Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Rom a n t ic L i t e r a ry Fa m i l i es

Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory. PUBLISHED BY PALGR AVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk FORTHCOMING TITLES: Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian

Rom a n t ic L i t e r a ry Fa m i l i es

Scott Krawczyk

ROMANTIC LITERARY FAMILIES

Copyright © Scott Krawczyk, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60475–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Krawczyk, Scott. Romantic literary families / Scott Krawczyk. p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives & letters) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–60475–9 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Authorship— Collaboration—History—18th century. 4. Authorship—Collaboration— History—19th century. 5. Authors, English—18th century—Family relationships. 6. Authors, English—19th century—Family relationships. 7. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 8. Romanticism—Great Britain— History—18th century. 9. Romanticism—Great Britain—History— 18th century. I. Title. PR448.C63K73 2009 820.9⬘9205—dc22

2008051917

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Evan and Audrey

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C on t e n t s

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Commonly used Abbreviations 1

xvii

Collaborative Dissent: Barbauld and Aikin’s Sibling Pamphlets

1

2 “The Aikin School”: Adopting an Aesthetic

29

3

Walking “Backwards And Forwards”: The Wordsworths in 1802/1807

4 Incorporating the Literary Family

53 95

5 Generations: Conflict, Continuity, and the Genius Familiae

135

Epilogue

159

Appendix: “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva”

163

Notes

167

Bibliography

205

Index

217

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P r e fac e

Just as ages exhibit generic affinities, they likewise reveal collabora-

tive affinities—forms of association in the joint labor of textual creation.1 In the third century BCE, seventy-two Jewish translators of the Pentateuch established a type of collective authorship that would remain prominent through the Middle Ages, when textual collaboration was the province of a religious brotherhood striving to preserve a classical tradition for the nascent world of secular scholarship. Nearly a century before the great humanist Petrarch was to shine forth in a blinding display of literary talent and scholarly industry, the dominant model of literary collaboration began its transformation from one involving networks of religious orders to one constituted by networks of friends. Indeed, the humble “beginnings of humanism,” according to L.G. Reynolds and N.G Wilson, “are clearly detectable in a small literary coterie” led by Lovato Lovati and his “circle of friends” in mid-thirteenth-century Padua (110).2 During the height of the Renaissance, theater companies and their derivative friendship coteries shared in the creative, logistical, and performative labor needed to write plays and stage productions in the “notoriously collaborative”3 business of theater. Friendship coteries such as that which produced Justa Edouardo King (1638), the poetic tribute to Edward King that closed with Milton’s “Lycidas,” or that which grew up around Aphra Behn, flourished throughout the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. In a typology of collaboration what differentiates one model from another is the nature of its mediating network.4 On its face, the Septuagint—that first Greek edition of the Bible so named for the number of Jewish scholars commissioned to produce it—reads not entirely unlike a page from Wikipedia. Each masquerades as the result of one authorial voice. The difference is that with the Septuagint we cannot follow a hyperlink that would unveil with certainty whether seventy-two or only seventy contributors made up the collaborative author function. Thus the traces of different translating hands are essentially invisible. Those translating hands themselves, however, were together in close company, touching, sharing, and perhaps even exchanging material texts. Today wiki technology mediates the electronic reach of authorial hands that may never

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experience the type of social contact mandated by the Septuagint project. All textual collaboration, whether synchronic or diachronic, eventuates in a readable medium, but over time textual collaboration has created readable media through a variety of mediating networks. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the burgeoning influence of women writers, coupled with the emergence of the family as both an affective unit and a source of economic production, set the conditions for literary collaboration in the Romantic era to be characteristically familial. In other words, the predominant mediating network for Romantic collaboration was the family. Indeed, eighteenth-century socioeconomic conditions made possible the emergence of the literary family: a collaborative network of family and friends participating in a household model of literary production. At the close of the eighteenth century, the firmly established literary family began to exhibit the characteristics of a nascent corporation. This definition of literary family differs from that articulated in Jane Spencer’s Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–1830, where the same term applies both metaphorically (Spenser as father of Milton, for instance) and biologically to the writers she discusses. To derive the present definition of literary family, I have relied on Naomi Tadmor’s important work Family and Friends in the Eighteenth Century: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001). Through precise attention to relational terms used by actual families, Tadmor identifies an eighteenth-century trend whereby the family, in the process of mobilizing in the business sphere, obtained additional labor for the household by extending kinship ties through marriage and by “incorporating”—embracing and enfolding—“friends.” (177, 272). This usage, then, most closely accords with that suggested by Michelle Levy in Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Palgrave, 2008), although the emphasis of the present study is foremost on the social dimension of the familial network rather than on the material dimension of the manuscript culture. To be sure, material conditions inform and transform social structures, and in its elucidation of the literary family, this book attends carefully to material influences on collaborative familial networks. Its primary interest, however, is in the human interaction that defines and creates both the networks themselves and their literary works: this, then, is the distinguishing feature of Romantic Literary Families. My research on English literary families between 1760 and 1820, including the Aikin-Barbauld family, the Pantisocratic set (Coleridge, Southey, Fricker, et al.), the Taylors of Ongar, the Godwins and the Shelleys, and the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle, reveals that the socioeconomic trend identified by Tadmor also manifested itself in the field of

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literary production. This book addresses the lived experience of specific authors, the defining features of their collaborative relationships and work, and the conflict or cooperation that emerged among (and within) literary families. What follows is therefore a work of socioliterary history. My objective, however, is to reexamine various works of poetry and prose in view of that history, and to reveal the extent to which literary familial relationships informed those works and vice versa. In this light, then, what follows is foremost a literary study. Central figures in these pages are Anna Barbauld, a woman whose career in letters and education is a landmark in British history, and her brother John Aikin.5 I can think of no comparable figure whose literary life so manifestly bridges the Augustan and Romantic eras like Barbauld’s. On the one end of that timeline, she gained the acquaintance and respect of Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Montagu; on the other, that of William Wordsworth and Maria Edgeworth. Her eleven years of formal teaching experience, not to mention the years spent tutoring numerous young women student-boarders, distinguish her from every other notable author during the period.6 Today the critical view of Barbauld remains stubbornly overcast by her complex associations with Mary Wollsonecraft and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Critical inferences regarding Wollstonecraft’s one sharp criticism of Barbauld’s poem, “To a Lady, with some painted Flowers,” have created the occasional misperception that the two women were polarized on issues regarding social equality and politics in general. Quite simply, the opposite is true. What they did not agree on, however, were methods: the question of how to go about effecting the reform they both recognized to be imperative.7 Limited but important scholarship has gone further in exposing Coleridge’s foul treatment of Barbauld, throwing into question some of the very foundations upon which critics in the early twentieth century accepted his dismissal of her as a literary figure of influence and genius.8 As this study demonstrates, Coleridge, who sought affiliation with one literary family after the next, never recovered from the Aikin-Barbauld family’s reluctance to embrace him as one of its own, an exclusion that later fueled, in part, his puerile expressions of disdain for the entire family. Because this book is about literary families, however, seldom does Barbauld receive isolated attention; instead, she figures throughout the book not only as an integral part of the network that constituted the Aikin-Barbauld literary family but also as a personality that sometimes polarized, sometimes galvanized the critical opinion of other literary figures and families. Her brother John, with whom she collaborated in several senses of the word, remains, among the critically unaccounted-for, one of Britain’s more prolific and influential literary

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professionals. The family’s second generation—Lucy, Arthur, and to a lesser degree Charles Rochemont Aikin—although not politically engaged as were Barbauld and her brother, extended a legacy of authorial, critical, and editorial contributions well into the nineteenth century. Like other literary families of the time, the Aikin-Barbauld literary family was not entirely restricted to biological membership: Former friends at the Warrington Academy, home to Anna and John from 1758 to 1774; several graduates of the Palgrave School, run by Barbauld and her husband Rochemont from 1774 to 1785; and other friends from Dissenting circles and elsewhere were active members in the family’s literary enterprises. For example, as editor of the Monthly Magazine from 1796 to 1806, John relied on the extended literary family for regular contributions. In a letter dated March 20, 1799, he describes using “my influence among my friends to favour the work,” through which effort, Aikin notes, “Mrs. Barbauld has enriched the miscellany with several contributions” (qtd in Rodgers 221). Julie A. Carlson’s recent book England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins, 2007) reflects current critical interest in the convergence of familial bonds and literary collaboration.9 Carlson’s central claim— and the rationale behind the book’s title—is that the public identity of this family, more than any other of the period, reflected a highly wrought image of its private life: “it is precisely the intimate portions of the private sphere,” says Carlson, that these three authors “sought to rewrite by publicizing them” (9). About her analytical method, Carlson states that one cannot “treat any of the three [writers] in isolation” without jeopardizing a fuller understanding of how, together, they contributed “to discourse in and about the public sphere” as a family (8). Daniel White’s invaluable study, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge, 2006), implicitly endorses a similar methodology. Without a question, reading the individual members of a literary family side by side allows one to gain the richest insights about the creative aims and collaborative interaction of the family as a whole. My approach is no different, except that it extends the logic of not approaching writers in isolation to the study of literary families themselves, treating the family, in effect, as an author. To comprehend the functioning of a literary family’s collaborative network is to advance a step toward recognizing the contours of a larger cultural and literary context; but only by juxtaposing and analyzing different literary family models during this period can one arrive at a subtler and deeper understanding of the various energies, personalities, and modes of being that shaped the phenomenon we call Romanticism. Through broader contextualization we begin to

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fathom, for instance, why Robert Southey should complain of an “Aikinish” review of Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, or why indeed he should vow never again to associate with “King Arthur [Aikin] and his whole generation.”10 To pursue an understanding of Southey’s discontent is to recognize that the surface tension betrayed in his comments was merely symptomatic of what William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft have described as a deeper “generational struggle we have insufficiently imagined” (SPP 29).11 This book makes clear that such tensions are best understood as signs of the contestation between and among literary families, not singular authors. Before proceeding, I would like to make clear some additional definitions and usages, beginning with family. We have widely acknowledged that the eighteenth century witnessed alterations in the structure, function, and emotional make-up of the family. These changes have been variously conceptualized. In Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1818, for instance, Ruth Perry has traced for us the gradual, anxiety-filled shift in allegiance from the consanguineal to the conjugal family. I will employ these terms to distinguish the consanguineal ties of Anna Barbauld and John Aikin as siblings, for example, from the conjugal bonds they entered into in 1774. As chapter one will demonstrate, their loyalty to the sibling bond, to the consanguineal family and its Dissenting legacy, came into direct conflict with the allegiance they owed, as spouses and parents, to their conjugal families. The terms nuclear and extended family have given way to more refined conceptions such as the household family model. The mutability of the household family enabled it to extend kinship ties through marriage and by “incorporating” friends, as Tadmor puts it. At various points throughout the book I will apply the term incorporation to the development of partnering networks within and between literary families. Tadmor also observes that the “alliance of two kinship groups” through marriage extended the applicability of terms like brother, sister, mother, and father beyond strict blood relations (133); where applicable, I will likewise highlight especially noteworthy usage of these terms. Thus the household family grew by embracing “friends” and by generating new “brothers” and “sisters” through marriage. And in this context we might recall the youthful exuberance of Southey and Coleridge, who through their marriages to sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker fancied themselves to be wedding their minds and becoming “brothers,” as Southey put it, “in the real sense of the word” (NL 1.72). Coleridge and Southey’s marriage arrangement, all part of the larger Pantisocratic scheme, is a fine example of nearly successful

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incorporation. Yet, it also points to something more: a collaboratively inspired yearning for intimacy, another potentially fraught term. What prompted the original aim of this study was the recognition that collaborative authorship during this period entailed more than just artistic or political objectives. Collaboration often involves or produces a mutual desire for emotional, intellectual, and/or physical connection. For my purposes, the word intimacy refers to these collaboratively induced forms of connection. Physical intimacy might entail an erotic component, as in the case of Percy and Mary Shelley; but it might also refer to the shared desire of siblings to be next-door neighbors, as was the case with John Aikin and Anna Barbauld, a sentiment John expresses in his poem “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva”: O then, while yet some zest of life remains While transport yet can swell the beating veins, While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat, And fancy still retains some genial heat, When evening bids each busy task be o’er Once let us meet again,—to part no more!12

A term I introduce in this book, one related to intimacy, is collaborative consciousness; I do so to denote, on the one hand, a collective will to effect reform, that reform being the ultimate objective of consciousness-raising in response to social and/or political ills. The briefest consideration of the Dissenting communities and their causes will reveal the many ways in which the pursuit of reform was a cooperative and communal effort, an effort that itself served to increase consciousness about social contagions ranging from slavery to prison conditions. Yet, on the other hand, because of its Lockean and Jungian dimensions, the term collaborative consciousness also sustains more private, intimate connotations. I therefore depend on it to suggest that the writer’s consciousness always already possesses an image of its twin: In Jungian terms, the anima’s collaborative animus.13 In Lockean terms, the shared intimacies of creative labor foster the development of a singular consciousness within the “different persons” thinking about and acting upon the joint enterprise.14 To seek a broad recontextualization of the Romantic period would be too lofty a hope for a study restricted to a handful of literary families. Yet, this small contribution to the long-standing and ongoing conversation about Romanticism nevertheless aspires to offer insights worthy of measure in the process of drawing future conclusions.

Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

I am honored and fortunate to be writing this acknowledgment

and to be part of a thriving community of teachers and friends who hold dear the virtues of research, scholarship, and a liberal education. I hope never to lose sight of what a gift that community represents. This book began at the University of Pennsylvania, and I remain deeply grateful for the guidance and support I received—and continue to enjoy—from numerous colleagues and friends, foremost among whom are Michael Gamer, Suvir Kaul, and especially Stuart Curran, whose mentorship has been of inestimable value. For her inimitable grace and wisdom during this project, I join a long line of Romantic scholars in offering my lasting thanks to Marilyn Gaull. Since leaving Philadelphia, I have continued to enjoy the warm friendship and support of numerous Penn English colleagues, including Dahlia Porter, Gabe Cervantes, Jared Richman, Cy Mulready, Kurt Schreyer, Kate Gustafson, Al Filreis, Anna Foy, Juliet Shields, Vicki Mahaffey, Dan Traister, and Jessica Lowenthal. The Eighteenth-Century Reading Group at Penn remains a stimulating intellectual and social network whose collaborative spirit breathes energy into many projects, including my own. Many fruitful conversations at various conferences, particularly those of NASSR and ASECS, have assisted in the shaping and reshaping of the arguments herein. I am particularly grateful to Toni Bowers, Felicity James, Daniel White, Jack Lynch, Brett Wilson, Lucy Newlyn, John Whale, David Fairer, William McCarthy, and Katherine Bennett Gustafson. Within my own department, I would like to express my sincere thanks to Colonel Rick Kerin and Elizabeth Samet for their patient and enduring support and for giving me the flexibility and time to work around so many competing priorities. Other colleagues at West Point have stimulated my thinking in ways large and small: Karin Roffman, Tony McGowan, Mat Moten, Dave Harper, Edward Ledford, Steve Herring, Emily Bryan, Patrick Query, Bob Tully, Richard Schoonhoven, Michael Stoneham, Jennifer Zais, John Nelson, Jeff Wilson, and especially Peter Molin, currently serving in Afghanistan, with whom I’ve shared many conversations about the unique challenges of negotiating the uncommon, sometimes

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Acknow ledgments

other-worldly terrain we inhabit as veteran soldiers and aspiring scholars. My thanks go likewise to the hundreds of students I’ve had the honor of teaching over the past four years, especially my senior thesis writers Reneé Rysiewicz and Kirsten Dawson who inspired me by their examples of ambition, scholarly curiosity, and passion for the work. Special thanks go to Pat Hoy III, an early and constant mentor who has become an important friend and confidant. Likewise I am grateful to my father, William A. Krawczyk, who inspired my early interest in literature and research. Much of the work required assistance from special collections, and my thanks go to the staffs of the Van Pelt Library, particularly the Rare Books Room; the Rare Books and Manuscripts Libraries at Columbia University and the New York Public Library; the Library Company of Philadelphia; and the Free Library of Center City, Philadelphia. Finally, my deepest love, admiration, and gratitude belong to my incredible wife Madonna, whose unwavering commitment and boundless patience have made this project possible. I have dedicated this book to our children Evan and Audrey, who give us the greatest joy and help us to keep everything in perspective.

C om mon ly Use d A bbr e v i at ions

ALB: BL: CL: CN: CPW: DW: EY: HCR: JA: LA: Letters: ME: NL: PALB: RLE: SH: SL: SPP: STC: Works: WW:

Anna Letitia Barbauld Biographia Literaria The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works Dorothy Wordsworth William Wordsworth: A Biography: The Early Years, 1770– 1803 (Moorman) Henry Crabb Robinson John Aikin Lucy Aikin The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (De Selincourt and Shaver) Maria Edgeworth New Letters of Robert Southey The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld Richard Lovell Edgeworth Sarah Hutchinson Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Works of Anna Letitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin. William Wordsworth

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Chapter 1

C ol l a bor at i v e Disse n t: Ba r b au l d a n d A i k i n’s Si bl i ng Pa m ph l e t s

A mid the many political pamphlets published in London in 1790, a note-

worthy pair appeared on the same day, March 27, in the shop of Joseph Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard. Both were occasioned by recent applications to Parliament for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, vestiges of Restoration policies that restricted the rights of Nonconformists, Protestant or Catholic, to practice their faith and to participate in the public sector. One, Anna Barbauld’s An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, bore this advertisement on the final page: This day is published, Price 1s. An ADDRESS to the DISSIDENTS of ENGLAND on their LATE DEFEAT. Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-yard.

The pamphlet thus advertised, written by Barbauld’s brother John Aikin, carried this reciprocal advertisement on the page opposite its title: This day is published, Price One Shilling, AN

ADDRESS TO THE

OPPOSERS OF THE REPEAL OF THE

CORPOR ATION AND TEST ACTS. Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-yard.

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Each bore just the one advertisement for its sibling pamphlet. That a brothersister team took part in these debates is itself noteworthy; Barbauld and Aikin’s teamwork marked the first time in English history that siblings participated in such reformist activism. What their joint effort signaled was the mobilization of the family, through writing, in the realm of political action: a familial model of collaborative authorship meant not to entertain in polite literary circles but to exercise a civil right to dissent. Marketed together and sold side-by-side in Joseph Johnson’s shop, these two pamphlets were expected—indeed designed—to be read together. Barbauld addressed the establishment, Aikin the disheartened dissenting community. The collaborative strategy at work in these two political tracts was necessitated by physical separation. Both married, John, forty-three, and Anna, forty-seven, had been living apart and actively pursuing individual careers for some sixteen years.1 When the two Addresses were written, Anna and her husband Rochemont Barbauld were living in Hampstead, roughly 120 miles away from John and his family in Yarmouth. During the weeks between March 2, the day of the Parliamentary debate, and March 27, the day Johnson published the pamphlets, substantial coordination between John and Anna (undoubtedly including travel to London), and coordination with Joseph Johnson, not to mention a printer or printers, almost certainly took place in order for them to coordinate and edit the messages and to arrange for simultaneous publication. Regrettably, any correspondence that might have shed light on the coordination is non-extant. 2 Two days before the pamphlets appeared in Johnson’s shop, the General Evening Post advertised the arrival of Anna’s Address to the Opposers and printed an unattributed excerpt, yet another indication of the remarkable logistical coordination preceding final publication.3 Addressing two separate audiences on the same topic on the same day represents a collaborative strategy befitting a reformist ethos characterized by familial and communal cooperation and action. And in many respects the strategy was successful, at least in terms of achieving a combined and coherent rhetorical effect. And yet, because of the social and economic ramifications for the family, these pamphlets also bring into focus the limits of familial collaboration as a means of political intervention. Retaliating against voices of dissent, loyalist forces within the public sphere could mobilize and take aim at subversives within private sphere, as was the case in Yarmouth where loyalists, also collaborating, curtailed John Aikin’s professional livelihood, forcing him and his family to leave friends and patients behind. As Lucy Aikin puts it, her father “was made to bear the penalty of his conscientious and disinterested efforts” (Memoir 79). What makes this particular situation especially noteworthy is how duties to family and to society became divergent for the writers involved. As siblings from a family deeply connected to the dissenting legacy of the Warrington Academy, John and Anna’s social and familial (public and private) loyalties were perfectly aligned because publicly voicing dissent in support of their political aims coincided with their duties as representatives of the Aikin family and the Warrington Academy. But for John and Anna as adults with families of their own, duty to those families existed in conflict with duty to the public sphere, most immediately

B a r b a u l d a n d A i k i n ’s S i b l i n g Pa m p h l e t s

3

figured as the larger dissenting community but extendable to the nation as a whole. The collaborative career pattern of this family’s first generation, represented by John and Anna, can be traced through three stages: the Warrington stage (1758–1774), which includes writings produced while living together at the Warrington Academy; the reformist and educational stage (1774–1802), characterized by the exportation of the Warrington ethos into activist and educational writings (its decline coinciding with the Barbaulds’ occupation of the house across from John Aikin’s family in Stoke Newington); and third, the canon formation stage (1802–1820), during which Anna and John, on the support of their reputations and substantial accomplishments in literary criticism, helped establish the English canon by compiling, respectively, two collections, The British Novelists (1810) and Select Works of the British Poets (1820). This final stage also included complementary works designed to shape literary taste, especially in women; Barbauld’s The Female Speaker (1811) and Aikin’s Letters to a Young Lady on a Course in English Poetry (1804) are representative thereof. The collaborative intimacy that developed during the first of these stages informs, in varying degrees, life and work during the subsequent stages. This chapter is concerned primarily with the first two of these stages, and to begin I will review some of the political background that led to the writing of John and Anna’s Addresses.4 Anna and John Aikin, born in 1743 and 1747 respectively, grew up in a family whose roots were deeply Nonconformist. Although their own beliefs eventually gravitated toward Unitarianism, distinguished by its denial of orthodox trinitarianism, the particulars of their faith were less important to them than the right to exercise not only religious but also political dissent. Heterodoxy characterized their home of fifteen years, the Warrington Academy, which was funded by Presbyterians and run by Dissenters of various denominations, including Arians and Socinians.5 In 1774 Anna married Rochemont Barbauld, a Unitarian preacher who had himself defected from the Anglican Church. When Anna Barbauld signed her Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts simply as “A DISSENTER ,” she spoke for all Nonconformists, irrespective of sect. Similarly, Aikin’s address to all “Dissidents,” a term he adopts symbolically to link English Dissent to the cause of Polish Dissidents who were memorialized by the Hanover court at the beginning of George III’s reign, erases distinctions of sect in order to call upon unity of effort.6 Instituted during the reign of Charles II, The Corporation Act (1661) established the condition that to hold public office, one had to have taken of the sacrament according to the rites of the Anglican Church within one year before election. Moreover, public office-holders had to swear oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and nonresistance to the Church. For a Dissenter to do so was considered the apex of disloyalty and hypocrisy. The Test Act (1672), aimed primarily at Catholics but equally prejudicial to Dissenters,7 required anyone holding any civil or military office to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Anglican Church within three months of appointment. Further discriminating against Nonconformists, the universities at Oxford

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and Cambridge relied on the Clarendon Code and the Test Act to exclude Dissenters from enrollment. After the Glorious Revolution, The Toleration Act (1689) became a first ameliorating step toward recognizing Dissenters’ rights; repeals of some of the discriminatory acts followed, especially during the Hanoverian succession, and by the time John and Anna were old enough to engage in the religious debates of their day, only The Corporation and Test Acts remained as formal obstacles to the rights of Nonconformists. Although politically engaged for much of their adult lives, neither John nor Anna would live to see the repeal for which they fought, for not until 1828 were the two acts abolished. In 1787, 1789, and 1790 motions for repeal appeared before Parliament, and support for repeal was probably at its highest in 1787, after Henry Beaufoy’s impassioned speech before the House of Commons on behalf of Dissenters.8 Events in France, however, immediately shifted the tide, and conservatives such as Pitt and Burke began conflating Dissenters with Jacobins. A month before the 1790 vote, Burke spoke before Parliament: Our present danger is from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger from being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy.9

Pitt, fearing that Dissenters who gained elected office after a repeal would undermine the Anglican Church, echoed Burke’s paranoid sentiments: “Toleration should not go to an equality which would endanger the establishment, and thence no longer be Toleration.”10 In her Address to the Opposers, Barbauld invokes the concept of Christian suffering and responds directly to Pitt’s use of “toleration,” portraying Dissenters, in one of her polemical inversions, as generously tolerating the abusive power of public officials: What you call toleration, we call the exercise of a natural and unalienable right . . . [Toleration] is the bearing with what is confessedly an evil, for the sake of some good with which it is connected. It is the Christian virtue of long suffering . . . Abuses are tolerated . . . Unjust claims are tolerated . . . These are the proper objects of toleration . . . but if there be a power that advances pretensions which we think unfounded in reason or scripture, that exercises an empire within an empire, and claims submission from those naturally her equals; and if we, from a spirit of brotherly charity, and just deference to public opinion, and a salutary dread of innovation, acquiesce in these pretensions; let her at least be told that the virtue of forbearance should be transferred, and that it is we who tolerate her, not she who tolerates us. (10–13)

Her satiric opening likewise inverts Pitt’s fear of Dissenters becoming elected to public office: “We thank you for the compliment paid the Dissenters, when you suppose that the moment they are eligible to places of power and profit, all such places will at once be filled with them” (3–4).

