adherence to vanquished republican ideals, the Phillipses’ changes of heart are depicted in terms that identify the nephews as harbingers of a compromised modernity. Through a series of paired oppositions building on the “doubles” motif familiar to readers of Caleb Williams, Godwin adapts the “bad” brother John and the “good” Edward to a study in psychological, genre, and revolutionary contrasts: John Philips ... was one of the ruggedest of mankind. When he separated himself from his uncle and inestimable benefactor, it was, so far as we can perceive, for ever ... He never forgets his claret; and he fixes on himself its due attendant and retainer, the gout. These two features constitute the ordinary character of a satirist. Without asperity he is never at home in his profession. (320)

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John had previously been arraigned for condoning the savage royalist revenge against Cromwell’s supporters, and in particular for his own contribution to their humiliation, a 1672 parody of Virgil’s Aeneid.25 In Godwin’s summary account of his character, John’s physical definition by the body (with gout signaling epicurean self-indulgence and “due attendant and retainer” its aristocratic inflections) and his choice of the “low” genre of satire recall the earlier assertion that satire had “extinguished” the “bolder sallies of genius, peculiar to the early ages of literature,” leaving for the present age “nothing but mediocrity, works written under the operation of terror, and of that anticipation of the critic sarcasm and the pointed sneer, which … the free-born Muse regards with most impatience and disdain” (146). The suspicion that “works written under the operation of terror” may refer equally to the Phillipses’ moment and Godwin’s own is confirmed by the clustering of additional historical analogues around the defining feature of crude opportunism. In contrasting the Cavalier-sanctioned desecration of Puritan bodies with the 1688 Glorious Revolution’s “war of the mind only” (268), for instance, Godwin invites his readers to identify the royalist John Phillips with the opposite but equal extremes of late eighteenth-century Jacobins and anti-Jacobins. The unreasoned violence of the immoderate – whatever the political orientation – appears as foil to Godwin’s own progressive liberalism. The depiction of Edward Phillips provides the counter-weight that allows for the Lives’ carefully crafted distinctions of body from mind, satire from historiography, revolution and reaction from the quiet advance of knowledge. Unlike his brutish brother, Edward’s disposition is yielding and sentimental, less a Falkland or a Caleb Williams than an Edward Waverley: Once, in the beginning of manhood, he was seduced into a desertion and almost defiance of his uncle; but he soon repented, and from that time, as he tells us himself, continued to see him almost daily. It would not be perhaps too great a refinement to say, that this temporary apostasy arose out of the mildness of his disposition. It seemed to him that the tenets of his uncle were too austere; he shrank from the severe and simple firmness of a republican creed. When he saw the gay votaries of the family of Stuart, his gentleness soon inclined him to pity a monarch in exile, and an ancient nobility stripped of their possessions. It is the same temper under a different aspect, that fills him with that reverence toward exalted minds, and those true ornaments of our species, which shows itself wherever it

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Like Scott’s youthful hero in 1745, Godwin’s in the 1650s is “seduced” by the romance of “ancient nobility.” But the empathy that misdirected leads to his “temporary apostasy” is susceptible to positive change. With the second turn of the “same temper,” Edward reverts to his true nature and is able once more to recognize and honor genuine integrity and intellectual accomplishment. He becomes an historian, not of politics and violence, but, like Godwin, of literature and progress. In the process, apostasy ceases to be simply a betrayal of the past and acquires instead the more complex figurations of a recovery that enables Edward not only to “recollec[t] himself” (161) but also to attend to Milton’s future reception. Godwin prepares us to read Edward in these terms by linking the publication of his authorial dictionary, Theatrum Poetarum, with the “singular moment” (161) of Milton’s death, setting the eclipse of poetic genius to coincide with the emergence of a nascent form of literary history.26 From the opening pages of the Lives, he had asserted the high seriousness of his own literary historical investigations, presenting them as a balance between the solitary pleasures of bibliographical research and the social ones of enlarging knowledge. “Accident” had initially exposed him to “two or three” works by the nephews, but when he found the numbers “gradually swelling to forty or fifty,” he realized how profoundly wrong Samuel Johnson and “persons better informed” than he had been in dismissing them as unproductive: I have never been, in matters of intellect, or in any thing else, of a selfish and monopolizing temper. I began to be afraid that this little handful of knowledge that I had gleaned, should die with me, and resolved to take measures to prevent that result. The materials were every day perishing; and if I did not seize the passing minute, and reduce the whole into a form capable of being perpetuated, it most probably would never be done. (vi–viii) The emphasis on preserving the documentary traces of the past is very much in the mode of antiquarianism, sharpened here by the tacit contrast between Milton’s monumental reputation and the evanescence of Edward’s. Antiquarians conventionally appear in writings of the period as narrowly pedantic and, alongside the equal, but opposite, fashionable literary critic, were disparaged as unreliable cultural commentators.

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has an opportunity to appear, and is so conspicuous in the Discourse prefixed to the Theatrum Poetarum. (319–20)

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

Godwin, however, presents antiquarian research as foundational to informed analysis. At the same time, he uses the absence of such scholarship in the work of earlier writers, particularly Samuel Johnson, as grounds for questioning their judgment. Johnson’s belittling of Theatrum Poetarum and misidentification of the author are made symptomatic of his scholarly incompetence and, more culpably, his lack of curiosity. “[A]ll books of Lives of English Poets,” Godwin asserts, “are founded in the first instance upon Edward Philips’s Theatrum Poetarum” and “though Johnson never looked into his original authorities, yet he must have seen in Jacob and Cibber, the second-hand retailers he did consult, Philips and Winstanley perpetually quoted; and this without its once occurring to his mind, that the Philips to whom he was so deeply indebted, and the nephew of Milton, treating on the same subject, might by possibility be one and the same person” (159–60).27 Attacks on Johnson had, since the publication of the Lives of the English Poets, been a favored means for liberal-minded commentators to mark their dedication to the expansion of knowledge and, in keeping with this practice, Godwin regularly punctuates the Lives of Edward and John Philips with dismissive references to “the great leviathan” (275). To his mind, the “wretched fancy of Dr. Johnson” vents itself in misanthropic interpretations of evidence and audience. But Godwin moves well beyond the question of personality that so preoccupied earlier writers. He wants in addition to assert a strain of native English resistance to autocratic rule, in the domain of letters as in that of absolute monarchs. Johnson’s claim that Paradise Lost was at first unread provides him with the occasion: Man is not so poor a creature as Dr. Johnson imagines. Englishmen, however debased by the Restoration and the unprincipled politics of Charles the Second, were of too generous a frame of spirit, to want to be taught by a king what they should admire, and to wait till a new revolution had unloosed their political fetters, before they would venture to give vent to their approbation. (262–3)28 Against the tyranny of Johnson and Charles II, Godwin advances “generosity of spirit” as a shared national trait. In attending to both the publication and reception of texts, his literary history, he suggests, can offer a truer gauge of this authentic Englishness than could ever be gleaned by political historians or Tory commentators. To this point, I have stressed Godwin’s sense of the disciplinary advantages of literary history: it is a genre more attuned to a broad national

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consciousness than sectarian political studies; it is removed from the “senselessness of modern criticism, and the folly of what is called history” (186); it can negotiate the complexities of apostasy by distinguishing selfish betrayal from principled wavering; it can convey the liberal commitment to the meshing of intellectual and political progress. But alongside this wish to stimulate comparative thinking, there is also an interest is making the past vividly present to his readers through thickly descriptive evocation. “We cannot precisely understand” John Phillips’ Montelion, 1660: Or the Prophetical Almanack, for instance, unless we “go back to the manners of the times, and call to our recollection many things which were then of great consideration and importance, though in the course of the following sixty or eighty years they were utterly forgotten.” To summon this sympathetic recovery in his reader’s mind, he describes his own situation: I have now lying before me a volume, in which the most popular Ephemerides for 1660, to the number of fourteen, are bound together ... [Their authors], though now swept away into long oblivion, were once the oracles of their times; ladies, who commanded all other hearts, trembled at their mummeries; and generals and statesmen, who lay claim to the gratitude of a distant posterity, dared not enter on the execution of their projects, till they had consulted their science, and obtained their sanction. (97) Godwin’s use of the collective pronoun (“we cannot understand”) and the precise visual detail of the book open before him reinforce his intimacy with his audience. It also particularizes an important aspect of his biographical method. The Ephemerides, “once the oracles of their times” but now “swept into long oblivion,” are present to readers as a consequence of his meticulous research, clear evidence of the literary historian’s ability to recover vanished eras by immersing himself in their social and political complexities. The Preface to the Lives had addressed the transience of the past, with Godwin setting himself as a portal between the records his antiquarian studies had unearthed and the prospect of oblivion as the “materials were every day perishing” (vii).29 At the end of his analysis of Lilly and the Ephemerides, he articulates the larger social and moral truth made possible by historicist inquiry: “It is the folly of superficial thinkers to imagine that human beings in past ages believed nothing that we do not believe at present: and indeed it is wonderful to conceive that, so short a time ago, the inhabitants of this island, in many respects much wiser than we are, entertained so

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serious a faith in astrology, witchcraft, and other exploded absurdities, as we find they actually did” (101). In uncovering the resilient “spirit” of the English people, literary history not only manifests their capacity for progress; it also makes close knowledge of likeness and difference available to those readers. Ten years earlier, Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a discussion of Addison quoted above in Chapter 1, used the Spectator volume “withdrawn from the parlour-window, and laid upon the shelf in honourable repose” as a trope for literary history itself, and in doing so acknowledged the genre’s commitment to investigating the relation between the immediacy of the contemporary reader’s textual experience and its eclipse or modification over time. Godwin, too, makes “the book now lying before me” a palpable token of the past and thus a means of exploring both its content and its surviving traces. For both, in short, books as physical objects and their readers’ relations to them play a central role in their representations of literary history. The next section will consider this perception in more detail by investigating the informing contexts of bibliomania and antiquarianism.

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Between 1770 and 1820 changes in reading and publishing practices helped to reshape the literary field. The previous section touched on one of these changes in its discussion of the ending of perpetual copyright in 1774 and the subsequent freeing of publishers beyond the London cartels, particularly to print works now ruled out of copyright. This section will consider a range of complementary developments that also helped extend social knowledge to a readership that might otherwise be excluded from its more elite or scholarly reaches. These include the publication of a number of works that explicitly signal a commitment to enlarging their readers’ access to the literary past including Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81) and a later sequence of literary Specimens by George Ellis, Robert Southey, and Thomas Campbell that built on Warton’s model. Before considering these, however, I explore another important aspect of literary historical formation, one that again contemporaries date quite specifically. For those in the period who rendered literary history as what we now describe as book history, particularly William Frognall Dibdin and Samuel Egerton Brydges, the sales of a number of large private libraries beginning in the 1770s initiate a different kind of revolution in literature by opening up the coterie researches of antiquarians to the conditions of the marketplace. Looking back a generation from the early nineteenth century, they register with varying degrees of ambivalence the emergence of a bookish culture that they see as mirroring larger social patterns of commodification.

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Section II: Literary History and Books

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The “rational antiquary” In 1807, Thomas Frognall Dibdin defines the auctioning of Sir Anthony Askew’s library in 1775 as a “sort of era in bibliography,” initiating a new age of acquisitiveness that saw “[h]ungry bibliographers meet, at sales, with well-furnished purses ... resolved upon sumptuous fare.”1 In the first “Bibliographiana” section of The Director; A Weekly Literary Journal discussing the Askew sale, he defends the avidity of these collectors as a sign of his culture’s “intellectual refinement” and hence “no more to be derided than the double curtains of muslin and moreen, or chintz, in our dining and drawing rooms ... when we cease to have beautiful books and splendid furniture, we shall be rapidly sinking into that inverted state of society, where, ‘Huge uproar lords it wide’” (II.46). Less than a year later, the penultimate issue of the journal returns to consider the social value of the conspicuous consumption that allows “books to be considered as necessary furniture to an apartment” (II.359).2 Concerned that he may have created the impression “that the love of reading and of collecting was known only to our forefathers, half a century and upwards ago – I mean on the contrary to convince him, that the present is the epoch of literature” (II.355). To this end, he broadens his inquiry from the rarefied market for unusual works and finds in the “thousand and tens of thousand of books … circulated by the London booksellers” heartening evidence that “in spite of revolutionary commotions abroad, and party bickerings at home, the love of knowledge still prevails” (II.359–60).3 In the progressive narrative he charts in The Director, the auctioning of substantial libraries has generated two distinct late-century book cultures: the one, equivocally rendered, produces the widening “prevalence of knowledge, or rather, 49

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Bibliomania and Antiquarianism

Literary History Writing, 1770–1820

perhaps, the circulation of books, in THIS COUNTRY at the present time” (II.354), the other more privileged, conservative, and considerably less volatile domain centers on the “collection or preservation of libraries” (II.360) and is identified in the 1809 Bibliomania; or Book Madness as an activity limited “to the male sex, and, among these, to people of the higher and middling classes of society.”4 The note of qualification about the state of English learning carried by the substitution of “circulation of books” for “prevalence of knowledge” is not developed by Dibdin into the vitriolic comments about “mob” tastes made by his fellow bibliophile Samuel Egerton Brydges (Dibdin in fact implies that the national appetite for “thousand and tens of thousand of books” may operate in counter-revolutionary terms to diffuse violence).5 Nor does Dibdin’s largely positive construction of book culture encourage him to consider with Brydges the deeply ambivalent nature of the acquisitiveness book auctions prompt. And while both men attempt to construct through their bibliographic researches what Philip Connell describes as a “commodified simulacrum” of aristocratic cultural authority, they also diverge in their marking out of points of access to the special knowledge of the past that old books offer and that their publication allows them to convey.6 Dibdin, relative to Brydges something of a parvenu, adapted emergent print and performance venues to tout the advantages of a fuller awareness of England’s literary inheritance. His bookish interests gave him access, when a newly ordained priest, to social circles otherwise closed to clerics, and those contacts continued to present him with occasions for personal advancement.7 His involvement in 1807 with The Director, for instance, was secured through his friendship with Sir Thomas Bernard who as manager of the Royal Institution also invited him to deliver a series of twenty-eight lectures “On the Rise and Progress of English Literature” between 1806 and 1808.8 While only partial transcriptions of the headings and text of these survive, his description in his 1836 Reminiscences of the best received, the three “Lectures upon Ballad-Poetry from the time of Chaucer to Cowper,” conveys the entrepreneurial advantages of engaging with an existing controversy: “There was about this time a sort of hue and cry (set agoing by the author of the Pursuits of Literature) against black-letter reading and the lovers and abettors of that species of reading were held up to something like public ridicule or contempt ... I felt bound to vindicate its value” (235–6).9 The Royal Institution lectures, drawing audiences “of which the first rank and fashion formed a considerable portion” (226), provide the right mix of social occasion and self-promotion to foster the bibliographic pursuits

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he began with the 1802 publication of An Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics and continues to develop through a long subsequent career.10 The adroit capitalizing on controversy evident in Dibdin’s references to Mathias’ Pursuits of Literature also characterizes The Bibliomania; Or Book Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of this Fatal Disease (1809 with a second enlarged edition, 1811), his response to Ferriar’s similarly titled verse epistle.11 Most of Dibdin’s prescriptions for the “cure” counteract bibliophiliac obsessiveness by widening – but only to a point – the means for researching and collecting books: through literary criticism; through reprinting and editing texts (activities already well underway after perpetual copyright ends in 1774); through support of “Public Institutions,” like the “Royal, London, Surry, and Russel” that he commends for “concentrating, in divers parts of the metropolis, large libraries of useful books; which, it is to be hoped, will eventually suppress the establishment of what are now called Circulating Libraries” (78); and through the professionalizing of private and public collections gained by placing “competent Librarians” (79) in their charge. All of these measures are deemed “useful and profitable” activities designed to weaken “excessive attachment to any particular pursuit” (4) while retaining, as the negative comments about circulating libraries suggest, the gentlemanly aura attaching to bookishness. But since the recommendations refer mainly to existing practices from which Dibdin himself profited, they unintentionally confirm the opportunistic edge attaching to The Bibliomania in its reworkings of Ferriar’s poem. If Dibdin engages literary history as performance and self-promotion, Brydges understands it as scholarly recovery and dissemination, in his case sharpened by acute awareness of the economics of the book market. The result is an often surprising blend of Tory suspicion of “the mob” with “liberal sentiments” directed to those comfortably above the artisan class.12 His antipathy to the “topsy-turvy” world of possessive individualism thus goes hand in hand with recognition of some of the more positive consequences of an exchange economy.13 Identifying his own stance in an “age of fierce extremes” as one poised between “overbearing, and ill-assorted aristocracy” and “furious, and malignant democrats,” he sees that the enhanced value attaching to books as a consequence of sales like the 1812 Roxburghe Library protects “many a rare gem, which, while it was cheap, called forth no interest. I care not if it be only whim and fashion that direct these things: the whim and fashion are directed to very good ends.”14 Such auctions also offer positive opportunities for interrupting the chain of private

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ownership that separates scholars from the objects of their desire. Like James Beresford in Bibliosophia, a satire of Dibdin’s Bibliomania, Brydges defines himself against both the intensely appropriative instincts of the “mere selfish Collector whose whole view is the possession of an exclusive treasure” and the antiquarian fetishizing of the partial and fragmentary.15 His own bibliographical projects are presented contrastively as second-order print transactions that temporarily stall the flow of books from auction venue to the confines of their new owners’ libraries. “[M]any valuable tracts,” he notes, “besides those which luckily pass into the hands of known collectors, float for a day on the market and then pass into some secret treasure house, where perhaps they lie hidden to all but the retired owner.” The transcription of information from sales catalogues and publication of miscellaneous reprints in his British Bibliographer and Censura Literaria work against this sequestering of knowledge, “rescu[ing] so many rare books, before they passed into libraries, where it might be difficult to consult, and whither it might sometimes not even be easy even to track them.”16 In his commitment to “make [old Chronicles and old poetry] accessible” through “the operation of the modern press,” Brydges thus resists what Deidre Lynch describes as the more usual bibliomaniac efforts to “reprivatize [the] public domain.”17 Naming his audience as “the general reader, who seeks enlarged information,” he aspires instead to fulfill “a liberal taste for the works of our ancestors.”18 Brydges designates this enterprise “literary history,” but represents it less as a coherent narrative genre than as the collaborative amassing of recondite information about the past through the material form of its books. The appearance of both Censura Literaria and British Bibliographer over extended periods of time, eight years in the first instance, five years in the second, seems entirely appropriate, given the dilatory and nonsequential modes of reading he encouraged. The mandate of his literary historical writing is to advance the researches of individual readers, and bibliography, as the means to this end, is assigned the concentering and consolidating functions that libraries ideally, but never actually, perform: “In what single library, public or private,” he asks rhetorically, “can be found all the curious volumes which the BRITISH BIBLIOGRAPHER has recorded?” (IV.i). The comprehensiveness to which bibliography aspires is predicated on the ranging through time it encourages in its practitioners, a scope reinforced by his disdain for those who limit themselves to particular periods: both the “pert witlings ... who scarcely know the title of a work beyond their own nation and their own time” and their opposites, bibliomaniac antiquarians “whose knowledge and

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A work of this kind is no more to be read onward than a dictionary. A portion too, must always be intended to form a store for future reference, as the occasion may demand. New tracks of inquiry and new questions may make that very interesting, which seems at present to lie inert and barren.20 Comparison of these comments from the Preface to the 1808 Censura Literaria with Joseph Berington’s 1814 A Literary History of the Middle Ages makes clear how widely Brydges strays from Berington’s more standard (and by mid-nineteenth century normative) representation of the genre’s purpose and methodology. Berington uses the moment of composition as his vantage point, constructing an explanatory narrative to measure continuities and differences between past and present. Brydges, in contrast, subordinates authorial to readerly agency, partly by relinquishing narratorial control, partly by situating the text in a fluid temporality designed to accommodate the inquiries of present and future readers. Brydges’ representation of literary history as a storehouse of materials gathered for the purposes of continuing research attracted much negative attention in the period. Four years earlier, Walter Scott had identified the weaknesses of Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry in precisely the terms that Brydges advances as his own work’s strengths: Warton’s text, writes Scott, was little more than “an immense commonplace book of memoirs to serve for such an history,” that is, the “distinct and connected history of our poetry” that he was unable to write because of his “total neglect of plan and system”; while Johnson “was unequal [to the task] through ignorance of our poetical antiquities,” Warton was “too deeply enamoured of them.”21 Satirists also found the connections between bibliographical literary history and antiquarianism a rich mine for ridicule. James Beresford’s “Collector,” for instance, hopes to triumph over his fellow bibliophiles by publishing an elaborate history of Tom Thumb, using as the book’s frontispiece an “etched thumb ... ornamented by the hand of Hollar,” an illustration of “an inestimable fragment of a Danish standard” with a figure of a raven, “an engraving of the Miller of Trumpington, almost too hastily torn out of a copy of the Princeps Edition of Chaucer” (44–5). The pastiche,

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taste are confined to the productions of a single age.”19 Against such parochialism, he sets the “rational antiquary,” suggesting that his mental habits of “perpetual intermixture and comparison” have generated a distinctive literary historical mode of enduring appeal and utility:

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achieved by destroying intact works and assembled without attention to narrative or chronological ordering, indicts the bibliomaniac author as heedless consumer and competitor. Such parodic renderings of the book collector as manufacturer of remnants help to explain why Brydges designates himself a “rational antiquary.” Doing so separates him from the taint of book madness and, even more importantly, allows him to represent bibliography as a positive variant of eighteenth-century antiquarianism, a variant in which textual fragments refer to an economy of knowledge (and not exclusively to the material and taxonomic impulses satirized in Pope’s “statues, dirty goods ... coins [and] Rare monkish manuscripts”).22 This constructive understanding of antiquarian research runs counter to the negative depictions that Joseph Levine argues steadily increase from the early seventeenth century onward as the caricature virtuoso supplants humanist ideals of classical scholarship.23 The positive representation of “rational antiquarianism” also participates in an evolving debate about authenticity – authorial and textual – that gains ground through a century-long series of forgery and plagiarism scandals, from George Psalmanazar’s Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704), William Lauder’s An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns (1750), Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley documents (composed in the late 1760s and published in the 1770s) through to Samuel Ireland’s 1795 publication of his son’s Shakespeare forgeries, quickly followed by William Henry Ireland’s confession in 1796 and more fully in 1805. In the controversy most relevant to subsequent literary historical writing, Thomas Percy’s Reliques (1765) challenged the integrity of James Macpherson’s third-century Celtic bard Ossian by asserting the Gothic origins of English poetry. As Nick Groom has detailed, one consequence of the triumph of Percy’s “reinvention of the Gothic” was the hierarchical distinction of a canon of physical texts from an oral tradition that by the mid-nineteenth century had been further relegated to “folklore” studies.24 Another was the elaboration and extension of Percy’s Gothic argument in Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81), for René Wellek, the “first history of English literature” and model for “the whole future development of English literary history” (vi).

Antiquarianism and Warton’s History of English Poetry Warton’s innovative privileging of imagination over judgment – most perfectly expressed in his speculation that modern “good sense, good

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taste, and good criticism” may have been purchased at the expense of “true poetry” – establishes him as the “inaugurator of Romantic literary history” for critics from Wellek through David Fairer to Robert Griffin.25 Their readings note the important relation of the History to Thomas Warton’s earlier remarks in Observations on the Faerie Queen of Spenser (1754), to Joseph Warton’s on Pope (1756, 1782), and to Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762). But orientating the History toward commentary grounded in polemical opposition to Pope, while consistent with one strand of Romantic representations of eighteenth-century poetry and artistic genius, minimizes important historiographical dimensions of Warton’s work, and more particularly his interest in the recuperative possibilities of secondary modes, including antiquarianism. Contemporaries and successors alike recognized the importance of these secondary modes to his design. Thomas Hurd’s 1762 remark that “a work of this sort [he refers here to the Observations] requires the Antiquarian, as well as Critic. But You are both” was apparently a crucial stimulus to Warton’s launching of his project.26 And to collectors like Brydges looking back a generation later, the History of English Poetry’s presentation of “so much original research under the guidance of such exquisite and highly-cultivated taste” appeared a model for his own rational antiquarianism.27 Brydges characteristically claims that Warton’s research demands “minds of more than common cultivation” to appreciate its “pictures of manners, sentiments and language.”28 But, in fact, the combination of extended quotation and historiographical critique makes the work not simply a history of English poetry, but a very accessible reading course in materials and methodologies, a point the author himself reinforces. From the opening pages, Warton claims a wide purview for his “history of poetry,” framing it as “an art, whose object is human society: as it has the peculiar merit, in its operations on that object, of faithfully recording the features of the times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive representations of manners.”29 To this end, he adjusts the “progress of refinement” model inherited from Thomas Hayward and Elizabeth Cooper to accommodate a more broadly socio-historical perspective.30 Acknowledging that the “transitions from barbarity to civility” have “become the favourite pursuits, and the fashionable topics” (I[i]) of his own “improved” age, he aligns himself – at least initially – with the “customs and manners” focus of Scottish Enlightenment writers. In doing so, he connects an organic understanding of his narrative as an outgrowth of the “complication, variety, and extent of materials” (I.v) with patient attention to audience

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needs and expectations. Throughout the History, addresses to the reader point to the limitations of other kinds of history writing to highlight the complementarity between form and content he favors. Warton’s discussion of medieval and modern history is typical of this contrastive deployment of other modes in order to validate his distinctively literary historical approach. Medieval historiography, he claims, oscillates between two equally problematic extremes: on the one hand, romance history, “more affected by the marvellous than by plain facts” (I.137); on the other, chronicles whose “minute prolixity” devolves into catalogue-like prose. The “antiquaries of former times overlooked or rejected these valuable remains” and deemed fabulous histories “false and frivolous” in order to focus exclusively on “reviving obscure fragments of uninstructive morality or uninteresting history” (I.209). Modern historians’ attention to issues of form rather than content (and, perhaps, to a narrowly “professional” readership, rather than to a more credulous, less skeptical one) has, ironically, led them to re-enact the medieval obsession with the merely factual. This assertion of parity between medieval and modern historiography not only establishes fabulous or romance history, on the one hand, and chronicle, on the other, as the extreme margins of inadmissibility as narrative models. It also opens up for Warton a middle ground in which he can reclaim medieval texts as source material, investing their content with a new revelatory social significance. Working with these source materials, the modern literary historian can balance the “curiosity of the antiquarian” with his own “taste and genius” in order “to display the progress of human manners, and to illustrate the history of society” (I.209). Literary history, here as later in Brydges, becomes the vehicle for a progressive or “rational” antiquarianism. For Warton, as for numbers of conjectural and philosophical historians of the period, infusing “taste and genius” into his account helps to encourage a more affective working out of the relation between author and reader. Warton frequently pauses to “prepare the mind of the reader” (I.250), even when “in fixing the reader’s attention on an important circumstance” (II.107), he runs the risk of overriding the temporal logic of his analysis. In fact, it might be argued that he deliberately courts such risks, since these moments of narrative suspension typically knot together a number of additional contraventions of history writing as chronicle. Warton tends to halt the progress of his narrative at those points where he wishes to announce his own significant departure from previous authorities, and simultaneously to endorse a reader-driven model of literary change. By this rhetorical reflex, he and the “common

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reader” are made concomitant heralds of innovation in terms that also help to emphasize the proximity of literary to social history. Throughout the History, Warton’s overt appeals to present readers will coincide with assertions that his groundbreaking historical research confirms that “popular taste” nourishes and enables literary change. As Brydges’ continuing references well into the 1820s suggest, the History of English Poetry remains a standard work, and large numbers of Warton’s successors silently adopt and extend his characteristic traits: the appeal to current readers, the linking of them with past audiences whose specific needs generated literary change, and the claim that literary history offers readers fuller access to the complexities of the past than conventional political histories, whether medieval or modern. In naming Warton as source, his contemporaries most often present their literary histories in complementary rather than antagonistic terms, making their indebtedness a token of scholarly credentials. Yet even those who gracefully acknowledge the History as precedent continue to embed within their own works tendentious renderings of other literary historical accounts.31 The practice is general enough to suggest that an important rhetorical function of these pointedly negative allusions may be their indication of the author’s social stance, and through this means a mapping out of his relation to the reader. For those wishing to establish elite credentials, hostile references to Johnson’s “thinking merely from the resources of his own mind” thus helped to signal their own “scholarly” commentary.32 For those of reformist leanings, Burke, Goldsmith, and again Johnson (although in different terms) are the favored foils – the charge that Johnson’s prepossessions led him willfully to misconstrue the literary past, especially in regards to Milton, provides a especially favored purchase for writers like John Aikin to define their liberal positions. Similarly, Henry Headley praises Cooper’s Muse’s Library and attacks the Augustans whom he then identifies with Goldsmith and Johnson; Robert Alves and John Aikin retain the bias against conservatism while making their target Burke; Hazlitt on parallel grounds focuses on Vicesimus Knox.33 These ideologically inflected patterns of citation point to a ubiquitously adversarial literary culture. But the charges of bias leveled by writers as diverse as Headley, Aikin, Alves, Ritson, and Hazlitt have a significance beyond polemical posturing. In addressing the political agendas of their peers, they also scrutinize the evidence on which literary histories draw, and in the process raise larger questions relating to genre that have the potential to be profoundly destabilizing in their implications. I turn now to consider the series of Specimens of English

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poetry published between 1790 and 1820 by George Ellis, Robert Southey, and Thomas Campbell. While the three share a declared indebtedness to Warton, they offer widely diverging accounts of the consequences of expanding access to the literary past. The intertextuality of these Specimens allows us to see with particular clarity how literary history provides an important medium for explaining the varied relations between politics, genre, and reading audiences.

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Literary History and Literary Specimens

“[T]oo many readers,” laments Samuel Egerton Brydges in the British Bibliographer “require to be taught how to think and to judge! It is not sufficient to give them specimens, and leave them to form their own opinions ... Better a thousand times is the plodding task of copying the dullest extracts ... These the profound antiquary, the philosophic investigator of ancient language and ancient manners, will know how to appreciate; while the praise or the jest of the flippant lover of the piquant style of modern criticism may be treated with equal indifference!” (IV.vi). Brydges’ attack on “specimens” that “leave readers to form their own opinions” has a very specific target: a sequence of works that built on the success of George Ellis’ 1790 Specimens of the Early English Poets by marketing collections of small poems and extracts with introductory histories designed to make the English literary past accessible to those Brydges denigrates as “the flippant lover[s] of the piquant style of modern criticism.” The sequence includes Ellis’ own 1801 (and 1803 and 1811) editions of the Specimens to which he added a substantial Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of English Poetry and Language and Robert Southey’s 1807 Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices. Thomas Campbell’s 1819 seven-volume Specimens of the British Poets; with biographical and critical notices, and An Essay on English Poetry extends both the period surveyed and the appended commentary.1 All of these texts open with summary literary histories that, using antiquarian “copying” as their foil and rejecting the emphasis on scholarly fragments characteristic of works like Brydges’ Censura, advance explanatory narratives to explore issues relating to periodization, taste, opinion, and national identity. Since each of the successors to Ellis’ Specimens also rewrites the precursor texts, and therefore stands as “sequel” to an original, each engages questions of imitation and 59

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originality within literary history both thematically – how and why do literary works change over time? – and formally – how do the histories that analyze these changes relate each to the other? Questions generated by reception issues serve each writer as organizing principles for their investigations of thematic and formal change. The double focus on present-day broadly based audiences and on an historically constituted reading public marks the Specimens’ most significant departure from Brydges’ perspective. Brydges conceives of literary history in elite terms as the recovery and reproduction of esoteric fragments for rational antiquarians, setting this exclusionary pleasure against what he sees as the prevailing fashion among the “superficial, idle, and pert” for the more popular modes of literary and periodical criticism.2 Ellis, Southey, and Campbell, in contrast, subordinate textual and bibliographical matters – what recent critics have named “document” consciousness – in order to emphasize the experience of reading as a form of recuperation.3 For all of these writers, “opinion,” however differently inflected and politically orientated, emerges as an important instrument for detailing (and potentially overcoming) estrangement from earlier periods, and thus as an important vehicle for literary history: in Ellis’ Specimens, attention to opinion enables a literary historical narrative focused on “manners and customs,” in Southey’s on “poetical taste,” in Campbell’s on the operations of the “national mind.”4 While these social, aesthetic, and national alignments organize the authors’ interpretations of the past, they also provide the terms that justify their particular historiographical assumptions. Considering the Specimens as a sequence reveals a remarkable diversity in literary historical practice between 1790 and 1820, a diversity that runs counter to representations of the seamless triumph of canonicity during the Romantic period.

George Ellis and the “opinions and prejudices of mankind” The ambitious scope of Ellis’ later Specimens was not particularly evident in the first 1790 edition. In its brief and unassuming Preface, Ellis represents his labors as a straightforward exercise in recuperation, an attempt to correct the Augustan “revolution in taste” that had “consigned to oblivion” the “irregular compositions of our early poets” (i–ii). But alongside this construction within the specialized terms of a “mortuary discourse” that sees Ellis faithfully reproducing “all the most beautiful short poems which had been published in this country during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” appears another potentially

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incompatible version of literary history.5 The impetus for this as yet unrealized model originates in his desire to reach beyond an audience of antiquarians already familiar with “black letter” texts and appeal in addition to “lovers of poetry,” to the “general class of readers,” and to the elite who already “possess a complete poetical library.” When he suggests that the novelty of his work lies in its combination of “the advantages of a poetical common-place book with those of a history of English poetry,” he tentatively names a hybrid mode designed to answer to the expectations of miscellaneous readers. But for the moment, he seems unclear about the disposition of this incipient mode and subsequent references to the “very imperfect” model of the “mere common-place book” register doubt about the status of such a composite text. Combined with the opening lament on the “difficulty of procuring a sufficient stock of material” (iii–iv), the remarks cumulatively reinforce the apologetic tone of the Preface and the sense of an author unsure of his strategy. In 1801, however, important revisions to the once-minimal Preface, the addition of a lengthy Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the English Poetry and Language, and the trebling of primary material alter both the organization and conceptualizing of literary history. The enlargement is in itself an interesting gauge of the publishers’ willingness to underwrite such costly ventures. But the critical significance of the second and subsequent editions lies in the clear distinction between the commentary supplied for works written before and after the reign of Henry VIII. The Historical Sketch focuses on the earlier period, organizing its account according to Enlightenment models of progressive refinement, and incorporating some of the characteristic formal devices of philosophical histories, including a “Digression on the Private Lives of the English.”6 For the works following the reign of Henry VIII, however, Ellis abandons detailed continuous narrative in favor of brief biographical notices and “a few observations on the literary character of each reign.” Changes in editorial practice complement this division: while the earlier materials illustrate the “customs and manners” of the period and are chosen without reference to formal values, the later ones are supposed to “explain, much more clearly than mere description could do, the progressive gradations of our language and poetical taste,” and are therefore drawn from “the best models that could be found, in each reign, of regular and finished composition” (II.4–5). Ellis, in other words, alters his standards for selection mid-way through his multi-volume Specimens: having opened with broadly based representative or “descriptive” criteria, he then emphasizes aesthetic ones. What governs this decision to circumscribe the definition of literary history – at the pivotal moment of

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Henry VIII’s reign – and present it from that point forward as a history of the language? His location of his own writing within a tradition of literary historiography, another of the innovations in the second edition, provides a starting point for consideration of this question and also of a further one, regarding readers and the functions of opinion. In the 1790 Preface, Ellis tenders his “history of our poetry” assembled from “the most beautiful small poems” as an elite alternative to what he represents as a lesser concern with “manners and opinions.”7 The 1801 Preface, however, reverses this hierarchy by foregrounding the “delineation of national manners” (I.iv–vi) as a crucial element in a newly modeled “rise and progress” structure that locates literature within social and political contexts. A more assertive narrative presence accompanies this expansion of scope, with the diffident 1790 lament that the “completion of the publisher’s plan has been prevented by the difficulty of procuring a sufficient stock of materials” (i) being replaced with the urbane declaration in 1801 that “the kind assistance of my friends” has enabled him to assemble his primary sources “from a considerable number of the best poetical libraries in the country” (I.iii). These changes between 1790 and 1801 at once signal deeper affiliations with historiographical conventions and a more developed sense of literary history as a mode whose characteristic strengths distinguish it from both political and philosophical histories. A prefatorial history of literary histories helps to establish this distinction in positive terms. Listing his precursors, he gives first place to Thomas Warton, but notes as well “Bishop Percy, Mr. Pinkerton, Mr. Ritson, the late Mr. Headley, and Mrs. Cooper,” all of whom have in their “modern Miscellanies” selected “what is most valuable from the scarcest and least accessible compositions of our early literature” (I.iv–vi). The identity of this group seemingly depends less on politics – Ellis, by this point staunchly conservative, includes without comment the radical and very contentious Joseph Ritson – than on resistance to the alternative kinds of literary critical analysis associated with Samuel Johnson, on the one hand, and antiquarians, like Hearne, on the other. Johnson, disparaged in the 1790 edition for his failure to include “antiquated writers” in his collection, is silently excluded from the 1801 Preface. But throughout the Historical Sketch, Ellis rarely misses an opportunity to attack him for scholarly failures, and Hearne for scholarly excesses, implying that their authoritarianism and pedantry grow out of a vanity contrary to the best interests of their readers. Alertness to readers’ needs is the other principal ground on which he advances the superiority of literary compared to political and philosophical histories. Ellis casts classical political narratives as unedifying

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in their narrow attention to “policy” and the “particular character” of individual monarchs (I.38), contrasting them with the commitment of the Historical Sketch to revealing the interdependence of social, political, linguistic, and literary change. “[O]ur modern surveys of history,” he claims, are “always to a certain degree insipid” because they do not give access to that “knowledge of the opinions and prejudices of mankind” and so hold the reader at a “distance from … the scene of action” (I.264). Literary historians, in contrast, “consult the gossiping histories of contemporary writers ... submit to the punctilio and formality of the times, and listen to long stories with complacency and patience” (I.264). Their immersion in primary material, intriguingly rendered here through the metaphors of oral story-telling, allows the literary historian to replace “distance from the scene of the action” with a sense of proximity to the past. The immediacy and vividness that for Ellis determine the superiority of literary history to classical political narrative could also be claimed by less prestigious modes, potential competitors for the attention of the reading public. The Historical Sketch responds directly to this challenge by suggesting that its social and anthropological knowledge has a complexity and interest greater than that, for example, of the travel narrative: There is, perhaps, no species of reading so popular as that, which presents a description of manners and customs considerably different from our own; and it is the frequency of such pictures, interspersed in the relations of voyages and travels, that principally recommends them to notice, and explains the avidity with which they are usually received by the public. But as the pleasure we derive from this source must be proportionate to the degree of interest which we take in the persons described, it is probable that a series of works of our own ancestors, and particularly of their poetry, which ... is sure to exhibit the most correct and lively delineation of contemporary manners, would attract very general notice, if it were not considered by the greater number of readers, as a hopeless attempt, to search for these sources of amusement and information, amidst the obscurity of a difficult and almost unintelligible language. (I.1–2) The Specimens by this account allows its readers to view the literary past as at once a foreign and a familiar place. As with travel narratives, we “avidly” observe the display of “manners and customs considerably different from our own.” But in addition to the intense if fugitive curiosity provoked

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by “voyages and travels,” literary history offers the deeper pleasure of recognizing family likeness in the “works of our own ancestors.” And, further, the Historical Sketch contracts to remove one impediment to such engagement – the “obscurity of a difficult and almost unintelligible language” – by providing the “unlearned reader” with the aids that will help him to “connect the links of our literary history” (I.36). When Ellis promises to give his readers the cultural grounding necessary to historically informed evaluation, he positions himself within the late eighteenth-century context that sees the history of opinion as a more revealing and truer form of knowledge than a history of event. Literary history gains its uniqueness as a form of such knowing through its capacity to mediate past and current modes of opinion: older literatures offer vivid access to the operations of opinion in distant periods; in a parallel fashion, present-day readers participate in contemporary formations by developing their own judgments and reflecting on social and cultural matters. The account Ellis provides of Piers Plowman typifies the complex negotiations of opinion made possible by literary history, a point to which he draws our attention by contrasting his representation with the alternative model of political history: Langland’s work, whatever may be thought of its poetical merit, cannot fail of being considered as an entertaining and useful commentary on the general histories of the fourteenth century, not only from its innumerable pictures of contemporary manners, [extracts of which appeared earlier in the text] but also from its connection with the particular feelings and opinions of the time. The reader will recollect that the minds of men were greatly incensed by the glaring contradictions that appeared between the professions and actions of the two great orders of the state. (I.166) Putting aside the question of “poetical merit” (literary critical judgment is yet another foil to the modes of inquiry pursued in the Historical Sketch), Ellis focuses on the ways in which the revelation of “contemporary manners” and “particular feelings and opinions” discoverable in Langland’s work at once evoke the age and expose the limits of “general histories of the fourteenth century.” As he details the consequences of the “intolerable oppression” of the poor by the clergy and aristocracy, he subordinates political outcome to explanatory cause: The people were driven to despair, flew to arms, and took a most frightful revenge on their oppressors. Various insurrections in

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Flanders, those of the Jacquerie in France, and those of Wat Tyler and others in England, were the immediate consequences of this despair; but the popular discontents had been in a great degree prepared and fomented by a set of itinerant preachers, who inveighed against the luxury and crimes of the great, and maintained the inalienable rights and natural equality of man. (I.167) It is difficult to ignore the transposition of the current radical vocabulary of rights and equality to the fourteenth century and curious to note that the conservative Ellis here offers a relatively sympathetic account of popular revolt (although involved in the Whiggish Rolliad [1785], by the 1790s he was, next to his friend William Gifford, the most frequent contributor to the Anti-Jacobin). In concluding his discussion of Piers Plowman, he draws together the scattered considerations of audience, political narrative, and literary commentary to deliver a summary literary historical judgment: Langland’s poem, addressed to popular readers, written in simple but energetic language, and admirably adapted, by its dramatic form, and by the employment of allegorical personages, to suit the popular taste, though it is free from those extravagant doctrines, breathes only the pure spirit of the Christian religion, and inculcates the principles of rational liberty. This may have prepared the minds of men for those bolder tenets which, for a series of years, were productive not only of national restlessness and misery, but which ultimately terminated in a free government and a reformed religion. (I.167–8) The final conjecture about the formative influence of literary works on historical change obtains not only for the fourteenth century, but also implicitly (as the language of rights and equality suggests) to Ellis’ own moment. Such appeals to the national sentiments of a broadly based rather than coterie audience go hand in hand with affirming the popular origins of elite culture. When, for instance, the Historical Sketch connects Piers Plowman’s “addres[s] to popular readers” and the work’s contribution to “free government and a reformed religion,” it not only gives precedence to “the people” of the fourteenth century, it also recalls for modern audiences the mandate of the Specimens to assign them equal ownership of that past. By these means, readers are offered privileged insights into the “contemporary manners” that nourished past writers, insights beyond the capabilities of historiography or literary criticism.8 Ellis thus, like Thomas Warton, aligns medieval historians with modern

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political historians, impugns both through contrast with antiquarians, and then suggests that literary history eclipses all three: it corrects the limitations of political history by its attention to the quotidian, and those of antiquarian research by shaping specialized detail into a coherent narrative that gives equal play to the social and the imaginative. But, most important, literary histories make their knowledge accessible: “it is not sufficient that the mines of literature contained in our public libraries should be distinctly pointed out, unless some steps are taken to render them generally useful” (I.57–8). As he elaborates the principles of “usefulness,” Ellis emphasizes the cardinal importance of reaching and instructing an extended audience. In short, the prominence given to reception as a marker of value means that literary histories that balance commentary and source material are preferred on the grounds that they best satisfy the needs of a diverse range of readers from the casual to the scholarly. Through such doublings of historical understanding, the Sketch affirms that literary history gives readers a “connection with the particular feelings and opinions” of earlier periods, a connection that allows them to discern specific parallels and distinctions between past and present and to recognize an overarching progression.

