Judith Thompson

The Politics of Collaboration

Given the increasing attention paid in recent years to the subject of literary collaboration, it is odd that so little notice has been taken of the history of the word. For even a brief glance at the OED undercuts surprisingly persistent ideologies of Romantic authorship. Far from disappearing with the rise of the so-called regime of the author as “solitary genius” in the late eighteenth century, as historians of authorship still too frequently assume,1 collaboration actually entered the English vocabulary in the Romantic period. As my epigraphs indicate, the word was first imported from France by Henry Crabb Robinson in 1801 to describe the cooperation between rich and poor, and then anglicized a year later by Jeremy Bentham to talk about the cooperation between the French and English. According to the OED definitions, both men must be counted as collaborators, Bentham as part of the long-term exchange between French and English Enlightenment thought that laid the groundwork for Romanticism, and Robinson as one of the tireless band of chroniclers, cataloguers, and confessors who together produced Romanticism as a “spirit of the age.”

Prospecting: Toward a New Peripatetic

When Thelwall arrived in the Quantocks at the beginning of the year that produced Lyrical Ballads, he was carrying notebooks that he had been keeping during his journey there, that he eagerly shared with his hosts, and that he later revised and published in the Monthly Magazine between 1799 and 1801 under the title “A Pedestrian Excursion through Several Parts of England and Wales during the Summer of 1797.” On this excursion both literal and literary, he consciously returns to the mode of his Peripatetic, recording day by day and in a loosely linked series of picturesque and political sketches, his route from London to the West Country. The published narrative breaks off on the verge of his arrival at Nether Stowey, with an unfulfilled promise “to be continued,” as his unnamed companion (Wimpory, a shoemaker, symbolic of the radical identity left behind in London) departs and a Miltonic Thelwall “pursue[s] his way, with solitary step” (JTPW 3. 55) toward the longed- for cottage and companion that await him there; as a headnote explains, one of the motives that “conspired” to prompt his “eccentric ramble” was “the opportunity of more immediate and intimate communication” with “an invaluable friend” on “the Somersetshire coast … whom as yet he had never seen, but for whom … he had conceived all the affection of a brother” (JTPW 3. 17).

A New School of Poetry

The only known exchange of letters between Thelwall and Wordsworth reveals how closely Lyrical Ballads and Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement are intertwined in their theory and reception as well as their structure, genre, and genesis. As usual, Thelwall’s letter has disappeared; but he had evidently written to Wordsworth from Scotland, where he had traveled from his new home base in Kendal to give elocution lectures in December 1803, immediately after visiting his “new” neighbors in Grasmere and Keswick. Seeking support in his endeavor, he enclosed a copy of the pamphlet he had written soon after his arrival, addressed to Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, whose “sneering” review of Thelwall’s volume of “tradesman’s” poetry in April 1803 had been followed by the sabotage of his Edinburgh lectures. Not long before, Jeffrey had fired the opening salvo in a battle that would define the reception of Lyrical Ballads and the direction of Wordsworth’s subsequent career, when he attacked the “new school of poetry” in his October 1802 review of Southey’s Thalaba. Although the Edinburgh Review does not explicitly connect Thelwall with the Lake School “conspiracy” as the Anti-Jacobin had linked him with “Coleridge and Co.,” beneath their superficial differences the two reviews have much in common; they draw the lines in an influential war over class, language, and feeling in which Thelwall led the charge and took the mortal wound, at once champion and scapegoat for a literary alliance that was tested and torn apart by the “Edinburgh Controversy.”

Poetry and Reform: Reviving the Sonnet

The essay in which Thelwall published his preemptive proem and reply to Wordsworth’s not-yet-published autobiography is only one of several in which he brought his dialogue with Wordsworth into the public eye after the appearance of The Excursion. These essays on “Literature, Arts and Criticism” were first published in a special weekly section of his newspaper The Champion titled “The Renovator,” intended to provide both readers and author a “refreshing and revivifying” release from the more contentious debates of the main pages by focusing only on “articles absolutely abstracted from all politics; recreations that may minister to the amusement and repose of our more strenuous faculties” (Champion July 1, 1820). After Thelwall was once again forced to withdraw from the paper under threat of prosecution (Scrivener Allegories 197–202), the essays and poems were republished in the 1822 Poetical Recreations of the Champion, whose preface asserts that the newspaper was from the first intended to be “a vehicle, at once, of … the legitimate principles of reform, and of critical disquisition upon … polite and elegant Literature” in which “intellectual refinement [would] go hand in hand with political enquiry” (Recreations v). That characteristically Thelwallian dual purpose is evident in the contents themselves, which resemble The Peripatetic in their mix of poetry and prose, politics and sentiment, principles of social and literary reform.

