Tim Fulford

Contest for cultural authority : Hazlitt, Coleridge, and the distresses of the Regency

A look at one of the scandals of literary history: William Hazlitts harshly satirical reviews of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Regency press. The author discovers in these a critique of Coleridges conservative response to the post-Waterloo crisis known as the Distresses of the Country.

Mental Travelers: Joseph Banks, Mungo Park, and the Romantic Imagination

We begin with two defining moments, two occasions when romanticism took form. The first, in 1816: Coleridge, at long last, published “Kubla Khan,” the poem he had written nearly twenty years earlier. To introduce it to the public, he told a story about how a new land arose in his imagination. A book of travels in his lap, he took an “anodyne” and promptly fell asleep. Under the influence of Purchas’s prose and Indian opium, he created a virtual world, “in which all the images rose up before him as things” (Coleridge, Poetical Works 1: 296). It was an exotic world, a strange place in which reality and dream, physical and visionary geographies met and blended. Drugs, it seems, had released in Coleridge the ability to imagine the Oriental regions to which Purchas’s travel narrative had been leading him as spaces of the mind. His Xanadu was the final destination of a journey not to China but to the remotest realms of the self. “Kubla Khan,” the poem, was the journal retrieved from the expedition, the travel narrative broken off when the person from Porlock interrupted its transmission from the inmost recess. The second occasion: 1818; a group of Coleridge’s friends and admirers met for dinner. Wordsworth, Lamb, Haydon, and Keats, sitting in one London room, represented the past, present, and future of Romanticism. With them that evening was a quiet young man—a prospective explorer, not of new fields of poetry but of lands that were only tantalizing blanks on the map. Joseph Ritchie was preparing to travel to central Africa—the region brought sensationally to Western eyes in 1799 by the words of Mungo Park. Since then, many had gone to their graves following in Park’s footsteps, fascinated by his tales of deserts, mountains, tribal peoples, and the fabled gold of Timbuktu. The assembled Romantics drank Ritchie’s health, knowing he would most likely never return. And one of them had a particular request: as if reversing the imaginative route outlined in “Kubla Khan,” Keats asked Ritchie to take with him a copy of Endymion. Ritchie agreed, and wrote in December 1818: “Endymion has arrived thus far on his way to the Desart, and when you are sitting over

The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets

The long-established association of Romanticism with youth has resulted in the early poems of the Lake poets being considered the most significant. Tim Fulford challenges the tendency to overlook the later poetry of no longer youthful poets, which has had the result of neglecting the Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey of the 1820s and leaving unexamined the three poets’ rise to popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. He offers a fresh perspective on the Lake poets as professional writers shaping long careers through new work as well as by the republication of their early successes. The theme of lateness, incorporating revision, recollection, age and loss, is examined within contexts including gender, visual art and the commercial book market. Fulford investigates the Lake poets’ later poems for their impact now, while also exploring their historical effects in their own time and counting the costs of their omission from Romanticism.

Editing Robert Southey for the twenty‐first century

Robert Southey is currently a fractured writer – a Romantic fragment. The editorial neglect he suffered from the mid‐nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century means that his writings are in a state of disrepair – so much so that a complete canon of his writings is only now being established. In addition, his elision from canonical accounts of late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century writing has meant that his reputation was (until recently at least) in ruins. This essay will focus on two major new editorial projects – the first ever collected editions of Southey’s poetry and letters. It will also explore their impact both on Southey’s reputation and our understanding of Romantic‐period culture.

Southey's "Christabel"; Coleridge's Thalaba

ABSTRACT In September 1800, while living in Portugal, Robert Southey wrote a verse romance responding to the story of “Christabel.” He composed several hundred lines of poetry about Leoline, a “hell-hag,” a damsel, and her mother the Lady of the Land—intending them for the last book of his Oriental romance Thalaba the Destroyer. They remain little known, although they are preserved in two MS drafts, because Southey dropped them from the poem before publication. The purpose of this article is to make them more easily available to scholars, and to consider what they reveal about Coleridge and Southey as instigators and revisers of each other’s poetry (including their adoption of experimental meters), about the trajectory of Coleridge’s unfinished poem, and about the development of Oriental and gothic romance from its origins in Spenser and Percy. Southey’s Leoline verses were not only one of the first but also one of the best-informed responses to “Christabel”: they were inflected by inside knowledge of Coleridge’s intentions for the poem, and throw light on its second part and on his plans for its completion.