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Whereas Anna took aim at the establishment, John’s Address to the Dissidents spoke directly to the affected community with a three-part message that consoles, admonishes, and uplifts. The opening paragraph establishes a rhetorical pattern of repetition that seems carefully attuned to Anna’s theme of toleration and Christian suffering: You have once more, my brethren, by the voice of your country been declared unworthy of a participation in those rights which are the inheritance of every freeman!—You have again been solemnly degraded into the condition of aliens, in a land which you have laid under eternal obligations by faithful attachment and essential services!—You are left to remain the objects of suspicion and insult: and all this, without a single charge against you as members of the state, without the smallest impeachment on your morals, your doctrines, or your abilities! You were, then, mistaken in your ideas of the equity, the good sense, the magnanimity of your countrymen. (Emphasis added; 5)

By referring to Dissenters’ status as internally colonized “aliens,” Aikin reiterates his sister’s theme of “empire within empire,” a reminder that the Corporation and Test Acts had created communities whose existence reflected the two senses of that word: at once foreign (collaborators with France, in a sense, and therefore not to be trusted) and at the same time alienated from the national community. Yet, faced with the apparently disingenuous commitment of some Dissenters, Aikin does not shy away from admonishing part of his audience for accepting “that paltry bribe which for a generation or two has been constantly weakening and degrading your cause, the Regium Donum,” arguing that “it certainly is not given for love, and therefore must be a hire for services” (21).11 The need to censure, albeit moderately, members of the community to which they belonged may well have played a part in determining the audiences Anna and John would address. A rhetoric of authorial gender is thus at work here. The brilliance of her prose notwithstanding, had Anna addressed the Dissenting community instead of the politicians in these twin pamphlets, she simply would not have gained the attention she generated by addressing her chosen audience. In the third, uplifting portion of his message, Aikin returns to his opening cadence but this time inverts the sense of persecution by praising Dissenters and their indispensability to the nation: There is not a commercial town in England in which you do not form a large proportion of the most respectable and opulent inhabitants. In character for morals, integrity, and knowledge, you are not merely on a level with, but you surpass your equals in the establishment. Every scheme for the public benefit, every charitable institution, has you for its most liberal and enlightened contributors . . . You are the surest and principal promoters of all plans for mental improvement . . . The members of the establishment well know that from among you would naturally be chosen magistrates and municipal officers if you were eligible persons; therefore Tests are made for your exclusion. But, according to a philosophical maxim, “knowledge is power”; and while you possess this in a superior degree, you must be entrusted with the most weighty concerns by your countrymen, for they cannot do without you. (25–26)12

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Instilling resolve in the face of persecution; acknowledging lapses in devotion to duty; and reinforcing commitment to faith, community, and cause, John’s address borrows generic properties from the sermon to conclude, finally, that the Dissenting community is not only indispensable but also integral to the nation. In terms of the rhetoric of gender and convention, here John’s voice more fittingly imitates that of the preacher before his congregation. In the fall of 1790, just eight months after the publication of Aikin’s and Barbauld’s pamphlets, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France made its unforgettable debut and became instrumental in shifting the balance of public opinion regarding the Revolution. Although Burke’s response to Richard Price and Wollstonecraft’s subsequent response to Burke were both blinding public displays of political animosity, the fact is those radically public ruptures were the result of the heated undercurrents already emanating from the debate over the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. At one impassioned moment in his Address to the Dissidents, Aikin borrows terms from Reverend Price that Burke would later appropriate for his own use; Aikin labels Members of Parliament swayed by Burke and Pitt “the stupid idolaters of ancient institutions, merely because ancient,” and chides them for being the “docile tools of craft and artifice” (7). Upholding France as an example for England, Aikin bemoans his own country’s failure to imbibe its republicanism: “So far from having caught new spirit from the noble sentiments now pervading Europe, [England] seems to go backward in its policy, and to be determined by weak fears and narrow views to the rejection of every thing which is elsewhere called improvement” (5). In her Address to the Opposers, Barbauld parallels her brother’s argument against prejudice and those beholden to ancient institutions. In doing so, she employs imagery that links liberty to femininity. Whereas in the Reflections Burke would subsequently tell his audience that he “love[s] a manly, moral, regulated liberty” (89), Barbauld’s earlier rhetoric champions a distinctly feminine Liberty “with the lifted crosier in her hand, and the crucifix conspicuous on her breast.” An advocate of policies “far more liberal and comprehensive than the boasted establishments of Greece and Rome, [Barbauld’s Liberty] diffuses her blessings to every class of men; and even extends a smile of hope and promise to the poor African, the victim of hard, impenetrable avarice” (33). Liberty for Barbauld is a product of maternal forces: “nature is laboring with the birth of great events” (34). Drawing on imagery from the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and novelist Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague, Barbauld’s eloquence envisions the struggles for freedom as sending shockwaves around the globe. Can ye not discern the signs of the times? The minds of men are in movement from the Borysthenes to the Atlantic. Agitated with new and strong emotions, they swell and heave beneath oppression, as the seas within the Polar Circle, when, at the approach of Spring, they grow impatient to burst their icy chains; when what, but an instant before, seemed so firm, spread for many a dreary league like a floor of solid marble, at once with a tremendous noise gives way, long fissures spread in every direction, and the air resounds with the clash of floating fragments, which every hour are broken from the mass . . . Obscure

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murmurs gather, and swell into a tempest; the spirit of Enquiry, like a severe and searching wind, penetrates every part of the great body politic; and whatever is unsound, whatever is infirm, shrinks at the visitation. (31–33)

Elizabeth Kraft and William McCarthy observe that Burke seems to have been influenced by this passage, evidently responding to its opening lines in his Reflections: “Many parts of Europe are in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmuring under ground; a confused movement is felt that threatens a general earthquake in the political world” (SPP 265). Barbauld’s Liberty is furthermore depicted as the legitimate offspring of revolutionary forces that are natural, maternal. Perhaps again influenced by Barbauld’s rhetoric, Burke would in turn pervert such a naturalized image in his memorable reference to a “seductive, Circean liberty” (238), the monstrous progeny of Burke’s overwrought imagination. Though published anonymously, political pamphlets routinely acquired attribution. For reasons consistent with the contemporary dictates of social decorum, John’s was the better voice for occasional reprimand—to say, for example, that “no small number among you have deserted your proper banners” (18). Even so, once his identity became attached to the pamphlet, his republicanism and unapologetic support for France, increasingly unpopular after Burke’s Reflections, lost him his Yarmouth medical practice. As Helen Braithwaite observes, “Aikin’s pamphlets lost him most of his friends and medical patients in Yarmouth and eventually forced him to leave his home and practice for London” (101).13 Lucy Aikin recalls this difficult time in her father’s life: In those days of party violence, no one whose situation was in any respect a dependent one, was permitted to take the weaker side with impunity; nor was it long before Dr. Aikin was made to bear the penalty of his conscientious and disinterested efforts . . . The members of the corporation and the high party . . . after studying to make him feel in various modes the weight of their displeasure . . . entered into secret machinations for inviting another physician to take up his abode among them. Meanwhile he continued to bear his head erect, as a man conscious of none but worthy motives, and prepared to stand to the consequences of his actions without shrinking;—but his natural disposition was so averse to turbulence and strife, that he . . . privately resolved, if the storm did not blow over, to yield to its fury and fly to the shelter of some friendly port. (Memoir 79)

Thus a strategy formerly used against dissenting clergymen—indeed against Aikin’s great grandfather John Jennings14 —effectively to alienate them from the communities they served, became directed against Aikin for giving voice to, though not preaching, dissent. Whereas previously the Anglican community, enforcing the Five Mile Act, separated the clergyman from his congregation, now it conspired to separate the physician from his patients. In both cases, coercive agents of the state cause the conscientious Dissenter’s loss of livelihood, in effect displacing, punishing, and forcing the Dissenting family into an ethical struggle with conflicting duties.15 Of the thirty-eight pamphlets marketed by Joseph Johnson as a result of the Repeal debates, nineteen were anonymously authored. Those that

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were attributed carried well-established names such as Joseph Priestley, Gilbert Wakefield, and John Milton. Standing out from amongst the titles advertised, Milton’s 1659 Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes is number twenty-five on the list (figure 1.1). By leaguing with the nineteen anonymous authors on Johnson’s shelves,16 Aikin and Barbauld became part of the publisher’s mediating network of Dissent, a network made credible, in part, by names such as Milton, Priestley, and Wakefield. Since Milton’s is the only non-contemporaneous essay on the list, Johnson’s marketing strategy in effect put the other Dissenting authors in diachronic collaboration with the 131-year-old tract. Milton’s work thus serves as a kind of prelude to the chorus of contemporary pamphlets, and his presence in the advertisement makes plain that the like-minded voices represented therein are inheritors of and participants in a radical legacy of Dissent. And although radical publishers eventually became the government’s more identifiable targets for prosecution (in 1799 Johnson himself was sentenced for “publishing certain seditious Libels”),17 here Johnson was savvy enough to include in the list of titles two Anglican tracts that could serve to mitigate the appearance of radicalism.18 In general, anonymity served to shield individual authors who lacked the protection of unassailable standing in the community. For Barbauld, anonymity in this instance was not simply a tactic of self-effacement or security. John had already felt the chill of public disapprobation after the appearance of his The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church of England Compared, a work jointly bound with another author’s Remarks on two Letters addressed to the Delegates of the several Congregations of Protestant Dissenters who met at Devizes, Sept. 14, 1789. His treatise was published in early 1790, amid the burgeoning Repeal debate literature, but prior to his and Anna’s Addresses. Indeed, it was one of the thirty-seven pamphlets Johnson was marketing at the time. By leveling charges of “Jacobitism” against the Anglican Church and asserting that it “[posed] the greatest denominational threat to the state” and was, furthermore, “hostile to the rights of their fellow-citizens,” Aikin put himself in a tenuous position vis-à-vis his Yarmouth community.19 Given the rhetorical and political situation, whatever other benefits or protections accrued from Barbauld’s anonymity, her gesture of non-attribution might well have served also to support her brother, for given their collaborative reputation, and because their pamphlets were so manifestly partnered, attributing one would essentially have meant attributing the other. Anonymity in this context therefore reflects, at least in part, a growing concern with familial intervention on the national political scene. Because the literary family is so deeply implicated in political and religious debate, anonymous authorship serves the aim of shielding its members from potential reprisals. Thus Anna’s anonymity derives from a duty not only to the brother representing their Aikin family legacy—to the divine law that binds Antigone so intractably to Polynices—but also to that law’s other manifestation: John’s family at Yarmouth—Barbauld’s sister-in-law Martha, her niece Lucy, and her nephew Arthur. And because Anna had adopted John and Martha’s son Charles at the age of two, that duty (fulfilled likewise by John’s own anonymity) redirected itself in a loop of familial intimacy back to her own household.

Figure 1.1 Milton advertisement in 3rd edition of Barbauld’s Address to the Opposers (1790). Author’s collection.

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When Parliament failed for the third time in as many years to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts, Anna Barbauld and John Aikin, sister and brother, postured themselves as spokespersons for the Dissenting cause. Addressing two separate audiences on the same topic on the same day is a collaborative strategy befitting a reformist ethos characterized by cooperation and communal action. For two authors no longer living under the same roof, it was also a strategy well adapted to the condition of physical separation, for they could divide responsibility along the lines of audience and proceed individually. Effecting the necessary coordination for their wellsynchronized messages required substantial planning, and not just any two authors could have pulled it off. John and Anna’s collaborative relationship had been preparing them for such a task for over twenty years. In what follows, the first section will address the development of the collaborative relationship between John and Anna during the Warrington stage by examining their early correspondence, John’s Essays on Song-Writing (1772), and Anna’s Poems (1773). We witness during those early years the emergence of a dialogic consciousness in the relationship that manifests itself in what I refer to as responsive collaboration. The second section returns to the political scene in 1793 by reading two additional sibling pamphlets, this time occasioned by the Royal Proclamation of 1793: Barbauld’s magisterial Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation and Aikin’s Food for National Penitence. Yet again in dialogue, these tracts likewise exhibit strategies evident in the two Addresses of 1790. What is more, through their deliberate echoes of Milton’s Treatise on Civil Power, the very pamphlet advertised by Joseph Johnson and sold alongside their 1790 Addresses, Aikin and Barbauld effectively put themselves in responsive collaboration with Milton, thereby drawing from and strengthening their ties to a deeper legacy of English Dissent.

I The year is 1772. John Aikin is recently home from medical school in Scotland, yet he continues to harbor aspirations more authorial than medical. Influenced at this point by his interest in Renaissance drama, he writes a two-act comedy called “The Man of Pleasure,” to be performed before an intimate audience at the Warrington Academy.20 At his request, his older sister Anna has written a “Prologue to ‘The Man of Pleasure’ by John Aikin,” which begins: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sent here to night / By our young bardling—he’s in such a fright, / Trembling behind the scenes and out of breath, / Pale as the ghost of Banquo in Macbeth [sic]” (PALB 49, ll. 1–4). The poem provides a playful yet informative glimpse into the sibling relationship: the joint effort to get John’s play off to a good start is indicative of precisely the kind of collaborative partnership that was to emerge over the coming decades. Anna’s prologue is light and humorous, but it exemplifies the mutual support and encouragement these siblings fostered for each other’s work as writers. Had we only John’s play as the artifact of this moment in Warrington’s social history, we would be far poorer than we are with Anna’s poem in our hands. For the poem enables us to see the

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collaborative spirit of their relationship at an early stage; moreover, it situates that collaboration squarely within a social and familial setting: precisely the confluence of authorship and affective familial ties that gave rise to the literary family. John’s play would not have been staged without the support of Anna’s prologue; soon it was to be Anna’s poems that might not have been published without her brother’s support: such reciprocity marks John and Anna’s subsequent writing lives. As with the two Addresses, here we can see that the writing of one sibling requires its complement in order to complete the picture. In spite of such entertainment being commonplace at the Warrington Academy, we have reason to suspect that the scope of John’s production in this instance exceeded normal bounds. Probably because the play included participation by Warrington students, the elder statesmen of Warrington, the tutors, did not wholly approve.21 Anna’s prologue indicates that John nearly withdrew his play in the face of censure from the “grave ones”: “He looked so scared I wondered what could ail him; / He faultering said his heart began to fail him: / The grave ones chid—he saw ’twould never please / And humbly begged he might withdraw his piece” (ll. 7–10). If any tutor was likely to support the scheme, it might have been the pair’s father, John Aikin, D. D., who would have recalled the liberal reputation of his father-inlaw, John Jennings, principal of the Dissenting Academy at Kibworth from 1715 until his untimely death in 1723, at thirty-six, of smallpox. One of Jennings’ innovations at Kibworth was encouraging theatrical performances, “a rare thing among Nonconformists at that date” (Rodgers 22). Both John and Anna inherited their grandfather’s interest in drama, Anna making theatrical productions a mainstay during her tenure at the Palgrave school, and John finding early critical interest in the collaborative work of Beaumont and Fletcher.22 Attempting to rekindle his grandfather’s liberal thespian spirit, John Aikin was nevertheless getting cold feet. Anna’s prologue continues in its teasingly mocking tone: No, no young man, you must not baulk the town; You’re in the lists, you’ve thrown the gauntlet down, You’ve gone too far, said I, there’s no receding; Set the best face you can on the proceeding. At length he acquiesced, but begged me say Something to recommend this infant play. His moving words might even critics melt, Had pity e’er in critics’ bosoms dwelt. (ll. 11–18)

And she continues by offering a rather humorous recommendation, wherein the play becomes the young doctor’s prescription for comedy: “To serve her [Comedy’s] cause he drew up this prescription; / A two-act sermon ’tis by his description. / Nay, you may yawn, a sermon I assure ye / Fit for the gravest synod of old jewry” (ll. 45–48). If John’s play displayed any wit at all, it surely must have found a rival in the rhyme of that last couplet. The image here of a brother and sister collaborating on the domestic stage in order to sway a synod of elders, though humorous, adumbrates the strategy

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they would later adopt on the public stage in order to confront councils of state. What this small moment in Aikin family history illustrates above all is the affectionate and collaborative bond forged between John and Anna during their life at Warrington that would characterize and strengthen their relationship throughout their lives. 23 Anna ref lects on the early history of that relationship in her epistolary verse, “To Dr. Aikin on his Complaining that she neglected him, October 20th 1768.”24 John’s jealousy, ostensibly caused by Anna’s tardiness in responding to his letters, prompted the poem, and Anna admits to having derived some pleasure from his anxiety: What if she half enjoy’d the anxious care, And almost triumph’d in the jealous fear, Those fond misgivings, which thy bosom prove As much alive to friendship as to love. (ll. 11–14)

She traces the source of their friendship and love to childhood days when “The first warm impulse which our breast did move, / ’Twas sympathy, before we knew to love” (ll. 19–20). Recounting their affectionate history is Anna’s method of alleviating John’s concern that she has somehow forgotten their bond. She reminds him that growing up itself was for them a collaborative act, undertaken hand-in-hand among the groves of their childhood home in Kibworth: As hand in hand with innocence we stray’d Embosom’d deep in Kibworth’s tufted shade; Where both encircled in one household band, And both obedient to one mild command, Life’s first fair dawn with transport we beheld, And simple pleasures, hardly since excelled. How like two scions on one stem we grew. (ll. 21–27)

Similarly paying tribute to their father, John would later put a twist on that final simile, turning the two scions of one stem into two “streamlets from one honor’d source.”25 John Aikin, D.D., took seriously the intellectual development of his children, and through his dissenting program of domestic education, which he administered without regard for gender, “Anna Laetitia,” writes Betsy Rodgers, obtained “an excellent classical education, such as was available to few women at that time. As well as Latin and some Greek, [her father] taught her French and Italian, and he gave her a wide knowledge of English literature, particularly the works of Addison and the writers of the Augustan age” (30). In “To Dr. Aikin,” Anna wistfully foregrounds this egalitarian aspect of the household education: “those hours are now no more which smiling flew / And the same studies saw us both pursue” (ll. 48–49). Sharing classical and literary pursuits at home helped to inspire in John and Anna their own creative aspirations, and as the end of the poem indicates, they

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simultaneously received the divine afflatus: For both our breasts at once the Muses fir’d, With equal love, but not alike inspir’d. To thee, the flute and sounding lyre decreed, Mine, the low murmurs of the tuneful reed. (ll. 90–93)

Though impelled at this point in their lives toward different genres, John primarily following drama’s choral flute, and Anna pursuing the simple lyricism of the pastoral reed, they are nonetheless invested in each other’s interests. Just as she complemented John’s efforts with her “Prologue to the Man of Pleasure,” Anna, as the following lines suggest, appears to have accompanied her brother in song, perhaps even assuming the role of the chorus in his theatrical productions: “Yet, when fair friendship shall unloose my tongue, / My trembling voice shall ne’er refuse the song” (ll. 94–95). Over the next half-century, John and Anna were to encourage each other’s literary pursuits, even to the point of good-humored chiding, whenever, as with the timid “young bardling,” either author was reluctant to be in the spotlight. Collaborating via correspondence offered a creative mode of thinking and working that adapted itself to separation. That they shared works in progress is apparent in these comments to John from Anna in 1777; here, too, is evidence of their mutual interest in literary criticism: You are very favourable to my fragments;–fragments, however, they are likely to continue unless I had a little more time. I want much to see your Essays,– how do you proceed with them? To attack Shakespear! heresy indeed! . . . I am of your opinion, however, that we idolize Shakespear rather too much for a Christian country. That inconsistencies may be found in his characters is certain: yet, notwithstanding that, character is his distinguishing excellence; and though he had not the learning of the schools in his head, he had the theatre of the world before him, and could make reflections on what he saw. An equal vein of poetry runs through the works of some of his cotemporaries: but his writings are most peculiarly marked by good sense and striking characters; so that I think you do him not justice if you call him only a poet. (Works 2.14–15)

The work Anna alludes to in this letter is An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777), and the brief mention of Shakespeare demonstrates that she was providing some early responses to his drafts. Shakespeare is one of the many names Aikin takes to task for a “propensity to imitation,” which enervates poetry through a “want of variety and novelty” in its metaphors and descriptions.26 After the Essay was published, John still sought Anna’s opinion, as demonstrated by this excerpt from another of her letters: The lines you have quoted from Thomson show with how much advantage the latter [flora] may be made the subject of rich description. I think, too,

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What this collegial yet intimate exchange importantly highlights is John and Anna’s mutual respect and interdependence; indeed it almost betrays deference on John’s part, but the collaborative, egalitarian tone of the conversation is manifestly discernible. An instance of this epistolary exchange merits attention for its allusion to Aikin family history. In 1787 Anna appears to have been prodding John once again, this time to write poetry. We only have one side of the conversation in this instance, but we can infer that John had turned the request around on Anna, seeking verses from her as inspiration for his own. She responds: I am very glad to be informed what is the proper method to engage you to write verses, and should inclose herewith an order for a score or two of lines, if I thought the command were certain to be as efficacious as the lovely Anna’s. The generous Muse, whom harsh constraint offends, At Anna’s call with ready homage bends; Well may she claim, who gives poetic fire, For what her lips command, her eyes inspire. (Works 2.153)

Anna’s response is noteworthy, foremost, because it underscores the familial spirit of their writing. In offering John lines of verse not her own, she nevertheless provides poetry that exemplifies precisely the kind of inspiration he seeks. That she chooses lines obliquely self-referential—they refer to the Anna for whom she is named: Anna Laetitia Wingate Jennings, their maternal grandmother—signals a sense of generational continuity important to their dissenting heritage. And doubly reinforcing that heritage, she quotes and thereby pays homage to their grandfather, John Jennings, the very man who inspired students to the dramatic art at the Kibworth Academy. Drawing on this familial inspiration, Anna speaks to her brother in a language handed down to them from an earlier generation, and thereby reminds him that the authorial legacy belongs as much to him as to her, and that he should write something original almost out of obligation to that legacy. As these lines have not, to my knowledge, ever been explicated, my reading of them is admittedly conjectural, though not without support. Barbauld’s “On the Death of Mrs. Jennings” reminds us that the only “Anna” in this family was indeed their maternal grandmother; Anna Letitia Aikin Barbauld was known as “Letitia,” as her brother’s poetry amply demonstrates. 27 In the elegy for her grandmother, Barbauld refers to “holy Anna’s spirit” and closes with, “Long, long shall mine her honour’d memory bless, / Who gave the dearest blessing I possess” (Works 1.116). On generationally interconnected levels, then, the Aikin family tree serves as a source of poetic inspiration for two of its scions, and Anna’s answer reminds John that she is currently its living muse. 28

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In a 1775 letter from Anna, by this time a nationally acclaimed poet, she seems knowingly to assume the role of muse by prompting her brother to write something original: I own I cannot help wishing you would undertake some original work, either of fancy or elegant criticism; you have the powers for both. I think we must some day sew all our fragments together, and make a Joineriana of them. Let me see:—I have, half a ballad; the first scene of a play; a plot of another, all but the catastrophe; half a dozen loose similes, and an eccentric flight or two among the fairies. (Works 2.9)29

Her amusingly prophetic description of their collaboration Evenings at Home fittingly recalls Samuel Patterson’s Joineriana: or the Book of Scraps, a book the Aikins were undoubtedly aware of, as it was published by their friend Joseph Johnson the same year in which he published John Aikin’s Essays on Song-Writing (1772), one of the three works that stands out during their collaboration while at Warrington. The other two are Anna’s Poems and the jointly authored Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1773). In the next chapter I will discuss the Miscellaneous Pieces as groundwork for the development of an aesthetic. The remainder of this section will focus on John’s Essays on SongWriting and Anna’s 1773 Poems in order to trace the emergence of a creative dialogue that informed not only their writing, including contributions to each other’s works, but also the material production of those works. When John returned from his residence in Manchester, he temporarily set aside aspirations of becoming a man of letters. “The Man of Pleasure” notwithstanding, his primary literary pursuits at this point were to publish a collection of songs and then introduce the world to the poetry of his sister. During his residency in Manchester, John often wrote to Anna about the collection of songs and essays he intended to publish.30 William McCarthy suggests that during their frequent correspondence on the topic, which undoubtedly included exchanges of songs, Anna probably wrote the pieces that John eventually included in the collection (PALB 249n). Essays on Song-Writing: with a Collection of such English songs as are most eminent for Poetical Merit. To which are added, Some Original Pieces appeared in 1772 and included six of Anna’s songs among the “original pieces”; it was thus their first collaborative published work.31 Although printed anonymously, the original pieces were prefaced by an “Advertisement” that offered a hint as to their authorship. Anyone even casually familiar with the Warrington circle would have had little doubt concerning whom John meant by “friend.” As the other contributor of original pieces, Aikin claims to add nothing but “novelty”; the “friend’s” contributions, however, are of considerable poetical merit: With regard to some of [the original pieces], [the editor] thinks it necessary to declare that they are admitted here solely upon the plea of novelty . . . There are others, however, which he is not afraid of recommending on a much superior ground of merit; and does not scruple admitting them to an equal rank in genuine poetry with any that form the . . . collection. For these, which are marked with an asterisk, he is indebted to a friend. (242)32

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Essays on Song-Writing nicely illustrates an instance of responsive collaboration between Anna and John, for it was John’s concept for the collection, outlined in letters from Manchester, that prompted Anna to write songs that John was to incorporate. Her offering of songs in itself was subtle but certain incentive for John to see the project through to the press. The book’s publication in turn inspired Anna to write “On the Origin of Song-Writing,” a poem that appears in her 1773 Poems with the footnote: “Addressed to the Author of Essays on Song-Writing.” To offer a sense of how thoroughly inscribed this responsive element of the writing became, I should note that, in the long-awaited 1810 edition of Essays on Song-Writing, retitled Vocal Poetry,33 John honored Anna’s thirty-seven-year-old poem by placing it at the end of his introductory essay, making it a poetic counterpart of the collection’s précis. His short preface to the poem reads: “I doubt not that every reader will be gratified by my concluding this Essay with the following piece from Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems, addressed to me as the author of the work which was the predecessor of the present volume” (Vocal Poetry l). In one sense, then, the siblings had come full circle, for Anna’s voice was serving once again as the validating prologue to John’s work, just as it had with “The Man of Pleasure.” Nearly two generations had passed since the publication of Essays on Song-Writing, so it is unlikely that many of Aikin’s new readers would have had any inkling that the inclusion of Anna’s poem marked not only the opening of the present volume but also the long-delayed culmination of a creative dialogue begun in letters. As William McCarthy observes, “On the Origin of Song-Writing” “reworks an old theme in Cupidology, ‘the education of Cupid’ ” (PALB 251); Barbauld’s alteration involves treating song-writing as the offspring of Cupid’s collaboration with the sister Muses: But Cupid tunes the Muse’s lyre, To languid notes of soft desire. In every clime, in every tongue, ’Tis love inspires the poet’s song. (Poems 63)

The final lines of the poem speak directly to John but serve, too, as a prefatory address to readers of the collection, encouraging them to extract from its pages material for their commonplace books: ’Tis yours to cull with happy art Each meaning verse that speaks the heart; And fair array’d, in order meet, To lay the wreath at beauty’s feet. (Poems 65)

As an address to her brother, the final lines also recall his selection of her songs for inclusion in the “Original Pieces.” And both gestures—the reader’s selection of favorites, following the Renaissance’s penchant for culling sententiae, and the editor’s borrowings from his sister—remind us that Vocal Poetry was both product and producer of responsive collaboration.