Southey’s “sneering at the reader” in a history of modern taste Robert Southey clearly hoped to capitalize on an existing readership by writing a companion piece and sequel to Ellis’ Specimens of the Early English Poets. But even as he asserts in his opening remarks to Specimens of the Later English Poets the compatibility of the two collections, he imposes his own significantly different structure. Ellis organized his selections from the tenth to the end of the seventeenth century to reflect the “rise and progress” of English literature; Southey’s work, “intended to accompany Mr. Ellis’s well known Specimens of the Early English Poets,” follows chronologically from Ellis’ by beginning with the reign of James II and ending with Cowper. But when he suggests that the two collections will “together exhibit the rise, progress, decline and revival of our Poetry” (I.[iii]), he silently turns the climactic moment of Ellis’ narrative – the late seventeenth century – into the nadir of his account, converting it into the moment of “decline” before a reascension that culminates in the work of Cowper. His assertion that the “Anglo-Gallican” allegiances of writers from Dryden through Pope make this period “the dark age of English poetry” (I.xxix) helps to explain why he disrupts the developmental narrative

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of the antecedent text. When Ellis charts the “progressive gradations of our language and poetical taste” (II.4–5), he connects literary advances to the refinement and enlargement of the reading public. Southey’s evaluations are, however, grounded in an elitism that is deeply suspicious of popular opinion.9 Part of his antipathy to late seventeenthcentury writing, for instance, is a consequence of his view of the Restoration as the period in which “the public taste, – dim enough at all times, – so utterly bedarkened” that the “Birmingham trade of verse” (I.xxviii–xxix) became ascendant.10 Contemporary reviewers were quick to identify the patronizing and self-regarding edge to such assertions: The prefatory notices are generally, though not undeservedly, expressive of contempt for the miserable bard of whom he tosses us a morsel. Nor is this all; the former and the future reader seem to be sneered at, from the implied conjecture, that, as this has pleased so many fools foregoing, it may probably impose on as many admirers in time to come. What value Mr. Southey’s specimens may contract by the rust of antiquity, or possess an hundred and fifty years from the present time, it is not for hoary-headed reviewers to hope that they shall live to behold. Certain it is, that the editor seems to plume himself on the anticipation, that an extrinsic value of this kind will one day be attached to his Specimens.11 Henry Brougham’s sardonic comment on editorial “plume[ing]” epitomizes his general impatience with Southey’s decision to treat his Specimens not as Ellis did, as a “cabinet of antiquarian curiosities,” but instead as “a key to posterity to judge of the prevailing poetical taste of the British public” (32). From the liberal perspective of the Edinburgh Review, this shift in direction involves abandoning the goal of informing and enlightening readers in favor of small-minded disparagement of them. Southey’s formulation of matters of opinion as questions of taste leads him to discriminate his oracular judgments from what he construes as the vitiated and unreliable ones of the “publick” (I.iv). In fixing his own viewpoint as an absolute measure, he disallows Ellis’ commitment to the “correct and lively delineation of contemporary manners” (1–2) as the appropriately collective context from which a narrative of literary progress might be constructed. He also opens himself to the charge of idiosyncrasy, a criticism he often seems deliberately to court with commentary that is alternately extravagantly metaphoric

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(“The reign of Mary checked all these buddings, like an East-wind in May; but under Elizabeth they burst into full blossom with the sudden luxuriance of an Arctic summer” [I.xxi]), sentimental (“In our whole poetical biography there are no lives so melancholy and so instructive as those of Lloyd and Churchill” [II.325]), and brutally dismissive (“Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English Poets? the fact is certain and the solution would be useful” [I.91]). Brougham’s review notes yet another form of inconsistency when it mocks Southey’s anticipation that “the gentle reader of the twentieth century” will “value” the Specimens in a work that otherwise disparages both former and future reader as “fools” (31). Having dismissed the tastes of readers as unreliable markers of value, Southey finds the ballast to weight his narrative of decline and renewal in a hazily defined national identity fostered by a coherent poetic tradition. Epitomizing but, paradoxically, transcending that identity are the “greatest Poets of England” (I.xvii), Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser and Milton, whose brilliance only a select few – among whom Southey numbers himself – can genuinely fathom. Clustered below are ranges of lesser writers: in the higher echelons, those like Thomson whose rejection of the “Anglo-Gallicanism” of poets from Dryden to Pope returned English poetry to its true course, in the lower reaches, popular writers from whom the deficient “taste of the publick” (I.iv) can be inferred. Key to this bifurcated structure is an essential and unchanging “Englishness” incarnated in the “greatest Poets,” lost during the Restoration, and recovered by the late eighteenth century. Southey thus dismisses Thomas Gray’s suggestion that literary historical materials be organized according to transnational “schools” because such a taxonomy “implies that we have no school of our own ... We have had foreign fashions in literature, as well as in dress, but have at all times preserved in both, a costume and character of our own” (I.xiii).12 Comments such as these distinguish a core national “character” that can serve as touchstone for period evaluations. The task of literary history is to chart deviations from this norm: poetry declines in the Restoration and early eighteenth century when it adopts French models and recovers only when Thomson “recalled the nation to the study of nature, which, since Milton, had been utterly neglected” (I.xxxi–xxxii).13 What Thomson accomplishes in the realm of poetry, Warton echoes in historiography, and to both activities Southey assigns the term “Reformation,” applying the sanction of religious discourse to their poetic and historical innovations. Southey’s claim that Warton “bore a great part in what may be called our Poetical Reformation – in recalling us from a blind faith in Idols, to

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the study of the true books” (III.317) is interesting not only for its lightly ironic praise of his predecessor’s achievement in making antiquarian texts current, but also for its refusal to register either Warton or himself within a larger antecedent tradition of commentary. Ellis, as suggested earlier, locates his own work in the context of a diverse group – Percy, Ritson, Pinkerton, Headley, Warton, Cooper – that he celebrates for providing access to previously obscure resources. Identifying with their efforts to open the past to fuller scrutiny, he expresses confidence both in his cohort of literary historians and in his immediate audience. Political history and antiquarianism, conversely, are dismissed as insufficiently attentive to opinion and to the needs of general readers. As Ellis’ organization of his materials by a chronology of monarchs suggests, however, his representation of literary history finally extends, rather than summarily rejects, these alternate modes. Southey’s claim that his history remedies the limitations of literary criticism is similarly revealing, and like Ellis’, has a structural complement to which he draws our attention when he notes that “a slight difference [from the earlier Specimens] has been made in arrangement; instead of sorting the Poets, according to the reigns in which they flourished, I have noticed each under the year of his death, where that could be ascertained, otherwise according to the chief of his publications” (I.[a2]). While Ellis attempts to correct the elitism of political history, Southey dissociates himself from the demotic impulses of literary critical writing, from which he nevertheless borrows both his idiomatic tone, his organization through reference to authors or works, and his tendency to highly subjective evaluation.14 These differences and their consequences for the orientation of literary histories emerge with particular clarity in the essayists’ comments on the place of mediocre writers within their collections. For Ellis, questions of aesthetic evaluation are secondary to the social functions of literature. Literary texts give readers insights into periods that lie beyond the range of their knowledge, and since this access to the more arcane reaches of public opinion remains unregistered in standard histories, past or present, literary histories properly generate narratives that study these primary sources (whatever their quality) and encourage modern readers’ immersion in them. For Southey, the historical dimension of literary history has value only as it relates to remote social and cultural circumstances: “the taste of the publick” he declares, “may better be estimated from indifferent Poets than from good ones; because the former write for their contemporaries, the latter for posterity” (I.iv).15 Uninterested in literary history as a heuristic, he makes little attempt to engage with a general constituency and avoids Ellis’ conciliatory

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Many worthless versifyers are admitted among the English Poets, by the courtesy of criticism, which seems to conceive that charity towards the dead may cover the multitude of its offences against the living. There were other reasons for including here the reprobate, as well as the elect. My business was to collect specimens as for a hortus siccus; not to cull flowers as for an anthology. I wished, as Mr. Ellis had done in the earlier ages, to exhibit specimens of every writer, whose verses appear in a substantive form, and find their place upon the shelves of the collector. (I.iv) Southey acknowledges that the activity realized through his Specimens – the gathering together of “worthless versifiers ... the reprobate, as well as the elect” – is identical to that pursued by both the “criticism” and the anthologies constructed as florilegia that he here disparages. But if the ends are equivalent, his motives, he claims, separate him (and his preferred reader) from the meanness of these lesser modes. Southey elevates the Specimens by contrasting his text with these other forms of miscellany, by metaphorically aligning his writing with the creation of a “hortus siccus” or dried garden (a version of botanizing he distinguishes from the less discriminating “culling of flowers” practiced by anthologizers), and by claiming association with Ellis’ project. But it is his identification of the “shelves of the collector” as a point of reference for his own selection of specimens that most sharply distinguishes his sense of both resources and audience from those of his predecessor and his rivals. As he expands on the principles that have shaped his choices, these differences are reinforced. The “list of [the] writers” that he has drawn from this imagined library will “inevitably be imperfect.” But, he hastens to add, the apparent defect testifies to the actual value of his project: “Of all branches of knowledge bibliology, though always becoming more and more needful, is that in which the student of literature can find the fewest works to guide his researches” (I.v). Literary history has been transformed here into “bibliology,” with its content defined as research into the books already possessed by the elite audience to whom Southey addresses his Specimens. The identification of bibliology with the gentleman’s library significantly revises the assumptions that guided Ellis’ literary historical narrative. His 1801 Specimens were imagined as a substitute for the kind

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gestures toward uninformed readers, moving quickly to suggest instead that both his mandate and his audience are more sophisticated than those assumed in the commoner forms of miscellany:

of wide-ranging collection that only a tiny minority of readers could aspire to own or consult. Southey, in contrast, envisions his work not as surrogate for, but complement to existing libraries. One consequence of this dedication to a coterie audience is the tendency to construct hierarchies that reinforce through repetition his own place among the elite: English over continental, gentlemen over mass audiences, historical over current manifestations of public opinion, specimens over anthologies, private libraries over reading publics.16 His privileged position is also expressed through his dual allegiances to the discourses of literary history and canon formation. The literary historical impulse ensures the inclusion of “indifferent Poets” like “Cleveland and Cowley, who were both more popular than Milton” on the grounds that they exemplify the sorry “taste of the publick” and hence “characterize their age more truly” (I.iv). But such period representations finally have value not as ends, but means: they serve to highlight writers like Milton, whose eminence consists precisely in his transcendence of the age: “Fame, indeed, is of slow growth; like the Hebrew language, it has no present tense; Popularity has no future one. The gourd which sprang up in a night withered in a day” (I.iv–v). The deliberately prophetic tones, weighted by biblical allusion, align Southey with Milton, commentator with canonic figure, and set both against the uninformed public that historiography is assigned the lesser task of recreating. Through such oracular pronouncements, literary history authorizes seeing the exceptional figure’s detachment from his age as a reliable index of greatness. The contrast of Ellis and Southey, intriguing in its own right, might easily be made to support the normative modern view that sees an encyclopedic Enlightenment literary history absorbed by the structures of canon formation. Robert J. Griffin has been an acute critic of various aspects of this “master narrative” of Romantic historiography. Most recently, he has examined its collateral reliance on the kinds of periodization endorsed in the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but conspicuously absent in women’s writing where literature is understood in terms of “enlightened progress” rather than conflict (with the result that the oppositions of “Pope to Milton and Spenser, reason to imagination and feeling, the head to the heart” are avoided).17 Thomas Campbell’s seven-volume Specimens of the British Poets; with biographical and critical notices, and An Essay on English Poetry (1819) considered within the context of an enlarged early nineteenth-century discourse of literary history provides another point of resistance to the standard “romantic” narrative, since he too counters Southey’s hierarchies. Southey’s depiction of a native English tradition interrupted by the “Anglo-Gallican” school

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of poets from Dryden through Pope diminishes historiography to favor a model of canon formation. In articulating this model, Southey participates in a long-standing debate over Pope’s legacy that emerged early in certain of the Wartons’ writings and continues through Wordsworth and Coleridge. But while aligning himself with this tradition, he as steadily ignores key aspects of another: the orientation toward “manners and opinion” in the literary histories of Henry Headley and George Ellis. Campbell reignites the debate over Pope as part of a return in his Specimens to an active engagement with the place of readers in the making and understanding of literary history.

Thomas Campbell and the “national mind” When Campbell, in the Essay on English Poetry attached to his Specimens, disparages writers like Southey as “exclusionist[s] in taste” (I.259) and focuses instead on what he calls the “emancipation” of the “national mind” (I.62), he reveals his affinities with a line of commentary extending from Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry through Henry Headley to George Ellis and William Hazlitt. The sequence of Ellis, Southey, and Campbell, in other words, does not confirm the triumph of canonicity in the terms that a narrowly conceived “Romantic” criticism supplies; instead, it marks the continuing vigor of a narrative that approaches questions of literary value through the prism of historical experience and that aspires to inclusiveness in its expanded understanding of literature, its attention to the reactions of the works’ initial and modern readers, and its willingness to represent literary history itself as heuristic. In the light of Robert Griffin’s suggestion that women writers exempted themselves from exact chronological renderings of the past, it is also important to see how and why Campbell, too, identifies periodization as an important problem within literary history. Campbell makes the specifying of change through the assigning of exact dates a pivot for his criticism of Warton and Ellis, and by extension, of antiquarianism and political history. Ellis had supported his claim that “we may fairly infer that the Saxon language and literature began to be mixed with the Norman around 1180; and that in 1216 the change may be considered as complete” by drawing on “a chronological series of those English poems we still possess in manuscript” and on the secondary evidence of “such documents as can easily be drawn from our political history” (I.76–7). Campbell honors Ellis’ opinions as “almost always founded on intelligent views,” but dismisses the “arbitrar[iness]” (I.6) of this finite location of poetic development. In advancing his own interpretation, he

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Yet, difficult as it may be to pronounce precisely when Saxon can be said to have ceased and English to have begun, it must be supposed that the progress and improvement of the national speech was most considerable at those epochs, which tended to restore the importance of the people ... Thus, in a general view, we may say that, amidst the early growth of her commerce, literature, and civilization, England acquired the new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprung. (I.18–19) Synchronic measures of change (“national speech” advances during “epochs” that “restore the importance of the people”) combine here with diachronic ones (a “language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprung”) to establish a pattern characteristic of the Essay on English Poetry: a layering of temporal moments that in its forward impulsion blurs the hard edges of periodization. As we have seen in Ellis’ discussion of Piers Plowman (“This may have prepared the minds of men for those bolder tenets which, for a series of years, were productive not only of national restlessness and misery, but which ultimately terminated in a free government and a reformed religion” [I.168]), he, too, on occasion anticipates the future course of the events he describes. But his predictive gestures reach toward political conclusions, while Campbell’s tend to disrupt the embedding of poetic texts in extrinsic event and to emphasize instead the “great movement of the national mind” (I.62). The layering of temporalities also provides Campbell with points of contact between his immediate audience and remote literary and cultural developments and, as a result, is most evident when he turns to consider the evolutions of national consciousness. In attending to the unfolding of the “dormant intellect of the nation” (I.106), he finds its clearest traces in poetry: What an intimate scene of English life in the fourteenth century do we enjoy in [Chaucer’s] tales, beyond what history displays by glimpses, through the stormy atmosphere of her scenes, or the antiquarian can discover by the cold light of his researches! Our ancestors are restored to us, not as phantoms from the field of battle, or the scaffold, but in the full enjoyment of their social existence. After four hundred

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minimizes the explanatory agency of politics and monarchs and throws emphasis instead on “the importance of the people.”18

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In passages like these – and there are many – he represents the capacity of literary history to revive “lost scenes of existence” as a complement to (even extension of) poetry’s own evocative powers. Neither political nor antiquarian narratives can give access to this elusive sense of presence, since their subject matter and methods remove them from the collective intimacy of social existence. Campbell draws on this same conjunction of the private and the social to account for epochal changes and, in doing so, again limits the explanatory agency of political circumstance, “the field of battle, or the scaffold.” The “activity and curiosity in the public mind” (I.121) of the late fifteenth and through the sixteenth centuries, for example, are connected with such diverse phenomena as the expansion of the “art of printing,” the securing of the English throne, the “great discoveries of navigation” and the “quickening … intercourse of European nations” (I.105). But instead of generating a regulatory narrative that straightforwardly matches public event to literary response, Campbell locates the stimulus for change in an inwardly defined vital principle: “When the fine spirit of truth has gone abroad, it passes insensibly from mind to mind, independent of its direct transmission from books; and it comes home in a more welcome shape to the poet, when caught from his social intercourse with his species, than from solitary study” (I.107). In this account of poetic creation and consumption, “social intercourse” serves as the conduit through which the dispersed “activity and curiosity in the public mind” are directed to the concentering imagination of the writer. Books then become the medium through which we, in turn, recover particular historical expressions of a “national genius” (I.87) that is itself a bubbling up from this “public mind” (I.121). In sharp contrast to Southey’s “bibliology” with its closed circle of gentlemen and their books, Campbell imagines reading as a form of sociability that recapitulates the prior grounding of writing in communal forms of engagement. Built in to his vision of the reading experience are several checks that guard against the desultoriness and elitism he associates with antiquarian researches. Most importantly, the commitment to a specifically “English taste and genius” operates as an absolute and unifying standard. But rather than Campbell himself setting its evaluative terms, as Southey does, he makes public opinion the arbiter of literary worth

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years have closed over the mirthful features which formed the living originals of the poet’s descriptions, his pages impress the fancy with the momentary credence that they are still alive; as if Time had rebuilt his ruins, and were reacting the lost scenes of existence. (II.21)

(and reveals liberal leanings that again align him with Headley and his successors). The persistence of a national consciousness across time thus works in concert with an historically specific, discerning “public attention” to filter out the “best and the better” from the “humblest and meanest writers” (I.193). The effect is not only to undermine the categorical usefulness of periodization, but also of one of its key corollaries: the modern approval or rejection of works solely by reference to the age in which they were written. Noting the “fashion of the present day” to “solicit public esteem” (I.193) for the most minor of Elizabethan writers, Campbell thus observes that there are men who, to all appearance, would wish to revive such authors – not for the mere use of the antiquary, to whom every volume may be useful, but as standards of manner, and objects of general admiration. Books, it is said, take up little room. In the library this may be the case; but it is not so in the minds and time of those who peruse them. Happily indeed, the task of pressing indifferent authors on the public attention is a fruitless one. They may be dug up from oblivion, but life cannot be put into their reputations. ‘Can these bones live?’ Nature will have her course, and dull books will be forgotten in spite of bibliographers. (I.195) The “minds and time” of readers provide a “natural” measure for the endurance of books, correcting the voguish tendency to take either period definition or critics’ pronouncements as a warrant of value. And conversely, the same reading public corrects the asymmetries imposed by those “exclusionists in taste, who think that they cannot speak with sufficient disparagement of the English poets of the first part of the eighteenth century.” Southey’s diatribe against “Anglo-Gallicanism” is discounted simply by citing evidence that there continues to be a wide audience that takes pleasure in the “archness of Prior,” the “wit of Swift,” and the “correct and equable sweetness of Parnell” (I.258–9). As Campbell moves from the distant to the more proximate past, he, like Ellis and Southey, adjusts the literary historical structures through which relations between past and present are distinguished. Ellis, as we have seen, makes the reign of Henry VIII the terminal point for his historical narrative, after which he provides a “short outline of the literary character of each reign and a few notices respecting the individual writers” (I.v). Southey, in turn, follows a chronology of poets’ lives, elevates Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton above the clutch

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of lesser writers who signify the tides of a questionable public taste, and minimizes continuous development: the “Anglo-Gallican School” for instance, “which Pope had perfected, died with him” as “Thomson recalled the nation to the study of nature which, since the days of Milton, had been utterly neglected” (xxxi–xxxii). One consequence of the commentary in both of these Specimens is very nearly to isolate the consideration of the contemporary from the pre-modern. In Campbell’s work, however, the historicist impulse to look at the past through the eyes of a modern reader offsets these sharp divisions. From the Specimens’ opening Essay on English Poetry through its biographical notices of particular poets, this assumed vantage point allows him not only to observe continuities and distinctions between past and present, but also to make predictive gestures toward future literary evolutions. When Campbell’s narrative approaches present-day literary culture, the affective terms of individual experience increasingly color his account of the “national mind.” To this point observers of an emergent English national identity, his audience is now imagined to be actively participating in the formations he describes. The shift in tone from the analytic to the more sentimental and familiar, grounded in a shared intimacy of commentator and reader, is evident in the discussion of James Thomson, “the author who has first or chiefly reflected back to our minds a heightened and refined sensation of the delight which rural scenery affords us.” While the collective pronoun underscores an elegiac identity, this shared experience also prepares for a more complex invocation of temporality: “The judgement of cooler years,” he continues, “may somewhat abate our estimation of him, though it will still leave us the essential features of his poetical character to abide the test of reflection” (V.216). Aesthetic pleasure, initially invoked as an end in itself, is now construed as the opening stage in a developmental process that sees empathy as the precondition of disinterested comparative analysis. The pattern known to every person who retrospectively considers his own subjective “literary history” thus describes the evolution not only of individual readers, but also of their collective embodiment in public opinion. Campbell in turn structures his commentary to mirror this transition from sentimental compact between reader and editor to historicist observation. His discussion of pastoral and genre transformation provides further evidence of how consistently this structure appears in his writing. Campbell’s point of reference for this investigation is Shenstone’s poetry and the “certain air of masquerade” (V.372) that hovers over it. Material and status explanations are offered as one way of accounting for

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[F]rom the end of the seventeenth century pastoral poetry became gradually more and more unprofitable in South Britain, and the figure of the genuine shepherd swain began to be chiefly confined to pictures on china, and to opera ballets. Shenstone was one of the last of our respectable poets who affected this Arcadianism, but he was too modern to sustain it in perfect keeping. (V.372–3) Individual readers provide another crucial perspective from which to consider the problem of anachronism. In this context, Campbell’s insights into the decline of pastoral as a functioning genre come not through reference to external factors, but (as with the comments on Thomson) through identity with his own audience’s responses. Why, he asks, do we reject pastoral conventions in modern poetry and accept them in the work of writers from Spenser through to Milton, knowing that “none of them probably ever possessed a live sheep in the course of their lives”? Since the high artifice of pastoral is invariable, the difference must be in an historically conditioned reflex to tolerate, even find pleasure in, past, but not present, incongruities. The more archaic the poet, the more willing is our suspension of disbelief: “their distance from us appears to lighten the romantic licence of the fiction” (V.372). In his review of the Specimens, Francis Jeffrey sees the complex mediating functions of opinion to which Campbell alludes – the capacity of opinion to illuminate the relation between poet and text, text and reception, reading public and social, cultural, and political change – as key to the value of the Essay on English Poetry, the introductory essays to particular writers, and the specimens themselves. By providing commentary and primary materials that encourage his audience “to correct and liberalize their judgments,” Campbell, in Jeffrey’s view, advances the instrumental power of literary history, represented here as the articulation of individual taste refined by historical awareness.19 When effectively pursued, literary history fulfills an important political need by offsetting the dangers of readers being “tossed about by every breath of doctrine, and every wind of authority” (467). These are readers of a very particular kind, however. A generation earlier, the “instructed orders” gained access to the past through Percy’s Reliques, Warton’s History, and Johnson’s Lives. Campbell’s work, like Ellis’, offers the same experience in the present moment to “ordinary readers” (467). In putting before the latter “a wide and large survey of enduring models,”

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the devolution of pastoral from a position of late seventeenth-century prestige to emblem of marketplace exchange:

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the Specimens not only opens to them a formerly closed literature; it also serves valuable social functions by organizing a potentially diverse audience as tractable citizens. “The fresh and deep sense of the matchless richness, variety, and originality of English Poetry” (468), Jeffrey asserts, enables aesthetic judgment unobtrusively to be shaped to the ends of social management by establishing a “secure basis for all future judgments” that “must compel, whenever it is general in any society, a salutary conformity to its great principles from all who depend on its suffrage” (467). From Jeffrey’s point of view, literary history both provokes and contains individual evaluation in terms that serve broad national and class interests. Jeffrey’s detailed appraisal, particularly in its comparative discussion of the sequence of Specimens volumes that followed Ellis’, reflects both the period’s general interest in the form and the increasing willingness of the major reviews to see literary history as an agent for social and political consolidation.20 Campbell’s Specimens, however, enjoyed a subsequent more particular notoriety, largely as a consequence of its contribution to a long-simmering debate about canon hierarchies that itself had profound implications for the conceptualizing of literary history. The “Pope controversy” that originated, as James Chandler has detailed, in Joseph Warton’s critical judgment of Pope in his 1756 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope and was kept alive by the interventions of Warton, Samuel Johnson, and William Lisle Bowles, flared again with the pamphlet war of 1819–26 that Campbell initiated with his prefatorial defense in the Specimens of Alexander Pope against Bowles’ demotion of him from the first rank of poets in the latter’s 1806 edition of Pope’s works.21 Among the participants in the controversy was Isaac D’Israeli who in the 1820 Quarterly Review takes up Bowles’ The invariable Principles of Poetry in a letter addressed to Thomas Campbell, Esq. occasioned by some Critical Observations in his Specimens of British Poets, particularly relating to the Poetical Character of Pope. Aligning himself with Campbell’s “masterful vindication” of Pope, D’Israeli reanimates the vocabulary of the revolution debate when he condemns Bowles’ concept of “invariable principles” as abstract and absolutist in tendency.22 “Theories of art” that express a “kind of mysticism in the language of [their] criticism” (409), he reminds his readers, have a discursive history that marks them as insidiously “democratic” (434). Just as Jacobin doctrine disguised its ulterior motives with assertions of objectivity and universality, so too “invariable principles” have “usually been drawn from the habitual practices and individual tastes of the framers; they are a sort of concealed egotism, a stratagem of self-love” (410). The terms of

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To arrange the vast diversities of nature into the contraction of a system, to methodize what is spontaneous, and to attempt to enumerate all its endless varieties, formed his sublime occupation, and his solitary amusement. Man was adapted to his system, which is much easier than to adapt a system to man. He peopled the world with Subtiles, and traced its government according to the legislation observed in the Utopia of his garret. (I.62) In refurbishing the anti-Jacobin critique of narcissism for the purposes of the Quarterly review, D’Israeli adds two elements that, as Section III argues, echo changes in his own conceptualizing of historiography in the decades following the 1790s: the first, an attack on parochialism (often expressed more positively as a defense of cosmopolitanism), and the second, an advocacy of the fuller cultural understanding that literary history makes possible (often expressed through condemnation of what appear to him more restrictive modes, including literary criticism and political history). In the Quarterly article, Bowles and the Lake poets more generally are thus represented as irredeemably provincial and small-minded. Subtile in his garret reappears here as those “rural writers and editors” afflicted with “literary hypochondriasm.” Citing Plutarch as his authority, D’Israeli declares that the best antidote to the “morbid fancy” produced by such isolation is access to a sociable bookish culture: a writer “should live in a great and populous city, which only could supply him with that abundance of books he requires, and with that traditional knowledge which floats in the memories of men of letters” (411). Campbell, as we saw, commended the way in which “the fine spirit of truth [goes] abroad” and “passes insensibly from mind to mind” (I.107); for D’Israeli, a necessary element in this process is a cosmopolitan milieu. The other books addressed in the Quarterly compendium review – Singer and Malone’s distinct editions of Spence’s Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men – provide D’Israeli with ample evidence of the pleasures of urbanity and sociability that he can adapt to his refutation of system-mongerers. The sequence in which he considers the volumes – the Anecdotes, followed by the Invariable Principles – has important implications both for the immediate goal of discrediting Bowles’ position and the larger one of ratifying its alternative, literary history. The first ambition is achieved by selectively drawing on the Anecdotes

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D’Israeli’s critique here strongly recall his attack on the Godwin figure, Subtile, in the 1797 key novel Vaurien:

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as a rich contemporary source of materials that support his own view of Pope’s greatness. The second is made possible by a steady widening and deepening of the speculative powers assigned to literary history. In the opening paragraph of the review, D’Israeli makes use of a relatively restricted view of the genre familiar from the antiquarian inquiries of Dibdin and Brydges, a view that identifies “literary history” with the “history of books” (400), in the case of Spence’s Anecdotes, a complicated tale of multiple manuscripts, selective quotation, suppression, and very nearly forced publication when the announcement of Singer’s edition resulted in Malone’s edition being “eagerly hurried through the press” (402). At the end of an essay that has drawn liberally from the Anecdotes to support the denunciation of Bowles as narrowly sectarian, however, D’Israeli moves to articulate the fuller claims of literary history as a mode that makes possible meticulous adjustments of style, period, genre, and historical change: Pope wrought to its last perfection the classical vein of English poetry; he inherited, it is true, the wealth of his predecessors, but the splendour of his affluence was his own. Whenever any class, or any form of literature has touched its meridian, Art is left without progressive power; there are no longer inventors or improvers; excellence is neutralized by excellence, and hence a period of languor succeeds a period of glory. At such a crisis we return to old neglected tastes, or we acquire new ones which in their turn will become old; and it is at this critical period that we discover new concurrents depreciating a legitimate and established genius whom they cannot rival, and finally practising the democratic and desperate acts of a literary Ostracism. (434) Literary history allows D’Israeli at once to define Pope’s “perfection” as the consummation of the “classical vein” and to set his particular achievement within larger patterns of aesthetic and cultural transformation, patterns that when carefully observed reveal intermittent sequences of advance, stasis, and regression. From the vantage point afforded by this more inclusive sense of literary history, the strongest evidence that the present is one of those exigent moments that “succeed a period of glory” is the “concurrent” – used in the rare sense of a lesser stream – development of literary criticism. Literary criticism operates here as a negative mirror of literary history: politically partisan, intellectually parochial, narrowly self-interested. As the next section will detail, from the 1790s onward, literary history comes to represent for D’Israeli an alternative not only to the emergent genre of literary criticism, but also to the culturally privileged ones of political and national history.

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Toward the end of his life, Isaac D’Israeli offered a brief retrospect of his career as a writer. Provoked by Bolton Corney’s attack on his first popular success, the Curiosities of Literature (1791), D’Israeli responded by claiming the innovativeness of his contributions to the emergent genre of literary history. Noting that in “my youth, the taste for modern literary history was only of recent date” he surveys the precedent texts written by Anthony Wood, Joseph Warton, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Warton. While these signaled that “the age of taste and genius had come” by creating a “more pleasing species of erudition,” they also orientated literary history toward a “barren antiquarianism.” In a brief but informed discussion of contemporary historiographical practices, he describes how his work allowed the “age of taste and genius” to ripen into “the age of philosophical thinking [that] was yet but in its dawn” when he published the Curiosities: An induction from a variety of particulars seemed to me to combine that delight, which Johnson derived from anecdotes, with that philosophy which Bolingbroke founded on examples. On the principle of demonstrating important truths, or elucidating interesting topics by a reasonable number of apposite facts, a work of research might become at once ethical and critical, philosophical and historical.1 D’Israeli touches in these comments on some of the major strands within eighteenth-century history writing: biography, antiquarianism, classical narratives of statecraft that conform to Bolingbroke’s definition of “history teaching by example,” and, finally, the new mode of philosophical history that from the mid-eighteenth century explored manners and customs in an attempt to offer systematic accounts of social experience. 81

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Section III: Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History

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Looking back from the self-vindicating moment of 1838, he suggests that in the 1790s he combined these diverse elements and inaugurated a new form of literary history. His method of moving inductively from a variety of particulars would bring together Johnsonian biography with Wartonian antiquarianism, and Bolingbroke’s traditional exemplary history with Hume’s more philosophical study of the “domestic and gradual revolutions of a state”2 Any autobiographical summary necessarily involves some foreshortening and editing of detail. But the economy of hindsight also distorts the complex progress of D’Israeli’s intellectual development. In practice, his involvement with the formation of literary history in the forty years between the Curiosities and the retrospective summary in The Illustrator Illustrated was both less purposive in its direction and more subject to the vagaries of extrinsic circumstance than his own assessment implies. Benjamin Disraeli’s remark that his father’s writings might be seen as “chapters” in a projected “History of English Literature” hints at an alternative approach to D’Israeli’s work.3 While the phrasing might seem a negative judgment on the partiality of Isaac’s achievement, it can also be more positively construed as a recognition that incompleteness is the logical complement to D’Israeli’s pursuit of his diverse political and psychological interests. In his engagement of literary history as alternative to prevailing historiographical modes, a sense of his own cultural marginality combined with a turn to conservatism in the 1790s played an important role. The commitment to developing the possibilities of opinion, anecdote, and secret history – elements of contemporary history writing that undermined classical norms – thus has a significant biographical dimension. From the mid-1790s onwards, two critical issues govern his preference for the incomplete, marginal, and anecdotal: first, the rejection of a narrowly conceived understanding of history as politics that occurred in the wake of his dismay at the “fatal progress” of the French Revolution; second, his equivocal status as an “outsider” who, nevertheless, carefully fostered the role of quintessential English man of letters. These pragmatic experiences led to an intellectual apostasy that provoked, especially in relation to the revolutionary crisis, a deep skepticism toward the spirit of system. This anti-systematic stance continues throughout his career to color his approach to questions relating to evidence, identity, and the grounds of knowledge. It also nourished his fascination with alienated, misconstrued, or victimized biographical subjects. While neither of these public or personal factors is named in the 1838 retrospective as a formative influence, his works reveal the cumulative pressure each exerts on

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his thinking about the still inexact boundaries between “history” and “literature.” Committed both professionally and temperamentally to the plural understanding of history writing that prevails at century’s end, D’Israeli draws together biographical, political, philosophical, social, and psychological perspectives, and contributes in the process to the emergence of a strand of literary historical thought that is at once distinctively his own and formative for the period. The two chapters following explore the relation between D’Israeli’s apostasy, his eccentric social position, and his recalibrating of genre hierarchies to give preference to the private and domestic over the public and overtly political.

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Section III: Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History

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5

“What often is not in history”: conservative iconoclasm and writing from outside Isaac D’Israeli began the 1790s as a radical and ended the decade a committed loyalist. As with many of his middle-class peers, his radicalism was expressed, in Marilyn Butler’s phrase, principally as “consciousness-raising and not as a programme for political action.”1 Characteristically, his early writings represent these shifts in consciousness in historical terms that center on changes in reading habits. “Within the present century,” he declares in Domestic Anecdotes of the French Nation, “a great Revolution was effected in the human mind. Philosophers ceased to be isolated. It is but of late that the people have been taught to read, and still later, that they have learned to think.”2 D’Israeli subsequently builds on this developmental narrative by suggesting that intellectual change precedes and enables large-scale social transformations. The Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character sees literature as crucial to this process, and further specifies that “the authors who form revolutions” tend to work in popular, rather than elite or specialist, genres: not a “Newton or a Locke” but “an Addison or a Fontenelle.”3 Because writers like Addison drew on “that happier knowledge which is of daily use, and addressed [it] to those who most want instruction,” England became “a reading, and of course a critical nation,” and can now export to Europe the “germs of reflection, and the flower of liberty” (168). Both Domestic Anecdotes and Manners and Genius of the Literary Character represent the relation of history and politics to literature as benignly progressive: modern histories chart the process by which the intellectual growth fostered by literature ultimately expresses itself in political 85

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Apostasy and Exclusion

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reforms that spread from nation to nation. But this constructive reading of quotidian, popular, subjective, and cosmopolitan impulses ends when D’Israeli renounces what his son Benjamin delicately describes as his father’s “education in the revolutionary philosophy of the eighteenth century.”4 Evidence of his retreat from radicalism appears first as a rejection in Miscellanies, or Literary Recreations of any intrinsic link between literary and political revolutions: A writer on literary topics, is now placed on a sharp precipice between politics and religion; and the public reward of all his anxieties, and all his toils, consists in the mutual denunciations of two dishonest factions. Literary investigation is allied neither to politics nor religion; it is a science consecrated to the few; abstracted from all the factions on earth; and independent of popular discontents, and popular delusions.5 Here, the earlier ideal of an enlarged constituency of readers is recast as the discontented “delusions” of mass audiences; the possibility of politics and literature as mutually informing is exchanged for the consecration of an evaluative discourse that transcends “popular discontent.” Authors can avoid the “mutual denunciation of two distinct factions” only by treating literature in disengaged terms as a “science” and by regarding themselves as entirely disinterested commentators. Politics has become equated with partisanship, with literature as its enlightened alternative. This denial of political agency to literature in the wake of his turn to loyalism encourages D’Israeli to rethink the uses to which history writing might be put. In the early, more radical texts, he had invoked classical histories as foils to his own explorations of consciousness, adapting anecdote and secret history to describe the progression from intellectual to political revolutions.6 His aversion to conventional historical narratives survives, even increases, after his apostasy, possibly because the reaction against the radicals’ instrumental use of literature for revolutionary ends further irritates an existing skepticism about narratives of statecraft. In any event, by the late 1790s, this double recoil from politics – as the matter of classical history and the means of fomenting social change – seems to have motivated a deepening interest in literary historical representations. In literary history, he discovers a mode that mediates the equal but opposite extremes of the polished narratives of classical history and the accumulated, unshaped details of antiquarianism: History itself would be but a vast catacomb, if the great actors are only to be heaped together like skeletons in its sepulchral pages;

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skulls which would only differ from each other, from being graven with a different title. They must bear a distinct identity, or they remain but names. The general characters of Clarendon, and the domestic details of Plutarch, must mingle together, if we would delight by exhibiting in vanished scenes, the reality of the past.7 Fully externalized history – names, dates, events – presents an undifferentiated and unenlightening mass of information. It is figured here through metaphors of death that turn history writing into an exercise in barren naming. Literary history, however, because it “mingle[s] together” the alternative methods of Clarendon and Plutarch offers possibilities for a more exact and authentic retrieval of “vanished scenes.” Over the course of the 1790s, D’Israeli attempts to recreate “the distinct identity” of the past while avoiding the limitations of classical histories. His experiments with genre transformation are clearly evident in the Miscellanies, a volume of brief essays that he declares to be at once “multifarious and concise” (18). Modern critics identify eighteenthcentury miscellanies with edited compilations – common-place books, keepsake albums, anthologies – but for D’Israeli, miscellanies are collections of original essays that offer “rather introductions to subjects, than subjects themselves; and like Prefaces, are frequently more pleasing, than the completer works” (a3).8 Their eclecticism and tentativeness provide him with opportunities at once to manage and enhance the tension between continuity and renovation, valuable attributes for a writer who wishes to impress upon his readers the merits of historical inquiry, while challenging customary modes of representation. In its combination of exactly observed detail and wide-ranging digressiveness, the miscellaneous essay generates investigations that are exploratory, but not unrestrictedly speculative in ways that by the late 1790s he regards as ideologically suspect. In its fully developed state, the essay allows D’Israeli to practice what might be called a conservative iconoclasm. Resistance to hierarchies of knowledge is key to this iconoclastic mode, but so too, paradoxically, is a commitment to the preservation of customary values. In the opening essay of the Miscellanies (1796), we have clear evidence of the first of these imperatives, the skeptical response to traditional scholarship. “Of Miscellanies” scrutinizes the genre divisions of philology, biography, and historiography in order to test history’s long-standing claim to intellectual pre-eminence. Questioning the prestige of historiography helps him to unsettle the assumption that there is a necessary connection between inherited, classically sanctioned forms and intellectual

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rigor. Once he has exposed the dignity of history writing as merely orthodox and not inherent, the way is clear for a fresh appraisal of marginal genres like biography. “Some Observations on Diaries, SelfBiography, and Self-Characters” argues that the received belief that biography is inferior to history operates to the disadvantage of both genres: “it was, an usual complaint with the meagre Biographers of the last century, when their subject was a man of letters, that his life could not be deemed very interesting, since he, who had only been illustrious in his closet, could not be supposed to afford any materials for the historian” (120). As long as only the public and political were deemed to possess value, biography remained “meagre” and history unduly restricted in scope. The alternative, the “philosophical” mode of writing D’Israeli advocates, admits the private and the literary as essential components of historical understanding.9 Modern historians who “detect and separate the shades of the passions” in the “human mind” (96) thus move significantly beyond the narrow sphere of classical history’s description of the “political intrigues and political opposition” afforded by the “life of a prime minister, or the memoirs of a general” (95). Furthermore, when philosophical historians engage with the “passions” that define their chosen subject, they increase the likelihood that readers, too, will feel a connection to the past: “Our hearts have learnt to sympathize; and we consult annals of history, as a son and a brother would turn over his domestic memoirs. We read history, not to indulge the frivolous inquisitiveness of a dull antiquary, but to explore the causes of the miseries and prosperities of our country.”10 To grasp the full potential of the miscellany as a legitimate conduit for this expanded understanding of the past requires that readers acknowledge not only the arbitrary limits sanctioned by classical histories and biographies, but also the restrictive categories within which literary essays themselves have traditionally been grouped. Essays, he asserts, are classed under philological studies; but philology formerly consisted rather of the labours of arid grammarians, and conjectural critics, than of that more elegant philosophy which has lately been introduced into literature [by such writers as Addison, Johnson, and Hawkesworth] and which by it’s graces and investigation, can augment the beauties of original genius, by beauties of it’s own. (3) Using philology, history, and biography to frame the literary essay helps D’Israeli to foreground his particular strengths and interests: he “augment[s]” the “beauties” of primary texts with incisive commentary,

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he ventures beyond externalized detail, and he reveals the man of letters “in his closet.” But, most important, the newly renovated essay form makes it possible to “reduce the aggravated magnitude of the illustrious dead, that we may perform an act of justice to the obscure living” (71). This attention to the overlooked, neglected, and unregarded threads itself through his writings and affords a powerful additional explanation for his antipathy to traditional genres. While his distaste for classical historiography originates partly in doubts about the fabricated artfulness of its narrative structure, partly in frustration with genre conventions (like imagined speech) that blur the line between authorial invention and his subject’s documented comments, it is the acts of exclusion on which the “aggravated magnitude of the illustrious dead” depend that most provoke his censure: “If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, and to glance into domestic journals, as well as into national archives, we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy to those few names, which eloquence has adorned with all the seduction of her graces” (68–9).11 This urging that attention be paid to the private, the anonymous, and the neglected could be construed in terms supportive of radicalism. As D’Israeli expands his critique of historiography, however, it becomes evident that he is not finally making a political argument for a more democratic commemorative mode, but an ethical claim for a less exclusionary approach to determining the matter of history. Methodological questions are key here. Our “sympathy” for “those few names” that figure in “national archives,” he suggests, not only leaves unexplored other aspects of the past, it also originates in the highly questionable practices of historians who direct their “eloquence” with “all the seduction of her graces” to dignify their subjects – and, D’Israeli implies, themselves – often at the expense of “fact.” William Robertson, the renowned author of histories of Scotland (1759), Charles V (1769), and America (1777), for instance, is described in the essay, “Historical Characters are False Representations of Nature” as a writer “so pleasing” that his “veracity becomes very suspicious.” Readers who “revere truth and humanity” (70) should look instead, therefore, to writers like D’Israeli whose understanding of history as recuperation leads him to private literary forms: journals, diaries, memoirs, anecdotes, and secret histories.

