Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease

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Consumption and Literature The Making of the Romantic Disease

Clark Lawlor

Consumption and Literature

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Consumption and Literature The Making of the Romantic Disease

Clark Lawlor

© Clark Lawlor 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–02003–0 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–02003–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction

Part I

1

Renaissance

1 Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition

15

2 The ‘Golden Disease’: Early Modern Religious Consumptions

28

Part II

Enlightenment

3 ‘The genteel, linear, consumptive make’: The Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental

43

4 ‘A consuming malady and a consuming mistress’: Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility

85

Part III 5

Romantic and Victorian

Wasting Poets

111

6 ‘Seeming delicately slim’: Consumed and Consuming Women

153

7 Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy

171

Conclusion: Germ Theory and After

186

Notes

191

Bibliography

217

Index

233

v


Acknowledgements This book has been long in the making and requires more acknowledgements than I can remember, so I begin by apologising to anyone my failing grey matter has inadvertently omitted. The broad area of this project arose in my time at the Thomas Reid Institute at the University of Aberdeen, so first I am grateful to George Rousseau for opening up this field of research (and indeed much of the literarymedical interface). My specific question for this monograph did not materialise until 2001, for which I have an anonymous reader to thank – her or his labours are much appreciated. I am also grateful to my friend and former colleague Akihito Suzuki, who has always been full of inspiring ideas and has brought to bear his historian’s rigour on my flighty literariness. His mentor, the late and greatly lamented Roy Porter, wrote a typically fruitful article on consumption which paved the way for later studies, including my own. Many of the ideas from this book have been presented to the eversupportive academic community in various forms and at various times. I’d like to thank Gert Brieger and the members of the English and Medical History Departments at the Johns Hopkins University, Malcolm Bowie, Andrea Carlino, David Duff, Mary Fissell, Judith Hawley, Allan Ingram, Tom Keymer, Ian Maclean, Sharon Ruston, Anne Vila, Nancy Cho, Lesel Dawson, the members of the North-East Postgraduate Forum in the Long Eighteenth Century, the Romantic Realignments Seminar, University of Oxford, the Travellers and Texts Seminar, University of Oxford and the many participants in diverse conferences run by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Thanks also to the hospitality shown to me by the Senior Common Room at my alma mater, St Anne’s College, Oxford, especially Professor Vincent Gillespie, who kindly kept me fed and watered! In my present institution, my thanks to my friends and colleagues in the English, History and Art History Divisions, especially the ever-supportive Allan Ingram and Alan Harvey (who has endured much and received little thanks!). Scott Burdon has made my life easier in so many ways. This manuscript has been completed with the aid of an AHRB matched funding Research Leave award, various University of Northumbria Small Research Grants, and an Award from the Universities of Scotland Carnegie Trust. vii

viii Acknowledgements

The staff at the following libraries have been generous in their assistance: the British Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Cambridge University Library; the Durham University Libraries; the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians; the Johns Hopkins University Libraries (especially the Institute of the History of Medicine and Christine Ruggere), the National Library of Scotland; the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society; the Newcastle University libraries; the University of Northumbria Library (especially the marvellous Jane Shaw); the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. My gratitude to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave, to an anonymous and insightful reader, and to Ros Normandale for her kind attempts at preventing my mistakes from creeping through into the final version. Without my parents – Jim and Eileen Lawlor – and my parents-in-law – Ginette and Eliot Dayan – I would have never have had the chance to produce this book: their constant support has been invaluable. I dedicate this book to my lovely little boys, Mikey and Max (whose four pneumonias at the age of one during the writing of this book taught me something of the realities of lung disease), and my wonderful wife, Mags Dayan.

Introduction

The beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? – and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious! to depart in the hey-day of the young blood – the heart all passion – the imagination all fire – amid the remembrances of happier days – in the fall of the year – and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves! Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Metzengerstein’1 Writers of romance (whether from ignorance or because it suits the tone of their narrative) exhibit the slow decline of the consumptive, as a state on which the fancy may agreeably repose and in which not much more misery is felt, than is expressed by a blossom, nipped by untimely frosts. Those who only see the sufferers in passing, are misled by the representation. And I have heard many persons thus prepossessed, after closely attending a sick friend, declare their surprise not less than their horror, at the unexpected scenes of varied and protracted misery which they have been condemned to witness. Dr Thomas Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption 2 Consumption has famously been described as the glamorous Romantic disease, an illness that Edgar Allan Poe – speaking through a fictional alter ego – wished all he loved could experience. To the surprise of a modern reader used to thinking of the contagious killer carried by coughs and sneezes, TB (tuberculosis), Poe portrays consumption as the disease of an easy and beautiful death. In the Romantic formulation, 1

2


consumption was aestheticised in a positive manner as a sign of passion, spirituality and genius. The setting of the autumn leaves is ‘gorgeous’ for Poe: autumn was traditionally the time for consumptive death, but also the most visually poetic of seasons. A condition poignantly afflicting the young, consumption took away the brightest and the best of both sexes: fair maidens expired in full bloom, while poetic young men, those Keats and Shelleys who burned brightly and exhausted their vital energy in heroic early death, became martyrs to literature. What on earth – or in heaven – were Poe and the Romantics thinking? Did they have any conception of consumption’s horrific reality? As the well-known doctor Thomas Beddoes complained, consumption had become a literary disease by the late eighteenth century: novelists regularly depicted what Beddoes saw as deceptively easy and beautiful deaths by consumption, so many blossoms ‘nipped by untimely frosts’. Beddoes took on the role of the medical iconoclast, smashing to pieces the artistic myth so that people could be led out of ignorance, a blindness induced by foolish literary representations. Expecting a beautiful and easy death, the inexperienced carer would witness a drama of a different kind: ‘scenes of varied and protracted misery’ that evoked surprise and horror rather than an agreeably poetic swoon. One nineteenth-century novelist provides us with an unusually graphic description of a consumptive death. Look away now if you are squeamish: Her body was bent forward on her knees; the joints of this body so thin, that it was almost deformed, were swelled and red and painful. She laboured and coughed for her breath; each time that she breathed she coughed up blood … But while they were still gazing at her, they saw the colour fade from her cheeks, the smile from her lips. Her face, with wonderful rapidity, became sallow and dusky; her lips and her finger-nails tinged with blue. Her breathing became rapid, and was expelled in sharp and hurried gasps. Long, deep streams of perspiration ran down her face; her features assumed an expression of anxiety, her eye-balls protruded, and her heart throbbed savagely and loudly.3 This is hardly the glorious death represented by a Poe or the majority of nineteenth-century writers: this is not spiritual or dashing or clever. One really would not like to shuffle off one’s mortal coil in such a way. And yet … the fact remains that – as a disease – consumption was strangely suited to the tone of romantic and sentimental novels, poetry and plays. Nor were the perpetrators of such narratives always ignorant

Introduction 3

of consumption’s realities: Poe’s own mother and wife died of consumption. Unique as he was in so many ways, Poe was close to cultural norms in his attitude to consumption. What could lead to such an apparent gulf between representation and reality, well-structured narrative and horrific biological fact? That is this book’s central question: how did such a killer disease come to be the object of glamorous representations in the Romantic period and beyond, and on such a large scale in Britain and America? What was it about this condition that caused it to be so seductive to both a popular and elite readership? There have been many studies of consumption, including excellent cultural histories, but none has entirely addressed the issue of the aesthetics of this disease.4 Susan Sontag’s remarkable Illness as Metaphor has blazed the way for further studies on the metaphorical nature of sickness by describing many of the positive resonances and representations of consumption as the Romantic disease and contrasting it with the stigma attached to Cancer and AIDS in the twentieth century.5 She has shown how these diseases are culturally constructed, how literary and artistic representations are part of the way people experience their own maladies, and how value and meaning is placed on illness. Her brief but brilliant book does not tell the whole story though: Sontag’s description of consumption tends to flatten out its varied narratives into one homogenous entity stretching from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth century of Thomas Mann’s sanatorium novel The Magic Mountain (1924). This study aims to historicise Sontag’s work more fully, explaining both how consumption arrived at the point where Beddoes could complain about its status as the glamorous disease in 1800, and how its mythology developed further in the nineteenth century. In seeking to comprehend the gulf between a murderous disease and its paradoxically glamorous – or at least positive – cultural representations, we need to make use of recent developments in the study of health and illness. ‘Narrative’ has become a buzzword covering a multitude of perspectives in the theory and, more recently, practice of medicine, not to mention in the fields of literary and cultural studies. To cut a long and reasonably well-documented story short, recent writers on matters medical – such as Arthur Frank, Byron Good, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter, Arthur Kleinmann and David Morris – have followed the lead of linguistic philosophy and shown that our experience of health and illness alike is constructed through signs, primarily language.6 We develop stories, patterns of expectation, plots and sequences of images and metaphors, which form our perceptions of disease, pain, the importance of suffering and so on.

4


In this book my use of the word ‘narrative’ is a tool to demonstrate how mythologies of illness arise partly because humans must explain disease through patterns of language: we have no choice in the matter. Susan Sontag has famously argued against the linkage of metaphor and illness but, according to our present understanding of illness, we have only language, only signs and metaphors. It has been possible for consumption to become a powerful set of cultural narratives – more or less positive – precisely because the narratives we must generate about any perceived object are able to transcend or transform the physical world: even that of our own bodies. Put simply: people’s need to explain, contain and even manipulate illness results in evolving discourses that may eventually detach themselves from what might be termed biomedical reality. What constitutes ‘reality’ for the patient is another matter. So – this is easy – we can happily settle into a postmodern linguistic relativism. Or can we? According the extreme version of the linguistic turn, the body vanishes in a puff of post-structuralism; the advance of biomedicine, which has eradicated illnesses like smallpox and found a cure for consumption itself, lies forgotten in a Derridean abyss. Having bashed the linguistically insensitive doctors, we can put the world to rights by making them read poetry and retrain in aromatherapy. Of course, if one is more sceptical about complete postmodern relativism, one might wonder about whether ‘alternative/complementary’ therapies can effectively remove one’s cataract, or whether a suitably poetic surgeon might still be incompetent in her or his day-job. In his Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, David Morris brings a heartening degree of common sense to the debate. Encouraged by feminist critics, who have been worried about denying the specific biological facts of maternity (for example), Morris reminds us of the existence of such things as bacteria, viruses and disease entities – many, if not most of which, are explicable through medical science, a discipline that has made astounding progress in the last four hundred years. His mediation between the biomedical and cultural perspectives on disease calls for recognition that we are biologically grounded in bodies with certain inescapable material processes and that we express such biology through language and narrative. Representation, or story-telling, is not an added extra to our experience of health and illness, but fundamental. The importance of Morris’s point for this study is that we need to acknowledge, not merely that consumption has been constructed or fabulated in some kind of mythical language, but that consumption has certain biological patterns that impose themselves on, and give rise to, cultural meanings of the disease. As it happens, consumption has

Introduction 5

symptoms – we might say genres or given plots of physical events – which came to be constructed through various discourses as beneficial to the recipient of the illness. Hence, this study uses that body of work (no pun intended) on medicine which has followed the importance of narrative in the famous ‘linguistic turn’ taken by postmodernism and post-structuralism but, because consumption is a real disease phenomenon, forces a recognition that complete relativism is a throwing out of the biomedical baby with the cultural bathwater. Now is a good point to meet consumption itself, a disease which, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, killed as many as one in four people in Western Europe and America.7 Actually, defining consumption is not so easy, because until the nineteenth century there were only consumptions in the plural – a range of wasting conditions under the one name. It was only with the rise of bacteriology that consumption’s modern definition of pulmonary tuberculosis came into being. Nevertheless, here is what happens: pulmonary tuberculosis, formerly known as consumption of the lungs, phthisis pulmonalis, tabes or ‘decline’, is caused by the tubercle bacillus, a bacterium discovered by Robert Koch in 1882. An infectious germ, it is usually airborne and tends to attack immunosuppressed people; it can affect other parts of the body, but the lungs are most vulnerable because the germ can be inhaled easily. It may remain dormant within the body or it may be activated by various stresses on the body. If activated, it produces a tubercle or lesion consisting of a dry, shapeless material. This deterioration of the lung tissue can end in death if untreated or if the body’s defences are too weak. Consumption can be rapid (‘galloping’) or, more usually, chronic, with very mild symptoms at first, such as a persistent cough, weight loss, pallor, night sweats and loss of appetite. Therefore diagnosis before the twentieth century was difficult in the early stages. As the disease progresses, the patient becomes emaciated and even skeletal, with the lips drawn back to reveal teeth; eye sockets are hollowed and bones stick out from the flesh. The ‘hectic fever’ worsens, characteristically strongest towards the evening, giving the patient’s skin a vivid ‘hectic flush’ which strongly contrasts with the otherwise whitened and drained appearance. Blue veins are often apparent under the seemingly transparent skin. Coughing too increases as the lungs disintegrate: the patient may expectorate blood and other matter, often with a fetid smell. Although the patient remains compos mentis until the end, the death can be extremely unpleasant, with patients becoming more and more short of breath, increasingly unable to control their coughing and expectoration, unable to gain a moment’s peace.8

6


This is the ‘narrative’ of the disease in biological terms. In a way, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. But, like literary narratives, the form of these parts can vary, especially the dénouement: consumptive death could be like the horrendous one described at the start of this chapter – all choking, coughing and eye ball-bulging horror. Or, it could be as Poe described – a beautiful decline with barely a hint of pain or distress, like golden leaves falling from the trees. It is hard to believe this last version of events, but the evidence in both literary and historical form is compelling: apparently people did die beautiful and easy deaths, however rare these examples might be. Evidently they were common enough to allow the popular construction of one type of story about consumption, one template on which people could shape their experience of the disease. Without this biological narrative, or narrative alternative, consumption would not have been an appropriate disease for the kinds of mythology and discourses that rose around it. A range of physical symptoms and events were necessary for consumption both to fit – and indeed to generate – the cultural roles it assumed in the Romantic period and before. In other words, semiotics alone cannot explain consumption: biology is also required. One trans-cultural example of the importance of symptomatology is the use of consumption as a beautiful, refined and refining disease in the famous Chinese eighteenth-century novel A Dream in the Red Mansion. Patently, Chinese readers were prepared to see the favourable wasting symptoms of consumption affect their heroine Lin Daiyu in a similar way to the readers of the Western Clarissa, whose eponymous heroine also dies of a spiritualising consumption (as I will be arguing later).9 On the other hand, biology (as any medic will confirm) is not a monolithic, reliable entity: even the tubercle bacillus itself has been subject to an evolution in which drug-resistant strains have developed during our own time.10 Consumptions may or may not have been fatal, chronic, painful or attended by all the expected symptoms: illness narratives varied, to some extent, with every individual, even if broad patterns or genres might be obvious. This book will attempt to chart some of those patterns – in literature and in life – even as it attends to the specificity of individual experiences. A word on definitions. I am not using ‘narrative’ in a technical sense: this is not a treatise on literary-medical narratology. Although I will use both terms, ‘narrative’ rather than ‘representation’ is useful in this context because it suggests illness as an aesthetic object that is in process rather than static, dialogic rather than monologic. Of course, representations, too, can be mobile, but narrative also embraces the idea that illness is a story we tell ourselves. As Byron J. Good has shown, we are all

Introduction 7

authors of our own illness narratives – in the sense that when we convey the story of our illness to other people, we take an amorphous collation of symptoms and physical experiences and transform them into a more or less coherent narrative or set of narratives.11 We, as sufferers, represent illness to ourselves and others by creating a personal aesthetic of disease which we bring into the cultural realm. Especially in chronic illness, we become writers of a narrative, a kind of diary or interpretation of our own body and its interaction with illness and our surroundings, physical and social. At the fundamental level of the sufferer, this means an ongoing, open-ended story which accrues new ‘chapters’ and meanings through each new incident that everyday life brings; every interaction with the body, even as small as a twinge of pain in the arm or a persistent cough, can cause a reinterpretation of the previous illness narrative. We become both writers and readers of our illness narrative, working in the midst of life’s uneven and fragmentary occurrences to make sense continually of disease and its effects on our world. In this way we build up a rich semiotics of illness: each symptom potentially a metaphor, an indication of impending disaster, recovery or merely stasis.12 This study will use a broad range of literary figures including diarists, religious writers, novelists, poets, dramatists, belle-lettristes and so on, some of whom are firmly minor figures, some anonymous. As Alan Bewell has observed, they provide a useful means of accessing cultural mythology on both a macro and micro-level, and further illustrate the ways in which the two intersect and interact.13 Writers are a form of litmus paper for all kinds of cultural discourses. We must be careful, however: although the ‘major’ figures are revealing and influential in the way they construct their own narratives, their often eccentric and individualistic responses can sometimes blind us to broader cultural trends. As well as looking at the likes of John Donne, Keats and the Brontës, it is necessary to read those anonymous poets published in provincial newspapers, diarists such as the law student Dudley Ryder (later a famous judge), and the pseudo-Keatsian poet David Gray. ‘Litmus paper’ is a passive metaphor for the role of literature in making consumption the Romantic disease. I will argue that literary works combined with others (such as visual, religious and medical) to produce cultural templates for consumption, and that writers provided the way for various groups of people to structure their experience of the disease, whether they be religious, poetic, male or female. In examining the construction of these consumption narratives, we will be looking at their multi-authored strands from different perspectives

8


according to the relevant emphasis: some of these writers suffered from consumption and wrote more or less directly about their knowledge; some had intimate friends and family who endured it; others had no immediate contact with it, beyond the broad cultural myths it engendered. Some of the texts produced by these figures are about the experience of dying from consumption; some are elegies for other people more or less known to the author, while some represent consumption and consumptive death as key or merely passing episodes in a novel, play or poem. From these varying degrees of importance we can assess the cultural impact of the disease. A further, but equally important, element in this equation is the medical sphere, popular and elite: as we move through the ‘story’ of consumption we will constantly examine the ‘internal’ theory of medicine, how the doctors understood and treated the disease, and how their writings intersected with the wider culture and their impact on the local world of the patient. Some of the literary figures we examine bridge the divide by being medically trained themselves: Smollett and Keats are obvious examples. These exceptions to the rule are useful, but we will also have recourse to those doctors who were able to cater for a more popular audience than their Latin-writing medical peers: George Cheyne and Thomas Beddoes stand out, as does Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, which spans much of the period we cover here.14 Medicine was by no means impervious to popular myths and perceptions of disease before the twentieth century; nor has it been after that time. Part of our task here is to show how the two interacted in the production of narratives about consumption that led to the Romantic mythology we saw at the beginning of this chapter. Although we have begun this book with Dr Beddoes’ complaint about literary representations, we will find that Beddoes and other doctors participated in many aspects of popular narratives about consumption. Because we need a long historical view to answer our central question, this book is structured chronologically into four periods, although our Victorian material follows on from the Romantic in Part III. It traces the development of various consumption narratives from the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. Part I deals with the Renaissance, consisting of two chapters on the crucial discourses of consumption as the disease of love and the disease of the good and easy death, both of these necessary to explain how consumption gathered meaning and symbolic force in later periods, and indeed showing how consumption already was a significant cultural and literary factor for different social reasons. By the time Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing,

Introduction 9

consumption was figured as the disease of love: Gideon Harvey provides medical evidence, while a range of literary authors demonstrate the strength of consumption’s metaphoric power even in this period. In the seventeenth century, as Chapter 2 shows, the consumptive poet-pastors John Donne and George Herbert were described by Izaac Walton as holy sufferers of consumption as the spiritual disease. The tradition of the ars moriendi contributes to the popularity of consumption: Thomas Browne, Thomas Fuller and Jeremy Taylor contribute to the idea of consumption as an actively desirable condition for the good Christian. Of course, there was resistance in various quarters to the idea of consumption as a preferable illness, and this alternative tradition is charted throughout the book. The second part moves on to the eighteenth century, dividing again into two chapters, but this time structured by the increasingly gendered division of consumption narratives in this period. Despite being thought of as the Romantic disease nowadays, narratives of consumption were both common and powerful in the Enlightenment. Chapter 3 examines – via the bingeing society doctor George Cheyne – the impact of the medicine of the nerves on representations of consumption, including on the influential image of Richardson’s dying Clarissa, who combines a good death and the typically female death of pining for a lost love object in a form of Neo-Platonic ascension from secular to religious love. Consumption becomes the physical disease of sensibility in both literature and medicine, as a number of writers, including Tobias Smollett, Anna Seward, Frances Brooke and Laurence Sterne amply demonstrate. The fourth chapter shows how male consumptions (especially in Richardson and Smollett) reflected responsibilities regarding finance and the need to maintain control over men’s estates and women. Novelist, medical man, and splenetic consumptive Tobias Smollett also gives an insight into the related masculine economies of moral and physical discipline. His conflict with consumptive novelist Laurence Sterne illustrates the increasing link of consumption with Romantic sensibility. Part III describes arrival of consumption as the glamorous disease proper in the Romantic period: as in Part II chapters deal with the gendered narratives of consumption. Masculine consumptive mythology centres around Keats as the primary symbolic figure of the consumptive poet, although this chapter shows that Keats was part of a consumptive, poetic network which preceded his own fame by many years. In this section we are introduced to now-unknown poets such as Michael Bruce, Henry Kirke White and Robert Pollok, as well as the better-known

10 Consumption and Literature

Romantic figures of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Robert Southey (the patron of consumptive poets). Here we find that there was money in disease, even if the hapless author might not live to profit from it. The coincidence of Romantic medical theory, (partly derived from the ‘Brunonian’ school) predicated on notions of nervous excitability, and the rise of the idea of the Romantic poet helped to push consumption to prime position in the hierarchy of alluring diseases. Aspiring lower-class young men might rise to fame via possession of a disease which authenticated one’s poetic credentials. Chapter 6 also shows a close relationship between medical theory and literary narrative: Washington Irving and Thomas Trotter regard lovesick women in a similar light. The consumptive poetesses Mary Tighe (an influence on Keats) and, in America, the notorious Davidson sisters (in cahoots with Poe, Southey and Washington Irving again demonstrate that women could be regarded as Romantic poets, albeit promoted for their biographical glamour rather than poetic ability. Religion continued to be vital to consumption as the disease of the good death, especially with the rise of Evangelical Christianity. As in Chapter 5, we find a surprising amount of consumptive textual dialogue and influence, including an entire genre of poetry about consumption populated by female authors like Mary Mitford, Amelia Opie, Felicia Hemans and many anonymous ones who sought consolation in a predictable poetic pattern. We conclude with an examination of the persistence of the consumption myth in the Victorian period, although here with the twist of gender and race in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final main chapter of the book moves to the Victorian era. Consumption continued its metaphoric power, but in ways suited to the Victorians. Chapter 7 relates how the now-unknown Scottish poet David Gray modelled his life and writing on Keats, even to the extent of finding a patron in Keats’s own biographer, Richard Monckton-Milnes. Gray continues, constructs, and indeed epitomises, the tradition of consumptive dialogue built up by poets in the preceding century. Gray’s sonnet cycle In the Shadows was written while he was dying of the disease himself, and includes other consumptive poets – including Keats – in a statement of generic solidarity. Matthew Arnold’s influential description of Keats and another consumptive poet, Maurice de Guérin, sets the agenda for the Victorian understanding of consumption and poetry, especially in his concerns about the expenditure of vital energy which so resonated with Victorian industrialism and theories of thermodynamics. We conclude with a brief excursus into what happened after Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882; why this spelt the beginning

Introduction 11

of the end for older narratives and genres of consumption; and why this end was so discontinuous. Although some authors, T.S. Eliot among them, now saw tuberculosis as a filthy disease, others – ironically aided by the new bacteriology – persisted in regarding it as a special, creative condition. Even today, as Anthony Thwaite’s recent poem illustrates, the myth persists in literary circles.15 This book explains how.


Part I Renaissance


1 Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition

Benedick – Come, I will have thee, but by this light I take thee for pity. Beatrice – I would not deny you, but by this good day I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing1 Consumption was a disease of love, desire and – regrettably on occasions – death. And not just in the Romantic period. Beatrice’s verbal fencing with Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing illustrates in comic miniature the logic of consumptive love: pining lovers fall into consumptions which can only be cured by possessing the object of their desire; Benedick must have Beatrice to live. If we are to explain how consumption came to be a glamorous disease, how the blood-spitting, coughing and skeletal sufferer could be seen as desirable, we need to delve into the forgotten history of consumption before the nineteenth century, to understand the power of the discourse of consumptive love. Evidently, by Shakespeare’s time, this discourse was a literary cliché and cultural given: for the audience of his day, this comment needed no explanation because the tradition of consumptive love stretched back to classical times; for us, Beatrice’s ‘rescue’ of Benedick hints at a long history that requires some reconstruction. Kittredge’s commentary on the play glosses consumption as ‘wasting away with love-sickness’, one of a number of possible consumptions.2 The early modern period lacked our scientific sense of consumption as pulmonary tuberculosis – a specific disease entity; what it did have was a rich literature, medical and otherwise, defining the relationship between love and consumption. 15


There was not just a metaphoric congruence between the wasting, languishing and diseased lover and the symptoms of consumption, but also a direct connection in medical theory, at least by the late sixteenth century. Poets were influenced by the physicians – and vice versa – in a process of cultural feedback. Illness became an aesthetic object after a long cultural process in which it accrued a variety of meanings (sometimes conflicting), both from the medical writers and the poets, dramatists and prose writers. As the title of this chapter suggests, consumption did not stand alone as a physical condition in this period: it was related to other diseases, like melancholy, which encompassed the realm of the psychological.3 Renaissance physicians and lay people took it for granted that mind and body were interactive; a physical disorder could lead to mental disturbance – and the reverse.4 Here I will be investigating consumption’s place in lovesickness and asking why it was more suited to lovers than other diseases. How did it come to reach the status of a cliché by Shakespeare’s time?

Classical consumptions To understand the consumptions of the Renaissance, it is necessary to know something about their Classical conceptualisation. Although the Ancients were by no means unanimous in their definitions and treatment of consumption – or consumptions as we should properly say – their broad legacy, couched in the theory of the Humours, remained influential even when the age of modern science began in the seventeenth century (approximately). Put simply, a consumption of the lungs (phthisis, tabes) could occur if a flux of catarrh went from the head to lungs and displaced various humours, which themselves caused damage to the lung tissue by virtue of their now-corrosive state, and further caused the person to cough up the purulent matter thus generated.5 Particularly relevant to the later definition of the illness as one of beauty and genius was the longevity of assertions – not always philosophically congruent – by diverse (and often quarrelling) medical writers such as Hippocrates and his school, Galen, and Aretaeus. A Classical mish-mash of myths (or truths) about consumption filtered unevenly through to later periods. Aretaeus was a sharp observer of disease, and bequeathed a famous and influential description of the consumptive type in his On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases. The typical consumptive would be young, slender (and later emaciated), possibly spitting blood, coughing, chronically feverish at night, weak in body, pale, narrow chested and ‘the whole shoulder blades apparent like wings

Consumption and Love Melancholy 17

of birds’. The face was striking too: ‘Nose sharp, slender; cheeks prominent and red; eyes hollow, brilliant and glittering.’6 Death would take a long time to come; Galen defined consumption as one of the lingering diseases, a band which included melancholy.7 Consumption was difficult, if not impossible, to cure, and was at its worst in the autumn. Importantly, despite its inevitability, death could be surprisingly painless, ‘for the lungs are insensible of pain’ (Aretaeus, 310). A further distinctive feature of consumption was the phenomenon of the spes phthisica, or ‘hope of the consumptive’. Patients apparently did not ‘despair of themselves, even although near the last’, presumably, according to Aretaeus, because they felt no pain in the lungs, and therefore no fear either (269). More than that, ‘there is a marvel in connection with these cases, how the strength is greater than the condition of the body, and the buoyancy of spirits surpasses the strength’ (316). Also part of consumption’s symptomatology – at least occasionally – were the soul-refining powers of an ‘ardent fever’ (Causus), in which ‘every sense is pure, the intellect acute, the gnostic powers prophetic’ (272–273). The heat of the fever burnt away the muddying humours in which they were formerly immersed, taking ‘away the mist from their eyes, and with the naked soul become true prophets’. The trade-off for reaching ‘such a degree of refinement in their humours and understanding’ was death: ‘the vital power having been already evaporated into air’ (273). Given these symptoms, it was not surprising that the young, slender, pale yet blushing, brilliant-eyed, acute and prophetic consumptives might be regarded as blessed in their disease. It is also apparent from the scathing comments of Aristides (fl. 160 AD) that there was a popular myth of consumption as a disease for the most ‘comely’, ‘and that they have many admirers … while those who are in excellent health and whose beauty is in high esteem are inferior to them’.8 The fever in consumption was more commonly called ‘hectic’, and continued to be so as far as the twentieth century. Disease in classical medicine was a function of the individual as a totality, not a bacterium or virus exterior to a person. Health depended on the balance of the humours: if they became seriously unbalanced, illness would ensue. Mind and body were intimately linked: one’s dominant humour dictated personality to a great extent. Those prone to consumption – of a consumptive ‘habit’ – would usually be young, slender, pale, narrow-chested, long-necked and have shoulders like birdwings (311–12). Women were especially subject to consumptions because they, like the humoural basis of the disease itself, were more ‘humid and cold’ than men (316, 312). If women’s discharges of blood


went wrong or were suppressed for any reason, consumptions (along with a range of other problems) might also result. Galen, however, thought young men most at risk because of their ‘youthful excesses’.9 Consumption had a vast array of causes, ranging from specific factors such as physical accidents, emotions, diet, climate and situation, lifestyle, hours of waking and sleeping, evacuations, heredity and so on – a combination of these factors might also motivate a consumption. It is essential for the history of the disease to know that consumption overlapped with many other conditions which might flow into, or out of, it: pneumonia, asthma, fevers, empyema, abscesses of the lungs and so on. Like the humours, diseases could flow into each other in a way very different from the modern conception of discrete disease entities. The lungs were an important area of the body, symbolically and physiologically. Galen conceptualised the lungs as the part of the body where food, transformed by the liver into blood with natural spirit, became infused with air or vital spirit (a form of pneuma or life force). Vital spirits would then flow to the brain – which would use it to make animal spirits to enable motion – and the rest of the body. Breath was life, both spiritual and physical. Galen’s ideas appealed to the Christian ages to follow because his vitalistic ideas of an animating life force were easily transformed into a non-pagan concept of the soul. The classical view of consumption persisted, with few changes, into the Renaissance. Even the treatment of consumption was similar: Aretaeus recommended change of air, especially sea journeys, while milk was the magic balm for delicate constitutions (478). Galen too thought the milder air of Egypt or Syria would benefit damaged lungs.10 What did develop, however, was the idea of consumption as a lover’s disease.

Gideon Harvey: medical tropes A later writer – strictly speaking part of the Restoration – confirming the cliché of consumption as a disease of desire was the notorious Gideon Harvey. Physician to Charles II and then ‘Royal Physician of the Tower’ in William and Mary’s reign, he prospered in personal practice, although his contribution to the advance of modern ‘scientific’ knowledge about tuberculosis was minimal and he was often at odds with the College of Physicians. He wrote treatises on a variety of medical subjects, including one on venereal disease, but our interest in him in this context is his condensation in medical writing of some common assumptions about consumption and its relationship both to love and melancholy. These


two discourses were profoundly connected in this period and continued to be so long after. In 1666 Harvey published Morbus Anglicus: or the Anatomy of Consumptions. Containing methods of curing all consumptions, coughs, and spitting of blood … To which are added, some brief discourses of melancholy, madness, and distraction occasioned by love.11 The first part of the title alludes both to the range of possible types of consumption, and to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) – a strong influence on Harvey. ‘Morbus Anglicus’ means ‘Disease of the English’, indicating the prevalence of the different consumptions in England at this time. Consumption in general signifies ‘a wasting of all the parts of the body’, even when the sufferer is being fed regularly (21). A proper consumption has to be chronic, deep-seated and not easy to cure; superficial fevers causing temporary weight loss do not qualify. To Harvey, a true consumption is ‘a devouring of the Fleshy and Spermatic parts of the body, through an immediate slow consumption of the essential mixture, viz. The Radical moisture, and the Innate heat’ (24). Since Hippocrates, life had been thought to rely on the balance of two fundamental qualities: radical (balsamic) moisture and radical heat. Both are called ‘radical’ because they are ‘the root and foundation of all the parts of the body’ (18). Harvey annexes Galen’s definition of a ‘perfect Consumption’ as ‘the dying of a living Creature through dryness’ (28), an idea compatible with Harvey’s own assumption that a consumption results from the corruption of the oily radical moisture, which is then dissipated or dried away. As we will see in more detail later, the medicine of the humours dictates the broader context of the Classical understanding of consumption and continues to do so even as far as the eighteenth century, although by then the New Science displaces the humours with a mechanistic model of the body. Essentially, if the four humours are put out of balance by a myriad of factors, either physical or psychological (including love melancholy), disease results. If foul humours descend to the lungs and cause damage in that delicate and vital part of the body, a general wasting of the whole body can ensue: radical heat and moisture are likely to be affected by humoural disorder. The fundamental and deep wasting of the ‘essential mixture’ characterises the ‘proper’ and ‘true’ consumption. But there are many ways of arriving at this state: ‘Improper or Bastard Consumptions are only slow growing extenuations (or wastings) of the fleshy parts, directly moving to a True and Proper Consumption, by reason of some indisposition of the intern parts, humours, and influent spirits’ (30). These ‘growing’ consumptions are curable, although they do need to be caught in time


if they are not to progress to a true consumption. Growing consumptions fall under numerous headings, including: ‘hypochondriack; scorbutic; amorous; of grief; studious; aposthematick; cancerous; ulcerous; dolorous; aguish; febril; cachectick; verminous; of rickets; pockie; poysonous; bewitch’d; of the back; of the kidneys; of the lungs’ and so on (31). Accidental damage to the lungs by external forces, even lifestyle, could also bring on a consumption. Any of the various causes presented by Harvey could result in a wasting or consuming of the body, the root meaning of the word ‘consumption’. Harvey is careful to delineate the etymology of consumption and its cognates – most of which denote some kind of wasting – such as ‘phthisis’ (Greek), ‘tabes’ (Latin), ‘marasmus’, ‘cachexy’ and ‘atrophy’. Despite attempts at precision, however, one term will often substitute without difficulty for another, as Harvey himself observes (7–13). However, because Hippocrates had defined ‘phthisis’ specifically in relation to wasting from incurable ulcers of the lungs and fever, its Englishlanguage equivalent ‘consumption’ would often be understood in the same way: usually the context would clarify the meaning.12 The confusion, or at least debate, over the word meant that writers of treatises on consumption were constantly attempting to impose their own interpretation on this slippery concept. The particular definition connected to a decay of the lungs became medically firmer in the eighteenth century, although the word popularly retained its general meaning of ‘wasting’ for a long time afterwards. Everard Maynwaring, who published his Treatise of Consumptions a year after Harvey’s, defined consumption as ‘a wasting or wearing away, from consumo to spend, wast, or lessen: but the latine word most commonly us’d by Physicians is Tabes from Tabeo, signifying also to consume or wast’.13 Maynwaring was keen to distinguish the different types of consumption in a more definite medical sense, as was Harvey. In their time and before consumption had a wide variety of causes, both mental and physical, which converged on one basic effect: the wasting of the body. By 1725 Sir Richard Blackmore (he of the bombastic epic and butt of Alexander Pope’s jokes) was to note the popular sense of the word in his Treatise of Consumptions but then specify the medical meaning: ‘nothing but the Ruin and destruction of the Lungs denominates a Consumption, in the strict Sense of the word, in which I here use it’.14 The second part of Harvey’s title connects consumption with some brief discourses of melancholy, madness, and distraction occasioned by love – apparently a non sequitur; however, the inclusion of these psychological conditions is only puzzling from a modern perspective. As we saw in


the list of ‘growing’ consumptions, one could be brought on through disorder of the mind and emotions such as love, lust, or grief. Medics up to the end of the nineteenth century assumed as a matter of fact that somatic problems were often likely to have a psychological origin and vice versa. Control of the emotions was necessary to the well-being of the body – as doctors incessantly preached from the time of the Ancients onwards. Harvey’s ninth chapter, ‘Of an Amorous Consumption’, relates the popular assumption that ‘when Maids do suddenly grow thin-jawed and hollow-eyed, they are certainly in Love’ (39). He gives a medical explanation, couched in extravagant prose, for this phenomenon which translates the violent emotions of love onto the female body: there is such a lingring, frighting, sobbing, and looking after the return of the absent object, the thoughts so fix’d, that they are imployed upon nothing but the past Vision; & the mind all that while so disturbed and perplex’d with hopes, fears, possibilities, and improbabilities, that the heart strikes five hundred sorts of Pulses in an hour; and hunted into such continual palpitations through anxiety (oppression) and distraction, that (as the saying is) fain would break if it could. By means of all which alterations, violent motions, frights, fears, and other passions, the Animal (spirits of the brain) and Vital (of the heart) spirits suffer such losses and dispersions, that we see it’s ordinary for young Wenches to be reduced to faintings, sownings, and extreme weaknesses, to the admiration of their parents, whence such … symptoms should source. (39) The old cliché of female hysteria is reworked here so that it becomes a cause of consumption. Swooning and consumptive maidens are one important facet of the discourse of consumptive love, and continued to be so. Such violence from mind to body gives the appearance of being a peculiarly female attribute, with the obsessed maiden unable to control her emotions. As we shall see shortly, women are also inextricably confined to their wombs. Yet men too are the victims of lovesickness, although cast in a more heroic mould than most women (there were exceptions as we shall see). Men, in the cult of courtly love and the later one of melancholy, were the most obvious sufferers of lovesickness, although their role declined along with those social and literary modes. Despite Harvey’s stress on female hysteria, the bodily mechanism for lovesick consumption is not confined to women and their wombs. Tumults of mind and spirit can oppress the heart of either sex so much that it can be choked in its


pulsation and ‘prevented from transmitting vital blood to the parts, which for want thereof must necessarily wither and dry away’ (44). Consumption is, at the most basic level, a failure of nutrition that results in the drying out of flesh. The chapters on ‘Grief’ and ‘the Studious’ emphasise much the same result: sorrow suppresses the vital spirits through heavy blood and impairs nutrition, whereas toil of mind attracts the spirits, the conveyors of vital force, from their proper duties elsewhere to the brain (60, 62). These growing consumptions become a true consumption when the malaise of the fluid, sanguinary ‘superstructure’ affects the fleshy base or ‘Fundamental Parts’ (18), drying away the vital moisture and exhausting the innate heat. Other factors play their part in the burning consumption induced by love. As Harvey and others since the time of the Ancients had observed, the brisk constitutions of the young – being almost over-supplied with vital heat – were prone to love’s fevered excesses, whereas the withered old folk were doomed (perhaps fortunately) to endure less dramatic conditions.15 Guillaume du Bartas’s influential depiction of the diseases unleashed on Adam after the Fall describes just such an ageist aetiology: To bloody-Flixes, Youth is apt inclining, Continuall-Feuers, Phrenzies, Phthisik-pyning. And feeble Age is seldom-times without Her tedious guests, the Palsie and the Gout.16 Consumptive love-melancholy is a disease of youth, according to medical and popular lore; a condition for those with vital spirits to burn, not those who are past caring. Harvey provides various common – by now clichéd – examples from the Ancients of various individuals, both male and female, falling in love and then suffering from consumption: Galen tells of a young woman who is enraptured by Pylades – an actor she has only seen dancing on the stage. The parents are entirely puzzled by her consumptive languishing until the perspicacious doctor realises that her pulse rate accelerates dramatically every time the name ‘Pylades’ is mentioned (40–1). Another example, which also appears in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and many other works besides, describes the young prince Antiochus rather oedipally falling in love with his mother-in-law Stratonice, but, because the object of his desire is notionally unattainable, he piously restrains his ardent feelings. In the logic of classical medicine repressed emotions will out, so the prince becomes consumptive. When a cunning doctor realises the problem, the king nobly – some


might say unbelievably – offers his wife to his son in an attempt to save him (42). Men are at least as vulnerable to lovesickness as women by this reckoning, yet Harvey does tend to emphasise, based both on medical and religious precepts, the fundamental physical weakness and emotional instability of women. Women are seen by religious and medical authorities to be irrational and bodily, whereas men are more ‘rational’ and therefore more capable of mastering their passions. This is a shift from the precepts of the Middle Ages where men were thought to be more prone to lovesickness because they were ‘hotter, their seed more “itching”, and their desire for intercourse more vehement’. At that time the lovesickness of men symbolised the inversion of masculine values also to be found in the cult of courtly love, with the idolisation of the woman causing the aristocratic man’s passion to rule over his reason – in effect feminising him. By the time of the Renaissance, the principle of feminine disorder was also to be located within women’s urges themselves, although this shift reactivated classical stereotypes to a certain extent.17 Young women who cannot forget their first loves are particularly prone to love madness, Harvey warns: the first impression made on their innocent minds is so forceful that many a maid will pine away for their man despite the best efforts of parents and doctors (46 ff.). As Elaine Showalter has observed, the love melancholy suffered by women was commonly represented as ‘biological and emotional in origin’ in contrast with melancholy men like Hamlet, whose association with this fashionable disease implied mental genius of some kind. Jacques Ferrand’s Erotomania (1640) stated the common view when he asserted that hysteria, or furor uterinus, was closely related to love melancholy. Harvey is writing after the masculine cult of melancholy – very popular in the 1580s – expired, although it had existed as a trope long before that time.18 Michael Macdonald attributes part of melancholy’s popularity to its chameleon-like symptomatology; consumption’s continuing metaphorical significance can also be credited to its own flexibility and complexity, as the following chapters will demonstrate. Harvey’s stress here falls on women rather than men, although his book is still peppered with examples of pining men in the Burtonian style. Morbus Anglicus gives us the medical mechanism of consumptive love, albeit one that operates in a gendered manner. Harvey’s assumption continued well into the next century and the one after: Richard Morton’s Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions was translated into English in 1720 and contained a chapter entitled ‘Of a consumption proceeding from Melancholy, as also from an Hysterical and


Hypochondriacal Affection.’19 Although doctors might squabble about the specific process of transmission, they agreed about the general principles – as Morton’s chapter title makes clear – although ‘melancholy’ began to be displaced by ‘hypochondria’ and ‘hysteria’ in the eighteenth century.20 The link between the medical and the figurative is especially clear in Will Greenwood’s Description of the Passion of Love (1657), in which he gives a list of the traditional symptoms of the lover: extreme emotions, palpitations, burning and freezing, sleeplessness, lack of order in his life, ‘all contemplation and no action’ and so on.21 To summarise, he states dramatically that ‘these are the consuming evils, and evil consumptions that consume him alive’, and goes on to relate an anecdote about poor Mullidor, who becomes so lean that his mother says he looks like ‘a shotten Herring’ (66). This kind of punning also manifested itself on the stage: William D’Avenant’s comedy The Man’s the Master (1669) has Don John observing that ‘there is nothing more Medc’nal against / the Consumption of Love than a Sack-Posset’.22 For Greenwood, as for the comic representation, the lover is consumed in his body and spirit; the pun is more than merely coincidence as it describes the deepest physical and mental realities of the lover’s condition. Images of pining lovers are common in Classical literature, and continue to develop through the medieval context of courtly love and its variants. In the literature of the Renaissance, by far the dominant image is that of the aristocratic male, partly because of the cult of love’s deification of the woman-as-patron and the medical idea that men were more prone to lovesickness than women in this period.23 Most of the literary examples of consumptive love-melancholy from this period are of men, despite the extensive coverage of women in medical writings. Many of the basic symptoms of consumptive lovers remain much the same from Classical to Renaissance literature: Troilus’ jealousy in Troilus and Criseyde gives him the features of the consumptive: ‘So was he lene, and thereto pale and wan.’24 In The Romaunt of the Rose, the physical form suitable for lovers is stated explicitly: a lover must be ‘Under her clothes pale and lene, / For Love leveth colour ne cleernesse; Who loveth trewe hath no fatnesse.’25 True love excludes ‘fatnesse’, and a pale visage is also compulsory – consumption fits the bill nicely here as a proof of genuine suffering in love. This confirmation of emotional authenticity through the wasting body supposedly cuts through the obfuscations of deceitful language to the truth of the matter: the flesh cannot lie even if speech and writing does. Of course other conditions can cause a consumption, as we find in ‘The Parson’s Tale’ when lechery ‘dreyeth … and


wasteth’ the miscreant.26 Even this is a kind of authenticity: the moral deviations of individuals are visited upon them in a physical punishment visible to all, although one needs to know the context of this wasting for the truth to be fully knowable. Robert Tofte was typical of his age in his expression of consumptive love melancholy. Writing in 1598 about the memory of his lovesickness in a lyric sequence, he cited his mistress as the necessary cure: Sick is my soule, my Body languisheth, So as I doubtfull love, scarce drawing breath, Twixt feare and hope in this extremitie. A strange Consumption hath me wasted long, And for a Pearl restorative I long. Tofte gives the usual form to the figure of the languishing poetic lover who wastes away in ‘a strange Consumption’ caused by his mental agitation. Punning upon the name of his mistress Alba – through the purity and whiteness of ‘Pearl’ and a possible medical cure, the Pearl restorative, Tofte makes evident both the problem and solution of the poem. Nor does he allow the cliché – literary and medical – of love’s consuming fire to go unspoken: ‘Thus do I burne, and burning breath my last, /And breathing last, to naught consume away.’27 Tofte’s persona is reduced to nothing by the expiration of his last breath, the vital flame being exhausted by the power of his love. In the early eighteenth century a young law student called Dudley Ryder, later the infamous Sir Dudley responsible for constant repression and prosecution of the (17)’45 rebels, wrote a diary in which he romantically identified with a tradition of consumptive lovers. Ryder had been obsessively attempting to woo a Mrs Marshall with little success and dreamed of a more ideal situation: at dinner I was taken with a fit of uneasiness and deep concern and all my thoughts were directed to Mrs. Marshall. I longed to see her and languished for her. It came into my head that I should pine away for her and grow very ill upon it. Perhaps this might move her pity. She might be willing to rescue me from death by her love. What ravishing joy and comfort would this bring! Methought this would at once revive and recover me.28 Adopting the pose of the consumptive dying lover allowed this young Dissenter to fantasise in an ideal world of romance and courtly love far


removed from his own in the London of 1715. Of course an integral part of the reverie is that the mistress feels such pity for the lover that she is persuaded to love him, at which point the hapless consumptive miraculously recovers because the psychological cause of his physical distress has been removed. Consumption figures as both a position of masculine weakness regarding the object of desire, but also a possible tool to overcome that weakness by gaining sympathy and, once in possession of the woman, become the dominant player. To the modern reader, and possibly to the more experienced contemporary, Ryder’s dreaming is comic, being so far divorced from the urban and unromantic context of early eighteenth-century London; but for him it suggested that a certain glamour and some benefits might be gained from being consumptive. Unfortunately (and perhaps unsurprisingly) the enigmatic Mrs Marshall was not convinced of Dudley’s charms, but the power of consumption as a disease of love evidently persisted into the eighteenth century. This was true for women as well as men, although their position was different from that of the consumptive male. Women, too, would commonly die of consumptive love, at least in representation as Harvey and others show, but they tended to be less vocal about it than men: more the objects of representation than the subjects. In material terms they were less likely to be allowed to write at all, and even when they did they would have to justify the action, rather than being able to take on the pose of melancholic creativity and malcontent. Female deaths from love melancholy continued into the eighteenth century, whereas – with the passing of the fashion for melancholy – those of men tended not to be depicted as much as in the previous centuries. Death from consumption became a convenient plot device as well as content for the new medium of the novel. Penelope Aubin’s works, to take the example of a popular and sensational novelist, are full of references to women languishing in grief and then consumption.29 Even the resilient Moll Flanders is thought by the doctors to suffer from a consumption when she is goes into a ‘High Fever’ from a failure in love and the loss of her desired man. She states that she is ‘so Weak, so Alter’d, so Melancholly’, that the doctors also surmise ‘that my Mind was Oppress’d, that something Troubl’d me, and in short, that I was IN LOVE’.30 Here, Moll happily avoids a terminal case of consumptive love, but others did not, as in the instance of one of Henry Fielding’s minor characters in A Journey from this World to the Next: ‘I found the parents of my darling in the utmost misery at her loss; for she had died, about a week before my arrival, of a consumption, which they imputed to her


pining at my sudden departure.’31 This kind of death is much more perfunctory than the elaborate sufferings of the male poets of an earlier age: the novel was yet to develop its relationship to consumption and especially female consumption in a fuller way, as we shall see in Chapter 3. What was in place by now in all forms of literature was the assumption that consumption is the physical disease of love, a flexible and gendered discourse that was to become important in the formation of the glamorous consumption myth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

2 The ‘Golden Disease’: Early Modern Religious Consumptions

Thought when I was alone about death, finding myself a little oppressed about my lungs. I fancied I might be in a consumption. I was almost pleased with the prospect of it. At least nothing shocking appeared in it and I thought if I was plainly in a dying condition I could with a great deal of calmness and serenity resign up my life. The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–17161 Dudley Ryder, the young and somewhat impressionable law student we met mooning over the inaccessible Mrs Marshall in the previous chapter, introduces the second strand of the literature of consumption in the Renaissance: the religious notion of consumption as the disease for a good or easy death. Ryder is merely confirming a cliché that had developed over a number of centuries and reached a powerful formulation in the seventeenth century. The main aim of this chapter is to reconstruct the reasons for Ryder’s apparently surprising view that dying of a consumption of the lungs might be a positive or ‘almost’ pleasurable experience. How is it that a terminal and often agonising disease can be incorporated into an attractive day-dream?

Ideals and myths Ryder exemplifies the complexity of attitudes to consumption because his notion of the condition was not as entirely positive as previous quotations might lead one to expect. Something of a hypochondriac, he observed on Sunday, 1st April 1716: ‘found my throat pretty sore. Was afraid I had got such a cold as might bring me into a consumption because I had heard of a consumption being got by such a thing’.2 28

Early Modern Religious Consumptions 29

Although the fear of consumption led Ryder to use quack medicines and travel to Islington Spa frequently, he knew that a consumptive death could be beneficial, as the dramatic instance of his visit to a friend on 25th June showed: [William Crisp] is sick in bed of consumption and past hopes of recovery conversed with us. He is very serious and loves to talk of another world and to prepare for it. It is indeed a happy state when a man is got so far into religion and so far above the world as to think of passing out of it without terror and distraction, to be able to be calm and serene under the assured expectation of death and leaving whatever is dear and pleasant to him.3 Crisp seems to be neither mentally nor physically distressed by his condition, but happily fading out of this world and into the next. This affirmative account is explicitly reinforced by Crisp’s mother, who thanks God that her son has been given a chronic disease that allows him time to repent his sins.4 The unifying power of this consumption narrative is evident in the concurrence of Crisp’s closest relative and Ryder in the construction of Crisp’s ‘story’. The diagnosis of consumption was often taken as a death-sentence, and the certainty that this enabled, coupled with consumption’s convenient symptoms, paradoxically reduced anxiety about dying.5 Crisp knows that he will die and therefore can take appropriate spiritual and temporal action. Dudley clearly takes this scene to heart because three months later he echoes the ‘calm and serene’ ideal of consumptive death in the same words, during his pleasurable reverie quoted at the beginning of this section. However, it is more than likely that Ryder had other sources for his attitude to consumption, most obviously another account of the death of a consumptive friend by the physician-author Sir Thomas Browne in his ‘A Letter to a Friend, upon the occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’, published posthumously in 1690.6 Browne’s more extended musings on death by consumption were influential both in this period and later, including the nineteenth century, in both Britain and America.7 The letter, as its title suggests, passes on a description of the death of a close friend, giving an exemplary account of an easy and good death from consumption. Unlike Ryder’s narrative of Crisp’s consumption, Browne is speaking from the position of a physician, a special perspective in consumption narratives because of the extra power over the illness ‘story’ that physicians were supposed to exercise by dint of their technical expertise. Beginning by asserting his own medical authority,


Browne notes that lay persons are often not aware that consumption is fatal, partly because of the fabled spes phthisica or ‘hope of the phthisic’ that, because they feel reasonably well and symptomless, they have hopes of recovery: strange it is, that the common fallacy of consumptive persons, who feel not themselves dying, and therefore still hope to live, should also reach their friends in perfect health and judgement;- that you should be so little acquainted with Plautus’s sick complexion, or that almost an Hippocratical face should not alarm you to higher fears, or rather despair, of his continuation in such an emaciated state, wherein medical predictions fail not, as sometimes in acute diseases, and wherein ‘tis as dangerous to be sentenced by a physician as a judge. (179–80) The message of Browne’s beautifully baroque prose is that non-medical friends can be misled by the patient’s optimism; only the physician acquainted with classical medicine can interpret the true signs of a consumption in its late and fatal stages, although he is powerless to cure it. The doctor can ‘read’ the mysterious language of illness, via other respected medics, in a more expert way than either the patient or friends: he has the key to understanding consumption’s apparently harmless symptoms written on the body. As Browne states here, the physician takes on the role of both prophet and judge: both ultimate arbiters of different types of narrative, both having the final – and often fatal – word. The Greek physician Aretaeus expanded on the origins of the spes phthisica when he wrote that a haemorrhage from the lungs is particularly dangerous, although patients do not despair even when near their end. The insensibility of the lungs to pain appears to me to be the cause of this, for pain is more dreadful than precarious; whereas in the absence of it, even serious illness is unaccompanied by the fear of death and is more dangerous than dreadful.8 This peculiar characteristic of consumption’s lack of pain is clearly a double-edged sword: even as it makes death easier and removes despair, it also blinds the sufferer to the danger he faces, paradoxically both freeing the patient from fear and yet withholding the possibility of action based on the truth of his condition.