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With Essays on Song-Writing on the market, John, an early and instrumental figure in forming the literary coterie surrounding Joseph Johnson,34 was now well positioned to assist with the publication of Anna’s poems. Printing them would be an uncomplicated first step, for he could rely on William Eyres, proprietor of the Warrington Academy’s local press; he could also rely on the fact that Anna’s talent as a poet was already well established, at least provincially. In addition to the many occasional pieces she wrote for family and friends, in particular Joseph and Mary Priestley, she also wrote “Corsica” (1769), a tribute to the Corsican fight for independence under General Pasquale Paoli. The poem made its way into Boswell’s hands and helped solidify her early reputation. 35 Yet Anna displayed virtually no ambition to become a published poet. Concerning the prospects of moving beyond the intellectual bounds within which society typically constrained women, she expressed reticence in the aforementioned 1768 verse epistle “To Dr. Aikin”: But hush my heart! nor strive to soar too high, Nor for the tree of knowledge vainly sigh; Check the fond love of science and of fame, A bright, but ah! a too devouring flame. Content remain within thy bounded sphere. (PALB 18–19)

The lines suggests that an outward display of ambition could be construed as a breach of female decorum, something understood and accounted for by John. Regarding the publication of the 1773 Poems, Grace Ellis observes that “when all the preparatory steps had been taken, finding her still reluctant to appear before the public as an author, [John] himself procured the paper for the book, and had it put into type” (44). In a sense, Anna needed John to be her ambitious half, and he readily was. His editorial hand was undoubtedly involved, perhaps most active in the arrangement of the poems themselves. In addition to the fact that he would have worked with Eyres to resolve questions about the setting of type, in Essays on Song-Writing he voices editorial self-consciousness regarding the rhetoric of arrangement in lyrical collections.36 William McCarthy conjectures that John probably chose the epigraphs, but I suspect that he and Anna shared in this effort, especially given their familiarity with the classical canon at the Warrington Library and their knowledge of Latin.37 Had John alone been responsible, we might expect an epigraph or two from the Greek, but since all of the tags are either Latin or English, it is entirely likely that their combined facility in the former helped them to identify suitable mottoes. That they shared an aptitude for Latin is evident in one of John’s letters to Anna: “What this age wants are, I am sure, examples of firmness and consistency; the friends of liberty particularly should say to themselves, in ea tempora natus est, quibus firmare animum expediat constantibus exemplis” (qtd in LA, Memoir 86).38 The prepublication dialogue that led to the landmark 1773 edition of Anna’s Poems, like the responsive collaboration surrounding Essays on SongWriting, is symptomatic of a dialogic habit of mind within the collaborative

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relationship, the traces of which are evident within the texts themselves. One poem in particular from the 1773 collection further illustrates the responsive—or dialogic—aspect of the siblings’ texts. The occasion that inspired “To Wisdom” will be familiar: the controversial staging of “The Man of Pleasure.” Despite her lighthearted “Prologue” to John’s play, Anna was displeased with the conservatism of some of the Warrington tutors, as we learn from Lucy Aikin’s account: “Somebody was bold enough to talk of getting up private theatricals. This was a dreadful business! All the wise and grave, the whole tutorhood, cried out, it must not be! The students, the Rigbys, and, I must add, my aunt, took the prohibition very sulkily; and my aunt’s Ode to Wisdom was the result” (qtd in Bright 14). “To Wisdom” is L’Allegro and Il Penseroso combined, inverted, and abridged. Organized into two ifthen propositions, the poem first sets Wisdom up as strawman, only to be obeyed if its governing hand rules with a light, ostensibly feminine touch: by “soft control,” “tender peace,” and “gentle sway” (Poems 57). An allimportant “But” follows and introduces the next if-then proposition: But if thou com’st with frown austere To nurse the brood of care and fear; To bid our sweetest passions die, And leave us in their room a sigh . . . W ISDOM, thine empire I disclaim, Thou empty boast of pompous name! In gloomy shade of cloisters dwell, But never haunt my cheerful cell. Hail to pleasure’s frolic train! Hail to fancy’s golden reign! (pp. 57–58)

A masculine, Presbyterian austerity aligns Wisdom here not only with the proscriptive attitude of the Warrington elders but with that same mirthless power that inspired Anna’s humorously lament-filled “Groans of the Tankard.” By consigning Wisdom to its darkened cloisters, far removed from her “cheerful cell,” Barbauld invokes the end of Il Penseroso and inverts Milton’s pledge never to “let my due feet . . . fail, / To walk the studious cloister’s pale” and his desire for the “peaceful hermitage” of the “mossy cell” (ll. 155–56, 168–69). An unsigned “Descriptive Song” in John’s Essays on Song-Writing inconspicuously answers “To Wisdom”: its appended note says, simply, “This Song is designed as a contrast to an Address to Wisdom” (1772, 129; 1774, 133). In keeping with the implicitly established Miltonic dialogue, the song opens by replying, “Now see my Goddess, earthly born / With smiling looks and sparkling eyes” and proceeds to praise a mortal beauty that outshines all learning and “might bring e’en Plato to disgrace” (108–109). As McCarthy has pointed out, there really is no contrast here, for Aikin also chooses to snub wisdom in favor of pleasure39; his version of the latter, however, is not a personified abstraction but a mortal goddess. In keeping with the Horatian motto chosen for “To Wisdom” (Odes 3.8.27–28): “Dona praesentis rape laetus horae, ac / Linque severa” (“Gladly take the gifts of the present hour

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and abandon serious things”),40 Aikin concludes, “I’ll scorn the scorn of all the wise.” Unless we read their works together, we remain oblivious to the responsive component of this partnership. I do not mean to suggest that the individual works cannot stand alone; rather I argue that signaled inside this authorial responsiveness is the growth of an intimate and creative dialogic consciousness. And although John’s song serves as a response, we should keep in mind that, aside from those inside the Warrington community, contemporary readers had not yet seen “To Wisdom,” for Poems was published after Essays. That they would be published was already a foregone conclusion in John’s mind, and his proleptic note served both to advertise and to forecast Anna’s poetic debut. Friends inside the Warrington sphere would have recognized the reciprocality of John and Anna’s writings, yet as their works became more widely known, their growing readership became attuned to that same reciprocality. At least one reader, Thomas Cautley of Trinity College, Cambridge, appears to have recognized the benefit of pairing their works, for his copies of the 1774 Essays on Song-Writing and the 1777 Poems are bound together in one volume.41 The material process of binding did for Cautley what this book advocates that we do when approaching not only Barbauld and Aikin but all the authors belonging to the Romantic era’s literary families: read them side-by-side.

II The republication of works during the reformist stage of John and Anna’s relationship served to keep their names together in the public eye. The 1777 publication of John’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, for example, just happens to have coincided with Joseph Johnson’s publishing of the fifth edition of Anna’s Poems. Given Aikin’s relationship with Joseph Johnson, this cannot have been mere happenstance.42 John was a shrewd businessman in terms of publishing, habitually worked with Joseph Johnson, and understood that the earlier collaborative work had primed the readership for seeing the siblings’ names advertised together. The advertisement at the end of the 1792 reprint of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose represents a small catalogue of Aikin and Barbauld titles available from Johnson (figure 1.2).43 The year 1792 also saw the sixth and final London edition of Poems, which conveniently included the antislavery poem, “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” also published in 1792. Even Anna’s 1797 edition of William Collins’s poems, published by Cadell and Davies, includes a page of advertisements with seven titles in which “Aikin” and “Barbauld” are the editors and commentators on writers such as Goldsmith, Thomson, Akenside, and Green.44 This advertising strategy would eventually embrace the second generation as well. In the 1810 Vocal Poetry, for instance, Anna, John, and John’s son Arthur Aikin appear together in the publisher’s advertisement. That the ad clearly identifies the full title of Arthur Aikin’s Natural History of the Year as “Being an Enlargement of Dr. Aikin’s Calendar of Nature” vividly underscores the presence, growth, and continuity of the literary family (figure 1.3).

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Figure 1.2 Aikin-Barbauld ad from 3rd edition of Miscellaneous Pieces (1792). Author’s collection.

With their reemergence in the 1790s in the shops of various booksellers, the names Aikin and Barbauld became reprinted in the national consciousness. In keeping with this spirit of authorial rebirth, mutually supporting political pamphlets authored by Aikin and Barbauld appeared for a second time in the liberal publishing shop at No. 72, St. Paul’s Church Yard. The occasion was the Royal Proclamation of a Fast in April 1793,45 and the two pamphlets were Anna’s Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation; or a Discourse for the Fast, Appointed on April 19, 1793 and John’s Food for National Penitence; or, a Discourse Intended for the Approaching Fast Day.46 Embroiled again in war, the government decreed that British citizens everywhere were to participate in

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Figure 1.3 Aikin family ad in John Aikin’s Vocal Poetry (1810). Author’s collection.

a day of national prayer and fasting, spiritual solidarity to gain God’s support in the cause. Needless to say, the Royal Proclamation violated every Dissenter’s liberty of conscience. As with their Addresses of 1790, Barbauld’s Sins of Government and Aikin’s Food for National Penitence exist in dialogue with each other, both addressing the deplorable state of affairs in a country that insisted, repeatedly, on adding war to a mounting list of sins: slavery, imperialism, and religious intolerance, to name a few. Each argument includes a number of intertextual references to its sibling, Barbauld’s, for example, suggesting that the nation might find “food for our national penitence” in governmental policy that enforced subscription to the Church’s thirty-nine articles of faith as a prerequisite for the rights of full citizenship (Works 2.393). Both echo their forebear, John Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes

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(1659), the same essay Joseph Johnson marketed in 1790 alongside Barbauld’s Address to the Opposers and Aikin’s Address to the Dissidents. Rhetorically leaguing with Milton, the two treatises fortify their attacks on Burke by implicitly demonstrating their inheritance of a national discourse in which they rely not on blind adherence to prejudice but on the same spirit of free inquiry and “Christian liberty” that guided Milton.47 We are not far into John’s argument before he overtly signals his alliance with Anna: “We are summoned on this day for the express purpose of humbling ourselves before our Maker for the sins of the nation; it is not therefore individual, but national faults, that are at present the proper subjects of our investigation” (4; emphasis in original). For Aikin, the nation can be likened to one of his patients. Vice has infected the body politic, and remedies must be prescribed, for “a state of vice is a state of disease” (6). Foremost among the causes of the prevailing “country distemper” is avarice, the root of all other evils. As Aikin sees it, the love of money generates an empire that must sustain itself with slave labor and attack anyone who opposes it. John leaves the virulent antiwar rhetoric to Anna, but neither pamphlet hesitates to confront the plague of “extended dominion,” in John’s terms. “Thus do we extend our grasping hands from east to west,” writes Barbauld, “from pole to pole, and in our selfish monopolizing spirit are almost angry that the sun should ripen any productions but for our markets, or the ocean bear any vessels but our own upon its broad bosom” (Works 2.398). John’s words echo those of his sister: Extended dominion, overflowing wealth, peace at home, and respect abroad, naturally become the parents of overweening confidence, of pride, arrogance, ostentation, luxurious indulgence, and insatiable avidity. Before these haughty passions, the sacred claims of justice, the sober pleas of moderation, the counsels of wisdom, and the remonstrances of freedom, are put to an ignominious flight. Patriotism is turned into a spirit of domination; industry becomes a grasping rapacity; and courage, daring violence. (7–8)

The solution to this bad parenting is, as Daniel White has well articulated, the spread of middle-class commercial values (as exemplified by the Aikin family and its publishing circle) aimed not at domination and imperial expansion, but at the diffusion of familial goodwill.48 Commerce, writes John, “is a golden chain by which man is connected with man; . . . its spirit is that of peace, equity, and good faith; and totally adverse to hostile encroachments, and the usurpation of dominion by fraud or force” (10–11). This is an economy ruled by a middle-class Christian work ethic—prudent, industrious, and constitutive of communal bonds. It exhibits nothing of the “effeminacy of luxurious indulgence” that feeds off the wares of slavery.49 Whereas Anna is less vocal about the slave trade, possibly owing to her already having published the “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” John reaches a fever pitch in taking on this “foul crime”: O shame! O guilt! O ingratitude! Britons make a traffic of slavery—tear innocent men by the basest of artifices from their native soil—from all they hold

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dear—carry them into irons to other Britons, who buy them like vile cattle, and wear out their wretched lives in the most corroding servitude! This foul crime, exposed, avowed, undefended, but still permitted, will sit heavy on the soul of Britain in the day of her adversity. Hide thy face, Queen of Isles, in burning blushes—wash out with repentant tears thy deep stains—mourn in sackcloth—mortify with real fastings—and dare not again to lift thy head towards the throne of Divine mercy, till thou hast ceased to be cruel and unjust! (10)

Barbauld and Aikin’s antislavery rhetoric, appealing in the early 1790s to audiences of government and wealth, would turn in 1796 to a potentially more receptive audience of young persons through the radical teachings of Evenings at Home (1792–1796), specifically the critically overlooked but profoundly important “Dialogue between a Master and Slave.” One of the most important pieces of abolitionist literature written in England, Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue,” reprinted in Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator (Boston, 1797), was read in 1831 by the young Frederick Douglass, who subsequently treated it, essentially, as his vade mecum.50 In Food for National Penitence, Dr. Aikin understands that causes, not symptoms, must be treated, the root cause of the prevailing condition being a prejudicial adherence to an ancient model of government: the unholy alliance of church and state. For Aikin, that alliance and its imposition on Christian liberty is criminal, not only in the figurative sense of betraying the aims of “an enlightened people” (“But are there not among us those who love darkness better than light—who obstinately foster ancient errors in preference to modern truths”), but also in the literal sense: “it is a national crime, and one of no mean rank” (12). We can already see in these few lines rhetoric aimed directly at Burke, and when Aikin connects the crime to party interest, he rests his argument on Milton and implicates Burke at the same time. Milton had made the case that exercising civil authority over Christian liberty was, in effect, criminal: “it is not lawfull for any power on earth to compell in matters of Religion” (296). Aikin is more pointed: “All interested opposition to the spread of religious truth, all debasement of the spirit of religion by allying it with state policy, and making it subservient to party views, is highly criminal in a Christian and a Protestant country” (13). He then associates that subservience with the restrictions of the Corporation and Test Acts by noting that Christ, when he said, “ ‘This do in remembrance of me,’ ” could never have imagined those words coming “in after ages to signify, ‘This do, that you may be qualified for a post in the army or revenue’ ” (13). That Aikin and Barbauld were in league with Milton should come as no surprise (despite the latter’s distaste for Presbyterians), for they felt a strong connection to the leveling age of political dissent in the seventeenth century, as is evident in this letter from John to Anna, written in 1779 while he was still teaching at Warrington: “Who do you think we have here as a student? No less a personage than the son of the American president Laurens—sent by Ben. Vaughn. He is a fine manly sedate lad, & we all like him much.

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We indeed pay our court to him as to a future Cromwell.”51 The spirit of civil resistance runs throughout Aikin’s polemic, but everywhere evident is his particular distaste for a Burkean definition of prejudice, at this point an extraordinarily loaded term that both he and Anna work to reclaim and redefine. “Let us then,” writes John establishing his pamphlet’s ground rules, “divested as much as possible of prejudice, consider the moral state of our nation” (5).52 Barbauld and Aikin were not especially fond of Burke after the French Revolution, as variously evidenced throughout writings that spar with him directly and indirectly. Aikin’s feelings on the matter appear in letters, poetry, and essays. In this letter to his friend Dr. John Haygarth, Aikin belittles the Reflections: I certainly do not agree with you in thinking that a folio is necessary in reply to Mr. Burke; for setting aside what in him is unanswerable, and what is not worth answering, and being content to admire that unequalled flow of wit and brilliancy which is no subject for an answer, his false principles and distorted reasonings will not I think require many pages to expose them at the bar of good sense. (Qtd in Memoir 88)

To Aikin it was abundantly clear that the appeals of Burke’s Reflections—the wit, pathos, and kairos—although thoroughly impressive as a rhetorical package, were nonetheless “unanswerable” to reason. What remained, he felt, was easily dismissed. In his Address to the Dissidents of England, Aikin had borrowed Reverend Price’s terms to label colleagues Burke and Pitt “the stupid idolaters of ancient institutions, merely because ancient,” and to chide them for being the “docile tools of craft and artifice” (7). Here, in Food for National Penitence, he forcefully reiterates that theme, arguing that the “evils” he has been outlining stem from religion being put in the service of politics. Aikin contends that the opinion held by some—that religion’s purpose is “chiefly to awe the minds of the vulgar, and that therefore it is better to preserve ancient institutions, however faulty, than to subvert them by means of free enquiry—is the pernicious error” that has corrupted many Christian nations (14).53 Thus Aikin’s argument recalls not only Milton’s Treatise on Civil Power but also the more general argument of Areopagitica regarding free enquiry and the relationship between vice and virtue, the “ancient institution” in that case being government censorship. Thoughts of responding to Burke were not new for either Aikin or Barbauld. During this reformist stage of their collaborative relationship, John and Anna continued to seek each other’s advice or critical assessment through letters, as when Anna writes, “Many are the literary matters I want to talk over with you when we meet, which I now look forward to as not a far-distant pleasure” (Works 2.17). On the topic of responding to Burke’s Reflections, she writes, I do not wonder at your asking whether I am answering Burke, for the question has been asked me even from Paris. The truth is, I have not been without thoughts of it, and I have now some sheets of loose thoughts written out, but

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whether they will see the light I know not; to answer him regularly I am afraid is an undertaking too big for me, and a little skirmishing which might have done very well at first, comes with an ill grace now. I wish you were here to consult, perhaps I may send it for your advice. (Qtd in Rodgers 210)54

Keenly attuned to the importance of kairos, Barbauld regards physical separation as further impediment to a timely rejoinder: “I wish you were here.” My emphasis underscores the importance Barbauld places on being together, physically, in order for the collaborative relationship truly to thrive—to achieve its greatest potential. Although they had managed to achieve an innovative collaborative tactic in spite of physical distance, the logistical coordination and improvisation must have been both mentally and physically taxing. Had John been living in London and not Yarmouth when he asked Anna about responding to Burke, perhaps we might have seen a companion piece to A Vindication of the Rights of Men. We can only speculate. But by 1793 John and his family, having left Yarmouth the year before, had resettled in London and were thus once again practically neighbors with Anna: “The near and dear connections whom he had quitted with regret six years before,” writes Lucy Aikin, and to whom he seemed to be returning from a tedious exile, received him and his with open arms; and Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld, now settled in Hampstead, were added to the number. The common attraction of the metropolis had also brought within its sphere several old and valued friends from whom he had long been separated; especially Dr. Priestley and Mr. Wakefield, who were at this time resident at Hackney and engaged as tutors in the new dissenting college there, which had been established as a successor to the Warrington one; and in which Dr. Aikin’s eldest son was now a student. (Memoir 90–91)

Thus the early 1790s witnessed a rebirth of the Warrington Academy spirit within London, a reunion of friends and family dedicated to continuing the work of dissent.55 And the new era honored the old, as we have seen, by bringing out new editions of the early works, Poems and Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Now, without the barrier of physical separation, and given the Royal Proclamation’s incentive to reenter political debates, John and Anna could collaborate to answer Burke together, through the discourse of “prejudice.” Reviewers of Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation did not miss its democratizing rhetoric, which emphatically places the seat of national power in the hands of the people, a sentiment one reviewer called “perfectly French.”56 With estimable satire, Barbauld allows that the people simply cannot expect to make “scapegoats” of their governmental leaders when the people themselves should be held accountable. Indeed, by ordering a day of penitence, the “lawgivers . . . call upon us to answer for them; they throw the blame where it ought ultimately to rest; that is, where the power ultimately rests” (Works 2.384). Borrowing the cultivating metaphor from her own Hymns in Prose, Barbauld thereafter contends with Burke, in language highly nuanced. Having taken up a seemingly objective stance regarding “public

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functionaries” and “reformers,” the former needing to be regarded with “wholesome suspicion,” she offers a glimpse into the mind of the latter: Reformers, conceiving themselves, as of a more enlightened class than the bulk of mankind, are likewise apt to forget the deference due to them [public functionaries]. Stimulated by newly discovered truths, of which they feel the full force, they are not willing to wait for the gradual spread of knowledge, the subsiding of passion, and the undermining of prejudices. They too contemn a swinish multitude, and aim at an aristocracy of talents. It is indeed their business to attack the prejudices, and to rectify, if they can, the systems of their countrymen, but, in the mean time, to acquiesce to them. It is their business to sow the seed, and let it lie patiently in the bosom of the ground, perhaps for ages—to prepare, not to bring about revolutions. (Works 2.389–90)

Barbauld refers to Burke’s notorious forecast that learning, which should have been satisfied to remain the supporting arm of its superiors, instead “aspired to be the master!” and would therefore suffer an ignominious end: “Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude” (173).57 In another significant allusion, the phrase “an aristocracy of talents,” Barbauld echoes the parable of the master in Matthew 25:15–30, who gives a number of “talents” to his servants: “to each according to his ability” (25:15). Certain political, social, and economic opportunities, by this formula, become monopolized through legal impediments such as the Corporation and Test Acts, not to mention surreptitious acts of blacklisting such as that which cost John his practice in Yarmouth. As one lesson of the parable is that you reap what you sow, the allusion also suggests that the nation loses economically by not extending opportunity to all. Of course, with millennial expectations running high in 1793, the larger lesson of Matthew 25 is likewise applicable: there will be a reckoning, and the nations of the earth, this one in particular, will be made to answer. John’s closing prayer in his discourse takes such consequences seriously: “Inspire us with that spirit of equity and moderation which may render unnecessary those severer visitations of thy Providence, by which thou reformest an obstinately guilty land” (16). Had the passage from Sins of Government excerpted earlier not ended with such a stubbornly ambiguous clause about the mission of reformers—“to prepare, not to bring about revolutions”—then it would be easier to agree with Helen Braithwaite’s assessment that Barbauld, in her “piety and moderation,” and “constrained by [her] patriotism,” presented a political discourse with “more tempered views” (138). But that last clause resists straightforward explication. On the one hand—if we read a fuller stop in the comma—it seems to disavow anything revolutionary. Yet, even with a complete stop, one might be inclined to ask, “To prepare what, or for what, exactly?” On the other hand, if we read the infinitives as not simply parallel but coordinated, then the clause implies that the current generation of reformers is to prepare the ground for future generations to bring about revolutions. What this ambiguity illustrates is Barbauld’s ability, so masterfully demonstrated

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throughout her political writing, to walk a fine line between radicalism and moderation by balancing on precisely this kind of rhetorical caesura. In part, it is the display of such rhetorical skill, not “tempered views,” that made the pamphlet popular enough to run through four editions in 1793.58 In the respective Addresses of 1790, Aikin and Barbauld appear to have matched a democracy of talents (and genders) to their respective roles in speaking to different audiences; here, the same strategy would account for the virtual absence of antiwar rhetoric in John’s piece as compared to the lengthy anathema in Anna’s. Under the political circumstances of March– April of 1793, it is difficult to imagine any man, let alone someone having already been persecuted like John, making statements such as his sister made in this stunningly contemporary excerpt from Sins: Of late years, indeed, we have known none of the calamities of war in our own country but the wasteful expense of it; and sitting aloof from those circumstances of personal provocation, which in some measure might excuse its fury, we have calmly voted slaughter and merchandized destruction—so much blood and tears for so many rupees, or dollars, or ingots. Our wars have been wars of cool calculating interest, as free from hatred as from love of mankind; the passions which stir the blood have had no share in them. We devote a certain number of men to perish on land and sea, and the rest of us sleep sound, and, protected in our usual occupations, talk of the events of war as what diversifies the flat uniformity of life. We should, therefore, do well to translate this word war into language more intelligible to us. When we pay our army and our navy estimates, let us set down—so much for killing, so much for maiming, so much for making widows and orphans, so much for bringing famine upon a district, so much for corrupting citizens and subjects into spies and traitors, . . . so much for letting loose the demons of fury, rapine, and lust, within the fold of cultivated society, and giving to the brutal ferocity of the most ferocious, its full scope and range of invention. (Works 2.400–1)59

Combining a deftness for scathing satire and the latitude extended to her as a woman attacking the war, Anna’s was the perfect voice for this denunciation. Undertaken by a man, such a critique surely would have called into question his patriotism and willingness to defend the nation.60 Even a comparatively tempered argument such as Dr. James Currie’s Letter, Commercial and Political, Addressed to the Rt. Hon. William Pitt, published the same year and also running through four editions, brought the author “popular odium” once his identity was revealed.61 “Principles, such as I have been recommending,” writes Anna in closing, “are not the work of a day; they are not to be acquired by any formal act of worship, or manual of devotion adapted to the exigency; and it will little avail us, that we have stood here, as a nation, before the Lord, if, individually, we do not remember that we are always so” (Works 2.412). It goes without saying that both John’s and Anna’s 1793 discourses took issue with setting aside a special day for the purpose of religious ceremony; in light of the other, more important issues, however, this one scarcely receives mention. Still, both arguments against the Royal Proclamation rest on the fundamental

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proposition that such an edict is not only inefficacious but also unlawful. Thus, although virtually an afterthought, it is appropriate that Anna close her essay with this wonderfully understated reminder that true piety knows no rank among days—the cornerstone upon which both pamphlets raise their arguments. It is fitting, moreover, that in doing so she comes full circle by echoing once again Milton’s Treatise of Civil Power: “It will be sufficient in this place to say no more of Christian libertie, then that it sets us free not only from the bondage of those ceremonies, but also from the forcible imposition of those circumstances, place and time in the worship of God” (YP 7: 263–64).

* * * The Warrington stage of the Barbauld-Aikin relationship produced the intimacies and habits of mind that would guide responsive collaboration during subsequent stages. During the reform and education chapter of their collaborative life, one work might represent a prologue to another, or two works might responsively complement each other. In 1793, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation and Food for National Penitence complemented not only each other but also Milton’s 1659 Treatise on Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes. To label the period from 1774 to 1802 the “reform and education” stage of the Aikin-Barbauld relationship is of course to generate a false impression of discreteness, for the concerns of reform and education permeated Anna’s and John’s thought and writing throughout their lives. To use that label is also to be somewhat redundant, for the writing aimed at reform was also meant to educate audiences; that written to educate young persons carried with it the corollary aim of social reform. Neither Aikin nor Barbauld ever wrote with just one audience in mind, and indeed their longevity in the world of letters is attributable in part to the range of readers to whom their works appealed. Republication efforts materially diversified their audiences, too, as in 1792, when new audiences could enjoy both Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and the final edition of Anna’s Poems, which included the immensely popular “Epistle to William Wilberforce.” That same year also marked the arrival of the first volume of Evenings at Home, which means that in 1792 potentially new audiences in every living generation could—and undoubtedly did—enjoy works authored by Aikin and Barbauld, works that advertised even more works by Aikin and Barbauld. The following chapter explores the development of an aesthetic, eventually cultivated by Barbauld in her children’s works, whose theoretical beginnings can be located in the responsively collaborative Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose.

Chapter 2

“Th e A i k i n S c hool”: A dop t i ng a n A e st h e t ic

To my sister and yourself Mr. Barbauld and I have a request to make, in which, though perhaps it may be rather singular, we are very seriously in earnest; and therefore, whether you grant or deny, we hope you will neither laugh at us nor take it amiss. Without further preface, it is this. You enjoy a blessing Providence has hitherto denied to us,—that of children: you have already several, and seem very likely to have a numerous family. As to ourselves, having been thus long without prospect of any, it is, to say the least, very uncertain whether that hope, which most I believe form when they marry, will ever be fulfilled. Some, indeed, say to us, that considering how large a family we have of others’ children, ’tis rather fortunate we have none of our own. And true it is, that employed as we are in the business of education, we have many of the cares and some of the pleasures of a parent; but the latter very imperfectly. We have them not early enough to contract the fondness of affection which early care alone can give; we have them not long enough to see the fruit of our culture; and we have not enough the disposal of them to follow our own plans and schemes in their education. We wish for one who might wholly be ours: and we think that if a child was made ours by being given into our hands, we could love it, and make it love us so well, as to supply in a great measure the want of the real relationship . . . Our request then, in short, is this: that you will permit us to adopt one of your children; which of them, we leave to you . . . Now I know not what to say to induce you to make us such a gift. Perhaps you will entirely deny it; and then we must acquiesce: for I am sensible that it is not a small thing we ask; nor can it be easy for a parent to part with a child. This I would say, from a number, one may more easily be spared . . . Now, my dear brother and sister, if you consent, give us which of your boys you please . . . only let him be healthy, inoculated, and as young as you can possibly venture him to undertake the journey. This last circumstance is indispensable: for if he were not quite young, we should not gain over him the influence, we could not

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I

n the summer of 1773 John and Anna Aikin, still at Warrington, appeared for the first time as coauthors, and although the title page of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose shows “J. and A. L. Aikin” on the byline, the individual pieces are unsigned, and the authors made no effort in their lifetimes publicly to identify who wrote what. Needless to say, this led to more than one case of misattribution. An anecdote related by Samuel Rogers in his Table Talk (1856) tells of Charles James Fox (MP, 1768–1774) meeting John Aikin at a dinner party and offering praise for the collection: “I am greatly pleased with your Miscellaneous Pieces, Mr. Aikin,” said Fox . . . Aikin bowed. “I particularly admire,” continued Fox, “your essay, Against Inconsistency in our Expectations.” “That,” replied Aikin, “is my sister’s.” “I like much,” returned Fox, “your essay, On Monastic Institutions.” “That,” answered Aikin, “is also my sister’s.” Fox thought it best to say no more about the book. (Qtd in Rodgers 61)

The same misattribution has often occurred regarding one especially popular entry, Sir Bertrand, a Fragment—a blend of gothic, romance, and fantasy—that was reprinted in various contemporary collections, including Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader (1789), and that by 1806 had become so popular that Sydney Owenson could refer to it in The Wild Irish Girl as a common cultural reference point.1 This, in spite of Owenson mistakenly substituting “Sir Bertram” for “Sir Bertrand,” a slip of memory that has left the reference untouched by editorial notation. The table of contents in Lucy Aikin’s 1825 edition of Barbauld’s Works makes clear which essays her aunt wrote, but that has not prevented continued error. Two hundred years after the appearance of the first edition of Miscellaneous Pieces, Penguin books included Sir Bertrand in its Great British Tales of Terror, naming Anna as its author. Recent editors of Wollstonecraft’s work also cite “Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Aikin)” as the author, but according to Lucy Aikin, Sir Bertrand was the brainchild of her father (Memoir 19).2 Does it matter who wrote Sir Bertrand? As I see it, it matters only insofar as it sheds light on the egalitarian ethos exhibited by the Aikins, for receiving proper credit was never their concern. Later editions of Miscellaneous Pieces could have cleared up the confusion, but the individual entries remained unsigned. What this points to is a model of shared authorship in which interchangeability of identity is completely acceptable, if not simply expected: a collaborative model that is at once noncompetitive and egalitarian, where the private sphere remains something of an enclave into which prodding like Fox’s appears almost indecorous. That authorial identity remained a secret suggests that the collaborative framework offered a way of keeping the private sphere private, even as a work ventured into the public realm.