“The historian of the human mind” If conservative iconoclasm licenses the debunking of existing narrative histories, and miscellaneous essays offer a formal alternative, what principles of selection determine how D’Israeli chooses from those who

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otherwise would be “doomed to have no historian”? What, in other words, is the appropriate subject for a writer hostile to radicalism, yet reluctant to number himself among those whose antiquarian pursuits make them “dead authors who are yet living” (Miscellanies, 41)? The 1814 Calamities and Quarrels of Authors makes exclusion and marginality the key signifiers of intellectual integrity, and plays this attention to the non-illustrious off against the historical genre most concerned with public men and public actions. In this way, D’Israeli establishes a correspondence between the sometimes obscure subjects of literary history and its discursive status – a history committed neither to prestigious political history nor to esoteric antiquarianism. In the Preface to Calamities and Quarrels, D’Israeli characterizes this activity as the “contributing of fresh materials to our literary history,” but two decades previously in a Dissertation on Anecdotes, he had located his work through implicit contrast with the extremes of narrative history and antiquarianism.12 In an important passage, quoted earlier, he writes: Our hearts have learnt to sympathize; and we consult the annals of history, as a son and a brother would turn over his domestic memoirs. We read history, not to indulge the frivolous inquisitiveness of a dull antiquary, but to explore the causes of the miseries and prosperities of our country. We are more interested in the progress of the human mind, than in that of empires.13 For D’Israeli, classical histories distort by placing a premium on pattern and causality in their descriptions of “empire,” while antiquarians render detail meaningless with their undigested accumulations of particulars. His alternative history avoids both the grandeur and the frivolity, drawing on the exploratory possibilities of the brief essay in order to map “the progress of the human mind.” Adapting this more pliable form, he is able to develop the “minute anecdotes of the age” that he gathers from “the private diaries of individuals” (9). This turn away from the public “archives of a nation” and toward something approximating “domestic memoirs” encourages sympathetic engagement with the past on the part of both the historian and his readers. The strategy, of course, complements other late eighteenth-century attempts to evoke an affective engagement of “unfinished” experience: the interest in ruins, in what Elizabeth Wanning Harries describes as the “sudden reappearance” of “the image made by chance” in Cozzens’ blot technique, in the fragmenting of narrative in sentimental fictions such as Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.14

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In the Preface to Calamities and Quarrels, he repeats his commitment to documentary evidence, but eliminates the phrase “progress of the mind” – an expression that had come to have radical connotations by the late 1790s – replacing it with a distinctly modern construction. His interests, he asserts, are “psychological,” a neologism striking enough to require a footnote: “From the Grecian Psyche, or the soul, the Germans have borrowed this expressive term. They have a Psychological Magazine. Some of their own recent authors have adopted the term peculiarly adapted to the historian of the human mind” (5). D’Israeli’s intention to blend the evidentiary with the psychological in his literary histories leads him to draw “the individual characters and feelings of Authors from their own confessions, or deduc[e] them from the prevalent events of their own lives ... [and from] their secret history, as it floats on tradition, or lies concealed in authentic and original documents” (5). In casting himself as “historian of the human mind,” he refers not simply to the inner lives of his subjects, but also to the mediating force of his own consciousness, illustrating, in an appropriately organic image, the collaboration between the two forms of genius: I feel anxious for the opinions and feelings which have arisen in the progress and diversity of this work; but whatever their [the authors’] errors may be, it is to them that my readers at least owe the materials of which it is formed; these materials will be received with consideration, as the confessions and statements of genius itself. In mixing them with my own feelings, let me apply a beautiful apologue of the Hebrews – ‘The clusters of grapes sent out of Babylon implore favour for the exuberant leaves of the vine; for had there been no leaves, you had lost the grapes’. (5)15 D’Israeli’s “mixing” of himself with the authors he studies invites us to consider in turn his motivations in the choice of biographical subject. In the writers he champions, D’Israeli stresses the likeness between his turns of mind and those of his beleaguered subjects, but he also reveals that the sources of their singularity are, in fact, quite distinct from his own. For his chosen authors, peripheral status originates in intellectual interests, political associations, or styles of writing – in elements of considered choice, rather than inheritance. By contrast, his own marginality, as his biographer James Ogden documents in contemporary responses to D’Israeli as a “lively foreigner,” grows out of the “unconventional position” of the family: “Jewish and though respected on account of D’Israeli’s literary achievements, not quite respectable” (73). A personal

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sense of incongruity is rarely directly expressed in D’Israeli’s writing, appearing instead at the remove of identification, as he projects his lack of entitlement on to maverick literary figures with whom he feels kinship.16 Michael Scrivener identifies a “recurrent pattern” in Romantic Anglo-Jewish texts in which “Jewish difference makes itself fit into already existing generic conventions in much the same way that British Jews became acculturated.”17 D’Israeli, however, deviates from this pattern, aligning his writings not with well-established preoccupations, but with the emergent mode of literary history.18 His iconoclasm, as we have seen, manifests itself in a skeptical treatment of the supposedly illustrious dead, in a sympathetic response to those whose qualities and achievements have not been sufficiently appreciated, and in an inclination both to conform and to deviate – an antiquary, a man of letters, an historian of England, but in all these roles, one who resists customary modes of representation. This attraction to the exceptional – at the level of both subject and genre – can be seen with particular clarity in D’Israeli’s identification of Zachary Grey and Thomas Carte as his predecessors in the writing of literary history. Grey and Carte were of the same generation (born in the late seventeenth century and living into the mid-eighteenth): both were fierce defenders of the Stuarts, accomplished in antiquarian research, and prolific authors of contentious works that, even at the time of their publication, argued for lost causes. D’Israeli glances at their involvement in political controversy, but the core of his discussion in “The Miseries of the First English Commentator” and “The Indiscretion of an Historian” (in Calamities and Quarrels of Authors) turns on the connections between personal integrity, public opprobrium, and scholarly innovativeness. Grey, “the father of our modern commentators” (104) and Carte, “the first of our historians who had the sagacity and the fortitude to ascertain where the true sources of our history lie” (110–11), thus appear at once to be victims and luminaries, casualties of traditional scholarship and progenitors of a more authentic and complex historicism. In describing them, D’Israeli emphasizes details that suggest their similarities to him, in relation both to strengths – his methods for recovering the literary past in fact repeat their tactics – and marginal status. As editor of Hudibras, Grey overcame his detachment from the past when he set out “to read what the poet read, to observe what the poet observed ... at once throwing himself and the reader back into an age, of which even the likeness had disappeared, and familiarising us with distant objects, which had been lost to us in the haze and mists of time” (105). Through a process of intense identification with Butler’s self, work, and times, Grey renewed

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the currency of the poem and its contexts, allowing the reader access to a complex world otherwise “lost.” His activities thus appear to D’Israeli to be simultaneously historical and critical, recuperative and restorative. Yet despite this erasure of distance and recovery of a vanished culture through “historical and explanatory notes,” Grey was “ridiculed and abused” (104) by his peers. The account of Thomas Carte reinforces this theme of unappreciated or misunderstood visionary. Central to the description is the letter that Carte himself sent to Jonathan Swift (August 11, 1738), in which he sets his projected History of England against Rapin’s and argues that an English historian would naturally have greater insight into native politics. Typically, D’Israeli is interested less in the political dimensions of national identity, than in the methodological advance made possible by Carte’s close attention to source material (as a progenitor of David Hume, Carte also reinforces D’Israeli’s own sense of affiliation with Hume, whom he consistently presents as the victim of republican apologists). Carte is commended for having “discovered a new world beyond the old one of our research ... [and] opened those subterranean veins of secret history from whence even the original writers of our history, had they possessed them, might have drawn fresh knowledge and more ample views” (110). When the first volume of his literary “monument,” the History of England, was published in 1747, however, it included a passage that described the Old Pretender curing scrofula by his touch, an endorsement of divine hereditary right that his detractors seized on to ruin Carte’s credibility. His Jacobitism – glossed over as an “absurd but not peculiar opinion” and “an indiscretion which was more ludicrous than dishonest” (113) – has some parallels with D’Israeli’s own early involvement in proscribed politics.19 But whatever personal motives for identification it might provide, the essay emphatically confirms that the two writers share a professional commitment to the “subterranean veins of secret history,” a mode that for D’Israeli, as we will see, offers a key source of “fresh knowledge and more ample views.” The sad fate of Carte, “compelled to render [his History] in shilling numbers” (110), thus seems doubly unfortunate, a “calamity” to the individual writer and to the prestige of a genre that to D’Israeli’s mind deserves a better reception. D’Israeli extracts an important consolation, however, from the wreck of Carte’s project. The History of England may have failed abruptly, but the “ideas of the literary man are never thrown away, however vain at the moment, or however profitless to himself. Time preserves without injuring the image of his mind, and a following age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend” (111–12). This argument for the

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persistence of ideas superficially resembles Wordsworth’s claim in the 1815 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” that poetry marked by “that accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past and a prophetic enunciation of the remotest future” will necessarily prevail, even if limited “for a season to few and scattered hearers.”20 But while D’Israeli registers as keenly as Wordsworth the failure of contemporaries to appreciate genius, he avoids the prophetic strain, directing his attention away from the “few and scattered hearers” and toward the changing cultural contexts through which we can understand why “a following age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend.” In Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, the discussion of writers treated badly by posterity (among them, Carte and Grey) is complemented by a focus on those neglected by their peers, including Hume and Dryden. He initially accounts for these latter instances of dereliction in terms of jealousy, reading the slighting of them as the attempt of the lesser to “level” the superior. Quickly, however, and with a characteristically elegant deployment of irony, he complicates the argument from resentment. “How the feelings and language of contemporaries differ from that of posterity!,” he begins, inviting us to feel a comfortable distance from those unimaginative forebears who failed to appreciate the brilliance of Dryden and Hume. But the condescension he briefly encourages can only be indulged at the expense of the comparative thinking he wants ultimately to defend: “And yet let us not exult in our purer and more dignified feelings – we are, indeed, the posterity of Dryden and Congreve; but we are the contemporaries of others who must patiently hope for better treatment from our sons than they received from the fathers” (206). Literary history here allows D’Israeli to link two of his key preoccupations: the pressure of subjective or inward responses on the public realm and the provisional nature of our relation to time. Where Coleridge, for instance, thinks in terms of fixing the literary canon by “[a]bstract[ing] from the degrees and peculiarities of individual genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period,” D’Israeli emphasizes instead the heuristic capabilities of literary history.21 For him, the “peculiarities of individual genius” are inherently, if unevenly, related both to particular material circumstances and larger cultural transformations. The historical contexts essential to understanding the “survival of the ideas of the literary man” are evident in both the figurative language and the actual examples D’Israeli provides to illustrate the delayed recognition of greatness. In describing the fulfillment of the pattern in which the “following age often performs what the preceding failed to comprehend,” he uses organic metaphors reminiscent of Burke’s. Hume,

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for instance, was left “to reap the harvest whose soil has been broken by [Carte’s] hand” (114), while in a later essay, Hearne, Camden, Stowe, and Holinshed are represented as “waters [that] silently swelled from the spring of Leland’s genius,” which is also imaged as a “spark [that] ... falling into the inflammable mind of a poet” produced Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (178).22 But though he draws on a natural vocabulary to define the transmission of influence, D’Israeli chooses material images to capture the extraordinary preliminary labors undertaken by the original writer, suggesting that the “ruins of Leland’s mind,” for example, “were viewed in his library” with its “volumes on volumes stupendously heaped together, and masses of notes scattered here and there” (178). The effect of this emphasis on concrete particulars is partly to undercut the ersatz Platonism of the “universal mind” (itself a variation on the Wordsworthian “sublimated humanity”), partly to reiterate the significance of the fragmentary, the neglected, the preliminary, the incomplete. Leland’s greatness was “diffused through a variety of other men’s; and what he intended to produce it has required many to perform” (178). The wrecked library as illustration of the “vestiges of his genius and its distraction” suggests the revelatory power of the carefully chosen detail, central (as we will see) to his defense of secret history as a privileged mode, and used here to indicate the complexities of literary influence. Every monumental or public achievement, he implies, depends on a prior, often unacknowledged source whose description gives the reader a denser, “truer” sense of the fostering culture than that afforded by conventional histories. The works of Hearne, Drayton, Holinshed, and Camden, their contemporary significance, their sense of the past, and their current reception: all emerge from the “ruins of Leland’s mind” and the library that emblematizes it. A decade later, D’Israeli would make this originary source textual and situate it in the context of public opinion. Doing so enables a reading of history not as a linear narrative of significant political events, but as a welter of texts that, properly interpreted, reveals the shaping influence of contingency and inwardness on public life. His Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First thus develops from the premise that historians err in using political developments to measure shifts in belief. An anterior realm of public opinion exists well before conviction hardens into action, and contemporary books provide the discerning modern writer with ample evidence of its contours: Those revolutions in public opinion, which are silently operating, without yet manifesting any overt acts, can only be detected in those

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histories of mankind which are furnished by themselves—Books! These are the precursors or the recorders, of whatever is passing in Europe. There is a philosophy in the aridity of bibliography which few bibliographers have discovered; there is a chronology of ideas as well as facts; and the date of an opinion is far more interesting than any on the Colophons.23 The reflexive description of books as “histories of mankind ... furnished by themselves” underscores the importance of antiquarian researches to D’Israeli’s sensibility. But while immersion in primary, and often arcane, literatures is a precondition of his understanding of history, a “philosophical” attention to the texture of mental life in previous eras is equally necessary if authorial representations are to enliven comprehensiveness with insight. From his perspective, a mode of writing that aspires to be “true” to the past must be alert to the “chronology of ideas as well as facts” and, hence, to the possibility that antecedent conceptions may be “far more interesting” than their eventual depiction in printed texts. Over the course of D’Israeli’s writing career, what he perceives as the constituent elements of that mode – opinion, fact, anecdote, secret history – are subject to differences of interpretation and emphasis, differences that cumulatively shape his understanding of literary history.

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6

Opinion, secret history, and anecdote In the earlier, more radical, moments of his career, D’Israeli invested writers with an agency, “superior to every power in the state,” to direct the “aweful voice of public opinion”: Opinion is the sovereign of man; and authors who are the propagators of her decrees, are some of the most important persons in society, and may be called ministers of state to Opinion ... Authors stand between the governors and the governed ... They awaken, they terrify, they excite, they conduct the people.1 By the late 1790s, he no longer subscribed to this progressivist view of opinion as a broadly diffused and potentially beneficent force. Rather than its being mobilized for noble ends, it becomes the engine through which extreme radicals express their violence and “quench their monstrous hatreds in the blood of him who only differs with them in opinion.”2 Severed from the possibility of consensus, opinion becomes identified with violent partisanship hostile to good government. The reversal that marks D’Israeli’s turn from a liberal to a reactionary interpretation is further complicated by his subsequent engagement of an alternative, more fully historical, representation of the social significance of opinion. For a time, however, the two views overlapped and coexisted, as can be seen in the essay “Political Criticism of Literary Compositions” from the 1814 Calamities and Quarrels. The narrower account appears in his definition of “Political Criticism” as “attacks [originating] solely from the accidental circumstances of [an author’s] differing in opinion from his critics on subjects unconnected with the 97

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topics he treats of” (423). The more constructive one is made possible when he enters the literary domain and provides a brief history of critics and their victims, beginning with Anthony Wood’s disparaging judgments of Locke and moving through Sprat and Warton to Johnson who “with all the rage of political criticism on subjects of literature, has condemned the finest works of Milton” (425). D’Israeli concludes his account of misjudgments fueled by prejudice by asserting that “the true objects of generic LITERATURE, the cultivation of the intellectual faculties, stand entirely unconnected with POLITICS and RELIGION ... In our free country unhappily they have not been separated – they run together, and in the ocean of human opinions, the salt and bitterness of these mightier waves have infected the clear waters of the springs of the Muses” (435). The transition from listing particular offenders to critical commentary is effected through the displacement of a negative and affective understanding of opinion, by a comparative and analytical one. While each of the authors from Wood to Johnson appears singly to be animated by jealousy or spite, the larger pattern made possible by D’Israeli’s sequential arrangement of them offers grounds for a constructive investigation of the tenor of the age. Individuals whose actions are determined by the “salt and bitterness” of political and religious factionalism continue to be condemned, in other words, but increasingly the “ocean of human opinion” (working in conjunction with the perspective supplied by “the clear waters of the springs of the Muses”) provides materials for a more authentic analysis than that afforded by traditionally conceived histories. His indebtedness (here as elsewhere) to the contention of his favorite English historian, David Hume, that it is “on opinion only that government is founded” is clear.3 As Mark Phillips has suggested, Hume’s argument “turns all history, in effect, into a history of the human mind,” a stance that D’Israeli will elaborate and theorize in his “psychological” rendering of secret history.4 For D’Israeli, opinion furnishes the historian with both a schematic periodization – the emergence of opinion, he claims, defines the crucial historical juncture at which modernity begins – and a subject – an authentic body of information that gives contemporary readers access to the distinctness of the past. In the 1816 An Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First, he describes the early seventeenth century as an age in which the rule of “authority” had just begun to yield to that of “opinion.”5 (Late in his career, the Amenities of Literature [1841] elaborates this point, making “the art of guiding opinion” the driving force behind the expansion of the press

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and restriction of autocratic rule in Elizabeth’s reign.)6 Understanding the epochal significance of this period requires observation of its uniqueness. Since “to decide of another age by the changes and the feelings through which our own had passed” is manifestly wrong (although often practiced), it is necessary for the writer both to exercise an antiquarian regard for minutiae and an historical consciousness alert to the “chronology of human opinions.”7 Over the course of the 1790s, secret history emerges as one of the privileged sources from which D’Israeli draws primary evidence of the role of opinion in previous ages. But in addition to providing historical matter, secret history also comes to serve important discursive functions related to its current potential to mediate between hardly digested fact and public narrative.8 Eventually, these functions will include correcting the deficiencies of narrative history and antiquarianism, establishing the grounds for his self-construction as at once privileged commentator and outsider, and providing plausible alternatives to both classical political history and to the hysterical conspiracy theories advanced by extreme anti-Jacobins.9 First, however, he needed to distance himself from the scandal chronicles and romans-à-clef of early eighteenth-century writers like Delarivier Manley, whose representations of court culture combined gender politics with scurrilous details in the defense of the Tory ministry.10 To authenticate his expanded version of secret history, D’Israeli uses the disreputable scandal chronicle as foil, implying that his ideological opponents deliberately misguide their readers by presenting slanderous comments as genuine documentary evidence. In An Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (1816), he thus makes polemical use of scandal chronicles to suggest that present-day republicans, intent on justifying their prejudice against the monarchy, collude with their seventeenth-century counterparts in willful misrepresentations of the king: The character of James I. has always been taken from certain scandalous chronicles, whose origin requires detection. It is this mud which has darkened and disturbed the clear stream of history ... In the times of the commonwealth, when all things were agreeable which vilified our kings, these secret histories were dragged from their lurking holes ... [R]egistered for posterity in many a scandalous chronicle, they have been mistaken for histories; and include so many truths and falsehoods, that it becomes unsafe for the historian either to credit or to disbelieve them. (161–2)

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A footnote to the passage literalizes the low origins of the scandal chronicle: “Most of these works were meanly printed, and were usually found in a state of filth and rags, and would have perished in their own merited neglect, had they not been recently splendidly reprinted. Thus the garbage has been cleanly laid on a fashionable epergne, and found quite to the taste of certain lovers of authentic history!” As “epergne” suggests, and the irony of “authentic” confirms, D’Israeli here impugns those like “the fierce, remorseless republican Catherine Macaulay” (8) who present Jacobean “state-libels” as legitimate sources in order to malign the English monarchy and advance the French cause.11 This version of secret history as scandal chronicle in the Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First operates alongside another, and ultimately dominant, model. In this more positive construction, secret history draws on the prestige of conventional, masculine historiography. It discovers the true meaning of the past, however, not in “the imposing appearance of public affairs,” but in the hidden recesses of private, even marginal, lives where the incentives for largescale distortions of experience are diminished.12 Conceived in these terms, the mode involves the integration of his long-standing interests in antiquarianism, opinion, and authorial genius. In Despotism: Or The Fall of the Jesuits. A Political Romance. Illustrated by Historical Anecdotes, he muses that “History might be composed in a new manner – it would not be to describe events and characters in the forms they now appear. When we describe the characters of men, we mistake the nature of things – Secret History is often a treasure under ground” (II.317). The anecdote is crucial to this “new manner” of writing because it provides the historian both with primary source material and an alternative to the uninflected organization of “public history” as a “regular narrative of incidents in the natural order of their occurrence” (Charles, iv).13 Both theoretically and practically, D’Israeli’s use of the anecdote (and its elaborated form in secret history) advances consideration of the fundamental representational problem he addresses – how are the distortions imposed on experience by a focus on politics and statecraft as the matter of history, and authoritative disinterestedness as its assumed perspective, to be overcome? The anecdote makes the intimate, telling detail revelatory of connections between domestic and public spheres. In doing so, it enables D’Israeli to adjust the scale of historical inquiry, accommodating questions of “motive” as well as “conduct” in an effort to “form a just conception of the individual [while] becoming acquainted with the times in which he lived” (Charles, 6). Further, by structuring the anecdote in ways that suggest a complementary relation

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between his own status as an outsider and the marginal or misconstrued position of the person he is describing, D’Israeli allows the historian’s empathy for his subject to guide the reader’s response. As he notes in Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, “to transform our forefathers into ourselves is to lose all likeness of the originals, and to throw into the back ages the notions of our own times has often been a source as fertile of errors in our history” (30). Anecdotes, then, encourage both sympathetic identification and (precisely because they so carefully particularize difference between past and present) evaluative detachment. The Dissertation on Anecdotes (1793) provides an early, small-scale instance of the uses made of the anecdote, while the 1816 James the First (to be considered subsequently) reveals how anecdotal elaborations underpin the larger-scale representations of literary history. The Dissertation on Anecdotes is organized by descriptive rubrics that specify the various ways in which the anecdote provokes “interesting conclusions in the affairs of life” (6). Anecdotes are often, his second rubric announces, the “most agreeable parts of History” (7) and their presence in Hume’s work accounts for the difference between his insightful sympathy and the “frigid rapture” (8) of the antiquarian Hearne. But despite their inherent interest, “Anecdotes [are] seldom read with reflection” (6). D’Israeli attempts to counter this tendency by breaking up the text, subdividing the page under distinct headings, and making adroit use of footnotes. As in Warton’s History of English Poetry, the dynamic between text and footnote slows the sense of purposive forward movement, while the footnotes themselves frequently provide the associational links that establish the subsequent topics to be addressed.14 In the passage just cited, for instance, the commendation of Hume is supported by a lengthy note that closes with a quotation from Johnson’s criticism of antiquarians in general, and Robert Henry’s History of England, in particular: “‘I [that is, Johnson] am told it [the History] is carried on in separate divisions, as the civil, the military, the religious history; I wish much to have one branch well done, and that is, the history of manners, of common life.’ Robertson answered, ‘Henry should have applied his attention to that alone, which is enough for any man’” (8). The footnote, ordinarily an ancillary appendage, then supplies the running title for the main text immediately following: “Anecdotes serve as materials for the History of Manners” (9). Just as authoritative political history is subordinated to an anecdotal history of manners, so too narrative progress is sacrificed to the footnote’s more haphazard pursuit of affiliations.

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Had I to sketch the situation of the Jews in the ninth century, and to exhibit at the same time the character of that age of bigotry, could I do it more effectually than by the following anecdote, which a learned friend discovered in some manuscript records? A jew of Rouen in Normandy, sells a house to a christian inhabitant of that city. After some time of residence, a storm happens, lightening [sic] falls on the house, and does considerable damage. The christian, unenlightened, villainous, and pious, cites the trembling descendant of Israel into court for damages. His eloquent counsellor hurls an admirable phillipic against this detestable nation of heretics, and concludes by proving, that it was owing to this house having been the interdicted property of an Israelite, that a thunderbolt fell upon the roof. The judges (as it may be supposed) were not long in determining this suit. They decreed that God had damaged this house as a mark of his vengeance against the property of a jew, and that therefore it was just the repairs should be at his cost. Perhaps it is to be acknowledged, that the judges were merciful, and the jew fortunate. To be condemned to rebuild a house, is better than to be burnt with some of its old wood. (10–11) The conversational tone, the mordant wit, the focus on the victim or the outsider, the identification of a manuscript source: these are all conventional to the anecdote. But the position of both reader and teller are complicated here by the ways in which D’Israeli invests this particular story with the elements of both historical exemplarity and contemporary resonance. The closing paragraph, whose present tense, brevity, and aphoristic tone offer many signs of oblique reference (including one to continuing pogroms), smudges the boundary between the ninth-century “age of bigotry” and the present moment. By directing our attention to this likeness, he makes the anecdote serve functions beyond the writing of the anti-institutional “counter histories” that Annabel Patterson describes as the genre’s central contribution to early modern culture.15 The same attention that D’Israeli pays here to the momentum of the reading experience can be seen elsewhere in his distinction of history from memoir: history construes the individual reader as “one who joins the crowd to see [great men] pass,” while in

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D’Israeli offers an abstract summary of how a history written from anecdotes might be constructed and then provides, under a new heading, “Various Anecdotes Illustrating the History of Manners,” a practical instance:

reading the memoir, “we are like concealed spies, who pause on every little circumstance, and note every little expression.”16 The differences in scale assume, as with the anecdote, that the intimacy gained by proximity conditions a slower, and more focused, pace of reading. D’Israeli’s sense of the anecdote is broadly political, although clearly not in the tradition of a Whig commitment to uncovering official chicanery. But he is also intent on using it to raise important methodological questions about historical representation. As he “sketch[es] the situation of the Jews in the ninth century” and implies analogies to late eighteenthcentury contexts, he establishes gradations of difference and likeness between past and present, all of which demand consideration. If antiSemitism defines an “age of bigotry,” then ninth-century France clearly has much in common with late eighteenth-century England (a point ironically underscored for readers familiar with Jewish history by the relatively enlightened conditions of ninth-century France). D’Israeli’s own narratorial stance is crucial to his efforts to realize this point through the retelling of the judicial ruling. In his role as commentator, he “exhibits” the “character of that age” by heightening its remoteness from the present; as a Jew recording an instance of anti-Semitism, he cuts across that detachment, using the ironic coda of the final paragraph to affirm continuities. By manipulating the perspectives of detachment and identity, he demonstrates how the anecdote underscores the skepticism inherent in secret history. In contradistinction to those of his peers who magisterially deny the artfulness of their constructions, who focus exclusively on public events, or who make insufficient allowance for variations in custom over time, D’Israeli isolates a telling moment from the past and, by trading on both contemporary and modern vantage points, encourages empathy toward the excluded and a critical scrutiny of the powerful. D’Israeli justifies his own often intrusive mediations on the grounds that they contribute to the pleasure of readers: a “writer of anecdotes ... [must] possess a portion of that genius which he records, if he means to afford us perpetual delight” (66). Later, in the Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, he outlines the dynamic that enables such “possession” of his subject: To judge rightly of the feelings of Charles the First at this moment, we must adopt them, in assimilating ourselves to himself and his situation. The writers of history are too apt to invest their personages with the knowledge, and make them influenced by the views, which time unrolls in that vast commentary, which can only be opened up by their posterity. (259)

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As this passage confirms, D’Israeli’s historiographical prescriptions grow out of a sensibility that delights in paradox. The “assimilation” he advocates here depends on the careful discrimination of past from present; similarly, we “judge rightly” only after the willed forgetting of all the “knowledge” that posterity makes available. “The true historian,” in short, “is a contemporary of the past” (Charles, 30). Anecdotes give him access to earlier periods, primary secret histories provide a rich vein of these telling details, and literary history, I would like now to argue, is for D’Israeli, the modern genre that best accommodates both modes to explorations of authorial genius and national consciousness with the object of generating psychologically discerning representations of the past.

Literary history and An Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First In the 1816 Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First, literary history provides a framework for the coordination of opinion, anecdote, secret history, psychological analysis, and national consciousness. Given the appeal of the marginal to D’Israeli’s imagination, James’s status as a defamed king and a maligned author – in Hume’s estimation, a status “as much disputed to this day, as is commonly that of princes who are our contemporaries” – makes him a logical choice for revisionist inquiry.17 The tendency of eighteenth-century republican historians like Catherine Macaulay to cite James as evidence of the failures of monarchy operates as a further incentive to expose “those hidden and involved causes which have so long influenced modern writers in ridiculing and vilifying this monarch” (vii). In developing his counter-interpretation, D’Israeli takes his cue from Hume’s relatively sympathetic account of the early Stuarts. Hume had suggested in his History that James’ “discourse, both for good reasoning and elegant composition, approaches very near that of a man, who was undoubtedly, at the time, one of the greatest geniuses in Europe” (V.33–4). But he, unlike D’Israeli, saw the role of kingship as fundamentally distinct from that of author, and his estimate of James’ literary abilities is scathing. Hume opens his account of the “encouragement of learning” in Appendix IV by declaring that although “the age itself was by no means destitute of eminent writers, a very bad taste in general prevailed during that period; and the monarch himself was not a little infected with it” (V.149). He then concludes his discussion of early modern literature: “We shall mention the king himself at the end of these English writers; because that is his place, when considered as an author. It may safely be

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affirmed, that the mediocrity of James’s talents in literature, joined to the great change in national taste, is one cause of that contempt, under which his memory labours, and which is often carried by party-writers to a great extreme” (V.154). D’Israeli maintained that Hume, James’s “most skilful apologist” (212), erred only in choosing theological and political issues as the leading terms of his analysis. His own investigation, in contrast, makes literary concerns central to the interpretation of Jacobean culture, monarchy, and authorship, supplying grounds for his assertion of the king’s active involvement in the formation of English national identity. As with the earlier Literary Miscellanies, his evidence is drawn from secret histories, memoirs, and anecdotes, with the addition of James’ own works as both primary source and point of contest with republican historiographers whom he charges with egregiously misinterpreting the monarch’s writings. In his attempt to integrate attention to qualities of mind with analysis of event, D’Israeli acts on his assumption that there is a “secret connection” between the “literary character of the monarch” and “his political conduct,” a connection that “led me to examine the manners and temper of the times, with the effects which a peace of more than twenty years operated on the nation” (viii–ix). Literary history allows him to observe the “vigour of that age of genius ... when the founders of our literature flourished” (12–13), to understand how the king’s scholarship enabled him to “balance the conflicting parties” and thereby ensure “pacific government” (26–7), and to ascertain the critical value and historical significance of James’ writings. Once again, political history serves as foil to his inquiry, the source of the methodologically and ideologically suspect representations of James against which he defines his own view. D’Israeli’s critique of existing political histories encompasses popular, standard, and republican accounts, all of which are deemed inadequate on the grounds that they work with historiographical conventions incapable of measuring the nature or extent of James’ accomplishments. The narrowly prescriptive understanding of history as a register of political activities encourages popular historians, for instance, to see national greatness not in relation to a uniquely English identity (an identity that James, he claims, helped to create), but only to foreign affairs: [H]ad the genius of James I. been warlike, had he commanded a battle to be fought and a victory to be celebrated, popular historians, the panders of ambition, had adorned their pages with the bloody

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The tilt of popular history toward external, self-aggrandizing event appears here not simply as unduly restrictive, but also as crudely opportunistic. The “panders of ambition” – both the original agents and their present-day apologists – typically batten on the past by staging it as “spectacle,” a maneuver that ensures the depreciation of rulers like James who cultivate “the still virtues” of peace. The misconstructions of standard political histories are generated by another, but equally damaging, confusion. In their case, the assumption that the monarch is a cipher of his times leads them to give insufficient weight to the “factious leaders” who “cautiously conceal from the people their errors, their passions, and their crimes” (225). The narrative advantages that follow from “converting the monarch into the scape-goat” are evident to D’Israeli – “And thus the historian conveniently solves all ambiguous events” (224) – but the conceptual shortcomings more than justify his alternative method. Without the sympathetic participation achieved by “throwing themselves back into the age of their inquiries” (116), he claims, neither popular nor standard political historians can hope to evoke the complexity of the past. These anachronistic and reductive representations are, however, far less disturbing to him than the ideologically freighted descriptions of James that he traces from the “unprincipled wits” who dominated the “French court of Charles II,” through the “new faction” of William’s “revolution court” (13), to eighteenth-century republican writers, including Catherine Macaulay.18 Such partisan political histories are particularly discomfiting because, like his own Enquiry, they draw on James’ works. But rather than finding evidence in them of “a studious monarch, whose habits formed an agreeable combination of the contemplative and active life” (207), republican writers discover instead a pedantic, superstitious tyrant. To counter the charge of tyranny, D’Israeli asserts that they have seized on “certain abstract doctrines of the times,” not unique to James but inherited from Elizabeth, and “artfully converted” a relatively benign “verbal despotism” into “so many acts of despotism itself”: and thus they [republicans] contrive their dramatic exhibition of a blustering tyrant, in the person of a father of his people, who exercised his power without an atom of brutal despotism adhering to it. When

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trophies; but the peace the monarch cultivated; the wisdom which dictated the plan of civilization, and the persevering arts which put it into practice, these are the still virtues, which give no motion to the spectacle of the historian, and are even forgotten in his pages. (213)

James asserted, that a king is above the laws, he did not understand this in the popular sense; nor was he the inventor, or the reviver of similar doctrines. In all his mysterious flights on the nature of “The Prerogative Royal,” James only maintained what Elizabeth had, as jealously, but more energetically exercised. (114–17) In their failure to discriminate James’ speculative writing from his policies, and the complexities of his historical moment from their own immediate and partisan motives, Macaulay and her cohort observe him “through optical instruments not invented in his days” (123). Their accusations of superstitious credulity are also dismissed through reference to contemporary beliefs: “The truth is, the greatest geniuses of the age of James I. were as deeply concerned in these investigations as his Majesty ... [Bacon] speaks indeed cautiously of witchcraft, but does not deny its occult agency; and of astrology he is rather for the improvement than the rejection” (55). In fact, “those who asperse this monarch for his credulity and intellectual weakness ... had they lived in the reign of James I. had probably written on the same topics; and felt as uneasy at the rumour of a witch being a resident in their neighbourhood!” (51). While James was a representative figure of his age in some respects, he also played a pivotal role in the making of modern literature and political culture, a role that “democratic writers” (114), determined to see him as an absolute monarch, are unable to comprehend. For D’Israeli, the early seventeenth century marks the originating moment of modernity, with all the accompanying turbulence that an epochal break with tradition implies. Efforts to understand such “a controversial age of unsettled opinion and contested principle” (12) must begin with the historian’s self-conscious acknowledgment that along with direct lines of connection to the present moment, there exist profound differences between his own age and the Jacobean one, differences that have to be engaged on their own terms. Drawing on literary texts as evidence of contemporary culture allows a more balanced and judicious reading of individual motivations and social conditions. As his repeated references to James’ writings suggest, D’Israeli sees the king’s authorship as an additional and compelling justification of a literary historical perspective. Literary criticism alone would deal only imperfectly with his accomplishments, since here, as with political judgments on his reign, interpretation requires sympathetic attention to the religious pressures exerted in an “age of doctrines” (18). James’ literary works and the broader issues they raise concerning the exemplary individual’s role in the formation of culture can only

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properly be understood through attentive reading of both canonic and non-canonic texts. The examples he provides as illustration of this point are carefully chosen to qualify the conclusions of respected historians like Hume and entirely to undermine those of present-day radicals. The charge that James indulged in arcane controversy, for instance, is answered in the Enquiry with the assertion that he mastered theological argument in order to disarm Nonconformists who “were cloaking their republicanism by their theology” and attempting to conceal the fact that “like all other politicians ... their ostensible were not their real motives” (28).19 And while current republicans seize on the recanted Daemonologie to malign James, D’Israeli suggests that “the philosophical inquirer” will be more interested in the social and literary issues this work raises about these “times of omens and meteors, prognostics and providences,” when the “greatest minds were then sinking under such popular superstitions” (51–2). Within this expanded historiographic framework, the writer can also draw on larger questions of genius to conceptualize the monarch’s role in an age in which “authority” begins to yield to “opinion”: When has there appeared a single genius, who at once could free himself of the prejudices of his contemporaries; nay of his own party? Genius, in its advancement beyond the intelligence of its own age, is but progressive; it is fancifully said to soar, but it only climbs. Yet the minds of some authors of this age are often discovered to be superior to their work; because the mind is impelled by its own inherent powers, but the work usually originates in the age. (57–8) This argument for genius as at once reflecting and surpassing its age helps to deliver James from the “political odium of arbitrary power” (133) and to place him firmly in the company of his renowned literary peers. Seen in relation to this cohort, even his “more mysterious flights on the nature of ‘The Prerogative Royal’” can be construed as evidence not of reactionary politics, but of a progressive consciousness that ultimately set the terms for a distinctly English culture and identity: “all the political reveries, the abstract notions, and the metaphysical fancies of James I. arose from his studious desire of being an English sovereign, according to the English constitution – for from thence he derived those very ideas” (115–17). D’Israeli develops this idea of “Englishness” in terms that neatly sidestep the republican critique of James as an absolute monarch bent on abusing royal prerogatives. Instead, he represents him as the first

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No scholar of a pedantic taste could have dared so complete an emancipation from ancient, yet not obsolete, prejudices, at a time when many of our own great authors yet imagined there was no fame for an Englishman unless he neglected his maternal language for the artificial labour of the idiom of ancient Rome ... There was something prescient in this view of the national language, by the King, who contemplated in it those latent powers which had not yet burst into existence. (15–16) The “literary character of the monarch” thus offers to D’Israeli a “secret connection” to the monarch’s “political conduct,” a master key that the Enquiry uses to refute the claims of James’ maligners. Literary history in its many incarnations – as a narrative of reception, as the context supplied by comparison with his peers, as corrective to anachronistic acts of literary criticism, as a framework for the coordination of information gleaned from secret histories, as a point of access to questions of opinion and the effect of social conditions on political rule – not only helps to discredit republican historiography. It also allows D’Israeli covertly to comment on his own period. While he vindicates his approach by claiming a disinterestedness his opponents lack, the analogues he establishes between James’ and his own age underscore his conservative agenda. At times, the working out of these prepossessions suggests the nature of D’Israeli’s personal stake in the choice of biographical subject. An interesting instance of this crossover between writer and subject occurs in the attack on Nonconformist duplicity, mentioned above. In his explicit linking of Nonconformist and modern republican discourses, he invites the reader to infer that by a parallel logic, James’ defense of literary standards, political integrity, and a national ideal echoes D’Israeli’s own literary efforts to discredit republicans and democrats. Equally committed to the preservation of embattled ideals, king and commentator appear linked in their status as outsiders. In a concluding twist to his argument against conventional modes of history writing, D’Israeli ends the Enquiry with the suggestion that while a strictly political account is clearly inadequate, his own approach may also need to be qualified. Literary history has allowed him to expose the fallacies of republican polemic and of canonical histories of conquest.

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modern English king, a writer whose love of the vernacular fed his commitment to national identity. This is the aspect of his genius that most fully represents his position in the vanguard of his age:

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Drawing on the documentary evidence of secret history, on James’ authorial gifts, on his commitment to the vernacular, and on his championing of a national consciousness, D’Israeli has attempted to rehabilitate the monarch’s damaged reputation. But the persistence of defamation from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries elicits an acknowledgment that literary history has its own limits: [I]t has not always been arbitrary power which has forced the people into the dread circle of their fate, seditions, rebellions and civil wars; nor always oppressive taxation, which has given rise to public grievances. Such were not the crimes of James I. Amidst the full blessings of peace, the people has shewn how easily they corrupt themselves; and how a philosopher on the throne, and the father of his people, shall live without exciting gratitude, and die without inspiring regret – unregarded, unremembered! (225–6) As the mode that best observes the parallel emergence of national identity and a self-consciously vernacular literature, literary history appears the quintessential genre of modernity. But its remedial aspirations must be checked by the “ingratitude and wantonness of mankind” (xi). D’Israeli’s address of the Enquiry in 1816 to a people again “[a]midst the full blessings of peace” ends on a mournful note that suggests that James’ “unregarded, unremembered” legacy may be predictive of his own fate. As with Godwin’s meditations on the transience of fame in the closing pages of Lives of Edward and John Philips, D’Israeli’s here underscore the fact that literary historical recuperations are premised on the distortion, misremembering, or outright forgetting of the past. For both writers, anxiously aware of themselves as marginal to the larger culture and concerned about their legacies, such recognitions must have been chastening. The course of literary history in the period following 1820 would confirm their anxieties.

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This study began by tracing the inheritance of two powerful late-century models for representing the past, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and Warton’s History of English Poetry, through the anthologies, memoirs, specimens, biographies, and antiquarian researches of their own generation and the generation following. The third section concentrated on a single writer, Isaac D’Israeli, observing across the range of his work – in novels, essays, periodical reviews, anecdotes, memoirs, and inquiries – the gradual articulation of literary history as an alternative to public or political history. This final section recovers a wider focus to explore the practice and theorizing of literary history in the genres just named, in writing for women and the young or uninstructed, and, most particularly, in the new venues for its dissemination previously mentioned only in passing: the recently founded Institutions, including the Royal, Surrey, and Russell, and the major reviews and magazines that rose to prominence in the wake of the revolutionary war. In reviews and lectures of the late 1810s, this section concludes, controversies centered on the making and reception of opinion alter the comparatively depressed status of literary criticism and in the process initiate the undermining of literary history’s vital mediation of period discourses. The cultural authority of institutional lectures and the enhanced prestige of post-1800 periodicals renewed debate about the liberal and iconoclastic functions of literary history, particularly its cultivation of opinion, its arguments for increasing access to the literary past, and its skeptical approach to conventional historiography. A crucial element in what quickly emerged as a conservative effort to standardize literary history writing (and in the process circumscribe its potential to unsettle traditional boundaries) was the defense of a uniquely British “national mind” vested in a canonic “national literature” that reached from 111

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Section IV: The Genres of Literary History

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the sixteenth century and carried forward to Wordsworth. Chapter 7 opens with a characteristic expression of this sentiment, John Wilson’s “On the Revival of a Taste for our Ancient Literature,” an article revealing both in its procedures and its conceptual framework the harmonizing of Tory politics with a nativist reading of the literary past. Wilson’s foundational assumption that he speaks to the “whole mind of the nation” is tested in this chapter by investigating genres from across the period – formal history, biography, novel, women’s literary history, and didactic and improving literature – that overtly engage and occasionally refute his hypothesis of standard experience. Chapter 8 considers the place of literary history writing in the highly contested realm of the periodical and lecturing cultures of the 1810s. My focus here is the “Cockneys and Lakers” controversy as it unfolds in a series of articles in Blackwood’s Magazine and in Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets. The adversaries articulate diametrically opposed political views, understanding of the forces of opinion, and representations of readers. But in a maneuver of crucial significance to the subsequent development of literary history, conservative and liberal alike defend their positions by drawing on remarkably similar assumptions about England’s literary past and hence about its reconstruction in narrative. From the 1770s, literary history writing had been a heterogeneous and politically diverse mode, one whose mediatory functions – in relation to class, genre, and opinion – had ensured its continuing vitality within an unsettled print economy. By the end of the Regency period, after the political crisis of Peterloo and with the ascendancy of literary criticism assured, literary history begins to assume its modern contours as a genre centered on consolidating a fixed canon of transcendent works.