Prologue: Mapping the Circle

Near the coast of Somerset, on the rising ground of the Quantock Hills, stands Alfoxden, now a derelict country-house hotel, once the home of William Wordsworth, during the miracle year that produced Lyrical Ballads. According to the now-famous story of literary origins, it was while wandering the magical moon-dappled hills between Alfoxden and nearby Nether Stowey that the poet, his sister, and their newfound friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge set the terms and mapped the territory of English Romanticism. Their poetical pathways have been retraced and trodden so thoroughly since then, both literally and textually, that one might suppose there is nothing more to discover about The Friendship (Sisman) that did so much to shape our understanding of literary history.1

The Retrospective Glance

It is tempting to wonder whether, among the “master pamphlets of the day” (Prelude 9. 97) that Wordsworth encountered during his residence in London in early 1795, he heard or read Thelwall’s lecture “On the Prospective Principle of Virtue.”7 For in this lecture, Thelwall addresses the “inseparable particle” that provided the seed for so much of both men’s subsequent work and character, as they developed in the hidden dialogue whose lineaments this chapter seeks to uncover. Thelwall distin-guishes the “malignant retrospective principle” which broods on the past in lethargy, despondency and “sullen silence,” from the virtuous “retrospective glance” that, as part of the broader prospective principle, looks to the past only to reclaim “useful energies” and turn them toward the present and future happiness of others. For Thelwall, as for Wordsworth in the “Yew Tree” lines, the act of recollection whether public (“the page of history”) or introspective (“the history of the human mind”), is vicious only when it is solitary and self-absorbed; it must never be an end in itself but it can be redemptive if it is progressive, aware of its correspondent obligations from and to the “fellow beings who have a just claim upon our exertions in the promotion of general happiness” (PEJ 91).

The Echoing Wye

For many years, the Lyrical Ballads were interpreted according to accounts of their origins, aims, and principles written sometimes long after their composition, as revolutionary experiments in poetic diction, ballads of rustic life and simple affections, or “cardinal” expressions of natural supernaturalism. Such authorized approaches glossed over elements, circumstances, and even whole poems in the eccentric and experimental collection that did not fit its authors’ stated creeds. As critics have become more skeptical of Romantic ideologies and more interested in the tense political moment of the poems’ origins, greater attention has been paid to ironies, slippages, and subversions of their stated aims, whether conscious or unconscious. This includes their remarkably complex, shifting, multiple voices and personae. Pioneering analyses of the ballads as dramatic monologues (Langbaum) or exercises in Romantic ventriloquism (Bostetter) have been deepened and complicated by Bahktinian theory (Bialostosky, Macovski) and research on Romantic recitation and performativity (Newlyn, Esterhammer). Hand in hand with New Historicism, dialogic approaches to the text as a “arena of co-respondence,” and discourse as the “product of the social interaction of three components:—the speaker (author), the listener (reader) and the one of whom (or of which) they speak (the hero)” (Macovski 23), have laid the groundwork for better understanding of the triumvirate structure of Lyrical Ballads and Thelwall’s correspondence with it.

“And yet again recover’d”: Reclaiming the Recluse

During ten days that shook Romanticism in July 1797, Thelwall, Wordsworth, and Coleridge shared ideas for the best way to change a nation that, in the wake of the “failure of the French Revolution,” had “thrown up all hope for the amelioration of mankind” (CLSTC 1. 527). Out of these discussions issued the intertwined streams of poetry that I have been discussing in this book, chief among them three long philosophical poems that were intended to retrace and renew Thelwall’s Peripatetic sketches of Man, Nature, and Human Life. Of these projects, Coleridge’s The Brook was, characteristically, the shortest-lived; but the other two, equally ambitious and equally incomplete, came much closer to fruition. Not only were substantial parts of Wordsworth’s The Recluse and Thelwall’s The Hope of Albion published but, more importantly, each supplied the governing metaphors and narrative frameworks for its author’s entire career, as he used his own life story as a basis for the redemption of the nation, and conceived his epic as an overarching structure in which his lifelong ideologies and utilities found a home. Wordsworth had written 1300 lines of The Recluse by early March of 1798 (EY 212), and for the rest of his life he would regard most of his work (including The Prelude) as either a component of or a distraction from it, in the rhythm that Johnston summarizes (Recluse xiv).

Poetry and Reform: Resounding the Ode

Critical neglect of the scope, originality, and ambition of Thelwall’s poetic theory and practice, especially after the 1790s, has excluded him from the some of the most exciting reformulations of Romanticism. Nowhere is this loss more grievously felt than in the ode, a genre that according to Duff, “has some claim to be representative of Romanticism” (201) and one to which Thelwall gave priority in his poetic oeuvre.1 Duff uses the ode to summarize the paradox of Romantic genre as a whole: How is it that a form so ostentatiously artificial and self-consciously rhetorical in its defining forms of address and emotion should have become the favorite of writers who “sought to revolutionize British poetry by excluding all rhetorical contrivance and replacing poetic diction with the language of ordinary speech”? (202). To that question the work of Thelwall offers an answer that challenges Duff’s fundamental premises about the revolutionary nature of Romanticism. For as I have already shown, Thelwall is revolutionary, not in his adaptation of ordinary speech to the uses of poetry, but in his active and artful adoption of poetic speech as a political instrument, to help the people of Britain to cultivate and exercise “practical fluency” (PEJ 400). His poetico-elocutionary theory and practice anticipate and complement re-soundings and reformulations of Romanticism by Newlyn, Esterhammer, and Wolfson (among others), foregrounding its performative nature, and returning attention to a sophisticated secondary orality that has been long overshadowed by a critical overemphasis on primary orality and the “real language of men.”