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The most substantial and valuable consideration of Miscellaneous Pieces to date is Daniel White’s “The ‘Joineriana’: Anna Barbauld, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Dissenting Public Sphere,” in which he rightly contends that by “universalizing the local character of the authors’ religious and social community,” the collection “seeks to establish the nation’s contemporary ‘natural’ character” (521). Whereas several of the pieces, as White demonstrates, facilitate the “diffusion” of “tempered Dissenting values” across and through “national culture,” and thereby “leaven” that culture, two essays not discussed by White stand out as literary criticism primarily concerned with aesthetics. One advantage of now knowing who wrote the individual entries in the Miscellaneous Pieces is being able to consider how separate essays ref lect a collaborative dialogue, and two essays in question are complementary in this manner: “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (with Sir Bertrand), written by John; and “An Enquiry into those K inds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations” (with A Tale), by Anna. Responding both to Burke and to gothic trends in contemporary fiction, the essays enter debates regarding aesthetic theory and sensibility. And though they approach a similar topic from different theoretical angles, the essays express through formal similitude an intellectual solidarity. What John’s essay leaves untouched—the sentimental—Anna’s subsequently examines in detail, simultaneously accounting for concepts of the gothic already discussed by John. The overarching concern of these essays is the effect of generic styles on readers: what (if any) aesthetic mode carries the utilitarian potential to lead readers from pain to pity to action? Anna’s final answer to this question is that no such mode exists, and in her later essay “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments” (1775), she begins to lay the groundwork for her own solution, which appears in the natural language and associative didacticism of her children’s works. So while the two pieces are in dialogue, they also point outside themselves toward something still to be developed. Thus the collaboration is itself impelled toward further elaboration and development. As a component of this collaborative design, “Sir Bertrand,” the narrative experiment designed to illustrate its foregoing theory, demonstrates something even more revealing, for it may be read as a psychological journey in the spirit of Poe, in which the allegorized imagination seeks its own double, a doppelgänger manifested in the female half of Aikin’s (and the overall work’s) collaborative consciousness. John’s essay opens by explaining what it is not interested in: neither “the exercise of our benevolent feelings, as called forth by the view of human afflictions” nor the sympathetic sensibility that allows painful feelings to be “softened and alleviated” into pleasure. His concern is with pain—the attenuated pain of suspenseful reading and the acute pain of “terror” when the mind is suddenly impressed with what he calls “natural horror”—something corporeal and bloody, like the “corpse just slaughtered” found in Smollet’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (126).3 Yet there is another type of terror contrasted to this one: “the well-wrought scenes of artificial terror which are

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formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination. A strange and unexpected event awakens the mind, and keeps it on the stretch; and where the agency of invisible beings is introduced . . . our imagination, darting forth, explores with rapture the new world which is laid open to its view, and rejoices in the expansion of its powers . . . And the the pain of terror is lost in amazement. (125)

The first type of terror is simply too lurid, too base; it lacks imaginative refinement. It finds its parallel in Anna’s discussion of abject poverty, scenes of which inspire disgust rather than compassion: “instead of melting into pity,” she writes, “we turn away with aversion” (204). To reach the climax of either type of terror, John observes, one must first be willing to experience the “actual pain” of anticipation: “The pain of suspense, and the irresistible desire of satisfying curiosity, when once raised, will account for our eagerness to go quite through an adventure, though we suffer actual pain during the whole course of it” (123). Once the anticipation is ended, the result is not, in agreement with Burke, pleasurable.4 It is a sharper pain, but “we rather chuse,” writes Aikin, “to suffer the smart pang of a violent emotion than the uneasy craving of an unsatisfied desire” (123). Total submission to authorial control, in other words, is painful. Pleasure, on the other hand, is achieved when our own imagination, superadded to that of the fantastical narrative, “darts forth” and fills in the spaces of the unknown, “rejoicing in the expansion of its powers.” Here, finally, “passion and fancy co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement” (125). As Aikin turns to his explicatory narrative, then, he implicitly invites the reader to activate his or her own imagination. The curious fragment of “Sir Bertrand” serves as an allegory of the imaginative faculty just described. Not only does Aikin attempt to justify his theory through the combination of anticipatory and fantastic elements; he enacts the readerly and imaginative experiences just discussed through Sir Bertrand’s pursuit of the fanciful light that “awakens the [reader’s] mind and keeps it on the stretch” (125).5 Promising some kind of revelation, the “dim twinkling light” leads Sir Bertrand on a “painful march,” at the end of which he is confronted with “a moated ditch surrounding the place from which the light proceeded,” a barrier where the reader and Sir Bertrand must stop until the imagination’s illuminating rays set the narrative back in motion. Its arrival is immediate: and by a momentary glimpse of moon-light he had a full view of a large antique mansion, with turrets at the corners, and an ample porch in the center . . . A draw-bridge, with a ruinous gate-way at each end, led to the court before the building—He entered, and instantly the light, which proceeded from a window in one of the turrets, glided along and vanished; at the same moment the moon sunk beneath a black cloud, and the night was darker than ever. (129)

The consequent stasis affects the narrative, nearly threatening its premature end as Sir Bertrand contemplates turning around: “But shame stopt his flight;

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and urged by honour, and a resistless desire of finishing the adventure, he returned” (131). His perseverance, like that of the reader caught up in the suspense, is rewarded with yet another light—a “pale bluish flame”—that again moves things apace. As with Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse,” in which the imagination heedlessly pushes itself across increasingly precarious thresholds, even in the face of countermanding reason, so Sir Bertrand pushes forth, pursuing the blue flame through corridors and winding staircases until finding himself faced with the lady on the bier: the imagination’s other, indeed the collaborative consciousness’s other half. Yet the mirror effect here is even more complicated than, for example, that found in Poe’s “William Wilson.” On the one hand, Aikin the critic is doubled in Aikin the story teller, but on the other, both Sir Bertrand and Aikin are doubled in the imaginative figure who leaves us suspended in anticipation of her never-spoken words. By earlier citing lines from “Il Penseroso” that allude to Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, Aikin foreshadows the kind of unfulfilled anticipatory pleasure he is to generate in “Sir Bertrand,” a fragment complete in its seeming incompleteness. The ends of imagination here lead to a collaborative climax: the kiss that sunders this narrative’s foundation and leaves us awaiting a response—the rest of the tale, so to speak. The female voice that replies is Anna’s in her complementary critical piece, “An Inquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite agreeable Sensations.” Thus John’s treatise signals its need for a complement, at its beginning by explaining what the critical essay will not talk about, and at its end by leaving the reader anticipating closure through a woman’s voice. Whereas “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror with Sir Bertrand, a Fragment” explores the internalization of emotion produced by the gothic (whether painful or amazing), “An Inquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite agreeable Sensations” sets out to contrast that inward impulsion with the effluence of emotion associated with sentimentalism’s inducement of pity. Early in the essay, Anna distinguishes the physical responses to pain and pity: “They are two distinct sensations, marked by very different external expression. One causes the nerves to tingle, the flesh to shudder, and the whole countenance to be thrown into strong contractions; the other relaxes the frame, opens the features, and produces tears” (193). Gothic internalizes emotions. The unhealthy consequence, as Anna’s description points out, is a kind of seizure. Sentimentalism externalizes emotions, generating tears, and, ideally, producing a selfless giving forth in philanthropic gestures. Yet each mode is a kind of pornography that supports the selfish and dissipating practice of emotional onanism. And this, ultimately, is the problem Anna attempts to remedy through her own educative aesthetic. Following Aristotle, Anna argues that representations of distress, in order to inspire “love and pity,” must be tempered, on the one hand, with an elevating quality—some “moral excellence.” On the other hand, such depictions cannot focus on characters “too perfect” in their moral inflexibility. Characters must possess fallibility—“something of helplessness and imperfection”—in order to inspire “love and pity” (207). By considering the “management of these latter emotions,” the essay moves beyond Aristotle to utilitarian concerns, and here is where we encounter paradox. First,

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“sensibility does not increase with exercise,” and the essay culminates in this dictum: Nothing is more dangerous than to let virtuous impressions of any kind pass through the mind without producing their proper effect. The awakenings of remorse, virtuous shame and indignation, the glow of moral approbation, if they do not lead to action, grow less and less vivid every time they recur, till at length the mind grows absolutely callous. (211–12)

Here Anna offers an explanation for the emergence of what Burke, in his discussion of pain and pleasure, calls the absence of both: “indifference” (Enquiry 33). But as her essay provocatively suggests, indifference is not the result of a simple absence; it is the product of improper emotional repetition. Habituation to pleasure (or pain, for that matter) actually produces indifference, even to the point of insensitivity. But there is yet an even more striking contradiction. On the one hand, depictions of distress cannot be too realistic if they are to inspire pity; on the other, if faced with too many unrealistic representations, readers are not likely to be moved to pity when faced with real misery: “Plays and romances do not improve our humanity,” she writes, “[because] they lead us to require a certain elegance of manners and delicacy of virtue which is not often found with poverty, ignorance, and meanness” (212). However, if the writer is “to make pity pleasing, the object of it must not in any view be disagreeable to the imagination,” else our compassion will likely “give way to contempt and disgust” (205). By exposing this paradox, Anna essentially refutes any claim about the humanizing virtues of sentimentalism and thereby denies its status as philanthropy’s literary mode. How, then, could the philanthropic, reformist impulse be promulgated through literature? What form and what style would best suit the purpose? In many ways, Anna’s lengthy career is both a case study about and an answer to that question. Her first and last politically minded poems, “Corsica” (ca. 1769) and “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem” (1812), serve as bookends to a career focused on political and social reform. In between we find the ballad-letter of “The Mouse’s Petition,” the heroic “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” the unprecedented Hymns in Prose, the short stories of Evenings at Home, the political pamphlets, and the essays of social criticism. Barbauld’s was a mind ever in search of forms through which she could communicate to disparate audiences, often simultaneously. As the Warrington stage of her career came to an end, Anna turned her focus almost immediately to children and to a natural, easily remembered style whose associationist underpinnings were to instill benevolence for a lifetime. That style, which served as her answer to sentimentalism’s failure, matured in Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), a work constructed on a model of responsive reading, a collaborative model that emphasizes the communal role in individual development—and one that recalls the responsive patterns of Barbauld-Aikin collaboration. As the summer of 1774 approached, so too did the end of life together at Warrington, and after moving apart, Anna and John would rely more heavily

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on correspondence to sustain their collaborative dialogue. Lucy Aikin notes the end of the Warrington stage in her father’s Memoir: The marriage of Miss Aikin, in the summer of 1774, to the Rev. Mr. Barbauld, and her consequent removal to Palgrave, in Suffolk, where a life of active occupation awaited her, necessarily dissolved that kind of literary partnership which subsisted between the brother and sister, and to which not only congeniality of tastes and pursuits, but the habit of daily intercourse, was essential. The pain of separation was severely felt by both: but the resource of frequent and intimate correspondence, animated by occasional meetings, remained. (20)

One “kind of literary partnership” had ended, but another was about to begin; nothing symbolized that new relationship and the desire to preserve the intimacy of siblinghood quite like Anna’s adoption of John’s son Charles in 1777, a singular act of familial collaboration that intensified the bond and kept them connected, in a sense, even while they were separated.

I In a letter to her brother in 1774 Anna, now Mrs. Barbauld, writes, “I am afraid my poor child is tossing upon the waves, for I have not heard yet of its arrival in London; and I cannot help feeling all a parent’s anxiety for its fate and establishment in the world” (Works 2.4–5). The “poor child” to which she refers is her selection from the Psalms of David and the Book of Job, Devotional Pieces, then on their way to being published by Joseph Johnson.6 On September 9, 1775, still without any news of their publication, Anna wrote another letter to John that reveals her self-effacing and keen sense of humor: I believe the Devotional Pieces have met with the fate of poor Jonah, and have been swallowed up by some whale,—perhaps out of pity and compassion, to save them in his jaws from the more terrible teeth of the critics. St. Anthony, I think, preached to the fishes; perhaps I may have the same honour. I should as soon hope to inspire a porpoise with devotion, as a turtle-eater. (Works 2.6–7)

Published later that year, Devotional Pieces includes Barbauld’s prefatory essay “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments,” an inquiry outlining philosophical and aesthetic concerns that would inform Barbauld’s future work, especially the children’s literature that occupied her creative energies during the following six years. Theoretical underpinning for both works derives substantially from “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste.” Yet the philosophical and aesthetic concerns that inform “Thoughts” reach back even further, as we have seen, to Anna’s response to the gothic and sentimental modes in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Understanding the larger intellectual discussion in which Barbauld participates requires placing “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste” and the accompanying Devotional Pieces in the context of emerging eighteenth-century theories of language

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and poetic expression. It becomes apparent in such a context that Barbauld continues the discussions of Bishop Lowth and Sir William Jones concerning sacred poetry and theories of language. While looking back to Lowth and Jones, Barbauld also anticipates aspects of the poetic theory Wordsworth outlines in the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. We will later see traces of a similar critical stance in Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777), a work marked by Anna’s input. Borrowing definitions offered in John Gregory’s A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (1765), Barbauld begins her essay on the “Devotional Taste” by recapitulating Gregory’s three views of religion (as “a system of opinions . . . a habit . . . [or] an affair of sentiment”); then, leaving Gregory behind, she pursues the somewhat radical implications of religion as an aesthetic taste. Barbauld’s restated definition of religion uses terms similarly associated with poetry: “Religion,” she writes, “may . . . be considered as a taste, an affair of sentiment and feeling, and in this sense it is properly called Devotion. “Its seat is in the imagination and the passions, and it has its source in that relish for the sublime, the vast, and the beautiful, by which we taste the charms of poetry and other compositions that address our finer feelings” (Works 2.232). Barbauld’s overarching concern is the deleterious effect on devotion of systematic, scientific enquiry into the nature of God, a practice that was prone (i) to abstract God into the expansive and impassive mechanical laws of the universe and (ii) to put religious belief to the test of science. In attempting to follow the ever-expanding complexity of the system over which the deity presides, “our imagination cannot here keep pace with our reason, and the Sovereign of nature seems ever further removed from us” (Works 2.238). Barbauld viewed this as a kind of murder by dissection, the victims being God (as a loving, living presence) and devotion, which, overawed by too much sublimity, shrinks inward, “confounded at its own insignificance” (238). As the theory behind Devotional Pieces, Barbauld’s essay drew stiff criticism, even from within the community of contemporary Dissenters, some of whom, like Joseph Priestley, were close friends. “Her own sensibility and the warmth of her imagination,” wrote a reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine, “seem to have betrayed her into the same error which formerly deluded the refined and elegant Fenelon” (581).7 Critics faulted not only Barbauld’s tendency toward Fénelonian mysticism but also what they deemed to be her illegitimate correlation of religious devotion and love. Here she anticipates and responds to such criticism: It will not be amiss to mention here, a reproach which has been cast upon devotional writers, that they are apt to run into the language of love. Perhaps the charge would be full as just, had they said that Love borrows the language of Devotion . . . Nor is the likeness to be wondered at, since both have their source in the love of beauty and excellence. Both are exceeding prone to superstition, and apt to run into romantic excesses. Both are nourished by poetry and music . . . Both carry the mind out of itself . . . (Works 2.245–6)

Priestley’s most heated disagreement concerned this passage: “If there be any persons who apply the language of ‘profound adoration’ to a human

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being, I consider it as a most abominable practice, as nothing less than direct impiety.”8 As a philosophical treatise, however, “Thoughts” earned credible praise. For William Enfield, a longtime friend of the Warrington community who reviewed the essay in the Monthly Review, Barbauld’s essay initiated a “philosophical examination of the natural influence of religious principles and ideas on the human mind.” Applauding Barbauld’s “originality of conception and elegance of expression,” Enfield avers that the topic had “seldom been treated with [such] philosophic precision” (“Review” 419, 420). “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste” was fittingly reprinted in the third edition of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1792), since it continues the line of inquiry regarding sensibility begun in “An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations.” When Barbauld concludes the earlier work with the moral precept, “Nothing is more dangerous than to let virtuous impressions of any kind pass through the mind without producing their proper effect” (1773, 227), the proper effect meant philanthropic reformist action. Here, however, in the context of acting on aroused devotional sentiment, the proper effect was to be prayer or devotional writing: expressions of thanksgiving, affirmation, penitence, or praise. Impassioned expressions of devotional taste, however, drew criticism and condescension from the scientifically pious, something that raises Barbauld’s ire in the essay. “Strong reasoning powers and quick feelings,” she contends, “do not often unite in the same person, [and] men of a scientific turn seldom lay their hearts open to impression” (Works 2.236). And as Barbauld sees it, those who are most inclined to such condescension fortify their beliefs with scientific proofs only to lose touch with a passionate sense of religious wonder, the consequence of which is detached hearts whose devotional spirit slowly decays: they find their “devotion grown weaker when their faith was better grounded” (Works 2.236). Barbauld thus perceives a threefold challenge: to bring God back into the everyday experience of man; to encourage more natural and emotive forms of prayer; and to instill in believers a devotional taste that will “continue vivid even in that uncomfortable season of life when some of the passions are extinct, when imagination is dead, and the heart begins to contract within itself” (Works 2.234). Barbauld’s response to the first of these challenges conveys an aesthetic attitude specifically opposed to that “zeal of a systematic spirit” that expresses its materialist, atomistic designs in “the operation of general laws.” She blames “philosophers” for “[tracing] the great outline of nature but neglecting the colouring which gives warmth and beauty to the piece” (Works 2.239). Barbauld’s vision is one in which sublimity is warmed and domesticated—indeed feminized—by beauty.9 Employing poetry and painting as analogies, Barbauld places religious expression in the hands of the artist: As in poetry it is not vague and general description, but a few striking circumstances clearly related and strongly worked up—as in a landscape it is not such vast and extensive range of country as pains the eye to stretch to its limits, but a beautiful well-defined prospect, which gives the most pleasure—so neither

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To employ M.H. Abrams’ famous metaphors, because God’s image is becoming mirrored in (and thus alienated by) abstruse, systematic theories of physical science, Barbauld reclaims and familiarizes that image with the warm lamplight of imagination. Perhaps the best example of this in Barbauld’s own writing is an extended simile found in the fifth hymn of Hymns in Prose. Inverting the hierarchy typically found in such similes, Barbauld deftly casts God in the domestic hues of maternity: As the mother moveth about the house with her finger on her lips, and stilleth every little noise, that her infant be not disturbed; as she draweth the curtains around its bed, and shutteth out the light from under its tender eyes; so God draweth the curtains of darkness around us; so he maketh all things to be hushed and still, that his large family may sleep in peace. (SPP 244)

This marks but one early instance in which, as G.J. Barker-Benfield observes, Barbauld presents a “feminized version [of] her God” (274). Yet because the scene here is also familial, it recalls not only the circumstances in which Barbauld had been living and writing; it also reflects the same domestic tableau in which the parent, having just read Hymns to her children, is now tending to the bedtime routine. To address the second challenge she faced—encouraging more emotive forms of prayer—Barbauld turns to the language of devotion, arguing that it must convey the emotions of the speaker. Too many sermons were composed with an air of analytical detachment, leaving them void of real feeling and therefore ineffectual, either in moving auditors or moving God. “A prayer strictly philosophical must be a cold and dry composition,” maintains Barbauld; furthermore, “from an over-anxious fear of admitting any expression that is not strictly proper, we are apt to reject all warm and pathetic imagery and in short, every thing that strikes upon the heart and the senses” (Works 2.239). Instead of avoiding expressive language, written or spoken, we ought to follow the example of the scriptures, she contends, by “accommodating the language of prayer to common conceptions,” [for] “it is safer to trust to our genuine feelings . . . than to any metaphysical subtleties” (Works 2.240). The turn here is inward—to the subjective, the passions, the imagination. And Barbauld’s benevolent God, handed down to her from the dissenting tradition of Francis Hutcheson,10 will overlook “an inaccurate expression” in favor of the honest emotion with which it is conveyed. By opposing the “systematic spirit” of the philosopher and arguing that devotional taste, being essentially poetic, finds its proper expression through emotive, natural language, Barbauld aligns her small treatise with Bishop Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, published in 1753. Lowth praises the sacred poetry of the Hebrews for its passionate language

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and its openly expressive quality. “Instead of disguising the secret feelings of the author, it lays them quite open to public view . . . All the affections and emotions of the soul, its sudden impulses, its hasty sallies and irregularities, are conspicuously displayed” (1.312). Drawing on the quality of the Psalms, Lowth argues that emotive language is properly the language of poetry, which he contrasts with the rational, staid language of reason: “In a word, reason speaks literally, the passions poetically” (1.309). Lowth’s argument about poetic language therefore participates in a tradition reaching back to Sidney’s Apology, in which only the poet’s language inspires the moral life.11 Consistent with this morally utilitarian idea, Barbauld intended the selections to be read as “acts of devotion.” As for the beauty of the poetry itself, she concurs with Lowth. Her brief introduction to the compilation praises the Psalms of David, those “most beautiful compositions” in which “the boldest figures of the high Eastern poetry are united with a simplicity which makes them intelligible to the common ear” (SPP 232– 33).12 As holder of the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, Bishop Lowth was primarily concerned with poetic theory and the uses of language, which places him in the intellectual genealogy leading to Wordsworth and Coleridge.13 Yet Barbauld’s own concerns with language and her turn to Eastern poetry may have found a more immediate precursor in the philologist Sir William Jones. In 1772 Jones published translations of Arabic, Persian, and Indian verse along with an “Essay on the Arts Called Imitative.”14 “Poetry,” writes Jones, “was originally no more than a strong and animated expression of the human passions . . . In defining what true poetry ought to be . . . we have described what it really was among the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs and Persians” (Works 10.372–3). His examples include the Psalms of David and the Song of Solomon, both of which epitomize for Jones what poetry should be: lyric and emotive, not descriptive (imitative) and rational. By advocating an emotive language of devotion in which the internal is made external, then, Barbauld participates, however tangentially, in the lateeighteenth-century’s intellectual shift from mimetic to emotional theories of artistic expression. The aesthetic vision she briefly outlines thus accords with the poetic project forwarded a quarter century later by Wordsworth, who turned to the “simple and unelaborated expressions” of rural life as the proper language of good poetry, famously defined in the 1800 Preface as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Lyrical Ballads 245–46). Barbauld’s final words on the issue of devotional language underscore this last parallel: “In compositions addressed to the heart, let us give freer scope to the language of affections, and the overflowing of a warm and generous disposition” (Works 2.240). There remained for Barbauld the final challenge, arguably the most important of the three, of how to make the expression memorable, how to cultivate such devotional taste as would continue to nurture the soul well into that “uncomfortable season of life” so that the spirit of the child would ever reside in the heart of the adult. Her answer culminated in the vision she presented in her most enduring work, Hymns in Prose. Inextricably allied with that aesthetic vision is an underlying distaste for religious and philosophical

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disputation—that “distinctly male behavior,” as McCarthy and Kraft put it, that is fueled by intellectual competitiveness. The egalitarian, noncompetitive spirit that infused Anna’s relationship with her brother was in turn fueled by this aversion; moreover, the relationship’s egalitarian ethos proved instrumental in allowing the collaboration to flourish even after they moved apart. We have already seen that Anna’s half-joking fears about her poor child finding its way into the jaws of the critics were borne out in the Gentleman’s Magazine. A letter written to John in the fall of 1775 reveals that another unfavorable review had appeared to which her brother had written a defensive response: I thank you, my dear brother, for so kindly drawing your pen in my defence. An admirer of Popery! Heaven help their wise heads! when it was one of my earliest aversions. But this I see, that in religious and political affairs if a person does not enlist under a party, he is sure to meet with censure from party. I had not seen the charge till I had your letter: we had had the Review too, but I had read it carelessly. If they do not insert your letter, I should be glad to see it. (Works 2.8)15

While John’s letter, unfortunately nonextant, was a gesture of family support that continued to link brother and sister, it would be a different kind of familial collaboration that would give rise to two of Barbauld’s important children’s works. The same letter in which Anna mentions her poor child reveals that John and his wife are immediately expecting the birth of another child. Anna tells John, “I hope I am by this time richer by a nephew or niece: if it is a boy, I claim it; if a girl, I am content to stay for the next” (Works 2.4). Anna and Rochemont Barbauld were either unable to conceive or simply anxious about the prospects, and little over a year after their wedding, Anna made, this time “very seriously in earnest,” the “rather singular” request for adoption reprinted in the epigraph to this chapter: “Now, my dear brother and sister, if you consent, give us which of your boys you please” (Works 2.13). The year Joseph Johnson gave birth to Anna’s poor child, 1775, also saw the arrival of John and Martha’s son Charles, born in August. Nearly two years later, in 1777, John and Martha granted Anna’s request. Although both Anna and John had entered conjugal familial bonds, Anna employs the terms of the consanguineal family—“my dear brother and sister”—in her adoption request, a rhetorical choice that, despite its conventionality, emphasizes familial intimacy and a shared responsibility. In 1777, the Barbaulds assumed custody of Charles Rochemont Aikin. Now charged with raising and educating her adopted son, Anna could put into practice some of the theory she had outlined in “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste”; indeed, adopting Charles meant adopting a new aesthetic, and the initial result was Lessons for Children, Barbauld’s first educational primer. As Lucy Aikin relates, Lessons was composed “for the use of her little Charles” (Works 1.xxix), and indeed, “Charles’s little book,” as Anna described it in a letter to John, is the work wherein she developed the simple, measured prose, often written in the cadences of responsive reading, that was later to become the

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hallmark of Hymns in Prose, similarly written for Charles’s benefit. Lessons would teach him to read; Hymns would instill in his young mind a lifetime’s worth of religious sentiment. Both Lessons and Hymns, then, represent the literary offspring of an intimacy between brother and sister that mirrors a marriage. With the publication of these works, the private sphere of the family became public, as a nation of readers vicariously participated in the raising of little Charles.16 Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose were just two of the works in which Barbauld combined her aesthetic theory with a reformist ideology in order to help generate a new model of male subjectivity.