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7

“Our Ancient Literature” John Wilson’s 1818 Blackwood’s article, “On the Revival of a Taste for our Ancient Literature,” locates his period’s interest in literary history within the broader development of the “whole mind of the nation” from a state of barbarism to one of civility.1 Emerging societies, he suggests, respond to the past with an attitude of “estrangement and aversion” (265) that reflects embarrassment at their proximity to the culture they wish to supersede. Intent on increasing their distance from it, they orientate themselves toward the future. But at a later evolutionary moment, “when a nation reaches a high point of civilization, and when its literature is highly refined and perfect,” a choice must be made: “it must then either turn itself to the study, and consequently the imitation, of the literature of other nations, or it must revert to the ancient spirit of its own” (266). To give substance to the claim that he and his contemporaries participate in this “general and necessary” (264) pattern when they elect (like Greece, and unlike Rome) to recover that “ancient spirit,” he contrasts the critical apathy and misconstructions of a halfcentury earlier with current responses. The comments he provides as evidence of the “revolution of sentiment” (264) from mid-century error to present-day aptitude are David Hume’s disparaging references to Spenser in The History of England and Oliver Goldsmith’s to Shakespeare in The Vicar of Wakefield.2 While his choice of Hume’s history and Goldsmith’s novel to mark the interpretive lapses of the previous generation might seem at first glance to prepare for a contrast of the genres highest and lowest in dignity, Wilson’s treatment of the two is not, in fact, hierarchically minded. Instead, he uses their mutual disdain for “our ancient Poetry” to assert the 113

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The “whole mind of the nation”

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near impossibility of any writer rising above “the overpowering opinion of his contemporaries” (464). Such entrenchment in local prejudice, however, opens up heuristic possibilities for the modern retrospective observer: “It would be well,” he comments, “if those whose reading leads them that way, would put together the evidence they find of the opinions which one age has entertained of another, to be taken in connexion with its own productions, as grounds for the estimate of its mind” (264). In this construction, literary history, considered as a history of opinion, of books, and of taste, provides a measure for comparative evaluation whose chief interest is its illumination of present-day culture. It is entirely typical of Wilson’s own moment that his historicist evaluation gives central place to the assumption that the “living and creative spirit of literature is its nationality” (266). Such anti-cosmopolitanism goes hand in hand with the increasingly institutional affiliations of literary history during the Regency period. The fervid language of the article’s concluding paragraph thus defends literary history by appealing not to the liberal conviction that it provides a medium for cultural debate, nor to the antiquarian commitment to preserve all that remains or can be recuperated from the past. Instead, quoting from Wordsworth, Wilson gestures toward an insular nativism: Happily for us, The ancient spirit is not dead, Old times, we trust, are living here. And while the worst part of our national literature is forgotten, – all that was meagre and bloodless, or rotten and impure, – on the other hand, we have raised up, as it were, from the tomb, a spirit that was only lying asleep, and that now, from the dust and the darkness, walks abroad among us, in the renovation of all its strength and beauty. (266)3 In this account, literary history documents the renaissance of an “ancient” canon that, once purged of “meagre and bloodless … rotten and impure” works, reveals in its “just estimate and passionate feeling of poetry” (264) an essential spiritual identity between sixteenth- or seventeenth-century and present-day writing. Wilson’s essay offers not only a polemical reflection on literary history’s significance, but also a practical exercise in its workings. His references to Goldsmith and Shakespeare, his allusions to Wordsworth, and his depreciation of Hume relative to his successors in British historiography,

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Robert Henry and Sharon Turner, function as capsule narratives that support his claim that both “intellectual speculation” and “something perhaps of a moral love” (265) inform contemporary reappraisals of preRestoration literature. Setting Sharon Turner and Robert Henry above David Hume on the grounds of their “encreasing exactness of minute research, and a fuller and stronger presentation of the extant materials of the times” (265) accords with this argument that an important gauge of present civility is intense curiosity about the literary culture of the past. In relation to Sharon Turner, in particular, a shared Toryism may well have contributed additionally to his positive assessment.

History, biography, and the “mind of the community” Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1799–1805) and his History of England During the Middle Ages (1814–23) develop a Burkean argument for a native tradition of liberty and resistance to Norman tyranny in conservative and patriotic terms that became particularly marked after 1815. While the antiquarian researches that made the Anglo-Saxons both innovative and influential also figure prominently in the second and third volumes of the Middle Ages (the “Literary History of England” and the “History of English Poetry”), the later work more emphatically projects the “peculiar, original, striking, and important” qualities of “our national historiography” forward into the present moment.4 Turner’s attention to the “ideas and feelings of the times, on the events that are mentioned” (I.xix) in the Middle Ages was by no means unusual. Even the most workmanlike of contemporary historians saw “the progress of the human mind” as a necessary complement to representations of “sieges and battles.”5 But in charting the evolution of a uniquely English “mind of the community” (I.248), he assigns to literature an instrumental role in the nation’s social and political advances, dating from the medieval period and forecast to continue in perpetuity. The literary historical commentary in Turner’s Middle Ages is thus descriptive, prescriptive, and proleptic. It is also, when directed by patriotic concerns, comparative. In order to exempt England from the classical pattern of imperial decline, for instance, he claims that the hostility to “useful knowledge” and “natural feeling” that distinguished Greek sophistry and Roman rhetoric (and that persisted well into the “dark ages”) inhibited all other forms of development: “Like the syllogism of Aristotle, [rhetoric] may enforce what is known; it will discover nothing that is unknown” (I.203). Characteristic structures of

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thought, deeply embedded in national cultures, manifest themselves in modes of writing that Turner uses to explain the waning of the classical world. Conversely, the “fertilization of the national mind” (I.248) that accompanied the twelfth-century emergence of a vernacular in England allowed an “escape from bondage and sterility” into the “possibility of being superior” (I.244–5). That possibility was subsequently fully realized because the “homely verses of our Anglo-Norman forefathers established a taste for simplicity and intelligibility, and framed a poetical diction, that permitted the heart to speak its feelings without restraint. No mental revolution could have been more beneficial” (I.383–4). Drawing on intellect and affect as both historical explanation and expressive medium once again allows him to connect the emergent moment of a distinctly English culture with its culmination in the present and with its assumed persistence. Turner’s critics and supporters alike noted that in his own prose, “poetical diction” often interfered with “simplicity and intelligibility.”6 The stylistic quirks, however, were an essential element in conveying the fit between patriotism and progressivism: Mental originality, increasing judgment, refining taste, and critical moral feeling, emerged with augmented frequency in every succeeding age; and have impressed upon the English nation that love of truth, science, reason, and sensibility, which has made our intellectual progress unintermitted, and is rapidly educating human nature to powers, knowledge, and virtues, which may cause its future history to be some atonement for its former degradation and abuse. (I.405–6) The evidence supplied by literary history confirms that “future history” will continue along the path of vigorous intellectual and moral refinement typical of England’s development from the medieval period to the present day. He thus concludes his survey of the “History of English Poetry” by noting that “rich and varied as our Parnassus had become” by the fifteenth century, the works of Chaucer, Occleve, and Lydgate were “but pledges of a still nobler vegetation, of a still superior culture. If a mind cannot be stationary, how can its works fail to partake of its progression?” (II.349–51). To understand intellectual advancement one need only observe a nation’s literary productions over time. The idea that “the progress of the human mind forms a capital object in the study of history” was a period commonplace.7 Sharon Turner and John Wilson, from distinct genre perspectives but with a shared Tory

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bias, confirm its ubiquity. For both writers, embedding the notion of progress within a narrative that charts the evolution of national consciousness presupposes congruity between literary and political history, a congruity that undercuts any counter-institutional functions that literary history itself might serve. There were, of course, alternatives to their parochial and triumphalist paradigm. As the first section’s discussion of “writing lives” suggests, individual and collective biographies had since the 1770s been an important medium for skeptical literary historical thought, both within historiography proper and in those modes that positioned themselves as alternatives to it. In the 1790s, the anti-loyalists Benjamin Heath Malkin and John Aikin offer their own theoretical grounds for biography’s capacity to challenge customary representations. Malkin, first professor of history, ancient and modern, at the University of London, and early friend of William Blake, sees its role as compensatory, noting that the “defect in historical narrative, in not tracing its hero into his closet, among his family and his friends, may in many instances be supplied by biography.”8 The dissenter John Aikin, author with William Enfield of the massive General Biography; or Lives, Critical and Historical (8 vols, 1799–1803), reverses Malkin’s genre hierarchy, placing biography above history. In doing so, he opens the possibility of a newly constituted domain: History, as it has been too much the custom to compose it, gives a distinct view only of those great events, as they are called, which, from their uniformity and simplicity, instruct less in the real nature of mankind, than the story of domestic and civil life … Biography has taken the personages of history, and by painting them as single portraits, has given more exact delineations of their features: but it has likewise selected many from the groups of common life, and has thereby made a display of human character vastly more copious, varied, and distinct than is to be found in history alone.9 For Malkin, it is a given that history “confines its principal attention to the turbulent scenes of political life” (66); biography enriches, without compromising, this mandate when it “elucidates the conduct of the politician by the manners of the private man, and gives a clearer insight into the temper and disposition by a few anecdotes, than history does by the most laboured dissertation” (68). For Aikin, however, the public and political are equally alien to the “real nature of mankind” which demands a more inclusive consideration of “common life.” The superior value of biography thus lies not only in its attention to character but

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also in its expansion of potential subjects to take account of those drawn from “domestic and civil life.”

In theory, the subjects to which Aikin refers could include women. But contemporary commentators were more often interested in reinforcing an “ideology of the feminine” than in detailing the “real nature” of women’s accomplishments.10 The mid-eighteenth-century gendering of biographical and other discourses, it has been argued, followed an earlier “erasure” of a subversive strain of women’s writing, an erasure that Paula McDowell identifies with the parallel emergence of literary history and its institution of a distinct tradition of the “literary lady.”11 Like McDowell, Margaret Ezell sees the displacement of the “androgynous set of criteria” that governed editorial decisions in early anthologies like Edward Phillips’ Theatrum Poetarum (1675) or Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register (1719) as crucial.12 Subsequently, women authors deemed insufficiently respectable appear less often in the anthologies, biographical dictionaries, encyclopedias, memoirs, and specimens that represent their literary history. Decorously expressed domestic and sentimental writing becomes normative, clearing the way for histories and anthologies that reinforce separate spheres doctrine, including George Ballard’s 1752 Memoirs of Several ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences and George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s anthology, Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755 and subsequent amended editions). From Ballard, Colman, and Thornton, through to Ann Thicknesse (1780), Mary Hays (1803), Matilda Betham (1804), and Alexander Dyce (1827), the focus remains consistently, Ezell notes, on the “moral character of the subject rather than literary, scientific, or artistic merit.”13 Yet while all of these texts make propriety the arbiter of inclusion, comparison of William Russell’s 1772 Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages with Dyce’s 1827 Specimens of British Poetesses suggests further important differences in the orientations of women’s literary history between the beginning and end of the period considered in this study. Russell, according to his contemporary biographer, John Irving, “cannot be pronounced a profound and original writer,” but his very conventionality proves interesting in relation to his adaptation of literary history to cultural critique.14 The first volume of the Essay relies heavily on Adam Ferguson’s recently published Essay on the History of Civil

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Society (1767) and John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) for its discussion of the “age of chivalry” and the early Renaissance. Drawing on Scottish Enlightenment social theory, Russell commends women’s learning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seeing their desire “to establish the equality of their sex in all things” as both encouraging an innate aptitude for poetry and helping to ameliorate the prevailing masculine focus on “a subtile philosophy, an abstract theology, and an empty study of dialect and of sounds.”15 But even as he celebrates this happy moment when women were “ambitious of arraying themselves in the knowledge of men” and men were “at all times ready with their panegyrics to return the compliment to the women” (I.106), he summons present-day shortcomings as contrast: “What has since been called SOCIETY was not then indeed so much known. Luxury, and the want of occupation, had not introduced the custom of sitting five or six hours before a glass, to invent fashions. Some use was made of time. Hence that variety of language, arts, and sciences, which were acquired by women” (I.105). At this point in the Essay, Russell’s intentions in citing past practices to censure present ones appear to be corrective: if contemporary women were to reject frivolity, they would presumably be able to “use” their time to polish their “learning and talents” (I.98). The second volume, however, retreats from the possibility of reform. The assertion there that modern culture is irredeemably corrupt makes it clear that the Essay’s focus on women is not finally historical, but is instead merely a means to the partisan end of attacking present-day commercial society. Russell identifies the crucial moment in his narrative of decline as the momentous change from the “spring” and “summer” (II.101) reigns of William and then Anne to the implied deep winter of the Hanoverians. As his survey brings him closer to the Hanoverian period, he abandons his earlier praise of learned women and attacks Descartes’ comments on the “philosophical talents of women,” asserting that they lack “that strong discernment, that depth of intellect, that diffidence which characterises the real philosopher … They have more sallies than efforts. What they do not see at once, they either cannot see at all, or they disdain, or they despair to see” (II.4). At the same time, however, his desire to call attention to the disorder generated by a Hanoverian exchange economy leads him to claim that late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century English women participated in a “short, but glorious period, of heroism and national capacity; of taste and science, learning and genius; of gallantry without licentiousness, and politeness without effeminacy” (II.101). He partially resolves the contradictory assertion

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of women’s innate limitations and their periodic literary eminence by invoking the overriding authority of traditional principles of distinction. In a footnote to a passage detailing the consequences of “the South Sea scheme and other mercenary projects [that] produced a passion of avarice and a taste for luxury, which prepared the way for all the corruptions of the following reign” (II.103), he thus notes: “Some of the foregoing observations may perhaps be thought foreign to the subject of this Essay; but the manners of women are so intimately connected with the manners of men, and those of men with the state, in this country, that it is impossible to seperate [sic] them entirely” (II.108). From Russell’s point of view, because late seventeenth-century women writers carefully observed class and gender hierarchies, they “joined the graces of society to the knowledge of letters and the virtues of domestic life” and thus were “friends and companions, without ceasing to be wives and mothers” (II.102). The order of the state, reflected in the manners of men, gave meaning and direction to the accomplishments of women. By contrast, in the “present state of sociability, luxury, and vicious refinement; in which all ranks, ages, and sexes mingle,” men have grown “regardless of character” and women have “neglected the duties of their sex” (II.107–8). Russell’s title indicates his intention to provide a comprehensive account of “the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages.” Since the best evidence for women’s experience lies in their writings, there is by default a strong literary historical element in the Essay. As with many contemporary historians, he assumes that women and literature alike serve indexical functions in relation to their milieu. But ultimately, the imperatives of a conservative, even misogynist, cultural critique that identifies women with the insidious forces of change undermine both his attention to their accomplishments and his interest in shaping those accomplishments into a coherent narrative. The work closes not with a discussion of contemporary literature but with conduct-book admonitions to women about “the best means of securing the hearts of those they love, and the esteem of such as deserve it” (II.129). For Russell, women’s literary history ultimately proves a vehicle for connecting the feminizing powers of luxury with the damage done to traditional hierarchies in a marketplace economy. Dyce’s Specimens, published at the end of the period considered here, are as inflected as Russell’s with gender assumptions. But Dyce’s fully internalized representation of the principle of separate spheres means that he does not follow the example of his predecessor and equate

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the condition and attributes of women with the state of society. The grounds for his argument are instead biological. Even as Dyce suggests that “the human mind, and, above all, the female mind, is making a rapid advance,” he therefore insists that “natural” forces constrain women’s advancement. In order to harmonize this assertion with his commitment to progress, he claims that women’s inherent weaknesses ultimately work to their advantage: The magic tones which have added a new existence to the heart – the tremendous thoughts which have impressed a successive stamp on the fluctuation of the ages, and which have almost changed the character of nations, – these have not proceeded from woman; but her sensibility, her tenderness, her grace, have not been lost nor misemployed: her genius has gradually risen with the opportunities which facilitated its ascent.16 The rhetorical subordinations in this sentence set man above woman by denominating as masculine – without actually naming it as such – writing that is at once affective, intellectual, and historically formative. In this account, the “ascent” of women’s limited “genius” follows in the wake of the opportunities an advanced civilization affords for the expression of sensibility and tenderness. Dyce’s description of his own work reproduces these gender and status hierarchies: in justifying the edition of “specimens of British poetesses,” there is no mention of earlier women anthologists such as Hays, Robinson, or Betham; he claims that his volume was “planned, and partly executed” (v) before he knew of Colman and Thornton’s commercially successful collection; and in noting that his, unlike theirs, draws on “rare books,” he tacitly identifies himself with the antiquarian “best editors, Ellis and others” (v). He aligns himself, in short, with a masculine tradition of elite scholars. Speaking from within a stable discourse of gender difference in a courtly effort to amend the earlier neglect of women’s writing, he makes no claims to unsettle the status quo. Instead, he anticipates from the evidence of his specimens a continued “ascent” of female “genius” responsive to masculine direction. While Russell’s literary history refers to an extrinsically defined hierarchy in its association of women with cultural decline, Dyce’s assumes that the internal impulses of “her sensibility, her tenderness, her grace” mandate women’s compliance with the “character of nations” as defined by men. The prescriptiveness of these two accounts in part reflects their emphasis on women as writers, in part their commitment to innate

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gender inequalities. Greater diversity of response appears in works that consider women as consumers of literature, and hence as subjects potentially capable of exercising choice. Here, the relation of nature to nurture emerges as a key point of contention. Russell himself raises the issue only abruptly to close it down. He compares “the intellectual powers of the sexes” and notes that the “philosophical spirit” which “out of a number of scattered ideas, selects one primitive and vast idea which combines all the rest” is “rare” among men, but entirely absent in women. His conclusion: “If there is no woman found on a level with those illustrious men, is it the fault of education, or of nature?” (II.3). For Russell, this is a rhetorical question that admits no doubts about women’s innate limitations. His exact contemporaries, Herbert Croft and George Isted, however, make social conditioning entirely formative. Responding sardonically to the claim that women are constitutionally unequipped to grasp “serious publications of great merit,” the author of the ninth number of The Literary Fly records, “I hardly ever saw a book dedicated expressly to the ladies, to whose title I have not longed to add, ‘of ten years and under.’”17 To Croft and Isted, the attachment of women to “trifling objects” (49) is neither necessary nor inherent; it is a socially mandated consequence of faulty education: Is a book eloquent, learned, wise? it is not fit for women. Has a girl a tendency to any science? she should not think of such things. Do we condescend to write any thing for the ladies? it is the history of Miss Lucy Sidney, or Miss Sidney Biddulph. Why is Locke’s Essay less proper for the perusal of a woman than Sir Charles Grandison? had I the honour to be of the fair sex, there is no offence for which I would not sooner forgive a man, than the premeditated malice of writing nonsense to me; yet there is no offence of which we are all so apt to be guilty. (50) The debate about whether such exclusions and limitations are providentially ordained or merely arbitrary intensifies with the surge in numbers of books and readers in the 1780s. Over the course of the next decade, discussion of the kinds of reading appropriate to other traditionally marginalized or emergent readerships becomes ubiquitous.18 Margaret Ezell’s remarks (quoted above) on the emphasis in eighteenth-century women’s literary history on the “moral character of the subject” at the expense of her “literary, scientific, or artistic merit” has additional period implications in the context of these other constituencies. When, however, works that comment on women’s writing and reading are

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compared to those intended for neophyte or inexperienced readers, an interesting distinction emerges: it is only in the 1820s that the latter become equally and overwhelmingly subject to the moral commentary previously directed to women alone. (As will become evident in the next chapter, this delayed achievement of parity between groups of readers deemed to require supervision is in keeping with wider post-1820 changes in literary history writing.) Three pedagogical texts published roughly a generation apart – William Enfield’s The Speaker (1774), Robert Alves’ Sketches of a History of Literature (1794), and Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Library Companion (1824) – demonstrate the pattern of deferred synchrony. Both Enfield and Alves emphasize their commitment to schooling the passions, but do not assume that their less privileged readers require more overtly didactic instruction. For Enfield, sensibility appears an essential component of any sound education: “the study of polite literature cultivates the taste, and improves the heart; and both unite, to form the Accomplished and Happy Man.”19 While the essays that introduce the selection of “miscellaneous pieces” are principally concerned with critical issues, he also outlines an account of reading in which literary history bridges the contrasting categories of “works of knowledge” (where writing “is made use of only as a vehicle of instruction”) and “works of taste” (where writing “itself becomes a principal object of attention” [xxix]). For Enfield, the civilizing effects of “works of taste” depend on the subjectivity they nurture, since they offer “a method of conferring with men who in every age have been most distinguished by their genius and learning, of becoming acquainted with the result of their mature reflections, and of contemplating at leisure the finished productions of their inventive powers” (xxviii). Literary histories – particularly in the forms that contemporary readers would find most familiar, that is, introductory essays to anthologies, miscellanies, dictionaries, and specimens – both normalize and contextualize this conversation with men of “genius and learning.” A generation later, Robert Alves defines his aspirations for his readers in similarly wide-ranging terms. His 1794 Sketches of a History of Literature aims to “establish polite learning on the principles of common sense, genuine purity, and eloquence” and to “estimate[e] national genius,” while also recommending to “the young writer a chaste elegance of language” and to “readers of every rank, the most rational entertainment.” Included among the latter, as he comments in a footnote, are “young ladies” to whose “usual reading … such as moral tales, fables, novels, history, and plays” he will give due attention while providing “ample directions.”20 As he works his way from ancient to modern, and from

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“eastern” to “western” literatures, Alves certainly voices concern with moral content. But more important is the distinction between “sentiment and feelings” and “reason or intellect,” with “sensibility” (162) being preferred as the measure of both literary excellence and historical and critical judgment. In contrast, Dibdin’s 1824 Library Companion, a guide designed for young men, emphasizes almost exclusively the edifying functions of the aesthetic: “I have never lost sight of what I considered to be the MOST MATERIAL OBJECT to be gained from a publication of this nature; namely, the imparting of a moral feeling to the gratification of a literary taste.”21 Enfield, Alves, and Dibdin contribute to the influx of school texts that followed the 1774 copyright decision.22 While didacticism tinctures the literary historical and aesthetic categories of all three writers, Dibdin’s work observably retreats from the more capacious understanding of improvement advocated by Enfield and Alves (and hence from the more diverse educative possibilities that are opened up by knowledge of past literatures). Does this shrinking of horizons of expectation simply reflect personal bias? Or is it part of a larger process of genre specification in which newly consolidated pedagogical modes refine their constitutive elements? Changes in representations of the literary past in another relatively recent genre, the novel, provide some answers. The following discussion approaches the relation of literary history to the novel in practice and theory, considering both literary histories embedded within novels and literary histories of the novel.

Literary histories in and of the novel As a genre that throughout the eighteenth century was often considered in hybrid, comparative, or mediatory terms – as comic epic-poem in prose, as the most recent and least dignified of literatures on the hierarchical scale, as midpoint between the extremes of public history and private consciousness – the novel offered potentially rich grounds for investigating literary historical themes. Its formal self-consciousness could easily be adapted to the exploratory impulses that shaped literary history; its marginal status held out the promise of reaching new audiences interested in expanding their cultural knowledge; its roughly parallel emergence with nationalist sentiment encouraged its identification as a quintessentially English mode. Henry Fielding’s comments on the novel offer an early attempt to attach prestige to the frequently maligned form by affiliating it with more established genres. His definition of “comic Romance” in Joseph Andrews as a “comic Epic-Poem

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in Prose” represents one semi-ironic classicizing approach, the more elaborate genre play of Tom Jones another.23 The opening chapter of Tom Jones Book II reminds us that we are to expect from the book’s title “a History, and not a Life, nor an Apology for a Life as is more in Fashion,” a glancing allusion to the epitome of biographical inflation, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.24 But having rejected private memoir, the narrator is equally intent on avoiding the “painful and voluminous” model of history that resembles the “News-Paper” (I.75) in its flatly mimetic and unselective recitation of detail. Instead, by focusing on “Matters of Consequence” (I.76), he hopes to “pursue the Method of those Writers who profess to disclose the Revolutions of Countries” – and perhaps even to move beyond imitation of method to the institution of a revolution of his own: “I am, in reality, the Founder of a new province of Writing, so I am at liberty to make what Laws I please therein” (I.77). This is not the place to explore the complexity of Fielding’s handling of such claims to authority and innovation; I want instead simply to note first, that later commentators draw extensively on his nexus of comparative terms – romance, history, biography, journalism, continuity, and revolution – for their own literary historical narratives; second, that while Fielding assumes a central place in late-century literary histories, both of and in the novel, he does not fully develop his own; and third, in relation to the embedding of literary histories in novels, that metanarrational references to the novel’s history do not appear until the revolutionary decade and then nearly exclusively in conservative texts. The belated appearance of internal histories of the novel relates to changes in the publication and distribution of texts: among them, an increase in both circulating libraries and in the numbers of novels, both new and reissued, in the 1780s and 1790s; the perception of the novel as a form sufficiently established to have its own critical tradition, registered as early as 1785 in Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance; and the reflexiveness of much late-century fiction evident in a heightened rhetorical awareness of the form and its audience. Each of these innovations was given a political turn in the revolutionary decade as conservatives sought through anti-Jacobin fictions to secure readers’ patriotism by alerting them to the dangers of sensibility and by methodically outlining loyalist tenets. As Kevin Gilmartin argues, the attack on French revolutionary principles was itself a defense of the distinctive history and style of English liberty, and one element in this double agenda was the articulation and promotion of a literary history of forms regarded as peculiarly English, including the novel.25 In proffering that history within their fictions, conservatives make particular assumptions about

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readers and their engagement with texts. Unlike reformist, progressive, dissenting, and radical writers and editors, who encourage, as we have seen, inclusiveness and active choice, loyalists adopt a more prescriptive and directive approach toward both their subject and their audience. They tend also to structure their anti-Jacobin novels as satires, presumably because the referentiality that is so often a signature of that genre allows the protagonist’s adventures to be plotted through his interactions with actual literary, social, and political events. Robert Bisset’s 1800 novel, Douglas; or, The Highlander makes literary historical commentary a key element of its anti-revolutionary repertoire. The narrative, in many specifics resembling Tom Jones while also anticipating Waverley, traces the development of a privileged hero, Charles Douglas, after he leaves Scotland for London in 1790.26 During his time in London, his youthful waywardness is conveyed through plots of sexual and political seduction; the first, in an echo of Tom Jones, has him loving the virtuous Isabella but trapped by a liaison with Lady Mary Manhunt, the second and more important, follows his flirtation with Jacobin principles. Throughout the novel, reading serves as a focal point for organizing the moral, social, and political contexts that define his experience of the revolutionary decade. Bisset attacks “solitary reading” (II.55) and circulating libraries as sources of political and sexual corruption; associates gender with class to suggest that allowing middling women access to “histories of Rome and England, abridged, by question and answer” (I.138) encourages unseemly social performances of “knowledge,” and that educating “low Londoners” ends inevitably with their “prostitution” (II.38–9); stages detailed debates between friends on such texts as Burke’s Enquiry and Paine’s Rights of Man; and belittles suspect print forms as, for example, when he quotes Shave, the constable, barber, and Jacobin supporter, announcing to Charles that, “we reads the Gazetteer, and the Morning Post, and Morning Chronicle, and Dr. Price’s Sarments; not as we of our club sets great store by sarments, unless they be of the right sort, against Bishops and Kings, and for liberty and equality, and Dr. Priestley’s paper-books, he is the man of the true light” (II.110). (In a further supercilious touch, a footnote to “paper-book” comments, “Meaning, perhaps, pamphlets.”) Charles’ retreat from revolutionary sympathies begins with studies in jurisprudence, is formalized in a trial scene that also exposes various secret identities, and is completed with marriage to Isabella and his election as Member of Parliament. His final reasoned support for established institutions has been carefully prepared for not only by the relentless satire of radicalism in theory and practice, but also by a prefatorial

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literary history of the novel that sets the terms for our interpretation of Douglas. This narrative identifies the origins of contemporary fiction with the separation of romance from history in Don Quixote. As we will see, Anna Laetitia Barbauld also interprets Cervantes’ work as epochal, making its discrediting of romance preliminary to the emergence of the “novel.”27 Bisset, however, retains one vestige of the romance tradition that he brings back into play to describe the course of late eighteenthcentury fiction. In contrasting Cervantes’ “fictitious history” with the chivalric romance it displaces, he uses descriptive terms that he subsequently revives to distinguish his own satire both from 1790s Jacobin “romances” and from a related, antecedent sentimentalism he identifies with Samuel Richardson. Thus, the “fancied adventures” that dominated medieval and early modern Europe are marked by the traits he elsewhere assigns to radical texts: “This species of writing [old romances] required no force of genius, no reach of knowledge; all that was necessary for an author, was to sit down, and give full scope to his fancy, without any restraint from judgment or experience” (I.[ix]–x). In Don Quixote, in contrast, “we find nature, life, and existing manners; we see real human beings imitated, an intellectual exertion, which pre-supposed knowledge of originals, and discernment of their various relations, duties, and characters” (I.xii). Le Sage and Marivaux in France followed the example of Cervantes, but in England it is only in “the reign of George II. when Smollet [sic], Richardson, and, above all, Fielding, rendered this country as much distinguished for excellence, in that species of literature, as it had before in the higher kinds” (I.xv). The grouping together of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, while necessary to Bisset’s nationalist account of the successive mastery of the novel in Spain, France, and England, is subsequently amended as he considers the local development of the form. The previous year, he had charged in the Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific, Magazine for 1799 that Richardson lacked knowledge of human nature (“his chief characters might have been formed from a contemplation of the Whole Duty of Man”).28 He now enlarges on this criticism, echoing the description of chivalric romances as “fancied adventures” by describing Richardson’s novels as “fancy pictures, not EXACT RESEMBLANCES TO HUMAN NATURE.” The objection is not ethical – Richardson’s “moral inculcations are unexceptionable and excellent” – but, as Bisset’s praise of Tom Jones as “imitating real life” suggests, social and practical. If novels are to be genuinely instructive, they must provide more than Richardson’s “moral virtues personified”; they must detail “manners” and convey “that mixture of good and evil that is to be met in society”

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(I.xvi). On these grounds, Richardson is effectively written out of the literary genealogy Bisset supplies, a genealogy that again in anticipation of Walter Scott’s, links literary authority with masculine sociability.29 The attempt to construct a literary history of the novel that works with the terms of established genres like satire, answers stringent notions of mimesis, and justifies Bisset’s own practice, produces some unusual configurations. While Robert Alves’ Sketches of a History of Literature, for instance, simply groups novels by gender (separating Fielding, Richardson, Brooke, and Smollett from Griffith and Burney), Bisset’s typology distinguishes between kinds of “fictitious biography,” first on the basis of adherence to the epic principles of unity of action, and second on their being “works of plot” or of “characters and manners.” Fielding, Burney, Smith, and Radcliffe “are of the epic kind,” and while “more of our ingenious novelists have succeeded in display of character, than in construction of plot,” Fielding and Burney are deemed to excel in both.30 In Douglas, however, he has “presumed to aim at fictitious biography, without aspiring to the EPIC PLAN of Fielding. My object is, to describe HUMAN NATURE and EXISTING MANNERS in probable circumstances and situations” (I.xix–xx).31As he explains in the closing paragraph of the Preface, “The object of my attempt is BRITISH SOCIETY; to draw the intellectual and moral virtues, by the operation of which it is upheld, and to mark the follies and vices by which it is disturbed” (I.xxiv). Given the negative connotations of political plotting in the revolutionary decade, Bisset’s own loyalism, and his patriotic intentions, the swift defeat of “follies and vices” by a hero distinguished by his “intellectual and moral virtues” presumably seemed a sufficient goal. Literary histories of the novel often appear to be less stridently polemical than embedded ones like Bisset’s, but they are still far from disinterestedly neutral. Clara Reeve’s 1785 Progress of Romance, an early example, is as Susan Staves understatedly notes, “somewhat constrained by the rigour of [its] adherence to virtue,” condemning Behn and Manley as immoral and (contrary to Bisset) denigrating Fielding’s “mixed characters” relative to Richardson’s admirably “perfect” ones.32 Alongside this somewhat retrograde didacticism, however, Reeve pursues a more progressive line of inquiry that resembles Enfield’s in its assumption that historical contexts are essential to the informed decisions of an array of readers: “In the following pages, I have endeavoured to trace the progress of this species of composition, through all its successive stages and variations, to point out its most striking effects and influence upon the manners, and to assist according to my best judgment, the reader’s choice, amidst the almost infinite variety it affords, in a

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selection of such as are most worthy of a place in the libraries of readers of every class, who seek either for information or entertainment” (I.iv).33 This commitment to her audience may come with a significant rider: while novels “are equally entitled to our attention and respect, as any other works of Genius and literature,” they “are not to be put into the hands of young persons without distinction or reserve” (I.xvi). But the cautionary note is counterbalanced throughout by her vigorous and subversive engagement with the forces of opinion. Ordering the Progress as a dialogue between Euphrasia and her male friend Hortensius gives formal centrality to a liberal construction of opinion, allowing conversational exchange to serve as the medium for Euphrasia’s disabusing her well-educated interlocutor of his prejudices against romance. The provocation for the twelve dialogues that make up the Progress is his demand that she justify “plac[ing Epic poetry,] on an equality with old Romance” (I.2). Euphrasia initially attributes his pique to the fact that her reasoning “opposed opinions long received, and but little examined” (I.3), then returns in their next meeting to widen her attack on his recalcitrance by locating its roots in class chauvinism: “It is astonishing that men of sense, and of learning, should so strongly imbibe prejudices, and be so loth to part with them” (I.21). When Reeve casts their conversation as an exchange of opinions and assigns to a woman the role of chief debater and opponent of the biases of a well-born and educated man, she locates Euphrasia’s efforts within the late eighteenth-century understanding of literary history at the vanguard of informed speculation about the past. Detailed knowledge of the romance tradition allows Euphrasia to pursue her advantage over Hortensius. After he has admitted to his prejudices, she thus asks him whether he formerly “suffered [him]self to form a contemptible opinion of books [he] never knew, nor enquired after?” To this, he can only reply, “If I have taken up an opinion upon trust, it was from the character that has been given me of those books, by persons of acknowledged abilities and judgment” (I.62). Euphrasia’s questioning of the multiple forms of authority with which she initially makes Hortensius complicit – literary, pedagogical, historical, gendered – does not develop into a more systematic relativism, in part because the first volume increasingly focuses on textual criticism at the expense of historical inquiry and the second is entirely dedicated to “living authors” with particular emphasis on their moral suitability. In fact, by the end of the Progress there has been a full retreat from the initial skeptical appraisal of a privileged and masculine literary history, a retreat signaled by Euphrasia’s final displacement from the text by the “Author” who enters to provide a list to “every

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Mother” of “such books as may be put into the hands of children with safety … intended chiefly for the female sex” (II.101). Adapting progress narratives to conservative formulations, as Reeve does here, was not unusual. A generation later, the Tory apologist Sharon Turner similarly subscribes to the notion of a formal and thematic continuum reaching from “ancient vernacular Romances” (V.237) to modern novels: “from the roman of Horn Child, to Sir Charles Grandison, we still have the representations of the beau ideal of their authors minds, either exhibited in their favourite characters, or in the deterring contrast of obnoxious ones … [and of their attempts] to give us either the best of what exists in actual society, or more usually something better, according as they conceive that better to be” (V.243–4). The alignment of expressive and mimetic theories here represents the benign face of novel history, legitimated in this instance by Turner’s eminence as medieval historian and by the nationalist agenda his work supports. A more combative, even aggrieved, defensiveness shapes John Dunlop’s History of Fiction, first published in 1814 and subsequently in a “greatly improved” second edition of 1816 that takes aim at the hostile reviews of his work by Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh and Francis Cohen (later Palgrave) in the Quarterly.34 The skirmishes between Dunlop and his detractors played out in their reviews and his response to them in the Advertisement to the second 1816 edition nicely capture the variety, critical sophistication, and topicality of contemporary literary historical thinking (while also indicating the growing cultural authority of both novel and periodical). Jeffrey’s 1814 review opens with lightly ironic comments on the pleasures of contemporary novels, moves into a conjectural history of the origins of fiction, and then some pages later turns to fault Dunlop for the “unhappy limitation of his plan” on a number of fronts: the account of the origins of fiction is inadequate; verse forms are arbitrarily and unnecessarily excluded; and his definition of fiction gives insufficient weight to the importance of affect and empathy.35 The concluding paragraph summons the mixture of weak praise and disdain characteristic of Jeffrey’s responses throughout: “Upon the whole, though we wish to see the History of Fiction executed on a very different plan, and with a greater spirit of philosophical inquiry and critical acuteness, we recommend the present publication as an agreeable and curious Miscellany, which discovers uncommon information and learning” (58). That Jeffrey intended the reference to “Miscellany” as a slur is suggested by the previous page’s equally coded attack on the book’s uniformity of tone: “it is Mr. Dunlop who tells all the stories; and he

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tells them in his own way … At another time we shall be happy to listen to Mr. Dunlop’s uninterrupted lecture; but on this occasion we expected that he was to introduce us to a great company of literati … Mr. Ellis has managed this matter better in his specimens of the early metrical romances” (57).36 The History that Dunlop envisioned as mapping “the origin and progress of prose works of fiction, with the analysis and criticism of the most celebrated which have been successively presented to the world” (I.3), Jeffrey here demotes to Miscellany or lecture, its lesser status pointedly reinforced through comparison with Ellis’ achievement in his Specimens. Cohen, in turn, omits the urbane forays into philosophical history that somewhat softened the Edinburgh’s critique and instead moves immediately to impugn Dunlop’s scholarship, citing in detail instances of parochialism, plagiarism, and dependence on often-deficient secondary sources. His closing sentence delivers a back-handed compliment that, like Jeffrey’s, stings with its condescension: “Yet to the numerous class of light readers who seek entertainment and novelty, and general information, Mr. Dunlop’s work will be highly acceptable; and its faults themselves will, perhaps, contribute to adapt it to general perusal.”37 In the 1816 Advertisement, Dunlop takes his cue from the bibliomania controversy and responds to these attacks on his learning with the charge of antiquarianism, accusing Cohen, in particular, of black-letter excesses that reduce books to covetable objects.38 As in Beresford’s Bibliosophia, the rhetoric of possession allows Dunlop to associate his adversary with a narrowly pedantic interestedness and then to counter Cohen’s doctrinaire approach with a more inclusive and socially oriented view. The forecast of his argument in the revised Introduction presents fiction as the least distorted gauge of the past and writing about fiction as correspondingly the most accurate means of assessing and analyzing change. The heuristic value of literary kinds, in other words, derives from their explanatory agency: the authority of “Fiction” (which he explicitly contrasts with history and poetry) rests on its encompassing of public and private concerns, generality and detail of depiction, veracity and inventiveness in expression; likewise, the “History of Fiction” attends at once to the personal and social, to individual and national genius, to the culturally specific and to cumulative or progressive developments, “not in an abstract or introspective method, but in a manner certain and experimental” (I.xxxi–xxxii). Once again, literary history mediates the competing claims (and the supposed limitations) of established forms, offering in their stead a more reliable, because wider-ranging, understanding of the past.

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One limit on the revelatory possibilities of his literary history is its scanting of post-Restoration fiction: for Dunlop, only the “very early periods of literature” are susceptible to cultural analysis because “in later times, not only an infinite number of works, but works of different kinds have sprung up at once; and thus were no longer expressive of the taste and feelings of the period of their composition” (II.422–3).39 As a result, he dedicates little attention (far less, for instance, than Clara Reeve) to eighteenth-century novelists, a fact noticed by Cohen and regretted by Jeffrey. Reeve’s account of the romance tradition’s continuing evolution is taken up instead by Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing.” In this introductory essay to her 1810 fifty-volume collection of British Novelists, Barbauld crisply dismisses the conventional defenses of the form on the grounds of virtue and authenticity of evidence advanced, respectively, by Reeve and Dunlop. Uninterested in exploring the relative truth claims advanced by history, fiction, or poetry, she instead concentrates on the question of reception, making diversion and accessibility the key evaluative criteria: “For my own part, I scruple not to confess that, when I take up a novel, my end and object is entertainment; and as I suspect that to be the case with most readers, I hesitate not to say that entertainment is their legitimate end and object.”40 Although Barbauld’s essay tends more toward literary appreciation than history of the novel, her analysis is informed throughout by a distinctive progress narrative. Her revision of the standard developmental model critically involves representing genre as an adaptable and dynamic category, rather than a fixed and inert one, a strategy that challenges traditional hierarchies and in so doing suggests possible new directions for literary histories prepared to register “the commerce of everyday life” (408) to which novels attend. The impetus for the rethinking of genre is the formative role assigned to readers. In dating to the mid-eighteenth century the eclipse of drama and poetry as favored kinds of “polite reading” (407), Barbauld identifies the emergence of the novel with the needs and expectations of new audiences. The superseded modes of drama and poetry, she contends, were hampered by limiting conditions that restricted their potential reach: theatre is “seldom enjoyed in perfection, and never without expense and trouble”; poetry requires “a certain elevation of mind and a practiced ear. It is seldom relished unless a taste be formed for it pretty early.” The novel, in contrast, carries no burdensome prerequisites for its consumption: it “is the cheapest of pleasures: it is a domestic pleasure” (407) and hence inclusive in its appeal.

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Barbauld’s vindication of the novel as entertainment combined with her view of genre formation as historically variable has – at least potentially – momentous consequences. Yet as Claudia L. Johnson brilliantly demonstrates, while the work marks “one of the instituting moments in the history of the British novel” – a status warranted by its comprehensiveness, its legitimizing of women authors, its politically self-conscious and progressive canon, and its engagement of public life – the British Novelists had an exceedingly brief tenure.41 Johnson tentatively suggests that John Wilson Croker’s savage 1812 Quarterly review of Barbauld’s poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven may have helped to invalidate the contexts of rational dissent that also informed her judgments in the “Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing.” But regardless of the Croker review’s immediate effect, the longer-term influence of the “diverse, inclusive, and politically vanguard agendas” (167) pursued by Barbauld was incontrovertibly shut down by Sir Walter Scott’s ten-volume Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library (1821–24). Overtly national in its canon-making and conservative in its political and gender assumptions, Scott’s formulations not only support his own practices, Johnson suggests, they also provide the template for histories of the novel from Dugald McKillop through Ian Watt to Michael McKeon. Scott’s carefully groomed consolidation of a novel tradition matches up with other contemporary trimmings of literary historical commentary in the late 1810s and early 1820s. Evidence of the deepening interest in managing the diversity of the literary field, however, appears not only in attempts, such as that of Scott’s multi-volume collection, to delimit by editing out signs of the feminine, the unruly, and the politically suspect. It also, and somewhat paradoxically, can be found in the increased numbers of periodicals in the late 1810s that appealed to distinctive – often class-based – constituencies, from the middling Blackwood’s to the radical Black Dwarf, from the Tory Quarterly to the Whiggish Edinburgh Reviews. These two forms of expansion – of divergent audiences and print venues – had significant implications for literary historical commentary, implications that the next chapter explores through the changes in periodical and lecturing cultures between 1770 and 1820.