Medical realism is soon blended with religious mythology however, when the ‘soft death’ of Browne’s friend is described: his soft departure, which was scarce an expiration; and his end not unlike his beginning … and his departure so like unto sleep, that he scarce needed the civil ceremony of closing his eyes; contrary unto the common way, wherein death draws up, sleep lets fall the eye-lids. With what strifes and pains we came into the world we know not; but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it: yet if it could be made out, that such who have easy nativities have commonly hard deaths, and contrarily; his departure was so easy, that we might justly suspect his birth was of another nature, and that some Juno sat cross-legged at his nativity. (180–81) What a seductive account for a Christian – or even pagan – this must have been: even today we strive to damp the physical and emotional agonies of death with a barrage of drugs and therapies; in Browne’s world there was opium and little else to comfort the frightened but devout individual on the deathbed. It is easy to see why Browne’s soothing tones remained attractive to a huge audience well into the nineteenth century. A consumptive end negates man’s natural terror of death because it is more like going to sleep than having to overcome a final agony. The medieval perspective on Christian death promoted the conquest of pain in order to prove oneself a worthy Christian; by the time of the late Renaissance the increasing number of empirical observations of deathbed scenes and the Puritan emphasis on preparation in life had de-emphasised the importance of the final struggle.9 Browne’s emphasis on a death so ‘soft’ that it is hardly death at all is very attractive to those who have no relish for a ‘hard’ last battle with pain-as-Satan. Even the eyelids deny death’s presence as they conveniently fall rather than remain open; so natural is this process that it does not even require man’s official intervention. Death becomes a gentle transition to Heaven, like that from waking to sleeping – not a frightening and agonising jolt from life into death. The other operative metaphor that rejects and indeed opposes death here is birth, or re-birth into the new spiritual world, with ‘his end not unlike his beginning’. If the original birth is traumatic, this second one is gentle and ‘easy’. It is a lucky person who reaches her or his end in this manner. Browne implies that the easy death has been earned by an exemplary life: ‘in brief, his life and death were such, that I could not blame them who wished the like, and almost to have been himself’ (188). One can aspire to be the


same as Browne’s friend who, in the style of Puritan biography, makes a good end to a worthy, though short, life. Mary Fissell has also noted that, for early modern Protestants, particularly Quakers and Methodists, sickness could be an ‘opportunity for the sufferer to exhibit grace’; illness was God’s doing and therefore ‘in some way beneficial to the sufferer’. His reasons were not to be questioned, merely accepted joyfully and enthusiastically. Indeed, ‘a hallmark of the truly blessed was their early recognition of their final, fatal illness’.10 Consumption’s usually slow development would permit the patient that vital early recognition of death’s approach. A further, more personal motive may have influenced Browne’s opinions on, and representation of, consumption: in early manhood he had been phthisical himself.11 It is therefore understandable that he, occupying the psychological position of patient as well as physician, might wish to construct an ideal scenario for his possibly consumptive demise. The Dissenter Dudley Ryder obviously agreed, as he also fondly imagined himself making a dramatic exit to everlasting glory. Browne was only one of the likely influences on Ryder, however. In his Life Out of Death, A Sermon preached at Chelsey, on The recovery of an honourable Person in 1655, Thomas Fuller, another Protestant divine, offered various ‘Motives to patience in illness’, including the following: Secondly, consider that thy disease is far gentler and painless than what thou hast deserved, what is thy disease, a Consumption? Indeed a certain messenger of death; but know, that of all the Bayliffs, sent to arrest us to the debt of nature, none useth his prisoners with more civility and courtesie then the Consumption, though too often an ill-use is made thereof, for the prisoners to flatter themselves into a possibility of an escape; but what a Consumption hast thou deserved: Correct us O Lord, and yet in thy judgement, not in thy fury, lest we be consumed and brought to nothing. A Consumption of annihilation is our desert.12 Like Browne, Fuller offers consumption as the disease of the easy but certain death: a gift from God for which we should be extremely grateful, considering what we really deserve in our sinful ways. Fuller is teetering on ‘hell-fire and brimstone mode’ here: unlike Browne, his goal is not to reassure the timorous Christian. Punning on the root meaning of consumption, Fuller argues that if God judged us according to our deserts, we would be consumed or destroyed by His righteous wrath. Consumption is Death’s gentlemanly bailiff who arrests us with civility, a refined disease from which a person of honour would wish to die; readers of higher rank would naturally be attracted to such a notion. Fuller adds the caveat that consumption is so ‘soft’ an illness that some people feel they


might cheat death and God’s judgement due to the spes phthisica, mentioned by Browne, in which the sufferer deludes himself that he is not doomed after all. Fuller, in his role as theologian, understandably concentrates on the religious aspects of consumption rather than its symptomatology and medical ramifications. His punning rhetoric quickly transforms the disease into a paradoxical sign of God’s mercy and reasserts the authority of religious discourse over this condition of the body. Unsurprisingly, the idea of consumption as a disease of the easy death was also present in literary representations. Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedie (1611) demonstrates the popular conception of phthisis when the dastardly Sebastian taunts the persecuted Charlemont that ‘the penurie / of a prison is like a soft consumption. T’will humble the pride / o’your mortalitie; and arme your soule in compleate patience / to endure the waight of affliction without feeling it’.13 Like prison, consumption is more a time for reflection than a severe punishment, at least according to our villain. One can compose one’s thoughts and morals conveniently without real suffering. Almost a century later, that proto-Scriblerian Dr Samuel Garth stressed consumption’s ‘soft’ nature in his satirical poem of 1699, The Dispensary: Whilst meagre phthisis gives a silent blow: Her stroaks are sure, but her advances slow. No loud alarms nor fierce assaults are shown. She starves the fortress first, then takes the town.14 Phthisis, a synonym for consumption, is part of a procession of diseases, distinguishing itself by its chronic, inevitably fatal nature and initial lack of obvious symptoms. Garth’s description of phthisis is secular, a manifestation of Augustan thinking cast in terms of a siege metaphor. But Sir Christopher Wyvill’s poem ‘Mors Mea’ (‘My Death’), published half a century earlier in 1647, ponders the matter of how he might die and his preferences for the manner of his going in a religious way. Wyvill was a firmly Protestant Member of Parliament in Richmond, Yorkshire; his ‘Mors Mea’, a relatively short poem, appears in the rare volume Certaine Serious Thoughts which at severall times & upon sundry Occasions have stollen themselves into Verse and now into the Publike View, a title which announces the putatively introspective mode of the book. The poem begins by observing that although death is ultimately certain, the timing and mode – we might say genre – are not: he wonders whether my consumptive breath Shall leisurely-expiring creep to death,


Or some more furious, hasty sicknesse have Commission to snatch me to my grave.15 An almost restful consumption of the lungs certainly sounds like a better option than a ‘furious’ acute malady, and not merely for the reason of enduring pain. Although Wyvill fights shy of asking for a choice of his fate (‘I dare not wish, nor were it fit, to be / A carver for my selfe, my God’ (ll. 13–14)), within a few lines he declares his preference: Yet, if it stand with thy good pleasure, send Not suddaine death, nor sence-bereaved end. And if thou’st honor with white haires my dayes, O teach me how to spend them to thy praise, That when I shall forsake the sons of men, My better part may flye to thee, Amen. (ll. 17–22) Consumption suits Wyvill better because it will not be sudden, like the plague or cholera, nor does it derange the mind, as many conditions causing great pain might. These peculiar characteristics of the disease were important for a Christian because they allowed crucial time to arrange one’s affairs, spiritual and temporal, before death. Ralph Houlbrooke has noted that ‘the countess of Huntingdon (d. 1633) often prayed for death by consumption, believing that God was more likely to speak with its “still soft voice” than in the “whirlwinde of a convulsion” or the fire of a fever’.16 Wyvill and the divines of the seventeenth century lead us backwards to the long-standing tradition of the ars moriendi – the central context both for Ryder’s reveries and Wyvill’s deeper thoughts: these texts about the art of dying in a good Christian manner began at the end of fifteenth century and dwindled in their didactic form at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Classical writers like Plato, Seneca and Cicero provided a pagan precedent for contemplating the manner of one’s going and how to manage it, but the early Church Fathers were not greatly concerned with the death scene and its imminent approach. Indeed, the Bible provides no impetus for the idea of consumption as a holy disease: it is mentioned twice, in the context of the Lord threatening people with a ‘wasting disease’ (schachepheth – translated as ‘consumption’ in the King James and Revised Standard Versions of the Bible (1611, 1901)).17 However, as we will see shortly, consumption was a feature of the ars moriendi texts and indeed the literature surrounding them. The English


tradition is marked by a rift – not always great – between the Catholic tradition and post-Reformation Protestantism.18 Doctrinal differences made their mark, however inconsistently, on images of disease for a number of reasons: Puritans reduced emphasis on the role of the priest, liturgy and sacraments, and loaded a greater weight of moral responsibility onto the shoulders of the dying person. Moreover, the Calvinist idea of election caused the God-fearing to look anxiously for signs of God’s grace in illness and death. For many, consumption was a ‘Golden disease’ (to quote John Bunyan) whose peculiar symptomatology and religious symbolism would guide them more gently through their last hours and show them to be among God’s chosen ones.19 Some of these features we have seen already, but Christians had specific reasons for choosing consumption as a popular disease, as a variety of ars moriendi texts show. It helped to know – with Classical precedent – that consumption could be relatively painless. Pain could make one peevish, alter one’s state of mind or, worse still, transform one into a raving, blasphemous devil who cursed his or her nearest and dearest in the foulest language imaginable. The lengthy duration of the condition was crucial: in the Crafte and Knowledge For to Dye Well (c. 1490), the anonymous writer cited St Gregory’s point that ‘the lenger the synne ys ordyned the lenger sekenes’.20 Better to be punished for one’s sins by sickness – preferably consumptive – on earth than in purgatory or in hell. Desiderius Erasmus’s highly influential Preparatione to Deathe (London, 1538) stated the need to prepare for death before sickness struck because there was so much to arrange in earthly and spiritual terms. Not only should one write a will and order one’s estate, but also – more pressingly – matters spiritual should be ready for God’s judgement. Protestant concerns intensified the interest in being prepared for death: the ‘most important role of the Protestant ars moriendi is the need to awaken the conscience to sin and the consequences of being unprepared’, claims David Atkinson (xxiii). Unfortunately, according to Erasmus, ‘there be many diseases of that sort that they gyve no space of disposynge’ (Atkinson, 48–9). He goes on to imply, by contrast, the popular hope that one will die a slow death, and warns the complacent Christian in no uncertain terms: The formes of death be innumerable, and among them some be horrible, eyther in that they kyll sodeynly, which thing hapneth to some men euen in the feastinge, or in that they haue sharpe and longe tormentes, as is the palsey, and the yschiace, or in they haue an


abhominable syght, as they which choked vp with rough fleum, waxe blacke, or in that they take awaye the vse of the tongue, and the holenes of mynde, as the apoplexis, the phrensy, and certayne feuers, and other peculiar formes … [leading to suicide] … For there be diseases whiche do corrupte the inward weselles of the mynd, whyche persones be commonly called the latyne tongue demoniaci, that is saye, possessed with dyuels. (Atkinson, 49) On this account the trembling Christian had good reason to fear any kind of death: Erasmus plays on the common anxieties that could destroy the fragile, ideal vision of the ars moriendi. Sudden death was clearly bad; even a slow death could be excruciatingly painful – but not consumption luckily. Demonic possession was also a worry, although much less so by the eighteenth century. Losing control of one’s mind was also disastrous as its ‘holeness’ allowed one to fight the good fight in one’s last hours and so prove oneself – spectacularly in all senses of the word – to be a valiant Christian. Death could be a victory, not a defeat. Christopher Wyvill’s mention of a hasty, ‘furious’ death in contrast to a consumptive demise reminds one that the word ‘furious’ also connoted a form of madness at that time: he too feared psychological derangement. Likewise, Jeremy Taylor, the most elegant writer of the ars moriendi and high Anglican divine, noted the obvious in his section ‘Of the practise of the grace of repentance in time of sicknesse’: ‘Men generally do very much dread sudden death, and pray against it passionately, and certainly it hath in it great inconveniences accidentally to mens estates, to the settlement of families, to the culture and trimming of souls. And it robs a man of the blessings which may be consequent to sickness, and to the passive graces, and holy contentions of a Christian, while he descends to his grave without an adversary or tryal.’21 It was also better to be taken ill and die at home surrounded by one’s family and friends; advice and farewells could be given to each individual as part of the dying person’s pious bequest. The death needed to be exemplary so that those left behind might be inspired to live and die well. Elizabeth Heywood transcended the boundaries of her gender by making a lengthy death-speech in 1661 that warned both her father and her husband – well-respected ministers – to resist capitulation to religious persecution. The men excused such boldness on the grounds of spiritual inspiration: the fact that her disease was a consumption might well have helped their judgement.22 According to biblical precedent, physical states reflected mental ones; a composed body – albeit


dying – might speak of God’s favour, especially to those believing in the doctrine of election. A further advantage was consumption’s lack of effect on the surface of the body until the final stages; smallpox, for example, would mark the skin and might imply a theological stigma, at least in popular tradition: that man’s sins are manifested in his flesh was a commonplace and, although the more enlightened might argue against this, there was still the sense that to die of a slowly wasting consumption would be better than scarification by smallpox.23 The damning smallpox of Madame Merteuil in Cholderlos de Laclos’s Liasons Dangereuse later in the eighteenth century is a more recent manifestation of this tradition. Raymond Anselment has described the attempts of seventeenth-century elegy writers to transform the smallpox into a metaphorically desirable condition, turning the smallpox pustules into stars, comets, rose-buds, gems and so on. Anselment finds these transformations to be in bad taste for the most part, at least to modern sensibilities, but this was at least a way of metaphorising an horrifically visual disease into something more acceptable.24 Whether the poetic process of tranforming smallpox into an acceptable condition (‘every spot a Star’) worked or not, it is clear that the literature of consumption had much less difficulty in overcoming the unpleasant aspects of the disease.25 As we already have seen and will see more in later chapters, consumption’s visual characteristics are important for their comparatively mild manifestations, at least up to the skeletal final stages; consumption’s metaphorical force partly derives from the fact that it is in many ways mysteriously internal, hidden beneath the skin rather than on it, as is the case with pustules of smallpox, the buboes of the plague and so on. Hence, as described by Fuller, Browne and Wyvill, consumption becomes a part of the Ars Moriendi or ‘Art of Dying’ tradition which had continued from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation, although Protestants reduced the role of the priest as giver of the last rites and increased that of the family and friends. The removal of purgatory and prayers interceding on behalf of the dead gave the devout Protestant the frighteningly binary options of heaven or hell; the moment of death therefore bore a greater burden than hitherto and engaged much of the time and energy of the Divines.26 In the seventeenth century, men of religious authority felt under more than usual pressure to provide the exemplary figures necessary to bolster Christian resolve in the face of death, especially given the secularising possibilities of the New Science emerging in that period; two such were provided by Izaak Walton in his


Protestant (Anglican High Church) biographies of the poet-priests and friends John Donne and George Herbert, published in the 1670s.27 Both famously died of consumption in the early seventeenth century and helped confirm the idea of consumption as the disease of the good death. Walton takes on the role of a mythographer of consumption who is more or less removed from the reality of the disease and whose aim is to forge a version of their lives that strengthens religious faith of a certain type; his version of Donne and Herbert is not the same as their own perceptions of the disease. The struggle over the meaning of this consumption narrative is complex, with Walton’s appropriation of the stories of Donne and Herbert’s lives displacing their own narratives in the public realm, whether they expressed themselves in prose or poetry. Walton’s hagiography describes how Donne, Catholic turned Anglican, was stricken in August 1630 when he ‘fell into a Fever, which with the help of his constant infirmity (vapours from the spleen) hastened him into so visible a Consumption, that his beholders might say, as St. Paul of himself: He dyes daily’ 28 In Donne’s own case, as narrated by Walton, consumption transforms him into an example of the Christian tenet that one should always live in readiness for death, because his thinning form becomes positively skeletal: a living memento mori. Walton relates the striking and influential episode of Donne’s preaching in the first Friday in Lent: his friends thought he would be too weak to perform as ‘his sickness had left him but so much flesh as did only cover his bones’ (74). But Donne determinedly overcomes the weakness of his body through his ‘strong desires’ and goes on with his religious duty: ‘and, when to the amazement of some of the beholders he appeared in the Pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice: but, mortality by a decayed body and a dying face. And doubtless, many did secretly ask that question in Ezekiel; Do these bones live: or, can that soul organize that tongue, to speak so long time as the sand in that glass will move towards its centre, and measure out in an hour of this dying mans unspent life?’ When he preaches the Text ‘To God the Lord belong the issues from death’, ‘many that then saw his tears, and heard his faint and hollow voice, professing they thought the Text prophetically chosen, and that Dr Donne had preach’t his own Funeral Sermon’ (74–75). As we will see throughout this book, the elements of realism admitted into representations of consumption vary, but this religious tradition of the consumptive body as a medieval or Gothic memento mori, a literal living death’s-head, will persist. Here it also serves as an index of Donne’s spiritual heroism in facing his priestly duties with so weak a body, although a notably clear mind, and as a recipient of divine grace; the pathos generated in the


audience is also beneficial to Walton’s dramatic and exemplary scene. This image of consumption stresses the visual element more than some other versions precisely because it needs Donne to be visibly legible to the witness, particularly in the spectacular context of the sermon in church. Walton explicitly states that the immediate sight of Donne’s body is more significant than the sound of his voice, although when his voice is heard it is like his wasted lungs: ‘hollow’. The congregation must perceive the consumptive to be consumptive if they are to make the imaginative connection with his spiritual heroism in the face of certain death. Walton is also keen to stress Donne’s readiness for death in terms of his temporal affairs: he did prepare to leave the world before life left him; making his Will when no faculty of his soul was damp’d or made defective by pain or sicknes, or he surprized by a sudden apprehension of death: but it was made with a mature deliberation, expressing himself an impartial father by making his childrens portions equal, and a lover of his friends, whom he remembred with Legacies fitly and discreetly chosen and bequeathed. (68) Consumption does not affect Donne’s mind or soul, leaving him at leisure to carry out his responsibilities to friends and family in a calm and orderly manner: the kind of serenity that would inspire Ryder almost a century later. Similarly, the slow-running disease brings Donne to the gates of paradise with great spiritual preparedness: ‘he lay fifteen days earnestly expecting his hourly change; and, in the last hour his last day, as his body melted away and vapoured into spirit, his soul having, I verily believe, some Revelation of the Beatifical Vision, he said, I were miserable if I might not dye’ (81). Donne, according to Walton, is eager to embrace death because he has had a vision of the afterlife, not because his disease is so painful that he would rather die than suffer further. Indeed, the true Christian was supposed to accept suffering, no matter how bad, as God’s will. Donne has earned God’s mercy so, rather than dying in an undignified or unpleasant way, he evaporates or melts into the world of the spirit, the consumptive leanness of his flesh symbolising the transition (‘change’) of the soul-breath (pneuma) from its earthly temple of clay to its true heavenly home.29

Into the Enlightenment Roy Porter has argued that the seventeenth-century emphasis on death as a supreme test of Christian faith centred on a fear of Hell and


ministered over by a priest, declined in the eighteenth. The optimistic philosophies of the early eighteenth century moderated the notion of death as the King of Terrors. An idea of a more gentle and benevolent God gave people a feeling of greater security about a happy afterlife: death could now become a gentle friend and its process a soft transition like going to sleep rather than a struggle with Satan. Also, the more secular concerns of the mechanical and rationalistic philosophy and science of the eighteenth century concentrated more on the bodymachine. As a consequence of both the changing attitude to death and the rise of mechanical medicine, the doctor’s role now became more important: he had to manage the death-bed so that pain and emotional anguish were minimised. Porter points to the heavy use of opiates as an indication of the greater medicalisation of death and stress on pain reduction. As the doctor became more powerful he edged out the priest, although a greater focus also fell on the family.30 The ars moriendi also faded away although, as we will see in the next chapter, literary representations of the consumptive good death were far from over: quite the reverse in the case of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.31 Against Porter’s stress on secularization, religion was still a powerful determinant of the way people lived and died in the Enlightenment; in favour of Porter, his case holds in the sense that the secular shift he describes did occur to some extent and did affect the structure of consumptive illness narratives and representations. These did show a decline in their religious aspects in both medical theory and literary representations, although with some crucial exceptions. As we move forward into the early eighteenth century we find Porter’s model emerging in a complex and discontinuous manner, with a greater concern about the pain of death, in part generated by a greater desire to avoid it. In the context of the previous chapter, it is evident that we need to acknowledge the coexistence of different narratives of consumption: Dudley Ryder was fantasising about consumptive easy religious and romantic deaths. Indeed, to distinguish between secular romantic and religious discourses is in some ways a false dichotomy because of the potential for a notion of neoplatonic progression from real, earthly and secular love to a love of God, most strikingly exemplified by Clarissa Chapter 3. The positive and interrelated traditions we have seen in these two chapters also remained ripe for reactivation or reformulation in later periods.

Part II Enlightenment


3 ‘The Genteel, Linear, Consumptive Make’: The Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental

You must see that I have been consuming from day to day. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, the history of a young lady1 I have always foretold, that these Symptoms [of nervous disease] (especially in tender, delicat, lively young Persons) would terminat in a real sensible Phthisis Pulmonum. George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the disorders of the mind depending on the body 2 By the end of the eighteenth century, consumption is not only the symbolic disease of the lover or a desired condition for the dying Christian, but also the glamorous sign of female beauty. Thomas Beddoes, maverick but fashionable physician and husband of novelist Maria Edgeworth’s sister, complains that the female boarding school ‘has greatly contributed to multiply the genteel, linear, consumptive make, now or lately so much in request’.3 Mothers attempt to make their daughters ‘languid’, lest they ‘not be delicate enough for the present demand’.4 Beddoes accuses fashionable people of making a category mistake: in their efforts to display social superiority through sensibility, people ‘have embraced sickliness instead of delicacy’: ‘do we not hear the diseased perpetually styled delicate?’5 Swimming against the tide of fashion, Beddoes faces the problem of convincing ‘the ghastly beauties of court and city’ that to be robust and in ‘rude’ or vulgar health is not a ‘curse’.6 Hester Thrale – society lady herself and part of Samuel Johnson’s star-studded circle – mentions ‘the strange Stuff advertised in Ladies Memorandum books’ ‘to prevent growing fat, or perhaps to 43


repress appetite’.7 Fat is certainly out of fashion by 1799, while the consumptive look is in. Why? What happened in the eighteenth century – the ‘enlightened’ age – to persuade women of all classes that they should lose their pleasing plumpness (embonpoint) and, in a vogue which is still with us today in a different mode, imitate the ‘linear, consumptive make’? The answer to this question is inevitably complex, and requires a knowledge of shifting medical ideas about the body at this time. At the end of the seventeenth century new modes of medical thinking came into being, notably the partial displacement of the ancient humoural theory by a mechanistic Newtonian model and then, around mid-century, an increasingly dominant physiology of the ‘nerves’. The medicine of ‘nervous sensibility’ made a powerful impact in the social and literary spheres, not only as manifested in the cult of the sentimental – in which the finer feelings of the ‘nervous’ better sort were allowed fashionable indulgence – but also in the wider ‘culture of sensibility’, to use Ben Barker-Benfield’s phrase.8 With these developments came a change in the status of consumption in both medicine and metaphor. Consumption was transformed from a (humoural) disease symbolising grossness and filth to one that embodied the aesthetic and the spiritual – largely through women. In contrast with humoural theory, which had regarded the heart, liver and bowels as more ‘nervous’ and important, eighteenth-century nerve theory substituted the brain and nervous system as dominant entities. For men too consumption became the mark of refinement, but generally of a different sort: consumptive males were to be more creative, intelligent, poetic: the shapers of representations; women became those beautiful images. Consumption itself had been metaphorically purified as the ideal physical disease of sensibility.

Medical perspectives Medical discourse was by no means separate from popular myths about consumption: the narratives of the doctors were likely to reinforce those myths even as they stated such assumptions in a medical language so technical that the lay person could not easily understand what was being said. Popular medical texts were another matter, aimed as they were at a less literary and Latinate readership.9 Even before Dr George Cheyne’s identification of consumption with interesting nervousness, consumption was beginning to be perceived by doctors as marking individuals of both sexes with some kind of special talent, particular beauty

Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental 45

or enhanced status. In his Treatise on a consumption of the lungs (1726), Edward Barry, or ‘the learned Dr B—’ as Smollett called him, who had studied under the famous Boerhaave – probably the most influential physician in the first half of the century – in Leyden and become Professor of Physic at the University of Dublin, was, on the one hand, happy to define the body as an hydraulic machine made up of solids and fluids. Barry rehearsed Boerhaave’s views on the condition, views which largely explained the traditional, classical symptoms of consumption from the perspective of Newtonian mechanics: free circulation of the fluids through the solids meant health, whereas an obstruction of some sort could cause putrefaction and disease.10 Thus ‘that Consumption, which is called Phthisis, can only proceed from a Collection of purulent Matter; from whence it is perpetually by the Absorbent Vessels received into the Mass of Blood, wasting the Solids, and corrupting the Fluids. In whatever part of the Body, either from an Ulcer, or Abscess, there is a sufficient Quantity of such Pus collected, a true Phthisis will thence ensue’ (69). Baron Gerhard Van Swieten had published his widely read Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms concerning the knowledge and cure of Diseases in 1776, in which the same hydraulic rationale was expressed.11 Van Swieten defined consumption – Phthisis Pulmonalis – as ‘A slow wasting of the whole body’ caused by an ulcerous imbalance of humours in the lungs (1). Despite using the concept of the mechanical body, Barry and Van Swieten’s distillation of Boerhaave had an essential image of a consumption of the lungs which differs little from the humoural model of putrid decay. Not a promising basis for a positive representation of the disease, one might think, but in other parts of his Treatise Barry displays different tendencies. At one point he is careful to stress that people in the British Isles, ‘particularly the better sort’, are more liable to ‘an Haemoptoe [a burst blood vessel], and thence a Phthisis, from their exorbitant use of an Animal Diet high Sauces, and Spiritous liquors; their Solids being naturally tender, and easily destroyed by the Acrimony and Velocity of the Fluids’ (211). Here, economic over-consumption is responsible for the medical variety, as the body is unable to digest adequately such new-fangled and sophisticated products, creating a type of blood quality and flow that corrupts the solids – whose job it is to variously direct, retain, alter and separate the fluids. Meat and liquor in particular agitate, accelerate and heat the blood, increasing its corrosive or ‘acrimonious’ properties. The best way to combat these is through a light, vegetarian and milky diet which ‘cools’ the blood back down to a safe state (188, 209). Because young people are considered to have particularly vigorous


systems, those between 18 and 35 are most at risk from a consumption caused by a burst blood vessel or haemoptoe (178).12 Although the disease is not desirable here, it does serve as a rough index of a nation’s and an individual’s wealth. Britain is prosperous, therefore consumption is common: the middle and upper classes are the richest people in the nation, so they are more likely to be smitten with this disease of indulgence. Barry does not make as much of this point as Cheyne will, but he certainly flags the interrelationship between the two types of consumption in the nation’s increasingly wealthy consumer economy.13 Writing even later, Van Swieten repeats the point – from a Continental perspective – about luxurious excess: ‘the consumption is so frequent among the English, who eat very strong food, and indulge themselves in drinking, and are less fond of vegetables than other nations’ (18). Even in the previous century Gideon Harvey and other medical writers had complained of Britain’s economic success and the resultant growth in crowded, polluted cities, as causes of all kinds of ills, physical and mental.14 Underlying this idea was the tradition, stemming from the Ancients’ humoural theories, that national characteristics could be determined by climate, with the Northern peoples being cold and moist (phlegmatic), while the Southern ones were hot and dry (bilious).15 Given the repulsive internal medical aesthetic of consumption, it comes as something of a surprise to see Barry describing consumptives in an oddly beautiful manner in his section ‘Of a Consumption of the Lungs’: A natural Predisposition to an Haemoptoe, may be easily distinguished by several Symptoms, which are peculiar to such consumptive Constitutions, viz. a long Neck, Scapulae prominent like wings, Thorax compressed, and narrow, a clear florid Complexion, the Cheeks and lips painted with the purest red, the Caruncle [small piece of flesh] in the Corner of the Eye, from its intense Colour, appears like Coral; and all the vessels are so fine, as to appear almost diaphanous: Such Persons are likewise most frequently remarkable for a Vivacity of Mind.16 The general shape of the consumptive as Barry describes it here had been a cliché since the classical physicians: long neck, wing-like upper back and thin chest. As we have seen, the Ancients had also recognised the potential for beauty in this disease: Barry’s picture is notable for the striking beauty of the symptoms as they affect the outer body, including


the long neck – traditionally a prized physical asset for women.17 Consumption seems to be a kind of natural cosmetic: the face is ‘painted with the purest red’ in a manner distinctly reminiscent of the courtly definition of female beauty. The white of the skin (here the ‘clear … Complexion’) contrasts with the red lips and blush on the cheeks. Similarly the ‘intense’ colour of the ‘Coral’ in the corner of the eyes adds to the impression of consumption as a disease subject to a positive aesthetic. But there is something new here which Hippocrates, Aretaeus and Galen could not have seen. Not only are colours vivid and pleasantly contrasted, but the religious concept of the consumptive as being refined out of existence by wasting is echoed here, in this secular context, with the statement that the blood vessels are ‘so fine, as to appear almost diaphanous’. No doubt this is a relatively early instance of the influence of the microscope upon perceptions of the body: people could now see the complex and finely tuned structure of the human body and were happy to cite this as an instance of God’s craftsmanship. As Ann Jessie Van Sant has put it, the microscope led to the ‘imagined immateriality of material structures’ by showing how the components of that body are so infinitesimally small that they seem to fade away into nothingness.18 Although Barry discusses the blood vessels here, this notion equally applied to the fineness of the lungs themselves, branching out as they do into eversmaller vessels. Doctors considered the lungs to be like a very fine sieve, filtering out impurities from the air which might be more or less healthy, more or less injurious to the delicate lungs (106–10).19 The filthy London air, itself another product of economic over-consumption according to the medical moralists, was often complained of as a source of consumptive illness. The London of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was not the London of Dickens, with its factories and polluting modern industry, but it had quite enough muck to fling into the air. 20 The element of spirituality and immateriality introduced by Barry’s comment on the diaphanous vessels is quickly followed by his characterisation of consumptives as ‘remarkable for a Vivacity of Mind’. The Classical physicians had noted the peculiar energy of those afflicted by consumption and coined the phrase spes phthisica to describe the ‘hope of the phthisic’, which manifested itself in a desire to keep on living as fully as if there were no disease, a wish often marked by a burst of activity just before the inevitable death occurred. Aretaeus was surprised how the powerful mind seemed to dominate the weak body in consumption.21 Benjamin Marten expressed this common view in his New Theory of Consumptions (1720) when he noted that consumptives were


‘generally observ’d to be quick, full of Spirit, hasty, and of a sharp, ready Wit’; by contrast it was rare to encounter ‘dull heavy Persons, or such as are slow of Speech, afflicted with this Disease’.22 Van Swieten defines the consumptive individual in the following terms, and goes some way to explaining Barry’s beautiful and creative consumptives: This disposition consists, 1. In a tenderness of the arterial vessels, and in the impetus of the blood rendered some way or other acrid. This is known by the visible slenderness of the vessels, and of the whole body; by the length of the neck; by a flat and narrow chest, and depressed shoulders; by a very florid, thin, dissolved, acrid, and hot blood; by a very fair and rosy complexion, and a transparent skin; a chearfulness of temper, and an early acuteness of genius and understanding. (13) Boerhaave’s student went on to explain the reason for such apparent beauty in the complexion of the consumptive: ‘Blood taken from the vein of such people, appears of a beautiful red colour; but the crassamentum is more loose, the serum falter, thinner, and less high-coloured, than in common healthy blood: and as the fine coats of the vessels are so small as not to admit the red blood; and hence the rosy colour of the cheeks, from the transparent contents of the vessels that are sanguinerous’ (14). Van Swieten also speculates on the reason for consumptive genius: ‘Such persons also have generally a long neck. Whether has his length of the neck any effect towards producing an acuteness of the intellect? Perhaps, in this case, the greater remoteness of the head from the heart, may so lessen the force of the blood ascending through the vertebral and carotid arteries, as to contribute to a more undisturbed and perfect exercise of all the functions of the brain; and daily observation shews, that youths of acute parts often die of this disease’ (15). This explanation relies on the hydraulics of a William Harvey and the mechanics of a Newton: when the medicine of the nerves became more prevalent in the second part of the eighteenth century, the interpretation of genius (itself a shifting concept) would be framed in terms of nervous sensibility, as we will see with George Cheyne.

Cheyne, nerves and consumptions Cheyne was a society doctor, treating the Great and the Good for their various ailments. The influence of his ideas on health and disease was


concomitantly large, especially as he identified himself as ‘one of us’. His Essay on Regimen was directed at ‘my Fellow-sufferers, the Scorbutic, Gouty, Consumptive or Nervous Valetudinarian-low-livers’.23 Striking a pose – with good reason given his astounding fluctuations in weight – as a fellow sufferer, he gained the attention, sympathy and patronage of his middle and upper-class readers, among them Samuel Richardson (who even published Cheyne’s writings), Alexander Pope, John Wesley, David Hume, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. Cheyne was therefore a conduit for medical ideas, themselves not entirely separate from religious ones, to the literary and popular culture of the eighteenth century. The fact that he himself was both a doctor and sufferer of nervous disease, as well as a good literary stylist, meant that he was able to bridge the crucial divide between the world of elite medicine, a world often mistrusted by patients – given its lack of effectiveness in treating disease – and the realm of the suffering individual. He was able to appropriate the power of both perspectives on the illness narrative for his own writing, gaining an authenticity and hence authority that other medical writers could not match. Such an advantageous cultural hybridity gave Cheyne a means to influence representations of consumption far beyond his own writings. His primary message was that the consumerism and luxurious lifestyle promoted by this new ‘consumer century’ had deleterious effects upon the body, engendering all kinds of psychological disorders which he defined as the new English Malady. These problems of the mind in turn could generate further physical deterioration. Tea, coffee, chocolate, rich sauces, too much liquor, a sedentary or idle lifestyle: all these elements of high-living British culture contributed to a weakening of the system. The medicine of the humours was now displaced, at least at the elite level, by that of the ‘nerves’, meaning solid tubes and fibres that carried sensations around the body. George Rousseau has shown how Thomas Willis’s new emphasis on the brain as the only seat of the soul forced a recognition of the role of the nerves in conveying knowledge from the outside world to the body and mind – even if not everyone agreed. This link between the sciences of physiology and the mind led to a paradigm shift in which both medicine and literature were dominated by notions of nervous sensibility.24 These thin and fragile structures were easily obstructed or corroded by undigested material which could either clog and slow the tubes or weaken and ‘relax’ the tone of the fibres. In this sense the body could be viewed, not so much as an hydraulic machine or a watch mechanism, as a stringed musical instrument: if the nerves kept the correct firm ‘tone’ or ‘elasticity’ they would be healthy; if they


became too highly strung or too ‘relaxed’, physical illness leading to mental hypersensitivity would result.25 The consequence of the assault of civilisation and its excesses on the nerves was a veritable epidemic of bad health in the upper orders, whose finely tuned sensibilities were already prone to the dangers of ill-health.26 The poet-physician John Armstrong – no doubt having read his fellow Scot Cheyne – warned ‘ye finer Souls, / Form’d to soft Luxury’ about the dangers of their lifestyle in his Art of Preserving Health (1744).27 People toiling in the fields could hardly expect to be anything other than in the rudest of health, so the myth had it. This construction of lower-class health continued into the nineteenth century, while in both centuries the actual high incidence of lower-class consumption (or tuberculosis) was ignored or placed in a different conceptual category to that of the higher orders: working-class consumption was more likely to be due to various vices like drinking and fornication, whereas middle-class consumption was a disease of refinement and delicate sensibilities above all. Class divisions were therefore marked by physiological differences, with the higher orders having ‘finer’ nerves than the lower ones. These broad ideological blind-spots could be prone to blurring, however: people behaving badly in the upper-classes could be chastised for their consumptions on similar grounds to the lower orders. Nevertheless, the usual assumption was that the upper orders, especially women, were more prone to develop consumption because of their already delicate constitutions.28 It was also convenient that consumption was thought to be, at least partly, an hereditary disease. Refinement might be passed down the generations. Cheyne’s remedy for the wealthy was a reformation of lifestyle: a keen advocate of vegetarianism, he recommended a lightening of diet, replacing rich food with plain, a reduction in consumption of alcohol, greater physical exercise and a generally sparse regimen. Heaviness, excess fat and overconsumption were all to be shunned by the tasteful and refined. Anita Guerrini has also discussed Cheyne’s commitment to physical selfdiscipline deriving from a Christian mystical tradition that broadly equates less fat with more spirituality.29 Ironically, Cheyne himself had a lifelong struggle with his ballooning weight and depressive mental state, transforming him into an exemplar of the struggles of modern life.30 The portly physician sought to heal himself, and did so successfully through his own ascetic regimen. These issues of thinness and distinction converged in the disease of consumption, as Cheyne’s writings illustrated. His Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the disorders of the mind depending on the body (1742) made the crucial claim that


consumption was the most significant disease affecting ‘the Young and Delicat’ in Britain next to nervous and hysteric diseases: ‘indeed there is such a connexion between high Hysterics with fits, and a Phthisis Pulmonum [consumption of the lungs] with Tubercles, that they generally and naturally slide into one another; and both are the fatal Distempers, that afflict or destroy the noblest Spirits, and finest Geniuses, of this Island, as every one who has been attentive must have observ’d’.31 For Cheyne ‘great Nervous Symptoms’ were ‘the first Stage, or Elements of a Phthisis’. He reinforced the idea that a consumption of the lungs was a disease that often struck the young, while also making a firm and newly formulated link between the English Malady (that cluster of psychological conditions arising from disorder of the nerves alternately called hysteria, hypochondria, melancholia and the Vapours) and consumption. Of course, in previous chapters we have seen consumption emanating from melancholy, but, in this new eighteenth-century context defined by Cheyne, it is not only the premier disease of the Renaissance which causes phthisis. Here, he transformed consumption and the ‘nerves’ into signs of greater sensibility and social distinction, even as he identified its debilitating effects. If you had consumption, he said, you were naturally likely to be a noble spirit or a fine Genius, and he made sure that his audience understood the point: ‘I have always foretold, that these Symptoms (especially in tender, delicat, lively young Persons) would terminat in a real sensible Phthisis Pulmonum’ – if not prevented. Should his austere ‘cooling’ regimen be applied before the disorder took too severe a hold, it would preserve ‘some of the noblest and brightest Spirits this Sage or Country produces’ (The Natural Method, 185–187). The important progression from nervous disorder to consumptive illness was also stressed by later physicians of the nerves, such as the influential Robert Whytt. In his Observations on the nature, causes and cure of those disorders which have been commonly called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric (1765), he specified that ‘a phthisis pulmonalis may also be the consequence of nervous disorders, when the morbid matter producing them falls chiefly upon the lungs’.32 In the same volume he also identified the possibility of ‘a nervous atrophy’, which involved ‘a marasmus or sensible wasting of the body’ that lacked many of the precise symptoms (such as sweating and fever) of a consumption of the lungs (253). The term ‘sensible’ is a telling one: by the time Whytt was writing, the move from the Boerhaaveian idea of the nerves as hydraulic pipes for the conveyance of animal spirits (a superfine fluid) to solid strings, like the vibrating wires of a musical instrument, was well underway. The


‘culture of sensibility’ had, as its predicate, the sensibility of the body manifested in the nerves. The move from humours to nerves also encouraged a vitalist, holistic conception of the body because it was now considered by Whytt that the seat of the soul – previously relegated by Descartes to a remote, hands-off leadership of the animal spirits via the pineal gland – was in the brain and spine, and extended to the rest of the body via the nerves. Vital energy flowed throughout the human being. Boerhaave and the iatromechanists had tended to view the body’s processing of external data as a one-way street, with the soul sending out instructions from its fortress, the pineal gland. Whytt and the later Cheyne had a much more dialectical view of the movement of the animal spirits; ‘sympathy’ – not just between body parts but also between different people – was now a keyword. Sympathy for the distressed had a physiological basis, it was now clear.33 The body was reciprocally, ‘sensibly’ connected in all of its parts, just as in society. Crucial in this development was the announcement in mid-century by Albrech von Haller – Whytt’s intellectual sparring partner – that the quality of sensibility was to be found in the centre of the solid nerve and which transmitted exterior sense-data to the brain. Anne Vila has shown how Haller’s attempts to prevent the notion of sensibility from unifying mind and body in a materialist direction by specifying the importance of ‘irritability’ were swept aside in a Europe-wide enthusiasm for the powerful new idea.34 Body tissues – such as muscles – embedded with nerves now had to be regarded as possessing sensibility and, more radically, could operate independently of the conscious, volitional, nervous system. All bodies were now ‘sensible’ bodies – although some more than others – and were above all feeling ones. Sensibility could bypass the conscious mind and strike at the body: the ‘nervous’ individual could become consumptive, sensibly wasting away due to psychological factors – as we shall see shortly.

Nervous types, consumptive types Some people had finer nerves than others. Age, as well as fat, was becoming a feminist issue: Cheyne’s aesthetic of spiritualising lightness and resistance to the grossness of affluence privileged ‘tender, delicat, lively young Persons’ as the embodiment of physical fragility and intellectual refinement. The morality of body shape was apparent in his ‘Reflections on the general method of cure of hereditary or acquired Tenderness, Thinness, Wasteing or Valetudinariness of Constitution,


from whatever causes’ in the same book (Natural Method, 243). In those of a consumptive tendency ‘the intellectual organs may be, and often are, in such Constitutions more acute, penetrating and comprehensive, than in those of the Fat and Plump, especially if these last are over-loaded with Clay’. This statement echoed his famous pronouncement in the English Malady (1733) that disease of the nerves ‘seldom, and I think never happens or can happen, to any but those of the liveliest and quickest natural Parts, whose Faculties are the brightest and most spiritual, and whose Genius is most keen and penetrating and primarily where there is the most delicate Sensation and Pain’.35 By the time of the later work, consumption was installed as the physical consequence of psychological problems; both were a sign of greater intellect, spirituality and sensitivity – physical and aesthetic. People who possessed finer nerves and were consumptive and thin were characterised by a corresponding ‘fineness’ of taste: to be ‘Fat and Plump’ was to be more dull and slow-witted, according to this equation of mind and body. Consumption’s higher status reflected the general shift away from a mechanical medicine to one predicated on a (more or less) vitalist sensibility: Cheyne himself had begun as a Newtonian mechanist, but his later work moves towards an idea of the body as a more subtle and spiritual entity. George Stahl (1660–1734) had argued, pace Boerhaave, that the material body was directly animated by a controlling immaterial soul, although Stahl retained the nerves and fluids. John Armstrong showed signs of Stahl’s vitalist influence in his Art of Preserving Health: ‘Mean while this heavenly particle pervades / The mortal elements, in every nerve / It thrills with pleasure, or grows mad with pain’ (Bk 4, p. 59, l. 17). This vitalist concept remained influential into the next century, even though it was contradicted by von Haller’s demonstration of the independent operations of certain body tissues. No soul could be animating a muscle which could respond to electrical stimulus after the subject had died.36 Cheyne’s later thought is evidently influenced by the less materialist ideas of the vitalists, although his education was grounded in Boerhaavian iatrophysics. There was a price to pay for these diseases of superior sensibility though: Cheyne conceded, in his cogitations on thinness, that the health of ‘the lean and Wither’d’ was so precarious that it could inhibit the individual’s full development, making him or her ‘subject to the smallest Accidents’ (Natural Method, 243). One would not be mistaken in hearing in this warning Tristram Shandy’s complaint about the role of accident in his own consumptive life: Sterne, being consumptive himself, was a keen reader of Cheyne. As many commentators on the culture


of sensibility have noted, the ‘sensible’ hero or heroine was constantly on the brink of sickness, if not already subject to it; their hyper-sensitive constitutions and all-too-responsive nerves brought the blessings of a refinement and taste that set them apart from the correspondingly insensitive world, but also cursed them to a life of physical and mental suffering. Creative and studious people were especially prone to such problems because ‘the Works of Imagination and Memory, of Study, Thinking, and Reflecting, from whatever Source the Principle on which they depend springs, must necessarily require bodily Organs. Some have these Organs finer, quicker, more agile, and sensible, and perhaps more numerous than others’ (English Malady, 53). Naturally, Cheyne’s audience were attracted to the idea of their illness being a sign of their social and intellectual distinction, and embraced his thinking accordingly. Indeed, Cheyne argued that suffering on earth was God’s placing man in ‘an expiatory, purifying and progressive State’, which took him on to ‘a greater degree of Perfection’ because God would not allow suffering for its own sake.37 Intellectual pursuits were not the only causes of disease: Cheyne, like the physicians before him, recognised that the passions could take their toll on the nerves. Chronic passions like ‘long Grief, dark Melancholy, hopeless natural Love’ and religious melancholy (in which the subject became fixated on the after-life) ‘waste’ and ‘wear out’ the nervous system (Essay of Health and Long Life, 155–157). Sudden and violent passions, on the other hand, could screw up, stretch, and bend the nerves in a more immediate manner (158). This contrast between a chronically suffering sensibility (albeit reworked from the tradition of consumptive melancholy we saw in the Renaissance) and an acute nervousness was mirrored in Cheyne’s distinction between poets and scholars. Those with rigid fibres had a better intellectual understanding, but were most susceptible to slow and lasting passions, ‘which secretly consume them as chronical Diseases do’ (100). As we have already seen, one of consumption’s defining characteristics was its lengthy course and insidious progress. At the other end of the ‘sensible’ spectrum were poets, the ‘Genus irritabile vatum’, whose nerves were so irritable and hyper-sensitive that they were subject to acute passions and more sensual desires, bombarded as they are with sensations from the world beyond the body. They ‘generally excel in the Animal Faculty of Imagination’ because they have ‘very springy lively, and elastic Fibres, [which] have the quickest Sensations in them’ (159). Paving the way for the stereotype of the tragically short-lived Romantic poet, Cheyne claimed that: ‘if they happen to


live so long (which is hardly possible) in the Decline of life they pay dearly for the greater bodily pleasure they enjoyed in youth’. The poet’s love of pleasure, in combination with his tendency to feel the woes of the world, was likely to result in early death or a painful old age. Poets too were subject to consumptions, although the effects were accelerated because of the more urgent strain of sense-data on the body. The specific combination of the poet’s irritable sensibility and consumption would gain in association throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. In his Essay on Original Genius (1767), William Duff argued – a la Cheyne – that intellectual inspiration had a basis in the nerves, because the genius possessed ‘an extreme sensibility both of pain and pleasure’.38 James Beattie stressed the empathetic powers of the nervous poet, who had the ‘sensibility, to enter with ardent emotions every part of his subject, so as to transfuse into his work a pathos and energy sufficient to raise corresponding notions in the reader’.39 Personified Genius, in The Botanic Garden by poet and medic Erasmus Darwin, is implicitly male, despite the feminising effects of extreme sensibility: ‘Whose finer sense each soft vibration owns / With sweet responsive sympathy of tones.’40 Romantic poets would struggle with the feminising legacy of sensibility and its diseases, as we shall see in the next chapter. Such a sympathetic communication between nervous systems is more a product of advances in nerve theory later in the century, but the basic influence of Cheyne’s notion of nervous consumptive genius remains.

Delicate women Although Cheyne did not tie down nervous disorders to rigid gender categories, as Roy Porter has observed, he conformed to general medical and popular expectations about women’s greater physical delicacy and tendency to be defined by their bodies rather than minds. 41 Anita Guerrini has argued that Cheyne employed a feminised version of body and spirit because of women’s special relation to food preparation, their tendency to control their bodies through diet, and his advocacy of milk (feminine) over meat (masculine).42 This was part of a more complex picture in which Cheyne’s regimen could be seen as advocating a masculine restraint, but the feminised aspect of his writing appealed strongly to writers like Richardson. One reader of Richardson’s complained about a passage in Pamela where ‘the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his Hands’, a literary representation that was ‘enough to ruin a Nation of Women by Tight-lacing’.43 Richardson too encouraged the consumptive look.


In some ways Richardson’s reader’s complaint was not a new observation: the famous Boerhaave’s apologist, Baron Van Swieten, quoted the Flemish anatomist Adrian van der Spieghel (1578–1625) on the subject of tight-lacing: Spigelius very justly inveighs against this custom, and ascribes to it the frequency of consumptions in England; and then adds, That solicitude which young women shew to make themselves appear taper-shaped, is absurd, and incredibly pernicious; for whilst by stays, and other hurtful contrivances, they straiten their chests, they do not consider that they are preparing the way for consumptions and decays. [De Hum. Corp. lib. I, cap. 9, p. 19]. On the other hand, he praises the custom of those countries, where (as he principally remarked at Venice) they endeavour to make the breast rather large than strait; and on that account, loosely enwrap the infant with a slight roller, instead of binding his body tight. Nor do prudent physicians cease at this day from opposing so absurd, so pernicious a custom, but (which is to be lamented) without success; for it would be easier to snatch Hercules club from his hands, than to prevail with foolish woman to leave off any received custom, however hurtful.44 Evidently the consumption had been a morbus anglicus for centuries due to the peculiarly pernicious mores of English women. Clothing styles changed, of course, but theories of sensibility were conspiring to bring in a look requiring thinness. Bernard Mandeville was unusually uncontroversial when opining that women’s nerves were finer, thinner and more fragile than men’s, making the fair sex more susceptible to the ill-effects of their passions and badly suited to ‘abstruse and elaborate thoughts … that fatigue the Spirits and require a Steadiness and Assiduity of Thinking’.45 John Mullan has pointed out that Cheyne’s description of Samuel Richardson as a ‘Hyppo’ (hypochondriac) and valetudinarian was laudatory, whereas for women the theoretically enabling discourse of sensibility, with which they seemed to be especially aligned, was all too often a way of denying their mental powers by valorising the primacy of their bodies (214). This was a more ambiguous and subtle way of positioning women than Burton and Gideon Harvey’s antifeminism in the previous century, nevertheless the broad pattern of labelling male illness as creative and female disease as debilitating but beautiful remained. The myth that women, with their womb-driven physiology and psychology, were supposed to be especially susceptible to consumptive


love melancholy persisted with very little adjustment. John Stephens, a doctor who was very likely read by Laurence Sterne, stated in his Practical Treatise on Consumptions that ‘there are many women who, upon the death of a tender husband, dearly beloved infant, or much valued friend, will refute all the comforts, pleasures, and satisfactions of life, and, when in the midst of plenty, sicken and die’.46 As we shall see, the literature of sensibility and sentiment confirmed this thesis of female emotional extremity and dependency time and again: loss of the object of desire brought consumptive grief. Here, the continuity with the Renaissance depiction of female melancholy, in contrast with the male cult of ‘intellectual’ melancholy, was especially apparent. While women pined away in Ophelia-like grief, Cheyne’s irritable poets became the heirs of the melancholy Hamlet. Both were dramatic, but the male tended to have greater agency. In the decades beyond Cheyne, women were increasingly conceptualised in terms of a model of feminine beauty based on disease. Burke’s pronouncement in his 1756 essay on the Sublime and Beautiful marked a trend already encouraged by Cheyne’s paradoxical glamorisation of certain forms of illness: an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it … It is the flowery species, so remarkable for its weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the liveliest idea of beauty, and elegance … The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy. 47 The line between sickness and ‘weakness’ is a very thin one: the comparison of women with flowers that die young emphasises the point. In fact, manuals for female behaviour, like Dr John Gregory’s widely-read Father’s Legacy, warned women that, even if they already possessed good health, they should ‘never’ boast of it, because men ‘associate the idea of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution’.48 The logic of the sentimental was well suited to the equation of women with illness, their delicate natures reacting to assaults upon their person by rapacious rakes, or some social injustice, with a range of physical effects from simple swoons to full-blown terminal consumptions. Some dissenting voices were raised, even from within the sentimental camp, as an article in the Sentimental Magazine (1773) entitled ‘Of Employment for the Ladies’ demonstrated. The writer complained


that: ‘ever since it has been the established fashion to have a weak stomach, a delicate constitution, and to live only upon drugs, it is indecent to enjoy a perfect state of health, and a lady who is not indisposed at least three days in a week, is looked upon as a Hottentot’.49 This is some way on from Burke’s more tentative valorisation of delicacy: the author openly states that it is positively fashionable to be sickly and, through imperfect indigestion and only living on medicines, thin – a logical result of Cheyne’s writings. Similar protestations would occur into the Romantic period, seemingly to little avail against the general trend. The sentimental novel also confirmed the fashionability of female physical fragility: Samuel Jackson Pratt or ‘Courtney Melmoth’ affirmed in Emma Corbett (1780) that ‘the feeblenesses to which the tender frame of woman is subject, are, perhaps, more seducing than her bloom … in nursing that which droops (sweetly dejected) and is ready to fall upon its bed, our care becomes more dear … objects are beloved in proportion … as they are gentle, unresisting and pathetic’.50 ‘Unresisting’ is perhaps the operative word here: at least part of the vogue for female consumptiveness was inspired by the notion of well-controlled femininity, sentimentally pathetic in nervous over-refinement. The reasons for consumption being regarded as a fashionable disease for both genders in the culture of sensibility are becoming apparent: Cheyne’s elision of ‘nerves’ with phthisis; his definition of these related diseases as badges of distinction, both aesthetic and moral; and his emphasis on the moral and intellectual superiority of the thin over the fat. Add these to the popular traditions of consumption as the disease of love and the good/easy death, and one constructs a malady that supposedly gives a thin and chronically sickly appearance, without necessarily inflicting grievous and inconvenient symptoms on the exterior of the body or the mind. Far from destroying female beauty, consumption could enhance it; far from preventing masculine creativity, consumption was positively a marker of poetic irritability and sensibility.

Clarissa’s consumption We saw at the end of Chapter 1 that heroines of the novel, like Moll Flanders, could be threatened by consumption if suffering from some form of love melancholy, or at least loss of their desired object. Such descriptions of consumption and consumptive death tended to be brief, concentrating more on the emotional logic of the event rather than the aesthetics of the act itself. The death of Clarissa, the famous heroine of Samuel Richardson’s novel of the same name, expanded the possibilities


of consumptive death by combining elements of the love melancholy tradition, aspects of the Protestant good and easy death, and Cheyne’s new discourse of sensibility. Clarissa would provide the template for future sentimental heroines in Britain, America and Europe, profoundly influencing representations of female consumptive death – it is difficult to overstate Clarissa’s importance – in the Romantic and Victorian periods as well as in its own century.51 By providing an extended process of aestheticised consumptive death, Richardson showed a new way of understanding the relationship between disease and gender.52 Clarissa’s death has been the source of much debate, resistant as it is to any scientific, twenty-first century, retrospective diagnosis.53 I myself have previously stated that Clarissa does not die of consumption, or at least an ‘earthly disease’: I was wrong.54 The medicine of the eighteenth century, as in the preceding ones, did not share our present mainstream understanding of illness as a product of purely physical disorder, despite tendencies in that direction. Nor was a disease separable from the individual’s constitution, both physical and moral: a whole complex of factors, from the hereditary to environmental, from emotional to occupational, were thought to be contributory to health or illness. Nor, as we have already seen, were diseases easy to separate from one another: one state could segue into another when the conditions were appropriate: the nerves to consumption, for example, or even different types of consumption. Consequently, attempts to pigeon-hole Clarissa’s death as a twenty-first century medical condition – such as anorexia nervosa – are doomed to failure. Clarissa’s death is constructed through complex and highly gendered discourses of consumptive death, even though her disease is not described in a way that doctors in our present century would find satisfactory. Various factors combine to cause Clarissa’s disease, the primary one being identified as grief by various people in the novel, including Clarissa herself: ‘Death from grief was, she believed, the slowest of deaths’.55 Consumption was perceived as chronic in its progress, a sense that its cognate ‘decline’ echoed. Medical opinion concurs with her selfdiagnosis: Goddard the apothecary states that she will recover if she wishes, but ‘so much grief, as you seem to indulge, is enough to impair the most vigorous health, and to wear out the strongest constitution’ (vol. 6, XCVIII, 400; vol. 4, 13). Of course at this point Goddard is mistaken in his belief that his recommended regimen can cure Clarissa because he does not fully comprehend her personal situation and the power of her emotions. Belford anticipates this outcome as he warns Lovelace, the rake whose abduction of Clarissa causes the problem, of


the probable effects of his actions: ‘what I most apprehend, is, that with her own hand, in resentment of the perpetrated outrage, she (like another Lucretia) will assert the purity of her heart: Or, if her piety preserve her from this violence, that wasting grief will soon put a period to her days’.56 Belford shows that a cultural template already exists for Clarissa’s situation: Clarissa grieves for the illegitimate loss of her virginity, but this grief is inserted into the traditional symptoms of love and religious melancholy. After all, she has lost the secular love relationship to which she aspired in the first place: Lovelace was once the object of her desire. Indeed her humane physician has no doubt in declaring that ‘her heart’s broken: she’ll die … there’s no saving her’ (vol. 7, LVII, 203; vol. 4, 177). As with so many other women, once her earthly sexual goals are frustrated and her loved one removed – for whatever reason – her only respectable option is to turn to religious consolation. The Neo-Platonic tradition of secular love leading one to a love of God provides a more philosophically cogent explanation for such a transition. This displacement from secular to religious love does not evade the festering grief felt by Clarissa, however. As Cheyne put it: ‘long Grief, dark Melancholy, hopeless natural Love’ and religious melancholy ‘waste’ and ‘wear out’ the nervous system (Essay of Health and Long Life, 155–157). Cheyne, and the physicians writing before him, assumed as a commonplace that grief and love melancholy would result in consumptions, unless the emotion was so strong that suicide cut short the process of wasting. Clarissa also reminds the devout Richardsonian reader, at least, of Badman’s wife in Bunyan’s Life of … Badman: she dies an elaborate good death of ‘a languishing distemper’, broken-hearted by Badman’s evil ways.57 Clarissa’s symptomatology is peculiarly suited to Richardson’s narrative requirements for his novel; she suffers from a consumption of a certain form. As we shall see later, she is not the only person in the text to die of a consumption: the rake Belton’s bad consumptive death is the obvious counterpoint to Clarissa’s good one. The representational flexibility and metaphorical power of consumption allows it to play a pivotal role in Richardson’s novel, contrasting the beatific effects of Clarissa’s malady with the hellish ones of Belton. In Clarissa’s death, the symptoms of the disease are minimal, although they do change the longer it progresses. The most striking initial aspect is consequent on its psychological motivation: Clarissa herself states that she has ‘no appetite’ (vol. 6, XCVIII, 400; vol. 4, 13). As a result, she loses weight without losing beauty; Belford reports to Lovelace: ‘could she have prevailed upon herself, I know that the sight of her would have been as affecting to you,


as your visit could have been to her; when you had seen to what a lovely skeleton (for she is really lovely still, nor can she, with such a form and features, be otherwise) you have, in a few weeks, reduced one of the most charming women in the world; and that in the full bloom of her youth and beauty’ (vol. 7, L, 172; vol. 4, 172). The paradox of the ‘lovely skeleton’ is crucial for later representations of consumptive women: Clarissa’s beauty is partly preserved by consumption’s ability to merely thin the body; smallpox and other like maladies would scar the skin as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poem on the disastrous effects on her own beauty from smallpox shows. 58 Clarissa’s moral beauty requires that no such external stigma occur, despite the fact that others in the eighteenth century had argued that the moral should be separate from the physical.59 Her youth (she is nineteen when she dies) is also stressed as a component of this beauty: consumption was commonly assumed to be a disease of the young by doctors and lay people alike, especially in its relation to love. The poignant contrast of death and the bloom of youth had long been employed for its dramatic pathos as well as its role in the Christian vanitas tradition, in which the juxtaposition of life at its height with decay and death stresses the vanity of disregarding the next life.60 Clarissa’s instance gives a new energy to these clichés in the eighteenth century: here they are employed to illustrate the dastardly effects of rakish behaviour on a moral and ‘sensible’ young lady, as well as lending her a further allure in her sickness. Other symptoms hint more specifically at a consumption of the lungs. Doctor H. responds to her ‘shortness of breath (which she attributed to inward decay precipitated by her late harasses …)’ by recommending the age-old remedy for disorders of the lungs: ‘go into the air’. However, because the consumption is a sign of a deeper psychological problem, both physician and patient know that this advice will do no good ‘in such a malady as mine’ (vol. 7, LXXII, 254–255; vol. 4, 215). This is as technically medical as the representation of her condition is allowed to become: ‘shortness of breath’ falls far short of many of the terrible problems that could beset those suffering from a consumption of the lungs, as we have seen already. There is no spitting of blood, no violent coughing, no nasty matter being expectorated from the lungs, no hectic fevers and, although one could claim a ‘facies Hippocratica’ or wasted, skeletal features for Clarissa, her beauty is not affected. What we have instead is one of the most symptomless forms of consumption; so symptomless in fact, that a specific medical term is not used, because it would divert attention away from the emotional and spiritual focus of Clarissa’s


death as well as allowing a certain latitude in Richardson’s manipulation of physical symptoms for narrative effect. It is true that there is medical precedent for the very easy death from consumption beyond Thomas Browne’s famous description of his friend’s death: William Buchan stated in his best-selling popular manual Domestic Medicine that ‘a Nervous Consumption is a wasting or decay of the whole body, without any considerable degree of fever, cough, or difficulty of breathing. It is attended with indigestion, weakness, and want of appetite etc’ and affects ‘those who are of a fretful temper’.61 Richard Brookes’ General Practice of Physic is happy to concur broadly with this definition, although in a slightly more poetic manner: ‘a Nervous Atrophy, or Phthisis, is a Wasting of the Body, without any remarkable Fever, cough, or difficulty of Breathing; but is attended with Want of Appetite, and a bad Digestion; when the whole Body grows languid, and is continually falling away’.62 Both Buchan and Browne had taken this terminology of ‘nervous consumption’ from Richard Morton’s influential treatise Phthisiologia (1689 Latin, 1694 English translation), in which Morton had referred to ‘atrofia nervosa’, ‘nervous atrophy’ and ‘phthisis nervosa’ as ‘a wasting of Body without any remarkable Fever, Cough, or Shortness of Breath; but it is attended with a want of Appetite, and a bad Digestion, upon which there follows a Languishing Weakness of Nature, and falling away of the Flesh every day more and more’.63 Nor, as we have seen already, was this a new concept to popular or medical culture. In Classical medicine, the term atrophia was closest to nervous consumption as described by Morton and those following. The difference in the mid-eighteenth century was the centrality of the new medicine of the nerves to conceptions of consumptive disease. Clarissa fits the bill: she has no hunger, bad digestion and becomes increasingly weak until she can no longer even write. Just as important, her consumption is motivated by ‘violent Passions of the Mind’. Richardson combines aspects of the various forms along the continuum of consumptions to structure Clarissa’s narrative progress, both symbolic and literal. Richard Brookes also describes a category of consumptions arising from ‘Hypochondriac and Hysterical Affections’ that differ from others by ‘an Oppression of the Breast, by unusual sadness or Melancholy, by frequent Hysteric Fits, faintings, and other nervous symptoms’ (276). Clarissa falls under this rubric to a certain extent, suffering a type of love melancholy of the sort that Gideon Harvey describes, and does suffer from a fainting fit when very close to death (vol. 7, CII, 402; vol. 4, 325). This involuntary loss of control of the body contrasts with Clarissa’s fixed determination to master her passions.