II In a letter to Anna Barbauld in 1804, Richard Edgeworth, mentioning that he came across a piece of Lucy Aikin’s writing in London, “five years ago,” comments that Lucy “does not disgrace the Aikin school” (qtd in Le Breton 94). Edgeworth’s use of the phrase “the Aikin school” should alert us that by the early nineteenth century this family was a virtual literary industry unto itself.17 Yet the Aikin school is likewise applicable to the body of children’s literature produced by John and Anna, work whose reformism is deeply influenced by a dissenting model of domestic education in addition to the practical experience both siblings gained as teachers. It has been suggested that Barbauld’s work in this vein serves the ends of patriarchy by modeling restricted spheres of action and influence for women.18 Though her writing was undoubtedly influential to men and women alike, the majority of her children’s works actually display a reformist pedagogy aimed not at girls, as Carol Shiner-Wilson argues, but at boys, with whom Barbauld, through teaching at the Palgrave school and raising Charles, was personally most familiar.19 What is more, Barbauld became thoroughly invested in the idea that lasting social change could come about only after creating—one might even say domesticating—a new kind of male subject: a compassionate yet hard-working middle-class Christian who stood in stark contrast to those “profligates of rank,” who, in Wollstonecraft’s memorable phrasing, had been “emasculated by hereditary effeminacy.”20 We can discern, even in her early writing, Barbauld’s impulse toward humanizing and generating compassion in the male reader. “The Mouse’s Petition,” for example, first printed in the 1773 Poems, is an early example of Barbauld’s deployment of what Mitzi Myers calls “gendered codes” in a humanitarian critique of social hierarchies. “The animal victim,” writes Myers, “was especially adaptable to women’s concerns and their critique of masculine values” (“Of Mice” 275).21 Incarcerated in a cage and awaiting subjection to scientific experimentation by Joseph Priestley, the mouse enters its plea not to let “strong oppressive force / A free-born mouse detain!” Thus Barbauld’s mouse voices the plight of the oppressed; the cage’s “wires replicate broader cultural constraints, entombing the mouse, but also setting it free to speak its mind and question the hierarchical givens of everyday existence” (276). As with various anthropomorphized animals of this period, Barbauld’s mouse serves to inculcate a humanitarian ethic, a

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compassionate frame of mind. A similar poem, “The Dormouse Just Taken,” appears in Charlotte Smith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry, as does “The Robin’s Petition,” with its explicit echo of Barbauld’s title.22 The lessons taught by these sundry animals reinforced the development of a moral sensibility expressly opposed not only to various forms of oppression but also to the leisure class’s sport of hunting—a moral sensibility fit for a middle-class Christian ideal of masculinity that stressed, as Davidoff and Hall carefully delineate, “moral earnestness, the belief in the power of love and a sensitivity to the weak and helpless” (111). Young Charles Rochemont Aikin, his family hoped, would be just such an Englishman. The Lessons written for him were to inculcate “a certain kind of sensibility” (McCarthy, “Mother” 205). On the one hand, Charles learned about “botany, zoology, numbers, [and] change of state in chemistry,” while on the other, he and every other “middleclass child [was also] being prepared to be a poet, at least in sensibility if not practice” (214, 217). Barbauld herself said as much in a letter to John: “Be it known to you that Palgrave seminary will soon abound with poets, even as the green fields abound with grasshoppers” (Works 2.6). As Anna was organizing and arranging the first edition of Lessons, she called on John’s knowledge and experience in printing and publishing to facilitate her vision of the book’s physical properties. She wanted the book to be small but the type to be large. “Charles’s little book is very well, but my idea is not executed in it: I must therefore beg you will print one as soon as you can, on fine paper, on one side only, and more space and a clearer line for the chapters” (2.19). Having already taught her share of school-aged children, she understood their unique requirements; indeed, only a practitioner of education could have articulated the specific material needs of young students. Turning again to John, she asked him to prefix the following advertisement to the work: This little publication was made for a particular child, but the public is welcome to the use of it. It was found that amidst the multitude of books professedly written for children, there is not one adapted to the comprehension of a child from two to three years old . . . Another great defect is, the want of good paper, a clear and large type, and large spaces. Those only who have actually taught young children can be sensible how necessary these assistances are. The eye of a child and of a learner cannot catch, as ours can, a small obscure ill-formed word, amidst a number of others all equally unknown to him. To supply these deficiencies is the object of this book. (2.19–20)

The material aspect of this collaboration, which relied on the support of the in-house printing press of William Eyres, has a familial component worth mentioning. Eyres descended from a family of booksellers, but it was his father John who first ventured into the printing business in Warrington. When William and his brother Thomas inherited the business in 1756, their mother remained active as a bookseller while they ran the printing press.23 Thus in nearly every facet of Aikin-Barbauld literary production we find familial networks of logistical support. John’s subsequent praise of the literary quality of the Lessons underscores the fact that he and Anna discussed this work in correspondence and that Anna, her humility notwithstanding, set out to infuse aesthetic and

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philosophical concepts from “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste” throughout this groundbreaking work of children’s literature: “The little book you have sent for Charles is what a person of real genius alone could have written; and so far from degrading Mr. Eyres press, I sincerely believe it has never been employed about so really useful a work; all its metaphysics, divinity, philosophy, and even poetry, not excepted” (qtd in Ellis 86). John and Anna complemented the humanitarian pedagogical aims of Lessons through their contributions to Evenings at Home. A father in Evenings tells his daughter, for example, that animals of all types are “made to be happy,” and that “we should never abuse them for our mere amusement, nor take away their lives wantonly” (252). John’s contributions to Evenings are virtually indiscernible from those of his sister, except when they betray thinly masked biographical detail.24 When a father speaks in Evenings, it is often to his daughter “Lucy,” as in the Twenty-First Evening’s reading, “Why the Earth Moves Round the Sun.” Thus, Lucy Aikin’s lesson in physics reminds us that Evenings modeled an egalitarian pedagogy derived from John and Anna’s own experience under the tutelage of their dissenting father. Moreover, it foregrounds the biographical reality of these works, as both Lucy and Charles were the actual, historical recipients of such lessons. Lucy Aikin recalls the impact of the Lessons on her development in her own account of her early life: “Mrs. Barbauld’s . . . ‘Early Lessons’ had prepared the way [for the Hymns], for in them too there dwells the spirit of poetry” (qtd in Ellis 99). Publication of works such as Lessons and Evenings made the private public, thereby modeling a pedagogy and simultaneously raising a nation by teaching its children. The Lessons, as William McCarthy describes them, “keep pace with the actual growth of the historic Charles. Since they presumably originated in real incidents of his and his mother’s life together, they document (in part) Barbauld’s performance as the mother of a small boy” (“Mother” 204). Yet very young children were not the sole focus of Aikin and Barbauld’s educational writing. Indeed, works such as Letters Written from a Father to his Son (Aikin, 1794), The Female Speaker (Barbauld, 1811), Letters to a Young Lady on a Course of English Poetry (Aikin, 1806), and A Legacy for Young Ladies (Barbauld: ed. Lucy Aikin, 1826) all point to serious engagement with audiences of adolescence and young adulthood. What continues to characterize at least some of the writing found within the educational works is the same dialogic pattern we have seen operating in the Dissenting pamphlets (chapter one): a pattern in which individual works mutually support and reinforce each other’s messages. A prime example involves the continuing effort to reclaim and redefine the term prejudice, to rid it of its political and pedagogical tethering to Burke and Rousseau, respectively. The partnering of Anna’s “On Prejudice” (1800) and John’s Letters Written from a Father to his Son (1794) provides an excellent instance of interdependence, as Anna’s essay provides the theoretical base for the superstructure of John’s practical advice. Barbauld’s only public acknowledgment of those scattered papers she told her brother about, her potential answer to Burke, comes at the end of an essay called, appropriately, “On Prejudice,” published in The Monthly Magazine in

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1800. Distinguishing between her purpose in the current essay and her potential response to Burke, she writes, “What has hitherto been said relates only to instilling prejudices into others; how far a man is to allow them in himself, or, as a celebrated writer expresses it, to cherish them, is a different question, on which perhaps I may some time offer my thoughts” (Works 2.336–7). Even though she disavows responding to Burke on this occasion, many of her points remain germane to discussions of prejudice as defined by both Burke and Rousseau. Offering a juridical model of analysis and reasoning, Barbauld argues that in order to judge well, we must not be, as Burke had been, “swayed by affection for whatever the sympathies of our nature incline us to love” (2.323). Instead we must “hold the balance with a severe and steady hand while . . . weighing the doubtful scale of probabilities; and, with a stoical apathy of mind, yield . . . assent to nothing but a preponderancy of the evidence” (2.323). Mindful of practical experience, she nevertheless acknowledges that we are always already implicated in our own subjectivity, each individual seeing things “contracted or extended according to his position in society” (2.326). Carrying the sight metaphor further, she states that “different associations will produce different opinions, as necessarily as, by the laws of perspective, different distances will produce different appearances of visible objects” (2.326). For her own part, Barbauld could claim far greater practical experience as a teacher—over a decade at the Palgrave School—than Rousseau.25 With such experience behind her, she had authority to dispute his dictate that a child should receive no prejudices in order that nothing need be unlearned.26 “The maxim sounds well,” she says, “and flatters perhaps the secret pride of man, in supposing him more the creature of reason than he really is; but, I suspect, on examination we shall find it exceedingly fallacious” (2.322). As she proceeds to define prejudice and carefully outline arguments in favor of parents imparting to their children whatever “mental wealth” they have accrued, she seeks to answer this question: Of what utility is experience? “Your child has a claim to the advantage of your experience,” she tells her audience, “which it would be cruel and unjust to deprive him of” (2.327). At the same time, she cautions (in line with Dissenting pedagogy), that “nothing should be received as a prejudice which can easily be made the subject of experiment,” except, of course, experiments that might prove injurious (2.335–6). Although Barbauld’s educational writing frequently portrays mother figures imparting “prejudice” to their children, as in the humorous “Letter from Grimalkin to Selima” (SPP 356–60) and the fable of “The Young Mouse” (Evenings at Home, 10–11), it is often the case that she draws on a father-and-son model, as in “Things by their Right Names” (Evenings at Home, 121–23). When her discussion in “On Prejudice” links imparting prejudice to moral and social survival, she uses a father-son model of instruction to ask her rhetorical question: “Will any father say to his son, “My dear child, you are entering upon a world full of intricate and perplexed paths, in which many miss their way, to their final misery and ruin . . . but I will instill no prejudices into your mind; I shall leave you to find it out as you can . . .” (338). This particular scenario, evocative of guidance articulated by fathers in Evenings, serves also as an intertextual allusion to the tenth letter in John’s

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Letters Written from a Father to his Son: “On Prejudice, Bigotry, Candor and Liberality.” Throughout the Letters, which were reprinted for upward of fifty years in England and America, 27 Aikin conveys advice, experience, and prejudice to his son Arthur. Topics range from appreciation of the arts to ornamental gardening to choosing a wife, the collection as a whole containing a remarkable assemblage of eighteenth-century parenting, pedagogy, culture, politics, and manners. The timing of Barbauld’s 1800 companion piece, seemingly distant from the original Letters of 1794, was nevertheless well suited to its republication in 1799. Like his sister, Aikin begins with a clear definition of prejudice as a “judgment prior to examination” (emphasis in the original; 90) and then, focusing on the illiberality of biases, proceeds to discuss the debilitating social and moral effects of prejudice. Insofar as Aikin’s text exemplifies the practice his sister advocates in “On Prejudice,” her essay serves to underwrite the philosophy behind Letters and, moreover, to sanction its use. Collaboration is powerfully at work here. John’s essays are designed for the child/student, Anna’s for the parent/teacher. John’s contain bits of moral detail, Anna’s the philosophical underpinning. Together, brother and sister shape a contemporary readership by offering both a pedagogical framework and its practical application, a technique we have already seen at work in Lessons for Children and Evenings at Home. John and Anna reinforce each other once again with their respective essays on economic inequality: “On the Inequality of Conditions,” written as one of John’s Letters; and “Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions,” published by Anna in The Athenaeum, John’s short-lived literary magazine.28 Both pieces hearken back to Dissenting progenitors the Levellers by invoking leveling principles such as philanthropy and organizing tactics such as “secret combinations.” When read in tandem, the essays illuminate the way in which brother and sister enter and extend the inquiry advanced by Rousseau when they were yet children. 29 Barbauld pushes her brother’s arguments in radical directions that, given his audience, he simply could not pursue. “Property will be acquired,” writes John, “will produce laws and government for its security, will accumulate, will be allied to magistracy, and in consequence will enforce and augment the natural inequalities among men” (203).30 Whereas John outlines the general conditions that produce and entrench existing inequalities, Anna goes further by detailing the state of corruption and provocatively alluding to the threat of violence: “Laws are continually made against combinations, but the secret combinations of the low against the high can never be prevented, because it is founded on the interest of the many, and the moral sense of all” (SPP 352). Reprinted for the first time in McCarthy and Kraft’s edition of Selected Poetry and Prose (2002), Barbauld’s essay has gained critical attention, as the editors point out, for its astonishingly proto-Marxist conceptualization of both alienation and accumulation.31 For Barbauld, the heart of the problem is the disproportionate and indiscriminate power generated by accumulation: Power enables the indolent and the useless not only to retain, but to add to their possessions, by taking from the industrious the natural reward of their

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R o m a n t i c L i t e r a r y Fa m i l i e s labour, and applying it to their own use. It enables them to limit the profits and exact the services of the rest of the community, and to make such an unnatural separation between the enjoyment of a thing and the power of producing it, that where we see the one, we are habitually led to infer the privation of the other. (SPP 347)

One remedy to the inequality of conditions, she suggests, is thievery, which might well be seen as a natural corrective to the hoarding of the upper classes and of the nation as a whole. Championing yet again the cause of the lower classes, Barbauld sides with Robert Burns, whose poems she was “much pleased with” (Le Breton 53), by citing his “To a Mouse.” Contrasting herself with those troubled by the poor who in desperate straits turn to crime by “[picking] up the superfluous crumbs of our plenty” (353), Barbauld says that she is “apt to say with Burns to the little Mouse, ‘I doubt na, whiles, but thou mayest thieve; / What then, poor Beastie! Thou must live’ ” (qtd in SPP 353–54). John’s personal example of providing free medical treatment to the poor and his article denouncing the “prison-like atmosphere” of certain workhouses, reprinted, “at his own expense,” by longtime friend and prisonreform activist John Howard32 was to supplement the advice he offered his son in Letters. For her part, Anna was to offer similar pro bono work in the form of her teaching skills. Once settled in Hampstead, she took a number of female students—sometimes without the means to any education themselves—under her wing and quietly imparted to them the gift of education. One Betsy Fletcher, from Edinburgh, came all the way to London “to spend some months with Mrs. Barbauld”; her mother wanted Betsy to “have a high standard of intellectual and moral perfection.” With Barbauld as her tutor, Sally Taylor, age fourteen, “ ‘compared Pope & Boileau . . . construed Horace and was introduced to Miss Joanna Baillie.’ ”33 Mary Anna Galton, a Quaker, spent a month profiting from similar tutelage at the age of twenty; one of Joseph Priestley’s granddaughters, who had been orphaned by the desertion of her father and death of her mother, became both borderer and student as well. At twelve Lydia Rickards began an intimate and lasting relationship with Anna, whose syllabus for the young girl included The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Life of Cicero, and an essay assignment on “what constitutes that beauty in a landscape, with which we are so much charmed” (Rodgers 101–102). What these relationships suggest is that Anna fostered exactly the kind of education she received, on a private, familial level, with young women, even to the point of introducing them to rising stars in the literary world such as Joanna Baillie.

III For fifty years Barbauld and Aikin were decisively engaged in the work of education with the aim of developing a more responsible, socially conscious citizenry, middle-class men and women who understood the pitfalls of clinging to irrational prejudices, who actively sought to remedy inequalities and

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to foster equal opportunity, and who, above all, were capable of exercising the noble patience often necessitated by the painfully slow pace of change. Their youngest students were just two years old when they benefited from the material and conceptual collaboration that engendered Lessons for Children; it is not possible to know the ages of their oldest students, loosely defined as anyone who read Aikin’s Letters, or Barbauld’s Female Speaker, or the Evenings at Home, just to name some possibilities. But we do know some information about certain readers and former students. We know, for instance, that the most famous of Barbauld’s English students was Thomas Denman, who sat in her classroom at the Palgrave School for two years in the early 1780s and later ushered in the Reform Bill of 1832, the bill that finally saw the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, the very laws against which Barbauld and Aikin had long agitated but did not live to see defeated. Denman served as an MP for several years, was knighted in 1830, and in 1835 became speaker of the House of Lords. In his later years he wrote and spoke out against the international slave trade until his death in 1854. We know about Thomas Denman (and other noteworthy students of Barbauld’s) because of the meticulous record keeping at the Palgrave School and thanks especially to the research of William McCarthy. 34 What we do not have such a clear picture of, however, are the many thousands of students in England and America whom Barbauld and Aikin influenced during the nineteenth century through their prose writings for young persons. One of those young persons profoundly influenced by Aikin and Barbauld was Frederick Douglass, among the most significant abolitionist voices in nineteenth-century America and a monumental figure in American history. It is fair to say that even though he read only one entry from Evenings at Home (the twenty-ninth Evening, “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave”), Douglass must be ranked far above Thomas Denman as the most politically and socially influential figure ever to have had his education shaped by Aikin and Barbauld—and by extension the spirit of the Warrington Academy. In 1831, when Denman, then attorney general, began crafting the Reform Bill, Frederick Douglass was a thirteen-year-old slave living in Baltimore. According to Dickson Preston, author of Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (1980), that same year Douglass bought the book in which “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave” was reprinted, The Columbian Orator, for fifty cents at Nathaniel Knight’s bookstore at Number 28 Thames Street (96). In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass famously credits The Columbian Orator, first published in Boston in 1797, with having been a cornerstone of his education. In particular he identifies two selections from the reader, “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave” and a speech before the Irish parliament on Catholic emancipation, as having been “choice documents” that he “read over and over again with unabated interest” (84). Here he describes Barbauld and Aikin’s “Dialogue”: Among much of other interesting matter, I found in it a dialogue between a master and his slave. The slave was represented as having run away from

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R o m a n t i c L i t e r a r y Fa m i l i e s his master three times. The dialogue represented the conversation which took place between them, when the slave was retaken the third time. In this dialogue, the whole argument in behalf of slavery was brought forward by the master, all of which was disposed of by the slave. The slave was made to say some very smart as well as very impressive things in reply to his master—things which had the desired though unexpected effect; for the conversation resulted in the voluntary emancipation of the slave on the part of the master. (83–84)

The first edition of Aikin and Barbauld’s Evenings at Home appeared in six volumes published between 1792 and 1796. The final volume included the “Dialogue between Master and Slave.” That the “Dialogue” appeared in an American anthology just one year after its initial publication in London speaks either to the general demand for frequent shipment of books from England or, perhaps more specifically to the demand for educational books, for the editor of the Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham, was both an education reformer and book publisher.35 In either case, it points to a level of transatlantic networking that, to borrow McCarthy and Kraft’s terms, we have “insufficiently imagined.” The “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” appeared in the first and every subsequent edition of Bingham’s collection.36 Preston observes that The Columbian Orator “would exert a profound influence on [Douglass’s] life and thinking” (96); about Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue” he writes, “Frederick soon knew the entire dialogue by heart. It described his own situation so precisely that it brought tears to his eyes, and much of his useful thinking on slavery was drawn from it almost word for word” (99). Perhaps only in the context of a slave readership, something not envisioned by its authors, does the radical message of the “Dialogue” become fully visible. One of its lessons is that a slave has a right, indeed a moral obligation to himself as a human being, to attempt escape in order to claim his natural right to freedom. Related is a subtle message about persistence. In his recollection of the “Dialogue,” Douglass actually makes a telling mistake regarding persistence. He mentions that the slave had run away three times; in fact, the slave in the “Dialogue” has been caught after only a second, not a third attempted escape.37 Douglass’s misremembering in the Narrative is telling because it suggests that the “Dialogue’s” message about persistence was itself so prominent for Douglass that the details became at once overshadowed and inflated. After the slave dismantles each of the master’s assertions about the legitimacy of slavery, the master offers the only rational and proper response. The master asks, “Suppose I were to restore you to your liberty, would you reckon that a favor?” “The greatest,” replies the slave, who then echoes sentiments familiar in Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) by saying, “for although it would only be undoing a wrong, I know too well how few among mankind are capable of sacrificing interest to justice, not to prize the exertion when it is made” (Bingham, 1797 242). The slave owner responds, “I do it, then; be free.” The “Dialogue” is especially remarkable for its repeated allusions to the threat of violence, indeed about the legitimacy of violent resistance. Early in the exchange, the slave counters the master’s assertion that Providence has

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created some human beings as subservient by saying that Providence has also “given me legs to escape with; and what should prevent me from using them? Nay,” he continues, “what should restrain me from retaliating for the wrongs I have suffered, if a favourable occasion should offer?” (241). Yet the threat of violent uprising is even more powerfully inscribed in the final words of the dialogue, which belong entirely to the slave. This astonishing closing begins immediately after the master has told the slave, “be free”: Now I am indeed your servant, though not your slave. And as the first return I can make for your kindness, I will tell you freely the condition in which you live. You are surrounded with implacable foes, who long for a safe opportunity to revenge upon you and the other planters all the miseries they have endured. The more generous their natures, the more indignant they feel against that cruel injustice which has dragged them hither, and doomed them to perpetual servitude. You can rely on no kindness on your part, to soften the obduracy of their resentment. You have reduced them to the state of brute beasts; and if they have not the stupidity of beasts of burden, they must have the ferocity of beasts of prey. Superior force alone can give you security. As soon as that fails, you are at the mercy of the merciless. Such is the social bond between master and slave! (242)

We must now acknowledge the fact that Douglass had imbibed a spirit of defiance—legitimized in print—from Barbauld and Aikin’s radical message in “Dialogue between a Master and Slave.” To revisit his words, it was one of the “choice documents” that he had “read over and over with unabated interest” (84), a document that endorsed for Douglass his right to fight for his own independence. Given the fact that so few slaves were literate, and that of those who were, fewer still were reading The Columbian Orator, it is as though Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue” had been especially designed for him. In a sense Douglass was its ideal reader. And one reason that he could embrace it so completely, perhaps, is that it was written from within a position of persecution, a position not within the dominant political or national discourse—and therefore from a position much closer to Douglass’s own than anything else he encountered in The Columbian Orator. To be sure, the persecution of nonconformists in England was a universe away from the suffering experienced by Douglass. But if we consider the only alternative to Aikin and Barbauld’s abolitionist discourse in the anthology, we shall more easily understand what made their “Dialogue” so appealing to Douglass. Aside from “Dialogue between a Master and Slave,” Bingham included just one other selection strictly dedicated to the topic of slavery: “Oration on the Manumission of Slaves,” an excerpt from a speech given before the New York Society for promoting the Manumission of Slaves on April 12, 1797, attributed to Reverend Samuel Miller. To juxtapose Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue” to this unmistakably American speech is to see side-by-side two vastly different examples of abolitionist rhetoric, the one informed by the Dissenting educational model of the Warrington Academy and thus by rational discourse from within a persecuted population; the other expressing the anxieties associated with being implicated within white America, indivisible

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from the persecuting population. In comparing the two pieces, we should recognize that this is precisely what Douglass might have done; indeed, it is difficult to imagine that he would not have read and distinguished between these two antislavery pieces in the Columbian Orator. The contrast between Barbauld and Aikin’s “Dialogue” and Miller’s speech is jarring. Here is the closing of the excerpt of Miller’s speech from The Columbian Orator 38: While the friends of humanity, in Europe and America, are weeping over their injured fellow-creatures, and directing their ingenuity and their labors to the removal of so disgraceful a monument of cruelty and avarice, there are not wanting men, who claim the title, and enjoy the privileges of American citizens, who still employ themselves in the odious traffic of human flesh . . . Fellow citizens! Justice asleep? Is Humanity discouraged and silent, on account of the many injuries she has sustained? . . . Oh Africa! Unhappy, ill-fated region! How long shall thy savage inhabitants have reason to utter complaints and to imprecate the vengeance of Heaven against the civilization of Christianity? . . . Oh Africa! thou loud proclaimer of the rapacity, the treachery, and cruelty of civilized man! Thou everlasting monument of European and American disgrace! . . . “Remember not against us our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; be tender in the great day of inquiry; and show a Christian world, that thou canst suffer and forgive.” (Bingham, 1799 294)

That final quotation comes from the Book of Common Prayer, and it exemplifies the nervous concern Miller (and presumably others) had for his country and his slave-owning fellow citizens. Miller’s rhetoric—overblown, sentimentalized—is so far removed from that of the plain-speaking slave in Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue” that the two are scarcely recognizable as belonging to the same taxonomy of abolitionist discourse. Thus the reform- and education-focused activism of England’s first literary family extended its reach across the Atlantic and, with the editorial assistance of Caleb Bingham, inspired and educated Frederick Douglass. He became, in effect, Aikin and Barbauld’s student. But the extent of that education does not end with Douglass. Indeed, after the unforgettable moment in the Narrative in which Douglass rose up against and fought the slave breaker Covey, Douglass, now age seventeen, took advantage of his growing reputation as a literate and defiant leader to “organize a clandestine school among the younger blacks who worked for . . . landowners along the Miles [River]” near Baltimore (Preston 131). These secret meetings during the summer took place wherever Douglass and his students could escape, even briefly, the watchful eyes of their owners: in the woods, the shade of a tree, behind a barn; in winter they were held in rooms within the homes of free blacks. “There,” writes Preston, “he taught reading, writing, and freedom three nights a week as well as on Sundays. Altogether he had more than forty scholars, several of whom told him later that they had fled to the North at least partly because of the spark he had implanted. It was one of the most satisfying experiences of his life” (131). Douglass recounts these secret meetings in his Narrative, and although he does not mention anything about a textbook, I rather imagine that he would have included the lessons of “Dialogue

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between a Master and Slave”; he almost certainly must have used it, for he kept The Columbian Orator close at hand for the rest of his life. In any case, it is at least conceivable, if not probable, that Douglass referred to Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue” when he taught lessons about freedom and sparked the determination in some of his students to flee North.

