Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830

transitions General Etlitor: Julian Wolfreys

Published titles NEW IITSTORICISM AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM

John Brannigan POSTMODERN NARRATIVE THEORY Mark Currie MARXIST LITERARY AND CULTURAL THEORIES Moyra Hask:tt LITERARY FEMINISMS Ruth Robbins DECONSTRUCTION•DERRIDA Julian Wolfreys CHAUCER TO SHAKESPEARE, 1337-1580

SunHee Kim Gertz MIL TON TO POPE, 1650-1720 Kay Gilliland Stevenson BURKE TO BYRON, BARBAULD TO BAILLIE, 1790--1830 Jane Stabler JACQUES LACAN Jean-Michel Rabate BATAILLE Fred Botting and Scott Wilson

Forthcoming titles NATIONAL IDENTITY John Brannigan GENDER Alison Chapman IDEOLOGY James Decker QUEER THEORY Donald E. Hall POSTMODERNISM • POSTMODERNITY Martin McQuillan RACE Brian G. Niro MODERNITY David Punter PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE Nicholas Rand SUBJECTIVITY Ruth Robbins TRANSGRESSION Julian Wolfreys FORMAllST CRTI1CISM AND READER-RESPONSE THEORY

Kenneth Womak and Todd Davis IMAGE TO APOCALYPSE, 1910--1945 Jane Goldman POPE TO WOLLSTONECRAFT, 1713-1786 Moyra Haslett PATER TO FORSTER, 1873-1924 Ruth Robbins ORWELL TO THE PRESENT, 1945-1999 John Brannigan DICKENS TO TROLLOPE, 1837-1884 Julian Wolfreys TERRY EAGLETON David Alderson JUUA KRISTEVA AND LITERARY TIIEORY

Megan Becker-Leckrone HELENE CIXOUS: WRITING AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

Abigail Bray ROLAND BARTIIES Martin McQuillan ALTHUSSER Warren Montag HOMI BHABHA Eleanor Byrne

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transitions

Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, 1790-1830

Jane Stabler

pal grave

* © Jane Stabler 2002

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRA VE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd).

ISBN 978-0-333-69625-5 ISBN 978-1-137-14939-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-14939-8

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Contents

General Editor's Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction X

1. 1790: Reflections of Revolution I • Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (1790) I • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution

in France (1790) 16 • William Blake, The French Revolution and The

Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) 30

2. Romantic Drama 46 • Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays (1798) 49 • Joanna Baillie, De Monfort (1798) 56 • Byron, Manfred (1817) 64 • August von Kotzebue, Lovers' Vows adapted by

Elizabeth Inchbald (1798) 78 • Charles Lamb, Lord Byron and transitions in

audience taste 81 • Transitions in audience expectations: Lamb's and

Byron's attitudes to women and children 87

3. Romantic Poetry 99 • Eigbteenth-rentury theories of transition 99 • Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads

(1798; 1800; 1802; 1805) 104 • William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799;

1804; 1805; 1850) 114 • John Keats 116 • Moving away from the 'Big Six' 121

v

y; Contents

• Anna Barbauld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge: poetic experimentation 123

• Links between technological and imaginative experimentation 133

• Charlotte Smith 135 • Anna Seward 138 • Mary Robinson 141 • John Clare 143 • Percy Bysshe Shelley 146 • Lord Byron: the Romantic poet's challenge to

the reading public 149

4. The Romantic Novel and Non-Fictional Prose 158 • Prose battles in the 'pamphlet wars': Burke, Paine,

Mackintosh, Williams, More and Wollstonecraft 159 • William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794) 174 • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818): links with the

Jacobin novel 180 • Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; or, The Wrongs

of Woman (1798) 182 • Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796) 187 • Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and

Persuasion (1818) 192 • Prose journals, fragments and confessions: Dorothy

Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey 200

5. 1830: Time for Change 211 • Felicia Hemans, Songs of the Affections (1830) 220 • William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1830) 233 • Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather and Letters on

Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) 245 • Byron, Werner (1822 and 1830) 251

Chronology 179(}-1830 265 Glossary of Key Concepts and Contexts 278 Annotated Bibliography of General Books on Romanticism 283 Bibliography 288 Index 310

General Editor's Preface

Transitions: transition-, n. of action. 1. A passing or passage from one condition, action or (rarely) place, to another. 2. Passage in thought, speech, or writing, from one subject to another. 3. a. The passing from one note to another. b. The passing from one key to another, modulation. 4. The passage from an earlier to a later stage of development or formation ... change from an earlier style to a later; a style of intermediate or mixed character . .. the historical passage of language from one well-defmed stage to another.