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Literary History, Periodicals, Lectures

The hypercritical tribe This final chapter considers the place of literary history writing within two spheres of unprecedented rapid growth and vigorous competition for readers: periodicals and institutionally supported lectures. While my focus will be on the early nineteenth century, the conditions within which the more ephemeral print forms developed and the audiences to which they appealed suggest the usefulness of some preliminary attention to their antecedents. Eighteenth-century writers widely noticed – and occasionally made comic capital of – the miscellaneous quality of contemporary print culture. Some, like John Almon in his New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1768–73), exult in its diversity. Among the “Collections of Several Curious Pieces” that make up the New Foundling Hospital is an account of newspapers that serves at once to celebrate and parody the dominant features of his own radical satire: the newspaper is an “olio, or mixed composition of politics, religion, picking of pockets, puffs, casualties, deaths, marriages, bankruptcies, preferments, resignations, executions, lottery-tickets, India bonds, Scotch pebbles, Canada bills, French chicken-gloves, auctioneers, and quack doctors.”1 For others, including Ralph Heathcote, eclecticism is less source of amusement than troubling evidence of a “redundancy of books,” a phenomenon he links to the growing diversity of reading audiences.2 As the running title of his Sylva; or, The Wood (1786) suggests – “Being a Collection of Anecdotes, Dissertations, Characters, Apophthegms, Original Letters, Bon Mots, and Other Little Things” – he opens himself to the charge of contributing to both forms of excess. His awareness of the irony of his position – conveyed by the questioning in Sylva’s opening pages of “what gentlemen who thus complain … can possibly mean by adding to the number?” (vii) – only 134

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makes additionally urgent his attempts to define for himself a legitimate middle ground within a rapidly changing literary field. Projecting a cohesive readership is a crucial first step. In anticipation, Heathcote specifies those for whom “this work is not so much intended.” At one extreme, he exempts the “mere illiterate English reader,” at the other, the socially privileged (identified through reference to the “folios and quartos” they haphazardly scan). Unlike the latter, who “read” but do not “think,” his model audience vigorously engages with the world; they are “men who have been liberally trained, and are not unacquainted with languages; men who may wish to have some sort of pabulum mentis, or mental fodder, always at hand, but whose professions and situations in life do not permit leisure to turn over volumes” (x–xi). This is presumably the same constituency to which Henry Headley appeals the year following: those who, in their eagerness to exercise “that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself,” are also prepared to consider reading as a valuable, if occasional pursuit rather than a time-killing and passive form of recreation.3 Having identified this liberal ideal, however, Heathcote turns back to consider again those for whom “‘reading is nothing better than a dozing kind of idleness, and the book a mere opiate, that makes them sleep with their eyes open’.” While such readers currently favor “prints and periodical publications,” there are, he notes ironically, “works better suited to their capacities and taste”: Those of a graver and more sedate cast will find much selfcomplacency and comfort in histories of England, biographical dictionaries, and the like. For those of universal knowledge, (and such we meet with, out of coffee-houses as well as in them) there are Magazines of various kinds, which will supply verbiage, or matter of talk and harangue, de omni scibili et non scibili. For the more gay and lively, novels and romances; and, lastly, for the critical or rather hypercritical tribe, who are ambitious to figure with airs of higher importance, there are Journals and Reviews, which will furnish the titles of all publications, with observations and strictures to descant upon them. Such aspirants will hence be enabled to pronounce upon all authors, without having read or examined any; to appear learned, without being so; in short, to be admired as critics and scholars, by those who are not critics and scholars: for this, surely, is as much as can in reason be desired. (x–xii) In a series of closely linked devolutions – from public to private, from privileged to aspirational, from aristocrat to arriviste, from established

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to emergent genres – this passage traces a downward trajectory that begins with history, moves through biographical dictionaries, magazines, novels, and romances, and ends with the lowest forms of journals and reviews. At each stage – until, at least, the final one – reading is associated with various kinds of lazy interestedness: in histories and biographies, the powerful find their “self-complacency” ratified; in magazines, inveterate talkers discover the necessary surplus of disjointed facts; novels and romance reward “gay and lively” dispositions. Journals and reviews break with this pattern by dispensing altogether with the private pleasures of reading, pleasures that, however tainted by egoism, are in the other modes he cites benign in their social effects. The proscribed forms, in contrast, cater to a factitious version of selfhood, allowing those “who are ambitious to figure with airs of higher importance … to pronounce upon all authors, without having read or examined any.” As cribs, journals and reviews offer only a simulacrum of knowledge. Yet those who trade in this ersatz learning have formed a powerful “hypercritical tribe” that demands to be “admired as critics and scholars, by those who are not critics and scholars.” The presence within a single work of two such fundamentally incompatible representations – on the one hand, a positive construction of the “liberal” reader; on the other, a darkly negative view of an unbounded marketplace of print, epitomized by journals and reviews – is unusual. As index to a more general ambivalence about the current revolution in print culture, however, Heathcote’s divided responses were increasingly typical. The growing power of magazines and reviews – from those launched earlier in the century, including Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731, Ralph Griffiths’ Whig Monthly Review; or Literary Journal in 1749, and Tobias Smollett’s Tory Critical Review in 1756, through to the 1780s, with the founding of the English Review in 1783 and the Dissenting Analytical Review in 1788 – had established the periodical press, in Frank Donoghue’s estimation, as “a central cultural presence, one uniquely suited to the vagaries of the open market in which they, along with nearly all other cultural productions, were situated.”4 Initially, as Sylva’s comments about journals “furnish[ing] the titles of all publications, with observations and strictures” indicate, they aimed to provide breadth of coverage through summary accounts and lengthy excerpted passages, replicating in text, at least potentially, the ideal of a “national, public culture.”5 Heathcote’s skeptical comments reveal how quickly that ideal of inclusiveness was reframed by its antagonists into the charge that it merely served to camouflage the sectarian interests of a “hypercritical tribe.”

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By the 1790s, the view that progressive social exchange depends on diversity of forms and opinions was strongly identified with dissenting culture. Joseph Johnson’s Prospectus of a New Miscellany to be entitled the Monthly Magazine; or British Register (1796), for instance, announces that it will be directed by “Conductors … sufficiently exercised in the habits of free enquiry to be emancipated from bigotry and prejudice, [who] can venture to promise that impartial attention to the suggestions of others, and that fair and candid representation of the facts and opinions coming under their notice, which are essential to the promotion of truth.”6 The Monthly attempted to realize these promises through a network of contributing correspondents who supplied the magazine’s miscellaneous departments with a wide array of articles.7 Mary Robinson’s report on the “Present State of the Manners, Society, && of the Metropolis of England” is typical in its praise for “the expansion of mind, which daily evinces itself among all classes of the people,” a phenomenon she ties to a sharp increase in periodicals that reveal “the temper of the times; the intricacies of political manoeuvre; the opinions of the learned, the enlightened, and the patriotic.”8 As Michael Scrivener notes, the Monthly Magazine expressed “the concerns of the most insurgent and innovative sectors of the intelligentsia.”9 But the very coherence of its mandate underscores its separation from the equally polemical, alternative vehicles for political expression that flourished in the 1790s, a spectrum of journals ranging from the loyalist British Critic (1793) and the Anti-Jacobin Review (1798) to Spence’s radical Pig’s Meat (1793–6) and Eaton’s Philanthropist (1795–6).10 Within the “discontinuity of publics” that Jon Klancher identifies as a distinctive feature of the decade’s periodical culture, echoes of the concerns voiced in Heathcote’s Sylva in the 1780s can still be heard: the fear that the substantial increase in books and reading audiences grows out of a corrupting “fashion to write down all we think, and to print and publish all we write” (v); the belief that “compendious methods of instruction” encourage the bad habits of those whom Carlo Denina labels the “indolent lovers of brevity”; the argument, backed by historical references to Rome, that the expansion of print is a symptom of a more widespread national decline, since “as books multiply, indolence and luxury prevail.”11 The shocks of the revolutionary decade, however, prompted new ways of organizing these disparate comments. Beginning in the 1790s, conservative accusations of a modish, undisciplined, and disruptive periodical press gradually cohere around the more inclusive charge that such journalism represents a larger triumph of fractious opinion over objective evaluation (with the assumption on the part

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of loyalists that writers like Robinson advocate exchange and diversity for narrowly self-interested reasons). The identification of journalistic forms with a potentially incendiary content helped in turn to reanimate residual modes of literary history writing. In the process, literary criticism appears as a particularized instance of those wider currents of opinion, made all the more dangerous by the seeming respectability of the journals that proffer it. The negative estimation of opinion is much in evidence in Charles John O’Reid’s 1811 Reviewers Reviewed. Like Brydges in his Autobiographical Memoir, O’Reid deplores the displacement of the elite domain of “taste and scholastic learning” by the “new power” of “Criticism ... whose pretensions embrace all the various subjects of human opinion, and whose influence is felt in a greater or less degree through all the orders of society.”12 Because “the spirit of Criticism is of a superficial nature, and the fashion of the times is most unfavourable to habits of deep thought and candid enquiry” (10), reading itself, he charges, has changed. Formerly “designed to lead … to the attainment of wisdom, and the formation of the intellectual character,” it now serves more immediate and instrumental purposes: Persons accustom themselves to read a work for the purpose of forming an opinion of its merits, not to imbibe its instructive efficacy. Opinion indeed, paradoxical as it may sound, is the refuge to which the natural indolence of men induces them to fall back, in order to escape “the insupportable fatigue of thought.” It is the fashion to have opinions, and how very different this is from having clear apprehensions, or just sentiments, is obvious. (12) The extension (and corruption) of the reading habit and the fashion for public airings of opinion combined with the ascendancy of the review “as a moral and political engine,” O’Reid maintains, “must awaken the jealous attention of the statesman as well as the philosopher” (2). The institutional alignments, the tacit argument for press restriction, and the extolling of traditional hierarchies locate this interpretation of opinion as an agent of social decay within a reactionary politics. For O’Reid, a return to “scholastic learning” as the ultimate arbiter of literary value seems the most promising corrective.

John Corry’s View of London In works less assertively retrograde than O’Reid’s, the search for a mode of directed reading that contains rather than flatly discrediting opinion

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was increasingly resolved by recourse to literary historical structures. As with other emergent forms of the period, a positional logic is quickly brought into play. We have seen already how Ellis, Southey, and Campbell represent their distinctive versions of literary historical commentary in the various Specimens as mediating philosophical and political historiographies; similarly, numbers of post-1800 works focused on contemporary literary culture locate themselves on a middle ground between polemical ‘Criticism’ and the equally polemical opposition to it that O’Reid epitomizes. Literary history offered such writers the status of affiliation with the prestige of historiography, possibilities for national (or cosmopolitan) definition, and a means of documenting the evolution of reading audiences, taste, and opinion in ways that ideally anchored present controversies to past practices. Many of these leading characteristics are evident in John Corry’s View of London, a work significant in this context in part because of the astonishing range of topics it surveys, in part because new editions appear regularly over the period considered here: first published in 1801, there were subsequent editions in 1803, 1804, 1809, 1815, and 1820.13 The work thus provides an evolving point of reference for larger changes in literary history writing from the early nineteenth century to 1820. For Corry, London is “the attractive centre of science, intelligence, and opulence; the important spot where legislators enact, and sovereigns give activity to the laws; the depositary of the national wealth, and the citadel of national glory; the school of genius, and the temple of intellectual refinement,” and each edition of the View expands on the possibilities for both “panegyric and censure” that the city presents. While numbers of the headings that organize this “inexhaustible theme” (1809: iv) are modified between 1801 and 1820, “Literature,” “Newspapers,” and “Reviewers” remain essentially the same, suggesting their centrality to his vision of metropolitan and national life (and their enduring appeal to potential purchasers of the work).14 Within this categorical continuity, however, particular editions reveal interesting patterns of retention, revision, and addition of new materials, patterns that help to clarify early nineteenth-century changes in the representation and functions of literary historical commentary. Certain changes indicate little more than superseded anxieties, touched on in the first edition and then, presumably because they appear outmoded, dropped. Among these can be numbered the vigorous refutation in 1801 of the mid-eighteenth-century concern “that this age is barren of genius, and English literature is on the decline” (1801: 208); the inclination subsequently is to suggest that there may be rather

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too many geniuses competing for public attention. Other remnants of an earlier period include lists of recommended authors; after 1801 this cataloging device gives way to narrative accounts organized around key thematic issues. There is also a growing conservatism, evident, for instance, in the softening of the harsh estimation of the Anti-Jacobin from the 1801 to the 1804 editions, with a further tempering in the 1809 edition, and in the removal of passages that sympathetically notice the economic interests of the non-elite (it is only in the 1801 edition, for example, that Corry counters reviewers’ attacks on the surplus of books with the assertion that “[b]ook-makers, however deficient in talents, give employment to a variety of trades, such as the rag-merchant, the paper-manufacturer, the printer, the book-binder, and the bookseller” [225]).15 Such adjustments reflect the heightened divisiveness of Regency culture and with it the entrenching of political positions; they may also be a reaction against the Edinburgh Review, the journal that from its founding in 1802 reshaped periodical writing by abandoning its predecessors’ universal coverage and claims to objectivity. The most substantive revisions, however, occur in the 1815 edition, the post-war moment at which, as Jeffrey Cox argues, “the relations between culture and politics, between art and society were being renegotiated and were thus the subject of much self-conscious and contentious debate.”16 The changes in the 1815 View encompass matters of form and content: there are fuller assessments, a more masculinist perspective, and a greater inclination to organize literary discussion through reference to genre. Literary history also acquires a new prominence, in part as a consequence of the redefining of both of its constituent elements. The earlier editions had assumed an inclusive eighteenth-century interpretation of literature that allowed Hume and Chesterfield, for example, to be discussed alongside Sterne. In the 1801, 1804, and 1809 editions, there is accordingly little sense of any special status attaching to works of “imagination.” There is also scant attention paid to works before 1700: in each of these editions, the “Literature” sections open with a summary paragraph that mentions in passing “the sublimity of Milton and the pathos of Shakespeare,” but only in order to commend the “more finished polish” given to both by Addison and Pope who, unlike their predecessors, “unite the sprightliness of wit with the dignified serenity of morality and religion” (1809: 182–3). In the discussion that follows, Corry provides scattered commentary on a range of eighteenth-century writers without any sustained justification of their inclusion or of the relative space assigned to each; the section closes, as it opened, on a didactic note that enjoins authors to remember that it is their “duty to ameliorate the morals of society” (1809: 193).17

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The 1815 edition, in contrast, refines its understanding of “Literature” to reflect a modern view of “imaginative” writings, a focus underscored by its engagement of a more fully historical representation of the English literary past. The section now opens by invoking national rather than moral criteria – asserting that “[i]f we estimate the intellectual powers of a people by their literary productions, those of the English will be found of the first order” (159) – and then historicizing this greatness by tracing its origins to the Reformation, to an empirical turn of mind, and to a free press. Together these have endowed the English with a “communicable facility” that has “contributed to a general taste for literature”: Nor is this love of knowledge confined to the opulent, for many industrious tradesmen, and ingenious artizans, expend that money in the purchase of books which their more improvident or vulgar neighbours would have wasted in Bacchanalian orgies; and thus, a very general diffusion of scientific, moral, and divine truth, has gradually exalted the character of the nation for correct habits of thinking and improved good sense, above that of other European contemporaries. Indeed, a retrospective glance at the progressive improvement of our national literature, will afford a pleasing illustration of our present manners, morals, and the superior civilization which we have so happily attained. (160–1) In the carefully scripted narrative that succeeds this rousing introduction, Corry represents Dryden and Pope not as improving on Milton and Shakespeare (as he had in previous editions), but as equal participants in the formation of the “superiority of the British muse” (161), a superiority confirmed by a succession of writers who “contributed to the refinement of language, manners, and morals” (162). When he turns to consider the specifics of present-day productions, however, he is much less sunny in his estimation of literary culture. He commends the “universality of reading” that the sharp growth in the numbers of “periodical publications termed Magazines” (163) has encouraged and extols the “animating prospect of an amelioration of morals by a general dissemination of the principles of truth, through the medium of that gift of divine mercy, the Bible” (168) with an evangelical fervor that crystallizes the more diffuse didacticism of the earlier editions. But, otherwise, he is preoccupied by what he sees as a decline in the quality of both novels and poetry since the eighteenth century. The 1820 English Metropolis is even bleaker in its assessments. Its realignment of rubrics – the Metropolis dispenses, for example, with

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detailed coverage of London inhabitants under the multiple headings of national origin, class, and profession, substituting in their stead two summary discussions that refer to London locales and “various classes” – allows for greater attention to print culture. But as suggested by the 1820 alteration (in title, not content) of the earlier heading, “Literature,” to the new, “Free Strictures on English Literature,” the increase in coverage is mostly negative in tone. Changed reading habits, both popular and elite, are the source of most of his derogatory comments, with muted praise of the Six Acts making clear his retreat from the occasional liberalism of the earlier editions. Corry claims that the “minds of the common people of England” were so “disturbed” by the “two-penny tracts of Cobbett and Wooler” (277) that the government had no choice in 1819 but to pass the Six Acts, including that to “prevent the circulation of Blasphemous and Seditious Libels” (278). Such interventions were made additionally necessary because the threats to order emanated not only from a gutter press that incited the “common people” to rebel, but also from within the ranks of the middle class. As a new section on “Scotch Romances” details, the very “stability of our excellent language ... is menaced by no common attempt to re-introduce vulgarity among us ... [through] the raving of Caledonian fanatics, and lunatics” (255–6), that is, Walter Scott and his imitators. In a sweeping indictment of contemporary mores, he claims that “even the egotism and vanity of Byron in poetry, and Cobbett in politics, have been exceeded by the bold pretensions of the present junto of Scottish poets, romancers, and reviewers” (262). A new chapter on the “Edinburgh Reviewers” takes up the latter charge, and echoing Coleridge – who had speculated in the 1817 Biographia that the Edinburgh sought to increase sales by “flattering the malignant passions of human nature” – Corry suggests that the journal’s popularity rests on its “skilful gratification of the worst passions of the human mind” (190).18 To him, the result of such pandering is a deeply entrenched cynicism that undermines the authority of religion, politics, and literature. In religion, the reviewers’ “philosophisme has cherished the pride of infidels,” while in politics, “their bold censure of men in power … gratified the predisposition of mankind to depreciate their rulers” (190). In the literary sphere, the Edinburgh’s hostility to traditional structures of knowledge takes the more insidious form of equalizing access to learning by allowing “scholarship” to be acquired second-hand, rather than directly. Its pernicious “retrogradation of a century or two” in order to discourse “most learnedly about Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Ford, Marlow, Cowley, Dryden and Milton,” he charges, has “spared their

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readers a world of application, and saved them the trouble of rising from their seats, to consult authors by way of reference, though they were ranged around the shelves of their libraries” (190). Underlying these observations on reading audiences, genre factions, and periodical culture is the assumption that literary history has two distinct aspects. On the one hand, it is a public narrative that confirms national identity through the existence of a canon of transcendent works; as the chapter (retained from the 1815 edition) on “English Literature” affirms: “sterling merit will survive … worthless and temporary productions, as the ever-green flourishes in perennial beauty amid the decays of surrounding vegetation” (253). John Wilson’s 1818 Blackwood’s article, “On the Revival of a Taste for our Ancient Literature,” with which this section opened, similarly links patriotism to a core group of quintessentially English works. This positive representation is shadowed, on the other hand, by an equally conservative rendering of what Corry sees as a rogue version of literary history. In this construction, the traditional ideal of gentlemanly scholarship as an elite activity pursued in the privacy of domestic libraries – the “bibliology” of Southey – has been undermined by counterfeit or ersatz accounts broadcast by popular journals (especially those with liberal leanings) with the intent of supplying the low-born with enough knowledge to mimic – or worse, challenge – the intellectual and aesthetic ascendancy of their social betters.

The Cockneys and the Lakers John Corry’s attack on the Edinburgh Review, as with his similarly deferred turn to connected narrative and to a more current understanding of “literature” only in the 1815 edition, is almost certainly a delayed response to controversies active well before the 1820 publication of the English Metropolis. One sign that he is engaging an existing quarrel is the element of anachronism in his choice of target: by 1820, the Edinburgh was no longer seen as the Whiggish adversary of the Tory Quarterly – as Hazlitt comments in 1819, they “both travel the same road and arrive at the same destination.”19 Another indication is the belated entry of the Metropolis into a debate over claims to the ownership of literary history – who could write it and under what circumstances – that became a key element in the mid-1810s conservative attacks on the collaborative writing associated with the Hunt circle. A version of this distrust of collaboration had been expressed from the early 1800s by liberal commentators, as evidenced by the Edinburgh’s 1802 review

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of Southey’s Thalaba with its negative account of the “set of poets” who are “dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism,” and was subsequently elaborated in Jeffrey’s 1808 attack on the Lyrical Ballads and his 1814 review of Wordsworth’s Excursion.20 In an effort to differentiate themselves from the Edinburgh, other major periodicals, taking their cue from Jeffrey’s attack on the “Lakers” (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey), advanced alternative groupings: as Marilyn Butler notes, the Quarterly thus set its targets on the Satanic school (Byron, Shelley, Maturin); the Quarterly and Blackwood’s on the “Cockney school” (Hunt, Hazlitt, Keats, Shelley); Leigh Hunt’s Examiner on the “Gallic” school could be added to the list.21 By 1818, the tactic was sufficiently entrenched to generate parodies, as in Blackwood’s account of “The Jumpers, A New School of Poetry” and “The Leg of Mutton School of Poetry.” It was Hazlitt’s application of the term “school” in his 1817 Edinburgh Review critique of Coleridge’s Biographia, however, that led to the most sustained invective. Blackwood’s launched a double counter-offensive with John Gibson Lockhart’s assaults on the “Cockney School” beginning in October 1817 and John Wilson’s defense of the “Lake School of Poetry” against its detractors, Jeffrey and Hazlitt, beginning in July 1818. Jeffrey Cox has pointed to the internecine qualities of this dispute and, in particular, to the rhetorical similarities between Jeffrey’s original attacks on the “Lakers” in the Edinburgh Review and Lockhart’s retaliatory ones on the “Cockneys” in Blackwood’s.22 Blackwood’s responded to the Edinburgh’s and the Examiner’s hostility toward the Lake School with a two-part strategy: first, Lockhart identified the so-called Cockneys with the debased sensibility that the Edinburgh had previously assigned to the Lakers; and second, Wilson sought to rehabilitate the Lakers by representing Wordsworth (along with Scott and Byron) as a national genius.23 For Cox, the perceived slight of being assigned membership in a “School” reflects the premium the period placed both on individualism and on the institution of literature through the creation of a standardized canon “where presumably authors were admitted as individuals rather than because of their status as a member of this or that group, class, or category.”24 As the burden of the attacks makes clear, however, through the distinctively different criteria applied to historically remote and more recent poets, class terms were also of paramount importance. In relation to the established or received canon, Blackwood’s makes no special demands for the social or political standing of the chosen writers; by a circular logic a Shakespeare or a Milton seemingly transcends such

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worldly markers.25 But inclusion in the cadre of those deemed to be legitimate commentators on the canon – and hence those who serve as gatekeepers for future entrants – is carefully monitored by invoking rigid standards of “group, class, or category” membership. This profoundly affects the evaluation of modern authors, pre-emptively foreclosing the entitlement of many to be recognized as enduringly great. Attention to the Cockney School debate thus reveals that Blackwood’s not only defends Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey and attacks Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats, but also attempts to define the conditions for literary history by stipulating what is required of those who write it. In representing inclusion in the existing and anticipated “canon” and commentary on it as mutually reinforcing, Lockhart and Wilson, in other words, help to codify the practices and objectives of literary history writing in recognizably modern terms. Ultimately, at least in the case of Blackwood’s and its conservative allies, those terms assigned authority to their own privileged constituency in regards to both class and politics. Lockhart founds his case against Leigh Hunt on the first principle that “[a]ll the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society,” and then proceeds to develop the obverse charge that Hunt’s low birth has as its complement a lack of talent that makes him “as completely a Plebeian in his mind as he is in his rank and station in society.”26 The cosmopolitan ideal that Jeffrey had offered as positive contrast to the Lakers’ rustication – and that D’Israeli, as we have seen, from a very different political position, would confirm in his 1820 Quarterly review of Bowles – is correspondingly reimagined by Lockhart as a vulgar parochialism that taints Hunt’s creative and interpretive efforts: He pretends, indeed, to be an admirer of Spenser and Chaucer, but what he praises in them is never what is most deserving of praise – it is only that which he humbly conceives, bears some resemblance to the more perfect productions of Mr. Leigh Hunt; and we can always discover, in the midst of his most violent ravings about the Court of Elizabeth, and the days of Sir Philip Sidney, and the Fairy Queen – that the real objects of his admiration are the Coterie of Hampstead and the Editor of the Examiner. When he talks about chivalry and King Arthur, he is always thinking of himself. (5.58–9) Lockhart tacitly refers to the qualities of a genuine historical sensibility – alertness to questions of difference and estrangement, likeness and empathy – in order to represent Hunt as operating within the double confines of commonplace or received notions of greatness and

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his own contemptible self-interestedness. As an arriviste, “perpetually labouring to be genteel” (5.59), Hunt lacks the innate receptiveness to literary history that forms part of the cultural elite’s complex inheritance of intellectual ability, national spirit, and political integrity. “The Cockney School of Poetry, No. III” assails Keats’s “foaming abuse” (5.196) of Pope as a further instance of the group’s obtuseness, then masses the now-established intellectual and social slurs into one combined attack on these “uneducated and flimsy striplings … fanciful dreaming tea-drinkers, who, without logic enough to analyse a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image, or learning enough to distinguish between the written language of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of Cockneys, presume to talk with contempt of some of the most exquisite spirits the world ever produced” (196).27 Effeminate, presumptuous, and affected, the Cockneys mark themselves through a vulgar patois that signals their inability either to read and then pronounce intelligently on Milton, Shakespeare, or Pope, or to express in their own creations a native genius – since that too depends on a deep, innate familiarity with “the written language of Englishmen” that their low birth precludes. John Wilson’s promotion, again in Blackwood’s (December 1818), of the “Lake School of Poetry” serves as positive complement to Lockhart’s denunciation of Hunt and Keats. The first article in the series, with its casting of Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron as the “three great master-spirits of our day” who “may indeed be said to rule, each by a legitimate sovereignty, over separate and powerful provinces in the kingdom of the Mind,” plays off against Lockhart’s impugning of Hunt as trumpery sovereign, a “King of the Cockneys,” whose “violent ravings about the Court of Elizabeth” confirm the egotism of the “Coterie of Hampstead and the Editor of the Examiner.” Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron, in contrast, are “of perfectly original genius, – unallied to each other, – drinking inspiration from fountains apart” (5.171). Their status as an exemplary triumvirate, as the comment about their being “unallied” suggests, does not depend on shared poetic practices. It is instead a critical fiction designed by Wilson to position himself as moderator between writer and reader and to advance his analysis of “genuine Poets,” both current and historical. In discharging these two functions as intermediary and interpreter, he proceeds from the assumption that without genius, “‘the vision and faculty divine’,” the individual poet “dies at once, and is heard of no more” (5.171). Egregious summary judgments – as in Wilson’s dismissing out of hand all the “mere clever verse-writers of our Augustan age” – represent

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the flipside of the absolutist decrees about the current state of poetry. Ultimately, only one era bears comparison with the present: “If we except the Elizabethan age, in which the poetic genius of the country was turned passionately to the drama, and which produced an unparalleled constellation of great spirits, we believe that no other period of English literature could exhibit three such Poets as these, standing in conspicuous elevation among a crowd of less potent, but enlightened and congenial Worthies” (5.171). Embedding literary history within a theory of genre enables Wilson’s somewhat paradoxical judgment that his chosen three are at once superlative and equivalent to the best of their antecedents. The assertion of complementarity makes Elizabethan drama as fully an expression of the brilliance of its age as is “Romantic” poetry, without in any way challenging the supremacy of those whom he champions. In declaring the essential continuity of Elizabethan and modern, he also anticipates the terms of the mid-nineteenth-century division between the literary critical commemoration of transcendent genius and the more workmanlike literary historical narrative that will emerge to support it. The genre maneuvers that enable these assertions of parity depend on an instrumental use of history equally evident when he begins to elaborate on his claim to “speak the general voice, when we place on a triple throne, Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron” (5.171). Scott and Byron are imagined to infuse earlier periods with their own animating energy, an energy that allows Byron to “hold converse with the mighty in language” (5.173) and Scott to write “Poems [that] are historical narrations, true in all things to the spirit of history, but everywhere overspread with those bright and breathing colours which only genius can bestow on reality” (5.172). History’s descriptive and analytical powers, represented by Wilson as having dwindled into little more than “dead letter” (5.172) accounts, are reassigned to the creative genius of Scott and Byron whose grasp of the true essence of history is realized through their insights into the “spirit” of past languages and events. By implication, Wilson himself shares in this rejuvenation when he outlines poetry’s ability to “connec[t] us” to earlier periods in ways that history cannot. And Wordsworth, too, displays his genius in a similar avoidance of the quotidian, the “customs, institutions, professions, or modes of life” (5.173), revealing a religious sensibility through his unfolding of “those great elementary laws of our nature which are unchangeable and the same; and therefore the pathos and the truth of his most felicitous Poetry are more profound than of any other, not unlike the most touching and beautiful passages in the Sacred Page” (5.173–4).

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The demotion of historiography, evident in the re-routing of its authority to poetry and commentary, generates in turn adjustments in the ranking of literary history and literary criticism. As we have seen, earlier writers and editors frequently drew on the perceived status inconsistencies between the two in order to validate their own “historical” commentary by citing its distance from a lower, partisan “criticism.” Wilson’s references to “professional” standards repress such hierarchies, elevating literary criticism (and potentially sinking literary history to an ancillary role): There is by far too much wrangling and jangling in our periodical criticism. Every critic, now-a-days, raises his bristles, as if he were afraid of being thought too tame and good-natured. There is a want of genial feeling in professional judges of Poetry; and this want is not always supplied by a deep knowledge of the laws. For our own parts, we intend at all times to write of great living Poets in the same spirit of love and reverence with which it is natural to regard the dead and the sanctified; and this is the only spirit in which a critic can write of his contemporaries without frequent dogmatism, presumption, and injustice. (5.174) The consensual vocabulary here is, of course, entirely tactical. Read in context – the comments immediately follow Wilson’s charge that “scarcely one syllable of truth – that is, of knowledge – has ever appeared in the Edinburgh Review on the general principles of Wordsworth’s Poetry, or, as it has been somewhat vaguely, and not very philosophically, called, the Lake School of Poetry” (5.174) – the attributes of “genial feeling” and “deep knowledge of the laws” can pertain only to Blackwood’s and like-minded publications.

Institutional lectures and literary history Wilson’s references to “professional judges of Poetry,” like Lockhart’s to the “spoken jargon of Cockneys,” grow out of a long-simmering frustration with liberal critiques, particularly Jeffrey’s and Hazlitt’s cutting 1814 responses to Wordsworth’s Excursion in the Edinburgh and the Examiner. A more immediate provocation – to which Lockhart’s fourth and fifth “Cockney School” articles respond directly – was the series of Lectures on the English Poets delivered by Hazlitt at the Surrey Institution between January and March 1818, and published later that year.28 When Lockhart fumes in the fifth number against “Hunt, the Cockney Homer,

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Hazlitt, the Cockney Aristotle, and Haydon, the Cockney Raphael,” asserting that “[n]one of them are men of genius – none of them are men of solitary meditative habits,” he takes particular umbrage at Hazlitt, who “cannot look around him at the Surrey, without resting his smart eye on the idiot admiring grin of several dozens of aspiring apprentices and critical clerks” (5.274).29 Hazlitt, of course, construes his audience, and by extension readers in general, in quite different terms, ones sufficiently distinct to suggest that Wilson’s July 1818 advocacy of “professional judges of Poetry” may be intended as counter-proposition to his adversary’s more inclusive model. Hazlitt opens “Lecture IV On Dryden and Pope” by asserting that his chosen subjects, though of an “unequal stature” to Milton and Shakespeare, “are entitled to a first place in the lists of fame” as a result of their excellence in what is styled the “artificial style of poetry.”30 The claim is not substantiated by referring as Wilson does some months later in Blackwood’s to professional assumptions, institutional norms, or “deep knowledge of the laws.” Instead, his estimation of their status seems to be not only the reason of the thing, but the common sense of mankind, who, without any regular process of reflection, judge of the merit of a work, not more by its inherent and absolute worth, than by its originality and capacity of gratifying a different faculty of the mind, or a different class of readers; for it should be recollected, that there may be readers (as well as poets) not of the highest class, though very good sort of people, and not altogether to be despised. (2.228) This passage takes its place in a continuous line of commentary that from the closing decades of the eighteenth century refuses to make either creative or interpretive ability the exclusive preserve of the well-born. Later in the Lectures, Hazlitt will target the Lakers specifically to reinforce the point: “Mr. Coleridge (in his Literary Life) says, that his friend Mr. Wordsworth had undertaken to shew that the language of [Gray’s] Elegy is unintelligible: it has, however, been understood!” (2.274).31 Lockhart, grasping the political resonances of evaluation as a broadly dispersed, intuitive “common sense,” responds, as we have seen, by mocking the vulgarity of the audience and particularly the mutual impudence evident in Hazlitt’s “resting his smart eye on the idiot admiring grin of several dozens of aspiring apprentices and critical clerks.” These hostile reactions to the representation of reading (and listening) audiences theoretically provide openings for Hazlitt and his

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liberal-minded peers to assert a more plural mode of literary historical commentary, one distinct from the canonizing of “master-spirits” celebrated by Blackwood’s. The Lectures on the English Poets does not, however, seize the opportunity for investigating, diachronically and synchronically, the relationship between literature and its contexts, the nature of reception, or the historical operations of opinion. Instead, he maps out comparative structures in which broadly articulated concepts are used to position individual writers. Lecture III on Shakespeare and Milton, for example, typically recalls authors discussed earlier in order to outline group affiliations: “it might be said that Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser, as the poet of romance; Shakspeare as the poet of nature (in the largest use of the term); and Milton, as the poet of morality. Chaucer most frequently describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakspeare, as they would be; and Milton as they ought to be” (2.207–8).32 Contextualization appears here only within the limits of allusions to now-standard “great” writers and only in relation to abstract principles rather than historical specifics. Hazlitt’s lack of interest in circumstantial detail and unwillingness to speculate about problems with periodization bring his account of the English literary past curiously close to those of Lockhart and Wilson. There are numbers of possible explanations for his resistance to literary historical narratives.33 A progressive account that attempted to chart the “rise” of English literature would go against the grain of his primitivist assumption that “[t]hose arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after” (2.206–7).34 Rhetorical issues might also play a part: the comparative structures mentioned above, for instance, have obvious heuristic functions in signaling the lecturer’s recurring themes and hence his alertness to his audience’s needs. Other characteristic features of the Lectures – the focus on particular formal traits, or the use of the present moment as a contrast to historically distant ones, almost always to the detriment of modern writers – further reinforce his refusal to plot connections between his chosen “English Poets” through a developmental paradigm. To capture the special qualities of Milton and Shakespeare, he thus notes that they “owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life,” and then distinguishes them from Wordsworth and his peers for whom “there is nothing interesting, nothing heroical, but themselves” (2.214).

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Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, in short, are finally exercises in literary criticism, rather than literary history, and even in their critical remarks, they favor the extremes of appreciation and denigration over analytical investigations grounded in period detail. In this, they reveal broad affinities with conservative periodicals, despite the latter’s tendency to endorse models of progressive national development. Adversaries in other regards, writers like Hazlitt and Wilson nevertheless share the assumption that there exists a native pantheon of transcendent greatness: for Hazlitt, a pantheon restricted to past writers, for Wilson, one whose glories point forward to the “triumvirate” of Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron. Their disagreements, consequently, occur apart from a key late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century issue: the grounds for inclusion or exclusion of writers from the “received” canon. Bracketing this literary historical concern, both liberal and conservative work instead to define the standards that license their claims to address readers (or listeners). In 1819, Blackwood’s takes the conservative critique a step further. In “On Public Lectures on Works of Imagination at Literary Institutions,” the author questions not only the legitimacy of the Cockneys’ claims to assess, but also of their audiences to listen; “injurious” social consequences, the article claims, will inevitably result from teaching “presumption and self-confidence to the ignorant, who would fain attempt to think before they know, and to know before they feel.”35 The ancillary position assigned to literary history writing in lectures and reviews during the literary critical skirmishes of 1818–19 caps a decade of significant change in the genre’s relative status. The growing and reciprocally defining influence of periodical writing and of the recently founded Institutions that served as “key sites of Romantic culture” was crucial to this realignment.36 As Jon Klancher notes, “lecturing institutions complemented the increasing cultural authority of literary reviews,” an authority heightened by their nearly simultaneous emergence.37 The period of the Napoleonic wars thus saw the launch of the Edinburgh Review (1802), the Examiner (1808), the Quarterly Review (1809), and the New Monthly Magazine (1814), and the establishment of the Royal Institution (1799), followed by the London (1805), Russell (c.1808), and Surrey (1808) Institutions. Each of these foundations, in addition to libraries, reading rooms, and in some instances, laboratories, provided venues for widely attended lectures on scientific, technological, arts, and literary subjects, supplementing existing programs at teaching hospitals, theatres, private houses, and substantial inns.38 Details of the lectures underwritten by the leading institutions are

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sparse, but Rudolf Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808–11) provides at least a contemporary summary of their early aspirations. Ackermann sets the institutions within an Enlightenment narrative of intellectual advance that sees the emergence of “social man” as key to the foundations’ commitment “to accelerate the progress of knowledge; it being an incontrovertible truth, that the civilization of man’s condition, from a state of ignorance and barbarism, to that of the highest civilization and refinement, has ever been effected by encouraging the arts, and promoting science; while the pre-eminence of any people must proportionably attach to the attainment of them.”39 Focusing on the Royal and Surrey Institutions, he details their leading characteristics, noting their commitment to both “experimental science” and “useful knowledge” (III.27); their middle-class audience, that is, those for whom knowledge “administers to the honour, the ornament, and the usefulness of life, without being necessary to its support” (III.27); and their contributions to national character, both through material support beyond “any other country or period of the world” (III.36) and through their inclusion of women of “rank and fortune” whose “influence is so great on general manners” (III.27–8).40 But important changes – between their founding objectives and actual operations, and between the first and second decades of their existence – led to increasing diversity of expectations and practice. The Royal Institution was initially designed to include a school for artisans and a model museum, with lecture series limited to pure and applied natural philosophy; by the end of 1804, “modified almost beyond recognition,” it set the pattern for subsequent foundations by widening its addresses to include belles lettres, fine arts, and music.41 Despite the ubiquity of lectures on literary subjects – from 1804 to 1809, for instance, John Hewlett, William Crowe, S. T. Coleridge, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin gave between them over 122 lectures there – little detailed information survives from the first decade about their actual content. As R. A. Foakes observes, the records of Coleridge’s 1808 lectures are partial, although they suggest that he attempted to establish that the sixteenth century “provided a context ‘favourable to the existence & full developement [sic] of Shakespeare’.”42 Dibdin’s 1836 Reminiscences of a Literary Life is similarly meager in its information; Dibdin documents only the “heads of the twenty-eight Lectures” delivered at the Royal in 1806, 1807, and 1808, names his principal sources (“Dr. Johnson; Tyrwhitt; Thomas Warton; Dr. Henry; Ellis and Ritson: – writers who have treated, more or less, of the subject under consideration”), and observes that the “chief point which I hoped to

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carry was this: to impress upon my audience a pretty correct notion of the progress of our literature both in poetry and in prose” (239, 244). “[U]nexpected and severe infirmities of old age” (I.viii) prevented Percival Stockdale from delivering his Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets, but the text of them that he published in 1808 confirms that he, too, assumed that in order to convey to his audience a narrative of national progress, his literary history would need to synthesize “the state of religion, literature and publick manners (with which national taste is always intimately connected) of the age” (I.70).43 This evidence from the first decade of institutional sponsorship suggests that the early lecturers relied on a standard progress model when framing their literary histories. The common venue for these lectures – literary topics were introduced at the Surrey only in 1811–12 and at the London in 1819 – and deference to (or at least willing complicity with) the Royal Institution’s aristocratic assumptions may account for some of the uniformity of approach. Ackermann, for instance, believed that one of the Royal’s valuable social functions was its easing of the separation between “commercial and literary characters” by normalizing the behavioral codes of the latter: “By the frequent intercourse of men of different ages and various pursuits, and by ready access to well-selected libraries, knowledge becomes more correct, taste more refined, and sentiments more liberal” (III.156).44 The London Institution, by contrast, was less grandiose in its assumptions – it was “organized in, by, and basically for the City of London” – and while from the beginning limited to the wealthy, it refused to accept the cultural boundaries that isolated education to “seats of education and the academic grove.”45 It also refused to subscribe to the apologist position of those like Ackermann who envisioned such institutions as remedying nouveau-riche vulgarity. In his speech celebrating the laying of the foundation-stone of the London Institution building in Finsbury Circus in 1815, the Lord Mayor, Samuel Birch, rejects the model of social melioration as obsolete, turning inside out Ackermann’s claim that institutions ease the transition from barbarism to civility: To contend for the extension of intellectual acquirement is now unnecessary … I would therefore, ask, can any stronger symptom of barbarism be produced, than the opinion that men are disqualified by genius and literature for employments which imply the direction and benefit of other men? ... The work now commenced will therefore be devoutly looked to for the happiest results in the progress of Literature and Science, for the benefit of this great commercial

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city … may Commerce and Literature be the twin offspring of her care, nursed as it were in one cradle, trained together in the same pursuits, entwined in friendship, and uniting their strength for the glory of the Empire, the stability of the Throne, the perpetuity of our glorious Constitution, and the prosperity of the People!46 Charles Butler’s Inaugural Address (which followed Birch’s speech) reaffirms the commitment to the “extension of intellectual acquirement” that such foundations both support and enable. He invites his audience to observe the “countless decencies of the middle ranks, the cheerful industry of the lowest, the general veneration for the constitution, the general obedience to law, the general devotion to their country” (426) that national attention to “Commerce and Science” makes possible in England. But he also warns that if the nation’s “superfluous wealth” (430) is not channeled into continued support for such resources, it may well follow the example of the Ottoman Empire, destroyed by invaders and “sunk into a state of abject misery, which no tongue can adequately survive” (425). Butler’s cautionary note, expressed in the context of imperial hazards but gesturing toward a larger sense of the difficulties of managing the potentially conflicting interests of “middle ranks” and the “lowest,” is consistent with the growing unease of the post-war period. William Craig’s Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting and Engraving (delivered over “nine seasons” at the Royal Institution and published in 1821) testifies to the problems inherent in what he sees as this “new state, after a half a century of sanguinary warfare.”47 In writing the Introduction, Craig addresses his sense of being obliged to justify an activity that had clearly acquired somewhat dubious connotations in the interval between the moment of the lectures’ delivery and their publication. The success of his lectures had induced me to extend the same benefit to all who may wish for it by a printed publication of those lectures. If I should be regarded by some as the advocate of a mode, respecting which there are conflicting positions, I beg to say, that I have not become so, without first giving a most serious and devoted attention to the subject, nor without offering indisputable facts and demonstrations, as to the truth of what I have thought it my duty to assert. (viii) The 1819 Blackwood’s article “On Public Lectures,” quoted earlier, provides further evidence that Butler’s confident declaration in 1815

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that the London Institution would make a positive contribution to the “extension of intellectual advancement” provoked sharp opposition. While in principle, the Blackwood’s author asserts, both metropolitan and provincial institutions may “owe their existence to a generous and honourable spirit,” in practice, the lectures they sponsor “run a great risk of degrading the character of instruction” because in the “mixed assemblies of populous commercial towns,” they are not subject to “an established authority of discipline, as well as an authority of reverence, residing in the seat of learning, in the persons of their teachers, and the ancient renown of the place” (162).48 Operating outside the pale of academic institutions, lecture venues threaten public order, whether understood literally or in relation to conceptual hierarchies. The positive sociability that Butler identifies with expanding access to knowledge is thus discounted, with lectures defined instead as occasions for the display of “the presumption and self-confidence [of] the ignorant” (163), both orators and listeners.49 In a near-inversion of liberal representations of opinion (and in terms remarkably close to 1790s anti-Jacobin arguments), he proclaims that those who testify to “their imagined independence of opinion, are in truth the veriest slaves of other men, who impose upon them at will the fetters and the stripes of their own reckless and capricious tyranny” (163). Since he regards reading as essentially private and literary study as the prerogative of a formally educated elite, lectures appear to him little more than occasions to observe “the contagious emotions of a thronged assembly, listening with excited feeling to a mixture of reasoning and passion” (167).50 The liberal politics of Charles Butler and the Tory bias of Blackwood’s might be enlisted to explain these contrary views of the value of the public engagement of opinion in lecture settings. But in at least one sense the point is moot. After Peterloo, aptly characterized by James Chandler as “an event of indeterminate duration that marks a major transformation in the practices of modern literary and political representation,” the atmosphere of repression fostered by the passing of the Six Acts confirmed the dangers of assembling.51 Concurrently, genre adjustments and material changes exercised their own pressures: among them, the marginalization of poetry effected by the growing authority of periodicals, the definitive separation out of scientific from literary languages, the emergence in the 1820s of an English “mass audience,” and the adoption of new means of material production (including such technologies as stereotyping and mechanical papermaking) that encouraged the targeted marketing of both working- and middle-class readers through the agency of publications sponsored by Brougham’s Society

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for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, such as the Library of Useful Knowledge and the Library of Entertaining Knowledge.52 From the 1820s, a newly consolidated version of literary history writing takes its place within a literary field defined by these genre realignments, diverse constituencies, print advances, and class loyalties and antipathies. No longer prized for its mediating capacities, literary history is poised to assume the categorizing and largely pedagogical functions it served in the Victorian period and beyond.