* * * The literary pursuits during the remainder of reformist stage were never quite as charged as they were during the early and volatile 1790s, but the collaborative spirit did not diminish, nor did the constant desire to be together. A testament to the intimacy Anna and John shared, the affection they felt toward each other and that pulled on them when separated, can be seen in Lucy Aikin’s account of the Barbaulds’ removal to Stoke Newington in 1802: The sole motive for this removal, which separated them from a residence which they liked and friends to whom they were cordially attached, was the mutual desire of Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld to pass the closing period of their lives in that near neighborhood which admits of the daily and almost hourly intercourses of affection,—a desire which was thus affectingly expressed by the former in an epistle addressed to his sister during her visit to Geneva in 1785. (Works 1.xxxviii)

The epistolary verse Lucy refers to, “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva,” which I will discuss together with “Tintern Abbey” at the beginning of the next chapter, is a powerful expression of the collaborative consciousness’s desire for reunification and the accompanying renewal of the type of physical intimacy that “admits the daily and almost hourly intercourses of affection.” For the remainder of their lives—the next twenty years—John and Anna were to share this intimacy. Their literary output would continue, but no new edition of poems, as John had hoped, was to come from his sister’s pen. By the time John and Anna retired to Stoke Newington, new poets such as Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were already hitting their stride. As Anna so poignantly put it in the essay prefatory to her Selections from the Spectator (1804), “it is equally true of books as of their authors, that one generation passeth away and another cometh” (Works 1.xli).39 In the world of familial collaboration, new generations were indeed appearing in the Edgeworths, the Lambs, and the Taylors of Ongar, to name a few. In Grasmere, where familial collaboration was thriving in Dove Cottage, the year 1802 carried its own significance, for as we will see in the next chapter, it was to be an extraordinary landmark in the collaborative relationship of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

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Chapter 3

Wa l k i ng “Bac k wa r ds a n d Forwa r ds”: Th e Wor ds wor t hs i n 18 02/18 0 7

Confronted with a late-eighteenth-century poem in which the poet

strolls along the banks of a river and lovingly addresses his one dear sister and “friend,” one would have to be a real Barbauld enthusiast not to think of Wordsworth. Even then it is not easy seeing around that monumental figure looming at the gates of the nineteenth century; yet before Dorothy Wordsworth’s first public appearance in “Tintern Abbey,” John Aikin’s famous sister appears at the heart of his poem, “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva.”1 I begin this chapter with a consideration of these two poems as a means of discovering what they reveal about the collaborative relationships of the respective siblings. As collaborative spheres, the Wordsworth and Aikin/Barbauld households stand in stark contrast to each other.2 Each is defined to a large extent by childhood experiences that shaped the domestic and collaborative relationships of adulthood. As I have discussed in chapter one, Aikin and Barbauld, through their shared education, correspondence, and literary pursuits during the Warrington stage of their relationship, nurtured a dialogic collaborative consciousness that informs the strategy of responsive collaboration seen in the political pamphlets of 1790 and 1793. During the reform and education stage of the partnership, their works continued to exhibit various levels of complementarity. Discontinuity in the Wordsworths’ childhood, indelibly imprinted by the deaths of both parents, helped to produce a collaborative consciousness guided by a desire to recover a childhood experience they never shared as children. The Wordsworths collaborated to recover intimacy both in poetry and in life, their years alone together at Racedown, Alfoxden, and Grasmere (1795–1802) representing an extended courtship that cemented the ties of siblinghood and friendship. Physical, emotional, and creative intimacy were most intense during the years at Dove Cottage

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and culminated, in the spring of 1802, in a flood of collaborative creativity that ultimately manifests itself in the vision of the 1807 collection, Poems, in Two Volumes. To begin with a discussion of childhood is already to invite controversy. The very term is contested, as the burgeoning scholarship can attest. Linda M. Austin’s essay “Children of Childhood: Nostalgia and the Romantic Legacy” provides a wonderfully cogent synopsis of the boundaries demarcating recent scholarship while simultaneously analyzing the term’s valences through various Romantic poems and novels.3 I will build on Austin’s work by historicizing the authorial figures themselves and putting their childhood experiences in context. By juxtaposing the historical figures of the Aikins and the Wordsworths, I lay the most basic groundwork for comparative analysis. John and Anna Aikin enjoyed continuity in childhood, spending their first fifteen years or so together at Kibworth, and then extending that stability well into their twenties during the residence at Warrington. Throughout, they shared one father, by all accounts a loving and attentive one; one education, administered by him; one roof; and one dissenting doctrine. Anna’s poem “To Dr. Aikin Upon his Complaining that she Neglected Him” celebrates their Kibworth upbringing where, hand in hand with innocence we stray’d Embosom’d deep in Kibworth’s tufted shade; Where both encircled in one household band And both obedient to one mild command . . . How like two scions on one stem we grew.” (ll. 21–27).4

The subsequent years at Warrington were some of their happiest, for they enjoyed the fellowship of friends and family, continued to share the excellent education of their classicist father, and began, as we have seen in chapter one, a fruitful collaborative relationship in writing. A profoundly close and loving sibling bond grew out of this time, an intimacy strengthened by events such as the Warrington Academy staging of John’s “The Man of Pleasure,” the publication of Anna’s Poems and John’s Essays on Song-Writing, and certainly the first official work of coauthorship, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. In 1774 their long “childhood” together ended, and married life took them to separate domestic spheres.5 At the end of “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva,” looking back to their childhood, John finds an intimate, pre-lapsarian space in which the sibling bond and collaborative consciousness took hold: How many years have whirl’d their rapid course Since we, sole streamlets from one honour’d source, In fond affection as in blood allied, Have wandered devious from each other’s side. (Appendix, ll. 108–11)

Paying tribute to their father and his home, John reworks Anna’s “two scions” into “sole streamlets” but laments their having “wandered devious”—like

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wayward children—“from each other’s side.” Although John too addresses his sister with the terms of friendship—“To thee I turn, my sister and my friend!”—Anna Barbauld functions differently in this poem as compared to Dorothy in “Tintern Abbey.” Aikin’s poem suggests that a shared subjectivity developed from their common childhood experience. They may have strayed from an original unity, but being allied through “fond affection” and “blood” fosters a spirit of inseparability, even in the face of disconnection. John measures their current separation in terms of its effect not only on himself and Anna as individuals but also on the subjectivity shared by John and Anna. At poem’s end, he expresses the ardent wish that “still struggles in my breast” for a consummating reunion with “one darling object unpossess’d”: O then, while yet some zest of life remains, While transport yet can swell the beating veins, While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat, And fancy still retains some genial heat, When evening bids each busy task be o’er, Once let us meet again,—to part no more! (ll. 114–19)

Here rapturous physicality is allied with creative spirituality in a vision that reveals, on the one hand, the energies of physical intimacy as inseparable fuel for creative collaboration, and on the other, the governance of a strong Christian ethos. John’s plea exposes a longing for reunification, a return to that blissful state when their subjectivities were bound together under one roof, “encircled,” as Anna put it, “in one household band.”6 Their fall is from an original unity—from the innocence of a shared childhood and the original wholeness of their “honour’d source,” their father, John Aikin, D.D., who also stands in for the Father. In keeping with traditional Christian ideology, redemption comes through reunification with the Father, both originary source and telos toward which the divided subject becomes impelled along a circular trajectory. For Aikin this redemption is also figured as an eternal marriage of souls, the reunification of a collaborative consciousness that has become divided from itself. The pull of this bond was not imaginary, and the feeling was mutual. In 1802, in order to be closer to John, Anna convinced her husband that they should move to Stoke Newington. The couple settled into the house directly across the street from John and his family. Brother and sister remained there for the rest of their lives, parted only by John’s death in 1822. “On a Portrait,” written while John was sick in 1798, expresses Anna’s poignant thoughts at the prospect of losing her brother, a possibility that would have made seeing the portrait too difficult to bear.7 Looking at John’s eyes in the painting, she imagines that our meeting glances prove The accustomed beamings of fraternal love. But O! should fate in some disastrous day;—

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As with Wordsworth who, when Dorothy collapsed in 1829, wrote, “Were she to depart, the Phasis of my moon would be robbed of light to a degree that I have not courage to think of,”8 the very thought of such a loss was disabling. When in 1774 Anna Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, it formally ended her lengthy childhood with John. The Barbaulds left John and the rest of the Aikin family at Warrington and moved to Palgrave, at which point John and Anna encouraged and supported each other’s individual careers primarily through letters, though with an occasional but rare visit, usually arranged in order to see young Charles, adopted by the Barbaulds at the age of two. If the siblings were already in “fond affection as in blood allied,” this gesture of familial collaboration made them doubly so. Their individual careers thrived initially, and John’s productivity never really slackened except in times of ill health. Anna’s output, however, suffered under the pressures of her new domestic and professional situation. Certainly her teaching duties at the Palgrave school were a factor, but they were not solely to blame. Despite her teaching demands, she published two volumes of Lessons for Children and the famous Hymns in Prose, both significant works in their own right, Anna’s dedication in writing them certainly undeserving of Samuel Johnson’s disparaging comment that her employment was “to suckle fools,” merely because it focused on childhood development. All in all, Anna appears to have balanced the demands of teaching with her writing career, notwithstanding the fact that she had published no further poetry. In the early 1780s, however, distractions of a different sort grew persistent and troubling. Married life for the Barbaulds was reasonably placid and even playfully affectionate in the early going, but Rochemont’s mental condition began to reveal serious instability some time around 1780, resulting in violent outbursts and fits of anger directed sometimes at the Palgrave students, sometimes at Anna.9 These outbursts were commonly accompanied by physical attacks and we can only speculate as to the extent of emotional and physical abuse Anna Barbauld suffered during her years of marriage.10 Years later, at Stoke Newington, Rochemont attempted to kill Anna with a knife, and she narrowly escaped by leaping from a window and seeking refuge with John across the street. A Christian ethos coupled with abhorrence for conditions in mental hospitals of the time prevented the family from institutionalizing Rochemont, who, shortly after the attempt on Anna’s life, committed suicide by drowning in 1808. By 1785, the year Aikin composed “To Mrs. Barbauld at Geneva,” the fits of violence had been taking their toll, so the Barbaulds took a break from Palgrave and embarked on their trip to the continent as a much needed palliative. The poem, a verse epistle written in the manner of a Horatian Ode, a form very familiar to Aikin, who imitated Horace’s Book III, number xxiii

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(“To the Poor”) in his Poems, serves as a record of this domestic crisis. He implores Europe to “lull each swelling wave of care to rest: / Heal with sweet balm the wounds of pain and toil.” Aikin must have felt powerfully moved by the situation, for some of his most eloquent and introspective lines occur in this poem.11 Though its transitions are not as jarring as one might expect, the scene changes are swift, like the “Fancy” that provides them, and there is a personal issue in need of resolution.12 The issue is Anna’s welfare, which Aikin links directly to poetry. Anna Barbauld’s domestic situation, which not only interfered with her writing but also endangered her life, represents a somber contrast to that of Wordsworth, whose extensive domestic support is well known. At times one can almost see “To Mrs. Barbauld at Geneva” masquerading as a collaborative form of the Greater Romantic Lyric in which Aikin, speaking to his absent sister, reflects on the events and progression of life. The Warrington Academy has closed, inducing him to move to Yarmouth. Just as the grating clamor of modernization robs Yarmouth of its natural charm, “Cold commerce has usurped” the once quiet retreat of Warrington, Mersey’s banks infringed upon by “Trade’s harsh din,” as Anna describes it in her “Epistle to Dr. Enfield.” Life moves on. John and Anna, perched it on either side of forty, have “wandered devious”—away from each other, away from poetry, away from writing together. A healthy, protected, and happy Anna will be capable of writing poetry again; however, France cannot provide these things, cannot restore the muse, because, after all, the real problem—Rochemont—is a product of France. Knowing this, Aikin ambles toward the only resolution that seems to make sense: reunion of brother and sister and reliving the collaborative past. In a peculiar way, this poem about regaining the muse seems almost to be written from Anna’s perspective, not John’s, which underscores the egalitarian nature of their relationship and bespeaks again the powerful way in which their minds remained in dialogue long after the primary collaborative work was done. When Wordsworth looks back on childhood in “Tintern Abbey” he sees a solitary experience reflected partly in nature, partly in the “wild eyes” of his sister. When he looks forward, as Aikin does toward reunion with Anna, Wordsworth either imagines Dorothy alone, the moon shining on her in her “solitary walk,” or he finds his vision occluded by uncertainty— “If I should be, where I no more can hear / Thy voice . . . ” (ll. 148–9). Separation and uncertainty: how better to represent the anxiety and loss both he and Dorothy felt as young children, just eight and six, respectively, when separated after their mother’s death. Dorothy, effectively dispossessed at that moment, went to live with her mother’s cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld, whom she affectionately called “Aunt.” Exacerbating this loss, their father died six years later. Dorothy must have felt especially affected by his death, given that, from the time of her mother’s death, she did not see her father again. Inexplicably, he never arranged for her to return home, not even for Christmas, which was also her birthday. “The day,” she wrote, “was always kept by my Brothers with rejoicing in my father’s house, but for six years (the interval between my mother’s death and his) I was never once at home”

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(Letters 1.663). Losing her mother was one thing; essentially being abandoned by her father was quite another. The psychological fallout from both is incalculable. From age six to nine Dorothy lived within the Dissenting sphere of Aunt Elizabeth’s family.13 Reverend Thomas Threlkeld, Elizabeth’s brother, was a graduate of the Warrington Academy. In this environment Dorothy attended Unitarian services weekly and obtained a small taste of the kind of practical education enjoyed by a young Anna Aikin. From nine until twelve she attended a boarding school near Halifax, after which she returned to the Threlkelds and completed her formal education at yet another school in Halifax, attending classes with her beloved lifelong friend Jane Pollard (later Marshall). “With Jane,” writes Ernest DeSelincourt, “Dorothy struck up one of those passionate friendships which, though they may provoke amusement or disapproval from the older world, are yet among the intensest and most educative of the experiences of girlhood” (9). During these six years educational discontinuity marked Dorothy’s life, although she did gain friendships and an adoptive family. At fifteen, however, life changed once again, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother having summoned her away from the Threlkeld home in order to support the family and its draper business in Penrith. Here she learned to conform to the Cooksons’ staunch Evangelicalism. Leaving Halifax meant, above all, separation from her closest childhood friend, and Dorothy’s letters to Jane from Penrith reveal how much she missed her and just how affectionate the two were. “Do you not sometimes wish for me?” she asks Jane in late 1787; “I flatter myself that you do. I often wish for you, I think how happy we could be together! notwithstanding the cold insensibility of my Gmr and the ill-nature of my Grandfr” (Letters 1.9). In the following letter of 1788, Dorothy encloses a lock of hair and expresses her wish that she and Jane were sisters: “I often wish, selfish as it may appear to you, that you my Dear Jane were my Sister, I think how happy we should be! . . . Adieu my Love, do not forget to send me a piece of hair” (Letters 1.16–17). The strength of affection in this intimate friendship is evident in the loving address, “my Love,” a term similar to that which Dorothy would later call William in her journals, “my Beloved,” though the first is more amorously personal.14 Dorothy also envisions herself and Jane sharing pleasant walks in her grandparents’ garden, there enjoying “views [that] are beautiful” (Letters 1.22). Evident from her many letters to Jane, before and even after she married John Marshall, is that Dorothy’s most intimate and stabilizing childhood relationship was with the girl she fondly wished could be her “Sister.” William’s childhood experience, meanwhile, was somewhat less disjointed. A year after his mother’s death he entered Hawkshead Grammar School where he fell under the tutelage of William Taylor of Norwich. Taylor helped to inspire and encourage William through his own love of verse, especially poetry of sensibility by authors such as Akenside and Collins.15 After his father died, William and his brothers lived with Ann and Hugh Tyson but continued to attend the Hawkshead Grammar School. “To the motherless Wordsworths,” writes Moorman, “Ann Tyson gave all she could of the

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sort of simple, unpretentious, rustic affection and discipline that seems like the very quality of the country-side distilled into human terms” (EY 29). Although considerably more stable than Dorothy’s, William’s childhood nevertheless suffered from the loss of both parents. In The Prelude, William recalls the subduing impact of his father’s death: The event, With all the sorrow which it brought, appeared A chastisement; and when I called to mind That day so lately passed, when from the crag I looked in such anxiety of hope, With trite reflections of mortality, Yet with the deepest passion, I bowed low To God and thus corrected my desires. (11.367–74)16

A rare holiday visit by her brothers William, John, and Christopher, in 1787 allowed Dorothy to record the sentiments they shared during a conversation in which the orphans found themselves “wishing we had a father and a home,” together comprehending “the loss we sustained when we were deprived of our parents.” She further reflected that “many a time have Wm, J., C., and myself shed tears together, tears of the bitterest sorrow” (Letters 1.3).17 The prevailing theme of Dorothy and William’s childhood relationship, as a result of these losses, is one of separation. When in The Prelude William fondly recalls his boyhood walks, it is not Dorothy but schoolmate John Fleming who comes so vividly to mind: My morning walks Were early: oft before the hours of school I travelled round our little lake, five miles Of pleasant wandering—happy time, more dear For this, that one was by my side, a friend Then passionately loved. With heart how full Will he peruse these lines, this page—perhaps A blank to other men—for many years Have since flowed in between us, and, our minds Both silent to each other, at this time We live as if those hours had never been. (2.348–59)

The great pleasure of walking is here linked with a friend whose presence, like Dorothy’s in “Tintern Abbey,” signifies intimacy superadded to the poet’s intercourse with nature. In the case of “Tintern Abbey,” the difference is that Dorothy is felt more as an absence in the first part of the poem, a mute spectator watching the frolicking scenes of William’s youth project across his memory. The fractured aspect of the poem underscores the disconnection between them in childhood, a disconnection they seek to repair through their collaborative life in Grasmere. For Wordsworth childhood is something to be recaptured in poetry—even created in poetry—and Dorothy’s collaborative presence helps him remember impressions, feelings, spots of time.

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Though Wordsworth himself wandered a bit deviously, his path eventually met with Dorothy’s, as celebrated in The Prelude: Three years, until a permanent abode Received me with that sister of my heart Who ought by rights the dearest to have been Conspicuous through this biographic verse— Star seldom utterly concealed from view— I led an undomestic wanderer’s life. (13.338–43)

For Wordsworth, home became a harbor of great productivity, enhanced by Dorothy’s creative and diligent approach to her part in the poetic endeavor, whether that meant fair copying poems, writing in her journal, or managing the household economy. In and of itself Dorothy’s domestic work constitutes collaboration in the material production of poetry. And whereas the Aikins strayed from each other’s side, the Wordsworths walked and worked side-byside. Dorothy’s often-used description from the Grasmere Journals—she and William walking together “backwards and forwards”—serves as an appropriate metaphor for the life they led together from 1795 to 1802, especially at Grasmere. As the intimacy of their shared life deepened, especially between 1798, when it began at Grasmere, and 1802, the year of William’s marriage, Dorothy also facilitated a creative vision that focused on minute particulars, a vision with defamiliarizing potential. To share that vision meant they both had to become students of nature in a literal sense, sometimes looking up in their botanical reference book names for objects commonly found in the garden or surrounding fields.18 Thus, what these siblings were unable to share as children—being students like John and Anna under parental tutelage— they shared as adults. And in so doing, they retrospectively reconstituted a childhood experience, both in poetry and in life. In poetry they collaborated to create a childhood in which separate experiences were imagined as having been shared. In life, they created an intimate space for themselves in the bowers, orchards, gardens, and paths of their natural surroundings. It was a realm apart from the domestic space of the cottage, in which their intimacy often mirrored that of a marriage. Yet, there is another important component to this relationship that might help inform its peculiarly intimate aspect. In all her fantasies of domestic bliss, Dorothy imagined one companion even more constant than William: Jane Pollard. When she outlines to Jane her plan for a future home, William figures not as her only domestic partner. Indeed, his role, mimicking more the father than the brother, is that of teacher and provider, allowing Dorothy and Jane to learn together and blithely share the intimacies of sisterhood/ friendship. “I look forward with full confidence to the Happiness of receiving you in my little Parsonage,” Dorothy writes; “I have laid the particular scheme of happiness for each Season” (Letters 1.88). She depicts a scene of domestic education in which her brother “contributes at once to our Instruction and amusement,” while she and Jane in turn “each hazard our observations . . . without the fear of Ridicule or Censure” (Letters 1.88).

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A learning environment without ridicule or censure, in which everyone is free to offer her opinion, accords precisely with the domestic educational model that characterized the Aikin household and with which Dorothy was familiar from the example of the Threlkelds in Halifax. For Dorothy, the power of fancy, or what she sometimes described as “building castles,” has the capacity to transport the imagination to spaces of unencumbered pleasure—the garden or future cottage, for example.19 It is a faculty she easily and unselfconsciously indulges: “I assure you I am a very skillful architect,” she tells Jane, “I have so many different plans for building one Castle, so many contrivances! Do you ever Build Castles?” (Letters 1.13). Thus the Wordsworths’ domestic arrangement, dedicated to a shared life of learning, seeing, and writing, had been conceived and planned early on by Dorothy; it was an extension of her childhood vision, her “fancy.” And though Dorothy was undoubtedly happy to be reunited with her “dearest Male Friend” (Letters 1.96), this particular castle was not completed according to plan. Jane was absent, which meant that William would have to stand in for her. In William, Dorothy would seek both brother and sister—sibling and female friend. If there is an erotic undercurrent to the life shared at Dove Cottage and in the secret retreats of the pastoral landscape, then the energies fueling that undercurrent receive an even greater charge from being commingled with the displaced intimacies of female friendship, the kinds of intimacies that, as Stuart Curran has pointed out, contemporary vocabulary cannot adequately signify.20 Such an unconventional life choice came at a price. Misunderstood by those around them, William and Dorothy famously became targets for rumor and speculation about the exact nature of their relationship and were undoubtedly stung by the “evil tongues,” / Rash judgments . . . [and] sneers of selfish men,” despite their resolve that no such incivility “shall e’er prevail against us” (“Tintern Abbey” 129–30; 133).21 When they looked at each other, William and Dorothy saw sibling, spouse, parent, and friend all rolled into one. Given the passionate energies embodied in the relationship, not least of all the ethos of female friendship Dorothy so hoped to indulge, its intimacies are in all likelihood far more nuanced than contemporary conceptions can imagine, and therefore persistently elusive to adequate representation. Its internal dynamics aside, the relationship had tangible effects; for Dorothy, choosing a relationship of service to William meant the sacrifice of an individual writing career, not to mention the prospect of her own family. With William now married and her resolve to write flagging, what must have gone through Dorothy’s mind when, making one of the final entries in her journal, she observed William reading the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, a poet who had virtually no support structure, who fended for herself, who carved out a niche as a professional writer, and for whom the production of those sonnets was an economic necessity? However ironic that moment might appear to us, we are nevertheless left, at the Journals’ end, with the inescapable impression that what made Dorothy genuinely happy was her “persistent, almost obsessional self-sacrifice” for William, both because it gave her brother pleasure, and because it “satisfied her deepest necessities,

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the longing of the inner orphaned child to be needed, and to have her own place within the family.”22 It is nevertheless this sacrifice, and its having been taken for granted by William, that distinguishes the Wordsworths’ relationship from the egalitarianism of Aikin and Barbauld, whose mutual encouragement and support of individual careers is everywhere evident. The name Wordsworth encompasses a vast range of personalities, relationships, geographical spaces, poetic experiments, political vacillations, personal crises, and critical opinion. Within the sub-circle of critical opinion, the tendency has been to polarize the larger circle’s most unifying figure, Dorothy—the loop of energy around which the wandering planets of this universe came together—from the very name of the circle itself.23 In what follows I will explore her inseparability from that name by taking seriously the notion that the name “Wordsworth” as a poetic signifier owes itself to familial collaboration.24 The critical divide in Wordsworth scholarship between historical suppression and egocentricity has made room for the occasional investigation of Dorothy and William together as writers, although the tendency has been implicitly to place them in a competition whereby Dorothy’s work is defined in terms of William’s (e.g., William/ solitary, Dorothy/community). Yet, there is another perspective that focuses rather on what Heidi Thomson calls Dorothy and William’s “shared experience” (535). John Worthen’s study of a year in the life of Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and the Hutchinsons finds that group intimacy fostered a “shared habit of mind” (56). Thomson’s assertion that the significance of “Tintern Abbey” “lies less in achieving a resolution than in sharing a vision” (537) invites further consideration of the Wordsworths’ collaborative experience and the intimacies it engendered. Aligned closely with this trajectory of critical inquiry, I will pursue the implications of work such as that of Thomson and Worthen in order to map the Wordsworths’ collaborative consciousness and to consider its implications, especially as manifested in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes.

I Any consideration of Dorothy’s contributions to the collaboration with William (or Coleridge, for that matter), or of her own legacy as an autonomous agent of language and poetic sensibility, ought necessarily to begin with the Journals.25 Within the Wordsworths’ collaborative model, Dorothy’s journals functioned in three primary ways: first, the work of the journal was an integral part of the joint labor of poetic production 26; second, the journals were a source of poetic language; and third, the entries themselves served as a historical record of observations and events, which, when jointly experienced, implicitly recorded Dorothy’s emotional responses to those events, regardless of whether she wrote them down. This last is important because we know it was often Dorothy’s reactions to events, not the events themselves, that stirred William’s own imagination and sensibility. Had Wordsworth actually been present on the occasion that prompted his first published poem, “On Seeing Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress,” which appeared in

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European Magazine in 1787, it would have represented precisely the kind of event to which I refer. 27 But since Wordsworth at this juncture had not met Williams—he was still a student at Hawkshead—he appears foremost to have been interested in entering the poetic debate over sensibility triggered by Frances Greville’s “A Prayer for Indifference” (1759). Helen Maria Williams’s “To Sensibility,” published in her 1786 Poems, responds directly to Greville, and in turn Wordsworth responds, mawkishly, to Williams.28 Had he instead written a poem in response to Dorothy’s reaction at first seeing and hearing the sea—whereupon she “burst into tears at the sight, a circumstance which (said William in old age) ‘was often mentioned among us as indicating the sensibility for which she was so remarkable’ ” (Moorman EY 14)—such a poem would then have been emblematic of Dorothy’s capacity to instill poetic sensibility in her brother. Even though he did not memorialize this particular occasion, it nevertheless informs the emotional sympathy underlying the poetic vision they grew to share. Yes, Dorothy famously envisioned her journaling as something that “shall give Wm pleasure” (15); still, we cannot overlook its function within the sphere of poetic production. Just as William’s composition was work, labor that sometimes exhausted or made him ill—“he wrote hard at it till dinner time, then he gave over tired to death” (122)—Dorothy’s journal writing was work that required “keeping my resolve” (15). As Worthen puts it, the journal was her “writing discipline, as poetry was his” (59). We know that William relied on and borrowed from the journals; he makes that plain enough in his note to “At the Grave of Burns”: “The following is extracted from the journal of my fellow-traveller, to which, as persons acquainted with my poems will know, I have been obliged on other occasions” (CPW 704). Numerous well-known examples exist of language and events making their way into the poetry of the “Concern,” as the Wordsworths and Coleridge sometimes called themselves. The case of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is emblematic but too overtaxed to bear further citation.29 Likewise well observed, these lines from Christabel, The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky, (49–52)

bear a strong resemblance to Dorothy’s entry on March 7, 1798: “One only leaf upon the top of a tree—the sole remaining leaf—danced round and round like a rag blown by the wind.” Sometimes the intertextuality seems to work the other way round. “The Cock is Crowing,” composed in mid-April, 1802, begins, The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing, The small birds twitter, The lake doth glitter, The green field sleeps in the sun;

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Just weeks later, on May 6, Dorothy writes, “The small birds are singing, Lambs bleating, Cuckow calling. The Thrush sings by Fits. Thomas Ashburner’s axe is going quietly (without passion) in the orchard. Hens are cackling, Flies humming, the women talking together at their doors” (122). What this juxtaposition underscores is that, more than words and images, even the rhythms of phrasing, the cadences of thought, if you will, become linguistic byproducts of communal thinking inside the “Concern.” Whether the “black-blue vault” of “A Night Piece,” or the echo of a raven in The Excursion, the myriad instances of linguistic semblance point to collaborative consciousness busily at work.31 My interests lie not so much with determining who originated a phrase as with attending to the poetic effects that emerge from those habits of observation and expression that so uniquely characterize the language of the Journals.32 If for Wordsworth destabilizing the field of sentimentality meant making the pastoral strange, then it was in some measure the particularity of Dorothy’s vision that helped him defamiliarize the landscape. Dorothy’s appreciation for language and capacity for detailed observation quickly received Coleridge’s notice and praise: “Her information various— her eye watchful in minutest observation of nature—and her taste a perfect electrometer—it bends, protrudes, and draws in, at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.”33 Even before the Alfoxden Journal occasioned Coleridge’s admiration, her eye was the critical instrument that assessed William’s early submissions to Joseph Johnson in 1793. Dorothy wrote Jane Pollard that “many Passages,” while “exquisitely beautiful,” also contain many Faults, the chief of which are Obscurity, and a too frequent use of some particular expressions and uncommon words for instance moveless, which he applies in a sense if not new at least different from its ordinary one; . . . it is a very beautiful epithet but ought to have been cautiously used, he ought at any rate only to have hazarded it once, [not] . . . three or four times. My brother Kitt and I . . . amused ourselves by analyzing every Line and prepared [sic] a very bulky Criticism. (Letters 1.89)

Even here, Dorothy’s concern is with the particulars of language, not, apparently, more general poetic considerations. She winces at obtrusiveness, language that is obscure because unnatural, and all the more grating because repeatedly used. Yet it is through the deployment of a more refined, subtly estranging obscuration that Wordsworth eventually achieves his most characteristically “natural” effects. In her critical assessment of Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, a book Dorothy received as a gift from her Uncle Rawson in 1795,34 Anna Barbauld makes similar observations regarding just this kind of obscurity. Barbauld emphasizes that Akenside’s “verse is sometimes feeble

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through too rich a redundancy of ornament, and sometimes laboured into a degree of obscurity from too anxious a desire of avoiding natural and simple expressions” (31; emphasis added).35 And while Barbauld’s assessment could not have influenced Dorothy’s thoughts about her brother’s work in 1793, it already contained a perspective that could validate, for Dorothy or anyone else who cared to read it, the future project of the Lyrical Ballads. Not surprisingly, Dorothy’s linguistic and observational patterns in the journals have invited interpretation from a psychological perspective. Susan Levin, for example, suggests that Dorothy’s insistence on minute description could point to a certain fear of what is happening around her, of nature’s autonomous process, and a need to control it through naming . . . Perhaps objective description is one way she has of defining her own subjectivity, of arriving at those distinctions between herself and all that is not the self that constitute the formation of an individual ego. (15)

