William Galperin

Wordsworth’s Double-Take

“It was, in truth, / An ordinary sight, but…” So writes Wordsworth in one of The Prelude’s more memorable segues that I have deliberately truncated. I have done so because my interest, following the poet’s own intuition, is with the “ordinary… but”—with the ordinary as something more or extra—rather than with the sublime interiority or “visionary dreariness” to which Wordsworth immediately assigns the sight in a characteristic, if possibly erroneous, move. My truncation might well be viewed as a truncation of romanticism itself, which commentators from Coleridge to Paul de Man have variously identified as incorporating a movement of mind from the particular to the universal or, in de Man’s lexicon, from the “earthly and material” to the “mental and celestial” (13). And indeed an otherwise “ordinary sight”—”A Girl who bore a pitcher on her head / And seemed with difficult steps to force her way / Against the blowing wind” (306–8)—ultimately rises in Wordsworth’s description to the level of vision. But equally important is the way the ordinary irrupts here only to evanesce. For the ordinary’s evanescence—in this case, into something personal and aesthetic—is not simply a foregone conclusion that the transitional conjunction (“but”) anticipates and abets; it is an introjection as well in which something at once ordinary and not (again, the “ordinary… but”) is palpably reconfigured, even counterfeited, as a romantic and mnemonic surplus.

The Uses and Abuses of Austen's "Absolute Historical Pictures"

IN 1833, in response to the reissue of Austen’s fictions in Richard Bentley’s series The Standard Novels, the Literary Gazette recommended Austen’s fictions to the “rising generation.” Noting that “one” particular “merit . . . of these delightful works is every hour increasing,” the Gazette continues somewhat ruefully that Austen’s novels are fast “becoming absolute historical pictures.” Were it not for these works, in other words, younger readers “would have no idea of the animation of going down a country dance, or the delights of a tea-table.” The Gazette’s view of history is both quaint and condescending. Implying that Austen’s writings are a repository not just of information but of values that are fast diminishing, the Gazette projects a new readership, whose ignorance of ephemera bespeaks other deficiencies that reading Austen will not remedy so much as underscore. Reading Austen is not simply educative on this view; it is, in its new capacity as popular history, a steady reminder of how far the “rising generation” has already fallen. The Gazette, it turns out, was not very far off base in its assessment. In fact, it is characteristic of the popular pedagogy in which Austen’s fictions were enlisted throughout much of the nineteenth century (and of her fictions’ ability to enshrine an historical moment or heritage) that their most succinct manifestation may be found among a group of readers who, suffice it to say, are as removed from that historical world as one could possibly be. I’m referring, then, to “the Janeites” memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his fictional vignette bearing that same title. 1 To those for whom the term “Janeite” is a shorthand for the amateur (and sometimes professional) enthusiast who knows Austen’s novels (and their cinematic adaptations) seemingly by heart, not to mention the various sequels to works such as Pride and Prejudice that have been essayed over the years, the “Janeite” enthusiasm that Kipling explores may prove something of a puzzle. For unlike the members of the Jane Austen Society, who are nothing if not blessed with a fair measure of cultural capital, the visibly traumatized veterans of the World War I artillery unit, to whom the sobriquet was first applied, would seem to be the last readers—if indeed they are readers at all—in whom Austen might strike a responsive chord. This is most evident perhaps in the Janeites’ mode of speaking, where cockneyisms and colloquialisms abound to a degree that is not only at odds with the otherwise normative discourse that we associate with Austen’s writing, but at odds to a

Afterword: The Picturesque and the Work of Regulation

IT WILL no doubt strike readers of this journal as odd that despite having written extensively on Wordsworth’s poetry and on issues of visibility in romantic literature and culture, it was the novels of Jane Austen that first got me thinking about the picturesque. As any reader of Austen knows, the sense of the picturesque that emerges in her writing is far from clear or settled. For every jab at the picturesque in Austen—and I am thinking chiefly of the satires in both Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility—there is something that qualifies as an endorsement. The most ringing of these endorsements is undoubtedly the view of Pemberley House in Pride and Prejudice, where landscaping practices that accord with picturesque principles are not just pleasing to the eye, specifically to the heroine Elizabeth Bennet, but have the equally important effect of naturalizing, thereby legitimating, the novel’s social hierarchy at whose pinnacle Pemberley’s current occupant stands. The other important endorsement of picturesque aesthetics, with attention, again, to landscaping practices, occurs in Mansfield Park. Here, the seemingly excessive improvements advocated by Henry and Mary Crawford, which the novel’s heroine deplores, are explicitly aligned with innovations in gardening undertaken by Humphry Repton (and before him Lancelot ‘‘Capability’’ Brown), whose works, practically and theoretically, proved the provocation in turn for opposing tracts by Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price that, along with writings of William Gilpin, form the core of picturesque theory. I will in a moment articulate what I take to be the central issues in picturesque discourse, particularly as it bears on the ideological valences of Romantic-period writing and is reflected, accordingly, in the essays that comprise this special issue. In the meantime, it is noteworthy that even when apparently endorsing the picturesque—in for example the Pemberley episode—Austen discloses something both sinister and delimiting that it is the purpose of the picturesque, as it has been the purpose of domestic fictions like Pride and Prejudice, to naturalize and obscure. In fact, one does not have to go much further than the novel’s famous first sentence to discover the picturesque—or a procedure analogous to it—at work. It may be ‘‘universally acknowledged,’’ and by that sanction a truism, that ‘‘a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’’ (1). However this does not obscure the fact that an altogether normative scenario, such as the sentence offers, is simply that. It represents an imposition, where the coercive weight of