Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

N E RV O U S R E A C T I O N S

SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Pamela K. Gilbert, editor

NERVOUS REACTIONS Vi c t o r i a n R e c o l l e c t i o n s of Romanticism

Edited by JOEL FAFLAK and JULIA M. WRIGHT

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y

OF

NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nervous reactions : Victorian recollections of romanticism / edited by Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright. p. cm. — (SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-5971-3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Faflak, Joel. II. Wright, Julia M. III. Series. PR468.R65N47 2004 820.9'008—dc21 2003045653 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright

1

I. NERVOUS CONTAINMENTS: RECOLLECTION AND INFLUENCE 1.

De Quincey Collects Himself Joel Faflak

2.

Mrs. Julian T. Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Lisa Vargo

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Between Action and Inaction: The “Performance” of the Prima Donna in Eliot’s Closet Drama Grace Kehler

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3.

4.

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“Nervous ReincarNations: Keats, Scenery, and Mind Cure in Canada during the Post-Confederation Period, with Particular Reference to Archibald Lampman and Related Cases D. M. R. Bentley

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II. A MATTER OF BALANCE: BYRONIC ILLNESS AND VICTORIAN CURE 5.

6.

Early Romantic Theorists and The Fate of Transgressive Eloquence: John Stuart Mill’s Response to Byron Timothy J. Wandling

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Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the Byronic Temper Kristen Guest

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vi 7.

Contents “Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic in Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters Julia M. Wright

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III. HESITATION AND INHERITANCE: THE CASE OF SARA COLERIDGE 8.

9.

10.

Snuffing Out an Article: Sara Coleridge and the Early Victorian Reception of Keats Joanne Wilkes

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Her Father’s “Remains”: Sara Coleridge’s Edition of Essays on His Own Times Alan Vardy

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Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: Sara Coleridge’s Editing of Biographia Literaria Donelle Ruwe

229

Bibliography

253

List of Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs Program for their generous support of our research in general and this volume in particular, and the staff and faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University for the myriad ways in which they helped to further this project. We would also like to thank Lisa Butler and Holly Crumpton for their research assistance during the final preparation of the manuscript, as well as James Peltz and others at State University of New York Press who provided invaluable guidance throughout the publishing process. We are also grateful to the anonymous readers of this volume for their astute and timely suggestions, and our contributors for their patience and commitment to this project. Tilottama Rajan is not a contributor to this volume in the usual sense of the word, but in some measure it stands as a synecdoche for her vast but uncharted influence on scholarship through her work as a teacher. We realized as the manuscript was going to press that nearly half of the contributors here were, at one time or another, her students. We, in particular, are deeply grateful for and always cognizant of her generosity and acuity as a reader and teacher. And, finally, we would like to thank our partners for their continuing support. They are probably as relieved as we are delighted to see this project go to press. Cover Art: “Horses in the Paddock,” attributed to Théodore Géricault, Oil on paper on canvas. 24.5 ⫻ 33 cm. Used by permission, Foundation Emil G. Bührle Collection.

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Introduction Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright

The relationship between the Romantic period and the Victorian era has long been a subject of scholarly enquiry, from tracings of literary and ideological debts between specific writers to formulations of the transformation of English culture from the “Age of Revolution” to the age of “muscular Christianity.” Recent volumes such as Andrew Elfenbein’s Byron and the Victorians, Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians, and C. C. Barfoot’s Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods testify to the ongoing interest in this fertile area of enquiry.1 The present collection seeks to contribute to this general project of interrogating the complex, and mutually determining, relationship between Romantic and Victorian literatures. But it does so not in the well-established terms of authorial influence, especially among poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Matthew Arnold. The chapters in this volume, rather, consider the construction of nervousness as a figure through which Victorian writers represented their response to the Romantic in a variety of genres. This response is not monolithic but, in many regards, pivots on the changing denotation of nervousness. The Oxford English Dictionary records that, from the fifteenth century forward, nervous was commonly used to refer to musculature, and so denoted strength, energy, and force in a variety of senses. Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, nervousness was used to describe feeling: In the literature and philosophy of sensibility, the nervous subject was connected to his or her fellow beings through a capacity to sympathize that writers such as David Hume and Adam Smith argued was the

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basis for justice and social cohesion. By the late eighteenth century, this capacity was pathologized to refer not to a state of health but of disorder—of an excessive sensibility, an undisciplined propensity to emotional reaction, that threatens not only psychological stability but also the health of the body itself. The shift in usage took place largely during the nineteenth century, when both usages are readily found but the former is increasingly rare. The writers considered here draw on these different valences of nervousness, identifying it in the empowered female subject and the enervated male subject, the maddened crowd and the productive populace, excessive female sexuality and male creativity, the Romantic poet and the Victorian Sage.

I The division of the nineteenth century into two literary periods has, of course, been widely challenged, in part because the key distinction is variously defined and historically located: The First Reform Bill in 1832, the accession of Victoria in 1837, and the death of Wordsworth in 1850 have all been represented as transformational events that separate the Romantic from the Victorian. But Britain in the 1820s was closer to the First Reform Bill and the beginning of Victoria’s sixty-four-year reign than to the Revolutionary year of 1789 or to the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads. Although P. B. Shelley announced in 1821 that English literature “has arisen as it were from a new birth” because of “the spirit of the age,” that “spirit” was already being prepared for memorialization just four years later by writers such as William Hazlitt.2 Such memorialization is less a commemoration than a premature burial, a way of stowing the Romantic safely in the past along with the bodies of the newly dead poets, Byron, P. B. Shelley, and John Keats.3 Such heraldings and commemorations, however, beg the question of what constitutes “the spirit of the age,” or Romanticism. The answer involves, in part, the priority of poetry in early constructions of Romanticism, and the ways in which poetry intersects with nineteenth-century notions of the feeling subject and literature’s effects on that subject (and, by extension, groups of subjects, particularly the national body politic). As scholars have lamented for some time, in a debate that is usually traced back to Arthur O. Lovejoy’s “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924),4 Romanticism itself has never been as fully coherent a category as those literary nominalizations that rely on the fixities of monarchs’ reigns or century boundaries. In 1982, William C. Spengemann called for an end to the division of the nineteenth century into Romantic, Victorian, and American, arguing that

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the definition of our subject as literature written in English between 1775 and 1918 has several clear advantages over our customary tripartite scheme. First of all, it includes and gives equal value, at least initially, to every literary work written in English in the period instead of conferring preeminence on those works which happen to support our notions concerning the nature of Romantic, Victorian and American writing.5 Consequently, in subtitling this volume “Victorian Recollections of Romanticism,” we do not wish to resurrect traditions concerning “the nature of Romantic [and] Victorian” literature, but to use those categories provisionally in order to interrogate the ways in which influential notions of Romanticism emerged during what we term the “Victorian period.” If the Victorians invented Romanticism, or at least began the process of its institutionalization as a given of literary history, then the child is not only father to the man. This construction of origins also calls into question traditional notions of influence by attending to the ways in which literary debts are defined by those who owe them and literary periods are constructed retroactively. More importantly for the chapters included here, understanding the degree to which “Romanticism” is a Victorian construct facilitates an investigation of the ways in which particular kinds of literature served specific Victorian interests. Our concern, then, is not with the familiar and important topics of Wordsworth’s influence on the Victorian novel or the Decadents’ debts to P. B. Shelley and Keats. It is instead with the myriad ways in which literary history and social history were mutually determining as “Romanticism” was invented by the Victorians: a Romanticism in which Byron is scandalous, Mary Shelley’s only important work is Frankenstein (1818), the growth of the poet’s mind is the basis for narrative, and private contemplation is the vehicle of personal growth. As Romanticists are often painfully aware, this period of literary study takes as its name a common pejorative term for a starry-eyed idealism. This naming arose from and perpetuated the privileging of a body of literature that represented transcendence rather than social engagement and neoplatonism rather than radical politics and rhetorical address. The literature of the period was thus winnowed down to that of the “Big Six”—William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, Keats, and Byron—or the “Big Five” (the Big Six with either Byron or Blake left on the margins). It is more than a little ironic that M. H. Abrams takes the title of his influential study of English Romantic literature, Natural Supernaturalism, from Thomas Carlyle, especially given that Abrams uses the category of the Romantic to exclude Byron, a threatening figure for Victorian sensibilities (as the second group of chapters in this volume makes clear):

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Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright Keats, for example, figures mainly insofar as he represented in some of his poems a central Romantic subject: the growth and discipline of the poet’s mind, conceived as a theodicy of the individual life . . . which begins and ends in our experience in this world. Byron I omit altogether; not because I think him a lesser poet than the others but because in his greatest work he speaks with an ironic counter-voice and deliberately opens a satirical perspective on the vatic stance of his Romantic contemporaries.6

This illustrative move reveals how Byron, despite his relatively late entry into the field of Romantic-era satire and radical politics, could be set aside as idiosyncratic.7 Many of the writers of the era were less concerned with “a theodicy of the individual life” than with the nature of community, whether Edmund Burke’s hierarchical social structure in which the low admire the high, post-Enlightenment notions of a collectivity of feeling subjects responding to sociopolitical stimuli, or emergent concepts of nationality as an attachment to the land, language, or polity. Abrams’s exclusion of Byron is also symptomatic of less tractable forms of the Romantic subject’s Bildung: the dark Prometheanism of the earlier Byron in Manfred (1817) or Cain (1821); the unremitting melancholia of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (written 1819–1820); the addictive properties of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English OpiumEater (1821); or the uncanny duplicity of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In these texts the developmental pattern of personal identity does not fit, and leaves the subject unfit for, the social order. Emerging from Enlightenment notions of sensibility, the Romantic subject is a feeling subject. Such feeling exceeds and thus cannot be managed within prevailing economies of social identity and so necessitates a response in the Bildung of the social order itself. Hence, when Byron is mentioned undisparagingly, as by Letitia Elizabeth Landon in 1832, it is for the “impassioned” nature of his writing, the power of which exemplifies the civilizing influence of poetry as a “natural language.”8 Purged of its orientalizing effects, its transgression of sexual, political, and moral boundaries, and its deadening correspondence to its author’s life, Byron’s writing instead demonstrates how the “imagination is to the mind what life is to the body—its vivifying and active part.”9 Poetry thus transcends generic and disciplinary distinctions because it keeps all genres and disciplines—indeed all modes of thought and being—alive to their own purer potentiality. But it must also be romanticized against the rise of the novel to speak for an increasingly prosaic body politic (not unlike that both satirized and celebrated in Byron’s Don Juan [1819–1824]). Enervated by its depleted imaginative and spiritual capacities and buried by an accumulation of material facts, this body needs poetry’s therapeutic power. The identifi-

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cation of the Romantic with the poetic, then, emerges in relation to these historically specific notions of poetry’s affective influence on the growing readership of the nation. It is therefore telling that the period division was never really applied in as concerted a fashion to prose fiction as it was to poetry and critical prose. Nineteenth-century anxiety about the cultural viability or utility of poetry was already being elaborated in the early 1820s in Thomas Love Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820) and P. B. Shelley’s response, “A Defence of Poetry” (written in 1821), but critics soon exploited a Romantic/Victorian distinction as a way of managing this nervousness. In an 1831 review of Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), William Johnson Fox is anxious to allay fears about the poet’s too-Romantic temperament by demonstrating how in Tennyson’s writing “the real science of mind advances with the progress of society.” The “poetry of the last forty years already shews symptoms of life in exact proportion as it is imbued with this science,”10 but Tennyson’s distinctly post-Romantic sensibility is more than symptomatic. He is firmly in control of his own Romantic state of mind because not only has he “felt and thought,” he has also “learned to analyze thought and feeling.”11 In another 1831 review of Tennyson’s volume, Arthur Hallam is equally specific: “We think he has more definiteness, and soundness of general conception, than the late Mr. Keats, and is much more free from blemishes of diction, and hasty capriccios of fancy. He has also this advantage over that poet, and his friend Shelley, that he comes before the public, unconnected with any political party, or peculiar system of opinions.” Free from Romantic rhetorical excess, delusions of imagination, and ideological sway, Tennyson is a writer “whose mind conceives nothing isolated, nothing abrupt, but every part with reference to some other part, and in subservience to the idea of the whole.”12 Here Romantic organicism informs the building of a healthy, productive, and coherent body politic, and animating this body is poetry as the moving power of a kind of burgeoning metaphysics of Empire. As Fox suggests, poetry “act[s] with a force, the extent of which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feelings and character, and consequently upon national happiness”—indeed, it is “as widely diffused as the electric fluid.”13 Thus the future Poet Laureate deploys as social action an inwardness and self-centeredness cautioned against in the 1830s, a melancholic indeterminacy that, as Arnold will later argue, the Victorians caught from the earlier nineteenth century. Unriddled by the disease of too much thought, Tennyson’s Romanticism is therapeutic and robust, fit for future Victorian writers and, more importantly, one with a salutary effect on Victorian readers, despite their class: “The most ignorant talk poetry when they are in a state of excitement, the firmly-organized think and feel poetry with every breeze of sensation that sweeps over their well-tuned nerves.”14

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Such remarks recall Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), particularly its claim that poetry can save the English reading public from the deadening effects of overstimulating foreign literature by offering a carefully balanced stimulation in metrical verse.15 Such poetry also stands for the ability of citizens, sensitive and receptive to the poetic nature of all things, to coalesce under the influence of this power—and, more importantly, to be educated by it. The payoff is clear: By socializing culture’s baser instincts, a feeling internalization of these higher properties will form sounder, healthier minds and bodies, specifically bodies ready to labor more productively in the Empire’s factories and institutions. Poetry creates a sympathetic “community of interest” that conserves rather than squanders its own internal energies, a “magnetic force”16 that galvanizes or amalgamates differences within a corporate identity, thus setting aside anxieties about this incorporation’s imperial power. Key to this process, then, is that it emphasizes feeling rather than thought. Hallam divides Tennysonian “sensation” from Wordsworthian “reflection,” the therapeutic effects of the former conquering the excessive analysis of the latter so as to restore balance between them and thus to create an “extensive empire over the feelings of men.”17 Sensation grounds the reader in the practical pulses of “daily life and experience,” for even if a knowledge of poetry might be “morally impossible . . . it is never physically impossible, because nature has placed in every man the simple elements of which art is the sublimation.”18 Hallam answers Keats’s plea for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts wherein the nature of feeling is preferable to the culture of knowing, if only because it is more deterministically framed. But Hallam is also exploiting Wordsworth’s “language of common men” by using sensation to temper their “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Enlightened feeling is better than impassioned thought, especially when the working class threatens to think for itself and thus to reconstitute the body politic. Despite Hallam’s attempt to balance sensation and reflection, and thus to create an Arnoldian disinterestedness that acted upon rather than merely thought about life, Romantic sensual anarchy threatened to prevail over Victorian intellectual culture. In 1856 John Ruskin decried a lack of faithfulness to nature in the form of the “pathetic fallacy,” “always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively of a weak one” unlike that of a great poet, who exhibits “two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it.”19 Such pathos created a grotesquely separate feeling body with a mind of its own, unlike the grotesque complexity of the gothic that is elsewhere in Ruskin’s aesthetics the sign of culture’s fidelity to nature’s vitality. In “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), even George Eliot argues for pictorial realism as a check against excessive “fancy” or “romanticism,” albeit ironically to bring art closer

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to social reality so as to fulfill an early Romantic political imperative of “linking the higher classes with the lower” and “obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness” by “the awakening of social sympathies.”20 But the threat of the sensible body recurs most vehemently in Robert Buchanan’s 1871 attack on the pre-Raphaelite “fleshly school of poetry.” Tennyson’s Maud (1855) having set the “hysteric tone” of a narrator emasculated by an unsound mind, now “the fleshly feeling is everywhere,” its proponents “spreading the seeds of disease broadcast wherever they are read and understood.”21 Theirs is a “morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility.”22 Here “tenderness” denotes the enlightened Victorian subject’s proper sympathy for human nature. But it is also, ironically, symptomatic of the inability to distinguish—and dissociate—the feminine fleshly body from the masculine cogito. As the too-masculine New Woman and the too-feminine Decadent threaten to pervert gender distinctions, society devolves toward the Darwinian baseness of sheer “animalism,” a culture that bears the “fatal marks of literary consumption in every pale and delicate visage.”23 For Walter Bagehot this degeneration toward a sickly (Keatsian) Romanticism leads to the “grotesque” body of Browning’s corpus from the early “pure” or “classical” visage of Wordsworth’s reflectiveness. This hermaphroditic body then becomes the synecdoche for a truncated body politic: “We live in the realm of the half educated. The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning, but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise.”24 The growing classed body of the Empire threatens to become Ozymandias staring blankly into the Egyptian waste without the guidance of poetry’s Romanticized past, a headless mass tantamount to cultural collapse.

II How can a Romanticism sentimentalized or idealized as a force of cultural therapy organizing the properly feeling Victorian subject be the same Romanticism associated with the anarchy of this subject’s toofeeling body? The subsequent distinctions of gender and genre created by this attempt to have it both ways are, as the chapters in this volume suggest, not as straightforward as the Victorians themselves at first appear to have them, so that nervousness cuts in several directions. Neither poetry nor prose can be that good or that bad (indeed, even the generic distinction itself hardly suffices to account for the period), and the legislation of the social order’s nervous body is never as ideologically

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seamless nor as apocalyptically chaotic as much of the discourse would suggest. The bodies of literature rediscovered in Romantic studies over the past twenty years, as well as the relatively neglected works of the Big Six, reveal at the turn of the eighteenth century the intense debate over social identity that was to inform a later Victorian nervousness about the place of the individual within the order of things.25 The late eighteenthcentury Della Cruscan poets, a school of writers working within the tradition of sensibility, constructed feeling subjects who not only responded strongly to friends and lovers, but also sympathized with the plight of the poor, the enslaved, and the French Revolutionaries. The novelists who followed Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) contested prevailing gender paradigms, especially on the segregation of the sexes, the suppression of desire, and the education of women. Authors of travelogues and orientalist fictions in prose, verse, and dramatic form addressed anxieties about national identity, empire, and international relations. This is not to suggest that the literature of the Romantic period was more politically diverse than that of any other. It is to suggest, rather, that the Victorian privileging of an idealistic and largely apolitical Romanticism elided its diversity, political and otherwise. Moreover, this elision is a suggestive one for scholars interested in the transition from one period to the other, not as a change in the Jaussian “horizon of expectations” but as a transition that was constructed to secure that horizon and with it the fiction of sociocultural stability. For a feeling, politicized Romanticism is a revolutionary one and, worse, unpredictable in its social effects, even for those who otherwise read this heterogeneity positively. Romanticism thus becomes, for Victorian writers, “sentimentalism” (frequently the pejorative form of sensibility for nineteenth-century writers), Byronic egotism, radicalism, and sensationalism—a Romanticism with addictive properties and thus a pathology within the body politic that demands either curing or excision. The first usage of the term romanticism to denote an artistic approach that is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary reveals the origins of the term in literary and political struggle. In 1823, a reviewer for the liberal New Monthly Magazine wrote: In England, where your dramatic faith is modelled upon nature and Shakespeare, you can have but a faint idea of the fierce struggle that is at present pending between the followers of the romantic and classical schools of tragedy in France and Italy. . . . The French Academy, which may be called the Sorbonne of literature, has adhered to the old order of things, and has pronounced an anathema upon all the followers of the great schismatic Shake-

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speare, and has determined never to receive within its bosom any one polluted by the dramatic heresy of romanticism. But this bigoted [sic] resolution has been of advantage to the adverse cause; for such is the distrust felt by the public for any doctrines openly patronized by the government, or any body of men under their influence, that the mere spirit of opposition urges them to follow, with greater alacrity, a contrary course.26 The only positives here loosely associated with Romanticism are “nature and Shakespeare.” The term is primarily defined negatively, as a refusal of “the old order of things,” the antithesis of classicism, and the rallying point for opposition to government policy. So, too, later in the Victorian period, Romanticism was constituted as the Other of Victorian orthodoxy: as emotional excess, revolutionary violence, psychological and physiological instability, literary experimentation, and threat to prevailing norms of gender and class. Just as Romantic orientalism evinces signs of both fear and desire, so too does the orientalized Romanticism of the Victorian period: like Byron’s Venice and P. B. Shelley’s “Asia,” Romantic texts offer a space in which to escape the pressure of social conservatism; like Southey’s and De Quincey’s “East,” Romantic texts also threaten to bring violence and disorder to the metropole. Unlike the distant East of Romantic orientalism, however, this feeling Romanticism hovered on the edge of the Victorian present through temporal proximity and surviving textual traces—in prose fiction, essays, drama, and poetry. Both the threat and the promise of this contiguous but Othered culture emerge, as we have seen, from the identification of the Romantic with excessive feeling and excess in general. As we have also intimated, however, this identification also has a complex history before the Victorians. The relationship between Romanticism and the literature of sensibility, along with that literature’s informing philosophical and medical models of the feeling subject, lends weight and depth to these varied alignments. As Jerome McGann has recently shown, the canonical Romantic poets emerged from the literature of sensibility while modifying it in key ways.27 Renewed scholarly interest in the literature of sensibility, a significant force in English literature throughout the Romantic period, is reminding us of the concomitant assumption of readerly affect, of sensibility’s claim that literature changes readers by inciting emotional responses.28 Late-eighteenth-century medical theory corporealized this Enlightenment model, and Steven Bruhm, Paul Youngquist, and Peter Melville Logan are among those now considering the wide-ranging impact of William Cullen’s neurophysiological model on conceptualizations of sensibility in relation to sensation and bodily health in nineteenth-century British culture.29 While neurophysiology imagines a medical subject

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stimulated into life, a network of bodily and mental feelings which must be brought into proper balance for health to prevail, the literature of sensibility follows eighteenth-century philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Henry Home in imagining a subject that feels for others, imaginatively reproducing the pain of another as a prelude to moral action. Literature directs the reader’s feeling to moral action in the traditional Enlightenment model, and potentially threatens the balance of stimulation in the later neurophysiological model.30 As P. B. Shelley puts it, “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”31 That Fox’s or Hallam’s reviews echo Shelley’s “Defence” (interestingly, a text not published until 1840 in the wake of these accounts) suggests how Romanticism, anxious about its own sensibility, offers itself as both disease and cure for Victorian paradigms of writing. The Victorian emphasis on morality (duty, propriety, work) as the restraint of emotional and bodily feeling functions in part as a direct reaction against the toofeeling Romantic body and morally transformable reader of sensibility. In his 1837 history of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle suggests a correlation between revolution, feeling, and literature, declaring during the year of Victoria’s accession, on the subject of 1780s France: Behold the mouldering mass of Sensuality and Falsehood; round which plays foolishly, itself a corrupt phosphorescence, some glimmer of Sentimentalism. . . . [T]he French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the perilous evil, which belongs to that. Rebellion, explosion, of unknown extent is to be calculated on. There are, as Chesterfield wrote, “all the symptoms I have ever met with in History!” . . . But if any one would know summarily what a Pandora’s Box lies there for the opening, he may see it in what by its nature is the symptom of all symptoms, the surviving Literature of the Period.32 In the phrase, “with the good, but also the perilous evil, which belongs to that [excitability],” Carlyle recognizes sensibility’s history in Enlightenment moral theory but insists on representing it as a slippery slope that leads straight to revolution or, more precisely, the dangerous mob.33 From the French Revolution (1789), the panics that followed the Vellore Mutiny (1806), mass street protests in the decades leading up to the First Reform Bill (1832), and the “Indian Mutiny” (1857–1858), crowds were every-

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where turning into mobs during the period covered by this volume. As Charles MacKay wrote in the 1852 preface to his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841: In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it.34 If literature is “the symptom of all symptoms,” as Carlyle puts it, echoing Fox’s “symptomatic” reading of poetry of the “last forty years,” literature’s control or elimination offers the hope of containing the disease. The hostility with which the sensationalist literature of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon was received is an obvious inflection of this reaction, but this volume’s emphasis is specifically on the ways in which it mediated the reception and representation of Romantic writers whose literature, despite their complicity in the Age of Revolution and its taint of “excitability,” still survived into the Victorian period.

III The focus of the contributors to this project is thus on a select group of Romantic-era writers whose work was canonized, in some measure, by the Victorians, but problematically associated with the kinds of feeling that the dominant Victorian ideology sought to contain. While Wordsworth was, in Gill’s phrase, “constructed as a marketable commodity,”35 as were writers such as Felicia Hemans and Walter Scott, the Romantic writers considered here were associated with less marketable strains of Romanticism. The Romanticism that emerges from the Victorian texts discussed in this volume is one that focuses on the feeling flesh and on an embodied subject who registers pain and pleasure on terms that tacitly or explicitly critique conservative hegemony. The Romantic authors we consider thus include Wollstonecraft, whose feminist sensibility inspired a generation of novels on the ways in which patriarchal oppression worked against “natural” feeling; Byron, who became a byword for the “dark Romanticism” that Victorian psychologists blamed for melancholic, dysfunctionally feeling subjects; Keats, an early poet of sensation whose class and putative femininity encapsulated the classed and gendered construction of feeling in the nineteenth century; the philosophizing opium addicts, S. T. Coleridge and De Quincey; and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, whose life

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with P. B. Shelley was so much at odds with the Victorian codification of domesticity and female sexuality, an example that plays out how the Victorians went through a great number of ideological acrobatics to contain the radical past established by her mother’s own life. The Victorians discussed here are primarily those of the early and mid-Victorian period, the immediate heirs—in the case of Sara Coleridge Coleridge, quite literally—of this uncomfortably sensitive Romanticism. Sara Coleridge, a little-studied Victorian figure who reworks her famous father’s writing and contributed to periodicals, emerges as emblematic of the various trends that this volume seeks to chart. In the unique position of being a female heir to the complex legacy of a controversial Romantic poet, Coleridge negotiates with her father’s varied ideological interests, his opium addiction, and the (en)gendering of a larger Romantic tradition. Eliot also found in Romantic precursors the means by which to open out the construction of female subjectivity and agency. These authors serve not only to remind us of the variety of ways in which Victorians could reconfigure Romanticism but also to suggest the importance of doing so for writers who either could not escape their connection to Romanticism (like Sara Coleridge) or who saw in it a potential for resisting the constraints of the Victorian era (like Eliot). Yet this was not only the case for women writers. Canadian post-Confederation poets turned to the marginalized Keats to claim some connection to the metropole beyond their status as subjects to the British crown. De Quincey’s later Victorian revisions of his own work reveal his ongoing attachment to the vigor of his Romantic writing, and Marshall’s otherwise doctrinal representation of Mary Shelley becomes complicated by a Wollstonecraftian attention to the letter rather than to narrative domination. It is this Romantic return that other writers considered here resisted, if not demonized. Elizabeth Gaskell pathologizes Romantic feeling, framing it as a cultural mutation that must be excised from the national body politic, while J. S. Mill privileges Wordsworth over Byron in an attempt to direct readers away from the kind of feeling engagement with the poetic text that threatens to produce a public rather than a private response. Carlyle, similarly, aligns his own physiological and emotional disorders with Romantic excess, and seeks a cure in Victorian duty and labor. This volume’s interest in Victorian negotiations with this ambivalent Romanticism divides itself into three sections that focus on different sites of nervousness and on genre as a key vehicle of the Victorian construction of Romantic identity. Genre experimentation toward varying ideological ends is an important aspect of Romantic discourse that informs Victorian writing as it renegotiates with Romantic precedents.36 Generic continuities among the papers included here thus tacitly register the ways in which genre was aligned with modes of rhetorical address that intersect

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with categories of gender, class, and politics. The first section, “Nervous Containments,” considers the ways in which recollection and influence are refracted by concerns about the potential for Romantic remains to challenge Victorian orthodoxy, especially on the sensitive subjects of gender, the sage’s authority, and national identity. The first two chapters specifically focus on the use of editions and biographies as mechanisms of canonization in the Victorian period, recalling Elfenbein’s point that there are a “range of discourses through which earlier writers become accessible to later ones.”37 These memorializations reinvent Romantic writers for Victorian audiences through a special attenuation of feeling that complies with newly hegemonic protocols, but in ways that also trouble conservative notions, especially of gender. The volume thus begins with a piece on De Quincey, an appropriately ambivalent figure whose writings, by resisting both Romantic and Victorian prescriptions, betrays the instability of the cultural categories of “Romantic” and “Victorian” this volume seeks to collapse. As Joel Faflak argues, “De Quincey’s corpus is defined by an early and ongoing ambivalence between a (Romantic) analysis of the subject’s interior life and a (Victorian) buttressing of this life’s external authority through the idea/ideal of the public man put forward in the collected edition’s Autobiography.” In the Autobiography, the confessing opium addict nostalgically rendering his pitcher of laudanum struggles to perform the Victorian Sage through the overdetermined organization of his diverse textual corpus. But this corpus is addicted to orthodoxy as well as disorder, compelled repeatedly to articulate a reality that both resists naming and demands classification. As Lisa Vargo demonstrates in the second contribution in this section, Mary Shelley troubled the Shelleys’ attempts to memorialize P. B. Shelley as poet in such volumes as Shelley Memorials (1859) and Relics of Shelley (1862). The wife was an awkward reminder of the husband’s apostasy: as an admirer of Mary’s father, William Godwin, especially his controversial espousal of reform, Political Justice (1793); as a husband who abandoned his first wife and children to run away with the teenaged Mary; and as a supporter of Mary’s writing and further education. As the author of numerous volumes, an essayist, and an editor, Shelley had to be transformed in her Victorian biographer’s hands. If De Quincey must be a Victorian Sage, Mary Shelley must be a dutiful spouse whose most important work, Frankenstein, was written before she was a wife and mother. But, as Vargo notes, this Victorian redaction of a Romantic life is further complicated by the biographer’s own position as wife and artist. The remaining chapters in this section, then, extend the exploration of gender to consider the ways in which gender and nationality complicate the contours of influence: Romantic drama provides a means for imagining

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female agency for Eliot, while Keats, the Cockney poet, serves as a precursor for Archibald Lampman through which the Canadian poet could establish a filial connection to the metropole. Grace Kehler echoes Vargo’s chapter on the constraints on the Victorian female artist by considering Eliot’s turn to the Romantic verse drama in Armgart (1871) and engagement with the emotive dynamics of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury opera. In Eliot’s work, questions of performance, gender roles, and female agency are posed through an engagement with the traditions of opera and the specifics of nineteenth-century opera history. As Kehler argues, the title character, a prima donna who plays “trouser” roles, emerges from the context of women singers’ replacement of the castrati and the corresponding growth of transvestite roles. The shift creates a complex genealogy of troubled gender performances that reverberates through nineteenth-century opera. Through the conventions of the Romantic verse drama, Kehler suggests, Armgart foregrounds these incommensurabilities by “repeatedly stag[ing] textual colloquies about acting well, onstage or offstage,” and, like the post-Wollstonecraft feminist fiction of the 1790s, ends with an unsatisfied agent still caught up in struggle. Expanding on the otherwise purely English focus of this volume, D. M. R. Bentley’s contribution offers an equally positive nervous response to Romantic precedents from the periphery of the British Empire. In the post-Confederation Canadian verse of Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) and other related writers, and in light of post–Civil War American mind-cure theories, Bentley examines how a Victorianized Romantic poetry that focuses on nature’s restorative power exerts a constitutive therapeutic effect in “placing” Canadian nationhood, both to define Canada’s postcolonial identity and to locate this identity vitally in a distinctly Canadian landscape. These writers reincarnate in Canada the feeling of Romanticism as a way of embodying their own “feeling for” the Mother Country, so that the textual soul of Keats’s poetry is used to awaken the soul of the Canadian body politic in Canadian poetry. This new colonization marks a rich and, until recently, unchronicled chapter in construction of other national literatures in English and in the ongoing recanonization of nineteenth-century literatures. In the second section, “A Matter of Balance,” the specific concern is the Victorian expectation that when literature circulates in the public domain, as through the Victorian period’s two most canonical prose forms of the sage’s essay and the realist novel, it works both to disrupt and to order that space. This section addresses how the effort to control what literature circulated in the public body was fed by a desire to control the nature of the public; the goal for the authors considered here is, in broad terms, a literary program that would create a self-disciplining public. Specifically, it was imperative not to excite the crowd, for excited crowds are unpredictable, violent, and, above all, revolutionary, as Carlyle’s writ-

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ing on the French Revolution makes clear. The masses must remain placid, disconnected by their inward contemplation of Wordsworthian reflection rather than roused and rallied by Byronic ire or sentimental affect. Thus Timothy J. Wandling addresses the conjunction of attacks on Byron and attacks on the new “mass” reading audience, a conjunction facilitated by Byron’s eloquence and awareness of the audience’s reception of his work. Building on Jon Klancher’s groundbreaking work on the significance of writers’ appeals to emergent reading audiences, Wandling relates these paired attacks to the development of a notion of literature that speaks “about” rather than “to” its readers, one that survives in both the privileging of expressive poetry and the reduction of Romantic literature to such poetry. An aristocrat-radical who satirized contemporary politicians and the monarch, Byron makes the Victorians nervous because he speaks directly to their “nervous” body politic rather than to their “purer” Arnoldian intellect. To speak rhetorically, occasionally, and eloquently violates literary decorum and the social agenda with which it was intimately connected. Kristen Guest traces in Carlyle’s corpus the identification of illness and a Romantic failure to manage the body, and the Sage’s attempts to contain his own Romantic suffering (which occasionally spills over into his private prose) through the Victorian controls of duty and labor. Moreover, she argues, Carlyle carefully distinguishes between a bodily weakness that strengthens the will and a weakness of will that wallows in bodily disorders, making illness a potentially transformational experience as well as a litmus test of character. Thus, in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), digestive metaphors for the public consumption of literature stretch indigestion to divide laboring readers from self-indulgent readers in terms of their willingness to work through a text. In Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1866), Julia M. Wright argues, the excitability and sensibility identified with Romantic literature—condemned by Mill and Carlyle—is further pathologized, excised, and thrust into the nation’s dangerously juvenile past, which the Victorians can then be seen to have outgrown in their progress toward a fitting adulthood. This adulthood is secured through an educational program supported by the sages, one that particularly emphasizes “serious” reading in the sciences to produce a particular kind of national community. Romanticism thus emerges as an adolescent obsession with “self-feeling,” in direct contrast to the more mature willingness to sacrifice personal interest for the sake of others. Victorian appropriations of the Romantic poets most strongly identified with a juvenile status (Keats, P. B. Shelley) thus might suggest more than literary and philosophical debt; they might also suggest attempts to contest certain Victorian notions of maturity, so often expressed through the realist novels, and thus the ideological claims that they enabled.

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The final section, “Hesitation and Inheritance,” focuses on Sara Coleridge as a case study of the various Victorian anxieties and nervous reactions considered in this volume. As a figure until now thoroughly set aside within the canon, and as a daughter who barely knew her father, in the domestic sense, Coleridge stands as one of the most potent—and poignant—symptoms of the very process of excision, exclusion, and marginalization on which Victorian ideologies depend as they reinvent their Romantic past. Coleridge was a more than capable editor, translator, poet, and contributor to the periodicals of her day, so that to reduce her to her famous patronym would be to make the mistake of Mary Shelley’s heirs. Coleridge herself encountered this process of Victorianization in her 1848 review of Tennyson’s The Princess for the Quarterly Review, from which John Gibson Lockhart, the journal’s editor, excised most of her references to Keats. As Joanne Wilkes argues, this excision brought Coleridge’s essays in line with Lockhart’s own on the “Cockney School,” which notoriously exploited a characterization of Keats as a figure of unfulfilled potential. By thus standardizing Quarterly Review statements on Romantic literature, Lockhart was also subordinating Sara Coleridge’s voice to that of the journal, through anonymity in publication and pruning shears in editing. But anonymity allowed some role-playing, which for women contributors meant assuming a male voice, although Coleridge uses her own womanhood in turn to authorize her opinion of gender matters. Her periodical publications thus reprivilege the body, the poetry of “sensation,” and the expertise of women on the feminine at the same time that they are editorially absorbed into the performed identity of the Quarterly Review. According to Alan Vardy, Coleridge’s 1850 collecting of her father’s early journalism, Essays on His Own Times, produces a similar editorial effect. A Victorian daughter of Romanticism who is revisited by her father’s political sins, Coleridge repeats his conflicts by both contesting and reinforcing Victorian paradigms of political conservatism and literary authority. Vardy demonstrates how the daughter’s editorship followed the father’s work in abstracting a “consistent” or organic intellectual spirit from a political corpus manifesting the material vagaries of history. She thus sanitizes Romantic radicalism for a Victorian audience who had embraced her father as one of their own children: the Tory man of letters and faithful adherent of the Church of England. Yet while her Introduction’s pious biography conciliates between politically divergent phases of Coleridge’s writings, it remains conflicted between suppressing and vindicating their heterodoxy. For Donelle Ruwe, Sara Coleridge is rather less ambivalent about her father’s Romantic past when editing his Biographia Literaria in 1847. Just as De Quincey psychoanalyzes his own Victorian superego, Coleridge’s editorship suggests a psychic anatomy

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of the Biographia’s Romantic ideology that was so important to that superego. The elder Coleridge begins to recuperate his Romantic past in the Biographia, which establishes his post-Romantic position as literary theorist, philosopher, and Meta-Physician. As Ruwe argues, however, the younger Coleridge continues this recuperation but by resisting its epistemological and ideological authority. Engaging with her father’s theory of imagination as a matter of the intellect devoid of any reference to his addiction, Coleridge’s commentary on the Biographia offers an alternate definition of imagination based on the bodily empiricism of her own addiction. Specifically reversing her father’s privileging of imagination over fancy, Coleridge favors a “nervous” fancy as a type of embodied imagination, one rooted in the sensorium of the body, to use the term Coleridge borrows from Thomas Trotter’s 1807 theory of nervous diseases. Reattaching the abstracted intellect of a masculine Romantic cogito to the materiality of its body, albeit in a way that might have made Bagehot rather uncomfortable, Coleridge edits her father’s remains as the empirical “body” of evidence he chooses to neglect. Such a gesture is a fitting reminder that, despite attempts to have Romanticism pass only into the purer mind of the Victorian subject, Romantic literature continues to remind Victorian writers—and post-Victorian readers—that what is bred in the bone and felt along the pulses is neither as “natural” nor as “cultural” as one would initially imagine.

NOTES 1. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); C. C. Barfoot, ed., Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). See also, for example, Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Anthony H. Harrison, Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); Clyde de L. Ryals, A World of Possibilities: Romantic Irony in Victorian Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990); Donald D. Stone, The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); George Harry Ford, Keats and the Victorians: A Study of His Influence and Rise to Fame (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944); as well as the wealth of criticism on “Victorian Romanticism” by scholars such as Herbert F. Tucker. 2. P. B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 508; William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits (London: Colburn, 1825).

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3. For the most recent discussion of this, see Cronin’s chapter “Memorializing Romanticism” in Romantic Victorians, 15–44. 4. Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39 (1924): 229–53. For a suggestive analysis of the various attempts to construct, and challenge, a coherent “Romanticism,” see Frances Ferguson, “On the Numbers of Romanticisms,” ELH 58 (1991): 471–98. 5. William C. Spengemann, “Three Blind Men and an Elephant: The Problem of Nineteenth-Century English,” New Literary History 14 (1982): 161. 6. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), 13. 7. For an excellent study of Romantic-era satire, see Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “On the Ancient and Modern Influence of Poetry,” in Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997), 167. 9. Ibid., 168. Landon condemns the reduction of the poetry to the poet, writing, “The personal is the destroyer of the spiritual; and to the former everything is now referred. We talk of the author’s self more than his works, and we know his name rather than his writings” (167–68). 10. William Johnson Fox, review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical [1830], in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 24. 11. Ibid., 25. 12. A. H. Hallam, review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical [1830], in Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 42–43. 13. Fox, Review of Poems, 33, 22. 14. Ibid., 22. 15. For an important discussion of Wordsworth in this context, see Paul Youngquist, “Lyrical Bodies: Wordsworth’s Physiological Aesthetics,” European Romantic Review 10 (1999): 152–62. 16. Hallam, Review of Poems, 41, 40. 17. Ibid., 41. 18. Ibid., 38, 39. 19. John Ruskin, “The Pathetic Fallacy,” in The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Harold Bloom (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 74, 72.

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20. George Eliot, “On the Natural History of German Life,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 270–71. 21. Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” in Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory, concise ed., ed. Thomas J. Collins and Vivenne Rundle (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), 648, 646. 22. Ibid., 647. 23. Ibid., 652, 656. Citing the pictorial qualities of D. G. Rossetti’s “The Blessed Damozel,” Buchanan cautions too against the hybridization of disciplines, in this case between poetry and painting: “[T]he truth is that literature, more particularly poetry, is in a very bad way when one art gets hold of another” (650). Ironically, Buchanan notes that the poem first appeared in Germ, “an unwholesome periodical started by the pre-Raphaelites” (649), thus capitalizing on the threat of contagion within the otherwise necessarily “pure” body of poetry. 24. Walter Bagehot, “Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry,” in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St. John-Stevas, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 2:365. 25. This material was never quite forgotten—one can find references to many such works, for instance, in Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (1947)—but it was marginalized because of the overarching rubric of “Romanticism,” which dominated, until recently, classroom anthologies, book-length studies, hiring expectations, and the other means by which literary history is institutionalized. 26. Review of Racine et Shakespeare, by M. de Stendhal (Paris: Delaunay, Mongie, 1823), New Monthly Magazine 9 (1823): 175–76. 27. Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 28. On English engagements with sensibility in the Romantic period, see, for example, Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility; Tassie Gwilliam, “ ‘Scenes of Horror,’ Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam,” ELH 65 (1998): 653–73; Mary Kelly Persyn, “‘No Human Form but Sexual’: Sensibility, Chastity, and Sacrifice in Blake’s Jerusalem,” European Romantic Review 10 (1999): 53–83; Candace S. Ward, “‘Active Sensibility and Positive Virtue’: Wollstonecraft’s ‘Grand Principle of Action,’” European Romantic Review 8 (1997): 409–31; Wendy Gunther Canada, “The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126–47. This is, however, a very partial list and excludes the significant body of work emerging from scholarship on eighteenth-century British articulations of

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sensibility and the importance of sensibility to American writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 29. Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Youngquist, “DeQuincey’s Crazy Body.” 30. Physician John Brown argued that thinking could be dangerous to the health: “Thinking, which more immediately affects the brain, than any other equal part of the system [i.e., mind and body as a single organism], encreases excitement over the whole body. Intense thinking, whether for once in a great degree, or habitual, may alone prove hurtful; but, in conjunction with other powers also hurtful from their excess of stimulus, becomes more so.” See The Elements of Medicine of John Brown, M. D., rev. ed., 2 vols., trans. John Brown, ed. Thomas Beddoes (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 1:128–29. 31. P. B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” 487–88. 32. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (1837; 3 vols.), in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, 30 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 2:58, 59. 33. On the relationship between morality and sensibility, see especially Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For an excellent introduction to sensibility, its philosophical debts, and its cultural importance in the eighteenth century, see Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986). 34. Charles MacKay, Preface to Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852; reprint, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1980), xvii. 35. Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians, 2. 36. See, for instance, Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright, eds., Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming Literature, 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 37. Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, 8. This aspect of our volume, and indeed the inception of the volume itself, emerges from a special session at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, “‘Recollections’: Victorian Editions of Romantic Biographies” (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 27–30 December 1997), organized by the editors. The panel included three contributors to the present volume: Donelle Ruwe, Lisa Vargo, and Alan Vardy.

Part I Nervous Containments: Recollection and Influence

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1 De Quincey Collects Himself Joel Faflak

De Quincey was lately urged to collect [his works]. His reply was “Sir, the thing is absolutely, insuperably, and forever impossible. Not the archangel Gabriel, nor his multipotent adversary, durst attempt any such thing!” —George Gilfillan, Modern Literature and Literary Men, Being a Second Gallery of Literary Portraits

I Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey’s first important and still most notable work, was first published in two installments of London Magazine in 1821, the year Keats died. An immediate succès de scandale, the work was published in book form in 1822, the year Percy Shelley died. De Quincey continued to revise the text up to his own death in 1859, almost ten years after the death of William Wordsworth, well into the ascendancy of High Victorian culture, and at a time of escalating reaction to a Romanticism that had, even by 1821, largely passed. Still, De Quincey is usually grouped with second-generation Romantic writers, even though Confessions is a difficult text to classify. To its 1822 edition De Quincey added an appendix answering moral charges that the work was biased toward the pleasures of opium.1 Here, Confessions submits itself to proto-Victorian scrutiny, yet also evades its gaze. The text’s amorphous body, like the opiated body of its author, thus becomes symptomatic of a nervous response to Victorian prescription, itself a nervous reaction against 23

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the text’s Romantically heterodox and controversial content. De Quincey’s subsequent additions to his confessional project—including fragmented attempts to write his full Autobiography; the 1845 “sequel” to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis; and especially the substantial 1856 revision of Confessions and the preface for De Quincey’s first British collected edition— attempt to manage this nervousness at the same time that they exacerbate its effects. Through De Quincey’s various incarnations of Confessions, the politic body of an emergent Victorian propriety meets the unruly body of its own none-too-distant Romantic past. The latter resists classification by the former; the former is consumed by its own taxonomies. One reason De Quincey has been marginalized within the Romantic canon is that he wrote almost exclusively for periodicals. As Margaret Russett shows, he yielded to this minority because of a transient, debtridden, and addictive existence that rarely allowed for a sustained literary achievement. Yet his periodic writings also exploit this minority by articulating a shifting and serial commentary on rather than an aesthetic or philosophical abstraction of the culture in which he lived.2 Previously a type of pathology within the organic whole of Romanticism, De Quincey is now a destroyer of Romantic shibboleths, confessing his addiction as the symptom of nineteenth-century culture’s larger traumas. That his works cannot be collected shows how Romanticism in general defies classification, notwithstanding the Romantics’ own efforts to collect themselves, as in the cases of Wordsworth or Scott. Even The Works of Thomas De Quincey, the first comprehensive editing of the author’s writings since David Masson’s late Victorian fourteen-volume Collected Writings (1889– 1890), challenges the philosophical coherence and cultural authority demanded by the act of collecting. Works offers a De Quincey who is, as Jon Klancher writes of the Bollingen/Princeton Collected Coleridge, “uncollectable,”3 and evokes the phenomenology of a Romantic subject whose thoughts remain scattered across nineteenth-century culture. One might better argue that the sum of De Quincey’s corpus, like the SUM4 of its author, is constituted by the undisciplined anatomy of its disparate parts.5 We can read this process through De Quincey’s own attempt to collect his writings, in which he attempts to capitalize on his early success with Confessions by extensively revising and enlarging the work as volume 5 of Selections Grave and Gay; Writings Published and Unpublished.6 But the business of collecting himself starts with the 1821 Confessions. That he cannot successfully “collect” his thoughts in that work eventually transfers to the later text and to the whole editorial project. Moreover, the confessional concerns of 1821 are ambivalently subsumed within a later collecting process, offering a case study of an author’s later Victorian response to his own early Romanticism. I highlight the terms because I first want to explore how they signify as

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taxonomical distinctions. The Romantic 1821 and the Victorian 1856 texts support and resist this distinction. Both texts submit De Quincey’s Romantic mind and body as specimens for Victorian moral and scientific observation. But these tranquilized artifacts have a psychic—or more specifically psychosomatic—life of their own that demands from De Quincey ongoing psychoanalysis and that collapses the difference between the Romantic and the Victorian. Isobel Armstrong argues that the “habit of marking off Victorian from Romantic . . . disguises the anxieties common to early and later nineteenth-century writers,” who are linked by what Armstrong calls a “crisis of representation.”7 This crisis reflects a post-Kantian concern about how the anthropos fits within the order of things, the idea of the anthropos itself being an Enlightenment classification of human consciousness that the nineteenth century was left to normalize, to make the “self-evident ground for our thought.”8 Used to effect this normalization, the Romantic and the Victorian point within the psychology of the nineteenth-century cultural imaginary to tensions that the distinction itself is meant to resolve. Put another way, the terms prescribe the limits of nineteenth-century culture by periodizing its accomplishments; but they are also distinct energies themselves within this process of cultural legislation. In the struggle of nineteenth-century culture to represent itself to itself, the Romantic and the Victorian signify two oddly supplemental facets of the cultural psyche that generates the terms in the first place. For instance, the 1821 Confessions expresses what came to be thought of as the creative afflatus of the Romantic writer, but also marks a Victorian disposition to manage the labors of the mind toward a more public end. The 1856 text capitalizes on this effort, yet is oddly more Romantic than its predecessor, a text that nervously reacts to its own early Romanticism and yet is also quintessentially Romantic. The self-fashioning and selfdisciplining that takes place both within and between the Confessions I call “self-Victorianization.” This process reflects a general nineteenth-century emphasis on the useful life and is not only a matter of later Victorians responding to earlier Romantics, especially in cases where personal psychology is not commensurate with the demands of the public sphere. De Quincey collects the earlier pieces of his Romantic corpus to make them coherent for Victorian society. Placing Confessions at the center of his oeuvre, De Quincey monumentalizes his life crises as the moral example of obstacles surmounted. The work of the author must be made to fit the Victorian order of things, an order, as Julia Wright argues in this volume (chapter 7), increasingly disposed toward feminizing and pathologizing Romanticism as an “ineffective cultural mutation” in the larger nineteenthcentury narrative of building a healthy Victorian (national) body by setting aside Romanticism’s excessive “self-feeling.”9

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By revising Confessions for his collected edition, then, De Quincey subsumes the multiple opium personalities of his early text within the Ego of the Victorian Sage or Man of Letters who is able to master his selfrepresentations. But the chronic nature of addiction, registered psychosomatically in the symptoms of De Quincey’s nervous body and reproduced in his corpus, resists the narrative of a mental or spiritual breakdown acutely overcome.10 This would be to identify De Quincey according to a Romantic ideology of creative potentiality, what Clifford Siskin calls Romanticism’s “self-made mind, full of newly constructed depths”11 and able to transcend contingencies of the real.12 Indeed, Romantic self-fashioning seems industriously Victorian for its cultural entrepreneurship, positively self-affirming but also threateningly self-proliferating and in need of selfdiscipline. The ability to prevail suggests as much Mill’s Autobiography as Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the former modeling a Victorian self-reliance that is in the latter only Romantic endurance. The Wordsworth who endures into the Victorian period via Mill or Arnold, however, is also the Wordsworth who encrypts The Prelude as a work he could neither release himself from in private nor release outright to the public sphere. If the malaise reflects Romantic melancholy, it is equally symptomatic of the “acute and morbid form”13 of a Victorian culture empowered by but also addicted to its own internal forces, a morbidity characterized by a monarch whose melancholy haunts the Empire’s collective ambitions. Tennyson’s In Memoriam seems to prolong mourning, whereas Idylls of the King finishes culture with a whimper rather than a bang. The elegy’s speaker is an “infant crying for the light / And with no language but a cry.”14 He collects his thoughts by appealing to a metaphysics constituting history “Behind the veil, behind the veil” (56.28) of its own contingencies. There must be the telos of a Hegelian Geistesgeschicthe, “One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves” (131.142–45) and which transforms the unmanageable primal interiority of a nature “red in tooth and claw” (56.15). However, in “The Passing of Arthur,” which closes Idylls, history ends in the Night of the World rather than in Absolute Spirit. Arthur’s kingdom is where “fragments of forgotten peoples dwelled, / And the long mountains ended in a coast / Of ever-shifting sand” (84–86). Here, the collective order of things, “the whole Round Table” as “an image of the world . . . is dissolved” (402–03) into a “phantom circle of a moaning sea” (87) as Empire fades to nothingness. The epic’s “deathwhite mist” (92) suggests the ghostly form of metaphysics, one that masters history speculatively, scientifically, and mechanically rather than transcendentally or spiritually. Utility rather than faith sustains culture, its monumental facade a Crystal Palace that

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establishes culture’s empire over its own representations. Both potently democratic and hegemonically fragile, this collective space signifies capitalism’s emergent cultural authority but also its immanent instability, one feeding parasitically off the other. Behind this veil of imperialism lies Empire’s unwieldy nature—political, historical, cultural, economic, social, racial, sexual, psychological. As this nature begins to appear “red in tooth and claw” because of its overwhelming complexity, it is categorized as being Romantically ornate or exotic. The Empire’s power to Romanticize its own nature, that is, precludes its having to deal with what its Romantic past—or present—might otherwise mean. By collecting the heterogeneous artifacts of Empire, the Crystal Palace thus encrypts its culture’s Romanticism as a knowledge about itself which that culture cannot easily assimilate. From a confrontation with Romantic heterodoxy uncannily parallel to a later Victorian complexity emerges a Victorian ambivalence about editing Romanticism. But how the Victorians react to an internalized Romanticism in turn anatomizes Romanticism’s own immanent Victorianism, its desire to know itself, to make itself useful within the social order—indeed, a desire it passed on to the Victorians. De Quincey’s corpus offers a compelling example of this phenomenology. His writings confess an interiority that has come to be associated with Romanticism but that is complexly negotiated between it and the Victorian period. In this sense Confessions can be read both genealogically forward to Victorianism and archaeologically back to Romanticism as a text that fits neither rubric but rather circulates within the economy that these rubrics mobilize. By addressing his “great body of opium dreams” as it is “shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed,”15 De Quincey explores how the subject’s internal construction both does and does not fit the external order of things. This psychosomatically feeling and thinking body exists uneasily within the world, often because strategies to contain it are resisted by this body’s separate (often psychotic) representational economy of dreams, reveries, and nightmares. Between the taxonomies of this hallucinatory and hallucinating body and those of culture, the self, like capital, circulates in what Andrea Henderson calls “the center of movement or circulation, a dangerous fluidity.”16 Confessions thus suggests a later nineteenth-century anxiety about collecting the subject’s thoughts and works where these fragile and transparent strategies always mask a less tractable and dangerous interiority within an increasingly hegemonic, imperial identity. De Quincey’s Confessions suggests how the taxonomies he employs to contain the “phantasmagoria”17 of his dreams begin rather to repeat its hallucinatory shape, a Victorian classification of Romantic thought that both manages and is managed by its heterogeneity.

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II Part 1 of the 1821 Confessions consists of a preface “To the Reader” and “Preliminary Confessions.” Part 2 continues with a brief conclusion to “Preliminary Confessions,” then “The Pleasures of Opium,” “Introduction to the Pains of Opium,” and “The Pains of Opium.” That the periodical division (parts 1 and 2) impinges on the text’s confessional order is the symptom of a tension within the text’s systems of classification that I want to explore for the rest of this chapter. This tension is already internalized, however, in the 1821 text itself. De Quincey begins “To the Reader” by apologizing “for breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve, which . . . restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities,” the pathology of “moral ulcers and scars” (29).18 De Quincey states that he “hesitated about the propriety of allowing this . . . to come before the public eye, until after [his] death.” Cultivating a Wordsworthian reticence while publishing a text that is decidedly un-Wordsworthian exploits the cultural capital of both maneuver. De Quincey posits the transgressive psychology of opium, an “excess, not yet recorded” (30). But he also offers this account as “useful and instructive” (29), risking censure for its unorthodox nature while also managing public response.19 The text’s daring invests in Romantic excess by dipping into British cultural reserve to profit from both. The payoff, as De Quincey writes in the preface, will be the moral promised at “the close of [his] confessions” (30). “Preliminary Confessions” continues this anxious economy by first grounding the text’s cogito in the empirical evidence of its author’s early history, the “foundation of the writer’s habit of opium-eating in after-life” (33; emphasis added). This section covers De Quincey’s life from birth to his 1803 impoverishment in London, where he endures the “heaviest affliction” (64) of his separation from Anne. The section first outlines three “reasons” for this “introductory narrative,” each of which is placed under immediate threat. First, he wants to forestall the question of why he took opium—although the text comes to suggest that even he has doubts. Second, he wants to “[furnish] a key to some parts of that tremendous scenery which afterward people the dreams of the opium-eater”— although by the end of the text this key remains lost. Third, he wants to “[create] some previous interest of a personal sort in the confessing subject”—although by exposing so much of his interior life to the reader he remains unable to ‘contain’ himself, thus preempting the first two reasons. Addressing himself to the first reason, De Quincey is careful to distinguish two stages of opium use. In the earlier stage he takes the drug to relieve physical pain, while his later “daily” (35) use from 1813 onward stimulates his imagination. Yet because “Preliminary Confessions” deals mostly with the former, and rather perfunctorily, it supplements the later

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text, but is also oddly dissociated from it. Moreover, the attempt to set aside the body while giving the mind free rein is problematic. Distinguishing between the merely somatic and the more profoundly psychical leaves the text divided against itself, what Peter Logan calls De Quincey’s conflicted attempt to “[make] over his suspiria de machina into a suspiria de profundis.”20 The abstraction of the body through the mind produces instead a body of psychosomatic evidence, the “fascinating enthralment” (30) of opium’s “divine luxuries” (32), which turn into the “unutterable monsters and abortions” (110) of his dreams. This body reproduces rather than cures a physiological suffering opium was meant to alleviate. And as the narrative orchestrates its theater of trauma, the increasing intensity of this drama becomes tied to the body’s determinism, played out symptomatically through the fact that these scenes, “interesting in themselves” (35), always seem to demand more telling. By always looking forward to a later psychological suffering, “Preliminary Confessions” increasingly urges a backward movement toward the text’s future, wherein De Quincey is compelled to scan what appears to be a mere somatology for its deeper psychic complexities. The missed encounter with Ann toward the end of the section is a crucial event in this respect. First, it disrupts chronology by propelling the text toward the indeterminate telos of De Quincey’s dream life. Second, by its very inability to make sense of Ann’s loss, it evokes the desire to tell what is left untold of the past. At the opening of part 2, De Quincey revisits London as a scene of earlier trauma (his “first mournful abode”). He is now a “solitary and contemplative man” (67) ready to write Confessions by using his “maturer intellect” to battle the “noxious umbrage” of his suffering. But London leaves him “oppressed by anxieties,” so that he “pace[s]” its streets again “for the most part in serenity and peace of mind” (68). Here the solitude and peripateticism of an earlier Romantic ideology (the Discharged Soldier, the Pedlar, the Leech-Gatherer, the Ancient Mariner— Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves), emerge as negative paradigms. Romantic interiority must now confront its own pathology—not the autonomy of the mind as “Reason in her most exalted mood”21 but the “mood” of Reason able psychosomatically to feel the mind’s ability to wander beyond the self’s control but unable to subdue its autonomy.22 Instead, De Quincey yearns to “fly for comfort” (68) to Grasmere to avoid the return of the repressed. But the mise-en-scène between London and Grasmere is more complex than this. The Wordsworthian ‘consolation’ of Dove Cottage is also the site of the “second birth of [his] sufferings” (68), the latter stages of his opium use in which he was “persecuted” by “ghastly phantoms.” He figures this “hideous dream” (69) as already cured (it “can return no more” [69]) even before he recounts the experience in the text, as if to preempt its possible return. Yet the ‘cure’ of Grasmere

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reproduces the traumas of London, and the text’s scene of writing becomes its primal scene, what Ned Lukacher defines as an “ontologically undecidable intertextual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and imaginative construction, between archival verification and interpretive free play.”23 This scene is staged in De Quincey’s text as between the past and the present as two sites of trauma: one the initial scene of suffering and the other the present ability adequately to overcome the past in the text’s commencement. The absence of telling in part 1 disrupts part 2’s subsequent attempt to work through past conflicts, so that the text both moves toward and delays confronting its own most disturbing conclusions. But if the telling of the past seems incidental, the later telling of dreams is likewise expedited, so that the narrative is oddly truncated on both ends. In part 2 De Quincey submits his autobiography to psychoanalysis to connect the external and internal events of his life. However, the increasingly repetitive determinism of this life, from his “opera pleasures” (79) and London “rambles” (81) to his dream of Coleridge’s description of Piranesi’s Dreams, produces an increasingly fragmented and serial tableaux of “vast processions” and “friezes of never-ending stories” (103), proliferating in an “endless growth and self-reproduction” (106), which evokes “madness” (109). Where opium “introduces amongst [the mental faculties] the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony” (73), it also introduces the subject to the mind’s “terra incognitae” (87), disrupting the linearity of autobiography and “[bringing] confusion to the reason” (87). As if to systematize this confusion, part 2 constructs a typology of the imagination divided between its “Pleasures” and “Pains.” This section follows the rough chronology from De Quincey’s first “pleasurable” use of opium in London in 1804 to a second, more “pained” stage of addiction after his departure from Oxford, from 1812 to 1817. Where “Pleasures” analyzes how opium generates the glories of the (Wordsworthian) “great light of the majestic intellect” (75), “Pains” explores its ‘other’ functioning as (Coleridgean) dejection.24 However, the division between the mind and the body of the imagination collapses as the sublime encounter with the unconscious in “Pleasures” succumbs to “Pains” by reanatomizing the “tranquilized” body as the psychosomatic “burthens of the heart” (82). Early in “Pleasures,” for instance, De Quincey notes the “grave and solemn complexion” (72) of opium, suggesting how the disease of the anthropos lies only dormant within the intellectual body of its visionary splendors. As a transpositional space between “Pleasures” and “Pains,” between mind and body, “Introduction to the Pains of Opium” mediates between them, but also disrupts their categorical stability. At the end of “Introduction,” before describing himself in his Grasmere study

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“with a quart of ruby-coloured laudanum” and “a book of German metaphysics placed by its side” (95), De Quincey marks the transition: “This done, I shall quit the subject of happiness altogether, and pass to a very different one—the pains of opium” (93). Here the “gloom and cloudy melancholy” of opium encroaches on the “brilliant water” (89) of reason, the chaotic psychological excess of laudanum threatening the philosophical contemplativeness of metaphysics. (Significantly, in 1856 De Quincey removes both the transitional passage and the earlier description of melancholy. The first deletion makes clearer the boundary between pleasures and pains, the former now more immune to the latter, while the second deletion buttresses the stoic demeanor of the Victorian social subject by removing the taint of Romantic melancholy.) De Quincey finally shifts in “The Pains of Opium” to the “history and journal of what took place in [his] dreams” (102). These are presented palimpsestically as a series of narratives, the larger structure of which is unreadable except as the subject passes through the chaos of each stage. Unable “to compose the notes for this part of [his] narrative into any regular and connected shape” (96), De Quincey opts for narrative free association: “[M]y way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my humours, than much to consider who is listening to me” (97). In a gesture reminiscent of the opening of “Preliminary Confessions” and as if to avoid the potential anarchy of leaving behind the surface order of autobiography, however, he first classifies four dream “facts” (103).25 But this brief metapsychology, while it theorizes the psyche, cannot systematize its “palsying effects” (98). As De Quincey “lies under the weight of incubus and night-mare” (102), his “intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt” (102). His “analytical understanding” (99) becomes overwhelmed by “intellectual torpour” (101). In spite of its debilitating effects, De Quincey ends the text having apparently “triumphed” (114) over his addiction and thus justified the text’s usefulness. However, that his “dreams are not yet perfectly calm” (115) delays the end of the subject’s ‘social work.’ Instead, the text quotes its own opening ambivalence—“I . . . have untwisted, almost to its final links, the accursed chain which fettered me” (30)—by misquoting “untwisted” as “‘unwound’” (113). The latter statement suggests breakdown rather than composure, a triumph that is “almost” but never quite achieved. Moreover, the text charts two attempts to overcome addiction, which point to what will become a repetition compulsion in De Quincey’s psychosomatic body. This repetition stalls the text’s teleological and epistemological momentum and aborts its attempt to shape psychopathology into a proper moral form.