Dorothy’s habits of observation may indeed have helped to shape her subjectivity; more problematic, however, is the assertion that those same habits—whose cause is certainly overdetermined—derive from a subjectivity plagued by “fear.” Indeed, it is quite possible that Dorothy’s practice of close observation stems in part from inspiration far more quotidian. Noting well nature’s botanical detail had become commonplace in numerous works, including Oliver Goldsmith’s History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789), Charlotte Smith’s Rural Walks (1795), and Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany (1796). Likewise, Barbauld and Aikin’s Evenings at Home (1792–1796) enacts a pedagogy often informed by detailed observation that sees general patterns in the particulars of organic form. A dialogue titled “The Compound-Flowered Plants,” for example, portrays a tutor in an outdoor classroom encouraging his pupil to use a magnifying glass to inspect a flower’s detail: “Look at this single one through my magnifying-glass: you observe the seed at the bottom, like the point of a dart. From it springs a slender hairy shaft crowned by a most elegant, spreading plume. You see, it is a complete arrow of Nature’s manufacture” (220–1). Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804), the collaborative project of Charlotte Smith and her sister Catharine Anne Dorsett, participates in a similar kind of pedagogy. The extensive notes for this work contain both common and Latin names for over 250 plants and animals, and it was precisely this type of education that found favor with the likes of More, Wollstonecraft, Macaulay, and many other women advocating for girls an education in the natural sciences, history, and poetry as an antidote to the banal accomplishments typically gained at boarding schools.36 Featuring such natural detail in poetry was a practice borne out in the works of Thomson and Erasmus Darwin; and critical encouragement thereof appears in John Aikin’s An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777). Aikin argues that poetry, through the “perpetual repetition

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of the same images, clad almost in the same language,” has come down to the present age, “worn down, enfeebled, and fettered” (2–3). Accordingly, poetic depictions of natural objects have grown “faint, obscure, and ill characterized . . . owing to a too cursory and general survey of objects, without exploring their minuter distinctions” (10)—a malady, Aikin implies, indicating the onset of a certain perceptual automatism.37 The imbrication of poetry with natural history appeared in prose works, too, such as Aikin’s Calendar of Nature (1785), enlarged in 1799 by his son Arthur into The Natural History of the Year, a text that informs the reader that the “glossy star-like yellow flowers of pilewort”—the lesser celandine celebrated in Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes—make their appearance in March (A. Aikin 63). Written by a doctor, The Calendar of Nature, though not a source-book for natural curatives, will nevertheless occasionally borrow from the language of healing: “The pure white flowers of the [white lily], elevated upon their tall stalk, give an agreeable sensation of coolness to the eye (116). Agreeable sensations for the eye, as the ancients believed, also derived from the celandine, not only for its beauty but also for its golden juice, which was “supposed to be a powerful remedy for weak sight.”38 This makes Worthen’s observation about Wordsworth’s Celandine poems (published in 1807) all the more apropos: These final poems went out of their way to concentrate on the thoroughly unimportant and overlooked. This allowed him to say that the work of the poet, just like that of the scientist or astronomer, is to see what is not normally seen. Dorothy’s journal had, three times already, described the flower, as a natural result of her developed habit of looking hard at things . . . And back at home, there it had been in their own garden. She and Wordsworth had at least one flower book, and probably looked it up . . . Dorothy saw it again while Coleridge was reading out his verses to Sara, and described it even more rapturously: “The pile wort spread out on the grass a thousand shining stars.” The poems Wordsworth wrote at this juncture are polemics about seeing, about the commonplace and the ordinary, and they are as obsessive as any poems he wrote at any time of his life. (174)

Dorothy and the celandine share duties here as aids to William’s poetic vision; these poems about seeing, and, subtextually, about needing aid to do so, become hauntingly prophetic when we consider the literal aid William would depend on from Dorothy in later years. Procured by the Wordsworths in March, 1801, the “flower book” referred to by Worthen was William Withering’s An Arrangement of British Plants according to the latest Improvements of the Linnean System (1796), the footnotes to which are replete with poetic references, especially to the ancients. Virgil, Ovid, and a number of Greeks are prominent, along with Beattie and Allan Ramsay. Charlotte Smith and Wordsworth appear in later editions, footnoted under the pilewort for “singing the praises of this unaspiring weed” (3.677).39 Smith, it seems, deserves credit as the first English poet ever to use the word pilewort in verse; it appears in “The Early Butterfly,” originally published in the aforementioned Conversations Introducing Poetry

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(1804). Not long after debuting in Conversations, the same flower makes an encore as the “celandine” in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. Before she had access to Withering’s text, Dorothy expressed the need for just this kind of reference work. On May 16, 1800, her journal records that she “carried a basket for mosses, and gathered some wild plants”; in the very next sentence she exclaims, “Oh! that we had a book of botany” (16). Not apparently until they acquired Withering’s text did the Wordsworths learn that the “starry yellow flower which Mrs. C[larkson] calls pile wort” is also called the lesser celandine, a name inherited from the genus of its cousin, the greater celandine.40 Indeed, Dorothy actually refers to it by its more scientific name “ranunculus,” on the first page of the Grasmere Journal, which reinforces the suggestion that she and William retrieved the term celandine from their botany text.41 Withering’s four volumes contain a vast amount of information, including medicinal uses for plants. This author was also an MD and indeed notes the celandine’s supposed viability as a cure for weak eyes. More updated information explained that “diluted with milk, [the flower’s juice] consumes white opake spots upon the eyes,” and, a little closer to home, was considered “an excellent remedy in icteric, and other obstructions of the viscera” (3.643–4). Thanks to Dorothy’s inquisitiveness, the Wordsworths now had a wealth of botanical information, interwoven with poetic references, at their fingertips. It was but one more way in which she contributed to what was becoming a shared vision of the natural world. As Coleridge offered philosophical underpinning for Wordsworth’s lyricism, so Dorothy provided her “watchful eye” as a “perfect electrometer” for the poetically minute. The first two celandine poems in the 1807 Poems (“To the Small Celandine” and “To the Same Flower”) implicitly acknowledge what Wordsworth elsewhere, as in “The Sparrow’s Nest,” makes explicit: that Dorothy provides him poetic vision. Appearing in the second volume of the 1807 Poems, “The Sparrow’s Nest” recalls that Dorothy Was with me when a Boy; She gave me eyes, she gave me ears; And humble cares, and delicate fears; A heart, the fountain of sweet tears; And love, and thought, and joy. (1807 228)

She is here a source of poetic sensibility, yet the eyes—inseparably linked for Wordsworth to poetic vision—earn priority of place in this short catalogue. When Wordsworth celebrates the pilewort under the name celandine, another appellation theretofore unsung in English poetry, he accomplishes three things. First, he defamiliarizes the commonplace (Mrs. Clarkson’s “pile wort”), thereby expressly drawing attention to the routinely overlooked. Second, he implicitly pays tribute to Dorothy as the source of vision and inspiration for the poem, the word celandine not having been a part of their vocabulary until she acquired the much-desired “book of botany.” And third, he makes a subtle but not insubstantial correlation between the idea that he

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is seeing this flower for the first time—“ ’Twas a face I did not know” (31)— and the notion that the celandine can restore eyesight. If this last appears somewhat attenuated, we need only consider the prevalence and popularity of texts such as Withering’s Arrangement, Thomas Rowlandson’s World in Miniature (1816), or indeed Charlotte Smith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry, which had already made reference to the “pilewort”: Trusting the first warm day of spring, When transient sunshine warms the sky, Light on his yellow spotted wing Comes forth the early butterfly. With wavering flight, he settles now Where pilewort spreads its blossoms fair, Or on the grass where daisies blow, Pausing, rests his pinions there. (1.43)

That the two flowers most recognized in the 1807 Poems should coincidentally appear in this short excerpt serves as a reminder that Wordsworth’s shorter lyrics, such as the celandine poems, “To the Daisy,” and “To a Butterfly,” participate in the same school for poetic use of natural history as Smith’s Conversations. Moreover, they also partake, though less explicitly, of Smith’s collaborative pedagogy. For Smith’s book, consisting of both her and her sister’s verse, enacts its teaching in the conversational vignettes through a model of shared seeing and learning, a model that recalls the Dissenting tradition of education exemplified by the Aikin household and replicated in Hymns in Prose and Evenings at Home. In Smith’s Conversations, however, it is a mother, “Mrs. Talbot,” who helps her children, George and Emily, to see and understand the natural world around them: There is a yellow butterfly, with dark iron coloured spots, and pointed wings, which is frequently seen abroad before the common cabbage-fly, so usual and so destructive in gardens, is [sic] hardy enough to venture [out in early March]. When I was very young, I was very fond of catching butterflies, to paint from nature, but I was soon disgusted with the attempt to kill them. It appeared so cruel, to impale an insect on a pin, and let it flutter for hours, and even days in misery, that I could never bear to do it. (1.42)

In keeping with the pattern of Smith’s Conversations, a poem—“The Early Butterfly”—follows the discussion, introduced by George’s comment that butterflies have been found “good subjects for our poetry,” but not without Mrs. Talbot’s caution that “it is difficult, George, to say any thing that is not mere common place on so obvious and hackneyed a subject” (1.42). The lessons here go beyond natural history and its application to poetry by teaching sensibility and poetic taste, all according to a domestic model of education, a model not unlike that which would encourage the freedom, as Dorothy told Jane Pollard, to “hazard our observations . . . without the fear of Ridicule

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or Censure.” And indeed the pattern recurs in the Wordsworth household, where a botanical lesson on the pilewort leads to its appearance as the celandine in 1807. Dorothy provides not only a way of seeing and describing the natural world; her desire to learn extends their vision into the realm of natural science and its botanical vocabulary where together she and William can engage with and learn new names for seemingly familiar objects, names with the power to make those same objects new. As they do so, they make their own relationship new, Dorothy’s vision of a life with Jane itself defamiliarized but nonetheless still visible in the form of life with William. Yet, to consider Dorothy merely a passive resource without authorial voice or agency in the relationship is to overlook her more active potential.42 Her Journal includes, for example, an instance of shared editing: “William met me with the conclusion of the poem of the Robin. I read it to him in Bed. We left out some lines” (112). In a rare display of assertiveness, she makes a composing decision for William: “I found William at work, attempting to alter a stanza in the poem on going for Mary which I convinced him did not need altering” (137).43 Probably their most collaborative effort in terms of shared authorship, the Goslar Journal, jointly written from February to April of 1799, was, unfortunately, lost (Moorman EY 431). This small sampling of collaborative moments may not, however, be an accurate reflection of the actual extent to which she shared in the work of creating, for Dorothy in the journals was often disinclined to foreground herself as possessing agency, creative or otherwise.44 Carefully unraveling certain moments in the journals, therefore, will allow us to discern more evidence of the collaborative consciousness at work. Three further examples will be instructive. The first deals with The Pedlar, the second with the Leech-Gatherer, and the third with the Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. On the last day of February 1802, Dorothy mentions having “stitched up the Pedlar” (98) in language that incorporates both domestic and surgical uses of the needle, for the poor Pedlar had met with some unfortunate accident—“disaster Pedlar” (96)—that necessitated mending. Two days pass before Dorothy revisits the apparently raw nerve of this disaster, and the terseness of her entry speaks volumes: “I was so unlucky as to propose to rewrite The Pedlar. Wm got to work and was worn to death. We did not walk. I wrote in the afternoon” (96–97). The contrast with the following day’s litany of detail is striking: Before we had quite finished Breakfast, Calvert’s man brought the horses for Wm. We had a deal to do to shave—pens to make—poems to put in order for writing, to settle the dress pack up etc. The man came before the pens were made and he was obliged to leave me with only two. Since he has left me (at ½ past 11) it is now 2 I have been putting the Drawers into order, laid by his clothes which we had thrown here and there and everywhere, filed two months’ newspapers and got my dinner 2 boiled eggs and 2 apple tarts. I have set Molly on to clear the garden a little, and I myself have helped. I transplanted some snowdrops—The Bees are busy—Wm has a nice bright day. It was hard frost in the night. The Robins are singing sweetly. Now for my walk. I will be busy, I will look well and be well when he comes back to me.

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The scene here is one nearly frantic with business, but almost all the activity is of a sort: giving order to that which is in disarray. The faltering steps of that second sentence mention “pens to make—poems to put in order,” and certainly this meant materially supplying William “for writing” while away in Keswick (a planned absence of just three days, curtailed by one in actuality). At the same time it meant ensuring that they were both supplied with pens for writing while he was away, but because the horses showed early, William was “obliged to leave me with only two.” These are minds preoccupied, foremost, with the business of writing. Still, not all the activity can be accounted for by William’s impending departure (or her psychological reaction to it).45 The flurry of organization that took place between 11:30 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. is largely domestic—“housecleaning,” if you will. Yet if all we see in this juxtaposition of duties is the threading of poetic chores into the woof of domesticity, we would perceive but half the picture. Dorothy’s seemingly mundane sorting and arranging—putting drawers in order, collecting scattered clothing, filing newspapers, helping clear the garden, and transplanting snowdrops—is a physical manifestation of the collaborative consciousness’s preoccupation with the current disarrangement of The Pedlar. Moreover, Dorothy’s frantic account of the scene—right down to William’s partially eaten apple—strikingly evokes in The Pedlar the disorder of Margaret’s household when the narrator returns there in the spring: She seemed the same In person [ ] appearance; but her house Bespoke a sleepy hand of negligence; The floor was neither dry nor neat, . . . and her few books, Which, one upon the other, heretofore Had been piled up against the corner panes In seemly order, now with straggling leaves Lay scattered here and there, open or shut, As they had chanced to fall . . . I turned towards the garden-gate and saw . . . the earth was hard With weeds defaced and knots of withered grass . . . No winter greenness; of her herbs and flowers It seemed the better part were gnawed away Or trampled on the earth; a chain of straw, Which had been twisted round the tender stem Of a young apple-tree lay at its root; The bark was nibbled round by truant sheep. Margaret stood near, her infant in her arms, And seeing that my eye was on the tree, She said, “I fear it will be dead and gone Ere Robert come again.” (The Ruined Cottage MS. D. 399–426; emphases added)

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Worthen’s speculation that the wrong (i.e., good) manuscript accidentally found its way into the fire46 receives support from Dorothy’s oddly elegiac moment with the apple. Dorothy’s wording even conjures the more destructive possibility that William threw The Pedlar in the fire on purpose, out of frustration, thereby unsettling Dorothy and provoking her subconscious preoccupation with its fate. To that end, the following journal entry from February 7 seems almost to foreshadow the inevitable “disaster”: “We sate by the fire and did not walk, but read the pedlar thinking it done but lo, though Wm could find fault with no one part of it—it was uninteresting and must be altered. Poor William” (85). In any case, the Pedlar’s injuries, however sustained, were prominent in Dorothy’s mind. Were we to approach this confluence of psychology, domesticity, and collaborative writing and simply heed the first two—concluding that Dorothy flew into a frenzied tidying of Dove Cottage because she did not want to look like the pitiable Margaret upon William’s return—our slighting of her collaborative significance would only be compounded by our further relegating her to the role of faithful amanuensis, quietly fending off suitors of boredom by copying and recopying poems until William’s return. On this day in her life Dorothy Wordsworth was concerned about the fate of The Pedlar. Would they have to rewrite it, as she had suggested the day before? Or might they be able to reconstruct it from their shared memory? They had been at work on some version since at least July, now seven months ago. We can trace her chain of associations on this day back to a disheveled household, an unkempt garden, and a partially nibbled “young apple-tree,” all triggered by William’s departure and the unfinished business of the poem, the poem she would help mend—put back in order—not only by recalling parts she had heard and copied over time, but also by connecting fragments and “stitching” them together. In a literal sense this could have meant stitching the manuscript pages together so as to preclude future misplacing or accidental burning; handiwork of this sort occurred in 1804, when “the leaves of MS. E [of The Pedlar were] stitched into stiff cardboard covers, with a woodcut of a bird on the back cover and one of a squirrel on the front.”47 If Dorothy’s comment of 1802 indeed describes material use of the needle, evidence for such stitching does not exist. James Butler suggests that the “homemade notebook” “stitched up” on March 7 “apparently does not survive,” possibly having been “dismembered in the process of arranging The Pedlar, 1802, for recopying on 8 July” (28). And yet, the language Dorothy employs during this stage of The Pedlar’s development, along with manuscript evidence of shared writing, suggests that she is speaking figuratively about the work of revision. On February 13, she mentions being “still at work at the Pedlar, altering and refitting”; the following day, “William left me at work altering some passages of the Pedlar” (90). What is noteworthy here are both the “refitting” that supports the tailoring metaphor and the solo work of “altering some passages” because the manuscript from this 1802 version of The Pedlar reflects having been both refitted and stitched up. In a space that was left blank in the 1799 fair copy of The Ruined Cottage (MS. D) we find Dorothy’s

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handwriting. In ink she filled this space with twenty-five lines (165–89), and the implication is that at least part of Dorothy’s work in stitching up The Pedlar included the insertion of these lines in 1802. The MS reveals that some of these lines were subsequently revised in pencil by William, and it appears that Dorothy captured that moment in her journal: On March 9, William and Dorothy “sate by the fire in the evening and read the Pedlar over”; then William “altered it in a few places” (99). No further mention of the poem occurs until July 8, when William “arranged” The Pedlar, 1802, into its final configuration. Dorothy then “wrote it out” (146). As documents of personal experience, Dorothy’s journals have the potential to consist of more than material facts, such as the stitching of The Pedlar; implicitly recorded in her entries are also her emotional reactions to incidents witnessed and people encountered. Entries reflecting a shared experience likewise capture traces of William’s responses, and, equally important, the memory of his response to her emotions. As with William’s anecdote about Dorothy seeing the ocean for the first time, she had the capacity to shape William’s impressions and treatment of events, whether on the spot or later, when recollected in tranquility. What moves William, at least in part, is seeing Dorothy moved. And her sensibility, which is never in doubt, can serve as a kind of litmus test for how readers ought to feel when reading about, for example, the Leech-Gatherer, whom the Wordsworths came across in late September 1800.48 William did not write the poem inspired by that occasion, “The Leech-Gatherer,” until the prolific spring of 1802; it was later published as “Resolution and Independence” in Poems, in Two Volumes. In spite of the delay, the impression made by this old man, bent “almost double,” was clearly a powerful one, for his lurking presence is discernible in the rhetoric of the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, which William was then writing. But what is even more telling is both William’s and Dorothy’s defensive reactions, two years later, to Sara Hutchinson’s criticism of the poem. Dorothy’s description of their encounter with the old man, written on October 3, 1800, is noteworthy for its better than customary detail, in which we can trace the contours of William’s poem: N.B. When Wm and I returned from accompanying Jones we met an old man almost double . . . He had a wife “and a good woman and it pleased God to bless us with ten children.” All these were dead but one of whom he had not heard for many years, a sailor. His trade was to gather leeches, but now leeches are scarce and he had not strength for it . . . He had been hurt in driving a cart, his leg broke his body driven over his skull fractured. He felt no pain till he recovered from his first insensibility. “It was then late in the evening, when the light was just going away.” (42)

That Dorothy begins this passage, which is an exercise in noting well, with a signal to the reader to do the same, suggests, on the one hand, that the incident with the Leech-Gatherer had been recognized as poetic raw material needing careful recording, and on the other, that this was an episode to which, at some point, they would return. When she and William did

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return to it, they were not the only ones involved in the poetic process. To an extent perhaps greater than any other Wordsworth poem, “Resolution and Independence” was shaped by collaborative input.49 I am less concerned here with the dynamics of group collaboration than with William’s and Dorothy’s individual responses to Sara Hutchinson’s criticism of the poem and how they betray a familial consciousness stung by that criticism. Nor are the particulars of poetic revision necessarily relevant; instead, what deserves note is that William and Dorothy both feel that their moral sensibility has been called into question by Sara’s criticism. Because Sara does not display a level of empathy commensurate with that of the Wordsworths, they grow defensive. For William, the fallout with Sara results from an imbalance in sympathies: her deficiency evident in her not having been moved as her “sister” and “brother” were.50 In her edition of the 1807 Poems, Helen Darbishire explains the source of tension: “Sara had evidently expressed feelings of boredom in reading the second part of the poem which gave the old man’s tale of his loss of wife and ten children and details of his travels and his difficulties in his unlucrative occupation” (472). In providing her criticism, Sara must have called that portion of the poem “tedious” because William focuses on that term in his indignant response of June 14, 1802: I am exceedingly sorry that the latter part of the Leech-gatherer has displeased you . . . A person reading this Poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and controuled, expecting almost something spiritual or supernatural . . . I cannot conceive a figure more impressive than that of an old Man like this . . . You speak of his speech as tedious: everything is tedious when one does not read with the feelings of the Author . . . It is in the character of the old man to tell his story in a manner which an impatient reader must necessarily feel as tedious. (Letters 1.366–7)

In the same letter, just below William’s signature, Dorothy writes, “Dear Sara . . . when you feel any poem of his to be tedious, ask yourself in what spirit it was written—whether merely to tell the tale and be through with it, or to illustrate a particular character or truth” (367). The emphasis here is plainly on the sentiment Sara ought to have felt upon encountering the character of the Leech-Gatherer. And the subtext is abundantly clear: William and Dorothy were both moved by this man and his story back in the fall of 1800. Dorothy had noted well the encounter. To question their shared emotional response was an affront to what had become virtually a single consciousness of this experience. If William’s upbraiding seems excessive, I would offer that it is written with the full sense of being legitimized by the one person whose sensibility ought never to be questioned: the barometer for moral sentiment with whom he shared the affective impressions, Dorothy. For William, Sara’s criticism justified such a response because, in a sense, she was being un-sisterly—indeed, she was generating collaborative dissonance as an unsympathetic member of the literary family.

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Yet another feature of this story returns to the legacy of The Pedlar, also at the forefront of William and Dorothy’s collaborative consciousness during this highly generative season of 1802. If William felt pricked by Sara’s pointed criticism of “The Leech-Gatherer,” her use of the term tedious could only have intensified the sting, for it is the very word he ironically puts in the mouth of the Pedlar when apologizing for his long-windedness: It would have grieved Your very heart to see her. Sir, I feel The story linger in my heart. I fear ‘Tis long and tedious, but my spirit clings To that poor woman . . . (The Ruined Cottage MS. D. [1799] 361–65)

The Pedlar’s words in this excerpt could almost substitute for the poet’s in relating the unfortunate circumstances of the Leech-Gatherer. No substitution is necessary in The Prelude, however, when it is the poet’s own story that is addressed to Coleridge, in whose sympathetic ear it could never ring of tedium: “Nor will it seem to thee, my friend, so prompt / In sympathy, that I have lengthened out / With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale” (1.645–7). And finally, as if intentionally confirming the effect of this nagging word on their shared consciousness, Dorothy herself, in A Narrative Concerning George and Sarah Green of the Parish of Grasmere (1808), uses the same rhetoric—“I fear I have spun out my narrative to a tedious length”— and invokes the Pedlar in the process: “I may say with the Pedlar . . . ‘I feel / The story linger in my heart, my memory / Clings to this poor Woman and her Family’ ” (86).51 What had originated as self-deprecation by the Pedlar in The Ruined Cottage of 1799 becomes a device of ironic deflation for both William and Dorothy; in the end, their retooling of Sara’s criticism puts language in the service of intimacy, for it allows them to share the secret of an inside joke. If in the figure of the Leech-Gatherer we can make out the prototypically alienated model of rusticity and grit so often associated with the Lyrical Ballads, and subsequently championed in the Preface of 1800, it should be no surprise; for the story the Leech-Gatherer told the Wordsworths in 1800 seemed itself a kind of poetry rendered in the language of men. Dorothy’s final enigmatic line in her description of the encounter, “ ‘It was then late in the evening, when the light was just going away,’ ” looks and sounds like a poetic reference, as when she elsewhere quotes from the Scottish ballad of “Sir Patrick Spens,” “We had the crescent moon with the ‘auld moon in her arms’ ” (121), 52 or from “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “I grew so sad. ‘When pleasant thoughts,’ etc” (21), or from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “we were at John’s Grove, and ‘a star or two beside’ ” (87). But the words are actually the Leech-Gatherer’s as he set the scene of his driving cart accident, the light of day having faded away right along with his consciousness. Set off in quotation marks—the journals’ signal for the poetic—the line virtually aspires to the condition of poetry as it concludes one of the important poetic impressions informing the Preface of 1800.53

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The story of the 1800 Preface is one that foregrounds Dorothy’s involvement in William’s writing, this time in prose. In October of 1800 she emphasizes the jointness of their work: “Wm and I were employed all the morning in writing an addition to the preface” (43). What they were working on was a portion intended to address—perhaps justify—the inclusion of Christabel in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Customarily received as meaning copying text, her term writing here is nevertheless stubbornly ambiguous, for Dorothy often makes it clear when copying was her task: “I copied poems on the naming of places at night” (45); “I copied out the L[eech] G[atherer] for Coleridge” (145). When William “writes,” it means he is composing, usually aloud while walking outdoors. When we back up to Dorothy’s entry for September 30, we see that she “wrote—the last sheet of notes and preface.” The next day, moreover, she and William work together: “We corrected the last sheet” (41). The first part of the Preface had already been mailed to Biggs and Cottle, postmarked that very day—the 30th—from Keswick, meaning that they were likely focused on finishing the second part, which was mailed on or about October 2, and writing the addition for Christabel, the first part of which was already at the printer.54 We are in the midst, then, of the finalization of the Preface of 1800. Dorothy’s wording of the 30th seems to imply that the work is near completion, but an important entry on October 3 would belie such an inference: “Wm walked to Ambleside after dinner. I went with him part of the way—he talked much about the object of his Essay for the 2nd volume of L.B. I returned expecting the Simpsons—they did not come” (41–42). On this day William was preoccupied with the “object” of the essay, which opens at least two possibilities: first, that its final form was yet inchoate on September 30; and second, that William was trying to reconcile the Preface’s argument with the increasingly peripheral Christabel. Just what were they focused on at this point in the process, and how did it pertain to the lingering issue of Coleridge’s poem? To fully unpack the collaborative thought process, we need to step back once more before moving forward. The day before their interrupted walk to Ambleside, Thursday, October 2, Dorothy mentions sharing with William a “pleasant conversation” about “the manners of the rich—avarice, inordinate desires, and the effeminacy unnaturalness and the unworthy objects of education” (41). In her sometimes hurried and ungrammatical fashion, she jams much into that small sentence, but if we consider the context of the Preface, it becomes apparent that their conversation was retracing parts of the argument. On the one hand, the Preface expresses disgust with the prevailing appetite for the gothic in popular taste, and with writers who, having fallen away from all that is permanent, philosophical, and natural in the “sympathies of men” by indulging “in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation” (LB 246). We can see the outline of that obsession in their conversation. The mission of the Lyrical Ballads, so states the Preface, is to “counteract” the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” which has become the byproduct of an “encreasing

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accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident” (LB 249). This is exactly what William and Dorothy were talking about—the condition of “unnaturalness” that in turn generates “inordinate desires.” “Effeminacy” in this context belongs to the city, the space of “social vanity,” as contrasted to the space of “low and rustic life,” governed by “simple and unelaborated” manners (LB 245). How, then, was this to comport with the manner of Christabel? Coleridge was hard at work on the second part, even as they spoke, and they were expecting its arrival any day. He showed up with it on October 4; on October 6 it was scrapped from the project. 55 In Romanticism and the Gothic (2000), Michael Gamer demonstrates not only how Wordsworth objected to the poem’s “heavy gothicism”; he also elucidates the profound irony of Wordsworth’s resorting to “Coleridge’s own notes and critical writing to find the language with which he could reject what is arguably one of Coleridge’s finest poems” (126). To supplement Gamer’s argument, I would simply offer that, besides its gothicism, what compounded Christabel’s already tenuous status—and confirmed its ultimate estrangement from the project—was the utter disharmony it created when played against the stark reality and rustic simplicity of Dorothy and William’s encounter with the Leech-Gatherer. The conf lict in genre between Christabel’s gothic and the pastoral of “Michael” was only exacerbated by the inability to reconcile the former with the argument of the Preface, particularly with the economic component that pitted rustic simplicity against an urban extravagance (fed in part by gothic revenues). If Lyrical Ballads was going to sell, it would be because people were going to buy the unadorned simplicity of a figure like the Leech-Gatherer, in this case embodied in Michael. What Wordsworth did not want to risk was the charge of acquiescing to the very tastes he excoriated in the Preface. When the Wordsworths decided to cut Christabel, it did not mean simply substituting “Michael,” for it had not yet been written. Wordsworth needed a strong poem to support the Preface and to end the volume, and not until the Preface was at the printer did he begin writing what Dorothy called “The Sheepfold,” which he completed on December 9. It was to be his finest substantiation of the Preface’s argument. Their conversation the day before the interrupted walk to Ambleside must have been good. Dorothy says “pleasant.” It must have been stimulating, in any event, because William wanted to continue it the next day, when the hodgepodge of topics—like the “last sheet of notes”—started taking shape, becoming the more recognizable and coherent “Essay for the 2nd volume of L. B.” Why did Dorothy walk only part way to Ambleside? Why did she leave the cottage at all, given that they were “expecting the Simpsons”? Could it be that she walked part of the way because William specifically wanted to talk with her about the preface? He needed to go to Ambleside. She needed to await the Simpsons. The only solution was for her to accompany him part of the way and then hurry back to meet their guests, who “did not come.” It is odd that the Simpsons did not show up, given that they were expected. Or is it possible that they showed up

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while Dorothy and William were out, found no one home, and departed? Consider the pregnant, conjunctive dash in Dorothy’s sentence: “I went with him part of the way—he talked much about the object of his Essay for the 2nd volume of L.B.” One might translate the dash: “I went with him part of the way, for he wanted to [talk] much (with me) about the object of his Essay.” Indeed, it is entirely plausible that he wanted to pick up where they had left off the day before. It is telling that Dorothy’s belated entry for the Leech-Gatherer appears on this day, after this conversation. As Pamela Woof observes, “They had both met the leech gatherer the week before and the details, and even some of the phrases in Dorothy’s account, could have come out of a shared memory and conversation” (12). Clearly, but even more, that conversation from the week before could also have informed the discussion about “avarice, inordinate desires” on October 2 that continued in the October 3 talk about the “object” of the Preface, thereby stimulating her to record the encounter with the Leech-Gatherer in that day’s journal entry. It may run contrary to our received ideas about the Preface, but William was more invested in the theory than he could recall those many years later. Indeed, for a brief moment in October 1800 it looks not as if Coleridge is harassing William about including a preface; rather, it appears William is pressing Dorothy about it.56 Writing about the Wordsworths in 1802, Woof notes that this was a period when, more than any other, William and Dorothy “inhabit each other’s concerns and conversation,” and that their shared thoughts, their intimate moments of reading Milton together in Dove Cottage, for example, can become the “genesis of [a poem’s] composition” (13, 14). Furthermore, she argues that their shared experiences are more generative, in terms of both writing and memory, than their separate experiences: more dear—to embellish slightly—for each other’s sake. Although “we cannot,” as Woof cautions, “retrieve . . . [the Wordsworths’] unrecorded conversations” (16), what I have attempted to demonstrate is that we can synchronize crucial moments in the Grasmere Journal with related writings in order to reanimate some of those conversations and thereby gain a better understanding of the collaborative thinking and writing that occurred.