Now she embarks on a slow decline in which she manipulates her death so that it conforms to the traditional good death, a process that her consumption facilitates. Another reason no one thinks fit to name Clarissa’s disease is because in many ways it was too obvious to her contemporaries, familiar as they were with the tradition of love melancholy described in the first chapter. J. F. Zückert, a physician writing in 1768, observed that Clarissa’s ‘slow consumption’ is a classic example of the physical consequences of ‘heart-break’.64 However, it is notable that Clarissa herself is far less afraid to discuss her condition than the tactful and usually ‘silent’ doctors within the novel (vol. 7, LVII, 206; 179, 215). It is she who forces the physician to tell her that she has only ‘a fortnight or three weeks’ to live (vol. 7, LVII, 206; 179), she who takes control of her own treatment, and it is she who comes closest to naming her condition technically: she tells Dr H. that ‘you must see that I have been consuming from day to day; and now, if I can judge by what I feel in myself … I cannot continue long’ (vol. 7, LXXII, 255; vol. 4, 215). No one has a better understanding of her consuming grief or her consumptive illness narrative than Clarissa herself: she knows what manner of consumption she suffers and its duration as she claims the privilege of the person of sensibility to prioritise her own experience of her body rather than the more or less ‘insensible’ analyses of the largely helpless doctors. Ironically, Lady Elizabeth Echlin’s An Alternative Ending to Richardson’s Clarissa kills off a reformed Lovelace with consumption twelve months after Clarissa dies: a sign of his genuine penitence.65 What Clarissa does not experience is anorexia nervosa, as Donnalee Frega has argued in her retrospective, psychoanalytic, analysis: that disease was only recognised in anything like its modern form in the mid-nineteenth century, and even then it can not be compared adequately to the wasting disease which sadly afflicts so many people in our own time.66 Frega believes that the pronouncements of the doctors that Clarissa’s illness is one of love, and psychological in origin, contradict the idea that she is suffering from a form of consumption (93). If Clarissa had been written in the twentieth century, this might be the case; but Richardson and his age did not generally adopt a dualistic view of body and mind, despite Cartesian attempts to divide them. Indeed, the interaction of mind/soul and body is, in many ways, the main point of the novel: love thwarted leads to death. Clarissa’s disease certainly incorporates an element of self-starvation as self-empowerment, but the motivations for this are less to do with patriarchy in twentieth-century consumer capitalism than the mores of eighteenth-century society,


older traditions of self-discipline for religious reasons, and the disregard for food found in the love melancholic. Of course, treatment for most types of medical condition in this period was generally ineffective; the doctor’s role was to palliate suffering if at all possible, often through the use of one of the few effective drugs available: opium.67 The doctors are therefore bit-players in this drama in which Clarissa dominates our understanding of her consumption. The shift of power from priest to physician that we described at the end of Chapter 2 is here redirected, at least in this literary representation, such that the suffering and ‘sensible’ individual takes control over her own narrative; in this context, the ill person becomes both her own doctor and, as we shall see next, priest. In the history of the self, Clarissa’s empowerment through her conquest of her own consumption narrative becomes a significant marker of the increasing emphasis in the bourgeois novel on psychological interiority at the expense of exterior institutions.68 Paradoxically, however, Clarissa’s powerful and apparently modern exercise of personal will is bent on confirming the ancient religious tradition of the good death.

Clarissa’s good death Clarissa’s symptoms show no real need for such medical pain-relief. She becomes increasingly weak – one of the defining characteristics of the languid consumptive – but if anything her experience of disease improves the nearer she gets to death: I don’t think I am dying yet – not actually dying, Mrs. Lovick – for I have no bodily pain – no numbnesses; no signs of immediate death, I think. – And my breath, which used of late to be so short, is now tolerable, my head clear, my intellects free-I think I cannot be dying yet … yet how merciful is the Almighty, to give His poor creature such a sweet serenity! ‘Tis what I have prayed for! (Vol. 7, XCI, 354; vol. 4, 288) Here we are entering the realm of the consumptive good and easy death that the Protestant divines of the seventeenth century and earlier had so vigorously discussed. We noted in the previous chapter that – with certain reservations – the good Christian ideally wished to die a chronic and symptomless death so that affairs temporal and spiritual could be prepared before the day of death: the soul could be in a fit state to ascend to God’s judgement, while family and friends could be dealt with in an


orderly will; the death itself could be similarly controlled, with appropriately edifying speeches to those gathered round the bed and a dignified departure to the next life. Richardson inserts Clarissa directly into this discourse, endowing her form of consumption with the qualities necessary for the perfect good and easy death. Ralph Houlbrooke, without mentioning the specific advantages of the disease, has noted briefly Richardson’s use of both the Puritan and sacramental traditions in Clarissa’s death.69 Although here she is not ‘actually dying’, she knows that she will die and, thanks to her generally pain-free body and clear intellect, she can prepare accordingly. God gives Clarissa the disease that Christians popularly pray for, notwithstanding Jeremy Taylor’s caveats about the need for a constant anticipation of death.70 As Tom Keymer has pointed out, Clarissa’s death moved contemporary readers powerfully, and even inspired women and men alike to die the good death.71 Even in the supposedly cynical and this-worldly eighteenth century, the best-selling – in 1751 it was in its 27th edition – Practical Discourse Concerning Death by William Sherlock was warning that ‘the Danger of a sudden Death is, that Men are suprised in their Sins, and hurried away to Judgement, before their Accounts are ready; that they are snatched out of this World, before they have made any Provisions for the next’.72 Sherlock’s use of the parable of the unready virgins, who have not bothered to buy oil for their lamps and miss the bridegroom’s (Christ’s) arrival, is peculiarly applicable to Clarissa, who is marked by Richardson, with only limited irony, as the readiest of virgins (Sherlock, 291). The direct connection with the seventeenth-century tradition of the good death is emphasised by Clarissa’s meticulous preparations for death, including the elaborate making of her will and, more strikingly, her orders for her own coffin to be placed in her bedchamber and the various inscriptions and devices upon the lid (vol. 7, LXXXII, 3311–13; vol. 4, 255–57). This extraordinary attention to the symbolic detail of a Christian death echoes John Donne’s notoriously pious and eccentric preparation for his death from consumption, described by Izaak Walton, in which he too designed his own monument. Donne had wrapped himself in a winding-sheet and stood upon the wooden figure of an Urn ‘with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might shew his lean, pale, and death-like face, which was purposely turned towards the East, from when he expected the second coming of our Saviour Jesus’. When the picture was finished he placed it by his bedside ‘where it continued, and became his hourly object till his death’.73 The difference lies in gender: whereas the men in Walton’s tradition are doughty exemplars, by Richardson’s time women are redemptive in


beauty, having begun to assume the spiritual and ornamental role of what would later be called the ‘angel in the house’. As Belford tells Lovelace: ‘I saw her more and more as a beatified spirit; and as one sent from Heaven to draw me after her out of the miry gulf in which I had been so long immersed’ (vol. 7, LXXI, 253; vol. 4, 214). The more strongly feminised Richardsonian culture of sensibility prioritises female traits as being more closely related to the spiritual, leaving the male to the more earthly world of sexual desire, commerce and finance – as we shall see more clearly when we come to masculine consumptions. Thomas Laqueur has argued that the idea of gender difference was transformed in the early Modern period from the Galenic model of women being inferior derivations of the male sex to a dimorphic model in which the sexes were clearly differentiated by their biology (as demonstrated by new scientific investigations). Anne Vila counters this theory by noting that nerve theory and sensibility posited the basic stuff of the human body as the same in both genders: nerves and fibres. Sex is not the basic unit in sensibility, but the type of sensibility possessed by a particular individual. Rather than distinguishing by gender, French physicians tended to examine the physiology promoted by a particular lifestyle: rural/urban, peasant/bourgeois, labouring/scholarly and so on.74 By partitioning its qualities between the sexes, the French later (by 1770) resolved the blurred gender lines that sensibility had created (257). In the British context, authors tended to cling to gender boundaries more strongly, although the rise of angelisme towards the end of the century – prompted by factors like nerve theory in combination with the changing social roles of women – intensified those boundaries to a certain extent. Yet sensibility – and the consumptions it could cause – retained its power to unsettle gender distinctions into the next century. One of the sentimental progeny of Richardson’s writing, Henry Brooke’s novel The Fool of Quality, describes the difference between the sexes in terms of innately differing powers of sensibility: ‘Man is as the rough and crude element of earth, unmollified by the fluidity of water and light. Heaven therefore sent WOMAN – gentle, bright, and beauteous woman – to soothe, form, and illumine the rudeness of his mass.’ In the sentimental world to come, a world partly shaped by Clarissa, woman is ruler of the spiritual world, while man is her theoretical slave. Men supposedly go to war, trade, compete and do all of those things of the public sphere from which women are theoretically excluded, for the sake of these very women.75 Clarissa literally embodies this urge to strain for the spiritual because ‘her extreme weakness, and the fervour of her devotions when at church,


were contraries which, pulling different ways (the soul aspiring, the body sinking), tore her tender frame in pieces’ (260). This dichotomy between the earthly body and the heavenly soul is particularly suitable to consumption – as we have already seen in the Protestant tradition and beyond – because the flesh falls away as if the body were dematerialising. A consumption of the lungs is all the better as it draws attention to the symbol of the spirit manifested in the breath. Of course, Clarissa becomes an angel before she dies (vol. 7, LXXXIII, 254; vol. 4, 308). Richardson’s rewriting of Walton’s Lives for his own century transforms Clarissa into a modern martyr, usurping much of the discourse of the consumptive good death. As a literary mythologist of consumptive femininity, Richardson is rather less radical than he might appear – in the sense that he ties woman’s fate into secular love even as he reinforces it with the master narrative of Protestant Christianity. All she can do, in Richardson’s logic, is die; consequently Clarissa turns all her concentration on dying well, or rather ‘decently’, complaining that Lovelace prevents her from doing this very thing: ‘he will not let me enter into my Maker’s presence with the composure that is required in entering into the drawing-room of an earthly prince!’ (vol. 7, XCVIII, 379; vol. 4, 308). Like her holy predecessors, she needs to be calm and composed in her final hours. Yet again the beneficial symptoms of consumption aid her in this process, a symptomatology that she interprets, as Browne and Fuller had before her, as a sign of divine favour: ‘if this be dying, said she, there is nothing at all shocking in it. My body hardly sensible of pain, my mind at ease, my intellects clear and perfect as ever. What a good and gracious God have I! For this is what I always prayed for’ (vol. 7, CII, 401; vol. 4, 324). This is an uncanny, and possibly not coincidental, echo of Dudley Ryder’s words when he ‘fancies’ he might be ‘in a consumption’: ‘I was almost pleased with the prospect of it. At least nothing shocking appeared in it and I thought if I was plainly in a dying condition I could with a great deal of calmness and serenity resign up my life.’76 Words like ‘easy’, ‘calm’ and ‘serene’ are constantly used in this discourse of good death, minimising the effects of death and stressing its role as a gateway into the next world. Clarissa is especially concerned to die in a rational manner, with her ‘intellects clear and perfect as ever’. The reader must not feel that she is ultimately discomposed by the force of her illness: despite her increasing faintness, failing eyesight and short convulsions at one point, Richardson is at pains to stress her general mental clarity and well-being throughout her protracted death (vol. 7, XCVIII, 375; vol. 4, 337). The


eighteenth century still believed in the power of consumption to maintain or even enhance the mental faculties to the last moment, as the Bishop of Durham, Joseph Butler’s comments in 1736 on ‘mortal diseases not impouring [sic] our present reflecting powers’ demonstrate: For in those diseases, persons the moment before death appear to be in the highest vigour of life. They discover apprehension, memory, reason, all entire, with the utmost force of affection; sense of a character, of shame and honour; and the highest mental enjoyments and sufferings, even to the last gasp; and these surely prove even greater vigour of life than bodily strength does.77 No doubt Butler is thinking of consumption here. Clarissa’s physical suffering makes her a suitably pathetic figure for a sentimental heroine, but she transcends this suffering to signify the triumph of the spirit. Not only does she accept death as God’s will but, like Herbert, Donne, and an endless list of religious exemplars, sees it as a ‘most joyful occasion’ (vol. 7, CIV, 405; vol. 4, 327). In a mise-en-scène of the ars moriendi, while giving the standard deathbed ‘lecture’, Clarissa drives the point home by discoursing on ‘the happiness of a timely preparation, and upon the hazards of a late repentance, when the mind, as she observed, was so much weakened, as well as the body, as to render a poor soul hardly able to contend with its natural infirmities’ (vol. 7, CVI, 420; vol. 4, 339). Clearly this is a reference to warnings like that issued by Jeremy Taylor about the hazards of wishing for an easy death that is all-too-likely to be illusory. She has the best of both worlds because she has made it her business to be ready for death, but also has the gift of a convenient disease, a sure sign of God’s favour. When her death actually arrives, it is an exemplary one in the true tradition of the good death, including a poignant blessing on her absent family: the one travesty of the usual practice indicates the familial rupture in a manner far more forceful for the contemporary reader than for us today. In an age when people died at home rather than in hospital it was thought necessary that the family should be present for the satisfactory conclusion of a person’s life. As Roy Porter has observed, the family’s role became more important in the eighteenth century, when the role of the priest at the death-bed declined due to increasing confidence in God’s benevolence and a concomitant reduced fear of hell and its terrors. Porter also argues that this greater assurance in the prospect of heaven also changed the image of death to a gentle friend rather than


a frightening skeleton.78 In Clarissa the family has abdicated its right to participate in Clarissa’s consumption narrative, with all responsibility focused on her individual conscience. The social structures supposedly designed to protect her have failed: these institutions of family, medicine, the Church and so on may have their opinions on Clarissa’s illness and its causes, but in terms of the novel it is Clarissa’s view which is paramount, her voice that carries the narrative. The idea of death as friendly is more true of the pious Clarissa than it is of those who do wrong in this novel – as we shall see: the terrors of hell certainly have a role to play in this heavily moral drama. Naturally, our heroine also forgives the second cause of her troubles – Lovelace – in a demonstration of the fact that she has risen (in a Neo-Platonic manner) above her earthly problems into a more elevated sphere (vol. 7, XCVIII, 377; vol. 4, 346–47). The remainder of her death is straight from the ars moriendi text-book: Clarissa quotes various appropriate biblical phrases and cries out to her new object of desire: ‘O come-blessed LordJESUS!’ – the usual offering of the soul to God immediately before death. She then dies smiling, with ‘a charming serenity overspreading her sweet face at the instant, as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun’ (vol. 8, I, 7; vol. 4, 347). The actual moment of death is minimised with the joyful entry into heaven having ‘already begun’. Clarissa has triumphantly achieved a Protestant good and easy death, a now-feminised drama of thwarted desire which would be imitated innumerably throughout the next century.

Beautiful dying and living Consumption is an important factor in this minimisation of death’s power. We have already noted that the physical changes wrought in Clarissa are not grievous. On the contrary, her disease seems to enhance her attractiveness by conforming to the views on the beauty of female weakness expressed by Burke and other male commentators. Mrs Norton’s visit to the body emphasises consumption’s uncanny power to preserve the features: ‘It was she indeed, she said! Her sweet young lady! Her very self! Nor had death, which changed all things, a power to alter her lovely features! She admired the serenity of her aspect’ (vol. 8, VII, 20; vol. 4, 357). Preserving physical identity in the form of an uncorrupted body is in some way a guarantor of the soul’s continued integrity: it is still Clarissa’s ‘very self’. Her consumptive ‘serenity’ also continues after death – a word constantly repeated throughout the account of Clarissa’s passing. Mrs Norton kisses Clarissa ‘as if she were living’, so effective is Clarissa’s


beauty-in-death (vol. 8, VII, 20; vol. 4, 357). After the death of the sufferer, the illness narrative continues to be constructed by those who survive: both her goodness and her beauty have transformative or exemplary effects on those left behind, who continue to interpret the meaning of the illness and death. In this case consumption helps to inoculate death’s terrors for Mrs Norton and the reader by leaving the body beautiful. The most famous description of Clarissa’s attractive consumption before death comes from Belford, who prefaces it by repeating the point he has made to Lovelace that, although ‘emaciated’, she is still ‘one of the finest women in England’: ‘For her features are so regular and exact, her proportion so fine, and her manner so inimitably graceful that, were she only skin and bone, she must be a beauty’ (vol. 7, CV, 411; vol. 4, 331–32). Here, Clarissa’s thin but beautiful frame becomes the visible symbol of her superior sensibility. Lovelace’s harsh persecution has had its effect on her body, although the result is paradoxical: rather than reducing her attractiveness, he has enhanced it, because consumption preserves her beauty as well as giving her a sympathetic delicacy and weakness that a certain masculine aesthetics was now beginning to pronounce fitting for a woman of the middling and upper sort. For Richardson, this physical debility indicates a higher spiritual value for woman in which she becomes a redemptive and beatific icon. The ‘charming scene’ (what an apparently strange way of describing a dying woman this is) that greets Belford places an unprecedentedly heavy emphasis on the aesthetic allure of Clarissa’s consumptive body: One faded cheek rested upon the good woman’s bosom, the kindly warmth of which had overspread it with a faint, but charming flush; the other paler and hollow, as if already iced over by death. Her hands, white as the lily, with her meandering veins more transparently blue than ever I had seen even hers (veins so soon, alas! to be choked up by the congealment of that purple stream which already so languidly creeps rather than flows through them!); her hands hanging lifelessly, one before her, the other grasped by the right hand of the kind widow … her aspect was sweetly calm and serene; and though she started now and then, yet her sleep seemed easy; her breath indeed short and quick; but tolerably free, and not like that of a dying person. (Vol. 7, CV, 412; vol. 4, 332) Richardson plays upon the poignant coexistence of the heat of life and the purity and coolness of Clarissa’s imminent death, with a particular focus on the transparent, spiritualised and slow-flowing veins


of her hands. This ‘languid’ scene in one sense denies death: Clarissa’s breath is ‘not like that of a dying person’, true to her consumptive condition, yet in another way there is a morbid fascination with Clarissa’s habitation of both the states of life and death in her sickness. One can envisage this scene taking place after her death, with a few minor adjustments. In fact it almost does in the morning after the death, in which various people view ‘the lovely corpse … admiring the charming serenity of her noble aspect. The women declared that they never saw death so lovely before; and that she looked as if in any easy slumber, the colour having not quite left her cheeks and lips’ (vol. 8, VI, 14; vol. 4, 353). The denial of death implicit in its aestheticisation is combined with a sexualisation of death, dying and illness; this rather necrophilic tendency was to be developed, though in a complex and historically specific manner, throughout the rest of this century and well into the next. In his monumental study, Philippe Ariès has argued that death became ‘untamed’ in the newly individualised early modern world, unleashing the previously controlled social ‘weak points’ of love and death in combination. New resentments (caused by secularisation) against death’s power to separate the individual from life led to a denial of its existence, which in turn bred both anxiety and desire. Fear about, and fascination with, a death now more ‘remote’ and alienated from everyday life found expression in the eroticisation of death: unconscious and hidden in the baroque period, but overt and conscious at the end of the eighteenth century.79 In an attempt to correct Aries’s blindspot, Elisabeth Bronfen has read this combination in Clarissa from a feminist and psychoanalytical perspective, regarding the dead and dying woman as the ideal site for the struggle of Culture to control Nature’s basic forces of love and death, the woman being at the limits of Culture. In general terms, Woman has been seen in Western culture as both virgin (complete lack of sexuality) and whore (its total presence), both a mother, a giver of life, and a femme fatale, a dealer of death to men. In her guise as a beautiful corpse, she at once symbolises the victory of Culture over Nature, and yet ‘its failure to expulse the Other completely: a superlative figure for the return of the repressed’.80 Beautifying the dead was one way of denying its power – the female figure especially being the symbol, and embodiment, of the beautiful. Bronfen reads the proliferation of images of female death from the mideighteenth century via Ariès’ contention that modernity is characterised by modern culture’s denial of death, a denial that gives rise to the need to control images of death and dying: the beautiful woman’s passing is the ideal tool for this purpose.81


There are problems with these readings, productive though they are. Aries’ broad, psychoanalytic generalisations have been criticised for ignoring specific historical differences: between Catholic and Protestant traditions of the good death, for example. His perspective on Clarissa is compromised by such sweeping observations.82 Bronfen also tends to read ahistorically and from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective, always finding patriarchy in the same condition, whether in the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries. For her, ‘woman’ is ‘Woman’ no matter in what era; just as ‘man’ is ‘Man’. For us, however, it is important to ask what is happening at the specific juncture of Richardson’s novel: what factors produce the powerful image of the dying Clarissa. Richardson’s conscious intention is to signify Clarissa’s religious purity in such an apparently death-defying aesthetic. His Christian, Protestant motivation is primary: this determines her actions and the narrative of her bodily transformation into a living angel. Richardson aims at an exemplary sculptural image in one sense: Clarissa’s body is preserved in beautiful consumptive aspic in order to image her spiritual value. Yet Richardson and his age are reluctant to abandon the body to God: there is something unconsciously and indeed sexually seductive about this sight of the wasting Clarissa, but sex is not the point in the conscious narrative. It would take later writers to push the sexualisation of consumptive illness towards the Romantic celebration of death, as we shall see shortly. This reading of Clarissa’s death has invested the arguments of Bronfen and Ariès with the more historically specific factors of the religious tradition of the good consumptive death and the medicine of sensibility. Even as the literature of sensibility suggested that the suffering individual is too pure for the crude world, it also focused attention, via its basis in the nerves and fibres, on the body itself. This new interest in the diseased female is a logical conclusion to the kinds of ideas being promoted by Cheyne and others, in which the most attractive kind of woman is both nervous and consumptively thin. At another level, Clarissa’s death moves the discourse of the good and easy death on to a newly aestheticised dimension. Now her ‘beautiful death’ will become a standard model for depictions of consumption as a beautiful disease: not something that had been claimed for it by the divines of the seventeenth century. We will have cause to examine the notable male demise from consumption in Clarissa in the next chapter, but two other deaths of interest here are ‘the pining consumptive ones of Betty Barnes and Joseph Leman, unmarried both, and in less than a year after the happy death of their excellent young lady’ (vol. 8, Conclusion, 271; vol. 4, 547). These


deaths are marks of punishment and guilt: the consumptions result from their foolish complicity in Lovelace’s plans and their guilt at the consequences of their actions. The ‘pining’ also signals their deep affection for their mistress, so in this way becoming a form of love melancholy that serves to strengthen notions of the ‘natural’ class order, in which servants are part of a paternalistic ‘family’ rather than merely glorified wage-slaves.83 Having the same disease as their mistress, despite the different causes, also provides a contrast between the glorious Clarissa and those more lowly; indeed, Richardson ponders whether ‘it might be descending too low to mention the untimely ends’ of the various servants. Clearly the flexibility of consumption as a range of conditions, symptoms and causes served Richardson well in his deeply Christian morality tale. As we shall see, other novelists quickly followed his lead.

Consumptive heroines Tobias Smollett’s major response to Clarissa comes in the character of the angelic Monimia, or Serafina as she is really known, in Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753). The rake – Count Fathom – behaves in an Iago-like manner, driving a wedge between Monimia and the hero Renaldo. She apparently dies of a consumption, brought on by Fathom’s attempt to rape her, but is ‘reborn’ like Shakespeare’s Hermione in the Winter’s Tale. She is genuinely ill, but when she receives information that Renaldo is not the evil person presented by Fathom, she finds the power to recover. In essence, Smollett rewrites the story of Clarissa, adding a happy ending so that the likes of Lady Bradshaigh, a friend and reader of Richardson’s famously critical of the death, could have their cake and eat it, revelling in both misery and recovery. Monimia serves to confirm consumption as the disease of sensibility. The links with Clarissa are very clear from the start of her illness, including a hint of the criticisms levelled at Clarissa that she effectively commits an un-Christian suicide: ‘her sustenance was barely such as exempted her from the guilt of being accessory to her own death’.84 However, like Clarissa, her melancholy switches from love to the religious, encouraging ‘no discourse but that which turned upon the concerns of her immortal part’, going to Chapel and ‘with pleasure saw herself wasting towards that period of mortality which was the consummation of her wish’. The ‘emaciated and enfeebled’ Monimia’s melancholy is evident in church, causing ‘a humane gentlewoman’ to give her a seat because she is so ‘struck with her beauty and dignified air’ and


filled with sympathy ‘at the ineffable sorrow which was visible in her countenance’. This trope of the dying melancholic being given respect because of their access to greater spirituality stems at least partly from the congregation’s reaction to the consumptive Donne’s sermon described in Chapter 2. It will continue to be a powerful influence in literature and biography to come. A true heroine of sensibility, Monimia is set apart from others by her superior aesthetic and moral refinement, derived from a rank and education which ill-prepares her to deal with the cruel realities of the cruder world – inhabited as it is by predatory and insensible rakes like Fathom. She is ‘a young lady who had been born to affluence and splendor, trained up in all the elegance of education, by nature fraught with that sensibility which refines the sentiment and taste, and so tenderly cherished by her indulgent parents, that they suffered not the winds of heaven to visit her face too roughly’. This kind of terminology (which itself echoes Shakespeare) rapidly became a cliché in sentimental literature and would persist beyond the vogue of sentiment for a surprisingly long time. Monimia’s delicate constitution almost inevitably succumbs to consumption, although her wasting condition is not confirmed as a specific consumption of the lungs until further abuse by Fathom drives her into a fever, after which ‘she was in all appearance doomed to linger a few weeks longer in a consumption’. The disease fails to erode the matchless beauty of Monimia, as in Clarissa’s case. In one way consumption seems to resist time and fleshly erosion: ‘yet her charms, far from melting away with her constitution, seemed to triumph over the decays of nature; her shape and features still retained that harmony for which they had always been distinguished; a mixture of majesty and sweetness diffused itself in her looks, and her feebleness added to that soft and feminine grace which attracts the sympathy, and engages the protection of every humane beholder’. Smollett expands the idea that physical frailty and illness is an attractive and feminine quality which especially encourages notions of male protectiveness and, implicitly, superiority. A later painterly tableau is also striking in the way that it presents the lovely sufferer in a sexually alluring manner. When Fathom is led into her chamber, she is attractively languorous in déshabillé: he beheld the hapless virgin stretched upon a sick bed, panting under the violence of a distemper too mighty for her weakly frame, her hair dishevelled, and discomposure in her looks; all the roses of her youth were faded, yet all the graces of her beauty were not


fled: she retained that sweetness and symmetry, which death itself could not destroy. Smollett goes well beyond Richardson in his titillating description of consumptive femininity within the bed-chamber, although, like him, the power of death over the heroine is minimised via consumption’s symptomatology. In another way, however, Smollett’s narrative is partly ironic, or at least parodic. Clarissa dies, Monimia does not; Smollett writes a comedy, Richardson a tragedy. Monimia’s disease is described in less depth and seems more easily extricable than Clarissa’s, as if her suffering is less authentic. Smollett can take more liberties in the bedchamber with his scantily-dressed heroine precisely because the denouement will not be tragic. Although not an effect that Monimia intends to produce, the tableau is also reminiscent of the kind of deliberate pose which women themselves were supposed to adopt when suffering from a convenient bout of the vapours (or spleen, hypochondria, hysteria) in Augustan times. Pope’s Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock is typical of the stereotypical image of female use of illness to attract men by inviting gaze upon the body: the Goddess Spleen’s handmaiden Affectation ‘with a sickly mien’ Faints into airs, and languishes with pride; On the rich quilt, sinks with becoming woe, Wrapt in a gown, for sickness and for show. The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease. (Canto IV, ll. 31–38, 1714 edn.) Pope’s antifeminist version, which follows a long tradition dating from the Ancients, ascribes female disease both to the erratic biology of the womb (the Cave itself symbolises this) and also to devious feminine wiles designed to entrap foolish men. Smollett’s heroine does not fall into this cynical, anti-sentimental mode, but Pope’s version does remind us that there was a comparatively recent precedent for a link between female illness and sexuality – or at least sexual display. Monimia’s display of alluring dishevelment is not the deliberate intention of the character herself, however. Monimia then proceeds to her supposed ‘end’ in a suitably moralistic manner, taking the course of the good death, although not in so much detail as that of Clarissa. She converses with ‘a worthy clergyman, who removed all her religious scruples’ and generally moves towards her fate in a tranquil way. The dastardly Fathom, on the other hand, realises that


she is doomed, and works to avoid having to pay her funeral expenses. The sight of ‘the sable hearse adorned with white plumes, as emblems of Monimia’s purity’ passing before us brings the execrations of the narrator down on Fathom’s head. Monimia’s morality tale is luckily a happy one, but it does take the development of the consumptive heroine further down the road of glamorous fashionability: who would not want to be Monimia – as long as she returns in splendour alive? The popularity of the tender consumptive heroine was not confined to the novel: in the Sentimental Magazine of 1774 the case of ‘The Melancholy Musician, or Female Flute-Player’ appeared in a series of articles called ‘The Physician of the Heart’, which was concerned with sentimental problems.85 This love doctor would investigate and solve the inevitable sickness caused by being in such a constantly sentimental state as ‘feeling’ people were assumed to be. As the culture of sensibility involved a constant teetering on the brink of disease, the title of this column was more than appropriate for such a publication. The case tells the tale of a young woman who has fallen in love with a beau called, symbolically enough, John Lovemore. Unfortunately her amour is beneath her social station and she begins to suffer from a consumption so badly that her mother thinks she has become ‘a perfect spectre’. The Physician of the Heart goes to visit his patient with some trepidation about this frightening image: The word spectre haunted my imagination till it was expelled by one of the most angelical forms I had ever seen. The fair mourner did not at first observe me. I had therefore time to contemplate her. She was reclined upon the bed, with a flute in one hand and a letter in the other. Her features were expressive of more than human sensibility; her person was as shadowy as is possible for flesh and blood; and her air was all that taste can desire of beauty. These, joined to the delicate paleness of her face, and the elegant fancifulness of her dress, inspired the heart with more than mortal respect.86 This ‘delicate paleness’ was becoming a literary code for the presence of consumption, albeit carefully purged of its more irritating and unseemly symptoms. Far from being a spectre, the young lady turns out to be a sentimental angel. There is no mention of being a ‘lovely skeleton’ here: consumptions of whatever sort are becoming less and less conditions with specific and unpleasant symptoms, as we move from the metaphorics of skeletons to shadows. More than ever, female consumption denotes both sexual attractiveness and spiritual superiority.


Consumptive ladies, like Monimia and this one, become aesthetic objects: the tableau here, with the lady reclining on the bed, ‘flute in the one hand and letter in the other’, is perfectly suitable for a painting. The increasing aestheticisation of disease and woman for a male viewer paradoxically empowers the male while at the same time positing woman as the object of worship. In this particular narrative the lady is cured by being reunited with the earthly object of her desire, John Lovemore.

Life, art and consumption Nor was the consumptive fashion limited to male writers, or indeed to fiction designed to be published immediately. Female writers, observing the happenings in their own lives, interpreted the people around them through the lens of sentimental fiction and its depictions of consumption’s narratives. Popular fictions such as those of Richardson gave people a cultural template with which to ‘read’ the illnesses and symptoms of their friends, family and neighbours. The ‘Swan of Lichfield’, Anna Seward, was a notable bluestocking poetess who wholeheartedly entered into the spirit of the sentimental – as her artfully crafted letters illustrate. In 1764 she was monitoring with some anxiety the health of her friend Honora Sneyd, in whom she correctly detected signs of consumption: This dear child will not live; I am perpetually fearing it, notwithstanding the clear health which crimsons her cheek and glitters in her eyes. Such an early expansion of intelligence and sensibility partakes too much of the angelic, too little of the mortal nature, to tarry long in these low abodes of frailty and pain, where the harshness of authority, and the impenetrability of selfishness, with the worse mischiefs of pride and envy, so frequently agitate by their storms, and chill by their damps, the more ingenuous and purer spirits, scattered, not profusely, over the earth.87 Seward found it natural to use the language of sentiment and sensibility to describe the condition of her friend in real life, so much so that this passage could easily be a quotation from a novel of the period. Even allowing for Seward’s notoriously florid style, and her undoubted ambition to publish the letters at some later point, it is clear that the logic of her ‘diagnosis’ is unquestioned and genuine. The twenty-one year old Honora is represented as a sentimental heroine amongst the young women of Lichfield, ‘fresh and beautiful as the young day-star, when he bathes his fair beams in the dews of spring’; she looks up into Seward’s


sister’s face with ‘eyes moistened by solicitous tenderness’. Unlike the characters of Clarissa and Monimia, Honora is not beset by a fictional marauding rake or forced to endure some piece of bad fortune: she is intrinsically under threat merely by existing as an actual person of sensibility in a harsh and crude world that happens to be the real world. It is her rapid development into a woman of sensibility that makes her ripe for disease, consumption in particular. Young and intelligent people were supposed to be especially prone to consumption: the logic of sensibility states that such delicate nerves as these people possess must necessarily be damaged by any kind of existence below heaven. Honora is too innocent and pure to survive an environment which is conceptualised in sentimental literature – ‘literary’ and medical – as assaulting the finely honed nerves of those elite individuals both privileged and cursed by their refined sensibility. The generous angelic spirit of people of sensibility, women especially, is always straining to shed the flesh and return to its heavenly home. Seward’s bluestocking background plays a part in her focus on the role of female education in the development of sensibility that male authors do not tend to stress. In the following paragraph she goes on to discuss the ‘delight [which] must then result to me from the consciousness that my sister and myself have been instrumental in the cultivation of talents and of virtues’. If Honora ‘seems angel before she is woman; how consummate shall she be if she should be woman before she is actually angel!’ As the mentor moulding Honora’s personality, Seward is attempting to snatch the brief mortal time between angelic states, thus clearing a space for women beyond the idealising angelisme that men attribute to them. Although a consumptive disposition may inhibit the full course of this development, it is already a sign of ‘excellence’ and superior sensibility.

Sterne’s heroines Men were capable of idealising consumptive women in sentimental fiction, but they also, and sometimes paradoxically, enjoyed the sexual allure that had come to be associated with consumptive women in the second half of the eighteenth century. As with the language applied to women in sentimental fiction, this was a phenomenon to be found in reality, not just the pages of Richardson and Smollett. The cultural narrative of the sentimental was something to be lived, not merely written about. Laurence Sterne is a striking example of the effects of consumptive women on the male ‘reader’. Himself a consumptive, ‘Sterne’, as Arthur Cash has put it, ‘could never resist consumptive ladies’.88


Cash identifies three such ladies: his wife Elizabeth Lumley, a woman he courted in Paris in 1764, and Sarah Tuting. Elizabeth Lumley was in imminent danger of death from a consumption which she contracted after Sterne had been courting her for about two years: so much so that she had bequeathed her fortune to him in the belief that she would certainly die. She recovered however, and they married in 1741.89 The marriage was not a happy one, leaving Sterne to move on to new targets of sentimental and sexualised sympathy. One such was the anonymous lady with whom Sterne dallied in Paris. He was ‘for eight weeks smitten with the tenderest passion that ever tender wight underwent’ as he told Hall (Letters, 213). Her very presence in Paris was due to her consumption because she was travelling down to Italy, presumably to seek a cure in the warm air – as so many travellers, including Sterne and Smollett, had begun to do in greater numbers later in the century (Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years, 183). Sterne’s affair with Sarah Tuting is the most interesting of the three simply because we have more detail concerning Sterne’s narrative ‘construction’ of her consumptive femininity. They had originally met at York Races in 1760, unsurprisingly, considering she came from a horseracing background at Newmarket. She consulted Sterne about using her recuperatory trip down to Naples in 1764 to its best advantage. ‘Gentle Sally’, according to Sterne, was ‘a lady known and loved by the whole kingdom’; certainly Sterne agreed with the nation (Letters, 222–24). As the editor of Sterne’s letters observes, she ‘was another of one of those fragile ladies who ever unhinged his sense of decorum’ (223). He was indeed smitten with sentimental love for her sickly delicacy, as his letter from Coxwold in August 1764 makes clear: The gentle Sally T— is made up of too fine a texture for the rough wearing of the world – some gentle Brother, or some one who sticks closer than a brother, should now pick her by the hand, and lead her tenderly along her way – pick carefully the smoothest tracks for her – scatter roses on them – & when the lax’d and weary fibre tells him she is weary – take her up in his arms.90 Sterne adopts the role of sentimental male protector of the attractively languishing female that we saw in the ‘sympathy’ and ‘protection’ inspired by Monimia’s ‘feminine’ ‘feebleness’. The fine-textured Sally, like Seward’s Honora (and expressed in similarly sentimental diction), is ill-fitted for a crude earthly environment that weakens the fibres of her nerves: she needs Sterne’s fantasy fraternal heroism to make the world


suitably soft, delicate and ‘sensible’ for her constitution. Of course with Sterne sensibility is never far from sex: he teasingly proffers the possibility of being ‘closer than a brother’, the innuendo indicating the sexual allure of this becomingly feminine delicacy. Before the quotation Sterne has disarmed his flirtation by warning her that, if she pines for any lover left back at home, she ‘will languish away the little fragment which is left of you to a shadow’. Naturally Sterne hopes that she will languish for him, but deploys his habitual subversion of any overt sexual gambit or assertion of a rakish sensibility unworthy of a man of feeling. The complex process of the displacement of desire into sympathy reflects both Sterne’s individual foibles and a more general cultural tendency to aestheticise the sick individual. Women are commonly objectified precisely because their identities are more closely equated with their bodies. Sensibility as a discourse of the body encourages a heightened awareness of sexuality, even as Christian ethics tend to the suppression of the physical.

Sentiment and cynicism A healthy (in more ways than one) cynicism about the delights of swooning consumptions could be found beyond the medical community. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) entry for ‘consumptive’ repeated John Dryden’s translation of Lucretius on the delusions of men in love: The lean, consumptive wench, with coughs decayed, Is called a pretty, tight, and slender maid; The o’ergrown, a goodly Ceres is exprest, A bed-fellow for Bacchus at the least.91 Even if love is not blind, it certainly distorts the vision: the over-weight and under-weight are equally beyond Lucretius’s golden mean for beauty. Yet Lucretius is a voice from the Classical age: what of the eighteenth century? Sarah Fielding displays some reservations about the efficacy of consumption as a sentimental disease. It is true that she makes use of the tradition of consumptive love melancholy early in David Simple (1744–53), where the seduced and abandoned daughter attempts to hide her woe from her Father; not because she fears him, but because she does not want to make him ‘uneasy’. The result is a change in her appearance that commonly afflicts the melancholy lovelorn maiden: ‘the alteration of her Behaviour, which from the most lively Chearfulness, grew into a settled


Melancholy, with her pale and dejected Countenance, made the poor old man fear she was going into a Consumption’.92 This is reminiscent of the traditional love-melancholy scenario of the doctor needing to discover the secret of the consumptive condition: usually a problem of thwarted desire. Here the kindly father fulfils the role, needing very little pressure to reveal his daughter’s ‘Folly’. Happily, reconciliation is swift, with the father vowing to visit his wrath upon the guilty rake, not his innocent offspring. This was a common situation for a sentimental heroine. Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison presents the angelic Harriet Byron suffering from lovesickness at Sir Charles’ departure for Italy in the usual manner: sleepless, failed appetite and so on. The kind Mr Deane ‘is extremely apprehensive of her declining health. He believes she is in a consumption; and has brought a physician of his intimate acquaintance to visit her; But she, and we all are convinced, that medicine will not reach her case: and she affected to be startled at his supposing she was in so bad a way, on purpose, as she owned, to avoid his kind importunity to take advice in a malady that nothing but time and patience can cure’.93 Consumption acts as a smoke-screen for true feelings of love in these circumstances, although a consumption could always result from continued melancholy, as we have seen. The best – and sometimes only – cure is a lover, not a physician’s medicine. On this occasion, Sir Charles ultimately overcomes his obligations in Italy and returns to marry the noble Harriet. In the tragedy-strewn Book Seven of David Simple, published after Clarissa, little Joan dies of ‘a galloping Consumption’; a consequence of the measles falling on her lungs.94 This can be traced back to the selfishness of Mrs Orgueil, who does not consider the dangerous consequences of visiting David and Camilla with her recently infected daughter, Henrietta. Their son, little David, dies of the measles and little Joan follows – through the more indirect route of the consumption brought on by measles. Although the consumption is ‘galloping’, a financial gift and the convenient presence of a skilful and kind physician enables her life to be prolonged a few weeks more than usual. However, this leads the mother, Camilla, to agree with ‘David’s former Observation, that if it were left to our own Choice, it would be infinitely preferable and more eligible for us to lose our Friends by the violent Seizures of mortal Distempers, than to see them decay in lingering Diseases’. Camilla’s, and David’s, thoughts on the matter are made from the perspective of a friend or relative though; not from the sufferer herself. Camilla, in a long passage (which strongly implies Sarah Fielding’s own experience of nursing the sick), stresses the misery of tending to those in terminal and constant pain. Such a process can only be agonising for the


carers, who torture themselves by wondering if they could have done something to improve the situation. Despite warning of death being given, ‘those Rents and Tearings of our Hearts’ are more than this warning is worth. Fielding’s attitude in this case may be structured by the fact that it is the death of a child, who may be thought to be less able to take advantage of consumption’s warning. The contrast with the – admittedly brief – description of Camilla’s good death in the next chapter is notable, although even here Camilla’s submission to God’s will is balanced by her more secular devotion to David: she deliberately denies herself ‘the Pleasure of uttering many little tender Expressions’, lest he feel her loss more keenly.95 Also, the depiction of the disease in Joan’s case is not as an ‘easy’ one: Sarah Fielding, again possibly from experience, tends to the more realistic depiction of consumption. Camilla dies two months after little Joan, overwhelmed, both physically and mentally, by her various problems. Fielding does not mention Camilla’s disease although, as in so much sentimental fiction, it is enough to specify a mental malady which then overwhelms the body in some nebulous manner. Of course consumption was often assumed to be the cause, because it was an appropriately consuming disease, and its symptoms could be minimised when needed. By the late 1760s the vogue of the sentimental heroine, although far from exhausted, was coming under a certain amount of scrutiny. Symptomatic is a comment made in Frances Brooke’s novel The History of Emily Montague, in which Arabella Fermor, a character named after Pope’s inspiration for The Rape of the Lock, observes that ‘the estimable part’ of women ‘are divided into two classes only, the tender and the lively’. The heroine of the novel, Emily, falls into the former category, while Arabella, true to Pope’s representation, belongs to the latter. Tender women ‘are infinitely more capable of happiness; but, to counterbalance this advantage … are also capable of misery in the same degree’; ladies of the other type ‘feel less keenly’ but ‘are perhaps on the whole as happy’.96 If both Emily and Arabella marry their lovers, Emily will be ‘more exquisitely happy’ than Arabella, but if the relationships are broken, Arabella would be less affected:

I should pout a month, and then look about for another lover; Whilst the tender Emily would ‘Sit like patience on a monument,’ and pine herself into a consumption. The reference here – much used in literary distinctions between types of heroines – is to Viola’s fictitious sister in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night


(II.iv.115), in which a woman’s concealed love leads to physical pining. This distinction also echoes that made between two sisters in Frances Sheridan’s Sequel to Sidney Bidulph of 1767. Although both are sentimental heroines, Cecilia is the more lively one, while the emotional Dolly is languorous and consumptive. The ‘vivacity of mind’ associated with male consumptives is here less than evident; quite the opposite in fact, as female consumption becomes a force for glamorous or attractive passivity. Consumptive femininity is now a cliché in the novel. It is notable that Frances Brooke is not criticising Emily though, despite the fact that the distinction between robust and consumptive women looks forward to Jane Austen’s more rational heroines. Emily’s extreme sensibility is still to be greatly admired by male and female readers alike. Narratives of consumption in novels, poetry and drama nevertheless provided ways in which people could deal with consumption in real life, or at least describe that consumption. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s first wife, Elizabeth, famously made a spectacular tableau of herself, posed in the manner of a Clarissa-like heroine, after she became aware that she was dying from consumption.97 Sheridan described the scene in a letter: ‘Last night she desired to be placed at the Piano-Forte – looking like a Shadow of her own Picture she played some notes with the tears dropping on her thin arms. Her mind is become heavenly, but her mortal Form is fading from my sight.’ The picture in question is her famous early portrait ‘Mrs Sheridan as St Cecilia’ (1790), painted by Joshua Reynolds, of her sitting at the piano as the holy martyr St. Cecilia, whose music calls the faithful to heaven. Evidently aware of the dramatic possibilities of the situation, Elizabeth – even in terminal illness – exploited art as well as literature to depict herself in the most sentimental manner possible. In making such a pathetic art object of herself, she may have been exacting a subtle – or not so subtle – form of revenge on her husband for his notorious adultery. If she could not hold his attention in health, perhaps she might in illness and death. The deeper point here is that, like Clarissa, Elizabeth Sheridan took control of her disease and shaped a narrative resonant with broader meanings as well as personal ones. Her culture provided a sentimental discourse within which she was able to insert her personal tragedy, and make of it both public art and private consolation of a sort. Likewise, the poetess Anna Seward found literary language the best means of describing a real incident involving her medical friend, the famous Erasmus Darwin, who treated Lady Northesk, ‘a lovely and amiable young woman’, for consumption of the lungs in 1778. Seward recounted this episode in her Memoirs of Dr Darwin, further described by


Sir Walter Scott in his biographical preface to her Works. Even in this medical encounter, Northesk becomes a sentimental heroine: Lady Northesk lay on a couch through the day, in Dr Darwin’s parlour, drawing with difficulty that breath, which seemed often on the point of final evaporation. She was thin, even to transparency; her cheeks suffused at times with a flush, beautiful, though hectic. Her eyes remarkably lucid and full of intelligence. If the languor of disease frequently overshadowed them, they were always relumined by every observation to which she listened, on lettered excellence, on the power of science, or the ingenuity of art. Her language, in the high Scotch accent, had every happiness of perspicuity, and always expressed rectitude of heart and susceptibility of taste.98 As a bluestocking, however, Seward was keen to stress female ‘intelligence’ rather than merely a passive consumptive spirituality and beauty, as the second part of this passage shows. Northesk’s body seems ready to evaporate into its original spirit-breath, so thin as to be almost transparent (as with Clarissa). Seward’s use of the more technical details of consumption, such as the hectic flush on the cheeks and the idea that ‘vivacity of mind’ is common in consumptives, works to heighten the aesthetic and intellectual qualities of Lady Northesk by exploiting the well-known symptoms of that disease. Despite the threat to her life, the various facets of consumption represented by Seward are largely signs of Northesk’s refined mind and body. Even the obstacle of languor is overcome by her powerful mind, although that lack of energy also has the effect of forcing her to lie on the couch – which sets up the attractive tableau that we have seen with so many other consumptive ladies interestingly reclined on couches or beds. The literary narratives of consumption internalised by Seward and her generation gave them the template with which to interpret and structure their actual dealings with the disease: in a strange feedback loop, Seward’s description of a real consumptive event is cast in a literary language which itself is derived from Clarissa and the ensuing flood of heroines. With Seward, we are on the point of transition to the explosion of consumptive representations of women to be found in the Romantic period: the specificity of her stress on the beauty of consumption in women was to be the pattern for the next century. Seward’s male predecessor, Samuel Richardson (with the aid of Cheyne), pointed the way for the following culture of sensibility to develop consumption as its foremost physical disease.

4 ‘A consuming malady and a consuming mistress’: Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility

Surely men had nerves too? Were they not aestheticised in the same way as the glorious and beautiful Clarissa and her literary – or even real – progeny? It is true that masculine consumptions had the medicine of sensibility and the nerves in common with feminine ones, but there were significant differences in the representations and experiences of those consumptions. Masculine illness was structured by different social and personal expectations, and indeed by the idea that male nerves were different in degree, if not kind, from those of the female. Revisiting what Cheyne said about male consumptions in the previous chapter, it is clear that he followed the general trend of ascribing to women more delicate constitutions, finer nerves and a psychological make-up dictated by the workings of the womb and the social destiny of marriage. Women are made for love and domestic concerns, men for what has been dubbed the public sphere. This broad distinction is roughly true, but the following analysis will show that male consumptions are brought on by the disasters of love in men too – albeit intertwined with the effect on the family finances, which are themselves the province of the man. The rise of the Man of Feeling further complicates the matter, by ascribing to men a more feminised nervous system than allowed previously in the century. From here it is a short step to the creatively nervous poets – that ‘Genus irritabile vatum’ discussed by Cheyne – of the Romantic period. The poets we will leave to the next chapter, but in this one we will make the connections between nervous consumption and the various narratives of masculinity, self-fashioned or otherwise, in the eighteenth century. 85


Men, morality and money We turn back to Clarissa to find an immediate divergence in the gendered representation of consumption: in direct and deliberate contrast with Clarissa’s good and beautiful consumptive death is that of Belton, a rake. ‘How unlike poor Belton’s last hours, hers!’, says Belford (vol. 7, CIV, 404; vol. 4, 327). Belton is punished for his rakish behaviour – some of which is too terrible to reveal apparently – by discovering that his mistress, Thomasine, has betrayed him and usurped his own house. In a further twist of the moral knife, Belton is wounded by the revelation that his children are not (biologically) his own. His emotional turmoil results in a consumption, a good emblem for the draining power of a woman on his spiritual and temporal estate, as Belford acutely observes: A consuming malady and a consuming mistress, to an indulgent keeper, are dreadful things to struggle with both together: violence must be used to get rid of the latter; and yet he has not spirit left him to exert himself. His house is Thomasine’s house, not his. Symbolically and literally cast out of his own home, Belton travels from inn to inn although, as Belford also notes: ‘his malady is within him; and he cannot run away from it’.1 There is no escaping the consequences of his own rakish actions, which have destroyed the entire male prerogative of his financial estate, his ability to pass on his family name to his (now rebellious) ‘sons’, and, indeed, his authority to command his woman. Even to fight with Thomasine will make his delicate condition worse. Earlier, Belford relates Belton’s instructive tale to the unmoved Lovelace. Before the psychological cause is broached, Belton begins with ‘complaints of his ill health and spirits, his hectic cough, and his increased malady of spitting of blood; and then led to his story’.2 These are definite signs of an ongoing consumption of the lungs: obvious to lay person and medic alike. As usual in the medicine of the nerves, the woes of the mind directly affect the body: it transpires that Thomasine – a mistress kept so long that people consider her to be his wife – has been having an affair with a lowly but handsome hostler and, in a double irony, has made him a gentleman by diverting funds that were supposed to pay off a mortgage upon Belton’s ‘paternal estate in Kent’. The estate will now be foreclosed and Belton’s relationship, children and all, is thrown into doubt. He is heading towards disaster, a fact that Belton himself states to Belford: ‘So KEEPING won’t do, Lovelace. ’Tis not the eligible life. ‘A man may keep a woman’, said the poor fellow to me, but not his estate! – Two

Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility 87

interests! – Then, my tottering fabric!’ pointing to his emaciated carcase’. (vol. 4, XXVI, 131) The ‘fabric’ – the pun was waiting to happen – of Belton’s two estates, physical and financial, is ‘tottering’ because he has entered into an illegitimate relationship with a woman. In Richardson’s conception of family structure, male transgression of the allowed marital gender roles can only result in the male prerogative being undermined. Lacking the proper controls over a wife, both legal and moral, Belton leaves himself open to the kind of fate that does actually occur. Both (male) estate and body are consumed by this illegitimate female; but her treachery is encouraged by Belton’s similarly immoral behaviour. This moral tale has Classical precedent: Demosthenes (fl. 355 BC) criticises Pytheas (son of Lycurgus) who, having grown rich enough to keep two mistresses, has been brought ‘on his way as far as consumption’.3 Belton’s subsequent progress is a direct and inverse parallel to Clarissa’s consumption: where she dies a good death, he dies a bad death. Although he has had the time to prepare for death, he has squandered it; when Belford tells him to repent, he responds: How can I! – I, who have despised all warnings, and taken no advantage of the benefit I might have reaped from the lingering consumptive illness I have laboured under, but left all to the last stake; hoping for recovery against hope, and driving off Repentance, till that grace is denied me; for, oh! my dear Belford! I can now neither repent, nor pray, as I ought; my heart is hardened, and I can do nothing but despair! (Vol. 7, L, 165; vol. 4, 165) This is evidently an echo of Jeremy Taylor’s warning against ‘thinking a lingering sicknesse [consumption] would certainly infer a lingering and protracted repentance’ and Thomas Fuller’s statement that ‘often an illuse is made thereof, for the prisoners to flatter themselves into a possibility of an escape’.4 Where Clarissa has used her consumption to its best advantage, Belton has wasted his chance to make his peace with God and man. Nor indeed can his temporal affairs be easily concluded. Belford’s later analysis of Belton’s consumptive career drives home the point: ‘And my only fear arises from this, that, till within the four last days of his life, he could not be brought to think he should die, though in a visible decline for months; and, in that presumption, was too inclined to set about a serious preparation for a journey which he hoped he should not be obliged to take’ (vol. 7, LV, 194; vol. 4, 170). This spes phthisica does no good at all: the hope of the consumptive Belton is


delusory in the manner that Browne mentions; an inability to act in time merely results in Belton’s later panic that removes all possibility of comfort from the sufferer and his loved ones (vol. 7, LV, 194; vol. 4, 170). Belton’s consumptive symptomatology reflects his negative moral status. Unlike Clarissa’s, his suffering is more visceral and ‘physical’ – as in the precise description of his cough, spitting blood and hectic fever. Similarly, his pain does affect his mental abilities: ‘those wretches have not had their minds enervated by such infirmities of body as I have long laboured under’ (vol. 7, L, 160; vol. 4, 146). Again, Taylor’s strictures on being ‘debauched by peevishness and a fretful sicknesse’ are present.5 The rest of Belton’s death is in direct contravention of the usual elements of the good death. Death to him is a ‘terror’: he has frightening rather than beatific visions, ‘as if he had seen a spectre’. These horrible illusions are both projections of his own conscience and a threat of hell. Belford cannot save him from them despite Belton’s pleadings (vol. 7, L, 162; vol. 4, 147). Belton desires to turn back time rather than face death in Clarissa’s confident and accepting manner. His final speeches are incoherent curses at God and man; he gains no comfort from the presence of family and friends and has no words of wisdom to dispense apart from warnings. Belton can only be a negative exemplar – as Belford exclaims to Lovelace: ‘if Miss Harlowe’s glorious Example, on one hand, and the terrors of This poor man’s last Scene on the other, affect me not, I must be abandoned to perdition; as I fear thou wilt be, if thou benefitest not thyself from both’ (vol. 7, L, 167; vol. 4, 150). Belton’s terrible pains and groaning on his death-bed contrast with Clarissa’s easy departure; where her beauty is enhanced, his visage is made grotesque: He is now at the last gasp – rattles in the throat – has a new convulsion every minute almost! What horror he is in! His eyes look like breath-stained glass! They roll ghastly no more; are quite set: his face distorted and drawn out by his sinking jaws, and erected, staring eyebrows, with his lengthened furrowed forehead, to double its usual length, as it seems. It is not, it cannot be, the face of Belton, thy Belton and my Belton. (Vol. 7, LV, 192; vol. 4, 170) Asymmetry and distortion characterise Belton’s now unrecognisable face, opposing Mrs Norton’s enraptured description of Clarissa’s unaltered and perfectly symmetrical form. Whereas Clarissa’s soul is strengthened by her disease and struggles, Belton’s is destroyed. Belford summarises this bad death exactly: ‘to the last gasp, all was horror and


confusion’ (vol. 7, LV, 194; vol. 4, 170). The beneficial aspects of consumption have become a curse rather than a blessing: Belford hopes that ‘thy long illness, and dreadful agonies in the last stages of it, were thy only punishment’. There are a few other notable deaths in Clarissa, one of which is not consumptive and moves one step beyond that of Belton: the prostitute’s Madam, Mrs Sinclair, epitomises the female antithesis of Clarissa’s good death. Where Clarissa’s consumption leads her towards the spiritual realm as she sheds her body, Sinclair dies howling like an animal and reverts to what seems like a primeval mass of flesh: a ‘huge quaggy carcass’ (vol. 8, XIX, 52; vol. 4, 380–82). Her infected broken leg – a bathetic and ignoble malady – has left her ‘No time for my affairs! No time to repent!’ (vol. 8, XIX, 53; vol. 4, 383). She blasphemes and actively refuses to die well, in a parody of seventeenth-century good deaths. Ironically, she is punished by enduring a long and agonising end, despite it being initially thought that she will only last a few hours or days. The suitably unideal French doctors discuss whether a grisly amputation will prolong her life, because her ‘affairs and mind want settling. A few days added to her life may be of service to her in both respects’ (vol. 8, XIX, 56; vol. 4, 384). The Swiftian disgust Richardson displays towards Sinclair posits her as an example of transgressive femininity, symbolised by her excessive fat (itself indicative of economic over-consumption), who should be duly punished with an untimely and ignominious death. Belton, on the other hand, dies a horrible death from consumption, but is an example of someone who might have used his time better. Sinclair was evidently damned from the start; as Belford puts it: ‘the death of poor desponding Belton is not, I think, to be compared with it’ [the ‘shocking’ scene of Sinclair’s death] (vol. 8, XIX, 50; vol. 4, 380). Even Belton’s negatively figured consumption is a sign of consumption’s connection with spirituality then, but equally as significant is the way it symbolises his dereliction of masculine responsibilities, especially those connected with the financial maintenance of his estate. His ‘tottering fabric’ refers to both the consumptive body and his financial estate: both are ruined by his insistence on running a parodic family unit through the installation of his mistress, Thomasine, as a pseudowife. When it transpires that his children are not his own, Belton is shattered, both physically and mentally; but the revelation and demise hardly shock Richardson’s reader, who expects retribution for Belton’s transgression of his masculine duties and role. Such a pattern of physical distress – caused by the abandonment of a man’s responsibilities to his family and society – is not rare in the eighteenth-century novel: this


form of male sensibility is attuned largely to the need to head the domestic household in a commanding manner, which means keeping the wife firmly under control when necessary. These narratives of consumption in the novel are structured around the accepted gender roles of the middling and upper sort, rather than standing alone as tales of suffering and disease in and of themselves. Richardson was not alone in following this pattern of masculine consumption: a male response to financial difficulties occurs in a minor way in Smollett’s first major work, The Adventures of Roderick Random [1748], where the itinerant ‘hero’ Roderick decides to ‘heighten’ his valet and friend Hugh Strap’s pleasure at their fortunes changing for the better by ‘depressing his spirits at first’. Random tells Strap that their watch and diamond have been ‘lost’, whereas Roderick has in fact given them away to obliging patrons: ‘Poor Hugh, who had been already harassed into a consumption by intelligence of this sort, no sooner heard these words, than, unable to contain himself, he cried, with distraction in his looks, ‘ “God in heaven forbid!”.’ Naturally Roderick soon disabuses ‘honest Strap’ of his deception.6 This is not the family unit of a Belton, but it may be regarded as social unit of its own in the form of master and servant. The social disparity is diluted and naturalised by the fact that Strap is an old school-friend of Random’s: an instance of the more generalised phenomenon of the tendency to justify unequal power relations by transforming servants into lesser members of a paternalistic and extended family.7 However, Strap does exemplify the situation of the hapless male harassed into a consumption by economic concerns. Female novelists also participate in the trope of the consumptive head of the household: Eliza Heywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) shows Betsy’s father similarly sunk by an inability to control his financial and familial affairs. A complex lawsuit drives him to London, where ‘he found his cause in so perplexed and entangled a situation, as gave him little hopes of ever bringing it to a favourable issue. The vexation and fatigue he underwent on this account, joined with the closeness of the town air, which had never agreed with his constitution, even in his younger years, soon threw him into that sort of a consumption, which goes by the name of a galloping one, and they say, is the most difficult of any to be removed’. He dies in three months without any resolution of the matter, although he does take advantage of consumption’s convenient symptoms to make an organised end: ‘being perfectly sensible, and convinced of his approaching dissolution, he made his will’, distributing his remaining wealth among his children and so on.8 The


energies of Betsy’s father, and men in general, are sapped by engagement with financial responsibilities; in the sphere of the sensible and the sentimental, ‘the world’ of romance wears women down, whereas male nerves are unstrung by the pressures of duties specific to their gender. A major instance of consumptive masculinity, which may well be an obverse commentary on the tale of Richardson’s rake Belton, is that of Matthew Bramble’s old school-friend Mr Baynard in Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Unlike Belton, Baynard is a good man at heart who is nevertheless ‘threatened with a consumption’ as the result of his wife’s reckless expenditure. This wasting of Baynard’s financial resources in his wife’s ‘oceans of extravagance’, even on a supposed costcutting trip to the Continent, obliges him to ‘mortgage his estate’.9 The result of all this is that Baynard is so ‘blasted in his prospects, he could not fail to be overwhelmed with melancholy and chagrin, which have preyed upon his health in such a manner, that he is now threatened with a consumption’ (279). Luckily, Mrs Baynard dies just before Baynard’s situation becomes terminal in both physical and financial senses. Bramble is then able to help Baynard restore his estate to its former glory. Males in the eighteenth-century novel often become consumptive because of an assault upon their ability to fulfil their function of providing for the family financially, and controlling the women in that household, just as women become consumptive through the failure of their role to achieve a suitable marriage through the medium of an idealised romantic love: money melancholy becomes the eighteenthcentury version of love melancholy for men. The disease consumption here represents, and elides, feminine and economic excess: Mrs Baynard’s monetary consumption causes her husband’s physical consumption: her waste results in his wasting.10