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Lucy Aikin’s 1823 Memoir of John Aikin offers two, quite different, narratives of her father’s life and work: the one shaped by her own retrospective, early nineteenth-century vantage point, the other, by quotation from John Aikin’s late eighteenth-century letters referring back to his experiences in the 1770s. The two accounts, father’s and daughter’s, grow out of distinctive understandings of the relation between history and literature that considered both comparatively and in terms of modern assumptions help to define some of the differences between contemporary and post-1820 constructions of literary history that this study has documented. The first and dominant position, the one preferred by Lucy Aikin herself, reads the deaths of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith as a momentous near stilling of “the English muse … a pause [that] gave full leisure to suggest new experiments, whether in the topics or the structure of verse.”1 Her assumption that rupture enabled a change in the orientation of poetry that results in its being considered latterly in scientific and empirical terms combines with her belief in a national literature that is nourished and guided by criticism. For Lucy Aikin, Cowper and Darwin are the first poets who spoke to “that passion for natural scenery, and all the objects connected with rural life, by which Englishmen are now distinguished above the members of any other civilised community,” and subsequent poets were then encouraged “to tread in the path there indicated” (26) by critical writings, including the essays of her father.2 The alternative account embedded in her commentary on the excerpts she provides from her father’s letters also locates the 1770s as epochal. But in this narrative, it is revolutionary turmoil and not the eclipse of mid-Georgian poetry that provides the direction for literary change. John Aikin’s childhood imagination, we are told, was “warmed” by the “glories” of the Seven Years War, but over the course of the American War 157

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of Independence there was a “gradual but complete and permanent revolution in his opinions ... [From 1778] he became a strenuous supporter of the cause of civil liberty ... [I]t was an attachment, in fact, which might truly be said to have given its colour to the whole of his remaining life, and it is therefore important to have marked exactly the time and manner of its commencement” (32–5). For John Aikin, this entrenched “political division” (109) along both class and religious lines deepened with the French Revolution’s polarizing of “aristocratic and democratic” (78) factions in England. Aristocratic polemic, by giving new prominence and intensity to the division, not only unintentionally focused attention on the inequities of power; it also fundamentally altered the relationship between democratic writers and their readers. Institutional support for conservative principles meant that the “only resource” open to those who wished to celebrate “the auspicious dawn of a new era of light and happiness” was “an appeal to public opinion” grounded in “a spirit of free enquiry and a general liberality of sentiment” (78–9).3 The contrary genealogies represented in the Memoir are shaped in part by the narrower and fuller understandings of literature to which they tacitly refer. In the one, Lucy Aikin traces the changes within a distinct literary sphere, as the deaths of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith spurred the emergence of a national poetry that speaks to an inherent English passion for nature and rural life. In the other, submerged report that relates more closely to her father’s narrative, the history of literature is understood through its dynamic intersections with broader social, civic, and cultural changes. Evidence of this latter “palimpsest” account in which a newly constituted readership exists in a mutually defining relationship with a series of revolutionary struggles can be traced through the Memoir, a model very much at odds with Lucy Aikin’s overt narrative of her father’s career. From the alternate perspective provided by John Aikin himself, his writing appears directed not by literary, but by political challenges; not by the deaths of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, but by the threat to civil and religious liberty posed by loyalist censorship and resisted by the operations of opinion. In the “selection of miscellaneous pieces” that accompanies the Memoir and throughout his essays and epistles, John Aikin petitions his audience to reflect on the ways in which history shapes reading and literary practices, even when, or perhaps most often when, no interference is acknowledged. As with many of his peers, Aikin registers these influences most particularly in relation to his understanding of a politicized literary history, inviting readers to consider as an example the diminution of Milton in the work of his own preferred adversary, Samuel Johnson.

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Lucy Aikin’s model – a model informed by the late-century separation out of “imaginative” from other forms of writing – dominates later nineteenth-century conceptualizing of literary history. Its unselfconscious stress on works exemplifying a particular kind of individual genius feeds the Romantic “master narrative,” defined by Robert J. Griffin as an emplotment in which “all of English literature, with the crucial exception of Dryden and Pope, is essentially Romantic in character.”4 Recent historians have also made claims for the epochal significance of the 1770s. Dror Wahrman, for instance, sees the decade as a “chronological signpost” marking both division and forgetting in a “cultural revolution” that provoked the closing down of the “ancien régime” of identity and the ushering in of a new essentialist and innate perception of the self, one hostile to counter-normative behaviors.5 In his account, the break is so sudden that it leaves behind a “retrospective incomprehension of what had come before” (76), a process that strongly recalls Lucy Aikin’s immunity to her father’s political defense of the “spirit of free enquiry and a general liberality of sentiment” a generation later. As the double narratives within the Memoir confirm, however, responses to the cultural revolution Wahrman projects were not uniformly registered by contemporaries. Lucy Aikin’s evolutionary paradigm of literary history – one guided by a highly selective focus on works exemplifying imagination and subsequently reinforced by the distortions of the canonic and period “romanticizations” – anticipates David Perkins’ description of this model as little more than an “aberration [lasting from 1840 to 1940] in the 2,400 years of western criticism.”6 For her father, in contrast, the 1770s are identified with the crystallizing of a political awareness that enabled the mobilization of both individual and public forms of “opinion” (the same “medium of opinion” that Edmund Burke would see as characteristic of the “political men of Letters” he attacks in the Reflections on the Revolution in France).7 The objective of literary history, from John Aikin’s point of view, follows logically from this premise: far from functioning as a hermetic elite mode, it serves instead to open the past to a wide readership through commentary that encourages both critical and historicist evaluation. As Aikin’s contemporary, Henry Headley suggests, in his appeal to what he calls the “School of the People,” literary history should provide the means through which readers may discover that “pleasure which every one feels, and ... that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself.”8 This celebration of mobility, of expansion, and of individual appraisal, as Aikin’s biographical commentary makes clear, comes sharply into focus in the discursive wars of the 1790s. From this point, numbers of

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his contemporaries retreat from the “gradual but complete revolution of mind” that he identifies with his own 1770s conversion from conservative nationalist to liberal cosmopolitan. The counter-revolutionary turn signaled by the apostasies of such writers as Wordsworth, Beloe, Southey, and Coleridge is quickly followed by their attempts to rationalize, justify, and in some cases obscure their former sponsoring of radical principles. Once committed like John Aikin to a sense of the purposeful intersections of history and literature, conservative converts begin from the mid-1790s to align themselves with an emergent understanding of literary value as transcendent and hence detached from social and political concerns. As this study has argued, the latter construction had a profound effect, both immediately and in the long term. Between 1770 and 1820 a central preoccupation of literary historical writing was the agency of books, an agency associated with transformative modes of reading and with interrelated changes in genre, politics, and print culture. Vestiges of this survive in literary histories written in the 1820s, but subsequently even these disappear, leaving the genre at the beginning of the twenty-first century to be routinely understood, Linda Hutcheon suggests, as “an act of synthesis and classification, evaluation and ordering ... an act of nostalgia, an inevitable return to the comforts of teleological narrativization.”9 Lucy Aikin’s Memoir represents in miniature – for lack of a better phrase – the ensuing history of the history of literary history. Her retrospective account subordinates to the point of near invisibility the competing narratives that constitute the vitality of literary history writing within the period she surveys. In not registering their presence, the Memoir provides indirect evidence of the regularizing and subduing of the generation-long contention between modes of literary historical representation that flourished between 1770 and 1820.

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Introduction 1. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); David Simpson, “Is Literary History the History of Everything? The Case for ‘Antiquarian’ History”, http:// www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/simpson/simpson.html; Lawrence Lipking, “A Trout in the Milk,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 1. Additional studies that address the current status of literary history include Rethinking Literary History: a Dialogue on Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies: a Discipline in Crisis? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Guy and Small argue that while literary histories framed within the contexts of academic specialization consistently point to the eclipse of the genre, literary histories continue to be written and, ironically, continue to draw for their evidence on canonical works. 2. William Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815),” in Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III.80. 3. For parallels between modern and period developments, see James Chandler, England in 1819: the Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature 1789–1837, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38; Ina Ferris, “Melancholy, Memory, and the ‘Narrative Situation’ of History in Post-Enlightenment Scotland,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 77–93. 4. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109; Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 21. For an account critical of the prominence given in St. Clair’s work to the 1774 copyright decision, see Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765–1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). H. J. Jackson sees the Donaldson v. Beckett ruling as a “crucial date for the history of publishing in Britain” partly for its breaking up of the cartels, but most importantly for its assigning of new powers, and with them new anxieties, over copyright decisions to individual authors. See, Romantic Readers: the Evidence of Marginalia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 15. See also, Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: a Social 161

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Notes

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Notes History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) and Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). The consequences of this categorical instability in relation to history writing and the genre repositioning stimulated by its increasing focus on manners are explored in Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of History Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), in particular, pp. 257–321, “Literary History, Memoir, and the Idea of Commemoration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain.” A characteristic example appears in William Russell’s 1779 History of Modern Europe, in which the author concludes that after “the histories of Robertson and Hume appeared, romances were no longer read. [Including the once popular “wellknown names of Tom Jones, Roderick Random, Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Amelia”] A new taste was introduced. The lovers of mere amusement found, that real incidents, properly selected and disposed, setting aside the idea of utility, and real characters delineated with truth and force, can more strongly engage both the mind and the heart, than any fabulous narrative. This taste, which has since given birth to many other elegant historical productions, fortunately for English literature, continues to gain ground.” See, History of Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1800), V.434–5. As Robert J. Griffin astutely observes, this “heterogeneity of writings” makes evident problems with the description of the period 1790–1832 as “Romantic” by exposing the gap between Romanticism as a chronological measure and the highly selective “subsequent discourse about a period that has a history of its own.” Since that discourse largely excludes the genres of literary history with which I am concerned here, I have tried to avoid the use of “Romantic” as a neutral period designation. See, “The Age of ‘The Age of’ is Over: Johnson and New Versions of the Late Eighteenth Century,” MLQ 62.4 (2001), 383. S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer, in Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 10 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 43. See, for instance, Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon from the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998). Even the more sympathetic Jonah Siegel, while acknowledging “the heterogeneous yet consistent project that is [D’Israeli’s] literary history,” finally dismisses it as “far from what is generally called theorizing; he rather assembles examples from an ever more extensive canon of biography in literature and art.” See, Desire and Excess: the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98–9. D’Israeli identifies both radical and conjectural histories as unacceptably theoretical in orientation. His objections to the former are usually voiced through attacks on “metaphysics,” the preferred code among 1790s conservatives for radical doctrine. Conjectural history, as practiced by Scottish Enlightenment writers like Millar and Ferguson, is diminished on the grounds that in order to confirm the “inseparable connection of

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10.

11.

12.

13.

circumstances ... [which] govern society ... the historian sometimes distorted facts, or joined together events which were no otherwise connected than by his own fallacious imagination.” See, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England (London: Henry Colburn, 1828–31), I. iv–v. Ralph Cohen, “Generating Literary Histories,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Representing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48. Johnson’s 1779–81 The Works of the English Poets was released under the provisions of the distinct English legal system. Preceding it were Blair’s selection, The British Poets (1773), Boyle’s English Poets (Aberdeen, 1776–6), and Bell’s Poets of Great Britain (Edinburgh, 1777–82). Following Johnson’s Works were Anderson’s The Works of the British Poets (London and Edinburgh, 1792–5), Cooke’s Pocket Edition of Select British Poets (London, 1794–1805), and Alexander Chalmers’ Works of the English Poets (London, 1810). Sequences of Lives modeled on Johnson’s continue well into the nineteenth century. Henry Francis Cary in his Lives, first published in 1821–4 in the London Magazine, comments on his predecessor: “It was the chance of Johnson to fall upon an age that rated his great abilities at their full value. His laboriousness had the appearance of something stupendous, when there were many literary but very few learned men. His vigour of intellect imposed upon the multitude an opinion of his wisdom, from the solemn air and oracular tone in which he uniformly addressed them. He would have been of less consequence in the days of Elizabeth or of Cromwell.” See Lives of English Poets, From Johnson to Kirke White. Designed as a Continuation of Johnson’s Lives (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), 92–3. Numbers of Lives were adapted to specific audiences, as with John Aikin’s Select Works of the British Poets. With Biographical and Critical Prefaces (London, 1820), advertised as “a ‘library of Classical English Poetry,’ and [one that] may safely be recommended to the heads of schools in general, and to the libraries of Young Persons” (sig. A). For an account of these various collections, see Thomas F. Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade, and his series of articles: “Bookselling and Canon-Making: the Trade Rivalry over the English Poets, 1776–1783,” in Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture Volume 19, ed. Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1989), 53–69; “John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain: the ‘Little Trifling Edition’ Revisited,” Modern Philology 85 (1987): 128–52; “Patchwork and Piracy: John Bell’s ‘Connected System of Biography’ and the Use of Johnson’s Prefaces,” Studies in Bibliography 48 (1995): 193–228. See also, St. Clair, Reading Nation, Appendix 6, “The Old Canon.” Jackson, Romantic Readers, 120. The interest in “organized diversity” to which Jackson points might also be seen to define the contexts governing the new cultural authority of collectivities such as those Jeffrey Cox describes in his analysis of the relationship between Hunt, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, a group whose distinct class affiliations were superseded by fairly uniform political concerns. See, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Clifford Siskin argues for the reciprocally defining nature of this process; for him “writing” becomes “literature” in the period as “[u]nprecedented numbers of people learned both the skills and – that crucial component of modern literacy – the belief in their transformative power.” See, The Work

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of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 6. For Mark Rose, too, copyright is tied to the emergence of new understandings of identity and labor as “a specifically modern formation produced by printing technology, marketplace economics, and the classical liberal culture of possessive individualism.” Authors and Owners: the Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), 142. 14. For the shift from patronage to professionalism within a commodity culture, see Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), George Justice, The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in EighteenthCentury England (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Press, 2002), and Mark Rose, Authors and Owners; for the production and marketing of books, see Barbara M. Benedict, “Readers, Writers, Reviewers and the Professionalization of Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740 to 1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–23; for the influence of conflict in America, see Thomas E. Bonnell, “Bookselling and Canon-Making”; for issues relating to reception, see Lucy Newlyn’s exploration of “hermeneutic anxiety” (317) in Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: the Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); for authorial self-fashioning, see H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writings in Books (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001); for the emergence of an “intellectual vernacular” (36) see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); for the adoption of literary works to pedagogy, see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); for the related tastes for the “Gothic” and a distinct aesthetic domain, see David Fairer’s introduction to his edition of Thomas Warton, Observations on the Faerie Queen of Spenser (London and New York: Routledge, 2001); for the process by which “empathetic” reading prepared for “the emergence of literature in its modern sense” by provoking a “change in how literary value was perceived, a change from production to consumption, invention to reception, writing to reading,” see Trevor Ross, “The Emergence of ‘Literature’: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” ELH 63 (1996), 397. 15. Isaac D’Israeli, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors. A New Edition edited by his son The Earl of Beaconsfield (London: Frederick Warne and Co., no date [1881]), 231–2.

Section I: Writing and Rewriting Lives 1. Percival Stockdale, Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets (London, 1807), I.134. 2. In his Lectures on the English Poets, Hazlitt contrasts the acknowledgment by “the voice of common fame” of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton as the “four greatest names in English poetry,” setting this popular judgment against that of the standard resource, Johnson’s Lives which excludes the “three first … (Shakespeare indeed is so from the dramatic form of his composition): and the fourth, Milton, is admitted with a reluctant

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

and churlish welcome.” “Lecture III. On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), 2, 207. Subsequent Victorian revaluations of Johnson, as Katherine Turner argues, generated a paradigm shift in representations of the eighteenth-century period more generally. See, “The ‘Link of Transition’: Samuel Johnson and the Victorians,” in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition, ed. Francis O’Gorman and Katherine Turner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 119–43. As Murray Pittock notes, “the struggle over [ Johnson’s] reputation” began immediately after his death, as evidenced by the publication in the seven years following it of eleven biographies. See, “Johnson, Boswell, and their Circle,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 157. See also, Robert E. Kelley and O. M. Brack, Jr. (eds), The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1974). The Most Disreputable Trade, 134. See, Roger Lonsdale, “Introduction,” Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on their Works, ed. with an introduction and notes by Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). See, Greg Clingham, “Life and Literature in the Lives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161–91 and Alvin Kernan, Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 158–63. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli also makes Johnson’s Lives pivotal, arguing the indebtedness of Romantic prose writers to his model of collective biography by stressing the “interpretative, subjective, fragmentary, allusive, iconographic” elements of his writing. See, Prose in the Age of Poets: Romanticism and Biographical Narrative from Johnson to De Quincey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 1–2. Paul Keen relates the Lives to a range of classificatory projects over the period including dictionaries and general histories in The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 104. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation, 115. St. Clair defines those books “that slipped through … the brief copyright window” from 1774 to 1808 as the “old canon.” After 1808 (and in reinforcements of the 1808 Act by those of 1814, 1837, and 1842), “the brief copyright window came to an end, [and] the number of titles coming out of copyright dropped sharply. As the publishers drove up the price of new books to ever higher levels, the old canon, held fast within the ever tightening economic constraints, stood unchanged, gaining in authority, falling in price, gradually extending its penetration ever deeper and wider into the expanding reading nation, but becoming more obsolete with every year. The closing of the window meant that most of the books written during the romantic period would have to wait until middle or late Victorian times to become as cheap, as accessible, or as widely read within the nation” (121). My focus is on the period following 1774 when the “old canon” works were released to greater numbers of readers but were not yet functioning in the prescriptive and hierarchical terms in which we tend now to consider canonization. Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 4. For Terry, Johnson’s Lives “sounds the final death-knell of the honourable old idea of fame” and

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represents the “extinction of the idea that the preservation of the literary past should be conducted in non-judgemental terms, as an essentially ethical and elegiac activity” (4). Jack Lynch, in turn, argues that while Johnson did not construct systematic literary histories, his writings from the late 1730s to the early 1780s follow the transition toward, and contribute to shaping, an understanding of the Renaissance as the “age of Elizabeth” defined by a distinctive canon, an understanding that then shaped representations of the British character and the modern nation. See, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For contrasting accounts of Johnson’s Lives as the originating point of modern canon formation or the terminal point of a residual rhetorical model of the canon see, respectively, Lawrence Lipking’s The Ordering of the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Trevor Ross’ The Making of the English Literary Canon. 8. René Wellek documents the transitions from traditional forms of what he terms “collective biography,” including encyclopedia and biographical dictionaries, to Johnson’s Lives. See, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941), 137. Terry (Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past) describes the more specialized authorial dictionaries in the context of the “cult of fame” (chapter 3), turning to the antecedents to Johnson’s Lives in chapter 7. Barbara Benedict’s account of the historical development of anthologies sees them as marked by a gradual loss of agency: the Restoration anthology, she posits, imagines the reader as a “collaborative participant in forging literary culture,” but by the late eighteenth century, the reader is merely “the recipient of commodified literature who reads poetry to train his or her moral response.” This late-century eclipse of anthologies and miscellanies by “periodicals, novels, and series,” not only “promotes the uniqueness of private tastes but also signals the decline of the early form of the miscellany, for it expresses the dissolution of the peculiar dialectic between community and individuality that defines the early genre.” Within this devolutionary paradigm, with its rehearsal of the conventional and limiting distinction of the eighteenth century from the romantic as a turn from community to individuality, and from sociability to personality, there is no place for the presence of forms like the Specimens that I discuss in Chapter 4. See, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6, 11. 9. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Colin Kidd suggests that Colley overstates the defining power of xenophobic sentiment on contemporary culture and while conceding aspects of Gerald Newman’s parallel argument (that “each major step in the consolidation of English rule in the British Isles – 1689, 1707, 1745, 1801 – was taken in the context of Anglo-French warfare”) argues the importance of both the Euro-Gothic perspective of many eighteenth-century antiquarians and the cosmopolitanism of Scottish Enlightenment historiography. See, Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: a Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 75 and Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10. Henry Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry (London: 1787), x. The next year, the first issue of the Analytical Review used a similar vocabulary to

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declare the intent of the “Literary Journal” to give “an account of new publications, as may enable the reader to judge of them for himself” (I [1788] i). The relatively recent practice of selective reviewing suggests interesting parallels with the consolidation of literary history, especially given the status inconsistencies of the two genres; it could be argued that the prestige of its historiographical affiliations initially allowed literary history to claim an authority greater than that available to the periodical, although this discrepancy was somewhat diminished with the enhanced status of the Edinburgh Review and its successors. In any case, if “march of intellect” is the catchphrase of the following generation, the coinage of this one, as will become evident, is “judging for themselves.” 11. William Hazlitt, “The Influence of Books on the Progress of Manners,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent and Sons, 1930; New York: AMS Press, 1967), XVII.326.

1

Writing Lives

1. Samuel Johnson, “Addison,” in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, III.36, 37. Johnson’s positing of a series of historical transitions from rules to taste to scientific principles intersects in interesting ways with Eric Rothstein’s model for alterations in literary theory between 1650 and 1800. In developing R. S. Crane’s analysis of literary criticism within the eighteenth century in terms that allow for both continuity and change and individual agency and cultural responsiveness, Rothstein posits the gradual exchange of “Personal” for “Civic” socio-political ideals. See, “On Rerouting the History of British Literary Theory, 1650–1800,” in Eighteenth-Century Contexts: Historical Inquiries in Honor of Philip Harth, ed. Howard D. Weinbrot, Peter J. Schakel, and Stephen E. Karian (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 265–86 and “Diversity and Change in Literary Histories,” in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 114–45. 2. Robert Bisset, The Spectator, with Illustrative Notes. To which are prefixed The Lives of the Authors ... with Critical Remarks on their Respective Writings. A New Edition (London: 1799), I.vii. In the continuation of this passage, Bisset makes a special case for the biographies of writers that are embedded in formal histories: “But though we enter warmly into the situation of those who have been eminent for the exertion of great qualities, yet are we most deeply affected by the history of men who have contributed much to our pleasure and advantage. The Lives, therefore, of excellent Writers have ever been the subject of public curiosity. When we have read the works of a HOMER, a VIRGIL, a THUCYDIDES, a TACITUS, a MILTON, a HUME, we anxiously desire to know the history of personages from whom we have derived united instruction and delight. To gratify this desire has been the reason that persons in all ages, in which Literature has been held in estimation, have taken pains to collect facts respecting the most admired Writers, which might exhibit a view of their lives and characters” (I. vii–viii). 3. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 131. 4. She does, however, quibble with the earlier suggestion that Addison was solely responsible for the recovery of Paradise Lost: “This admirable poem, which is

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Notes now the boast of every Englishman, was at that time but little noticed. Not that Addison, as some seem to think, discovered the Paradise Lost: it had been long enough before the public to attract the notices of judges: but there had been no large edition before his time, and many circumstances had contributed to prevent its soon becoming a popular work.” A. L. Barbauld, Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder, with a preliminary essay, by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: J. Johnson, 1804), xx. For the controversy surrounding Milton’s reception, see Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In his Lives of Edward and John Philips, Godwin investigates the historical relativizing of critical judgment, particularly in Appendix IV which explores the fall from favor of Jonson’s work by setting it in the context of earlier failures of appreciation, citing Addison’s judgment of Spenser and Pope’s of Cowley as writers no longer read. See Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815). Coleridge’s comments on Addison in an 1810 letter to Poole provide a sharply negative response to what Barbauld presents in more positively affective terms: “the love of Reading, as a refined pleasure weaning the mind from grosser enjoyments, which it was one of the Spectator’s chief Objects to awaken, has by that work, & those that followed ... but still more, by Newspapers, Magazines, and Novels, been carried into excess: and the Spectator itself has innocently contributed to the general taste for unconnected writing – just as if ‘Reading made easy’ should act to give men an aversion to words of more than two syllables, instead of drawing them thro’ those words into the power of reading Books in general.” Quoted in Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism, 325, note 62. Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie (New York, 1807), II.111. Robert Anderson, The Works of the British Poets, I.[1]. See Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade, 207–11 for the bibliographical problems with the title of Anderson’s work. Anderson’s plagiarism of Headley shifts the target of the original. Headley was in fact attacking another version of his chosen form, the “Beauties of English Literature,” in particular, that of Goldsmith. Such works, Headley asserts, are “in a great degree idle and impertinent, and do but multiply books to no good end; by anticipating him, they deprive the reader of the pleasure every one feels, and of that right which every one is entitled to, of judging for himself.” Headley, Select Beauties, ix. Thomas F. Bonnell contradicts this claim, noting that “continuing sales of Bell’s Poets may be traced through the reprints of dozens of volumes between 1786 and 1803, culminating in 1807 when the whole series was republished in expanded form as The Poets of Great Britain in Sixty-One Double Volumes.” See, Bonnell, “John Bell’s Poets of Great Britain,” 152. Terry discusses the “calculated defamation” of Bell’s edition in Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 216–51. Samuel Johnson, “Pomfret,” in Lives, ed. Lonsdale, II.60. Headley, Select Beauties, vii–viii. Headley’s comments here might be seen as bridging what St. Clair describes as two distinct constituencies: the “reading nation” (those who “regularly read English-language printed books”) and the

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12.

13.

14.

15.

“literate nation,” those whose reading is restricted to reading for employment or to newspapers. See, The Reading Nation, 13. Headley’s argument extends that of earlier advocates for pedagogical change such as Joseph Priestley whose Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London, 1767) suggests that “revolutions in the state of knowledge” (26) have made it advisable for “Gentlemen who are designed to fill the principal stations of active life” ([1]) to be better informed about civil history and policy. Priestley, however, excludes from the syllabus proposed for boys in their mid-teens “poetry and the Belle-Lettres” on the grounds “that a turn for speculation unfits men for business ... if those speculations be foreign to their employment” (19). Headley also suggests that “the military spirit of the day, in Eliza’s reign, being put upon the stretch far beyond its usual tone by the perilous and alarming situation of the kingdom, served to excite and to diffuse a general inclination for action, that invigorated attempts of every kind, whether literary or political” (xvii). For subsequent assertions of the simultaneity of literary and military advances, see Joseph Berington, A Literary History of the Middle Ages; Comprehending An Account of the State of Learning, From the Close of the Reign of Augustus, To its Revival in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1814) and William Hazlitt, “Lecture I – Introductory General View of the Subject,” Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth in Selected Writings of William Hazlitt 5, ed. Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Hazlitt describes this “heroic and martial spirit” of the Elizabethans by citing Burke’s “‘age of chivalry’,” and while he suggests that “it was comparatively an age of peace,” he claims that “the spear glittered to the eye of memory” (5.171). This tacit forecasting of another potential “renaissance” pushes Headley’s account of English poetry beyond the terminal point that Jack Lynch identifies in The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson. Lynch details the ways in which attempts to understand the age of Shakespeare and Elizabeth repeatedly turned back to the present with a bleak sense of its lesser status. Stuart Curran, in turn, sees the Select Beauties as the “key instrument in the [Romantic] Renaissance revival” in his Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 22. Headley suggests that Johnson’s arbitrariness aligns him generically and regressively with those writers of “Satyr and Morality” from the previous generation, “Pope, Atterbury, and Swift, who headed one party, Addison, Congreve, and Steele, who led the other, in Queen Anne’s reign.” Just as they with a “Parnassian sneer peculiar to themselves, either neglected or hunted down their poetical predecessors,” so Johnson betrays a general failure of historical imagination when he privileges “later improvements” over the “ancient poets” (xix), and a more particular lapse when he depreciates Milton. Associating Johnson with political factionalism, personal censoriousness, and a suspect preference for satire and overtly didactic modes links him to Augustan writers, while also conveying the additional charge of disregard of current readers. For a contemporary history of what its author views as a long-standing “particular malevolence to Milton” (4) that culminated in Johnson’s Life, see Francis Blackburne’s Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton (London, 1780). Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions. Collected and Preserved by Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green and C. and J. Rivington, 1824), I.165–6. Hawkins, of

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16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

Notes course, aligns herself with this “higher class,” declaring that while his writing “might be entertainment to many: to myself, as I may have hinted, it was the most fatiguing wear and tear of mind, that any writing could inflict” (I.167). Chalmers, The Works of the English Poets, I.v. Chalmers, like Headley, discredits antiquarianism in order to authenticate his own version of literary history, presenting the latter as offering possibilities for narrative that are whole and entire, rather than segmented and partial. Late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century writers characteristically referred to “antiquarianism” in this narrow sense to describe forms of historical inquiry modeled on the archaeological attention to minutiae. For the proponents of antiquarian researches, however, awareness of what Samuel Egerton Brydges refers to as the “storehouse of recondite materials” is crucial to the education of a gentleman and the fragmenting of the text is similarly positively construed as a deliberate measure that allows non-sequential reading: “A work of this kind is no more to be read right onward than a dictionary. A portion too, must always be intended to form a store for future reference, as the occasion may demand. New tracks of inquiry and new questions may make that very interesting, which seems at present to lie inert and barren.” See Censura Literaria. Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, with Original Disquisitions, Articles of Biography, and Other Literary Antiquities. By Sir Egerton Brydges, Bart. K.J.M. Press, second edition (London: 1815), VIII.li–liii. D’Israeli’s satires of antiquarians link them with bibliophiles. See Vaurien: Or, Sketches of the Times: Exhibiting Views of the Philosophies, Religions, Politics, Literature, and Manners of the Age (London: Cadell and Davies, 1797), II.28–30 and Flim-Flams! Or, The Life and Errors of My Uncle, and The Amours of My Aunt! (London: John Murray, 1805), 93. Modern historians, following Arnaldo Momigliano, use antiquarianism in an expanded sense to signify the crucial influence of the eighteenth-century attention to primary documents and archaeological remains on the formation of eighteenth-century historiography. See D. R. Woolf, “Little Crosby and the Horizons of Early Modern Historical Culture,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–102, for a succinct account of the “importance of antiquarianism in the creation of modern attitudes to the past, and of modern historical method” (93) and Rosemary Sweet, “Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2001): 181–206 for the influence of antiquarianism on British national sentiment. Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 10–11. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader, 28. In a similar vein, Price (citing Benedict and Trevor Ross) asserts that “On or about 1774 ... literary history became anthologists’ job” (The Anthology, 67). Literary history, as her subsequent discussion makes clear, is identified with the codifying activities of canon formation and functions to render reading audiences the passive recipients of a fixed editorial vision. On the connections between anthologies and the consolidation of nationalism, see Julia M. Wright, “‘The order of time’: Nationalism and Literary Anthologies, 1774–1831,” Papers on Language and Literature 33 (1997): 339–65.

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21. Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts: or useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Youth, In Speaking, Reading, Thinking, Composing; and in the Conduct of Life; being similar in Design to Elegant Extracts in Prose (London: Charles Dilly, 1784), v, A. 22. Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary. The Second Edition, Corrected and Enlarged (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1779), I.37–8. 23. Johnson’s personality – the object of so much previous criticism – here drops away as a key issue, leaving his deference to readers as the central issue. 24. Andrew Franta identifies Wordsworth’s claim as the originating moment of the second-generation Romantic poets’ turn from an expressive poetic to one orientated toward audience responses. See, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9–10. 25. Knox’s literary history is orientated to a transcendent principle of “nature and ... truth” (Essays, I.89) seen to provide an invariable measure of worth: the “vulgar herd of poets” modeled on “Gothic progenitors” (I.91), for instance, deviate from these principles, while Goldsmith heralds the “revival of Attic and Augustan wit” (I.94). Wordsworth’s “hasty retrospect of the poetical literature of this Country for the greater part of the last two Centuries” (III.67) provides an aggrieved catalogue of misplaced attentions, designed to incriminate the “public.” 26. William Hazlitt, Select British Poets, Or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time, with Critical Remarks. By William Hazlitt. Embellished with Seven Ornamented Portraits, after a Design by T. Stothard, R.A. (London: W. C. Hall, 1824), iii, [i], ii. John Aikin’s Select Works of the British Poets similarly advertises itself as “a ‘library of Classical English Poetry,’ [that] may safely be recommended to the heads of schools in general, and to the libraries of Young Persons,” sig. A. 27. Characteristically, Hazlitt’s position on this issue varied; see Section IV for his passionate defense of a contrary, devolutionary model.

2 Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy 1. Chalmers, Works of the English Poets, I.vii. 2. Charles Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: the Poetics of Political Reaction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 15. Mahoney minimizes the significance of Romantic apostasy as an historical phenomenon, focusing instead on its functions as an ironic trope for “an abiding crisis in literary signification” (12). Kevin Gilmartin discusses the modern historical debate about the credibility and force of conservative thinking in the period and, citing H. T. Dickinson, Ian R. Christie, Frank O’Gorman, Mark Philip, Gregory Claeys, David Eastwood, James J. Sack, Don Herzog, and Robert R. Dozier, suggests that their work makes it possible to “demonstrate the enterprising and productive (rather than merely negative or reactive) presence of counterrevolutionary voices in the culture of the romantic period.” Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9. 3. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: the Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1. 4. Samuel Egerton Brydges, Autobiographical Memoir, 22–3. The only dating is provided by a superscript, January 1, 1826.

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Notes

5. Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. Howe, V.347. 6. While expressing the loyalist perception of a widening gap between the stable forces of government and the dangerously volatile ones of public opinion, Brydges does not follow Coleridge and Southey in advocating institutional renovations, to be directed by a clerisy, of both the Anglican Church and the existing school system. 7. Samuel Egerton Brydges, The Green Book; or Register of the Order of the Emerald Star (no date), 11. This work repeats the charge that the French Revolution precipitated epochal change: “With the revolutionary politics of the Continent came its revolutionary taste ... The work of thousands of years was overturned; all the sages of past times were deemed fools and drivellers; and every one began to build anew according to his own rash ignorance and ideotism [sic]” (16). 8. Samuel Egerton Brydges, Arthur Fitz-Albini (London: J. White, 1798), I.271. The Monthly Review 27 (1798) notes that the “chief object of this well-written novel seems to be to plead the cause of birth against fortune. It represents loftiness of sentiment, and disinterestedness of character, as exclusively allotted to the high-born; and as sources of perpetual mortification and disappointment to the possessor” (318). 9. Robert Bisset, The Life of Burke (London: George Cawthorn, 1800), I.3–4. 10. In The Ruminator; Containing a Series of Moral and Sentimental Essays reprinted in Censura Literaria, Brydges contrasts Pitt, who “imagined that the temper of the public mind might be, not only best, but exclusively, influenced through the channel of parliamentary oratory” with Fox, who carefully cultivated writers and “now enjoys the effect of it in the adulation paid to his memory” (Censura VIII.102–3). Fox’s recognition that the management of public opinion entails attention to posterity has allowed a carefully crafted personal reputation to modulate into a positive historical judgment. An encomiastic account of the “Character of Dr. Samuel Johnson” appeared in Bisset’s Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific, Magazine (London: 1799), 191–2. 11. See Oxford Dictionary of Literary Biography. For Beloe’s involvement with the conservative press, and especially his co-editorship with Robert Nares of the British Critic in 1793, see Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution. James L. Sack cites Beloe as an instance of the patronage system as it applied to editors and journalists before the Liverpool administration. See, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 12. On the discovered manuscript trope, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 56–7. Beloe was dismissed from his post at the British Museum in 1806, on the charge of negligence, after numbers of engravings were stolen by James Deighton, whom he had allowed into the library. 13. William Beloe, The Sexagenarian; Or The Recollections of a Literary Life (London: J. and C. Rivington, 1817), I.6. 14. See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 157–69, for an account of Gerrald’s trial and subsequent transportation to Australia. Southey’s “To Joseph Gerald” is discussed by Lynda Pratt, in “Robert Southey, Writing and Romanticism” in Romanticism on the Net, Issues 32–33, November 2003–February 2004, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n32_33/009255ar.html

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15. Beloe includes “Dr. Priestley, Mr. Henley, Dr. Price, Horne Tooke, Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld, Bishop Percy, the venerable Bishop Douglas, Dr. Gregory and Mrs. Wolstoncraft” among the participants in the pre-revolutionary salons. Jon Mee, in tracing Barbauld’s early attraction to and subsequent rejection of the bluestocking circle’s version of politeness, affirms the continuity of Dissenting models of conversational exchange with 1790s radicalism in “‘Severe contentions of friendship’: Barbauld, Conversation, and Dispute,” in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–39. 16. H. T. Dickinson identifies the special status accorded 1789 with the attempts of historians of early British radicalism to argue that only the intervention of the French Revolution prevented parliamentary reform, Kevin Gilmartin with the ways in which “the Burke problem” or the “Burke–Paine debate” for many years framed British Romantic studies. See, Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1977), 270–2 and Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, 8–9. Jon Klancher considers the extended literary history of Romanticism through critical readings of 1789 in “Romantic Criticism and the Meanings of the French Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 463–91. 17. Godwin, Lives of Edward and John Philips, v–vi. 18. Jack Lynch notes that radical commentators from Toland to Shelley acknowledged and celebrated Milton’s politics, but for large numbers of eighteenthcentury commentators, particularly early in the period, Milton was defined as an apologist for regicide. See, The Age of Elizabeth, 148–9, and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 19–62. 19. As William St. Clair notes, “In the year of Waterloo to praise an author as a ‘patriot of the world’ was to flaunt lack of commitment to a narrow nationalism.” For St. Clair, the work more generally comments on “antiJacobin England as much as on the nation’s last great political reaction.” See St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: a Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 391. 20. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” Appendix IV, Things As They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 362–3. 21. William Godwin, The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature in a Series of Essays (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), x. 22. Tilottama Rajan, “Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton,” Milton Quarterly 32 (1998), 81. 23. St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, 406–7. 24. Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers,” 28. 25. The parody, Godwin writes, with “an utter oblivion of and indifference to the most sacred ties; has taken the opportunity of Eneas’s descent into the shades, to exhibit Harrison and Bradshaw and Vane, and their fellow-patriots and victims for the public cause, in hell” (149). 26. Godwin further stresses the links between Milton and Edward by describing the latter as “the first person, so far as has come down to us, that committed to the press his feeling of the merits of Paradise Lost” (144) in his essay

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“Compendious Enumeration of the Poets,” “the germ” (159) of the 1675 Theatrum Poetarum. See Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 for an assessment of Phillips’ work and its importance to eighteenth-century biographical dictionaries. 27. Wellek concurs: “The honour of having founded English biographical literary history must be reserved for Edward Phillips, Milton’s much maligned nephew.” See, English Literary History, 17. 28. In the “Essay, Supplementary to The Preface,” also published in 1815, Wordsworth takes “a hasty retrospect of the poetical literature of this Country for the greater part of the last two Centuries” (with a particular focus on Johnson’s Works) and seizes on the supposed failure of Milton’s contemporaries to appreciate his genius in order, by aligning himself with him, to argue that contemporary inattention is in fact a mark of enduring genius. See, “Essay,” III.67. As Jack Lynch notes, Wordsworth’s sense that sublime poetry was eclipsed with Milton represents the culmination of a long trajectory beginning very nearly with Milton’s death and articulated with increasing urgency over the course of the eighteenth century. See, Age of Elizabeth, 158. 29. James Mackintosh’s review suggests that the faults of the work – “digressions too expanded, and details too minute” – give the Lives “the air of openings of chapters in an intended history of England,” but also concedes that such criticism may appear “ungracious in an age distinguished by a passion for bibliography, and a voracious appetite for anecdote.” More positively, he sees the Lives as “not only interesting as a fragment of the history of Milton, but curious as a specimen of the condition of professed authors in the seventeenth century.” Edinburgh Review 25 (1815): 485–501, reprinted in William Godwin Reviewed: a Reception History 1783–1834, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 330.