The Volcanic Humphry Davy

By April 1812 Humphry Davy had become the poster boy of the Regency. On the eighth of that month, the Prince Regent personally knighted him, the title sealing the rise of a poor boy from remote Cornwall, a boy who had never attended university, to a gentleman accepted by the London establishment. Davy promptly married a wealthy socialite with many connections among the nobility, completing his personal transformation from rustic Cornishman to metropolitan figure.

The Politicization of Allusion in Early Romanticism: Mary Robinson and the Bristol Poets

The Bristol coterie came into being as young writers, recoiling from the culture of conspicuous consumption and political repression they associated with London, formed themselves into a group united by its common diagnosis of that culture as the expression of a commodifying capitalism. They used allusion both to forge a common language—a dialect—and to satirize that culture obliquely when direct attack became dangerous. They made it their common task to show that its hidden cost was the reduction of value to material possession—a reduction that not only corrupted the consumer but also exploited the producer, who was himself reduced to a commodity. 1 In this respect Britons had become, Coleridge remarked (anticipating Marx), “Fetich worshippers.”2

Allusions of Grandeur: Prophetic Authority and the Romantic City

My last chapter again explores the alienation under the surface of the London Magazine essay as written by a member of the Cockney school who was also a participant in the Lakes coterie. Thomas De Quincey was a disciple of Coleridge and Wordsworth who had lived in Wordsworth’s former cottage in Grasmere. Like Lamb, he produced a distinctive Romanticism by replaying Lake coterie motifs—ruralism, imagination, confession, prophecy—in the context of the Cockney essay, product of a commercial London by which the Lake poets were both fascinated and repelled. In the process, he asked whether Romantic poetry could lyricize the city, when the city destroyed the communal relationships, the coterie languages, on which Romantic poetry depended—when to write from the city was to write from an experience of commodification, isolation, and alienation. His answer to his question was to oppose country to city and poetry to prose, precipitating a lasting polarization, inscribed into the very discourse that he defined—“English literature.”

Romanticism Lite: Talking, Walking, and Name-Dropping in the Cockney Essay

It is “an age of personality,” wrote Coleridge in 1809 (Friend, II, 286–87), discomfited by the appetite of readers for details of the private lives of public figures and literary men. In this chapter, I investigate the role of allusion in fueling this appetite, focusing on the particular uses to which it was put in the new genre that, more than any other, characterized the age—the magazine essay. Shorter, lighter, less demanding than poetry, the essay was also more amusing and popular. In the hands of the coterie who wrote for the London Magazine, it was also informal, colloquial, spontaneous, intimate— celebrating the ordinary pleasures and bemoaning the routine pains of the metropolitan life that the essayists shared with their readers. These authors—disparagingly termed “Cockneys”—voiced with a new focus and zest the middlebrow perspective of London “cits”— shopmen and office workers. No deep learning or classical education was needed to enjoy their prose: although it shared some of the values defined in Wordsworth’s Excursion and Coleridge’s Biographia, readers did not have to grapple with Miltonic inversions or allusions to Schelling: the essay was user friendly.

Positioning The Missionary: Poetic Circles and the Development of Colonial Romance

In this chapter, I investigate the pioneering of a new Romantic genre that, in the hands of Byron and Scott, would become one of the most popular of the era. The colonial romance—the verse narrative that told a story of love and hate between colonizer and colonized in a country undergoing imperial conquest—was a cousin of the Oriental tales that I examined in the second chapter, but was much more clearly related to contemporary power struggles across the globe. Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick (1811), for example, used the eighth-century conflict for control of Spain to allegorize the Peninsular War between Napoleonic France and the allied forces of the Spanish resistance and of Britain. Byron’s The Giaour (1813) set a love story between a Christian and a Muslim in the Greek islands, long the possession of Venice and coveted by the Turks and currently the object of both French and Russian/Ottoman ambition. “The Island” (1823), meanwhile, portrayed the recently discovered Tahiti, setting the love of an island girl and a mutineer from the Bounty against the colonial order imposed by the British navy.