Writing consumption: Smollett So far we have largely examined narratives of consumption in the novel, a discourse that tends to address the broader dilemmas of the middling sort and renders consumption in terms of these problems. A different perspective emerges when one analyses the writing, albeit literary, of a man (as opposed to a group identity) suffering from consumption himself. To be subject to a disease is clearly not the same as writing about it at one remove: one is presented with a more sobering view of the matter when it is one’s very self threatened with suffering and death. Tobias Smollett and Laurence Sterne both died of consumption and wrote about their experience of suffering. As literary writers, they in


some ways reflect the general concerns of their culture, and in others innovate trends through their idiosyncratic styles and personalities. Their narratives are inserted within the broader cultural understanding of disease and transform it even as they at least partly confirm some of its metaphors and stereotypes. They convert the illness into an aesthetic object or narrative at one remove again from that formed by the sufferer because they must represent it to others in writing and, ideally, in an entertaining manner. Of course, the malady is also not necessarily the central object of the narrative in literary writing, and one needs to be aware of this in one’s analysis of consumption’s presence in such narratives. In Sterne and Smollett’s writing they have a pervasive awareness of consumption because they are personally afflicted with the disease: a material difference from the perceptions and representations of other writers, however much the two have inherited cultural templates for understanding the condition from others. Sterne will wait until later when we examine consumptive men of feeling; first we discuss Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy, published in 1766, in order to establish a less sentimental, although related, vision of consumption. The Travels are a fictionalised and detailed account in letters, more or less adapted from genuine ones, of his search for health in warmer climes. In them we find that Smollett, himself a trained doctor, followed Cheyne’s opinion of the economics of consumption: that the feminising excess and luxury of the modern world induces bad health, especially in those working in a sedentary profession – like the writer. In his role as medic as well as author, Smollett is especially interesting for the light he sheds on the relationship between medical and more popular, literary representations. His self-narrativisation negotiates the need to curb the extravagant consumption and idleness of a modern lifestyle in order to regain a manly state of moral and physical fitness, reflecting in many ways the more fictional narratives of consumptive masculinity we have seen in the novel. Smollett’s Travels are also significant for their inauguration of a new genre of travel writing, in which the Grand Tour is combined with a medical travel guide. Smollett was certainly not the first person to travel abroad in search of health and combine this quest with the cultural opportunities offered by the (European) Continent, but he is the first to make the issue of health so visible in a pseudo-fictional account. His movement through France and Italy involves not only the description of the usual cultural sites of interest, such as the Vatican, but also detailed accounts of the quality of air, ‘A Register of the Weather’ and temperatures in various resorts-including comments as to whether a


particular place is good or bad for a certain complaint. In Montpellier, Smollett observes that ‘the air is counted salutary in catarrhous consumptions, from its dryness and elasticity: but too sharp in cases of pulmonary imposthumes [a purulent swelling or abscess]’.11 Because more people of the middling sort could afford to travel in Europe as the eighteenth century progressed and the British became richer as a nation, travel for health also became part of the package: the likes of Smollett, Fielding and Sterne were able to travel, and to follow the Ancients’ advice regarding the treatment of consumption and enjoy a ‘change of air’ in foreign climes. In the case of the British, this meant France and the balmy Mediterranean shoreline. Only later, in the nineteenth century, would new medical opinions switch emphasis to places like the mountains of Switzerland, where one would receive the sanatorium treatment – immortalised in Thomas Mann’s twentieth-century novel The Magic Mountain. As we move into the Romantic period, more and more people would take the route southwards in the now-affordable quest for a cure. Even relatively poor poets such as Keats (and, at one stage, Shelley) might beg money from friends or relatives to take a trip to Italy for their bad lungs, although sometimes this proved a convenient excuse to go on a Grand Tour without actually admitting that enjoyment was the primary goal; illness could serve a useful purpose in the accumulation of cultural capital. The importance of travel for health has, in general, been ignored by literary critics, due to their stress on the artistic aspects of the Grand Tour and the increasing quest for the Sublime.12 The two phenomena are not to be separated so easily, however, because the medical industry of travel for consumption and the cultural industry of the Grand Tour became fused later in the century: books like Smollett’s catered for the two needs.13 As with Sterne later, the very act of motion keeps death at bay, propelling the precarious narrative ever-onwards. Smollett complains about the cramped conditions in carriages, the general time taken to travel when obstructed by annoying officials, or purely physical difficulties – such as having to travel by boat from Paris to Lyon: ‘all these were insurmountable obstacles to me, who am in such a bad state of health troubled with an asthmatic cough, spitting, slow fever, and restlessness, which demands a continual change of place, as well as free air, and room for motion’ (64). ‘Asthma’ was one of a range of diseases that could lead directly on to consumption if not checked: in this text the word ‘asthma’ is cognate with the more serious disease.14 The subject of travel is one to which we shall return but, for the present, Smollett’s attitudes to his own disease concern us more immediately. At


the very beginning of the Travels he states his intention to go to South of France, ‘where I hoped the mildness of the climate would prove favourable to the weak state of my lungs’.15 He goes into great medical detail about the nature of his consumption when he corresponds with the famous Dr Antoine Fizès, a professor of medicine in Montpellier – which was then one of the most notable medical schools in Europe. This episode gives us a window onto the medical culture of consumption at the time, and the way in which the dynamic between two professionals is complicated by the fact that one of them is the patient, thus unbalancing their usual power dynamic. Both Smollett and Fizès, in their professional capacities, struggle for control of Smollett’s illness narrative, but for Smollett the battle is a personal one, as much for recognition of his own identity as for a professional diagnosis of his malady. His interaction with Dr Fizès is unhappy, Smollett both disagreeing with Fizès’ diagnosis of the particular type of consumption and also getting the feeling that the haughty Fizès has not been reading his long Latin self-diagnosis properly. Smollett informs Fizès of the severity of his symptoms: ‘the cough and consumptive spitting still remain, together with the susceptibility of cold: the patient’s flesh wastes apace, and the strength continues to decay’ (94). The use of the third person places Smollett in the pose of the emotionally detached professional, although he can hardly have been a disinterested spectator of his own case. On setting out from England, Smollett had told John Moore that ‘I am now so thin you would hardly know me. My Face is shrivelled up by the asthma like an ill dried Pippin, and my legs are as thick at the Ancle as at the Calf.’16 The seriousness and psychological impact of Smollett’s disease, as of Sterne’s later, cannot be underestimated: a far-gone consumption is thought to be incurable usually, and Smollett is well aware of this – as he writes just before leaving for France: ‘I am a little heavy-hearted at the prospect of removing to such a distance from you. It is a moot point whether I shall ever return. My health is very precarious. Adieu’ (41). Even allowing for an element of self-pity and melodrama, those departing for foreign shores had no guarantee they would come back to their motherland. The causes of this sorry state derive from ‘a sedentary life of hard study’ which has relaxed Smollett’s fibres, ‘and in consequence of reading and writing in a stooping posture, his breast became affected’ (93). Other factors that worsen the disease include his grief at the death of his daughter and his ‘utmost aversion’ to medicines that should have tackled his early ‘scorbutical taint’ or tendency to scurvy, a condition thought to lead on to consumptions by Cheyne and other medics (93–94). Smollett disagrees with Fizès’ assessment that he must have


‘tubercles [small nodules] on the lungs’ ‘as I never spit up purulent matter … I imagine, therefore, that my disorder was originally owing to a sudden intermission of bodily exercise, intense application of the mind, and a sedentary life which hath relaxed the whole fibril system, and that now it may be called a pituitary, not a purulent, consumption. Tabes pituitaria, non tabes purulenta’ (98, 102). Smollett opts for the less unpleasant diagnosis, in which a change in lifestyle is to blame – and a change of lifestyle might well reverse if the condition is not too far gone, caused as it is by the pituitary gland rather than the lungs. Fizès’ less optimistic medical opinion argues that Smollett is producing matter from the lungs, suggesting a consumption further gone than Smollett would like. Common wisdom had it that consumptions could be prevented from worsening if caught in time, a thought no doubt uppermost in the patient’s mind. In an age where there were fewer diagnostic tools (such as the stethoscope) than even the early nineteenth century, there was greater room for dispute amongst the medical profession. Smollett feels that there is no proof of his purulent consumption and therefore his narrative is the most accurate: Fizès is duly rejected as an authority by Smollett, who takes the patient’s prerogative in trusting his own opinion. Aside from the technical dispute about the exact nature of Smollett’s consumption between the two doctors, it is clear that the modern lifestyle of the – sensible and sensitive – thinking man relaxes the fibres and has long-term effects on the body, including, as Smollett mentions elsewhere, a ‘dejection of the spirits’ consequent on his sedentary life – all in accordance with Cheyne’s teachings (308–09, L35). Smollett’s particular solution to his disease of contemporary civilisation, and his attitude to the effeminating effect of that society, is to be found in his keen pursuit of manly cold bathing and hard exercise. Early on in the Travels Smollett states his belief in the wonderful powers of cold sea bathing against medical dogma and asserts that he would bathe in the sea ‘even if there had been an abscess in my lungs’, a consumptive state that was certainly not thought to be susceptible to this treatment. However, not all doctors argued against this: Sir John Floyer and Edward Baynard had written a book, well-known to both Smollett and Sterne, entitled The history of cold bathing, both ancient and modern, in which cold bathing is said to be good for almost any disease and argues that cold bathing has fallen out of fashion because of the recent increase in ‘Luxury’ bringing in an inappropriately hot regimen, whereas Britain is a cold country requiring a cold regimen.17 Broadly speaking, cold bathing condenses and strengthens the spirits and fibres. Consumptions and various other diseases come from


‘vicious’, new-fangled regimens and rich diets of both men and women: tobacco, strong ale, salt, strong sauces, liquors, sugared and spiced liquors, chocolate, tea, coffee and so on. The last, sugary, elements of this list especially constitute the female diet: the pernicious effects of modern luxury continue into the next generation as the children inherit the diseases of their parents (74–5). Floyer and Baynard report the cure of a consumptive woman with the aid of cold bathing and drinking water and go on to list other similar cases (114, 116). Smollett too meets someone with consumption who has cured himself by cold bathing at home (14) and is of the opinion that his own sea bathing at Boulogne has had the effect of ‘strengthening my relaxed fibres’ (63, L8). Indeed, he positively revels in his perverse adherence to this Spartan treatment: when bathing in May 1764 he comments that ‘they thought it very strange, that a man seemingly consumptive should plunge into the sea, especially when the weather was so cold; and some of the doctors prognosticated immediate death’ (192, L23, Nov. 1764). Just how masculine an activity Smollett regards cold bathing to be is revealed when he comments on the famous baths in Rome, claiming that the Romans would have been better to bathe in cold baths rather than ‘the warm bath in the thermae, which became altogether a point of luxury borrowed from the effeminate Asiatics, and tended to debilitate the fibres already too much relaxed by the heat of the climate’ (276, L32). In this period the image of the luxurious and effeminate Easterner was a common one, its ideological function being to contrast with the manly work-ethic of the civilised West, although – somehow – the practices of the Asiatics manage to infiltrate the Romans and even Britain. For Smollett and Cheyne, the agenda is one of re-affirming Western masculinity by overcoming diseases of luxury, like consumption, by a regimen that denies the dangerously feminising possibilities of a burgeoning mercantile capitalism. When Smollett goes to Italy, he not only continues cold bathing, but also adopts a regime of rigorous walking and riding in order to re-masculinise his relaxed nerves and enervated body: ‘I now for the first time drank to the health of my physician Barazzi, fully persuaded that the hardships and violent exercise I underwent by following his advice, had greatly contributed to the re-establishment of my health’ (302, L34). Significantly, Barazzi had provided Smollett with a cure that chimed with the patient’s notions of true masculinity, thus gaining applause where Fizès had gained derision: Barazzi’s consumption narrative conveniently blends into that of Smollett. Hardship, not luxury, is the way to displace the deleterious effects of a modern existence. Before the rigours of Italy he ‘had been [“for some years”]


as subject to colds as a delicate woman new delivered’, whereas in Italy he feels himself ‘growing stronger every day’, and has subsequently ‘enjoyed good health and spirits’ since returning to Nice – despite all the rain (308–309, L35). As in the novels we examined previously, some of which were written by Smollett himself, a man rejects the consumptive role of ‘a delicate woman’ by taking control of both his estates, physical and financial; in each, a regimen is to be followed that requires the curbing of excessive desire, whether it be of women, gambling or modern food.18 The importance of regulating excess is illustrated in Thomas Amory’s eccentric novel John Buncle, in which he presents an encounter with two consumptive male cousins. The first, Richmond, has lived the dissolute life of a libertine – ‘drinking and whoring’ – and, although ‘once a Sampson, and the handsomest man of his time’, has paid the price by being reduced to his present consumptive state, coughing up ‘a filthy pus … streaked with blood, and mixed with filaments torn from his lungs and membranes’. This purulence was of the kind that Fizès attempted to attribute to Smollett. Richmond is ‘the very image of death’: ‘his whole body thin like a skeleton’ and a living example of the effects of ‘Intemperance’.19 Ironically, his previous excessive consumption of food and drink has been reversed to such an extent that he is unable to drink ‘above a spoonful or two’ of his mutton broth; no doubt his sexual abilities are similarly drooping. The second cousin, Ribble, has an hereditary consumption – which he has controlled by a moral and physical regimen, as the doctors recommend: ‘in me is seen the wonderful effect of rule and sobriety’. In contrast with Richmond, Ribble has been born with the classic shape of a consumptive: ‘sharp shoulders … which are called pterogoides, or wing-like, and had a contracted thorax, and long chest, a thin and long neck, a flaccid tone of all parts about the breast, and a very flabby contexture of the muscles all over my body’. His lifelong ‘strict temperance’, in a further irony, has allowed him ‘more useful hours to myself than the strong and young can enjoy in their continued scenes of dissipation and riot’. Ribble’s potentially effeminate ‘very weak and miserable constitution’ becomes more productive than that of supposedly healthier men ‘by attending to nature, and never indulging in gratification or excess’; instead he devotes himself to the rigours of experimental philosophy, specifically chemistry. The varying causes of consumption allow Amory to use it as a flexible, if ironic, moral tool: Ribble demonstrates control of a physical disorder by moral order – the disease is reduced – whereas Richmond instigates and exacerbates his disease through his moral disorder. Consumption is the ideal disease to figure excess through its very opposite.


Thus far consumption in men is tied up with their gender, but differs from the way women are constructed through the disease. In particular, men are not usually beautiful – or at least pleasingly passive – when stricken with consumption; far from it indeed, given Ribble’s horrific description of his cousin. Smollett states this fact overtly in his Travels, when he comments on Michaelangelo’s Pieta in St Peter’s in Rome: ‘I was not at all pleased with the famous statue of the dead Christ in his mother’s lap, by Michael Angelo. The figure of Christ is as much emaciated, as if he had died of a consumption’.20 While Michaelangelos’s consumptive Christ may have been meant to illustrate the vulnerability of a feminised and martyred figure, Smollett clearly felt that this emaciated Christ was a bridge too far for contemporary masculine boundaries. Although Smollett’s splenetic opinions on great European art-works were by no means echoed by his peers, his fundamental thought – that at least the later stages of consumption are not attractive in a man – is echoed by others, and by his own novels. In The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Smollett resorts to the older tradition of constructing the consumptive as a living memento-mori (see Chaucer’s rattle-bones Reeve) in his description of the entirely unprepossessing and comic figure of the stick-thin Lismahago when chased by Jack Wilson, himself in the guise of Harlequin Skeleton – a popular stage figure at the time. Lismahago is so tall and skinny that the ensuing scene is ‘a lively representation of Death in pursuit of Consumption’ (331). Thomas Preston’s annotations in the University of Georgia Press edition of the novel rightly argue that this may well be an allusion to Tristram Shandy’s encounter with Death at the beginning of Volume 7 of Sterne’s eponymous novel, in which the consumptive Tristram manages to evade Death’s attempts to catch him as he, like Smollett, flies to the Mediterranean (438). More strikingly visual is Thomas Patch’s illustration of a well-nigh skeletal Sterne greeting an equally emaciated Death, the one mirroring the other. Both Sterne and Smollett’s self-representations draw on a medieval tradition of man reduced to bare bones, so to speak, that we saw in the first two chapters; an often comic mode that dovetails with the self-deprecatory tone which the two often adopt in their letters and through their fictional alter-egos – although Lismahago is not to be directly equated with Smollett in anything other than physique.

Sterne and consumptive self-fashioning Despite the fact that there appears precious little of sensibility or enhanced status in this ancient representation of the consumptive male,


it is nevertheless the case that Smollett, and more so Sterne, announce their superior powers of thought and feeling through their consumptive illness. Smollett, it will be remembered, falls to consumption partly through his intensity of thought. Sterne, with his less distrustful relationship to the mode of sensibility, takes the disease to a different level of respectability, making it the sign of his ardent artistic and amorous temperament. This is almost immediately apparent in his novel Tristram Shandy, a serial work that was published in instalments of two volumes from 1759–1767. Here Sterne identifies with various consumptive characters and weaves the experience of his own consumption in with theirs, most notably through Yorick the parson and Tristram Shandy himself. In fact, the entire novel is packed with allusions to consumption: not only do we have Tristram and Yorick as consumptives, but also Walter Shandy, Tristram’s father, is ‘a little phthisical’, as is Yorick’s horse.21 Literary critics have tended to ignore, or at least underplay, the role of consumption in shaping both the form and content of Tristram Shandy, not to mention Sterne’s life and other writings.22 Yorick and his horse mirror each other physically: when people scoff at his trotting slowly on the broken-winded nag, ‘instead of giving the true cause, – he chose rather to join in the laugh against himself; and as he never carried one single ounce of flesh upon his own bones, being altogether as spare a figure as his beast, – he would sometimes insist upon it, that the horse was as good as the rider deserved; – that they were, centaur-like, – both of a piece. At other times, and in other moods, when his spirits were above the temptation of false wit, – he would say, he found himself going off fast in a consumption’.23 Yorick’s steed is ‘full brother’ to that of Don Quixote: Cervantes describes Rosinante as ‘so admirably delineated, so slim, so stiff, so lean, so jaded, with so sharp a Ridge-bone, and altogether so like one wasted with an incurable Consumption, that any one must have owned at first sight, that no Horse ever better deserved that name’.24 Yorick does indeed suffer from consumption – as the mention of him being able to ‘compose his cough’ on the back of his spindly steed suggests (TS I.10.41; Florida 1.17–24). The comedy of Yorick and his horse takes a more serious turn with his death, an event caused by Yorick’s status as a man of feeling, an innocent abroad, who is mortally wounded by the harsh politics of a cruel world, not unlike the image of Don Quixote in the eighteenth century.25 Because Yorick is ‘a man unhackneyed and unpractised in the world’, he does not care whom his careless and honest wit offends and, as Eugenius warns him, makes various enemies who do not take kindly to his jesting (FL 1.11.30; TS 1.1.58). ‘CRUELTY’, ‘COWARDICE’ and ‘MALICE’


conspire to attack all his ‘infirmities and mistakes’, until Yorick is ‘worn out by war’ and dies, ‘as was generally thought, quite broken hearted’ (FL 1.12.32–36; TS1.12.66–7). The episode no doubt has a basis in Sterne’s own difficulties with local ecclesiastical politics after the publication of A Political Romance, and enacts a certain self-pitying wishfulfilment in the tearful death of the wronged and all-too-sensitive Yorick, repeating yet again through Eugenius ‘that the heart of his friend was broke’ (FL 1.12.36; TS 1.12.71). Yorick’s conveniently symptomless and consumptive death tearfully transforms him into the sympathetic hero whose sensibility is too great to inhabit the world. This consciously constructed image of the sensitive and consumptive parson would attach itself to Sterne as well as his fictional creation, as the later Thomas Patch sketch of Sterne encountering death would show. Yorick made a reappearance as the ‘author’ of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy – and of course many people were happy to take the hint and elide the real and fictional writers into one sentimental persona. By this time it was well known that Sterne was consumptive and had a physique to suit his extreme sensibility. As David Moore has put it: ‘After Sterne, the author, his life and work become an expressive totality, which teases and tantalises the reader to complete the portrait, of which the works themselves form only a pencilled outline.’26 The reading public accepted, more or less, Sterne’s selfrepresentation as a whimsical, artistic consumptive, as he himself built on medical narratives inherited from the likes of Cheyne (whose work he knew well), narratives that increasingly stressed the link between individual genius and nervous consumptive illness. In so doing, Sterne paradoxically provided a useful cultural template for himself, and began to live the role which he had started to construct through Tristram and Yorick’s illness narratives in the novel. Henry Mackenzie’s archetypal Man of Feeling, published in 1771, similarly allows its hero, Harley, to die in a gentle ‘decline’ of health, although the physician declares him to suffer of ‘no formed complaint’.27 In fact it was around this period that ‘decline’ was becoming a euphemism for ‘consumption’, as its use in medical treatises as well as novels would demonstrate. The OED’s earliest example of ‘decline’ – in the sense of a wasting condition – is in 1783; Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) does not have a definition of decline meaning consumption.28 Like Clarissa, Harley knows his illness to be beyond the reach of medicine and thinks that ‘I feel myself approaching my end, by steps so easy, that they woo me to approach it’ (p90). His experiences in the harsh world of London, and even the countryside too, wear him away until his


sentimental nature can no longer bear it. According to this logic, the people who prosper in a competitive society are those who are selfish, greedy and (therefore) thick-skinned. Only beyond this self-interested mortal sphere can the man of feeling’s supposed ‘weaknesses’, which the world defines as ‘romance or melancholy’, become strengths (91). The final blow to his health arrives when Harley mistakenly comes to believe that his female counterpart – the interestingly wilting Miss Walton – is to be married to another; even though he eventually learns of his error, they still have the financial obstacle of their unequal fortunes (91–2). By the end of the novel it seems as if Harley’s vital energies have been so continuously sapped by ‘the bustle of the busy’ and ‘the dissipation of the gay’ that he has lost the will to live, even when Miss Walton gives him hope for love (90). She asks him: ‘let not life be so indifferent to you’, but all he can do is grasp her hand, smile faintly – his cheek reddened by ‘a languid colour’ – and flop back on his seat to die. ‘Languid’ and its variations are words often associated with consumption, suggesting as they do a loss of vital energy so central to the later eighteenth-century understanding of consumption, although to name any specific medical condition in Harley’s case seems superfluous as the body is entirely dependent here upon the activity (or lack of it) of the mind – and particularly the emotions. As Janet Todd has also noted, male sentimental deaths are not usually as elaborate of those of women because men’s social and personal identities are not so heavily equated with their bodies.29 Unlike Yorick, Harley is not particularly learned or witty: there is no sense in which Harley’s role is to be creatively masculine, because he is more firmly placed in the realm of pure emotion. Appearing roughly a decade after Yorick, Harley lies further along the spectrum of passive and feminised sensibility. In the intervening years, however, Sterne had developed his consumptive sensibility and its public image further. Tristram Shandy’s own relationship to consumption in many senses defines both the content and structure of the novel, it being obvious from the very beginning that the composition of this serial narrative is dependent on Tristram’s precarious health: early in the novel Tristram complains of living in ‘one of the vilest worlds ever made’ and his difficulty in breathing due to ‘an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders’.30 As with Smollett, ‘asthma’ at this time was a condition that could easily signify a looming, if not actual, consumption. Sir John Floyer stated in his Treatise on Asthma that few people will die of an asthma-fit, ‘but the Frequency of that often occasions Consumptions in lean habits’.31 Van Swieten’s Commentaries on the great Boerhaave had


stressed the dangers of cold air: ‘as the tender vessels of the lungs, through which the blood moves in this viscus, have a great extent of surface exposed to the air, if the cold could be very great, the vessels will be contracted, the fluids will be condensed, and by this means the blood propelled from the right ventricle of the heart will exert more violence on the vessels when their cavity is straitened, and the blood almost congealed with cold is less fit to pass them’ (38–9).32 Later in Sterne’s writing career, he would depict his consumption in terms of nervous sensibility, as we will see shortly. By the time of the seventh book, Tristram, like Sterne in January of 1762, is forced to escape Death by galloping down to the South of France: No – I think, I said, I would write two volumes every year, provided the vile cough which then tormented me, and which to this hour I dread worse than the devil, would but give me leave – and in another place … I swore it should be kept a going at that rate these forty years if it pleased but the fountain of life to bless me so long with health and good spirits.33 Tristram’s ‘vile cough’ is now a confirmed consumption and constantly threatens to terminate his novel in mid-gallop. Many commentators have noticed the change of tone and pace at this point in the book, and with good reason. Consumption was a very serious condition: a far-gone consumption was deemed by most authorities to be fatal.34 Gerard Van Swieten’s famous commentaries on the medical star Boerhaave’s aphorisms contain one section disturbingly headed: ‘Phthisis – Why it is Always Mortal.’35 Tristram, and Sterne with him, have every motive to ‘dread’ each lung haemorrhage – and even a cough – ‘worse than the devil’. When Tristram states that ‘my Opinions will be the death of me’ (FL 4.13.341–42 TS 4.13), he is not disagreeing with Sterne, who ascribes breaking a vessel in his lungs to ‘hard writing’ and ‘preaching, which I have not strength for’ (Letters, 150). As with Smollett, and true to popular medical opinion, intense creative work was thought likely to bring on a consumption, although clearly Smollett was not a preacher like Sterne. One is also reminded of Cheyne’s comments about poets with irritable nerves being doomed to early deaths and Barry’s observation on consumptives having a great ‘vivacity of mind’ – all of which we saw in the previous chapter. Although both work in the more plodding realm of prose, Sterne and Tristram write in a distinctly digressive, lively, and certainly vivacious,


style. Yorick’s ultimately self-destructive comedy of learned wit conforms to Benjamin Marten’s view that consumptives are ‘generally observ’d to be quick, full of Spirit, hasty, and of a sharp, ready Wit’.36 The association of consumption and genius in the popular imagination of the Romantic age was, in part, initiated by Sterne. Tristram takes this poignant sense of mortality and wit cut short in its prime with him throughout the novel, a characteristic which readers would naturally carry over to Sterne the author: ‘what jovial times! – but where am I? and into what a delicious riot of things am I rushing? I – I who must be cut short in the midst of my days, and taste no more of ‘em than what I borrow from my imagination’ (TS 7.14.46, FL 7.14.595). Sterne’s development of his sympathetically and sentimentally consumptive persona begins with Yorick and Tristram in his first novel and extends into later work. Typical of Tristram’s self-representation is his encounter with a French priest: ‘the director of Madam Le Blanc’s conscience coming in at that instant, and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at his devotions – looking still paler by the contrast and distress of his drapery – ask’d, if I stood in want of the aids of the church’.37 The irony of the joke only extends so far: Tristram is in genuine danger – as is Sterne, although Sterne (like Smollett) rallies round in Italy. A peculiar logic of health, inherited from Robert Burton, also drives the novel’s humour: the comedy of ‘True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and like all those affections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro’ its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round’ (FL 4.32.401–2, TS 4.32.219). The free circulation achieved by Sternean laughter prevents the dangerous obstructions in the lungs and other areas of the hydraulic body that can lead to corruption and consumptions. This defensive humour is also necessary to protect Sterne against the critics who thoughtlessly criticise his novel and threaten to wound both body and mind – or the ‘jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining; – rumple the one – you rumple the other’ (FL 3.4.189–191, TS 3.4.13–17). These ‘monthly Reviewers’ are asked: ‘how could you cut and slash my jerkin as you did? – how did you know, but you would cut my lining too?’ Beneath his airy light-heartedness Tristram reveals his more delicate sensibility and his subscription to the popular notion that harsh criticism of literary work could cause ill-health as the turmoil of the mind has its effect upon the body. This logic will be at the heart of the one of the most famous consumptive cases of the Romantic age: Keats, who Shelley notoriously claimed had been given a fatal consumption


through a bad review from the Quarterly. For the present, however, the intertwined images of the ailing Tristram, Yorick and Sterne suit well the pose of the man of sensibility: creative, yet frail and in danger of being done to death, via consumption, by elements of the harsh world like Yorick’s ecclesiastical critics or Tristram’s literary ones. A Sentimental Journey, somewhat surprisingly for a narrative again motivated by a quest for health, very rarely mentions Sterne/Yorick’s condition. One reason for this is that readers were well aware of Sterne’s disease by now through Tristram Shandy, the place where the sentimental journey had, in effect, already started. Another reason is that Sterne is keen to write an anti-Smollettian narrative: Smollett’s Travels had been reviewed as a tirade of splenetic abuse directed at foreigners and their culture, largely motivated through his consumptive peevishness. In his Useful Hints to Those who Make the Tour of France (1768), Philip Thicknesse wittily opined that the Travels should ‘more properly … be intitled, “QUARRELS through France and Italy for the cure of a pulmonic disorder” ’ (5). Garrick thought that Smollett’s comments on the French were ‘the false colourings of pique, sickness, and fretfullness’.38 Sterne dubbed Smollett ‘Smelfungus’, and rejected the bad temper of his rival for the good humour of the man of sentiment and sensibility.39 Sterne and the critics diagnosed Smollett’s illness narrative in a very different way from the author himself, and – to a large extent – it was their interpretation that became dominant in the public mind. Nevertheless, Yorick does drop the occasional reminder of the underlying reason for his sentimental excursion: indeed, at the top of his ‘general causes’ of travel is ‘infirmity of body’. We are a long way into the journey before Le Count de B*** notices that Yorick looks ‘a little pale and sickly’ and insists on him ‘taking an arm-chair’ (69); on the same page Yorick identifies himself as ‘an invalid’, not to be cruelly used by the French, in an obvious gesture of sympathy-gathering. We are reminded of another Sternean consumptive alter-ego later, when Yorick asks Maria, who is also making a reappearance, whether she remembers ‘a pale thin person of a man who had sat down betwixt her and a goat about two years before?’ (96) Of course this is Tristram himself, embarked on his own sentimental journey in search of health. Shortly before this incident Yorick has been forced to the South because he grows ‘sick’, partly from the falsity of Parisian society, but also no doubt because he really is sick (94). At the end of the second volume of the Sentimental Journey, the last due to Sterne’s ill health, Yorick does ‘not endeavour to stifle my cough’ when the lady and her maid, with whom he is sharing a bedroom at an


over-full inn, contemplates confining her amorous co-habitant to ‘a damp cold closet’ (102). Thus, although Sterne eschews a crude Smollettian equation of his travels and personality with disease, he does manipulate his existing image to good effect at the correct moment. Sterne’s more extended relationship to consumption, one that to a great extent reflected that of his sentimental era, is to be found in his Journal to Eliza, a correspondence with a Mrs Eliza Draper that was written at the same time as the Sentimental Journey, but not actually published until the early twentieth century, having fortuitously survived the nineteenth.

Consuming sentimental love Sterne’s sentimental flirtation with Eliza prompted him to suggest composing the Journal when it became clear that she would have to accompany her husband to Bombay; Sterne therefore describes it as ‘a Diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose Society he languish’d’ (107). The Journal may have been vaguely intended for publication at one stage, but it is clear that Sterne lost interest after a while, having substituted Eliza’s feminine sympathy for his woeful health with that of other ladies closer to home. Whatever the status of this work, it is clearly an outlet for the deep concerns about his health at this time which he suppressed, for a variety of reasons, in A Sentimental Journey. The Journal uses the tradition of consumptive love melancholy (Burton was of course one of Sterne’s favourite authors) to express Sterne’s relationship with Eliza and his attitude to his own body. He has been ‘worn out with fevers of all kinds but most, by that fever of the heart with which I’m eternally wasting, and shall waste till I see Eliza again!’ (108). ‘Wasting’ is another of consumption’s cognates: often a sign of consumptive love, as it had been in earlier times. Sterne dramatically conflates his severe consumption and his role as sentimental lover; his invention of the names Bramin and Bramine for himself and Eliza only emphasises the aesthetic nature of his physical drama, whose symptoms are nonetheless real. Like a Renaissance courtier, he ‘shall do nothing but think of thee – and burn out this weak Taper of Life. by the flame thou hast superadded to it-fare well My dear ****’ (117). Here, love wastes the vital energy by making it burn too rapidly. Sterne’s position is worsened by his already grievous disease being unable to withstand the onslaught of love: ‘poor Sick-headed, sick hearted Yorick! Eliza has made a Shadow of thee’ (109). Again, as in the tradition of love melancholy, the only cure for the lover is the lost or, in this case, absent object of desire, as Sterne


complains: ‘Alas! alas! the only Physician and who carries the Balm of my Life along with her,-is Eliza’ (110). Even his friends agree that he is a serious case of consumptive love: ‘Tears ran down her cheeks when She saw how pale and wan I was-and never gentle Creature sympathiz’d more tenderly-I beseech you, cried the good Soul, not to regard either difficulties or expences but fly to Eliza directly-I see you will dye without her – save yourself for her’ (116). Love melancholy manifests itself in different and appropriate ways in this culture of sentiment however: tears flow plentifully from all parties, as the pathos of Sterne’s dangerous condition, as well as the intrinsic situation of thwarted love, are exploited to the full. Sterne’s ultra-responsive, ‘sensible’ body mingles with the very text itself: ‘my poor pulse quickened – my pale face glowed – and tears stood ready in my Eyes to fall upon the paper, as i traced the word Eliza’ (114). Emotion and body are so proximate that writing becomes the act of blending the two. As usual, conventional medicine is helpless: ‘parted with 12 Ounces of blood, in order to quiet what was left in me – tis a vain experiment,-physicians cannot understand this’ (110). Late in the second volume Sterne has been drinking the spa water at Harrogate ‘to no effect’ (147). Sterne, in fact, faces a paradox that was becoming a part of actual medical treatment. Although the object of desire should cure the lover, even to think about her excites and wastes the nervous energy – as we have already seen. He longs to see Eliza’s Journal, but knows that there are things within it that ‘will make my heart bleed and waste within me’ (134). Excessive sensibility was envisaged as an over-stimulation of the nervous system which could dangerously consume vital energy.40 This would ultimately lead to the situation where Keats was forbidden to be with Fanny Brawne, or even to write poetry, because both were thought to be over-stimulating. Sterne is relatively early in the move towards a Romantic medicine of the Brunonian variety, but the signs of the dangers for the Romantic lover are there in this new mode of ‘sensible’ love melancholy. A sentimental form of Neo-Platonism also comes into play when Sterne’s consumption literally begins to dematerialise him – as it had done many a pining Clarissa. Sterne is entering the realms of the insubstantial, although it is a form of spiritualisation that has an eye very much upon the secular lover as well as the Dantean God: ‘I shall be sublimated to an etherial Substance by the time my Eliza sees me – she must be sublimated and uncorporated too, to be able to see me-but I was always transparent and a Being easy to be seen thro’ (115). Both Sterne and Eliza will be able to see each other in their angelic lovers’ states. He


still plays on the image of the innocent abroad – like Yorick before and Harley after him and, like Harley, is considerably feminised in the process. His consumption is in some senses forced on him, echoing the sentimental passivity of the pure Man of Feeling, himself a feminised figure. Like the lady flute-player in the Sentimental Magazine that we saw in the previous chapter, he is ‘worn down my dear girl to a Shadow’ (110–111). The feminising tendencies of consumptive sensibility are put more explicitly when, ironically, Sterne is feeling quite well: ‘I was never so well and alert, as I find myself this day-tho’ with a face as pale and clear as a Lady after her Lying in’ (133). Sterne died in 1768, three years before the publication of the Man of Feeling, and never becomes quite as passive as Harley. It must be remembered that the ritual of sentimental flirtation is in the service of heterosexual love, but it could still be seen as a double-edged sword, always teetering on the brink of unmanly and diseased sensibility; an accusation that was to dog the literature of sensibility in the Romantic period and beyond. By the 1780s consumption had become a much more desirable disease than at the start of the century. The writings of George Cheyne had condemned the gorging modern consumer lifestyle and identified the disease of consumption as one of the effects of over-refinement. Such a move had paradoxical effects: consumption was likely to take away the cleverest and the most beautiful people of the better sort, especially the young. Hence, consumption came to be regarded as a sign of superior sensibility, although the form of this sensibility played itself out in different ways across the genders. Women were broadly figured as passive sentimental heroines after the manner of Clarissa, while men were permitted the power of consumptive intellect. Yet gender boundaries were sometimes blurred by the feminising effects of consumptive sensibility as well as other factors: Seward’s stress on female education and taste, and the extreme passivity of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, are cases in which women are masculinised and men feminised through consumption. The range and power of consumption narratives was considerable in this period, although so far largely unnoticed by literary scholars. Important trends from earlier centuries, such as those of love melancholy and the good and easy death, were reworked in the light of eighteenthcentury culture and medicine. As we move into the Romantic period, we will see these factors again transformed for a different age, a time in which the poetic mythology of consumption would be confirmed as a cultural force.


Part III Romantic and Victorian


5 Wasting Poets

‘I look pale. I should like to die of a consumption’. ‘Why?’ asked his [Byron’s] guest. ‘Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying’. At Athens he used to take the bath three times a week to thin himself, and drink vinegar and water, eating only a little rice. The Journal of Thomas Moore, 1826–18301 This consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done, and with the assistance of an English winter it can often indulge its selection; – I do not think that young and amiable poets are at all bound to gratify its taste; they have entered into no bond with the Muses to that effect. Shelley writing to Keats; July 27, 18202 John Keats, who was kill’d off by one critique, Just as he really promised something great … Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article. Byron, Don Juan, XI, LX Romanticism and consumption: surely now we are on familiar ground. Although consumption before the nineteenth century is an unknown quantity in terms of historical and literary criticism, the same cannot be said for the time of archetypal consumptive genii such as Keats, the Brontës, and a host of other writers who suffered from the disease. True, there have been many studies of consumption, and many individual studies of writers who happen to have been consumptive, but none have 111


connected – to any significant extent – the literary mythology of consumption with the preceding centuries to explain why and how consumption became so popular in the nineteenth. In previous chapters we have described and analysed the development of various cultural narratives or mythologies which contributed to the creation of a Romantic idea of consumption as the glamorous disease of the beautiful and the genius. Byron and Shelley certainly thought so, as the epigraphs to this chapter confirm. No doubt Byron was being ironic, but this was a double-edged irony: consumption was deeply attractive to both genders, despite its obviously deadly outcome. This chapter will focus on the specific reasons why consumption held a particular appeal for poetic young men, or at least – reinforcing Shelley’s observation to Keats – was felt to choose them as its own. Shelley used the disease as a way of marking out Keats as a good poet, a youth of refined sensibility, even if the linkage of poetry and disease was an unwanted contractual obligation as far as Keats was concerned. Indeed, Keats is the key figure in the subsequent mythology of poetic consumption, although certainly not the only important one for the nineteenth century. This chapter revolves around Keats because of his remarkable posthumous afterlife, both in the Victorian period and even in our own time: everyone knows about Keats nursing his consumptive and dying brother, Tom, in a confined bedroom while writing ‘Hyperion’. We are also familiar with the fact that Keats was referring as much to Tom as to Chatterton and other poets when he penned that famous line in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies’.3 Keats’s tortured letters to Fanny Brawne and his unsuccessful flight from early death to the Piazza di Spagna in Rome are equally part of a legend which in many ways seems to be the epitome of Romanticism and the Romantic poet in particular. The bright meteor, flashing briefly in the sky before burning itself out, is an apposite way of describing Keats’s paradigmatic consumptive career, a pattern that many an aspiring young poet would attempt to imitate. Alan Bewell has stated the case for Keats’s importance in the disease mythology of nineteenth-century Europe, arguing that this literary figure in particular made consumption, as the mysterious spiritualising disease of middle-class Western youth, a way of differentiating the ‘White Plague’ from other cultures, races and classes. In fact, the term ‘White Plague’ was coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his Medical Essays: ‘Two diseases especially have attracted attention above all others with reference to their causes and prevention: cholera, the “black death” of the nineteenth century, and consumption, the white plague of the

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north’. The phrase also appears in his novel Elsie Venner, but neither work entirely explains its meaning: was it purely a contrast with the Black Plague of the Middle Ages and the cholera of the present, both of which required a medieval crusade of medicine, or did it refer to race, to the fact of tuberculosis as the scourge of the ‘white’ countries? Perhaps the pallor of the consumptive was also a factor in this telling name? In the twentieth century, symptomatically, the Chalet School children’s cult novelist Elinor Brent-Dyer also referred to it as ‘the White Man’s Plague’ or ‘the White Man’s Scourge’, no doubt echoing the ‘White Man’s Burden’ of imperial duty coined by Rudyard Kipling.4 Keats, with the help of Shelley’s Adonais, also appealed to middle-class women as a feminised figure who could help explain their apparently greater susceptibility to consumption.5 In fact, as I will argue, Keats also provided a model for aspirational lower-class poets. Keats is far from being the originator of the myth, however, as Shelley’s observation shows. To Shelley, Keats is one in a line of poetic consumptives, a masculine consumptive genealogy that will require some reconstruction here. Initially, however, we need to follow important developments in the medicine of sensibility in order to understand the increased significance of the consumptive poet.

Romantic medicine In Chapter 3 we saw how George Cheyne, other medics, and then the literati, defined the poet – that ‘Genus irritabile vatum’ – as an individual particularly endowed with fine nerves, an enhanced sensibility to the point of excessive suffering when in contact with the rough, ‘insensible’ world – and, crucially, prone to early death from consumption. Changes in medical theory in the Romantic period did little to contradict such an image: on the contrary, they enhanced it to the point at which consumption seemed the poetic disease par excellence. Théophile Gautier, in an example of the power of the consumption myth all over Europe, stated that ‘When I was young I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds.’6 Likewise, Alexandre Dumas wryly recalled that ‘in 1823 and 1824 it was the fashion to suffer from the lungs; everybody was consumptive, poets especially; it was good form to spit blood after each emotion that was at all sensational, and to die before reaching the age of thirty. Of course Adolphe and I, being tall and very thin, considered we were entitled to indulge ourselves too’.7 Did medicine support the idea of consumptive and poetic glamour and, if so, how?


We saw in previous chapters the new importance of the nerves in medicine from the time of Willis through to Cheyne and Whytt. This trend continued: Scottish medicine in particular emphasised the importance of the nerves.8 William Cullen argued that a necessary degree of ‘excitement’ or tension in the nerves was required in order to sustain health: inadequate amounts of stimulation, both internal and external, meant depression of the body’s systems, and required stimulating exercise, air, food and drugs.9 Over-stimulation produced spasms and needed a depleting regimen that included the inevitable blood-letting, ‘low’ vegetarian diet, rest and more medicines of a calming nature. Cullen’s conveniently simple scheme paved the way for Edinburgh physician John Brown’s Elementa Medicinae of 1770 – a text that led to the medical movement of ‘Brunonianism’ which would affect representations of consumption for at least the next fifty years and would be one of the main features of Romantic medicine in Europe. Brown (1735–1788) updated more ancient vitalistic theories concerning the apparently fixed store of vital energy or life force within a human being.10 For Brunonian theorists, life was defined by a principle of excitability – the single quality dominating all life, not just the muscles and nerves – which required even regulation. This need for balance was partly a hangover from the humoural idea of equilibrium between the four humours as necessary for health. Appropriately for the approaching Industrial Age, Brown thought that people were born with a fixed quantity of life-giving excitability – the ‘fuel’ propelling the body. Health was a regular and orderly stimulation of that core amount of excitability through internal and external impulses. If the stimuli were too weak, the body would be ‘aesthenic’; too strong, it would be ‘sthenic’. The physician’s job was to boost or lower levels of excitement to the correct point. If one were overstimulated in any way, whether mentally or physically, then the body worked too hard and entered a state of intense activity that lead to a depletion and potentially total exhaustion of this vital energy, even resulting in death.11 Brown aided the move to a Romantic vitalism in medicine, in which it was popularly thought that the intense and sorrowful passions of the sensitive individual were likely to cause consumption. We have already seen that theories about consumption in the Enlightenment generally admitted the interaction between the body and mind/soul/passions, even if their conception of the body was mechanistic, but Brunonian theory – following hot on the heels of neo-Hallerian sensibility – helped to close further the Cartesian gap between the body-machine and

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immortal soul. Now the body and mind could be seen as more profoundly unified by the single power or deity which supposedly constituted the active universe.12 The medicine of sensibility was combined with a Romantic vitalism that viewed man’s life (both physical and mental) as a burning flame with a fixed amount of fuel.13 Sensibility also became more individualised in this period: that is, less sociable, less a sympathetic bond between people in general, and more a private, melancholic, even religious experience, more oriented towards artistic creativity and the torments of rebellious genius.14 Sensibility could now be described – especially in relation to the artist – as ‘morbid’. The place of consumption in Brown’s scheme of diseases was not entirely clear in his otherwise simplistic philosophy. This was because he considered problems specific to different parts of the body to be mere manifestations of a general malaise in the whole organism. If one had a ‘sthenic’ diathesis (constitution), the nervous energy or excitability would be – sometimes literally – at fever pitch. In this overwrought, hyper-stimulated state, ‘all the senses are acute, the motions, both voluntary and involuntary, are vigorous, there is an acuteness of genius and a great force of sensibility as well as of passion and emotion’ (ii.133–134). The sthenic state, caused by ‘indirect debility’ or excessive stimulus, would be cured by decreasing stimulation in order to allow a better balance of excitability. So-called ‘weak stimulants’, such as thin diets, vomiting, purging, blood-letting and mental and physical rest, were applied. Adult males, thought Brown, more usually had a sthenic diathesis. Conversely, an ‘asthenic’, under-stimulated diathesis meant languor and a dulling of the senses and intellect. The asthenic state came from ‘direct debility’, or an accumulation of excitability due to lack of stimulation, a build-up which might then manifest itself in disease. This would be cured by increasing the stimulus to healthy levels through ‘strong’ stimulants such as a rich diet with meat, alcohol, opium, exercise of body and mind, fresh air, use of musk, ether and camphor. Women, or those with delicate nerves and solids, were more liable to an asthenic diathesis. Perhaps confusingly, one state could flip rapidly into its opposite: when the sthenic over-stimulation had gone on for too long, it drained the excitability to such an extent that exhaustion and languor ensued. Extreme over-stimulation could result in death: total exhaustion of the limited store of excitability. It was here, in this see-sawing mode, that consumption could be situated. For Brown, tubercles were not the cause of consumption, but an effect of the localised blockages caused by a


general malaise (i.260, 139). Because the lungs were an external part – due to their direct exposure to air – they were affected with inflammation more readily than other parts of the body (ii.147). Although Brown considered ‘tabes’ – ‘a general consumption’, a general wasting of the body – to be an asthenic disease which drained the life-force and required stimulants of various kinds, this was only part of a more complex disease process.15 Consumption could be the result of a chronic sthenic condition: if a poet (Keats, for example, or Shelley’s representation of himself in Alastor) worked too hard and too quickly, his genius at full stretch, mental and physical over-stimulation would eventually result in languorous exhaustion and disease. Mental over-stimulation was especially destructive: ‘excess in thinking, by wasting the excitability, ends in indirect indebility’ (i.125). This reworking of the medicine of sensibility retained the older notion that excessive thought could have the same consequences as violent passions of the mind in their effects upon the nerves which, as the seat of the vital life force, could then result in a consumption (i.126). Romantic love was particularly characterised by the notion that frustrated desire over-excites and brings disease – a new spin on the ancient idea that we have seen previously. Hermoine de Almeida has argued that the figures on Keats’s Grecian Urn illustrate the sthenic, false energy that preceded exhaustion and death. Their eternal lack of sexual fulfilment torments them as they are frozen in a state of feverish over-stimulation; they demonstrate a set of physical signs that the medics of early nineteenth century would have ‘recognised as the particular terminal symptom of the exhausted but unnaturally excited consumptive patient’ (Almeida, 119). Brown had, at least partly, provided a template for the Romantic concept of consumption. The initial sthenic state of the male poet was one of heightened genius, like the old spes phthisica: a false and compressed expenditure of limited life-energy preceding languor and death. The habit of poets to sustain their writing, even in illness, by the use of stimulants might revive them temporarily, but eventually they would lapse back into an idle asthenic state, and so on, in an oscillation between the sthenic and asthenic, until the system was finally and completely exhausted. The influential consumptive poet, Henry Kirke White, diagnosed himself in Brunonian terms in a letter to his friend Leeson in 1806: ‘My mind is of a very peculiar cast. – I began to think too early, and the indulgence of certain traits of thought, and too-free an exercise of the imagination, have superinduced a morbid kind of sensibility, which is to the mind, what excessive irritability is to the body.’16

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Women too, being of a more delicate physical and mental cast, fitted into Brown’s broad gender distinction. They were naturally more passive, more prone to the asthenic state, and so not as likely to be as energetic in the creative realm as men (although there were some exceptions, as we shall see in the next chapter). Women were more suited to the love-lorn literary wasting deaths from consumption so common in this period: their initially low levels of excitability were all the more vulnerable to the dangers of frustrated desire. Brunonianism was not the only medical theory in the Romantic period, although its influence is manifest in the literature and popular representations of disease in the period. Yet because of the broad assumption that the nervous system was the fountain of life, both mechanists and vitalists stated that the mind had a somatic basis and that ‘the intellect depended on the material body for vigour and power’.17 There were debates about whether or not the fuel of life resided in the blood, the nerves or some other part of the body, but there was general agreement that it was possible to burn out the body by using up the ‘spirit’s oil’ too quickly through over-stimulation.18 Sir Humphry Davy, natural philosopher, inventor of the Davy lamp and amateur poet, expounded his version of this vitalistic view to his wife: ‘I cannot help thinking that a certain quantity of nervous or vital power is given to man, which, when consumed, cannot be replaced, and which limits the period of activity and experience.’19 Davy died young, convinced that he had worn himself out, and comparing himself with other icons of doomed youth like Keats and Shelley – even writing poetry on the subject. Davy initially moved in the same circles as fellow Brunonian, the radical Dr Thomas Beddoes, who argued that the modern consumer lifestyle sapped the nation’s vital energy and himself translated Brown’s Latin version of the Elementa Medicinae into English in 1795.20 The imagery of the consumptive as a burning meteor was also influenced by the developments in the chemical understanding of physiology. The famous chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) had followed on from Georg Stahl’s theory of ‘phlogiston’ (a substance supposedly emitted in all flammable substances when they were burnt) by liberating what would come to be known as oxygen – although Priestley’s comprehension of oxygen’s operation was in many respects backwards. In his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1790) Priestley speculated on the dangers of consuming one’s vital chemistry at a faster rate: From the greater strength and vivacity of the flame of a candle, in this pure air, it may be conjectured, that it might be peculiarly salutary to


the lungs in certain morbid cases, when the common air would not be sufficient to carry off the putrid effluvium fast enough. But, perhaps, we may also infer from these experiments, that though pure dephlogisticated air [oxygen] might be very useful as a medicine, it might not be so proper for us in the usual healthy state of the body; for, as a candle burns out much faster in dephogisticated than in common air, so we might, as may be said, live out too fast, and the animal powers be too soon exhausted in this pure kind of air. A moralist, at least, may say, that the air which nature has provided for us is as good as we deserve.21 Old metaphors about life burning out too quickly in consumptives were given a fresh meaning by these advances in chemistry: the body depended upon combustion of air via the lungs, but fast living at the level of chemical processes meant a spectacular early death. In 1798, Priestley’s fellow radical Thomas Beddoes, along with a young Humphry Davy, set up the Pneumatic Institution for inhalation gas therapy in Clifton, Bristol, on the understanding that some diseases – especially consumption – would respond to higher or lower levels of oxygen. Because Beddoes’ Brunonian application of these ideas – gas as stimulant – was fundamentally wrong, the Institute had no success with its patients and was closed, but not before it had become an icon of Romantic scientific and literary radicalism, with a young Coleridge as one of its participants. As Priestley, and others such as Antoine Lavoisier (who named ‘oxygene’), discovered more about the nature of air, life came to be conceptualised as a process of combustion of carbon and oxygen, like a burning flame. Stock metaphors of the fast-burning consumptive now had a more literal meaning. Brown’s ideas, and those of Cheyne before him, influenced Thomas Trotter’s A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807), which extended the epidemic of nervous disorders to the now-affluent middle orders as well as Cheyne’s blue-bloods.22 Physician to the Fleet, Trotter was also concerned with the health of the nation: Britain’s trading wealth as an empire had led to such luxurious lifestyles that a decline and fall on the classical model must follow. If we were not to be made ‘a nation of slaves and ideots’ we needed to return to ‘simplicity of living and manners’ (xi). Trotter’s Romantic regimen implied a Rousseauvian ‘savage state’ rather than over-refined civilisation (xii). The modern ‘nervous system’ was particularly susceptible to ‘fine impressions’, which induced a ‘delicacy of feeling, that disposes alike to more acute pain, as to more exquisite pleasure’; ‘the untutored and illiterate inhabitants of a forest’ (of course) were incapable of experiencing these sensations (25). Large

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cities, the bewildering division of labour, sedentary professions, everincreasing addictive desires fostered by consumerism, late marriage due to career-chasing men and – inevitably – female education and lifestyle: all contributed to the explosion of nervous disorders in industrial modernity. Like the Swiss physician Tissot, however, Trotter did not advocate a complete regression to the primitive: if people were to follow a more ascetic regimen they could – paradoxically – enjoy the pleasures of life more fully.23 Trotter assumed, as did everyone else, that ‘all men who possess genius … are endowed by nature with more than usual sensibility of the nervous system’ (59). Genius would be a contentious subject, however: Samuel Taylor Coleridge had also been associated with Davy and Beddoes in the radical days of the Bristol Pneumatic Institute, although Coleridge later rejected the ‘pathological account of genius’, as Nigel Leask has put it. The Genius should have ‘sanity of mind’ and a ‘calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves’, whereas there is a class of ‘false’ geniuses, whose creative irritability is based on ‘an ill conformation of the body, obtuse pain, or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation’.24 German Romantics such as Novalis, himself a consumptive, had valorised sickness as leading to greater consciousness of life and the self, both physical and spiritual. Just as an awareness of sin could make one more aware of its opposite – God – so sickness could make one feel more alive, more creative.25 The debate about the physiology of genius would rage on into the Victorian period, centered in Britain around the mythology of John Keats. Ancient vitalist metaphors of life as a burning flame emitted from a candle or a meteor – now given new force by developments in science – were particularly applicable to the popular idea of the romantic consumptive genius as a person who consumed his (and it was nearly always his) vital force too rapidly, due to his hyperactivity and hypersensitivity.26 In the first volume of American poet James Gates Percival’s Clio (1822), the essay ‘She faded, but in beauty’ (itself a quotation from his poem about consumption) discussed the constitutions of poets: ‘high-toned, irritable, feeling every sense of pleasure and pain with the poignancy of agony or rapture; moving with the rapidity, the eccentricity, and the ominous glare of a comet; never moderate in their desires and endevours; now springing with the collected energy of an eagle to some high and unattainable glory, and then sinking down exhausted’.27 The idea of the poetic Faustian or Promethean overreacher was an innovation of the later eighteenth century, no doubt reinforced by a medical theory which postulated the dangerous consequences of physiological and psychological excesses.