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III The 1821 Confessions evokes a prescient Victorianism that one expects to see fully manifested in 1856, which simplifies the text into three parts: a first part entitled “Confession of an English Opium-Eater,” which triples the length of the earlier “Preliminary Confessions”; “The Pleasures of Opium”; and “The Pains of Opium.” De Quincey argues that the 1821 text did not make clear that the opium experience of part 1 and the dream experience of part 2 were connected, only that they “both happened to the same person” (204). His response, then, is to counter the unfinished 1821 psychology with an expanded autobiography that attempts to root the internal logic of dreams in the suffering of the past, to provide a clearer developmental chronology between them, and therefore to compose a more integrated picture of the confessing subject. The “incidents of [De Quincey’s] early life” are now an “indispensable” key to the “entire substratum, together with the secret and underlying motive” (147) of his later dreams. Whereas in 1821 the determinism of dream life upsets the work’s organic structure, now he advocates this determinism: “I trace the origin of my confirmed opiumeating to a necessity growing out of my early sufferings in the streets of London” (146; emphasis added). De Quincey is anxious to find a singular cause because by 1856 he has “four several times” overcome his addiction only to have “resumed it upon the warrant of [his] enlightened and deliberate judgment” (147) that sobriety is equally uneconomical.26 Thus the 1856 text uses its strategy of backward deduction to make sense of the rather unclear inductive logic of his 1821 pyrrhic victory over opium. Ordering the psyche’s life in advance of its analysis, part 1 moves away from confession to autobiography, from self-observation to description. The opening autobiography is now the edifying principle that conserves the public, social, and moral character of the confessing subject, who can endure and resist the ensuing examination of his “moral ulcers and scars,” his pleasure and pains of opium. Public and private personae are thus continuous with one another, but carefully distinguished as separate spheres of epistemological instruction, the former uncontaminated by the latter. The shift from confession to autobiography makes sense in terms of De Quincey’s writings between his two Confessions. In 1834 he published seven articles for Tait’s Magazine entitled “Sketches of Men and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium Eater.” These formed the kernel of what became formally known as his Autobiography.27 In 1853 and 1854 these writings were renamed “Autobiographic Sketches” and “Autobiographic Sketches, with Recollections of the Lakes” to form the first two volumes of the collected edition. These later recollections are, as

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Vincent de Luca writes, “carefully edited and arranged to form a narrative continuum, . . . a kind of anthology of [De Quincey’s] previous autobiographical writings,”28 which incorporates the discrete parts of the author’s life as productions of a singular cogito. This anthology subsumes Confessions within the Autobiography. The Autobiography now leads the corpus by shaping De Quincey’s early wayward life into a life history that recuperates in advance of the 1856 text (volume 5) the disruptive and chronic effects of his later addiction. But even in the organizational spirit of the Autobiography, the 1856 revisions do not quite make sense. Part 1 gives such an extensive account of the subject’s social construction but is also so digressive that it overpowers the remaining two sections (which De Quincey barely revised at all) to create an autonomous narrative that at the same time rather uncannily repeats the later sections’ internal disarray. It seems compelled always to say more than it means or needs to and exacerbates the tension in De Quincey’s corpus between (later) Autobiography and (earlier) confession, between public self-fashioning and private analysis. The Autobiography is interpolated within Confessions ostensibly to tell the accomplished life. But it becomes symptomatic of confession’s inability to narrate adequately the life of the opiated body or of the dreaming subject. The texts’ larger self-writing process is divided between the narrative of the self’s closure (a finite plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end) and the unending narrative proliferations of its psychology (the self’s multiplying characters and episodes). The text distinguishes autobiography from confession to economize this fluidity, but this taxonomy marks the text as a hybrid structure internally split between two forms. In short, the Autobiography is unsettled by its own autobiography, its confessing ‘other’ that performs the internal analysis of its own psychology. We thus need to read synchronously or palimpsestically rather than teleologically or archaeologically between versions. De Quincey’s attempt to show the “strictness of the inter-connection” (204) between earlier and later versions of himself becomes especially crucial at the beginning of “The Pains of Opium,” at the precise point where in 1821 he had given up narrative organization. He now writes: The final object of the whole record lay in the dreams. For the sake of those the entire narrative arose. But what caused the dreams? Opium used in unexampled excess. But what caused this excess in the use of opium? Simply the early sufferings; these, and these only, through the derangements which they left behind in the animal economy. On this mode of viewing the case, moving regressively from the end to the beginning, it will be seen that there is one uninterrupted bond of unity running

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To avoid the unraveling moral of the 1821 text, De Quincey, by a narrative sleight of hand, relocates the end of his narrative at the text’s beginning in the past of his Autobiography. The pathology of his dreams is now tied to the ontogenesis of the social subject rather than to the psychic determinism of that subject’s interior life. Accordingly, the 1856 text also streamlines the ambivalent divisions of the earlier text into three distinct parts. The structure resolves suffering dialectically backward, the antithetical conflict between pleasures and pains, respectively, being synthesized regressively in the origin of suffering in the text’s beginning in the first part. Yet because it attempts to read the 1821 version as its own textual unconscious, the 1856 text works by a repetitive temporality that resists systematization. In the 1856 “Prefatory Notice to the New Edition” De Quincey speaks of the text’s “own former self” (137) whose “narrative had been needlessly impoverished.” He now says what was left unsaid: “[N]ot so properly correction and retrenchment were called for, as integration of what had been left imperfect, or amplification of what, from the first, had been insufficiently expanded” (137). The later text raises from symptom to interpretation the earlier “[attempt] to communicate the Incommunicable” (139) so as to overcome its trauma. But by thus naming the unconscious within a hermeneutic that claims to name what is unnameable, the cure of prolonged talking itself becomes a symptom for a cure it can never attain. The most significant additions to the 1856 text—the long footnote on rhabdomancy,29 and subsequent passages on the Whispering Gallery and the Bore—evoke a blind and causeless determinism for which the text cannot account, the “inexorable advance” (168) and “rapturous command” of which is largely “Inexplicable” (163) because it is “spoken from some hidden recess in [the author’s] own will” (169). Consequently, this determinism turns those passages which seem merely digressive into symptoms of an addiction to telling that displaces the purpose of confession altogether, as in part 1’s very expanded description of the Manchester Grammar School, now prolonged to the point of being pointless. In 1821, having recounted his “final specimen” dream, after which he vows to “‘sleep no more!’,” De Quincey writes: “I am now called upon to wind up a narrative which has already extended to an unreasonable length” (112–13). Unable to relate “how this conflict of horrors was finally brought to a crisis,” he shifts attention away from his own failure to the more “legitimate centre” of his text: “Not the opium-eater, but the opium,

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is the true hero of the tale. . . . The object was to display the marvellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure or for pain: if that is done the action of the piece is closed.” In the next paragraph, as if to evoke the crisis he cannot precipitate, he vows to “die throwing it [opium] off” (114), but at the beginning of the next paragraph he writes: “I triumphed: but think not, reader, that therefore my sufferings were ended.” In 1856, to resolve this tension between closure and indeterminacy, he discards the previous two paragraphs and describes instead the (Victorian) social subject who, like Wordsworth and Mill, has triumphed over the (Romantic) ambivalence of this subject’s interiority: “Nothing short of mortal anguish, in a physical sense, it seemed, to wean myself from opium; yet, on the other hand, death from overwhelming nervous terrors . . . seemed too certainly to besiege the alternative course. Fortunately I had still so much of firmness left as to face that choice, which, with most of instant suffering, showed in far distance a possibility of final escape” (215). To confirm this stoicism, at the start of the next paragraph De Quincey writes: “This possibility was realised: I did accomplish my escape.” But the preface to the 1856 text challenges this self-prescription. De Quincey speaks of curing the imperfection of the “very principle of change” (137) in the 1821 text, but the battle has been “won at a price of labour and suffering” in the form of a “nervous malady, . . . which has attacked [him] intermittingly for the last eleven years” and has returned “almost concurrently with the commencement of this revision.” Reading beyond the end of the 1856 text, the preface reactivates rather than alleviates the symptoms of the text’s production: “The consequences have been distressing to all concerned. The press has groaned under the chronic visitation; the compositors shudder at the sight of my handwriting” and the “wearying siege of an abiding sickness” has tainted the “clearness of critical vision” (138–39). The 1856 revisions, rather than restoring the mind’s control over the body, produce instead the return of a repetitive psychosomatic determinism that makes its own nervous revisions to the text. By 1856, Nigel Leask argues, Confessions is “removed from the troubling no man’s land of the elegant case-history or pathology” of both the personal and the cultural in the 1821 version and “settled comfortably into the genre of literary autobiography.”30 But it is also true that the 1856 text is in many ways more Romantically heterodox than its predecessor.

IV De Quincey’s collective strategy mobilizes a set of taxonomies to organize the writer’s life as public persona. However, the local introduction of these taxonomies in the text’s narrative—the text’s telling of itself—becomes an

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overdetermined reaction to the self’s economy that resists containment. The interminable and digressive nature of the 1856 revision disrupts autobiography’s order of things to suggest an emergent Victorian identity addicted to giving a full account of selfhood that cannot be given. Autobiography both alienates and secures the subject from the contingency of experience through a crisis of representation that leaves the self in an oddly dissociated order. This fact makes the later text neither a definitive Victorian text nor an idiosyncratic revision of an earlier Romantic work, but something far more compelling in the unfolding of nineteenth-century literature and culture. In his 1856 preface, De Quincey speaks of how the “case of poor Ann the Outcast . . . shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed—the great body of opium dreams.”31 As De Quincey’s text takes on the radically unsettling shape of this body, which mutates its organic form as it develops, De Quincey dissociates the psychic functioning of organicism from the monolithic apparatus of its Romantic ideology as “majestic intellect.” In “The English Mail-Coach” (1849) he describes his dreams as “the caprices, the gay arabesques, and the lovely floral luxuriations” that “betray a shocking tendency to pass into finer maniacal splendours.”32 This “horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures” demonstrates the pathology of Romantic imagination, through which the “dreamer finds housed within himself . . . some horrid alien nature” that “contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it” (201).33 Most disturbing is the mutation of this singular pathology into the cognate of the subject’s multiple personalities. Here De Quincey refigures Wordsworth’s Gothic church as the “mighty mists” (227) out of which emerges an “infinite cathedral” (232) containing a “vast necropolis” or “city of sepulchres” (230) within its recesses. Within this vision the subject, whose nature is rooted in the anthropomorphic stability of the human face, proliferates into a sea of “faces, which no man could count” (232). Now De Quincey’s shifting taxonomy encrypts interiority’s pathological structure as an autonomous economy within the outward form of organicism. This hybridity suggests an immanent pathology within organicism as it had become a central organizational imperative of the Romantic ideology, as in Coleridge’s prose writings, that became in turn a model for Victorian concepts of order. In De Quincey the subject’s coherent identity disappears within the radically pathological regeneration of psychic life, which erupts in an arbitrary and cancerous fashion (“I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles” [109], De Quincey writes in Confessions). The luxuriantly overdetermined imagery of De Quincey’s dreams becomes a metonymy for the ornate, exotic, and heterogeneous interior of the Victorian parlor or Crystal Palace, a cancerous interiority that is both intrinsic and alien. As Martin Wallen writes, “[W]e find that what seems temptingly like organi-

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cism is actually something that threatens organicism by continually disclosing the dreaminess, the fantasy which must be accepted as a dominant force of this rhetoric.”34 De Quincey similarly describes how in narrative the pathology of imagination unfolds through “parasitical thoughts, feelings, digressions”35 as a telling of experience that continually leads narrative astray. The interrelated taxonomies of Romanticism and Victorianism are likewise pathological. De Quincey’s corpus is defined by an early and ongoing ambivalence between a (Romantic) psychoanalysis of the subject’s interior life and a (Victorian) buttressing of this life’s external authority through the idea/ideal of the public man put forward in the collected edition’s Autobiography. This larger project attempts to normalize the subject’s thoughts by collecting them. But the “writing” of life, which chronically keeps De Quincey from a productive life of writing, compels him nonetheless to return compulsively to life-writing, so that the conservation of the (Victorian) subject in his writings always exacerbates the more radical indeterminacy of its confessing (Romantic) other. De Quincey’s 1856 revisions are thus a conflicted Victorian gesture that neither fully suppresses nor fully accepts a heterodoxy that emerges in Romanticism but that does not sit comfortably within Romanticism itself. De Quincey regretted the 1856 text because it sacrificed the “excitement” of “an almost extempore effort, having the faults, the carelessness, possibly the graces, of a fugitive inspiration,” for the “studied and mature presentation of the same thoughts, facts, and feelings” (134).36 Ironically, however, an unrestricted narrative still leaves experience radically untold, for it points to how this telling, always attempting to recount the “vast sepulchre” of the past, is always rendered “incommunicable.” While speaking his “whole” mind would relieve its “burthen of horrors,” making this story conform to a “regular” shape would entail some “effort,” for “no one can know but [himself]” his “entire history” (97), and not even then. A comprehensive telling is an impossibility that burdens the author, and the idea of the Victorian in De Quincey’s later revisions suggests a nearly exhausted response to the “burden of the incommunicable,” to the fact that there is always more to tell. The urgency to narrate the anthropos becomes an increasingly anxious concern of the nineteenth century (both “The Passing of Arthur” and Arnold’s abandonment of poetry evoke this exhaustion). Percy Bysshe Shelley addresses this protoVictorian exhaustion in “A Defence of Poetry,” written in 1821 but ironically not published until 1840, when he states that “the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.”37 Perhaps the most telling symptom of the collective strategy is the 1853 general preface to Selections Grave and Gay. Confronted with making

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editorial sense of his writings, De Quincey outlines a threefold “rude general classification.”38 This taxonomy systematizes his corpus as a palimpsest of its psychic modalities, the internal constructedness of this body’s hidden depths. The first class of writings contains descriptive works such as “Autobiographic Sketches,” which “[propose] merely to amuse the reader.”39 The second class contains “ESSAYS,” which “address themselves purely to the understanding as an insulated faculty” and thus mark the intermediate ground of reason between the merely historio-descriptive first class and the profoundly visionary third and “far higher” class of “impassioned prose,”40 which includes Confessions. Wordsworth conceives of poetry’s passion transcendentally in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Poetry’s “impassioned” nature in De Quincey, however, signifies the heterogeneous range of suffering that speaks against understanding to disrupt the progress toward the visionary. Similarly, writings of the first class “occasionally . . . pass into an impassioned interest,” wherein “narrative rises into a far higher key” and fixes on “the solitary infant, and its solitary combat with grief—a mighty darkness, and a sorrow without a voice” that also “rekindle[s] at a maturer age, when the characteristic features of the individual mind have been unfolded.”41 The second class of rational writings also give way to the “exploring eye” of understanding as it is “carried right and left into the deep shades that have gathered so thickly over . . . history.”42 Each level, therefore, returns, with varying degrees of intensity, to a suffering or psychosomatic excess of feeling always circulating within the economy of history. As distinctions of the subject’s identity, autobiography, understanding, and the visionary collapse into one another, for “because a man cannot see and measure these mystical forces which palsy him, . . . he cannot deal with them effectually.”43 This inability confronts the Victorian subject with the limits—the improper fit—of his utility within the social order. The 1853 preface, attempting to consolidate the author’s labor, makes this work redundant by showing that it cannot be collected. The taxonomies of Confessions overdetermine and defamiliarize rather than clarify the psyche. Both texts struggle to incorporate this taxonomical pathology within the economy they both generate and sustain. They become, that is, addicted to their own strategies. In its attempt to systematize its own experience, De Quincey’s confessional project exploits addiction as a complex symptom of health. In physiopathology the body’s immune system mobilizes itself to defend against disease as a sign of the body’s immanent health. In this instance disease suggests the organism’s ability to regenerate itself. Addiction both does and does not conform to this model. Whereas the resistance to infection suggests the body’s familiarity with disease as an integral component of its anatomy, addiction introduces an utterly foreign component (opium)

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that hybridizes the body’s makeup, but in disruptive ways. This is perhaps why De Quincey says opium, and not the opium-eater, is the true hero of his tale. Moreover, as both physio- and psychopathology, addiction further breaks down distinctions between health and disease, inside and outside, mind and body, the normal and the pathological, used to define the properly feeling Victorian subject. Indeed, addiction paralyzes the taxonomies used to classify this subject, mutating these distinctions beyond their economical functioning. Addiction both threatens attrition and offers the potential for transgression, but a transgression the outcome of which remains unknown. Ironically, in the Victorian program for the properly ordered body that this volume explores, feeling, like the psychosomatic, marks within all Victorian binaries a threshold of irresolution and indeterminacy— hence the great necessity for controlling the excess of feeling that in turn made the (re)construction of Romanticism so crucial to the Victorian ideology. Addiction reminds the body of culture, however, that its desire for normality is itself pathological, producing an unnatural order of things burdened by the weight of its own ideologies. Within the body of ideology that would weigh the Romantic against the Victorian, De Quincey’s addiction resists this prescription. The 1821 Confessions tells the perfunctory life’s narration of “Preliminary Confessions,” which unravels into the text’s serial ending and against its moral and organizational mandates. The 1856 text tries to execute these mandates early on by filling in gaps in its opening narration, but then ends up unraveling on both ends. The author’s alien nature turns chronology into genealogy as Foucault defines it: Where the soul pretends unification or the self fabricates a coherent identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning— numberless beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of colour are not readily seen by a historical eye. The analysis of descent permits the dissociation of the self, its recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events.44 This empty synthesis, like the Crystal Palace, incorporates the self’s disparate parts within an economy that oddly evacuates the self’s frequently disturbing interiority. For De Quincey, however, this interior phenomenology, despite its “unimaginable horror” (109), constitutes an authentic experience, in that the representational economy of interiority resists, as De Quincey seems to resist, the very act of collection undertaken in Selections Grave and Gay. De Quincey’s examination of psychic dis-ease is drawn toward the cure by locating pathology within an interpretive framework—a Pathology of pathology. He is thus eminently Victorian:

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attempting to classify, and thus to set aside as “other,” that which does not appear to fit. Yet the act of collecting resists this closure—the pathology within Pathology that does not fit the organic whole. This anxiety about Empire makes the Romantic and the Victorian uncanny reflections of each other. Not fitting induces a kind of anxiety to conform, but not without in turn pathologizing conformity itself. Which is what makes Confessions such a telling commentary on our effort to collect ourselves by collecting others.

NOTES I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous support of this research, and Julia Wright for her always sage advice as I was writing this chapter. 1. The Appendix was reprinted in the December 1822 London Magazine. De Quincey also promised a third installment, to be finished by the end of January 1822, but never produced it. Confessions is really the only book-length work, other than Klosterheim; or, The Masque and The Logic of Political Economy, published by De Quincey in his lifetime. 2. See Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92–134. 3. Jon Klancher, “English Romanticism and Cultural Production,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), 86. 4. Coleridge uses the term in chapter 12 of Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 1:272. Coleridge’s idea of the SUM comes from German idealism and means “spirit [Geist], self [Ich], and self-consciousness [Selbstbewusstsein]” (1:273). The SUM suggests the organic absorption of all differences within the identity or unity of the universal mind, a transcendental idealism traditionally associated with the Romantic imagination. Coleridge uses the term again in chapter 13 in his account of the primary imagination as a “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in infinite I AM” (1:304). 5. Works appears to avoid editorial totalization by obeying the chronology of De Quincey’s writings. This chronology runs from his earliest Juvenilia, his 1803 Diary, and his 1818–1819 articles for the Westmoreland Gazette, to his 1853–1858 articles for Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, written up to a year before his death. Volume 2 of Works, however, prints together both the 1821 and 1856 Confessions, and so, again, betrays a desire to consolidate De Quincey’s oeuvre. The two texts were last published together in Malcolm Elwin’s 1956 edition. John E. Jordan’s 1960 edition favors the 1856 text as a less fragmentary and more mature work reflecting the author’s final intentions, à la Greg-Bowers and the “New

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Bibliography.” In The Prose of Vision (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), Vincent de Luca writes, the “new material becomes a kind of commentary on the old” (122) and brings to a manifest conclusion meanings that were only latent in the original text. Grevel Lindop’s or Alethea Hayter’s editions, in the spirit of the Cornell Wordsworth and its attention to the archaeology of a text’s earliest versions, adopt the 1821 text because the 1856 revision—thought to be digressive, unwieldy, even superfluous—defuses the original’s afflatus. In the first case, 1821 becomes a suppressed origin, and in the latter scenario, 1856 additions are relegated to an appendix. In his edition of Confessions (London: Cresset Press, 1950), Edward Sackville-West calls the 1821 text a “considerable work of art” while the 1856 version is “hardly that” (xvi), a sentiment repeated by Ian Jack in “De Quincey Revises His Confessions,” PMLA 72 (1957): 145. 6. De Quincey worked on the edition from 1851 to his death in 1859. The final volume appeared posthumously in 1860. First, the 1856 text adds “Prefatory Notice to the New Edition” to justify revisiting the original work (which supposedly marked an end to addiction); second, it rewrites the original preface and triples the 1821 text’s “Preliminary Confessions”; and third, it attempts to rationalize further the interpretation of dreams presented in “The Pains of Opium.” De Quincey also added “The Daughter of Lebanon,” which was intended for his self-proclaimed sequel to Confessions, Suspiria de Profundis, published in four 1845 numbers of Blackwood’s Magazine, yet never finished. Although beyond my immediate concerns, Suspiria’s place within the publishing history of Confessions is a fascinating episode in the formation of De Quincey’s corpus. 7. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 6. 8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1973), 344; see also 125–65 and 303–86. 9. On the relationship between sensibility and canonical Romantic poetry and culture, see Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). On the nervous body of narrative in Romanticism, see Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 10. On the place of De Quincey’s nervous body in the unfolding of his philosophical identity, see Paul Youngquist, “De Quincey’s Crazy Body,” PMLA 114 (1999): 346–58. 11. Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. 12. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). 13. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 6.

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14. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill Jr. (New York: Norton, 1971), 54:19–20. All remaining citations in the text from Tennyson’s poetry are from this edition. 15. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols., ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), 3:222. 16. Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. 17. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Alethea Hayter (New York: Penguin, 1986), 33. All subsequent citations from De Quincey’s writings, except where noted, are from Hayter’s edition, hereafter cited by page number in the text. The full Works had not appeared at the time of this chapter’s initial writing. Moreover, I use the Hayter edition because it reprints substantial portions of the 1856 text along with the 1821 version and, along with Grevel Lindop’s Oxford Classics edition (which does not, however, include any of the 1856 text), is still more readily available than Works. 18. As Ronald R. Thomas writes in Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), “these apologies are also recognitions that his writing is itself a symptom and that his text is the presentation of a case study that requires a kind of talking cure. . . . It records the history of a self inventing the language to describe its private life” (102). 19. Moreover, using the pseudonym “X.Y.Z.” protects him from the work of confession while also placing him within the public sphere. Later in the text he speaks to the reader “into whose private ear [he is] confidentially whispering [his] confessions” (96), thus cultivating acceptance of his authority while also sanctioning the reader’s ability properly to “hear” his confession. 20. Logan, Nerves and Narrative, 75. In Confessions De Quincey establishes the somatic cause of suffering to refute his own “self-indulgence” (30), for which he was criticized by Coleridge among others: the moral that De Quincey took opium “purely for the sake of creating an artificial state of pleasurable excitement” (34). On nineteenth-century cultural constructions of opium see Logan, Nerves and Narrative, 76–85; Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170–87; John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 1–24; and Charles Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Barrell’s account of the addictive paradox of opium as both cure and infection—the palliative incorporation of the toxic “other” to keep one inviolable from its deeper subversion—has been useful to the present writer. 21. William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 13:170. This quotation is from the 1805 version.

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22. Moreover, this torpor manifests the latent “disease” (82) of solitude, a “natural inclination” that in De Quincey’s early life made him “hypochondriacally melancholy.” On one hand, he values “solitude and silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature” (81–82). On the other hand, being alone with one’s mind, necessary to the analysis of psychic dis-ease, becomes the pathology of “meditat[ing] too much,” repeating the very thing it seeks to avoid. 23. Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 25. 24. See De Luca, The Prose of Vision, 16–17, for the distinction between Wordsworthian Pleasures and Coleridgean Pains. 25. These are, first, his ability voluntarily to imagine things “upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to [his] dreams”; second, all “changes in [his] dreams, were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy”; third, the “sense of space . . . and . . . time” were “amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity”; and fourth, the “minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived” (104). On the parallels between De Quincey’s and Freud’s dream theories, see Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 90–111; Robert Maniquis, “The Dark Interpreter and the Palimpsest of Violence: De Quincey and the Unconscious,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 117–35; and Thomas, Dreams of Authority, 71–81, 105. On the parallels between De Quincey and modern psychoanalysis, see Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self, 16; and Thomas, Dreams of Authority, 101. Clej writes, “More like an ‘interminable’ self-analysis than a rigorous confession, De Quincey’s discourse constantly transgresses its own boundaries and meanders away from its course, obliging the interpreter to follow what is often a vanishing trail” (20). In a manuscript entitled “Romantic Psychoanalysis and the Burden of the Mystery,” I argue that De Quincey’s Confessions is De Quincey’s attempt to contain the interminability of psychoanalysis, whereas Suspiria radicalizes psychoanalysis as a fundamentally interminable venture broached between psychic determinism and self-making. See Joel Faflak, “Analysis Interminable in the Other Wordsworth,” Romanticism on the Net 15 (November 1999), available at ; and “‘On Her Own Couch’: Keats’s Wandering Psychoanalysis,” Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Ghislaine McDayter (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 74–99. 26. On the unstable relationship between addiction and sobriety in Romantic writing, see Orrin Wang, “Romantic Sobriety,” Modern Language Quarterly 60 (1999): 469–94. 27. De Quincey wrote most of these pieces between 1834 and 1841, but continued expanding their number up to 1852. In 1834 he began a second series

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of recollections containing his four “Lake Papers,” focusing on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. Aside from the 1845 Suspiria, De Quincey initiated another two-part series of autobiographical writings, “A Sketch of Childhood,” published in Hogg’s Weekly Instructor (1851–1852). He reshuffles these later writings to form the Autobiography in Selections Grave and Gay. 28. De Luca, The Prose of Vision, 118–20. Masson adds one of De Quincey’s original 1834 Tait’s articles, “Parentage and the Paternal Home,” to the beginning of the Autobiography, thus enforcing its symbolic pattern. Masson resituates “Autobiographic Sketches” as the first two volumes of his edition, retitled chronologically as “Autobiography from 1785 to 1803” and “Autobiography from 1803 to 1808,” respectively. He calls the new title “less ragged” (1:2) than the original and thus consolidates at the end of the nineteenth century a reaction against the heterogeneity of life-writing initiated in De Quincey’s own revisions of his autobiographical writings. 29. Rhabdomancy is the art of divining wells, which for De Quincey suggests the “[unveiling] or [deciphering] of what is hidden” (Collected Writings, 3:290n). 30. Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, 172. 31. De Quincey, Collected Writings, 3:222. 32. Thomas De Quincey, “The English Mail-Coach,” in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 200. Hereafter references to this text will be cited parenthetically in the text. “The English Mail-Coach” first appeared in 1849 in Blackwood’s as two papers: “The English Mail-Coach, or The Glory of Motion” and “The Vision of Sudden Death.” De Quincey gave these a single title when he reedited the piece for volume 4 of Selections Grave and Gay. 33. Editing “The English Mail-Coach” in 1854, De Quincey removes this passage, replacing the earlier “mighty dial, sculptured with the hours, and with the dreadful legend of TOO LATE” with “sculptured with hours, that mingle with the heavens and the heavenly host” (199). The shift places the text’s selfobservation within a more religious frame, and thus also subdues the subsequently disturbing psychic phenomena of the “vast emblazonry . . . [of] unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures” to the text’s patriotic heraldry of “One heart, one pride, one glory [connecting] every man by the transcendant bond of his English blood” (203). Here, the dissenting voices of Romantic interiority’s multiple personalities are silenced/cured by the monolithic (and Imperialist) ego of the Victorian social subject. De Luca reads in the “multifoliate” forms of De Quincey’s visionary writings the transcendental “sensed presence of a giant composite form, at once human and divine, like Blake’s universal man, Albion” (74). 34. Martin Wallen, “Body Linguistics in Schreber’s Memoirs and De Quincey’s Confessions,” Mosaic 24 (1991): 104. See also Robert Lance Snyder, “‘The Loom of Palingenesis’: De Quincey’s Cosmology in ‘System of Heavens,’”

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Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 338–60. 35. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 94. 36. Even in his recollections De Quincey theorizes how the interminable nature of psychic exploration works against the systematic grain of autobiography. He considers it a “judicious principle, to create a sort of merit out of his own necessity” and to adopt a “professedly careless” or “desultory and unpremeditated style,” which demands no “regular termination of summing up,” rather than follow “preconceived biographies, which, having originally settled their plan upon a regular foundation, are able to pursue a course of orderly development.” See Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright (1970; reprint, Toronto: Penguin, 1986), 100. 37. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 503. 38. De Quincey, Collected Writings, 1:8. 39. Ibid., 1:9. 40. Ibid., 1:10, 1:14. 41. Ibid., 1:9. 42. Ibid., 1:10. 43. Ibid., 1:11. 44. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 81.

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2 M r s . J u l i a n T. M a r s h a l l ’s Life and Letters of Mary Wo l l s t o n e c r a f t S h e l l e y Lisa Vargo

Although this chapter concerns a specific late Victorian biographical project, it invites some more general consideration of the legacy of the romantic ideology of selfhood and how writing a woman’s biography necessarily involves a departure from this model. The male quest plot of the rise of the qualified individual associated with the romantic self does not harmonize with what Carolyn Heilbrun, in thinking about the writing of women’s lives, calls “the only narrative available to them: the conventional marriage or erotic plot.”1 And yet, if nineteenth-century ideology of selfhood is a male-constructed discourse in conflict with an image of passive, self-sacrificing woman, it is clear that women developed various covert strategies to subvert the dominant ideology. I not only want to look at the interplay between adherence and resistance in the ideological representation of the gendered subject in biography, but I also want to look at how later views of writers are often determined by an uncritical reception of Victorian biography as received wisdom. The focus for my piece, Florence Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, represents the Victorian rewriting of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who was born near the end of the revolutionary decade of the 1790s and died a year after the opening of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. Emily Sunstein suggests, in the introduction to Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, “It is one of biographical history’s more remarkable miscarriages of justice that Mary Shelley, a legend 47

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in her own time, came to be misunderstood, or belittled, or maligned in specious comparisons to Shelley. Her life has been collapsed into his.”2 Sunstein calls Mary Shelley “a striking example of a posthumous reputation bent out of shape by admirers and, more lastingly, by traducers” (387). In recent years the traducers have fallen by the wayside as Mary Shelley has become recognized as a writer in her own right, distinct from her husband Percy. Nevertheless, a belief that her writings after her husband’s death reflect a conservative perspective persists among literary critics. This version of Mary Shelley’s life represents an act of appropriation in the name of the expression of Victorian values that date from her death in 1851. According to Sunstein, the catalyst for the Mary Shelley who sought to conform to what Mary Poovey calls the “conventional expectations of what a woman should be”3 was a rector’s initial refusal to bury her and her parents in Bournemouth churchyard, a “final affirmation of identity with what they stood for” (Sunstein, 385). Mary’s daughter-inlaw Lady Shelley would not stand for this legacy; thereafter began on the part of Sir Percy Shelley and his wife, Sunstein explains, “a beatifying reaction. They commissioned Henry Weekes for a large memorial sculpture à la Michelangelo’s Pieta: Mary on one knee clasping Shelley’s drowned body” (389). The family established a shrine of artifacts in their home, and textually enshrined Percy’s life and literary remains into volumes suggestively titled Shelley Memorials (1859) and Relics of Shelley (1862).4 The place of biography in this quest for literary canonization was not lost on the Shelleys’ Victorian heirs. By the time Lady Shelley had mobilized her forces, one brief account had already constructed the life of Mary Shelley along the lines of the conventional marriage plot so acceptable to Victorian bourgeois ideology, and accordingly wrote out any thoughts of ambition on her part other than being the widow of Percy. The Scottish Dissenting minister, editor, and literary critic George Gilfillan included “Mrs. Shelley” in his second volume of contemporary literary portraits, published in 1850. Half of the essay is devoted to musing about the Romantic period and the membership of what he calls “the Godwin school,” and the majority of the pages on Mary Shelley are devoted to praise of Frankenstein. But primarily her life is subsumed in the memory of her husband: Indian widows used to fling themselves upon the funeral pyre of their husbands: she has thrown upon that of hers her mode of thought, her mould of style, her creed, her heart, her all. Her admiration of the Shelley was, and is, an idolatry. Can we wonder at it? Separated from him in the prime of life, with all his faculties in the finest bloom of promise, with peace beginning to build in the crevices of his torn heart, and with fame hovering ere it

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stooped upon his head—separated, too, in circumstances so sudden and cruel—can we be astonished that from the wounds of love came forth the blood of worship and sacrifice?5 The essay concludes with a reminder of the duty of the widow: “Of one promised and anticipated task we must, ere we close, respectfully remind Mrs. Shelley; it is of the life her husband. . . . No hand but hers can write it well . . . she alone fully knows the particulars of his outer and inner history; and we hope and believe, that her biography will be a monument to his memory.”6 A biography of Mary Shelley meant that even in death the poet’s wife could contribute her part in the construction of a monument to his memory. It was on the recommendation of Richard Garnett, assistant keeper of printed books at the British Museum, that Florence Thomas Marshall was chosen by Sir Percy and Lady Jane Shelley to write the Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which appeared in two volumes in 1889. Marshall’s life of Mary Shelley demonstrates how recollection signifies a recasting of a life in which the ideological assumptions of a successive age are imposed on the preceding one. What is equally important is that this retelling has acquired an authority whose provenance is overlooked. Marshall’s work embodies Victorian constructions of class and gender in which feminine authority is conceived, as Margaret Ezell describes it, as “domestic, passive, and modest.”7 Yet for all of its ideological complicity, the biography also presents an example of resistance that further accounts for why we should recollect this particular transformation of a romantic life. It is the form of the life and letters, in which extensive quotation of letters by and to the subject is accompanied by the biographer’s narrative, that her heirs felt it best to respond to competing recollections by Percy’s friends Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Thomas Love Peacock, and Edward John Trelawny that emerged after Mary Shelley’s death.8 The genre, with its mixture of document and commentary, made it possible to defuse the problem of Mary’s elopement with Percy before the suicide of his first wife Harriet. The nineteenth-century life and letters cleverly masks the power of the biographer to recollect a life. While the subject’s own words seemingly resurrect him or her as speaking subject, another level of narrative simultaneously disempowers that subject. Indeed, there exists an interplay between the words of the subject and the authority of the voice of the biographer interpreting the subject. Pamela Clemit suggests that John Gibson Lockhart’s monumental Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (1837–1838) is a notable example of a form that “was fast becoming the dominant nineteenth-century biographical mode.”9 That Lockhart was son-in-law to Scott also points to the fact that the life and letters was often produced by family members, and Mary Shelley was

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eager to include herself in this form of literary endeavor. She conceived of her unfinished biography of her father William Godwin as a life and letters; she wrote the son of William Hazlitt who had recently completed the Literary Remains of his father: “I wish I may perform my task as well as you have done yours.”10 Mary Shelley recognized the economic and cultural capital represented in recollection and the forms of power it allowed. She was well aware of the storm of controversy precipitated by her father’s frank memoir of her mother, published in 1798, which long after had influence over Mary Shelley’s own life and writings. Forms of biography particularly occupied her literary activities during the 1830s, at the very time when what we have come to view as Romanticism gave way to a proto-Victorian perspective. She collaborated with Thomas Moore in writing a life and letters of Byron (1830), which allowed her say in how Percy and her stepsister Claire, who had a child with Byron, were represented. She edited a fictionalized version of Edward John Trelawny’s life, Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), and negotiated for its publication.11 Between 1835 and 1838 she wrote a number of biographies of French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese literary and scientific figures for Dr. Dionysis Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (Sunstein, 323–30). Clemit contends that the posthumous biography of her father she began in 1836 had a clearly political agenda of creating a narrative shaped “according to her father’s beliefs” yet at the same time safeguarded his privacy. It is perhaps the difficulty of translating some of his beliefs to an era unsympathetic to his unorthodox religious beliefs that made her eventually abandon the project and incorporate some of her thoughts about her father into the portrait of Cervantes she created for Lardner.12 Her desire to undertake the biography of her husband was thwarted by Percy’s father, who forbade the writing of a biography as a condition of an allowance to support her son Percy Florence; the life was realized only in a fragmented form of prefaces and notes to her 1839 edition of Percy Shelley’s writings, which can be seen as a version of the life and letters form where the editor’s narrative is relegated to prefaces rather than integrated with the writings of the subject. Not only in her work as editor and biographer but as the author of novels that contain elements of autobiography, Mary Shelley must have realized that to recollect can mean a remembering of a life which reconstructs it to suit the purposes of the survivors and to be responsive to the ideological restraints of a subsequent era. Despite the fact that more than eighty years had passed since Godwin’s publication of the life of her mother, its damning effect on the posthumous reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft in the nineteenth century was not forgotten by her heirs and it is no surprise that her daughter’s own life and letters seeks to guard the respectability of its subject in spite

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of its declarations of openness. In her preface Marshall explains that her biography “has been compiled from the MS. journals and letters” that Sir Percy and Lady Shelley have “entrusted to me, without reserve, for this purpose.”13 Above all, the narrative voice of Marshall, which holds together fragments of Mary Shelley’s writings, takes precedence. To read Marshall’s work critically is to identify the modes of recollection at play. Mary Shelley’s literary authority is subsumed in the name of middle-class respectability and her heirs’ “higher purpose” of consolidating Percy Shelley’s literary reputation. The Shelley family’s agenda of rescuing the poet from infamy is betrayed by the appearance of statements about Percy’s separation from his first wife in the Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in the preface and postscript. In contrast, a Mary Shelley who (it is implied, unlike Harriet) was loyal and subservient to Percy Shelley is presented in the text through Marshall’s perspectives on Mary’s literary authority: that she was not interested in writing, that her post-Percy writings are important for what they convey about him and Byron, and that she was a selfless helper who embodies the Victorian domestic angel. Mary Shelley’s letters and journals are translated as such, and the recollections of those who knew her are cited for support. Marshall’s declaration that she worked “without reserve” masks the narrative of constraint that contained her own activities in writing the life. To begin with, Marshall did not have unlimited access to Mary Shelley’s papers, a part of Lady Shelley’s determined effort to control the content of the biography. Although she was given a selective transcript by Lady Shelley, Marshall may have assumed that she was seeing Mary’s actual manuscripts.14 If Lady Shelley misled Marshall, it was for the higher purpose of protecting her esteemed mother-in-law’s reputation. Even without Lady Shelley’s interventions, “Mrs. Marshall” was bound by larger ideological Victorian bourgeois propriety with respect to constructions of authority, class, and gender. Sylva Norman calls Marshall a lady who “remains wrapped in some obscurity,” and if Marshall is not quite as unknown as Norman suggests, it is telling that information about her appears in the 1897 British Musical Biography and in the Dictionary of National Biography under entries for her husband. Julian Marshall (1836–1903), an amateur musician, “chiefly known by his ‘Annals of Tennis’ (1878), a work of minute and exhaustive research” according to the DNB, had money from the family flax spinning business in Leeds. He contributed essays about music to periodicals and to the first edition of Grove’s dictionary, was a member of the committee for the first Leeds Festival in 1858, and collected engravings and musical autographs. Florence Ashton Thomas (1843–1922) is called “a composer and writer on music.” She studied at the Royal Academy of Music, conducted the concerts of the South Hampstead orchestra (England’s first amateur orchestra), composed

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a fairy operetta (“Prince Sprite”) and a Nocturne for clarinet and orchestra, and set some of Percy Shelley’s lyrics to music. Like her husband, she contributed articles to Grove and to various periodicals, and was the author of a Life of Handel for Hueffer’s Great Musicians Series (1883) and several books of musical exercises. Their wealth meant that the Marshalls were able to maintain a life of privileged leisure, but it is interesting that both British Musical Biography and the DNB establish a distinction between the husband, who is classified as an amateur, and the wife who is characterized through her professional training.15 Marshall may have seemed an unlikely choice, but it can be surmised that it was through the collecting habits of the husband that the Marshalls became friends of Richard Garnett, who was himself brought to the attention of Lady and Sir Percy Shelley in 1859 when he was twenty-four.16 Lady Shelley enlisted his aid in the Shelley Memorials and the Relics of Shelley, and although he wrote essays defending Percy and edited Mary’s short fiction, experience seems to have taught him to resist the call to write their biographies. To this end he asked Florence Marshall in 1882 if she wanted to write Mary’s life; Marshall responded, “I cannot myself help feeling that I would like to undertake the task quand meme, if the needful materials could be obtained, and write the memorial for the love of it! . . . As one warms to the task, one would find it hard not to go on!” (Thurman, 435). She adds with modesty, “I have never properly expressed to you what a compliment I feel it that you should think of entrusting the task to me!” (Thurman, 435–36).17 Garnett seems to have passed along its contents, if not the letter, to Lady Shelley, who wrote on 28 July 1882: I am enchanted with Mrs Marshalls letter—I see that her heart would be in her work—and that is exactly what I want. If she has a love for Mary Shelley without having known her personally—I know that it will become a burning flame when she looks into her soul by reading the journals—that I am anxious should be done only under our roof & when I can answer any questions, which would naturally arise—I believe that no one excepting Shelley perhaps, knew her so well as myself—& I have loved all women for her sake (excepting Miss Westbrook & Mrs Hogg18). (Thurman, 172) However much, as she put it, her “soul panteth after” the idea of Mrs. Marshall writing the biography (Thurman, 172), it was clear that Lady Shelley wanted to control Marshall’s burning flame, and later yet to douse it. When in 1883 Garnett recommended Edward Dowden for the life of Percy Shelley, the Mary Shelley biography became a liability. Norman

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explains that Lady Shelley worried that if Marshall used Shelley and Mary it would call attention away from Edward Dowden’s more important life of Percy Shelley: Dowden complained that “‘if she goes to work now I cannot hope to keep up with her.’ It was arranged that he should win the competition; Dowden published in 1886, Mrs Marshall three years later.”19 But more than stalling her progress, Lady Shelley also had second thoughts about allowing Marshall to undertake the project. Initially all was well. On 1 July 1885 Marshall wrote to Garnett of a trip to Boscombe: “Lady Shelley was exceedingly kind. I enjoyed my visit, and I hope it may be of use. About the projected work I feel in spirits and as if it might ‘come to something’; anyhow I put it in hand at once” (Thurman, 438). One year later a letter to Garnett of 6 September 1886 notes that Mrs. Marshall is “much discouraged” (Thurman, 196), but it is clear that the source of the discouragement came from Lady Shelley herself. On 14 September 1886 Marshall wrote from Boscombe to Garnett: If it would turn out that you are able to run down here, we shall all be very glad, and Lady Shelley especially so. . . . She is in an unsettled frame of mind with regard to my work, and keeps urging me for my own sake to give it up or at any rate not to go on with it yet. The delay she urges for the fear of the difficulties of finding a publisher. I have reassured her all I can on this point, & told her that I have really no fear, & am at any rate willing to risk it. Now however she shifts her ground & says no woman can do the Life properly at all,—that a woman cannot speak strongly enough on some points &c &c. . . . She says she feels she ought not to allow me to deal with the story,—for my sake! I told her I had not accepted the task 3 years ago without considering these things, & I have seen no reason to change the decision I came to then. Then she says she must “think for me,—it is her duty.” (Thurman, 438-39) Marshall all but guesses the truth of her position: [T]he fact is, my dear Mr Garnett, she wants you to do it: she always has wished it, but I think now it is her only wish . . . you have their fullest confidence; secondly because I never write without painfully feeling my own deficiencies. I have had no training and very little practice in literary composition, besides which, and more than which, I am lacking in general reading,— that wide collateral knowledge which must help writers so much to bring out & enforce the varied significance of their subject, and in which you must be supreme. (Thurman, 439–40)

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Presumably dear Mr. Garnett helped smooth things over, but the pressures to conform to Lady Shelley’s view of things were by no means diminished. To a large degree Marshall’s life adheres to Lady Shelley’s firm conviction that “no one excepting Shelley perhaps, knew her so well as myself” (Thurman, 172). In fact Marshall’s text sometimes seems dictated by Jane Shelley: “To live with Mary Shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel. Perfect unselfishness, selflessness indeed, characterised her at all times” (2:311). Lady Shelley is described by Marshall in terms that establish her absolute authority with respect to Mary Shelley by echoing Lady Shelley’s own opinion of herself: “No one, except her son, is living who knew Mary so well and loved her so enthusiastically” (2:310). In spite of Marshall’s diplomatic praise for her “kindly help and sympathy” (1:vi), Lady Shelley must have been difficult to deal with. As has already been suggested, she restricted Marshall’s access to Shelley circle papers, to transcripts, and to the selective and edited Shelley and Mary, a three-volume work that during Jane Shelley’s lifetime existed in an edition of twelve copies. She also may have censored Marshall’s text (Sunstein, 7). Richard Garnett’s point of view no doubt also influenced Marshall. Emily Sunstein suggests that Garnett “fixed the impression of her subsidiary importance” in his Dictionary of National Biography essay, which echoes the sentiments of his 1891 introduction to her tales and stories (Sunstein, 396): “It is customary to regard Mary Shelley’s claims to literary distinction as so entirely rooted and grounded in her husband’s as to constitute a merely parasitic growth upon his fame.”20 At least to twenty-first-century ears Garnett’s defense seems hardly a defense at all. He suggests: It may be unreservedly admitted that her association with Shelley, and her care of his writings and memory after his death, are the strongest of her titles to remembrance. It is further undeniable that the most original of her works is also that which betrays the strongest traces of his influence. Frankenstein was written when her brain, magnetized by his companionship, was capable of an effort never to be repeated. But if the frame of mind which engendered and sustained the work was created by Shelley, the conception was not his, and the diction is dissimilar to his. Both derive from Godwin, and neither is Godwin’s.21 And apart from The Last Man, which is “most representative of Mary Shelley in the character of pining widowhood which it was her destiny to support for the remainder of her life,” “her work did not really interest her. Her heart is not in it.”22 Garnett speaks with the authority of the keeper of manuscripts for the British Library, as a poet and writer of

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biographies, and as someone who possesses the sanctioned approval of Mary Shelley’s son and daughter-in-law. This narrative of the pressures to which Marshall was herself exposed is told at length to make clear the purpose and power of the version of Mary Shelley received by the twentieth century and beyond. And to a certain extent Marshall seems willingly to have adopted the Shelley family orthodoxy. Her working thesis in the life and letters is that Mary Shelley nobly subordinated the demands of her life and career for others; above all, for Percy Shelley. She portrays Mary Shelley as a self-sacrificing Victorian angel of the house: “[N]o woman of like endowments and promise ever abdicated her own individuality in favour of another so transcendently greater” (Marshall, 1:3). Percy’s death is placed at the conclusion of volume 1, yet Mary’s life has a literal and metaphorical second volume that is recollected in such a way that minimizes her independence: “Her existence, from its outset, had been offered up at the shrine of one man. To animate his solitude, to foster his genius, to help—as far as possible—his labours, to companion him in a world that did not understand him,—this had been her life-work, which lay now as a dream behind her, while she awakened to find herself alone with the solitude, the work, the cold unfriendly world, and without Shelley” (2:38). After 1822, then, “Two sheet-anchors of hope she had, and by these she lived. They were, her child—so friendless but for her—and the thought of Shelley’s fame” (2:98). Marshall stresses that “of herself she never seemed to think at all; she lived in and for others. Her gifts and attainments, far from being obtruded, were kept out of sight; modest almost to excess as she was, she knew the secret of putting others at their ease” (2:311–12). As testimony to her insider’s knowledge, she quotes an unnamed “friend” who insists, “I really think she deemed it unwomanly to print and publish; and had it not been for the hard cash which, like so many of her craft, she so often stood in need of, I do not think she would ever have come before the world as an authoress” (2:315–16). Marshall certainly reinforces this view with respect to her treatment of Mary Shelley’s writing after Percy’s death: “The best of Mary’s power spent itself in active life, in ministering to another being, during those eight years with Shelley. What she gained from him, and it was much, was paid back to him a hundredfold. When he was gone . . . she could not call back the freshness of her powers nor the wholeness of her heart” (2:318). And for the most part her writings are treated perfunctorily by Marshall. Perkin Warbeck (1830) is “a work of great ingenuity and research, though hardly so spontaneous in conception as her earlier books,” while Lodore (1835) “is written in a style which is now out of date, and undoubtedly fails to fulfil the promise of power held out by Frankenstein and to some extent by Valperga, but it bears

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on every page the impress of the refinement and sensibility of the author,” along with the “special interest” of autobiographical elements (2:196, 2:264). It is this act of recollection of Mary Shelley on the part of her admirers that has had influence on her subsequent reputation as writer and thinker, in particular, the thought that the later Mary Shelley was politically conservative and unconcerned with literary fame. An enduring legacy of the Victorian Mary Shelley places her writings after Frankenstein into a position that necessarily devalues their worth. Such a view of her fiction has until recently largely been accepted by critics such as Jane Blumberg who argues that in her late fictions Mary Shelley “was finished with the intellectual and emotional struggle that had characterized all her previous work and she settled into an artistically unchallenging, but emotionally tranquil life.”23 An equally influential myth about Mary Shelley, her political quiescence, is another product of the Shelley family hagiography. Marshall makes reference to Mary Shelley’s journal entry for 21 October 1838 as “a kind of profession of faith; a summary of her views of life; the result of her reflections and of her experience”; the passage is a deeply personal meditation on political reform that begins “I have been so often abused by pretended friends for my lukewarmness in ‘the good cause,’ that I disdain to answer them” (2:319). Within her musings she reflects, “If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed. At every risk I have befriended and supported victims to the social system; but I make no boast, for in truth it is simple justice I perform; and so I am still reviled for being worldly,” and concludes, “If I write the above, it is that those who love me may hereafter know that I am not all to blame, nor merit the heavy accusations cast on me for not putting myself forward. I cannot do that; it is against my nature. As well cast me from a precipice and rail at me for not flying” (2:321–22). It is perhaps with the allusion to Mary Wollstonecraft in mind that Marshall comments, “The true success of Mary Shelley’s life was not, therefore, the intellectual triumph of which, during her youth, she had loved to dream, and which at one time seemed to be actually within her grasp, but the moral success of beauty of character” (2:322). Subsequent commentators have been less willing to see this as “a very real victory” (2:322), but they have agreed with Marshall’s reading. Poovey cites the passage as evidence of her “political quiescence,” while Anne Mellor suggests that Mary Shelley “was by temperament a conservative who endorsed a cultural and social tradition based on a model of monarchical democracy, class stability, and organic evolutionary growth.”24 But the journal passage represents a complex statement of her perspective on politics; to read it simply as quiescence is to simplify her subtle understanding

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of the nature of political action. Mary Shelley admits, on some topics, “(especially with regard to my own sex) I am far from making up my own mind” (2:319). But instead of seeing her indecision as a sign of conviction, Marshall and subsequent critics believe it to be timidity. If this simplistic reading represents a curious blind spot on the part of critics, and like the treatment of the fiction, the source of the consensus that Mary Shelley abandoned her radical political beliefs is with Marshall’s Life and Letters. This is not to say that Marshall’s biography is not without considerable merit. It need be remembered that even some of the words Marshall faithfully recorded were already excerpted and it is worth noting that some that were left by Lady Shelley were eventually seen as problematic to Mary Shelley’s reputation. As has already been mentioned, Marshall had access to Lady Shelley’s transcriptions and not to the manuscripts, and in the case of this journal entry, a comparison with Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert’s edition suggests that Lady Shelley deleted portions that mention Percy in a critical light (that her life with him was lonely), are too topical (her repulsion with Chartist Radicals), or are deemed perhaps too personal in expressing her loneliness and her anxiety about attacks on her character by Trelawny.25 Such omissions place her reticence in some perspective beyond mere timidity of character or a ladylike desire to remain uninvolved with political causes. Even more interestingly, the passage is one of several places in the journals where, as Feldman and Scott-Kilvert note, an unknown person later mutilated the journal and deleted phrases present both in Shelley Memorials (1859) and in Marshall’s version: “Then, I recoil from the vulgar abuse of the inimical press; I do more than recoil” and “To hang back, as I do, brings a penalty. I was nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father: Shelley reiterated it. Alone.”26 It is clear that the passage was viewed by the Shelleys and by Marshall as a key statement of her beliefs and therefore had to be recollected with care if not complete accuracy. Critics now have access to the entry in its entirety, thanks to the efforts of Feldman and Scott-Kilvert in their edition of 1987, but the sentiments that Mary Shelley was politically quiescent is an enduring legacy of the efforts of Lady Shelley. It is ironic that what for late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century readers places Mary Shelley in a less glowing light was in part a defensive response to the recollections of some of those traducers Sunstein mentions as tarnishing the reputation of Mary Shelley in her own times. The promulgation of a domestic, passive, and modest Mary Shelley is meant to refute Trelawny’s denunciation in his Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878), as well as to memoirs by Peacock and Hogg published in the late 1850s, which defend Harriet Shelley. Trelawny, who called Jane Shelley a “nasty devil” and Sir Percy a “beer-swilling lout”

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(Sunstein, 392), “shifted the ground so that the woman renowned for heterodoxy, character, and talent came to be thought conventional and more or less deficient” (Sunstein, 393). For Trelawny she was emblematic of self-serving disloyalty. He told Claire Clairmont that she “is the blab of blabs—she lives on hogs wash—what utter failures most people are.”27 If shifting the ground to the conventional was in accord with Lady Shelley’s own agenda, little else was, as David Wright comments: “What really earned Trelawny his reputation as a cad was his portrait of Mary Shelley,” particularly that “the picture of Shelley and Mary as twin souls was blown sky high: ‘. . . she was possessed of the green-eyed monster, jealousy. . . . She used every effort to make Shelley conventional, and to get him to do as others did; her moaning and complaining grieved him, and her society was no solace.’”28 Trelawny’s preoccupation with his own self-fashioning made him indifferent to the cruelty of the attack, and perhaps the fact that many years before Mary turned down his offer of marriage still rankled. Yet Marshall takes a leaf out of his own book; Trelawny himself becomes the means to serve Marshall’s narration of a myth of self-sacrifice. Mary Shelley’s “abundant employment in furthering the work of another,” the assistance she provided Trelawny with his Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), receives an entire chapter in volume 2. Marshall is responding to the Shelleys’ campaign to restore Mary’s reputation with respect to Trelawny’s negative comments by reminding readers of the trouble Mary Shelley went to on his behalf.29 At the same time the account serves to de-emphasize Mary Shelley’s interest in writing in the name of her “devotion to the memory of Shelley and of a golden age which ended at his death” (2:204). And as she sums up Mary Shelley’s life, Marshall stresses that if Percy “never seemed to leave her mind for a moment,” “But of herself she never seemed to think at all; she lived in and for others. Her gifts and attainments, far from being obtruded, were kept out of sight; modest almost to excess as she was, she knew the secret of putting others at their ease” (2:312, 2:311–12). What needs to be recognized is how this version of Mary Shelley represents a recollection by a subsequent age with a specific set of concerns. As Betty Bennett suggests, “the Romantic rebel Mary Shelley is transmuted into the Victorian passive Mary Shelley, considerably modifying potential critical perceptions regarding the relationship between Mary Shelley and her works.”30 It is only recently that Mary Shelley’s reluctance to engage with the political is being rethought along with a revaluation of her writing. The novels that Marshall and so many other critics have dismissed as conformist are being revalued as sites of political engagement. An example of this critical revision is Fiona Stafford’s “Lodore: A Tale of the Present Time?” This article demonstrates that it is “fruitful to extend the consideration of politics beyond issues of gender”

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to see the work “as a moral tale, emphasizing the evils consequent upon an irresponsible life of idle self-indulgence” that questions “whether the new brave world ushered in by the Reform Act promised any real improvement on the old.”31 So much for Shelley as the blab of blabs, and yet the image of the daughter who was not “her mother’s intellectual heir” persists, as is evidenced by a 1998 debate on Mary Shelley’s politics carried out in the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement.32 It is ironic that those who would see Mary Shelley as lacking her husband’s “passion for reforming the world” miss what Marshall seems to have recognized about her subject. Mary Shelley, who was born in 1797, was not a Victorian lady, but a product of an earlier generation; her words do not always fit Marshall’s interpretation. Try as she might to make the life and the writings conform to this reading, some of the letters and journal passages Marshall includes contradict Mary Shelley’s alleged lack of concern for her writing. And such instances allow the voice of Mary Shelley to be heard in spite of all the editorial restraints. Marshall quotes Mary Shelley’s letter to Leigh Hunt describing her attendance at the drama based on Frankenstein in which she announces with Byronic verve, “‘But lo and behold! I found myself famous’” (2:94). In spite of the fact that the “‘story is not well managed,’” she admits “‘I was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience’” (2:95). Ten pages after she dismisses Lodore, Marshall quotes without comment a letter to Maria Gisborne that tells a different story about the novel: “‘The booksellers want me to write another novel, Lodore having succeeded so well’” (2:274). That novel, Falkner (1837), goes unnoticed, and the Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) are mentioned in passing like her lives for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia and her short fiction. Omission takes on a double edge as Marshall acknowledges that Mary Shelley had an active career as a woman of letters and in “spite of her retired life she had come to be looked on as a celebrity, and many distinguished literary people sought her acquaintance” (2:196). These discrepancies between the narrative voice of Marshall and the contents of Mary Shelley’s letters undermine Victorian bourgeois orthodoxy about female authority. Yet the fact that such instances are not readily apparent is a testament to the powers of the narrative voice in the life and letters form to shape a life to its own authority. But there is another possible explanation for why the flaws in her argument are so carefully concealed: If Mary Shelley does not fit, the same might be said for Florence Marshall whose own career as a composer and conductor was itself unconventional. To look closely at her work is to recognize that there are some intriguing slippages in her account, as in, for example, her insistence that if Mary had not married Percy so early she might have made something more of herself: “Not only has his name

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overshadowed her, but the circumstances of her association with him were such as to check to a considerable extent her own sources of invention and activity. Had that freedom been her lot in which her mother’s destiny shaped itself, her talents must have asserted themselves as not inferior, as in some respects superior, to those of Mary Wollstonecraft” (Marshall, 1:2–3). Like Marshall, whose achievements shine out even as they are subsumed under her husband’s name, the narrative of selfless service has a fascinating subtext. Marshall seems to recollect her own position and rid herself of Lady Shelley’s influence when she reflects, “As an author Mary Shelley did not accomplish all that was expected of her. . . . [I]t was in imaginative work that she had aspired to excel, and in which both Shelley and Godwin had urged her to persevere, confident that she could achieve a brilliant success.” Following the examples presented to her by Gilfillan and Garnett, Marshall believes that only in Frankenstein “has she left an abiding mark on literature.” But she does not accept Garnett’s suggestion that its exceptional status can be attributed to the fact her brain was magnetized by Percy. Marshall maintains “her powers were very great, her culture very extensive, her ambition very high” (2:314). Marshall might be enacting this subversion unconsciously, but the closeness of the comment to her own experience suggests that she is writing as a Victorian woman who is aware of the price of the constraints of marriage and respectability. To wonder that Mary Shelley “did not accomplish all that was expected of her” (2:314) leads her to ascribe the “shrinking and sensitive retiringness of nature” so commonly elicited by the question to a friend (2:314). The attribution seems a very deliberate act on Marshall’s part. Having positioned the accepted view with another authority, she boldly provides her own point of view on the matter: “But a true cause lay deeper still, and may afford a clue to more puzzles than this one. What Mary Godwin might have become had she remained Mary Godwin for six or eight years longer it is impossible now to do more than guess at. But the free growth of her own original nature was checked and a new bent given to it by her early union with Shelley” (Marshall, 2:316). This one comment, carefully contained within so much that is respectful to the Shelley family, speaks volumes about the position of middle-class British women in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In recognizing “the free growth” of a woman’s “own original nature,” Marshall indicates her willingness to see Mary Shelley as something more than the self-sacrificing conformist that Marshall herself so willingly promotes. Marshall’s own position prevents her from recognizing that the growth was not as checked and bent out of shape as she thought. Yet paradoxically her perspective, as locked as it is within Victorian ideology, allows for a more complex reading of Mary Shelley than many later critics have admitted. Lyndall Gordon points out, “Women’s lives deviate from the set stories of

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traditional biography”; therefore, she proposes “that what is most distinctive in women’s lives is precisely what is most hidden.”33 For all of her seeming commitment to the set stories, Marshall anticipates Gordon’s location of what is concealed “not only from the glare of fame, but hidden from the daylight aspect which women present for their protection,” but as a product of her age she is not at liberty to be as frank as Gordon.34 If it is difficult to read against the biographer’s stated interpretations, doing so unveils the ideological underpinnings of Victorian recollection as well as their own potential to undo themselves. That potential seems to have been ignored. Despite a 12 October 1905 letter from Garnett to Dowden about the need for “a new edition of Mrs. Marshall’s biography” (Thurman, 266), the text was not reprinted. While Marshall’s work is no longer considered authoritative by scholars, I have attempted to demonstrate her unacknowledged influence over subsequent readings of Mary Shelley’s life. I do not mean to dismiss Florence Marshall’s achievement. Rather I want to argue that it is important to understand the pressures she faced, the milieu in which she worked in producing her recollections. If we need to appreciate the forces that created her narrative and reject some of its fictions, it is also a work to be admired for its scholarship, and for its subversions. We need to recollect the complicated cultural forces that produced the writing of the biography and Mrs. Marshall herself. Through this particular example of the Victorian writing of a woman’s life we can see the dominance of the romantic ideology of self even as her heirs and biographer seek to rewrite that self into a narrative of idolatry which “vanquished and enthralled” and “narrowed the extent of her own genius.”35 The example of Mary Shelley and of her biographer Florence Marshall reminds us that we need pay attention not only to the forces that formed them but also to those which shape our own reception of them.

NOTES 1. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 48. 2. Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 6. Hereafter cited in the text parenthetically by page number. 3. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 116. 4. Sunstein suggests that Lady Shelley carried these activities to an extreme and “insisted that Mary Shelley had been a saint, claiming, for instance, that a

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pencil portrait of Mary that Sir Percy and she had found at Casa Magni had been worshipped as the Virgin by a local peasant” (395). She describes how “Jane made her boudoir into a museum displaying relics, manuscripts, and portraits, an entirely appropriate undertaking if she had not called it ‘the sanctum’ and expected admittees to be church-reverent” (389). 5. George Gilfillan, “Mrs. Shelley,” in Modern Literature and Literary Men, Being a Second Gallery of Literary Portraits, 3d American ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 258. 6. Ibid., 262. 7. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 103. 8. Hogg’s biography was commissioned by Lady Shelley, but she was so displeased by his account that she dissociated herself from the project. This experience may, in part, account for why more than thirty years elapsed between Mary Shelley’s death and the writing of the biographies of Mary and Percy. See Sylva Norman, The Flight of the Skylark: The Development of Shelley’s Reputation (London: Max Reinhardt and University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 195-201. 9. Pamela Clemit, Introduction to Godwin, in Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries, vol. 1 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), xii. 10. Quoted in ibid. 11. See Paula Feldman’s “Biography and the Literary Executor: The Case of Mary Shelley,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 72 (1978): 287–97; and “Mary Shelley and the Genesis of Moore’s Life of Byron,” Studies in English Literature 20 (1980): 611–20. 12. Clemit, Introduction to Godwin, xii, xiii–xiv. 13. Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1889), 1:v. Hereafter cited in the text parenthetically by volume and page number(s). 14. This point has been suggested to me by Paula Feldman. 15. Norman, The Flight of the Skylark, 225. For biographical information about Florence Marshall, see Charles Welch, “Marshall, Julian,” in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920); and James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British Musical Biography (London: William Reeves, 1897). 16. William R. Thurman Jr., Letters about Shelley from the Richard Garnett Papers, University of Texas (Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Austin, 1972), 9. Hereafter cited in the text by page number. For information about Garnett, see Carolyn Heilbrun, The Garnett Family (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), esp. 37–64. Heilbrun speculates that Lady Shelley may have been led to Garnett by his sonnet to Percy Shelley in Io in Egypt (54).

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17. A letter from Sir Percy on 30 April suggests that she had begun research on Mary Shelley even before her May letter (Thurman, 170–71). 18. Miss Westbrook is Eliza, the sister of Harriet Shelley. See Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Quartet Books, 1976), 353–56. Mrs. Hogg is Jane Williams, whose companion Edward drowned with Percy Shelley. She later married Percy’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg and caused Mary Shelley much grief by spreading gossip about her. A source of information is Joan Rees, Shelley’s Jane Williams (London: William Kimber, 1985). 19. Norman, The Flight of the Skylark, 225; Charles Kegan Paul was commissioned in the 1870s to write William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries (2 vols., 1876); he also produced an edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters to Gilbert Imlay, published in 1879, which contains a memoir of Wollstonecraft (Sunstein, 392). 20. Quoted from Richard Garnett, Introduction to Tales and Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (London: William Patterson, 1891), v. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., vii–viii, vii. 23. Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley’s Early Novels (London: Macmillan, 1993), 223. For examples of more sympathetic readings of Shelley’s later fiction, see the essays in the Mary Shelley Bicentenary Issue of Romanticism 3.2 (1997) and the editorial material included in Mary Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, 8 vols., ed. Nora Crook and Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996). Some recent volumes of essays are Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, eds., Mary Shelley in Her Times (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O’Dea, eds., Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein (Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses, 1997); and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, ed., Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner (London: Macmillan, 2000). 24. Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 115; and Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988), 211. 25. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (1987; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 552–59. 26. Ibid., 554n. 27. Quoted in ibid., 558n. 28. Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 19. Mary Shelley privately voiced her estimation of Trelawny’s character: “[e]ndued with genius—great force of character & power of feeling but destroyed by being nothing—destroyed by envy & internal disatisfaction” (Shelley, Journals of Mary Shelley, 526–27).

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29. Marshall blames the change in his opinion on his own infirmities: “Greek fevers and gunshot wounds told on the ‘Pirate’s’ disposition as well as on his constitution” (2:231). 30. Betty T. Bennett, “Feminism and Editing: Finding Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Editor And?/Or? the Text,” in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 85. 31. Fiona Stafford, “Lodore: A Tale of the Present Time?” Romanticism 3 (1997): 209, 215, 218. 32. See Miranda Seymour, Review of “Hyenas in Petticoats,” National Portrait Gallery, Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 1998, and subsequent letters by Judith Chernaik (Times Literary Supplement, 16 January 1998 and 6 February 1998) and by Pamela Clemit (Times Literary Supplement, 30 January 1998). 33. Lyndall Gordon, “Women’s Lives: The Unmapped Country,” in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 96. 34. Ibid., 96–97. 35. Gilfillan, “Mrs. Shelley,” 258.

3 Between Action and Inaction: The “Performance” of the Prima Donna in E l i o t ’s C l o s e t D r a m a Grace Kehler

Published simultaneously in Macmillan’s and the Atlantic Monthly of 1871, Armgart comprises George Eliot’s single use of the fully dramatic form, though the cast, especially the title character, enacts one of the social and cultural issues that recurs in Eliot’s literature, that of possible and appropriate action for women. Typically, Eliot offers multiple critiques of education, morality, sexuality, or work, tacitly or explicitly endorsing nineteenth-century feminist grievances against a masculinist society that conspires to restrict women’s lives and minds. Yet while the writings of this intelligent and acclaimed author protest against wasted feminine potential, they proceed cautiously, even ambivalently, in the construction of exceptional women who achieve professional success.1 Of these, Armgart constitutes an early and important example of Eliot’s literary inquiry into both the “Woman Question” and that of agency. The title character, a young prima donna, successfully makes her operatic debut in a trouser role, but soon afterward loses her singing voice. The terse drama, all of which takes place in the singer’s private salon, explores Armgart’s triumph and anguish in five brief scenes. The first two portray the successful singer in dialogue with, respectively, her singing teacher Leo and her persistent suitor Graf Dornberg. Shifting to loss and its intense accompanying emotions, the final three scenes highlight Armgart and her relationship with 65

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her lame cousin and companion Walpurga. Both preceding and succeeding Armgart’s traumatic voice loss, the title character self-consciously reflects on the available roles for women (onstage and offstage), scorning all but the professional actress’s life as narrow and insignificant. Her perspective, though, is made relative by the three other primary speakers (Leo, the Graf, and Walpurga), who rebut her perspective, and by the form in which it is presented: the verse or closet drama. This genre, though it boasted little success in theaters and rarely made it to the stage, was an important form of Romantic experimentation that several major Victorians subsequently used. A form attentive to both internal and external conflict, the verse drama explores contemporary anxieties and debates about agency, especially as conceived in the aftermath of the French Revolution.2 It brought into sharp focus the equally dire consequences of rigid hierarchy and extreme individualism; additionally, the bloody-mindedness of royalty and “reformers” underscored the problem of translating cogent theory—in this case the rights of the lower- and middle-class individual—into sound practice. Thematically and formally, the verse drama explores revolutionary questions of and failures in reformulating agency and hierarchy. As a result, conflicting ideologies are key to this genre, which certainly may favor a particular voice but seldom without dramatizing its possibilities and limitations. Both Romantic and Victorian dramatic writers make both action and subjectivity a problem to be examined, inquiring into not just the desirable conduct of a particular character, but also into the social forces that determine class and gender propriety.3 This unique tension between actions and words at the level of content achieves heightened poignancy in the verse drama’s own repeated fate: that of describing actions that did not receive representation on the contemporary stage. In this chapter I argue that Armgart falls within a broadly defined revolutionary aesthetics, the verse drama harboring multiple evocations of reformers and reconceptions of rank, authority, and gender roles: notably Christoph von Gluck and Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s reform operas and Ludwig van Beethoven’s revolutionary Fidelio, which subtend Armgart’s own conflicts. These operatic pre-texts evoke the historical contests between composers and performers for artistic control and introduce a still fascinating gender enigma, the female stage transvestite who replaced the eighteenth-century castrato. Drawing on period journal articles and opera histories, I examine Armgart’s politically charged representations of performance and gender as a recurrence to Romantic verse dramas that test forms and rhetoric of action: specifically, Armgart investigates the subversive nuances of the female performer of transvestite operas and the period responses that successfully bracketed inflammatory performances. As a verse drama poised between action and inaction, between logomachy and quantifiable effects of recurrent historical struggles, Armgart places onstage

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and offstage performance within a scene of struggle and compromise that only partially reflects the desires and endeavors of the individual agent. The play, in fact, takes the form of scenes of contest, and I will look at three of these—between singer and teacher-composer (Armgart and Leo), between prospective lovers (Armgart and Graf Dornberg), and between the professional and the domestic woman (Armgart and her companion Walpurga)— to link them with historical ideas and relationships that shape and often limit action.