The aim of Transitions is to explore passages and movements in language, literature and culture from Chauoer to the present day. The series also seeks to examine the ways in which the very idea of transition affects the reader's sense of period so as to address anew questions of literary history and periodisation. The writers in this series unfold the cultural and historical mediations of literature during what are commonly recognized as crucial moments in the development of English literature, addressing, as the OED puts it, the 'historical passage of language from one well-defmed stage to another'.

Recognising the need to contextualise literary study, the authors offer close readings of canonical and now marginalised or over­looked literary texts from all genres, bringing to this study the rigour of historical knowledge and the sophistication of theoreti­cally informed evaluations of writers and movements from the last 700 years. At the same time as each writer, whether Chaucer or Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, Byron, Dickens, George Eliot, Virgi­nia Woolf or Salman Rushdie, is shown to produce his or her texts within a discernible historical, cultural, ideological and philosophi­cal milieu, the text is read from the vantage point of recent theore­tical interests and conoerns. The purpose in bringing theoretical

vii

viii General Editor's Preface

knowledge to the reading of a wide range of works is to demonstrate how the literature is always open to transition, whether in the instant of its production or in succeeding moments of its critical reception.

The series desires to enable the reader to transform her/his own reading and writing transactions by comprehending past develop­ments. Each book in the second tranche of the series offers a pedagogical guide to the poetics and politics of particular eras, as well as to the subsequent critical comprehension of periods and periodisation. As well as transforming the cultural and literary past by interpreting its transition from the perspective of the critical and theoretical present, each study enacts transitional readings of a number of literary texts, all of which are themselves conceivable as having effected transition at the moments of their first appearance. The readings offered in these books seek, through close critical reading, historical contextualisation and theoretical engagement, to demonstrate certain possibilities in reading to the student reader.

It is hoped that the student will fmd this series liberating because the series seeks to move beyond rigid definitions of period. What is important is the sense of passage, of motion. Rather than providing a definitive model of literature's past, Transitions aims to place you in an active dialogue with the writing and culture of other eras, so as to comprehend not only how the present reads the past, but how the past can read the present.

Julian Wolfreys

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Julian Wolfreys for his patience and encour­agement during the writing of this book. Keith Povey gave invaluable assistance at the copy-<:diting stage for which I am most grateful. My friends and colleagues in the English Departments of Dundee and Glasgow Universities have offered support and good cheer: in particular I would like to thank Kasia Boddy, Alison Chapman, Richard Cronin, Jo-Anne George, Gwen Hunter, Peter Kitson, Simon KOvesi, Seamus Perry, David Robb, Andrew Roberts, Jean Spence, Jim Stewart, Nicola Trott, Rob Watt and Keith Williams. My family and my husband's family have shown tireless interest in my research and writing: I thank them for this and many other things. For stimulating conversations about the history of the period I am grateful to Lawrence and Mary James. David Fairer has shared his extensive knowledge generously over many years and his shrewd critical advice, kindly encouragement and editorial expertise have all helped to shape this study. The book is dedicated to Nicholas Roe who taught me how to read Romantic poetry.

I am grateful to the editors of The Charles Lamb Bulletin, The Coleridge Bulletin, The English Review (Philip Allan Updates) and Essays in Criticism (Oxford University Press) for permission to reprint in a revised form articles which first appeared in those journals. I would also like to acknowledge the kind permission granted by JOHN MURRAY to quote from manuscripts in the John Murray Archive.

ix

Introduction

Definitions of the Romantic period have altered considerably over the last few years. Beyond the careers of the 'Big Six' (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats), critics have begun to examine a full range of writers flourishing in the second half of the eighteenth century and the frrst half of the nineteenth. A popular starting date for anthologies and courses remains 1789, the year of the French Revolution and William Blake's Songs of Innocence and The Book of The/. Another popular choice used to be 1798, otherwise known as the 'annus ntirabilis' of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Lately, however, this traditional concept of periodisation has been questioned: Jerome McGann's New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993) begins coverage of the period iu 1785 (perhaps best known as the year of William Cowper's The Task, although McGann chose not to iuclude it iu his anthology). Duncan Wu's Romanticism: An Anthology (1994; 2nd edition 1998b) commences its poetry selection even earlier with Thomas Warton's sonnet 'To the River Lodon' (1777). Wu's anthology of Romantic Women Poets (1997a) includes many poems from the early 1770s, reflecting the precedence of women iu the literature of sensibility, which is one of the many strands making up what we recognise as Romanticism.