Answers to the question of the origin of vital force depended to a great extent on one’s religious and political convictions: some conservatives said that God lends the divine spark of life to man (such as the later Davy and the surgeon John Abernethy (1764–1831)), while other radicals viewed vital energy as a purely material phenomenon (like Abernethy’s arch-enemy and former student, Percy Shelley’s physician William Lawrence (1783–1867)). Sharon Ruston has discussed the politics, cultural and otherwise, of the Abernethy / Lawrence debate at length in Shelley and Vitality.28 Either way, vitalist or materialist, consumption became a narrative of nervous over-excitement and exhaustion. Literary over-production, derived from over-stimulation, led to medical consumption because it consumed vital energy. William Buchan’s popular and long-running medical manual Domestic Medicine warned against the dangers of occupations involving sedentary mental labour: ‘Nothing is so destructive to the nerves as intense thought. It in a manner unhinges the whole human frame, and not only hurts the whole vital motions, but disorders the mind itself. Hence a delirium, melancholy, and even madness, are often the effect of close application to study’.29 These stereotypical diseases of the Romantic poet were often accompanied by consumption, the physical result of psychological and emotional disorder. Buchan had also warned that ‘the Studious’ were especially prone to consumption: ‘So great is the power of the mind over the body, that, by its influence, the whole vital motion may be accelerated or retarded, to almost any degree’ (42–43). Buchan’s text did not change substantially until the mid-nineteenth century; although not Brunonian in orientation, its popular pronouncements accorded well enough with the more sophisticated medical theories of Brown. As Hermione de Almeida has observed, Brunonian theory was flexible, appealing to both organicists and mechanists.30 Thomas Carlyle – in his early guise – utilised the general principle of Brunonian theory in his explanation of Schiller’s consumptive condition: he depicted the German writer heroically working into the night, using ‘the pernicious expedient of stimulants, which yield a momentary strength, only to waste our remaining fund of it more speedily and surely’, to overcome the ‘languor and exhaustion’ that accompanied his condition.31 The traditional remedy for creative consumptives was to prevent them from pursuing the over-stimulating activity of writing. Sterne and Keats had been instructed in the same fashion as Schiller: ‘A total cessation from every intellectual effort was one of the most peremptory laws prescribed to him’.32 Alongside Brown’s writings on excitability, the general idea of consumption as a disease of genius grew ever more common in medical

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texts as well as in popular opinion. The biological facts of consumption helped to confirm myth: no doubt the symptomatology of consumption was, at least occasionally, conducive to ideas of the easy death, as we have already seen. The actual link with genius, however, is much more tenuous: so many people had consumption that it is statistically likely that many creative people would suffer from the condition. It is more probable that consumption hindered artistic effort, as one can see in the case of many writers – not least Keats, who suffered terribly in the final, supposedly ‘productive’ stages of his illness. Ironically, William Lambe, who was later to be the last doctor to see John Keats in England, was puzzled to find that in consumption there appeared to be no ‘destruction of the nervous energy’ and felt that ‘it seems impossible to explain this common phenomenon, by any supposed laws of action and reaction’.33 More particularly, ‘even the mind receives an unnatural vigour, as is shown by the extraordinary vivacity and delirious spirits so characteristic of this disease. It seems doubtful, from these appearances, whether the sensorial power is really destroyed in any, even in the last stage of Consumption’. The tradition of describing the consumptive as having a vivacity of mind continues here, although now cast in partly Brunonian terms: consumption is peculiar in allowing the spes phthisica, or ‘hope of the consumptive’, to manifest itself in undiminished, albeit ‘delirious’, creativity. An American medic had also observed, no doubt following on from the Protestant ideas of the good death, that before a consumptive’s death ‘in many cases the sense seem perfect and entire’.34 Thomas Hayes’ Serious Address on the Dangerous Consequences of Neglecting Common Coughs and Colds, with Ample Directions for the Prevention and Cure of Consumptions (1796) noted that ‘among those who perish by consumption, there are many who, in respect to the excellencies both of body and mind, have given indications of becoming conspicuous ornaments of humanity’; a comment that Cheyne had made earlier in the century, but more frequently uttered now. Doctors were becoming increasingly alarmed at the rise in incidence of chronic diseases, and consumption in particular: the London Bills of Mortality attributed one tenth of all deaths to consumption at the start of the century, rising to one quarter by the end.35 Consumption takes both ‘men of the greatest talents’ and women ‘of the fairest forms and liveliest sensibility’.36 By 1815, Thomas Young felt able to state: there is some reason to conjecture, that the enthusiasm of genius, as well as of passion, and the delicate sensibility, which leads to a successful cultivation of the fine arts, have never been developed in greater perfection, than where the constitution has been decidedly


marked by that character, which is … often evidently observable in the victims of pulmonary consumption.37 Romantic medical opinion, whatever its rationale, was happy to reflect – and indeed encourage – the general idea that male consumptives were in some way blessed with special qualities linked specifically to their disease. In terms of the diagnosis and understanding of consumption, the new Paris medicine – under the auspices of Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope in 1819 – allowed doctors to ‘read the body’ internally through auscultation and, as Sander Gilman has put it, ‘suddenly there was a semiotics of tuberculosis’ through these ‘signs’ both within and without the body.38 It is more accurate to say that this was a new semiotics of consumption, albeit more scientific. Diagnosis remained uncertain for the rest of the century, and crucially no cure was found. In that sense, consumption remained as mysterious as it had ever done, with the medical profession unable to supply the certainty that people required in order to start changing consumption’s mythological status. Hence the continued existence of the term ‘consumption’ alongside the newly scientific ‘tuberculosis’ for the rest of the century. As consumption was a disease of modern civilisation, of refined sensibilities and a high-consuming lifestyle, it was seen as a ‘white plague’ of Western society. Centred in urban areas, consumption supposedly marked off the boundaries of a civilisation that, for good or ill, outstripped less ‘sensible’ cultures and bodies.39 In his observations on consumption, John Armstrong noted the bad effects of ‘manufacturing system’, with its crowded cities and sedentary occupations, on the incidence of consumption.40 My study concentrates largely on the mythology of consumption focussed on the white middle and upper classes: as Herzlich and Pierret have observed, there were at least two semiotics of consumption in the nineteenth century: the first celebrated the consumptive higher orders and the second stigmatised the unclean, tuberculous lower ones.41 Even before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 there was an ideological occlusion of consumption in the lower classes and other races or ethnic groups, as we shall see in later chapters. In these contradictory discourses, foreigners and the lower classes could by turns be either more or less susceptible to consumption than the white middle classes, but either way labourers, Jews, the Irish, African-American slaves or Native Americans were depicted as suffering from a different order of consumption from their superiors.42 Consumption could, however, provide a certain amount of mobility for

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those of the lower classes willing to assimilate to the higher by means of professions like the emergent literary-critical industry.

Before Keats Predating Keats by more than four decades, the Scot Michael Bruce was one of the earliest embodiments of the Romantic myth of poets who died young, with this formulation emerging from the discourse of sensibility that we have described. Bruce’s subsequent fame was intimately bound up with the emergent institution of literary criticism and its media, the literary magazines, journals and newspapers of the day. In 1779, Lord William Craig, a Scottish judge, wrote an article in The Mirror entitled ‘Reflections on genius unnoticed and unknown; anecdotes of Michael Bruce.’43 Craig described how Bruce died of consumption at the age of twenty-one in 1767, and went on to observe that Bruce’s humble and harsh background had been too much for the poet to bear. The benevolence of the upper-class observer – for he too was supposed to be a man of sentiment and sensibility – was awakened by the consideration of genius thus depressed by situation, suffered to pine in obscurity, and sometimes, as in the case of this unfortunate young man, to perish, it may be, for want of those comforts and conveniences which might have fostered a delicacy of frame or of mind, ill calculated to bear the hardships which poverty lays on both. (268) In this case, the hypersensitivity of the poet was related to his financial and class position, which in turn prevented his genius from emerging into the public gaze. Bruce’s ‘delicacy’ of mind and body needed the comfort of a different ‘situation’ in which to thrive: sensibility was incongruous in a lower-class person, who was – by necessity – coarsened to the harshness of his life in order to survive. One of Craig’s main points in the article was his regret that he was unable to help Bruce at the time. If he had prised Bruce from financial obscurity, the consumption might have been prevented and the budding poet’s full literary potential realised. A strong association was made here between the disease of consumption and the myth of a young and talented man from an obscure background, struggling with his lack of financial and social resources and aspiring to immortal fame via literary achievement. Bruce was known, in ‘spite of resistance’, to be ‘apt to be overcome with melancholy’, an extension of the Renaissance tradition of the creative male melancholic


who would – of course – be prone to consumption (52–53). No doubt the suicide of the young Thomas Chatterton in 1770 contributed to Craig’s assessment of Bruce: suicide and madness were other, and less godly, fates for over-sensitive poets, their minds overwhelmed by the harshness of an unwelcoming world, especially if they were emanating from the lower ranks of society. At least consumption was involuntary and, in theory, more dignified than unchristian options. In one way, the word ‘delicacy’ implied a certain feminisation of Bruce, as indeed did the application of sensibility to men in general, as we saw in the previous chapter. Bruce could be regarded as a Man of Feeling, ill-suited to descend to the vulgarities of a lower-rank environment. His biographers all stressed his vulnerable, sensitive physique, which reflected and embodied his delicate mind: ‘his appearance indicated his tendency to phthisis. He was slenderly made, with a long neck and narrow chest; his skin white and shining; his cheeks tinged with red, rather than ruddy; his hair yellowish, and inclined to curl’.44 In another way, his disease was constructed in a more masculine form than Harley’s, for example. Unlike the passive and purified nature of Honora Sneyd’s predicted consumption, Bruce’s disease was not merely the object of another’s representation: he actually took control of the discourse of consumption by incorporating it into an aesthetic of the self. Indeed, Craig finds this consumptive self-fashioning to be his most laudable literary act: A young man of genius, in a deep consumption, at the age of twentyone, feeling himself every moment going faster to decline, is an object sufficiently interesting; but how much must every feeling on the occasion be heightened, when we know that this person possessed so much dignity and composure of mind, as not only to contemplate his approaching fate, but even to write a poem on the subject! (269) The poem to which Craig refers is the ‘Elegy Written in Spring,’ in which Bruce ironically contrasts the birth of new life at this time with his own deteriorating condition: ‘Dim in my breast life’s dying taper burns’ he complains, ‘Meagre and pale, the ghost of what I was.’45 Bruce was clearly aware of his imminent death and wrote that fact into the inevitable narrative of the lyric. Craig ended his article with an extract from the poem that included these lines, which were to be repeated ad infinitum throughout the nineteenth century as a moving example of the heroic, youthful poet making art from disease – especially so as this disease, theoretically, meant certain death.46 As late as 1905, a biographer stated that ‘from

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letters to his dear friend David Pearson, we discover the trying circumstances which beset him, particularly the state of his health, which greatly hindered his work. Yet with a stout heart he bravely struggled on …’47 In taking control of his consumption through a self-dramatising process, Bruce fulfilled the mission of the poet seeking fame from beyond the grave. Here was a recurring pattern in consumption narratives: the divergence between the perspective of the sufferer and those around him or her. In this case, the artist and the critics both jostled for control of the narrative. In contrast with Byron’s attraction to consumption, Bruce knew the realities of the disease as a sufferer; nor did he give any hint that he regarded consumption as a way of making him ‘interesting’ (although it did for others). Bruce is truly despondent, as well he might be – his plans for poetic fame left in tatters by his illness. Critics such as Craig, however, preferred not to dwell on Bruce’s despondency, but his heroic resistance to the disease. Part of this drama derived from the religious tradition of the Good Death: Bruce had originally trained as a Minister in the Scottish burgher synod, and his later refusal to stop writing poetry was interpreted by biographers as a sign of his Christian heroism. In 1823 a ‘Select Biography’ in The Mirror of Literature assumed that ‘Bruce’s death-bed must have been a scene of singular and deep interest. There was indeed the fainting and the weakness of humanity; but there were also the deep, strong consolations of religion to cheer him.’48 In the usual manner of Protestant biography outlined in Chapter 2, Bruce’s friend David Pearson described Bruce’s decline: ‘he endured his distress and the prospect of his approaching exit with admirable serenity of soul’, and gave over his poetry for study of the Bible at this point.49 This attitude to disease was exemplified by the only surviving letter of his father, Alexander, who interpreted ‘diseases and pains’ as part of God’s grand design, to which the faithful should submit: ‘He chastens us for our profit.’50 Despite this, the tone of his poetry often tended to be melancholic in a secular manner. Evidently the poet, like many others before and since, did not find it easy to reconcile the reality of his suffering with his religion – in writing or life. Among those later stuck by Bruce’s myth was Nathan Drake who, in his Literary Hours of 1798, mentioned Craig’s article, and quoted the concluding lines of Bruce’s Loch Leven which (understandably) adopted the partly Miltonic pose of the doomed poet: Thus sung the youth, amid unfertile wilds, And nameless deserts, unpoetic ground,


Far from his friends he stray’d, recording thus The dear remembrance of his native fields To cheer the tedious night, while slow disease Prey’d on his pining vitals, and the blasts Of dark December shook his humble cot. Ironically, the ‘unpoetic’ and ‘unfertile’ ground trodden by the Lycidas figure produced this testament to the tormented sensibility of the consumptive poet. The poem itself stresses the isolation of the consumptive: a Protestant poetic trope, but also a frequent social effect of debilitating and chronic illness. Drake was careful to mention that these verses were ‘finished under the pressure of mortal disease’, which he had earlier identified as ‘that scourge of our isle, pulmonary consumption’.51 The proto-Romantic sense of isolation conferred by the misery of disease partly intersected with the ‘graveyard’ school of poetry – exemplified by Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. Bruce did not derive pleasure as such from his disease, as one would expect in the later stages, but rather from its representation in poetry, and the possibility of religious consolation after death. Later critics, seeing his melancholy as a part of the cause of consumption, noted that, as Alexander Grosart put it, ‘Bruce seems from the outset to have looked forward to early dying.’52 This was not altogether a critic usurping Bruce’s ‘authentic’ self-representation: Bruce was active in constructing his own image as a doomed and isolated poet, as his conscious references to, and contrasts with, Milton’s Lycidas illustrate. His religious background fed into this kind of Protestant angst, but now was set against the background of the possibilities for a young man of lower-class status to rise to fame via the mechanisms of the literary press. Bruce, and later poets of his ilk, saw poetry as a way out of otherwise dull or impoverished existences, and constructed themselves as men of hyper-sensibility who would therefore be prone to a ‘refining’ disease like consumption. The fact that Cheyne had defined consumption as a disease of the middle and upper classes also helped the young poet’s cause: developing consumption as the result of a middle-class activity – like writing – would mark the poet off as a person of the better sort, trapped in a class beneath his true deserts. Bruce thus had various elements in his biography and poetry that would make him attractive to a new Romantic tradition which valorised the extreme sensibility of the poet as manifested in melancholy, consumption and early death – as well as in a lyrical poetry of often morbid content. His religious background and training in the strict Scottish dissenting tradition contributed to these gloomy elements, although they

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could be more or less ignored by those of a secular tendency. Bruce continued to be discussed throughout the nineteenth century, even strengthening his popularity with the resurgence of Keats and other consumptives after 1850. John Small commented – in an article dealing with another aspect of Bruce’s legacy, the dispute over whether Bruce or John Logan (Bruce’s first posthumous editor) had written the ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’ – that Bruce’s life story is ‘well known, and is one of the most touching chapters in the literary history of Scotland’. This observation was made in 1877, and in a reprint from an earlier article that year in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review.53 Consumptive writers were beginning to be constructed and discussed as such by the Romantic period; they continued to be so throughout the nineteenth century.

Henry Kirke White: Romantic cultures of consumption Even more famous than Bruce was Henry Kirke White, a Nottinghamshire poet and son of a butcher, who died young of consumption in 1806. He was very well known and influential in the nineteenth century, both in Britain and America, largely due to the ministrations of Robert Southey, who edited the Remains of Henry Kirke White in three volumes, published between 1808 and 1822. In 1823 he published a tenth three-volume edition, just at the time when the Keats myth and the first of Thomas Carlyle’s articles describing the German consumptives Schiller and Novalis were coming into the public domain.54 After examining White’s collected papers shortly after his death Southey had claimed that the existing manuscripts of Chatterton ‘excited less wonder than these’.55 Byron too, although antagonistic to Southey, enthusiastically trumpeted White’s fame in his ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ of 1809, lamenting White’s early death.56 According to both Byron and Southey, White had brought on a consumption by overwork at Cambridge University. As Byron puts it in the same passage: ‘’Twas thine own Genius gave the final blow’. Before this, however, White had suffered a cruel review that brought him to the attention of Southey: Byron had mentioned to Tom Moore that what had happened to Keats had nearly happened to Kirke White.57 Meanwhile, another influential article appeared in the popular journal The Mirror Of Literature in April 1823, stating that few readers would have heard of Bruce, but many of Henry Kirke White, ‘and it is impossible to present any stronger inducement to peruse these pages, than to state, that Michael Bruce was, in many respects, the counterpart of that very interesting individual’.58 Critics had started to connect the illness


narratives of consumptive poets in a way that had not occurred in earlier periods: Bruce and Kirke White were given the collective label of ‘young consumptive poet’ – with which both poets consciously identified themselves. White, even more so than Bruce, had made his consumptive condition central to his poetry and, indeed, seemed obsessed with the disease (which was well-nigh epidemic in Nottingham) before he contracted it, rather precociously writing a fragment of a Shakespearean imitation, when he was fourteen, called ‘The Dance of the Consumptives.’59 He later wrote a sonnet – an appropriate genre for the ‘melancholy man’60 according to White – to ‘Consumption’ that imagined a good consumptive death for its author.61 Kirke White, like Bruce, had had ambitions to be a minister and was steeped in the Protestant ideals of the good death, which were to be so significantly revived and reworked in this period through the rise of Evangelical Christianity and the general nineteenth-century re-imagining of death. He drew upon the idea and language of the good death that we saw in Thomas Browne’s everpopular description of his friend’s consumptive demise, and echoed much of Browne’s terminology. The painless process of consumption allowed an otherwise violent confrontation to seem like going to sleep, a condition much to be desired – as the poet’s plea to Consumption in the first quatrain makes evident. The second quatrain rather immodestly (but typically) portrays White as a good man, deserving of an angelic orchestra, and runs on into the third – which adds a suitably melancholic tone to the musical accompaniment, while also rehearsing the traditional ritual of bidding one’s weeping friends farewell. Kirke White is a particularly striking and apt example of a consumptive poet because he was intensely aware of living the Romantic myth of the suffering and diseased poet towards which the literature of sensibility had been moving. Indeed, in retrospect his whole existence seems to have been an amalgam of all the clichés of Romantic poetry. His own illness narrative was constructed by Brunonian medical narratives, older traditions of the consumptive Good Death, and newer notions of the Romantic poet. To him, the glamour of consumption was real, even though the suffering of consumption was also far too evident. His Ode to ‘Genius’ explicitly lays out the fate of ‘Genius’ favourites’ (iii.1), who are condemned to be ‘devour[ed]’ by grief, ‘weeping Woe, and Disappointment keen, / Repining Penury, and Sorrow sour, / And selfconsuming Spleen’.62 Given the standard of his poetry, which veers between what can only be described as whinging self-pity (‘Fifty years hence, and who will hear of Henry? / Oh! None’) and melodramatic

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delusions of greatness, White is being rather presumptuous in including himself amongst the ranks of the Genii. Kirke White asks personified Genius to hear his complaint ‘of anguish-ridden days, /Pangs that his sensibility uprouse / To curse his being and his thirst for praise’ (iii.1). Mindful of his lowly rank, Kirke White also mentions ‘keen neglect’ and ‘the rich man’s scorn’. This extension of sensibility’s role portrays the poet as uniquely suffering, distanced from his fellow men by both his intellectual genius and the sharp pain to which his exquisite nervous system subjects him. At pains to contrast himself with normal, happy people who sleep well, the poet paints a melodramatic picture of himself ‘in feverish study’ ‘by his lonely lamp … At solemn midnight, when the peasant sleeps’ (i.2). He returns to this self-pitying and glamorous image repeatedly throughout his poetry – a redeeming sense of humour and irony is not evident either in his poetry or personal life. The popular medical idea of the poet consuming his vital energies in literary over-production is also manifested in this poem: the poet ‘consumes his watchful oil’ and ‘waste[s] life’s fleeting breath … for neglect and penury’ and ‘untimely death’ (ii.2). Kirke White imagines himself lying ‘dejected pale’ and despairing, feeling ‘the vital flame decrease’. This dramatic woe is heightened by the poet’s vision of ‘the grave wide yawning for its prey’, while the bard, alienated from the sublunary world of ordinary mortals, expires friendless and alone. Lest we be in any doubt about the agonies of the Romantic poet, the sonnet ‘Sweet to the gay of heart’ announces that ‘howls of furies’ ring in his ear, and ‘melancholy wastes the vital fire’; while in the ‘Fragment of an Ode to the Moon’ he declares that ‘These feverish dews that on my temples hang, / This quivering lip, these eyes of dying flame; / These dread signs of many a secret pang, / These are the meed of him who pants for fame!’ Robert Southey concurred with these notions when he described the closing days of Kirke White in his Life: having been working intensely in Cambridge and then gone on a trip to the all-too-stimulating environment of London, he had been so depleted that ‘when he returned to college, he was so completely ill that no power of medicine could save him. His mind was worn out, and it was the opinion of his medical attendants, that if he had recovered, his intellect would have been affected’.63 To the modern ear, Kirke White’s gloomy midnight world of graveyards, moonlight and feverish poetry is hackneyed; even in his time, the ‘graveyard’ school of poets was well known. Laying questions of quality aside, however, – and it is best that we do – his drawing together a number of traditions (and clichés) worked effectively on his contemporaries


both in Britain and America, where the image portrayed by the poet – and in a sense authenticated by his early death from consumption – was itself consumed eagerly. The dramatic manner in which Kirke White anticipated his death (‘Yes I must die, – I feel that I must die’) and his obvious lust for poetic fame appealed to ambitious men of lowly origin, like the Victorian poet David Gray who we will meet later, as well as those who merely revelled in the poignancy of early death.64 Andrew Bennett has shown that part of the Romantic legacy was a ‘culture of posterity’ in which, for the first time, poets wrote more to perpetuate their own identity in writing than for money (pace Dr Johnson on blockheads), contemporary social status and so on. Poets like Kirke White and Keats consciously represented themselves as consumptive, wasting and fading, despite the efforts of recent criticism to counter the Victorian image of Keats as feminised and ill with a ‘restored’, healthy Keats, more body-builder than poet. Bennett rightly argues that Keats inscribed himself in the line of sickly poets like Chatterton and Kirke White, creating his own after-fame through his ailing body.65 We need to recognise this partly self-authorised cultural narrative of consumptive fame, rather than seeking to ‘sanitise’ such inconvenient facts. Kirke White’s self-image, and promotion of that image, was also amplified, and even usurped, by the critics. A notable article in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction attempts to sell Michael Bruce to the audience of 1823 by calling him to the ‘counterpart’ of the by-now more famous Kirke White.66 ‘Edgar’s’ statement on the phenomenon of the diseased poet is worth quoting in full: alas! for the mind that is cast in a finer mould than ordinary, a man of genius is very often the envy of those who, do what they may, are destined never to rise above mediocrity; but they know not the annoyances which far more than counterbalance its disadvantages. What can compensate for the morbid sensibility which compels them to view with disgust the commonplace events, and the common-place personages, with which they continually come into contact? What can the most splendid genius bestow as an equivalent for the agonising wretchedness of the disappointment, the neglect, perhaps the sarcasm of the worthless and unfeeling – matters which to minds differently constituted would be nothing, but to them are overwhelming and distracting to a degree that is almost inconceivable? Under this torturing but indescribable state of feeling did poor Chatterton flee to that tremendous resource of despair – suicide; and a similar lot was Kirke White’s, as he writhed under the causeless

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malice of a cold-blooded reviewer, with such acuteness of misery as to hasten his progress to a premature grave. The male poet has become further individualised and alienated from general society, his consumptive physiognomy expressing the ‘morbid sensibility’ that characterises poetic greatness and distinguishes him from the unfeeling and insensible populace. As Kirke White put it himself in his ‘Melancholy Hours’: ‘who knows how many may have shrunk, with all the exquisite sensibility of genius, from the rude and riotous discord of the world into the peaceful slumbers of death’.67 In an extension of ideas of poetic sensibility from the eighteenth century, poets are hardly able to tolerate contact with the world: their sensations are more extreme, ‘exquisite’. This contact between poet and ‘World’ takes its concrete form in the literary sphere through the mechanism of the burgeoning industry of the journal review. Ironically, the literary industry thrived on these criticisms of its own heartlessness, providing as it did the grounds for further debate and a controversy that awakened the interest of its readership to often mediocre poets. Kirke White was harshly reviewed in the Monthly Review of February 1804, although his protest in the March issue attracted the attention of Southey, who consequently became involved in promoting the cause of Kirke White.68 Southey was a compulsive ‘collector’ of consumptive young poets, as we shall see.69 He later recounted, in his famous Life of Kirke White, that Henry had written to him, complaining that ‘this review goes before me wherever I turn my steps; it haunts me incessantly, and I am persuaded it is an instrument in the hands of Satan to drive me to distraction. I must leave Nottingham’.70 Perhaps the powers of Satan were not all that encouraged an ambitious young man to depart the unlovely environs of early nineteenth-century industrial Nottingham. The trope of the young poet driven to distraction by a cruel review became something of a cause celebre for poets like Shelley, who would use the examples of Kirke White and Chatterton to promote the myth of Keats. Even before the death of Keats, a review article in Baldwin’s London Magazine – written by Peter George Patmore, minor author, father of Coventry Patmore and friend of Hazlitt and Lamb – complained about the ‘attempts of modern criticism to blight and wither the maturity of genius’.71 Patmore asserted that ‘we need only pronounce to ourselves the names of Chatterton and Kirke White among the dead, of Montgomery, and Keats, and Wordsworth among the living’ to prove the case. He went on to mention other names, such as ‘Byron, Shelley, Hunt, &c.’, but the


first four were most significant, because the others, ‘with an equal share of poetic ambition’, had less of ‘the illness does attend it;’ ‘less of its overrefined and morbid sensibility’. Although Kirke White and Chatterton were as different as a ‘flower’ and a ‘star’, they were nevertheless united in their fate by a ‘cold-blooded critic’ and subsequent early death. Chatterton, of course, was an icon of the sickly Romantic poet: rather than manifesting the world’s neglect through a terminal consumption, Chatterton committed suicide; along with madness, this was another ‘option’ for the poet.72 All these alternatives fitted on the continuum of possibilities for the diseased poet’s future, however, and it was symptomatic that Coleridge compared a blossom that has bloomed too soon to both Chatterton (‘Bristowa’s bard’) and a consumptive girl in his ‘On observing a blossom …’: Flower that must perish! Shall I liken thee To some sweet girl of too too rapid growth Nipped by consumption mid untimely charms? Or to Bristowa’s bard, the wondrous boy An amaranth which earth scarce seemed to own Till disappointment came and pelting wrong Beat it to earth.73 Flower imagery was closely associated with the poetry of consumption, its major function being to symbolise the poignancy of (early) death juxtaposed with beauty. It was natural for Coleridge to associate the glamorous figure of Chatterton with consumptives who had also died young, were (theoretically) beautiful like ‘the wondrous boy’, and had an unusual genius. All were characterised by an extreme sensibility that would lead them to an early grave through their inevitable ‘disappointment’ (a word also used by Edgar) with the ‘World’. Robert Southey’s posthumous Life and Remains of Kirke White exploited the trope of the early and beautiful death as a strong selling point, Southey also having been closely concerned with the ‘marketing’ of Chatterton. Southey was especially concerned to link the two poets and to highlight the pathetic and poignant circumstances of their deaths as young neglected genii: The very circumstance of his early death gives a new interest to his memory, and thereby a new force to his example. Just at that age when the painter would have wished to fix his likeness, and the lover of poetry would delight to contemplate him, in the fair morning of

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his virtues, the full spring blossom of his hopes – just at that age hath death set the seal of eternity upon him, and the beautiful hath been made permanent. To the young poets who come after him, Henry will be what Chatterton was to him; and they will find in him an example of hopes, with regard to worldly fortune, as humble, and as exalted in all better things as are enjoined equally by wisdom and religion, by the experience of man, and the word of God. And this example will be as encouraging as it is excellent.74 ‘Early death’ was a handy marketing tool, adding ‘new interest’ to what might otherwise be a commodity fading in the ‘lover of poetry’s’ memory, preserving in ‘permanent’ amber the youthful literary ‘beauty’ of the poet. In the case of Chatterton especially, this beauty would also be physical, as the famous painting depicting him sprawled in beautiful death made clear.75 Kirke White continued the Chattertonian legacy by providing an ‘example’ of the possibilities for achieving fame, if not financial reward, in the glorious profession of poetry. Crucial in the rise of the Kirke White and Keats’s reputations as consumptive poets was the rise of the institution of literary criticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially the proliferation of literary journals like the ones that supposedly destroyed Kirke White, Keats and many others. This literary industry required poetic ‘product’, not merely in terms of the poetry itself, but in the figure of the poet behind – or within – the poetry. Disease, especially the convenient consumption, helped connect the poetry intimately with the poet, and even provided a way of interpreting the poetry through an aesthetic of illness. Poetry was the most intimate of literary genres, and so more suited to a confessional lyric mode of the type practised by Kirke White, and the Graveyard School before him. If that failed, one could compensate for lack of poetic ability – which was often the case – with human interest: Emily Taylor’s Memories of Some Contemporary Poets with Selections from their Writings in 1868 did just that: ‘Independent of the harmonious and beautiful structure of the verse, surely the more than foreboding, the certainty, of death nearly approaching, invests them with great interest’. Taylor reprinted some sonnets about the imminent prospect of death from consumption by Charles Johnston, the nephew of William Smith, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Johnston’s poems had first featured in Joanna Baillie’s Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and From Living Authors (1823).76 Critics, therefore, became part of the narrative of consumption in ways not previously possible: Southey made a career out of editing the


works of consumptive poets whom he had ‘discovered’: often his editions were posthumous, adding further value to their reputation and, consequently, their price. Southey had ‘collected’ William Roberts, a Bristolian who died aged nineteen, and Herbert Knowles, who met the same fate.77 Edmund Clarence Stedman much later mentioned that ‘sexagenarians can remember the notoriety given Herbert Knowles – an English youth who died at Canterbury in his twentieth year – by Robert Southey, who set him forth in the London Quarterly as a second Kirke White. Knowles was a precocious religious poet, and his surviving verses are ‘Lines written in the Churchyard of Richmond’. Southey also seems to have been concerned for his own health, following the deaths of his mother, and cousin Peggy Hill, from consumption around 1801–182. He wrote to Governor Bedford on April 18, 1816 after the death (very likely from the same disease) of his ten-year old son: ‘long anxiety has wasted me to the bone, and I fear it will be long before grief will suffer me to recruit. I am seriously apprehensive for the shock which my health seems to have sustained’.78 Southey regarded himself as consumed by grief, but lived to fight another day, unlike many of the young poets he befriended. The original voices of the poets themselves were layered over by critical interpretations which were often completely opposite to the meanings and values placed on consumption by the poets themselves. The struggle for power over these narratives of illness gained a new dimension through the new role of the literary critic, who often had the upper hand in his ability to convey opinions about a poet to the ever-increasing literary public, and from that public to the less literate one. The critical frenzy which pursued consumptive poets helped further raise the visibility of the disease and its mythology, but at the cost of losing or contradicting the messages sent by the poets themselves. The previous tension between a religious discourse and the individual’s desire was now partly displaced by the secular tension between poet and critic in a new dynamic of illness narrative. Nowhere was this more obvious than with our main protagonist, John Keats. Keats’s dramatic, short existence, and much of his relationship to consumption, is very well known, but a short recap from the consumptive perspective is useful here. From his earliest existence he was closely affected by consumption at a personal level. His mother died of consumption, as had his uncles, and as did his brother Tom, who was nursed by Keats while he wrote ‘Hyperion’. Keats told Dilke that ‘Tom’s identity presses upon me so all day … his countenance his voice and feebleness’. Keats had been medically trained as a surgeon/apothecary at

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Guy’s Hospital in London and was, in any case, well-used to spotting the signs of a consumption, but the psychological impact of tending to Tom in a confined room was obviously great. In his folio edition of King Lear he underlined the words ‘Poor Tom’ and wrote next to them ‘Sunday evening, Oct. 4, 1818’.79 Keats himself had probably contracted the disease before nursing Tom: his first dramatic symptom of consumption appeared in early February, after Tom’s death in the winter of 1818. Returning from London, sitting on top of a stagecoach to save money, Keats caught a feverish chill and was instantly ushered to bed on his arrival home by his friend Brown: On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say, – That is blood from my mouth. I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. Bring me the candle, Brown; and let me see this blood. After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, – I know the colour of that blood; – it is arterial blood; – I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die. I ran for a surgeon; my friend was bled; and at five in the morning, I left him after he had been, some time, in a quiet sleep.80 No doubt Brown used some poetic license in the retelling of this episode, as he lauded Keats’s instant diagnosis and stoical calm in the face of his ‘death warrant’. Brown’s perspective on Keats’s narrative was far from disinterested, and attempted to convert Keats into the melodramatic and tragic genius whose image has solidified in literary folklore subsequent to Brown’s account. Brown at once implied Keats’s own medical knowledge – in recognising arterial blood – and at the same time staged the vital moment of recognition which established a familiar illness narrative by predicting death from one drop of blood. It was likely that Keats already had some inkling of his condition, because he had already been worried that he had forgotten his great coat, at that time the poor man’s prophylaxis against tuberculosis, whilst on top of the coach. Northern Europeans held that consumption was often hereditary: to Keats himself his prospects did not look good, although doctors continually misdiagnosed his condition until the end of his life. However, Keats and his doctors did agree that his malady was as much mental as physical. Nervous over-excitement was the danger for a young man of a consumptive and creative disposition. Keats desired a less agitated mind: ‘Quieter in my pulse, improved in my digestion; exerting


myself against vexing speculations-scarcely content to write the best verses for the fever they leave behind’.81 Mental disorder, especially the intense thought required by the writing of poetry, could feed very easily into physical problems. In April 1820, Keats informed his sister that a Dr Bree had diagnosed the cause of his recent palpitations, consequent on more blood-spitting, as ‘nervous irritability’ connected with ‘my anxiety of mind of late years and the too great excitement of poetry’.82 Keats also recognised his own extreme sensibility: ‘so very nervous as I am’, he said to Fanny Brawne.83 Like Kirke White, and as Shelley mentioned in this chapter’s second epigraph, Keats deemed himself to be experiencing the trade-off between disease and poetry. In a later letter to Taylor Keats complained that ‘My Chest is in so nervous a State, that anything extra such as speaking to an unaccustomed Person or writing a Note half suffocates me. This Journey to Italy wakes me at daylight every morning and haunts me horribly … every line I write encreases the tightness of the Chest.’84 Like Kirke White and Bruce, Keats was not averse to a selfdramatisation – natural enough among poets. Chronic illness also lends itself to close scrutiny of the body and the relationship between one’s mental state and the body: as Byron Good has observed, the sufferer of chronic disease becomes a diarist of sorts.85 Keats’s remarkable letters were a personal testament to the actual suffering he underwent, physical and mental, even as they dramatised the situation for the various correspondents and fellow participants in his illness narrative. Keats constructed a persona characterised by nervous consumption, but this persona was not a ‘bolt on’: it was Keats as he understood himself to be – physiologically as well as psychologically. After all, he had inherited several illness narratives of and by consumptive poets that helped him to understand his role. The trip to Italy mentioned by Keats was a sure sign that the doctors feared consumption. Travel for health was by now accessible even to those of the middling rank, so Keats was dispatched in 1820, after his condition gradually worsened. His excitable state was thought to require as much calm as possible, so he was forbidden to write poetry or see Fanny Brawne: love was quite as capable as writing of burning out the poet’s vital energies. Writing was the first overstimulant for Keats, love the second. Keats bitterly explained his paradoxical position to Brown: ‘I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate me much’, but of course Fanny Brawne was one subject that obsessed him. If he possessed her it would consume him; if he did not he would still waste away.86 The older medical understanding of consumptive love-melancholy

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had persisted, although now with a more sophisticated Brunonian rationale. After much suffering on the voyage over to Naples, Keats died in Rome on the 23rd of February, 1821. An autopsy was performed by Dr James Clark (the notable consumption doctor who also treated Chopin), a Dr Luby and an Italian surgeon. Keats’s friend, the painter Joseph Severn, reported that ‘they thought it the worse possible consumption – the lungs were intirely destroyed – the cells were quite gone. The physicians could not conceive by what means he had lived these two months’.87 Keats thought that his name had been ‘writ in water’, but his after-fame was to increase with the century’s progress, much of it connected to his status as a dramatically consumptive poet.

Shelley’s role Keats was not the sole author of his illness narrative, however; this process of rewriting started with Shelley and his friends, and gathered momentum as it became the territory of a literary-political turf war. Fellow poets also attempted to wrest the authority of interpretation away from Keats’s own pronouncements and poetry. Shelley actually began the fabrication of the idea that Keats’s consumption had been caused by his despair after a bad review of his poetry before Keats died. Talking of Keats to Marianne Hunt, Shelley said that ‘I intend to be the physician both of his body and soul’, and made good his remark by rewriting the facts of Keats’s illness and death.88 He pronounced: Poor Keats was thrown into a dreadful state of mind by this review [the Quarterly’s review of Endymion] which I am persuaded was not written with any intention of producing the effect, to which it has at least greatly contributed, of embittering his existence, and inducing a disease from which there are now but faint hopes of his recovery. – The first effects are described to me to have resembled insanity, and it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupture of a blood vessel in the lungs, & the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.89 Again, consumption was a consequence of poetic sensibility along a continuum of disorders: Shelley rather dramatically included madness and suicide in this instance – consumption itself followed naturally from mental disorder. James Heffernan has reconstructed the way in


which Shelley built up the idea of a Keats slain by the political hostility of the Quarterly in various pieces of correspondence with Byron and others.90 He has also shown that Shelley’s Preface to Adonais, his elegy on Keats, was a major locus for the transmission of the myth of Keats as destroyed by the harsh reviewers, his genius expressed by the disease he contracted.91 This creative power was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder if its young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements were from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. Here, Shelley actually compressed the time between the bad review and Keats’s death. Keats himself had scarcely been bothered by the review, thinking that the Quarterly had rather shot themselves in the foot by attacking young poets. As we have seen with the examples of Kirke White and Chatterton, the trope of the poet abused by an insensitive critical establishment was already in place, partly with the help of Southey’s literary-political role as defender of poets against the forces of the free market. Keats became one in a line of youthful authors at the mercy of merciless and conservative reviewers. Shelley’s representation of Keats was, in another sense, a veiled insult, portraying Keats as a feminised figure whose passive and feeble mind was not robust enough to withstand the world’s woes. The consumptive metaphor was both enabling and disabling, a mark of distinction and a stigma, indicative both of the sensitivity and intensity of genius and yet the feminine weakness accompanying such a position. The image of the young flower cut down in its prime was reminiscent of the many representations of consumptive young maidens at this time. In Adonais itself, Shelley portrayed Keats as a consumptive flower: ‘The bloom, whose petals … Died … is waste.’92 There were echoes here of Coleridge’s version of Chatterton as consumptive maiden and fading bloom. Moreover, Shelley’s response to Byron’s scepticism about the myth he was peddling placed Keats very much in the feminine mode, in contrast to the virile Byron and Shelley: ‘Some plants, which require delicacy in rearing, might bring forth beautiful flowers if ever they should arrive at

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maturity. Your instance hardly applies. You felt the strength to soar beyond the arrows; the eagle was soon lost in that light in which it was nourished, and the eyes of the aimers were blinded.’93 Byron was the manly eagle, while Keats was the delicate flower: two distinct categories according to Shelley. At this point Shelley defined a virile, aristocratic and unconsumptive masculinity, naturally embodied by himself and Byron, against a consumptive effeminacy – symbolised by the ‘Cockney’ Keats. This complex of associations shut out Shelley’s own concerns with a romantic androgyny for the moment, although Shelley did cast himself as a rather more passive figure in sections of Adonais and much of his other poetry. Here, in pandering to Byron’s aristocratic virility, he elided his own ambiguities about sexuality and class, merely appropriating the largely negative aspects of consumption as a feminising disease which brought weakness upon the weak-minded. This internal rift in the discourse of the Romantic poet played out problems inherent in the literature of sensibility – in which distinction through disease was frequently a double-edged sword, forcing male poets to constantly re-negotiate their position with regard to ‘traditional’ and ‘healthy’ masculinity. Hostile reviews of Shelley’s Adonais were keen to observe that Keats had fallen victim to being led astray by his friends of the ‘Cockney’ school of poetry more than to being a young talent cut down in his prime by a hostile press: ‘all this is not necessary to help a consumption to the death of a poor sedentary man, with an unhealthy aspect, and a mind harassed by the first troubles of versemaking’.94 This review in Blackwood’s combined a number of commonly recognised causes which resulted in Keats’s consumption, including the difficulties of writing poetry. A more friendly reviewer in The Literary Chronicle cited Shelley’s theory and agreed: ‘poor Keats was of too gentle a disposition for severity, and to a mind of such exquisite sensibility, we do not wonder that he felt keenly the harsh and ungenerous attack that was made upon him’.95 In contrast, The Literary Gazette’s reviewer attacked both Shelley’s profanity and Keats’s foolishness, alleging that he ‘caught cold in training for a genius’ due to discarding his neck cloth – a fashion among ‘the cockney poets’.96 He, too, regarded the true cause of Keats’s death as ‘the breaking down of an infirm constitution’. Because Keats was not a real poet, he could not possibly possess a sensibility refined enough to be damaged by a review. Towards the end of the 1820s, two articles appeared that would confirm the greatness of Keats in terms of his illness. An article signed ‘Illuscenor’ (possibly the poet Barry Cornwall, himself the father of a


consumptive poetess) in The Olio of 1828 expressed the idea that Keats’s genius for poetry could be read through his consumptive physiognomy: John Keats was handsome, indeed his face might be termed intellectually beautiful; it expressed more of poetry than even his poetry does, beautiful as it is, with all its faults, and these are not few. It was such a face as I never saw before nor since. Any one who had looked on it would have said That is no common man. There was a lustre in his look which gave you the idea of a mind of exquisite refinement, and high imagination; yet, to an observing eye, the seeds of early death were sown there; it was impossible to look at him, and think him long-lived. Jeremy Taylor says, in one of his admirable sermons, that there are but few persons upon whose foreheads every man can read the sentence of death, written in the lines of a lingering sickness; but on his forehead it was written sufficiently palpable for some to read it as they ran.97 It was ironic that Jeremy Taylor, that foe to the mythology of consumption, was cited here as a way of proving Keats’s individual brilliance. The eye of the perceptive critic of poetry and body saw both genius and early death in Keats’s face. The same went for Keats’s deceptively barrel-like chest: but he who could perceive the inner-workings, who could estimate the wear and wasting which an ardent, ambitious, and restless intellect makes in the human form divine, must have felt persuaded that the flame burning within would shortly consume the outward shell. His spirit was like burning oil in a vessel of some precious and costly wood, which when the flame has consumed its nutriment, will then burn that which contained it. This was a classic statement of the Romantic theory of the creative consumption myth: it drew on ancient notions of the fundamental meaning of the word consumption – through the traditional (but recently rejuvenated) metaphors of oil burning in a wooden vessel – and more modern, Brunonian, ideas about the depletion of nervous energy and the dangers of poetic composition. Unfortunately for Keats, Kirke White and the others, the result of their consuming ambition and intellect might be the consumption of the inner, and then outer, body. Keats could now be seen as a willing victim to consumptive creativity, ‘a self-devoted martyr to intellect’, who had

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sacrificed himself for the good of the religion of literature. His disease was a visible sign of his commitment and heroism: ‘unlike the pyre that consumes the devoted widow of the Hindoo husband, where we may see the fire but not the victim, in him we saw the fire and the victim too’.98 If consumptive and beautiful women were described as passive, wilting flowers, creative men were often conceptualised in terms of active, cometary fire. Such a positive construction of Keats’s relationship to consumption was not entirely approved by Leigh Hunt’s chapter on him in Lord Byron and some of his contemporaries, published in the same year.99 Hunt notoriously criticised ‘Mr. Keats’s natural tendency to pleasure, as a poet, [which] sometimes degenerated, by reason of his ill health, into a poetical effeminacy. There are symptoms of it here and there in all his productions, not excepting the gigantic grandeur of Hyperion. His lovers grow ‘faint’ with the sight of their mistresses; and Apollo, when he is superseding his divine predecessor, and undergoing his transformation into a Divus Major, suffers a little too exquisitely among his lilies’ (253). Although he qualified this by saying that Keats had intended to mend his ways before he died, Leigh Hunt was very much following the Shelleyan view of consumption as a manifestation of delicate effeminacy and the susceptibility of the consumptive lover to sensual pleasures. Using the same metaphor as Shelley to Byron, he asserted that that ‘the hunters had struck him; that a delicate organisation, which already anticipated a premature death, made him feel his ambition thwarted by these fellows; and that the very impatience of being impatient was resented by him, and preyed on his mind’ (257). Hunt did not entirely coincide with Shelley’s version of events, having told Byron that he was mistaken about the critics causing Keats’s death, although ‘they had perhaps hastened, and certainly embittered it’ (266). In fact, ‘Mr Keats had felt that his disease was mortal for two or three years before he died. He had a constitutional tendency to consumption; a close attendance to the death-bed of a beloved brother, when he ought to have been nursing himself in bed, gave it a blow which he felt for months; and meanwhile the rascally critics came up, and roused an indignation in him, both against them and himself, which he could ill afford to endure’. In this version, Keats appeared to have a fatal constitutional flaw that rendered him susceptible to the ‘rascally critics’. Here, his consumption was a reflection of his constitution that, because the body manifested the workings of the mind and emotions, exposed a psychological deficiency.


Hunt’s attitude to disease was not uniformly negative, however: as Nick Roe has shown, Leigh Hunt consciously represented himself as sickly a la Keats in his Autobiography.100 He was happy to read the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ through Keats’s consumption, as it ‘in a very touching manner falls in with the poetical biography of the author, having been composed by him while he lay sleepless and suffering under the illness which he felt to be mortal’ (263). The poem was ‘touching’ because it was authenticated by the suffering of the poet himself. This was nearer to the literary martyrdom of the Olio review, but not nearly enough to reverse the image of Keats as effeminate and weak. Both critics, however, judged Keats through the workings of his body as well as his mind. Keats’s contested after-fame regarding consumption and the critics was by no means over, however, as we shall see. Now we turn to the architect of one aspect of Keats’s reputation and a consumptive poet in his own right – Shelley.

Shelley himself Though we have traced Shelley’s ambiguous depiction of Keats as a delicate and feminised consumptive, he himself had been concerned that he was developing the condition. He was told by Dr Pemberton on 28 February 1815 that he was in imminent danger of death by consumption.101 Later, in a letter to his father-in-law William Godwin in 1817, he thought it clear that ‘the true nature of my disease’ was ‘consumption’, and described the potential heightening of his creative perception as a result of its effects: My health has been materially worse; my feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to a state of such unnatural and keen excitement, that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass, the boughs of distant trees, present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness. Towards evening I sink into a state of lethargy and inanimation, & often remain for hours on the sofa between sleep & waking a prey to the most painful irritability of thought.102 The price to be paid for the ‘unnatural and keen excitement’ – that Brunonian ‘irritability’ of the nerves – was a loss of energy when it subsided. This passage has been used many times by critics or historians keen to co-opt Shelley into the many lists of artists and writers who were aided in their perceptions by the consumptive spes phthisica.103

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Such an assessment accords with Shelley’s Brunonian concept of the relationship between mind and body in his ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet,’ which claims that ‘the vital principle by some inexplicable process influences and is influenced by the nerves and muscles of the body. The flesh is wasted by an excess of grief and passion. Thought is suspended by the langor of a lethargy and deranged by the excitement of a fever’.104 As the word ‘wasted’ indicates, consumption was the Romantic disease par excellence: the operations of the mind were bound to speak through the body. When the vital principle was in disharmony, the body was fatally consumed by the spirit. Shelley’s poetry abounds with wasting and melancholy lovers and poets, whose vain pursuit of perfect love is usually frustrated. No doubt there was a certain amount of autobiography in these representations of consumptive poets: the more their passions burnt, the more they used the flesh as fuel.105 Significantly, vegetarianism had been thought to be helpful to consumptives, at least since George Cheyne’s time: Shelley himself had read Cheyne on the subject. Indeed, Shelley ended his wheedling letter to Godwin by stating that ‘I ought to say that I cannot persevere in the meat diet.’ As with Keats, the obvious course was felt to be south, to Italy: ‘It is to my advantage that this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the event of its assuming any decided shape, it would be my duty to go to Italy without delay, & it is only when that measure becomes an indispensable duty that, contrary both to Mary’s feelings & to mine as they regard you, I shall go to Italy’.106 The nebulous nature of the disease and its diagnosis made the precise timing of treatment unclear. Shelley would only go ‘in the event of its assuming any decided shape’. Apart from his genuine concern about consumption, Shelley was also angling for a trip to Italy for more enjoyable, artistic reasons – as his conniving attempt to overcome Godwin’s objections makes clear. Clearly consumption could enable one to have something of a Grand Tour on the pretext of poor health, if one could manage sufficiently ominous symptoms. The fact that an early consumption was still very difficult to diagnose, as well as the usual recommendation that the condition should be nipped in the bud if the patient were to stand any chance, meant that patients could exploit any minor coughs and colds if determined to do so. The doctors did take Shelley seriously, however: like Keats, he was forbidden to write poetry in the latter part of September, 1817. As Mary put it in a letter shortly afterwards: ‘It is well that your Poem was finished before this edict was issued against the imagination.’107


The remedy of Italy apparently worked, and Shelley’s health began to improve gradually. Thornton Hunt later contrasted Shelley’s consumptive appearance in Britain with his stockier one in Italy. Hunt described Shelley’s previously ‘ultra-youthful figure’: ‘His extremeties were large, his limbs long, his face small, and his thorax very partially developed, especially in girth. An habitual eagerness of mood, thrusting forward his face, made him stoop, with sunken chest and rounded shoulders.’108 This was the classic consumptive form, with a small thorax and slender limbs. In Italy, however, he found Shelley more confident, with a stronger voice and a chest ‘of a larger girth’ by ‘three or four inches’. This maturity of physique was combined with a maturity of character: he was now ‘less impulsively changeful’ (191). The air of Italy had vanquished consumption, according to Hunt’s Victorian, biographical narrative, and in so doing quelled the feminine aspects of the rebellious poet. Here, Thornton Hunt tamed Shelley’s radicalism through a kind of mythical immersion in the balmy and soothing air of the South, which healed the soul as well as the body. Politics related to gender, of course, and Hunt presented us with a Shelley who had transcended a feminising consumption for masculinised good health, symbolised – or perhaps literalised – by his manly chest.109 Hunt was explicit in his biographical principle of linking body and writing: ‘The physical development of the man with the progress of time may be traced in the advancement of his writings. The physical qualities which are equally to be found in his poetry and prose were quite as manifest in his aspect, and not less so in his conduct of affairs’ (204). For Hunt, Shelley had improved morally, intellectually and physically through his career, the key point being when he overcame consumption in Italy. However, Shelley, in an alternative illness narrative that was at least partly self-authorised, did identify to a certain extent with Keats. Shelley had been genuinely worried about the possibility of his own consumption and this, in an act of displacement, may have increased his concern for Keats. Indeed, Keats had been invited by Shelley to come to his own home at Leghorn for a cure. These concerns also manifested themselves poetically: in Adonais, he represented himself as ‘one frail Form, / A phantom among men’ and ‘a Power / Girt round with weakness’, a figure as consumptive as the apparent hero of the poem.110 He too seemed beset by the woes of the harsh world, literary or otherwise, as he referred to himself as ‘a dying lamp’ and a ‘withering flower’ (metaphors both masculine and feminine), or like a wounded deer, ‘struck by the hunter’s dart’ (st. 31–2). Evidently Shelley’s more macho

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ponderings with Byron elided his own ambiguous attitude to his poetic status: Keats provided a model with whom he could identify in a variety of ways. His own thoughts may have been on the possibility of joining Keats in … that high Capital, where kingly Death Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, He came; and bought, with price of purest breath, A grave among the eternal. (St. 7, ll. 55–58) This refers to Rome, where Keats had gone to die with all the other consumptives in Death’s ‘pale court’. Ironically, the usually unpleasant, or even disgusting, breath of the consumptive becomes pure – as Keats moves from physical mortality to eternal fame. Echoing similar thoughts to those expressed by Keats in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Shelley shows that those left behind on earth must be consumed themselves: ‘We decay / Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief / Convulse and consume us day by day’ (l. 348). The penultimate stanza of the poem concludes with Shelley himself departing the world, with the Dantean divine light that irradiates the universe ‘Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality’ in the poet (l. 486). Again Keats’s breath, symbolising the spirit and invoked by Shelley, draws him to join the now immortal Keats in the final stanza of the poem. Shelley had exercised his earlier concerns about consumption when he wrote Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude in the fall and early winter of 1815. Having received his ‘death sentence’ from Dr Pemberton earlier in the year, the trope of the consumptive poet features heavily in this poem. The narrative broadly follows the progress of a poet figure who seeks for all that is ideal and pure in one (female) person; he fails to find his vision and dies early, ostensibly a warning about the dangers of ‘selfcentred seclusion’ away from redeeming human contact and sympathy (Preface). Even ‘the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt’. The poem has autobiographical elements, although the youth is by no means speaking in Shelley’s own voice. The ‘hero’ of the poem is always being consumed by the turmoil of his intense emotions in his quest for earthly and solitary perfection in one fixed being. He dramatically exemplifies the image of a poet burning through his vital energy too quickly, so concentrated and full of desire is


his earthly existence. As Stuart Sperry has observed, the way of Shelley and Alastor was not to conserve energy dully, but to burn brightly and rapidly in high ambition, ‘even at the cost of sudden exhaustion’.111 The mental and emotional violence of his search throughout the world is bound to take its toll on the body: where the desolated tombs Of Parthian kings scatter to every wind Their wasting dust, wildly he wandered on, Day after day, a weary waste of hours, Bearing within his life the brooding care That ever fed on its decaying flame. And now his limbs were lean; his scattered hair Sered by the autumn of strange suffering Sung dirges in the wind; his listless hand Hung like dead bone within its withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone.112 (l. 243) At one level, this scene partakes of the old tradition of love melancholy, or at least a consumption arising from the lack of a desired object, unable as he is to recapture the orgasmic vision of his earlier dream, ‘for ever lost’ (209). The ‘youthful maidens, taught / By nature’ to ‘interpret half the woe / That wasted him’ certainly think so (266). Here, of course, there is no object to be had in reality; the poet’s vision is too ideal to be realised. The repetition and alliteration of ‘waste’, ‘wasted’, ‘wasting’ and their combination with ‘withered’, ‘burning’ and ‘consumed’ directs attention to the poet’s consumptive state deriving from his over-excited mind, which in itself derives from his excessive ambition – amorous and intellectual. A further element in the consumptive context is the mention of autumn, the season when consumption would traditionally strike. The vitalistic metaphor of life as a burning flame that consumes the body from within works in a similar way to its manifestations in the representations of Kirke White and Keats’s critics, although here in Alastor the protagonist is partly blamed for bringing decay upon himself by his lack of human sympathy. Nevertheless, given Shelley’s personal circumstances and his later consumptive self-representations in Adonais, there is a strong identification with the hero of his poem, possibly a projection of his personal medical circumstances from earlier in the year, but

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certainly investing the persona of the poet with a tragic consumptive glamour. Alastor, as a ‘fragile lute’ on whose strings plays ‘the breath of heaven’, absorbs impressions from the world around him. The extreme delicacy of his body in its various stages of consumption is a suitable parallel with the idea of the trembling strings of the lute (667–668).113 Shelley had also referred in his notes to Queen Mab to a medical case representing the dangers of excessive sensibility. Dr Thomas Trotter had described the ‘corroding sorrows’ of passion sporting with the constitution of one who feels ‘sensibility to excess’; such a ‘degree of feeling … loves and hates beyond all bounds’.114 Trotter subscribed to a common and roughly Beddoesian (via Brunonian) conception of modern lifestyle leading to an explosion of nervous disorders, which in turn would lead to more consumptions. Shelley’s vision of the poet would therefore seem to be tragic: the sensitive poet is unable to survive his own burning desire. Only those lacking in sensibility can live long in the world.115 Alastor perishes as glamorously as he has lived; the central motivation of the traditional religious good death is not appropriate to the atheist Shelley, but the aspect of consumption as an easy and aesthetically structured death certainly is. Shelley has already prepared the way with the consumptive autumnal imagery of leaves falling to the ground, ‘ethereally pale’ (585). The poet goes on to a dramatically staged Romantic death that has the all the signs of a consumption, an updated version of Thomas Browne’s consumptive friend: He did place His pale lean hand upon the rugged trunk Of the old pine. Upon an ivied stone Reclined his languid head, his limbs did rest, Diffused and motionless … no mortal pain or fear Marred his repose, the influxes of sense, And his own being unalloyed by pain, Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there At peace, and faintly smiling. (632) Languor, paleness, serenity, clear mind: all these conspire to provide a consumptive ‘beautiful death’ for the poet, rather than a good one.116 Shelley drags out the last moments of Alastor’s life several lines more


until he finally expires, ‘fled / Like some frail exhalation’ (687). Here, Shelley draws on the literature of consumptive sensibility in which all that is left of the person is their breath-as-soul, drawn back up to heaven or, in this case, Shelley’s Neo-Platonic Oneness. This is a Romantic reworking of the Christian Good Death into a dramatically poetic and beautiful one, using the myth of consumption’s gentle symptomatology to institute a new vision of the aspiring and suffering male poet. The welcome accorded to death by the religious man now becomes the archetypally Romantic mingling of death and pleasure (‘faintly smiling’), the poet being ‘half in love with easeful death’, as Keats would put it. Garrett Stewart has noted that Romanticism attempts ‘mimesis of death from a perspective near or within the dying mind’ through ‘extended closural death scenes, often allegorical of poetic inspiration itself and its reach beyond mortal limits’, thus recovering a central concern of the seventeenth century.117 Shelley certainly provides an extended death scene. Chapter Three on the eighteenth century has shown that death was also a primary concern of that period’s literature and culture, not just the seventeenth, but Stewart’s formula for Romantic death is essentially correct and perfectly matched by the missing factor of consumption, a disease that allowed an extended focus on the dying mind of the overreaching poet – as well as embodying that very excess.