I Despite Armgart’s setting exclusively in the prima donna’s home, this verse drama bears traces of eighteenth-century discourses on the opera and of the historical substitution of the prima donna for the eunuch singer or castrato. Unmistakably, opera references constitute an (intertextual) frame for the drama, beginning with Armgart’s debut in Christoph von Gluck’s Orfeo and concluding with an allusion to Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s (historical) performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio.4 This framing is repeated at the visual level, for the stage instructions concerning Armgart’s salon in which all five scenes take place specify that “[b]ronze busts of Beethoven and Gluck” appear opposite one another. If neither these composers nor their respective eighteenth-century operas perform highly conspicuous roles in the body of the drama after Armgart and Leo’s debate over interpretations of Gluck, the operas’ performance histories and plots resonate with the issues of gender and authority that visibly dominate Eliot’s play. Furthermore, the verbal sparring between teacher and student establishes the dialectical mode that not only structures the drama, but additionally connects it to operatic contests begun in the age of castrati supremacy: the age of the late baroque opera, equally notable for its vocal embellishments and for its alterations in the hands of reformers such as Calzabigi and Gluck. The interpretive contests of Eliot’s drama begin with the evaluation Leo offers of his voice pupil’s debut. He commends Armgart on her execution and histrionics while disapproving of the interpretive license she takes, the sort of license accorded to eighteenth-century vocalists. Beginning with his attack on her improvised trill, Leo responds “sardonically” to her claim that Gluck’s “immortal pulse stirred” in hers during the performance; thereafter he accuses her of betraying her role as an artist by pandering to the “low” taste of her audience: Will you ask the house To teach you singing? Quit your Orpheus then, And sing in farces grown to operas,

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Grace Kehler Where all the prurience of the full-fed mob Is tickled with melodic impudence: Jerk forth burlesque bravuras, square your arms Akimbo with a tavern wench’s grace, And set the splendid compass of your voice To lyric jigs. Go to! I thought you meant To be an artist—lift your audience To see your vision, not trick forth a show To please the grossest taste of grossest numbers.5

His responses exceed that of a teacher who produces a successful singer with a well-trained voice, and precisely the historical underpinnings of Leo’s overdetermined rebuttals deserve scrutiny. A former—and failed— composer, Leo nonetheless attempts to perpetuate the reform principles of Gluck and Calzabigi, who had an immense practical and ideological role in restructuring eighteenth-century opera and redefining artistry. The importance of Gluck for Armgart lies in his legendary—and, in part, retrospectively glorified—stature as a reformer, a stature that inhabits a space somewhere between actual historical developments and the myths reformers circulated about themselves. Both his music and his theories of reform impressed Hector Berlioz, who revived select operas of Gluck during the 1850s and 1860s, and these original notions of reform as well as Berlioz’s valorization of them underwrite the text of Armgart. To begin with Gluck, admiring historians credit him with revising overtures, recitatives, choral music, and arias in his seven works known as the “reform operas.” The first of these works, Orfeo (1762), continues the baroque tradition of adopting myths for libretti, allowing the operatic stars to appear as heroes or demigods. Unlike most eighteenth-century operas, however, Orfeo moves away from vocal spectacles and a libretto marked by intricate complications to highlight the emotional drama of the tightly focused plot: the death of Euridice, Orpheus’s reunion with and rescue of his beloved wife from Hades, and her second death and resurrection. Whereas Calazbigi’s “economy of language” enabled a similar simplicity in Gluck’s composition and a close correspondence between words and music,6 much of late baroque opera cultivated audience attentiveness less in terms of “what was sung, than how it was sung.”7 Libretti were set and reset by any number of composers—one of Pietro Metastasio’s libretti by more than fifty—and the scores tended to consist of arias that were loosely connected by recitativo secco (or sung speech) and were designed to suit and exhibit a specific castrato’s voice.8 Gluck, though not given to excessive ornamentation, wrote many of these conventional operas before collaborating with the librettist Calzabigi, who assisted in Gluck’s audible shift in compositional style and in the famous reform

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treatises.9 If their collaboration advanced an ideal that gained in popularity throughout nineteenth century—that of the opera score as a unique and dramatically unified work of art—concomitantly they sought to subordinate the virtuoso’s art that, in spite of challenges, had shaped opera for a century.10 The score became a site at which the composer waged his battle for recognition and status in the musical world. According to their own treatises, Gluck and Calzabigi represent a concerted effort to revolutionize eighteenth-century taste and to circumscribe the power invested in the castrati. Their shared goals and ideological stance are detailed in the preface to Alceste, their second reform opera, which refined the compositional practices begun in Orfeo. Gluck wrote: [W]hen I undertook to write the music for Alceste, I resolved to divest it entirely of all those abuses, introduced into it either by the mistaken vanity of singers or by the too great complaisance of composers, which have so long disfigured Italian opera and made of the most splendid and most beautiful of spectacles the most ridiculous and wearisome. I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments. . . . Thus I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello, nor to hold him up in the middle of a word on a vowel favourable to his voice, nor to make display of the agility of his fine voice in some longdrawn passage, nor to wait while the orchestra gives him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. . . . [I]n short, I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain.11 This treatise, with its strenuous objection to the bel canto of the castrato, perpetuates a long tradition of criticism and satire of the virtuoso, linking his execution, if not voice, with a transgressive aesthetic that interferes with reasonable communication: that of specific words and ideas as well as that of continuously developing drama. Yet the vocalises, pauses, and dramatic disjunctions that raise Gluck’s ire derive from an alternative aesthetic of generating drama and communicating emotion. Operas were written to suit a particular singer and tessitura, and singers had the liberty of embellishing the melodic line of the arias as they saw fit. As outlined by the renowned teacher Tosi in Observations on the Florid Song, the castrato’s training was strenuous and exacting, intent on transforming him from a student to a “master” of his art.12 In partial fulfillment of this expectation, the castrato was expected to know when to insert and how

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to compose (spontaneously and premeditatively) trills (shakes), divisions, and graces; and he was required to vary his embellishments in repeated music, as in the three-part da capo aria, with its recurrence to the first section.13 Ridding opera of all vocal “abuses,” as Gluck requires, necessarily entails harnessing the voice to a score, which has increased its authority and inversely decreased its malleability. The sound of the singing voice, of course, remains stubbornly individual, but this distinctiveness must vie with that of the composer and librettist, who have begun to insist on a degree of uniform attention to their words and their notes. Represented as vocal anarchy, florid art and the castrato’s role of cocreator of scores come under attack. The far-reaching implications of this aesthetic contest emerged in the late nineteenth century, when the set score and the baton-wielding conductor appeared standard features of the opera. Wagnerian innovations, such as the dimmed theater, increased the composer’s control over performance by limiting the opportunities for interactions between singers and audiences. Previously, audiences had been prone to socialize during performances, behavior suggesting a measure of indifference to the baroque plots of melodrama and intrigue, yet the dynamics between them and the singers as well as those among the singers were volatile and exciting—an improvised drama, as it were. Unlike current audience members (especially in English-speaking countries) who are acutely aware of their spectator roles—the watching transmuting into interaction only at culturally acceptable noise breaks, like the end of an act or of an exceptionally well-sung air—eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century audiences were confident in the knowledge that they determined the fate of an opera.14 Personal conversations and shouted commentary took place concomitant with the performance and, if the opera or the singer did not suit their taste, audience members were quick to riot or to demand a different opera. In addition, the castrati frequently staged a drama of competition, vying with one another to produce the most complex coloratura, to provide unprecedented variations in arias, and to sing astonishingly high notes.15 Critics, claques, and general operagoers encouraged and evaluated these performances, determining the financial success or failure of both singers and operas. Thus public taste, coupled with the exotic voices of the castrati, was a producer of ideologies, baroque operas, and star systems, and composers served the system, often while lamenting or satirizing the vulgar state into which opera had sunk. Reform theories, however, must not be read in isolation, apart from historical practice and the realization that opera continually evolves, with or without explicit ties to theory. The castrato, the composer, and the opera matured together, singer and voice occupying the foreground, because they offered a sound rated more unusual and beautiful than what

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the composer could offer. As a result, composers, even reformers, constructed scores with an ear to the grain of the voice, balancing stringent demands for change with practical accommodations of singers. Authoritative poses under scrutiny, therefore, may yield surprisingly irresolute portraits of the opera in process. For instance, the debut of Orfeo met the standards of Gluck and Calzabigi not because they subdued a singer given to vocal display, but because Gaetano Guadagni, the chosen Orpheus, had already arrived at strict principles of vocal and dramatic efficacy—principles he had derived from David Garrick and which, coincidentally, proved amenable to the reformers’ aims and views of bel canto.16 In addition, the reformers displayed their own flexibility, for they did not subject all singers to a single Orfeo score: After fashioning the original score for a mezzo castrato, Gluck transposed it for a soprano castrato (Giuseppe Millico) and then rewrote it as Orfée, inserting new arias, for a Parisian tenor. It is precisely because of some of the unique vocal traits of the first performers of Orpheus that Gluck’s opera poses difficulties for singers up to and including the present day. The institution of the castrato is obsolete, and modern tenors are rarely capable of singing the title role as written for the Parisian haute contre Joseph LeGros at an elevated tessitura, which displayed his exceptional high notes and obscured his weak middle range. Patricia Howard has commented on the irony that Gluck twice composed an opera for voices that ceased to exist in the nineteenth century;17 an equally important point is that his first reform opera continued to undergo revision and transposition to accommodate the available voices. In the nineteenth century, Berlioz entered into this process, reworking and amalgamating the Italian and the Parisian scores of Orfeo to adapt the opera for the female, dramatic mezzo-soprano. Specifically, he designed it for Pauline Viardot-Garcia—the singer alluded to at the conclusion of Armgart—perhaps the most famous Orpheus as well as a superior Fidelio of the century. The collaboration of Berlioz and Viardot-Garcia overwrites, literally and figuratively, the castrato history and informs the relationship of Armgart and Leo, for the nineteenth-century Orfeo continues the previous century’s debate about authority and artistry. In both the historical and the fictional representations, a male musical colleague of the cantatrice opposes her for daring to revive, to insert into the opera, ornaments belonging to the (baroque) bel canto tradition. In Armgart, the verbal power struggle has its inception in the heroine’s claim that “Gluck sang, not listened,” that singer and composer may occupy not merely equivalent positions but the same creative role, a concept that is immediately (and “sardonically”) qualified by Leo: “Ay, ay but mark you this: / It was not part of him—that trill you made / In spite of me and reason!”18 The slippage in Leo’s speech from “him” to “me” mirrors and challenges Armgart’s identification with the position of composer by confining the

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process of creativity to the studio where singers and scores are made. In Armgart’s configuration there is, at the very least, duality, while in Leo’s there is hierarchy—composer, score, teacher, singer—that seeks to efface the “double drama” of performance, its fluidity, its unpredictability. His containment strategy consists of an appeal to the authority of the original composer, which, however, places Leo in the ironic position of taking refuge behind a changing score, one that was partially determined by shifts in public taste and the availability and talents of the era’s singers. The unusual castrato voice and its (unnaturally produced) capacity for breath control may have been a factor in the tenor and soprano move away from bel canto, but certain singers and teachers carried on the tradition. Nineteenth-century critics tend to offer Angelica Catalani as an infelicitous example of bel canto singing and the highly musical Garcia family as symbols of serious artistry. All of the Garcias have come down to posterity as compelling, multitalented people, but Pauline ViardotGarcia had the distinction of being regarded as an intellectual both in performance and off the stage. A twentieth-century biographer, April FitzLyon, tells of public consternation when Viardot-Garcia refused to step out of character and deliver an aria encore, a manifestation of dramatic restraint and firm artistic standards of which the musical elite, including Berlioz, approved.19 Assessing her interpretation of Orpheus, Berlioz pays tribute to her voice, vocalization, sensibility, gestures, and facial expressions, all of which prove her rarity and distinction from the “vulgar singers,” and then adds a caveat: But why, after so much praise, should it now be necessary to reproach Mme. Viardot with a deplorable feature of her performance, occurring at the end of this air [J’ai perdu mon Euridice]? It consists of a change, produced by a holding note which she makes upon the high G, and which obliges the orchestra to stop, instead of proceeding precipitously towards the conclusion, as Gluck had written; and which leads to a modification of the harmony, as well as to the substitution of the chord of the dominant for that of the sixth upon the subdominant: in short, it is the contrary of what Gluck intended. Why should there also be some textual alterations; and a few misplaced roulades in a recitative to reproach her with? Alas, why!20 (emphasis added) Like Armgart’s contentious trill, Viardot-Garcia’s ornamentation ignites a self-appointed male defendant of what Gluck had written, of what he had intended. And with Berlioz, as his Autobiography reveals, intentionality and static scores were obsessions; recounting his days as a young would-be composer, Berlioz figures himself as the “priest” of Gluck’s

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music and boasts of the instances in which he immediately and volubly “apostrophised the delinquents” in the orchestra if any note or instrument was changed.21 The word priest captures perfectly the position he aspired to, that of the privileged interpreter of the deceased master’s works. As in the spiritual hierarchy, the priest in Berlioz’s ideal musical realm acts in lieu of the absent ultimate authority, presiding unquestioningly over the general public and musical colleagues. Berlioz, scrupulously, even provides a description of the desired relationship between the original and later artists, emphasizing that “when any alteration in a great work is required it should be made by the very greatest artists only; . . . correction should come from above, never from below.”22 Yet, if we rely exclusively on his or on the fictional Leo’s definitions of great artists, we end up with a tautology or an impasse. In the first case, one (man) assumes the sole right to interpret and judge particular performances, while in the second the contradictions that inhere in the composers’ definitions disqualify each aspirant to interpretive authority. To clarify the latter point, we may focus on the condescension of Berlioz and his fictional counterpart, Leo, another self-appointed “priest” of music, toward the prima donna and the public.23 In Leo’s representations, the audience is a prurient “full-fed mob” that is “tickled with melodic impudence” and lacks judgment “till rapture brings a reason”— sentiments that accord with those of Berlioz.24 Thus, beginning with the premise that this emotionally volatile, uninformed audience approved Armgart’s improvised trill, Leo questions her status as an artist. This process of reasoning is retrograde insofar as it aims at effacing both the intensive training of the prima donna—which qualifies her for performance or for Leo’s role of teaching—and opera’s dependence on the public sector for financial support, for attendance, in short, for existence.25 The crucial performer–audience dynamic of the opera is hinted at by the Graf, who requests a narration of the “double drama” of Armgart’s debut, and by Leo himself, who tacitly acknowledges the power of the listener in his recollection that, as a composer, he “wrote for silence.”26 A work must be heard and appraised not just by the cognoscenti but also by the theater ticket holders of all classes, who are free to defer to the experts or to exercise independent judgment; utter condescension to the public ineluctably places the authority figure in an impossible position. For example, Berlioz, who neither wrote nor conducted for silence, revived Gluck’s opera to instant and widespread success in which he took a qualified pleasure. Having presumed unequivocal audience indifference to the masterpieces, Berlioz took to lamenting that Orphée was in vogue and that “Monsieur Prud’homme or a Polonius” were merely “pretending to understand and feel.”27 Pretense and sincerity, however, are notoriously slippery standards of evaluation, which allow for the disqualification of any

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number of musicians and critics, including Berlioz’s and Leo’s idealized reformers. Calzabigi vacillated between “adulation” and “scathing criticism” of the Court Poet, Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti comprised one target of Calzabigi’s reforms but whose status too might have incited rivalry on the part of the younger poet.28 In this respect, Gluck is also somewhat enigmatic, for, according to Howard, he displayed no signs of discontent with contemporary opera or with Metastasio’s libretti, many of which he set to music, until he worked with Calzabigi.29 Complicating the issue still further, Gluck’s compositional practices even during the reform period suggest an artistry informed by diverse aesthetics, including those of immediate and popular appeal. But this art does not so much compromise itself by conflating high theory with popular taste and economic exigencies as reveal the workings of reform or revolution that necessarily occur within a practical context. Eliot’s drama similarly qualifies appeals to highbrow or legitimate artistry as Leo attempts to gain ascendency over the successful debutante. His expression of scorn for the audience is closely followed by his derision of the singer’s art as lowbrow culture, specializing in “burlesque bravuras” and “lyric jigs,” or as an unreasonable attempt to combine the natural with high culture. Responding to Armgart’s defense of her trill—“O I trilled / At nature’s prompting, like the nightingales”—he queries, “are bird-beaks lips?”30 His sarcasm is made all the more poignant by the fact that the vocal imitation of the nightingale’s trill was a specialty of the castrati.31 Thus his query is less rhetorical than confrontational, a display of power reinforced during their next exchange, in which the singer delineates her own dissatisfaction with the audience, validating Leo’s perception, only to be silenced once again: Peace, now, peace! I hate my phrases to be smothered o’er With sauce of paraphrase, my sober tune Made bass to rambling trebles, showering down In endless demi-semi-quavers.32 Armgart does not, in fact, paraphrase Leo’s account of the opera as seen from an offstage perspective, but describes instead her reaction to the audience as a performer. Under the tutelage of Leo, though, her interpretations of Gluck or her own performance meet with objections and “reform” rhetoric. Her “paraphrase” is verbal, yet he depicts it as musical and frivolous, as “rambling trebles” and “endless demi-semi-quavers,” as the despised coloratura of bel canto, in contrast with his “sober tune.” Leo, in this attempt to define and limit Armgart’s musical role, has intertextual connections with Gluck, Beethoven, and Berlioz, but also, as I will

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argue later, intratextual links with the Graf, Walpurga, and Armgart herself. Each, in turn, appeals to his or her desired hierarchy, arguing for its inevitableness (as in Gluck’s appeal to “sense and reason” in the preface to Alceste), and the drama may be read as a series of negotiations about social and power positions (and the role of love) that have provisional rather than absolute resolutions.

II Mindfulness of such recurrent competition and alteration is crucial when examining an opera that is repeated and reinterpreted over the years. The endeavors of composers to control singers, for example, underwrite Orfeo, but their agendas are further dialogized with the libretto and with specific performances. For the performer of the title role, the libretto acts self-reflexively, foregrounding the art of singing and paying tribute to the singer’s power.33 With this dramatic focus on the eponym, a virtuoso performer has the opportunity of bringing together her prima donna status with that of the legendary singer whose voice reputedly moved even the gods, and thus effected the restoration of his dead wife. This Orpheus is the supreme singer, his voice the ultimate symbol of the miraculous, transcendent powers of song. Orpheus’s voice, at its most potent in sonorous lament, dissolves the opposition between life and death and, as sung by the prima donna, that between the sexes. Giving voice to the plaintive laments of Orpheus, the prima donna enters into a doubly mythological space, echoing the unheard sounds of both the Greek hero and the castrato, whose own voice had found a firm place in legend by the nineteenth century. Even as Orpheus contributes to the rebirth of Euridice, then, the prima donna reanimates operatic myth. As Leo intimates when he is commending rather than correcting Armgart, one of the great stage triumphs ensues when a merger of the static and the active, of the role and the interpreter, shows new ways to mean: Armgart stood As if she had been new-created there And found her voice which found a melody. The minx! Gluck had not written, nor I taught: Orpheus was Armgart, Armgart Orpheus.34 It is Orpheus, as much as Armgart, who is “new-created” on the stage, for the construction of the opera is such that the success of the whole of it hinges on the interpretation of the principal role. If the prima donna of

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the nineteenth century lacked the extensive vocal license granted to the castrato, still performance lends itself to a process in which her voice sounds uniquely in the midst of myriad informing voices—those of composers, reformers, bel canto advocates, critics, and audiences. One intriguing locus of conflict between old and new in the nineteenth-century role of Orpheus is its transformation into a breeches part, accompanied by the reinstated mezzo-soprano voice. Breeches or trouser roles were not unusual in this century’s dramas or its operas, for the many transvestite roles encompassed female Hamlets, Iagos, Don Giovannis, and Romeos. Bellini’s Romeo was created for Giuditta Pasta, and cross-dressing roles like Leonore’s in Fidelio or Gilda’s in Rigoletto were written into the operas.35 Pat Rogers combines two of the prevalent (recent) readings of the cross-dresser: He notes her implicit protest “against the limitations of propriety at large, which so constricted the available modes of being, personal and existential, for women everywhere.”36 Like several other critics, though, Rogers concludes that the effect of the stage transvestite on the (male) public tends to be erotic and to uphold the status quo, illustrating this claim with verses that make actresses’ legs the toast of the town.37 One gets this sense of prurient lipsmacking and pseudovoyeurism in operatic reviews of various Cherubinos (played by women, who, due to plot exigencies, are required to pose first as men and then as men disguised as women) and in reviews of the performances of Madame Vestri, a one-time opera singer who gained her fame in dramas and musicals with trouser roles, notably the travesty Don Giovanni in London.38 Such fascination could be complicated, though, by actresses’ relations to the current standards of attractiveness, which, in several instances, confined certain performers to trouser roles precisely because of their lack of conventional, feminine allure. As Lord Mount-Edgcumbe reports, Pisaroni, the “finest contralto” of her era, proved “too plain” to be permitted women’s operatic roles in England, though “to those who only listened she gave unqualified satisfaction”; in 1832, Marioni rivaled Pisaroni “in voice, singing and ugliness, performing only in male characters.”39 In such cases, the trouser roles become a symbol of sexual inadequacy, though sartorial factors such as tights might compensate the lecherous viewer for the singer’s purportedly inadequate face and figure, or cross-dressing in and of itself might provide spice. The permutations of the spectacle of sex and the desires that precede and succeed it are legion, and the plain-featured transvestite—including the fictional Armgart, who has “a goodly length of limb” but “[n]ot a pretty face!”—refocuses attention on those physically deprecated but vocally prized.40 Reading the opera transvestite always requires contemplation of artistry as well as seduction; and in the nineteenth century, many reputable journals and memoirs granted serious consideration to prominent

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lyric actresses such as Giuditta Pasta and Viardot-Garcia whether they performed in female or in trouser roles. Further, these artistic assessments declined the opportunity to remark on the disparity between gender and role.41 Viardot-Garcia’s Orpheus was certainly judged for its vocal and dramatic efficacy, and contemporary critics were virtually unanimous in proclaiming her representation the definitive one. In the words of the overwhelmed Athenaeum critic, nothing on the contemporary stage equaled her Orpheus, and nothing previous could have surpassed it.42 This critical act of using superlatives to describe Viardot-Garcia, corresponding with the social trend of lionizing her, however, does not signal an unequivocally enlightened attitude toward artists and entertainers any more than audience interest in cross-dressing actresses. The fervent homage given to an illustrious prima donna harks back to the earlier worship of the castrato, who remains a disturbing predecessor of and intertext for her performances. He had previously played both male and female roles to great acclaim, and some of these parts reverted to the prima donna, producing the first trouser roles. In their link to the castrato, the trouser roles acquire a sinister cast, for, at least in one possible reading, both the cross-dressed castrato and the breeched prima donna become material for stardom because of their socially inscribed lack. Neither had the legal status of a man, the castrato because of his gender ambiguity and the prima donna because of her decided femininity, but the voice, in thrilling contrast to this gender inferiority, was charged with the stage superiority to basses, baritones, and tenors. Armgart, arguing the latter distinction, informs the Graf that she is given a voice such as nature “only gives a woman child” and that “The great masters write / For women’s voices”—an ironic statement considering that her debut role was actually written for a man-made man’s voice.43 Her unreflective statement directs attention to the fact that, for entirely unnatural reasons, the castrato also sang high notes and had the dubious eminence of having had the great masters compose for him. The high voice of the castrato seems to have been thrilling precisely because of its unnaturalness, which often was equated with eroticism. As Roland Barthes hypothesizes in S/Z, the castrato’s sexuality was displaced onto his voice: “Italian music, an object well defined historically, culturally, mythically . . . connotes a ‘sensual’ art, an art of the voice. An erotic substance, the Italian voice was produced a contrario . . . by singers without sex.” Once eroticized, this voice could return sexuality to the body of the castrato, while simultaneously diffusing itself over “the entire surface of the body, the skin” of auditors.44 Voice, in other words, rewrote the concept of male virility, a sexual reversal that also applies to the femininity of the prima donna as she appears in Armgart. Here the prima donna’s voice is her “child,” the nineteenth-century sign of a woman’s sexuality and of her familial position.45 This atypical child, if it does not legitimize

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the iconoclastic life of the prima donna, excuses her (in musical circles) from biological motherhood, for the voice replaces conventional femininity, permitting her to give birth to her own talents. In the Graf’s words, the “magic” of Armgart’s “nature-given-art” also constitutes the “sweetest effluence of [her] womanhood.”46 Womanhood and especially motherhood, however, were and are powerful, essentialist concepts, and the maternal metaphor aligns the prima donna with common, “voiceless” women in the very act of distinguishing her. In the revival of Orfeo, the gender and vocal complexities begin with Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s replacing of the mezzo castrato and the hautecontre tenor. The female mezzo voice, higher than a tenor’s but lower than a soprano’s, usually rendered the singer a seconda donna; but ViardotGarcia had a remarkable three-octave voice span and, in addition, the mezzo was eligible for the Orpheus role because of Berlioz’s desire to return it to the original tessitura. Yet the gender implications and limitations for castrato and prima donna diverge. His fame and vocal deification involved surgery that was clandestine and probably coercive, a practice that visibly branded him as exceptional in both positive and negative ways, while barring him from the usual masculine privileges; the physically intact prima donna, though socially censored by the middle class, nonetheless increasingly represented their constructions of desirable femininity on the stage—even when performing trouser roles.47 Consider the critical evaluations of Orpheus. Passion and pathos, tenderness and inspiration, and human grief are a few of the traits the Athenaeum critic singles out for praise in Viardot’s Orpheus, while the Times music columnist expresses approbation for Rosa Csillag’s “consummate” portrayal of Euridice’s constant spouse.48 What is striking about these descriptions is that they work equally well in relation to the successful performer or to the ideal woman of the midcentury, permitting gender ideology to perform subtle work in operatic reviews: The woman singer is acclaimed for her excellent portrayal of a trouser role, which is not discussed as such, and simultaneously credited with enacting feminine virtues in this role. The role of Orpheus, then, is rife with contradiction and dialogism, for the forces of essentialism and those of subversion meet, clash, in every performance. Legend and human, singer and woman, castrato and eunuch—power and lack—are in dialogue, lending the opera a rich and unfinished nature and enabling each performer to reconfigure and temporarily arrest the contending elements.

III The prima donna’s task of making her mark on an opera and its audience requires artistry and exertion. Her voice comes out of negotiation and

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conflict—is created by them—with even the notes and words of scores providing material for contests. Armgart must take account of and reply to other voices to make her own heard; but the verse drama stages these competitions within the private home of the prima donna. In so doing, the drama calls attention to the various ideological crossovers among society, art, and home. Of crucial importance are the social ideals of love underwriting the operas, which in turn are further revamped by Eliot’s drama. Love, in the Gluck and the Beethoven operas, involves a conjugal couple and portrayals of absolute commitment: When one spouse dies (Orfeo) or mysteriously disappears (Fidelio), the remaining spouse risks life itself in order to recover the missing beloved. Orfeo’s inconsolable grief and his descent into hell distinguish his spousal love, while Leonore’s/Fidelio’s insinuation of herself into the prison cell of her husband Florestan, and her physical shielding of him from Pizarro’s dagger, create an idealized love, epitomized by the line “Tödte erst sein Weib” (Kill first his wife). These potentially sacrificial acts, noted and lauded by many London reviewers of the operas, problematize current analyses of gender performance in opera, especially in terms of cross-dressing and the representation of marriage. Twentieth-century gender critics and scholars of Orfeo argue persuasively for the disordering of gender stereotypes in the portrayal of the transvestite’s, Orpheus’s, mythic desire. So acute and inconsolable is his desire for Euridice that nothing short of the recovery of embodied love suffices. This staged drama of a female mezzo singing to a female soprano opens up the possibility that social ideals of affection, constancy, even eroticism, may be transposed to couples not sanctioned by society, samesex couples whom the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries viewed with apprehension and (often) disdain. Between a libretto marked by conservative gender ideology and a performance permitting the indulgence of traditionally opposed desires, criticism proposes possibilities. Wendy Bashant begins her article on Eliot and Gluck’s Orfeo by declaring the latter “one of the queerest operas” she knows, an assertion that prefaces an operatic and literary exploration of Eliot’s use of “the myth of Orpheus to defend women and female friendships.”49 With this assessment of queerness, Leonardi and Pope concur, noting that the verse drama and the theatrical setting both question the relation between gender roles and biological sex, especially given the intertextual link to an opera of gender reversal and slippage.50 In general—and the writings of Sam Abel and Joke Dame on the castrato confirm this tendency—the homoeroticism of cross-dressing and the riddling of roles as performance lead to a posited transmutation of uncertainty into openness, into a moment of resistance to an oppressive master narrative.51 Yet, I would suggest, the negotiations concerning indeterminacy could reinforce existing hierarchies as well as

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challenge them. Where representations of permissible love relations are at issue, opera and its audiences are anything but reliable in their decisions. Consider the historical setting and reception of Beethoven’s Fidelio, the other transvestite opera evoked in Armgart. Receiving its debut performance in 1805, this rescue opera with its trajectory valorizing freedom (Freiheit) and its cross-dressed heroine resonates with both the recent rhetoric of the French Revolution and the eroticism of castrati performances. Explicating in detail Fidelio’s ties to revolutionary ideology, Paul Robinson directs our attention to the swift reversal from an old to a new order (a “right-angled” history) and to the “impersonal and categorical imperative” underpinning Leonore’s actions, actions generated by a resolve to free the dungeon prisoner regardless of his identity as stranger or husband.52 Importantly, both Robinson and Edward Said situate Beethoven in the German intellectual response to revolution, in which political particulars become subsumed into a “grand abstraction” (Robinson), into an endeavor to “get beyond politics altogether, and beyond history as well” (Said).53 Yet this conception of the universal demands consideration of what the opera actually achieves. Fidelio’s democratic scene featuring the liberation of all Pizarro’s prisoners, for example, preserves a clear hierarchy, with a magnanimous Minister superintending the process, while the Revolution’s own assault on the class structure shies away from radical inclusiveness in matters of race and gender. As Julie Carlson argues, critics reading retrospectively may draw on “substantial information regarding French women as historical and symbolic agents,” even as critics confront a “revolution—and democratic legacy—constructed against, not simply without, women.”54 In reference to Leonore’s operatic and critical reception in the nineteenth century, status and agency present similarly vexed problems. Robinson, whose reading probes the structural and ideological links between the opera and revolution, indicates that German librettist Joseph Sonnleithner “anticipated the dominant nineteenth-century understanding of the opera when he suggested . . . that Fidelio was not about politics at all but about ‘wifely virtue.’”55 Preserving, for the moment, this untroubled and myopic vision of feminine virtue as a nonpolitical trait even when enacted in a public space and when key to social upheaval, I want to substantiate Sonnleithner’s reading of the opera with reference to London reviews from 1832, Fidelio’s English debut with Wilhelmina SchröederDevrient in the title role; from the 1835 production with Maria (Garcia) Malibran; and from 1851 with Sophie Cruvelli. While critics did not necessarily concur in their evaluations of any one performer, their unanimity regarding successful representations of the eponym astonishes. At present, questions of gender performance focus on relativity and on suggestive misprisions, such as the amorous attachment of the jailer’s daughter

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Marcellina to the transvestite Fidelio, a desire that complicates constructions of fidelity and marriage and that allows us to recuperate plot muddles as productive, homoerotic subtext. A succinct excerpt from the Athenaeum indicates the radically distinct semantics and ideological work of the opera for nineteenth-century critics, fascinated with the dungeon scene as exigent in plot development and gender definition: “Madame Devrient, as Leonora, sings and acts with a fervour and intensity of expression that positively thrills through one’s veins—no words can convey the effect which she produces in the scene, where she rushes forward to shield her husband from the dagger of Pizario [sic].”56 As Leo’s commendation of Armgart confirms—“Not the Schroeder-Devrient / Had done it better”57—acting rivaled singing in representations of Leonore, and London’s first illustrator of the faithful wife wrenched operatic convention by speaking the final word in her threat to Pizarro, sacrificing the aurally pleasing to impassioned histrionics.58 That this surprising substitution of words for music riveted audiences and critics (much like Maria Callas’s innovations in the 1950s) attests to the paradox of the nineteenth-century Fidelio: Flouting of convention may uphold steadily calcifying constructs of femininity. Though familiar, these constructs require reintroduction here to provide evidence for our predecessors’ own gender bending, a bending of gender and voice into the service of an idealized love that appears to involve agency and ingenuity, but resolutely diffuses passion’s volatile and political implications. Both Malibran’s and Cruvelli’s receptions as Leonore uncover this critical tendency that reinforced the opera’s and respective performers’ acclaim. As the Athenaeum posits, “Leonora, as a character, so completely commands the sympathies of her audience from first to last that any woman who is able to express feeling can hardly, by any possibility, escape a certain success in it.”59 Malibran lent her immense stature and habitually fervid acting to the portrayal of the feeling “any woman,” and obtained predictable reviews. In the Times, Malibran’s singing ranks as “admirable” but secondary to her acting in the dungeon scene. The power which she exercised over the spectators was such as to make them forget the singer in the actress, and the coups de théatre, in her rushing between the uplifted dagger and her husband, and the presenting the pistol to Pizarro, were among the most striking and effective that have perhaps ever been attempted.60 Adverting to this 1835 review of Malibran, the Times in 1851 approves Cruvelli’s performance as well, absorbing singer into character, and character into abstract femininity: “Fidelio is the heroine of heroines, the

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lover of lovers, the wife of wives, the woman of women, and Beethoven has described her, has done her justice, has individualized her, has made her immortal—which would seem to establish the paradox that art is higher than virtue.”61 Art as the flawless and immortal manifestation of the feminine symbolically resolves the troublesome figure of the pistolwielding, famous actress in tights into an (other) intellectual ideal, rising out of but dismissive of the historical: Operatic women in tights become divorced from their social ancestry, their unmistakable heirship in relation to the castrato as well as to female cross-dressers like de Maupin and Charlotte Charke. In the prominent and polite journals of the nineteenth century, one means of staging contradiction and paradox as nonconflictual involved situating multifaceted characters and actresses within the greater context of feminine emotion and resulting service for family, however manly these women might appear in dress or action. Such emphasis on abstraction, then, deftly counters the politicization of gender and the offstage realm that figures prominently in Eliot’s verse drama.62

IV In current configurations of the political, gender (and its roles) derives meaning precisely from its junction of private inclinations and public legislation, which grants or denies recognition of certain families, or, more generally, of expressions of desire. This notion of the private as political was available in the nineteenth century, partially through religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestly and Jacobin sympathizers such as William Godwin, whose politically charged associationism argued for a causal relationship between social conditions and inequalities; the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, too, offered trenchant critique of gender categories and of putative, innate feminine characteristics. By the mid-nineteenth century, Caroline Norton, Barbara Bodichon, Bessie Parkes, Florence Nightingale, Frances Power-Cobbe, and John Stuart Mill (among many others of varying degrees of public visibility) worked practically and wrote polemically to reform laws and social strictures limiting the education and status of women.63 Yet, as Barbara Caine remarks, nineteenth-century feminists “spent decades refuting the idea that those women who sought political and social reform also sought to end the family and to assert women’s freedom to reject existing moral standards.”64 Preservationist tactics, whether indicating belief or rhetorical strategy, flourished alongside revolutionary pronouncements, with feminists recurrently positing an altered but rigorous morality as a favorable basis for social change. In fact, beginning with Wollstonecraft’s Vindication, many of the treatises contend that family and nation will benefit

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from an expansion of the individual rights and freedoms of women, for they will behave in increasingly intelligent and responsible ways at home or at work. Norton pleading for custody of her children, Nightingale lamenting that women have nothing of worth to do, and Cobbe noting the degradation of a society that allows wife beating, all employ an argument that attempts to address the individual’s complicated position in relation to one or more social groups. Eliot’s Armgart belongs at least partially in this epistemological tradition for it politicizes gender—as the Diva’s Mouth authors and Bashant have argued; the political, though, does not operate as a straightforward evocation of operas featuring transvestism and the empowered prima donna. Instead, Armgart develops its action as do other verse dramas, by testing forms and rhetoric of action. As critics from Otten to Jewett suggest, the verse drama, flourishing in the wake of the violent French Revolution, partakes of diversified, international Romantic desires for social and ideological reform, but tends to question the connection between reformist ideas and revolutionary actions.65 The result is a drama of competing voices, individual quandary, or circumscribed possibilities. If people tend to stake their conceptions of self upon their capacities to act, Jewett proposes, Romantic verse drama “seeks to arouse and sustain pressures and anxieties” about agency itself.66 Such hesitations clearly obtain in Eliot’s Victorian-era drama as well, which signals irresolution both in its individual scenes of dispute and in its final scene in which the eponym’s stated plans for her compromised future suspend closure beyond textual confines. In treating both the public and the private, Armgart repeatedly stages textual colloquies about acting well, onstage or offstage. Specifically, Armgart brings the operatic ideals of heterosexual love and of sacrifice into a zone of contact where relationships are complicated by the competing desires and expectations. Far from typical, contemporary interpretations of Beethoven’s opera in terms of wifely paragons, stereotypical villains, and pure passions, Armgart dramatizes the power struggles inherent in domestic and love relations and problematizes the concept of love. Leonore, the universal ideal of the sacrificial wife and lover, is more or less consistent with the paradigm of womanhood the Graf presents to Armgart, in which the talented, trained woman foregoes fame to concentrate her “power in home delights / Which penetrate and purify the world.” His insinuation is that love, particularly of the sacrificial type, is the peculiar and supreme possession of women, and his half-resolution to live without the conventional comforts of marriage is, as Armgart perceives, a self-deceptive means of preserving intact both his desire for her and his desire for masculine dominance in a marriage. For her, this construction of womanhood comprises “joys / Which make men narrow by their narrowness,” and her prima donna

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voice sounds and is heard because of her recognition and rejection of the Graf’s notions of gender as binary and complementary.67 Alternative construals of love are possible, as Armgart reveals in her radical conception of a husband who will “cherish” her art or in her valorization of art itself as a love object.68 The phenomenon of a husband devoted to his prima donna wife certainly existed in the nineteenth century; and, as Sutherland Edwards points out in his half-facetious portrait of the various stereotypes of the prima donna and her officious or ornamental husbands, “[n]o one can wish her to become the wife of some titled or untitled millionaire, who will be egotistical enough to withdraw her from the stage. Such a one is not a prima donna’s husband: he is simply a man who has married a prima donna.”69 The dedicated and perspicacious artist Viardot-Garcia had not only a husband committed to furthering her career, but also influential male friends and would-be (perhaps discarded) lovers: Alfred de Musset, Hector Berlioz, and Ivan Turgenev.70 Armgart suggests even further revisions to the traditional family structure, proposing to live sexually “unmated” in order to serve her art vocationally, as nuns do their religion.71 Art which is cherished, publicly shared, and the object of the singer’s sacrifice reproduces an aspect of heterosexual love insofar as an individual, here a singer, gains an exalted position. Yet art as a love object demands continual sacrifices of the singer and repeated audience–singer negotiations about status and fame. The singer receives the status of queen in exchange for her servitude to her art. Yet the verse drama does not conclude with this portrayal of the singer. Armgart refuses the Graf’s gendered vision of love, and, subsequently, she faces the challenges of Walpurga, whose discourse paradoxically condones and castigates the symbolic system that perpetuates hierarchies and gender unevenness. Walpurga recognizes the inequity of her position as a lame woman “whom no one ever praised / For being cheerful” or useful in her daily, sacrificial acts; however, she remains suspicious of a successful woman and, like Leo, objects to any prima donna tendencies in Armgart. While Leo charges that Armgart’s susceptibility to materialism and to other displays of audience adoration make her less than a consummate artist, Walpurga implies that the prima donna “desert[s]” other women, relying, like the worst of the patriarchy, on “slaves” whose individuality she fails to recognize.72 This pertinent social critique enables Walpurga to create a space for nonsexual love and so to foreground the neglected: She insists on the importance of private acts performed by unnoticed women who are nonetheless indispensable to the ones they serve. Strategically, however, Walpurga’s concept of love is impotent, since it implicitly defers to and reinforces the system that creates servants and masters, while precluding the possibility of amelioration by passing judgment on women who do not of their own volition sacrifice themselves to others.

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But Armgart does not embrace a life of negatives, what Walpurga herself calls a “pauper’s heritage.”73 Armgart’s plan to teach singing in Freiburg, Walpurga’s childhood home, is at once a concession to Walpurga’s desires and suffering and an ongoing commitment to her artistic ideal of bringing pleasure to audiences through operatic song.74 This proposal may not signal resolution, though, because the verse drama metaphorically aligns Armgart with a “bereaved” mother who learns “to love / Another’s living child” and structurally associates her with Leo, the thwarted musician who takes up teaching.75 The domestic metaphor, while underscoring the permanence of offstage deaths, places Armgart’s loss within the context of other unfinished lives, in the space of redefinition and negotiation; somewhat differently, the association with Leo indicates the possibility of an altered form of power for the retired prima donna through instruction of and debate with her students. Thus, Armgart’s closing scenes do not necessarily diffuse the charged gender and musical conflicts, for the characters are still engaged in the preliminary formulation of plans. Resembling other verse dramas poised between action and inaction, between logomachy and quantifiable effects of recurrent historical struggles, Armgart houses the dilemmas of the professional female musician, displaced from stardom and tenuously placed in relation to the contentious musical hierarchies with their shifting bases of authority. Possessed of an incipient awareness of and concern for the servants of the world, the silenced singer also has a history of domination and privilege and a desire to pass on Leo’s gift, perhaps borrowing too his notions of authority; however, her gender, especially as signaled by her maternal metaphor of voice adoption, complicates the relations between instructor and voice student in very different ways from Leo’s role of “priest.” The text is reticent, ruling out several possibilities for conventional happy endings (the Graf will not propose again, and Leo gives no hope that Armgart will regain her voice) while evoking conflicts in the private and professional arenas. Offstage, Armgart and Walpurga verbally spar about the definition of significant lives and meaningful love, while at the opera house the new Fidelio sings some of the most difficult music written for mezzo-soprano, music which prompted critics to express disapprobation of Beethoven’s nonaccommodation of singers and ignited yet another composer–singer power struggle.76 In contrast, the operatic scripts of Fidelio and Orfeo offer (at least to nineteenth-century critics) a realm where friction is ultimately jettisoned and spouses are rejuvenated and reunited. Eliot’s verse drama appears to be seduced by aspects of these operas and their reception history, especially the reform opera, for Armgart resembles Orfeo in its avoidance of (baroque) excess: severe simplicity and focus of plot, a limited number of characters, and scenes apposing the title character with other characters link the nineteenth-century drama with its

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operatic forebear. Even aspects of the two operatic plots recur in the verse drama. Notably, like Orpheus, Armgart experiences suicidal despair after her great loss, and, like Leonore, offers to place another’s well-being above her own (though Armgart’s gesture for Walpurga is considerably less grand and certainly not life threatening). But Armgart’s melancholic ending has more in common with the historical lives of prima donnas and castrati than with myths of grand passion. Poised for obscurity, the protagonist faces the necessity of action within a newly circumscribed form of agency, the relatively meager opportunities for the failed singer. Her still-nascent plans for the future serve to displace operatic teleology, whereby private acts of love necessarily offer satisfactory conclusions, and to replace the loving or compassionate act within a scene of struggle and compromise that only partially reflects the desires and endeavors of the individual agent.

NOTES 1. The following texts offer detailed discussions of Eliot’s treatment of successful, professional women: Rosemarie Bodenheimer, “Ambition and its Audiences: George Eliot’s Performing Figures,” Victorian Studies 34 (1990): 7–33; Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); Gillian Beer, George Eliot, Key Women Writers Series (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester, 1986); Allison Booth, Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); and Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996). 2. See William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Julie A. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 3. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, 6. 4. See Susan Rutherford, “The Voice of Freedom: Images of the Prima Donna,” in The New Woman and her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914, ed. Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 95-113. 5. George Eliot, Armgart, in Poems (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1902), 288. 6. Bruce Alan Brown, Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 364. 7. Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, ed. Frank Mercer (New York: Dover, 1957), 2:663.

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8. Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 181; and John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 161. 9. Patricia Howard asserts that “it is widely accepted that Calzabigi probably wrote the preface to Alceste which appears over Gluck’s name.” See Patricia Howard, “The Libretto,” in C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, ed. Patricia Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 22. 10. Patricia Howard, Gluck and the Birth of Modern Opera (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963), 3–4. 11. Christoph von Gluck and Ranieri de’ Calazbigi, Preface to Alceste; quoted in Alfred Einstein, Gluck, trans. Eric Blom (London: J. M. Dent, 1936), 98–99. 12. Pier Francesco Tosi, Observations on the Florid Song, or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers, 2d ed., trans. Mr. Galliard (London: J. Wilcox, 1743), 89. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Exceptionally severe and vociferous in their judgments were the Roman critics, of whom Michael Kelly relates animated tales in Reminiscences, ed. Roger Fiske (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 32–34. 15. Francis Rogers, “The Male Soprano,” Music Quarterly 5 (1919): 417. 16. Burney, A General History of Music, 2:876–77; and Howard, “Libretto,” 12. 17. Howard, “From ‘Orfeo’ to ‘Orphée,’” in C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, ed. Patricia Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 70. 18. Eliot, Armgart, 287. 19. April FitzLyon, The Price of Genius: A Life of Pauline Viardot (London: John Calder, 1964), 65. 20. Hector Berlioz, Gluck and His Operas with an Account of Their Relation to Musical Art, trans. Edwin Evans (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), 14–21. 21. Hector Berlioz, Autobiography of Hector Berlioz, from 1803 to 1865, Comprising his Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England, trans. Rachel Scott Russell Holmes and Eleanor Holmes (London: Macmillan, 1884), 1:67, 1:72. 22. Berlioz, Autobiography, 1:84. 23. Eliot, Armgart, 294. 24. Ibid., 288–89; see also Berlioz, Autobiography, 1:84, 1:254.

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25. Berlioz’s attempt to subordinate Viardot-Garcia is incommensurate with an argument for the sanctity of the composer’s art, since Berlioz makes allowance for the musical tamperings of great artists and knew of Viardot-Garcia’s status as a thorough musician—one who was a multilinguist, a proficient pianist, and a composer. The renowned music critic Henry Chorley added to this impressive list of abilities Viardot-Garcia’s supremacy in florid song, in “grandeur of execution belonging to the old school, rapidly becoming a lost art.” See his Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, ed. Ernest Newman (New York: Knopf, 1926), 237. 26. Eliot, Armgart, 288, 320. 27. Berlioz, Gluck, 25–26. 28. Brown, Gluck, 359. 29. Howard, Gluck, 7. Berlioz’s reworking of Gluck is not without its own curiosities. The younger composer was verbally committed to the “beautiful simplicity” advocated in Gluck’s preface to Alceste, but when he revived Orfeo Berlioz relied heavily on the Parisian score, rather than on the original, sparer Italian score (New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie [London: Macmillan, 1992], 3:457). The Orphée of 1774 was a “conservative work, reinforcing the regular audience in their cherished prejudices, and wooing rather than provoking the more thoughtful spectators” according to Howard, “From Orfeo to Orphée,” 68. Its conservative nature is well demonstrated by the interpolated “L’espoir revaît dans mon âme,” a bravura aria written for Le Gros that endorsed many of the “abuses” of singers recently denounced by Gluck. Viardot-Garcia not only sang this showpiece aria with its high notes and runs and roulades, she even provided a cadenza for it, apparently condoned by Berlioz. The result is an opera that points up Berlioz’s own deviations from reform principles. See Eve Barsham, “Berlioz and Gluck,” in C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, ed. Patricia Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 95. 30. Eliot, Armgart, 288. 31. Charles Ancillon, Eunuchism Displayed (London: E. Curll, 1718), 31. 32. Eliot, Armgart, 289. 33. Patricia Howard, “Synopsis,” in C. W. von Gluck: Orfeo, ed. Patricia Howard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 38. 34. Eliot, Armgart, 290. 35. To clarify, the roles of Gilda and Leonore (Fidelio) involve a female character who adopts masculine dress for a portion of the opera. These differ from traditional trouser roles, such as Orpheus, in which a female performer plays a male character throughout the opera. 36. Pat Rogers, “The Breeches Part,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1982), 252.

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37. I disagree with Peter Ackroyd, who argues that male cross-dressers seemed socially threatening whereas female cross-dressers merely engaged in a “harmless reversal.” See his Dressing Up. Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 102. 38. Times, 16 March 1842, 3; Athenaeum, 19 March 1842, 261; and Luigi Arditi, My Reminiscences, intro. and ed. The Baroness von Zedlitz (New York: Dodd/Mead, 1896), 110. For a recent assessment of Vestris in terms of gender debates, see Rachel Cowgill, “Re-gendering the Libertine; or, the Taming of the Rake: Lucy Vestri as Don Giovanni on the Early Nineteenth-Century London Stage,” Cambridge Opera Journal 10 (1998): 45–66. 39. Richard, 2d Earl of Mount-Edgcumbe, Musical Reminiscenses of the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe Containing an Account of the Italian Opera in England from 1773 to 1834, Music Reprint Series (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 203, 209. 40. Eliot, Armgart, 289. 41. These findings about the dignity of the female cross-dresser and the lack of contemporary gender criticism are corroborated by the following two critics: Frank W. Wadsworth, “Hamlet and Iago: Nineteenth-Century Breeches Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 17 (1966): 132; and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 37. 42. Athenaeum, 14 January 1860, 58. 43. Eliot, Armgart, 298, 299. 44. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 109, 110. 45. Eliot, Armgart, 311, 323. 46. Ibid., 298. 47. Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, Gender and Performance Series (London: Routledge, 1991), 76. 48. Times, 28 June 1860, 12. 49. Wendy Bashant, “Singing in Greek Drag: Gluck, Berlioz, George Eliot,” in En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corinne E. Blackmer and Patricia J. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 216, 232. 50. Susan J. Leonardi and Rebecca A. Pope, The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 80. 51. Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996); and Joke Dame, “Unveiled Voices: Sexual Difference and the Castrato,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139–53. 52. Paul Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79.

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160. 54. Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, 7. 55. Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven, 145. 56. Athenaeum, 26 May 1832, 340. Similarly, the Times writes of Schröeder-Devrient that it was not “until the second act, when she descends into the dungeon, and discovers her husband, that the audience became fully aware of her power, either as a singer or actress. The manner in which she sang the passage ‘Tödte erst sein Weib,’ when she rushes forward to shield her husband from the dagger of Pizarro, was perfectly electrifying.” See Times, 19 May 1832, 5. See also The Examiner, 27 May 1832, 340. 57. Eliot, Armgart, 289. 58. Berlioz, Autobiography, 2:106; and Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven, 150. 59. Athenaeum, 28 April 1860, 589. 60. Times, 13 June 1835, 5. 61. Times, 21 May 1851, 8. 62. Such conservative readings of gender also applied to Eliot as a female author. See Kristin Brady, George Eliot, Women Writers Series (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 50. 63. As Mary Poovey elucidates these Victorian reformers’ arguments in her densely historical, groundbreaking gender study, the ability of some women to support themselves rendered “the notion that ‘maternal nature’ was the norm . . . increasingly suspect and in need of defense,” while substantiating the claim of feminists “who considered economic or social independence the proper goals of education.” See her Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 152. 64. Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 255. 65. Terry Otten, The Deserted Stage: The Search for Dramatic Form in Nineteenth-Century England (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), 8. 66. Jewett, Fatal Autonomy, 5, 18. 67. Eliot, Armgart, 299. 68. Ibid., 303, 304. 69. H. Sutherland Edwards, The Prima Donna: Her History and Surroundings from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century, Music Reprint Series (New York: Da Capo, 1978), 2:291–92. 70. FitzLyon, The Price of Genius, 348.

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71. Eliot, Armgart, 304. 72. Ibid., 319. 73. Ibid., 317. 74. Bodenheimer, “Ambition and Its Audiences,” 22; Rutherford, “The Voice of Freedom,” 101; and Susan J. Leonardi, “To Have a Voice: The Politics of the Diva,” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987): 71. 75. Eliot, Armgart, 323. 76. Examiner, 21 June 1835, 388; Athenaeum, 24 May 1851, 562; and Henry Pleasants, The Great Singers from Jenny Lind to Callas and Pavarotti, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 64.

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4 Nervous ReincarNations: K e a t s , S c e n e r y, a n d M i n d Cure in Canada during the Post-Confederation Period, with Particular Reference to Archibald Lampman and Related Cases D. M. R. Bentley

It is a strange fact that, although seventy-one years have elapsed since the death of Keats, no monument of any sort to his memory has been erected upon English soil. . . . We learn, therefore, with satisfaction that a very beautiful bust of Keats, by Miss Anne Whitney, an American, is about to be placed in the parish church in Hampstead, London, where Keats lived and wrote many of his best pieces. —Archibald Lampman, At the Mermaid Inn

[C]harming natural scenery . . . acts in a . . . directly remedial way to enable men to better resist the harmful influences of ordinary town life, and recover what they lose from them. It is thus, in a medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value; there is not one in the apothecaries’ shops as important to the health and strength or to the

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D. M. R. Bentley earning and tax-paying capacities of a large city. . . . We can apply the term [charm] . . . to scenery because . . . certain scenery has a tendency to lift us out of our habitual condition into one which, were the influence upon us stronger and the moods and frames of mind toward which it carried us more distinctly defined, we should recognize as poetic. Let us say for the time being the charm of natural scenery tends to make us poets. —Frederick Law Olmsted, Mount Royal, Montreal

“Keats has always been such a fascination for me and has so permeated my whole mental outfit that I have an idea that he has found a sort of faint reincarnation in me.” So wrote Canada’s finest nineteenth-century poet, Archibald Lampman (1861–1899) on 25 April 1894, when, as he informed his friend Edward William Thomson in Boston, he was “only just . . . getting quite clear of the spell of that marvellous person” whose work had held him enthralled for “ten years.”1 In the first half of the century just past, these remarks would have provided the basis for a straightforward study of the influence of Keats on Lampman. A couple of decades ago, they would have furnished rich material for a Bloomian reading of Lampman as a weak poet who underwent a prolonged apophrades (“return of the dead”)2 before finally, if at all, achieving his own style or voice. Today they might provide grist for a postcolonial discussion of the resistance of a colonial writer to the literature of the imperial center as an aspect of the formation of a national culture or the processes of (de)canonization that characterize post-Romantic writing in Canada and elsewhere. While grateful to all of these approaches, this chapter will pursue a somewhat different line, however: Using as a point of departure Lampman’s mildly theosophical3 notion that Keats had found in him “a sort of faint reincarnation,” it will argue that, although the Confederation group of Canadian poets to which Lampman belonged faced the daunting task of establishing a distinctive personal and Canadian voice in the wake of their “great” (or “strong”) Romantic and Victorian precursors, they also sought ways of localizing and naturalizing the English Romantic poets whom they admired in the Canadian literary and physical environments as a means not only of coming to terms with Canada, but also of affirming English Canada’s Englishness—its condition of apart(of)ness in relation to Britain, the British Empire, and North America. In pursuing this argument, it will also seek to demonstrate that even as he construed himself as “a sort of faint reincarnation of Keats” in a new habitation Lampman conceived of his poetic self as a nervous being vacillating between the Romanticized and manic poles of dejection and joy, (infernal) city and (paradisial) countryside, as inflected by the American mind-cure therapies that were preva-

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lent enough in the period following the trauma of the Civil War to warrant T. J. Jackson Lears’s conception of the era as the incubator of an emerging “therapeutic world view.”4 In short, this chapter will argue that both the English Romantics and American therapeutics were, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, weighty “deposits” in the habitus of late-nineteenth-century Canadian poetry that bore heavily on its content, its purposes, and the selfcreation of its authors.5 “[A]s long as you retain that robust health, you cannot get very dangerously far from the basis of happiness,” Lampman told Thomson on 20 May 1895; “I—as usual—vary from day to day in my condition—one day depressed and almost below endurance—another inspired with an unreasonable joy—on the whole in a thoroughly disturbed state—a state of nervous disorder” (AC, 141).