This introductory study of the Romantic period is part of a series designed to accompany traditional and newly evolviug undergrad­uate courses. For the sake of clarity dates have to be specified iu the title: 1790 and 1830 are the designated starting and ending points for this book. In the light of the new Romantic scholarship described above, however, this study will discuss earlier Romantic writers whose work will also feature iu the eighteenth-century Tran­sitions volume. Similarly, the arbitrary division of the nineteenth

X

Introduction

century into Romantic and Victorian sections is questioned when we study writers who lived through the cut-off dates of the Great Reform Act (1832) or the start of Queen Victoria's reign (1837). This volume ends with a discussion of one of Tennyson's lyrics from Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and readers are encouraged to con­sider Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning as Romantic wri­ters, while examining the transformation of William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley into 'Victorians'.

Although the dates 1790 and 1830 are arbitrary markers of a period, they make two revealing cross-sections. The year 1790 saw the publication of important work in all three of the genres we shall be considering; it was the year after the French Revolution and the one which opened the last decade of the century, and its works are marked by a remarkable self-consciousness of publication at a sig­nificant moment. With their varied styles the texts selected from 1790 introduce some of the key themes and preoocupations of the period. Above all, we shall see how interest in the idea of change, especially social transformation, feeds plot dynamics, vocabulary and cadence.

One of the aims of this book is to examine the relationship between literary texture and context: our interpretation of Roman­tic poems, novels and plays is enriched if we are aware of the ways in which literary works shape and are shaped by the cultural and political currents of their time. This approach differs from tradi­tional, canonical accounts of Romanticism which used to begin with a list of concepts such as Nature, Imagination, Transcendence and Promethean rebellion, and then avoided all the works which did not include these key ingredients (for example, Jane Austen and the satiric Byron of Beppo, The Vision of Judgement and Don Juan). Each of the following chapters is built around a selection of histori­cally-informed close readings. These case studies will enable readers to explore in detail a number of key works within a wider concep­tual framework. Where necessary, sub-sections and footnotes point the reader to other theoretical perspectives which form useful coun­terpoints to the broadly historicist readings provided in the main body of the text. After sampling the Romantic period by year, three chapters focus on each of the three main genres -drama, poetry and the novel - together with non-fictional prose. A number of repre­sentative works are discussed so as to introduce the reader to key

xii Introduction

formal and conceptual developments in the period. Very brief bio­graphies of the authors are supplied to give readers enough infor­mation to situate each work, and the annotated bibliography at the end of the volume identifies recent specialised criticism for further study. Following on from the main text, the reader will fmd a glossary of key concepts and contexts which recur in discussions of the Romantic period. Like the biographies, these notes are designed to help ftrst-time students of Romanticism to orientate themselves before embarking on more detailed study. In a short introductory study it is impossible to cover all the writers who made up an astonishingly rich and varied period of literary productivity. Throughout I have attempted to interweave discussion of canonical ftgures (who still form the core of most Romantics courses) with the more recently recovered women writers (Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, Elizabeth Inchbald, Felicia Hemans) and less well-known male writers (James Mackintosh, John Clare, William Cobbett, William Macready). This intermingling is designed to complicate traditional deftnitions of Romanticism in what I hope will be a frnitful way. For the same reason this book makes a point of discussing the genres of non-ftctional prose and drama which were marginalised when Romanticism was dominated by the poems of the 'Big Six' plus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. By re-placing the poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats in the publishing orbit in which they ftrst appeared, readers will gain a fresh perspective on an age of transition which is now benefiting from transitions in contemporary scholarship.

The names in the title of the book - like the dates - signal a critical approach to Romanticism which is partly inherited and partly serendipitous discovery. Anna Barbauld and Joanna Baillie have only recently appeared on undergraduate Romantic reading lists, whereas the aesthetics and politics of Burke and the almost legendary presence of Byron have dominated the Romantic scene for generations. The title of the present study, Burke to Byron, Barbauld to Baillie, reflects the different perspectives and different lines of enquiry which now proliferate in Romantic studies and make it one of the most exciting ftelds of research in literary studies. Any students who take the time to visit either the relevant special collections department of their library or the growing number of electronic archives on the Internet are in a position to work on an

Introduction xiii

author or group of authors who might have been lost for the last two centuries. Alternatively, the recovery of cultural material from the same resources has the potential to produce an entirely new perspective on a writers as famous as Lord Byron or Mary Shelley. The most important transitions forwarded by this series will be the results of individual readings and where they lead next.

ForN. H. R