Pollok: ‘the borders of fever’ Alongside the more famous lives of Keats and Shelley were other poets who provided grist to the mill of the consumptive myth. One, Robert Pollok, we will see later mentioned in Chapter Seven as a star of David Gray’s sonnet concerning famous consumptive male poets. Pollok followed Michael Bruce’s trajectory through the efficient Scottish education system, from a humble Calvinist Covenanting background to Glasgow University, and thence into training as a minister. He became famous for writing The Course of Time, an ambitious, religious poem in ‘ten books’ broadly inspired by Paradise Lost. Today, its subject matter seems turgid and inaccessible, but to his fellow Covenanters it proved an irresistible buy, selling an enormous 78,000 copies by 1868.118 Begun in December 1824 and finished July 1826, it was published in March 1827. The poet himself had been suffering from consumption throughout the making of the poem and went to Shirley Common, near Southampton, for change of air, but died there in September 1827. The poem itself makes little mention of consumption, but the circumstances of the

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poem’s production certainly proved of interest to both the contemporary and later nineteenth-century audience. An exemplary interpretation of Pollok’s situation was provided by the Reverend Andrew Thomson, who wrote a ‘Biographical Sketch of the author’ in his introduction to Pollok’s prose work, Tales of the Covenanters.119 For Andrews, the process of poetic composition had excited the poet’s mind to such an extent that his body had also felt its effects: The intense and protracted mental exertion imposed by the composition of such a work, in so short a space of time, – an exertion, compared with which he found the study of the most difficult Greek and Roman classics to be an amusement, and which, night after night, brought him to the borders of fever, – may well be imagined to have told unfavourably on a constitution which had already been shaken by disease. The chariot-wheels had indeed caught fire through the rapidity of their own motion, the consequence of which was, that by the time that the poem was concluded, he appeared emaciated and pale, and distressing fears were awakened, that in writing The Course of Time he had been intwining a splendid wreath, to be laid upon an early grave. The labours and anxieties connected with obtaining a publisher and carrying his poem through the press, served to give the disease a deeper seat in his constitution, and to bring out more unfavourable symptoms. (25) As we saw with previous poets, the intensity of the poetic process, against which other academic tasks seem relaxing, forces the poet to ‘the borders of fever’. Pollok had already developed a weakened constitution from previous studies but it is the specific activity of poetry that dramatically causes the ‘chariot-wheels’ to catch fire through his heroic efforts of creation. Like Kirke White and Keats before him, Pollok burns up his vital energies too quickly. The price he pays for his poetic success is his early death, with the poem ironically becoming ‘a splendid wreath’, an image directly connecting poetry and death, and that testifies to Pollok’s physical sacrifice. Also like Kirke White and Keats, Pollok’s consumption is hastened by his wrangling with the crude mechanics of the literary world; not a bad review this time, but ‘the labours and anxieties’ of achieving publication when one is an unknown poet. Pollok survived for some time more, but throughout the spring of 1827 Pollok’s ‘feeble appearance, and countenance alternately flushed


and wan’, betrayed evidence of the ‘insidious malady’ of consumption. A trip to Italy was discussed, but Pollok could only get as far as Southampton. Andrews notes that Pollok experienced the spes phthisica or optimism that one will live: ‘it is with a kind of sad interest that we behold the dying poet under the influence of that false hope with which consumption dazzles her victims, indulging day-dreams of returning health, to be devoted to yet higher achievements in literature, when he returned laden with the classic stores, and refreshed by the bright remembrances of Italy’ (26–7). Paradoxically the place of cure was also the ideal resort for poets: Keats and Shelley had both looked forward to remedy and poetic inspiration from the Mediterranean coast, but the Grand Tour for health would all-too-often end in death rather than renewal.120 Andrews’s view of Pollok was by no means unique. Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature succinctly noted that ‘Robert Pollok was destined, like Henry Kirke White, to an early grave,’ and that ‘his application to his studies brought on symptoms of pulmonary disease … this tendency was further confirmed by the composition of his poem’.121 A longer examination of Pollok appeared in Rosaline Masson’s Pollok and Aytoun of 1898 in the ‘Famous Scots Series’.122 Masson traced the origins of Pollok’s ill-health to straining his chest while running too strenuously at school and later with further heavy work on the harvest, but these mechanical causes were nothing compared to the effects of study and poverty. Before college he had a ‘a full, roomy chest’ and ‘the expression of his countenance was open, bold, and manly’; but ‘the difference between this picture and the little watercolour sketch taken by Sir Daniel Macnee, ten years later, with its hectic cheeks and hollow eyes, is a striking enough example of the effect of ten years of overwork and underfeeding’ (20–21). The epitome of healthy masculinity, the chest signifying bounteous vital energy, is replaced by the starved and consumptive poet. Ironically, at college Pollok had wooed a Paisley girl called Maria whose complexion was ‘’not high’ nor ‘fashionably pale,’ but one ‘peculiar to those who are neither exposed to the weather nor engulfed in dissipation’ (27). Pollok himself was certainly not seeking fashionable paleness, but through his studies and poetry was having it thrust upon him. Masson too reads Pollok as an innocent, suffering from the agonies of the literary world, as indeed did Pollok himself. Robert told his brother David to ‘be as short as you can on the manuscripts business, as the simple thought of them is very apt to sicken me’ (39). Another letter finds Pollok describing himself in the language of sensibility: ‘Before the New

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Year I had about three weeks of glorious study. Soaring in the pure ether of eternity, and linking my thoughts to the everlasting throne, I felt the healthy breezes of immortality revive my intellectual nerves, and found a point, unshaken and unthreatened by the rockings and stormings of this world’. Divine aid will help him through The Course of Time, raising the sensitive poet above such difficulties (40–41). Pollok was optimistic about his health when finishing the poem: ‘Although some nights I was on the borders of fever, I rose every morning equally fresh, without one twitch of headache; and, with all the impatience of a lover, hasted to my study. Towards the end of the tenth book … where the subject was overwhelmingly great, and where I, indeed, seemed to write from immediate inspiration, I felt the body beginning to give way. But now that I have finished, though thin and with the great heat, and almost unintermitted mental exercise, I am by no means languishing and feeble’ (43–44). As in the case of Keats, the poet is brought to ‘the borders of fever’ by poetry. Pollok agrees with his biographers on the literary cause of his illness, but of course biographers know the end of the story. Pollok’s comment that ‘it is with much pleasure that I am now able to tell you that I have finished my poem’ causes Masson to lament: ‘Poor Pollok! With what pride he wrote that!-And he had signed his own death warrant. Barely six weeks, and he had written three thousand five hundred verses, and had written his life-blood into them’ (45). The allusion to Keats’ famous ‘death warrant’ speech to Brown shows that Masson, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, has synthesised Pollok into the genealogy of consumptive poets. ‘Life-blood’ here has the medical resonance of the vital energy, supposed by some to be stored in the blood, which Pollok has depleted by his intensive efforts in six weeks of writing poetry. His brother David uses a more Brunonian vocabulary when he describes the ‘irritating mental and bodily excitement that entirely took away his sleep’ in February 1827 (Masson, 54). Masson herself repeats this explanation with a little adjustment, mentioning that Robert was calmed by the (delayed) printing of the poem in March, but ‘the young man’s mind was evidently wrought up to a great pitch of excitement’ about his work and new ambitions. Pollok’s youthful and apparently entrepreneurial ‘enthusiasm, energy and enterprise was linked to a weak and phthisical body, ill fed, ill housed and overused from the beginning, and the rules of physiology are not respectful to persons and are very vindictive’ (56–57). This late in the nineteenth century, Masson has a more sociological and economic perspective on the causes of disease, due to the development of the social sciences and the rise of bacteriology. Here, the idea of weakened immunity has a very different basis to


that of the Romantics, even if some of the language and imagery is similar. Pollok took his place among the consumptive pantheon in David Gray’s sonnet later in the century (to be discussed in Chapter Seven), but has been lost, along with Bruce and Kirke White, those other lower-class poets who benefited – however dubiously – from a consumptive, Keatsian allure. In the Romantic period, then, the cultural narrative of consumption took a strong turn towards the male poetic Genius, underpinned by the older medicine of sensibility and a new Brunonianism. Although Keats’s status became iconic in the Victorian period, his transition from poverty-stricken Cockney to glamorous consumptive poet was informed by an existing literary tradition and a new literary market. The likes of Michael Bruce, Henry Kirke White and Robert Pollok were well known at the time, and they too fed into the myth of consumptive diseased tubercular genius; a myth, at least partly, self-authorised and authored. What became of the Keatsian image in the Victorian period we will see later, but next it is necessary to explore the fate of consumptive women.

6 ‘Seeming delicately slim’: Consumed and Consuming Women

So unnatural and perverted are fashionable opinions on this subject, that a blooming complexion is thought to indicate low life and vulgarity in breeding. What a false standard for beauty: to prefer a sickly sallow hue of the countenance to the roses of health! And yet seek to imitate them by artificial means. Dr Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament1 How did consumption maintain – and even increase – its popularity for women and in narratives about women? We have seen the male poets gleaning both marketability and personal benefit (however qualified) from the disease, but surely women were largely debarred from the higher echelons of the creative sphere? Trotter’s comment on the perverse behaviour of women in wishing to look seductively ill suggests that the eighteenth-century fashion of sickly sensibility continued into the Romantic period, despite continued scepticism from doctors and writers alike. Yet even as they condemned and attempted to reform the cult of consumptive glamour, doctors like Trotter reinforced cultural myths of infirm femininity, as we shall see. Before examining medical developments, it is worth illustrating the extent of the complicity between medical and literary discourses in generating alluring images of consumptive women in this period. Two of the sketches in Washington Irving’s extremely popular Sketch Book, published in the United States and Britain in 1819–1820, ‘The Pride of the Village’ and ‘The Broken Heart’, depict women dying romantic, beautiful deaths from consumption, both caused by problems in love.2 In the first tale, a pure country maiden (‘the pride of the village’) falls in love with a seemingly gallant soldier, but when he makes a sexual pass at her, ‘her pure mind’ is unable to cope with this harsh reality, and ‘the effect 153


was withering’ (243). ‘The Broken Heart’ depicts an Irish lady who, at the execution of her rebel husband, becomes consumptive and dies from grief. In these narratives both women die of a romantic love melancholy that begets a consumption: ‘I have seen many instances of women running to waste and self-neglect, and disappearing gradually from the earth, almost as if they had been exhaled to heaven; and repeatedly fancied that I could trace their death through the various declensions of consumption, cold, debility, languor, melancholy, until I reached the first symptoms of disappointed love’ (‘The Broken Heart’, 50). Female love melancholy leads to consumption; in this cultural pattern, women are dependent on men, and love is the way in which they link themselves to men. When love goes wrong for a woman, she has no alternative but disease and ultimately death – preferably a beautiful one from consumption. Irving’s logic coincided perfectly well with contemporary medical explanations of female nervous disease. In his famous treatise on disorders of the nerves, Thomas Trotter discussed ‘the effects of disappointed love, on the sensible female frame’: ‘In the male sex the active pursuits of business or pleasure, more quickly supplant tender impressions; and men much sooner regain that mental tranquillity which fits them for the busy scenes of life. This is not the case with the fair sex; for the influence on both body and mind, seems to be in proportion to the concealed struggle of attachment.’3 Irving echoes this division between male and female spheres in ‘The Broken Heart’ (49): women live ‘fixed’, ‘secluded’ lives and, because their destiny is ‘to be wooed and won’, they have no distractions from the power of their passions. Women must conceal their desires: ‘The love of a delicate female is always shy and silent.’ So too for Trotter: burning hidden passion and a state of suspense as to the resolution of the conflict torments ‘persons of nice sensibility’.4 ‘Dying of a broken heart’, Trotter continues, is an expression with a medical truth, proceeding – as disease does – from nervous disorder. Male writers, then, were happy to peddle seductive myths about the extreme sensibility and purity of women – often in the language of literary sensibility, if literature could be said to ‘own’ the language of sensibility. It is truer to say that literature and medicine were not so divorced from each other as they are now, the lines of demarcation not so distinct, both in the language they used and the objects of their interest. Indeed, recent anthologies of literature and science have pointed to the difficulty of separating one from the other in the long eighteenth century.5 The love-death of the Romantic period also seemed inevitable to women writers too, although not always with the sugary sentimentality

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of an Irving. Even a feminist like Mary Wollstonecraft was partly constrained by these ideas of female destiny. In her novel Mary, A Fiction (1788), the eponymous heroine falls in love with the tubercular Henry, who has ‘rather ugly, strong lines of genius’ written on his face.6 Although Mary herself has genius, she does not die of consumption, but, on Henry’s death, goes into a terminal ‘phrensy’ – an alternative option for the Romantic love-death (66–67). As Christine Battersby succinctly puts it: ‘female genius dies of empathy with an unhealthy male genius, and love remains woman’s destiny’.7 In this case, Battersby’s generalisation works, but female destiny and disease are not always limited to the love-melancholy pattern, even in the case of Wollstonecraft, as we shall see shortly. To understand why women and men remained attracted to the idea of consumptive femininity in its various guises, it is first necessary to examine how the medical culture of consumption had evolved in relation to women.

Medicine, consumerism and female consumptions As we observed in Chapter Three, female beauty had been increasingly related to the consumptive look because the culture of sensibility prioritised female delicacy. Medical theory – written almost entirely by men – had long identified women as the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. Now women had been shown to have thinner, more fragile nerves, more refined sensibilities (to the point of evaporation), an accompanying moral angelisme, yet – paradoxically – an erratic body dominated by the biological destiny of the womb. Thomas Trotter described the ‘female constitution’ as ‘furnished by nature with peculiar delicacy and feeling, soft in its muscular fibre, and easily acted upon by stimuli, has all its native tenderness increased by artificial refinements’ (52–53). Already, the chances of women avoiding disease seemed slim. But physiology was only one part of the equation, as the final part of Trotter’s statement suggests: women of the upper orders had increasingly ornamental roles as the eighteenth century wore on, and were identified both as conspicuous consumers of the products of capitalism – including the many new – fangled goods being imported from the expanding empire – and as prone to living the most sedentary of lifestyles. Popular medical writers such as George Cheyne, James Makittrick Adair, Thomas Beddoes and Thomas Trotter were trenchant critics of modern, ‘nervous’, lifestyles, and those of women in particular. James Makittrick Adair’s essay on ‘Fashionable Diseases’ (1786) attacked the deleterious effects of Luxury and its ever-accelerating companion, Fashion: an


economic and social phenomenon which now attached itself to matters medical. Spleen and Vapours had given way to the ‘nerves’, which itself ceded to ‘bilious’ disorders (13–15). Adair played the role of iconoclast, exposing the ‘gross and vulgar error’ of thinking bile to be the cause of disease, and chastising the fashionable ‘British Fair’ for believing this possible (29–30).8 By the nineteenth century, more and more women could afford to ‘have their hot close rooms, drink strong hyson, and keep late hours, as well as a dutchess’, said Thomas Trotter, fretting about the prevalence of bad health among ‘women of very moderate fortune’, the ‘wives and daughters of all reputable tradesmen in this country’ (52). Thomas Beddoes, like our previous writers, diagnosed the ills of modern society. In his collection of popular-medical essays, Hygeia, he focused on ‘British Characteristics’ and posed the paradox of Britain’s glorious wealth as an expanding mercantile empire, yet its increasingly bad health.9 Nation and well-being, stated the radical Beddoes, were not categories to be divorced by medical science: ‘the genius of a people has always decisive influence upon the genius of its diseases’ (7–8). Although he began by launching a withering attack on the physical evils of British imperialism, Beddoes’ philosophy was that health begins at home. Like Adair and Cheyne, he concentrated on women, because they were the ‘nervous’ sex: the most visible consumers were the most visible sufferers of diseases of consumption, both psychological and physical. The section on ‘Schools for Girls’ suggested a replacement regimen for the evils of typical Romantic-period educational establishments. Following the life of a girl from school into womanhood, Beddoes argued that society was breeding a sickly race of women who, as mothers, contributed to an increasingly diseased nation. Diet, fashionable clothing, music, novel-reading, tea-drinking, exercise, bad sleeping habits: all were subjects on which Beddoes vented his opinions.10 In his 1799 Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption for the Use of Parents and Preceptors, Beddoes identified the modern female lifestyle as a factor predisposing already fragile women to consumption. Because of their sedentary habits, women were woefully lacking in physical strength: hence, in respect to delicacy of constitution, they have been well compared to flowers brought forward by the cherishing heat of the conservatory. They cannot with impunity bear to be roughly visited by the winds of heaven. The slightest cause disorders them, and till the phthisical period is past, they exist in a perpetual state of dangerous


weakness. For in this country, by whatever cause women under thirty are weakened, there is always considerable hazard of consumption.11 Remarkably, although Beddoes was in other respects sceptical of literary representations of disease, he used the language of the novel of sensibility – as had Trotter – to describe how women became consumptive. Compare Smollett’s consumptive heroine Monimia, for example: ‘a young lady who had been born to affluence and splendor, trained up in all the elegance of education, by nature fraught with that sensibility which refines the sentiment and taste, and so tenderly cherished by her indulgent parents, that they suffered not the winds of heaven to visit her face too roughly’.12 It was natural for medical writers – who, like Beddoes, were attempting to reach a wider audience – to adopt the style of a popular literary medium such as the novel. More significantly, there was still a symbiotic relationship, albeit uneven, between the two discourses of literature and medicine: sentimental novels had managed to influence even Beddoes’s conception of consumption as a disease of sensibility, just as Cheyne and other ‘nerve’ theorists had made their impact on writers like Samuel Richardson. This literary-medical two-way street continued to be so even into the late nineteenth century, despite the increasing specialisation and scientific complexity of medical knowledge. Scientists continued to be influenced by popular and literary beliefs about disease, and shaped their language and findings accordingly. For Beddoes then, delicate women were ever-teetering on the brink of a consumption: the illustration facing the title page to his Manual of Health depicted a consumptive young woman as the embodiment of modern illness. The blue streaks on the upper eyelids and chest, the ‘long, often slender necks, streaked also by veins; the narrow chest, too near approximation of the points of the shoulders’, the flushed face and throbbing temples are symptoms that ‘particularly afflict females of the class commonly said to live at ease, but who are probably kept more ill at ease by the want of healthy sentient organs, than they would by the want of means of living without labour’.13 The picture, Beddoes asserted, ‘was actually copied from nature’. This plate took a woman as the central example of the ‘feebly sensitive’ class of people whose ‘parts are ready to fall into languor, or to be overstimulated’ – the two options in Brunonian terminology. As a result, ‘it is this temperament which is particularly liable to all the variety of scrophulous ailments, and to consumption among the rest’.14 Consumption was regarded as the natural death of the scrofulous (constitutionally debilitated) patient. Those who ‘become consumptive, whether from hereditary disposition, from


conformation or accident, are most commonly also nervous’ (99). Cheyne’s link between consumption and nervousness was reaffirmed and even strengthened here, because more people were a part of the wealthier classes by Beddoes’s time, and therefore more likely to suffer from a nervous consumption. Nor were women helped by the modern occupations of their sex: ‘Of sedentary employments, all kinds are not equally unfavourable to health. Those which most exercise the sensibility are doubtless the most hurtful. Hence the frequent perusal of melting love stories related in novels, has been justly reprobated. The prevailing passion for music has probably occasioned more extensive mischief’ (121). Physical and literary sensibility were of a piece: a romantic novel or a beautiful melody could ‘exercise’ the nerves so much that the overwrought system might deteriorate into a consumption. ‘Melting’ love stories literally melted the flesh – particularly that of women, who were supposedly more susceptible than men to the power of emotions, and love especially. Thomas Trotter also stressed a general concern, which had been apparent since the seventeenth century, about the deleterious effects of city, especially London, life: ‘the remote causes of nervous diseases are chiefly to be sought for in populous towns; and increase in proportion to the deviation from simplicity of living’ (55). Bad air, lack of exercise, luxurious diet, late hours, intense study and hyper-stimulation of the sensibility were all contributors to urban existence. Tobias Smollett had complained about the dangers of London in his novel Humphry Clinker, but by Trotter’s time London had become even more industrialised, even more gigantic than the many-headed hydra of the mid-eighteenth century. Trotter’s comments at the head of this chapter echoed Beddoes’ medical strictures about the paradoxical dangers of female fashions: imitating the sickly look could lead to real sickness. To a healer like Trotter, this trend seemed ‘unnatural and perverted’, especially since the corollary of this upper-class fashionability was that people who seemed healthy were inadvertently signalling their class difference, their ‘low life and vulgarity in breeding’. Although Trotter appeared to deviate from fashionable opinion here, women writers often took a sceptical view of consumptive glamour themselves. Mary Wollstonecraft attacked the pride women took in their consumptive ‘delicacy’ in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), while in her novel, Mary, A Fiction, Mary’s consumptive mother is a typical example of corrupt modern femininity in ‘her sickly, die-away languor’: ‘Her voice was but the shadow of a sound, and she had, to complete her delicacy, so relaxed her nerves, that she became a mere nothing.’15 Ironically, her husband prefers the rude


health of working women to his ornamental wife. Male commentators may have been especially ready to condemn the female way of living, but women too could see the dangers, albeit with greater sensitivity to more deserving examples of womanhood like Wollstonecraft’s heroine, Mary. (Of course Jane Austen was an expert critic of the female, and male, use of disease for social ends – see especially her unfinished novella Sanditon). In effect, there were two types of consumption for Wollstonecraft and others: the genuine article, which displayed true female sensibility, and the fake, to be exploited by ruthless or stupid women. The particular perils of a woman’s life-style, especially young women, were also evident in both Britain and America. In the first American edition, taken from the fourth London version, of Thomas Hayes’ A Serious Address on the Dangerous Consequences of Neglecting Common Coughs and Colds, with Ample Directions for The prevention and cure of consumptions, he complained about decadent female fashions. In the evening, women could be seen gallivanting ‘half-naked in the play-house, or in a cold coach’.16 Poets were no less keen to keep women’s unruly pleasures in check through dire warnings of the dangers of consumption. David Humphreys (1752–1818), politician and poet, declaimed in stentorian heroic couplets about the need to consolidate the emergent American nation in his ‘A Poem On The Industry Of The United States Of America’, written in 1792 but expanded in 1804.17 Humphreys hailed Connecticut as the home of virtuous toil, a model for America and the world. Through the firm foundation of industry, the poem argued, social stability could be achieved. Contravening this work ethic were those women who dallied in frivolous, foreign-bought fashions: Will ye, blest fair! adopt from every zone Fantastic fashions, noxious in your own? At wintry balls in gauzy garments drest, Admit the dire destroyer in your breast? Oft when nocturnal sports your visage flush, As gay and heedless to the halls ye rush, Then death your doom prepares: cough, fever, rheum, And pale consumption nip your rosy bloom. Hence many a flow’r in beauty’s damask pride, Wither’d, at morn, has droop’d its head and died. In case the ladies missed the point, Humphreys added a hectoring footnote: ‘This, it is wished, may be received as a useful warning by young


persons against exposing themselves, when too thinly clad, to the winter air. Many deaths have been occasioned by imprudencies of this nature’. As so often, the disease consumption became a function of economic consumption: the needless consumption of foreign fashions to satisfy inappropriate and unpatriotic female desires was punished by the ‘dire destroyer’ of phthisis. Humphreys worked very much in the mode of Alexander Pope, in which ‘pride’ was a defining characteristic of Belinda-like young women who insisted on revelling in capitalism’s spoils. Women, according to recent studies of consumerism, have been scapegoated by men anxious about the potentially anarchic free play of the market. Because women were the most conspicuous consumers of goods, attention was focused on them as representatives of both capitalism’s glamorous products and any disorder consequent on the supply of those products – like ill health.18 Men might have their faults, but the effect of women’s high visibility was to elide – at least partly – the male role in capitalism’s systems. We saw a similar operation in action in the case of Smollett’s Mr Baynard and his unruly, free-spending wife in Chapter 4. Via Humphreys, who echoed the opinions of Beddoes and Trotter, consumption, as a disease, became part of a discourse of gendered nation building. Another American poet, Thomas Green Fessenden, was less concerned with problems of pure Americanism when writing The Ladies’ Monitor, A Poem in 1818. Here, he staged a partly satirical dialogue between the predictably named Mentor and Narcissa, with Mentor complaining about the fast-moving fashions to which women sacrificed their health in order to hook a vacuous man. These fashions were invariably perceived to be unhealthy, ranging from wearing too few clothes and being exposed to chills, to forcing the body into unnatural and lung-damaging postures through tight-lacing and stays: Let not your wardrobe be disgrac’d by means Of modern, modish, mischievous machines, With which, unless they’re dolefully belied, Some fools of fashion have been fortified, And bitterly, regretted their presumption, When squeez’d and pinion’d into a consumption. My pupils should not be allow’d the use Of too much vinegar and lemon juice, With which some ladies, not so nice a prim, For sake of seeming delicately slim,


Have drugg’d themselves (may heaven such fools forgive) ’Till they became too delicate to live!19 Acids such as vinegar and lemon juice were commonly thought to promote weight-loss, as we have seen in previous chapters. Whichever fashion-driven strategy the ladies adopted – tight-lacing or drugs – would lead to a consumption. In the Romantic period it seemed that both male and female commentators, whether patronising or genuinely concerned, were swimming against the tide of consumptive fashion and self-fashioning.

Consumptive poetesses After all this medical hectoring, one might well wonder how on earth women, especially writers, could think of consumption as an attractive disease. While the male poets were generating myths of consumptive genius, how did the women fare? The Irish Mary Tighe and the American Lucretia Maria Davidson were two such poetesses. Mary Tighe died of consumption in 1810, aged 38, and was an influence on Keats through her long poem Psyche; or the Legend of Love. Until recently, Tighe has only been considered, if at all, as the handmaiden of Keats, providing the Great Poet with the raw materials which he would reshape into ‘real’ poetry.20 The other figure is the American poetess Lucretia Maria Davidson, who died at Plattsburgh, New York in 1825, aged 16. Due to her extreme youth, Lucretia never reached the poetic maturity attained by Mary Tighe, but was still lauded as a consumptive prodigy by the likes of Robert Southey.21 Lucretia’s fame was increased even further by the later consumptive death of her likewise poetic sister, Maria, at a similar age. Whereas Lucretia and Maria embraced their ‘poetic’ consumption and to an extent indulged in a degree of consumptive self-fashioning, Mary Tighe did not: what both had in common was a tendency of the male critics and patrons to convert the consumptive poetess into a figure of feminine pathos rather than poetic genius. The British Review said of Tighe’s Psyche that ‘on the whole, there is a characteristic delicacy, a ‘trew feminitée’ about this publication, which is exceedingly attractive’ and in pleasing contrast to those women writers who ‘prefer the din of arms’.22 Nevertheless, critics and readers were prepared to insert consumptive poetesses into the identifiable male lineage of doomed poet: in his diary entry of 27th January 1812, Sir James Mackintosh connected Tighe with another familiar figure in our story: ‘Chaulieu, Michael Bruce, and Mrs Tighe have written verses on the prospect of death, and


hers are not the least affecting.’23 Lucretia Davidson consciously connected herself with that tradition in ‘To the Memory of Henry Kirke White’, a poem she wrote at the precocious age of thirteen.24

Genre poetry The individual examples of Mary Tighe, and Lucretia and Maria Davidson have shown us that, despite the lack of a consumptive lineage as clear as those of the male poets, women did participate in the idea of the poet’s early consumptive death – as their frequent references to Kirke White suggest. Women were also the producers, consumers and objects of a genre of poetry about consumption which was not necessarily written by those who actually suffered from the disease. The essence of the genre was sentimental: both male and female poets waxed lyrical on the spiritualising beauty of consumptive death, particularly female. To male authors – like Poe – this beauty could be of sexual interest; to women, it might suggest a form of empowerment. Titles could be more or less indirect: one of the earliest examples, Thomas Park’s sixteen-line pseudo-sonnet ‘On a Young Lady, Who Died of a Consumption’ (1797) evidently takes as its subject the young lady, although the disease and its symptoms are central to the poem’s form and meaning. James Henry Leigh Hunt’s ‘Sonnet, On the Sickness of Eliza’ (1803) is more directly focused on consumption, although it is not mentioned in the title. Amelia Opie’s ‘Consumption’ (1802), Mary Mitford’s ‘Ode to Consumption’ (1810), James Gates Percival’s ‘Consumption’ (1823) are all medium-length meditations entirely addressed to the disease, while sonnets ‘To Consumption’ were produced by Henry Kirke White (1806) and William Cullen Bryant (1823).25 Many of these poems were reproduced in newspapers, journals and anthologies, as were many anonymous verses on the same topic, often no doubt supplied by the readership itself. The authors of this genre showed an awareness of each other’s existence and manifested it in their writing. There were several reasons for the continued popularity of literature about consumption in this period: the relevance – personal and social – of the disease itself, and the need for consolation; its link with the idea of female beauty; its connection with religious purity via the tradition of the good death; and, as we have seen, the notion of consumptive genius. These factors were often combined in the same poem, giving consumption narratives a rich, if predictable, metaphoric layering. As we have seen from previous periods, the ideas of religious purity and the good death were strongly associated with consumption, and


continued to be so in the nineteenth century. Both Opie and Mitford’s Odes to Consumption stress consumption’s spiritualising power for women. Echoing Opie’s use of the words ‘smiling fate’, Mitford calls Consumption ‘smiling mischief’, and goes on to describe its effects on a lovely young woman. The victim looks like an angel because beauty, paradoxically, is the only warning of consumption’s presence. The disease ‘trickest out a bride for Heaven’: So thin, she floats upon the eye, Like light clouds o’er the evening sky; It seems as no terrestrial creature Could so throw off all earthly feature. Consumption dematerialised and spiritualised, went the inexorable logic. Poetry about consumption used the tradition of the good and easy death to console its many victims, not least because the social cost was very high at this time (and throughout the rest of the century). So powerful was consumption’s redemptive, spiritualising power, that it might even convert the heathen. Cheryl Walker has claimed that Felicia Hemans died from consumption, age 42, in 1835.26 This is open to some dispute: the ‘Prefatory Memoir’ of the Lansdowne Poets edition of her Poetical Works lists her various ailments leading up to death. She was first attacked by a scarlet fever, then a cold, then ‘ague’ and ‘hectic fever attended by symptoms of dropsy’.27 A hectic fever could certainly be interpreted as code for consumption, but it is her sentimental use of the disease in her poetry rather than her final ailments that interests us here. Her deployment of consumption in narrative sentimental poetry was a template for others, notably Lydia Sigourney (‘the American Hemans’), although she herself had already been influenced by the type of novelistic representation we saw in Chapter Three. In Records of Woman (1828), Hemans wrote ‘Edith. A Tale of the Woods’, a narrative poem in which consumption plays a central role in glamourising woman as a redemptive Christian heroine.28 Set in the context of the British settlement of America, the heroine, Edith, is widowed when her husband dies in battle with the native American Indians. Subsequently, she is adopted by an old Indian couple who treat her as well as their own daughter who has ‘departed to the land of spirits’ (344). Edith reciprocates their affection, but she is unable to forget her departed husband: ‘and her patient smile / Spoke of farewells to earth’. Like Clarissa, and many other consumptive heroines frustrated in love, she is aware that she is certain to die, ‘for well she knew / The secret whisper of her bosom true’. Before


this happens, however, she has ‘One purpose to fulfil’: the conversion of her heathen ‘parents’ to Christianity. Inevitably, she succeeds in this ambition and becomes a pure representative of that ‘religion of the heart’ that defined women as the emotional, and therefore more spiritual, sex. Her ‘Indian fosterers’ are not won over by rational argument, but through emotional and aesthetic methods such as ‘the persuasion of her fervent eye, / All eloquent with childlike piety’. The metaphoric language is still colonialist, however, in the sense that Edith is fighting a religious war, striving to ‘win for heaven’ the ‘love’ of the Indians, attempting to ‘enchain / the soul in gentle bonds’ (345). As a religious heroine, she triumphs through her superior feminine spirituality rather than the rough male methods of war. Ironically, this section is full of the traditional imagery of air and breath-as-soul, a mark of Edith’s purity: her ‘soft-breathing influence’ converts her parents; her voice becomes a ‘summer breeze’ which parts the ‘forest shade / And lets the sunbeam through’. The discovery of God through nature makes the use of such wind and fresh air metaphors appropriate for Edith’s now-consumptive breath. Of course, this is a divergence between the reality of the consumptive’s often stinking breath and the idealised spirituality that the disease was thought to embody. Once her missionary work is done, Edith is free to die the good death of the consumptive woman. Here, consumption is a gentle disease that mirrors the subtle persuasion of emotional Christianity and its conquest of the pagan American Indians: at one level a progressive humanitarian narrative, Hemans’s poem is not able to allow Edith’s Indian parents to continue in their apparently benighted original religion. Tolerance only extends up to a point: the correct conclusion must be reached via the redemptive Edith. Christian Americans were particularly prone to poetry about consumption within a wider poetry of consolation. The American CommonPlace Book of Poetry, with Occasional Notes, by George B. Cheever (1831) collated a number of these poems, some anonymous, some famous.29 This work, just one in a series of Landmark Anthologies, also gives some idea of the high popularity of these poems by their very inclusion. Their audience was not primarily an elite one: these lyrics draw upon simple variations of the standard hymn rhythms, themselves closely related to the ballad form. The sentiments and content also tend to be unsophisticated, appealing to a broad-based readership who would generally be of Unitarian religious beliefs. That is, more liberal than the older New England Calvinism, and opposed to doctrines of inherited guilt, the loss


of free will, eternal punishment and vicarious atonement. A humanitarian ‘religion of the heart’, Unitarianism encouraged the emotion of sentimental literature as well as an increased concern with decay and death, elements it shared with the closely-related Evangelical movement in Britain. The ‘Preface’ freely acknowledged that some of the poetry within might not be ‘a stately and perfect song’, but ‘generally simple’ and ‘unambitious’, ‘a poetry of devotion’ in which verse became ‘the handmaid of piety’ (3–4). The attraction for the god-fearing reader would be the ‘purest moral character’ of the volume’s contents, as well as enabling ‘a thought on death and eternity’ to be conveyed in poetic form to those who would otherwise not take the time to consider such deeply religious matters (5). Death and dying are predominant themes of the anthology, reflecting the Evangelical emphasis on the redeeming power of suffering, the moral authority of pained sensibility, and the reformulated interest in the idea of the good death. This genre of consumptive poetry suited the needs of its readers. The audience could supply its own writers: authors were often anonymous, and originally published in general newspapers and journals rather than specialist literary magazines. Lyrics of this type included ‘The Consumptive’ (Anonymous, Rockingham Gazette)30; ‘To H.’ (Anonymous, reprinted from the Christian Examiner, a Unitarian periodical printed in Boston)31; and ‘On the Death of a Beautiful Young Girl’ (Anonymous, reprinted from the Connecticut Mirror).32 Often focusing on the death of a young woman, they (tediously, to the modern reader) detail the transformation – via consumption – of metaphorical angel into literal angel. Yet the readers had a seemingly insatiable demand for just this kind of repetition. Jane Tompkins has argued, in relation to popular prose fiction, that the clichéd nature of these kinds of texts was the point: their very repetitiousness reflected shared values and conventions, addressing live cultural issues in an understandable manner.33 It is hard to imagine anything more immediately relevant to human existence in this period than the high incidence of consumption in America and Britain. Both Opie and Mitford emphasised the social and emotional cost of the disease: Opie – a doctor’s daughter – spoke to an audience who would share her feelings and experiences: ‘Ye who have felt all this … O pay my verse / The mournful meed of sympathy, and own, / Own with a sigh, the sombre picture’s just’.34 To be told that death would be uplifting and beautiful, as well as empowering to women, was seductive to both sexes. These repeated disease narratives helped people to cope with consumption’s woes – either personally, as a family, a group of friends, or at the level of wider society


and its imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase.35 The repetitiveness of the consumption genre emphasised and enforced its social meaning, providing a tried and tested response to the visitations of this mysterious disease. Another myth about consumption which would persist throughout the century was that of its power to enhance female beauty. Opie’s ode stressed consumption’s paradoxical powers in her melodramatic opening lines: the ‘fairest of Death’s craving brood!’ paints the poor victim’s cheek With roses mocking health’s rich bloom, and gives The sinking eye such lustre as adorns Love’s eager glance. Thou cloth’st thy destined prey In glowing charms it ne’er could boast before.36 A disease which beautifies one physically as well as spiritually will be popular indeed – why bother with cosmetics? Little wonder that many women tried to give themselves the consumptive look, even if they were perfectly well, by drinking vinegar and tight-lacing. Opie went on to describe the great but ‘unwholesome beauty’ of the ‘cheek’s bright crimson’ and the ‘bright dilated eye’ (a medical term) which owed its ‘wondrous lustre’ to ‘decay alone’. Here there was no sexual interest – as in Leigh Hunt’s adolescent fantasies of consumptive women – but an appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of consumption. So: consumption was a beautiful disease; it was spiritual and consoling; and it was also still a malady of desire and love, as male writers such as Irving insisted: pining maidens made good copy – they were sexy. Even Amelia Opie saw the cosmetic value of this flattering enemy: clearly the wider public of women were at least attracted to the image of consumptive glamour, even if most of them did not go the lengths of drinking vinegar in order to emulate the ‘look’. Surely this fashion could not continue into the healthy-living Victorian period?

Victorian continuities The American writer Abba Goold Woolson wrote a chapter called ‘Invalidism as a Pursuit’ in her Woman in American Society (1873) in which she presented the popular myth that robust good health was only suitable in ‘washerwomen and amazons. A sweet-tempered dyspeptic, a little too spiritual for this world and a little too material for the next, and who, therefore, seems always hovering between the two, is the accepted


type of female loveliness. No wonder, then, that the boarding schools hold the tradition that it is interesting to be pale and languishing and consumptive.’37 This echo of Thomas Beddoes’ observations on female education and the effects of boarding schools in Britain clearly shows the continuity in consumptive fashion from the early part of the century. The literary fame of female consumptives like the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Adelaide Procter and Sarah Flower Adams further encouraged the association between disease and creativity in women as well as men.38 In combination with the centrality of Evangelical Christianity, and its concomitant stress on the Good Death, to Victorian culture, these factors ensured the continuance of the consumption myth, albeit in a specifically Victorian form.39 A footnote in John Mason Neale’s ‘In Consumption’ (Hymns for the Sick, 1843) states that ‘Consumption is called by French Divines, La mort des élus [the death of the elect], on account of the long warning which it gives, the mental vigour which it leaves, and its freedom, for the most part, from intense bodily pain; thus allowing the mind to be its own master.’40 We end this chapter with an examination of the manner in which consumption is used in the context of the conjunction between gender and racial representation in literature in the exemplary religious instance of Little Eva.

Good deaths and race One of the most powerful representations of Evangelical redemptive suffering is the death of Little Eva (Evangeline, no less) in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s astoundingly popular novelistic intervention into the politics of American slavery. The line between child deaths and deaths of young women is a hazy one in this period, but the Victorians relished the uncorrupted innocence of children taken to heaven. Here, there were no complications about whether the individual was discerning or not: children and the young had a special access to spiritual authority that the more worldy-wise could not. This discourse sat alongside the alternative tradition of consumption as a redeeming disease for the sufferer. From France had been imported Alexandre Dumas fils’ glamorous play La Dame aux Camélias, first staged in 1847, in which Marguérite, the dangerous and immoral courtesan, was transformed into a sentimental and – crucially – reformed, dying consumptive, now monogamously consumed by love.41 Fallen women might be restored to spiritual health by the purifying powers of consumption.


Little Eva ‘suffers’ one of the most well-known deaths in literature, and one of the most effective in terms of its political impact. However, her consumptive death was constructed by her class and colour, despite Stowe’s positive message in other respects. Although medical discourses on race and consumption were varied, William Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology (1819) set the tone for the rest of the century: he argued that the ‘dark races’ were inferior, morally and intellectually, and that ‘Negroes’ were not subject to nervous diseases because of their low sensibility. They could display consumption-like symptoms, as could monkeys, but this was evidently of a different order to the spiritualising disease of the white middle-classes.42 Francis Hopkins Ramadge argued in a similar vein, stating that consumption was not recorded ‘by those who have mingled with the savage tribes of either the old, or the new world’ because their life of constant exercise must ‘call forth and perfect every bodily energy’. ‘Free from the restraints which are the unavoidable consequence of a state of superior intelligence, neither confined to the manufactory, nor chained down to the counting house, untrammelled by dress, and uncramped by the various devices to which either fashion, or the forces of habit, renders us subservient despite the dictates of reason, the savage possesses at best uncontrolled use of his limbs.’43 Although Ramadge renders this superior intelligence of the Anglo-Saxon race as a mixed blessing, the message is essentially the same as Lawrence’s: consumption is the ‘white plague’, and its special symptoms and metaphorical resonance are reserved for the sophisticated, urban members of the Northern European peoples and their colonies.44 After the 1830s, Southern physicians identified a disease called ‘Negro consumption’ or ‘cachexia Africana’ (African wasting or emaciation) which was generally supposed to be different in kind, as the labels suggest, from the consumption suffered by whites.45 Beecher Stowe’s cultural perspective is unusual in its powerful assault on patriarchy as well as slavery, however compromised her views on both. Yet, in other ways, she is typical because she expresses the values of her Victorian, female, middle-class readers. Central to this discourse is a feminised religion that empowers women in their role as spiritual guide for men: if modern civilisation was dominated by a harsh, secular capitalism of the kind found in Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ or Dickens’ Hard Times, women were the agents of religious redemption. In America, slavery was part of that mix of elements in the masculine public sphere that needed to be ‘softened’ by those domestic angels, Victorian women. The generic means to this end was the sentimental


mode – a much-abused term which covered a multitude of possibilities for both literature and politics. If women could not justify their role as literary creators per se, they could at least write claiming to be working for a higher cause: in this case, God’s anger at the scandalous maltreatment of fellow human beings only differentiated by skin colour. However, the portrayal of the death of Little Eva, especially when she is contrasted with the (apparently) barely human slave-child Topsy, makes it clear that Stowe could not quite make the leap between notions of ‘white’ disease and ‘black’. Eva’s consumption is caused by her extreme sensibility and religious purity: she cannot bear to see the suffering in a world like the slaving South. Her status as child gives her privileged access to the world of the spiritual, unsullied as she is by earthly desires of any sort. Eva becomes a type of Christ, her death a redemptive event which causes her cynical father, St. Clare, to see the sin in keeping slaves. Her spiritual authority is enacted on the deathbed, as family, friends and slaves gather round to hear Eva’s final dispensations on how they should change their lives for the better; in all ways she is exemplary, including her disease.46 Stowe frames Eva’s consumption in a way typical of the period: the child has the prophetic certainty of her imminent death, and a similar conviction that she is returning to her heavenly home; she has the hectic flush, a slight cough, transparency of the skin, lack of pain, bright eyes and wasting body. For Stowe, the physical symptoms symbolise the consumptive’s transition from the world of flesh to spirit: ‘the rays of the sun formed a kind of glory behind her, as she came forward in her white dress, with her golden hair and glowing cheeks, her eyes unnaturally bright with the slow fever that burned in her veins’.47 Her father is fooled by consumption’s gentleness: ‘it was impossible to realise that it was death that was approaching. The child felt no pain – only a tranquil, soft weakness, daily and almost insensibly increasing; and she was so beautiful, so loving, so trustful, so happy, that one could not resist the soothing influence of that air of innocence and peace which seemed to breathe around her’.48 Eva’s evangelical mission is aided by consumption’s emotive and aesthetic powers; it is as if her spiritualising condition radiates her influence beyond her own body and into other people’s – a legacy of the medicine of sympathetic sensibility. Stowe invokes the stock imagery of autumn in order to poeticise and soften Eva’s inevitable consumptive demise: ‘it was like that hush of spirit which we feel amid the bright, mild woods of autumn, when the bright hectic flush is on the trees, and the last lingering flowers by the brook; and we joy in it all the more, because we know that soon it will


all pass away’ (ch. 26, 424). This is a death both good and beautiful. By the time she dies, Eva is almost pure spirit: ‘her little transparent fingers’ turn the pages of the Bible (ch. 26, 413). Eva, like Clarissa before her, prepares for her good and beautiful death in a ritualistic manner, making sure that she has disposed of her personal effects and dispensed her pearls of spiritual wisdom well before death can strike. The bedroom cum sickroom constructs an exemplary tableau in which Eva is surrounded by the imagery of childlike purity and heavenly peace: the whiteness of the room, from the lily-vase to the drapes to the white japonica, reflects the ‘intense whiteness of her complexion’ (ch. 26, 418). The insistent imagery of whiteness and light associated with Eva’s person and surroundings is in direct contrast with Topsy, ‘one of the blackest of her race’ (ch. 20, 351). The two are ‘representatives of their races’: ‘the fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbour’ (ch. 20, 361). Although Stowe attributes Topsy’s state mostly to her lack of education, it is still clear with whom the physical and moral authority lies. African-American characters in this novel, and in most others of the period, are excluded from this ‘soft, insidious disease which sweeps away so many of the fairest and loveliest’ (ch. 22, 383). Although there are parallels between Eva and Tom as types of Christ, rebels through passive aggression, the narrative still gives Eva the consumptive, authoritative death. Tom is beaten and then allowed to dispense his moral wisdom before death – perhaps a symbolically appropriate fate for a slave who has lived his life in a violent society – but still Eva’s death is the centrepiece of the book. In ‘The Grass Withereth – the Flower Fadeth’ (ch. 22) – in which Eva’s fatal consumptive symptoms are spelled out for the reader – the power relationship between Eva and Tom is also made clear: as she educates him in the ways of Christianity, ‘he loved her as something frail and earthly, yet almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine’ (ch. 22, 379). The coincidence of consumption and moral racial authority is, in fact, no accident.

7 Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy

There is a dread disease which so prepares its victim, as it were, for death; which so refines it of its grosser aspect, and throws around familiar looks, unearthly indications of the coming change – a dread disease, in which the struggle between soul and body is so gradual, quiet, and solemn, and the result so sure, that day by day, and grain by grain, the mortal part wastes and withers away, so that the spirit grows light and sanguine with its lightening load, and feeling immortality at hand, deems it but a new term of mortal life; a disease in which death and life are so strangely blended that death takes the glow and hue of life, and life the gaunt and grisly form of death; a disease which medicine never cured, wealth never warded off, or poverty could boast exemption from; which sometimes moves in giant strides, and sometimes at a tardy sluggish pace, but, slow or quick, is ever sure and certain. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickelby1 We have great doubts as to the propriety of this incessant working up our feelings by pictures of consumption. It is hardly fair. The subject is, to half the families of England, too fraught with painful reality to be thus introduced in a work of amusement, and amid dreamy sentiment. It suggests reminiscences at once too agonizing and too sacred to make it admissible in fiction. Like the death to which, in all its manifold varieties, it surely, whether slowly and inch by inch, or with impetuous torrentlike rapidity, conducts its prey, consumption is a thing too terribly real to be fitly sported with. The Christian Remembrancer2 171


With the passing of Romanticism, one might have expected the cultural interest in consumption to have waned: the cult of the sickly individual should have given way to healthy, muscular Christianity, to a Victorian emphasis on virile industry rather than sporadic poetic idleness. As with all clichés, of course, this division between Romantic and Victorian is both too simplistic, and yet partly true. Elements of Romantic culture persisted and even grew, yet the Victorians – or many of them – did react against some of the Romantics’ perceived excesses. This was also the case with narratives of consumption. Evidently the problem of consumption’s popularity persisted, at least for those – like the writer in The Christian Remembrancer – who railed against the divergence between ‘too terribly real’ consumption and the ‘dreamy sentiment’ of its representations in fiction. The physician of Keats himself, the famous Sir James Clark, had said much the same thing a decade earlier: ‘it has often been stated that pulmonary consumption is a mild disease, by which the patient is imperceptibly wasted away, without pain or suffering, indulging the hope of recovery to the last. They must have witnessed but little of the disease who could give this as its general character’.3 So, what kept consumption going? What narratives did the Victorians inherit, and create themselves, in order for consumption to remain a cultural and artistic entity? We must not forget that consumption’s symptoms could be mild, as James Clark was forced to acknowledge by his own medical observations: ‘In many cases, the patient’s sufferings give place to a state of tranquillity and ease during the last days of life; and he sinks gradually without a struggle.’4 This biological factor aided the persistence, and indeed the enhancement (as it dovetailed with Evangelical Christianity), of the tradition of the good death: Victorian men, and especially women, were supposedly empowered by consumptive death. Women reached the apotheosis of spirituality in consumption, as historians Philippe Ariès and Pat Jalland have shown in great detail, while men – as the instance of the obscure Keats imitator David Gray will prove here – still saw the disease as a sign of creative inspiration.5

Consumption and energy: Arnold on Keats and Guérin For the Victorians, consumption was as mysterious a disease as ever; despite the various explanations of its origins, effects and possible cure, despite the vogue for sanatoria and fresh air later in the century, nothing seemed to work. In his Lectures On Pulmonary Phthisis (1844), John T. Evans discussed the confusion regarding consumption’s true nature: was it a Cancer? Scrofula? An inflammation? ‘A disease of debility’?

David Gray and the Romantic Legacy 173

Contagious or not?6 After Laennec’s advances in the early nineteenth century, medics came to accept that phthisis was a tubercle-related disease, but no one could prove whether it was an inflammatory (growth) or morbid (decay) process. Virchow’s research into cell formation suggested that tubercles were like tumours – a kind of inflammation, while the idea that blood might be spoiled or blocked – stemming from faulty nutrition – inspired those arguing for morbid tubercle pathology. The dispute would only be settled in the 1880s after Koch’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus. Older ways of framing the disease into a beneficial or at least meaningful narrative persisted in the absence of a successful scientific explanation from an increasingly professional medical world. Ideas of the vital force being drained away by the rigours of modern life, at least in the white middle and upper classes, remained in vogue. One popular manual, Consumption of the lungs or decline (1862) by Robert Lalor, discussed, amidst a welter of literary references, the fact of consumption’s continued prevalence in Britain, its tendency to take the young, brilliant and beautiful, its connection with literary genius, and its status as a disease of civilisation in the manner of Beddoes and Cheyne. The cures Lalor proffered were not greatly different from the different options that doctors had tried for hundreds of years.7 Dickens’ description of consumption’s mystery in Nicholas Nickelby remained as true in 1881 – the year of Koch’s paradigm-shattering identification of the tubercle bacillus – as it had been 40 years earlier. Yet there were shifts in consumption’s medical status even before Koch’s discovery. As a way into the popular perception of these changes and their effect on the literary-poetic world, particularly the legacy of Keats, we will examine Matthew Arnold’s exemplary thoughts on the relationship between poetry and consumption. The mythology of consumption for men continued to develop in the Victorian age: the idea of a cometary death was still attractive to poeticallyminded young men, especially those from lower-class backgrounds. While debates raged about the merits or demerits of Keats’s example, the effect of Keats’s story as a narrative for others was evident, especially in the case of the now-forgotten Scottish poet, David Gray. Victorian arguments concerning the nature of Keats’s genius and illness coalesce in Matthew Arnold’s pronouncements in his essay on the poet ‘Maurice de Guérin’, first published in Fraser’s Magazine, January 1863.8 This piece could easily have been titled ‘A French Keats’, according to the critics.9 Like Keats, Guérin died young of consumption (in 1839), was sensitive, depressive and, like Keats, had been intensely


productive in his short life, endued with a ‘passion for perfection, the necessity to produce, to produce constantly’ (28). This typically nineteenth-century concern with productivity as a way of justifying an apparently idle profession for men is tied in by Arnold with the disease common to these two poets: In him, as in Keats, and as in another youth of genius, whose name, but the other day unheard of, Lord Houghton has so gracefully written in the history of English poetry,-David Gray,-the temperament, the talent itself, is deeply influenced by their mysterious malady; the temperament is devouring; it uses vital power too hard and too fast, paying the penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion and in premature death. (32) The appearance of David Gray in this equation was not a surprise to the contemporary reader: Gray had recently died prematurely from consumption, his poems posthumously published. His work became wellknown, the edition regaled with a prefaratory notice by none other than Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton-Milnes, now Lord Houghton.10 We turn to Gray later; for the moment it is Arnold’s definition of consumption and genius that concerns us.

Thermodynamics and nerve force At first glance, Arnold’s comments might seem to be identical with the Romantic formulation: the ‘mysterious malady’, consumption, consumes (devours) the ‘vital power’ at an accelerated rate and, apart from causing early death and its attendant woes, plays a part in defining the poet’s ‘temperament’ or ‘talent’. But scientific developments in the midnineteenth century gave older, vitalistic conceptions of human energy a new justification. After Hermann von Helmholtz’s statement of the First Law of Thermodynamics at the end of the 1840s concerning the conservation of energy, the previous vitalist idea about the limited quantity of vital energy available to the human organism was given more scientific validity and, indeed, urgency.11 The First Law stated that energy could not be destroyed, only transformed into another form (heat into work, in the case of a steam engine). Apparent loss of energy in a system was only a conversion of energy from one form to another: friction in a steam engine would transform the potential energy of coal into ‘lost’ heat, for example. Unexceptionable as this law might seem, its importance to the


interpretation of the human body lay in the idea of conversion of energy into different forms: parts of the body and mind, which had seemed separate or mysteriously connected before, could now be linked through this concept of conversion. Work by the likes of Virchow in the chemistry of cells aided a new conception of the body as a chemical process. The implications of this Law were not lost on medics or philosophers: the human body appeared to be subject to mechanical rules from the discipline of physics, nothing more or less than an engine dedicated to converting food into energy for muscles and nerve force. The mind could be considered to be a side-effect dependent on the mediating nerve force, whose energy came from the chemistry of the body. More than ever, a healthy body meant a healthy mind, or – as relevant to Arnold – a diseased body could produce a diseased thought. The Victorians fretted about the ‘consumption’ (wastage through conversion) of scarce energy in human beings, as well as in the general physical universe: metaphors of economic expenditure (including taxation) and the body-machine, often compared to the steam-engine or an electric battery, were commonly combined. Thomas Inman, in The Nature of Inflammation (186?), wrote in the Arnoldian mode (and at roughly the same time) when describing the modern, machinic concept of the combustive chemical body: ‘under ordinary circumstances our food keeps up the combustible supply for the body, and that the fire and its food being duly balanced, the heat is continuously kept up; but if the combustion is increased in intensity, and the supply of fuel is diminished, it follows that the fire threatens to go out early’ (14).12 Inman’s own idea of the usual, slow consumption contrasted with his concept of inflammation: ‘the idea of inflammation being an excessive and unusually rapid consumption of animal fuel, necessarily involves a comparison with phthisis and other diseases, in which there is a waste of tissue, and with excessive fatigue or starvation – in all we have a diminution of tissue, and a greater amount of combustion than of supply. They differ from inflammation in degree, but not in kind. They involve a slow process of decay; inflammation a rapid one’ (16). Inman was clearly of the school of inflammation as far as explanations of consumption went, but his general outline of the burning consumptive was in accord with his age. Many thought that the ‘nerve force’ might be used up in a frenzy of poetic creativity or in the other, more normal, physical functions. Overconcentration on one area, such as intense creativity or study, would divert much-needed energies away from other parts, thus depleting the


body’s battery-like store of vital power. Thinking was a particularly wearing activity, as the self-congratulatory intellectuals and artists told each other.13 (This trope could be devalued or ironised, of course: the first words in Hermann Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick – after the table of contents – describe the etymology of the whale ‘supplied by a late consumptive Usher to a grammar school’ who pores over his dusty old lexicons and grammars, ‘the pale Usher – threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain’. The slow-wasting scholar – an ancient tradition – was not in the same category as the fast-burning poet.)14 In the second part of the nineteenth century, the eighteenth-century anxieties regarding the toll which modern civilisation was taking on the nervous system were recast according to the laws of physics as well as biology. Nervous conditions such as neurasthenia became part of the consumptive chain of diseases; women, as usual, were thought to have less energy than men in the first place and, in combination with their internal reproductive ‘machine’ (womb), were more likely to be consumed by the competing demands on their nervous systems. In his Phthisis Pulmonalis (1882), Gershom N. Brigham was still talking about the ‘exciting causes’ of consumption, notably ‘exhausting drains upon the system’ such as sex, masturbation and intense work.15 New regimens designed to control the expenditure of energy were thought to be necessary to counteract the onslaught against a human constitution which had not evolved rapidly enough to keep up with the perils of an industrial society. Arnold expressed the anxieties of his age: he admired the constant productivity of the two poets even as he considered that productivity to be dependent on a premature exhaustion of nerve force.16 Indeed, his own poetry laid out the conventional fear of the toll taken on man’s vital powers by a draining industrial modernity: For what wears out the life of mortal men? ’Tis that from change to change their being rolls; ’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, Exhaust the energy of strongest souls. (‘The Scholar Gypsy’, l. 141) Here, Arnold posited a loss of energy from the human engine via a form of psychological friction, the ‘repeated shocks’ that ever-changing Victorian technology and its concomitant philosophy inflicted on the life of the industrious man. This echoed, in an updated form, Humphry Davy’s fears of nervous exhaustion that we saw in Chapter Five. Keats


and Guérin’s fates, prematurely worn out by both the difficulties of the literary market and their own flawed constitutions, were a logical extension of such physico-medical theory. Guérin himself talked in Brunonian terms about his being ‘a youth doomed never to ripen into manhood. I grow old and wear myself out in the most futile mental strainings … Mental work brings on, not drowsiness, but an irritable and nervous disgust which drives me out’ (32). As with the theory of the early part of the century, it was thought that poets were especially unable to ‘conserve’ (as the new jargon had it) their energies. Arnold defined this type of temperament as ‘morbid and excessive’, a personality not designed to bring its bearer happiness (32–33). The mysterious disease itself shaped the nature of Keats’s talent, consuming the vital energies from within, not merely wearing away the poet by the strains of civilised life. Consumptive genius was itself like a machine, a manic steam engine which devoured its fuel too quickly and burnt itself out as a result. New concepts about energy had not detached the old humoural idea that consumption was a function of the individual’s personality, and that one’s ‘habit’ (personality, physiology and lifestyle) determined one’s disease. The consolation, however, was that ‘the very excess and predominance of their temperament has given to the fruits of their genius a unique brilliancy and flavour’ (33). Both Keats and Guérin were poets of the natural world rather than the moral one, although Keats tended to ‘what is pleasurable and open in the life of Nature’ – a ‘sensuous’ writer; while Guérin leaned to the inward and secret life of Nature – a ‘mystical’ poet (34). This ability to write ‘natural magic’, as opposed to ‘moral profundity’, ‘always has for its basis a peculiar temperament, an extraordinary delicacy of organisation and susceptibility to impressions; in exercising it the poet is in a great degree passive … he aspires to be a sort of human Aeolian harp, catching and rendering every rustle of Nature’ (33, 30). This language of Romantic sensibility had now become combined with a more material understanding of how the poet’s system would transform vital energy or nerve force into mental energy and works of creative literature. Medical opinion partly concurred with the idea of the abnormally sensitive poet: James Clark’s bible of consumptive medicine, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, discussed the way in which the state of the nervous system varied in individuals: those suffering from a ‘tuberculous cachexia’ were ‘generally morbidly sensitive and irritable: in persons of nervous temperament, more especially females, the nervous sensibility is greatly increased. The intellectual functions are often


performed with a preternatural degree of activity, a premature development of the mental faculties being a frequent accompaniment of the tuberculous habit’.17 Hungerford Sealy’s early-Victorian medical essay on the effects of the imagination on the body similarly argued that the imagination is excitable, especially in the case of poets like Shelley, and can be like an overstruck musical string.18 Such poets, therefore, were a function of their bodies and maladies, specifically consumption. By being subject to the kind of extreme physical sensibility that could both bring on a consumption or be a consequence of it, the passive poet filtered the sensory input of the world through his nervous system. Consumption was both a sign and a cause of this poetic talent: a physicality that made the poet more sensitive to nature, more poetically productive, yet doomed to die through that very physicality. Although Arnold praises the manly productivity of the two poets, he considers their constitutions to be fundamentally flawed. The finest type of poetry should combine both the natural and the moral faculties, with the ‘active’ latter one dominant (33). Arnold’s Victorianism demands the curbing of unfettered Romantic aestheticism by a sense of restraining public and spiritual morality, and insists that the Romantic mode of the sensuous poet should be pared down to a decorous plainstyle in the manner of a Wordsworth or a Milton. Keats and Guérin were too dissociated from the necessary task of socio-cultural engineering in which the Victorian literary writer and critic must needs be involved – at least according to Arnold. Guérin’s drifting ‘into religion and out of religion, into society and out of society’, merely ‘to feel what it is all like’, is compared with ‘the passive and ineffectual Uranus of Keats’s poem’ whose life was ‘but the life of winds and tides’ (31). Guérin’s problem is therefore Keats’s malaise also: productive though they both were in their intensified lives, this production was partial and misdirected. Moreover, it was their consumptive condition that both enabled and skewed their extreme efforts into a poetry of unthinking sensation. The advantages of a masculine productivity are submerged in the primarily ‘passive’ temperament of Keats’s type of poet. Within his general analysis of the Victorians’ suspicion of Keats’s ‘diseased’ sensibility, James Najarian has rightly argued that, ‘for Arnold, Keats’s poetic passivity is analogous to sexual passivity’, which is itself of a piece with his consumptive condition.19 Arnold’s critical admiration of Keats ‘natural magic’ could only extend so far, precisely because his talent was confined to the natural and the bodily. The poet’s consumption, in Arnold’s formulation, becomes the index of an imaginative restriction to the body.