I [O]ur best men . . . work altogether too hard now-a-days. Their life is lived at fever heat. . . . [I]t is the happy blending of hard work with wise idleness that constitutes the golden mean. By wise idleness I mean . . . quietly absorbing something through the eye or ear that for the time at least drowns the petty business and worries of life as the incoming tide silently engulfs the pebbles on the beach. —J. Macdonald Oxley, “Busy People”

The poems that Lampman wrote in the spring of 1884, a little over a year after moving to Ottawa to assume the position in the Post Office Department that he would occupy until his untimely death in 1899, provide ample corroboration of his apperception in April 1894 that Keats had begun to “permeate . . . [his] mental outfit . . . ten years” earlier. Several of the pieces in his debut volume, Among the Millet, and Other Poems (Ottawa, 1888), are manifestly Keatsian in diction, imagery, and tone, none more so than “April,” which was composed in May 1884.6 While some of the natural sights and sounds that are mentioned in “April” (“the slender adder-tongue,” for example, and the “pulse and trill” of frogs) ground the poem in its North American environment, its overall treatment of the Canadian spring7 is heavily and obviously indebted to Keats’s “To Autumn,” a work that Lampman would later credit with having “had a great part in creating that love for nature poetry . . . that distinguishes the present generation” (ER, 178) and that L. R. Early describes as “unquestionably the single poem that had the greatest part in creating [Lampman’s] love of nature and poetry.”8 Following are the first two stanzas of “April”:

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D. M. R. Bentley Pale season, watcher in unvexed suspense, Still priestess of the patient middle day, Betwixt wild March’s humored petulence And the warm wooing of green kirtled May, Maid month of sunny peace and sober gray, Weaver of flowers in sunward glades that ring With murmur of libation to the spring; As memory of pain, all past, is peace, And joy, dream-tasted, hath the deepest cheer, So art thou sweetest of all months that lease The twelve short spaces of the flying year. The bloomless days are dead, and frozen fear No more for many moons shall vex the earth, Dreaming of summer and fruit-laden mirth. (Poems, 4)

“[M]any moons” has North American resonances as, in the context of late-nineteenth-century writing about the climates of the American northeast and the Canadian southeast, does the choice of April as the quintessential spring month.9 But the many resemblances between these stanzas and just the opening lines of “To Autumn” (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; / Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines”10) leave little, if any, room to doubt that Keats’s poem was Lampman’s literary inspiration and model. Later in “April” there is even an equivalent of “To Autumn”’s “wailful choir . . . [of] small gnats [that] mourn / Among the river swallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies”:11 as the poet-speaker of Lampman’s poem prepares to reenter the city from which he has fled to commune in Keatsian manner with “the outward things of . . . earth” (ER, 178), he passes through a “thin / Mist of gray gnats that crowd the river shore, / Sweet even choruses, that dance and spin / Soft tangles in the sunset” (Poems, 6). In its final lines the poem comes to rest on an analogy between the poet-speaker’s return to the “dissonant roar” and “hot heart” of the city and his creation and presentation to his readers of “meek song[s]” that will enable them collectively to “toil . . . without distress, / In calm-eyed peace and godlike blamelessness.” At no point does “April” more than camouflage its Keatsian sources, but it nevertheless assimilates its Romantic components to a therapeutic pattern of excursion and return whose origins also lie partly in Romanticism, and whose purpose is verbally to enact the mind cure of the nervous poet-narrator and, hence, to enact the mind cure of the nervous reader through vicarious contact with the natural world. Not merely because he died young (he was thirty-seven in 1899) was Lampman known as “the

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Canadian Keats,” a sobriquet that in any case reflects the very complex sense of difference (the Canadian Keats) within continuity (the Canadian Keats) that was characteristic of English-Canadian culture in the postConfederation period. (The roots of Confederation, it may be recalled, lay by way of Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America [1839] in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s conception of Britain’s overseas dependencies, “not [as] new societies, but [as] old societies in new places”12). Until well into the twentieth century, Canada was a “colonial nation”13 whose burgeoning nationalism was “defined as much by its imperial context and connections as by its Canadian-ness.”14 Especially during the decades between Confederation and the First World War, the search for a distinctive Canadian identity and literature was largely undertaken in an unapprehensive and noncombative manner within a pervasive conception of Canada as “an auxiliary kingdom within the Empire.”15 How exactly, then, did Lampman come under the “spell” of the English poet who was to “permeate . . . [his] mental outfit” for “ten years”? The poems and essays that he wrote in the early 1880s while a Classics scholar at Trinity College, Toronto, indicate that at the outset of his creative career he was under the spell, not of Keats, but of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Carlyle, and such German poets as Ernst Moritz Arndt and Max Von Schenkendorf, whose “patriotic songs” he both admired and emulated.16 A clue to the likely source of the spell that in 1884 began to produce poems like “April” lies in the terms that are used to praise Keats in Lampman’s first written reference to him, a passage in the lecture entitled “The Modern School of Poetry in England” that he delivered to the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society in March 1885. Arguing in high Victorian fashion17 that the work of “all the greatest poets” is distinguished by its “versatility” and “geniality”—that is, by a variety of subject, style, and mood that results from “[l]ooking with a wide and hearty and sympathetic eye upon all life” (ER, 59)—he sees Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson as the two nineteenth-century poets who most exemplify these qualities, and observes of the former that “his genius was easy and versatile.” “No doubt if Keats had lived,” he concludes, after naming “Ode to [sic] a Grecian Urn” and “The Eve of St. Agnes” as examples of Keats’s versatility, “a wider contact with individual human life would have given him also the spirit of geniality—indeed, he even had somewhat of it in his own delicate and romantic way” (ER, 59–60). What constitutes the clue in these statements to the preliminary source of Lampman’s knowledge of Keats is their resemblance to the analysis of Keats’s moral–aesthetic strengths and weaknesses in the Introduction to his poems in the fourth volume of Thomas Humphrey Ward’s The English Poets: Selections and Critical Introductions (1880).18 There Matthew Arnold, applying the theory that he had first propounded in his essay

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“Maurice de Guérin” (1863), asserts that although Keats’s “achievement . . . [was] partial or incomplete” he nevertheless “ranks with Shakespeare” in the faculty of “naturalistic interpretation” and, if time had permitted, would have “ripe[ned]” in “his faculty of moral interpretation.”19 For Arnold, as for Lampman, Keats is a “master” by virtue of the “great spirit” (Arnold) or “large heart” (Lampman) that enabled him in the course of his short life to experience a considerable range of human feelings, to perceive and strive for an ideality, and, in consequence, to achieve especially in his lyrics a “rounded perfection and felicity of loveliness” (Arnold). For both writers, the tubercular body of Keats contained emotional and spiritual elements (heart, spirit) that issued in work that is in every sense happy—that is, verbally and formally felicitous and conducive to happiness and well-being. Additional evidence of Arnold’s role in shaping Lampman’s conception of Keats can be found in “Poetic Interpretation,” an essay of the late 1880s or early 1890s in which the Canadian poet focuses primarily on Keats and William Wordsworth to illustrate his argument that, because each and every phenomenon of external nature and human life has its own “peculiar harmonic value” and “answering harmony,” poets attain to perfection in proportion to their ability to interpret or reproduce the greatest number of such phenomena: “The perfect poet” would thus be “one in whose soul should be found the perfect answering harmony to every natural and spiritual phenomenon. . . . In creating his pictures of life he would weave into each . . . its own peculiar harmony,” and, as a result, he would “have no set style” but “a different one for every thing he should write, a manner exactly suited to the subject” (ER, 126–27). Judged by these criteria, “no man has ever been a perfect poet,” but “[o]f all [nineteenth-century] poets . . . Keats . . . was the most perfect” for “[h]e was beyond all other men disposed to surrender himself completely to the impression of everything with which his brain or his senses came in contact” and, in consequence, his “work is a storehouse of musical perfections” and “poetic interpretation” (ER, 127–28, 134). Not only does Lampman’s notion of “poetic interpretation” recall that of Arnold in “Maurice de Guérin” (“The grand power of poetry is in its interpretative power . . . of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a . . . sense of . . . be[ing] in harmony with them”20), but his estimate of Keats as a near perfect poet echoes several of Arnold’s remarks in Ward’s English Poets (“No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite . . . his perfection of loveliness. . . . [I]n shorter things, where the matured power of moral interpretation . . . [is] not required, he is perfect”21). Agreeing with Arnold (and, indeed, Keats himself) that Endymion is “a failure,” Lampman merely mentions it in passing as “the work of an inexperienced and over-abundant youth” (ER, 128), and in accordance with

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Arnold’s judgment both as a critic and as an anthologist that Hyperion, though “not a success,” contains “fine things” (there are six pages of excerpts from it in The English Poets), he quotes several passages from the first two books of the poem to illustrate his argument that “[t]he poet is painting Titans and his harmony is Titanic” (ER, 131). It is probably not coincidental that two of the four passages quoted from Hyperion by Lampman in “Poetic Interpretation” are also in the excerpts anthologized by Arnold. Almost as palpable a presence as Arnold’s essays in “The Modern School of Poetry in England” and “Poetic Interpretation” is the work of his friend, disciple, and successor to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford, John Campbell Shairp. To give just a couple of examples: Shairp’s argument in On Poetic Interpretation of Nature (1877) that “[a]ny real object, vividly apprehended . . . will awaken in an intelligent and emotional being a response which is the beginning of poetry”22 may well lie behind the phenomenological approach of “Poetic Interpretation.” And his emphasis on “variety,” “sympathy,” and “morality” rather than “aesthetic theories” as the salient qualities of the “true . . . human-hearted poet”23 in Aspects of Poetry, Being Lectures Delivered at Oxford (1882) may have helped Lampman to develop the standard by which he judges poets in “The Modern School of Poetry in England” (and, indeed, in his other essays on English and Canadian poets).24 By the same token, Shairp’s insistence on the “restorat[ive]” effects of “Nature” on Wordsworth in the wake of the Reign of Terror and Britain’s declaration of war on France (he was “wandering around . . . aimless and dejected” until Dorothy “saw and understood his mental malady” and “took him once more to lonely and beautiful places”25) can only have helped to increase Lampman’s awareness of the therapeutic effects of natural scenery. This insistence on the sources and contexts of Lampman’s critical and psychological concepts is necessary for two reasons. First, it makes abundantly clear that in his literary essays Lampman was in no way “writing back” from the colonial periphery to the imperial center as part of a process of cultural and national liberation but, on the contrary, importing and adapting English ideas for Canadian purposes with an absence of intertextual nervousness that borders on the “calm-eyed peace and godlike blamelessness” of the final lines of “April.” Second, it prepares the way for a full understanding of two separate but related aspects of the long essay entitled “The Character and Poetry of Keats” that Lampman wrote in the early 1890s—namely, the mosaic mode of the essay’s composition and its failure to achieve publication during the poet’s lifetime. “The Character and Poetry of Keats” began its life in October 1892 as a lecture that Lampman was planning to “deliver . . . at Kingston [Ontario]” during the impending winter (AC, 50). In large measure, due to

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the encouragement of Thomson, who throughout the early 1890s was an editor with the Youth’s Companion in Boston, it gradually evolved into a much more ambitious and substantial piece of writing. On first hearing of the project in October 1892, Thomson offered to arrange an invitation to deliver it at Boston, a possibility that both attracted and intimidated Lampman: “I must have time to prepare something as good as I can make it before I go lecturing in Boston,” he told his friend on 20 October, and on 9 November: “I do not know whether I can lecture at all to anyone’s satisfaction” (AC 52–53, 55). By the spring of 1893, when Lampman apparently took it with him on a visit to Thomson in Boston, the lecture had developed through “a good deal of conscientious labor” into an “Essay on Keats” that, on his friend’s advice, he was hoping to “sell” to an American publisher. “It is rather too long for a magazine,” he told his wife in a letter dated 24 April from Boston, “but might be published in a small book or monograph.”26 Lampman’s hopes for his manuscript (which runs to 132 pages and is dated January 1893) were not fulfilled, however, for on 18 May he reported to Thomson that Horace Scudder, in his capacity (or capacities) as editor of the Atlantic Monthly or (and) reader for Houghton Mifflin, had given his “paper on Keats . . . some cautious praise, and agree[d] that it is good as a lecture,” but declined to accept or recommend it for publication (AC, 78–80). As far as can be told, this was Lampman’s only attempt to sell “The Character and Poetry of Keats,” which was first published in a severely truncated form in the University of Toronto Quarterly in 1946. It is not difficult to appreciate why Scudder, who was himself the author of several literary studies including the essays on English and American writers gathered in Men of Letters, would have judged “The Character and Poetry of Keats” unworthy of publication. Even in the context of the informal treatment of secondary sources that pervades nineteenth-century criticism, Lampman’s essay is very cavalier in its levies on such well-known sources of information and insight into Keats’s life and work as Lord Houghton’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats and Sidney Colvin’s Keats.27 As the annotations in the recently published Essays and Reviews of Archibald Lampman copiously confirm, few portions of “The Character and Poetry of Keats” can entirely escape the charge of being a pastiche or a paraphrase of Houghton or Colvin. One example will suffice to make the point. Toward the end of the essay, when discussing Keats’s mental state and poetic activities in the “summer and early autumn of 1819,” Lampman writes that the poet was engaged in “two very diverse undertakings”: “The Cap and Bells”—“a kind of fairy tale” of a “comic or satirical character” inspired by his “study of Ariosto” and “touched everywhere with [his] surprising knack of versification”— and “a pathetic attempt to remodel Hyperion” in which he gives “expres-

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sion to some of the awful reflections” that were “pressing upon his disordered soul” (ER, 179). The fact that Houghton is mentioned by name in the opening paragraphs of the essay goes some way toward excusing the absorption into these comments of his statement that Keats’s study of Ariosto led to the writing of “The Cap and Bells” in the summer of 1819 (ER, 220–21). Colvin is nowhere mentioned in Lampman’s essay, however. This makes all the more dismaying its unacknowledged rehearsal of Colvin’s observation that “The Cap and Bells” is an admixture of “fairy fancy” and “worldly flippancy” that contains much evidence of Keats’s “suppleness and grace” and his statement that “[b]esides his morning task . . . on the Cap and Bells, Keats . . . ‘was deeply engaged in re-modelling Hyperion,’” a task that is of “singular and pathetic interest in [his] history” because it was undertaken “partly . . . to give expression to thoughts and feelings which were pressing on his mind” (ER, 183–86). It is, unfortunately, no coincidence whatsoever that the lines with which Lampman illustrates his discussion of The Fall of Hyperion (1:161–80) in “The Character and Poetry of Keats” are drawn, not from the text in the 1867 edition of Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, but from the passage as quoted in Colvin’s Keats (see ER, 346). Scudder was surely correct in classifying “The Character and Poetry of Keats” as a lecture rather than a publishable monograph. The very scope of Lampman’s reliance, first on Arnold and Shairp, and then on Houghton and Colvin, is not only an indication of the degree to which Keats and other Romantic poets were mediated for Lampman and other Canadian writers of the post-Confederation period by the major Victorian poets and critics, but also an exemplary instance of the tendency of the Victorians, whether in England or Canada, to assign value to the Romantics in accordance with the extent to which their poetry seemed to embody healthy, health-giving, and socially melioristic qualities. As a student of Carlyle, Lampman dutifully and vigorously put down Byron as a poet whose work is “a disturbing influence to human progress . . . and therefore of no real value to us” (ER, 120).28 As a reader also of such reactionary critics as W. J. Courthorpe and Edmund Clarence Stedman he dismissed the Pre-Raphaelites as poets who “cannot have much permanent influence upon taste, for the grand reason that they have done nothing to help mankind in the gradual and eternal movement toward order and divine beauty and peace” (ER, 68–69). With what relief, then, must Lampman have come upon Colvin’s reading of The Fall of Hyperion as the work of a poet for whom “the human mission and respectability of his art” had been a central and abiding concern “from [a]lmost the first dawning of his ambition,” a poet of an entirely different and higher order than “one who to indulge himself in dreams withdraws himself from the wholesome activities of ordinary

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men . . . , a trifler indifferent to the troubles of his fellow men” who is rightly “condemned to perish swiftly and be forgotten” (ER, 188–89).29 Indebted as it most certainly is to Colvin’s analysis, the lengthy commentary on Moneta’s explanation of “the poet’s character and lot”30 with which Lampman concludes his discussion of The Fall of Hyperion reflects Lampman’s long-standing and deeply held convictions of the man whose only substantial prose writings after “The Character and Poetry of Keats” were a friendly review of a collection of Thomson’s short stories, a fragmentary discussion of Socialism, and an essay on “Happiness.” Keats’s “own experience,” writes Lampman, had put him at cross-purposes with the profound and serious conception of human responsibility which was really his, and which ought, for his own happiness, to have been the guiding light of his life. However much a certain phase of his character drew him to the dreamer’s existence, a full and active humanity was the true motive power of his soul, and it could only be satisfied with an intimate share in the common life of men. He had come to think that the life of the wise and seriously-minded man, who is a poet, and a poet solely, must of necessity be unhappy; for it is the life of one who is intensely conscious of human suffering, and is persuaded that man’s existence is only justified by his usefulness in making that suffering less, yet who is forever haunted by the fear that the fruit of all his own intellectual travail is in the end nothing but vanity. (ER, 180) Through an effort of the imaginative empathy that he had been taught by Arnold, Shairp, and others to regard as a defining characteristic of the most “perfect” poets, Lampman here enters into Keats’s experiences and thoughts in an act of unselfconscious self-projection that makes the Romantic poet as much the embodiment of Lampman’s nervous personal and period concerns as the author of the moral–aesthetic ruminations of The Fall of Hyperion. More than Lampman’s notion that Keats had “found a sort of faint reincarnation in [him]” might suggest, the relationship between the two poets was a complex process of transmission and transference that enabled the Canadian writer to envisage himself as an heir to the psychological attributes, ethical ideals, and personal sufferings of a major Romantic poet and, thus, to conceive his own characteristics, principles, and apprehensions not only as evidence of a spiritual continuity between himself and that poet, but also as components of “the life of the wise and seriously-minded man, who is a poet, and a poet solely.” Behind the critical mosaic that is “The Character and Poetry of Keats” lives a Canadian writer whose own character and poetry were to a very con-

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siderable extent authorized by his conception of the “marvellous person” whose work he first encountered in the spring of 1884. If one observation could be made about Lampman’s compositional practice in both prose and poetry during the decade of his enchantment with (or by) Keats, it would be that a “motive power of his soul” at that time was emulation—a desire more assimilative than anxious to match the achievements of the writers whom he admired by being like (that is, somewhat similar to and somewhat different from) them. In prose, the derivativeness that this desire engendered appears, if anything, to have increased between 1885 (“The Modern School of Poetry in England”) and 1893 (“The Character and Poetry of Keats”); but in poetry the reverse was true: A little over a year after writing “April” in May 1884, Lampman was writing “nature poetry” whose descent from the Keats of “To Autumn” and its heirs (most notably Arnold’s “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gipsy”), though apparent, does not provoke the dismay or “embarrassment”31 of pastiche or slavish imitation. Fundamental to this shift are the local details that, as a stanza from “Among the Timothy” written in August 1885 will show, are described with sufficient clarity and conviction to render the stanza’s Keatsian (and Arnoldian) structure and components all but invisible. Eight years later, Lampman would draw “The Character and Poetry of Keats” to a close by rehearsing Colvin’s account of the composition of “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art” and by quoting “the tenderest, loftiest, and most touching [sonnet] in the English language” in its entirety (ER, 181), but in the final stanza of “Among the Timothy” he so appropriately and unobtrusively quotes the phrase that sums up the mood of sensual reverie in Keats’s sestet that it becomes, if unrecognized, an integral component of the poem’s climactic vision and, if recognized, a fitting supplement to its depiction of psychological regeneration: And hour by hour among all the shapes that grow Of purple mints and daisies gemmed with gold In sweet unrest my visions come and go; I feel and hear and with quiet eyes behold; And hour by hour, the ever-journeying sun, In gold and shadow spun, Into mine eyes and blood, and through the dim Green glimmering forest of the grass shines down, Till flower and blade, and every cranny brown, And I are soaked in him. (Poems, 16) “I confess that my design for instance in writing ‘Among the Timothy’ was not in the first place to describe a landscape,” Lampman informed

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the American writer Hamlin Garland on 25 April 1889, “but to describe the effect of a few hours spent among the summer fields on a mind in a troubled and despondent condition. The description of the landscape was an accessory to my plan.”32 In a ten-line heterometrical stanza respectfully reminiscent of both Keats and Arnold (and, of course, both “Thyrsis” and “The Scholar-Gipsy” are themselves indebted formally to “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to Melancholy”), “Among the Timothy” combines elements drawn from the Canadian environment (such as “purple mints”) with elements reminiscent of English Romantic and Victorian poetry (such as “sweet unrest”) in an admixture that proclaims itself a continuation in the North American therapeutic context of the British tradition. As the acknowledged leader of the Confederation group, Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943), put it much later in an address on “Canadian Poetry in Its Relation to the Poetry of England and America” (1933), “Canadian verse during [the post-Confederation] period was distinctive from the verse of England and America” and also “a branch of one splendid parent stem.”33 Or as Lampman’s friend and poetic protégé Duncan Campbell Scott (1862–1947) observed in his At the Mermaid Inn column in the Toronto Globe in 1892, “Once in a while the critics across the water may look perplexed and ask what our poets mean by ‘timothy,’ or some other colloquial term,”34 but in the main there are more similarities than differences between Canada and Britain: “Our skies are higher and brighter, the tints of our forests are more varied, our winter comes with greater snows and frosts,” but “in all essential points . . . we have a decent, old-fashioned climate, which corresponds . . . to that which has bronzed the poets of old England” (9). Since the cold winters of Canada had, since at least the end of the eighteenth century, been regarded as conducive to good health, Scott might have added that Canada’s “decent old-fashioned climate” was as much a source as England’s of mental and physical well-being. It will scarcely come as a surprise that the authors of the statements just quoted—Roberts and Scott—wrote commemorative odes that explicitly link major Romantic poets with portions of the Canadian landscape: Shelley with the Tantramar region of New Brunswick and Keats with “the high tarn” of the Arctic.35 In both Roberts’s “Ave (An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892)” and Scott’s “Ode for the Keats Centenary / February 23, 1921” the spirit of an admired and cherished Romantic poet is not only incarnated in a site beloved by the Canadian poet but also made therapeutically present through association to any reader who visits the site after reading the poem. Before looking briefly at both “Ave” and “An Ode to the Keats Centenary,” a few moments must be taken to place on view the seminal poem in the Canadian commemorative genre to which they

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belong: “Shelley” by Roberts’s cousin and fellow Confederation poet Bliss Carman (1861–1929).

II One of the trips which we made from Montreal was up the river Ottawa, a stream which has a classical place in everyone’s imagination from [Thomas] Moore’s Canadian Boat song. . . .The effect [of the poem] is great, even upon those who have never seen the “Utawa’s tide,”—nor “flown down the Rapids,” nor heard the “bell of St. Anne’s toll its evening chime;” while the same lines give to distant regions, previously consecrated in our imagination, a vividness of interest when viewed on the spot, of which it is difficult to say how much is due to the magic of the poetry, and how much to the beauty of the real scene. —Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828

An early manifestation of the admiration for Shelley that would lead Carman to write “The White Gull / For the Centenary of the Birth of Shelley” (1892),36 “Shelley” is a crisply structured appreciation of the “rebel captive” who “[b]urn[ed] to free the soul of man” that was first published in the 8 January 1887 number of The Literary World (Boston) during Carman’s brief stint as a graduate student at Harvard.37 The first five stanzas of the poem consist of a lackluster rehearsal of Shelley’s qualities that comes to rest at his grave “beneath the wall / Of changeless Rome,” and the remaining stanzas use the “strange[ness]” of the locale as a pretext for suggesting that a more appropriate repository for the poet’s remains would be the poem’s compositional setting of “Frye Island, N[ew] B[runswick], Canada”: More soft, I deem, from spring to spring, Thy sleep would be, Where this far western headland lies Beneath these matchless azure skies Under thee hearing beat and swing The eternal sea. A bay so beauteous islanded— A bay so stilled— You well might deem the world were new; And some fair day’s Italian blue,

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With its somewhat awkward syntax and stock diction (“azure skies,” “beauteous islanded”), “Shelley” does not represent Carman at his best, but is nevertheless remarkable for three, interrelated reasons: (1) its suggestion that Shelley’s “soul” might be more at home in a natural, unspoiled Canadian environment than in the carceral, historical space of Europe;38 (2) its association of the English poet with a Canadian landscape that he never visited or described;39 and (3) its insistence that the landscape thus inspirited with Shelley is a site of “calm” untinged by “pain.” In effect, Carman creates a site of poetic significance and therapeutic properties in the Canadian environment where none had previously existed, transforming the animate and inanimate features of an island off Canada’s east coast into what Frederick Law Olmsted had described as a place of “prophylactic,” “therapeutic,” and “poetic” value— and Henri Lefebvre would describe as a “representational space”—a place that is simultaneously present in its “actuality” and as a script of “affective . . . associations and connections” centered on Shelley.40 After reading Carman’s poem it would be difficult, if not impossible, at least for a while, to hear the thrushes of Frye Island (and similar locales) without thinking of the author of Alastor, “Ode to the West Wind” and “To a Sky-Lark” and associating their song with a tranquil transcendence of mental anguish. The intertextual link between “Shelley” and “To a Sky-lark” is especially interesting because it points to another aspect of Carman’s originality in the poem: his preservation and reinscription of a North American species (the thrush) for an English species (the skylark) that is not indigenous to Canada. A variation on this strategy can be found in “The White Gull,” Carman’s contribution to the 1893 “Centenary of the Birth of Shelley,” in which he treats the “solitary sea-bird” that reportedly put in several appearances at Shelley’s “funeral ceremony”41 as a partial analogue for his new renown in Canada. “In that sea-rover’s glimmering flight,” Carman tells Shelley, “something . . . like thy fame / Dares the wide morn . . . / As if the Northland and the night / Should hear thy splendid name /

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Put scorn to scorn.”42 Several stanzas of “Shelley” are incorporated into the final portion of “The White Gull,” but pride of concluding place in the later poem goes, not to the thrushes of Frye Island, but to “[a] white gull search[ing] the blue dome / With keening cry” by the “ruthless noisy sea.”43 The implication is clear: Anyone seeing or hearing a seagull on the coast of Canada or the United States should think of Shelley. Nor is the shift from “thrushes” to “gull” the only notable difference between “Shelley” and “The White Gull,” for by the time he wrote the latter poem and the commemorative odes on Keats and William Blake that surround it in By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (1898)44 Carman had become deeply immersed in a system of mind–body–spirit harmonization (unitrinianism) derived from the French theorist François Delsarte and designed “to medicine the mind[s]”45 of the supposedly “overmentalized”46 urban American middle and upper classes. Annie Crawford wrote in the 21 November 1891 issue of the Dominion Illustrated that the Delsarte System is a “revelation to nervebound persons who, with well-developed muscles, keep such tension upon them when not in use that their vital force is uselessly squandered. It teaches how to conserve vital energy; how to avoid wasteful nerve tension; so that the student works better, rests better, and also, by the physical exercise of certain nerves, gains more brilliancy and activity of mind.”47 While the thematic and technical results of Carman’s immersion in the Delsarte System are most readily apparent in his Vagabondia (1894–1900) and Pipes of Pan (1898–1906) series, By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies is also a medicinal book aimed at reducing the nervous tensions of its readers by conducting them into a realm of harmony and tranquillity. “A good book, like a good comrade,” Carman would write in The Friendship of Art (1904), “is one that leaves us happier or better off in any way for having known it”; it “must be so true that it convinces our reason . . . ; it must be so beautiful that it . . . delights our taste; it must be so spirited and right minded that it enlists our sympathy and stirs our more humane emotions. . . . A book must always appeal to us in these three ways” if it is to harmonize mind, body, and spirit and, thus, alleviate the nervous disorders of modern life.48 Since Roberts read and admired “The White Gull” before completing “Ave” in late October of that year,49 it is scarcely surprising that his commemorative ode also contains a reference to the seagull that graced the poet’s funeral. In “Ave,” however, the “wild white bird” is the “wailing semblance” of a “grieving ghost”—possibly, as Desmond Pacey and Graham Adams suggest, the ghost of Keats50 who is “made one with Nature” toward the end of Adonais and, hence, becomes a “presence to be felt or known . . . where’re that Power may move / Which has withdrawn his being to its own.”51 While this neo-Platonic notion of the universal

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immanence of a dead poet’s spirit obviously lies in the background of “Ave,” Roberts’s poem also betrays its debt to Carman’s commemorative pieces in its association of Shelley with a particular New Brunswick landscape, in this case the tidal marshes of the river that Roberts had begun to make his own almost a decade earlier in “Tantramar Revisited” (1883), the Wordsworthian return-poem-cum-Victorian sea meditation that has come to be regarded as one of his masterpieces. The fact that by 1892 the Tantramar marshlands were closely “associated and connected” with Roberts, who was by then generally regarded as the leader of a new school of Canadian poets, adds a magnanimity born of self-confidence to his construction of them as a natural equivalent of Shelley’s character and concerns and, indeed, of his agonized mind and body: Strangely akin you [the marshes] seem to him whose birth One hundred years ago With fiery succour to the ranks of song Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong. Like yours, O marshes, his compassionate breast, Wherein abode all dreams of love and peace, Was tortured with perpetual unrest. Now loud with flood, now languid with release, Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife Of tides from the salt sea of human pain That hiss along the perilous coasts of life Beat in his eager brain; But all about the tumult of his heart Stretched the great calm of his celestial art.52 As the final lines of this last stanza attest, Roberts construes the Tantramar marshes not only as a correlative for the “pain” experienced by Shelley, but also as a figure for the release from pain that can be obtained through contact with both his “celestial art” and the natural world: Therefore with no far flight, from Tantramar And my still world of ecstasy, to thee, Shelley, to thee I turn, the avatar Of Song, Love, Dream, Desire, and Liberty; To thee I turn with reverent hands of prayer And lips that fain would ease my heart of praise, Whom chief of all whose brows prophetic wear The pure and sacred bays

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I worship, and have worshipped since the hour When first I felt thy bright and chainless power.53 Conceived as a “Commemoration Ode” rather than an “elegy,”54 “Ave” nevertheless belongs in the tradition of the pastoral elegy that Roberts traces back to Bion and Moschus in an essay first published in the New Princeton Review in May 1888 and subsequently reprinted, first in the King’s College Record (Windsor, Nova Scotia) in March 1893 and then as the preface to his 1902 edition of Shelley’s Alastor and Adonais. Almost as predictable as the presence of the two stanzas beginning “He is made one with Nature” as the principal sample of Adonais in “Pastoral Elegies” is Roberts’s Victorian insistence that the “Spiritualized pantheism” of Shelley’s neo-Platonic consolation is “vivified by a breadth of the essence of Christian philosophy” and a “creed of personal immortality, of inextinguishable identity.”55 The Shelley who is made one with the Tantramar marshlands in “Ave” may have “Defied the ancient gates of wrath and wrong,” but he also followed the same “star” as Dante and “saw . . . the living God / And worshipped . . . beholding Him the same / Adored on earth as Love.”56 In short, the Shelley who is assimilated without any sign of provincial nervousness or nationalistic truculence to the Tantramar marshlands is a Browningesque Shelley who is “strangely akin” to the physical qualities of a particular Canadian place and also a product of both the religious disposition of Victorian Canada and the therapeutic culture of post–Civil War America. Nor should it escape notice that from the opening words of “Ave” (“O tranquil meadows, grassy Tantramar”)57 and in the heterometrical ten-line stanza form of the poem, Shelley is celebrated by a poet steeped in Wordsworth, Keats, and Arnold. (In 1892 Roberts published an essay on “Wordsworth’s Poetry” that takes issue with Arnold’s enormously influential Introduction to his selection of Wordsworth’s poems in the Golden Treasury series [1879], and in 1927 he told an interviewer that as a young man he had “soaked in the sheer poetry, . . . the cadence and the colour” of Keats and Shelley and was “touched” first by the prose and then by the poetry of Arnold.58) Implicit in Roberts’s treatment both of Shelley’s poetry and of the Canadian landscape in “Ave” and other poems of the 1880s and 1890s is the conception of wild(er)ness as therapeutic that would lead him in 1902 in the Introduction to his collection of animal stories, The Kindred of the Wild, to credit the literature of “woods and wild life” with the capacity to “refresh . . . and renew” readers by freeing them “a little from the world of shop-worn utilities and from the mean tenement of self.”59 If there is a terminus ad quem, a limit to which the Confederation group’s emulation and celebration of the English Romantic poets, in

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general, and Keats, in particular, was inevitably pushed by the vast social and literary shifts for which the First World War is frequently seen as a symptom and cause, it is probably Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Ode for the Keats Centenary . . . Read at Hart House Theatre before the University of Toronto” on 23 February 1921. In choosing to compose a poem to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Keats’s death, Scott must have remembered the extraordinary importance of the English poet to Lampman’s poetic development and identity. (“Arnold was his favorite modern poet and he read his works oftener than those of any other,” Scott had written of Lampman in the “Memoir”60 that serves as a preface to his Poems [1900], “but Keats was the only poet whose method he carefully studied.”61) Perhaps Scott was also remembering the commemorative poems of Carman and Roberts when, in the opening verse paragraphs of his “ode,” he elected to follow a brief meditation on the posthumous nature of Keats’s fame by focusing on his burial place “[b]eneath the frown of . . . old Roman stone / And the cold Roman violets” as a means of quickly establishing his ultimate “alone[ness] and absence.”62 Certainly, Scott could be echoing Carman’s “Shelley” when he suggests that if Keats were able to escape the “Shadow” of death then his “power / Of ‘seeing great things in loneliness’” (the quotation, as Tracy Ware has noted,63 comes from one of Keats’s letters to Benjamin Haydon) would propel his “Spirit” away from the “toil” and “press” of southern Europe to the health-giving solitude and purity of the Canadian Arctic. At the heart of Scott’s “Ode” are a series of parallel stanzas and verse paragraphs that juxtapose the isolated beauty of Arctic flora and fauna with the difficult work of poets and scientists who “brood alone in the intense serene” (a variation, of course, on Shelley’s “intense inane”) for the spiritual health and progress of humankind. “Spirit of Keats,” intones Scott in parallel apostrophes, “[t]each us by these pure-hearted” and “soul-haunted things / Beauty in loneliness.”64 Clearly, what makes Keats a fitting teacher and physician for poets, scientists, and others who work “oft in pain and penury” is his experience of precisely these conditions in his lonely dedication to truth, beauty, and human melioration. “When . . . calling on the name of poetry,” Scott would tell the Royal Society of Canada in his presidential address on “Poetry and Progress” in May 1922, “I am thinking of that element in the art . . . in which the power of growth resides, which is the winged and restless spirit keeping pace with knowledge and often eating into the void in advance of speculation. . . . This spirit endeavours to interpret the world in new terms of beauty. . . . It absorbs science and philosophy, and anticipates social progress in terms of ideality. It is rare, but it is ever present, for what is it but the flickering

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and pulsation of the force that created the world.”65 The fact that Keats is mentioned and quoted several times in “Poetry and Progress” reinforces the suspicion that in Scott’s mind the winged “Spirit of Keats” and the “winged and restless spirit of poetry” were so closely linked as to be almost identical. The remainder of “Ode for the Keats Centenary” is a meditation on the forces that have driven Beauty into the Canadian Arctic and the means by which the “goddess” might be persuaded to return to the “desolate world” of the early twentieth century.66 Driven into solitude by human ignorance, aggression, and sordidness, Beauty might be persuaded to return to “the great highways” of human life “if the world’s mood” were to “Change” for the better and if the “Spirit of Keats” would “lend [its] voice . . . like surge [breaking] in some enchanted cave / On a dreamsea-coast” to that of the poet and her other devotees. Without the necessary change in the weltkultur, however, even a chorus containing Keats’s “Spirit” must fail to tempt Beauty away from “the precinct of pure air / Where moments turn to months of solitude”: “‘Let me restore the soul that ye have marred,’” she implores, “‘Leave me alone, lone mortals, / Until my shaken soul comes to its own.’”67 After this request, the “mortals” redouble their appeals to Beauty to return to the “lonely world,” and the poem draws to its muted and crepuscular conclusion: “All the dim wood is silent as a dream / That dreams of silence.”68 Beauty, it would appear, has taken “permanent . . . refuge from life” and can only be found in regions “beyond the bitter strife.”69 Such therapeutic realms are as geographically remote as the Canadian Arctic and as readily available as the town library, for, as Scott says at the conclusion of his address on “Poetry and Progress,” “if the poetry of our generation is wayward and discomfiting, . . . bitter with the turbulence of an uncertain and ominous time, we may turn from it for refreshment to those earlier days when society appears to us to have been simpler, when there were seers who made clear the paths of life and adorned them with beauty.”70 It was this antimodern yearning for less complex and more aesthetically congenial times and places that drew Scott to both Keats and the “lonely north” and led, in “Ode for the Keats Centenary,” to a conjunction of the Romantic poet and the Canadian Arctic that emphasizes the remoteness even while it affirms the persistence of a Beauty that may yet “return / Even lovelier than before” to grace the “crowded southern land.”71 After all, had not the “seer” himself asserted in the famous opening lines of Endymion that “[a] thing of beauty is a joy forever” whose “loveliness increases” and “will never / Pass into nothingness”?72


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No more in “Ode for the Keats Centenary” than in “Ave,” “Shelley,” “Among the Timothy,” or “April” does the English literary tradition appear as a burden that stifles creativity, an imposition that demands resistance, or an inheritance that generates anxious or nervous apprehension. On the contrary, in Scott’s commemorative ode, as in the earlier poems of Roberts, Carman, and Lampman, the lives and works of the English Romantic poets are explicitly or implicitly (and often both) celebrated through acts of imitation, emulation, and apostrophe. In the 1880s and 1890s, the poetry of the Confederation group thus honored the tradition from which it largely sprang, revealing especially in the commemorative poems inspired by the Shelley and Keats centenaries an urge to invest Canadian landscapes with the spirit of the Romantic poet or, in Lefebvre’s phrase, to implant the poet as the “affective kernel or centre” of a particular area or region.73 In time, of course, the unstable amalgam of Canadian nationalism and British imperialism that had helped to sustain the sense of apart(of)ness that characterized the post-Confederation period decayed and disintegrated as, indeed, did the Confederation group itself. In February 1897, Roberts joined Carman in the United States and two years later Lampman was dead. For a brief period to which Scott’s “Ode for the Keats Centenary” is a residual testament, it had been possible to think of Romantic poetry as a vital component of the Canadian environment, to overcome the distances of space and time between the Old World past and the New World present, to imagine the possibility of “faint reincarnation”: It had been possible to be a Romantic and a Canadian poet, a local-descriptive writer and mediciner of nervous North American minds and bodies. Such contiguities are a reflection of Canada’s place in time and space, and they help to constitute a body of literature that by habitus and orientation identifies itself as, in every parsing of the term, British North American.

NOTES I am grateful to the University of Western Ontario and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of my teaching and research, and to Joel Faflak and Julia Wright for their invitation to write this piece. Readers unfamiliar with Canadian literature will want to know that Archibald Lampman was a member of the Confederation group of Canadian poets, whose other members were Charles G. D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Frederick George Scott, and William Wilfred Campbell. Always highly unstable for reasons of geography (Lampman, Campbell, and the two Scotts were central Canadians, Roberts and Carman were Maritimers), the group flourished between 1880 and 1897, when Roberts, its acknowledged leader, joined Carman in the United States. The At the Mermaid Inn in the Toronto Globe from which the first of the opening epigraphs is taken, was a weekly col-

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umn conducted by Lampman, Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott. The author of the third epigraph, J. Macdonald Oxley, was a literary associate of Lampman, Campbell, and Scott in Ottawa, and his essay “Busy People” was published in a periodical owned and edited by Lampman’s father-in-law, Edward Playter, a prominent physician and a channel through which the mind-cure theories of S. Weir Mitchell, George Miller Beard, and others probably reached the poet. See Mitchell’s Wear and Tear or Hints for the Overworked (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871); and Beard’s American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences; a Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881) and, for further discussion of the presence of the therapeutic aspects of the work of the Confederation group, see D. M. R. Bentley, “Carman and Mind Cure: Theory and Technique” in Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal, ed. Gerald Lynch, Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 16 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990); and “Charles G. D. Roberts and William Wilfred Campbell as Canadian Tour Guides,” Journal of Canadian Studies 32 (Summer 1997): 79–99. It is also worth noting that Lampman, Roberts, and Carman all suffered from the “nervous” problems that their poems address—Lampman after his move to Ottawa in the early 1880s, Roberts as a result of overwork and marital problems in the early 1890s, and Carman as a consequence of the premature death of Richard Hovey shortly after the turn of the century. A rich and readily accessible source of scholarly and critical material on the Confederation poets (and, indeed, on Canadian poetry generally) is the Canadian Poetry Web site www.arts.uwo.ca/canpoetry. 1. Archibald Lampman, An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thompson (1890–1898), ed. Helen Lynn (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980), 119. Subsequent references to this text are cited as AC. 2. See the final chapter of Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 139–55. 3. Lampman’s reference to “the Astral Plane” in a letter to Thompson on 22 November 1893 (AC 102) is one among several pieces of evidence that in the early 1890s he was familiar with ideas promulgated by the Theosophical Society, which, of course, included reincarnation. 4. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xv. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 54. 6. See L. R. Early, “A Chronology of Lampman’s Poems,” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 14 (spring/summer 1984): 78. All subsequent references to the dates of composition of Lampman’s poems are based on Early. 7. Archibald Lampman, Poems, ed. Duncan Campbell Scott (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1900), 4–5. Hereafter, this book is cited within the text as Poems. For a discussion of the association of the trilling of frogs with spring in the American northeast and, by extension, the Canadian southeast in the late nineteenth century (and, in large measure, as a consequence of the work of the

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American nature writer John Burroughs), see D. M. R. Bentley, “American Meteorological Determinism and Post-Confederation Poetry,” in Informal Empire? Cultural Relations between Canada, the United States, and Europe, ed. Peter Easingwood, Konrad Gross, and Harmut Lutz, Schriftenreihe des Zentrums für Kanada-Studien an der Universität Trier, 8 (Kiel, Ger.: Verlag, 1998), 129–30. In “Two Canadian Poets: a Lecture” (1891), Lampman recalls that on a May morning when he was still a student at Trinity College “a few adder-tongues . . . [were] still blossoming” (Archibald Lampman, Essays and Reviews, ed. D. M. R. Bentley [London, Ont.: Canadian Poetry Press, 1996], 95; emphasis added). Subsequent references to this text are cited as ER. 8. L. R. Early, Archibald Lampman, Twayne World Authors Series, Canadian Literature 770 (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 47. In the first influence study of Lampman’s poetry (1901), John Marshall points out the resemblances between “April” and “To Autumn” and suggests that almost all elements of Lampman’s poem—“[p]icturesque epithet, syntactical arrangement, personification, the use of apostrophe, the rhythmical movement and, with modifications, the stanza form—are “derived from Keats.” See his “Archibald Lampman” in Archibald Lampman, ed. Michael Gnarowski, Critical Views of Canadian Writers (Toronto: Ryerson, 1920), 40. In “April,” “Lampman’s eye,” Marshall argues, was “obviously . . . rather on his author than on his object.” Lampman’s indebtedness to Wordsworth is also touched upon by Marshall, but its very extent and complexity dictates that it can only be mentioned in passing in this chapter. See, however, such poems as “Winter Hues Recalled” (circa 1888) (Poems, 27–30), The Story of an Affinity (1892–1894), and the lengthy discussion of Wordsworth in the undated essay entitled “Poetic Interpretation” (circa 1892) in Lampman’s Essays and Reviews, 234–41. For the argument that the poetry of the post-Confederation period in Canada is characterized by a Romanticism that is rendered “ironic” by “a subtle naturalism and materialism” (1), see Les McLeod’s “Canadian Post-Romanticism: The Context of Late Nineteenth-Century Canadian Poetry,” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 14 (spring/summer 1984): 1–37. 9. See Bentley, “American Meteorological Determinism,” 129–41. In The Climate of Canada and Its Relations to Life and Health (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1884), William M. Hingston observes that “April . . . is the month which may with truth be called a spring month” in Canada (that is, what is now central and eastern Canada) (44). 10. John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (1956; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 218. 11. Ibid., 219. 12. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State of Both Nations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 329. 13. Frank Birbalsingh, Novels and Nation: Essays in Canadian Literature (Toronto: TSAR, 1995), 3.

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14. Sarah M. Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 50. 15. Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 4. 16. See especially “The Revolt of Islam,” “Gambetta,” and “German Patriotic Poetry” in Lampman’s Essays and Reviews, 3–9, 28–33, and 46–57 and the accompanying annotations. Lampman’s attitude toward Shelley was mercurial; for example, shortly after moving to Ottawa in January 1883, he told a college friend that he had “betaken [himself] lately back to [his] old love, Shelley and . . . swear[s] that he is the greatest of them all” (quoted in Carl Connor, Archibald Lampman: Canadian Poet of Nature [New York: Louis Carrier, 1929], 67), but several years later, in his At the Mermaid Inn column for 5 March 1892, he responded to the suggestion that “some Canadian publisher should issue a memorial volume of contributions by Canadian authors in honour of the Shelley [onehundredth] anniversary” by including himself among the “class of minds . . . who do not find themselves drawn to Shelley in the intensest degree” (28). What Lampman found most remarkable about Shelley in 1883—the “sort of tremendous, weird, unearthly majesty in his wilder pieces” (quoted in Connor, 67)— seems to have been the basis of his later reservations: As I read over and meditate on those wonderful poems, I find myself often a little repelled by the absence of something, which . . . I would call “the human.” Shelley appears to us not as a normal being of this world but as a spirit, strange, radiant, and inspired, whose joy had in it the glow of an unearthly light, and its gloom a shadow fantastic and without the bound of mortal conception. . . . We miss in him that earthy human heartiness and neighbourly warmth . . . of Shakespeare . . . , the quality that glows in Keats’s and Wordsworth’s best. Archibald Lampman, At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892–93, ed. Barrie Davies, Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 28, 29. 17. Lampman’s points of departure for the lecture are Carlyle’s definition of the poet as an “interpreter of the Invisible,” Matthew Arnold’s conception of poetry as a “criticism of life,” and Alfred Austin’s notion of it as “a transfiguration of life” (see ER, 58), and at several points in the essay he echoes such conservative critics of the Pre-Raphaelites as John Campbell Shairp and W. J. Courthorpe (see ER, 245–58). 18. See Thomas Humphry Ward, ed., The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, 4 vols. (1880; 1885; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971). 19. See Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–1977), 9:214–15.

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22. John Campbell Shairp, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877), 27. 23. John Campbell Shairp, Aspects of Poetry, Being Lectures Delivered at Oxford (1881; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1972), 1–30. 24. The most obvious case in point is Lampman’s essay “Style” (circa 1889), which relies heavily on the chapter “Poetic Style in Modern English Poetry” in Shairp’s Aspects of Poetry. See Lampan, Essays and Reviews, 260–73. 25. Shairp, On Poetic Interpretation of Nature, 257. 26. See Archibald Lampman, Papers, W. A. C. Bennet Library, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia. Lampman may have been encouraged to expand his project not only by Thomson, but also by the extraordinary interest in Keats in Boston literary circles in the early 1890s. Led by Fred Hall Day, a Wildean aesthete whose publishing house, Copeland and Day, would eventually print Lampman’s second volume of poetry, Lyrics of Earth (1895), and Louise Imogen Guiney, a poet and critic whose intense anglophilia would eventually take her permanently to England, a campaign had been underway since 1891 to erect the memorial to Keats that Lampman describes in the second epigraph to this chapter. The Keats Memorial was dedicated in July 1894. 27. See Lord Houghton, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (New York: George Putnam, 1848; rev. ed., 1867) and Sidney Colvin, Keats (1887; rev. ed., 1869; reprint, London: Macmillan, 1913). 28. This quotation is from Lampman’s “The Poetry of Byron” (circa 1892), an essay that makes its Carlylean case against Byron by drawing heavily on the more sympathetic treatments of his work by Arnold and Roden Noel (see ER, 290–301). At several points in the essay, Lampman compares Byron unfavorably with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, remarking of the last that “there is something in [the last two lines of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’] . . . by which we feel rather than know . . . the one ruling instinct of the poet’s mental and worldly life [to be a] sensitive and absorbing feeling for pure abstract beauty” that assists “mankind” in its slow but sure movement toward “what is pure and noble and beautiful” (ER, 116, 124). In emphasizing Keats’s “feeling for pure abstract beauty,” Lampman is merely echoing widely quoted statements by Keats himself, albeit once again perhaps under the tutelage of Arnold, who makes much of Keats’s dedication to “the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things” as an indication of his “great spirit” (see Arnold, Complete Prose Works, 9:213–14). 29. Lampman’s passing and anomalous view of Keats in “Style” as the only major Romantic poet who “stands separate from his age, like a half completed palace of the Italian Renaissance, planted in nineteenth-century England, absorbed in its own reminiscent dream of beauty and unconscious of all spiritual

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fervour and social stir around it” (ER, 81) may be an extrapolation of Courthorpe’s characterization of him in “The Latest Development of Literary Poetry: Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris” (1872) as a “strange example of literary reaction” whose poems treat “the remote tales of Greek mythology” and contain “not . . . a single allusion to passing events” (ER, 61–62). Courthorpe’s 1872 review appears to lie centrally in the background of “The Modern School of Poetry in England.” See [William John Courthorpe], “The Latest Development of Literary: Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris,” Review of Songs before Sunrise, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and The Earthly Paradise, by William Morris, Quarterly Review 132 (January 1872): 59–84. 30. Colvin, Keats, 187. 31. Ibid. 32. As quoted in James Doyle, “Archibald Lampman and Hamlin Garland,” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 16 (spring/summer 1985): 40. 33. Charles G. D. Roberts, “Canadian Poetry in Its Relation to the Poetry of England and America,” ed. D. M. R. Bentley, Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 3 (fall/winter, 1978): 81. 34. Scott is referring to the anonymous review of Among the Millet, and Other Poems under the title “A Canadian Poet” in The Spectator (London) on 12 January 1889, 52–53. Interestingly enough for the present argument, the review begins by stating that Lampman’s poetry is “full at once of the influence of Canadian scenery and of classical culture.” 35. Duncan Campbell Scott, Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1926), 153. 36. Like Roberts, Carman was also a very great admirer of, among others, Emerson, Thoreau, Burroughs, and the Pre-Raphaelites (particularly Morris, Swinburne, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti). 37. See Bliss Carman, “Shelley,” The Literary World 18 (8 January 1887): 8. 38. See Maia Bhojwani, “A Northern Pantheism: Notes on the Confederation Poets and Contemporary Mythographers,” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 9 (fall/winter 1981): 42. 39. Susan Glickman, “Carman’s ‘Shelley’ and Roberts’ ‘Ave,’” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 24 (spring/summer 1989): 25. 40. See Olmsted, Mount Royal, Montreal; and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 42. 41. Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1886), 2:534. 42. Bliss Carman, Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1929), 169. 43. Ibid., 173–74.

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44. Bliss Carman, By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (Boston: Lamson, Wolffe, 1898). 45. Bliss Carman, The Kinship of Nature (Boston: L. C. Page, 1903), 58. 46. Bliss Carman, The Making of Personality (Boston: L. C. Page, 1908), 220. 47. Annie Crawford, “Chautauqua,” Dominion Illustrated, 21 November 1891, 484–85. 48. Bliss Carman, The Friendship of Art (Boston: L. C. Page, 1904), 166. 49. See Charles G. D. Roberts, Collected Letters, ed. Laurel Boone (Fredericton, N.S.: Goose Lane, 1989), 154–55. 50. See Charles G. D. Roberts, Collected Poems, ed. Desmond Pacey (Wolfville, N.S.: Wombat, 1985), 461. 51. P. B. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), ll. 370–76. 52. Roberts, Collected Poems, 145. 53. Ibid., 147. 54. Roberts, Collected Letters, 156. 55. Charles G. D. Roberts, “Pastoral Elegies,” New Princeton Review 5 (1888): 365. 56. Roberts, Collected Poems, 148, 151. 57. For a fine discussion of the presence of Wordsworth in Roberts’s poetry and criticism, see L. R. Early, “Roberts as Critic,” The Sir Charles G. D. Roberts Symposium, ed. Glenn Clever, Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 10 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), 173–89. 58. See Charles G. D. Roberts, “Lorne Pierce’s Interview with Charles G. D. Roberts (as reported by Margaret Lawrence),” ed. Terry Whalen, Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 21 (fall/winter 1987): 73. 59. Charles G. D. Roberts, The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life (Boston: L. C. Page, 1902), 29. 60. The story of Lampman’s complex relationship with Arnold has yet to be told and, clearly, lies outside the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, it can be noted that in his earliest extant letter to Lampman (23 September 1882), Roberts indicates that Lampman has mentioned Arnold in a previous letter, describes him as “second to no living English writer in prose or verse,” and recommends Essays and Criticism, particularly the essays on “Heine,” “Maurice de Guérin,” and “On Translating Homer,” as a source of “the richest intellectual fruits” (Collected Letters, 30). In February 1884, Lampman heard Arnold’s “Numbers; or the Majority and the Remnant” lecture in Ottawa and was “filled with an abiding sense of reverence and affection for that splendid old fellow, who looks and acts and

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speaks as nobly as he writes” (quoted in Connor, 76), and in his At the Mermaid Inn column for 25 June 1892 he designated Arnold as the “poet who in this last age occupies the clearest and noblest plane of all. . . . With a mind blown clear as by the free wind of heaven he surveys the extent of life. He passes through an atmosphere where only the noblest emotions, life, beauty and thought, possess him” (quoted in Connor, 97–98). 61. See Duncan Campbell Scott, “Memoir,” in Poems, by Archibald Lampman (Toronto: George N. Morang, 1900), xi–xxv, esp. xxiv. 62. Scott, Poems, 151–52. 63. Tracy Ware, “A Generic Approach to Confederation Romanticism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Western Ontario, 1984), 103. 64. Scott, Poems, 153–54. 65. Duncan Campbell Scott, “Poetry and Progress,” Duncan Campbell Scott: A Book of Criticism, ed. S. L. Dragland (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1974), 19. 66. Scott, Poems, 155. 67. Ibid., 156–57. 68. Ibid., 157. 69. Ibid., 156. 70. See Scott, “Poetry and Progress,” 27. 71. Scott, Poems, 47, 155. 72. See Keats, Poetical Works, 55. 73. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 42.

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Part II A Matter of Balance: Byronic Illness and Vi c t o r i a n C u r e

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5 Early Romantic Theorists and T h e F a t e o f Tr a n s g r e s s i v e E l o q u e n c e : J o h n S t u a r t M i l l ’s Response to Byron Timothy J. Wandling

“Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.” —John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties”

For I will teach, if possible, the stones To rise against the tyrants. Never let it Be said that we still truckle unto thrones;— But ye—our children’s children! think how we Showed what things were before the world was free! —Byron, Don Juan

This chapter examines the question of what became of Byronic poetics and the cultural anxieties that shape the negative reaction to his audiencedriven mode of poetry. In the passages quoted here, John Stuart Mill and Byron put forward contrasting models of poetic practice. Mill’s wellknown description of poetry as that which is “overheard” reflects these post-Romantic anxieties about readers that shape both the negative reception of Byron’s poetry and the ideas about audiences that come to inhabit 123

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the institutions of literary criticism. Against the grain of the expressive poetics developed and articulated by his contemporaries, Byron practices a mode of poetry that throughout his career seeks to engage his audience with issues both political and personal, often showing how the two could not be separated.1 His poetics are not published in traditional accounts of Romantic literary theory; however, as is the case with Keats, Byron’s letters, journals, and, in particular, his poetry itself, can allow us to discern a poetics of transgressive eloquence that is quite unlike that of any of his now canonical contemporaries.2 To explore the fate of this poetics, we must look to the literary and social milieu of the late 1820s and into the next decades in order to see how Byron’s transgressive eloquence is rejected and the hostility to mass audiences articulated by Wordsworth and Coleridge became institutionalized as part of literary study. One might expect a rethinking of Byronic poetics to be a crucial part of the critical project of the last two decades, but this has not necessarily been the case. Beginning in the early 1980s with the work of Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson, and others, scholars began a crucial rethinking about what constitutes Romanticism. The result has been an emerging criticism that refuses to take Romanticism on its own terms and that seeks to reveal the ideologies that underlie canonical Romantic works. This inquiry has necessarily focused on the five poets, Wordsworth above all, whose work has traditionally been seen as expressive or visionary. At the same time, scholarly work has flourished on noncanonical writers, particularly the many important women writers of the period. Byron, however, remains uneasily camped in either of these groups, neither canonical nor marginalized. On the one hand, he is, after all, one of the six major male poets of traditional Romantic period courses; but on the other hand, his mode of poetry was hardly influential at all in terms of the development of English literary history. Save Auden, few traditionally anthologized poets have ever modeled their practice on Byron’s. One might say that while Byron has remained a canonical figure, always represented as important to understanding the feelings of the Romantic era, his poetry, and especially his poetics, have remained less than central to the study of Romanticism. To explore how Byronic practice came to be seen as less than central to Romanticism requires an examination of the fate of Byron’s poetics of transgressive eloquence in terms of the cultural values developed and articulated by the Victorian men of letters. These men grew up reading the Romantics, and their work in the developing field of literary studies led to an eventually dominant poetics, a poetics quietist in its politics and hostile to mass reading audiences in its ethos. When Mill uttered his famous proclamation opposing poetry to eloquence, he was self-consciously arguing against Byronic practice, as his contemporary readers were well

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aware.3 His opinions about Byron did not see print until 1873, when his Autobiography was published. However, the records of the debates centered on Byron, Wordsworth, and the relationship of poetry to audience are available to us and will provide a glimpse into the cultural anxieties that underlie the literary values shaped during the period. Despite his own political radicalism, Mill’s poetics align with those of the dominant strain of reactionary nineteenth-century theorists, who sought to remove poetry out of the realm of the kind of engaged rhetoric Byron used throughout his career: from Childe Harold to his speech in Parliament on behalf of the Luddite Frame breakers to passages such as the one from Don Juan that serves as one of the epigraphs to this chapter. Byron sought to inspire both thought and action in his public, and articulated this most clearly in the more radical sections of Don Juan: Then comes “the tug of War,”—’twill come again, I rather doubt; and I would fain say “fie on’t,” If I had not perceived that Revolution Alone can save the Earth from Hell’s pollution. (8.51) Such appeals to his reading public define Byron’s poetics and certainly did strike a response with working-class readers over the decades following his death. The anxieties generated concerning those mass readers and by Byron’s eloquent appeals to them, in turn, generate the hostile reaction to Byron’s practice.4 From the late 1820s onward, Byron and mass reading audiences shared a common fate at the hands of the earliest theorists of Romanticism who disparaged the former and often demonized the latter. During the period following Byron’s death, these theorists sought to deny the rhetorical, social role of literature, in general, and of poetry, in particular. According to these men, Byron appealed only to the vulgar senses and powerful feelings of readers: He appeals to these passions as a demagogue might, solely to gain sway with the emerging mass audiences.5 Having put forward and attacked this conception of the poet as rabble-rouser, these critics then offered a model of the poet as a genius whose truth exposed through self-expression would trickle down to all mankind by means of some unseen agency. Scholars have long noted that the period’s most notorious attacks on Byron came from Thomas Carlyle and Henry Taylor.6 Less attention, however, has been paid to the significance of the anti-Byronic tirades that pervade the writings of other key figures in the development of Romantic theory. Through academic, social, and periodical institutions, men such as Carlyle, Taylor, John Keble, F. D. Maurice, and Richard MoncktonMilne often denounced both Byron and mass audiences in one breath.

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Mill’s several debate speeches and critical writings, especially the speech in which he argued for Wordsworth’s superiority over Byron, offer compelling examples of the elitist poetics he helped shape during the period. Despite his political differences with reactionary thinkers like Carlyle, Mill’s ideas about literature are representative of the emerging poetics developed by his fellow “men of letters.”7 The cultural anxieties that shape these poetics in many ways undermine his politically progressive agenda. As these men sought to institutionalize a poetics of self-expression, they attacked both the social poet’s motivation as well as the mass audience’s ability to understand literature. An equally strong tradition of Romantic poetics that emerges out of this period emphasizes the “disinterested” artist whose artistic vision celebrates an objective beauty. This tradition also has little use for Byron. Enunciated most clearly in Keats’s letters, which were first published by Monckton-Milnes in 1848, this tradition represents the “mirror” that M. H. Abrams famously opposed to the “lamp” of Romantic expressionism.8 What both the objective and expressive traditions share, as Abrams’s study in fact celebrates, is a uniform hostility to audiences.9 This hostility to readers is evidenced in many of the attacks on Byron made by the early figures in the development of these traditions. Byron’s readers, according to their theories, are “immature,” female, and lower class; on the other hand, readers of true literature are “cultivated,” male, and possessed of good “taste.” These men defined themselves and the institutions they helped form as the regulators of literary taste—and set themselves against the market-driven forces that led other works to become popularly and financially successful despite lacking good “taste.” By understanding the attacks on mass reading audiences found within the attacks on Byron and his poetry, we can better understand how fears and anxieties about the new audiences shaped the early institutional history of Romantic poetics. That Byron’s reputation declined during this period is a fact of literary history; the period’s cultural history suggests as a cause for this decline the attempts to regulate reading and to empty literature of its social content made by various societies for the control of or distribution of knowledge.10 It is in the period immediately following the Romantic era that eventually dominant conceptions of what makes writing “literary” and what makes it “popular” emerge. As evident in Mill’s speech about contemporary literature, which I will discuss in detail later, the popular literature of this period was attacked by the early post-Romantic theorists, most of whom considered the era devoid of works of “literary” merit. Their negative opinion of this era has been repeated ever since as a commonplace of literary history—the period is a “prolonged lull or barren phrase” between the Romantics and the rise of the “Condition of England” novel.11 In his work on the social reform liter-

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ature of the period, Patrick Brantlinger offers a corrective to the “literary historians [who] sometimes consider the 1830s a barren interlude between the Romantic and Victorian periods.”12 The reaction against Byron and the denigration of the literature of the period following his death is part of an arbitrarily conceived history of the period, for the period was far from “barren” in the range and diversity of its literary production: The late 1820s and early 1830s saw the rise of the socially charged Newgate novels, as well as the political and satirical poetry of authors such as Thomas Hood and Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer.13 To make the claim that the artistic genius must speak beyond the market pressures of the day, the post-Romantic theorists held that any works aimed at a mass audience were nonliterary; furthermore, they had to propagate the idea that the “people” lacked a “voice” which only the concerned, paternalistic cultural leader could provide. The social criticism found in later Victorian literature assumes these attitudes. For instance, a precondition for the industrial novel was the coding of the “people” as “voiceless” by the ideology of the dominant culture. Elizabeth Gaskell’s preface to Mary Barton, her “Condition of England” novel published in 1848, exemplifies this coding. She aims her novel, she claims, at middle-class philanthropists and sees her mission as attempting to “give utterance to the agony which, from time to time, convulses this dumb people.”14 This claim effaces the thousands of voices raised in protest during the hungry 1840s and the thousands of signatures appended to the Charter. Literature could only count as literature when it sought to speak on behalf of or for the “dumb masses”; literature seeking to speak to the masses was invariably not literature at all, but rather “propaganda,” “drivel” or “sensationalism.” As Gaskell’s attitude reveals, the “cultivated” men of the era two decades earlier succeeded in establishing new norms for literature, norms that denied its rhetorical and social roles. In seeking to deny or denigrate the rhetorical role of literature to act upon real audiences, even politically progressive thinkers such as Mill helped to inscribe a quietist, paternalistic ideology into a poetics of literature that became increasingly conservative as it was institutionalized by these influential theorists and their followers.15 These theories of Mill and the “cultivated” men in whose circles he traveled were powerfully influential and at the same time mutually reinforcing. In his autobiography Mill puts forward a picture of “crowded auditories” filled with open-minded and contentious debate.16 Yet we should keep in mind that these debates rarely attracted more than one hundred participants and that these men often agreed much more than they disagreed. In the audience on the night Mill spoke in favor of Wordsworth and against John Roebuck’s defense of Byron were men who would help shape the development of literary history. Some of these men

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were also members of the influential Cambridge Apostles and, later, the select Sterling Club.17 Henry Taylor, whose attack on Byron I mentioned earlier, was another member of the London Society and attended Mill’s speech.18 Several years later he published his preface to Philip van Artevelde, which Samuel Chew has called the period’s “most representative enunciation of anti-Byronism.” Taylor’s attack parallels Mill’s ideas in many ways. In his study of Byron’s reputation during the nineteenth century, Chew argues that Byron’s reputation recovers after this nadir, but I would argue that (especially in terms of the development of poetics) neither Byron, nor reading audiences for that matter, ever recover from this peak period of anti-Byronism.19 Basing their ideas on elitist and hierarchical attitudes, Mill and his contemporaries insisted on taste as the criterion for assessing literature’s value. According to the theories put forward by these figures, literature involved an attempt by a creative genius to speak to the higher taste of the “cultivated”—one of Mill’s favorite words—men of his generation. More frequently, it was the “next” generation they had in mind. Many of these men saw themselves as critics of their society; yet in formulating this elitist poetics, they stripped literary production of its social force: Literature was not to act upon society, but only upon those “cultivated” few who could act for society. This “trickle-down” theory of the writer–reader contract rests on an assumption of a mass reading audience unqualified (because they are, variously, too “vulgar,” too “enfeebled,” or too “dangerous”) to be addressed directly by men seeking social change or moral improvement. Education is often put forward by these critics as the panacea that will ultimately improve conditions; yet they are never clear about how or when the vulgar will improve enough as a class to read responsibly on their own. Their trickle-down theory, in practice, re-creates elitist classand gender-based anxieties toward the disenfranchised that retard rather than promote social change. Underlying my critique of the post-Romantic institutions of learning is the idea of a dialectical mode of education addressing the intellects of the disenfranchised groups. This kind of educational theory is elaborated most clearly in Paulo Freire’s conception of a revolutionary pedagogy that poses questions to the populace in relation to the contradictions found in their own lives.20 My sense of reading Byron is that (at least for his age) he offers to readers a transgressive mode of relating to the dominant culture, by means of what Terence Hoagwood aptly describes as a “disruptive dialectic.”21 Especially disruptive to the paternalistic cultural elite of the nineteenth century were Byron’s direct appeals to the oppressed, a poetics that I describe as Byron’s poetics of transgressive eloquence: To speak rhetorically, occasionally, and eloquently about political, sexual, and social concerns violates what came to be accepted as literary decorum.

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Let us return for a moment to another passage from the “Siege of Ismail” in Don Juan to consider how Byron employs his transgressive eloquence in seeking to engage his readers dialectically in rethinking their culture. Don Juan is, of course, frequently erotic, and it is this that is often seen to scandalize Byron’s Victorian critics. Yet what makes his erotics so politically transgressive to these critics is the linkage of his insistent eroticism with political oppression: ‘fierce loves and faithless wars’—I am not sure If that be the right reading—’tis no matter The fact’s about the same, I am secure; I sing them both, and am about to batter A town which did a famous siege endure. (7.8)22 In this invocation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, an established epic of British nationality, Byron knows very well that he has got the wrong reading. His intertextual punning forces readers to reconsider the traditional account (as in Spenser’s original wording) of love as faithless and war as fierce. Inverting Spenser, Byron claims priority for the fierceness of love and claims that it is political wars that are unfaithful. The uncertainty of his reading, which Byron calls attention to and then discusses as “no matter,” matters indeed. Travestying and rewriting Spenser at the level of citation and allusion, the passage calls attention to Byron’s insistence throughout Don Juan to “sing them both”—to invite his reader to reflect on the connections between the political and the erotic. It is in this posing of questions fundamental to the bodies and lives of his readers—the faithlessness of those who lead them to war and the fierceness of the desires culture seeks to inhibit—that Byron’s dialectical mode of poetics strikes me as similar to that of Friere’s. This mode of cultural contestation is diametrically opposite to the trickle-down poetics favored by Mill and his contemporaries. Freire opposes his educational model to a “banking concept” of education, which views students as empty containers to be filled with the knowledge of the dominant interests. Clearly, the ideas of Mill and his fellow theorists reflect this kind of thinking about the “people.” As their ideas trickle down through the Victorian period, the rallying cry of political and educational reformers becomes “we must educate our masters” rather than a call that the intellectual and political interests of the “lower” classes be heard directly by those who had previously dominated them.23 The educational program of the post-Romantics, at least as developed in the institutions that train men of letters, often succeeded only in teaching the next generation to accept the same elitist distance between themselves and their conception of the masses.24

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Mill’s 1829 speech before the London Debating Society exemplifies these contradictory attitudes toward literature and social change. Mill describes this debate in the “mental crisis” chapter of his Autobiography to emphasize his movement away from the “propagandizing” attitudes of his youth toward a Coleridgean or Wordsworthian stance of sympathetic distance. In his speech, Mill’s main critique concerns what he calls Byron’s superficial representation of feelings (438). Byron engages his reading audience by appealing to their feelings rather than by expressing his own “genuine” feelings. On the other hand, it is Wordsworth’s ability to express genuine feelings of sympathy while maintaining aesthetic distance that makes his work so appealing to Mill. The ideas about audience and taste underlying Mill’s 1829 speech on Wordsworth and Byron are put forth quite clearly in earlier speeches he had made during the society’s earlier debates about literary topics. In November 1827 Mill argued in favor of the proposition “that the literature of this country has declined and is declining.” Mill proceeds to “hint at the principle vices” that appear to him “to distinguish the literature of the day” (409). He asserts that the “literature of any country may be said to have deteriorated, if its tendency, in regard to the opinions and sentiments it inculcates, has grown worse and if it is less distinguished than formerly by the beauties of composition and style” (410). Mill argues that literature is declining on both of these counts, but before he goes much further with his analysis, the first of his standards begins to break down. Being the acute analyst of political economy that he is, Mill cannot help but see that the state of literature is actually a function of market relations: “It is the demand,” he points out to his listeners, “in literature, as in most things, which calls forth the supply” (411). Now, if producers of literature are simply meeting the demand of their readers, how can literature be said to be deteriorating based on its influence, the “opinions and sentiments it inculcates”? The influence obviously runs both ways. To resolve this dilemma, Mill must turn to a diatribe against readers: Because “writers of every age are for the most part what the readers make them” (411), Mill looks to the readers to find the cause of what ails literature. What he sees is that although the “present age is very markedly distinguished by the number of persons who can read” (411), this increase in readers has not yet brought about any “marked increase in taste for the severer exercises of the intellect” (412). It has led only to “the intense multiplication of those who read but do not think” and has forced literature to be written “down to the level” of the many (412). Mill repeatedly uses the phrases “half cultivated” and “half educated” to describe the mass reader; because of the “degraded” condition of readership, fully “cultivated” men like Mill must look to the “ultimate benefits” of reading rather than to its “immediate effects” (411). Mill depicts a mass

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audience that has failed to take advantage of its opportunity to promote proper literary production; therefore the producers themselves must take responsibility for the deeper values important to literature. Thus, because “it is notorious that half instructed persons can never appreciate the highest order of excellence in thought or in composition” (412) and also because the “half cultivated taste is always caught by gaudy, affected, meretricious ornament” (415), serious writers, who cannot gain immediate success because of the market-driven periodical-based literature of the day, must “hope for ultimate reputation and success by being above their age” (416). Mill has solved his dilemma concerning influence by setting up a sphere of literary production that stands “above” its age, aloof from the demand-centered production he has described earlier. In a true irony of political and literary history, Mill’s theories speak to and represent the cultural anxieties about mass readers that shape the politics of Reactionary Tories such as Sir Charles Shaw. A decade or so after Mill’s debate speeches, Shaw and others sought to control the working class’s ability to teach themselves by denigrating the morality of their educational practices and by doing so in heavily gendered terms. In 1843, Shaw anxiously expresses his concern that, unlike the government’s, the working class’s attempts to offer education to their children are all well organized.25 He worries about the “vile influence” working-class women have on their children,26 and goes on to conclude that some effort must be made to regulate the education of the masses, now only half “awakened” to their roles as responsible beings.27 Although Shaw’s statements are clearly hostile to the working class, whereas Mill offered sympathy and often political support to them throughout his life, both of them evoke a half-educated reading public unable to separate ornamental or propagandizing trash from genuinely “moral” and “masculine” literature. Most readers of Wordsworth’s literary prefaces will recognize his theories and attitudes about readers in the descriptions of the reading public put forward by both Shaw and Mill, in particular the claim that a poet must create the taste by which he is to be appreciated. According to his Autobiography, Mill read Wordsworth again sometime in 1828, after the 1827 speech in which he condemned contemporary literature and before the debate with Roebuck about Byron. As we will see, the poetics practiced and theorized by Wordsworth answered Mill’s call for an artistic mode that is “above” its age. Mill may have already debated with Roebuck as early as January 1827 on the question of “whether the writings of Byron had an immoral tendency.” A speech probably written for the occasion, but which has now been lost, was later described by an editor of Mill’s as “an able if puritan attack on Byron.”28 We can, however, follow the progress of the

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London group’s ideas about Byron by considering the opinions of Mill’s “friendly adversary,” F. D. Maurice, who in 1828 published his “sketch” of Byron in Athenaeum, the journal founded by the Cambridge Apostles. Maurice attacks Byron on precisely the grounds raised at the 1827 debate: his morality. What I want to stress about his argument is that it, too, is puritanical and can only accomplish its seeming attempt at consensus by limiting its audience to those already in agreement with the author about mainstream morality: No one, probably, will be inclined to maintain that Lord Byron’s poetry produces a good moral effect, except those who are anxious to spread the disbelief of the goodness of God, and to bring about the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes. With such persons we have at present no quarrel. They are welcome to their opinions so far as we are concerned; and we can only lament, for their own sakes, that they should think and feel as they do.29 Maurice does not want to “quarrel” with those who might have different notions about sexuality and religion and assumes a common understanding with his audience that Byron’s poetry promotes immoral attitudes about these topics. It is only when he has bracketed out such possible topics for debate that Maurice can “give up the advantage to be derived from pressing” these points and goes on to address other flaws of Byron such as his lack of “sympathy with human nature” and the fact that “he had no love of truth.”30 Maurice’s views are important to our understanding of how Mill’s thought evolves. Mill attests to the fact that as his “intimacy with Roebuck diminished” he “fell more and more into friendly intercourse” with Maurice and John Sterling, his “Coleridgean adversaries.”31 Two years later in his debate with Roebuck, Mill begins his attack on Byron by employing much the same bracketing-out procedure as Maurice. He states that he aims his speech only at the “highest class,” the “many” in the group “who are my equals or superiors in intellectual and moral cultivation”; he will not consent to be judged by those he considers his “inferiors in both” (434–35). This is more than just a rhetorical gesture as classifying fit audiences has been a central preoccupation of Romantic theorists from Wordsworth and Mill to the present. This classifying tendency certainly goes on to inform his famous essays on poetry, where he begins by referring to the “vulgarest” definition of poetry with which “no person possessed of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself” can be concerned.32 And, by 1833, it is with “the most cultivated and vigorous . . . minds” of his time that Mill sees the “powerful” and “highly beneficial influence” of Wordsworth beginning to assert itself.33

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These elitist attitudes pervade Mill’s earlier attack on Byron, whose “power,” he argues, is overestimated because of the “prestige” (popularity) of story. Mill believes that “the number of Byron’s admirers [is] swelled immensely by those who think only of the story”; this is also true, he adds, of “Scott’s poems” and “bad novels” (436). Moreover, Byron’s poetry appeals only to “the more intense feelings,” neglecting the “calmer” intellectual needs of the truly cultivated mind (436). This last aspect of Mill’s critique becomes key as he develops it, wedding Byron’s lack of poetic depth to the “superficiality” of the mass audience. He claims that in the following analysis of “the feelings particular to Byron,” he is entering into “the metaphysics of criticism”:34 [T]hose feelings which we describe from observation only, must necessarily be described superficially. There is no depth, no intensity, no force, in our descriptions of feelings, unless we have ourselves experienced the feelings we describe. But yet, to readers who have never experienced the feelings, a superficial description may appear sufficient: and an attempt at a profound one, but thoroughly false, may be taken for true and profound both. This is the secret of their admiring bad poetry and bad acting. (438) In this passage Mill shifts his audience’s focus from a “we” that can recognize the depth or superficiality of “descriptions” to the “readers” who cannot and who value Byron precisely because of “their” admiration for bad theatrics. Mill’s discussion of feelings here is the most important of the three points of comparison he uses to structure his analysis: description of objects, description of feelings, and “felicitous expressions of thought” (436).35 He spends the bulk of his time on feelings because, as he recounts in his Autobiography, Byron was the poet “whose particular department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings.”36 Mill must contest what it means to describe feelings in order to elevate Wordsworth over Byron. He does so by valuing the interiorized responses to the suffering of others depicted by Wordsworth over the eloquent outbursts of social critique expressed by and through Byron’s characters. He says of Wordsworth that “whatever he has described he has felt” (439), while Byron’s depictions of feelings, with few exceptions, are based on “observation” only and therefore are “superficial” (438). In essence, Mill extols empathy—readers are to identify not with the objects of suffering as depicted in literature, but with the poetic observer of these sufferings. Sympathy, compassion for the feelings or plights of others, and active involvement in their causes, can only be seen as “insincere”

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given his reading. Yet Byron’s “characters” are often thinly veiled portions of Byron’s political and literary persona, and it is to the voice of outrage expressed by such characters that many readers did respond: “Hereditary Bondsman! Know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the first blow? / By their right arms the conquest must be wrought?” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 2.76).37 As William Ruddick shows, although this famous apostrophe was nominally directed to the Greeks suffering under Turkish rule, it was received in England as a rallying call by radicals and as seditious by the government.38 These kinds of appeals were received in such a way as to transgress lines of class, race, and nation. Nearly a century later, W. E. B. Du Bois used this passage as an epigraph to a chapter in The Souls of Black Folk,39 and British working-class readers throughout the first half of the twentieth century responded to Byron’s call to rethink oppression and to resist tyranny. But these genealogies trace different paths of resistance than the dominant conceptions that determined “official” literary history up until recent years. It is this mode of using sensationalized characters—filled with grief for loss of love and/or liberty—to voice radical critique, which Mill labels as “insincere.” Byron uses characterization to depict the suffering of others; what Mill finds more “genuine” is the Wordsworthian depiction of the individual’s response to that suffering. In embracing this poetics, Mill embraces a version of the egotistical sublime and joins in the antiByronism found in the writings of the men in whose circles he moved. Their assessment may be summed up by Carlyle’s 1832 claim “that no genuine productive Thought was ever revealed by [Byron] to mankind.”40 Byron’s fault, according to these men, is that he does not depict his emotional response to the pain of others, rather he practices “bad acting” by adopting poses aimed at a mass audience variously depicted as feminine, adolescent, or lower class. We can see these attacks on Byron’s audience in many of the comments, both public and private, put forward by the literary men of the era. Bulwer-Lytton described Byron’s relation to the public as “a lover to his mistress.”41 Charles Buller’s mother wrote to Carlyle, expressing the opinion of a “lady of high social standing” that “none admire that nobleman, so much as boarding-school girls and young men under twenty.”42 Henry Taylor follows Mill in describing popular poetry, especially Byron’s, as having a powerful effect on “very young readers” and playing upon the “unpracticed ear” of the uncultivated reader.43 Reacting against the popularity such writing had for real readers, they attack audiences while embracing an aesthetic centered on the self and rejecting one based on social relations. Drawing largely on the ideas of Mill and his circle, Abrams influentially depicted this movement away from audience and toward the poet as

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the “expressive” tendency of romantic theory.44 Literary history suggests that the critical fate of both Byron (although he is not mentioned explicitly) and of mass reading audiences are at stake in what F. Parvin Sharpless calls Mill’s “most often quoted statement,”45 the distinction between poetry and eloquence: “eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.”46 Mill’s insistence that “all poetry is of the nature of a soliloquy” in some significant ways betrays his commitment to progressive politics. Ironically, he concludes his speech at the 1828 debate by acknowledging, “Wordsworth tends to make men quietists, tends to make them bear” (442). He allows that “great struggles are necessary and that men who were nourished only with his poetry would be unnerved by such struggles” (442). Unfortunately, Mill is unable to reconcile his disdain for the lack of cultivation he sees in the great mass of the people who must undertake such struggles with his commitment that such struggles must go on. Mill’s inability to reconcile the real lives and interests of the people with his intellectual commitments, which Raymond Williams characterizes as Mill’s distance from “any kind of lived reality,”47 leads him to embrace the quietist poetics that grew into dominance during his lifetime. As Marilyn Butler has observed, the institutional history of this poetics up until the recent present has seen a “rejection of politics” common to both the “quietist poet and the quietist critic.”48 For the dominant models of poetics do indeed come to stress “ultimate” rather than “immediate” rewards for both readers and for those who would be the leaders or teachers of these readers. As Brantlinger has argued, the movement away from literary forms engaged in the political struggles of their immediate audiences characterized much of the literary work and even the social criticism of the Victorian period, manifesting in a “general pattern or movement away from the reform idealism of the 1830s towards modes of social thinking which, even while calling themselves ‘liberal,’ were decidedly more conservative than the radicalisms of the Benthamites, of the early Punch satirists, and of the younger Carlyle, Dickens, and even Disraeli.”49 By examining the attitudes about audience reflected in the literary theories of even the early “radicalism” put forward by Mill, Carlyle, and their contemporaries, I have sought to show how the move toward “conservative” attitudes was bound up within the processes of evaluation developed in literary institutions as early as the late 1820s. The example of Byron and the fate of his readers points to the way negative evaluations of a politically motivated author are used to denigrate the perceived audiences of that author. Mill’s thinking about literature and its audiences, especially when contrasted with his egalitarian and politically engaged philosophical writings, poignantly reflects the stripping away of the rhetorical and political elements of literature during its early days in the post-Romantic institutions that fostered literary study. In rejecting

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the eloquent, socially engaged voice of the period’s most public poet, Mill joins his powerfully progressive voice to those of his more conservative peers and helps to formulate an eventually dominant conception of literature that insists upon poetry as a form of soliloquy, rather than as an interactive social engagement between writers and their many audiences.