3 Bibliomania and Antiquarianism 1. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Director; A Weekly Literary Journal (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, J. Hatchard, W. Miller, 1807), II.279–80. 2. Dibdin’s views on “furniture” offer an interesting index to changing responses to commodification. In the 1809 Bibliomania, he cites Ferriar’s “satirical verses” on Thomas Hope’s “magnificent volume, Household Furniture” as one of the provocations to the writing of his own work: “The first question is, does the subject admit of illustration? and, if so, has Mr. Hope illustrated it properly? I believe there is no canon of criticism which forbids the treating of such a subject; and while we are amused with archaeological discussions on Roman tiles and tesselated pavements, there seems to me no absurdity in making the decorations of our sitting rooms, including something more than the floor we walk upon, a subject at least of temperate and classical disquisition ... Upon what principle, a priori, are we to ridicule and condemn it? I know of none. We admit Vitruvius, Inigo Jones, Gibbs, and Chambers, into our libraries: and why not Mr. Hope’s books? ... These sentiments are not the result of partiality or prejudice, for I am wholly unacquainted with Mr. Hope. They are delivered with zeal, but with deference. It is quite consolatory to find a gentleman of large fortune, of respectable ancestry, and of classical

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attainments, devoting a great portion of that leisure time which hangs like a leaden weight upon the generality of fashionable people, to the service of the Fine Arts, and in the patronage of merit and ingenuity.” The Bibliomania; Or Book Madness; Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms, and Cure of this Fatal Disease. In an Epistle Dedicated to Richard Huber (London, 1809), 2–3. He sounds a different note in the 1832 Bibliophobia: “Are the gewgaws of jewellery, the tawdryness of furniture, the trickery of horse dealing, the brittleness of Dresden and Sèvre ware, and ‘such-like,’ to form paramount objects of purchase and speculation, by those, whose purses are usually well lined with pistoles? In what an age of effeminacy among men, and of utter nonchalance and apathy among women, do we now live!” See, Bibliophobia. Remarks on the Present Languid and Depressed State of Literature and the Book Trade. In a Letter Addressed to the Author of the Bibliomania. By Mercurius Rusticus. With Notes by Cato Parvus (London: Henry Bohn, 1832), 8–9. 3. Subsequent commentators generate more jaundiced interpretations. John Corry, for example, conveys the complexity of the book trade in detailing its economic effects on different social sectors: “those book-fanciers may discover, that it would be more praiseworthy to endow a school for the education of the children of their tenantry, than to pay one or two thousand pounds for the worthless and illegible production of a departed scribbler. The sober-minded friend of literature must, indeed, smile at the foolish competitions of black letter amateurs, when he is informed that an English nobleman paid upwards of two thousand pounds for the Decameron of Boccacio! But it is by the extravagance of such ninnies that tradesmen live; and those booksellers who are now so active for the accommodation of the excellent critics of the puerile madrigals, the absurd tales, and the obscene narratives of the half-taught bards, who amused James the First and Charles the Second with their ribaldry, may well be terms the resurrection-men of antiquated literature.” John Corry, The English Metropolis; Or, London in the Year 1820 (London: 1820), 263–4. The reference is to the sale of the Roxburghe library in 1812, details of which had recently been repeated in Dibdin’s The Bibliographical Decameron; Or, Ten Days Pleasant Discourse Upon Illuminated Manuscripts, and Subjects Connected with Early Engraving, Typography, and Bibliography (London: Shakspeare Press, 1817). 4. Dibdin, Bibliomania, 14–15. Gary Kelly argues that Bibliomania should be seen as “an extravaganza, clearly not meant to be read through, a monument to its subject, the classic of Romantic bibliophilia, and a challenge to commercial, professional, and utilitarian ideas of the book,” in “The Limits of Genre and the Institution of Literature: Romanticism between Fact and Fiction,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 168. 5. Nathan Drake makes a parallel argument: “In the present hour of difficulty and danger, when politics and finance appear so entirely to occupy the public mind, it is little to be expected that subjects of fancy and mere elegant literature should greatly excite attention, or meet with adequate support. Long however as our eyes have been now turned on scenes of turbulence and anarchy, long as we have listened with horror to the storm which has swept over Europe with such ungovernable fury, it must, I should imagine,

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6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

Notes prove highly grateful, highly soothing to the wearied mind, to occasionally repose on such topics as literature and imagination are willing to afford.” See Drake, Literary Hours or Sketches Critical and Narrative (Sudbury: 1798), i–ii. Philip Connell, “Bibliomania: Book Collecting, Cultural Politics, and the Rise of Literary Heritage in Romantic Britain,” Representations 71 (2000), 32. See also, Jackson, Romantic Readers, 208–12; Deidre Lynch, “‘Wedded to Books’: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists,” Praxis Series: Romantic Libraries, ed. Ina Ferris; and Ina Ferris, “Bibliographic Romance: Bibliophilia and the Book-Object,” the latter two at www.rc.edu/praxis/libraries/ferris E. J. O’Dwyer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin: Bibliographer and Bibliomaniac Extraordinary 1776–1847 (Pinner: Private Libraries Association, 1967), 13, 17. See, Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Reminiscences of a Literary Life; By the Reverend. Thos. Frognall Dibdin D.D. (London: John Major, 1836), 231–9, and O’Dwyer, Dibdin, 12. As part of his defense of studies in the “ancient literature of our country,” he suggests that knowledge of black-letter texts not only enhances the pleasures of reading later “classical” authors, but also allows a parallel, highly flattering to his audience, between readers and writers: “why do we feel such frequent transport in the perusal of Spenser, of Shakspeare, and of Milton? It is because the minds of those great men had been stored by a perusal of some of the most celebrated productions of their predecessors” (237). Solitary black-letter reading of “classical authors,” in short, gives simultaneous access to their distinctive genius and their mediation of previous texts; literary historical lectures turn the reader’s private affective experience into a social and pedagogical one. And as Dibdin is quick to note, the Royal Institution attracted an elite audience. James Beresford parodies the range of activities – invention of neologisms, institutional lecturing, black-letter studies – to which Dibdin refers in the Reminiscences and Bibliomania: “Perfect originality in any project for general, or particular benefit, it is now, perhaps, too late in the long history of man, to hope with reason. In the great object with which I now teem, I am, in part, forestalled. To the active and enlightened spirit of the present times, we are already indebted for four literary ‘INSTITUTIONS.’ – I am ready with Proposals for a fifth; – an INSTITUTION, for Young BOOK-COLLECTORS, whom, in their combined capacity, I would call THE COLLECTORIAT. – The scite, [sic] and dimensions, of the future Edifice, are points which it would be obviously needless to bring into view, until it be seen whether the great object to which they would have reference, shall be encouraged by the Parties concerned in it.” After attending lectures, young book-collectors would be granted specific Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, as in B.L.P.C. Bachelor of Large Paper Copies, etc. (the acronyms continue for a full paragraph). James Beresford, Bibliosophia; or Book-Wisdom. Containing some account of the pride, pleasure, and privileges, of that glorious vocation, book-collecting. By an Aspirant. II. The Twelve Labours of an Editor, separately pitted against those of Hercules (London: William Miller, 1810), 66. Intertextual references confirm the strong connections between these writers on books and bookishness: Dibdin’s Lectures to Mathias’ Pursuits, Dibdin’s Bibliomania to Ferrier’s Bibliomania, Beresford’s Bibliosophia to Dibdin’s Bibliomania; the running title of Dibdin’s 1832 Bibliophobia announces that the text is addressed to “The Author of the Bibliomania” and opens with an account

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

of the “excessive astonishment and chagrin which I experienced at the sale of the Autograph Novels of the renowned AUTHOR of WAVERLEY” (8). Brydges, Censura (1815), I.xxxii. In what was originally a postscript to Volume I of the first edition, Brydges laments the erosion of civic humanist values: “Society is thus turned topsy-turvy; there is no permanence in rank or in estates; adventurers and stock-jobbers rise above all that is venerable for wisdom or virtue or station; and the people habituated to a constant sight of changes lose all reverence for establishments, and become ripe for insurrections, revolutions, and plunder.” Censura (London: 1815), I.xiii. Brydges, Censura, VII.236; Samuel Egerton Brydges and Joseph Haslewood, The British Bibliographer (London: R. Triphook and T. Bensley, 1810–14), II.iv. Brydges was, with Dibdin, a founding member of the Roxburghe Club, formed after the auctioning of the collection ended. Brydges and Haslewood, British Bibliographer, II.v. Writing before the emergence of widespread concern with the negative effects of collecting and book sales, Thomas Warton had lamented the fact “that English literature and English poetry suffer, while so many pieces of this kind still remain concealed and forgotten in our manuscript libraries.” See, The History of English Poetry, intro. David Fairer (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1998), I.208–9. Beresford satirizes “the Collector” by contrasting his literal possessiveness with the reliance of the hapless “Student” on an imperfect “Memory” in terms that emphasize the bibliophile’s lack of interest in learning or scholarship. See, Beresford, Bibliosophia, 5–6. For a discussion of negative representations of antiquarianism, see Joseph Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977). Brydges and Haslewood, British Bibliographer IV.ii–iii; IV.ii. Samuel Egerton Brydges, Desultoria; Or, Comments of a South-Briton on Books and Men (Lee Priory, Kent: printed at the private press Lee Priory by Johnson and Warwick, 1815), 2; Lynch, “‘Wedded to Books’.” Brydges’ claim to “liberal” interests here refers presumably to the humanist distinction between liberal and servile activities, and thus maintains the hierarchical class affiliations (as opposed to the more specialized contemporary vocabulary of liberalism to which writers like John Aikin refer in their mapping out of a literary history accessible, through new print media including cheap reprints, miscellanies, anthologies, and journals, to a much broader reading audience). Elsewhere, the aggressively elitist tone of Brydges’ comments on readers defines them through reference to social status. Brydges, Anti-Critic, vii; Censura VII.2–3. Brydges, Censura, I.li; I.xxxiii; I.lii. Edinburgh Review 4 (1804), 153. Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons. Epistle IV, To Richard Boyle Earl of Burlington, ll. 8–9, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1963). Joseph Levine, Humanism and History: Origins of Modern English Historiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 72–106. See also, his Dr. Woodward’s Shield and The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977). Susan Manning argues that the relation of antiquarian writing to historiography was defined in terms

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24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Notes of a marginal to a master narrative, a messy to a coherent one, a disruptive and obfuscatory to a progressive and shaping one. It is also a relation that set the antiquarian’s miserly and exclusively proprietorial response to materials in conflict with the “circulating economic and sympathetic currencies of Civil Society” (67) as described by eighteenth-century philosophical history. See, “Antiquarianism, the Scottish Science of Man, and the Emergence of Modern Disciplinarity,” in Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 57–76. For Clifford Siskin, the emergent understanding of writing as “the imaginative product of mind” (“Literature”), as the best examples of the national language (“English Literature”), and as something to be taught, shared, and cherished by the nation (the discipline of “English Literature”) is strongly indebted to the concentring functions of the version of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy that Manning describes. See, The Work of Writing, 94. Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s Reliques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 104. On the plagiarism and forgery scandals, see Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Bertrand Goldgar, “Imitation and Plagiarism: the Lauder Affair and its Critical Aftermath,” Studies in Literary Imagination 34.1 (2001): 1–16; Ian Haywood, Faking It: Art and the Politics of Forgery (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); Peter Martin, Edmond Malone Shakespearian Scholar: a Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On the Macpherson/Percy debate, see, in addition to Nick Groom, Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: a Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988) and Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: the Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On the relation between, and political resonances of, folklore and antiquarianism, see Robert Folkenflik, “Folklore, Antiquarianism, Scholarship and High Literary Culture,” in Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 602–21. For the ideological significance of Percy’s work, see Philip Connell, “British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 161–92. Warton, History of English Poetry, II.463; I.13. Quoted in Fairer, “Introduction,” Warton, History of English Poetry, I.18. Brydges, Anti-Critic, 95. Brydges, Censura, VII.266–7. Warton, History of English Poetry, I.ii–iii. The decision to open his study not with the Saxons, but with the Norman accession is again used as an occasion to display the social and political underpinnings that shape the methodology of his literary history: “every reader that reflects but for a moment on our political establishment must perceive, that the Saxon poetry has no connection with the nature and purpose of my present undertaking. Before the Norman accession, which succeeded to the Saxon government, we were an unformed and unsettled race. That mighty revolution obliterated almost all relation to the former inhabitants of this island; and produced that signal change in our policy, constitution, and public manners, the effects of which have reached modern

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30. 31.

32.

33.

times. The beginning of these annals seems therefore to be most properly dated from that era, when our national character began to dawn” (I.vi). See Fairer, “Introduction,” Warton, History of English Poetry, I.6. Joseph Ritson is a striking exception to the commendation of Warton as literary historian. His 1782 Observations on the First Three Volumes of Warton’s History of English Poetry (London: J. Stockdale and R. Faulder) notes that “[n]ext to the civil history of a country, an account of its language, literature and poetry is, both to natives and strangers, the most interesting and important subject that can be conceived” (47); Warton’s, however, is not a “History,” but “an injudicious farrago, a gallimawfry of things which both do and do not belong to the subject, thrown and jumbled together, without system, arrangement, or perspicuity” and hence will “remain a monument of disgrace to yourself and your country” (48). Brydges’ contrast of Johnson with Warton is typical: “No taste could have been more dissimilar, than that of Johnson and the Wartons! No minds formed in more opposite moulds! The Wartons were classical scholars of the highest order, embued with all the enthusiasm, and all the prejudices, if you will, of Greece and Rome, heightened by the romantic effusions of the ages of chivalry, by the sublimities of Dante and Milton, the wildness of Ariosto and Spenser, the beauties of Tasso and Petrarch. Johnson was a severe moralist, who, thinking merely from the sources of his own mind, endeavoured to banish all which he deemed the useless and unsubstantial eccentricities of the mind. He loved the ‘Truth severe,’ but he could not bear to see it ___________‘in fairy fiction drest.’ How could such discordant tempers agree?” (Censura, VII.264). Joseph Ritson’s identifying of Thomas Warton’s language in the History of English Poetry as “easy and elegant” coupled with the charge of “indolence in collecting and examining materials” might be construed as an attack on privilege. See, Ritson, Observations, 47, 48.

4 Literary History and Literary Specimens 1. Charles Lamb’s Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakspeare (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme 1808) and Charles Abraham Elton’s Specimens of the Classic Poets in a chronological series from Homer to Tryphiodorus (London, 1814) testify further to the popularity of the form and the perception of the interrelations between distinct sets. 2. Brydges and Haslewood, British Bibliographer, II.vi. 3. See Ina Ferris, “Antiquarian Authorship: D’Israeli’s Miscellany of Literary Curiosity and the Question of Secondary Genres,” Studies in Romanticism 45 (2006): 523–42. 4. George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets (London: Edwards, 1790), iv; Robert Southey, Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807), a2; Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets; with biographical and critical notices, and An Essay on English Poetry (London: John Murray, 1819), I. 62. 5. For literary history as “mortuary discourse,” see Terry, Poetry, 251. 6. The “Digression on the Private Life of the English” follows the manner of Hume’s Fourth Appendix in that Ellis’ “Digression” marks the break between

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Notes 179

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

Notes the historical narrative and the post-Henry VIII “specimens.” The dramatic expansion of the historical narrative between the 1790 and subsequent editions of Ellis’ Specimens has intriguing parallels with the contemporary reorientation of reviewing practices that followed the 1802 decision of the Edinburgh Review to deviate from the established practice of briefly noting new publications and to pursue instead more lengthy articles on select subjects. The status implications of the distinction emerge in Ellis’ comment that he has excluded ballads from the Specimens because their primary interest lies in their revelation of “ancient manners and opinions” and they are hence “less connected with the history of our poetry,” a history that he plots through reference to a model of progressive refinement. As Nick Groom notes, only after the publication of Percy’s Reliques in 1765 do ballads begin to shed their association with low street culture when “Percy’s nationalist antiquarian approach to cultural heritage [helps] to defuse the explosive revolutionary politics of ballads” (The Making of Percy’s Reliques, 25). While a sense of ballads as disreputable still clings to the 1790 comments, the inclusion of Percy among the pantheon of literary historians Ellis names in later editions of the Specimens confirms Groom’s point. This is not to suggest that literary history was in fact the exclusive preserve of commentary relating to manners and opinion; across an historiographical spectrum marked by increasing responsiveness to competing modes, similar claims are made in works ranging from traditional political history to more vanguard forms, including literary histories. The elitism might be seen as predictable, given Southey’s imminent affiliation with the Quarterly Review and his very public apostasy, although, as noted above, Ellis’ loyalist sentiments apparently did not color his advocacy of increasing opportunities for a range of readers to gain access to the past. As Elizabeth Eger notes, Southey’s was one of the few male-edited compilations before Alexander Dyce’s 1825 Specimens of Women Poetesses to include representation from women. See, “Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology,” in Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: the Making of a Canon, 1730–1820 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 213–14. But as his contemporary Lucy Aikin noted tartly, “I am persuaded that he [Southey] hated most literary women; and latterly, all dissenters.” See, Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, ed. Philip Hemery Le Breton (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864), 164. The OED defines birmingham or brummagem as “counterfeit, sham, not genuine; of the nature of a cheap or showy imitation.” Reviewer identified in Wellesley Index as possibly Henry Brougham. Edinburgh Review 11 (1807), 31. Pope, too, had favored the “encyclopaedic and taxonomic,” but, as Fairer suggests, Warton’s History made this approach obsolete. See, “Introduction,” Warton, History of English Poetry, I.5. For a detailed account of alternative taxonomic histories, see James M. Osborn, “The First History of English Poetry,” in Pope and his Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 230–50. In “On the Comparative Refinement of the Age that preceded, and that which followed, the Commonwealth,” John Scott presents a more insistent version

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

of Southey’s anti-French and elitist argument: “The truth is, that there is not an intelligent critic in England who does not consider the age of Charles the Second, – held out by the French critics as one of literary improvement – to be remarkable for the decline of the national literature, and as the period when it took a false direction, acquired a depraved character, and assumed a vicious manner.” But he insists, at length, that this is not an opinion “dictated by the successively-continued prejudices of the mass of the people”; it “is rather to be considered as a lately triumphant truth, established with difficulty by the action of our finer intellects on the more indurated comprehensions and feelings of the multitude – who have never any quickness to see excellence in what is not sanctioned by some common rule, or order, in what they cannot count on their fingers’ ends. The decision to which we have at length happily come on this point, cannot be said to have been carried by the popular voice, but, on the contrary, it is one that has been forced upon the public understanding by the natural leaders in intellectual questions, and, above all, by the experience of protracted years.” London Magazine 3 (1820): 264–5. Both, in short, extend the key premises of the genres they ostensibly condemn. While Southey names only Warton as a precursor, he does thank Heber, Isaac Reed, Mr. Hill, and Grosvenor Charles Bedford for their “personal assistance” (I.v). His failure to identify himself as operating within a tradition of literary historical commentary bears suggestively on Godwin’s charge that Samuel Johnson similarly refused to acknowledge his predecessors. In his review of the Specimens in the Edinburgh, Brougham demolishes Southey’s logic: “The taste of no age is to be deduced from the mere existence of a swarm of scribblers. Their existence may arise from the want of brighter geniuses to eclipse them, or they may be scintillations struck off from superior luminaries, like the train which follows the comet. If such petty sparks of literature fly up in the dark during a particular era, they may indeed prove the want of genius, but not the want of taste, in the age which tolerates them ... The existence of men of genius, such as Pope, Thomson and Gray, proves something definite and certain; it proves that there was genius in the eighteenth century, and taste to feel and revere it. The existence of half an hundred scribblers, proves nothing at all.” Edinburgh Review 21 (1807): 35–6. Francis Jeffrey challenges Southey’s dismissal of public opinion in a review of Campbell’s Specimens that uses the earlier text as foil: “Present popularity, whatever disappointed writers may say, is, after all, the only safe presage of future glory; – and it is really as unlikely that good poetry should be produced in any quantity where it is not relished, as that cloth should be manufactured, and thrust into the market, of a pattern and fashion for which there was no demand.” Edinburgh Review 31 (1819): 466–7. Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: a Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 390; Griffin, “The Age of ‘The Age of’ is Over,” 389. Campbell subsequently uses Donne as an exemplary instance of the limitations of organizing literary history either by the dates of monarchs or by their formative influence on “the poetical spirit of the age” (I.199). Edinburgh Review 31 (1819): 466. While Jeffrey commends Ellis’ Specimens, he suggests they were “too scanty” to accomplish the ends he anticipates for Campbell’s; Southey’s, in turn, are

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Notes

harshly judged: “Southey’s continuation of Ellis did harm rather than good; for though there is some cleverness in the introduction, the work itself is executed in a crude, petulant, and superficial manner, – and bears all the marks of being a mere bookseller’s speculation. – As we have heard nothing of it from the time of its first publication, we suppose it has had the success it deserved” (467). 21. James Chandler, “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poets and the English Canon,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1984): 481–509. 22. Isaac D’Israeli, Quarterly Review 23 (1820): 408.

Section III: Isaac D’Israeli and Literary History 1. Isaac D’Israeli, The Illustrator Illustrated (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), 3, 6. The Illustrator Illustrated was written in response to Bolton Corney’s Curiosities of Literature, illustrated by Bolton Corney, Esq., Honorary Professor of Criticism in the République des Lettres, and Member of the Society of English Bibliophiles (1837), which was itself an attack on D’Israeli’s Curiosities. Corney replied to The Illustrator Illustrated with his Ideas of Controversy (1838). 2. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1987), 112. 3. Benjamin Disraeli, “On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli by his Son,” in Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature. By Isaac D’Israeli. A New Edition, Edited with Memoir and Notes, by his son, the Earl of Beaconsfield (London and New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1881), I.xxvi.

5 Apostasy and Exclusion 1. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 78. James Ogden places D’Israeli “on the fringe of the ‘Jacobin’ circle during the Revolutionary decade. Whether he knew Godwin himself is uncertain, though they were on friendly terms later, when he helped with the preparation of Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth (1824–29).” Ogden, Isaac D’Israeli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 43. D’Israeli’s representation of Godwin as Subtile in Vaurien, however, is devastating: “Subtile in his dismal retreat, was in a similar situation with the religious visionary, whose prolific and atrabilarious fancy, procreates a monstrous brood, which feed and gorge on the entrails of their mother; that species of insanity which takes possession of the melancholy being, who severed from all human interests, yields itself with phrenetic fervour to one solitary and bewitching contemplation. With a fearless hand he drew a circle round nature, and became that unreasonable being who reduced every thing to the line and compass of human reason; and with whom to vary in opinion was to wander in error. An emphatic monotony, gigantic ideas, and hyperbolical truths formed his genius, his rigid mind could not change its attitude; but, firm and massy, made every thing yield to its superior pressure” (I.61–4). 2. Isaac D’Israeli, Domestic Anecdotes of the French Nation, During the Last Thirty Years. Indicative of the French Revolution (London: Kearsley, 1794), 3.

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3. Isaac D’Israeli, Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (London: Cadell and Davies, 1795), 167. In a later essay in the same volume, still referring to the “revolution in the human mind,” Locke will appear with Pope and Addison, as writers who “have subjugated the minds of millions by the energy of an intellectual sovereignty” (182–3). 4. Benjamin Disraeli, “Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli by his Son,” I.32. 5. Isaac D’Israeli, Miscellanies; Or, Literary Recreations (London: Cadell and Davies, 1796), xxi. 6. In Domestic Anecdotes, for example, he describes in highly ironic terms how “at some distant day, the pencil of history” will produce an apparently “faithful” (A7) but in fact almost completely mistaken account of the revolution in France. 7. Isaac D’Israeli, Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, Or, A Reply of “The Author of a Book” entitled “Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First,” to “The Author of a Book” Entitled “Some Memorials of John Hampden, His Party, and His Times” (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1832), 35. 8. The 1796 Miscellanies or Literary Recreations appear in 1801 in a muchexpanded, retitled version as Literary Miscellanies: Including A Dissertation on Anecdotes. A New Edition, Enlarged (London: Murray and Highley). For the modern definition of the miscellany, see St. Clair, The Reading Nation where the index directs those interested in miscellanies to the discussion of common-place books (775); Benedict (Making the Modern Reader) describes miscellanies as “bundled together from contemporary, fashionable material by booksellers” (3) and argues that “anthologies and miscellanies constitute the same genre” in the period (4). D’Israeli’s model is probably Francis Bacon’s Essays; Bacon’s “inductive” methods were frequently invoked by anti-Jacobin authors as counter to the supposed “metaphysical” theorizing of radical philosophers. See, for example, Robert Bisset, Sketch of Democracy (London: Smeeton, Mathews, Dilly, White, 1796), i–v. 9. The technique of playing off a prestigious genre against a less established one in order to question the methodological grounds and epistemological certainties claimed by the dominant form can also be seen in Godwin’s later, and until recently unpublished, essay, “Of History and Romance.” But as I argue in “Radical Utopias: History and the Novel in the 1790s,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 (2004), 783–802, Godwin reluctantly reasserts the pre-eminence of formal history on the grounds that its limited truths can be empirically confirmed, while those of imagination cannot. D’Israeli, in contrast, continues to press the claims of emergent and conventionally subordinate genres. 10. D’Israeli, Literary Miscellanies, 7. 11. In “Historical Characters are False Representations of Nature” in the 1796 Miscellanies, D’Israeli demonstrates the problems with the convention of invented speech by quoting Robertson’s acknowledgment that overemphasizing “political motives” when considering historical figures such as Queen Elizabeth, unduly diminishes the “‘passions with which they feel in common with the rest of mankind. In order to account for Elizabeth’s present, as well as her subsequent conduct towards Mary, we must not always consider her as a queen, we must sometimes regard her merely as a woman.’” D’Israeli responds indignantly: “This is precisely what the refining ingenuity of this writer does as rarely as any historian ... He explains projects

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

Notes that were unknown, and details stratagems which never took place. We often admire the fertile conceptions of the queen regent; of Elizabeth; and of Bothwell; when in truth, we are defrauding Robertson of whatever praise may be due to political invention” (70–1). Isaac D’Israeli, Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, 5. Isaac D’Israeli, Literary Miscellanies: Including A Dissertation on Anecdotes, 7. The Dissertation on Anecdotes was first published in 1793. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 47. The “opinions and feelings” that have caused him anxiety and that are referred to here collectively as “errors” appear in the particular essays as his subjects’ madness, melancholy, suicide, superstition, and jealousy. D’Israeli’s exchange of intellectual for religious marginalization has additional resonances, carrying as it does a peculiar mix of injured pride and sense of failure. In this light, Benjamin Disraeli’s account of his grandmother, Isaac’s mother, is provocative. She was, he says, a woman who “had imbibed that dislike for her race which the vain are too apt to adopt when they find that they are born to public contempt. The indignant feeling that should be reserved for the persecutor, in the mortification of their disturbed sensibility, is too often visited on the victim” (“On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli by his Son,” x). Ogden comments on the “fanciful genealogy” of Benjamin Disraeli’s memoir of his father, noting that the family can be traced only back to the opening of the eighteenth century, and were not Italian Jews “more aristocratic than the English aristocracy” (Isaac D’Israeli, 9). Michael Ragussis regards such attempts to link the crypto-Judaism of fifteenth-century Spain to nineteenth-century England as preoccupations of both Isaac D’Israeli and Benjamin Disraeli, tracing considerations of the topic from the father’s Curiosities of Literature and Genius of Judaism through to the political trilogy of his son’s Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred. See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 177–211. Michael Scrivener, “British-Jewish Writing of the Romantic Era and the Problem of Modernity: the Example of David Levi,” in British Romanticism and the Jews: History Culture, Literature, ed. Shelia Spector (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 159. Stuart Peterfreund, in contrast, argues compellingly against the inference that D’Israeli’s Anglophilia represents a form of assimilation, suggesting that “something far more significant than cultural affiliation” shapes his aggressively English and European learning, namely, an attempt, denominated by Peterfreund, Talmudical, to identify and elaborate “the paradigms by which literature generally, and the literary imagination, in particular, may be understood.” See, “Not for ‘Antiquaries,’ but for ‘Philosophers’: Isaac D’Israeli’s Talmudic Critique and His Talmudical Way with Literature,” in British Romanticism and the Jews, 191. Todd Endelman argues that “anti-Jewish views ... shared the stage with countervailing forces and ideas that, in practice, made the conditions of Jewish life in eighteenthcentury Britain more tolerable than elsewhere in Europe at this time.” See, The Jews of Georgian England: Tradition and Change in a Liberal Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, [1979] 1999), xx–xxi. Ogden interprets the account of D’Israeli that he quotes from “A Biographical Sketch of

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18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

I. D’Israeli Esq.” in the Monthly Review for 1796 – “He is a rare instance of a person of [Jewish] origin acquiring any literary reputation. But he is truly a philosopher, and we believe, though a descendant of Israel, is disgraced by no vulgar superstition, and, as he says, has quite forgotten his Hebrew alphabet” (Isaac D’Israeli, 193–4) – as consistent with the views expressed in D’Israeli’s own early publications. Benjamin Disraeli discusses his father’s failure as a poet, but claims that “the poetical temperament was not thrown away upon him … [I]t was this great gift which prevented his being a mere literary antiquary; it was this which animated his page with picture and his narrative with interesting vivacity; above all, it was this temperament, which invested him with that sympathy for his subject, which made him the most delightful biographer in our language. In a word, it was because he was a poet, that he was a popular writer, and made belles-lettres charming to the multitude” (“On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli by his Son,” xxvi). Carte was, in fact, closely involved with the Jacobite cause, living in exile in France between 1722 and 1728 to escape arrest under a charge of high treason and arrested again in 1744. The individual poet, committed to “creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed” speaks to, and will finally be rewarded by, the “Spirit of human knowledge” from which issues the “Vox populi which the Deity inspires.” Wordsworth’s famous phrase echoes D’Israeli’s comment in Calamities and Quarrels that any bookseller attempting to “create a taste will find himself anticipating a more cultivated curiosity by half a century” (87). See, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface (1815),” in Prose Works of William Wordsworth III, 81. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2.29. As M. H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, 1980) documents, the organic images of spark and fountain are commonplace in Romantic poetry. But their principal use there is to approximate the processes of creative genius, and not, as in D’Israeli, to describe patterns of intellectual inheritance. The inheritance patterns he invokes, moreover, involve complex patterns of innovation and material transmission, as evidenced by D’Israeli’s use of Camden who drew on Robert Cotton’s manuscript collection in writing his history of Elizabethan England. Isaac D’Israeli, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, II.317–18. Leah Price suggests that while twentieth-century critics were in the main inattentive to bibliographic matters, the ambition of current book historians “to reverse center with periphery” represents a new direction. D’Israeli’s alertness to the revelatory possibilities of the book, while characteristic of his period, is more speculative than such contemporaries as Dibdin or Brydges, particularly because he pursues his attraction to the exceptional and marginal both biographically and methodologically. See Price, “Introduction: Reading Matter,” PMLA 121 (2006), Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature, 13.

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186

Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

D’Israeli, Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, 175–6, 182–3. D’Israeli, Vaurien, I.xvii. Hume, Essays, 32. Phillips, Society and Sentiment, 49. Isaac D’Israeli, An Enquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First (London: 1816), 12. Ina Ferris suggests that D’Israeli’s work was prompted by the republication of Sir Anthony Weldon’s Court and Character of James the First (1650) in a collection, Secret History of the Court of James the First (1811), edited anonymously by Walter Scott. See, Ferris, “The ‘Character’ of James the First and Antiquarian Society,” The Wordsworth Circle 37 (2006), 74. Isaac D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature, ed. Benjamin Disraeli (London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1881), 9. Significantly, at this late point in his career, D’Israeli represents the expansion of reading not as politically fraught – as he did in the 1790s – but as a noteworthy stage in the development of the nation: “We were now at the crisis of that great moral revolution in the intellectual history of a people, when the people become readers, and the people become writers” (Amenities, 11). D’Israeli, James, 5. In Vaurien, the case against literary antiquarianism is made by the aptly named Mr. Acrid: “‘Mere antiquaries are ever to be duped,’ replied Mr. Acrid with a dictatorial tone. ‘Without taste to discern, penetration to decide, or that illuminating sagacity that combines it’s unerring calculations; with a brainless head and sightless eyes, you pore on inscriptions, sepulchral monuments, and manuscripts that would never have been such, had they merited literary honours. You only read the dullness of other times, and call this erudition; the gross jests of our gross forefathers, and you conceive you are men of wit ... The dullest of a dull age becomes to the mere antiquary the most precious of his own times; and yet such bear no other resemblance to Midas than by his exterior sign, their touch cannot turn lead into gold. You have already stifled Shakespeare by your commentaries, the text cannot breathe freely amidst your incumbrances. Here is a man who writes with an orthography of his own invention, and in a style that has no invention at all; and every fool of learning is summoned to admire a modern skeleton in an ancient leaden coffin’” (II. 29–30). According to Seamus Deane, the “most ferocious and absurd of all the versions of the conspiracy thesis” was the enormously popular account offered by Abbé Barruel who identified the French Revolution with the activities of an international cabal of intellectuals who plotted for decades to overthrow all traditional values. See, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 11. For a contemporary English rendering of Barruel’s argument, see the anonymous Jacobinism Displayed; In An Address to the People of England The Second Edition (Birmingham: E. Piercy, 1798), 4–5. D’Israeli’s early indebtedness to the scandal chronicle and romans-à-clef can be seen in his comments on the secret power women exercise in matters of state: “We are apt to be surprised ... that while an invasion takes place, a monarch is assassinated, or an inquisition erected, the motive-power of this vast machine is a little unperceived spring, touched and played upon by the dexterity of a

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6 The Structures of Opinion

woman.” See, Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, 257. By the end of the decade, however, he positions the scandal chronicle as foil to his own “masculinised” secret history, and uses the trope of powerful women to attack republican sympathizers whom he charges with endorsing a volatile mixture of gender contraventions, class antagonism, and radical politics. The class connotations of the condemned secret histories emerge clearly in D’Israeli’s contrast between them and the secret histories on which he draws, one of the sources of which is the “voluminous correspondence ... carried on between residents in the metropolis and their country friends” in the era before “newsbooks, as the first newspapers were called ... Great men then employed a scribe who had a talent this way, and sometimes a confidential friend, to convey to them the secret history of the times; and, on the whole, they are composed by a better sort of writers” ( James, 165–6). The conventions of the romans-à-clef are briefly revived in the anti-Jacobin novel, Vaurien (where Holcroft, for example, appears as Reverberator and Thelwall as Dragon). For an account of the most significant of the scandal chroniclers in the early eighteenth century, Delarivier Manley, see Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). For Michael McKeon, early eighteenth-century secret histories problematize the boundary between the private and public at the transitional historical moment of an emergent modernity. See, McKeon, “The Secret History of Domesticity: Private, Public, and the Division of Knowledge,” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1759–1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 171–89, and The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 11. In the opening pages of James, D’Israeli describes how the character of the king had “to pass through the lengthened inquisitorial tortures of the sullen sectarism of Harris. It was branded by the fierce, remorseless republican Catherine Macaulay, and flouted by the light sparkling whig Horace Walpole. A senseless cry of pedantry had been raised against him by the eloquent invective of Bolingbroke, from whom doubtless Pope echoed it in verse, which has outlived his Lordship’s prose” (7–9). His subsequent more detailed attack on Macaulay (203–20) interprets her hostile representation of James as an outgrowth of her republican sympathies. 12. Isaac D’Israeli, Despotism: Or The Fall of the Jesuits. A Political Romance, Illustrated by Historical Anecdotes (London: John Murray, 1811), II.344. 13. Joel Fineman, Annabel Patterson, and Lionel Gossman have separately described how the anecdote provides an alternative to the grand narrative. Fineman’s interest is in determining precursors to New Historicism, Patterson’s in establishing the anecdote as a quintessentially Whiggish genre, and Gossman’s in distinguishing historiographic modes that authorize, from those that subvert, established views. None of these perspectives easily accommodates D’Israeli’s achievements – Fineman’s narrative builds on the classical and Renaissance texts that the New Historicists themselves privilege, Patterson’s makes little room for “Tory” writers, while Gossman argues that the anecdote has limited exploratory value and serves principally as “an illustrative rhetorical device” (163). See, Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fact and Fiction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram

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14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

Notes Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 49–76; Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Gossman, “Anecdote and History,” History and Theory 42 (May 2003): 143–68. Ogden provides a brief history of the fashion for anecdotes in the late seventeenth century, their decline in popularity and subsequent revival in the 1770s, as witnessed by Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England, James Pettit Andrews’ Anecdotes Ancient and Modern, William Seward’s Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, and Boswell’s Life of Johnson. James Chandler, in turn, explores the relation of the anecdote to the “conversational model of representing culture,” citing Hazlitt’s Round Table as exemplary. See, England in 1819, 283. For an account of the technique, closely related to Warton’s and D’Israeli’s of “writing double, critical narratives in English” that was developed by Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson, see Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: a Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 103–4. Patterson, Early Modern Liberalism, 160. D’Israeli, Literary Miscellanies, 14. David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to The Revolution in 1688 (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), V.121. Lucy Aikin’s nearly contemporary letter to Mrs. Taylor (August 1816) on the subject of her own work on Queen Elizabeth’s court (eventually published in 1819) reveals a similar awareness of the need for a new kind of historiography that avoids the limitations of political history and antiquarianism: “Your opinion on this mode of writing history is peculiarly gratifying to me. It appears to me that a historian who undertakes to narrate the events of centuries must necessarily neglect the illustration of their literature, their biography, the manners, and domestic morals; but are not these, to the great body of readers, at once the most instructive, and the most amusing branches of the knowledge of past ages? On the other hand, the mere antiquarian presents all the minuter parts of this knowledge in a detail which is often dry and disgusting; he is frequently destitute of all powers of writing, and almost always void that philosophical spirit which combines, which generalises, and infers. Yet the writer of essays on the progress of civilisation, on manners, &c. is still worse; he is generally a Scotch or French metaphysician, who sets out with a system; if the former, he gives you facts so exaggerated, so embellished, or so distorted, that you would give the world to get clear out of your head all the error that he has put into it.” See, Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, 142. For an account of the increasing public and private criticism of Macaulay in the late 1770s, and the near-eclipse of her reputation as historian in the period after her death in 1791, see Devoney Looser, “ ‘Those historical laurels which once graced my brow are now in their wane’: Catherine Macaulay’s Last Years and Legacy,” Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 213–25. D’Israeli carefully attaches interested motives to all writers whose estimations of James are negative, beginning with “Burnet, the ardent champion of a party so deeply concerned to oppose as well the persons as the principles of the Stuarts” and continuing with “the lengthened inquisitorial tortures of the sullen sectarism of Harris” (whom he charges with misrepresentations provoked by the wish to please his patron, the republican Thomas Hollis), the “fierce, remorseless republican Catherine Macaulay,” the “whig Horace Walpole,”

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who “had something in his composition more predominant than his wit, a cold, unfeeling disposition which contemned all literary men, at the moment his heart secretly panted to partake of their fame,” and the “eloquent invective of Bolingbroke.” Together, these “party-writers” have been responsible for an entirely false view of the monarch’s learning: “Few of my readers, I suspect, but have long been persuaded that James I. was a mere college pedant, and that all his works, whatever they may be, are monstrous pedantic labours. Yet this monarch of all things detested pedantry, either as it show itself in the mere form of Greek and Latin; or in ostentatious book-learning; or in the affectation of words of remote significance; these are the only points of view in which I have been taught to consider the meaning of the term pedantry, which is very indefinite, and always a relative one” (James, 6–11). 19. Hume asserted, using the conference at Hampton Court as evidence, that by “entering zealously into frivolous disputes, James gave them an air of importance and dignity, which they could not otherwise have acquired” (History, V.12). D’Israeli, contrarily, claims that by doing so, James maintained the order of the kingdom: “The pacific government of James I. required that the King himself should be a master of these controversies to be enabled to balance the conflicting parties, and none but a learned king could have exerted the industry or attained to the skill” ( James, 26–7).

7 The “whole mind of the nation” 1. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 4 (1818), 265. 2. Subsequently, as part of his argument for the scope of what he sees as a very recent interest in pre-Restoration writings, he notes the signs of such interest not only in investigations of the “Poetry,” but also the “Ancient Literature” and “Ancient History of our Country.” 3. On Wilson’s wavering responses to his friend Wordsworth, see David Higgins, “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordsworth’s Genius,” in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. Kim Wheatley (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), 122–36. See Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 52–60, for an account of Blackwood’s deployment of a “language of intellectual desire, a desire to be acted and re-enacted in the moment of reading itself” (60). 4. Sharon Turner, The History of England During the Middle Ages, 2nd edition (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Brown and Green, 1825), I.xvii. Isaac D’Israeli’s cousin, frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review, and John Murray and Southey’s solicitor, Turner had conservative ties that were familial, social, and professional. See Jonathan Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review: a History, 1809–25 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 29, note 44, pp. 209–10. 5. John Adams, Flowers of Modern History; Comprehending a New Plan, The Most Remarkable Revolutions and Events, as Well as the Most Eminent and Illustrious Characters, of Modern Times; With a View of the Progress of Society and Manners, Arts and Sciences, From the Irruptions of the Goths and Vandals, and other Northern nations, Upon the Roman Empire, to the Conclusion of the American War (Philadelphia: 1796), Advertisement.

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6. John Wilson thus comments that “In reading the volumes of Mr. Turner, we may be excused for expressing the regret which every student of our early history must feel, that a work so valuable by its contents, should have been rendered less interesting, and almost, we might say, of less authority, by the style of the language in which the author has thought fit to convey them.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 4 (1818), 265. 7. Alexander Fraser Tytler, Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia, 1809), iv. 8. Benjamin Heath Malkin, Essays on Subjects Connected with Civilization (London: C. Dilly, 1795), 67–8. 9. John Aikin, Letters from a Father to his Son, On Various Topics, Relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life. Written in the Years 1792 and 1793 … The Third Edition (London: 1796; New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), II.218–19. 10. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 69. 11. Paula McDowell, “Consuming Women: the Life of the ‘Literary Lady’ as Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England,” Genre 26 (1993): 219–52. 12. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History, 88. 13. Ibid., 86. See also, Elaine Bailey, “Lexicography of the Feminine: Matilda Betham’s Dictionary of Celebrated Women,” Philological Quarterly 83 (2004): 389–413. 14. David Irving, Lives of Scotish Authors; viz. Fergusson, Falconer, and Russell (Edinburgh, 1801), 126. 15. William Russell, Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages. Enlarged from the French of Mr. Thomas, by Mr. Russell (Philadelphia, 1774), I.96–7. 16. Alexander Dyce, Specimens of British Poetesses; Selected and Chronologically Arranged by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (London: T. Rodd, 1827), v, iv. 17. Herbert Croft and George Isted, The Literary Fly (London, 1779), 50. 18. St. Clair suggests that despite the “scattered, and still largely unquantified” nature of the evidence for such growth, “it seems likely … that the accelerated trend continued, matching, and then outpacing, the increase in population all through the nineteenth century” (The Reading Nation, 382). 19. William Enfield, The Speaker: Or, Miscellaneous Pieces, Selected from the Best English Writers, and disposed under proper heads, with a View to facilitate The Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking (London: 1801), xlviii. The Speaker “was reprinted in large editions every year, and sold in hundreds of thousands of copies throughout the romantic period” (St. Clair, Reading Nation, 137). Richard Terry locates Enfield’s elocutionary manual within the “hospitable attitudes” to literature encouraged by dissenting academies, while registering the irony “that the institutions in England that did most to propagate the concept of English literature were ones existing outside the mainstream of education and society” (Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 195). 20. Robert Alves, Sketches of a History of Literature: Containing Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers in Different Languages, Ancient and Modern and Critical remarks on their Works. Together with Several Literary Essays. The Whole Designed as a Directory. To Guide the Judgement and Form the Taste in Reading the Best Authors. By the Late Robert Alves. To which is prefixed A Short Biographical Account of the Author (Edinburgh, 1794), [iii]–iv. Douglas Lane

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21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

Patey notes that Alves’ Sketches is guided by the assumptions of an older sense of “literature” that after the mid-eighteenth-century introduction of the category of “belles letters” was gradually displaced by a contracted aesthetic understanding of “imaginative literature.” See, Patey, “The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon,” Modern Language Studies 18 (1988), 19. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, The Library Companion; Or, The Young Man’s Guide, and The Old Man’s Comfort, in the Choice of a Library (London: Nichol, 1824), [i]. St. Clair, Reading Nation, 137. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 4. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, intro. Martin C. Battestin, ed. Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Wesleyan University Press and Oxford University Press, 1975), I.74. Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, 24. Gilmartin and M. O. Grenby, following H. T. Dickinson and Ian Christie, describe 1790s loyalist writing as both heir to an antecedent conservative tradition and productive of modernist structures of feeling. For a particularly cogent development of the argument against the notion of conservative discourse as merely reactionary, see Gilmartin’s first chapter, “In the Theatre of Counterrevolution: Loyalist Association and Vernacular Address.” The heroes’ trajectories are, of course, reversed since Douglas grows up in Scotland, not England, and the key political moment is the French Revolution and not the Jacobite Rebellion, but they share a youthful idealism and journeys that contrast Scotland with England. Also interesting is the adventure of the family friend, Mr. Rhodomontade, a follower of the “young Chevalier”: “The morning of the battle of Culloden he was unfortunately taken ill, which prevented him from signalizing himself. When the battle was over, providentially recovering, he retreated with great expedition, but was, as he himself bore testimony, overtaken by four English dragoons, drafted from the very stoutest men of the horse grenadier guards, who attacked him. He fought and conquered, and, killing two, and putting the other two to flight, continued his journey. A great price had, he said, been set on his head by government, on account of the eminent services he had rendered the rebels by his courage and wisdom. He was, therefore, compelled to leave the country, and, like Coriolanus, was necessitated to turn his virtues against the land of his nativity. He entered into the service of France, (others say of a Frenchman,) became very intimate with Marshal Saxe, and was one of the chief causes of the victory at Val.” Robert Bisset, Douglas; Or, The Highlander (London: Anti-Jacobin Press, 1800), I.133–4. The narrator comments on the string of Rhodomontade’s marvelous stories in which he occupies center stage in terms of momentous events and famous persons: “Other historians vary a little from this account; and, though they admit his zeal, yet confine its exertions to the movables of the enemy” (I.134–5). The pivotal role assigned Don Quixote was standard in contemporary critical commentary, from at least the point of James Beattie’s “On Fable and Romance,” in Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783). Bisset, The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific, Magazine, For February 1799, 56.

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29. For discussion of Scott’s masculinizing of the novel, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991) and Claudia L. Johnson, “‘Let me make the novels of a country’: Barbauld’s The British Novelists (1810/1820),” Novel: a Forum on Fiction 34 (2001): 163–79. 30. The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific Magazine sharply criticizes Smith’s politics and notes, “[o]f the imitators of real life, in fictitious biography, the only writer that has approached towards an equality with Fielding is Miss Burney” (56). 31. In fact, the loosely episodic form allows Bisset, like his fellow anti-Jacobin novelists, to cram huge numbers of direct references to radical writers and extended quotation from their works into his own. 32. Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 383; Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countries, and Manners; with Remarks on the Good and Bad Effects of It, on them respectively; In a Series of Conversations (Colchester and London, 1785), I.39. 33. Reeve, however, in considering rival accounts, aligns herself not with Enfield but with the more prestigious Susannah Dobson, suggests that Beattie has provided an “outline” while leaving “to industry and inferior talents, the minuter parts, and more laborious task of detail and arrangement” (I.viii–ix), and comments that while Warton’s History was encountered too late to be particularly helpful, she has been “happy” to find “my opinions were confirmed, and my arguments strengthened by this learned and judicious writer” (I.ix). Subsequently, she includes extracts from Percy and Walpole. On the question of access, Sophronia (friend of the central commentator Euphrasia) later asserts that reading novels may be dangerous “for the middling and lower ranks of people” (II.84). 34. John Dunlop, The History of Fiction; Being a critical account of the most celebrated prose works of fiction; from the earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the present Day, 2nd edition (London, 1816), I.v. 35. Edinburgh Review 24 (1814), 52. 36. Jeffrey may also have been responding to Dunlop’s own claim, at the opening of Volume II, that he was attempting something considerably more than “merely to compass a pleasing miscellany” (II.3). 37. Quarterly Review 13 (1815), 408. 38. Simon Jarvis’ succinct analysis of eighteenth-century criticism from Temple’s Battle of the Books to Coleridge’s esemplastic imagination considers the polarities of “general” and “minute” commentary, textual and literary criticism, gentlemen and pedants, man of the world and scholar, in terms that further contextualize this exchange between Cohen and Dunlop. See “Criticism, Taste, Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740 to 1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–42. 39. William Howison’s 1819 Blackwood’s article, “Thoughts on Novel Writing,” concurs with Dunlop’s point – though in somewhat apocalyptic terms. Howison argues that the task of representing “the different modes of national existence” passed in the seventeenth century from epic to novel; the present-day, essentially uniform urban culture, however, has invidiously

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infected “external existence” to the point that “English literature is running waste, and sinking into degradation.” See, “Thoughts on Novel Writing” (IV. January 1819) in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25: Selections from Maga’s Infancy Volume 5 Selected Criticism, 1817–19, ed. Tom Mole (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), 239, 241. 40. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing,” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 407. Barbauld’s critical sophistication relative to Dunlop is evident in her discussion of the representational strengths and limitations of history and fiction. Under certain conditions, she maintains, the “false lights” of fiction may be applied to actual events – that is, when the “obscurity of remote periods and countries” cannot be illuminated by contemporary documents – but fiction’s intrusion into the sphere of history can also produce absurdities, as evidenced by the distress of a “lady” who had credulously accepted Sophia Lee’s account in The Recess of Elizabeth’s “cruelty to two imaginary daughters of Mary Queen of Scott’s, who never existed but in the pages of a novel” (393). 41. Johnson, “‘Let me make the novels of a country,’” 167. For Johnson’s account of the particular qualities of the British Novelists, see 169–73.