David Gray The critics might well have been ambiguous about Keats and his legacy, but Romantic, idealistic young poets, especially lower-class ones, found his meteoric example one to be imitated. David Gray represented the direct desire of at least one youth to emulate his poetic hero. In 1861 Gray died of consumption, aged twenty-one, having written a sequence of 30 sonnets entitled In the Shadows, which describe the process of dying.20 The name is lost to us today, although (ironically) he became famous shortly after his death. Gray was not a particularly able poet, but he is important for a number of reasons. First, because he marks the culmination of the myth of the consumptive poetic genius: he wanted to be Keats, who is, of course, the poet whom we all know now as the archetypal artistic consumptive. By the time of Gray, the legend of Keats was getting up a head of steam, encouraged by Richard Monckton-Milnes’ edition of his poetry – published in the middle of the century.21 Writers and artists like Gray were coming to regard Keats as an icon of diseased genius. Ironically, it was Monckton-Milnes who wrote the preface to the posthumously published life and works of Gray himself, just one of many links in the culture of literary consumption that had been evolving since before the eighteenth century. As Milnes put it: ‘He had somehow found out that his lungs were affected, and the image of the destiny of Keats was ever before him.’22 Gray also displays a highly developed sense of the literary tradition of consumption, making, in a single sonnet, some of the connections we have already seen. Born at Duntiblae in Scotland, a small village not far from Glasgow, and son of a handloom weaver, Gray internalised the idea that a poet could rise in social status, as others had done before, and pursued his chosen profession with some determination. He went down to London to make his literary fortune, and it was said that he – somewhat romantically – thought it would be a good idea to sleep on a park bench, given his impecunious position, and from this incident caught a cold which led to his consumption and death.23 In itself this is dramatic and interesting (if also laden with comic potential) as his contemporaries frequently observed, but of particular interest to the literary historian of consumption is the third sonnet of In The Shadows: With the tear-worthy four, consumption killed In youthful prime, before the nebulous mind Had its symmetric shapeliness defined, Had its transcendent destiny fulfilled.


May future ages grant me gracious room, With Pollok, in the voiceless solitude Finding his holiest rapture, happiest mood; Poor White for ever poring o’er the tomb; With Keats, whose lucid fancy mounting far Saw heaven as an intenser, a more keen Redintegration of the Beauty seen And felt by all the breathers on this star; With gentle Bruce, flinging melodious blame Upon the Future for an uncompleted name.24 Here, Gray provides a limited genealogy of consumptive poets: like himself, those apart from Keats who have been largely forgotten by modern critics, despite being extremely well-known in their time. We have already met Michael Bruce, Kirke White and Robert Pollok. Gray’s construction of a consumptive poetic tradition is limited: all the poets he mentions are male, from plebeian backgrounds, and half are Scottish. Like the others, Gray had been in the process of becoming a minister of the church (another escape route from his humble beginnings), even if his real interest was in poetry. Clearly this is an issue of identification for Gray: these other poets, most notably Keats, provided him with dramatic role models of the fame (if not fortune) that could be achieved for one of a lower station in life. Disenfranchised males were particularly attracted to a romantic image that cast them as misunderstood outsiders, neglected by an unfeeling and increasingly industrialised capitalist society. In Gray’s case, his Scottish nationality added a further sense of marginality to the existing feeling of class alienation, as is implied by his use of the lower-class Bruce and Pollok as poetic precursors. The examples of other Scots making their way to literary glory, in a tradition stretching back one hundred years, inspired him to seek a place for himself. Unfortunately, Gray’s manner of seeking poetic advancement bordered on the ludicrous: his letters to various patrons, like MoncktonMilnes and Sydney Dobell, were defensive yet arrogant: ‘I am a poet. Let that … be understood distinctly.’25 Gray had enough insight to apologise to Dobell in a subsequent letter for his ‘rude and unmannerly’ missive, but spat out his humble pie by then insisting that ‘I tell you that if I live-my name and fame shall be second to few of any age, and to none of my own.’26 Behind such oscillation between insecurity and overassertion in these ‘hectic sentences’, as James Hedderwick called them, lay the heavy investment Gray had placed in becoming a poet – the only


way for him to rise in society.27 As he said himself (again to Dobell): ‘What keeps me up? The firm consciousness that I am a poet. I think, dream, joy, weep over that.’28 Following literally in the footsteps of Keats, Gray sought out Keats’s biographer Richard Monckton Milnes, who, as Gray’s friend Robert Buchanan reported in the Cornhill Magazine, described the hapless poet’s reaction to the news of his consumptive disorder: Just then, David read the Life of John Keats, a book which impressed him with a nervous fear of impending dissolution. He began to be filled with conceits droller than any he had imagined in health. ‘If I were to meet Keats in heaven,’ he said one day, ‘I wonder if I should know his face from his pictures?’ Most frequently his talk was of labour uncompleted, hope deferred; and he began to pant for free country air.29 Buchanan also recounted Gray’s description of himself as ‘a foster son of Keats,/ the dreamily divine’, and noted Gray’s thought that, if he were to die, at least Milnes would write an introduction to his poems.30 Although this is Buchanan’s construction of Gray as a poet similar to the feminised Keats, clearly Gray himself saw Keats’s illness narrative in terms of both desire and fear: consumption was an illness that killed one, however painlessly.31 As it happened, Gray’s passing was not an ideal consumptive death by any means, and his terror of hospitals like the Brompton, packed with terminal consumptives, understandably led him to flee England in the last months of his life for his comforting home and parents in Scotland.32 As his illness worsened he became increasingly worried and disabled by its effects, remarkably only just managing to see the first proof of his published poetry the day before he died.33 However, Gray’s is a case in which we can see a fascinating aspect of his own illness narrative(s) through his poetry, as opposed to his correspondence. The poetic outpourings of a dying consumptive are, in some ways, more meaningful (because seen as a legacy of identity) than actual events or practical interactions. Gray stages his consumptive self in an aesthetic and self-conscious manner, a self-fashioning in which the persona of the poet cannot be separated from the real-life illness – of which the reader is necessarily conscious. Sterne had exploited a similar situation a century before as we saw in Chapter Four. In The Shadows displays Gray’s awareness of his own relationship, not merely to Keats, but also to the critical reception of Keats’s consumption and to other poets like Henry Kirke White. Gray possessed his own copy


of Kirke White’s The Life and Remains of Henry Kirke White with Life by R. Southey and it is clear from his marginalia that he took a close interest in White’s poems on consumption and in White’s own illness and fame. He marked a passage in which Southey talks about encouraging Henry to publish in his particular consumptive circumstances, even though, as a rule, young poets should not publish their productions prematurely; this before Gray knew of his own illness.34 Gray’s use of the sonnet may well be influenced by White’s definition of that form as the one most suitable for melancholy musings, as well as by the Renaissance image of the poet. Sonnet cycles are fitting for a consumption narrative as well as a Renaissance love narrative because they enable the overall development of the illness to be traced into ‘the shadows’, while within that structure intense bursts of feeling ranging from despair to hope are manifested in the individual sonnets, hence charting the progress of the sufferer’s state of mind at any particular point.35 Keats is uppermost in Gray’s construction of his poetic illness narrative though: from the beginning to the end of the poem, which ostensibly charts a movement from dismay at impending doom to a reconciliation with God’s will, Keatsian mythology dominates. Sonnet V rather crudely but sincerely quotes Brown’s description of Keats’s ‘death warrant’ speech discussed in Chapter 5: Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain, There came arterial blood, and with a sigh Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein, That drop is my death-warrant: I must die. (160)36 Gray’s evident grief at the terminal effects of consumption is in some sense ameliorated by the melodramatic and intertextual nature of its expression. The feeling is no doubt authentic: we must bear in mind that Gray knew he had a serious consumption at this stage, diagnostic techniques having improved since Keats’s day, but consumption still remained the mysterious, uncontrollable disease described by Dickens. The recommended place of resort for consumptives may have been shifting from the warm Mediterranean to the bracing air of mountain resorts like Davos in Switzerland, but it was still no guaranteed cure.37 Gray took the cultural ‘text’ of Keats and used it to frame his own literary illness narrative, to make sense of his own otherwise arbitrary experience of the disease. As Shelley had said to Keats: consumption selects young poets, whether they like it or not. For Gray, to be visited by consumption was terrifying, but at the same time an event that marked him


out as distinctive, a person of sensibility so acute that consumption could not be avoided. To be poetic was, in this way, to be consumptive: ‘Whom the gods love die young’, Gray quotes in Sonnet II. A clue to the title of the poem can be found in Gray’s assessment of his own condition, read via Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (itself medically influenced), in a letter to Dobell: ‘Did you ever feel the sickness and dull pain of an overwrought brain – brain working in shadow, with no voice to cheer.’38 The potentially harsh realities of consumption destroy one’s identity at an early age, but the benefits of the disease are realised by the poetic fame consequent on that early death. Gray’s identity could live on after his passing in this poetic memorial, something that obsesses him throughout In the Shadows. Early in the poem he wishes for a literary monument so that ‘undestroyed / By rank, oblivion, and the hungry void, / My name shall echo through prospective days’ (VII).39 He, by publishing his works, will join the consumptive tradition that he himself has identified in Sonnet IV and secure the continuance of his identity in the body of the text: genre was crucial to Gray’s conception of his self. Although the poem wavers in its conviction as to whether his obsession with poetic fame is sinful or not (XVIII asks for a good death in the manner of the consumptive Ars Moriendi) Gray, ultimately, is compelled to return to the legend of Keats. ‘My Epitaph’ ends the thirty sonnets, and consciously – if uninventively (perhaps that is the point) – echoes that of Keats, whose name was famously ‘writ in water’: ‘Below lies one whose name was traced in sand. / He died, not knowing what it was live.’40 Only in poetic fame can the poet-consumptive give meaning to, and even overcome, his illness: the narrative has a consolatory ending at the level of literary identity. This was the peculiar option that arose at the end of the eighteenth century for artists suffering from the continuum of ‘creative’ diseases, of which consumption was the most desirable. By following the myth of Keats and his precursors, Gray was able to give meaning to Dickens’ mysterious disease. This being a broad cultural narrative, it was not only Gray that understood himself in such a manner. James Hedderwick’s ‘Memoir’, contained within the first edition of Gray’s works in 1862 and accompanied by Monckton Milnes’s prefaratory notice, repeated the Arnoldian conception of the consumptive poet: ‘His beautiful dying sonnets were all written when his shattered frame only showed more clearly the burning of the internal fire.’41 Even the popular local Scottish press inscribed Gray within the very tradition that he had desired to occupy. The Dumbarton Herald, (3-7-1862) gave the story a nationalistic twist: ‘David Gray – the Kirke White of Scotland … must now … be known to the


whole literary public.’ It also drew the parallel with fellow-Scot Pollok’s life, as Gray would have wished: ‘One cannot but remember here the similar case of Robert Pollok’s last pilgrimage to Devonshire. He too was devoured by ambition as well as disease. He had published his magnum opus, but the echoes of his fame were as yet faint and doubtful; and when he came to the land of strangers, his heart, untravelled, continued to turn towards Scotland.’42 The Edinburgh Daily Review listed a number of poets who had died young, including the consumptives Michael Bruce, Keats, Kirke White, Thomas Hood and Herbert Knowles: ‘But the peculiarity of the volume of David Gray is that almost the whole of it may be said to have been written by a man on his death-bed’. This partisan review trumpeted the message of local interest: ‘Scotland should be proud of David Gray. Her literature has not for many a day displayed such a wealth of fine potentialities.’43 Not all were so smitten, however: the Morning Journal saw Gray much as others had seen Keats: ‘of a massive, masculine intellect there is not a trace in the book. The type of mind exhibited is refined, sensitive, feminine, and destitute of the element of power, which is the indispensable condition of permanence’.44 The wildly optimistic estimate of his own abilities, as seen in his letters, led the reviewer to conclude that there was ‘some radical weakness and unsoundness lurking in the mind of David Gray’, just like the ‘consumptive disease’ hidden in his body. Pathologies physical and mental could not be separated, it seemed. Back on the side of Gray, Milnes himself drew several parallels with both Keats (wounded by a harsh review) and Shelley (whose consumptive face in youth looked like Gray’s), while selling the poetry less than circumstances of its production: ‘the public mind will not separate the intrinsic merits of the verses from the story of the writer, any more than the works and fate of Keats or of Chatterton; we value all connected with the being of every true Poet because it is the highest form of Nature that man is permitted to study and enjoy’.45 It was only through the persistence of the Romantic cult of the author and his posterity that such a glamorous idea of consumption could be so powerful both in the minds of Gray and his audience. Gray’s actual fame faded rapidly at the end of the nineteenth century, the poetry not being able to sustain the interest generated by his life in the manner of a Keats, or even a Kirke White. The moral of Gray’s story is more than that of a talentless poetic stalker of the ‘real’ celebrity – Keats. He demonstrates the power of the connection between consumption and poetry, and the complex links between these two discourses. Although Keats was being constantly revaluated by the Victorians, his presence as consumptive poet par


excellence was impossible to ignore and, as review upon review described his consumptive body and poetry, the link between poetic genius and consumption was confirmed more and more strongly. Keats’s class position gave poets like Gray hope of social advancement, although – as we have seen – Keats was not the only poet to inspire Gray. Kirke White was, in some ways, almost as influential as Keats for a large part of the century. Gray’s social rank and gender drew him to the consumptive tradition that Keats symbolised: a tradition which shaped lives as well as poetry.

Conclusion: Germ Theory and After

… all The poems that my father wrote that year In 1941 – all the poems He ever wrote, that year of war, while I was far away Safe in America. Later, he said They coincided with a TB spot Found on his lung, and doctors blotted out: As if, at thirty-eight, the romantic blight Forced him to write them Anthony Thwaite, ‘My Fathers Poems’1 Slaves in Boston’s great department store, in which Harvard University owns twenty-five hundred shares of stock, be reconciled to your long hours and low wages and sentence to die of tuberculosis-because upon the wealth which you produce some learned person has prepared for mankind full data on ‘The strong verb in Chaucer’. Upton Sinclair addressing workers in a Boston department store, 19232 This book ends not with the myth, but with the beginnings of the end of that myth. As Anthony Thwaite’s poem about his father’s poetic tuberculosis demonstrates, the erosion of the Romantic mythology of consumption has been slow and messy.3 Consumption became ‘TB’, the tubercle bacillus that Koch had identified in 1882 – the time when the science of bacteriology was coming into its own. Consumption was a mere germ that could be contracted by anyone, a contagion or plague 186

Conclusion 187

which could infect rich or poor alike, as Upton Sinclair’s pointed speech to Boston store-workers insisted. But still the myth persisted; still medical people attempted to justify the spes phthisica in terms of an altering of the brain caused by toxins that the tubercle bacillus released into the body.4 The Victorian poetess Sarah Flower Adams’s biographer assumed that her poetry had been inspired by consumption: It is well to remember that the disease to which Mrs Adams at last succumbed is recognized as inducing characteristic mental and emotional states. Consumption has, indeed, been described as ‘the most intellectual and the most mysteriously psychic of all illnesses,’ and, though we stand but on the threshold of the investigation of its elusive effects and the manner in which they are brought to be, we cannot doubt their reality. The mind is not debilitated, rather it manifests a peculiar capacity for extreme concentration of its power together with a frequent tendency to violent emotional experience.5 Tuberculosis remained a disease of genius, now giving inspiration – not through a heightened sensibility, but through bacteria. Arthur C. Jacobson argued in Genius: Some Revelations that the toxins produced by the tuberculosis bacillus acted similarly to alcohol, releasing the inhibitions imposed by civilisation. This mix of chemistry and Freudianism was one of the many theories that still linked consumption and genius through new and apparently ‘scientific’ criteria.6 D. G. Macleod Munro’s title The PsychoPathology of Tuberculosis is self-explanatory in this context.7 Science now understood what tuberculosis was, and much of the disease process, but not how to cure it: effective respite would not be available until the mid-twentieth century with the discovery of streptomycin in 1944, by which time the disease was declining in the First World in any case. As Sander Gilman has argued, older conceptions of consumption persisted powerfully in the medical literature of the age, even though they ‘should have vanished with Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus’.8 The juggernaut of consumptive narratives would take a long time to halt. The reason for this was that different narratives of consumption were still performing certain important discursive functions in society. The creative classes continued to need a justification for their consumptive condition, while opposing discourses, legitimating the stigmatisation of the lower classes, foreigners and various social ‘others’, continued in more or less complex formulations.9 The bacteriological terminology


and imagery of infection, contagion and pollution was ideal for a new mode of blame. Susan Sontag has pointed to Hitler’s first political tract of 1919, in which he ‘accused the Jews of producing “a racial tuberculosis among nations” ’.10 T. S. Eliot certainly saw consumption as a disease of the other: his Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar (1925) describes the decadent, pseudo-Jewish Princess Volupine’s ‘meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand’.11 This discourse of contagion also applied to the opposite end of the political spectrum: in his The White Plague and Other Poems of 1909, the radical Thaddeus Browne described consumption as the result of the rich making the poor work in unhealthy conditions, as Upton Sinclair had also argued. Infected labourers are ‘Plague-stricken’; ‘They spread contagion among you.’ In spectacularly bad poetry, Browne depicted consumption as ‘Malignant, repellent, appalling’, and illustrated his poems with the medieval image of Death the skeletal reaper scattering the seeds of consumption over the city. This was not the peaceful easing into the heavenly home of the Victorian period.12 At the end of the nineteenth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) reflected the contemporary anxiety about Koch’s discovery that consumption is an infectious germ.13 Consumption’s symptoms are similar to those of vampirism: Dracula himself is described by Stoker as being ‘tall and thin, and ghastly pale’, having a particularly thin nose and cheeks: ‘The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.’14 The ghastly teeth of the vampire were also similar to the exposed teeth of the consumptive in the very late stages. Blood-spitting was a key symptom of consumption, and vampires too passed blood through their mouths. Moreover, consumption’s connection with blood had been a longstanding tradition: the vital spirit or force was thought by some to reside in the blood, while, in the extraordinary episode of Erasmus Darwin’s attempts to cure Lady Northesk, one desperate suggestion had been to transfuse blood from Anna Seward into the wasting lady in an attempt to restore life.15 More recently in 1898, a painting entitled ‘The Blood Drinkers’ depicted consumptives taking a ‘cure’ by standing in the presence of a newly-slain ox and then drinking its blood; their disgusted reaction carries some of the visceral horrors that could be associated with consumption, its symptoms and treatment.16 Vampires also chimed with late-Victorian fears about the drain of modern civilisation on vital energy: diseases such as neurasthenia accompanied consumption as an index of a languorous society. These monsters, sapped of blood and needing ever-more to replenish their lifeforce, represented degeneration and contagion: they became the other

Conclusion 189

side of the coin to the idealised representations of consumption supplied by the earlier parts of the century – what Dijkstra has called ‘the cult of the consumptive sublime’.17 The mythology of consumption had begun to shift, and with it the old genre of consumptive poetry vanished. The praise of spiritualised women fading into God’s glory is rarely, if at all, to be found after the 1880s. Now, Decadent literature embraced illness as a sign of the outsider, of psychological alterity, rather than being central to the social process as in the Victorian period. In this sense, consumption was not a disease of the Self, but a disease of the Other.18 There were other reasons for the end of the genre apart from consumption’s altered medical status, however. The poetry of consumption was closely connected with Evangelical sentimentality, a force that declined in the 1880s.19 Secular science began to displace religion and the accompanying notion of the good death, a shift accelerated by quick and brutal deaths on a mass scale in the First World War. As Pat Jalland has put it: the Great War ‘destroyed the remaining Victorian spiritual resources which had enabled individuals and families to perceive positive meanings in the deaths of loved ones’.20 The good death was predicated on facing up to death: modernity insisted on ignoring or suppressing it. In addition, the status of medicine itself as an institution had risen; now a respected profession, it had the authority of genuine scientific progress to back up its claims, an authority it certainly could not have claimed a century earlier. With the use of technology to assess the patient’s condition rather than the greater human contact of previous eras, the mystery of diagnosis was largely removed from the diagnosis of consumption. Hospitals and sanatoria replaced the environment of the Victorian sickroom, depersonalising the illness experience and removing much of the patient’s control over that process. Lay people now could not contest the doctor as easily: specialised medicine, which fragmented the body into its constituent parts, denied the holistic view of medicine that had persisted through much of the nineteenth century: the patient became more a pair of lungs to be examined than a suffering individual. 21 Although the upper-class sanatoria generated a particular hothouse culture of refined decadence that could lead to the goings-on in Thomas Mann’s novel the Magic Mountain, this was more of a group phenomenon than the individualised Victorian sickroom.22 The development of consumption as the ‘new’ disease of tuberculosis after 1882 requires another study: this one has shown how consumption arrived at the point where revelations about its contagious and germ-like nature could cause a shift, however uneven, in its social


perception. We have seen how consumption’s myths and metaphors developed over hundreds, if not thousands of years, accruing more and more meanings – not just in abstract literary representations, but in the lives of actual people. Literature affected consumption’s reality, just as consumption shaped literature to a hitherto unrecognised extent. Perhaps this will continue to be the case if modern-day tuberculosis – a different disease from the one(s) we have been studying in this book – continues to grow in First World inner cities.23 If so, a look to the literary past will help to structure the medical future.

Notes

Introduction 1. ‘Metzengerstein’, Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II, Tales and Sketches 1831–42, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 20. 2. Thomas Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption for the use of Parents and Preceptors (Bristol: Longman and Rees, 1799), 6. 3. William W. Reade, Liberty Hall, Oxon., 3 vols. (London: C. J. Skeet, 1860), iii, 323, 327. 4. For a good general history see Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), and the classic by René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992); notable cultural histories are: David S. Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in nineteenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Barbara Bates, Bargaining for Life: a social history of Tuberculosis, 1876–1938 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Linda Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain: A Social History of Tuberculosis in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Sheila M. Rothman, Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994); F. B. Smith, The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988); one overview that does place literary narratives at its centre is Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption, 1700–1830’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–94. 5. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 6. David B. Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1998); Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience: an anthropological perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kathryn Montgomery

191

192 Notes

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Hunter, Doctors’ Stories: the narrative structure of medical knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: body, illness, and ethics (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). A matter for dispute, but see René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague, 6–10. Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, 22–23. Cao Xuequin, A Dream in the Red Mansion (Haikou, China: Hai Nan Press, 1985), 121, 465, 329. My thanks to an anonymous reader for reminding me of the significance of this fact. Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience, 140–46. Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience, 153–64, 173–79; Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, 4–5, 14–18, 23–28, 48–53. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 22. For more on these figures see later chapters, especially 3, 5 and 6. Anthony Thwaite, ‘My Father’s Poems’, Times Literary Supplement (18 Februray 2000), p. 15, l.10.

1 Consumption and Love Melancholy: The Renaissance Tradition 1. Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1981), V.4.96, p. 216. 2. Arden Fn. 96. 3. For a classic introduction to Renaissance medical theory, melancholy, and its relation to literature, see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a study of melancholia in English Literature from 1540–1642 (East Lansing MI: Michigan State College Press, 1951). 4. See, for example, Jacques Ferrand, Erotomania, or A Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love or Erotique Melancholy (Oxford: E. Forrest, 1640 [Fr, Paris: 1623]), 200. 5. Walter Pagel, ‘Humoral Pathology: a lingering anachronism in the history of tuberculosis’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 29 (1955) [299–308], 300–301. 6. The Extant Works of Aretaeus, The Cappadocian, repr., unabridged, of 1856 edn, ed. and trans. Francis Adams (Boston, MA: Longwood Press, 1978), ‘On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases’, bk. 1, ch. 8, ‘On Phthisis’, 309–12. 7. Bruno Meinecke, Consumption (Tuberculosis) in Classical Antiquity (New York: Paul Hoeber, 1927), 390. 8. Meinecke, Consumption, 389. 9. Meinecke, Consumption, 390. 10. Meinecke, Consumption, 390–91. 11. Gideon Harvey, Morbus Anglicus: or the Anatomy of Consumptions (London: Nathanael Brook, 1666). 12. Harvey himself relates Hippocrates’ definition in his own attempts at clarification on p. 8. 13. A Treatise of Consumptions. Scorbutic Atrophies. Tabes Anglica. Hectic Fevers. Phthisicks. Spermatick and Venereous Wafting. Radically demonstrating their

Notes 193

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

nature and cures from vital and morbific causes, reflecting the errours of vulgar doctrine, and Practice. Examined by Chymical Principles and the latest Practical Discoveries (London: T. Basset, 1667), 1–2. Sir Richard Blackmore, MD, A Treatise of Consumptions and Other Distempers Belonging to the Breast and Lungs, 2nd edn., Corrected (London: John Pemberton, 1725), 5. See ‘Aphorisms’, Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1983), section 3.29, p. 216. Guillaume du Bartas, ‘Adam, The Third part of the first day of the second week’, ‘The Furies’, Du Bartas: His Divine Weekes And Workes, trans Josuah Sylvester (London: H. Lownes, 1621 [first publ. 1605]), p. 212, ll. 533ff. See Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 149–151. Elaine Showalter, ‘Representing Ophelia; Women, Madness, and the Responsibility of Feminist Criticism’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 77–94; see also Vieda Skultans, English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580–1890 (London: Routledge, 1979), 17–20; Lawrence Babb, Elizabethan Malady, for the (ungendered) history of melancholy up to 1642; on the general history of melancholy and specifically its fashionability for men see Michael Macdonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 150–64. Richard Morton, Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions (London: Innys, 1720). See Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 185. Will Greenwood, A Description of the Passion of Love (London: William Place, 1657). William D’Avenant, The Man’s the Master (London: Henry Herringman, 1669), ii, p. 25. Mary Wack, 150. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, iv, ll. 1212–15, p. 472. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, l. 2682. ‘Parson’s Tale’, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ll. 845–50, pp. 255–56. Robert Tofte, Alba. The Months Minde of A Melancholy Lover (London: Matthew Lownes, 1598), part 3, 277, 139. Dudley Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, transcribed from shorthand and ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 281. For Ryder’s later reputation see the response of Samuel Bruckshaw in ‘One more proof of the iniquitous abuse of private madhouses’, Voices of Madness, ed. Allan Ingram (Stroud: Sutton, 1997 [1774]), 79. See, for example, Penelope Aubin, Madam de Beaumont, in A Collection of Entertaining Histories and Novels, vol. 3 (London: Midwinter, 1739), Ch. 8, 285; Count Albertus in A Collection of Entertaining Histories and Novels, vol. 2 (London: Midwinter, 1739), ch. 1, 199. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (London: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1722]), 42. Henry Fielding, A Journey from this World to the Next (London: Dent, 1973 [1743]), 105.

194 Notes

2 The ‘Golden Disease’: Early Modern Religious Consumptions 1. Dudley Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, transcribed from shorthand and ed. William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 345. 2. Ryder, The Diary, 209; for Ryder’s concern about his health and frequent visits to medical practitioners (both qualified and quack), see The Diary, passim, especially 276–78, 295–98. 3. Ryder, 263. 4. Ryder, 234. The fear of sudden death, depriving the dying of the chance to prepare for one’s end, was widespread in European society. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 10–13: Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 65–69. 5. Thomas Sydenham reported that there were ‘two Thirds dying of it who are spoiled by Chronical Diseases’; see The whole works … of Dr. Thomas Sydenham, 10th edn., trans. and corrected from the original Latin by John Pechey MD (London: W. Feales, 1734), 326. 6. ‘A Letter to a Friend, upon the occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’, Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici and other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 177–96: originally published posthumously in London, 1690. 7. For the American reception see Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 15. 8. The Extant Works of Aretaeus, The Cappadocian, repr., unabridged, of 1856 edn., ed. and trans Francis Adams (Boston, MA: Longwood Press, 1978), ‘On the Causes and Symptoms of Chronic Diseases’, bk. 1 ch. 8, ‘On Phthisis’, 269. Also quoted in Thomas Daniel, Captain of Death: the Story of Tuberculosis (NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 19 [B. L. Gordon, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (NY: Philosophical Library, 1959), 476]. 9. See Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 167, 203. 10. See Mary Fissell, ‘The disappearance of the patient’s narrative and the invention of hospital medicine’, British Medicine in an Age of Reform, ed. R. French and Andrew Wear (London: Routledge, 1991), 92–109, 97–8; see also Andrew Wear, ‘Puritan perceptions of illness in seventeenth-century England’, Patients and Practitioners, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 55–100; a useful volume for the general area is Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Scolar Press: Aldershot, 1996). My thanks to Dr Fissell for her comments on an early version of this research. 11. Arthur C. Jacobson, Genius: Some Revelations (London: John Hamilton, 1929), 51. 12. Thomas Fuller, Life Out of Death. A Sermon preached at Chelsey, on The recovery of an honourable Person (London: J. Williams, 1655), 20–21. 13. Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedie (London: John Stepneth, 1611), III.i.266, n.p. 14. Samuel Garth, ‘The Dispensary’ [1699], The Poems of Garth and King, Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, vol. 20 (London: Nichols, 1779), Canto VI, ll. 155–59, p. 82.

Notes 195 15. Sir Christopher Wyvill, ‘Mors Mea’, Certaine Serious Thoughts Which at Severall Times & upon Sundry Occasions have Stollen Themselves into Verse and now into the Publike View from the Author (London: Printed by F. B. for George Badger [etc.], 1647), ll. 3–6, pp. 22–23. 16. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 196. 17. See Virginia S. Daniel and Thomas M. Daniel, ‘Old Testament References to Tuberculosis’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 29:6 (1999), 1557–58. 18. See David William Atkinson, The English Ars Moriendi (New York: P. Lang, c1992), Introduction, especially xxii. 19. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Presented To the World in a Familiar Dialogue Between Mr. Wiseman, And Mr. Attentive (London: Printed by J. A. for Nath. Ponder [etc.] 1680), p. [323], 302. 20. Anon. Harl. MS. 1706f.26, quoted in Atkinson, 7. 21. Jeremy Taylor, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying ([London, 1651], Atkinson 335 – sect 5); also in Holy Dying (London: R. Royton, 1651), p. 188, ch. 4, sect v. 22. The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702: his autobiography, diaries, anecdote and event books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 3 vols. (Brighouse: A. B. Bayes, 1881–85), i:66–8; also quoted in Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family, 185–86. 23. See Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England’, Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke, (London: Routledge, 1989), 43–61. A useful overview is Death in England: An Illustrated History, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Clare Gittings (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000). For the features of the good death as they persist in the Victorian Evangelical movement, see Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 17–19, 26–28. For smallpox, see Raymond Anselment’s The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1995), ch. 5, and J. R. Smith, The Speckled Monster: Smallpox in England, 1670–1970 (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1987). 24. The Realms of Apollo, ch. 5, 210–11. 25. Quoted in Anselment, 210, originally in Alexander Brome, ‘To a Gentleman that fell sick of the small Pox. When he should be married,’ in Poems, ed. Roman R. Dubinski, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), i:265. 26. See Jalland, 18, and R. Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual and Bereavement, 25–42. 27. Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, 4th edn, 1675, intro. George Saintsbury, Oxford World’s Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1927). For the literary aspects of the Ars Moriendi see N. L. Beaty, The Craft of Dying: A Study in the Literary Tradition of the ‘Ars Moriendi’ in England (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 28. Walton, ‘Life of Dr John Donne’, 1–90. 29. Donne himself apparently believed that his body would be returned in heaven, a theory ignored by Walton: see David A. Hirsch, ‘Donne’s Atomies and Anatomies: Deconstructed Bodies and the Resurrection of Atomic Theory’, SEL, 31 (1991), 69–94.

196 Notes 30. Roy Porter, ‘Death and the Doctors in Seventeenth-Century England’, Death, Ritual and Bereavement, 77–94. 31. See Atkinson, xxiv for the decline of the Ars Moriendi.

3 ‘The genteel, linear, consumptive make’: The Disease of Sensibility and the Sentimental 1. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, 3rd edn., 8 vols. (London: S. Richardson, 1751), vol. 7, XCVIII, 376. 2. (London: G. Strahan, 1742), 185–87 – ‘A Consumption’. 3. Manual of Health: or, the invalid conducted safely through the seasons (London: J. Johnson, 1806), 214; for more on Beddoes see Roy Porter, ‘Reforming the Patient in the Age of Reform: Thomas Beddoes and medical practice’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), British Medicine in an Age of Reform (London: Routledge, 1991), 9–44. On Beddoes’s opinions on consumption, see Roy Porter’s groundbreaking article, ‘Consumption: Disease of the consumer society?’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 58–81, 65–70. 4. Hygeia, or essays moral and medical, 3 vols. (Bristol, J. Mills, 1802), Vol. 1, Essay iii, 62. 5. Hygeia,1.iii.63; Manual of Health, 17. 6. Manual of Health, 14, 7. 7. Hester Piozzi, Thraliana, ed. K. C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), vol. 1, 393, July 1793; see also Pat Rogers, ‘Fat is a fictional issue: the novel and the rise of weight-watching’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Roy Porter (eds), Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), 168–87, 174. 8. For the broad changes in the medical model, see Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in An Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 191; for the nerves in particular see G. S. Rousseau’s important article, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,’ in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137–157; J. Spillane, The Doctrine of the Nerves (London: Oxford University Press, 1981); G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1992). For a sophisticated reading of the status of the nerves and sensibility in a European context, see Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 9. For more on popular medicine, see The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1992). 10. Edward Barry, A Treatise on a consumption of the lungs (Dublin: George Grierson, 1726), 8–12; Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London: University of Georgia Press, 1990 [1771]), 18. 11. Baron Van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms concerning the knowledge and cure of Diseases, 18 vols. (London: J. Murray 1776), vol. 12, ‘Of a Pthisis [sic] pulmonalis’, 1–195, 16.

Notes 197 12. See Richard Morton, Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions (London: Smith and Walford, 1694), 121–114. 13. Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982); Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988); Carole Shammas, The Preindustrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 14. Gideon Harvey, Morbus Anglicus: or the Anatomy of Consumptions (London: Nathanael Brook, 1666). 15. See Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 56–58. 16. Edward Barry, A Treatise on a consumption of the lungs, 176. 17. For the locus classicus, see Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 226. 18. Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: the senses in social context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105–6. For the advances in the understanding of the lungs via the microscope see Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Fontana, 1997), 223–25. 19. See Sir Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of Consumptions and other Distempers Belonging to the Breast and Lungs, 2nd edn., Corrected (London: John Pemberton, 1725), 18. 20. See Dr Everard Maynwaring, A Treatise of Consumptions, scorbutick atrophies, tabes anglica, … phthisicks, spermatick and venereous wasting (London: T. Bassett, 1667), 82. 21. See Extant Works 316; Thomas Daniel, Captain of Death: the Story of Tuberculosis (NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 19; [B. L. Gordon, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine (NY: Philosophical Library, 1959), 476]. See also Dubos, White Plague, 59. 22. Benjamin Marten, A New Theory of Consumptions, More especially of a Phthisis, or Consumption of the Lungs (London: Knaplock, 1720), 5. 23. George Cheyne, An Essay on Regimen (London: Rivington, 1740), 1. 24. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137–57, 141–47 especially. See also Raymond Stephanson, ‘Richardson’s “Nerves”: The Physiology of Sensibility in Clarissa’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49:2 (1988), 267–85. 25. See George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London: George Strahan, 1724), 185–86. 26. See Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’, 64–5. 27. John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem (Dublin: John Smith, 1744), Book Four, p. 70, l. 331; see also Bk 4, p. 73, l. 431. For an introduction to Armstrong, see Bruce Boehrer, ‘English Bards and Scotch Physicians: John Armstrong’s debt to Paradise Lost and the dynamics of literary reception’,

198 Notes

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

Milton Quarterly, 32:3 (1998), 98–104; Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson, ‘John Armstrong’s The Oeconomy of Love: A Critical Edition with Commentary’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 19:3 (1995), 38–69. See Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 27–28. Anita Guerrini, ‘The Hungry Soul: George Cheyne and the Construction of Femininity’, ECS 32 (1999), 279–291, 280–82; see also Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 185. Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: the life and times of George Cheyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). George Cheyne, The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the disorders of the mind depending on the body (London: G. Strahan, 1742), 185–7 – ‘A Consumption’. Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, causes and cure of those disorders which have been commonly called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1765), 237. See Stephen Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 11–14. Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France. Advertisement to Part 3 of English Malady, in Introduction to George Cheyne, The English Malady, ed. and intro. Roy Porter (1733; repr. London: Routledge, 1991), 262. See Guenter B. Risse, ‘Medicine in the age of the Enlightenment’, in Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149–98, 160–63. George Cheyne, An Essay on Regimen (London: Rivington, 1740), 69. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly Poetry (1767), ed. J. L. Mahoney (Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), 152. James Beattie, Essays on Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1778), 53. Erasmus Darwin, ‘The Economy of Vegetation’, The Botanic Garden (London: J. Johnson, 1791), Canto I, ll. 9–12. George Cheyne: The English Malady (1733), ed. Roy Porter, p. xli. Guerrini, 286. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Peter Sabor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1740]), 397, fn. 286, p. 354. Baron Van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms, ‘Of a Pthisis [sic] pulmonalis’, 1–195, 16. Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases in Three Dialogues (London: J. Tonson, 1730 [1711]), 246–247; also discussed in Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 26–7. John Stephens, A Practical Treatise on Consumptions (London: W. Owen and J. Gretton, 1761), 202. My thanks to Tom Keymer for bringing Stephens’ presence in Sterne’s library sale catalogue to my attention.

Notes 199 47. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), sections 14–16. 48. Dr John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, 4th edn. (London: W. Strahan, 1774), 31. 49. ‘Of Employment for the Ladies’, Sentimental Magazine (London: G. Kearsley, 1773), vol. 1, 406. 50. Emma Corbett or the Miseries of Civil War (London: R. Baldwin, 1780), ii.116–17. 51. See, for example, Anna Richards, The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 64. 52. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992) and Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6–8. 53. See Raymond Stephanson’s discussion of this problem in his ‘Richardson’s “Nerves”: The Physiology of Sensibility in Clarissa’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 49:2 (1988), 267–85, 267–68. Stephanson prepares much of the ground for my own argument in his attribution of Clarissa’s death to her sensibility and its physiological attributes. 54. See Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption, 1700–1830’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–94, 277–78. 55. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, 3rd edn., 8 vols. (London: S. Richardson, 1751), vol. 7, XCVIII, 376; references also supplied to the widely available but inaccurate Dent edition: Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, 4 vols. (London: Dent, 1976), vol. 4, 305. 56. Vol. 4, LVI, 342. 57. John Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Presented To the World in a Familiar Dialogue Between Mr. Wiseman, and Mr. Attentive (London: Nath. Ponder, 1680), [304] 283. 58. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Saturday: The smallpox’, Six Town Eclogues (London: M. Cooper, 1747). 59. See Pope’s footnote on Thersites in The Iliad of Homer, Translated by Mr. Pope, 6 vols. (London: Bernard Lintott, 1715), bk 2, l. 255, p. 102. 60. See Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 98. 61. William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: Or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines (Dublin: Saunders et al., 1774), 125. 62. Richard Brookes, General Practice of Physic, 2 vols. (London: Newbery, 1765), vol. 1 – entry on ‘Consumption of the lungs’, 271–72. 63. Phthisiologia; or, a Treatise of Consumptions (London: S. Smith and B. Walford, 1694), 4–10. 64. J. F. Zückert, Von den Leidenschaften (Berlin: Mylius, 1768), 61–64: see also J. L. Rather, Mind and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: A Study based on Herome Gaub’s De Regemine Mentis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), 227, n. 125.; and Christopher Fox, ‘Defining eighteenth-century psychology: Some Problems and Perspectives’, in Christopher Fox (ed.), Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS Press, 1987), 1–23, 10.

200 Notes 65. Lady Elizabeth Echlin, An Alternative Ending to Richardson’s Clarissa (Bern: Francke, 1982), 166; see Thomas Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 214. 66. This tendency to back-read anorexia nervosa is present in Donnalee Frega’s Speaking in Hunger: Gender, Discourse, and Consumption in Clarissa (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture) (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Anna Krugovoy Silver’s, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is better historicised, but still shares the same bias as Frega. Anna Richards’s The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) is more sensitive to the subtle relationships between related diseases such as those of the nerves, consumptions, chlorosis and neurasthenia, and is one of the few books to note the existence of nervous consumptions as a medical definition (83). Ron Van Deth and Walter Vandereycken have studied the question ‘Was nervous consumption a precursor of anorexia nervosa’, and found almost no evidence to support a positive connection between the two – see Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 46 (1991), 3–19. 67. See Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Fontana, 1997), 269. 68. See John Mullan, ‘Feelings and Novels’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 119–134. 69. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 180–81. 70. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, Vol. II: Holy Dying, ed. D. G. Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 [1651]), ch. 4, sect. i, ‘Of the Practise of Patience’, 123–24. 71. Thomas Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader, 204. 72. William Sherlock, A Practical Discourse Concerning Death, 27th edn. (London: Ware, 1751), 173 73. Izaak Walton (ed.), The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson 4th edn, 1675, with intro. by George Saintsbury, Oxford World’s Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 78. 74. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 226, 242. 75. Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality (London: Routledge, 1906 [1777]), Ch. 8, 121–22. 76. Dudley Ryder, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, transcribed from shorthand and ed. by William Matthews (London: Methuen, 1939), 345. 77. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, ed. Joseph Angus (London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d. [1736]), 30. 78. Roy Porter, ‘Death and the doctors in seventeenth-century England’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual and Bereavement, 77–94, 84–86. 79. See Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 369–95. 80. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 86. 81. See also Nancy K. Miller, ‘The exquisite cadavers: Women in eighteenthcentury Fiction’, Diacritics, 5:4 (Winter 1975), 37–43, who, in a review essay,

Notes 201

82. 83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

argues that woman as Other functions, through her death, to restore masculine social and psychological order. Again, this is an ahistorical, psychoanalytical approach. In Nancy Rogers, ‘The wasting away of Romantic Heroines’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 11/3, no. 4 (1983), 346–56, the author draws an analogy between ‘the sentimentalised sufferings of the tubercular and hysterical patients’, and briefly suggests that both were an outgrowth of humours theory – specifically melancholy. This, as the present study shows, is true to a large extent, although clearly the development of consumption as a symbolic disease is reliant on more factors than this one (254). See Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 8. See John P. Zomchick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: the Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 14. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Damian Grant (London: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1753]), Ch. Lxix, 235–242 for Monimia’s ‘death’; Ch. Lxiii, 320–7 for her ‘rebirth’. Sentimental Magazine (London: G. Kearsley, 1774), vol. 2, 27 (Number IV, Case IV). Sentimental Magazine (1774), vol. 2, 27. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Sir Walter Scott, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne and Co., 1810), vol. I, p. cxvii, Letter – Lichfield, April 1764; also quoted in E. V. Lucas, A Swan and Her Friends (London: Methuen, 1907), 30–3. Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Routledge, 1992), 183. See The Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 4. Letters of Laurence Sterne, 224. For more on Sterne’s relation to his own consumptive condition see Clark Lawlor, ‘Consuming time: Narrative and disease in Tristram Shandy,’ Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), 46–59; and ‘Sterne, Edward Baynard, and the history of cold bathing: Medical Shandeism’, Notes and Queries, 244 [new series, 46] (March 1999), 22–25. John Dryden, ‘The latter part of the fourth book of Lucretius: Concerning the nature of love’, The Works of John Dryden (London: William Paterson, 1882–1892), vol. XII, p. 351, ll. 153-. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple (London: Oxford University Press, 1969 [1744 and vol. 7, 1753]), bk. 1, ch.11, 61. The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris, 3 parts (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), part 2, vol. 5, letter xiv, 542–43. Bk. 7, ch. 5, 411–12. Bk. 7, ch. 6, 413. Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, intro. Carl F. Klinck (Ottowa: McClelland and Stewart, 1961 [1769]), letter 114, 160. See Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption, 1700–1830’ 469. Anna Seward, Memoirs of Dr Darwin (London: J. Johnson, 1804), 110–114; also quoted in The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Sir Walter Scott, 3 vols., vol. I, pp. xiv-xvii, Letter – Lichfield April 1764; and in E. V. Lucas, A Swan and Her Friends (London: Methuen, 1907), 107–109.

202 Notes

4 ‘A consuming malady and a consuming mistress’: Consumptive Masculinity and Sensibility 1. Vol. 6, LXXVI, 321; vol. 3, 480. 2. Vol. 4, XXVI, 131. 3. See Bruno Meinecke, Consumption (Tuberculosis) in Classical Antiquity (New York: Paul Hoeber, 1927), 385. 4. Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, Vol. II: Holy Dying, ed. D. G. Smallwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 [1651]), Ch. 4, sect. i, ‘Of the Practise of Patience’, 123–124; Thomas Fuller, Life Out of Death. A Sermon Preached at Chelsey, on The Recovery of an Honourable Person (London: J. Williams, 1655), 20–21. 5. Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying, ‘Of the Practise of Patience’, 123–24. 6. The Adventures of Roderick Random (London: Dent, 1973 [1748]), 309. 7. John P. Zomchick, Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10–15. 8. Eliza Heywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 4 vols. (London: Garland, 1979 [1751]), vol. 1, 12–13. 9. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (London: University of Georgia Press. 1990 [1771]), 278–79. 10. For a discussion of the need for regulation of excessive demand/desire within the bourgeois household see Zomchick, Family and the Law in EighteenthCentury Fiction, 160. See also Elizabeth Bergen Brophy, Women’s Lives and the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida Press, c. 1991) for the authority of the husband over the wife, 159. 11. Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, ed. Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 [1766]), 87 – Letter 10. 12. The otherwise excellent Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) makes no significant mention of travel for health. 13. For further discussion of travel and the medical market, see Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–94. 14. See Clark Lawlor, ‘Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in Tristram Shandy’, Yearbook of English Studies, 30 (2000), 46–59. 15. P. 2, letter 1 (1763). 16. To John Moore, Letters, 108. 17. Sixth edn. [1st edn. 1706] (London, Innys, 1732). See also Ginnie Smith, ‘Prescribing the rules of health: Self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249–82, 259 Also see Clark Lawlor, Notes and Queries. 18. For more on Smollett’s often complex relationship to the concept of modern life and its physical consequences, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), especially Part 3 on Humphry Clinker. 19. The Life and Opinions of John Buncle Esquire (London: Routledge, 1904 [1756]), 371–73.

Notes 203 20. Tobias Smollett, Travels through France and Italy, 266, L31. 21. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 1st London edn. [2nd edn.] (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), 3.24, p. 131: henceforth abbreviated as TS; references will also be given to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, 2 vols. (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1978), 3.24, p. 249; henceforth abbreviated as Fl. 22. Recent work by Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, Tom Keymer, and the late Roy Porter (as ever first to the subject) has begun to remedy this situation. See Tom Keymer, ‘Dying By Numbers: Tristram Shandy and Serial Fiction’, Shandean 8 (1996), 41–67; Sterne, The Moderns, and The Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Clark Lawlor, ‘Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in Tristram Shandy’; Lawlor and Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self’; Roy Porter, ‘ “The Whole Secret of Health”: Mind, Body and Medicine in Tristram Shandy’, in John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (eds.), Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 61–84. 23. FL 1.10.17–24; TS 1.10.40. 24. See in particular the comments of the Florida editors (FL, 1.18.7–12, TS 1.18.63); Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux, rev. John Ozell, 7th ed., 4 vols. (London: D. Midwinter, 1743) I:74. 25. See Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: the aesthetics of laughter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 26. Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1982), 230. 27. London: Norton, 1958 [1771], 89. 28. But Sterne comes close to the meaning of decline as a consumption when he says of his daughter: ‘[Lydia] is in a declining way with this vile Asthma of hers, which these last 3 winters has been growing worse and worse’ (to Lord Fauconberg, April 10, 1762, Letters, 160). See also Letters, 162, 164. 29. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 102. 30. TS I, Ch. 5, 16; Florida I, 8. For more on Tristram Shandy as a serial narrative see Tom Keymer, ‘Dying By Numbers: Tristram Shandy and Serial Fiction’, Shandean 8 (1996), 41–67; Sterne, The Moderns, and The Novel. 31. John Floyer, A Treatise of the Asthma, 3rd edn. (London: Wilkin, 1726), 17, library sale catalogue no. 1185. 32. Baron Van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms concerning the knowledge and cure of Diseases, 18 vols. (London: J. Murray 1776), vol. 12, ‘Of a Pthisis [sic] pulmonalis’, 1–195. 33. TS VII.1.1–2; FL II.575–77. 34. See Clark Lawlor, ‘Consuming Time: Narrative and Disease in Tristram Shandy’, 50–51. 35. Baron Van Swieten, Commentaries upon Boerhaave’s Aphorisms, 39. 36. Benjamin Marten, A New Theory of Consumptions, More especially of a Phthisis, or Consumption of the Lungs (London: Knaplock, 1720), 5. 37. TS 7.35.130; FL 7.34.636. 38. 14th Nov. 1767, quoted in The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831–2), ii.524. 39. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 [1767]), 24.

204 Notes 40. Albrecht von Haller, A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals, trans. M. Tissot (London: J. Nourse, 1755).

5

Wasting Poets

1. The Journal of Thomas Moore, 1826–30, vol. 3, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 1,119–20. Entry dated 19th, Feb. [Tuesday] 1828; also cited in René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 58. 2. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), ii.220–1; July 27, 1820. 3. See especially the 3rd stanza and its poignant reference to Tom’s death. 4. See Allan Weisse, ‘Why the white plague?’, in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39 (1) (Autumn 1995), 132–138; Sally Dore, ‘this thing we dread’: Tuberculosis and the Chalet School’ (1996), http://www.rockterrace. demon.co.uk/FOCS/tb.html; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Medical Essays, 1842–1882 (London: Sampson Low, 1891), 352; Elsie Venner, 2 vols. (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861), vol. 1, Chapter 10, ‘The Doctor Calls on Elsie Venner,’ – first published in successive parts in the Atlantic Monthly, under the name of ‘The Professor’s Story’, 5:31 (May, 1860), 611. 5. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 186, 189. 6. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 29. 7. Dumas is quoted in Dubos, The White Plague, 58. 8. See Christopher J. Lawrence, ‘The nervous system and society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, ca1979; Medicine as Culture: Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1984). Also Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, Thomas Trotter, An Essay, Medical, Philosophical, and Chemical, on Drunkenness, and its Effects on the Human Body (repr. London: Routledge, 1988 [1804]), pp. ix-xl, p. xxxiv. 9. See Guenter B. Risse, ‘Medicine in the age of the Enlightenment’, in Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149–98, 163–65. 10. Elementa Medicinae (Edinburgh: n.p., 1770, trans. 1795). See also Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69–73, 104; G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘The spermatic economy: A nineteenth-century view of sexuality’, in Michael Gordon (ed.), The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St Martin’s, 1972), 374–402, 375; Brunonianism in Britain and Europe, ed. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1988); W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 16–18. 11. Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats, 69. 12. See Christopher Lawrence, ‘The power and the glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism’, Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213–227, 215.

Notes 205 13. For the development of Romantic medicine, especially its relation to vitalism and literature, see W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), Brunonianism in Britain and Europe; Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats; G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘The spermatic economy: A nineteenth-century view of sexuality;’ Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 10. 14. See Anne Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 302, 295. 15. John Brown, Elementa Medicinae, ii.177. 16. To Leeson, from Nottingham, 7–4–1806, in Charles Vernon Fletcher’s ‘The Poems and Letters of Henry Kirke White: a Modern Edition’, 3 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 1980), iii.890. 17. Barker-Benfield, ‘The spermatic economy’, 375. 18. Shelley uses this phrase in Peter Bell the Third, 8.5. 19. David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 161. My thanks to Dr Sharon Ruston for drawing my attention to this quotation. 20. For some of the connections between Brown, Davy, Beddoes and their radical circle see Christopher Lawrence, ‘The power and the glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism’, in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213–227, 215. 21. Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air and Other Branches of Natural Philosophy Connected with the Subject, 3 vols. (Birmingham: J. Johnson, 1790), 168–169. 22. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament; Being a Practical Enquiry into the Increasing Prevalence, Prevention, and Treatment of those Diseases Commonly Called Nervous, Bilious, Stomach and Liver Complaints; Indigestion; Low Spirits; Gout, etc, 2nd edn. (London: Printed by Edw. Walker, Newcastle, for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807). 23. Samuel Tissot, De la santé des gens de lettres, intro. François Azouvi (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981 [1768]). 24. Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: anxieties of empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 185; Biographia Literaria, i.33, 37. 25. George Brandes, The Romantic School in Germany (London: Heinemann, 1902 [1873]), 189–201. 26. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art, 10; also see Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: disease of the consumer society?,’ in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1994), 59, 79. 27. Reprinted in The Poetical Works of James Gates Percival with a Biographical Sketch, 2 vols (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), i.382. 28. Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 29. William Buchan, Domestic Medicine: or, a Treatise on the Prevention and Cure of Diseases by Regimen and Simple Medicines (Dublin: Saunders et al., 1774), 44. 30. Almeida, 102–103. 31. Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825; reprint with 1872 Supplement, London: Chapman Hall, 1873), 110. 32. Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller, 92; Sterne ascribed breaking a vessel in his lungs to ‘hard writing’; see Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The

206

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

Notes Later Years (London: Routledge, 1992), 104; also Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 640. A Medical and Experimental Inquiry into the Origin, Symptoms, and Cure of Constitutional Diseases (London: J. Mawman, 1805), 137. John Moore, An Essay on the Causes, Nature, and Cure, of Consumptions. In a Letter to A Friend (Boston: R. Hodge, 1782), 26. See Roy Porter, Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick-Trade in LateEnlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1992), 102. Thomas Hayes, A Serious Address on the Dangerous Consequences of Neglecting Common Coughs and Colds, with Ample Directions for the Prevention and Cure of Consumptions …’ [Ist American edn taken from 4th London edn.] (Boston: T. West, 1796), 17, 51. Thomas Young FRCP, A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (London: T. Underwood, 1815), 43. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 169. See Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 168; Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 28. John Armstrong, Practical Illustrations of the Scarlet Fever, Measles, Pulmonary Consumption … (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1818), 244, 241–42. Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 26–8. See Michael Worbouys, ‘Tuberculosis and Race’, Race, Science and Medicine 1700–1900, ed. Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (London: Routledge, 1999), 144–66; Katherine Ott: Fevered lives, 100–10; Douglas A. Lorimer, ‘Race, science and culture: historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850–1914’, in Shearer West (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996): 12–33, 20; Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), 239–42. William Craig (later Lord Craig), ‘Reflections on genius unnoticed and unknown; anecdotes of Michael Bruce,’ The Mirror: A Periodical Paper published at Edinburgh in the Years 1779 and 1780, 11th edn. (London, 1801), 266. First published in The Mirror, 36 (29 May 1779). John Guthrie Barnet, Life and Complete Works of Michael Bruce. Poet of Loch Leven, The Cottage Edition (London: Thynne and Jarvis, 1927), 65. John Guthrie Barnet, Life and Complete Works of Michael Bruce, 108. See W. and R. Chambers, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, 3rd edn. (London, 1876), i.687. This echoes Milton’s perception of his loss through blindness in Paradise Lost Bk. 3, 40: ‘Not to me returns …’; although Milton also uses his affliction as a sign of divine favour and Christ-like perfection through weakness and suffering. J. Mackenzie, Life of Michael Bruce, Poet of Loch Leven (London: J. M. Dent, 1905), 63. [Edgar] ‘Select Biography: Michael Bruce’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 1:26 (26 April 1823), 403–405. Quoted in John Small, Michael Bruce and the Authorship of the ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’ (Edinburgh: np., 1877), 18, originally in Baird MSS.