NOTES 1. See Jonathan Gross’s Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), a compelling study of how the erotics of Byron’s personal life inform his poetry. Gross offers a critique of the tendency in Byron criticism to focus on Byron’s erotic life only to explain his biography, rather than to explore “the political significance of his private conduct” (32). 2. Byron’s poetics are, in fact, more fully articulated than the now canonical example of Keats, whose theories of poetry were set forward in private letters rather than in formalized pieces such as Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” Wordsworth’s “Prefaces,” or Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria; Keats’s letters are, of course, staples of Romantic and literary history. 3. Traditional criticism of Romanticism has tended to see Byron as reacting against what it considers the dominant Coleridgean poetics of his age, a view that fails to observe how much that poetics was reacting against Byronic practice. Michael Cooke argues persuasively that the two mutually influenced each other. See his “Byron and Wordsworth: The Complementary of a Rock and the Sea,” The Wordsworth Circle 11 (1980): 10–18. 4. Of course the history of Byron’s own attitude toward his audience is shifting and complex. See Jerome Christensen, “Theorizing Byron’s Practice: The Performance of Lordship and the Poet’s Career,” Studies in Romanticism 27 (1988): 477–90. Christensen’s ideas are elaborated in his Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). Although I differ from Christensen’s assessment that Byron develops a more critical voice when he shifts from writing for an audience, my focus in this chapter is on Byron’s posthumous reputation. 5. Jon Klancher describes the class-related tensions permeating the period’s “making” of audiences in his The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). I want to expand on his impressive study by assessing the role of Byron and his relationship to these mass audiences. 6. On Carlyle, see Charles Richard Sanders, “The Byron Closed in Sartor Restartus,” Studies in Romanticism 3 (1963): 77–108. On Taylor, see Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (New York: Scribner’s, 1924), 252–53. 7. See John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: A Study of the Idiosyncratic and the Humane in Modern Literature (London: Macmillan, 1969),

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a useful study of the institutions in which many of these men of letters flourished during the nineteenth century. See also, D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies: An Account of the Study of English Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Oxford English School (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), an important account of the early history of English literary study. 8. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). 9. Ibid., 21–29. 10. See Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; Midway reprint, 1983), which provides detailed documentation of the century-long attempts to control or regulate reading by government, religious, social, and educational institutions. See also Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), for an account of the role ideas about the proper education for working-class adults seeking education played in shaping the university study of English literature. 11. David Craig, Introduction to Hard Times, by Charles Dickens (New York: Penguin, 1981), 13. Craig makes this common claim in situating Dickens’s novel in literary history: Dickens also arrives after a prolonged lull or barren phase in British Writing. By 1824 Shelley, Keats, and Byron are dead, and Maria Edgeworth published nothing of interest after 1812, and Scott’s best vein is quite done by 1824. The twenties and thirties are thus, in literature, a flat calm, stirred only by the faint ripples of Tennyson’s first books; and when urgency returns to literature it is in the form of an urgent concern with what came to be called the “condition-of-England Question.” (12) 12. Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 11. 13. For a consideration of the political aspects of the literature of this period, see Brantlinger, “Literature of the 1830s,” in The Spirit of Reform, 11–33. 14. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Penguin, 1970), 37–38. 15. See the introductory chapters of Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); and Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932 (1983; rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For specific applications to Romanticism, see Jerome J. McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) or The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Marilyn Butler, “Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnson et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 133–57.

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16. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), 106. 17. The men who belonged to one or more of these clubs included Mill; Carlyle; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Arthur Hallam; Monckton-Milnes; John Sterling; John Keble; F. D. Maurice; and Charles Buller. See the full list of Apostles in Mrs. Charles Brookfield, The Cambridge “Apostles” (London: Pittman and Sons, 1906), 302–03. 18. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 26, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), xvii. In his introduction to this volume, Robson lists the members of Mill’s society. Further references to Mill’s debating speeches, unless otherwise noted, are to this volume, and will be cited by page number in the text of this chapter. 19. Chew, Byron in England, esp. 220–304. For a recent treatment of the Victorian cultural response to Byron, see Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, rev. ed., ed. and trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1993). This is Freire’s classic critique of the banking concept of education. 21. Terence Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1993), 24. 22. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Oxford Authors: Byron, ed. Jerome J. McGann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 622. 23. Alec Ellis, Educating Our Masters: Influences on the Growth of Literacy in Victorian Working Class Children (Hampshire, U.K.: Gower Publishing, 1985). Ellis describes how, after the second Reform Bill, Victorian politicians and educators condescendingly set about a program of educating the people “up” to the task of mastery, which their sheer numbers and the vote had given them. 24. How thoroughly these elitist ideologies are entrenched in the institutional history of both Romanticism and literary studies is the topic of several important recent books: McGann, The Romantic Ideology; Herbert Lindenberger, The History in Literature: On Value, Genre, Institutions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), and, in broader contexts, John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 25. Sir Charles Shaw, Manufacturing Districts: Replies of Sir Charles Shaw to Lord Ashley, M.P., regarding the Education and Moral and Physical Condition of the Labouring Classes (1843); reprinted in The Factory Education Bill of 1843: Six Pamphlets (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 28. 26. Ibid., 29. 27. Ibid., 44.

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28. There is no extant copy of Mill’s speech on this topic. The comment by Harold J. Laski, who collected Mill’s speeches in the early twentieth century, is quoted by Robson in the textual introduction to Collected Works, 1:vii. 29. Frederick Denison Maurice, Sketches of Contemporary Authors, 1828, ed. A. J. Hartley (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1970), 112. 30. Ibid. 31. Mill, Autobiography, 124. 32. Mill, “Thoughts,” 343. 33. Ibid., 358. 34. Mill here is intentionally linking himself to Maurice and his nominal adversaries. Metaphysical criticism in 1828 was firmly associated with German influence in general and with Coleridge in particular. 35. In his speech, there is only one paragraph on objects and one page on expression; five pages are given to feelings. 36. Mill, Autobiography, 120. 37. Byron, Oxford, 76. 38. William Ruddick, “Byron and England: The Persistence of Byron’s Political Ideas,” in Byron’s Cultural and Political Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul Graham Trueblood (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 32–34. 39. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 392. 40. Quoted in Andrew Rutherford, Byron: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), 291. 41. Ibid., 322. 42. Sanders, “The Byron Closed,” 86. 43. Henry Taylor, Philip Van Artevelde (Leipzig: n.p., 1834), 10–11. 44. See The Mirror and the Lamp, passim. Abrams argues that after Romanticism “the poet has moved into the center of the critical system and taken over many of the prerogatives which had once been exercised by his readers” (29). Abrams naturalizes this aspect of Romanticism so that by the time he writes Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), he excludes Byron from the study on the grounds that he was not Romantic at all, but rather contrary to their “vatic stance” (13). 45. F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 77. 46. Mill, “Thoughts,” 348.

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47. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 52. 48. Butler, “Plotting the Revolution,” 153. 49. Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform, 6–7.

6 Dyspeptic Reactions: Thomas Carlyle and the B y r o n i c Te m p e r Kristen Guest

What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy! Art thou nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dolefully because carrion enough is not given thee? Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe. —Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

In The Victorian Frame of Mind, Walter Houghton categorizes attitudes characteristic during the Victorian age, examining, in turn, the expressions of enthusiasm, commercialism, and earnestness that shaped the Victorians’ self-perceptions. At the same time, he also provides insight into the darker side of progress, exploring the effects of doubt, hypocrisy, and anxiety. Among Houghton’s categories it is perhaps anxiety that best expresses the effects of an age of rapid change, including widespread fears that progress might lead to revolution or that social mobility might carry the related threat of demotion. Perhaps most importantly, Houghton’s discussion captures the crucial relationship between anxiety and work, which were conceptualized, respectively, as symptom and cure for the ills of modernization. Discussions of work and anxiety intertwine in The Victorian Frame of Mind, and Houghton specifically notes the widespread currency of Thomas Carlyle’s belief that the imperative to distinguish 141

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oneself through work represented not only an antidote for the anxieties raised by spiritual doubt, but also, quite literally, a way “to gain a sense of health and well-being.”1 Carlyle’s belief that “an endless significance lies in Work” became a central tenet of Victorianism;2 yet, his own experience contradicted the conviction that “anxiety” could be alleviated, addressed, or contained by productive work. Throughout his life Carlyle was plagued by dyspepsia, a digestive disorder that confounded physical and psychological symptoms, including weakness and depression as well as alternating bouts of constipation and diarrhea that left him unable to work. Such symptoms, which were prompted by anxiety, were increasingly common among the Victorian middle classes who experienced dyspepsia, hysteria, and neuralgia on an epidemic scale.3 If somatic responses to anxiety were symptomatic of the conditions of nineteenth-century life, they also provided a powerful metaphor for responding to its conditions. As Peter Melville Logan suggests, “An author could use the health or sickness of the body to ground a commentary on the British way of life, or, more precisely, on the structure of British social power, which had brought the nervous body and its protean complaints into being.”4 For Carlyle, who was both a dyspeptic and among the first and most influential of the Victorian social critics, disease did indeed become a metaphor for describing social problems, including, most pointedly, the effects of industrialization and democratization. Erin O’Connor notes Carlyle’s description of England as a consumptive body in Past and Present, while John Plotz argues that in Chartism the struggle for suffrage is figured as a “symptom” of disease.5 Such constructions of illness as the negative other of health allowed Carlyle to address problems associated with emerging mass culture, as both O’Connor and Plotz demonstrate. However, Carlyle also employed metaphors of disease on a more personal level in his writing, where their effects and meanings were more conflicted and unstable, presenting disease as both social symptom and as potentially transformative cure. Such metaphors are particularly evident in Sartor Resartus, where Carlyle’s own digestive ailment is evoked, not as an indictment of sickness, but rather as a criticism of the “healthy” middle-class British reader more attuned to the demands of appetite than to addressing society’s ills. Central to his use of disease as a metaphor was Carlyle’s personal struggle with dyspepsia, which simultaneously hindered the progress of his actual work and provided metaphors for its symbolic realization. Insofar as it offered a way to figure himself as an outsider whose heightened sensitivity allowed him to diagnose the condition of England, I argue, Carlyle’s dyspepsia represented a counterbalance to the excessive “health” of burgeoning consumer culture. This chapter focuses on the tensions between

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personal symptoms and social metaphors in Carlyle’s work, considering the ways that references to dyspepsia express, among other things, anxieties of influence related to Romanticism. In what follows, I connect Carlyle’s use of metaphors of disease to his interest in rewriting the narratives of suffering associated with British Romanticism through the phenomenon of Byronism. Carlyle’s rejection of Byronism was prompted by his scorn for its self-absorption; yet, in describing his illness he generated a personal narrative of suffering that was Byronic in its excess. I contend that Carlyle’s ambivalent relationship to his predecessors not only shaped his use of divergent metaphors of illness, but also underpinned his attempts to come to terms with his own narrative of suffering in distinctly Victorian terms.

THE DIS-EASE

OF

ROMANTIC SUFFERING

Almost from the outset, Carlyle’s criticism of Byronism focused on the emotional and physical excesses that had come to characterize both Byron’s literary celebrity and British Romanticism generally.6 As a counter to Byronic sentimentalism, Carlyle proposed the “gospel” of work and the typically Victorian mandate to “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.”7 Carlyle’s position had great appeal for subsequent Victorian admirers, including Harriet Martineau and John Morley, both of whom applauded his assault on the “gloomy” mood of Byronism.8 Commenting on the dangers of this outlook in 1821, Carlyle opined that such poets “are like opium eaters; they raise their minds by brooding over and embellishing their sufferings, from one degree of fervid exaltation and dreamy greatness to another, till at length they run amuck entirely, and whoever meets them would do well to run them thro’ the body.”9 Beyond its obviously disparaging tone, Carlyle’s remark suggests the radical separation between body and spirit that Byronism entails. Not only are such poets enslaved “like opium eaters,” their habits of “brooding” on their own suffering keep them from meaningful action. His suggestion that one “would do well to run them thro’ the body” therefore foregrounds the need to forcibly reconnect thought—and suffering—to physicality.10 This view is more clearly delineated in Carlyle’s private correspondence, which depicted such behavior as a form of moral disease reflected in the physical body. “He has no resolution,” Carlyle noted in a letter describing his first meeting with Coleridge: His cardinal sin is that he wants will; he has no resolution, he shrinks from pain or labor in any of its shapes. His very attitude bespeaks this: he never straightens his knee joints, he stoops with

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Kristen Guest his fat ill shapen shoulders, and in walking does not tread but shovel and slide . . . his eyes have a look of anxious impotence; he would do with all his heart, but he knows he dare not.11

In this passage Coleridge’s misshapen body becomes a material sign for Carlyle of the moral degeneracy that arrests the ability to act. Carlyle similarly despises the Lambs’ lack of restraint, describing them as “A very sorry pair of phenomena” with “an insuperable proclivity to gin.”12 In fact, nearly all of his private comments link physical degeneracy or deformity with a want of moral control: Coleridge is described as an addict “sunk inextricably in the depths of putrescent indolence,” De Quincey a “dwarf Opium-Eater,” and Shelley “a kind of ghastly object . . . without health or warmth of vigour.”13 Where Carlyle’s public writing associates the popular current of British Romanticism with an unchecked appetite for self-pity, then, his private indictments identify this sentiment with the nervous excesses and physical quirks of its practitioners. Carlyle’s distaste for the excesses of his British Romantic predecessors may, to some extent, be explained by the strict Protestant values inculcated in him from an early age. From a critical perspective, however, what is perhaps most interesting about his comments are the striking, if unconscious, parallel they suggest between Carlyle and the objects of his criticism: All shared the self-focused temper, moodiness, and associated physical weaknesses (if not the addictions) for which he disparaged his predecessors. Most centrally, like the British Romantics whose selfabsorption he abhorred, Carlyle was prone to the physical effects of a nervous temperament that manifested, from early adulthood on, as a digestive ailment that hindered his ability to perform intellectual work. For Carlyle, dyspepsia was not merely a disorder of the digestion but rather a dark, unseen force that “chains down the fiercest spirit, and lays it prostrate in a dungeon built of the blackest materials which imagination can furnish.”14 Moreover, Carlyle shared the tendency to embellish his suffering, exhaustively detailing the effects of his condition to his friends and family.15 In 1820 he wrote, characteristically, of a “bodily disorder— embodied now in a most refractory state of the digestive process—[that] cramp[s] my exertions and almost entirely forbid[s] study.”16 Carlyle’s ailment not only prevented him from working, it was also associated with the psychological effects of doubt, despair, and spiritual crisis. “Today the guts are all wrong again,” he complained in 1821, “the headache, the weakness, the black despondency are overpowering me. I fear those paltry viscera will fairly dish me at last.”17 Both in the frequency with which it was repeated, and in the tenor of its description, Carlyle’s record of his illness was Byronic in its excess: “My curse seems deeper and blacker than that of any man.” He

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despaired in early 1821, “How have I deserved this?”18 While replicating the pattern of Byronic self-absorption, Carlyle was nonetheless conscious of his hypochondria, admitting that “no one ever dies of such disorders”; “the real object of dread,” he suggested, “is that of dwindling by degrees into a pitiful whining valetudinarian, which is far worse than death.”19 To avoid such “dwindling,” Carlyle idealized work as a way to overcome adversity. Where Romantics like Coleridge shrank “from pain or employment in any of its shapes,” Carlyle resolved to overcome his condition and temper by force of will, transforming his suffering into productivity by jarring body and mind into action. Authorship was to be his salvation, providing a sense of purpose that could ease the mental effects of illness. “I shall accomplish much,” he wrote to his brother in 1821, “and among other things the long wished for results of gaining for myself some permanent employment, so that I may no longer wander about the earth a moping hypochondriac, the soul eating up itself for want of something else to act upon.”20 Carlyle’s sense that the Byronic temper consumed itself “for want of something else to act upon” became an important focal point in his early work, where he identified productive action as the antidote to selfabsorbed suffering. The impetus for his first major accomplishment came in 1822 during his experience of spiritual conversion in Leith Walk—an episode that provided the basis for Carlyle’s revision of Romantic suffering in the semiautobiographical Sartor Resartus. Carlyle’s first major literary effort, Sartor proposed work as an alternative to self-absorbed suffering in Teufelsdröckh’s injunction to “Close thy Byron” and “open thy Goethe” (146). Coming at the culmination of Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual crisis, the proposed shift from a British to a German worldview also signaled Carlyle’s movement toward a more Victorian sensibility. “Be no longer a Chaos, but a World or even a Worldkin. Produce! Produce!” Teufelsdröckh exhorts, “Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name. ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee” (2:149). Having come to a moment of insight that takes him out of the “chaos” of personal suffering, Teufelsdröckh moves on to the work of writing his Clothes Philosophy and ultimately—as Janice L. Haney suggests—to the life of action associated with “Victorian Romanticism.”21 If the fictional resolution of Sartor Resartus emphasized the value of German Romantic philosophy, Carlyle’s struggle with dyspepsia was not to be overcome through willpower or dialectic progression. Despite his moment of insight in 1822, his illness persisted, and his literary work proceeded slowly. Complaining to William Graham following his experience in Leith Walk, Carlyle described a state that paralleled his later description of a Coleridge paralyzed by want of will. “I feel called upon by voice of terror to bestir myself,” he wrote, “and a thousand miserable causes—

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indecision, ignorance, dyspepsia . . . keep me riveted to the spot.”22 While spiritual crisis was crucial both to the evolution of Carlyle’s personal philosophy and to his sense of vocation as an author, then, it did not bring an end to his physical distress or to his kinship with the British Romantics. Instead, the crisis that allowed him to distance himself from his literary predecessors also underlined their common, if unacknowledged, temperament and offered the reminder—as Paul Youngquist suggests in his discussion of De Quincey—that the “body grounds representation and not vice versa.”23 Perhaps most centrally, Carlyle’s uncomfortable kinship with the Romantics came to shape his understanding both of the work of authorship and of the role sickness might play in describing that process. Although apparently oppositional terms for Carlyle—“work” being the way one overcame physical and moral weakness, while “sickness” was symptomatic of deficient will—these concepts were actually quite mobile in his writing. Thus, the wrong kind of work could erode one’s character, while the right kind of sickness could consolidate it. In an 1838 essay on Walter Scott, for example, Carlyle argued that the author’s childhood illness had helped foster his genius.24 “Disease, which is but superficial, and issues in outward lameness, does not cloud the young existence,” he suggested, “rather forwards it towards the expansion it is fitted for.”25 Here, Carlyle identified a positive role for disease in opposition to the bodily comfort and ease that might impede the development of insight. In Scott’s case, Carlyle noted, disease created the conditions of possibility for the development of other capabilities: “The miserable disease had been one of the internal nobler parts, marring the general organisation; under which no Walter Scott could have been forwarded, or with all his other endowments could have been producible or possible.”26 His discussion thus drew a key distinction between the weakness of will that permeates character and the bodily weakness that promotes character—differentiating “superficial” illness that promotes growth and higher insight from the moral deficiencies of the self-absorbed who remain locked in stasis. In this regard, disease was not inevitably tied to defects of character. Rather, it also functioned as a metaphor for personal and social transformation. The difference between “superficial” disease and deep-seated Romantic “weakness” was a critical distinction in Carlyle’s writing, which allowed him to redeem his own suffering by making it a stage in what Andrew Elfenbein has described as a “narrative of transition.”27 In 1825 he wrote of his illness as “a sort of blessing in disguise” that had kept him clear of economic temptation by isolating him physically from the demands of society.28 In this respect, disease validated Carlyle’s sense of himself as an outsider committed to critique and so ultimately contributed to his self-definition as a Sage. In the shorter term, Sartor simi-

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larly validated Carlyle’s fictionalized passage through a state of despair into a position of greater insight. In “The Everlasting No,” where he describes Teufelsdröckh’s experience in heroic terms that emphasize the strength which may underlie suffering, the British Editor notes that “transitions are ever full of pain . . . thus the Eagle when he moults is sickly” (2:123). The idea that demeaning work could wreck one’s health while illness might function, ironically, to preserve one’s higher character from worldly influence complicated Carlyle’s formulation of the emerging gospel of work; at the same time, it also influenced his attempts to rewrite the narrative of Romantic suffering by providing a metaphor for criticizing a consuming society that seemed to be destroying itself through the excellence of its digestion.

STOMACH TROUBLE: C A R LY L E ’ S D I G E S T I V E M E T A P H O R S To provide a fictional alternative to Romantic excess in Sartor Resartus, Carlyle attempted to validate the terms of his own illness by rewriting Byronic suffering as part of a dialectic movement toward insight. If Carlyle’s rejection of Byronism was partially motivated by the desire to make sense of his own personal narrative of progression, it was also— as Elfenbein suggests—a response to the larger connection between this phenomenon and the profession of authorship.29 From Carlyle’s perspective, the enterprise required not only that he distinguish “work” as a way of achieving personal salvation, but also that he extricate literary endeavors from a Romantic influence that had allowed the publishing industry to shape contemporary literature. In 1825, for example, he complained that “the very best” of the remaining Romantics were “illnatured weaklings,” suggesting they had become “only things for writing articles.”30 Elsewhere he was more violent, pronouncing that such literary men were “the Devil’s own vermin, whom the Devil will in his good time snare and successively eat.”31 Carlyle’s descriptions of the Romantics’ negative influence on the publishing industry are interesting insofar as they link his personal anxieties about authorship to his predecessors. Not only does he reject the cult of personality that had come to characterize Byronism, he also invokes an ingestive metaphor to express the consequence of such practices. In the case of Byron, Elfenbein points out, readers’ feelings of personal acquaintance with the poet’s mind provided an illusory sense of connection in an industry that was increasingly bureaucratic and impersonal by the early nineteenth century.32 By disparaging the Romantics as “things,” Carlyle not only rejected the focus on selfhood that had

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come to dominate critical discussion, first of Byron, and subsequently of other Romantic authors such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake,33 but also drew attention to the machinery that created literary celebrity. At the same time, Carlyle’s use of the metaphor of being “snared” and “eaten” expressed one of his core anxieties about authorship: the fear that in order to sustain his body he would have to allow his moral being to be symbolically “consumed” by the publishing industry. Professionally Carlyle was terrified of the economic temptation to “sell out,” a fear that was heightened by his precarious financial situation. He shrank from “selling the very quintessence of my spirit for two hundred pounds a years [sic]”34 as a tutor, and as an author was concerned “[t]hat I might not have to write for bread; might not be tempted to tell lies for money”—a situation he identified specifically with the practice of writing for the periodicals.35 Disavowals aside, however, Carlyle was obliged to “write for bread” through the 1830s, and much of his work appeared in periodical form, including Sartor, which was published in parts by Fraser’s in 1833–1834. This situation was, in large part, a measure of his economic position because for a significant portion of his life writing provided Carlyle with a living that, at the beginning especially, was often tenuous. Through the first third of the nineteenth century, the concept of “consumption” was in flux, caught between earlier associations with wasting of the body or goods, and the later, more abstract, idea of consumerism as an economic principle.36 For Carlyle, the fear of being symbolically consumed by the publishing industry conflated these meanings, suggesting his reluctance to become part of the dialectic of exchange central to a capitalist economy. Work as a spiritual duty might have material effects—as it did in the idealized medieval world of Past and Present—but in a world dominated by what he saw as “mechanistic” concerns, “production” was always followed by consumption. If the ideal of work Carlyle advocated was a quintessentially Victorian answer to the problem of a Romanticism that “shrank” from the pain of labor, then, it also carried the related threat that literature might be reduced to an empty form and that authors might become mere things.37 In “Signs of the Times,” for instance, he remarked that “Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery.” “Literature,” he singled out for “its Paternoster-row mechanism, its Trade dinners, its Editorial conclaves, and huge subterranean, puffing bellows; so that books are not only printed, but, in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery.”38 For Carlyle, this structure of trade and advertising, a byproduct of the emergence of mass production, had the effect of standardizing ideas and of constructing, rather than generating, opinion through the processes of selection and presentation that mediated literature for its audiences.

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Carlyle’s fears about the publishing industry suggested a crucial change in attitude toward the work of authorship that had prevailed through the heyday of British Romanticism. Where material dependence had once been glossed over, as Paul Keen suggests, by appeals to the “disinterest” of literature,39 the growth of the mass press made it more difficult for authors to distance themselves from economic concerns.40 From Carlyle’s perspective, this process of “mechanization” meant that higher interests were replaced by concerns about production and consumption. “What morality we have takes the shape of Ambition,” he noted; “beyond money and money’s worth, our only rational blessedness is Popularity.”41 Such concerns perverted the ideal of the press as an open forum: Rather than providing a space in which the educated could exchange ideas, publishers began to focus on expanding and homogenizing their audiences, creating opinions in order to consolidate a consumer base.42 Within such a context, Carlyle argued, the ability to recognize beauty would be lost, replaced by “some brute image of strength”: “How widely this veneration for the physically Strongest has spread itself through Literature,” he suggested, “[w]e praise a work, not as ‘true,’ but as ‘strong;’ our highest praise is that it has ‘affected’ us, has ‘terrified’ us.” The result, he suggested, was that the proliferation of literature becomes “the symptom not of vigorous refinement, but of luxurious corruption.”43 On a metaphorical level, Carlyle’s digestive illness addressed the problem of “luxurious corruption” by refusing to consume at all. Not only did his ailment literally restrict his intake of food, it also constrained his physiological processes of digestion. In the throes of dyspepsia, his digestive system froze and, as Fred Kaplan notes, Carlyle “could not purge himself of what was wrong, dirty, fecal.”44 The connection Kaplan identifies between Carlyle’s actual illness and his personal feelings about his work is apparent in his writing. In Sartor, for instance, Professor Teufelsdröckh was originally “Teufelsdreck,” or “Devil’s shit.” If Carlyle attempted to “purge” his philosophy through Teufelsdröckh, he also employed a direct metaphor of digestion in Sartor that called into question the attitudes and habits of the British reading public. Perhaps most centrally, Sartor rewrote the Victorian ideal of health—manifest, most often, in appetite—as a symptom of illness or degeneracy. Through much of Sartor, Carlyle appealed to “digestion” as a metaphor for the way human beings are reduced from spirit to “mechanism.” In “The World Out Of Clothes,” for example, the Editor incorporates references to digestion while laying the groundwork for Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy. Tracing the origins of the Professor’s conviction that differences between people are superficial rather than essential, he notes both the moment he grasped the significance of clothes and the Professor’s feelings about the obviousness of his insight. “Strange enough

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how creatures of the human-kind shut their eyes to plainest facts,” Teufelsdröckh observes, “and by the mere inertia of Oblivion and Stupidity, live at ease in the midst of Wonders and Terrors. But indeed man is, and was always, a blockhead and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider” (45). Here, “digestion” is introduced both as a metaphor for man’s reluctance to “think” and as an indicator of the ways that our tendency to place physical concerns over higher interests unites us. “Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the woolen, and fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes),” he suggests, “into the Man himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!” (52). Teufelsdröckh’s description of mankind in this passage not only acknowledges the coexistence of corporeal mechanism and sublime spirit, it also emphasizes the need to look beyond surface appearances and comforts. Subsequently, the metaphor of digestion becomes the basis for an extended critique of the British reader, whose utilitarianism and focus on comfort impedes his spiritual growth. When providing background about the Professor’s childhood, for example, the Editor glosses over Teufelsdröckh’s habit of observing farm animals. “It may be that hereby he acquired a ‘certain deeper sympathy with animated Nature,’” the Editor admits, but “[w]e are wont to love the Hog chiefly in the form of Ham” (72). The Editor’s use of the pronoun “we” in this passage highlights the British tendency to reduce things to products that may be consumed, and his decision to pass over “the little one’s friendship with cattle and poultry” is a subtle nod in the direction of readers impatient of details and eager to reach the point. However, the gesture quickly takes on a critical cast as the Editor expands on a distinction that calls into question the validity of such attitudes. Perhaps Teufelsdröckh’s childhood observations do reveal something about the deep nature of reality, he intimates. “Herein, say they, consists the whole difference between an inspired Prophet and a double-barreled Game-preserver”: “the inner man of the one has been fostered into generous development; that of the other, crushed-down perhaps by vigour of animal digestion, and the like, has exuded and evaporated, or at best sleeps now irresuscitably stagnant at the bottom of his stomach” (72–73). “Digestion,” here, indicates the “mechanistic” element of our being, the unconscious processes that link us to animals—but it is also associated with an attitude toward life. In this sense, the Editor’s appeal to digestion is an implied criticism of the utilitarian tendency to emphasize use-value at the expense of broader concerns. In “The Everlasting No” the digestive metaphor appears again, this time in the context of Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual crisis. At this point in the

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text, earlier, more subtle, attempts to promote self-reflection in the reader are replaced by more forthright indictments of a widespread attitude. The British Editor directly addresses “such readers as have reflected . . . on man’s life, and happily discovered, in contradiction to much Profit-andLoss Philosophy, speculative and practical, that Soul is not synonymous with Stomach” (124). Teufelsdröckh himself, in the throes of doubt, asks whether “the heroic inspiration we name Virtue is but some Passion; some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by?” (125). He concludes: If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver! Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying-pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect! (125) In this passage, Teufelsdröckh indicts the “appetite” that replaces spiritual expansion with questions of comfort, producing a crisis in which despair over the generalized tendency to make a philosophy or religion of “cookery” leads Teufelsdröckh to turn on himself. “I walked solitary,” he reports, “and (except as it was my own heart I was devouring) savage also” (127). Teufelsdröckh’s despairing response to the evils of consumption is to “devour” his own heart and so rewrite the expected association between “health” and good digestion by turning on himself. Such uses of the metaphor of digestion focus Carlyle’s social criticism by reversing the traditional opposition between health and sickness, so that signs of physical “health” are shown to conceal an underlying deficiency that makes “spiritual” digestion impossible. In the world of Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh’s crisis is not therefore the story of his own “chronic” illness (127), but rather of a society in which the smug, self-absorbed reader becomes a symptom of larger evils. Near the end of the text, the British Editor sums up the culmination of this state of affairs, noting the lack of use-value in the Professor’s philosophy of clothes: “In the way of replenishing thy purse, or otherwise aiding thy digestive faculty, O British Reader, it leads to nothing, and there is no use in it; but rather the reverse, for it costs thee somewhat” (204). To reach “into the region of the Wonderful, and seest and feelest that thy daily life is girt with Wonder, and based on Wonder,” he suggests, it is necessary to think differently about the material world itself (205). To do so, he suggests, is to profit “beyond money’s worth” (205).

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If the Editor functions as an intermediary between Teufelsdröckh and the reader, drawing attention to the disjunction between the processes of “digestion” and “thinking,” his final injunction emphasizes that the transformation charted within the text needs to find a corollary among its consumers. To achieve this end, he intimates, it is necessary that readers be willing to embrace feelings of “irritation” as their customary ways of thinking change. In his conclusion, the Editor notes that British readers may have found Teufelsdröckh “an uneasy interruption to their ways of thought and digestion” (225). To the unreflecting, digestive problems— like the labor required to untangle vexing thoughts—may remain something to be avoided. For those willing to embrace the process of change, however, the internal “state of quarrel” Teufelsdröckh provokes leads to a condition of improved spiritual health.

“PRODUCE! PRODUCE!”: C A R LY L E ’ S D I G E S T I V E P R O C E S S Insofar as it presents illness as a precondition for diagnosing society’s ills, Sartor Resartus differs significantly from twentieth-century critical readings of disease as the negative other of health. For Sander Gilman, disease represents “the fear of collapse, the sense of dissolution” that we project “onto the world in order to localize it and, indeed, domesticate it.”45 This understanding of disease draws attention to the ways that illness and the metaphors it engenders allow us to contain our larger anxieties about, among other things, loss of identity. Indeed, both Gilman and Susan Sontag point out that the process of defining disease, however crudely, enables us to control our fear of being subsumed, in Gilman’s words, into “the chaos represented in culture by disease.”46 If both Gilman and Sontag self-consciously focus on the ways that the healthy respond to illness on a symbolic level, Carlyle’s alternative uses of illness as a metaphor suggest how the “chaos” disease represents may play a productive, explicitly social, role for those it afflicts. Perhaps most importantly, the binary logic that Gilman identifies as central to cultural thinking about disease is abandoned in Carlyle’s writing, where metaphors derived from his digestive ailment allow him to address the related terms of consumption and production central to his critique of contemporary society. For Carlyle as an author, the imperative to “produce” evoked a complementary fear of being consumed. To avoid being figuratively “eaten,” or reduced to “a thing” for writing articles, Carlyle idealized a work ethic that would allow him to symbolically transcend the conditions under which he was obliged to write. Carlyle himself regarded Sartor as

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“medicinal,” a cure for a contemporary reading public that had lost its work ethic. In Sartor, this cure took the form of a self-consciously difficult style that required the reader’s labor to produce meaning. In its diction, style, allusions, and organization, Sartor notoriously refused easy “digestion,” as its early readers and reviewers often remarked.47 John Sterling, Carlyle’s longtime friend, praised elements of the work but noted the “lawless oddity” of Sartor’s form and “positively barbarous” difficulty of its language, complaining of words used “without any authority; some of them contrary to analogy: and none repaying by their value the disadvantage of novelty.”48 Sterling’s attempt to explain why the work had found “so little acceptance among the best and most energetic minds in this country”49 focused on the problem of a text that often failed to repay the labor required to decipher it. A contemporary critic expressed the general consensus more directly: “[W]hat does the author mean by Baphometic fire-baptism?” he asked. “Why cannot he lay aside his pedantry, and write so as to make himself generally intelligible?”50 If Carlyle’s style in Sartor Resartus was anathema to its first readers, it also evoked the “state of quarrel” he believed was necessary to think through accepted ideas in a new light. The predominantly middle-class readers of Fraser’s Magazine who were Sartor’s earliest public were frustrated by its implicit challenge to their expectations about the medium. Used to taking their opinions from the periodical press, this group protested vociferously against the sustained effort required to unlock its meaning, and resented the fact that they could not take up installations of Sartor after dinner as an aid to digestion. This process of reading extended the imperative to “produce!” to literature’s consumers, and the fact that Carlyle succeeded in “irritating” his readership was, for him, a positive effect already written into the conclusion of the text. Most interestingly, one result of this “irritation” was to metaphorically re-create his own symptoms of dyspepsia by forestalling the linear process of healthy digestion and replacing it with a system that proceeded, painfully, by stops and starts. In a letter to James Fraser soliciting periodical publication, Carlyle conceded that Sartor was most profitably read “a few chapters at a time,” and his characterization of the text as a “Satirical Extravaganza” seemed to further encourage a discontinuous approach.51 By translating his own illness into a metaphor for producing meaning, Carlyle reversed the terms of chaos and containment associated with “diagnosing” illness, instead forcing readers to engage with ideas from the perspective of chaos and so diagnose society’s ills. Structurally, this engagement was highlighted in the preliminary chapters, where the British Editor notes that the Professor’s philosophy of clothes “naturally falls into two Parts . . . but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents,

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and indeed quite runs through the other” (26). According to the British Editor this collapse of discrete units into a single chaotic whole results in a book which “not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, Rhine-wine and French mustard, were hurled into one huge tureen or trough, and the hungry Public invited to help itself” (26–27). The list of foods brought together in the metaphor of a “mad banquet” not only suggests a digestive process already begun, but also rejects conventional modes of organizing and delivering courses. Far from predigesting for the consumer, Carlyle’s play on “helping oneself” thus emphasizes that in order to make sense of the feast, the British Public must look beyond convention. This imperative frustrates the Editor’s self-appointed task of “bring[ing] what order we can out of this Chaos” (27), and as the text progresses this task seems increasingly self-defeating. Upon confronting the documentary evidence to be used in the construction of the Professor’s biography, itself intended as an illuminating key to the clothes philosophy, the Editor exclaims that “if the ClothesVolume itself was too like a Chaos, we have now instead of the solar Luminary that should still it, the airy Limbo which by admixture will farther volatilise and decompose it!” (61). Later, the Editor acknowledges the plight of his reader, adrift in a “Chaos-flood;” “can it be hidden from the Editor,” he asks, “that many a British Reader sits reading quite bewildered in head, and afflicted rather than instructed by the present Work? Yes, long ago has many a British Reader been, as now, demanding with something like a snarl: Whereto does all this lead; or what use is in it?” (204). This nod in the direction of the frustrated reader simultaneously acknowledges and questions the utilitarian attitude behind “mechanized” modern thought. Throughout Sartor, Carlyle questions the characteristic preoccupation with use-value, self-consciously “afflicting” the reader and, in doing so, he takes his own paralyzed digestive tract as a model for the process of decoding. Reread through the metaphor of digestion, the imperative to “Produce” that underpinned the middle-class Victorian ideal of work gained another, conflicting, layer of meaning. To take up the spiritual dimension of work and so begin to “heal” society, Carlyle seems to suggest, one must first acquire the sensitivity brought on by illness. The paradox that one must see the sickness of the world through the lens of illness in order to change it was central to Carlyle’s earliest sense of himself as a social commentator. As diagnostician, Carlyle not only placed himself apart from society but also set out to correct its ills by presenting physical health in terms that rendered it grotesque. Thus, for example, his metaphor of the “mad banquet” in Sartor rejects the rational ordering of food as courses in order to draw attention to the gruesome

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reality of matter “confounded” in the process of healthy digestion. This sort of appeal to grotesque imagery works, as Wolfgang Kayser suggests, by shattering the seeming coherence of our experience and so alienating us from the familiar world—an approach that would become central to the tradition of sage writing that begins with Carlyle.52 In Sartor the ordinary, and ordered, presentation of food not only provides a basis for criticizing a utilitarian attitude toward life, it also makes health grotesque and illness the basis for healing society. In the final chapter, “Farewell,” the Editor further emphasizes the relationship between the text and the “mad banquet” when he claims that Teufelsdröckh’s text is “like a Scottish Haggis” (221), an analogy that transforms the dysfunctional stomach into a container for ideas that may provide, “though in barbaric wise, some morsel of spiritual nourishment . . . to the scanty ration of our beloved British world” (221).

CONCLUSION: BYRON REVISED

OR

REVISITED?

In his attempts to provide a model for changing the world in Sartor, Carlyle perhaps came closest to moving beyond the self-absorption he had rejected in British Romanticism. For Janice Haney, Sartor’s “Victorian Romanticism” marks the shift toward a life of action as Teufelsdröckh moves from self-imposed isolation in Germany to a more public life in England at the end of the text; similarly, Anne Mellor sees Sartor’s refusal to provide easy answers for its readers as a “goad to action.”53 If both Haney and Mellor find Sartor valuable because it is meant to generate social effects outside itself, however, Carlyle’s personal contribution to social change remained largely symbolic. As with his own illness, which he imaginatively “resolved” in the story of spiritual conversion that consolidated work as the centerpiece of his philosophy, Carlyle’s call to action in Sartor did not change his actual behavior. Instead, as public sage—a role he cultivated in the years following the publication of Sartor—Carlyle reinvented the Byronic sufferer as social prophet, only to remain caught in many of the paradoxes that haunted Byron. Regarded for his ability to inspire others to action, Carlyle himself remained a largely textual figure for the Victorians, a limitation that is expressed in the persistent metaphor of his own disease. Carlyle’s difficulty as an emerging sage was already discernible in “Characteristics,” an essay he published in 1831 while looking for a publisher for Sartor. In many respects an extension of the concerns and metaphors central to Sartor, “Characteristics” emphasizes the potentially productive role disease might play in matters “moral, intellectual, political, poetical.”54 While Sartor takes up the theme indirectly, “Characteristics”

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offers a more didactic critique of contemporary society. In the opening paragraphs, Carlyle outlines the traditional view of health that he claims denotes a state of unity. So long as “the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings,” he suggests, “it is a melody and unison” (186). This view of health emphasizes a positive state in opposition to disease, where the “derangement” of one part “announce[s] its separate existence” (186). If Carlyle initially adopts an oppositional view of health and illness, however, he quickly shifts his attention to the potentially productive nature of disease. “The beginning of Inquiry is disease,” he argues; “[a]ll Science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong” (187). Carlyle’s identification of disease with productive thought here emphasizes that the realities of an imperfect life must be addressed, that one cannot dwell on the tragedy of a lost Eden. For Carlyle, the capacity to achieve “partial healing” is a necessity in modern life: “The memory of the first state of Freedom and paradisaic Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: With Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order” (187). In this scheme, as in Sartor, “disease” not only describes our present state of derangement, it also offers the consolation that knowledge is both symptom and cure, and so may work to restore some degree of order. If the metaphor of disease structures his broad discussion of human organization in “Characteristics,” Carlyle’s dyspepsia was also an important focus in his discussion of contemporary society, “the Era when all manner of Inquiries into what was once the unfelt, involuntary sphere of man’s existence, find their place, and, as it were, occupy the whole domain of thought” (200). For Carlyle, this condition of intense selfconsciousness calls forth “cures,” in the form of “Coöperative Societies, Universal Suffrage, Cottage-and-Cow systems, repression of Population, Vote by Ballot”; far from alleviating the causes they are designed to address, however, these cures only intensify human suffering (202). Carlyle explicitly equates this proliferation of cures with digestive ailment, a parallel that identifies them with the systems, or “machinery,” that represent grotesque parodies of order in his writing. “To such height has the dyspepsia of Society reached,” he suggests, “as indeed the constant grinding internal pain, or from time to time the mad spasmodic throes, of all Society do otherwise indicate” (202). While Carlyle himself writes as a way to address this problem, he denounces the modes of writing currently available to address social problems, rejecting equally the two cures offered by Romanticism: escapism through an interiorized connection with nature and literary reviewing as a way to promote thoughtful response.

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In “Characteristics” Carlyle is critical of literature as a system, placing special emphasis on the modes of writing associated with Romanticism. Of the “View-Hunting” through which authors engage in a “constant dwelling in communion with [Nature]” (205), Carlyle complains that such an appreciation of nature leads to self-absorption in the act of regarding. “We have not the love of greatness,” he suggests, “but the love of the love of greatness” (205). This displacement means that rather than use literature to regard the world around us more clearly, we instead treat it as an impressionistic mirror. Such approaches not only trivialize nature, he contends, they ultimately degrade literature by reducing it to a popular formula (205). Carlyle is similarly opposed to “the prevalence of Reviewing,” which also threatens to turn inward on itself: “By and by,” he suggests, “it will be found that all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring review; and, as in London routs, we have to do nothing, but only to see others do nothing” (206). Displaced equally from positive and negative processes of digestion, Carlyle claims “your Reviewer is a mere taster” (206) and is therefore unable to process ideas in any useful form. Such criticism suggests both the decline of the periodical press as a public sphere and the corresponding problem posed by emerging mass production, which replicated successful patterns rather than functioning as a forum for intellectual exchange. In both cases, the basis of Carlyle’s objection is the inertia that comes with self-consuming modes of expression. In rejecting the popularized remains of British Romanticism in 1831, Carlyle found himself without a useful model. Like Byron, he despised much of his contemporary society; yet, he also recognized the limits of the Byronic response: “Behold a Byron, in melodious tones, ‘cursing his day’: he mistakes earthborn passionate Desire for heaven-inspired Freewill; without heavenly load-star, rushes madly into the dance of meteoric lights that hover on the mad Mahlstrom; and goes down among its eddies” (212). To address the void, and to avoid the Byronic solution of selfdestruction, Carlyle began to revise the alienated Romantic into the sage who stands outside society in order to diagnose its ills. This tactic is, as Andrew Elfenbein suggests, at once an extension and rejection of Byronism.55 Where Byron’s anger took shape as emotional and physical excess, Carlyle’s anger took the shape of textual critique, in which stylistic excess functioned, in John Holloway’s words, by forcibly “stimulating [the reader] to notice something to which he was previously blind.”56 If Carlyle’s attempt to revise what he saw as the limitations of Romanticism allowed him to escape self-destructive Byronism, it did not allow him to transcend the limitations of the practical world or to forego action. Rather, as with his illness, Carlyle continued to struggle with the problem of engagement, which he could imaginatively, but not practically, resolve. As a sage, this meant that Carlyle was required to communicate with his

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readers through the mechanism of a publishing industry that was also an object of his critique. His increasingly shrill pronouncements may therefore suggest, among other things, his underlying anxiety about “feeding” a system, which, despite his best efforts, increasingly saw his work as fodder for an all-too-healthy digestion.

NOTES 1. Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 254. 2. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1999), 196. 3. Peter Melville Logan notes that such conditions were a response to the extremes, of work and confinement, demanded by the new organization of social life (Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997], 1–2). Among the many historical studies that note the prevalence of hysteria in the nineteenth century are, for example, Mark Micale’s Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Martha Noel Evans’s Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Sander Gilman et al., Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 4. Logan, Nerves and Narratives, 2. 5. Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 1; and John Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 144. 6. For an excellent discussion of “Byronism,” see chapter 2 of Andrew Elfenbein’s Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 7. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 148; subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 8. John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908), 1:156. Harriet Martineau made similar comments about the “morbid” Byronism of the British temper in her Autobiography, 3 vols. (London: Smith Elder, 1877), 1:387. 9. Thomas Carlyle, “To Jane Welsh Carlyle,” 28 January 1821, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Duke-Edinburgh ed., 9 vols.,

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ed. Charles Richard Sanders and Kenneth J. Fielding (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970–1981), 1:316. See also Carlyle’s essay “Goethe” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 2. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899). 10. Paul Youngquist offers a related observation on Coleridge, suggesting that he “eliminates materiality, including that of the body, from the philosopher’s purview.” See his “DeQuincey’s Crazy Body,” PMLA 114 (1999): 347. 11. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 24 June 1824, Collected Letters, 3:90. 12. “To Jane Welsh Carlyle,” 29 August 1831, Collected Letters, 5:378 13. “To Jane Welsh Carlyle,” 20 December 1824, Collected Letters, 3:233–34; and Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. C. E. Norton (London: Dent, 1932), 354. 14. “To Alexander Carlyle,” 19 February 1821, 1:327. 15. This tendency was received in much the same spirit that Carlyle castigated the Romantics. Retrospectively, James Anthony Froude acerbically noted that, despite the fact that Carlyle was “never more eloquent then in speaking of his own crosses,” he “had really a vigorous constitution. . . . He used to ride or walk in the wildest weather and never carried so much as an umbrella.” See his My Relations with Carlyle (London: Longmans, 1903), 6–7. 16. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 26 January 1821, Collected Letters, 1:313. 17. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 10 February 1821, Collected Letters, 1:325. 18. Thomas Carlyle, Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton. (New York: Grolier Club, 1898), 55–56. 19. “To Jane Welsh Carlyle,” 12 October 1823, Collected Letters, 2:447. 20. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 25 February 1821, Collected Letters, 1:330. 21. See Janice L. Haney, “‘Shadow-Hunting’: Romantic Irony, Sartor Resartus, and Victorian Romanticism,” Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978): 331. 22. “To William Graham,” 30 October 1822, Collected Letters, 2:191. 23. Youngquist, “DeQuincey’s Crazy Body,” 348. 24. Ironically, Carlyle did not develop health problems until his twenties and was notably healthy as a child; see Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 29. 25. Thomas Carlyle, “Sir Walter Scott,” in Scottish and Other Miscellanies (New York: Dutton, 1915), 71. Originally published in Westminster Review 12 (1837). 26. Ibid., 71. 27. Elfenbein uses the phrase to describe Carlyle’s attempt to incorporate Byronism in a larger pattern of development in order to surpass it (Byron and the Victorians, 90).

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28. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 10 February 1825, Collected Letters, 3:277–78. 29. Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, 91. 30. “To Jane Welsh Carlyle,” 20 December 1824, Collected Letters, 3:233–43. 31. “To John Aitken Carlyle,” 29 August 1831, Collected Letters, 5:378. 32. Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, 53. 33. Biographical profiles of Romantic authors became popular in periodicals with philosophical pretensions. See, for example, profiles of Coleridge and Blake in Fraser’s in March 1830 (217–35), July 1833 (64–65), and October 1834 (379–402). 34. “To Margaret Carlyle,” 6 July 1824, Collected Letters, 3:104–05. 35. “To Goethe,” 25 September 1828, Collected Letters, 4:408. 36. For descriptions of this shift, see the Oxford English Dictionary and Raymond Williams’s Keywords (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1983), 78–79. 37. In The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Paul Keen notes a related anxiety widespread in the late eighteenth century: that the proliferation of “literature” necessitated by emerging mass publishing might empty all literature of meaning (109). 38. Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in Scottish and Other Miscellanies (New York: Dutton, 1915), 228. Originally published in the Edinburgh Review 98 (1829). 39. Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s, 87. 40. For a description of the scope of these changes, see Richard D. Altick, “English Publishing and the Mass Audience in 1852,” in Writers, Readers, and Occasions: Selected Essays on Victorian Literature and Life (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 141–58. 41. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 243. 42. Although it does not refer to Carlyle specifically, Jon Klancher’s The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) provides an excellent overview of the process by which mass audiences were self-consciously constructed during the Romantic period. 43. Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” 241–42. 44. Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 64. 45. Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1.

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46. Ibid., 4. See also Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 5. 47. Where contemporary audiences complained, many of his twentieth-century critics have praised the work’s tendency to challenge the reader, a strategy that lends itself particularly well to poststructuralist critique. See, among many others, Anne K. Mellor’s discussion of Sartor in English Romantic Irony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Franco D. Felluga, “The Critic’s New Clothes: Sartor Resartus as ‘Cold Carnival,’” Criticism 37 (1995): 583–99; and Colin N. Manlove, “Perpetual Metamorphoses: The Refusal of Certainty in Carlyle Sartor Resartus,” in Critical Responses to Thomas Carlyle’s Major Works, ed. D. J. Trela and Rodger L. Tarr (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), 30–45. 48. John Sterling, Sartor Resartus, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), 308–310. 49. Ibid., 308. 50. Ibid., 320. 51. Ibid., 303. 52. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968), 37. My remarks about the genre of sage writing are indebted to George P. Landow’s Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986) and John Holloway’s The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Archon, 1962). 53. See Haney, “‘Shadow-Hunting,’” 331; and Mellor, English Romantic Irony, 133. 54. Thomas Carlyle, “Characteristics,” in Scottish and Other Miscellanies (New York: Dutton, 1915), 186. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 55. Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians, 90. 56. Holloway, The Victorian Sage, 9.

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7 “Growing Pains”: Representing the Romantic i n G a s k e l l ’s Wives and Daughters Julia M. Wright

On the whole the influence of these [nervous] diseases is often great on national character, and domestic happiness. When wealth and luxury arrive at a certain pitch in any country, mankind cannot remain long stationary in mental qualifications or corporeal strength. Domestic peace is first invaded by asperity of temper and turbulent passions. Vices and diseases are close attendants on riches and high living. All these gradually extend among the community; and the circle widens, till it engulphs a whole people; when polished society may be said to bring on its own dotage, and to dig its own grave! —Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament

Elizabeth Gaskell’s last, and never-completed, novel, Wives and Daughters: An Every-Day Story (1866), belongs to a group of important novels in which the Victorians looked back to the previous age and considered cultural change not in the “sixty years since” of Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, but in terms of the short space of a single generation.1 W. A. Craik suggests that, in Wives and Daughters, Gaskell “chart[s] the changing shape of society, the gradual breaking-down of the class system as the old order changes, and the gradual infiltration of the squirearchical structure 163

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by the new men of science, learning, and the professions, as the younger generation reshapes itself amid the older one.”2 But this cultural progress is not smooth; there is a detour, in the form of the Romantic,3 which threatens to divert the nation from its auspicious path. The novel’s hero, Roger Hamley, binds the future to the past by distinguishing himself from the present of the novel. Roger is a “Hamley of Hamley,” with a Saxon frame, the mind of a scientist, and no interest in Romantic literature, and he plays the part of Mentor to the heroine’s Telemachus in large part by teaching her to reject Romantic culture, too (137). As Deirdre D’Albertis has argued, Lord Hollingford, Gibson (the heroine’s father), and Roger employ scientific discourse to “legitimize rational accounts of social organization profitable to some and debilitating to others, accounts that expand to justify gender discrimination, racial divisions, and imperial projects.”4 But the Darwinian competition between the Hamley brothers, discussed by D’Albertis in relation to the “empowerment of male selection,” is shaped significantly by the discourse of sensibility as a means of identifying the elder, Osborne, with a Romantic past that must be discarded as an ineffective cultural mutation.5 Here the informing scientific discourse is broadly that of Darwinian evolution, but, in its particulars, it is firmly rooted in turn-of-the-century medical concepts of the nervous body, particularly as they relate to philosophical constructions of sensibility and emerging organicist notions of the place of the individual within the nation. Through these two scientific discourses, Gaskell divides the main characters of her novel into two groups. The first is morally and medically pathologized: They have nervous bodies, superficial or flawed sentiments, and, through their egotism, cause most of the trouble in the novel. They all, moreover, favor the literature of the Romantic period, particularly romances and the poetry of Felicia Hemans, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Byron, and William Wordsworth. The second group includes the healthier bodies of the narrative, all with deep but private sentiments and a willingness to sacrifice their personal comfort for the good of others that makes it possible for many of the problems in the novel to be fixed. They all read “serious” literature, a category that, in Gaskell’s novel, includes science, philosophy, agriculture, and specifically pre-Romantic literature. The identification of Romanticism with egotism is not an uncommon one. Henry Maudsley, for instance, a contemporary of Gaskell’s and the author of treatises on psychology, refers to a time of “great self-feeling” as “the stage of Byronism.”6 Such thinking informs, but is not limited to, Victorian representations of second-generation Romantic poets as effete, juvenile, or sickly. In his well-known essay on P. B. Shelley (1852), Robert Browning excuses the poet’s “passionate, impatient struggles” as the “[c]rude convictions of boyhood” for which “all boys have been pardoned. They are growing-pains, accompanied by temporary distortion, of

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the soul,” and then speculates that “had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians.”7 In Wives and Daughters, the Romantic period itself becomes a juvenile convulsion that shook the national body but passed, leaving the healthy, more practical national body of the Victorian era, and on terms strongly suggestive of Maudsley’s argument. Romanticism is identified not with the transcendental self, but with Wordsworthian egotism, an unproductive attention to feeling that must be supplanted for the patient to mature and find health. The pathologizing of “self-feeling” was part of a larger Victorian program in which the subjection of the self to the national good supplanted earlier formulations of the nation as a body which coheres through feeling. As Sally Shuttleworth argues, “With the rise of organicist philosophy, writers of all fields and moral persuasions drew stern moral contrasts between egoism and duty: the divisive qualities of individualist impulses were to be subordinated to behaviour directed towards the greater good of the social whole,” the “‘organismic’ thinking” that Daniel J. O’Neil argues “contributed to the sacrificial motif” in nationalist discourse.8 “Such thinking emphasized the common good and man’s duties in contrast to natural and individual rights,”9 rights at the center of Romantic-era political debate. Gaskell’s teenage heroine, Molly, thus spends the novel learning “to think more of others than of herself” (119). Linda Seidel Costic remarks that Gaskell “perceived that learning can sometimes take one out of oneself” and the “broadening of mental horizons frequently leads to a corresponding emotional maturity.”10 But emotional maturity here is closely allied with a form of nationalism that relies on a variety of organicist discourses that tacitly support notions of national progress and the bildungsroman that charts Molly’s growth. That she is the daughter of a doctor, the future wife of a botanist, and prefers a garden to cut flowers are just some of the ways in which Gaskell draws attention to the variety of organicist discourses that she brings to bear in her novel, and the importance of the maturing Molly as a symbol of the nation’s progress from Romantic puberty to Victorian maturity. To unpack the mutually determining discourses of self and nation, body and mind, I wish to begin with Gaskell’s diagnoses of the characters of her narrative, before turning to her cultural grounding of those bodies’ states of health via literary sensibility, and finally the larger implications of these medical claims for one strand of Victorian nationalism.