8 Literary History, Periodicals, Lectures 1. John Almon, The New Foundling Hospital for Wit. Being a Collection of Several Curious Pieces, In Verse and Prose, second edition (London, 1768), 128. 2. Ralph Heathcote, Sylva; or, The Wood: Being a Collection of Anecdotes, Dissertations, Characters, Apothegms, Original Letters, Bons Mots, and Other Little Things By a Society of the Learned (London, 1786), vii. 3. Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, x. Heathcote, however, goes on to list “Beauties” among the forms that encourage mere “reading” at the expense of genuine “thinking.” 4. Donoghue, The Fame Machine, 2. More specifically, he notes that “[e]xcluding newspapers, there were more than 30 different periodicals published in London in 1745. By 1755, that number had increased to more than 50, and by 1765 to more than 75” (2). 5. Benedict, “Readers, Writers, Reviewers and the Professionalization of Literature,” 11. For Benedict, the emergence of a culture in which politics and literary evaluation are identified followed the founding of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. 6. Prospectus of A New Miscellany, To Be Entitled The Monthly Magazine; Or, British Register (1796), 2. For an analysis of The Monthly as ambiguously orientated toward both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modes of thought, see Felicity James, “Writing in Dissent: Coleridge and the Poetry of the Monthly Magazine,” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 3 (2006): 1–21. www.19.bbk.ac.uk 7. A typical volume – IV, for example, – contains among its standing features a “Tour of England” providing provincial news, “Notices of Publications, British and ‘Foreign’,” “Diseases in London,” a “Half-Yearly Retrospect of the State of Domestic Literature,” “State of Public Affairs,” “Account of the Former Progress

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes and Present State of Literature and Science in Scotland,” “Mathematical News,” complete with detailed drawings, “Original Anecdotes and Remains of Eminent Persons,” and “Medical and Philosophical Lectures which will be delivered in London in the course of the ensuing winter.” The author of “On the Advantage of the Present Age,” mocks this inclusiveness by pointing to the other publishing interests in school books and cheap reprints of the Monthly’s founder, Richard Phillips: “How easy is now the acquisition of knowledge! ... Natural philosophers tell us that all the matter of the world might be compressed into a ball of an inch diameter; and our modern booksellers, reasoning by analogy, have concluded that all the mind of the world may be put almost into as small a compass. Thus they have given us the whole of the Sciences in one pocket-volume, and all the beauties of Literature into another. It was said, in the praise of Socrates, that he had drawn Philosophy from the heavens to reside amongst men: it may, with equal justice be affirmed, to the honour of Sir Richard Phillips and his coadjutors, that they have enticed her from the libraries of men, to take up her abode in the play-rooms of children.” The Reflector, A Quarterly Magazine, on Subjects of philosophy, politics, and the liberal arts. Conducted by the editor of The Examiner 2 (1811), 157. Reprinted in PMLA 119 (2004), 118. Adriana Craciun, “Mary Robinson, the Monthly Magazine, and the Free Press,” in Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture, ed. Kim Wheatley (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003), 19–40, discusses the centrality Robinson assigns to the periodical press in her prose works of the 1790s. Michael Scrivener, Poetry and Reform Periodical Verse from the English Democratic Press, 1792–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 131. As Klancher points out, however, after 1800, the Monthly Magazine “would shed its ‘republicanism’ like a fustian coat” (Reading Audiences, 41). See Klancher, Reading Audiences, Chapter 1, “Cultural Conflict, Ideology, and the Reading Habit in the 1790s,” 18–46. Klancher considers in addition to radical and loyalist journals, a third type, epitomized by the Oeconomist (1798–9), that he sees as anticipating the “social pedagogy” (44) of the massmarket improving journals of the 1820s and 1830s: the Penny Magazine, the Mirror of Literature and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. Klancher, Reading Audiences, 44. Carlo Denina, An Essay on the Revolutions of Literature. Translated from the Italian of Sig. Carlo Denina; Professor of Eloquence and Belles-Lettres in the University of Turin. By John Murdoch (London, 1771), 218, 215. Like Denina, Heathcote cites Seneca as his authority for proposing an analogy between “declining Rome” and “declining Britain” (Sylva, v). John Charles O’Reid, Reviewers Reviewed; Including An Enquiry into the Moral and Intellectual Effects of Habits of Criticism, and their Influence on the General Interests of Literature. To which is subjoined A Brief History of the Periodical Reviews Published in England and Scotland (Oxford, 1811), 1–2. The title of the work, first published in 1801 as A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century, by An Observer was subsequently amended in 1803 to A Satirical View of London Comprehending a Sketch of the Manners of the Age, and in 1804 to A Satirical View of London; Or A Descriptive Sketch of the English Metropolis: With Strictures on Men and Manners, shrinking in 1809 to A Satirical View of London, before ballooning in 1815 to A Satirical View of London: Comprising Free Strictures on the Manners and Amusement of the Inhabitant

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14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

of the English Metropolis; Observations on Literature and the Fine Arts; and Amusing Anecdotes of Public Character, and again in 1820 to The English Metropolis; Or, London in the Year 1820. Containing Satirical Strictures on Public Manners, Morals, and Amusements; a Young Gentleman’s Adventures; And Characteristic Anecdotes of Several Eminent Individuals Who Now Figure in This Great Theatre of Temporary Exhibition. The English Metropolis, despite its title-page announcement that it is “By the Author of a Satirical View of London,” in fact substantially reproduces – but with significant changes and additions – the earlier work. The literature, reviews, and newspaper rubrics are slightly altered in the 1820 Metropolis where they appear as “Free Strictures on English Literature,” “Modern Reviewers,” and “English Newspapers.” In the 1809 edition, “Reviewers” is set off as a heading in the body of the text, but does not appear as a separate item on the Contents page. Other headings change more dramatically: “Caricatures and Print Shops” and “The Temple of Modern Philosophy” do not appear in the 1801 edition or in the 1820 English Metropolis, but are included in the 1809 and 1815 editions; the chapter on “Spaniards, Dutchmen, Jews” in 1801 becomes “Jews” in 1804, “Spaniards, Dutchmen, Jews” in 1809, and disappears entirely in the 1815 and 1820 editions. The 1804 edition also adds notices of the Monthly Mirror and Monthly Epitome. The 1820 edition, in turn, initially follows the 1815 one, then incorporates material on the British Critic and Anti-Jacobin from the 1809 edition. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, 54. In the 1804 edition, this is preceded by a paragraph that praises literature as the “celestial handmaid of Knowledge, under the guidance of Truth” (194). Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, VII.2.112. “Preface,” Political Essays in Selected Writings, 4, 17. Earlier in the century, the Edinburgh’s Whig sympathies, though not, as Klancher points out uniformly expressed, appear sharply contrasted to the Tory Quarterly Review, whose founding by Walter Scott and John Murray in 1809 had been driven, Jonathan Cutmore argues, “first and foremost by concerns about politics and politicians.” See, Contributors to the Quarterly Review, 23. As Jeffrey N. Cox notes, Lyrical Ballads was the “key act of anonymous collaborative work that gave substance to the notion of the Lakers as a group.” See, “Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School: the Lakers’ ‘Other’,” Romanticism on the Net 14 (May 1999), 1, http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/huntlakers.html Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: the Role of the Review,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141–2. Writing under the pen name “Z,” Cox notes, John Gibson Lockhart “interpellates the Cockneys, calls them into critical being, as antagonists to the Lakers” and in the process gives point to a controversy that would last into the 1820s. See “Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School.” For Blackwood’s involvement in the rehabilitation of Wordsworth see Higgins, “Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and the Construction of Wordsworth’s Genius.” See Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School.” Alternatively, as with Lockhart’s claim at the opening of the first of the “Cockney School” essays, flat assertion of the high birth of all canonical authors could stand in for historical argument.

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26. Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25, 5.58, 61. 27. In the intervening “Letter from Z. to Leigh Hunt, King of the Cockneys” (May 1818), Lockhart directly questions Hunt’s authority: “I shall shew that you have written verse for these ten years without ever having had one glimpse of what true poetry is; that you have been a weekly babbler about patriotism and freedom, and, yet, all the while, the most abject slave … I shall shew the world to what a low pass the spirit of England is reduced, when any of her children can stoop to be instructed by one who has not a single iota of the English character within him” (Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25, 5.143). 28. Hazlitt’s “Character of Mr. Wordsworth’s New Poem The Excursion” appeared in The Examiner, August 21 and 28, 1814, and was subsequently reprinted “in much revised form” in The Round Table (1817). See Duncan Wu, Selected Writings of William Hazlitt 2.390, note 46. As Wu indicates, the publication date of Hazlitt’s Lectures remains unclear, with the possibilities ranging from April to July 1818. A second, revised edition, Wu’s copy-text, was published in 1819. See, Wu, Selected Writings, 2.xvi–xvii. 29. See, also, Wilson’s slighting references to Hazlitt as “ex-painter, theatrical critic, review, essay, and lecture manufacturer” in “Hazlitt Cross-Questioned,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817–25, 5.205. 30. William Hazlitt, “Lecture IV On Dryden and Pope,” Selected Writings, 2.228. 31. Confirmation of Hazlitt’s specific point about Gray’s work can be found in the frequent period echoes of the “Elegy,” although often for political ends exactly counter to those of the original poem. Charles Butler, for instance, suggests that the London Institution will aid “some whose bosoms are pregnant with celestial fire, and who only want the facilities of acquiring knowledge, which these afford, to become like that great man, leaders in Science and benefactors to Humanity; but who, without these, would live and die unknowing.” See, The Inaugural Oration, Spoken on the 4th day of November, 1816, at the Ceremony of Laying the First Stone of the London Institution for the Diffusion of Science and Literature (London, 1816), III.429. Hazlitt’s opinions on public taste, however, as with other critical issues, are not uniform. “Lecture V On Thomson and Cowper” considers Robert Bloomfield, a poet whose limitations suggest that “original genius alone,” while in earlier periods, was a force sufficient to generate “bold and independent results,” is tainted in the present day by writers’ “consciousness of a want of the common advantages which others have,” a consciousness that leads to their “aping, the hackneyed accomplishments of their inferiors.” Alternatively, and more generally, writers of genius find it impossible to “move in direct opposition to the vast machine of the world … The public taste hangs like a millstone around the neck of all original genius that does not conform to established and exclusive models. The writer is not only without popular sympathy, but without a rich and varied mass of materials for his mind to work upon and assimilate unconsciously to itself; his attempts at originality are looked upon as affectation, and in the end, degenerate into it from the natural spirit of contradiction, and the constant uneasy sense of disappointment and undeserted [sic] ridicule” (Selected Writings, 2.254). 32. Lecture IV of the Lectures on the English Comic Writers adapts this construction to fit the familiarity that comedy permits: “Of the four writers here classed

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33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

together, we should have courted Congreve’s acquaintance most, for his wit and elegance of his manners; Wycherley’s, for his sense and observation on human nature; Vanbrugh’s, for his power of farcical description and telling a story; Farquhar’s, for the pleasure of his society, and the love of good fellowship.” See, Selected Writings, 5.77–8. The striking exception is the series of lectures Hazlitt delivered at the Surrey Institution, 1819, on the “Age of Elizabeth,” a period he defines as extending from the Reformation to 1649, after which point, he asserts, English literature declines rapidly. Particularly in the opening lecture, Hazlitt touches on numbers of established features of literary history writing, including a commitment (envisioned as heroic) to restoring forgotten writers, an attention to the operations of opinion, a pursuit of the interrelations of literary, religious, and political issues, and an interest in the formation of “the national Genius.” But these features remain isolated within the period he represents as essentially unconnected to subsequent developments, and hence as outside the framework of a diachronic history. See, “Lecture on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,” Selected Writings, 5.159–60, 163–5, 164, 169. Peacock’s, possibly ironic, declaration in The Four Ages of Poetry of the form’s redundancy carries Hazlitt’s point to its logical conclusion. For the Romantic narratives of progress and decline, and the alternative categorical distinction of classical from modern, see David Perkins, “Literary History and Historicism,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 338–61. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 6 (1819), 166, 163. Gillian Russell, “Spouters or Washerwomen: the Sociability of Romantic Lecturing,” in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141. See, Klancher, “Lecturing,” in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 581. The line between reviewing and lecturing was in fact doubly permeable: not only were the lectures widely reported and reviewed in the periodical press (and vice versa), but lecturers frequently recycled review material; thus the first three of Hazlitt’s Lectures originate in his June 1815 Edinburgh Review of Sismondi’s Literature of the South. See Frederick Kurzer, “A History of the Surrey Institution,” Annals of Science 57 (2000): 109–41. As Kurzer points out, lectures at the London Institution began only in 1819. Rudolph Ackermann, The Microcosm of London (London, 1808–11), III.154, 155. Lecturers themselves echo Ackermann’s terms in speaking of their commitment to a “general interest in the pursuit of universal knowledge,” particularly by instilling in their audiences a patriotic appreciation for their “language and laws, their liberty, and their religion.” See, for instance, James Ingram, An Inaugural lecture on the Utility of Anglo-Saxon Literature; to which is added the Geography of Europe by King Alfred, including his account of the discovery of the North Cape in the ninth century (Oxford, 1807), 3, 2.

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Notes

41. Jo Nelson Hays, “Three London Popular Scientific Institutions, 1799–1840,” PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1970, 64. 42. R. A. Foakes, “Editor’s Introduction,” Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume V (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), V.1.lxviii. As Foakes details, in a period of just over a decade, Coleridge alone delivered more than a hundred lectures (none published) at the Royal Institution (1808), the London Philosophical Society (1811–12, 1818), Willis’s Rooms (1812), Surrey Institution (1812–13), White Lion, Bristol (1813, 1814), Mangeon’s Hotel, Clifton (1813), and the Crown and Anchor, Strand, London (1818–19). 43. The Eclectic Review of the Lectures suggests, however, that the mere declaration of intent to synthesize is insufficient: “From the beginning of this work to the end, there is a total renunciation of all method and regularity; it exceeds all former examples of literary rambling … For fifty pages together there shall be no sign of progress, but the advancing figures at the top.” See, Eclectic Review 4 (1808), 222–3. 44. See Kurzer, “A History of the Surrey Institution,” 114. Kurzer, citing M. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: the Royal Institution 1799–1840 and Janet Cutler, The London Institution, 1805–1933, details the preponderance of the aristocratic and wealthy landowner in the membership of the former, and the much larger “trade and mercantile element” of the latter. 45. Hays, “Three London Popular Scientific Institutions,” 237, 256; Charles Butler, Inaugural Oration, 1816, 422; the quoted material is from the speech by Samuel Birch, Lord Mayor of London, who introduced Butler. 46. Butler, Inaugural Oration, 422–3. 47. W. M. Craig, A Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, Considered as Branches of Elegant Education. Delivered in the Saloon of The Royal Institution, in Successive Seasons, and read subsequently at the Russell Institution (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 4–5. 48. Hazlitt, predictably, does not advance the universities as alternative to lectures. But in suggesting that the source of the problem lies in the institutional commitment to the classics as a “sort of privileged text-books” and the concomitant “neglect of our earlier writers” which have together “unavoidably neutralize[d] a taste for the productions of native genius, estranges the mind from the history of our own literature, and makes it in each successive age like a book sealed,” he anticipates the vernacular turn that finally would see literary history lodged within the disciplinary division of English literary studies. See, Hazlitt, “Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,” Selected Writings, 5.163. 49. Hazlitt provides a different reading of such “presumption and self-confidence” in justifying his methods: “I conceive that what I have undertaken to do in this and former cases, is merely to read over a set of authors with the audience, as I would do with a friend, to point out a favourite passage, to explain an objection; or if a remark or a theory occurs, to state it in illustration of the subject, but neither to tire him nor puzzle myself with pedantic rules and pragmatic formulas of criticism that can do no good to any body. I do not come to the task with a pair of compasses or a ruler in my pocket, to see whether a poem is round or square, or to measure its mechanical

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dimensions.” See, Lecture VI, “On Miscellaneous Poems,” Lectures on the English Comic Writers, Selected Writings, 5.281. 50. The sentiment is consonant with Coleridge’s “strong persuasion that little of real value is derived by persons in general from a wide and various reading.” Accordingly, he suggests in his “Prospectus of a Course of Lectures by S. T. Coleridge” that the “subjects of the Lectures are indeed very different, but not (in the strict sense of the term) diverse: they are various, rather than miscellaneous. There is this bond of connexion common to them all, – that the mental pleasure which they are calculated to excite is not dependent on accidents of fashion, place, or age, or the events or the customs of the day; but commensurate with the good sense, taste, and feeling, to the cultivation of which they themselves so largely contribute, as being all in kind, though not all in the same degree, productions of GENIUS.” See Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819, 5.2.40. 51. See, Chandler, England in 1819, 18. 52. Erikson, The Economy of Literary Form, 20.

Conclusion 1. Lucy Aikin, Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. with A Selection of his Miscellaneous Pieces, Biographical, Moral and Critical (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824), 26. 2. Anne Janowitz traces the nearly century-long process of self- and familial assessment in which the extended Aikin family engaged, part of what she sees as a “reputation machine” that made an “intergenerational claim for the importance of [the Aikin] family within British culture as the embodiment of moral conviction from the seventeenth-century period of religious controversy to the liberal politics of the nineteenth” by drawing on the resources of “religious networks, periodicals, newspapers, educational institutions, and ... a series of family memoirs.” In Janowitz’s view, however, few of John Aikin’s 1791 Poems refer to landscape, and none of them represents a “sympathetic relation between the observer and objects observed, nor do they suggest a relationship between the speaking identity and the natural world.” See, “Memoirs of a Dutiful Niece: Lucy Aikin and Literary Reputation,” in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80, 91. Lucy Aikin’s narrative closely resembles the nominally apolitical one that prevails by mid-century (a narrative that endorses the view that literary criticism points the direction for literary change, and that literary history narrates these transformations according to internally defined criteria set by literary horizons), and that continues well into the twentieth century to exercise a strong conservative pull in the modern academy. While prescient, it is also continuous with earlier literary historical representations. Robert Southey in his comments on James Thomson, and Robert Alves’ earlier ones on Milton, provide like-minded assessments, linking nature and national genius to a coherent literary field. Milton offers a particularly graphic instance of the rewards for conservative commentators of constructing a literary history focused on questions of genius, since individual genius allows a sidestepping of the difficult question of politics. Alves thus suggests that Milton “forms an

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3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Notes epoch to himself” since his “superior mind and genius were utterly adverse to [his] times.” Alves, Sketches of a History of Literature, 123. Jon Klancher suggests that in the post-1780 period, public opinion represents a newly aggressive form of the old republic of letters, and that as the “term republic itself began to admit political self-definitions reaching far beyond the boundaries of the polite literary sphere and its origins in the city-state,” the pan-European consequences were evident in “emergent and eventually explosive nationalisms.” See Klancher, “The Vocation of Criticism and the Crisis of the Republic of Letters,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume V: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 302; for the eighteenth-century republic of letters, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Dror Wahrman argues that the sense of “public opinion” as the “fount of authority and legitimation” that was dominant in the 1810s (after an earlier period in the 1790s when it was perceived as “confused and contradictory”) was a version of constitutionalism and hence open to all sides to be tilted to their particular agendas. See, “Public Opinion, Violence and the Limits of Constitutional Politics,” in Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 92, 99. Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope, 21. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 88. David Simpson, analyzing the initial alignment and then displacement of chronologies of British Romanticism relative to the French Revolution notes that the designation of the period as 1789–1815 was countered by “the long-durational literary history, one that most commonly placed the significant events in the evolution of the ‘modern’ well before 1789.” See, “The French Revolution,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism, 53. Perkins, “Literary History and Historicism,” 343. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell, Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), VIII.160. Headley, Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, vii, xix. Linda Hutcheon, “Preface: Theorizing Literary History in Dialogue,” in Hutcheon and Valdés (eds), Rethinking Literary History, xii.

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Anon. Jacobinism Displayed; In An Address to the People of England The Second Edition. Birmingham: E. Piercy, 1798. Anon. Prospectus of A New Miscellany, To Be Entitled The Monthly Magazine; Or, British Register. London, 1796. Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, 1980. Ackermann, Rudolph. The Microcosm of London. London, 1808–11. Adams, John. Flowers of Modern History; Comprehending a New Plan, The Most Remarkable Revolutions and Events, as Well as the Most Eminent and Illustrious Characters, of Modern Times; With a View of the Progress of Society and Manners, Arts and Sciences, From the Irruptions of the Goths and Vandals, and other Northern Nations, Upon the Roman Empire, to the Conclusion of the American War. Philadelphia, 1796. Aikin, John. Letters from a Father to his Son, On Various Topics, Relative to Literature and the Conduct of Life. Written in the Years 1792 and 1793…The Third Edition. London, 1796. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Aikin, John (ed.). Select Works of the British Poets. With Biographical and Critical Prefaces. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1820. Aikin, John and William Enfield. General Biography; Or Lives, Critical and Historical, Of the Most Eminent Persons of all Ages, Countries, Conditions, and Professions, Arranged According to Alphabetical Order. London: G. G. and J. Robinson; G. Kearsley; R. H. Evans; and J. Wright, 1799–1813. Aikin, Lucy. Memoir of John Aikin, M.D. with A Selection of his Miscellaneous Pieces, Biographical, Moral and Critical. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824. Aikin, Lucy. Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, ed. Philip Hemery Le Breton. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864. Almon, John. Biographical, Literary, and Political Anecdotes, of Several of the Most Eminent Persons of the Present Age. London, 1797. Almon, John. The New Foundling Hospital for Wit. Being a Collection of Several Curious Pieces, In Verse and Prose, second edition. London, 1768. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader: a Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Alves, Robert. Sketches of a History of Literature: Containing Lives and Characters of the Most Eminent Writers in Different Languages, Ancient and Modern and Critical Remarks on their Works. Together with Several Literary Essays. The Whole Designed as a Directory. To Guide the Judgement and Form the Taste in Reading the Best Authors. By the Late Robert Alves. To which is prefixed A Short Biographical Account of the Author. Edinburgh, 1794. Anderson, Robert (ed.). The Works of the British Poets. With Prefaces, Biographical and Critical. By Robert Anderson, M.D. London: John & Arthur Arch; Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute and J. Mundell, 1795. Arac, Jonathan. “What is the History of Literature?” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995, 23–33. 201

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Abrams, M. H., 185n22 Ackermann, Rudolph, 153 Microcosm of London, 152 Adams, John, 189n5 Addison, Joseph, 7, 85, 140 Spectator, 13–16 Aikin, John, 57, 117–18, 157–60, 173n15 General Biography, 117 Letters from a Father to his Son, 117 Select Works of the British Poets, 163n11, 171n26 Aikin, Lucy, 180n9 Memoir of John Aikin, 157–60 Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters, 188n17 Almon, John New Foundling Hospital for Wit, 134 Altick, Richard D., 161n4 Alves, Robert, 57, 199n2 Sketches of a History of Literature, 123–4, 128 Analytical Review, 136 Anderson, Robert, 3, 6, 10, 17, 37, 39 The Works of the British Poets, 17–18, 26, 163n11 anecdote, 2, 5, 82, 86, 89, 90, 96–104, 117 anthology, 3, 17–26, 71, 111, 123 Anti-Jacobin Review, 137, 140 anti-Jacobin writing, 99, 125–6, 155 anti-Semitism, 102–3, 184n16 antiquarian, 2, 3, 4, 5, 16, 17, 22–3, 29, 31, 33, 43–5, 47–58, 59–61, 66–9, 72–5, 80–2, 86–8, 90, 92, 96, 111, 114–15, 131, 185n18, 188n17 apostasy, 28, 31–46, 82–110, 180n9 autobiography, 2, 27–30 Bacon, Francis, 107, 183n8 Bailey, Elaine, 190n13 Baines, Paul, 178n24 ballads, 180n7

Ballard, George, 118 Ballaster, Ros, 186n10 Barbauld, A. L., 10, 17, 127, 173n15 The British Novelists, 132–3 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 133 Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder, 13–16, 46 Barrell, John, 172n14 Beattie, James, 17, 191n27, 192n33 Bell, John Poets of Great Britain, 9, 18 Beloe, William, 11, 39, 160 Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, 33 The Sexagenarian, 3, 27, 32–7, 39–40 Benedict, Barbara M., 24, 164n14, 166n8, 183n8, 193n5 Beresford, James Bibliosophia, 53, 131, 176n10, 176n10 Berington, Joseph Literary History of the Middle Ages, 53, 169n12 Betham, Matilda, 118, 121 bibliography, 75, 96 “bibliology,” 70, 74, 143 bibliomania, 3, 4, 49–54, 131 biography, 2, 3, 4–6, 9, 81–2, 87–8, 109, 111, 117, 136 and history, 14, 30, 37–8, 87–8, 117 Birch, Samuel, 153 Bisset, Robert, 10, 11, 27, 39 Douglas, 126–7 The Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific, Magazine, 127, 172n10 Life of Burke, 3, 27, 30–2, 37 Sketch of Democracy, 183n8 The Spectator, 13–14 Blackburne, Francis Remarks on Johnson’s Life of Milton, 169n14

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Index

Black Dwarf, 133 Blackwood’s Magazine, 112, 144–6, 149–51, 154–5 Blair, Hugh, 7 The British Poets, 18, 163n11 Bloom, Harold, 1 Bloomfield, Robert, 196n31 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount, 81–2, 187n18 Bonnell, Thomas F., 9, 161n4, 163n11, 164n14, 168n7, 168n9 Bowles, William Lisle, 78–80, 145 The Invariable Principles of Poetry, 78–80 British Critic, 137, 195n15 Brougham, Henry, 33, 155, 180n11, 181n15 Brydges, Samuel Egerton, 4, 10, 27, 39, 47, 50–7, 60, 80, 185n23 Arthur Fitz-Albini, 30 Autobiographical Memoir, 3, 28–30, 37, 138 British Bibliographer, 52, 59, 177n14–16, 179n2 Censura Literaria, 51, 52, 60, 170n17, 172n10 Desultoria, 177n17 The Green Book, 172n7 Burke, Edmund, 30–2, 37, 57, 94 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 126, 159 Burney, Frances, 128 Butler, Charles, 154–5, 196n31 Butler, Marilyn, 85, 144 Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, 33, 142, 144, 146–7, 151 Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler, 165n5 Camden, William, 95 Campbell, Thomas, 3, 4, 47, 58, 79, 139 Specimens of the British Poets, 59, 71–8, 181n16, 181n20 canon formation, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 24, 26, 32, 37, 60, 71–2, 133, 143–5, 150–1 Carte, Thomas, 92–5 History of England, 93 Cary, Henry Francis

Lives of English Poets, 163n11 Cervantes’ Don Quixote, 127 Chalmers, Alexander, 3, 7, 10, 37, 39 Works of the English Poets, 22–3, 26, 163n11 Chandler, James, 78, 155, 161n3, 187n13 Chatterton, Thomas, 54 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 73, 75, 142, 145, 150 circulating libraries, 51, 125–6 Clingham, Greg, 165n5 Cobbett, William, 33, 142 “Cockney School,” 6, 112, 143–8 Cohen, Francis, 130–2 Cohen, Ralph, 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 4, 32, 33, 71–2, 144–5, 149, 152, 160, 199n50 Biographia Literaria, 94, 142, 144 On the Constitution of the Church and State, 4 Colley, Linda, 11 Collins, William, 157 Colman, George, 118, 121 Connell, Philip, 50, 178n24 Cooper, Elizabeth, 55, 57, 62, 69 copyright, 2, 10 Corney, Bolton, 81 Corry, John, 138–43 The English Metropolis, 141–3, 175n3 A Satirical View of London, 138–43 Cowper, William, 66, 157 Cox, Jeffrey, 140, 144, 163n12, 195n20 Craig, W. M. A Course of Lectures on Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, 154 Critical Review, 136 Croft, Herbert and George Isted The Literary Fly, 122–3 Croker, John Wilson, 133, 143 Crowe, William, 152 Crown and Anchor, Strand, London, 198n42 Cutmore, Jonathan, 189n4, 195n19 Darwin, Erasmus, 157 Deane, Seamus, 186n9

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Index 221 Dunlop, John History of Fiction, 130–2 Dyce, Alexander, 118 Specimens of British Poetesses, 120–1, 180n9 Edinburgh Review, 67, 130, 133, 140, 142–3, 148, 151, 166n10, 179n6, 195n19 Eger, Elizabeth, 180n9 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 200n3 Ellis, George, 3, 47, 58, 60–6, 69–70, 72, 75, 77–8, 121, 131, 139, 152 Specimens of the Early English Poets, 59, 60–6, 181n20 Elton, Charles Abraham Specimens of the Classic Poets, 179n1 Endelman, Todd, 184n17 Enfield, William, 128, 117 The Speaker, 123 English Review, 136 Erickson, Lee, 199n52, 161n4 essay, 87–90 Examiner, 144–5, 148, 151 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 118, 122 Fairer, David, 55, 164n14, 180n12 Ferguson, Adam, 118, 162n9 Ferriar, John Bibliomania, 51, 174n2 Ferris, Ina, 161n3, 176n6, 179n3, 186n5, 192n29 Fielding, Henry, 124, 127–8 Joseph Andrews, 124–5 Tom Jones, 125–6 Fineman, Joel, 187n13 Foakes, R. A., 152 Folkenflik, Robert, 178n24 forgery, 54 Franta, Andrew, 171n24 French Revolution, 82, 158, 186n9, 200n5 Loyalist responses, 28–37 “Gallic School,” 144 Gentleman’s Magazine, 136, 193n5, 193n6 Gerrald, Joseph, 34–6

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Denina, Carlo, 137 diary, 89–90 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall, 4, 47, 80, 152, 177n14, 185n23 The Bibliomania, 50–1, 174n2, 176n11 Bibliophobia, 174n2, 176n11 The Director, 49, 50 The Library Companion, 123–4 Reminiscences of a Literary Life, 50, 152 Dickinson, H. T., 173n16 D’Israeli, Isaac, 4, 78–110, 145, 189n4 Amenities of Literature, 98–9 Calamities and Quarrels of Authors, 8, 90–5, 97–8 Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, 95, 100–1, 103–4, 162n9 Curiosities of Literature, 81–2 Despotism, 100 Domestic Anecdotes of the French Nation, 85 Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, 183n7 Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character, 85, 97, 186n10 Flim-Flams!, 170n17 Genius of Judaism, 184n16 The Illustrator Illustrated, 81–2 James the First, 5, 98, 101, 104–10 Literary Miscellanies: Including A Dissertation on Anecdotes, 105, 183n8 Miscellanies; Or, Literary Recreations, 86, 87, 183n11 Vaurien, 79, 97, 170n17, 186n8, 186n10 Disraeli, Benjamin, 82, 86, 184n16, 185n18 Dobson, Susannah, 192n33 Donaldson v. Beckett, 2, 6, 47, 51, 124 Donne, John, 181n18 Donoghue, Frank, 136, 164n14 Drake, Nathan Literary Hours, 175n5 Drayton, Michael Poly-Olbion, 95 Dryden, John, 14, 66, 72, 94, 141–2, 149

Index

Gifford, William, 65 Gilmartin, Kevin, 125, 171n2, 172n10, 173n16 Godwin, William, 27, 79, 181n14, 182n1 Caleb Williams, 41 The Enquirer, 39 Lives of Edward and John Philips, 3, 11, 27, 32, 37–46, 110, 168n5 “Of History and Romance,” 38–9, 183n9 Goldgar, Anne, 200n3 Goldgar, Bertrand, 178n24 Goldsmith, Oliver, 17, 57, 113–14, 157, 171n25 The Beauties of English Poetry, 168n8 Goodman, Dena, 200n3 Gosse, Edmund, 1 Gossman, Lionel, 187n13 Grafton, Anthony, 188n14 Gray, Thomas, 68, 149, 157, 181n15 Grey, Zachary, 92–4 Griffin, Robert J., 55, 71–2, 159, 162n6 Groom, Nick, 54, 180n7 Guy, Josephine M., 161n1 Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, 90 Hawkins, Laetitia-Matilda Memoirs, Anecdotes, Facts, and Opinions, 21 Haydon, Benjamin, 149 Hays, Jo Nelson, 198n41, 198n45 Hays, Mary, 118, 121 Hayward, Thomas, 55 Haywood, Ian, 178n24 Hazlitt, William, 6, 11, 17, 29, 33, 39, 57, 72, 143–5, 149–50, 187n13 Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 169n12, 198n48 Lectures on the English Comic Writers, 198n49 Lectures on the English Poets, 111, 148–51, 164n2 Round Table, 196n28 Select British Poets, 26 Headley, Henry, 3, 6, 10, 11, 17, 37, 39, 57, 62, 69, 72, 75, 135

Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, 17, 19–21, 26, 159 Hearne, Thomas, 62, 95, 101 Heathcote, Ralph Sylva, 134–7 Henry, Robert, 101, 115, 152 Hewlett, John, 152 Higgins, David, 189n3, 195n23 history, 16–18, 30, 56, 62–6, 69, 70, 72–4, 79–82, 86–9, 100, 105–8, 117, 135, 139, 147, 157 and anecdote, 100–1 and biography, 14, 16, 30, 76, 100, 117 and literary criticism, 3, 5, 6, 16, 64–5, 147–8 and politics, 27–46, 85–6, 105–8 Holcroft, Thomas, 186n10 Holinshed, Raphael, 95 Hone, William, 33 Howison, William, 192n39 Hume, David, 30, 31, 93–4, 101, 104–5, 140, 162n5, 179n6, 188n14 Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 82, 98 History of England, 104, 104–5, 113–14, 189n19 Hunt, Leigh, 144–6, 148 Examiner, 144 Hurd, Richard, 7, 15, 23, 39, 55 Hutcheon, Linda, 200n9 Hutcheson, Francis, 7 Ingram, James Inaugural Lecture on the Utility of Anglo-Saxon Literature, 197n40 Ireland, Samuel and William Henry, 54 Irving, David. Lives of Scotish Authors, 118 Jackson, H. J., 7, 161n4, 164n14, 176n6 Jacob, Giles, 118 James, Felicity, 193n6 Janowitz, Anne, 199n2 Jarvis, Simon, 192n38 Jeffrey, Francis, 77–8, 130–2, 144–5, 181n16 Johnson, Claudia L., 133, 192n29

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Johnson, Joseph, 137 Johnson, Samuel, 6, 30–1, 39, 53, 57, 62, 78, 81, 98, 152, 158, 181n14 Lives of the English Poets, 3, 6, 9, 13, 24, 77, 111, 163n11 responses to, 9–26, 43–4 Justice, George, 164n14 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 15 Keats, John, 144–6 Keen, Paul, 165n5, 200n3 Kelly, Gary, 175n4 Kernan, Alvin, 165n5 Kidd, Colin, 166n9 Klancher, Jon, 41, 137, 151, 161n3, 173n16, 189n3, 194n9, 194n10, 195n19, 200n3 Knox, Vicesimus, 17, 26, 39, 57 Elegant Extracts, 24–5 Essays, Moral and Literary, 25 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, 162n8 Kurzer, Frederick, 197n38, 198n44 “Lake School,” 6, 79, 112, 143–8 Lamb, Charles Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets, 179n1 Langland, William Piers Plowman, 64–5, 73 lectures, 6, 50, 111, 131, 134, 148–56, 176n10 Leland, John, 95 Levine, Joseph, 54 libraries, 49–50, 175n3 Lipking, Lawrence, 1, 165n7 literary criticism, 3, 5, 6, 14–19, 51, 69, 79–80, 107, 111, 138–9, 148, 151 Lockhart, John Gibson, 6, 144–5, 148–50 London, April, 183n9 London Institution, 51, 151, 153–5, 196n31 London Magazine, 180n13 London Philosophical Society, 198n42 Lonsdale, Roger, 165n4 Looser, Devoney, 188n18 Lynch, Deidre, 52, 176n6 Lynch, Jack, 165n7, 173n18, 174n28 Lyrical Ballads, 144

Macaulay, Catherine, 100, 104, 106–7 Mackenzie, Henry, 90 Mackintosh, James, 174n29 Macpherson, James, 54 magazines, 111, 135–7, 141 Mahoney, Charles, 27, 33. Malkin, Benjamin Heath, 117–18 Mangeon’s Hotel, Clifton, 198n42 Manley, Delarivier, 99 Manning, Susan, 177n23 Martin, Peter, 178n24 Mathias, T. J. Pursuits of Literature, 50–1 Maturin, Charles Robert, 144 McDowell, Paula, 118 McGann, Jerome, 1 McKeon, Michael, 133, 172n12, 186n10 Mee, Jon, 173n15 memoir, 2, 89, 102–3, 105, 111 Millar, John, 119, 162n9 Milton, John, 38–41, 43, 68, 71, 75–7, 98, 140–2, 149–50, 158, 199n2 miscellany, 87–8, 123, 130 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 170n17 Monthly Review, 136–7 Morley, John, 1 Murray, John, 189n4, 195n19 national identity, 65, 68, 72–8, 93, 104–5, 108–12, 114–16, 124, 139, 141, 143, 157–60, 186n6 New Monthly Magazine, 151 Newlyn, Lucy, 164n14, 168n5, 173n18 Newman, Gerald, 166n9 newspaper, 125, 134, 139 novel, 123–33, 135 O’Dwyer, E. J., 176n7 O’Reid, John Charles Reviewers Reviewed, 138 Ogden, James, 91, 182n1, 184n17, 187n13 opinion, 4, 5, 6, 10, 16, 21, 24–6, 60, 62–7, 69, 72, 74–7, 82, 95–104, 108, 111, 114, 129, 137–9, 150, 155, 159, 200n3 Osborn, James M., 180n12

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Index

Paine, Thomas, 126 pastoral, 76–7 Patey, Douglas Lane, 190n20 patronage, 30–1 Patterson, Annabel, 102, 187n13 Peacock, Thomas, 197n34 pedagogical texts, 6, 24, 123–4, 129, 156 Percy, Thomas, 54, 62, 69, 192n33 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 77, 180n7 periodicals, 134–7, 148, 155 periodization, 72, 75, 150 Perkins, David, 1, 159, 197n34 Peterfreund, Stuart, 184n17 Peterloo, 112, 155 Phillips, Edward Theatrum Poetarum, 43, 118 Phillips, John Montelion, 45 Phillips, Mark Salber, 14, 98, 162n5 Phillips, Richard, 193n7 philology, 88 Pinkerton, John, 62, 69 Letters of Literature Pittock, Murray, 164n2 Pope, Alexander, 20, 21, 54, 55, 66, 71–2, 76, 78–80, 140–1, 146, 149, 169n14, 180n12, 181n15 Pratt, Linda, 172n14 Price, Leah, 24–6, 185n23 Priestley, Joseph, 126, 173n15 Essay on a Course of Liberal Education, 168n11 Psalmanazar, George, 54 Quarterly Review, 78–9, 130, 133, 143–4, 151, 80n9, 189n4 Radcliffe, Ann, 128 Ragussis, Michael, 184n16 Rajan, Tilottama, 39. readers, 4, 6, 15, 22–5, 29, 47, 55–7, 62–71, 76, 88, 102–3, 122–6, 128–9, 132–3, 135, 138–9, 142–3, 149, 155 Reeve, Clara, 132 The Progress of Romance, 125, 128–30 republic of letters, 200n3

reviews, 6, 111, 135–8, 139, 166n10, 179n6 Richardson, Samuel, 127–8 Rigney, Ann, 28 Ritson, Joseph, 57, 62, 69, 152 Observations on … Warton’s History of English Poetry, 179n31, 179n33 Robertson, William, 89, 101, 162n5, 183n11, 188n14 Robinson, Mary, 121, 137–8 Rose, Jonathan, 162n4 Rose, Mark, 163n13, 164n14 Ross, Trevor, 162n8, 164n14, 165n7, 170n20 Rothstein, Eric, 167n1 Roxburghe Club, 177n14 Royal Institution, 50, 51, 111,151–4 Russell, Gillian, 197n36 Russell Institution, 111, 151 Russell, William, 161n5 Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women, 118–22 Russett, Margaret, 178n24 Sack, James L., 172n10 Saintsbury, George, 1 St. Clair, William, 2, 7, 10, 40, 161n4, 163n11, 165n6, 168n11, 173n19, 173n23, 183n8, 190n18, 190n19, 191n22 “Satanic School,” 144 Scott, John, 17, 180n13 Scott, Walter, 42–3, 53, 125, 128, 142, 144, 146–7, 151, 195n19 Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library, 133 Waverley, 126 Scrivener, Michael, 92, 137 secret history, 2, 5, 30, 82, 86, 89, 91, 93, 95–104, 110 Shakespeare, William, 20, 31, 54, 68, 75, 113, 114, 140–2, 144, 146, 149–50, 152 Shelley, Percy Byshe, 144 Shenstone, William, 76–7 Siegel, Jonah, 162n8 Simpson, David, 1, 200n5 Siskin, Clifford, 163n13, 177n23 Six Acts, 142, 155 Small, Ian, 161n1

10.1057/9780230283336 - Literary History Writing, 1770-1820, April London

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Smith, Charlotte, 128 Smith, Olivia, 164n14 Smith, William, 33 Smollett, Tobias, 127–8, 136 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 155–6 Southey, Robert, 3, 4, 32, 33, 47, 58, 75, 139, 143–5, 160, 189n4, 199n2 Specimens of the Later English Poets, 59, 66–72, 181n20 Thalaba, 144 specimens, 2, 3, 4, 59–80, 111, 123 Spence, Joseph Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, 79 Spence, Thomas, 137 Spenser, Edmund, 21, 55, 68, 71, 75, 77, 113, 142, 145, 150 Spirit of the Age, 181n18 Stafford, Fiona J., 178n24 Staves, Susan, 128 Sterne, Laurence, 90, 140 Stockdale, Percival, 11, 17, 21 Lectures on the Truly Eminent English Poets, 9, 153 Surrey Institution, 51, 111, 148–9, 151–3, 197n33, 198n42 Sweet, Rosemary, 170n17 Terry, Richard G., 10, 164n14, 166n8, 168n9, 173n26, 179n5, 190n19 Thelwall, John, 186n10 Thicknesse, Ann, 118 Thomson, James, 68, 76, 181n15, 199n2 Thornton, Bonnell, 118, 121 Turner, Katherine, 164n2

Turner, Sharon, 115–17, 130 History of the Anglo-Saxons, 115 History of England During the Middle Ages, 115 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 152 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 190n7 Wahrman, Dror, 159, 200n3 Walpole, Horace, 187n11, 187n13, 188n18, 192n33 Walsh, Marcus, 167n4 Warton, Joseph, 55, 72, 81 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, 78 Warton, Thomas, 7, 62, 65, 68–9, 72, 81, 98, 152 History of English Poetry, 3, 4, 47, 53, 54–7, 77, 101, 111, 177n15, 180n12, 192n33 Observations on the Faerie Queen, 55 Weinbrot, Howard, 178n24 Wellek, René, 54, 166n8, 174n27 White Lion, Bristol, 198n42 Willis’s Rooms, 198n42 Wilson, John, 6, 112, 113, 116, 144–51, 190n6 women’s literary history, 118–22 Wood, Anthony, 98 Wooler, T. J., 142 Woolf, D. R., 170n17 Wordsworth, William, 2, 25–6, 71–2, 114, 144–7, 149–51, 160 “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815), 25, 94–5, 174n28 Excursion, 144, 148 Wright, Julia M., 170n20

10.1057/9780230283336 - Literary History Writing, 1770-1820, April London

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Index 225