Notes 207 50. Mackenzie, Life of Michael Bruce, 17. 51. Nathan Drake, Literary Hours (London: T. Cadell, 1798), 352–53. 52. The Works of Michael Bruce, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1865), 35. 53. John Small, Michael Bruce and the authorship of the ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’, 3. 54. Carlyle’s Life of Schiller of 1825, first published in the London Magazine in 1823–24 as ‘Schiller’s Life and Writings’, and his famous essay on Novalis in the Foreign Review (4), July 1829, provided a further elaboration of the myth of tuberculosis. See useful reprints of these pieces: Thomas Carlyle, The Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825; reprint with 1872 Supplement, London, 1873); idem, ‘Novalis,’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Chapman Hall, 1872), ii.183–229. 55. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1840), xli. Later critical assessments complained that the skill of the biographer and the enthusiasm of a religious readership had elevated mediocre poetry above its station: see John Gibson Lockhart and Whitwell Elwin, Quarterly Review (December 1850), pp. lxxxviii, 197–247. 56. The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, Poetry, vol. 1 (London: Murray, 1898), 364. 57. John T. Godfrey and James Ward, The Homes and Haunts of Henry Kirke White with Some Account of the Family of White of Nottingham and York (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1908), 212. Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1821. 58. [Edgar], ‘Select Biography: Michael Bruce,’ The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 1:26 (April 26, 1823), 403–405. 59. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, 171. White has an unfinished letter, which he intended to send to the Editor of the Nottingham Journal, complaining of consumption’s prevalence; it is reproduced in Charles Vernon Fletcher’s ‘The Poems and Letters of Henry Kirke White: a Modern Edition’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Nottingham, 1980), ii.364. 60. ‘Melancholy Hours’ No. V, The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1840), 344. 61. The Poetical Remains of Henry Kirke White [editor unnamed] (London: Jones and Co., 1824), 33. 62. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, 155. 63. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, xxxviii. 64. ‘Written in the prospect of death’, Charles V. Fletcher, ‘The poems and letters of Henry Kirke White: A Modern Edition’, i.280–281. 65. Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 147–153. 66. [Edgar] ‘Select Biography: Michael Bruce’, 403–405. 67. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, 331–II.

208 Notes 68. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, xvii. 69. Brian Goldberg, ‘Romantic Professionalism in 1800: Robert Southey, Herbert Croft, and the Letters and Legacy of Thomas Chatterton’, English Literary History, 63.3 (1996), 681–706. 70. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, xxii. 71. Review, Baldwin’s London Magazine, I (April 1820), 380–389, 329. 72. Andrew Bennett has usefully discussed the importance of Chatterton’s influence in the area of disease in Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, 147. 73. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), i.149. 74. The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan, xli-ii. 75. Henry Wallis, ‘The Death of Chatterton’ (1856), Oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London. 76. Emily Taylor (ed.), Memories of some Contemporary Poets with Selections from their Writings, (London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1868), 35; Joanna Baillie (ed.), Collection of Poems, chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1823), 195. 77. Charles Thomas Browne, Life of Robert Southey (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854 [1853]), 157, 204; Edmund Clarence Stedman, Genius, and other Essays, by Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1911), 71. 78. The Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, ed. Charles C. Southey, 6 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, 1849–1850), iv.161–164. 79. Bate, 389–340. 80. Bate, 635–636. 81. Jennifer Davis Michael, ‘Pectriloquy: The Narrative of Consumption in the Letters of Keats,’ European Romantic Review, 6 (1995), 38–56. The Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), ii.209. 82. 1st April, 1820, letter to sister: Sir William Hale-White, Keats as Doctor and Patient (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), 54. 83. The Letters of John Keats, ii.162–163 (n. 230). 84. Sir William Hale-White, Keats as Doctor and Patient, 57. 85. Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 140–46, 153–64, 173–79. 86. To Charles Brown, 30 Sept. 1820, ii.345. 87. Bate, 696. 88. Frederick L. Jones (ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1964), ii.240. 89. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ii.252. 90. James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Adonais: Shelley’s consumption of Keats’, Studies in Romanticism, 23 (1984): 295–315. 91. Alan Bewell has also discussed Shelley’s powerful influence in the transmission of the consumption myth to the Victorians in Romanticism and Colonial Disease, 188–92. 92. Adonais, 6.8 93. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ii.289.

Notes 209 94. William Maginn, ‘Remarks on Shelley’s Adonais’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 10 (Dec., 1821), 696–700, 334–335. 95. Unsigned review, The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 1 (Dec 1821), no. 133, 751–754, 295–6; repr. in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). 96. Unsigned review, The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Letters, 255 (8 Dec 1821), 772–773, 297. 97. ‘Illuscenor’, ‘Recollections of Books and their authors. – no. 6. John Keats, the Poet’, The Olio, I (28 June 1828), 391–394. Barry Cornwall (B. W. Proctor) has been suggested as a possible author. 98. ‘Illuscenor’, ‘Recollections of Books and their authors’, 256–7. 99. Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), 246–68. 100. Nick Roe, ‘The romance of sickliness: Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography and the example of Keats’, in Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (eds.), Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 71–80. 101. Newman Ivey White, Shelley, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1947), i.393; see also Nora Crook and Derek Guiton, Shelley’s Venomed Melody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 8, 75. This is a matter for dispute: Kelvin Everest claims that William Lawrence diagnosed Shelley consumptive: see the headnote to Alastor in The Poems of Shelley, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London: Longman, 1989), 462–63. 102. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, i.410, 572–3. 103. See, for example, Jean Dubos, The White Plague; Lewis J. Moorman, Tuberculosis and Genius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1940). 104. The date of composition is unknown. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet,’ in Shelley’s Prose: The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David L. Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1966), 91–96, 93; first published in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, Julian Editions, 10 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926–30). 105. See Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude for example, 242 ff., for a typical example of the wasting Romantic lover-poet. 106. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 573. 107. Ibid. p.740, – fn. 37 – ‘Shelley consulted his old physician, Lawrence, in the latter part of September’ (Mary to Shelley, 25 September 1817). Mary’s next letter, 26, September contains the quotation. 108. Thornton Hunt, ‘Shelley by one who knew him’, The Atlantic Monthly, 9 (Feb., 1863), 184–204, 189. 109. For the link between lung capacity and British imperialism, see Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 124–5. 110. St. 31 onwards. 111. Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 26–7. 112. All further references to Alastor will be line numbers and will use The Poems of Shelley, ed. Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 458–89.

210 Notes 113. For the lute imagery in Alastor see Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 132. 114. Queen Mab, H, 833; Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 2nd edn. (London: Longman et al., 1807), 164; discussed in Sperry, 135, fn. 90. 115. See Sperry, 136. 116. For the origins of the term ‘beautiful death’ see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 409. 117. Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10. 118. The Course of Time: A Poem in Ten Books (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1827); William E. Freedman (ed.), The Victorian Poets: The Bio-Critical Introductions from A. H. Miles’s ‘The Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century’, 3 vols. (London: Garland, 1986), ii.168; Rosaline Masson, Pollok and Aytoun (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1898), [Famous Scots Series], 58. 119. Robert Pollok, Tales of the Covenanters, 5th edn. (Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons, 1850), 5–39: ‘Biographical sketch of the author’ by the Rev. Andrew Thomson. 120. For the link between disease, aesthetics, and the Grand Tour see Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption, 1700–1830’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–294. 121. W. and R. Chambers, Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (London: Chambers, 1876), ii.144 – ‘Pollok’. 122. Rosaline Masson, Pollok and Aytoun.

6 ‘Seeming delicately slim’: Consumed and Consuming Women 1. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), 57. 2. Reprinted in The Works of Washington Irving, 2 vols. (London: George Bell, 1876), vol. 2, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 239–46, 48–52. 3. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 90–91. 4. Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 90–91. 5. Cheryce Kramer, Trea Martyn and Michael Newton (eds.) (2003), Science as Polite Culture, Literature and Science, 1660–1834, General Ed. Judith Hawley, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003–4), i.372. 6. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, a fiction: And, the Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1788]), 22. 7. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), 95. 8. James Makittrick Adair, Medical Cautions, for the Consideration of Invalids; those especially who resort to Bath: Containing Essays on fashionable disease (Bath, R. Cruttwell; London, J. Dodsley and C. Dilly, 1786). 9. Thomas Beddoes, Hygeia, or Essays Moral & Medical on the causes affecting the personal state of our middling and affluent classes, 3 vols. (Bristol: J. Mills, 1802), vol. 1, essay 3, ‘On individuals, comparing our affluent and easy classes, British characteristics and schools for girls,’ 1–84.

Notes 211 10. See Porter, Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick-Trade in LateEnlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1992), 161–64. 11. Thomas Beddoes, Essay on the Causes, Early Signs, and Prevention of Pulmonary Consumption for the Use of Parents and Preceptors (Bristol: Longman and Rees, 1799), 124. 12. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Damian Grant (London: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1753]), Ch. Lxix, p. 235–242. 13. Thomas Beddoes, Manual of Health: or, the Invalid Conducted Safely Through the Seasons (London: J. Johnson, 1806), 104, 97, 113. 14. Manual of Health, 90, 95–98. 15. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol Poston (London: Norton, 1988 [1792]), 43–49; Mary, a, Fiction: And, the Wrongs of Woman, 2. 16. Thomas Hayes, A Serious Address [1st American from 4th London edition] (Boston, MA: T. West, 1796), 46. 17. David Humphreys, The Miscellaneous Works of David Humphreys, Late Minister Plenipotentiary from the United States of America to the Court of Madrid (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1804), p. 104, l. 276. 18. Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (London: Cornell University Press, 1993). 19. Thomas Green Fessenden, The Ladies’ Monitor, A Poem (Bellows Falls, Vermont: Bill Blake, 1818), p. 68, l. 1122. 20. See Keats and Mary Tighe: the Poems of Mary Tighe with Parallel Passages from the Work of John Keats, ed. Earle Vonard Weller, (New York: Kraus, 1966 [1928]). 21. Robert Southey, ‘Amir Khan and other poems’, Quarterly Review, 41:82 (1829), 289–301, 293. See also Clark Lawlor, ‘Transatlantic consumptions: Disease, fame and literary nationalisms in the Davidson sisters, Southey and Poe’, Studies in the Literary Imagination 36:2 (Fall 2004), 109–126. 22. Review of Psyche, Art. XIV, British Review, 2 (June 1811), 277–293, 297. 23. Quoted in Weller, Keats and Mary Tighe, xx. 24. Samuel Finley Breeze Morse (ed.), Amir Khan and other poems: the remains of Lucretia Maria Davidson, who died at Plattsburgh N.Y., August 27, 1825, aged 16 years and 11 months, with a biographical Sketch, by Samuel Finley Breeze Morse (New York: Carvill, 1829), 159. 25. Thomas Park, Sonnets and other Small Poems (London: G. Sael, 1797), 92; James Henry Leigh Hunt, Juvenilia; or, A Collection of Poems, 4th edn. (London: J. Whiting, 1803), 52; Poems by Mrs. Opie, 6th edn. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811), 215–29; Poems; by Mary Russell Mitford, 2nd edn. (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811), 187–92; The Poetical Works of James Gates Percival with a biographical sketch, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), i.7; The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White, Rev. edn. with a memoir by Sir Harry Nicolas (London: George Bell and Sons, 1907), 188; William Cullen Bryant, ‘The Death of the Flowers’, Poems (New York: Harper and Bros, 1840), 258. 26. Cheryl Walker, The Nightingale’s Burden: Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 (Bloomington, Indiana; Indiana University Press, 1982), 26. 27. The Poetical Works of Mrs Hemans with memoir, explanatory notes, etc., Lansdowne Poets edition (London: Frederick Warne, 1897), xvii.

212 Notes 28. ‘Edith. A Tale of the Woods’, The Poetical Works of Mrs Hemans, 344, originally part of Hemans’s Records of Woman (London: John Johnstone, 1828). 29. (Boston: Carter, Hendee and Babcock; Baltimore, MA: Charles Carter, 1831). 30. The American common-place book of poetry, 288–89. 31. The American common-place book of poetry, 240–41. 32. The American common-place book of poetry, 356. 33. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: the cultural work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi-xvii; for a less positive view of the cultural place of sentimental writing at the time see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 200–206. Their debate is summarised in the introduction to Shirley Samuels (ed.), The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in NineteenthCentury America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 34. ‘Consumption’, Poems by Mrs. Opie, 215–29. 35. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 36. Poems by Mrs. Opie, 215–29. 37. Woman in American Society (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1873), 136. 38. For information on Procter see Gill Gregory (ed.), The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); for Adams see H. W. Stephenson, The Author of Nearer, My God, to Thee (Sarah Flower Adams) (London: Lindsey Press, 1922). 39. See Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 40. John Mason Neale, Hymns for the Sick (Cambridge: T. Stevenson, 1843); the poem is discussed in J. R. Watson’s The English Hymn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 374–375. My thanks to Nancy Cho for drawing my attention to Neale’s work. 41. The derivatives of this play were many and varied: for more see Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), 69–72. 42. William Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London: J. Callow, 1819), 445, 428. 43. Francis Hopkins Ramadge, Consumption Curable, and the Manner in which Nature as well as Remedial Art Acts in Effecting a Healing Process (London: Longman et al, 1834), 59. 44. See Chapter 5, 112–13. 45. See Marion M. Torchia, ‘Tuberculosis among American Negroes: Medical Research on a Racial Disease, 1830–1950’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 32 (1977), 252–279, 259. 46. In contrast with Eva’s disease, her father complains that Miss Ophelia’s haste to make a will for him to free the slaves suggests that he has ‘symptoms of yellow fever or cholera’, swift and deadly diseases that allow no time for a good death: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly, ed. Ann Douglas (Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1981), ch. 28, 447. 47. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 24, 401. 48. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ch. 26, 424.

Notes 213

7 Meeting Keats in Heaven: David Gray and the Romantic Legacy 1. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 [1838–1839]), Ch. 49, 628. 2. The Christian Remembrancer, 4 (Dec 1842), 592. 3. James Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1885 [1835]), 35. 4. James Clark, A Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 35. 5. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 6. John T. Evans, Lectures On Pulmonary Phthisis (London: Longman, 1844), 2. 7. Robert David Lalor, Consumption of the lungs or decline (London: J. Allen, 1862), 5, 7, 49, 26. 8. ‘Maurice de Guérin’, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1972 [1973]), 27. 9. George H. Ford, Keats and the Victorians (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 60. 10. Gray is mentioned again in this essay on p. 35. 11. For this and the following discussion of ‘nerve force’, see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), Ch. 4, ‘The Machinery of the Body’, 104–129; also Anna Richards, The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31. 12. Thomas Inman, The Nature of Inflammation and the Principles on Which It Should Be Treated: Examined from a Common Sense Point of View …: to Which is Added, a History of Atheroma in Arteries: its Nature and Alliances, Showing the Bond of Union between Consumption, Aneurism, Apoplexy, Scrofula, and Fatty Degenerations of the Heart and other Organs (Liverpool: Henry Greenwood, 1860?). 13. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science, 113–14. 14. Hermann Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Tony Tanner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 [1851]), p. xl. 15. Gershom N. Brigham, Phthisis Pulmonalis (New York: Boericke and Tafel, 1882), 16. 16. See Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 61, 110. 17. James Clark, (1885 [1835]), 20. 18. Hungerford Sealy, Medical Essays: No. 2. The Imagination, its History and Effects on the Functions of the Body (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1837), 67. 19. James Najarian, Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 76. 20. David Gray, The Luggie and other Poems, Memoir by James Hedderwick, and a prefaratory notice by R. M. Milnes, MP (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862); see also the American edition, Poems by David Gray with Memoir of His Life (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1864). 21. Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes, 2 vols. (London: Moxon, 1848). 22. David Gray, The Luggie and other Poems, Introductory Notice, x. 23. See Robert Buchanan, ‘David Gray’, Cornhill Magazine, 9 (1864), 164–177, 168–169.

214 Notes 24. Poems by David Gray with Memoir of His Life (Boston, MA.: Roberts Brothers, 1864), 158; all further references to Gray’s poetry (unless stated otherwise) will be to this edition. A modern edition of In the Shadows is edited by John Heath-Stubbs (London: Hearing Eye, 1991). 25. For a peculiarly Scottish twist to literary ambition, see Peter Murphy, Poetry as an Occupation and as an Art in Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3; Gray’s outburst was reprinted in most of the biographies and articles but is originally found in his letter to Sydney Dobell, Nov. 1839, in the National Library of Scotland ms 8463, 13–14. 26. ms8463 – letters; 5 – Dec 1859 to Dobell. 27. David Gray, The Luggie and other Poems, p. xx. 28. ms 8463 – letters, no. 26 – to SD, 1859–60. 29. Robert Buchanan, ‘David Gray’, Cornhill Magazine, 9 (1864), 164–177, 170. 30. Robert Buchanan, David Gray and Other Essays, Chiefly on Poetry (London: Sampson Low, 1868), 72, 78. 31. For Buchanan’s version of these poets as both physiologically and poetically feminised, see his David Gray and Other Essays, 68. 32. Gray’s vacillations on this subject are clear in his letters to various correspondents, including his parents: National Library of Scotland ms 8463, pp. 30, 48. 33. Robert Buchanan, ‘David Gray’, 173. 34. National Library of Scotland MS 8479, The Life and Remains of Henry Kirke White with Life by R. Southey (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1852), xxx. 35. ‘Melancholy Hours’ No. V, The Poetical and Prose Works of Henry Kirke White: with Life by Robert Southey, ed. George Gilfillan (Edinburgh: Gall and Inglis, 1840), 344. 36. Even in 1920, John Ferguson felt that this sonnet ‘pierces the soul’: In the Shadows (London: Andrew Melrose, 1920), 8. 37. See Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption 1700–1830’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–94, 493. 38. ms 8463 – letters: no. 21 – to SD, 1859–60. For Keats, see Chapter Five. 39. Heath-Stubbs edits out the comma after ‘rank’. 40. For the origins of Keats’ epitaph and a brief comparison with Gray, see Harrison S. Morris, ‘Two Epitaphs’, Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, ed. Sir Rennell Rodd and H. Gay (1913), 30–32. 41. David Gray, The Luggie and other Poems, xlii. 42. For the local reception of Gray see National Library of Scotland ms 8478A. 43. ms8478A, ‘Review of the Luggie and other …’, The Edinburgh Daily Review [?], 1862. 44. ms8478A, Morning Journal, May 12, 1862, p. 4. 45. David Gray, The Luggie and other Poems, pp. vii, ix, xiv.

Conclusion: Germ Theory and After 1. Anthony Thwaite, ‘My Father’s Poems’, Times Literary Supplement (18 Feb. 2000), p. 15, l. 10. My thanks to Jerome de Groot for bringing this poem to my attention. 2. Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1965), 402.

Notes 215 3. See also Diane-Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 157. 4. Katherine Ott, Fevered lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 74–78. 5. H. W. Stephenson, The Author of Nearer, My God, to Thee (Sarah Flower Adams) (London: Lindsey Press, 1922), 55–56. 6. (London: John Hamilton, 1929), 5. 7. (London: Oxford University Press, 1926). 8. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, 1995), 171. 9. See Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 28. 10. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 80. 11. T. S. Eliot, ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ (1925), Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 43, l. 26. 12. Thaddeus Browne, The White Plague and Other Poems, illustrations by L. Revera and A. Gay (Toronto: William Briggs, 1909), 9, 11. 13. See, for example, the many references to Koch and his theory of consumption in the Times in 1890, such as ‘Consumption, Interview with Prof. Koch’, Saturday November 22, 1890, p. 7; Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (London: Norton, 1997 [1897]). 14. Bram Stoker, Dracula, 23–4, 83. 15. The Poetical Works of Anna Seward, ed. Sir Walter Scott, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne and Co., 1810), vol. 1, pp. xiv – xvii. 16. Dijkstra, Idols, 338. 17. Dijkstra, Idols, 29. 18. Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 142; Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (London: Cornell University Press, 1989); Clark Lawlor and Akihito Suzuki, ‘The Disease of the Self: Representations of Consumption 1700–1830’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 258–94. 19. Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. 20. Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family, 380; see also Philippe Ariès, The Hour of our Death (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 559. 21. Ott, Fevered lives, 66; Bailin, Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, 142. 22. See also earlier novels like Beatrice Harraden’s Ships that Pass in the Night (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893); F. B. Smith discusses this in The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 101. 23. Katherine Ott has argued strongly for the need to see consumption as a different and changing disease in each new cultural context, Fevered Lives, 156–168. As early as 1993 cultural commentators like Henry Porter were arguing that, with the recurrence of TB as a major disease in New York, it is acquiring the mythic qualities AIDS had in the mid nineteen-eighties: Henry Porter, Guardian, 27 April 1993, supplement, p. 5.


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230 Bibliography Moore, David. Romanticism: A Structural Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1982). Morris, David B. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Morris, Harrison S. ‘Two Epitaphs’, Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, ed. Sir Rennell Rodd and H. Gay (1913), 30–32. Mullan, John. ‘Feelings and novels’, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 119–134. Mullen, Richard. Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World (London: Duckworth, 1990). Murphy, Peter. Poetry as an Occupation and as an Art in Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Najarian, James. Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Ott, Katherine. Fevered lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Pagel, Walter. ‘Humoral pathology: A lingering anachronism in the history of tuberculosis’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 29 (1955), 299–308. Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: the Aesthetics of Laughter (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Porter, Henry. Guardian, 27 Apr. 1993, supplement, p. 5. Porter, Roy. ‘ “The whole secret of health”: Mind, Body and Medicine in Tristram Shandy’, Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 61–84. ——‘Reforming the patient in the age of reform: Thomas Beddoes and medical practice’, British Medicine in an Age of Reform, ed. R. French and Andrew Wear (London: Routledge, 1991), 9–44. ——‘Death and the doctors in seventeenth-century England’, Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke (London: Routledge, 1989), 77–94. —— Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (London: Penguin, 1990). —— Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick-Trade in Late-Enlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1992). —— ‘Consumption: disease of the consumer society?,’ Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1994), 58–81. —— The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (London: Fontana, 1997). —— (ed.). The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992). Rather, J. L. Mind and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century: A Study based on Herome Gaub’s De Regemine Mentis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). Richards, Anna. The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Risse, Guenter B. ‘Medicine in the age of the Enlightenment’, Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 149–198. Roe, Nick. ‘The Romance of sickliness: Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography and the example of Keats’, Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 71–80.

Bibliography 231 Rogers, Nancy. ‘The wasting away of Romantic heroines’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 11/3: 4 (1983), 346–356. Rogers, Pat. ‘Fat is a fictional issue: the novel and the rise of weight-watching’, Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 168–187. Rothman, Sheila M. Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1994). Rousseau, G. S. ‘Nerves, spirits, and fibres: Towards defining the origins of sensibility’, Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 137–157. —— Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). —— (ed.). Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Rudolph, Frederick. The American College and University: A History (New York: Knopf, 1965). Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Samuels, Shirley (ed.). The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Schofield, Robert E. Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in An Age of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought from Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Shammas, Carole. The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). Showalter, Elaine. ‘Representing Ophelia; women, madness, and the responsibility of feminist criticism’, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (London: Methuen, 1985), 77–94. Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Skultans, Vieda. English Madness: Ideas on Insanity 1580–1890 (London: Routledge, 1979). Smith, Francis Barrymore. The Retreat of Tuberculosis 1850–1950 (London: Croom Helm, 1988). Smith, Ginnie. ‘Prescribing the rules of health: Self-help and advice in the late eighteenth century’, Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in PreIndustrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 249–282. Smith, J. R. The Speckled Monster: Smallpox in England, 1670–1970 (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1987). Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio (London: Cornell University Press, 1989). Sperry, Stuart M. Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Spillane, J. The Doctrine of the Nerves (London: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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Index Adair, James Makittrick, ‘Fashionable Diseases’, 155–6, 210n Adams, Sarah Flower, 167, 187, 212n Aestheticisation of disease, 2–3, 6–7, 16, 44, 46–7, 53, 58–9, 70–85, 92, 105, 124, 133, 147, 164, 166–9, 178, 181, 199n, 210n African-American consumption, discourses of, 112–13, 167–70 AIDS, 3, 215n Almeida, Hermione de, 116, 120, 204n, 205n American common-place book of poetry, 164, 212n Americans, Native, 122, 163–4 Amory, Thomas, John Buncle, 97, 202n Anderson, Benedict R., 166, 212n Anorexia nervosa, 59, 63, 200n Anselment, Raymond, 37, 195n Aretaeus, 16–18, 30, 47, 192n, 194n Ariès, Philippe, 171–72, 194n, 200n, 210n, 213n, 215n Aristides, 17 Armstrong, John (1709–1779), Art of Preserving Health, 50, 53, 197n, 198n Armstrong, John (1784–1829), 122, 206n Arnold, Matthew, 10, 172–8, 183; ‘Maurice de Guérin’, 173–8; ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, 176 Ars moriendi, 9, 34–40, 68–9, 183, 195n, 196n Asthma and consumption, 18, 93–4, 101, 203n Atkinson, David William, 35, 36, 195n, 196n Aubin, Penelope, 26, 193n Austen, Jane, 83, 159 Author, Romantic cult of the, 100, 103, 133, 184

Babb, Lawrence, 192n, 193n Bacteriology, see Germ Theory Bailin, Miriam, 215n Baillie, Joanna, 133, 208n Baldwin’s London Magazine, 131, 208n Barcus, James E., 209n Barker-Benfield, G. J., 44, 196n, 197n, 198n, 204n, 205n Barnes, David S., 191n Barnet, John Guthrie, 206 Barry, Edward, Treatise on a consumption of the lungs, 45–8, 102, 196n, 197n Bartas, Guillaume du, 22, 193n Bate, Walter Jackson, 206n, 208n Bates, Barbara, 191n Battersby, Christine, 155, 210n Baynard, Edward, The history of cold bathing, both ancient and modern, 95–6, 201n Beattie, James, 55, 198n Beaty, Nancy Lee, 195n Beauty and consumption, 16, 17, 43–8, 57–8, 61, 66, 73–5, 80, 84, 133, 153–5, 159, 162–7; beautiful death, 60–1, 69, 70, 73, 88, 132, 145, 162–7, 210n Beddoes, Thomas, 1, 2, 8, 43, 117, 118, 119, 147, 155, 158, 160, 167, 173, 196n, 205n, 206n, 211n; ‘British Characteristics’, 156; Essay on the causes, early signs, and prevention of pulmonary consumption, 1, 156–7, 191n; Hygeia, 156, 210n; Manual of Health, 157–8, 196n, 211n Beier, Lucinda McCray, 195n Bennett, Andrew, 130, 207n Berg, Maxine, 197n Bewell, Alan, 7, 112, 192n, 204n, 206n, 208n Bible, 34, 125, 170

233

234 Index Blackmore, Sir Richard, Treatise of Consumptions, 20, 193n, 197n Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 139, 209n, 210n Boehrer, Bruce, 197n Boerhaave, Hermann, 45, 48, 51–3, 56, 101, 102, 196n, 198n, 203n Bordo, Susan, 198n Borsay, Peter, 197n Brandes, George, 205n Breath, symbolic and metaphorical significance of, see Lungs Brent-Dyer, Elinor, 113 Brewer, John, 196n, 197n, 205n Brigham, Gershom N., Phthisis Pulmonalis, 176, 213n British Review, 161, 211n Brome, Alexander, 195n Bronfen, Elisabeth, 71–2, 199n Brontë family, the, 7, 111, 167 Brooke, Frances, 9; History of Emily Montague, 82–3, 201n Brooke, Henry, The Fool of Quality, 66, 200n Brookes, Richard, General Practice of Physic, 62, 199n Brophy, Elizabeth Bergen, 202n Brown, John, 120; Elementa Medicinae, 114–18, 205n Brown, Laura, 211n Browne, Thaddeus, The White Plague and Other Poems, 188, 215n Browne, Charles Thomas, 208n Browne, Thomas, ‘A Letter to a Friend’, 9, 29–33, 37, 62, 67, 88, 128, 147, 194n Bruce, Michael, 9, 123–30, 136, 148, 152, 161, 180, 184, 206n; ‘Elegy Written in Spring, 124; Loch Leven, 125, 206n; ‘Ode to the Cuckoo’, 207n Bruckshaw, Samuel, 193n Bruhm, Stephen, 198n Brunonianism and consumption, 10, 106, 114–17, 118, 120, 121, 128, 137, 140, 142–3, 147, 151, 152, 204n, 205n; women’s place in, 117, 157

Bryant, William Cullen, ‘To Consumption’, 162, 211n; ‘The Death of the Flowers’, 211n Bryder, Linda, 191n Buchan, William, Domestic Medicine, 8, 62, 120, 199n, 205n Buchanan, Robert, 181, 213n, 214n, Bunyan, John, 35, 60, 195n, 199n Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 57, 199n Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 19, 22 Butler, Joseph, The Analogy of Religion, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 200n Bynum, William F., 204n, 205n Byron, John, 10, 111–12, 125, 131, 138–9, 141, 145, 207n, 209n; Don Juan, 111–12; ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’, 127 Calvinism, 35, 148, 164 Cancer, 3, 20, 172 Carlyle, Thomas, 120, 127, 205n, 206n, 207n Cash, Arthur H., 78, 79, 201n, 206n Causes of consumption, 18: excessive sensibility (see also Melancholy; Sensibility), 106, 116, 126, 119, 147; excessive study, 22, 54, 94, 116, 120, 129, 149, 150, 151, 158, 175–6; genius, 48, 51–5, 100, 103, 115–16, 119–21, 123, 128–31, 138, 155, 161, 174, 177, 179, 187; hereditary, 18, 50–2, 59, 97, 135, 157; immorality (see also Masturbation; Modern lifestyle and luxury; Sexual excess), 87, 167; literary reviews, 103–4, 127, 131, 137–9, 142, 184; love melancholy and grief, 15–24, 54–7, 60–3, 73, 106, 136, 143, 146, 154; masturbation (see also Sex), 176; melancholy, 123, 126, 128; menses, suppression of, 17–18; modern lifestyle and luxury, 49–50, 66, 92, 95–6, 107,

Index 235 Causes of consumption – continued 117–22, 147, 155–6, 158, 177; money melancholy (male), 91; non-naturals, 18; physical accident, 18, 20, 53, 102, 158; poverty (see also Money melancholy), 123, 150, 152, 171; religious melancholy, 54, 60, 73; sex and sexual excess, 21, 24–5, 50, 176 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 99, 203n Chatterton, Thomas, 122, 124, 127, 130, 131–3, 138, 184, 208n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 98, 186, 193n; Romaunt of the Rose, 24; ‘The Parson’s Tale’, 24, 193n; Troilus and Criseyde, 24 Cheever, George B., 164, 219n Cheyne, George, 8–9, 43–60, 72, 84–5, 92–6, 100, 102, 107, 113–14, 118, 121, 126, 143, 155–8, 173, 197n, 198n; English Malady, 49, 51, 53, 54, 198n; Essay of Health and Long Life, 54, 60, 197n; Essay on Regimen, 49, 197n, 198n; Natural Method, 43, 50–3, 198n Chinese literature and consumption, 6 Cholera, 34, 112–13, 212n Christian Examiner, 165 Christian Remembrancer, 171–2, 213n Christ (Michaelangelo’s Pieta), 98 Civilisation, and consumption as a disease of, 50, 95, 118, 122, 173, 176, 188 Clark, James, 137, 172; Treatise on Pulmonary Consumption, 177, 213n Clark, Timothy, 210n Class, rank and consumption, 10, 32, 44–6, 49–50, 63, 70, 73–4, 90–1, 93, 107, 112–13, 118, 122–4, 126, 129, 136, 139, 152, 155–8, 168, 173, 179, 183–6, 189, 210n Climate and consumption, 18, 46, 94–6, 143 Clothing and consumption (see also Fashion), 55–6, 75, 76, 135, 139, 156, 159–60, 166, 168, 169, 186

Cold bathing, 95–6, 201n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 118–19; ‘On observing a blossom . . .’, 132, 138, 208n Colonialism and consumption, 112–13, 163–4 Comedy and consumption, 15, 24, 26, 75, 98–9, 103, 176, 179 Connecticut Mirror, 165 Conservation of energy, 174–5 Consumerism, consumption as disease of (see also Civilisation), 46–9, 63, 107, 119, 155–62, 196n, 197n Cornhill Magazine, 181, 213n, 214n Courtly love and consumption, 21–5, 47 Craig, William, 123–5, 206n Crook, Nora, 209n Cunningham, Andrew, 194n, 204n, 205n Daniel, Thomas, 194n, 195n, 197n Daniel, Virginia S., 195n Darwin, Erasmus, 83–4, 188, 210n; The Botanic Garden, 55, 198n D’Avenant, William, The Man’s the Master, 24, 193n Davidson, Maria, 10, 211n Davidson, Lucretia Maria, 10, 161–2, 211n; ‘To the Memory of Henry Kirke White’, 162 Death: aestheticized (see also Beauty), 2–3, 58–9, 70–2, 74, 77, 80, 84–5, 124, 146–8, 164, 166, 169–70, 181, 199n; bad, 87–9; of beautiful women, 69–73, 73–80, 83–4, 153–67; of children, 82, 167–70; early, as marketing tool, 132–3; easy, 1, 2, 6, 8, 28–40, 62–72, 82, 100, 147, 163; Good Christian consumption as popular disease of, 9, 10, 28–35, 38, 65, 128, 162–70; eighteenth-century feminisation of, 9, 65–9; Evangelical and Victorian, 128, 165, 167, 172, 183; inspired by

236 Index Death: aestheticized – continued literature and art, 60, 65, 83; Protestant effect on, 59, 65–7, 72, 121, 125, 128; Romantic, secularised reworking of, 147–8; decline of the, 189 Death-sentence, consumption as, 29, 32, 39, 94, 102, 124, 135, 145, 151, 171, 182, 210n Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders, 26, 58, 193n De Grazia, Victoria, 197n Demosthenes, 87 Definitions of consumption (see also Tuberculosis, Pulmonary), 5, 20 (including phthisis, tabes, atrophy, marasmus, cachexy), 60 (Negro consumption or cachexia Africana): Classical, 16–18; Renaissance to Restoration, 18–22; Enlightenment, 20, 44–58; Nervous consumption, 61–3; Romantic, 113–23; Victorian, 172–8; contemporary, 5, 186 Deth, Ron Van, 200n Diagnosis, 5, 29, 59, 77, 94–5, 104, 116, 122, 135–6, 143, 182, 189, 209n Dickens, Charles, 47, 168; Nicholas Nickelby, 171, 173, 182, 183 Diet (see also Regimen), 45, 50, 55, 96, 114–15, 143, 156–8 Dijkstra, Bram, 189, 199n, 215n Discourses of consumption (see also Semiotics of consumption), 63, 122, 187–8 Donne, John, 7, 9, 38–9, 65, 68, 74, 195n, 200n Dore, Sally, 204n Douglas, Ann, 212n Drake, Nathan, 125–6, 207n Dubos, René and Jean, 191n, 192n, 197n, 204n, 209n Duff, William, Essay on Original Genius, 55, 198n Dumas, Alexandre, 113, 204n; La Dame aux Camélias, 167 Dumbarton Herald, 183

Echlin, Lady Elizabeth, An Alternative Ending to Richardson’s Clarissa, 63, 200n Economic consumption (see also Consumerism), 45–7, 89–92, 154, 156, 159–61, 175 Edinburgh Daily Review, 184, 214n Education (female) and consumption, 74, 78, 107, 119, 156–61, 167, 170 Effeminacy, consumption and, 95–7, 139–42 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 11; Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar, 188, 215n Emotion and disease, 18, 21–4, 55, 58–62, 83, 86, 101, 106, 113, 115, 120, 141, 145–6, 158, 164–5, 187 English Malady, 49–54, 198n Evangelical Christianity, 10, 127–8, 165–89, 195n Evans, John T., Lectures On Pulmonary Phthisis, 172, 213n Fashion, fashionability and consumption, (see also Selffashioning): male, 23, 26, 58, 77, 95, 113, 150, 193n; female, 23, 26, 43–4, 55, 58, 76–7, 113, 150, 153, 155–61, 166–8 Fat and consumption, see Weight Female (and feminising) delicacy and consumption (see also Sensibility), 43, 55, 57–8, 70, 79–80, 118, 123–4, 138, 147, 155–61, 177 Female intelligence and consumption, 77, 84 Femininity and consumption (see also Self-fashioning), 58, 67, 75, 79, 83, 89, 153, 155, 158 Ferrand, Jacques, Erotomania, 23, 192n Fessenden, Thomas Green, The Ladies’ Monitor, A Poem, 160, 211n Fielding, Henry, 93; A Journey from this World to the Next, 26, 193n Fielding, Sarah, David Simple, 80–2, 201n Fissell, Mary, 32, 194n Fizès, Antoine, 94–7

Index 237 Fletcher, Charles Vernon, 205n, 207n Floyer, Sir John, The history of cold bathing, both ancient and modern, 95–6; Treatise on Asthma, 101, 203n Food, consumption of, see Regimen; Weight Ford, George H., 213n Fox, Christopher, 199n Frank, Arthur, 3, 192n Fraser’s Magazine, 173 Freedman, William E., 210n Frega, Donnalee, 63, 200n French, Roger, 194n, 196n Fuller, Thomas, 9; Life Out of Death, 32–3, 37, 67, 87, 194n, 202n Galen, 16–22, 47, 66 Garrick, David, 104, 203n Garth, Samuel, The Dispensary, 33, 194n Gautier, Théophile, 113 Genre and disease, 5–6, 10–11, 33, 92, 128, 133, 162–6, 183, 189 Genre poetry and consumption (see also Poetry of consumption; Sonnet), 162–6, 189 Genius and disease, 2, 16, 23, 48–55, 100–3, 112, 115–32, 138–40, 152, 155–6, 161–2, 173–4, 177, 179, 185, 187 Germ Theory, 5, 11, 151, 186–90 Gilman, Sander, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, 122, 187, 206n, 215n Gittings, Clare, 195n Godfrey, John T., 207n Goldberg, Brian, 208n Good, Byron J., 3, 6, 136, 191n, 192n, 208n Gordon, Benjamin Lee, 194n, 197n Grand Tour (see also Travel for health), 29, 79, 92–5, 98, 104–5, 136, 143, 150, 210n Gray, David, 7, 10, 130, 148, 152, 171–85; In the Shadows, 10, 179, 181–3, 214n Greenwood, Will, Description of the Passion of Love, 24, 193n

Gregory, Gill, 212n Gregory, Dr John, Father’s Legacy, 57, 199n Grell, Ole Peter, 194n Guérin, Maurice de, 10, 172–8, 213n Guerrini, Anita, 50, 55, 198n Hale-White, William, 208n Haller, Albrecht von, 52–3, 114, 204n Harraden, Beatrice, 215n Hart, Clive, 198n Harvey, Gideon, 9, 18–23, 26, 46, 56, 62; Morbus Anglicus: or the Anatomy of Consumptions, 19–23, 192n, 197n Hawley, Judith, 210n Hayes, Thomas, 121, 159, 206n, 211n Heffernan, James A., 137, 208n Hemans, Felicia, 10, 163, 211n; ‘Edith. A Tale of the Woods’, 163–4, 211n Hereditary consumption versus infection, 50–2, 59, 97, 135, 157 Herndl, Diane-Price, 215n Herzlich, Claudine, 122, 206n, 215n Heywood, Eliza, History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 90, 202n Heywood, Oliver, 195n Hippocrates, 16, 19, 20, 47, 192n Hirsch, David A., 195n Hitler, Adolf, 188 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 112–13; Elsie Venner, 113, 204n; Medical Essays, 112, 204n Hood, Thomas, 184 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 34, 65, 194n, 195n, 200n Hulme, Peter, 202n Humphreys, David, ‘A Poem On The Industry Of The United States Of America’, 159–60, 211n Hunt, James Henry Leigh, 141–2, 209n; ‘Sonnet, On the Sickness of Eliza’, 162, 166, 211n Hunt, Thornton, 144, 209n Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery, 3, 192n

238 Index Hutcheon, Linda and Michael, 212n Hypochondria, 20, 24, 28, 51, 56, 62, 75 Hysteria, 21–4, 51, 62, 75 Imperialism, 112–13, 156, 209n Individualism and disease (see also Self-fashioning), 64–6, 69, 71–2, 78, 80, 113–15, 131, 134, 172, 177, 189 Inman, Thomas, The Nature of Inflammation, 175, 213n Irving, Washington, 10, 166, 210n; ‘The Broken Heart’, 153–4; ‘The Pride of the Village’, 153 Jalland, Pat, 172, 189, 194n, 195n, 201n, 212n, 213n, 215n Jewishness and consumption, 122, 188, 206n Johnson, Samuel, 43, 80, 100 Jones, Frederick L., 204n, 208n Jordanova, Ludmilla, 198n Jupp, Peter C., 195n Keats, John, 116–23, 127, 130–52, 161; Victorian legacy of, 171–85; Fanny Brawne, 106, 112, 136; Endymion, 137–8; ‘Hyperion’, 112, 134, 141; ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 116, 183; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 112, 142, 145 Keymer, Tom, 198n, 200n, 203n Kleinmann, Arthur, 3 Knight, David, 205n Knowles, Herbert, 134, 184 Koch, Robert, 5, 10, 173, 186–8, 215n Kramer, Cheryce, 210n Laclos, Cholderlos de, Liasons Dangereuse, 37 Lalor, Robert David, Consumption of the lungs or decline, 173, 213n Lambe, William, 121 Landmark Anthologies, 164 Language and disease (see also Narrative), 3–4, 24, 30, 44, 77–8, 83–4, 154–7, 164, 177 Lawrence, Christopher, 204n, 205n

Lawrence, William, 120, 209n; Lectures on Physiology, 168, 212n Leask, Nigel, 119, 205n Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, 139, 209n Literary Gazette, 139, 209n Lockhart, John Gibson, 207n London Quarterly, 134 Lorimer, Douglas A., 206n Love melancholy, consumption as disease of (see also NeoPlatonism), 15–16, 22, 24–5, 57–63, 73, 80–1, 91, 105–7, 136, 146, 154–5, 193n Lucas, Edward Verrall, 201n Lungs, symbolic and metaphorical significance of, 17–18, 20, 25, 30, 39, 45, 47, 61, 67, 84, 94, 95, 97, 102, 103, 113, 116, 118, 137–8, 145, 147–8, 160, 164, 169, 186, 189, 197n, 206n, 209n Luxury and consumption (see also Civilisation, Consumerism), 50, 92, 95–6, 155 Macdonald, Michael, 23, 193n Mackenzie, Henry, Man of Feeling,100, 107 Mackenzie, James, 206n, 207n Macleod Munro, Donald George, 187 Madness, 19, 20, 23, 36, 120, 124, 132, 137, 193n Maginn, William, 209n Mandeville, Bernard, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases, 56, 198n Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, 3, 93, 189 Marten, Benjamin, New Theory of Consumptions, 47, 103, 197n, 203n Masculinity (see also Self-fashioning): and disease, 9, 23, 26, 58, 85–8, 89–92, 97–8, 101, 107, 113, 124, 139, 144, 150, 168, 178, 184, 200–1n; and domestic control, 85–8, 91; and regulation of emotional and physical excess (see also Regimen), 55, 85–8, 91–2, 96–7; Western versus Asiatic, 96

Index 239 Masson, Rosaline, 151, 210n Masturbation, 176 Maynwaring, Dr Everard, 20, 197n Medical literature and creative literature, relationship between, 2–10, 15–16, 21–4, 29–31, 40, 44, 49, 55, 59, 61–2, 78, 83–4, 92–3, 100–1, 114, 121, 147, 153–7, 166, 177–8, 183, 187–90 Meinecke, Bruno, 192n, 202n Melancholy, see Causes of consumption; Love melancholy; Madness; Religious melancholy Melville, Hermann, 186; Moby Dick, 176, 213n Metaphor and illness (see also Language; Narrative; Representation), 3–4, 7, 9–10, 16, 23, 31, 33, 37, 44, 60, 76, 92, 118–19, 138–46 passim, 162, 164–65, 168, 175, 190 Michael, Jennifer Davis, 208n Miller, Nancy K., 200n Milton, John, 125–6, 178, Paradise Lost, 206n Mirror, The, 123, 206n Mind and body, relationship between, 16–26 passim, 34–9 passim, 43–9 passim, 50–63 passim, 84–6, 88, 95, 101, 103, 114–19, 120–4, 138–42, 143–9, 154, 167, 175, 184, 187 Mitford, Mary Russell, 10; ‘Ode to Consumption’, 162–3, 165, 211n Moore, David, 100 Moore, John, 94, 202n, 206n Moore, Thomas, 111, 127, 204n, 207n Moorman, Lewis J., 209n Morality, 25, 33–5, 47, 52, 58–61, 69, 73–6, 86–91, 92, 97, 118, 144, 155, 165, 168–71, 177–8 Morning Journal, 184, 214n Morris, David B., 3–4, 191n Morris, Harrison S., 214n Morton, Richard, Phthisiologia, or, A Treatise of Consumptions, 23–4, 62, 193n, 197n

Mullan, John, 56, 200n Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, 196n Murphy, Peter, 214n Najarian, James, 178, 213n Narrative and disease (see also Language; Representation), 1–11, 29–30, 38, 40, 44, 49, 60–4, 67–72, 75, 77–9, 83–5, 90–6, 100–1, 104, 107, 112, 120, 125, 128, 130, 133–7, 144, 152, 153–4, 162–5, 170–3, 181–3, 187, 191–2n Nationalism (see also Colonialism; Imperialism), 46, 55, 117–18, 156, 159–60, 180, 183, 188, 211n, 212n Neale, John Mason, ‘In Consumption’, 167, 212n Neo-Platonism, 9, 40, 60, 69, 73–5, 106, 148 Nervous sensibility, consumption as disease of (see also Sensibility), 44, 48–9, 61–3, 102, 177 Neurasthenia, 176, 188, 200n Newton, Michael, 210n Novalis, 119, 127, 207n Olio, The, 140, 142, 209n Opie, Amelia, 10; ‘Consumption’, 162–6, 211n, 212n Orientalism and consumption, see Masculinity, Western versus Asiatic Other, consumption as disease of the (see also African-American; Class; Femininity; Jewishness; Masculinity, Western versus Asiatic; Native American; Vampirism), 71, 122, 187–9, 200–1n Ott, Katherine, 191n, 194n, 206n, 215n Pagel, Walter, 192n Park, Thomas, ‘On a Young Lady, Who Died of a Consumption’, 162, 211n Patch, Thomas, 98, 100

240 Index Patmore, Peter George, 131 Paulson, Ronald, 203n Percival, James Gates, 119, 205n; ‘Consumption’, 162, 211n Piozzi, Hester, 196n Plague, 34, 37, 186, see also White Plague Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 10, 162, 211n; ‘Metzengerstein’, 1–2, 6, 191n Poets: male and consumption, 7–10, 54–7, 85, 93, 111–52, 171–85; female and consumption, 161–6; aspiring lower-class, 113, 126, 130, 152, 179–80, 185; weight of (see also Weight), 113 Poetry, as cause of consumption, 103, 111–13, 116, 119, 123, 174 Poetry of consumption (see also Genre), 10, 128, 162–6, 182–4, 189 Pollok, Robert, 9, 148–52, 180, 184, 210n; The Course of Time, 148–51, 210n; Tales of the Covenanters, 149, 210n Pope, Alexander, 20, 49, 199; The Rape of the Lock, 75, 82, 162 Porter, Henry, 215n Porter, Roy, 39–40, 55, 68, 194n, 196n, 197n, 198n, 200n, 202n, 203n, 204n, 205n, 206n, 211n Postmodernism, post-structuralism and disease, 4–5 Pratt, Samuel Jackson, Emma Corbett, 58 Priestley, Joseph, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, 117–18, 205n Quarterly Review, 138, 207n, 211n Race and consumption, see AfricanAmerican; Jewishness; Masculinity, Western versus Asiatic; Americans, Native Ramadge, Francis Hopkins, Consumption Curable, 168, 212n Rather, Lelland Joseph, 199n Reade, William W., Liberty Hall, Oxon., 2, 191n

Regimen, 49–59 passim, 95–7, 114, 118–19, 156, 176 Religious melancholy (see also NeoPlatonism), consumption as disease of, 54, 60, 73, 193n Representation and disease (see also Visual representations of consumption), 1–9, 26, 38, 40, 44–5, 49, 55, 59–64, 82–4, 85–6, 92, 98–103, 114, 116–17, 124, 126, 138, 143, 146, 157, 163, 167, 172, 189, 190, 191n Reynolds, Joshua, ‘Mrs Sheridan as St Cecilia’, 83 Richards, Anna, 199n, 200n, 213n Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 6, 9, 40, 43, 58–73, 75, 78, 81, 83, 84, 85–9, 100, 106, 107, 163, 170, 196n, 197n, 199n, 200n; Pamela, 55, 198n Risse, Guenter B., 198n, 204n Rockingham Gazette, 165 Roe, Nick, 142, 209n Rogers, Nancy, 201n Rogers, Pat, 196n Rothman, Sheila M., 191n Rousseau, G. S., 49, 196n, 197n Rudolph, Frederick, 214n Russett, Cynthia Eagle, 213n Ruston, Sharon, 120, 205n Ryder, Dudley, The Diary of Dudley Ryder, 1715–1716, 7, 25–6, 28–9, 32, 34, 39, 40, 67, 193n, 194n, 200n Samuels, Shirley, 212n Schiller, Friedrich, 120, 127, 205n, 206n, 207n Schofield, Robert E., 196n Scottish poetry and consumption, 180, 183–4, 214n Scott, Walter, 84, 201n, 215n Sealy, Hungerford, 178, 213n Self-fashioning and consumption (see also Individualism), 83, 85, 92, 98–107, 124–6, 129–30, 139, 142, 144, 146, 152, 161–2, 181–3

Index 241 Semiotics of consumption (see also Discourses of consumption), 6, 7, 122 Sensibility (see also Sentimentality), 9: Enlightenment female and medicine, 43–84 passim; Enlightenment male, 85–110 passim, Romantic male and medicine, 111–52 passim; Romantic female and medicine, 153–70 passim; Victorian, 171–85; and race, 168–70; and class, 50, 123, 126 Sentimentality, 2, 43–84 passim, 91–107 passim, 154, 157, 162–9, 189 Sentimental Magazine, 57, 76, 107, 199n, 201n Seward, Anna, 9, 77–9, 201n, 215n; Memoirs of Dr Darwin, 83–4, 188, 201n Sex and sexuality (see also Masturbation; Sexualisation of consumption), 24–5, 50, 60, 66, 71–2, 74, 116, 139, 153, 176, 178 Sexualisation of consumption, 71–2, 74–6, 78–80, 84, 97, 107, 162, 166 Shakespeare, William, 128, 193n; King Lear, 135; Much Ado About Nothing, 8, 15, 192n; Twelfth Night, 82–3; Winter’s Tale, 73 Shammas, Carole, 197n Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2, 10, 93, 103, 111–13, 116–17, 120, 131, 136–49, 150, 178, 182, 184; Adonais, 113, 138–9, 144–5; Alastor, 116, 145–8, 209n; ‘Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet’, 143; Peter Bell the Third, 205n; Queen Mab, 147 Shelley, Mary, 143, 209n Sheridan, Elizabeth, 83 Sheridan, Frances, Sidney Bidulph, 83 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 83 Sherlock, William, Practical Discourse Concerning Death, 65, 200n Showalter, Elaine, 23, 193n Shuttleworth, Sally, 203n Sigourney, Lydia, 163

Silver, Anna Krugovoy, 200n Sinclair, Upton, 186–8 Skultans, Vieda, 193n Small, John, 127, 207n Smallpox, 4, 37, 61, 195, 199n Smith, Francis Barrymore, 191n, 215n Smith, Ginnie, 202n Smith, John R., 195n Smith, William, 133 Smollett, Tobias, 8, 45, 49, 73, 75, 78–9, 90–105, 157, 158, 160; Adventures of Roderick Random, 90; Expedition of Humphry Clinker, 91, 98, 158; Ferdinand Count Fathom, 73–7; Sir Charles Grandison, 81; Travels Through France and Italy, 92–8, 104 Sneyd, Honora, 77, 124 Sonnet and consumption, 10, 128–9, 133, 148, 152, 162, 179, 182–3, 214n Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor, 3–4, 188 Southey, Robert, 10, 127, 129, 131–4, 138, 161, 182, 207n, 208n, 211n Spackman, Barbara, 215n Sperry, Stuart M., 146, 209n, 210n Spieghel, Adrian van der, 56 Spillane, John, 196n Spiritual disease, consumption as (see also Death, Good Christian; Lungs; Religious melancholy), 2, 6, 9, 36–9, 44, 47, 50, 52–3, 61, 70, 72, 74, 76, 84, 89, 106, 112, 119, 162–70, 171–2, 189 Spleen (see also Hypochondria; Hysteria; Vapours), 38, 75, 128, 156 Stahl, George, 53, 117 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 134, 208n Stephanson, Raymond, 197n, 199n Stephens, John, A Practical Treatise on Consumptions, 57, 198n Stephenson, Harold William, 212n, 215n Sterne, Laurence, 9, 49, 53, 57, 91–5, 120, 181, 198n, 201n; attraction to consumptive women, 78–80;

242 Index Sterne, Laurence – continued Journal to Eliza, 105–7; Political Romance, 100; Sentimental Journey, 100, 104–5; Tristram Shandy, 53, 98–104, 201n Stewart, Garrett, 148, 210n Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 188–9, 215n Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 10, 167–70 Sussman, Herbert, 205n Suzuki, Akihito, 191n, 199n, 201n, 203n, 210n, 214n, 215n Swieten, Gerard van, 45–8, 56, 101–2, 196n, 198n, 203n Sydenham, Thomas, 194n Symptoms of consumption, 5: bloodspitting, 15, 16, 19, 61, 86, 88, 93–5, 113, 136, 188; breathlessness, 2, 4, 25, 33, 61, 62, 64, 84, 101; chronic not acute duration, 5, 6, 7, 16, 19, 29, 33, 54, 58–9, 64, 116, 121, 126, 136, 171; clarity of mind, 34–6, 38–9, 58, 64–5, 67, 88, 147, 167, 187; cough, 1–2, 5–7, 15–16, 61–2, 80, 86, 88, 93–104 passim, 135, 143, 159, 169, 182; delusion of health, see spes phthisica; eyes, bright, 17, 46–7, 77, 84, 146, 164, 166, 169; fever and hectic fever, 5, 16–20, 22, 26, 34, 38, 51, 61–2, 74, 88, 93, 105, 116, 129, 136, 143, 148–51, 159, 163, 169; genius and inspiration, see spes phthisica; painlessness, 6–7, 17, 30–5, 39, 63, 65, 67, 88, 128, 147, 167, 169, 172, 181; pallor, and flushed cheeks alternating, 5, 16–17, 24, 65, 70, 76, 81, 103–4, 106–7, 111–13, 124, 129, 145, 147, 149–50, 159, 167, 176, 188; scarification, lack of, 37, 61; spes phthisica, 17, 30, 33, 47, 87, 116, 121, 142, 150, 187; wasting, 5, 15–16, 19–20, 24–5, 34, 37, 39, 45, 47, 51–2, 54, 60–3, 72–4, 91, 94, 99–100, 105–6, 111, 116–17, 119, 129–30, 134, 136, 138, 140, 143, 146, 154, 168–9, 171–2, 175–6, 188, 200n, 201n

Taylor, Emily, 133, 208n Taylor, Jeremy, Holy Dying, 9, 36, 65, 68, 87–8, 140, 195n, 200n, 202n Thicknesse, Philip, Useful Hints to Those who Make the Tour of France, 104 Thinness and consumption, see Weight Thrale, Hester, 43–4 Thwaite, Anthony, ‘My Fathers Poems’, 11, 186, 192n, 214n Tighe, Mary, 10; Psyche; or the Legend of Love, 161–2, 211n Tissot, Samuel, 119, 204n, 205n Todd, Janet, 101, 203n Tofte, Robert, Alba. The Months Minde of A Melancholy Lover, 25, 193n Tompkins, Jane, 165, 212n Torchia, Marion M., 212n Tourneur, Cyril, Atheist’s Tragedie, 33, 194n Travel for health (see also Grand Tour), 18, 29, 79, 92–8, 104–5, 136, 144, 148, 172, 181–2, 184 Treatment of consumption (see also Cold bathing; Diet; Regimen; Travel for health), 4–5, 8, 15–16, 18, 25, 49, 59, 63–4, 77, 79, 81, 83, 93–6, 104–6, 115, 137, 143–4, 150, 172–73, 182, 187–8 Trotter, Thomas, A View of the Nervous Temperament, 10, 118–19, 147, 153–8, 160 Tuberculosis, pulmonary, 1, 5, 11, 15, 18, 50, 113, 122, 186–90, 191n, 192n, 215n Unitarianism, 164–65 Vampirism and consumption, 188–9 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 47, 197n Vapours, 38, 51, 75, 156 Vila, Anne C., 52, 66, 196n, 198n, 200n, 205n Visual representations of consumption, 2, 7, 9, 37, 39, 65, 71–2, 74–5, 77, 83, 97–8, 100, 129, 133, 147, 150, 157, 166, 170, 188, 209n, 215n

Index 243 Vitalism, 17–18, 22–5, 52–3, 114–20, 146, 173–7, 188, 205n Vrettos, Athena, 209n Wack, Mary, 193n Walker, Cheryl, 163, 211n Walton, Izaak, Lives of John Donne . . ., 9, 37–9, 65, 67, 195n Watson, J. R., 212n Wear, Andrew, 194n, 196n, 198n, 204n Weatherill, Lorna, 197n Weight, consumption and (see also Clothing; Fashion; Female delicacy; Poets, weight of; Sensibility; Symptoms, wasting), 2, 5, 19, 21, 24, 38–9, 43–4, 46, 48–50, 52–8, 60–1, 71–2, 80, 83–4, 89, 94, 97–8, 104, 111–13, 151, 155–61, 163, 188, 196n, 198n Weisse, Allan, 204n Wesley, John, 49 White, Henry Kirke, 9, 116, 127–40, 146, 149–52, 162, 180–5, 205n, 207n, 208n, 211n, 214n; ‘To Consumption’, 128, 162; ‘The Dance of the Consumptives’, 128; ‘Fragment of an Ode to the Moon’, 129; ‘Genius’, 128–9;

‘Melancholy Hours’, 131, 207n; ‘Sweet to the gay of heart’, 129 White, Newman Ivey, 209n White Plague, 112–13, 122, 168, 188, 191n, 192n, 197n, 204n, 209n, 215n Whytt, Robert, 51–2, 114, 198n Willis, Thomas, 49, 114 Wollstonecraft, Mary, Mary, A Fiction, 155, 158, 159, 210n; Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 158 Woolson, Abba Goold, Woman in American Society, 166–7, 212n Worbouys, Michael, 206n Wyvill, Sir Christopher, ‘Mors Mea’, 33–7, 195n Xuequin, Cao, A Dream in Red Mansions, 6, 192n Yellow fever, 212n Young, Thomas, 121, 206n Youngs, Tim, 202n Youth, consumption as disease of, 22, 55, 61, 112, 117, 125, 134, 145, 161, 174 Zomchick, John P., 201n, 202n Zückert, J. F., Von den Leidenschaften, 63, 199n

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