DIAGNOSING

THE

HAMLEYS

AND THE

GIBSONS

Since Bruce Haley’s influential study, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (1978), a great deal of work has been done on the Victorian obsession

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with medical science as a means of establishing bodily control. Analyses of the female invalid, treatises on urban sanitation, Darwinian evolution, criminal phrenology, and notions of degeneracy have shed light on the Victorian novel in particular. The Victorians’ awareness of medical discourse, however, extends not only to contemporary developments in medical practice, but also to the residues of recently superseded theories. As studies such as Athena Vrettos’ Somatic Fictions suggest, the nervous body was an important concept for representations of the female invalid long after medical science had effectively discarded it.11 Gaskell’s novel, moreover, is explicitly grounded in Romantic-era medical thought. Gibson, the father of the heroine, Molly, is a Scottish physician, trained at the turn of the century. As D’Albertis has suggested, following Gillian Beer’s groundbreaking work,12 Gibson’s role as country doctor is an integral part of the novel’s engagement with Darwinian scientific models. But the specifics of his training suggest another context not yet addressed by scholars. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish medicine centered on the wellknown teacher and founder of neurophysiology, William Cullen. Cullen died in 1790, but his work was continued by his students, most famously John Brown and Thomas Trotter. Brown’s and Trotter’s neurophysiological models were not only widely accepted by medical thinkers at the turn of the century but, as a number of recent studies have established, familiar to laypeople as well.13 Their specialist understanding underpins the popular understanding of the relationship between excitement and health. Brown’s extremely influential Elements of Medicine, first published in Latin in 1780 but available in English after 1788, offered a view of the mind and body as a “system” in which the level of excitement determines health or sickness. For Brown, “[e]xcitement, the effect of the exciting powers, [is] the true cause of life.”14 But it is varied in its effects: too little excitement, and the system becomes characterized by “direct debility” as the patient is weakened and disposed to illness; too much excitement, and the system becomes subject to “indirect debility,” as the patient is exhausted from overstimulation and so submits to weakness and vulnerability to disease.15 Because the Brunonian system considers the mind and body as comparable parts of a system, the balance of excitement can be affected by improper amounts of emotion or intellectual activity. By locating the novel in a time when such medical theories were still accepted, and focusing on Gibson, a much-admired local doctor trained in the region famous for such approaches, Gaskell resurrects their signification if not their scientific authority. To ensure that the theoretical orientation of the doctor’s training is grasped, Gaskell peppers the novel with Gibson’s neurophysiological analyses. Gibson has “medical insight into the consequences to health of uncontrolled feeling” (32), and, when Molly

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is ill, he falls silent on an emotional subject because “[h]e felt as if much speech from him would only add to her excitement, and make her worse” (549).16 His palliatives treat emotions as much as bodies—“His commonplace words acted like an astringent on Molly’s relaxed feelings” (399)— and his own can be “stunned into numbness” (400). The Hamley family is Gibson’s main charge, and the means by which Gaskell discriminates between nervous and active bodies, as well as between superficial sentimentality, stylized via the literature of sensibility, and authentic, profound feeling for others. The senior Hamleys mark the divide between self-indulgent sentimentality and selfless, deep feeling. Mrs. Hamley “was gentle and sentimental” (43), while Squire Hamley “was awkward and ungainly in society, and so kept out of it as much as possible; and he was obstinate, violent-tempered, and dictatorial in his own immediate circle. On the other side, he was generous, and true as steel; the very soul of honour in fact” (42). The Hamleys’ marriage is “one of those perplexing marriages of which one cannot understand the reasons” (42), and the distinction rests in part on their modes of sympathy: “[H]er sympathy was given en détail, the squire’s en gros,” as Mrs. Hamley “liked to hear details” while the squire is pained by what he hears (136). As Roger puts it, “My father is a man of few affections, but what he has are very strong; he feels anything which touches him on these points deeply and permanently” (203). The contrast between husband and wife is reiterated in their sons. Osborne, “[t]he eldest—the reading boy—is very beautiful” and “writes poetry” (65); he “takes after his mother” (73) and, like her, has health problems and dies during the course of the novel. Roger, conversely, “knows a deal of natural history” and is, “like [his father], a Hamley of Hamley, and no one who sees him in the street will ever think that redbrown, big-boned, clumsy chap is of gentle blood” (73, 74); “in those days, before muscular Christianity had come into vogue” (30), Roger is ahead of his time. The squire, as he compares his sons to their parents, is careful to draw another distinction: His wife’s family, and by extension his eldest son, “can’t tell who was their grandfather” (74); “a Hamley of Hamley,” however, is “of as good and as old a descent as any man in England” (73), and a member of one of the “old Saxon houses” (228). As in H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), the true Englishman is no effete lord, but “[s]hort, thick-set, and deep-chested almost to deformity”—strong rather than beautiful or, in Arnoldian terms, Hebraic rather than Greek.17 Critics have long drawn attention to the gendering and hierarchization of the brothers: Osborne is feminine and ineffectual, while Roger is masculine and pragmatic. My concern here, however, is with the construction of the two brothers’ sensibilities. Quoting his own Medicina Nautica, Trotter writes:

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Osborne exhibits all of these symptoms. He is increasingly marked by debility, and it is hard to tell how far it is the cause of his fatal disease (suggestively, a faulty heart) or the consequence of his “moping life,” as he terms it (493): “He had sat down, as if thoroughly glad of the rest, and fallen into a languid stooping position, as if it had become so natural to him that no sense of what were considered good manners sufficed to restrain him now” (492). Even before his illness, he is described as “too indolent to keep an unassisted conscience” (353). His reluctance to “attend to business and the common affairs of life,” in Trotter’s phrase, leads to his failure in university, and his inability to manage his domestic affairs. To the question, “Where to get money?” Osborne “bethought him of his poems—would they sell, and bring him in money?” (259), in decided contrast to Roger’s practical plans to save the family estate through scientific labor and judicious spending. While, as Terence Wright has noted, “secrecy suggests a moral failing, or at least a confusion,” in the novel, most obviously with Osborne’s concealment of his marriage and child,19 too much talking can suggest the same. Osborne, despite his silence on crucial matters, specifically has the kind of nervous, narrative body defined by Trotter and discussed so ably by Peter Melville Logan: “When Roger came home Osborne did not let a day pass before telling his brother of his plans [to publish his poetry]. He never did conceal anything long from Roger; the feminine part of his character made him always desirous of a confidant, and as sweet sympathy as he could extract” (261).20 He is almost petulant in his response to his father’s brusqueness, “gloomily” complaining of it (262). The narrator remarks, “Osborne was too self-indulgent or ‘sensitive,’ as he termed it, to bear well with the squire’s gloomy fits, or too frequent querulousness” (299). Finally, he exhibits dyspeptic symptoms: He is “moody and depressed in mind and body” (369); Mrs. Gibson speculates that the symptoms derive from “a little fit of indigestion” (428); later, Osborne also exhibits a lack of appetite (492). In sum, he meets not only some, but all of the “leading characteris-

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tics of nervous disorders,” which Trotter represents as nearly endemic in early-nineteenth-century England. While Osborne is “sensitive” (299), “susceptib[le]” (262), “half a woman” (392), and too talkative (261), Roger is taciturn, keeps his profound feelings private, and helps others contain their own emotions in compliance with reason and social mores. In the precise terms of Trotter’s symptomology, Roger is the opposite of his elder brother. He has a “firm, quiet way” (590) and a “grave, kind sympathy” (115) while showing, in contrast with his mother, the proper reluctance to hear of “any private sorrow” (115); his sympathetic responses are rooted in analysis rather than sentimental platitudes, “reasoning out the matter” so that he can determine “the real source from which consolation must come” (116). Roger and Gibson consistently modify deep sensibilities through moral judgment and rational analysis. For instance, Roger, like Gibson, cannot sympathize with a sufferer until he is aware of the details (421), even if just a brief explanation that is accompanied by a “look” that is “more eloquent than words” (116); in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith suggests that sympathy is initially weak, and intensified by familiarity with the circumstances of the suffering, particularly when virtue proves to be on the side of the sufferer.21 This contrast is reiterated in the Gibson household where, once again, there is a practical father, a sentimental mother, and two siblings (stepsisters) with contrasting sensibilities, each following a different parent. Mrs. Gibson is a conventional representation of the superficially sentimental woman, trained too much in appearances and too little in the proper moral sympathies. Thus, she is characterized by “affectation and false sentiment” (397), competes with her daughter to exceed her in apparent “sensibility and affection” (124), and falls into “a flutter of sentimental delight, which she fancied was family affection” (419). Her sentiments run shallow, as she dismisses Molly’s affection for her late mother’s possessions as “sentiment . . . carried too far” (183) and Molly’s feelings for the dying Mrs. Hamley with the remark, “Nonsense! You’re no relation, so you need not feel it so much” (199). Gaskell’s narrator laments not only Mrs. Gibson’s superficiality, but her superficial understanding of others: “[H]er own words so seldom did express her meaning, or if they did, she held to her opinions so loosely, that she had no idea but that it was the same with other people” (401). The children follow the parents. Mrs. Gibson’s daughter from her first marriage, Cynthia Kirkpatrick, instead of having the “warmer heart” (387) praised by the novel, represses her feelings to avoid any display of them (435), trying to be the opposite of her mother selectively and in appearance only. She finds Roger only “plain and awkward” (377) and claims, “I don’t like people of deep feelings” (601), supporting

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the assertion by encouraging suitors in whom she is not interested, much to Gibson’s horror. She has no grasp of geography—anticipating her lack of interest in Roger’s travels—but can “repeat [Byron’s] ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ from beginning to end,” an accomplishment of which her mother is quite proud (267). While Mrs. Hamley’s effect on her sons is largely implied or naturalized, like Mrs. Gibson’s effect on Cynthia, the marriage of Mrs. Kirkpatrick to Gibson in the early pages of the novel makes possible a more dramatic account of the impact of such false sentimentality: [Gibson] had become nervously sensitive to his wife’s failings, and his whole manner had grown dry and sarcastic, not merely to her, but sometimes to Cynthia,—and even—but this very rarely, to Molly herself. He was not a man to go into passions, or ebullitions of feeling: they would have relieved him, even while degrading him in his own eyes; but he became hard, and occasionally bitter in his speeches and ways. (410) [Molly] was gradually falling into low health, rather than bad health. Her heart beat more feebly and slower; the vivifying stimulant of hope—even unacknowledged hope—was gone out of her life. It seemed as if there was not, and never could be in this world, any help for the dumb discordancy between her father and his wife. Day after day, month after month, year after year, would Molly have to sympathize with her father, and pity her stepmother, feeling acutely for both, and certainly more than Mrs. Gibson felt for herself. (411) Here Gaskell again suggests Trotter’s medical theory. Logan notes that, in Trotter’s formulation, “the female body, though victimized by confinement, is also the contagious source of the nervous epidemic; the nervous mother, in her debility, infects her offspring with a constitutional nervous temperament.”22 Mrs. Gibson infects the Gibson household, debilitating Molly herself on terms that suggest Osborne’s poor health. This nervousness, moreover, is in large part due to “artificial refinements” (View, 51), and above all romances—recalling both Mrs. Hamley’s and Mrs. Gibson’s reading habits.

OF CHOICE IN READING: THE SERIOUS AND THE ROMANTIC That reading influences the reader is fundamental to the literature of sensibility, a body of work closely tied to clear pedagogical aims, as well

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as consistent with medical and philosophical notions of sensibility. Medical and philosophical notions of sensibility offered the terms on which late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century writers could articulate the effects of stimulation on the subject, and the circulation of such stimulatory effects from subject to subject. In Brown’s theory, if the medical subject is overexcited intellectually, his or her body can become vulnerable to disease: “Thinking, which more immediately affects the brain, than any other equal part of the system, encreases excitement over the whole body. Intense thinking, whether for once in a great degree, or habitual, may alone prove hurtful; but, in conjunction with other powers also hurtful from their excess of stimulus, becomes more so, and may produce sthenic diathesis.”23 Smith suggests, moreover, that the imagination is capable of reproducing the feelings of another in the observer, and so clarifies the means by which the literature of sensibility was supposed to operate: the identification of the reader with the feelings of the characters. Proponents of sensibility emphasized the pedagogical effects of such identifications. As Janet Todd succinctly puts it, “A sentimental work moralizes more than it analyses and emphasis is not on the subtleties of a particular emotional state but on the communication of common feeling from sufferer or watcher to reader or audience,” and “[s]uch display is justified by the belief that a heightened sense of one’s virtue through pity for another is morally improving.”24 In his “A Defence of Poetry,” first published in 1840 but written in 1821, Shelley argues the point in broader terms: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”25 But, from a neurophysiological perspective, this can be taken too far, and the overwrought emotionalism of some literature can consequently be perilous. Trotter outlines the dangers of particular kinds of reading: The passion of novel reading is [e]ntitled to a place here. In the present age it is one of the great causes of nervous disorders. The mind that can amuse itself with the love-sick trash of most modern compositions of this kind, seeks enjoyment beneath the level of a rational being. It creates for itself an ideal world, on the loose descriptions of romantic love, that leave passion without any moral guide in the real occurrences of life. To the female mind in particular, as being endued with finer feeling, this species of literary poison has been often fatal. . . . How cautious then ought parents to be in guarding against the introduction of these romances among their children; so calculated to induce that morbid sensibility which is to be the bane of future happiness. (View, 89–90)

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Of specific interest here is the identification of such sensibility with immaturity and egotism. Favoring the reading of science and history rather than romances, Wollstonecraft identifies the “romantic” and the “sentimental” to condemn reading that stultifies women’s intellectual development: Another instance of that feminine weakness of character, often produced by a confined education, is a romantic twist of the mind, which has been very properly termed sentimental. . . . These are the women who are amused by the reveries of the stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales, and describe meretricious scenes, all retained in a sentimental jargon, which equally tend to corrupt the taste, and draw the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because never having been exercised, its slumbering energies rest inactive.26 Maudsley, faintly echoing Wollstonecraft, also argues that adolescents must “press toward a calmer stage of insight in which feeling is subordinated to reason”: The great mental revolution which occurs at puberty may go beyond its physiological limits, in some instances, and become pathological. . . . [A] kind of vague and yearning melancholy is engendered, which leads to an abandonment to poetry of a gloomy Byronic kind. . . . The anxious sympathies of those most dear are apt to foster the morbid self-feeling which craves them, and thus to aggravate the disease.27 In Wives and Daughters, Trotter’s medical opinion, Wollstonecraft’s view on education, and the Victorian views exemplified by Maudsley’s psychological perspective come together in a wide-ranging dismissal of Romantic literature as unproductive and debilitating. The difference between the Hamley brothers is emphatically articulated in terms of reading habits: I remember the painter, Mr Green, once saw Osborne reading some poetry, while Roger was trying to persuade him to come out and have a ride in the hay-cart—that was the “motive” of the picture, to speak artistically. Roger is not much of a reader; at least, he doesn’t care for poetry, and books of romance, or sentiment. He is so fond of natural history; and that takes him, like the squire, a great deal out of doors; and when he is in, he is always reading scientific books that bear upon his pursuits. (65–66)

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In short, they embody the distinction between “pink sentimentalism” and “matter of fact” (133). This difference between the two brothers is later revealed in their literary pursuits: Osborne tries to publish poetry in the style of Hemans and Wordsworth (259), while Roger publishes scientific essays. The trajectory of Molly’s education is emblematic here, as it passes from one extreme of the Hamley household to the other—from romances and contemporary poetry to science and pre-Romantic literature. In Mrs. Hamley’s sitting room, Molly finds “[a]ll the books that had been purchased since” “the middle of the last century” (71), primarily “poetry and mild literature” (81). Most of the women of the novel have the same reading habits as Mrs. Hamley: Lady Harriet claims to be “well versed in the tender passion, thanks to novels” (93), and Mrs. Gibson was always “willing to listen . . . if the subjects spoken about did not refer to serious solid literature, or science, or politics, or social economy. About novels and poetry, travels and gossip, personal details, or anecdotes of any kind, she always made exactly the remarks which are expected from an agreeable listener” (96–97). As Mary Waters has noted, Mrs. Gibson is the product of the kind of education deplored by Wollstonecraft, “an education designed only to make women superficially pleasing rather than to strengthen their minds.”28 Mrs. Gibson thus prefers “the dirty dog’seared delightful novel from the Ashcombe circulating library” (130), likely a romance, quotes “such a pretty line of poetry” from S. T. Coleridge’s “Christabel” (582), and praises her first husband’s sentimental verse, including “a little poem . . . in which he compared [her] heart to a harp-string, vibrating to the slightest breeze” (447). The uselessness of such literature is quickly made clear. Molly, reading in Mrs. Hamley’s library, is “so deep in one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels that she jumped as if she had been shot” when called by the squire (71); despite being so wrapped up in a historical romance that she has difficulty “pluck[ing] away her thoughts from the seventeenth century” (71), Molly is unable to answer a basic question about English history (73).29 Romantic literature proves to be the trap that Molly is to escape, despite her stepmother’s laments that “she’ll be quite a bluestocking by and by” (267). Molly, Mrs. Gibson laments, is no Cynthia, but is her father’s daughter: Like him, she has “no soul for poetry” (because she favors such poets as Cowper rather than contemporary writers) and “reads such deep books—all about facts and figures” (267). Molly’s reeducation begins in the Hamley library, and it leads her straight into the literary past. After “read[ing] poetry and mild literature” (81) with Mrs. Hamley, she would go to the library, “mount the ladder, sitting on the steps, for an hour at a time, deep in some book of the old English classics” (82) from “a very fair collection of the standard literature in the middle of the last century” (71). Her access to this

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pre-Romantic library is impeded by Roger’s habit of spending his mornings there (88), but he soon begins to direct her reading and loan her books: “[H]e had felt himself of real help to her in her hours of need, and in making her take an interest in books, which treated of higher things than the continual fiction and poetry which she had hitherto read” (147). Roger’s literary influence even begins to counter Mrs. Gibson’s. Cynthia declares: “Though it may be logic, I, for one, can understand what Mr Roger Hamley said just now; and I read some of Molly’s book; and whether it was deep or not I found it very interesting—more so than I should think the ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ now-a-days. I’ve displaced the Prisoner to make room for Johnnie Gilpin as my favourite poem.” “How could you talk such nonsense, Cynthia?” said Mrs Gibson. (267) The text to which Cynthia refers is William Cowper’s “The Diverting History of John Gilpin” (1782): Pam Morris suggests that “the replacement of Byron by this poem is perhaps to be seen as a substitution of healthy English humour for Romantic European–influenced melodrama.”30 Like the heroines of such antiromance novels as Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), Molly’s expectations of men are based on her reading of romances and the “maiden fancy” with which Gaskell associates her reading habits: “From time to time her maiden fancy had dwelt upon what he would be like; how the lovely boy of the picture in Mrs Hamley’s dressing room would have changed in the ten years . . . ; if he would read poetry aloud; if he would even read his own poetry” (81); “Molly’s little wavering maiden fancy dwelt on the unseen Osborne, who was now a troubadour, and now a knight, such as he wrote about in one of his own poems” (147). But while Lennox’s and Austen’s heroines discover that romances are simply wrong on the subject of men and male behavior, Gaskell’s heroine discovers that men who shape their behavior to comply with the romantic are unattractively superficial and effeminate. When Molly finally meets Osborne, she finds him too feminine even for romance: “His appearance had all the grace and refinement of his mother’s. He was sweet-tempered and affectionate, almost as demonstrative as a girl” (43). He has “sentiment and imagination” (80), but is “languid-looking, almost as frail in appearance as his mother” and “dressed to perfection” (167).31 His effeminacy transforms him from the chivalric knight of romance into the delicate figure of sentimental verse:

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Molly was trying to reconcile the ideal with the real. The ideal was agile, yet powerful, with Greek features and an eagle-eye, capable of enduring long fasting, and indifferent as to what he ate. The real was almost effeminate in movement, though not in figure; he had the Greek features, but his blue eyes had a cold, weary expression in them. He was dainty in eating, and had anything but a Homeric appetite. However, Molly’s hero was not to eat more than Ivanhoe, when he was Friar Tuck’s guest; and, after all, with a little alteration, she began to think Mr Osborne Hamley might turn out a poetical, if not a chivalrous hero. (167) Tellingly, Osborne gets along well with Mrs. Gibson: “They talked of the ‘Shakspeare and musical glasses’ of the day, each vieing with the other in their knowledge of London topics. Molly heard fragments of their conversation in the pauses of silence between Roger and herself. Her hero was coming out in quite a new character; no longer literary or poetical, or romantic, or critical, he was now full of the last new play, the singers at the opera” (180). Molly must, like the heroines of antiromance novels before her, put away sentimental fiction and learn the mundane realities of contemporary life. Molly’s impending marriage to a botanist who travels the globe to expand the imperial collection of scientific minutiae, and her turn away from his poet-brother, marks a refusal of romantic idealism in favor of realist particularism—a refusal attended by a change in reading practices, as Molly begins to read science, philosophy, and pre-Romantic literature, instead of contemporary romances and verse. Moreover, as E. Holly Pike has noted, Wives and Daughters has a “fairytale opening” and “the early parts abound with references to myths and fairytales.”32 The novel’s function as a bildungsroman is well-established, but by identifying Molly’s development with a particular move away from Romanticera literature and toward more pragmatic and pre-Romantic reading, while reproducing this movement in the space of the novel itself—from the fairy-tale allusions of the opening pages to the scientific disquisitions of the later pages—and mapping both against a specific historical backdrop, Gaskell draws a broad but sustained parallel between the nation’s and the heroine’s maturation. Both Molly and England must pass through their adolescence, and reject the romantic. The literary means by which the romantic is proliferated reinforces its artificial status, and Gaskell’s implication that the “romantic” figures of Wives and Daughters are, to use a phrase of Sydney Owenson’s, trained only in, and debilitated by, “the theory of sentiment.”33 The weight of this point is increased by passing allusions to a wide variety of texts during the

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course of the novel: With few exceptions, the narrator and the favored characters quote scientific and pre-Romantic texts, including Miguel Cervantes, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, and eighteenth-century essayists such as Samuel Johnson, while the sentimental characters cite Romantic writers, including most of the canonical poets. As if to reinforce the pattern, Gaskell’s narrator notes that the squire hates the reform-minded Morning Chronicle (which even published the notorious radical Leigh Hunt) and Osborne has trouble reading the ubiquitous Enlightenment standard of taste and morality, Hugh Blair’s Sermons (70; 430).

V I C T O R I A N H E A LT H : SELF-SACRIFICE AND ORGANICISM Emerging during the reign of the literature of sensibility and Cullen’s neurophysiology, modern nationalism was initially conceived on affective terms.34 While Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume represented national character as an effect of culture (especially political organization), late-eighteenth-century writers on nationalism stressed nationalist sentiment.35 From German philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder to Irish poets such as William Drennan, authors drew on such premises as the priority of human happiness, the “natural” feeling of attachment to the land or to the national people, and a native passion to protect the national territory. But, as the Romantic period passed, sensibility faded with romance as utilitarianism and Victorian restraint rose. Nationalism was reformulated, becoming less the definition of a passion than the articulation of a duty. Thus, while Coleridge’s patriot cries, “There lives nor form nor feeling in my soul / Unborrowed from my country,” Thomas Hughes’s laments, “To die without having fought, and worked, and given one’s life away, was too hard to bear,” and Rudyard Kipling’s must “Take up the White Man’s burden! / Have done with childish days.”36 Molly’s development is specifically initiated by Roger’s lessons in the avoidance of “self-feeling.” The narrator remarks, at the end of chapter 11, “He endeavoured to lead [Molly] out of morbid thought into interest in other than personal things. . . . She felt that he did her good, she did not know why or how; but after a talk with him, she always fancied that she had got the clue to goodness and peace” (137). Here Gaskell participates in the Victorian justification of duty as a psychological imperative: “[W]hat such patients need to learn is, not the indulgence but a forgetfulness of their feelings, not the observation but the renunciation of self, not introspection but useful action.”37 This is the lesson that Roger embodies throughout his activities in the novel, and on terms that are

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strongly suggestive of the nationalist agenda rather than a general moral one. That Molly is predisposed to nervous disorders—even a “fit of sobbing” and near-“hysterics” (555)—because of her “rapid growth” is especially suggestive, tacitly linking romantic sensibility with the rapid social change against which Edmund Burke warns in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Gaskell favors instead slow, steady progress: Roger is “steady” and “slow” (258), and the squire, praising his younger son’s accomplishments, declares, “slow and sure wins the race” (364). Such practical regularity is nationally specific in a digressive paragraph on watches. Osborne, late for dinner, has challenged the accuracy of the squire’s watch: “It had given the law to house-clocks, stable-clocks, kitchen-clocks—nay, even to Hamley Church clock in its day; and was it now, in its respectable old age, to be looked down upon by a little whipper-snapper of a French watch[?] . . . ‘My watch is like myself,’ said the squire, ‘girning,’ as the Scotch say—‘plain, but steady-going’” (252). France appears throughout Gaskell’s narrative in such passing references as the site of sentiment and falsity, and as England’s greatest military threat during the Romantic period. France links together all those of the sentimental set; for instance, Cynthia is educated in France, Mrs. Gibson idolizes French fashions, and Osborne marries a Frenchwoman. Conversely, the squire has an inveterate antipathy toward all things French (259–60) and his younger son rises to fame by disputing a French scientist’s work.38 Roger “publish[es] a paper in some scientific periodical, which had excited considerable attention, as it was intended to confute some theory of a great French physiologist, and Roger’s article proved the writer to be possessed of a most unusual amount of knowledge on the subject” (297). The Squire is proud of his son’s scientific fame, despite his prose being tainted by French words: “I heard Gibson speaking of [a review of Roger’s essay], and I made him get it for me. I should have understood it better if they could have called the animals by their English names, and not put so much of their French lingo into it.” “But it was an answer to an article by a French writer,” pleaded Roger. “I’d ha’ let him alone!” said the squire earnestly. “We had to beat ’em, and we did it at Waterloo; but I’d not demean myself by answering any of their lies, if I was you. But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French.” (349) The article launches Roger’s scientific career, leading specifically to his appointment as botanist in an expedition to Africa (365).

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Roger sends back little information about his travels in his letters to the Gibson household, and Gaskell only conveys a brief reference to a fever and his emphasis on books. He writes, “in apology, what had he to write about in that savage land, but his love, and his researches, and travels? There was no society, no gaiety, no new books to write about, no gossip in Abyssinian wilds”—in short, nothing to interest Cynthia, though Molly, “thanks to his former teaching,” is fascinated and hopes to gather the books to which he refers (413). What we know of Roger’s expedition is limited to the personal and scientific, and not, at first glance, the imperial and national. But, as Mary Louise Pratt suggests: [N]atural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole of the planet; it elaborated a rationalizing, extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants, and animals. . . . [T]he system of nature as a descriptive paradigm was an utterly benign and abstract appropriation of the planet. . . . The system created . . . a utopian, innocent vision of European global authority, which I refer to as an anti-conquest.39 The selection of details in the references to Roger’s expedition conforms to Pratt’s notion of the “anti-conquest”: His scientific accomplishments and vague references to the difficulty of his task are all that is needed to establish his authority and, by extension, England’s. Racist remarks by Gibson (391; 589) reinforce Roger’s superiority as a European. Moreover, the effects of his letters from Africa are directed almost entirely toward consolidating Roger’s social status within England. The reading of his account at the “annual gathering of the Geographical Society” is reported in a scientific journal (449), and his accomplishments raise him in the new meritocracy. The “proud Lady Cumnor” remarks that “high rank should always be the first to honour those who have distinguished themselves by art or science” (607). The voyage also develops his Saxon build even further, “If a young man of twenty-four ever does take to growing taller, I should say that he was taller. As it is, I suppose it is only that he looks broader, stronger—more muscular” (589). And, more importantly, his voyage saves the Hamley estate after the sentimental Osborne cripples it financially. The economic viability of the Hamley estate is a recurring source of tension in the novel. The squire’s only romantic failing proves to be the downfall of the estate: “Very fine trees—sound, perhaps, too, fifty years ago, but gone to rot now; had wanted lopping and clearing. Was there no wood-ranger or forester? They were nothing like the value young

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Mr Hamley had represented them to be of.” The remarks had come round to the squire’s ears. He loved the trees he had played under as a boy as if they were living creatures; that was on the romantic side of his nature. (248) Impoverished by Osborne’s extravagance, the squire cannot make longrequired improvements to the land, and looks enviously at the work being done on a neighboring estate, “not on his land—better worth expense and trouble by far than the reedy clay common on which the men were, in fact, employed . . . the squire’s ready anger rose high at the sight of his neighbour doing what he had been unable to do, and he a Whig; and his family only in the county since Queen Anne’s time” (334). The squire’s own drainage system is “half-completed” (336); he had borrowed to pay for the work (his “only concession to the spirit of progress” [336]), and now was paying interest without reaping the benefits of a finished drainage system. The solution comes in the form of Roger’s appointment as botanist on the imperial expedition. In a letter informing his father of the terms of his appointment, Roger writes that “he knew well the suffering his father had gone through when he had had to give up his drainage works for want of money; that he, Roger, had been enabled at once to raise money upon the remuneration he was to receive on the accomplishment of his two years’ work; and that he had insured his life at once, in order to provide for the repayment of the money he had raised, in case he did not live to return to England” (366). In other words, Roger has arranged to perfection a solution to the Hamley estate’s financial crisis, taking advantage of new loan protocols (“progress” [336]) to make the benefits of his appointment both immediate and certain. These benefits are tacitly national. Trotter’s View makes explicit the relationship between the nervous body of the individual and the nation’s body, tracing relationships between national events and individual health on terms much indebted to Cullen. Diagnosing contemporary England as excessively nervous, he offers a cure that recalls the means by which the Hamleys and their estate are renewed: agriculture. The physician represents early-nineteenth-century Britain as both nervous and effeminate, suggesting that it is becoming too sickly to do the work of empire: A nation that cannot recruit its soldiers from a robust and hardy peasantry, can never bring into the field an army able to endure the toils and adventures of actual war. Amidst the general effeminacy of manners, that is rapidly consuming the manly spirit and physical strength of this age, and what may ultimately annihilate all that is great in the character of Britons, it is somewhat consoling to observe, that the

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Trotter supports a cure that would remasculinize the national body, and one which he suggests is already part of national policy: An eminent senator, Sir John Sinclair, has lately made some noble attempts to regenerate the physical strength of the country, by recalling mankind to agricultural life. His institution of a society for that purpose, under the authority of parliament, has already had considerable effect. Many noblemen and gentlemen, of great landed property, have seconded these patriotic views, and turned their attention to this national object: a spirit of improvement has appeared in every county, and is daily increasing. (View, 149–50) Thus, “[t]he glory and security of the United Kingdom, must be to blend these pursuits, agriculture and commerce, in the national character” (View, 150)—and so Roger does, using the capitalist mechanisms of bank loans and professional employment to finance agricultural improvements, after strengthening his body on a voyage free from the “enervating customs” of English Romantic-era society. As the land improves, so does Molly. For much of the latter third of the novel, Molly is in a “state of delicate health, consequent upon her rapid growth during the last few months” (446); in short, she is suffering “growing pains,” the condition with which Browning diagnoses Shelley. Her condition is exacerbated by her distress over her father’s marital problems, Roger’s attraction to Cynthia (recalling Maudsley’s sexually frustrated pubescent girl), and her work taking care of Aimée. After Aimée’s recovery, she develops a “nervous fever” (584) marked by such pallor that Mrs. Gibson compares her to Coleridge’s Christabel: “You’re looking a little—what shall I call it? I remember such a pretty line of poetry, ‘Oh, call her fair, not pale!’—so we’ll call you fair” (582). With Roger’s return and the rising promise of their union, her health rapidly improves (621). That Roger restores the vigor of two symbols of the nation—the Hamley estate and the maturing Molly—is not only evidence of the power of practical science and slow, steady progress, but also of the importance of self-sacrifice to the nation’s well-being. Self-sacrifice, as has already been noted, increasingly marked social and nationalist discourse in the nineteenth century. Ernest Renan can thus suggest, in 1882, “A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the

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sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”40 The popularity of poems from Hemans’s “Casabianca” to Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” testifies to the power of sacrificial discourse, glorifying those who set aside their personal comfort or health for the national good41—and this is precisely what makes Roger the novel’s hero. It is Roger who tells Molly the fable of Harriet, the girl who “thought of her father’s happiness before she thought of her own” (117), risks his life to work on an expedition to save the family estate, and interrupts his expedition and travels back to England to “put his brother’s child at once into his rightful and legal place” (590) rather than taking advantage of doubts to become the heir himself. Roger is not only a botanist, but embodies organicist thinking on a political level, representing a new national vigor based on a practical pastoral and a self-sacrificing sense of duty threatened by, but ultimately victorious over, a dangerously ineffectual, self-indulgent, adolescent, and sickly Romanticism.42 Through him, Molly recovers her health and finds the path to “goodness and peace” (137), and the Hamley estate is “improved” in nationally productive ways. In Wives and Daughters, Gaskell lays out the educational and agricultural program by which the nation can mature and so, in Kipling’s phrase, “Have done with childish days.” While the literature of the Della Cruscans and their Romantic descendants, as well as the “sentimental romance” (to use Squire Hamley’s term) of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, valued “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,”43 Gaskell takes a position broadly similar to Maudsley’s. To contain powerful emotions through reason and to feel for others is to support the community in productive ways and avoid “morbid” egotism. To do otherwise is to become susceptible to ill health, as well as unproductive and superficial displays of emotion—the symptoms of individuals that have lost themselves in a body of literature disconnected from science and the nation’s cultural history, including “the old English classics” (82). Molly’s discarding of romances, and the romantic Osborne, her increasing self-restraint and her willingness to sacrifice herself to serve others not only figures a turn from Romantic to Victorian values, but also clarifies the terms on which Victorian identity could be framed as a repudiation of the Romantic. That both the Romantic and the colonized are negated on similar terms—immaturity, excessive emotion, improper education, selfishness—suggests the extent to which this view of Victorian national identity needed to be defended, and propagated, on a variety of fronts. Given the ongoing popularity of Thomas Moore, Hemans, Byron, Wordsworth, and a host of other Romantic writers, a narrative that relegates the Romantic to the national past as a pubescent interruption in the nation’s progress is political fable masquerading as cultural history. It is perhaps, then, suggestive that the most canonical

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Romantic poets known to the Victorians (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, John Keats, and Byron)44 have particular features in common: They either died young or wrote almost all of their most important works before they were forty; their works were either explicitly autobiographical or were taken as such; they all wrote lyrics, a personal form identified with an examination of one’s feelings and so indebted to the literature of sensibility. In other words, the traditional notion of Romanticism that Romantic scholars have contested for the past twenty years is not only demographically, philosophically, and generically limited, but is also implicated in a Victorian discourse of maturity and responsibility as a rejection of “self-feeling” and unproductive aesthetic activity.

NOTES I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous support of this research, and Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak for their invaluable suggestions as I was working on this chapter. 1. All references to Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel are taken from Wives and Daughters, intro. and ed. Pam Morris (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1996), and page references will be incorporated in the text parenthetically. I take the phrase “sixty years since” from the subtitle of Walter Scott’s first historical novel, Waverley (1814). Many well-known early- and mid-Victorian novels represent the previous age; see, for example, Ann Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–1837), George Eliot’s Felix Holt the Radical (1866), and William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848). Gaskell sets the opening of her novel “Five-andforty years ago” (6), that is, the early 1820s; most of the novel is set in the late 1820s. The author died in 1865, with the novel still incomplete; the note on the novel by the Cornhill editor provides a synopsis of Gaskell’s projected conclusion to Wives and Daughters and is included in the edition used here (648–52). 2. W. A. Craik, Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (London: Methuen, 1975), 207–08. 3. There are two forms of the romantic at work here, which I will distinguish through capitalization: “Romantic” denotes the literary period, roughly 1785 to 1837, in which individualism, sensibility, and radicalism were significant influences in literature and political culture; “romantic” has the significance it had during the Romantic period, that is, an adjective that suggests romance, impractical idealism, and overwrought feeling. 4. Deirdre D’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Social Text (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 140. 5. Ibid., 145. For another discussion of the Darwinian competition between the two brothers, see Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington: In-

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diana University Press, 1987), 191–92. On the significance of sensibility to canonical Romantic poetry, see, for example, Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 6. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into Their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders, enl. and rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 1873), 169–70. The volume arises from Maudsley’s Gulstonian Lectures for 1870, placing his argument within the same cultural moment as Gaskell’s final novel. 7. Robert Browning, “Introductory Essay” [“Essay on Shelley”], Robert Browning: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John Pettigrew, suppl. and compl. by Thomas J. Collins (Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1981), 1007, 1009. 8. Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–38; and Daniel J. O’Neil, “The Cult of Self-Sacrifice: The Irish Experience,” Éire-Ireland 24 (1990): 91. 9. O’Neil, “The Cult of Self-Sacrifice,” 92. 10. Linda Seidel Costic, “Elizabeth Gaskell and the Question of Liberal Education,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 14 (1982): 51. 11. See Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). 12. See Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13. See, for example, Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in 19thCentury Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Vrettos, Somatic Fictions; Paul Youngquist, “Lyrical Bodies: Wordsworth’s Physiological Aesthetics,” European Romantic Review 10 (1999): 152–62; and, in this volume, Donelle Ruwe’s “Opium Addictions and Metaphysicians: Sara Coleridge’s Edition of Biographia Literaria” (chapter 10). 14. John Brown, Elements of Medicine by John Brown, M.D., trans. John Brown, ed. Thomas Beddoes, rev. ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 1:14. 15. Ibid., 1:88–89. 16. Gibson also subscribes to the precepts of medical geography, claiming that the air in a region not “surrounded by trees” and “well drained” is healthier (476). For a discussion of medical geography in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Alan Bewell, “Jane Eyre and Victorian Medical Geography,” ELH 63 (1996): 773–808. 17. H. Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, ed. Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7–8.

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18. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1976), xvi–xvii. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as View. 19. Terence Wright, Elizabeth Gaskell: “We Are Not Angels”: Realism, Gender, Values (London: Macmillan, 1995), 47. 20. Roger, however, strikes Molly as “unfeeling in his talkativeness” (87) when he tries to comfort his mother by distracting her with the idle chitchat she likes; he is only voluble to serve others’ emotional needs, not his own. 21. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11–12. 22. Logan, Nerves and Narratives, 24. 23. Brown, Elements of Medicine, 1:128. 24. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), 4, 8. 25. P. B. Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 487–88. 26. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Miriam Brody (1792; Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1985), 305–06. For Wollstonecraft’s privileging of science and history over romances, see especially 261 and 287. 27. Maudsley, Body and Mind, 170, 83–84. 28. Mary Waters, “Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Conduct Books: Mrs. Gibson as the Product of a Conventional Education in Wives and Daughters,” Gaskell Society Journal 9 (1995): 18. 29. The novel is peppered with negative remarks about poetry and romance: It is either improper (like Byron) or impractical. Lord Cumnor is chastised for quoting Byron (139), for instance, and Mrs. Kirkpatrick for giving her daughter, Cynthia, “a romantic name” (106) and having one herself. Gibson complains that Cynthia’s is “such an out-of-the-way name, only fit for poetry, not daily use” (105) and that Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s name, Hyacinth, is “the silliest name [he] ever heard of” (121). Molly’s name, however, “is an old-fashioned name,” and is in keeping with the “good old fashions” (68). 30. See Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 664n. 31. While Osborne’s concealed marriage to the French Aimée might suggest Wordsworth’s relationship with Annette Vallon, the emphasis on his effeminacy, general ill health, idealism, and aristocratic status links him strongly to contemporary representations of P. B. Shelley. 32. E. Holly Pike, Family and Society in the Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 131; see also Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell, 172–73. 33. Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (1806; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68.

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34. Most theorists of nationalism trace the modern form of the ideology to the time of the French Revolution, that is, the late eighteenth century. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 12; and Anthony D. Smith, “Neo-Classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions,” in Nationalist Movements, ed. Anthony D. Smith (London: Macmillan, 1976), 75. 35. See David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in David Hume: The Philosophical Works, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 4 vols. (Aalen, Ger.: Scientia Verlag, 1964), 3:244–58. 36. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Fears in Solitude” (1798), in Coleridge: Poems, ed. John Beer (Toronto: Everyman’s Library, 1982), ll. 192–93; Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; Markham, Ont.: Puffin, 1971), 243; and Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), 324. 37. Maudsley, Body and Mind, 84–85. 38. Julian Wolfreys’s remarks about Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis are pertinent here: “[W]hat knowledge a younger generation has to offer is not necessarily of the order of a positive or fruitful ‘progression’; such movement may be ‘tainted’ by a shallow appropriation of the foreign inimical to the health of Englishness.” See his Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 88–89. 39. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 38–39. 40. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. 41. Linda Colley notes, for instance, that Benjamin West’s Death of Wolfe “caused a sensation” because it “took classical and Biblical poses of sacrifice and brought them into the British here and now,” “start[ing] a vogue for paintings of members of the British officer class defying the world, or directing it, or dying in battle at the moment of victory.” See her Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 179. 42. That Roger’s expertise lies in organicist disciplines with practical national benefits—botany, physiology, agriculture, national literary history—suggests the privileging of a particular interdisciplinarity in Wives and Daughters rather than a general Newmanesque “liberal education.” 43. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 598. 44. The only member of the so-called Big Six not mentioned here is Blake. His work was only circulated widely in the latter decades of the Victorian era, after the publication of Wives and Daughters.

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Part III Hesitation and Inheritance: The Case of Sara Coleridge

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8 Snuffing Out an Article: Sara Coleridge and t h e E a r l y Vi c t o r i a n Reception of Keats Joanne Wilkes

Early in 1848, Sara Coleridge Coleridge wrote a review of Tennyson’s new poem The Princess for the Quarterly Review. Although she had already composed several unpublished essays, as well as essays and notes for the editions of her father’s works which she and her husband Henry brought out after S. T. Coleridge’s death, this was her first venture into periodical criticism. She had sought a commission from the Quarterly’s editor, John Gibson Lockhart, to supplement an income straitened by her widowhood (Henry had died early in 1843), and by her difficulties with gaining access to money she had inherited: She knew Lockhart personally, and he had been a close friend of both her father and her husband.1 (Coleridge’s husband Henry Nelson Coleridge was also her cousin, and thus S. T. Coleridge’s nephew.) She had met Lockhart herself, however, as early as 1825, before her marriage, an encounter that had induced him to report to his wife that she was “a lovely vision of a creature . . . the very ideal of a novel heroine,” but gave the impression of “extreme ignorance of the world.”2 For her part, Coleridge once told her sister-in-law that Lockhart reminded her of “the ghost of Hamlet’s father”—“what with his stately figure, his fine cast of features, his white hair, pallid thin face, and extreme stillness and taciturnity and high reserve, he might act ‘the buried majesty of Denmark’ with nothing done to him.”3 By the time she 189

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wrote her review in 1848, Coleridge had overcome much of her “ignorance of the world,” but she found that Lockhart, rather like old Hamlet, was trying to make the past govern the present. In her review, Coleridge had situated Tennyson’s career in the context of his literary predecessors, establishing for him a Romantic heritage of two generations—first Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then Shelley and Keats. But when the review appeared in March 1848, she found that Lockhart had excised completely every one of her references to Keats. To present Keats as a significant forebear to Tennyson was in itself not at all unconventional in early Victorian discourse on the later poet’s work. Nonetheless, Coleridge’s approach to Keats differs in some ways from those found in other contemporary discussions, and hence Lockhart’s censorship deprived readers both past and present of a notable contribution to the debate. Moreover, a comparison of the published text of the review with the two manuscript versions that survive (one an expanded and slightly altered version of the other) illustrates not only what was lost to the critical tradition on Keats, but also how far the Quarterly under Lockhart pursued into the 1840s a rearguard action against important trends in poetry and criticism, impelled by his version of traditional pre-Romantic values. As far as Coleridge’s career specifically as a female critic is concerned, her comments on poetry, both in the review and elsewhere, offer further evidence of what Bradford Keyes Mudge has called the “strategies of accommodation and subversion through which she exercised a growing need for ‘unladylike’ self-assertion.”4 As Coleridge was aware—together with most other readers of poetry—the Quarterly had a reputation for hostility to Keats. In September 1818, it had published a review of Endymion by John Wilson Croker that became notorious, and after Keats’s premature death there developed the legend that this article had actually hastened his demise. The legend became particularly potent, of course, because of poems by Shelley and Byron. In the preface to his elegy Adonais (1821), Shelley declares: The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.5 The poem itself wishes on the reviewer “the curse of Cain” (stanza 17), and characterizes him variously as “the unpastured dragon in his den,” one of the “monsters of life’s waste” (stanza 27), and a “viperous mur-

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derer” (Stanza 36).6 Then canto 11 of Byron’s Don Juan (1823) claimed that Keats “was killed off by one critique / Just as he really promised something great,” and went on to reflect, “’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself by snuffed out by an Article” (stanza 60).7 Commentators on Keats up to the late 1840s and beyond continued to discuss Keats’s reputation in terms of the alleged effects on him of the Quarterly’s review of Endymion. An example likely to have been familiar to Coleridge, given her preoccupation with her father’s works, was the account given by Cyrus Redding, since it appeared in his edition of The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats in 1829: Certain party critics, who made it their object to lacerate the feelings, and endeavour to put down by vituperation and misplaced ridicule every effort which emanated not from their own servile dependents or followers, furiously attacked the writings of Keats on their appearance. . . . The unmerited abuse poured upon Keats by [the Quarterly Review] is supposed to have hastened his end, which was slowly approaching when the criticism beforementioned appeared. . . . [I]t is difficult to decide whether the cowardice or the cruelty of the attack upon [Endymion], most deserve execration. Of great sensitiveness, . . . and his frame already touched by a mortal distemper, he felt his hopes withered, and his attempts to gain honourable public notice in his own scantily allotted days frustrated. He was never to see his honourable fame: this preyed upon his spirit and hastened his end.8 Coleridge was certainly familiar with the unrepentant attitude toward Keats evident in 1833, when Croker ridiculed him again in the Quarterly, and this time yoked his alleged faults with those of Tennyson, whose Poems (1832) was the subject of the review. Clearly responding to the reception of his Endymion review, Croker, with heavy-handed sarcasm, drew attention to the lack of popularity attained by Keats’s poetry, notwithstanding the attacks on his own article: We did not foresee the unbounded popularity which has carried [Endymion] through we know not how many editions; which has placed it on every table; and, what is still more unequivocal, familiarized it in every mouth. . . . [W]e request that the publisher of the new and beautiful edition of Keats’s works now in the press, with graphic illustrations by Callcott and Turner, will do us the favour and the justice to notice our conversion in his prolegomena.9

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(The first and only edition of Endymion had indeed not sold out in the fifteen years since its publication.) Just before writing the article, Croker had communicated to John Murray, publisher of the Quarterly, “I undertake Tennyson and hope to make another Keats of him.”10 Hence his article proceeds leadenly through several of Tennyson’s poems—just as his earlier piece had moved leadenly through the first book of Endymion—ridiculing what he presents as Tennyson’s obscure and newfangled (obscure because newfangled) diction and imagery. Thinking of this article in particular, Coleridge would say of the Quarterly some years later, “Its poetical criticism is arbitrarily vague, without the slightest attempt at principle, and in a sneering, contemptuous spirit. Its treatment of Keats and Tennyson was ultra-zoilian” (that is, ultramalignant or carping).11 Coleridge did have some respect for the value of consistency within the writings that appeared—anonymously in this period—under the aegis of a particular periodical. She argued, “They who write for a Review ought to let the Review speak with and through them—ought to look on it as an individual having its own character to keep up, its own conscience, opinions, responsibilities, need of consistency,—not as a mere dead receptacle for various essays of various thinkers.”12 Coleridge possibly assumed, however, that the Quarterly would be receptive to a more laudatory article on Tennyson by 1848, given that in September 1842 its outlook had already apparently changed: It had published a generally positive review of the poet’s collection of that same year—this time written by John Sterling. She even refers to this review in her article, and offers her own comments on Tennyson’s poetry ostensibly as “a few additional remarks.”13 What she presumably did not know was that Croker, one of the Quarterly’s most prolific and longstanding contributors on many subjects, had remonstrated strongly with Lockhart (in the latter’s capacity as editor) about the Sterling review. He had interpreted its publication as “an obvious and intended rap over the knuckles” to himself, and declared: “[I]t was understood by others as a broad hint that my influence in the Quarterly was gone, and by myself, as an intimation that our connection was drawing to a close.”14 Valuing Croker both as a contributor and as a friend, Lockhart was hard-pressed to dissuade him from severing his links with the Quarterly. In any case, since Tennyson’s 1842 volumes had included many poems from his two collections of the 1830s, Lockhart had already excised from Sterling’s review any praise of poems that Croker had criticized back in 1833.15 To justify his excisions of all of Coleridge’s comments on Keats, Lockhart alluded to the incident of 1842, explaining to her, “There is still extant the old reviewer of both Keats & the original Tennyson in the QR. He was very wroth with me for allowing John Sterling to praise Tennyson’s 2nd publication and he will not like this dose of Tennyson—but he cd not swallow laudations of Keats at

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the same time.”16 Lockhart also excised accordingly Coleridge’s effort to present her own discussion of Tennyson as a continuation of a Quarterly “line” on the poet initiated by the Sterling article. Needless to say, Lockhart had himself attacked Keats back in 1818, in one of the notorious and anonymous articles on the “Cockney School of Poetry,” which he had contributed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine—and Coleridge may well have been aware of his authorship.17 The extent to which the Quarterly (or any other periodical) operated effectually as an “individual,” with “its own conscience, opinions, responsibilities, need of consistency,” through which its various contributors “spoke,” is, as Joanne Shattock has shown, very debateable.18 Such an identity, nonetheless, could theoretically be fostered by the convention of anonymity: Articles ostensibly appeared as if by the “individual” periodical rather than by particular “individual” contributors to it. The convention also gave contributors some scope to adopt specific kinds of voices or personae—Croker among them. Although there is no evidence that he thought more highly of Keats’s or Tennyson’s poetry than his articles suggest, Croker did relish writing slashing literary reviews, or what the Quarterly staff came to call “fools,” as a relief from his more weighty political articles.19 But by contrast, what happened in the case of Coleridge’s review of The Princess was that Lockhart altered both the content and the tone of the original manuscript so as to give the article the outlook and voice he himself sought for the Quarterly. By 1848, nonetheless, the climate of reviewing had changed since the days of the Quarterly’s early attacks on Keats and Tennyson, and ad hominem strictures and acerbic abuse had become less acceptable. This was partly because overt links between politics and literature had weakened: Many of the thrusts against, and defenses of, innovative writers such as Keats had been animated by their perceived political allegiances, and by the embodiment of these allegiances in both the subject matter and the technique of these writers’ poetry. So in 1848 Samuel Phillips, reviewing Monckton Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats in the Times, could explain the attacks on Keats of thirty years earlier as having been fueled by a virulent Tory Party spirit that had rendered them “vicious beyond all bounds”—but he is very much looking back on a bygone era.20 At this juncture Lockhart could hardly have overtly revived his and Croker’s campaign against Keats via Coleridge’s review, even if he did not have to be mindful of his longstanding association with her family. But his excision of all references to Keats from her article writes the poet out of the Quarterly’s version of literary history, and, together with other alterations he effected, deprives Tennyson of some of his anchorage in literary tradition, making him come across (like Keats in 1818) as given to unwarranted innovation. When Milnes’s Life appeared,

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shortly after Coleridge’s article, the Quarterly and Blackwood’s were alone among major periodicals in failing to notice it. If this dangerous young Romantic was to speak beyond the grave, Lockhart’s nervous reaction would be to ignore him as far as possible. After her review came out, Coleridge explained to Aubrey de Vere, her friend and fellow writer on Keats and Tennyson, that in it she did by no means “attempt to do justice to Keats,” because she realized that “that would not be allowed in the ‘Quarterly.’”21 Coleridge would have known that to write in the Quarterly at all on Keats was to remind readers of the periodical’s famous and allegedly fatal attack on the poet. She had, then, to negotiate this problem. The way she found of doing so, nevertheless, also enabled her to avoid being caught up in the prevalent discourse that the very fascination with Keats’s death had fostered—a discourse in which the emphasis on his premature demise (whether or not at the hands of the Quarterly) inscribed him preeminently as a poet of great promise rather than one of achievement (cf. Byron: “Just as he really promised something great”). G. M. Matthews begins his Keats: The Critical Heritage by pointing out that “[v]irtually the whole course of Keats criticism, directly until the 1840s, and indirectly till about 1900, was determined by two exceptional circumstances: his supposed death at the hands of the reviewers, and the early age at which he died.”22 Indeed Coleridge himself had contributed to this discourse, and Henry Nelson Coleridge had brought his comments into the public domain by publishing them in the Table Talk in 1835: Recalling in 1832 his only meeting with Keats (in 1819), Coleridge had not said anything of the other’s poetry, but remembered shaking Keats’s hand and then, after Keats’s departure, observing to his own companion, “‘There is death in that hand.’”23 Before Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, Keats’s actual poetry was less familiar than his personal fate: None of the three volumes published in his lifetime had sold out, a collection of 1840 had been remaindered, and in 1845 Keats’s publisher Taylor had raised only 50 pounds for the copyrights to his works, including unpublished manuscripts. Sara Coleridge implies, however, that Keats’s early death is irrelevant to his poetic stature. Her article begins with an extended discussion of the period of life at which poets produce their best work, and although she acknowledges exceptions, she argues that more often than not it is when poets are under about thirty-five; she asserts too that “no small amount of genuine poetry, excellent in its kind and fit to live for its own sake, has proceeded from men under thirty.”24 In support of this claim, she adduces as “the poetry of youth” the work of “Catullus, so perfect in its style, the poetry of Crashaw and of Collins, of Gellert and of Bürger, of Coleridge and Byron for the most part, of Shelley and Keats entirely.”25 Lockhart cut out the words “& Keats.”

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Coleridge frames her argument, then, so that the Quarterly’s impact on Keats is beside the point, and his poetry can be evaluated for what it achieved, rather than for what it promised. In discussing Keats’s poetry directly, in a passage entirely deleted by Lockhart, she says that both his and Shelley’s work are characterized by “fine imagery & striking expressions used chiefly as the vehicle of thoughts & emotions, which interest the imagination, but are not of the highest order.”26 Her subsequent comments also balance Keats’s strengths against his limitations, as she perceives them. Keats is not capable of the “meditative pathos which reaches the depths of the heart,” yet “no poet has better conveyed a sense of the luxury of weeping,” and to illustrate this she cites lines from the then not especially celebrated “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Of the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” Similarly, she argues that “[c]ompared with the works of great poets the greatest of Keats is as the lilac or the elder tree to the plane or the lofty elm—all branch & leaf & fragrant diffused blossoming with scarce any perceptible stem—a forest of gilly flowers & jonquils”—but she also claims that “[i]n some passages of the Hyperion he recalls visual splendour of Dante & Milton & the music of the latter” (if not the earlier poets’ “lofty piety or intellectual ardour”).27 In the context of early Victorian Keats criticism, however, the most important point Coleridge makes is that, far from being a poet whose work contains obscurities and excesses of diction that reflect his youth, Keats was a writer whose talent was fully fledged. His poetry certainly had limitations, but they were limitations of which he was himself fully aware, so that he played to his undeniable strengths: On one point Keats is to be commended above any other poet of his school: no other has been so strictly true to his own genius or kept so uniformly within the range of the gift assigned him by heaven, none of any school has exceeded him in sustained refinement & equibility of tone: in that ethereal region of “illuminated mist” & rainbow which he chose for his poetic residence he constantly abides, never dropping below it into the trivial & vulgar, never soaring above it into the clear heaven of a high poetic philosophy.28 Coleridge’s comments on Keats are also notable for the way she draws on Arthur Hallam’s influential 1831 review of Tennyson’s first collection. The “school” to which she assigns Keats—plus Shelley and Tennyson—is what she calls “‘the school of Sensation rather than Reflection,’”29 quoting Hallam, who had also defined the three writers as “Poets of Sensation.”30 She proceeds to outline a literary heritage for Tennyson, from Wordsworth through Coleridge to Keats and Shelley, in terms of the relative importance

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of “Sensation” and “Reflection.” Wordsworth is the “great philosophic poet of our age,”31 but Coleridge’s poetry provides a link between his work and that of Keats and Shelley: [T]hough elsewhere he shows himself the “thoughtful poet, eloquent for truth,” yet in the “Circassian Love Chaunt,” “Love,” and “Kubla Khan,” [Coleridge] set the example of that style of poetry, afterwards extended so far in the hands of Shelley & Keats, which describes moods and feelings interpreted by sense rather than thoughts and actions, which interchanges the attributes of the external and internal worlds, now investing the human spirit with a drapery of the forms and colours of nature, now informing nature with the sensations and emotions of man.32 Yet to his daughter, Coleridge’s poetry is generally more characterized by “moral thinking” than that of Shelley and Keats, and thus can still be aligned with that of Wordsworth. Sara Coleridge cites as illustrations of this contrast a double comparison—between Shelley’s “To A Skylark” and Wordsworth’s poems on the same bird, and between Coleridge’s “The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem” and Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” (Lockhart excised the references to the latter pair.) She argues that in the older poems, though outward nature is presented and the senses are called in aid of the poet, yet moral thinking forms the centre of the piece; in the later, vivid painting, fine expression, and the melody of verse are devoted to the illustration of natural feeling, which, though modified by its co-existence with the spiritual and rational, has its seat in a lower part of the soul.33 In the context of early Victorian poetics, it is significant that here Coleridge retains some of the complexity of Hallam’s late-Romantic treatment of the poetry of “Sensation” and of “Reflection” (cf. the Introduction to this volume). Her literary and personal allegiances to Coleridge, and—especially in this context—to Wordsworth, made her value poetry of “Reflection,” and particularly its moral dimension, more than Hallam had: Hallam had asserted that “[w]henever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art.” Moreover, a man “accustomed to measure his ideas by their logical relations rather than the congruity of the sentiments to which they refer,” is likely to “pile his thoughts in a rhetorical battery, that they may convince, instead of letting them glow in the natural course of contemplation, that they may enrapture.”34 Yet Coleridge holds on to Hallam’s

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sense, expressed here in his notion of thoughts being allowed to “glow,” that “Sensation” and “Reflection” are not in fact mutually exclusive. She also quotes his related comment on Shelley and Keats, that “so vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.”35 In addition, her comparisons between Wordsworth and Coleridge on the one hand, and Shelley and Keats on the other hand, acknowledge that in the work of both the older and the younger poets the “senses” and “the spiritual and rational” coexist. The final words of her deleted tribute to Keats again emphasize this coexistence: In short [Keats] remembered that in all poetry good of its kind, whether it belong to the sensational & sentimental or the intellectual and reflective class of productions, there is evidence of clear & powerful thinking; every poetical creation which manifests internal consistency in the scheme, and is organized in a body of forcible & appropriate diction, manifests power of thought in the poet.36 Such a passage is telling, given the development of early Victorian poetics. According to Isobel Armstrong, commentators drawing on Hallam’s review often simplified his argument, such that poetry was theorized “either in terms of the discourse of moral statement or as a much weaker picturesque poetry of empathy.”37 Coleridge is one critic who avoids such simplicities: She shows some awareness of the complex relationship between thought and feeling evoked by Hallam—an awareness which, as Donelle Ruwe makes clear in chapter 10 of this volume, informs her overall conception of the poetic imagination. Apart from his excisions of all references to Keats, Lockhart made other alterations to Coleridge’s review which positioned the Quarterly—as in the 1818 piece on Endymion—as a defender of traditional poetical values against unwarranted innovations and made it more critical of Tennyson as well. For example, Coleridge argues for the existence of a “distinct poetic faculty” in some individuals. Lockhart does not delete this passage— although he does condense it. But where she writes, “we hold that poetic genius is as truly a distinct gift as a mathematical, a pictorial, or a musical genius,” he adds “still,” so that it reads, “we still hold,” and precedes the sentence with an interpolation: “We, in short, are of the old and common opinion.”38 That is, he uses her argument to present the Quarterly as an embattled defender of traditional concepts of the poet. Later, although Coleridge, in common with many early writers on The Princess, criticizes its variations in tone, Lockhart aggravates the criticism by interpolating a

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sentence upbraiding Tennyson for his “fearless intermixture of the modes and phrases of all ages, past and present.” He also cuts out a palliative clause of Coleridge’s: Although the poem’s status as a “medley” is “its principal defect,” she continues, “like all the best long poems . . . ever written it has indeed defects only not equal to its beauties.”39 Further on, when she turns to discuss the characteristics of Tennyson’s work as a whole, Lockhart inserts two long critical passages. The first returns to Tennyson’s early “Adeline” and echoes Croker’s article of 1833 by attacking as incongruous its images, “the merry bluebell rings,” the “language wherewith Spring letters cowslips on the hill,” plus its comparison of a laugh to “the screaming of jays and woodpeckers.” Lockhart also adds a note that reinforces the Quarterly’s status as a supporter of tried-and-true, pre-Romantic literary values, by declaring “We do not encounter in classic authors, ancient or modern, these chance kaleidoscope combinations; but the more closely we examine their miniature portraits of natural objects the more faithful we find them.”40 In the second interpolation, he cites Tennyson as yet another perpetrator of a fault supposedly characteristic of contemporary literature, “profuseness.” Modern authors, Lockhart asserts, work in haste, because of their “desire to be ever producing an effect, and to hear the shout of applause at every utterance of the Muse, as the mountains re-echo the voice which loudly salutes them.” By contrast, he claims, in earlier times “a writer probably contemplated his work as a whole while he was executing it in detail, and thus kept the detail in order, compressing his matter within a certain sphere to the exclusion or preclusion of much that might be good in itself.”41 That is, contemporary authors have lost sight of classical and neoclassical ideals of form, balance, and moderation. Coleridge’s version of Keats, then, challenges the pre-Romantic literary values that Lockhart’s Quarterly wished to champion into the 1840s. On the other hand, especially in its debt to Hallam’s important review of 1831, her article avoids the simplifying dichotomies that often characterized the poetical criticism of her own time. Her critical writing was also affected, however, by the fact that she was female—a fact which has bearings on both her Quarterly article and her comments on Keats in private letters. Coleridge was writing at a time when women were becoming more active as literary critics, but when periodicals were still dominated by male writers, particularly conservative organs such as the Quarterly. Sometimes the convention of anonymity (that persisted well into the second half of the century) was enabling for female periodical writers, since by not disclosing their sex, they could avoid having their work automatically judged according to assumptions about gender. This was not the case, however, for Coleridge. In the anonymous Princess review she adopts neither an overtly female nor an overtly male voice. But in editing

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her text, Lockhart himself exploits the convention of critical anonymity, making alterations which imply that the writer of the review is a man, and something of a misogynist at that. This is not to say that writing on The Princess, a poem actually about gender roles, Sara Coleridge departs significantly from conventional early Victorian ideas. Like many critics of her own time and since, she identifies the “message” of The Princess with the prince’s speech beginning “[f]or woman is not undevelopt man / But diverse,” a passage that defines the two sexes as intrinsically distinct in their qualities and roles, yet as needing to become more alike than they are in the contemporary world. If women were “as the man,” then “[s]weet love were slain,” while men must retain “the wrestling thews that throw the world,” women their “childward care.” But men should also attain more of the “feminine” qualities of “sweetness” and “moral height,” and women should acquire more “mental breadth.” Coleridge endorses these ideas as “plain truths.”42 Although she supports the sentiments of the “woman is not undevelopt man” speech, Coleridge does take issue with the belief in woman’s significant spiritual inferiority, which she claims to find expressed in lines of Spenser’s that characterize the “feminine” as “imperfect” and “mortal” and the “masculine” as “immortal” and “perfect.” She goes on: “Women might say to poets, who speak thus, what the lion said to the statuary; but ladies are better off than lions as to the power of selfdescription & lady-authors have it all their own way in many a clever & attractive novel.” Lockhart changes the sentence after “statuary” to read, “but we beg pardon—modern lionesses have it all their own way in many a man-shaming novel”—using the legend of the lion and the statuary to create a somewhat pejorative image of women writers as social lionesses, and hinting that their works express aggression against men.43 More unequivocal is his interpolated characterization of the contrast in The Princess between Lady Blanche and her daughter Melissa: Coleridge quotes descriptions of the two with almost no comment, but Lockhart inserts, between the description of Blanche and that of Melissa, “[h]ow should this painted mummy contrive to be the mother of the budding charmer thus sketched?”44 The words “budding charmer” seem added to catch the tone of a “man of the world,” while in labeling Blanche as a “painted mummy,” Lockhart, probably less wittingly, expresses conventional male disgust for physically unattractive women. Coleridge herself was particularly offended by an epithet Lockhart inserted to describe Princess Ida in academic mode—“the Buckland in petticoats.” As a woman of strong intellectual credentials herself, she would have interpreted the phrase as expressing male fear of and hostility to academic pretensions in women.45

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Coleridge produced one other article for the Quarterly. This was a review of a new edition of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher,46 and again it was severely cut by Lockhart. In this case, his editorial excisions were less ideologically driven, as her original manuscript was very long, often prolix, and sometimes veered off into tangents. As she explained to a friend: “I cannot easily adapt myself to place & occasion. I am carried away by my subject, & cannot help going too deep into it and travelling too widely all about it—into all its inmost recesses and around all its extensive environs.”47 She saw these traits in part as an inheritance from her father, but they were also, I would claim, a result of her active subordination of her own intellect to perpetuating his work. Coleridge was, as Mudge has argued, caught between ideals that were patriarchal (in all senses of the word), and a desire for an intellectual life, and she did use her father’s legacy as a raison d’écrire.48 But her lifelong intellectual endeavors also meant that she accumulated much knowledge and many ideas and opinions that she could not fully express in editions of her father’s writings—hence the outpouring of some of them in the Beaumont and Fletcher review. Most of Coleridge’s literary criticism actually remains embedded in her many and copious letters. Yet this private mode of discourse, and one in which her sex was naturally known to her correspondents, did sometimes permit her to support her views by recourse to what she saw as specifically womanly experience. This is especially the case in critical writings Coleridge included in letters to her friend Aubrey de Vere. Here she sometimes uses the traditional sphere of women as a space from which to write, as a space giving her, as a woman, a certain kind of expertise, and an expertise, moreover, that she brings to bear on Romantic poetry. This posture is evident, for example, in her 1847 critique of Wordsworth’s poem Laodamia. The nub of the matter for her is the representation of Laodamia herself, that she perceives as betraying in Wordsworth a lack “of feeling, of tenderness and delicacy”—that is, a deficiency of qualities particularly associated with women of the period. Wordsworth’s characterization is also wanting in “truthfulness”—by which Coleridge means plausibility as a representation of how a woman in Laodamia’s situation would feel and behave and still retain the reader’s admiration.49 Even more telling, however, are Coleridge’s comments to de Vere on Keats himself, written a couple of years before those in the Princess review.50 Here she takes issue with Keats’s portrayal of Adonis in Endymion, claiming this to be too effeminate to convince readers that such a figure would attract Venus: “I’ve no patience with that Adonis lying asleep on a couch, with his ‘white arm’ and ‘faint damask mouth,’ like a ‘dew-lipped rose,’ with lilies above him, and Cupids all round him. If Venus was in love with such a girl-man as that, she was a greater fool than the world

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has ever known yet.” She elucidates her point by explaining that what makes a man effeminate, and Keats’s picture of Adonis “so disagreeably feminine,” is “the presence of such beauty apart from something else to which it is subordinated.” Ascribing effeminacy to Keats’s poetry and to Keats himself had become common by the 1840s. It was featured in critical discourse since the early reviews and was, not least, a component of Lockhart’s attack in Blackwood’s. (Indeed Keats’s own writing post-Endymion was partly aimed at creating a more masculine poetic persona so as to preclude this kind of response.)51 Unfortunately, the posthumous legend of the poet’s vulnerability to critical barbs had only served to reinforce this image of effeminacy, and thus reinforced as well the Victorians’ nervous reaction to Keats’s works. It is therefore unsurprising that in her published writing Coleridge did not wish to aggravate this impression of the poet, preferring, as we have seen, to concentrate on linking his “Sensation” with his “Reflection,” his body with his mind. But in the more relaxed (and jocular) medium of the private letter, she takes the opportunity to use her reservations about Keats’s Adonis to claim her own authority to speak as a woman, her own knowledge of what women find attractive in men: “I think I have a right to preach on this theme, just because I am a woman myself. . . . Nothing provokes ladies more than to hear men admiring one another’s beauty.” For her here, “the rights of woman” do not consist in “the right of speaking in Parliament and voting at elections,” but in having the “diverse” qualities of the sexes upheld—what she calls “having her own sex to herself, and all the homage due to its attractions.” Moreover, Sara Coleridge also deploys here, I think, a sort of strategic “womanly” ignorance. She foreshadows an objection from de Vere based on classical models: “You will perhaps tell me that the Greek poets have sometimes ascribed a delicate beauty to Adonis.” But she can counter this in advance by asserting that the Greek poets, in portraying Adonis, “must have been thinking of their own lady-loves all the while.” What she knows de Vere cannot use as an argument, since she as a woman is not meant to be aware of it, is the homoerotic dimension of classical Greek culture as a possible explanation for Greek poets’ versions of Adonis. The respectably feminine form of personal letters was, then, for Coleridge, ultimately a more congenial outlet for her literary ideas than the masculinist Quarterly. By contrast, a brief consideration of another female Quarterly contributor whom Sara Coleridge knew, Rigby (later Lady Eastlake), illustrates how a woman could accommodate herself to the exigencies of periodical writing—yet also at what cost. Rigby started contributing to the Quarterly in 1842, and continued to do so up until 1891, two years before her death: She was, in fact, the most prolific of its few female contributors over this period. She was also a woman whose

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conduct in social life much impressed Coleridge. As befitted a woman whose intellectual endeavors were largely devoted to promoting her father’s genius rather than her own, Coleridge disliked female authors who displayed their intellectual pretensions in public. But Rigby did not put herself forward in company: In 1846, Coleridge reported to her sister-inlaw Mary that she liked her “better than any lady authoress that I have come in contact with for a long time.” This is because “[t]here is no lionism about her”—unlike another woman whom she described as “dreadfully hold forthy and unsoft.”52 She was equally enthusiastic three years later, and for the same reasons, when she wrote of Rigby to Edward Quillinan in 1849: “She is perhaps the most brilliant woman of the day—the most accomplished and Crichtonian. . . . [T]he top of her perfections is, that she has well-bred, courteous, unassuming manners, does not take upon her and hold forth to the company . . . Miss R is honourably distinguished in this respect. She is thoroughly feminine.”53 By 1849, however, Rigby was the author of a very unfeminine article in the Quarterly which is now equally famous as Croker’s attack on Keats’s Endymion, and which expressed a virulence rare in periodical criticism by that date. Published in December 1848, it is a review dealing with the most striking and puzzling of recent novels, Jane Eyre, supposedly the work of “Currer Bell.” Like Croker’s review of Endymion, it is written at a time of political turbulence, at a period of working-class discontent in Britain and revolution on the Continent, so that it declares— famously and tellingly—that “the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”54 But considerations of gender are also significant here. Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym, “Currer Bell,” was androgynous, but there was a great deal of speculation over the sex of this author. Rigby identifies in Jane Eyre’s writer “great mental powers, . . . a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion,” and for her these qualities can coexist only in a man. If by some chance the writer is a woman, then she can only be “one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex.” What clinches the argument in favor of male authorship for Rigby is the novelist’s apparent ignorance of things every woman should know. A woman writer, Rigby argues, would not have referred to a woman’s trussing game and garnishing dessert dishes with the same hands, or given to a female character the costume worn by Blanche Ingram, or had Jane don a “frock” when suddenly roused in the night. But what I would emphasize here, in the light of Coleridge’s experience, is that Rigby herself is anxious not to betray direct familiarity with the “female” subject matter of which she considers “Currer Bell” so ignorant—for to do so would of course invite the speculation that the

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writer of the review may actually be a woman. So she affects to be writing as a man, thus validating her aggressive tone toward “Currer Bell,” and taking on the kind of persona that suited the character of the Quarterly under Lockhart’s editorship. This stance becomes evident in the rather clumsy ploy Rigby adopts to account for the reviewer’s familiarity with the female domain: Her article attributes this knowledge to “a lady friend, whom we are always happy to consult.” No more than Keats was Charlotte Brontë really “snuffed out by an Article.” Sara Coleridge, too, enjoyed a sort of private, verbal revenge on Lockhart and Croker. In 1851 de Vere had submitted to the Quarterly’s Whig counterpart, the Edinburgh Review, an article on the poetry of Coleridge’s late brother Hartley—only to have it altered by the editor (William Empson). Coleridge wrote to him in commiseration at the article’s having been “cut and slashed and squeezed and ground, and perhaps inlaid and vamped by editorial interference.”55 But her proper “feminine” sympathy barely conceals her memories of her own treatment, as she declares: An editor of a critical review ought to be painted with a pruninghook in his hand as big as himself, and an axe beside him, just ready to fall edge foremost upon his own foot,—only that it would tantalize one to see it always suspended. There’s a piece of savagery! The foot ought to be represented as rough as that of a bear, and clumsy as the pedestal of an elephant, to denote the rough clumsy way in which those ursine editors go ramping and ravaging about the fairest flower-gardens. That it is not only editors she has in mind is clear from the immediately following recollection of Croker—how his “great hoofs went plunging about in Tennyson’s first volume, containing ‘Mariana,’ ‘The Miller’s Daughter,’ and the ‘Ode to Memory,’ and ‘The Dying Swan,’ and ‘Oenone,’ the loveliest and most characteristic things, to [her] fancy, that he ever wrote.” Indeed this and other performances of Croker’s, she continues with increasingly personal relish, prove that he merits punishment at female hands—to be “shut up with the guests of Circe, in a sty of tolerable accommodation and capacity, for the rest of his bearish and Grilline existence.” But at least by 1851, in “remembering how Keats was treated,” Coleridge can take comfort in the thought that the poet “now by some critics is boldly styled the most poetical poet of the age.”

