Jon Mee

Romanticism, enthusiasm, and regulation : poetics and the policing of culture in the Romantic period

I. THE DISCOURSE OF ENTHUSIASM Introduction: Situating Enthusiasm 1. Commanding Enthusiasm through the Eighteenth Century 2. Enthusiasm, Liberty, and Benevolence in the 1790s II. THE POETICS OF ENTHUSIASM 3. Coleridge, Prophecy, and Imagination 4. Barbauld, Devotion, and the Woman Prophet 5. Wordsworths chastened enthusiasm 6. Energy and Enthusiasm in Blake Conclusion: Enthusiastic Misreadings

The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790s

On 24 September 1792 George, the Prince of Wales, wrote to Queen Charlotte, his mother, in a state of high anxiety: Beleive [sic] me, my ever dearest mother, if this is not taken up in a very serious manner by Government & prosecuted as a libel upon the King, yourself & the constitution, there will be no end to these atrocious publications, as they are not only intended to be sold but are studiously distributed amongst the common people, as the motives to instigate everyone to adopt the principles of the French Revolution, & those very emissaries who I have already mention’d before as attending all the pot houses they can gain entrance into, distribute these very pamphlets in order to enforce the language they hold.1 His alarm at the circulation of ‘the principles of the French Revolution’ among the lower classes was a widespread one among the ruling elite in 1792, but George had his personal reasons for being disturbed. He was writing out of a particular concern with the distribution of Charles Pigott’s The lackey Club, a pamphlet which was full of maliciou s scandal abo ut the Prince and his circle . Nevertheless, Geo rge was right to see that Pigott’s pamphlet was not simply a scandal sheet.

Dickens and Ways of Seeing the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities

Until recently, Dickens criticism has often operated with an idea of his writing privileging inter-personal relations, especially focused on the family, as a safe haven against the vicissitudes of historical change and the prison-house of society (Bowen and Patten 2006, 7). Such judgements may seem to have a particular purchase in relation to his historical novels, both of which narrate eruptions of mass political action; the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Barnaby Rudge (1841) and the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859). In his classic study of the historical novel, Georg Lukacs argued that these texts take on ‘the character of modern privateness in regard to history’ (1969, 292). The plots The plots of both novels do focus on the survival of a family group despite the turbulence of events around them: in Barnaby Rudge, the family of the locksmith Gabriel Vardon provides a refuge for those who survive; A Tale of Two Cities, of course, famously ends with Sidney Carton’s vision of an afterlife in ‘a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence’ (Dickens 2000, 390).1 Plenty of people who have never read A Tale of Two Cities know the famous lines from its denouement: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known’ (390). They aremostly read as self-sacrifice, as the initially craven Carton places ‘affective’ family values above even his own fate.

‘Mutual Intercourse’ and ‘Licentious Discussion’ in The Microcosm of London

Abstract This paper looks at the gathering of London scenes brought together in Ackermann’s lavishly illustrated The Microcosm of London (1808–1811), focusing on the decision to augment the original architectural designs by Pugin with social groups drawn by Rowlandson. To some extent, these groups look like microcosms of the ‘great community’, as Sir Charles Grandison puts it, constituted of ‘so many miniatures’. Each scene shows a gathering of talkers intent on business or pleasure in relatively ‘public’ spaces. Whether these private companies together constitute a national public remains at issue, the commentary at key points suggesting that the ‘full flow of London talk’, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, might be divisive and centrifugal rather than a cohesive medium for bringing people together. Quite possibly, the collection hints as much at the safety of private and domestic conversation as against the risk of mixed social spaces outside.

Popular radical culture

This chapter approaches the British radical movement in the 1790s as a cultural and not simply a political phenomenon. Inspired by events in France in 1789, many Britons certainly hoped that their country would become a more enlightened nation, even if opinions differed as to what might constitute enlightenment. Across these differences, there persisted an aspiration to participate in a new literary and political culture, especially among many of those who had previously been excluded. Over the previous few decades the spread of print culture, the rise of literacy, and the development of a tessellation of societies, clubs and urban entertainments had produced what might be termed a popular enlightenment across Britain and Ireland. Debating clubs and newspapers habituating those excluded from the franchise to the discussion of political and public matters fed into the official meetings and penumbra of debating clubs and other groups surrounding the London Corresponding Society and its older and more respectable ally the Society for Constitutional Information. Given the focus of this Companion on writing about the French Revolution, my account of radical culture will have an emphasis on print, but on print as part of this larger aspiration to social and political participation represented by the interacting careers of a selection of radical writers and publishers. Circulation was central to the meaning of writing in this context (and key to whether it was prosecuted or not), and printers, booksellers and readers were as important as writers. Without wishing to overlook the importance of the English provinces, not to mention the quite distinctive responses to the French Revolution in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, this chapter concentrates on the formation of a radical culture in London, partly out of the exigencies of space and partly because the capital and its bookshops, newspapers and coffee houses acted as such a magnet for many of those wishing to rewrite the republic of letters.

Bloody Blake: Nation and Circulation

This essay is comprised of three sections. The first is concerned with the discourse of circulation as it operated across a range of contexts in the eighteenth century. The opposition between circulation and blockage was central to ideas of the health of the nation both literally and metaphorically. The circulation of goods was regarded as the lifeblood of the nation. Knowledge was also often understood in the same way. Susan Matthews’s essay in this book indicates that old maids were often figured as a blockage in the healthy circulation of the nation’s sexual energy that reduced its productive capacity as surely as any trade dispute. Circulation through the appropriate ‘formatted space’2 was regularly contrasted with other sorts of exchange that were represented as transgressive in their deviation from legitimate conduits. Trade, for instance, a word whose etymology derives from ‘track,’ described not just the circulation of goods, but also implied their circulation through certain legitimate ‘charter’d’ routes, like the streets in Blake’s ‘London.’ Movement had to flow through prescribed routes like blood through the arterial system. The cardiovascular system provided the key trope for circulation in the period. While the authority of any one particular pattern of circulation rarely remained uncontested, David Trotter is surely right to detect an aversion to ‘contaminating pleasures’3 in eighteenth-century writing on the marketplace.

The Lake School

The group of poets who gathered first in Bristol in 1795 and later in the Lake District introduced new accounts of the relationship of the mind to nature, new definitions of imagination, and new lyric and narrative forms. Their theories of creativity emphasized the individual imagination, but their practice of writing tells another story, one of collaborative writing. This practice originated in imagining a social community that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey called pantisocracy, or government by all. Coleridge and Southey met in June 1794, planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania with a few friends to set up an ideal community based on abandoning private property, and together composed poetry and delivered public lectures to raise money for their emigration. Pantisocracy proved utterly impractical, and Southey withdrew from the plan in the summer of 1795. Their plans for a community of writers with shared property changed to a practice of collaborative writing, dialogic creativity, and joint publication. When Coleridge met William Wordsworth in September 1795, the two began a dialogue in their poems. Their attempts at joint composition were successful only in minor poems, but their best poems were generated in response to others by members of their circle, and were often addressed to them. Their individual poetic voices were generated in a process of poetic statement and counterstatement within a social context that came to be known to the public as the Lake School.