NOTES 1. For earlier discussions of Sara Coleridge’s review of The Princess and its genesis, see Bradford Keyes Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her

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Life and Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 137ff; and “On Tennyson’s The Princess: Sara Coleridge in the Quarterly Review,” The Wordsworth Circle 15 (1984): 51–54. 2. Sir Walter Scott, letter of August 1825, in Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1894), 2:342. 3. Letter to Mary Coleridge, n.d., quoted in Earl Leslie Griggs, Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 180. 4. Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 12. 5. P. B. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 391. 6. Ibid., 388–406. 7. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 483. 8. Quoted in G. M. Matthews, ed., Keats: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 261–62. 9. See John D. Jump, ed., Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 66. Originally published in Quarterly Review 49 (April 1833): 81–96. 10. Quoted in Myron F. Brightfield, John Wilson Croker (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940), 350. 11. Sara Coleridge, letter to her brother Hartley, 20 January 1845, in Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 2d ed., 2 vols., ed. Her Daughter [Edith Coleridge] (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873), 1:320–21. 12. Quoted in Griggs, Coleridge Fille, 197. 13. Sara Coleridge, “[Review of] The Princess; a medley, by Tennyson. A ms with A Corrections,” 34 pages, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (second manuscript version). Both manuscripts are paginated by Sara Coleridge. These manuscripts and the manuscript letters of Sara Coleridge are quoted with the kind permission of Mrs. J. M. Coleridge. 14. Quoted in Brightfield, John Wilson Croker, 426 (Croker’s emphasis). 15. Sterling hastened to explain this to Tennyson himself. See Edgar Finley Shannon Jr., Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of the Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics upon His Poetry, 1827–1851 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 70–71. 16. Letter of March 1848, quoted in Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 140. The 1842 collection was actually Tennyson’s third significant publication, after his collections of 1830 and 1832. 17. An indirect result of Lockhart’s involvement with Blackwood’s had been his friendship with Coleridge. See Marion Lochhead, “Coleridge and John Gibson

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Lockhart,” in New Approaches to Coleridge: Biographical and Critical Essays, ed. Donald Sultana (London: Vision Press and Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1981), 61-79. 18. Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1989), 15–18, 92ff. 19. Brightfield, John Wilson Croker, 337. 20. “The Life of John Keats,” Times (London), 19 September 1848, 3; quoted in Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 320–24. 21. Letter of 4 November 1849, in Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 2:274 (Coleridge’s emphasis). 22. Matthews, Keats: The Critical Heritage, 1. For a recent discussion of posthumous poetic tributes to Keats that have the same emphases, see Jeffrey C. Robinson, “‘My Ended Poet’: Poetic Tributes to Keats, 1821–1994,” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995): 441–69. 23. Entry for 14 August 1832, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, arranged and ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), 180. 24. Sara Coleridge, “Tennyson’s Princess, a Medley,” Quarterly Review 82 (March 1848): 428; page 2 of both manuscript versions. 25. Both manuscript versions, 2. 26. Second manuscript version, 10. 27. Second manuscript version, 10–11. 28. Second manuscript version, 11. 29. Second manuscript version, 9. 30. Review of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, Englishman’s Magazine, 1 August 1831: 616–28; reprinted in Jump, Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, 34–49. 31. Published version, 429; second manuscript version, 3. 32. Second manuscript version, 9; the published version omits “& Keats.” 33. Second manuscript version, 10. 34. Jump, Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, 35–36. 35. Published version, 435; second manuscript version, 9. 36. Second manuscript version, 11. 37. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 95. 38. Published version, 432–33; second manuscript version, 7.

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45. Published version, 440. Her annoyance at the phrase is expressed in a letter to her sister-in-law Mary Coleridge, September 1848, quoted in Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 140. William Buckland was a prominent geologist. 46. [Sara Coleridge], “Dyce’s Edition of Beaumont and Fletcher,” Quarterly Review 83 (September 1848): 377–418. 47. Letter to Mrs. Richard E. Townsend, September 1848, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (Sara Coleridge’s emphasis). 48. Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 14. 49. Sara Coleridge, “Reasons for Not Placing ‘Laodamia’ in the First Rank of Wordsworthian Poetry,” manuscript included in Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 245–48 (Coleridge’s emphasis). 50. Letter of September 1845, in Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 1:339ff. 51. See especially Alan Bewell, “Keats’s ‘Realm of Flora,’” in New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, ed. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 71–100. 52. Letter of 8 June 1846, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (Sara Coleridge’s emphasis). The name of this other woman is hard to read, but appears to be a “Mrs. Gray.” 53. Letter of April? 1849, in Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge 2:224–25. Quillinan was the widower of Coleridge’s close friend Dora Wordsworth. 54. “Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review 84 (December 1848): 153–85. The section on Jane Eyre was reprinted in Miriam Allott, ed., The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 105–16. 55. Letter of 20 June 1851, in Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 2:417–19.

9 H e r F a t h e r ’s “ R e m a i n s ” : S a r a C o l e r i d g e ’s E d i t i o n o f E s s a y s o n H i s O w n Ti m e s Alan Vardy

In her 1850 edition of her father’s journalism, Essays on His Own Times, Sara Coleridge Coleridge attempts to perform two somewhat contradictory tasks. As the subtitle of the three-volume work, Forming a Second Series of The Friend, indicates, she has hopes that the collection will be received as a part of her father’s literary remains, a work to be considered in any thorough examination of his thought. To make this claim she includes a lengthy introduction that strives to show the development of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought from the early radicalism of The Watchman, to his contributions to the highly politicized Morning Post for the years 1799, 1800, and 1802, to his later contributions to the Courier. Her effort is directed at the discovery of intellectual coherence over the entire range of his writing. Her search for Coleridgean coherence in this brief literary biography takes up the work already begun by her father. He first had occasion to defend himself against the charge of Jacobinism in the pages of the Morning Post, and the rhetorical strategy of that defense began a tradition of reading Coleridge’s prose for an abstract “consistency.” Coleridge revisited the charge in 1809 in The Friend (much to the discomfort of the Wordsworths who viewed it as impolitic in the extreme), and again in 1818 with the redesigned version of The Friend; such repetition indicates a persistent and profound need to construct the meaning of his own political history. It is this project that Sara Coleridge inherits, and that defines her other goal in collecting 207

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the journalism: a vindication of her father’s political opinions. What makes the project contradictory is that by including The Watchman she includes some of the most heterodox of her father’s views. She sets herself the daunting task of squaring the conservatism of the Courier material with Coleridge’s radical enthusiasms of the 1790s. The heart of Coleridge’s rhetorical power in the 1790s lay in his harnessing of powerful emotions in an effort to move and convince his audience, but by the time he reinvented himself, circa 1818, he attempted to efface his earlier use of excessive emotion in the creation of philosophical “consistency.” As we shall see, the appeal to the audience’s “sensibility” was a salient feature of the rhetoric of all political sides during the 1790s, and the battle for this contested terrain (the hearts of readers) underwent many shifts and permutations as political debate evolved throughout the ensuing century. The efforts of the Coleridge family, including those of Coleridge himself, to both vindicate and obscure the heated political attachments of youth provide an index of the politics of feeling as they developed into the mid-Victorian period and beyond.1 This chapter takes as its point of departure a review of Coleridge’s various defenses to the charge of Jacobinism over the course of the years 1798 to 1818, and examines how he developed a strategy of differentiating between the intellectual essence of his writing and its historical specificity, or in other words, how he effected a move to ideological certainty.2 Such certainty could be achieved only through the sublimation of feeling, and the elimination of the record of his excessive political commitments, making him appear consistent while simultaneously traversing much of the political spectrum. The second part of this chapter examines how Sara Coleridge’s inclusion of The Watchman puts enormous pressure on her father’s strategy by tipping the balance toward historical specificity, in particular the emotional and moral confusion occasioned by the war. The need to guard against apparent contradiction, and the charge of political apostasy, necessitates her biographical “Introduction,” and its various sections reflect the need to reanswer fifty-year-old charges that she herself has caused to resurface. I will concentrate on “Section II: Consistency of the Author’s Career of Opinion.” The desire for “consistency” is at odds with the heterogeneous form of The Watchman, and Sara Coleridge’s process of selecting constitutes an act of political and historical forgetting in which she silences the impassioned voice that characterized her father’s political efforts. Punctuating this discussion of the arguments made by both Coleridges in their efforts to evade discomfiting historical facts is an investigation of some of the contemporary historical moments that impinged both on Sara Coleridge’s editorial decisions and on her father’s various reinventions of himself. The purpose of this historicizing is to demonstrate that no amount of desire for ideological certainty can com-

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pletely separate an author from the vagaries of historical contingency, and the emotional confusion it occasions. Coleridge first defended himself against the charge of Jacobinism in 1802, when, as a leading voice on the Morning Post, he came under increased attack from the Anti-Jacobin. But Coleridge’s involvement with the Morning Post had placed him at the center of the increasingly dangerous political climate considerably earlier, beginning in the first months of 1798. The original Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner was founded in 1797 precisely to counter the perceived liberal bias of the London press, and in particular the Morning Post and her sister paper the Morning Chronicle. Under the political direction of George Canning, then a junior minister in the Pitt government, and the editorial direction of William Gifford, the Anti-Jacobin set out to “examine” the newspapers each week, and to check the spread of Jacobin principles. Coleridge was an obvious target of this examination. One of his first pieces for the Morning Post was a reprint from The Watchman, entitled “Queries,” which asked a series of inflammatory questions including “1. Whether the wealth of the higher classes does not ultimately depend on the labour of the lower classes? . . . 6. Whether hungry cattle do not leap over bounds?”3 The leveling implications of these questions were clear enough, and the proposed justification of a rebellion of the “cattle” must have particularly enraged Ministerial circles. Coleridge’s implicit threat to the ruling orders took the form of an instinctual response to oppression, and thus one that would naturally and inevitably occur. No appeal to reason would remove the desire to “leap over bounds.” The uncontrollable realm of human feeling became contested terrain in the propaganda war, as each side attempted to use the fear of violence to their rhetorical advantage. The first specific charge of Jacobinism against Coleridge came in early March 1798. The examiner section of the Anti-Jacobin was divided under the headings “Lies,” “Misrepresentations,” and “Mistakes.” Under “Misrepresentations” for 5 March, they attacked an article by Coleridge from the 24 February Morning Post that assessed the various political crises engulfing Europe, including the invasion of Rome by the French army and the “dying convulsions of the Swiss Republics” (Erdman, 21).4 The editors of the Anti-Jacobin took particular offense to Coleridge’s presumption in characterizing the British “Public Temper” toward these events. They quoted Coleridge’s opinion: “We read without emotion, that the Armies of France have entered Rome,” along with their rejoinder: “Where he found this ‘insensibility’ we know not, unless among the Patriots of the Corresponding Society.—For our parts, we have a very lively feeling of the transaction, which, for perfidity and inhumanity, surpasses whatever we have yet seen.”5 This sneer at the lack of “feeling” among radicals was coupled with a more pressing fear. With horror they noted that Coleridge

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had explicitly linked these European crises with conditions in Britain: “In the midst of these stupendous Revolutions, the Nobility and Gentry, and Proprietors of England, Make NO EFFORTS to avert that ruin from their own heads which they daily see falling on other Countries.” This judgment provoked the charge of Jacobinism: “Never, probably, in any period, in any Country, were such Efforts made, by the very descriptions of men this worthy tool of Jacobinism has pointed out as making no exertions.” Of course, the “efforts” Coleridge had in mind were reforms, while the “exertions” favored by the Anti-Jacobin were those of the war policy. As a political slur the charge of Jacobinism did a paradoxical double duty: It accused the individual of excessive rationalism (considered to be a French disease), and tarred him with the violent chaos of the Terror. Coleridge’s lack of “feeling” made him a monster in the eyes of the editors, his “insensibility” the sign of the dangerous ideologue. I draw attention to the details of this initial exchange because March 1798 was a telling month. The Morning Post had agitated against the corrupt Swiss oligarchies, but that changed dramatically on 19 March with the French invasion of Switzerland. Coleridge could not defend French aggression, unless it was provoked, as was the case with Rome. So the assault on the Swiss republics, despite their corruption, could not be assimilated into his radical idealism, and precipitated the political crisis chronicled in “Fears in Solitude,” and “France: An Ode,” the latter of which was first printed in the 16 April Morning Post as “The Recantation: An Ode.” Before this crisis Coleridge would have accepted being characterized as a Jacobin as part of the political game as it was played, but afterward he felt the increasing need to distance himself from his earlier stridency, and to characterize it as youthful folly—excessive feeling. His sensibility distorted and betrayed his young and unformed intellect. Coleridge’s reevaluation of the necessity of the war with France, and of his political beliefs in general, occurred during a time of increasingly bitter and personal attacks. Without the protection of habeas corpus, radicals had operated for some time under the threat of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Between 1798 and 1802 that political oppression intensified along with the emergence of Bonaparte in France. The successor to the Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine used slander as well as the more direct engagement favored by its predecessor. Coleridge and Southey were the clear, if anonymous, targets of an essay in the July 1800 issue entitled “The Literati and Literature of Germany,” signed by “An Honest Briton.” The essay recounts a story of two young Englishmen and their decline into Jacobinical vice: I heard lately, too, from a friend, of two gentlemen, formerly well known at Cambridge, who, feeling the restraints of law and reli-

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gion somewhat irksome, left the University and became philosophers. It seems these worthy men, finding the climate of England totally unfit for them, agreed with four others to go to America, and put their philosophy in practice. It was agreed that each of the six should engage a woman to accompany him, and that these women should be common to the whole. An actress, who acceded to this philosophical arrangement, was engaged for one; but the voyage to America failed, and the delicate lady remains, or at least remained some time, the mistress or wife of him who engaged her. Two of these gentlemen, who, it seems, were the projectors of this admirable colony for America, and who are writers for the Morning Chronicle and other publications of Jacobinical notoriety, came afterwards to Germany, to enable themselves, by acquiring the language and philosophy of this favoured country, to enlighten more compleatly the ignorant people of England.6 Here Jacobinism leads the young away from “the restraints of law and religion” and into the dangerous realm of philosophical speculation and, eventually, into sensual degradation. Having one’s youthful idealism reduced to a vulgar burlesque must, in part, have motivated Coleridge to set the historical record straight. In the spring of 1798, he felt betrayed by France, but still in touch with his domestic political goals;7 however, by 1802, in a hostile political climate, he finally reconsidered and recast those goals. On 21 October 1802, in response to being targeted yet again by the Anti-Jacobin, Coleridge finally answered the charge and published the essay “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin” along with a reprint of “The Recantation: An Ode,” and excerpts from “Fears in Solitude” in the Morning Post. The thrust of his defense was twofold: first, that the term Jacobin lacked content, that it was “a term of abuse, the convenient watchword of a faction” (Erdman, 368), and, second, that given the actual historical specificity of the term, he had never been a Jacobin. These two strategies are somewhat at cross purposes as they, on the one hand, dismiss the charge as “a term of vague abuse” used in Ministerial circles as one would “use the word, Whig,” while on the other hand they provide the historical detail necessary to legitimate such a charge. Coleridge lists the eight tenets of what he calls the Jacobin “creed.” He uses the list rhetorically to point out that many active anti-Jacobins exhibit Jacobin characteristics. But, more significant, he includes in the list the notion of leveling: that every citizen has the right to sufficient property to maintain themselves (an edict against poverty), and furthermore that surplus property must not translate to greater political rights (that is, more votes, a

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restricted franchise, and so forth). This belief was foundational to Coleridge and Southey’s plan for Pantisocracy, but, surprisingly, it is introduced here, in his list of Jacobinical tenets, in an effort to disassociate himself from such extremism. He claims in his defense that “[a]s far back as memory reaches, it was an axiom in politics with us, that in every country in which property prevailed, property must be the grand basis of government; and that that government was best, in which the power was the most exactly proportioned to the property” (Erdman, 372–73). Frankly, given the nature of the Pantisocracy scheme8 and the political content of pieces like “Queries” from earlier in his Morning Post career, this statement speaks to the fallibility of Coleridge’s memory, but little else. The true grounds by which Coleridge was not a Jacobin, and he was not, surface in the vocabulary that he uses to close his argument. He sees holding on to such radical enthusiasms despite the evidence of their failure as instances of sin. Jacobinism, in its extreme rationalism, leaves no room for the religious concepts of “mercy” or “repentance,” and this absence of the reliance on God’s love in the amelioration of the human condition is intolerable to Coleridge’s devout Christian beliefs. At the time, Coleridge made alliances where he needed to, but, after the fact, he can easily assent to the Ministerial prejudice against Jacobin ideology. Ideology need not refer to a specific set of ideas, but rather can simply describe the dangerous intellectual habit of constructing reality through a single v v lens, Slavoj Zizek’s “quilting.” It is interesting that he did not foreground his profound religious difference from Jacobinism in his defense seeing that it was identical to his public dispute with Godwinian rationalism during the 1790s, and thus easily substantiated from the public record, unlike his clumsy falsification of his political views. Of course, the fact of his former radical Unitarianism may, in part, account for his reticence to argue the point on strictly religious grounds. Coleridge’s developing Anglican orthodoxy made such a subject highly sensitive personally, and hardly helpful in attempting to convince others of your moderate political beliefs. The amount of historical detail necessary to attempt a defense of Utilitarian beliefs in the 1790s exceeded the scope of a newspaper article, and he no longer felt any allegiance to those beliefs. As we shall see, the securing of Coleridge’s religious reputation as an Anglican theologian becomes one of Sara Coleridge’s goals in constructing her father’s consistency. When Coleridge revisited the charge, almost ten years after the fact, in The Friend of 1809, he chose to highlight the fancifulness of the Pantisocracy scheme in relation to Jacobin “fanaticism.” While claiming that his early political beliefs were essential in the development of his mature moral being, he employed self-mockery to undercut the seriousness of those early commitments:

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[W]hen we [he and his fellow Pantosocrats] gradually alighted on the firm ground of common sense, from the exhausted Balloon of youthful Enthusiasm, though the air-built Castles, which we had been pursuing, had vanished with all their pageantry of shifting forms and glowing colours, we were yet free from the stains and impurities which might have remained upon us, had we been travelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents, through the dark lanes and foul bye roads of ordinary Fanaticism.9 (Friend, 2:147) Following his return from serving the military governor of Malta, and the conservative political turn it precipitated, and in the midst of innumerable personal crises (estrangement from his wife, his feelings for Sara Hutchinson, the coolness of the Wordsworths), the time had come to dissemble and disassociate himself from radical politics once and for all—ten years of political commitment characterized as an adolescent folly. Pantisocracy became rhetorically equivalent to Jacobinism in its “fanatical” blindness. The irony of this rhetorical performance is that it itself attempts to create a calm surface over the emotionally raw political chaos that necessitated those youthful commitments. Consistency demands its own blindness, a new fanaticism for the old. In the 1818 version of The Friend, Coleridge finally highlights the irreligiosity of the Jacobinical position, and moves closer to an accurate description of his original opposition to Revolutionary rationalism. This final revisiting of the charge of Jacobinism was occasioned by William Hazlitt’s characterization, in the 3 January 1818 issue of The Yellow Dwarf, of Coleridge’s extreme opinions during the time of Robespierre.10 This shift in focus follows from the strategy employed to mount his defense. He submits as evidence his Bristol lecture of 1795, which he had published as the “Introductory Address” in his Conciones Ad Populum, also in 1795. His intention is clear enough: He offers his own radical thoughts and formulations from that period as a final proof that he was never a Jacobin. The original speech was one of extreme skill and cunning. He managed to draw a direct comparison between Robespierre’s shameful practice of tolerating “evil as the means to contingent good” (it is important to note that he left open the possibility that Robespierre’s ultimate ends may have been just), and Pitt’s practice of using “inflammatory harangues” (Friend, 1:328–29) to deform public opinion and incite violence. Coleridge’s rhetorical performance hinged on his ability to make this comparison clear without naming Pitt, an act that, in 1795, would have constituted treason. None of this matters to Coleridge in 1818, however. In republishing the speech he wants to emphasize a distinction he made between his own views concerning how public opinion

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could be shaped in the service of a meaningful political revolution, and Godwin’s purely secular views of human perfectibility. He refers directly to “the Author of an essay on political justice” who “considers private societies as the sphere of real utility.” Godwin held that self-interest would be the mechanism by which human beings would manifest their inherent powers of reason and that the irrationality of absolutist politics would wither away. Coleridge, while agreeing with the proposition that “the perfectness of future men is indeed a benevolent tenet,” did not believe the mass of common folk would be afforded the contemplative leisure necessary to such a faith coming to pass. As a result he states that “religion appears to offer the only means efficient” to the task of transforming the natures of the poor and powerless. He offers the edict, “Go, preach the GOSPEL to the poor”: “By its simplicity it will meet their comprehension, by its benevolence soften their affections, by its precepts, it will direct their conduct, by the vastness of its motives ensure their obedience” (Friend, 1:334–35). In brief, then, Coleridge’s republication of the Bristol lecture argued that he was never a Jacobin both on the grounds that he eschewed their unprincipled focus on the ends while employing evil means (a charge that makes Pitt a Jacobin), and, more importantly, he professed a deep faith in God’s love as the only “efficient” means of human amelioration. This difference from Godwinian rationalism provides the link between Coleridge’s religious feeling and his political commitments. The two men shared identical political goals, but differed over how they were to be achieved. Coleridge claimed meaningful political change had to rely on the human capacity for religious feeling, while Godwin believed that the evolution of human rationality would displace the political absurdities created, in part, by the exploitation of the religious feeling of a gullible people. In the political climate of 1818, what had been defensive evasiveness in 1802 and political reinvention in 1809 becomes a pro-Ministerial voice in opposition to the ongoing agitation for reform, a voice of the Tory establishment. Despite claiming that “the only omissions [from the original text of the 1795 Bristol lecture] regard the names of people,” he disingenuously omits direct attacks on Pitt, the “detestable Minister” who “manufactures conspiracies” (Friend, 1:326, 331). The result is the loss of the historical specificity of the original lecture and its original political significance. The cumulative effect, then, of Coleridge’s repeated defenses against the charge of Jacobinism was to erase the historical context of his views. His extraordinary range of views, from the belief that Robespierre’s intended ends may have been just to the defense of the Tory resistance to universal manhood suffrage in 1818, is erased in favor of an abstract level of discourse in which all of his political views exhibit coherence, or what Sara Coleridge terms “consistency.”

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The only term that adequately describes the creation of this perfectly coherent system of belief is ideology, and half of Sara Coleridge’s goal in the construction of Essays On His Own Times is the creation of an ideologically closed text out of heterogeneous materials. Just as Jacobin or Godwinian ideological formulations attempted to evade or, in Godwin’s case, transcend individual human feeling in the service of a perfectly coherent system, Sara Coleridge’s version of her father’s “opinion” attempted to evade the messy emotional chaos of his life. This goal necessitates section 2 of her “Introduction” (and many that follow). She seeks a means to stave off potential damage to Coleridge’s decidedly Tory Victorian reputation as a man of letters and a key figure in the intellectual development of Anglicanism. In essence, Sara Coleridge attempts to employ an extremely pious biographical sketch that describes her father’s journalism as a key component of his literary remains. Yet, she must include among those remains material that most observers (without the benefit of her guidance in the “Introduction”) would take to be impious in the extreme. If she can successfully shape his “career” in her edition, then she can reasonably assume that his reputation (so carefully constructed in his lifetime) will be secure. Her careful editorial decisions about selections from The Watchman and her construction of the idea of consistency in the “Introduction” combine to make a biographical likeness of her father’s career that removes any troubling inconsistencies of belief from the public record while paradoxically giving limited public access to such inconsistencies. At midcentury Coleridge’s reputation was not yet secure. For example, in September 1850, the year Sara Coleridge published her edition, he came under attack in The Times. In reviewing the Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, an anonymous reviewer used the occasion to launch a highly moralistic attack on Coleridge’s character. Unlike the venom of The Anti-Jacobin or Hazlitt’s tone of disappointment and regret, this attack did not focus on perceived political shortcomings, but rather on Coleridge’s failings as a husband and parent: Coleridge, with all the grandeur of his mind, condescended to humiliations from which many a day labourer would have shrunk; and, grievous as the effects of his conduct were upon his own fortunes, they are still worse upon the lives of his successors, who see no shame in what their master gloried in. No man might have passed through life more creditably than Coleridge. He had a wife and children to support, the means of earning money at command, yet he would not work, and he suffered his family to receive the protection and earnings of a brother writer whose heart was as sound as his moral sense was perfect.11

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This slander suggests that there may have been something morally suspect in Coleridge’s intellectual and poetic genius, and the passage’s emphasis on bodily vice, sensual “humiliations,” suggests a degraded intellect. The reviewer repeats the rhetoric of a diseased sensibility betraying the reason, and dragging it into a sensual torpor. The use of the word creditably sets up restrictive economic terms for considering the value of his philosophical work. In fact, the life of the mind and its productions, the foundations of present-day valuations of Coleridge, are denied value by the assertion that “he would not work.” In this quintessentially Victorian critique it is no longer Coleridge’s political ideas that represent a public danger, but rather his moral turpitude and lazy sensuality. The review’s high moral tone of condemnation also affects the value of the family’s ongoing posthumous production of Coleridge’s literary and philosophical corpus, his remains. We are told to be suspicious of “successors” blind to their “master’s” moral culpability. The suggestion is that the children have been morally disabled by the father’s dissipation. Southey’s moral character, and presumably his exemplary Tory political views, are extolled as a means to denigrate his “brother poet,” and the terms employed to make the distinction between the two men emphasize the equilibrium in Southey between head and heart, the realms of feeling and intellect, that Coleridge lacked: “[A] brother writer whose heart was as sound as his moral sense was perfect.” This posthumous judgment of Southey, after a long career as poet laureate and Tory sage, reflects his and his descendents success in effacing the memory of “the author of Wat Tyler.” The attack on Coleridge’s reputation was considered serious enough by the family to merit an immediate response from Derwent Coleridge in the form of a letter to the editor of The Times. Derwent’s defense focused particularly on the vitiated definitions of work and value implicit in the review. He countered the accusation of sloth by challenging the reviewer’s definition of productive work: In the words of his nephew and son-in-law [Henry Nelson Coleridge, Sara Coleridge’s husband, the compiler of Coleridge’s Table Talk, and his posthumous literary editor], “he did the day’s work of a giant.” True, it was of a kind calculated to enrich the world with wisdom than himself with money; but if his children are far more than content that it should have been so, who else need complain?12 The letter’s rhetorical strategy turned the reviewer’s assumed moral categories on their heads, and exposed his definition of work as shallow and vulgar in its reduction of all value to commerce. The legitimacy of Coleridge’s intellectual project was at stake, and while Derwent Coleridge

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defensively asserted that “the time will come when he [his father] will be better known,” he simultaneously asserted his faith in the eventual place his father would have in the history of English letters. It is this “work of a giant” that Henry Nelson Coleridge described in Table Talk, and that resulted in the posthumous creation of that giant, the sage of Highgate. It was this dubious, if commonplace, view of Coleridge as dissipated and ineffectual, based as it was on malicious gossip and half-truth, which Sara Coleridge sought to remedy. Consistency was not just an intellectual value, the vindication of past political and religious views, but a moral value, the assertion of the overall contribution made by her father’s intellectual “work,” and its vindication as work. Far from being lazy, the construction of a coherent set of literary remains would reveal Coleridge as the most splendidly industrious of men. The prototypical Victorian value of “industry” thus forms part of the immediate context for the family’s ongoing construction of the literary remains. Returning then to her “Introduction,” under the title, “Consistency of the Author’s Career of Opinion,”13 Sara Coleridge presents a fivepart strategy for reading her father for his consistency. The first three depend on the notion that each individual has a “precious essence” that remains consistent over time. The “essence” is not quite stable in the first case (called “his own system of belief”): “But even because it is thus part of himself, it needs must grow and alter with growth, and will surely exhibit, in its earlier stages, the immaturity of his being.” This is to say that he is not consistent, and subject to youthful folly (his contempt for Pitt and opposition to the first Ministerial war with France become examples of his “immaturity”), and, yet, simultaneously he is consistent at an abstract level of the foundation of the system; it is a single system subject to superficial alteration over time. In support of this notion she makes the distinction that Coleridge’s opinions differed only in detail and “that the cast of [her] father’s opinions was ever of one kind—ever reflected his personal character and individuality.” Again, this idea depends on the claim that each individual has an inner “essence” that is the only true measure of consistency: “[T]he vast majority of reasoners seek to set forth that which is comfortable with the divine will and reflects the light of the Supreme Reason, differing only as to the medium of outward condition and circumstance, in which the precious essence is exhibited” (EOT, xxiii). This is the very definition of ideology: Historical specificity (“outward condition and circumstance”) is transcended by an abstract level of ideality where the skillful reader can find comfort in the presence of consistency; coherence is guaranteed by the explanatory force of the divine will as expressed through individual essence. The final sentence of the section repeats this claim in the language of religious exegesis, arguing that “[t]he spirit of his teaching was

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ever the same amid all the variations and corrections of the letter” (EOT, xxv). Taken at its own terms, this claim is unassailable other than to point out that the religious interpretative practice alluded to can more properly be viewed as eisegetical—dependent on the insertion of meaning v v into the text rather than its extraction, or what Zizek would call “ideological quilting.” The final strategy is less ambitious: She simply forgets to include pertinent facts. Her long paragraph on the consistency of his religious beliefs goes to great pains to argue that Coleridge was consistently anti-Romanist (something that was not at issue), and uses that as a screen when describing his early opposition to “the evils of a rich hierarchy.” The reader can only assume that this is the earliest example of his anti-Romanist feeling, rather than what it is, a reference to his contempt for the Anglican establishment; and, of course, the word Unitarian does not appear. Sara Coleridge’s defense of her father’s opinions, then, constructs itself in such a way that any “circumstance” can be made to conform to an v v ideologically closed system (Zizek would say “quilted”). Historical fact, removed from the richness of its complex original context, can be absorbed as evidence of a greater power (abstract, perhaps divine) at work. She can question her father’s stated views, cautiously, by presenting views more acceptable for her Victorian readers. For example, on the subject of the first Ministerial war with France, in her section on “The Author’s Course of Political Opinion” (EOT, xxv–xxxi), she leaves the question of merits of her father’s views open by posing them in a question: “Who can say whether England did not lose more by the poverty and discontent produced by the war, before it appeared clearly necessary to the public at large, than was gained by that of preparedness and that proficiency in warfare, which an early entrance into the great European contest ensured?” (EOT, xxxi). This is a subtle piece of fence-sitting, leaving open the possibility of her father being right to oppose the war, while carefully siding with the political establishment’s conclusions that the “great European contest” was “clearly necessary,” even if some of Britain’s subjects had been slow to recognize this. Coleridge would not have shared her doubts. His opposition to the first war was steadfast, and his shift in supporting the war policies of the early nineteenth century (his purported political apostasy) was defended and explained as the result of the profound changes in the structure and behavior of the French state. But, on the subject of the necessity of opposing Pitt in the 1790s, as a patriot,14 he never wavered. Sara Coleridge’s conclusions about the “necessity” of the “great European contest” may not have been entirely the product of her desire to harmonize her father’s political views with those of the political status quo. More immediate pressures certainly played a role in her desire for

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moderation. The Chartist demonstrations in April 1848 had a profound influence on her. In a letter to a friend of 14 April, she recounted recent political disturbances and her feelings about them. She had received “an awful account of the Chartist preparations for insurrection and violence,”15 and had become concerned about the security of her own neighborhood, fashionable Regent’s Park. Hysteria was such that “gentlemen of the neighbourhood” called to inform her of “the arrangements for the defense of the Park” and to “offer protection.” Rumors circulated of possible army rebellions if the Chartist resistance “proved very formidable,” of the army’s hatred of the Duke of Wellington, of the uncertain sympathies of the “middle or shop-keeping class,” and so on. In a strong echo of the political rhetoric of the 1790s, she described the source of the danger in such a way as to betray her class anxiety: “[H]aving no principle to guide them [the middle class] one way or the other, and not being given to theories and abstractions, or to go beyond the present hour, they might throw themselves into the arms of the mob, as did the shopkeepers and National Guard, who are so much composed of that class, in Paris.” She is referring to the events immediately preceding the creation of the Paris Commune, but the anxieties about French political precedent sound remarkably like those of sixty years earlier, with the exception of the interesting inversion of the value attributed to “theories and abstractions.” Whereas conservative opinion in the 1790s, following Burke, characterized “theories” as a species of madness, intellectual excess that had overwhelmed the French, 1848 conservative opinion feared the lack of abstract principles and the descent into irrationalism and violence. The absence of any ideological check on public feeling became the great danger, rather than the demagoguery that ideological “principles” made possible. A Victorian anxiety over excessive politics and the fear of violence politically invert the emotionalism of 1790s sensibility, championed as the heart of Englishness by the conservatism of Burke, and decried by radicals as damaging our ability to exercise reason. This fear of the mob, she claimed, was one she shared with her father, and was listed among his consistent political views in her “Introduction”: “[T]hough like all other leaders of reflection, he was equally an opponent of the mob, whether consisting of the uneducated many in the humbler ranks of society, or the herd of mediocre and undisciplined intellects in the higher, who seek to tyrannize over their betters by the mere shew of hands” (EOT, xxii). This antidemocratic slur has little to do with Coleridge’s political positions of the 1790s, of which it is an obvious distortion, but of her own political anxieties. As the Chartist crisis deepened, she finally acceded to her son’s wishes and collected the family “plate” and fled to the safety of Eton and Windsor. The purported danger posed by the Chartists was absurdly overstated, as was their irrationalism (after all they were the ones promoting

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the rational reform of British institutions as a means of avoiding class violence). She celebrated the “happy event” of the failure of the Chartist demonstration with a brief encomium to the Duke of Wellington: “The arrangements of the Duke for the preservation of the metropolis were worthy of the hero of Waterloo, and how merciful thus to preclude, by the formidable and complete nature of the preparations, any attempt on the part of the misguided Chartists.” The use of the words preservation and merciful reinforced the sense of religious deliverance and cast the Iron Duke as a messianic light against the potential darkness of “pure anarchy alternating with despotism.” While she acknowledged the possibility that the Chartists’ “demands were in themselves reasonable,” Sara Coleridge relied on conventional conservative argument to deny their ultimate legitimacy. She could present herself as concerned with the amelioration of human suffering, and still oppose constitutional efforts to effect the necessary social changes: “It does not seem at all clear to me that there would be the slightest use in giving votes to more and poorer men, without bettering their condition or improving their education before-hand.” This is a convenient, and circular, piece of paternalistic reasoning—“poorer men” cannot be given the political means to improve their condition until their condition has been improved. The letter ends by betraying the good faith she said existed between her and the “reasonable” demands of the reform movement. Her earlier equanimity collapses into reactionary slander: “A great proportion of them are sufferers by their own fault, . . . who become Chartists in pure ignorance, with a blind hope of bettering their state by changing the present order of things.” To accuse the most disadvantaged members of society of selfishness and/or laziness was a stock conservative response, then as now, and, as an unreasoned reaction, pointed to the ingrained nature of Sara Coleridge’s conservatism. An additional irony in her opinions, of course, lies in their repetition of the very charges brought against her father in this period, laziness and intellectual blindness. It is telling then, in the light both of the construction of her father’s posthumous reputation as an Anglican Tory and her personal desire to ground her own Tory politics in her father’s, that the subject most absent from The Watchman material, as a direct result of her editing, was the war. Opposition to the war dominated the journal from its inception; it was the occasion of its coming into being, the reason Coleridge felt compelled to be heard despite the considerable risks involved (charges of treason had been leveled against those who had said much less). Furthermore, the most salient feature of the journal was its heterogeneous structure. Number 1 began with a detailed overview of the war debate from December 1792 up until the week of publication culled from the Parliamentary record. This was juxtaposed with a summary of recent French peace

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overtures, and Coleridge’s assertions of the reasonableness of the French terms. In short, the journal began by constructing the political context in which it appeared in stunning detail. This context was followed by the only poem in the issue, “To a Young Lady,” subtitled “With a Poem on the French Revolution.” The poem acted as an individual appeal to feeling, based on the potted history of the war debate that preceded it, as a means to convert the “young lady” to the revolutionary cause. This was the original context of the first of the two selections Sara Coleridge made from Number 1, Coleridge’s review of Edmund Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord.” Coleridge’s review is a model of political wit. He judiciously praises Burke’s record of eloquence: “Mr. Burke always appeared to me to have displayed great vigour of intellect, and an almost prophetic keenness of penetration,” and then switches out of the past tense to register his present disappointment in the subject of his review: “With such notions of the matter and manner of Mr. Burke’s former publication, I ought not to be suspected of party prejudice, when I declare the woeful inferiority of the present work—Alas! we fear that this Sun of Genius is well nigh extinguished.”16 The review goes on to ridicule Burke and his unseemly connections (financial and otherwise) with the Pitt ministry, and thus represents, in the context of the rest of the first issue, Coleridge’s willingness to enter the fray on both aesthetic and political grounds. Crucial to Coleridge’s attack was the strategic admission of Burke’s eloquence, and Coleridge defined “true eloquence” as the ability “to argue by metaphors” (Watchman, 31; Coleridge’s emphasis). The strategic use of aesthetic figures disarms the reader, and moves them to the author’s point of view through the use of pathos. This rhetorical trait, essential to Burke’s political success, and praised here by Coleridge, was a common target of radicals. Paine famously described Burke’s use of excessive description and figuration in Reflections on the Revolution in France as “Mr. Burke’s horrid pictures,” and Godwin considered the hysterical emotional tone of Burke’s treatise a prime example of the way excessive sensibility disabled the capacity to reason clearly. As Marilyn Butler has noted, Burke’s “Letter to a Noble Lord,” as polemic, was “even more powerful than the Reflections.” The chill it spread through radical circles was profound. Butler rhetorically asks: “[A]fter this [the publication of the “Letter” and its impact], who would freely own to being a radical philosopher?”17 That Coleridge would choose to attack that particular document in his first issue indicates the level of his political commitment and his willingness to carry the fight to his political enemies. While it might be tempting to consider Coleridge’s initial praise of Burke’s rhetorical eloquence as merely strategic, such a conclusion ignores Coleridge’s use of similar appeals to feeling later in the same number of The Watchman.

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When Sara Coleridge selected this review and, thus, removed it from its specific historical moment, she directed readers toward an aesthetic appreciation of its wit and away from its political implications. After all, how could the reader of 1850 be expected to be familiar with the war debate of the week of 1 March 1796? Similarly, the other selection she made from Number 1, “Copy of a Handbill,” becomes an example of her father’s abilities as a satirist. It consists of a parody of a public handbill offering a reward to any one who can decipher Pitt’s last speech in the House: [A]nd whereas the entire, effectual, and certain meaning of the whole of the said sentences, phrases, denials, promises, retractions, persuasions, explanations, hints, insinuations, and intimations, has escaped and fled, so that what remains is to plain understanding incomprehensible, and to many good men is [a] matter of painful contemplation: now this is to promise, to any person who shall restore the said lost meaning, or shall illustrate, simplify, and explain, the said meaning, the sum of FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS, to be paid on the first day of April next, at the office of John Bull, Esq. PAY-ALL and FIGHT-ALL to the several High contracting powers engaged in the present just and necessary War! (Watchman, 48; Coleridge’s emphasis) This is uproariously funny, but what we lose in our laughter and what was lost in Sara Coleridge’s selection of it for her edition is both the raw emotion of the sarcasm in the phrase, “just and necessary War,” and the risk run by its author in challenging Pitt. To attempt to restore this “lost meaning,” to follow Coleridge’s own theme, we need to consider how the original readers of the “Copy of a Handbill” would have heard the satire’s tone. As I said earlier, The Watchman was an extremely heterogeneous document. The Handbill ridiculing Pitt was followed by a report on the “Proceedings of the House of Commons” for Monday, 22 February, that detailed the profligacy of the Pitt government in forcing through a Credit Bill to allow them to continue the war policy. But, more telling, the two sections that preceded the Handbill were titled “Foreign Intelligence” and “Domestic Intelligence” (these two sections appeared in all the numbers of the journal). In particular, under “Domestic Intelligence,” Coleridge included an item from Salisbury on the fate of “the remnant of the 88th regiment” that had recently arrived in that city. Two years earlier, he reported they had “embarked for the Continent,” 1,100 strong. After “the severe winter of 1794–95” they had been reduced to 250 men, and subsequently embarked for the West Indies wherein they were attacked and “reduced to

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about 100 men.” Coleridge concluded this sad history by ominously noting that they were to march to Portsmouth and “probably be drafted into some other corps.” This report left little doubt about the author’s attitude to this “just and necessary War,” juxtaposed as it was with Southey’s lines from “Joan of Arc”: Of unrecorded name Died the mean man, yet did he leave behind, One who did never say her daily prayers Of him forgetful; who every tale Of the distant war lending an eager ear, Grew pale and trembled. At her cottage door The wretched one shall sit, and with dim eye Gaze o’er the plain, where, on his parting steps, Her last look hung. (Watchman, 43–45) The pathos of considering the widows of each of the lost members of the 88th regiment was overwhelming in its effect, and this direct appeal to the sensibilities of his audience repeated the Burkean “eloquence” so decried by republican rationalists. In relation to this unqualified condemnation of the war, Sara Coleridge’s equivocation in her summary of her father’s “course of political opinion,” that “[w]ho can say” if the war was just, comes close to obscenity. It functions as a betrayal of her father’s “opinions” and their justification, and, paradoxically, a betrayal in which he himself was complicit. The deliberate muddying of his views in defense of the charge of Jacobinism, and the characterization of his political career in the 1790s as a naive adolescent folly gave license to Sara Coleridge to continue the project of reinvention, posthumously. Given the heterogeneous structure of The Watchman, the very process of selecting from it destroys its historical specificity, and with it the reasons for its coming into being; it is impossible (in Coleridge’s words) to “restore said lost meaning.” Coupled with Coleridge’s own practice of decontextualizing previous works in order to redeploy them in a new political context (the history of his use of the 1795 Bristol lecture, or of the republication of the “Frost at Midnight,” “Fears in Solitude,” “France: An Ode” pamphlet,18 for example), this systematic displacement of the complex heterodoxy of the historical moment in favor of the ideological certainty of consistency is representative of a tendency to regulate meaning, and must be understood as one of the driving goals in constructing literary remains. Such a goal sacrifices the sheer variety of the rhetorical tropes and strategies of the political game as it was played, its use of pathos in creating political sympathy, for example, in the service of the posthumous process of “quilting” the ideological fiction

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of Coleridge’s consistency. In posthumously constructing the “precious essence” of the authorial subject, Sara Coleridge erases the historical moments in which that subject lived. By 1850 the “shame,” as the Times reviewer put it, of the chaotic Romantic body, excessive, sensual, degraded by feeling, had to be hidden from the view of polite society. Perhaps these acts of sublimation account, at least in part, for the near hysterical tenor of Sara Coleridge’s responses to the emotional intensity of the 1850 Chartist demonstrations. A gauge of the effectiveness of Sara Coleridge’s editorial project can be found in an 1874 review of her daughter’s publication of Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge that appeared in the Edinburgh Review. The reviewer’s general estimation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge showed no trace of the malicious gossip in evidence in 1850. He was considered to have been “a great poet and thinker.”19 The review quoted at length from Sara Coleridge’s description, in a letter to a friend, of her father’s death. It is an extraordinary portrait. She reported that “[w]hen he knew that his time had come he said, that he hoped by the manner of his death to testify [to] the sincerity of his faith; and hoped that all would know that he died in that of the English Church.”20 In the context of the complex history of his faith and its public perception, this was an understandable and pious “hope.” But the reviewer detected no anxiety in the scene, and left Coleridge’s orthodox piety as a given. Consistency of belief was assumed, and the reputation thus secured much as his “brother poet” Southey’s had been in 1850. The description of the death scene concluded with a final event that speaks volumes about Coleridge’s unresolved relationship to his own history: “[O]n the last evening of his life, he repeated a certain part of his religious philosophy, which he was especially anxious to have accurately recorded. He articulated with the utmost difficulty, but his mind was clear and powerful, and so continued until he fell into a state of coma.”21 The anxieties that drove this final composition, some of which I have tried to recover in this chapter, were left uncommented on by the reviewer. The unintended pathos of the scene, the anxious subject attempting to quilt ideological certainty with his very dying breath, was likewise lost. So, to conclude, the ultimate effect of Sara Coleridge’s creation of her father’s literary remains was the securing of his place in Victorian culture, but at a considerable cost. As much as we may decry the loss of historical specificity that was the price of her achievement, the reviewer in the 1874 Edinburgh Review reflected the measure of her success: The death of this eminent man gave a decided turn thenceforth to the literary occupations of his daughter and his son-in-law. Kindred offices to those performed by Lockhart for Walter Scott,

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and by John Warter for Southey, devolved upon Henry Nelson Coleridge in connexion with the father of his wife; and in his work as editor of the poet’s literary miscellanea he found a zealous helpmate in Sara during his lifetime, as she proved also an efficient substitute when death at an early age cut short his own career of intelligent activity.22 Gone is the cultural memory of the dangerous radical popular in attacks in the early years of the century, and the lazy, immoral, dissolute father who abandoned his family that characterized attacks at midcentury. Sara Coleridge’s efforts finally made a place for her father in a Tory triumvirate of genius, Coleridge, Southey, and Scott united by politics and by an authorized Victorian realm of feeling—daughterly devotion.

NOTES 1. The term sensibility has been much debated in recent years. Two of the most influential contributions to that debate are Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); and Jerome J. McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Todd makes a distinction between “sentimentality” as “the arousal of pathos through conventional situations, stock familial characters and rhetorical devices,” and “sensibility” as “the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering” (2–7). She makes the historical connection between this cult of feeling and the development of theories of the body that occurred in the same period: “[I]t [sensibility] appears physically based, a quality of nerves turning easily to illness and described in contemporary medical treatises in terms of movements within the body” (7–8). While admitting the difficulty in distinguishing the terms, McGann largely reiterates Todd’s distinction between sentimentality as the deliberate creation of pathos for rhetorical purposes, and sensibility as the mental faculty or physiological capacity for such feeling, claiming that “the discourse of sensibility is the ground on which the discourse of sentiment gets built. In terms of the crucial mind/body diad that shaped the originary philosophical discussions, sensibility emphasizes the mind in the body, sentimentality the body in the mind” (7). McGann’s contribution to these critical “discourses” seems particularly apposite given that his development of the critical “discourse” of “Romantic ideology” did so much to open the period to new historical scrutiny. McGann’s turn to sensibility performs a, perhaps unintended, mea culpa for the clumsiness of some of his earlier formulations. In the context of this chapter, and of Coleridge studies in general, McGann’s notion that Coleridge’s poetic ideology displaced the realms of the social and political in favor of inwardness, a personal realm of feeling, and, further, that such a shift represented a de facto reactionary politics, cannot but be undermined by a close historical examination of the uses of sensibility in the period. As we will see,

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the rhetorical appeal to pathos constantly crosses political lines. One way to defend McGann’s originary position would be to argue that sensibility can move in opposite directions depending on whether excessive emotion ruptures cultural codes, or whether it is recuperated into the construction of the isolated and autonomous poetic self, Wordsworth’s “abundant recompense.” As this chapter will make clear, the idea that Coleridge successfully recuperated poetic feeling in creating a stable self cannot be sustained. In fact, the chapter chronicles Coleridge’s failed efforts to effect such recuperations and create ideological certainty. 2. By “ideology” I mean not the specific formulations of a philosophical or political creed, but rather the process by which such a creed organizes experience, and by eliminating competing ideas seeks to establish certainty, whether political, philosophical, or religious. This process has been characterized by the v v theorist Slavoj Zizek as “ideological quilting” in The Sublime Object of Ideology v v (London: Verso, 1989), 87–89. Zizek theorizes that “ideological space” is made up of “non-tied, non-bound elements, ‘floating signifiers,’” and that the “quilting” is performed as a means to arrest this free-floating state. In other words, ideology “quilts”v experience and renders it consistent to whatever ideological v system it serves. Zizek seems particularly apt in discussing the editorial processes affected by the Coleridges because he ties the desire for ideological certainty to the Lacanian notion of “lack.” In the classic Lacanian formulation, the self misrecognizes lack in the other as the need for the “supplement” provided by the self. In reality, the vself constitutes another lack. By using this formulation as a v political allegory, Zizek exposes the self-deluded neurosis driving the desire for certainty—ideology as false supplement—and aligns Lacanian notions of emotional evasion with his critique of ideological formation. One of the concerns of this chapter is the means by which Coleridge and his heirs strive to quilt the content of his radical past into an acceptable ideological surface. The morass of free “floating signifiers” that they attempt to marshal makes their task difficult, and part of that process entails harnessing the chaotic realm of feeling. 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, ed. David V. Erdman (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 11–12. To avoid confusion with Sara Coleridge’s edition, references to the Erdman edition will be cited in the text as Erdman. Sara Coleridge judiciously edited this piece of forthright radical provocation out of her edition. 4. This phrase demonstrates the rhetorical use of bodily sensation by describing the political malaise in Switzerland as symptoms of a diseased and suffering body. 5. Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, ed. William Gifford, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: J. Wright, 1799), 1:7–8. 6. Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine 6 (July 1800): 594. Coleridge probably saw this essay as evidenced by his adopting its title, “The Literati and Literature of Germany,” in his own history of his German travels and interests in Number 18, the 21 December 1809 issue of The Friend; see Samuel Taylor Cole-

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ridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 239. Cited parenthetically in the text as Friend. 7. As evidenced by his self-justifications in “France: An Ode.” 8. In fact, a disagreement over the extent of the leveling implications of the plan contributed to its failure. Coleridge was shocked when he discovered that Southey did not recognize the basic contradiction of taking servants with them to America. 9. “Fanaticism” is another term that cuts both ways: on the one hand denoting an excessively narrow ideological framework, while on the other hand denoting the capacity of overzealous feeling to overwhelm rational judgment. 10. See William Hazlitt, Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1933), 19:203. Hazlitt was incensed by Coleridge’s betrayal of the cause of reform, and attacked this political apostasy by recalling Coleridge’s former revolutionary idealism. Byron used a similar device in attacking Southey when he referred to him as the author of Wat Tyler, Southey’s long-suppressed Jacobin drama. 11. Times (London), 4 September 1850, 7. 12. Times (London), 9 September 1850, 6. 13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Own Times, ed. Sara Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1850), xxii–xxv. Cited parenthetically in the text as EOT. 14. “Patriot” was a fiercely contested term. Those who opposed the war were, legally speaking, “unpatriotic,” but radicals were quick to invert the term and use it to denote their own “true patriotism” answering to a higher moral authority than the corrupt Pittites. 15. Sara Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Her Daughter [Edith Coleridge], 2d ed., 2 vols. (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873), 2:161–65. 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 31. Cited in text parenthetically as Watchman. 17. Marilyn Butler, ed., Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 50. 18. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see Paul Magnuson’s “The Politics of ‘Frost at Midnight,’” The Wordsworth Circle 22 (1991): 3–11. 19. Edinburgh Review 139 (January 1874): 45. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 56.

10 Opium Addictions and Meta-Physicians: S a r a C o l e r i d g e ’s E d i t i n g o f Biographia Literaria Donelle Ruwe

When Sara Coleridge Coleridge received her copy of the 1847 Biographia Literaria coedited by her husband Henry Nelson Coleridge and herself, she painstakingly marked minor errors: an incorrect accent in a Greek quotation, a misspelling of Eschenmayer as Eschenmeyer, and an inaccuracy in an indirect quote in a footnote. She also crossed out the adjective nerveless from her description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The nerveless languor, which, after early youth, became almost the habit of his body and bodily mind, which to a great degree paralysed his powers both of rest and action, precluding by a torpid irritability their happy vicissitude,—rendered all exercises difficult to him except of thought and imagination flowing onward freely and in self-made channels; for these brought with them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost that bound his spirit.1 Coleridge’s second thought about describing the nervous condition of her father indicates more than her trademark meticulousness in editing, for Victorian audiences, her father’s reputation as well as his writings. She attends to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s nerves because in the medical rhetoric 229

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that haunts this passage, her children’s books, her incomplete autobiography, and her private essay “Nervousness” (1834), the imagination is embedded in the physical body.2 One cannot be nerveless and still have an imaginative faculty. Coleridge’s sentence punctuates the artificial split of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s body and mind—on one side of her sentence’s dash is her father’s bodily mind, and on the other is the warmth of his thought and imagination.3 Editing the Biographia Literaria allows Coleridge to explore her physical inheritance from her father even as she uses her physical experiences to critique his metaphysics. In effect, Coleridge, a lifelong opium addict and the daughter of the opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge, uses her research into opiates, laudanum, and nervous disorders to further her own literary ambitions as she analyzes the flawed work of her father. Coleridge’s own nervous response to her father’s excess—as both a verbose and overdetermining Meta-Physician as well as an opium addict—is not to control him through editorial excision but to address, instead, his bodily disease. Coleridge uses her superior control over opium as a way of critiquing her father’s metaphysics. By contrasting her father’s excessive opium use to her own controlled doses, Coleridge proves that her own understandings of the interaction of the body and the mind are superior to her father’s theories. In a larger context, Coleridge’s editorial commentary on Biographia Literaria models a successful strategy by which women authors can locate literary authority within a study of their own physical limitations. As Isobel Armstrong indicates in her studies about women Romantics, such editorial projects allow women to construct their own discourses of knowledge through interaction with numerous competing discourses, both medical and metaphysical: “A politics, an epistemology, an account of knowledge, and an understanding of language can be derived from women’s questioning of a number of discourses—aesthetic and philosophical, socioeconomic, medical, and legal.”4 In essence, I am arguing that Sara Coleridge constructed a Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was a nerveless (⫽ nervous), problematically embodied and feminized father, a father who provided a space for his daughter’s authorial activities. When Coleridge critiques her father’s construction of the primary imagination, she does so according to her own understanding that the imagination is part of the body and bodily mind. She replaces S. T. C.’s highest level of the creative imagination with something resembling his lowest level, fancy, that faculty associated with materiality and femininity. Most importantly, by locating imaginative authority within the body, she escapes her father’s potentially overbearing intellect, particularly when she insists that she can control her body in contrast to her father’s acknowledged lack of control over his own. Coleridge recasts her father’s construction by presenting the imagination as that which moves con-

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stantly between the body and the mind, not as that which elevates the spirit beyond the body. She presents the imagination as an interval, a continual coming-and-going that she links, as I will argue, to the sensorium and the nervous system. Coleridge initiates her definition of the imagination in a private essay about her own body, “Nervousness,” and more fully develops it as she edits and comments on her father’s writings.
Sara Coleridge was Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s youngest child and only daughter. She was raised at Greta Hall with her mother, the Fricker sisters, and the Southeys and, in her own words, had “never lived with [her father] for more than a few weeks at a time.”5 Despite her lifelong separation from her father, Coleridge was the most intellectual of his three surviving children. By age nineteen, when she had not seen her father for over ten years, Coleridge was fluent in six languages and had published a formidable, three-volume translation from the Latin of the missionary Martin Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay (1822).6 Ironically, her translation earned the Coleridge family £113 from the publisher John Murray, more than S. T. C.’s yearly annuity from the Wedgwood family at that time.7 It makes little sense, then, that Coleridge should have abandoned her own creative projects and, after S. T. C.’s death, spent the rest of her life editing and republishing his poetry and prose.8 Within a seventeen-year span, Coleridge discovered, organized, extensively annotated, and edited, in some cases in collaboration with her brother Derwent and her husband (who was her father’s literary executor), previously uncollected and often unattributed works by her father. She produced or coproduced the first definitive editions of Table Talk, Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare, Essays on His Own Times, and The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a phenomenal editorial feat to which contemporary editors are still indebted. As an example of her assiduous attention to every detail in the publishing of her father’s works, in 1848 Coleridge sent a letter to her publisher, William Pickering, indicating how to arrange into two volumes Coleridge’s notes on plays, general lectures on drama, and on Shakespeare (see figure 1).9 Of her own work—other than her translation of Dobrizhoffer, a translation of the sixteenth-century memoirs of Chevalier Bayard, a collection of children’s verses, and a four-hundred-page fantasy novel for young adults—she left unpublished fragmentary manuscripts such as essays, letters, journals, poems, and theological dialogues. While dying of breast cancer in 1851, she stopped her own autobiography (a twenty-sixpage manuscript addressed to her daughter that ends in midsentence with

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a series of dots) and turned to editing the authoritative edition of her father’s poems. As a role model of female authorship, Coleridge’s self-effacement before her father has disappointed literary historians. For example, Virginia Woolf’s review of Earl Leslie Griggs’s Coleridge Fille regrets that Coleridge seems to be no more than an extension of her father: Sara was a continuation of Coleridge, not of his flesh indeed, for she was minute, aetherial, but of his mind, his temperament. The whole of her forty-eight years were lived in the light of his sunset, so that, like other children of great men, she is a chequered dappled figure flitting between a vanished radiance and the light of every day. And like so many of her father’s works, Sara Coleridge remains unfinished.10 Although Woolf’s review is characteristically attuned to the difficulties that nineteenth-century women writers faced in discovering their own voices, neither she nor Griggs see Coleridge as having created her own, distinct voice.11 More recently, Bradford Keyes Mudge, a biographer of Sara Coleridge, has suggested that these early failures to read Coleridge reveal our own scholarly ideologies, for our system of valuation “presupposes the necessity of public performance, of ‘great works’ produced by artistic or intellectual ‘genius.’ That system cannot accommodate the fragmentary and miscellaneous remains of Sara Coleridge without immediately pronouncing them a failure” (6). As Mudge’s book demonstrates, Coleridge found the intellectual rigor of bibliographical and editorial work pleasurably absorbing. Mudge contends that Coleridge was skilled at manipulating a “nominal subservience to patriarchal authority” to empower her own writing, and that her constructions of S. T. C.’s literary life allowed her to control her own patrimony (10). My argument extends Mudge’s study of Coleridge by further examining how she manipulates her father’s texts to validate her own textual mastery. As a “nervous” editor, Coleridge’s editorial critiques center on how nerves connect the body and the mind, and how the imagination is a form of the sensorium or the nervous system. If S. T. C. cannot control his opium use, he must not understand how the mind and the body affect each other. And if he does not understand how the mind works, then his philosophies about the mind are unsound. Coleridge singles out S. T. C.’s concept of the creative imagination as particularly in need of revision. S. T. C. describes the imagination as a supernatural and spiritual power, but Coleridge considers it a function of the body. In somatizing the imagination, Coleridge privileges a type of imagination more closely akin to her father’s category of fancy than that of the primary imagination.

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As Christine Battersby, Marlon Ross, Margaret Homans, and others have noted, the canonical Romantics, in differentiating between creative and pseudocreative imagination, position women’s texts and poetic abilities within the fanciful to better position their own texts within the imaginative. More recently, feminist critics have begun to analyze how numerous women writers reject the transcendent and totalizing forms of the creative imagination and instead insist on limiting the effects of the imagination to the body.12 The materiality implicit in the aesthetic category of fancy provides women authors with a site of authority: As a category within metaphysics, fancy allows women to speak imaginatively, to cross the hostile polarities of subject/object and mind/body binarisms that would present women as bodies and objects without poetic voice. Coleridge’s letters remark that poetry must arise not just from “genius” and imagination, but from the body and its senses. A poet, she writes, must see “keenly” and “feelingly, else his poetic faculty has no adequate materials to work upon” (ML, 360). In Coleridge’s texts, images of the nervous system, the sensorium, and opium become significant representations of how the imagination actually functions within the body. Coleridge’s revolutionary model of the imagination is constructed through her interpretations of the philosophical and aesthetic implications of nervous disorders: specifically, through her interpretations of contemporary medical texts and her own nervous temperament. To use bodily illness to gain access to power and knowledge is a technique shared by other nineteenth-century authors attempting to speak with authority from a marginalized position. As Diane Price Herndl and Athena Vrettos have argued, however, the Victorian celebration of invalidism has dangerous repercussions for women writers. An invalid woman rebels against society’s restrictions by selfishly drawing attention to herself, but she also confirms that women are the weaker sex.13 Further, understanding the world through anatomizing the body is essentially an impasse: Although exploring the boundaries of one’s physical existence does supply an access to knowledge, it also alienates and distances the body from oneself. When an author speaks as an invalid, it can have a profound impact on an audience’s reception of a text. For example, Peter Melville Logan has shown that, because nervous sufferers were assumed to have a compulsive need to narrate their sufferings, nervous narrators had less authority as authors than narrators who were free from a nervous contamination by the body.14 But what happens if the invalid woman, as in Coleridge’s case, is from a family in which the patriarch himself is an invalid? And not merely chronically ill, but ill in a way that brings emotional, mental, financial, and social instability to his family? Coleridge does not valorize female illness so much as she reads her own condition as infinitely more healthy than her father’s (as well as that of her alcoholic brother, Hartley, whose

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posthumous texts she also edited).15 Thus, she is able to read her own approach to the mind and body as better informed than the approach that S. T. C. presents in Biographia Literaria. In other words, Coleridge constructs her own physical experience as a check to metaphysical abstractions. Thus, her body, though somewhat alienated as the object of study, is still comparatively less objectified than her father’s body and texts, the ultimate object of her study. For the purposes of my argument, it makes little difference whether Coleridge’s logic is a sublimation of her own illness in which she denies her own culpability in her nervous disorders by pointing a finger at her father’s greater culpability. Coleridge sees herself as more in control than her father, and she uses that perception to construct a foundation for her own authority and comparative self-control. Indeed, Coleridge stands in a unique position within literary history. She can intervene in history through her editorial project, and because her father, an important literary patriarch and her literal father, shares her nervous temperament and opium addiction, she can alleviate her own anxieties by demonstrating her physical superiority and, in so doing, the primacy of her own philosophical position.16 Coleridge also stands in a unique relationship to the traditional nineteenth-century pattern by which “masculine reason and control are implicitly set against female sensation and nervousness and bodily disorder.”17 Coleridge’s nervousness and bodily disorder are the foundation for her own rational defense of her metaphysics of the imagination. And finally, as an editor, Coleridge can comment on nervous disorders without a loss of narrative authority, for she can discuss and publish her opinions on this crucial topic without revealing her own nervousness. Coleridge links S. T. C.’s addiction to his misunderstanding of how the mind and body affect each other, a misunderstanding that is repeated in his definitions of the creative imagination. Whereas S. T. C. describes the imagination as a supernatural and spiritual power, Coleridge defines the imagination as a function of nerves, as a bodily faculty that moves unceasingly between the mind and the body, the spirit and the flesh. Coleridge’s construction of what she terms “the bodily mind” is almost certainly influenced by her own “nervous derangement” and popular medical texts such as Thomas Trotter’s A View of the Nervous Temperament.18 Nervousness, the condition shared by Coleridge and her father, was an all-encompassing disease in the nineteenth century through which nervous sufferers, physicians, and social critics explored volatile ideological tensions. As a term relating to both the body and the mind, nervousness was associated with a surprisingly wide range of experiences and beliefs including but not limited to spirituality, sexuality, imagination, incipient insanity, emotional exhaustion, physical pain, and the debilitating effects of modern civilization.

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Trotter’s influential medical text characterizes “nervous disease” as precisely this convergence of innumerable causes and multiple effects. A View of the Nervous Temperament embraces the hereditary as well as environmental transmission of nervous disorders. As a physical state, it comprehends so many symptoms that it cannot be adequately explained: Nervous feelings, nervous affections, or weak nerves, . . . are in the present day, terms much employed by medical people, as well as patients; because the expression is known to comprehend what cannot be so well explained. An inaptitude to muscular action, or some pain in exerting it; an irksomeness, or dislike to attend to business and the common affairs of life; a selfish desire of engrossing the sympathy and attention of others to the narration of their own sufferings; with fickleness and insteadiness [sic] of temper, even to irrascibility [sic]; and accompanied more or less with dyspeptic symptoms, are the leading characteristics of nervous disorders; to be referred in general, to debility, increased sensibility, or torpor of the alimentary canal. (xvi) Trotter’s text, as Roy Porter has noted, is not a radical medical work so much as it is a comprehensive and carefully organized presentation of widespread concerns about opium and nervous disorders.19 After unearthing a rash of nervous disorders in Britain, Trotter suggests that the primary cause is the overcivilizing of society itself. Trotter’s list of noteworthy victims of society’s overcivilization includes middle-class women whose sedentary domestic routine provides little mental and physical stimulation, girls in the enforced restrictions of boarding schools, and men who work in milliner’s shops (they begin to behave effeminately). Other susceptible groups include all artists and all upper- and middle-class women, particularly during puberty, menses, pregnancy, and menopause. Coleridge, an artistic woman living a sedentary life, is vulnerable to nervous diseases. But she is additionally vulnerable through heredity. Trotter insists that a predisposition toward nervousness and opium abuse is both environmental and hereditary. He notes that nervous disorders are found within family groups—“we frequently observe the family peculiarity to be hereditary”—and are exhibited by children who resemble their father or mother (209). The nervous system (which Trotter also calls the sensorium and the sensorium commune, terms that Coleridge adopts in her letters, essays, and editorial writings) “inherit[s] all the bad impressions of its progenitor, hoarded as it were in the structures of its nerves” (210).20 Thus, he argues, a predisposition can be transmitted from parent to child through the parent’s behaviors as well as through the nerves themselves, which are “the basis and prime director of the evolution of

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the foetus” (202). All of these “hoarded” sensations are waiting to be excited into action by the right stimulation; the unsuspecting children of diseased parents can, unwittingly, trip off their body’s alarms and activate their “predisposition”: “[B]y hereditary predisposition is to be understood, an original conformation of body, transmitted from the parent to the offspring; by reason of which, when particular exciting causes are applied, a similar train of morbid phenomena takes place” (166). This, then, is the nature of the beast that Coleridge inherits from her father. As she wrote in her autobiography, she, more than any of her siblings, had “inherited that uneasy health of [S. T. C.],” and “Nervous Sensitiveness and morbid imaginativeness had set in with me very early” (34, 48). What Coleridge believes she has inherited is a “permanent state of body” that cannot be easily changed and can quickly shift from predisposition to an active disorder if the nerves are not constantly monitored. Her continual self-scrutiny in diaries, letters, editorial commentaries, fiction, and poetry (which contain poetic cautions to her children, whom she fears are susceptible to nervous disorders) attempt to control her nervous father’s legacy within her own nervous body. Hypervigilant, Coleridge corrects S. T. C.’s philosophy even as she monitors her own body in the hopes that she may stave off her own potential cycle of addiction and nervous illness. In her editing of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge’s most passionate interventions follow those textual moments when her father contemplates the mind and the body. S. T. C. provides ample fodder for her speculation, for he returns obsessively to the nature of the mind/body binarism. In his efforts to lift the human being above the brute, S. T. C. searches for a clear separation between body and soul. He divides human life into three parts: the brute corporeal life, the human life of selfish pursuit of intellectual pleasure, and the divine life “when we die to the creatures and to self and become deiform by following the external laws of order from the pure love of order & God.”21 S. T. C.’s concept of life fractures the self into hierarchical entities: The highest stage is the farthest from the body, and imagination is the means by which the human is raised beyond the animal.22 In fact, as Alan Richardson contends in British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, S. T. C. opposed all bodily based theories of the mind, and his famous definition of the transcendent creative imagination is a reactionary attempt to wrest the imagination away from the brain scientists and to restore it to a hallowed place in the hall of poetry.23 S. T. C.’s obsessive working and reworking of the exact nature of the soul/body interaction causes his daughter, in editing a particularly opaque commentary of her father’s about the body for Biographia Literaria, to exclaim to Aubrey de Vere:

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What did S.T.C. mean by a form not material? A material form is here divisive as well as disjunctive, and this he denies of the essential body or bodily principle. Did he conceive the body in essence to be supersensuous, not an object of sense, not colored or extended in space? Of the bodily principle we know only this, that it is the power in us which constructs our outward material organism, builds up our earthly tenement of flesh and blood. Can this power, independently of the organism in and by which it is manifested, be conceived of as a form indicating the existence and finiteness of some one being to another? (ML, 243) The letter then questions how S. T. C. could possibly conceive of the bodily principle as independent of its manifestation as a body. Coleridge’s exasperation with her father’s philosophical fence-riding is based on S. T. C.’s inability to phrase precisely how the body and the soul work. Her letter to de Vere concludes by confessing that her father’s musings about the body/mind disconnection are incomprehensible. In her 187-page introduction to the Biographia, Coleridge indicates that what S. T. C. considered to be a record of the life of his mind was always already influenced by the life of his body. For example, she attributes the uneven structure and style of the Biographia to her father’s body, for it was “composed at that period of his life when his health was most deranged, and his mind most subjected to the influence of bodily disorder” (xxi). In many ways the Biographia is a nervous text: disorganized, digressive, babbling, obsessively returning to key topics or fixations. Not only was the text itself damaged by S. T. C.’s physical disorder, but his body was damaged by his unhealthy focus on philosophy: His mind, according to Coleridge, “loved to go forward, expanding and ennobling the soul of his teaching, and hated the trouble of turning back to look after its body” (xix). Perhaps Coleridge is able to construct her own philosophy of the imagination between the interstices of her father’s texts because her father left behind such a rich and complicated body of work on the imagination. Coleridge’s critique of her father’s metaphysics is already latent within his own texts: The Biographia so frequently revisits this crucial issue because he himself was unsatisfied with his understanding of the imagination. Recently discovered poems of S. T. C. show the unhealthy nature of his struggle to integrate his literary imagination with his body: He appears to have written poetry using his own blood as ink and affixed a piece of skin that peeled off in the bathtub onto his manuscript paper. From his letters, we know that his philosophical ideals were disturbed when his wife first became pregnant, for he had never seriously considered the pain of childbirth when he developed what he called his “system of optimism.” Because S. T. C.’s “universal” ideas about the body are in reality based on

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the bodies of men, he cannot reconcile the female body to his metaphysical concepts. He writes that the very idea of pregnancy “seems coercive,” for “it starts uneasy doubts respecting Immortality, & the pangs which the Woman suffers, seem inexplicable in the system of optimism.”24 His daughter, who had had six children in under ten years (only two of whom lived to maturity), was not likely to embrace any construction of the imagination that excluded the limitations of the body. When S. T. C. struggles to define the nature of creativity, his thoughts continually return to two terms, imagination and fancy, which he considers distinct mental powers. Imagination is a totalizing, unifying godlike power in which the artist has a supernatural ability to create something out of nothing. By contrast, fancy is limited: It just rearranges memories and sensory data. Coleridge critiques her father’s definition of the imagination by implicitly privileging fancy. She does not believe that the imagination rises above physical experience, and so she reintroduces the physical world, through her readings of her own body and, by extension, her father’s body, into her father’s abstractions about the imagination. Coleridge defines imagination as a bodily faculty, and she links it to the sensorium, or the nervous system. She defines it as that which moves constantly between the body and the spirit as if it were the nerves themselves—the imagination is a translator of the body to the mind and of the mind to the body: “[I]n the one case the chain of communication is the body, in the other the mind; when the sensorium is affected through the body, it may affect the mind; when affected through the mind, it may affect the body” (ML, 130). The sensorium is an “organ of feeling” composed of more than its material particles and what our material senses recognize. It is life: “[A] something which is neither the soul nor the visible, tangible frame, but keeps both united, or, rather, makes the human frame a fit receptacle and instrument of the reasonable soul” (130). In other words, the imagination unifies the soul and the physical body. Coleridge’s language, here, almost precisely mimics Trotter’s treatise. Trotter suggests that “the mind and body being connected by the nervous system,” the nerves engage in a constant reciprocal action between body and mind (210). The sensorium is “the GREAT SYMPATHETIC NERVE,” which “directs the most important operations in the animal economy; and bind together in one great circle of feeling, action and motions both distant and opposite” (228, 229). If, as Coleridge writes, the imagination is the sensorium, the imagination itself is physical. It cannot escape the physical body to create new things out of nothing. Instead, it continually moves back and forth between the body and the mind, bringing sensory data as raw material for the mind to work on when it creates poetry. Coleridge’s depiction of the bodily mind, of a type of writing from the body, should not be confused with our contemporary

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constructions of l’éctriture féminine, even though her work does bear provocative affinities to the type of writing from the body described by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous in the mid-1970s. Coleridge, too, refuses to separate the mind and body and foregrounds the errors of the Western metaphysical tradition that would do so. However, Coleridge’s critique does not valorize nonlinear writings, does not arise from psychoanalytic understandings of subjectivity and language, does not celebrate the female body and feminine sexuality, and, if anything, is riddled with cautions about the importance of bodily control. More recently, Irigaray has suggested that a rethinking of Western philosophical traditions of ethics, aesthetics, logic, and religion would require acknowledging a movement “between,” through a recognition of sexual difference that is not presented as a binarism. Such a movement between would fundamentally alter “the split between body and soul, sexuality and spirituality, the lack of a passage for the spirit or for God, between inside and outside.”25 And so, when Coleridge crosses out the word nerveless from her editorial descriptions of her father in the Biographia, she is adding a third term to the mind/body polarity: the sensorium. To have the bodily as well as the mental and spiritual warmth of the imagination, he must recognize the importance of nerves, that which unites the soul to the tangible frame. As Coleridge depicts her father, his imagination warms his spirit but leaves his frozen body paralyzed: His soul moves forward, but it hates “the trouble of turning back to look after its body” (“Introduction,” xix). He lacks her central ingredient of a poetic imagination: the connection between the body and the mind, between flesh and spirit. An extreme case, proving the connection between the mind and the body, and the importance of self-control, is the condition of nervous derangement. Coleridge insists that it is both a bodily and a mental disease, for “those who perceive only how it affects the mind are apt to forget that it also weakens the body; those who perceive that it is a bodily disease wonder that it should produce any alteration to a well regulated mind” (“Nervousness,” 203). The well-regulated nervous temperament or its opposite number, nervous derangement, presents Coleridge with a model of self-knowledge. In the same way that the body naturally heals itself with or without the “helping hand” of a “medical man,” medical advice “cannot be the pilot of our voyage” (207). Coleridge writes that doctors and outsiders do not understand how her nervous condition is both a bodily disease and a mental disease, that the one affects the other. Doctors cannot cure her because they do not know her body. No one knows what is wrong with her but herself. By extension, her study of nervous disorders also provides her with a model for reconfiguring metaphysics through her bodily self-knowledge: “[F]or the details of management we

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must chiefly rely upon ourselves” (207). Indeed, Coleridge opens her essay “Nervousness” by verifying that her own suffering provides her with authority for self-knowledge above and beyond medical experts: After some years of suffering from the derangement of the nervous system I have satisfied myself that there is no all competent tribunal without ourselves. . . . We must listen with a clear & candid spirit to the opinions of all persons of strong natural sense and receive the fruits of their knowledge & experience; but in the end our own understanding . . . must determine in the last resort. We may err, . . . but depend on it in this as on every other point we shall be our own counsellors [sic]. (201) Coleridge uses her own “years of suffering” to ground her self-knowledge. There is no “all-competent tribunal,” there is only her own understanding of her own body, her own counsel. The sensorium becomes a form of self-knowledge that is more accurate and effective than the masculine disciplinary knowledge transferred through the metaphysical and medical discourses. The sensorium can be used to obtain knowledge of either the body or the mind; thus, listening to her sensorium provides Coleridge with a tool for critiquing the body through the mind or the mind through the body. Because she defines the imagination as the sensorium, a part of her body, and because she alone is an authority on how her body works, she knows how the imagination works. Coleridge gains physical and metaphysical authority when she controls the medicine that regulates her mind and her body, a medication that she alone understands how and why to apply—and that her father did not. Coleridge, perhaps borrowing Trotter’s useful categorization of narcotics, distinguishes between the use of laudanum as addictive or as palliative. If one desires laudanum for “positive comfort,” then one has become a habitual user. One must only use laudanum “cautiously & rationally” so that it can “never become a bad mental habit” (211).26 In Coleridge’s reading of her father, his philosophy could not find a space for the interval, for the mental-as-physical, and thus he could regulate neither his body nor his mind. In the same way that he cannot regulate his body through judicious use of medication, his imagination is hampered by a lack of bodily awareness. His imagination cannot affect the “habitual paralysis” of his body and bodily mind, for, in Coleridge’s reading, her father refuses to acknowledge that the channel between the mind and the body is the sensorium, the seat of the imagination. He refuses the sensorium, and thus his prodigious intellect cannot affect his addiction.

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S. T. C. depicts the imagination as the invisible wind that touches the Eolian harp, or through the classical opposites of water and ice: the “sacred river” versus the “caves of ice,” or the secret ministry of frost. Coleridge alludes to her father’s imagery for the imagination when she associates this figurative language with his splitting of the body from the mind: S. T. C.’s bodily langor paralyzes his actions except “thought and imagination flowing onward freely and in self-made channels; for these brought with them their own warm atmosphere to thaw the chains of frost that bound his spirit” (“Introduction,” xix). Coleridge’s image of the imagination is not one of water or ice, but that of a natural narcotic: the poppy. As an ephemeral flower of fancy, it brings poetry and dreams but only as a drug that affects the mind through the body. Opium, like the sensorium, like fancy, is an image of the interval, the “between” whose effects can only be measured as they move between the body and the mind. Although S. T. C.’s writings do not specify an ethical place for opium, Coleridge’s writings do. She links laudanum to self-control of her body. Coleridge’s emphasis on the bodily nature of the mind is not an isolated position but rather part of a broader cultural shift destabilizing the rigid Cartesian split of the mind and the body. As Armstrong suggests, illness and physical weakness experienced by many women writers gave them an access to sensory knowledge that could be maneuvered into a position of intellectual authority: Such access to sense challenges the Cartesian division between matter and mind, actually inverts the traditional hierarchical relation between mind and sense. Speculations on the nervous system in the early 1820s . . . considered whether the source of experience was in the senses or the brain. There might be multiple centers of sense perception: the soul might be material, existing in fluid or vital spirit circulating in the body, and sense experience might be conducted around the body in the same manner.27 Coleridge’s theory of the bodily mind is a useful synthesis of nineteenthcentury medical and metaphysical thought. In rewriting her particular patriarch’s concept of the imagination, Coleridge is also rewriting patriarchy at large by making visible what classical metaphysics would have invisible or repressed: the interchange between the body and the spirit. Coleridge’s sensorium figures the continual movements of nerves that integrate the mind and the body, the soul and the flesh. Thus, a woman writer, who is traditionally linked to the material side of the mind/body binarism, can escape this limiting classification if she understands the imagination to be a sensorium, a moving between the body and the mind.

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I am placing the sensorium, fancy, and laudanum on equal terms as intervals that unsettle dichotomies. In adding a third term to move between the mind/body dichotomies of S. T. C., Coleridge does not discount his work, but she brings to it her sense of carnal ethics. The body and the spirit are inseparable. She is also, perhaps, making a place to move between her physically absent father and his abstract legacy of metaphysical texts. Her project of writing his life, editing his Biographia Literaria, is her comingand-going. As she wrote of the Biographia Literaria, “[T]he troubles I have taken with the Biographia Literaria [are] ridiculous to think of—it is a filial phenomenon; nobody will thank me for it, and no one will know or see a twentieth part of it. But I have done the thing con amore, for my father’s book” (ML, 300). In analyzing how one nervous narrator controls the nervous text of another nervous narrator, I am arguing for a different conception of the anxiety women experience as authors. When Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar first developed their influential model of literary genealogy, they adopted Bloom’s theory of an anxiety of influence in which male artists fear that the works of their predecessors assume priority over their own works. Women, who are excluded from this father-to-son tradition, do not suffer an anxiety of influence. Cut off from their literary grandmothers, they suffer an anxiety of authorship. Writing in the late 1970s, Gilbert and Gubar, as well as Margaret Homans, had inherited a canon of almost exclusively male authors—and their theoretical readings of literary history, therefore, are based on a sense of women’s isolation within literary traditions. However, due in part to their pioneering efforts in recovering the history of women’s literature, a multitude of contemporary critics have rediscovered the work of thousands of women writers and, further, have recognized that women writers were not, indeed, isolated or even necessarily working in a separate tradition.28 Sara Coleridge, however, stands in a unique relationship to literary history. As a woman author, she was almost entirely engaged in publishing the works of male authors. Coleridge can intervene in this history through her editorial project, and because her father, both an important literary patriarch as well as her literal father, shares her nervous temperament and opium addiction, she can alleviate her own anxieties by demonstrating her physical superiority and, in so doing, the primacy of her own philosophical position. In insisting that a person’s “feeling” body is an essential element of his or her unique identity, Coleridge locates her own power within her body: “In life there is no more personal identity than in the body to which it belongs; indeed, the tangible frame and the life together constitute the body; it is my life, my body” (ML, 131). Her emphatic punctuation of “my” only further accentuates her personal and possessive claim to her physical body and, by extension, her metaphysics.

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NOTES 1. Sara Coleridge, from Introduction to Biographia Literaria: Or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Pickering, 1847), xix; emphasis Coleridge’s; hereafter cited in the text as “Introduction.” Coleridge’s excision of the word nerveless is documented in an edition of Biographia Literaria housed at the Folger Library. The text contains notes copied by James Dykes Campbell from Coleridge’s personal copy. Coleridge’s letters also mention the errors in the 1847 edition and how she spent a great deal of time proofing the editions purchased by her various friends: “The ‘Biographia’ has various misprints, omissions, etc, in it, which I have been correcting in my friends’ copies.” See Sara Coleridge, Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, ed. Edith Coleridge (New York: Harper, 1874), 313. Hereafter referred to as ML. 2. Bradford Keyes Mudge in Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989) suggests that public criticisms of her father “jolted Sara out of the complacent routines of her life,” and “encouraged by her husband, she systematically reread Coleridge’s works, measuring what she knew of his personal weaknesses against what she was learning of his philosophical strengths” (75). (Hereafter, references to Mudge will be cited parenthetically as Mudge in the text, as will references to Coleridge’s essay, “Nervousness,” reprinted in Mudge’s volume). For example, De Quincey’s four-part serial in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine was “tactless” in its description of Sarah Fricker Coleridge and a powerful indictment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s intellectual shortcomings. As Earl Leslie Griggs demonstrates in Coleridge Fille: A Biography of Sara Coleridge (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), Coleridge had read, in addition to De Quincey’s review, J. A. Heraud’s piece, “Coleridgeiana,” in Fraser’s Magazine, and John Wilson’s generally favorable portrayal in Blackwood’s, although Wilson did consider Wordsworth to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “master”—a phrase that Sara Coleridge found objectionable (quoted in Griggs, 107). See Griggs, appendix E, for a partial listing of these magazine reviews and articles. De Quincey’s writings such as “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” (which focuses on the bodily constitution rather than the intellectual achievements of Kant) might well have informed Coleridge’s own approach to rereading aesthetics. As Paul Youngquist suggests, De Quincey (as I am arguing of Coleridge) uses opium addiction to reread aesthetic categories such as Kantian transcendence and, by extension, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s interpretation of Kant. See Youngquist, “De Quincey’s Crazy Body,” PMLA 114 (1999): 346–58. Samuel Taylor Coleridge “eliminates materiality, including that of the body, from the philosopher’s purview—at a time in his life when he was waging a private little war against opium dependency” (347). 3. In the remainder of this chapter, I will refer to Sara Coleridge as “Coleridge” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “S. T. C.” Sarah Fricker Coleridge, S. T. C.’s wife and Sara Coleridge’s mother, dropped the “H” from her given name at S. T. C.’s request. Sara Coleridge married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, thus confusing further an already confusing situation.

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4. Isobel Armstrong, “The Gush of the Feminine: How Can We Read Women’s Poetry of the Romantic Period?” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995), 16. See also Anne K. Mellor’s analysis of women critics (“A Criticism of Their Own: Romantic Women Literary Critics,” in Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995], 29–48). 5. Sara Coleridge Coleridge, “[The Autobiography of Sara Coleridge],” in Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter: Her Life and Essays, by Bradford Keyes Mudge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 249. Hereafter cited in the text as “Autobiography.” 6. Coleridge’s translation (as well as an acclaimed 1818 portrait of her by William Collins as the “Highland Girl”) had given her a reputation in London that her actual appearance only intensified. She was variously described as delicate, celestial, sylphlike, ethereal, a living representation of “Psyche or Ariel, Juliet would be too material”—her beauty and brains dazzled all of London as well as her future husband. See Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 28–29; and Molly Lefebure, The Bondage of Love: A Life of Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Paragon, 1986), esp. 234–36. In 1825 Coleridge wrote a twenty-six-page manuscript essay, “On the Disadvantages Resulting from the Possession of Beauty,” championing character over appearance and intellect over ornamentation. 7. I am using a conservative figure from Mudge’s book; Lefebure reports Sara Coleridge’s earnings as somewhat higher at £125. The translation was begun at the urging of Southey who had initially suggested that Derwent might earn scholarly fame and money for his university education through the translation. According to Sarah Fricker Coleridge, Derwent began the first volume and Sara Coleridge began the third, but Derwent soon dropped the translation and she completed it. Southey was concerned that Coleridge would work too hard and ruin her health; Coleridge, however, said that she liked the employment above all other things. For additional discussion, see Mudge, Sara Coleridge, A Victorian Daughter, 25–26. 8. Coleridge’s editions of her father’s works include Table Talk (1835), coedited with Henry Nelson Coleridge, though it was largely Sara Coleridge’s effort; Aids to Reflection (1843); Poems (1844); Biographia Literaria (1847), coedited with Henry Nelson Coleridge; Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare (1849); Essays on His Own Times (1850); and The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1852), coedited with Derwent Coleridge. Christmas Tyde, a collection of religious verse (London: Pickering, 1849), is often erroneously attributed to Coleridge (in the Union Catalogue of Books and The Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseuodonymous Literature). Coleridge, however, was not involved in its production or the subsequent volume, Passion Week, and, in fact, declined to participate in aiding the editor, Mrs. Richard Townsend (ML, 320–21). 9. Figure 1, a letter to William Pickering dated Monday, 15 October 1848, shows Coleridge’s own commentary on arranging the collection of S. T. C. lectures on Shakespeare:

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I feel a little undecided as to the filling up of the 120 pages. It would have been best, if possible, to throw all the dramatic matter together—But the notes on Shakespeare & other Dramatists . . . are enough for a vol. of themselves. Now the title of these two vols ought to announce the dramatic nature of the contents. But I cannot fill up the first—the 120 pages—with dramatic matter—& the addition of matter of a different kind seems more [allowed] at the end of vol 1— in the middle of the whole, considered as one book—than it would be at the end of the second. Yet to place the notes on particular plays before the more general lectures seemed to me, at first, not the right order. Upon the whole however I think it would be rather best to make the notes the first vol.—If this can now be done with-out inconvenience or expense—be it so. The deficient vol may be filled up with Essay on Prometheus— about 34 pages[,] Essays in Taste & on Beauty perhaps 8 p-[,] MS. Essay—4 [,] Letters in Blackwood—55 (I have procured the required numbers of Blackwood). The Apologetic Preface (now at the end of the poems) would suit well in subject about 13 p. This letter is held in the Boston Public Library/Rare Books Department and is published here courtesy of The Trustees. 10. Virginia Woolf, Review of Earl Leslie Griggs’s Coleridge Fille, in Collected Essays (London: Hogarth, 1966), 3:222. 11. Coleridge is slowly gaining recognition as a nineteenth-century writer: Phantasmion has been republished in Woodstock’s series of Romantic-era facsimiles edited by Jonathan Wordsworth. Selected poetry from Phantasmion is included in Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock, eds., Nineteenth-Century Women Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 238–40; poetry from Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children and Phantasmion as well as an excellent introduction to Coleridge’s life can be found in Paula Feldman’s British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 194–203. Although their introduction contains inaccuracies (the heroine’s name from Phantasmion is misspelled), Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds reprint two poems from Phantasmion in their anthology, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 61–63; and Mudge’s biography of Coleridge reprints several unpublished and previously uncollected essays. 12. For classic criticism of the implicit or explicit masculinization of aesthetic categories, see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). For discussion of how women Romantics differently construct a more feminized form of the imagination, see two articles by Julie Ellison, “‘Nice Arts’ and ‘Potent Enginery’: The

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Gendered Economy of Wordsworth’s Fancy,” Centennial Review 33 (1989): 441–67; and “The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility,” in Re-Visioning Romanticisim: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 228–55; and Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1992). Marie Mulvey Roberts outlines how women Romantics critiqued the gendering of aesthetic categories through scientific knowledge. She analyzes Erasmus Darwin’s genetic schemes (that sex and the heredity of one’s offspring result from the male imagination). See “The Male Scientist, Man-Midwife, and Female Monster: Appropriation and Transmutation in Frankenstein,” in A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 59-73. 13. Diana Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); and Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). 14. Peter Melville Logan, Nerves and Narratives: A Cultural History of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century British Prose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 15. Two recent books, which were published after this chapter was completed, provide an informative analysis of Hartley Coleridge’s life and texts in relationship to S. T. C.: Judith Plotz, Romanticism and the Vocation of Childhood (New York: Palgrave, 2001), esp. 191–251; and Anya Taylor, Bacchus in Romantic England: Writers and Drink, 1780–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). 16. Perhaps this, too, explains why Coleridge chose to abandon her own creative work after her father’s death and began to edit the works of others, particularly her father’s. She uses her father’s texts as a comforting way to deal with her own anxieties about her body. Indeed, her two early creative works were written, explicitly, as a type of therapy. She describes Pretty Lessons Verse in an 1834 letter as sickroom amusement, and as “a little record of some of my occupations during a season of weakness and suffering, when I was shut out from almost all pleasures and means of usefulness” (ML, 90). She similarly describes Phantasmion in an 1837 letter: “This little book was chiefly written . . . when I was more confined to my couch than I am now . . . and could view the face of nature only by very short glimpses” (ML, 136). The few moments in which these books shift into autobiography—as in the poem “Poppies,” which blesses poppies for the sleep they provide—she is criticized. Derwent expressed his displeasure that the family predilection for opium use was being paraded before the public yet again. Coleridge skillfully deflects his criticism by resorting to a reference to the body: “[T]he Poppy poem in ‘Pretty Lessons’ should have been left out—some other doggerel substituted—but I was [feeling] poorly” (reprinted in Mudge, 67). 17. Sally Shuttleworth, “‘Preaching to the Nerves’: Psychological Disorder in Sensation Fiction,” in A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature, ed. Marina Benjamin (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 193.

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18. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament; Being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of Those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver Complaints; Indigestion; Low Spirits; Gout, and etc. (1807; reprint, New York: Arno, 1976). Hereafter references to Trotter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 19. For general information on Trotter’s career, literary and medical publications, and his impact on late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century medicine, see Roy Porter’s introduction to a modern reprint of Trotter’s An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical on Drunkenness and Its Effects on the Human Body (1804; reprint, London: Routledge, 1988), ix–xl. Trotter (1760–1832), according to Porter, joins other Scottish conjectural historians, such as Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and John Millar, who study the development of modern society through a rather broad reading of the Enlightenment, focusing on “epochal transformations of human culture” (xxviii). Porter contends that Trotter’s unique contribution to eighteenth-century philosophical speculation is that he reads the history of civilization medically, through its effects on the physical body. For a discussion of Trotter’s description of the nervous body as a body defined by its tendency to talk about itself, and the implications of this definition for nineteenthcentury narratives, authors, and readers, see Logan’s Nerves and Narratives. For a discussion of how the language of feeling shaped literary discourse, see David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); see also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). For discussion of medical constructions of nervousness in Romantic era writers, see Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Sally Shuttleworth, “‘Preaching to the Nerves,’” as well as “Sexuality and Knowledge in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 18 (1996): 425–41; Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987); and Sander Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, George Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). The classic work on opium and Romanticism is Althea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). 20. Although I do not know if Coleridge was familiar with Trotter’s texts, the ways in which she phrases her cautionary discussion of the benefits and dangers of opium use suggests that she was familiar with A View. Both Trotter and Coleridge contrast opium uses as a “palliative” to opium used for pleasure. What Coleridge has inherited, according to Trotter’s medical treatise, is a predisposition toward nervousness, a “permanent state of body”: “To predisposition, whether hereditary or acquired, I give the name of nervous temperament, which is now to be considered as a permanent state of body, that cannot be easily changed, and will commonly remain for life” (197). 21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 3 vols., ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 3:256.

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22. As Anya Taylor suggests, in this passage the primary imagination is intended to “[lift] the human being decisively away from the animal.” See Coleridge’s Defense of the Human (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 72–73. Taylor details S. T. C.’s constant renegotiation of the nature of the soul within the context of associationist philosophy and the Humean bundle theory (that human nature is nothing more than an aggregate of the random sense impressions that enter its environment). 23. Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), writes that early-nineteenthcentury fascination with “imagination” and the powers of the mind, which scholars have long attributed to German philosophy and Kantian metaphysics, is perhaps much more indebted to the field of brain science. Richardson’s analysis of Coleridge’s anti-body definitions of the imagination supports my own findings about Coleridge’s critique of her father’s work. Indeed, she may well have been the first critic to suggest that her father’s anti-body version of the mind and the imagination was tied to his own inability to confront his bodily weakness and his opium addiction. Unfortunately, my chapter was already complete before the publication of Richardson’s work, and so I have been unable to fully address his important contributions to our understanding of brain science and its impact on Romantic-era constructions of aesthetic categories. 24. Reprinted in Lefebure, The Bondage of Love, 74. 25. Luce Irigaray, “Sexual Difference,” in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 173. For a useful summary of French feminists Cixous and Irigaray, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’Écriture Féminine,” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 370–83. 26. Coleridge carefully divides the use of laudanum into the categories of addictive and palliative. One must only use laudanum as an inevitable evil—not something that is desired, but something that is used dutifully as a precaution, “to ward off obstinate sleeplessness,” and “what we do thus cautiously & rationally can never become a bad mental habit” (“Nervousness,” 211). Trotter, too, cautions against most uses of opium, for it tends to feed into the symptoms of the disease; only in dire cases should opium be used to “palliate” the disease: “To palliate particular symptoms . . . is sometimes a difficult task in these diseases,” for the palliative, like opium, “must inevitably have the effect of increasing the predisposition” (311). 27. Armstrong, “The Gush of the Feminine,” 27. 28. In tandem with our recovery and republication of once-overlooked women authors, recent critics have begun to analyze why history has found so compelling the myth that women authors were isolated or wrote within a separate tradition. See, among numerous others, Tricia Lootens’s Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996) for discussion of how nineteenth-century critics’ glorification of

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women poets opened up the way for critical neglect of their work; see Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989) for discussion of the “empty field” theory in the rise of the novel—by presenting the field of novel writing as “empty,” men novelists were able to enter into and dominate the novel genre; and Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), provides a historically rich reading of how late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century women authors were at first received and published, and how subsequent generations of publishers, responding to changing perceptions of femininity and other market forces, gradually narrowed the scope, selections, and number of women authors.

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Zizek , Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.

Contributors

D. M. R. BENTLEY is professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, specializing in Canadian literature and Victorian poetry, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites. He is the author of numerous essays on these subjects and such volumes as The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1992) and Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). He has also edited a number of Canadian texts, and is the general editor of the Early Canadian Long Poems Series for Canadian Poetry Press. JOEL FAFLAK is assistant professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. His areas of interest are British Romantic literature, psychoanalysis, and popular culture. He is currently working on an edition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater for Broadview Press. He has also published articles on De Quincey, Keats, Shelley, Schopenhauer, and Wordsworth and is coediting an anthology of essays on cultural studies entitled Cultural Subjects, for Thomson-Nelson. KRISTEN GUEST is assistant professor at the University of Northern British Columbia. Her area of research interest is Victorian literature and culture. She has recently edited Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), a collection of essays on cannibalism in literature. GRACE KEHLER works as an assistant professor in English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She has published on nineteenth-century literature and opera, eighteenth-century opera and film, and contemporary Canadian literature. DONELLE RUWE, an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois, publishes on Romantic women poets and

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children’s literature and is currently editing a festschrift in honor of Mitzi Myers for the Children’s Literature Association. She serves on the governing board of the 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writer’s Association and has been an associate professor of English at Fitchburg (Mass.) State College. ALAN VARDY is assistant professor of English at Hunter College, the City University of New York, and author of John Clare, Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2003). He is currently working on a study of the nineteenth-century editing of Coleridge’s works, and the cultural and political anxieties embedded in those editions. LISA VARGO teaches in the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan. She has produced two editions of writings by Mary Shelley—Lodore (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1997) and Spanish and Portuguese Lives (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002)—and is coeditor with Allison Muri of a hypertext edition of Anna Barbauld’s Poems 1773. She has published essays on the Shelleys, on women writers of the romantic period, on Graham Greene, and on hypertext editing. TIMOTHY J. WANDLING is an assistant professor at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. His research and teaching interests are Romanticism and nineteenth-century literature and culture, literary theory, and service learning. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Byron and Transgressive Eloquence: The Fate of Readers in 19th-Century British Culture. JOANNE WILKES is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her Lord Byron and Madame de Staël: Born for Opposition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy and the Elma Dangerfield Prize from the International Byron Society. She is currently working on nineteenth-century British women literary critics, and on an edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton. JULIA M. WRIGHT is associate professor and Canada Research Chair in English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She is the author of over twenty articles and the forthcoming Blake, Nationalism, and the Politics of Alienation (Athens: Ohio University Press); the editor of The Missionary: An Indian Tale, by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2002); the coeditor (with Tilottama Rajan) of Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and the coeditor (with Angela Esterhammer) of a special issue of European Romantic Review (spring 1999).

Index

Abel, Sam, 79 Abrams, M.H., 3–4, 126, 134–5, 139n44 Ackroyd, Peter, 89n37 Adams, Graham, 107 Altick, Richard D., 137n10, 160n40 Armstrong, Isobel, 25, 197, 230, 243 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 97 Arnold, Matthew, 1, 5, 26, 37, 109; and Keats, 97–9; and Lampman, 97–9, 102, 110, 115n17, 116n28, 118n60. Works: “Heine,” 118n60; “Maurice de Guérin,” 97–8, 118n60; “Numbers; or the Majority and the Remnant,” 118n60; “The Scholar-Gipsy,” 103–4; “Thyrsis,” 103–4; “On Translating Homer,” 118n60 Auden, W. H., 124 Austen, Jane, 174 Austin, Alfred, 115n17

Bagehot, Walter, 7, 17 Barfoot, C.C., 1 Barrell, John, 42n20 Barthes, Roland, 77 Bashant, Wendy, 79, 83 Battersby, Christine, 235, 247n12 Bayard, Chevalier, 231 Beard, George Miller, 113

Beer, Gillian, 166 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 74, 82, 85; and Fidelio, 66–7, 76, 79–82, 85 Bennett, Betty, 58 Bentley, D. M. R., 113n7 Berlioz, Hector, 68, 71–4, 78, 84, 88n25, 88n29 Bewell, Alan, 183n16, 206n51 Blackwood’s Magazine, 193–4, 201, 245n2 Blake, William, 107, 160n33 Bloom, Harold, 244 Blumberg, Jane, 56 Bodenheimer, Rosemary, 86n1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 95 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 11 Brady, Kristin, 90n62 Brantlinger, Patrick, 127, 135, 137n13 Brontë, Charlotte, 202–3 Brown, John, 20n30, 166, 171 Browning, Robert, 1, 7, 164–5, 180 Bruhm, Steven, 9 Buchanan, Robert, 7, 19n23 Buller, Charles, 134, 138n17 Bulwer-Lytton, Charles, 134 Burke, Edmund, 4, 219; and “Letters to a Noble Lord,” 221; and Reflections on the Revolution in France, 177, 221 Burroughs, John, 113n7, 117n36 Butler, Marilyn, 135, 221

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Index

Byron, Lord, 2, 9, 51, 136nn1–3, 147–8, 164, 181–2, 184n29; and affective quality of his writing, 4, 12, 125, 130, 133–4; and excess, 11, 143, 157; and Keats, 191; and Lampman, 101, 116n28; and Mill, 124–7, 130–1, 133–4; and readers, 15, 123–5, 128–9, 134–6, 136n4, 147; and M. Shelley, 50; and Southey, 227n10; and Spenser, 129; and H. Taylor, 125, 128; and the Victorian reception of, 3, 123–6, 128, 131–2, 134. Works: Cain, 4; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 125; Don Juan, 4, 123, 125, 129, 191; Manfred, 4; “Prisoner of Chillon,” 170, 174

Caine, Barbara, 82 Callas, Maria, 81 Calzabigi, Ranieri de, 66–9, 74; and the preface to Alceste, 69, 87n9 Cambridge Apostles, 128, 132, 138n17 Campbell, James Dykes, 245n1 Campbell, William Wilfred, 112–3 Canadian post-Confederation poets, 112–3; and nineteenth-century British poetry, 94–5, 104, 109–10, 112; and notions of therapeutics, 95, 106–11; and Victorian mediation of Romanticism,101–2; see also Carman; Lampman; Roberts; and Scott. Canning, George, 209 Carlson, Julie, 80 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 138n17, 141–58; on Byron, 101, 125–6, 134–5, 136n6; and Byronism, 143–7, 157, 159n27; on illness of Romantic authors, 143–4; and health, 142–5, 149, 159n15, 159n24; and Lampman, 97, 101, 115n17; and nervousness, 10–1, 14–5, 143–5, 149; and publishing as industry, 147–9, 152, 157–8; and sensibility

10–1; and reading as therapeutic work, 12, 141–3, 145–6, 148, 152–7, 161n47. Works: “Characteristics,” 155–7; Chartism, 142; History of the French Revolution, 10–1, 14–5; Past and Present, 142, 148; Sartor Resartus, 15, 141–2, 145–52, 154–6; “Signs of the Times,” 148 Carman, Bliss, 105–8, 112–3, 117n36; and Canadian national identity, 106–7; and the Delsarte System, 107. Works: By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies, 107; The Friendship of Art, 107; Pipes of Pan, 107; “Shelley,” 105–7, 110, 112; Vagabondia, 107; “The White Gull/For the Centenary of the Birth of Shelley,” 105–7 Catalani, Angelica, 72 Charke, Charlotte, 82 Chartism, 218–20 Chew, Samuel C., 128, 136n6 Chorley, Henry, 88n25 Christensen, Jerome, 136n4 Cixous, Hélène, 240–1, 250n25 Clairmont, Claire, 50, 58 Clarke, Edwin, 249n19 Clemit, Pamela, 49–50 Coleridge, Derwent, 216–7, 231, 246n7, 248n16 Coleridge, Hartley, 203, 235–6, 248n15 Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 189, 194, 216–7, 224–5, 229, 231, 245n3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 36, 124, 139n34, 160n33, 176, 196–7; and the Anti-Jacobin, 209–12, 215, 226n6; reputation of, 215–17, 224–5, 245n2; and the nervous body, 159n10, 229–31, 235–6, 238–44, 250n23; and Burkean eloquence, 221, 223; and the imagination, 17, 230–1, 234, 236, 238–43, 250n22, 250n23; and Kant, 245n2; and Keats, 194; and opium addiction,

Index 230, 234, 242–3, 245n2, 250n23; and his political history, 207–14, 217–18, 220–5, 227n8; and readerly sensibility, 208–10, 219, 221; and Southey, 210–2, 216, 223, 227n8; and Carlyle, 143–5, 148; and De Quincey, 42n20, 245n2; and Godwin, 214–5; and Hazlitt, 213, 215, 227n10; and Pitt, 213–4, 217–8, 222. Works: Biographia Literaria, 16–7, 136n2, 229–31, 236, 238–41, 244; “Christabel,” 173, 180; the Collected Coleridge, 24; “Copy of a Handbill,” 222–3; the Courier, 207–8;“Fears in Solitude,” 210–1, 223; “France: An Ode,” 210, 223, 227n7; The Friend, 207, 212–3, 226n6; “Frost at Midnight,” 223; “Introductory Address,” Conciones Ad Populum, 213–4; the Morning Post, 207, 209–12; “The Nightingale,” 196; “Once a Jacobin Always a Jacobin,” 211–2; “Queries,” 209, 212; “The Recantation: An Ode,” 210–1; Table Talk, 194, 216–7; The Watchman, 207–9, 215, 220–4 Coleridge, Sara Coleridge, 12, 16–7, 189–251; and Aubrey de Vere, 200, 238–9; and bodily imagination, 17, 230–1, 234–6, 240, 242–4; and political radicalism, 218–20; and her father’s legacy, 12, 16–7, 200, 215–7, 224–5, 229–31, 234–6, 238–44, 245n2, 246n8, 246n9, 250n23; and the Duke of Wellington, 220; and her own legacy, 16, 234, 247n11; and gender, 16, 198–202, 206n45, 230, 234, 236, 243–4; and Hallam’s “Sensation” and “Reflection,” 195–7; and John Gibson Lockhart, 189–90, 192–3, 197–200, 203, 204n17; and Keats, 190–203; and

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Croker, 190–3, 203; and nervousness, 235–8, 240–3, 248n16; and opium addiction, 230, 242–3, 248n16, 249n20, 250n26; and periodical reviewing, 16, 192, 198–9; and the Quarterly Review, 192, 201; and Rigby (Lady Eastlake), 201–3; and Woolf, 234; and The Watchman, 220–4; and W. Wordsworth, 195–6, and her father’s political history, 16, 207–9, 215, 217–8, 220–5, 226n2. Works: edition of Biographia Literaria, 16–7, 229–44; edition of Essays on His Own Times, 16, 207–5; Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge, 224–5; “Nervousness,” 229–31, 242; “On the Disadvantages Resulting from the Possession of Beauty,” 246n6; Phantasmion, 247n11, 248n16; Pretty Lessons in Verse for Good Children, 247n11, 248n16; “Poppies,” 248n16; “Reasons for Not Placing ‘Laodamia’ in the First Rank of Wordsworthian Poetry,” 200; review of Fletcher and Beaumont, 200; review of Tennyson’s The Princess, 189–90, 192, 195–9 Coleridge, Sarah Fricker, 245n2, 245n3, 246n7 Colley, Linda, 185n41 Collins, Wilkie, 11 Collins, William, 246n6 Colvin, Sidney, 100–3 “Condition of England” novel, 126–7, 137n11 Cooke, Michael, 136n3 Costic, Linda Seidel, 165 Court, Franklin, 137n10 Courthorpe, W.J., 101, 115n17, 116n29 Cowgill, Rachel, 89n38 Cowper, William, 173–4 Craig, David, 137n11 Craik, W. A., 163–4

280

Index

Crawford, Annie, 107 Croker, John Wilson, 190–3, 198, 202–3 Cronin, Richard, 18n3 Cruvelli, Sophie, 80–1 Crystal Palace, 26–7, 36, 39, 47 Csillag, Rosa, 78 Cullen, William, 9, 166, 176, 179

D’ Albertis, Deirdre, 164, 166 Dame, Joke, 79 Darwin, Erasmus, 247n12 Day, Fred Hall, 116n26 Della Cruscan poets, 8, 181 Delsarte, François, 107 De Luca, Vincent, 33, 41n5, 43n24, 44n33 De Maupin, 82 De Quincey, Thomas, 4, 9, 11–3, 16, 23–45; and his four dream “facts,” 43n25; and the classification/ collection of his texts, 12–3, 16, 23–40; and confession vs. autobiography 32–3; and the nervous (psychosomatic) body, 23–4, 26–31, 35–6, 38–9; and his nervous Romantic corpus, 24–7, 35–40; and opium addiction 13, 28–32, 38–9, 42n20, 43n26, 245n2; and opium dreams 27–8, 30–1, 33–4, 36–7;and periodical writing, 24; and reticence about publishing Confessions, 28; and solitude, 43n22; Works: Autobiography, 13, 32–4, 43n27, 44n28; Collected Writings, 24; Confessions of an English OpiumEater, 4; ambivalent ending of, 31, 34–5; and the Appendix to, 23, 40n1; as nervous text, 23–6, 35, 38–40; and the structure of the 1821 text, 28–32; 1856 revisions to 1821 text, 24–5, 31–7, 39; “The English Mail-Coach,” 36, 44n32, 44n33; “The Last Days of

Immanuel Kant,” 245n2; 1853 Preface to Selections Grave and Gay, 37–8; Selections Grave and Gay; Writings Published and Unpublished, 24; Suspiria de Profundis, 24, 41n6, 43n25; Works of Thomas De Quincey, 24, 40n5. De Vere, Aubrey, 194, 200–1, 203, 238–9 Delsarte System, 107 Dickens, Charles, 137n11 Dobrizhoffer, Martin, 231 Don Giovanni in London, 76 Dowden, Edward, 52–3, 61 Drennan, William, 176 Du Bois, W. E. B., 134 Durham, Lord, 97 Dyer, Gary, 18n7

Early, L. R., 95, 118n57 l’écriture feminine, 240–1 Edinburgh Review, 203 Edwards, Sutherland, 84 Elfenbein, Andrew, 1, 13, 138n19, 146–7, 157, 158n6, 159n27 Eliot, George: Works: Armgart, 14, 65–8, 71–80, 82–6; and agency, 66–7, 83, 86; and gender, 12–4, 65–6, 79–83; and opera, 67–86; and Romantic verse drama, 12–4, 66, 83; and sexuality, 79–81, 83–4; “The Natural History of German Life,” 6 Elliot, Ebenezer, 127 Ellis, Alec, 138n23 Ellison, Julie, 247n12 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 117n36 Empson, William, 203 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 49, 250n28

Faflak, Joel, 43n25 Feldman, Paula, 57, 62n14 Ferguson, Adam, 249n19 Ferguson, Frances, 18n4

Index FitzLyon, April, 72 Fortin, Nina E., 250n28 Foucault, Michel, 39 Fox, William Johnson, 5, 10–1 Fraser, James, 153 Fraser’s Magazine, 153 Freire, Paulo, 128–9, 138n20 French Revolution, 10–1, 14–5; and nationalism, 185n34 Froude, James Anthony, 159n15 Frye, Northrop, 19n25

Garber, Marjorie, 89n41 Garland, Hamlin, 104 Garnett, Richard, 49, 52–5, 60–1, 62n16 Garrick, David, 71 Gaskell, Elizabeth: Works: Cousin Phillis, 185n38; preface to Mary Barton, 127; Wives and Daughters, 163–70, 172–81: and disciplined sensibility, 169, 176–7, 180–1, 184n20; and educational reading, 170–6; and France, 177; and false or excessive sensibility, 12, 15, 164, 168–70, 173, 175–7, 181; and nationalism, 176–81, 185n42; and scientific discourse, 164, 166, 177–8, 182n5; unfinished nature of, 182n1 Gifford, William, 209 Gilbert, Sandra, 244 Gilfillan, George, 23, 48–9, 60 Gill, Stephen, 1, 11 Gilman, Sander, 152, 158n3, 249n19 Gisborne, Maria, 59 Globe, 104, 112 Gluck, Christoph von: and Calzabigi, 68–9, 74, 87n9; and castrati, 69–70; and opera public, 74; and Orfée, 71, 73, 88n29; and Orfeo, 67–9, 71, 75, 78–80, 85, 88n29; and the preface to Alceste, 69, 75, 87n9, 88n29; as reformer, 66, 68–9 Godwin, William, 82; and S. T. Coleridge, 213–4; Political Justice,

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13; and M. Shelley, 54, 60; and sensibility, 215, 221; and Wollstonecraft, 50 Goldsmith, Oliver, 176 Gordon, Lyndall, 60–1 Graham, William, 145 Gray, Thomas, 176 Griggs, Earl Leslie, 234, 245n2 Gross, John, 136n7 Gross, Jonathan, 136n1 Guadagni, Gaetano, 71 Gubar, Susan, 244 Guillory, John, 138n24 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 116n26

Haggard, H. Rider, 167 Haley, Bruce, 165 Hall, Basil, 105 Hallam, Arthur, 10, 138n17; reflection vs. sensation, 6, 195–7; and Tennyson, 5, 195, 198 Haney, Janice L., 145, 155 Haydon, Benjamin, 110 Hays, Mary, 82 Hayter, Alethea, 40n5, 42n17, 249n19 Hazlitt, William, 2, 50, 213, 215, 227n10 Heilbrun, Carolyn, 47, 62n16 Hemans, Felicia, 11, 164, 173, 181 Henderson, Andrea, 27 Heraud, J. A., 245n2 Herndl, Diane Price, 235 Hingston, William M., 114n9 Hoagwood, Terence, 128 Hogg, James, 4 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, 49, 57, 62n8, 63n18 Holloway, John, 157, 161n52 Homans, Margaret, 235, 244, 247n12 Home, Henry, 10 Hood, Thomas, 127 Houghton, Lord, 100–1 Houghton, Walter, 141–2 Hovey, Richard, 113

282

Index

Howard, Patricia, 71, 74, 87n9, 88n29 Hughes, Thomas, 176 Hume, David, 1, 10, 176 Hunt, Leigh, 59, 176, 215 Hutchinson, Sara, 213

Imlay, Gilbert, 63n19 Irigaray, Luce, 240–1, 250n25

Jack, Ian, 40n5 Jacyna, L. S., 249n19 Jewitt, William, 83 Johnson, Samuel, 176 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 250n25

Kant, Immanuel, 245n2 Kaplan, Fred, 149 Kayser, Wolfgang, 155 Keats, John, 2, 6, 11–2, 14–5, 23, 107, 109, 124, 136n2, 182, 194–5, 201; and Byron, 190–1; and S. C. Coleridge, 16, 190–5, 197, 200–1; and Lampman, 14, 94, 103–4, 110, 115n16, 116n26, 116n29; and Lockhart, 16, 190, 192–4, 201; and Quarterly Review, 16, 190–4; and D. C. Scott, 104–5, 109–12; and P. B. Shelley, 190–1, 195; and Tennyson, 5, 97, 190–2, 195. Works: “To Autumn,” 95–6, 103, 114n8; “The Cap and Bells,” 100–1; Endymion, 98, 111, 190–2, 197, 200–2; “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 97; The Fall of Hyperion, 101–2; Hyperion, 99–101; Letters, 126; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 97, 104, 116n28; “Ode to Melancholy,” 104; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 104, 195–6 Keble, John, 125, 138n17 Keen, Paul, 149, 160n37 Kelly, Michael, 87n14 King, Helen, 249n19

Kipling, Rudyard, 176, 181 Klancher, Jon, 15, 24, 136n5, 160n42

Lampman, Archibald, 94–112, 113n3, 115n17; and Arnold, 97–9, 116n28, 118n60; and Byron, 101, 116n28; and Canadian national identity, 94, 96–7, 104; and Carlyle, 97, 107, 115n17; and Keats, 14, 94, 96–104, 110, 114n8, 116n26; and nervousness, 94–5, 102; and Shairp, 99, 116n24; and P. B. Shelley, 97, 115n16; and therapeutic, 94–6; and Victorian mediation of Romantic poetry, 101–3. Works: Among the Millet, and Other Poems, 117n34; “Among the Timothy,” 103–4, 112; “April,” 95–6, 103, 112, 114n8; “The Character and Poetry of Keats,” 99–101, 103; “Gambetta,” 115n16; “German Patriotic Poetry,” 115n16; Lyrics of Earth, 116n26; At the Mermaid Inn, 93, 112–3, 115n16, 118n60; “The Modern School of Poetry in England,” 97, 99, 103, 116n29; “Poetic Interpretation,” 98–9, 114n8; “The Poetry of Byron,” 116n28; “The Revolt of Islam,” 115n16; The Story of an Affinity, 114n8; “Style,” 116n24, 116n29; “Two Canadian Poets: a Lecture,” 113n7; “Winter Hues Recalled,” 114n8; Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 4 Landow, George P., 161n52 Lardner, Dionysis, 50 Laski, Harold J., 139n28 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 95 Leask, Nigel, 35, 42n20 Lefebure, Molly, 246n7 Lefebvre, Henri, 106, 112 LeGros, Joseph, 71, 88n29 Lennox, Charlotte, 174 Leonardi, Susan J., 79 Levinson, Marjorie, 124 Lewis, Reina, 86n1

Index Lindenberger, Herbert, 138n24 Litvak, Joseph, 86n1 Lochhead, Marion, 204n17 Lockhart, John Gibson: and the “Cockney School” essays, 16, 193; and S. C. Coleridge, 189–90, 192–3, 197–200, 203, 204n17; and Croker, 192–3; and Keats, 190, 192–4, 201; and W. Scott, 49, 224–5; and Tennyson, 197–9 Logan, Peter Melville, 9, 29, 41n9, 42n20, 142, 158n3, 168, 170, 235, 249n19 Lootens, Tricia, 250n28 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 2 Lukacher, Ned, 30

MacKay, Charles, 11 Magnuson, Paul, 227n18 Malibran, Maria (Garcia), 80–1 Maniquis, Robert, 43n25 Marshall, David, 249n19 Marshall, Florence: in Dictionary of National Biography, 51–2, 54; and Garnett, 52–5; Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 12, 47, 49–61; and J. Marshall, 51–2; and her musical career, 51–2; and Lady Shelley, 51–4 Marshall, John, 114n8 Marshall, Julian, 51–2 Martineau, Harriet, 143 Masson, David, 24, 44n28 Matthews, G. M., 194 Maudsley, Henry, 164–5, 172, 180–1, 183n6 Maurice, F. D., 125, 132, 138n17, 139n34 McGann, Jerome, 9, 41n9, 124, 137n15, 138n24, 183n5, 225n1 McLeod, Les, 114n8 Mellor, Anne K., 56, 155, 246n4, 247n12 Metastasio, Pietro, 68, 74 Micale, Mark, 158n3

283

Mill, J.S., 35, 82, 129, 138n17; and Byron, 124–7, 130–4; on literature and the public taste, 12, 15, 123–136; and Maurice, 132, 139n34; and quietism, 135; and sensibility, 133–4, 139n35. Works: Autobiography, 26, 125, 127, 130–1, 133; 1829 speech before the London Debating Society, 130; “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” 123 Millar, John, 249n19 Millico, Giuseppe, 71 Mitchell, S. Weir, 113 Monckton-Milnes, Richard, 125–6, 138n17, 193–4 Moore, Thomas, 50, 181 Morley, John, 143 Morning Chronicle, 176, 209 Morning Post, 207, 209–12 Morris, Pam, 174 Morris, William, 117n36 Mount-Edgcumbe, Lord, 76 Mudge, Bradford Keyes, 190, 200, 203n1, 234 Mullan, John, 249n19 Murray, John, 192, 231

nationalism: emerging concept of, 4, 185n34; and sensibility, 165, 176, 179–81; Victorian constructions of, 165, 176, 180–1 nervousness, 7, 15, 17; changing definition of, 1–2, 7, 15, 17, 23–25, 35, 102, 109, 112, 229–30, 235–8, 240–2, 249n19; and gender, 235–8, 244; and imagination, 17, 230–1, 234–36, 240, 243; and narration, 235; and nervous derangement, 241–2; and opium addiction, 236; and the sensorium, 17, 235, 237, 240–3; and therapy for, 4–7, 10–11, 94–6, 104, 106–7, 109–11, 128, 141–2, 145–6, 152–3, 167, 180–1; see also sensibility; and individual authors

284

Index

neurophysiology, 9–10; see also Brown, Cullen, and Trotter New Monthly Magazine, 8 Nightingale, Florence, 82–3 Noel, Roden, 116n28 Norman, Sylva, 51–3 Norton, Caroline, 82–3

O’Connor, Erin, 142 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 94, 106 O’Neil, Daniel J., 165 opera: and audiences of, 70, 73; and castrati, 69–70; and castrati and prima donna, 77–8, 82; and Eliot’s Armgart, 67–86; and innovations in, 68–9; and the prima donna, 75–6; and sexuality, 76, 79, 82; see also Beethoven, Calzabigi, and Gluck opium addiction, 237; and S. T. Coleridge, 230, 234, 242–3, 245n2, 250n23; and S. C. Coleridge, 230, 242–3, 248n16, 249n20, 250n26; and De Quincey, 27–31, 42n20, 245n2; and Trotter, 242, 249n20, 250n26 Otten, Terry, 83 Owenson, Sydney, 175 Oxley, J. Macdonald, 95, 113

Pacey, Desmond, 107 Paine, Thomas, 221 Palmer, D. J., 136n7 Parkes, Bessie, 82 Pasta, Giuditta, 76–7 Paul, Charles Kegan, 63n19 Peacock, Thomas Love, 5, 49, 57 Phillips, Samuel, 193 Pickering, William, 231, 246n9 Pike, E. Holly, 175 Pitt, William, 213–4, 217–8, 222 Playter, Edward, 113 Plotz, John, 142 Poovey, Mary, 48, 56, 90n63 Pope, Rebecca A., 79

Porter, Roy, 237, 249n19 Power-Cobbe, Frances, 82–3 Pre-Raphaelites, 101, 117n36 Priestly, Joseph, 82

Quarterly Review: 16, and anonymity, 193, 201–3; and S. C. Coleridge, 16, 189, 192, 201; and Croker, 192–3; and Keats, 16, 190–4; and Lockhart, 16, 190, 192–3, 197–8, 203; and Tennyson, 16, 192–3, 197–8 Quillinan, Edward, 202, 206n53

Rajan, Tilottama, 20n36 Redding, Cyrus, 191 Richardson, Alan, 238, 250n23 Rigby (Lady Eastlake), 201–3 Rigoletto, 76 Roberts, Charles G. D., 104–5, 107–10, 112–3, 117n36, 118n57, 118n60; and Canadian national identity, 108; and Carman, 108; and P.B. Shelley, 107, 109; and therapeutic, 108; Works: “Ave (An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892),” 104–5, 107–9, 112; “Canadian Poetry in Its Relation to the Poetry of England and America,” 104; The Kindred of the Wild, 109; Shelley’s Alastor and Adonais, 109; “Tantramar Revisited,” 108; “Wordsworth’s Poetry,” 109 Roberts, Marie Mulvey, 247n12 Robespierre, Maximilien, 213–4 Robinson, Jeffrey C., 205n22 Robinson, Paul, 80 Robson, John M., 138n18, 139n28 Roebuck, John, 127, 131–2 Rogers, Pat, 76 Romanticism, definitions and canons of, 2–3, 8–11, 15, 25, 36–7, 124, 126, 134–5, 143–4, 147–8, 164–5, 182n3

Index Ross, Marlon, 235, 247n12 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 19n23, 117n36 Rousseau, George, 249n19 Ruddick, William, 134 Ruskin, John, 6 Russett, Margaret, 24 Ruwe, Donelle, 16–7, 20n37, 183n13, 197 Rzepka, Charles, 42n20

Sackville-West, Edward, 41n5 Said, Edward, 80 Sanders, Charles Richard, 136n6 Schenkendorf, Max Von, 97 Schröeder-Devrient, Wilhelmina, 80–1, 90n56 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 104–5, 110–3, 117n34; Works: At the Mermaid Inn, 104, 112–3; “Ode for the Keats Centenary/February 23, 1921,” 104–5, 109–12; “Poetry and Progress,” 110–1 Scott, Frederick George, 112 Scott, Walter, 133, 146, 163, 173, 182n1, 224–5 Scott-Kilvert, Diana, 57 Scudder, Horace, 100–1 Sensibility, concepts of, 19n28, 169, 225n1; and authenticity, 133–4, 167, 169–70, 177; excessive, 2, 9–12, 14, 25, 37–9, 73, 108, 143–4, 171, 181, 209–10, 216–17, 219, 227n9; and the feeling subject, 4, 11, 130, 164; in literature, 1–2, 9, 99, 170–1, 182; and medicine, 9–10, 20n30, 143–4, 158n3, 164, 166–71, 179–80; and nationalism, 164–5, 176, 179; in opera, 69–70, 72; in philosophy, 1–2, 4, 9–10, 20n33, 164, 169, 171; and reading audiences, 123–5, 130, 133–6, 223; and reason, 6, 29, 73; and sentimentalism, 8, 143, 167, 174–5, 177, 181; and women writers, 200–3; see also neurophysiology;

285

nervousness; therapeutic; and individual authors Seymour, Miranda, 64n32 Shairp, John Campbell, 99, 102, 115n17, 116n24 Shakespeare, William, 9 Shannon, Edgar Finley, Jr., 204n15 Sharpless, F. Parvin, 135 Shattock, Joanne, 193 Shaw, Sir Charles, 131 Shelley, Harriet, 49, 51, 57 Shelley, Lady Jane, 48–9, 51–4, 57–8, 61n4, 62n8, 62n16 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 11–3, 16, 47–61; and her biographywriting, 49–51; and Dowden, 52–3; and her editing, 13, 50; and gender, 47–9, 54–5, 59–60; and Gilfillan’s biography of, 48–9; and her journals, 57; in F. Marshall’s Life and Letters, 12, 47, 49–61; and Trelawny, 49–50, 57–8, 63n28; and Wollstonecraft, 56, 59–60; Works: entries in Cabinet Cyclopaedia, 50, 59; Falkner, 59; Frankenstein, 3, 48, 54–6, 59–60; The Last Man, 54; Lodore, 55–6, 59; Mathilda, 4; Perkin Warbeck, 55; Rambles in Germany and Italy, 59; Valperga, 55 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1–2, 9–10, 12, 23, 51, 110, 144, 182, 184n31; and Browning, 164–5, 180; and Carman, 105–7; and Dowden, 52–3; and Keats, 190–1, 195; and Lampman, 97, 115n16, 116n28; and Roberts, 104–5, 107–9; and Relics of Shelley, 13, 48, 52; and Shelley Memorials, 13, 48, 52, 57. Works: Adonais, 107, 109, 190–1; Shelley, Percy Bysshe (continued), Alastor, 106; “A Defence of Poetry,” 5, 10, 37, 136n2, 171; “Ode to the West Wind,” 106; “Ozymandias,” 7; “To a Sky-Lark,” 106, 196 Shelley, Sir Percy, 48–9, 51, 57–8

286

Index

Showalter, Elaine, 249n19 Shuttleworth, Sally, 165, 249n19 Siskin, Clifford, 26 Smith, Adam, 1–2, 10, 20n33, 169, 171, 249n19 Sonnleithner, Joseph, 80 Sontag, Susan, 152 Southey, Robert, 9, 216, 223, 227n10, 246n7; and Byron, 227n10; and S. T. Coleridge, 210–12, 215–6, 227n8; and Warter, 224–5. Spengemann, William C., 2–3 Spenser, Edmund, 129, 199 Stafford, Fiona, 58–9 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 101 Sterling Club, 128 Sterling, John, 132, 138n17, 153, 192–3, 204n15 Stoneman, Patsy, 182n5 Sunstein, Emily, 47–8, 54, 57 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 117n36

Townsend, Mrs. Richard, 246n8 Trelawny, Edward John, 49–50, 57–8, 63n28, 64n29 Trotter, Thomas: and neurophysiology, 166, 236–7, 240, 249n19; and opium addiction, 242, 249n20, 250n26; Works: Medicine Nautica, 167; A View of the Nervous Temperament, 17, 163, 167–72, 179–80, 236–8, 240, 249n20 Tuchman, Gaye, 250n28 Tucker, Herbert F., 17n1 Turgenev, Ivan, 84

Taylor, Anya, 250n22 Taylor, Henry, 125, 128, 134, 136n6 Tennyson, Alfred, 1, 137n11, 138n17, 204n16; and S. C. Coleridge, 189–90, 192–3, 197–9; and Croker, 191–3, 203; and Hallam, 5, 195, 198; and Keats, 5, 97, 190–2, 195; and Lampman, 97; and Lockhart, 197–9; and Quarterly Review, 192–3, 197–8; and sensibility, 5; and Sterling, 192–3, 204n15. Works: “Adeline,” 198; Idylls of the King, 26; Maud, 7; In Memoriam, 26; “The Passing of Arthur,” 26–7, 37; Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 5, 191; The Princess, 16, 189, 197–9 Thomas, Ronald R., 42n18, 43n25 Thomson, Edward William, 94–5, 99–100, 102, 113n3, 116n26 Thoreau, Henry David, 117n36 Todd, Janet, 20n33, 171, 225n1 Tosi, Pier Francesco, 69

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 97 Wallen, Martin, 36–7 Wang, Orrin, 43n26 Ward, Thomas Humphrey, 97–9 Ware, Tracy, 110 Warter, John, 224–5 Waters, Mary, 173 Weekes, Henry, 48 West, Benjamin, 185n41 Williams, Jane, 63n18 Williams, Raymond, 135, 160n36 Wilson, John, 245n2 Wolfreys, Julian, 185n38 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 8, 11, 50, 56, 60, 63n19, 82–3, 172–3, 184n26 Woolf, Virginia, Review of Griggs, Coleridge Fille, 234 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 99 Wordsworth, Frank W., 89n41 Wordsworth, William, 11, 29, 35–6, 109, 118n57, 184n31; and Lampman, 98–9, 114n8, 115n16, 116n28; and Mill, 126–7, 130–3,

Vestri, Madame, 76, 89n38 Viardot-Garcia, Pauline, 67, 71–2, 77–8, 84, 88n25, 88n29 Von Herder, Johann Gottfried, 176 Vrettos, Athena, 166, 235

Index 135; and Victorian reception of, 7, 12, 125–7, 130–4, 181–2, 195–6. Works: Laodamia, 200; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 6, 38; prefaces, 136n2; The Prelude, 26 Wright, David, 58 Wright, Julia M., 20n36, 25 Wright, Terence, 168

287

Youngquist, Paul, 9, 18n15, 41n10, 146, 159n10, 245n2 Youth’s Companion, 100 v v

Ziz ek, Slavoj, 212, 218, 226n2