II The refined symmetry of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes, thematically evident in the internal balancing of the macro- and microcosmic, and formally conspicuous in the sonnets that enact what Stuart Curran describes as the collection’s “continual readjustment of perspective between the simple and complex, the quotidian and the cosmic,”57 reflects a habit of being that, for the Wordsworths in 1802, had become powerfully characterized by a shared vision, a vision rooted in a dissenting model of domestic pedagogy, physically mirrored in the continual pattern of walking backwards and forwards and indelibly inscribed upon their collaborative consciousness. Wordsworth tropes the collection’s dialectical patterning in the prefatory

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lines to the first section of volume one, “The Orchard Pathway”: ORCHARD PATHWAY, to and fro, Ever with thee did I go, Weaving Verses, a huge store! These, and many hundreds more, And, in memory of the same, This little lot shall bear Thy Name!58

Pamela Woof’s implicit response to Marlon Ross’s questionings in The Contours of Masculine Desire (1989) emphasizes the significance in 1802 of the repetition embedded in the pulse of such “to and fro” patterning. In recording that William was soothed by having verses repeated to him over and over again [“This is the Spot” on 4 May], Dorothy illustrates a characteristic of her own writing that leads us to say of her language that, in Wordsworth’s words, it can “uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe.” That characteristic is repetition. Lifelike, and offering us something as natural as the power of gravitation, the Journal is full of repeated actions—bakings of pies and breads, walks, readings, visits, repeated weathers and seasons and images. But they are repetitions with variation, not inert sameness. (7)59

Woof’s exquisitely subtle rejoinder demonstrates not only that Dorothy and William both desired patterns of repetition—the “repose that ever is the same”—but also, implicitly, that the Romantic quest, internalized or no, is supplanted by the desire for those patterns. And it is precisely “not inert sameness” that Wordsworth seeks when he expresses in the “Ode to Duty” his desire for “a repose which ever is the same” (l. 40); rather, it is a balance, in life and art, between the intuitive and the philosophical, between the mundane and the transcendent, between the unpretentious joy of the Orchard Pathway and the systematic program of The Recluse, between Dorothy and Coleridge, between duty to family and duty to society. Yet, scored into the repetitive rhythms of Grasmere, the to and fro of the Orchard Pathway, the walking backwards and forwards with Dorothy, is more than just William’s desire for repose; there, too, we can trace the contours of Dorothy’s desire for female friendship that envisioned patterns of repetition in a cottage with a “particular scheme of happiness for each Season,” and in walks along “A garden stored with fruit and flowers / And sunny seats and shady bowers” (“Irregular Verses” qtd in Levin 202). There are, then, underlying tensions informing the “dialectical patterning” of the 1807 Poems between the contentment of intimacy with Dorothy, reflected in the unassuming poetics of female friendship, and the ambitiousness of a philosophical odyssey, reflected in the epic vision of The Recluse. Both impulses turn away from competition and gothic avarice in the literary marketplace, but Wordsworth cannot pursue them concurrently. Thus there is an ethical tension, a Hegelian conflict between duty to the family and duty to society, symbolized here on the one hand by Dorothy, and on the other by

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Coleridge, with whom Wordsworth memorably foresees himself, at the end of The Prelude, laboring in the collaborative work of societal redemption: Blessed with true happiness if we may be United helpers forward of a day Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work— Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe— Of their redemption, surely yet to come. (13.437–441)

The remarkable lyrical harvest of 1802 marked the culmination of William and Dorothy’s collaborative intimacy. It is a period whose symbolic beginning occurs with a turn in the final poem of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads: “For thou art with me, here, upon the banks / Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend” (115–16)—a proclamation that marks the subtle beginnings of Wordsworth’s drift away from Coleridge and toward Dorothy. Just as subtly, the turn back toward Coleridge begins when William’s marriage intervenes in the previously unadulterated intimacy of Dove Cottage. As “Tintern Abbey” marked a closure and a beginning, two poems from the 1807 collection, the forward-looking “Ode to Duty” in the first volume and the contemplative “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” from the second, recall the new beginning and nostalgic closure signaled at the end of 1802. On sixteen separate occasions in the Grasmere Journal Dorothy notes that she and William walked backwards and forwards; fourteen occur between March 17 and July 7, 1802. Distinct as a perambulatory mode, this kind of walking is not to be confused with walking in general.60 It would be interesting to know exactly what it looked like. Were they side by side, in tandem, slightly offset, or perhaps staggered, with one trailing the other at a distance? If side by side, who stood where, or did it matter? Cognitive-behavior specialists might find the arrangement of bodies illuminating. Was Dorothy visible as William composed aloud or perhaps just felt as an accompanying presence, half-perceived in the penumbra of his senses? Did she have to keep pace with him so as not to be distracting, or was she allowed, child of nature that she was, to frolic about, to chase a butterfly or pick a celandine? Did she speak? Or just keep silent? Although she omits depictions of herself on such walks, we do have her account of William’s solitary mode of walking and composing from a letter to Lady Beaumont. Rain or shine, Dorothy notes, William usually “composes his verses out of doors,” where he “walks backwards and forwards, and though the length of his walk be sometimes a quarter or half a mile, he is as fast bound within the chosen limits as if by prison walls” (Letters 1.477). The first time Dorothy mentions in the journal sharing such a walk with William, it was her idea, as if she were hoping to coax him out of the solitude described earlier in order to enjoy the kind of adolescent intimacy she and Jane Pollard shared when, “for secrets or whispered confidences they took ‘Mr. Caygille’s walk,’ a lane running past his estate . . . up a steep wooded hill” (Gittings and Manton 62). Dorothy records this first occasion just over a week after the decision to cut “Christabel”; William was

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beginning to work on “Michael”: “A very fine clear morning. After Wm had composed a little, I persuaded him to go into the orchard. We walked backwards and forwards” (45). As though the “fine clear morning” could help clarify thoughts, Dorothy’s idea seems designed to spark the creative process, William having composed only “a little” thus far that morning. And at times, this is exactly what happens: “We walked backwards and forwards between home and Oliffs till I was tired. William kindled and began to write the poem” (103). Indeed, Dorothy’s invitation to walk in the orchard recalls a similar invitation—Barbauld’s “The Invitation to Miss B[elsham],” the childhood friend with whom she wrote verses in the alcoves of Warrington: Will DELIA , at the muse’s call retire To the pure pleasures rural scenes inspire? Will she from crowds and busy cities fly, Where wreaths of curling smoke involve the sky, To taste the grateful shade of spreading trees, And drink the spirit of the mountain breeze? (ll. 13–18)

In the complement to Dorothy’s first invitation—the journal’s final depiction of this intimate mode of intercourse—it is William who does the persuading, the growing darkness having made Dorothy “rather unwilling” to join him for the reading of letters. Often cited for its poignancy as well as its beauty, this image of their walking together appears in Dorothy’s description of the final night in Grasmere before their departure on the journey that would take them to France during August, back to London for family meetings, and then to Gallow Hill for William and Mary’s wedding in October: He came to me at about ½ past nine pressing me to go out; he had got letters which we were to read out of doors—I was rather unwilling, fearing I could not see to read the letters, but I saw well enough . . . The moon was behind. William hurried me out in hopes that I should see her. We walked first to the top of the hill to see Rydale. It was dark and dull but our own vale was very solemn. The shape of Helm Crag was quite distinct, though black. We walked backwards and forwards on the White Moss path there was a sky-like white brightness on the lake. The Wyke Cottage Light at the foot of Silver How. Glowworms out, but not so numerous as last night. O beautiful place! Dear Mary William. The horse is come Friday morning, so I must give over. William is eating his Broth. I must prepare to go. The Swallows I must leave them the well the gardens the Roses, all. Dear creatures!! they sang last night after I was in bed—seemed to be singing to one another, just before they settled to rest for the night. Well, I must go. Farewell. (146)

Fittingly, on this final night in their beloved vale of Grasmere, they are outdoors, in the moonlight, and the final image Dorothy records of her shared life with William is of their walking in their distinctly personalized way: backwards and forwards. As that profoundly intimate moment, recorded in the past tense, recedes before us in the journal, it is immediately supplanted

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by a timeless sentence fragment, as though the words are trying to stave off the inevitable progress of time. Then, slowly, language itself gives over, the elliptical “Dear Mary William” serving as a last deep breath before the present comes ungracefully into focus, initially tripping over “the horse is come” before finally crystallizing with the quotidian William eating his broth. The future then usurps the place. Adhering to neither teleological nor chronological confinement, this mode of walking is essentially a way of “marking time”—the term for marching in place—only with the added feature of pacing to and fro.61 For the Wordsworths, marking time as such often included the accompaniment of reading, reciting, or composing poetry; poems such as “Michael,” “The Emigrant Mother,” “The Firgrove,” and “To the Small Celandine” were conceived, and, in the last case, also recovered, during such walks. On April 26, 1802, they brought along Spenser: “We spent the morning in the orchard. Read the Prothalamium of Spenser—walked backwards and forwards” (116). Here the space of the orchard is infused with a powerful coalescence of intimacies. For Dorothy, marking time in the orchard recalls walks shared with Jane Pollard, memories of which she continually recalled as an adult. In early 1797 she revisited those memories in a letter to Jane (now Mrs. Marshall): “I dare say you have not forgotten our walks in the wood at the side of Mr. Rawson’s house, you must remember how happy we were . . . I often think of those early days” (Letters 1.179). Many years later, in a poem written for Christmas day in 1827—her fifty-sixth birthday— Dorothy tells Jane’s daughter Julia about the prospect of domestic happiness she once shared with her mother: —To her I told in simple prose Each girlish vision, as it rose Before an active busy brain That needed neither spur nor rein, That still enjoyed the present hour Yet for the future raised a tower Of bliss more exquisite and pure Bliss that (so deemed we) should endure Maxims of caution, prudent fears Vexed not the projects of those years Simplicity our steadfast theme, No works of Art adorned our scheme.— A cottage in a verdant dell, A foaming stream, a crystal Well, A garden stored with fruit and flowers And sunny seats and shady bowers . . . // Such was the spot I fondly framed When life was new, and hope untamed: There with my one dear Friend would dwell, Nor wish for aught beyond the dell. Alas! the cottage fled in air, The streamlet never flowed: Yet did those visions pass away

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Though the very scene itself is a work of art, “No works of Art” with a capital “A” are allowed to intrude on unadorned simplicity; this is the province of neither literary competition nor philosophical disputation. Its philosophy is “fondly framed” in the unpretentious beauty of “sunny seats and shady / bowers”—in Barbauld’s “Alcove,” if you will, wherein lies, as the first sonnet of the 1807 sonnet sequence declares, a “map of the whole world” (113). Simultaneously, marking time in the orchard, generically inscribed with the reading of Spenser, puts us in mind of lovers, and of marriage, too, the poetry in this case being “Prothalamion.” The strange, symbolic consecration of marital rites between William and Dorothy on the eve/morning of William and Mary’s wedding day underscores just how potent this fantasy could be: “I gave him the wedding ring—with how deep a blessing! I took it from my forefinger where I had worn it the whole night before—he slipped it again onto my finger and blessed me fervently” (154).63 Yet, the psychological complexities of the relationship continue, determinedly, to resist simple allegorizing. Reading Wordsworth’s image of the two swans in Home at Grasmere in the context of Spenser’s “Prothalamion” demonstrates this point. Having meditated on the beautiful Hegelian dialectics mirrored back to him in the “perpetual harmony and dance” of the vale’s birds: tracing and retracing that large round, Their jubilant activity evolves Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro, Upwards and downwards, progress intricate Yet unperplexed, as if one spirit swayed Their indefatigable flight,64

Wordsworth realizes “two are missing.” In the process, he explicitly links the image of the swans with that of the observers and turns the solitary voice of An Evening Walk into the “we” of a “solitary pair”65: —two, a lonely pair Of milk-white Swans. Wherefore are they not seen Partaking of this day’s pleasure? From afar They came, to sojourn here in solitude, Choosing this Valley, they who had the choice Of the whole world. . . . to us, They were more dear than may be well believed, Not only for their beauty and their still And placid way of life and constant love Inseparable, not for these alone, But that their state so much resembled ours;

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They having also chosen this abode; They strangers, and we strangers; they a pair, And we a solitary pair like them. (238–55)

The comparison here is not with Jove and Leda; on the contrary, it is with the “two Swannes of goodly hewe” that Spenser describes having seen “Come softly swimming downe along the Lee; / Two fairer Birds I yet did never see”—two maidens heading to London for their “Brydale day,” in Spenser’s refrain, “which was not long” (ll. 37–38).66 But Wordsworth’s swans do not go to London to meet drakes. They fly away, toward Westmoreland, content to enjoy simple pleasures far from the din of empire. By invoking Spenser’s image, Wordsworth implicitly genders himself female when he draws the comparison, at least infusing, if not supplanting, the sibling/marital relationship with the intimacy of female companionship.67 As a trope, moving backwards and forwards reflects an aspect of an age caught up in looking backwards and forwards, backwards at the ruins of history suffering erosion at the hands of the Enlightenment, and forwards to an uncertain future; from the relic to the reliquary; from fragments of ancient poetry to the national tale; from Burke on the one hand to Price, Wollstonecraft, and Paine on the other; from codified archaisms in English law to William Frend’s language-based proposal for legal reform, Peace and Union; from the Terror to Napoleon. Indeed, from Milton to Wordsworth. As with the famous image in The Prelude of the river that, “Yielding in part to old remembrances, / . . . Turns and will measure back his course” (9.2, 5), so walking backwards and forwards represents a mode of thinking, of composing, and of remembering—tracing and retracing the past (often collaboratively) in order to move forward in the present. Ranging thus also epitomizes the Wordsworths’ collaborative model of poetic production, for the Journals served as a place from which William could retrieve past experiences to be contemplated, sometimes much later, in tranquility. “Beggars,” “The Leech-Gatherer,” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” were all composed some two years after experiencing the actual incidents. In Poems, in Two Volumes, however, this trope resonates in a variety of important registers. Paralleling the shifts in historical perspective noted earlier, the 1807 Poems traces and retraces poetic history by invoking and then reworking themes and forms. Contemporaneous political figures (and the issues they embody) such as Napoleon, Gustavus IV, Charles Fox, Thomas Clarkson, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the Men of Kent sit side-by-side with a host of poetic/ political forebears: Orpheus, Sydney, Milton, Michelangelo, Ossian, Rob Roy, and Burns. Implicitly present, of course, are Spenser, Petrarch, Horace, and Gray. Whereas William and Dorothy find themselves literally “stepping westward” in Scotland—seemingly back in time—toward that “wildish destiny,” the reader traces (and retraces) literary history (and memory) in these two volumes.68 For the Wordsworths in 1802, walking backwards and forwards was a collaborative means of thinking, creating, and recovery, and therefore this mode of intercourse became inscribed in the 1807 Poems. On April 30 it literally

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was a way of retracing memory. The subject matter will be familiar, for on this day we find that William “began to write the poem of the Celandine.” Later in the day, he and Dorothy “walked backwards and forwards” (118). The next day’s entry plainly illustrates that Dorothy and William’s marking time is uniquely tethered to memory, for they lose the poem, and must thereafter track it down again. They had been outside most of the day, working in the garden or simply lying in “our old resting place”: Oh the overwhelming beauty of the vale below—greener than green . . . We went down to tea at 8 o’clock—had lost the poem and returned after tea. The landscape was fading, sheep and lambs quiet among the Rocks. We walked towards Kings and backwards and forwards. The sky was perfectly cloudless . . . Wm wrote the Celandine 2nd part tonight. (119)

The poem is “lost” somewhere in a landscape that comes to signify the memory they trace and retrace until they can find it again. Significantly, they journey back out to find the poem together, collaboratively. If this is indeed a poem about seeing, then it is entirely appropriate that William should be accompanied on this search for an overlooked flower turned poem by the collaborative partner who helped him see it in the first place: his sister. If there is a fundamentally dialectic rhythm in Poems, in Two Volumes, resonating across the collection as a whole and through the turns and counterturns of verse, that rhythm is even more deeply layered by returns within and across volumes that retrieve what has been left behind, like the celandine poem, in order to carry it forward. Wordsworth’s note in volume two to the second of the collection’s three daisy poems openly signals this return: “The two following Poems were overflowings of the mind in composing the one which stands first in the Volume” (1807 267). These two daisy poems return to a theme set out in the first movement of the larger score—in fact its opening notes—yet not as simple repetition. There is thematic repetition, but those opening notes have now become conditioned by and will further condition the thematic progression of the overall work. We can see an instance of this in the third stanza of this second daisy poem, “To the Daisy.” Wordsworth coyly sets up the stanza by claiming that while staring at the daisy he often plays a game of free association, giving the flower “many a fond and idle name.” He then proceeds with the naming: A Nun demure of lowly port, Or sprightly Maiden of Love’s Court, In thy simplicity the sport Of all temptations; A Queen in crown of rubies drest, A Starveling in a scanty vest, Are all, as seem to suit thee best, Thy appellations. (1807 268)

Julie Ellison singles out these lines for their deployment of fancy in the service of male fantasy—the male gaze that turns the flower into “the object

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of lascivious sport, in which ‘play with similes’ feels like sporting with erotic ‘temptations.’ Rubies and a ‘scanty vest’ are simply costumes appropriate to different styles of women.”69 Yet this overlooks the collaborative, bi-gendered nature of this gaze, pollinated in 1802 and then germinated in the leaves of 1807. Moreover, as the poem’s next stanza reminds us, the daisy, especially this one, is also “A little Cyclops, with one eye” (l. 25)—it is the “day’s eye” that opens at the beginning of this collection, almost as if to watch over—and reflect—its contents. Curran draws the connection between the collection’s opening and closing images: “The final great lines—To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”—deliberately return us to the opening poem of volume one, “To the Daisy,” now reconceptualized in almost cosmic terms” (“Multum in Parvo” 235). To return to the stanza in question—which, carrying forth the opening theme, resurfaces well into the second movement—we can now consider how it has been conditioned by the intervening poems. The “scanty vest” in this stanza, for example, can only be eroticized through dissociation—by removing it from the undeniably asexual “starveling” wearing it. Indeed, to dislocate the poem from the context of the collection as a whole is to alienate it from the field of signification in which that starveling—“Alice Fell”—is to be found.70 For Wordsworth’s short list of appellations, on a second look, are not flights of fancy at all; they are deliberate echoes of figures and poems returning in this floral note: the “Queen” fit to “head those ancient Amazonian files” in “Beggars”; the Nun figured on the one hand as “holy time” in Sonnet 19 (“It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free”) and on the other as the moon in Wordsworth’s reworking of Sydney (“ ‘With how sad steps, O Moon thou climb’st the sky’ ”); and the “sprightly maiden” initially embodied in “Louisa,” then found singing in the Highlands in “The Solitary Reaper,” and finally “reproached for taking long Walks in the Country” in “To a Young Lady.” 71 Whereas “To the Daisy” in the second volume returns to carry forth images that have appeared along the way, thereby foregrounding them in the present moment of the work, “To the Lesser Celandine,” also in the second volume, does the work of looking backwards and forwards at the same time. Were we to think of Poems, in Two Volumes as itself enacting an odic rhythm, we would surely be reducing its perspectival complexities, particularly its important returns, carried out in its intricate to and fro movements. Nevertheless, the scheme might in certain instances be illuminating, and although I will not pursue the myriad possibilities for strophe and antistrophe, I will suggest that at least one moment resembling an epode is found in “The Small Celandine,” for the poem, composed in elegiac meter, is a thoughtful moment of stasis serving as the fulcrum that manages to hold “Louisa,” the collection’s second poem, and “Elegiac Stanzas,” its penultimate, in balance. Yet, the stasis itself is wrought with internal tension—that between youth and age—expressed in the speaker’s frustration with what youth must ultimately relinquish. Being in the second volume, this poem has carried with it something of its forebears—the first volume’s two celandine poems—but it has nothing of their lightheartedness nor of their intimate,

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personal address. “The Small Celandine” is noteworthy, too, for displaying a rare glimpse of the poet’s spleen, something we are not accustomed to see in other poems about flowers (or nature in general), which are predominantly celebratory. In this poem, the speaker finds, to his surprise, a celandine braving a storm: “Now standing forth an offering to the Blast, / And buffeted at will by Rain and Storm” (ll. 11–12). Knowing that the celandine is not wont to suffer so, and would typically be “muffled up from harm / In close selfshelter,” he pauses—“I stopp’d”—in the exact middle of the poem, to take a closer look, and he finds that this flower is aged: I stopp’d, and said with inly muttered voice, It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold: This neither is it’s courage nor it’s choice, But it’s necessity in being old. The sunshine may not bless it, nor the dew; It cannot help itself in it’s decay; Stiff in it’s members, wither’d, changed of hue.” And, in my spleen, I smiled that it was grey. (ll. 13–20)

The spleen here, expressed in terms of frustration in the follow-on stanza, is a measure of the loss of youth’s unbounded hope and enthusiasm so contrastingly depicted in “Louisa,” whose very being is characterized by “endless play” (l. 10). Louisa, too, struggles against wind and rain but, in doing so, inspires only the wish to kiss the drops from off her cheek: She loves her fire, her Cottage-home; Yet o’er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak; And when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains That sparkle on her cheek. (ll. 13–18)

Rain only adds luster to this youthful cheek, the outward glow of an indomitable spirit so unlike the “wither’d” visage of the small celandine. The perspective, innocently hopeful, is deliberately naïve, befitting both the subject and the poem’s place. By the time we get to Peele Castle, the naiveté of “Louisa” and the frustration of “The Small Celandine” become submerged in a placidity—a “fortitude, and patient chear”—able to withstand “The light’ning, the fierce wind, and the trampling waves” (ll. 57, 52). “Cased in the unfeeling armour of old time,” the venerable “Pile,” becomes a direct reflection of the small celandine—the pilewort—“standing forth an offering to the Blast.” Had the poet been the painter, he would have found this pile/flower/brother, a safer harbor: “I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile / . . . On a tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss” (ll. 17, 20). But the poet grows contented, knowing he is not, nor could have been, the painter. Exquisitely expressed in the concluding line of his “Elegiac Stanzas,” the poet and the work have arrived at a peace that passes understanding: “Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”

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The two celandine poems of the first volume implicitly pay homage to Dorothy and to the collaborative vision that made them possible. Likewise, “Louisa,” “The Sparrow’s Nest,” both “To a Butterfly” poems, and “The Redbreast and the Butterfly”—this last conceived in the garden, where Dorothy “saw a robin chacing a scarlet Butterfly” (112)—all celebrate shared experiences and intimacies. “Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland,” the section that introduces volume two, relocates those earlier shared experiences to the maturer intimacies of a walking tour. The case of “To a Butterfly” is illustrative the Wordsworths’ mode of collaboration when fancy is genuinely involved. Conceived in Dove Cottage in March of 1802, “To a Butterfly” is a lighthearted poem that celebrates childhood and the important role Dorothy played as a barometer of sensibility for the young William72: Stay near me—do not take thy flight! A little longer stay in sight! Much converse do I find in thee, Historian of my infancy! Float near me; do not yet depart! Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art! A solemn image to my heart, My father’s family! // Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days, The time, when in our childish plays, My sister Emmeline and I Together chased the butterfly! A very hunter did I rush Upon the prey;—with leaps and springs I followed on from brake to brush; But she, God love her! feared to brush The dust from off its wings. (CPW 62)

A conversation over the breakfast table about their childhood experience led William to compose the poem on the spot, and he includes this poem in volume two under the heading “Moods of My Own Mind.” Mary Moorman dates the experience back to their days in Cockermouth when, “in their father’s fields beyond the river, and in the ‘green courts’ of the old castle they rushed about after butterflies” (EY 17). Worthen notes the significance of this poem’s composition history not only because it “reanimated their common childhood” (117) but also because Dorothy’s description of the Hamlet-like William composing, “unbuttoned, unstockinged, waistcoat open,” suddenly transforms him from adult to young boy: “He is not the Romantic poet” relates Moorman “and cannot be the properly dressed or conventional adult: he is caught up by memory, no more properly dressed . . . than a schoolboy (116). As the schoolgirl Dorothy built her castles for a future cottage home, so William, in the guise of schoolboy, does fancy work, albeit in the service of recovering childhood. A passage from Dorothy’s journal demonstrates that on the morning of March 14, William and Dorothy collaborated to create

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more than a poem: they collaborated to create a shared childhood experience from separate adult memories. While we were at Breakfast . . . he wrote the Poem to a Butterfly! . . . The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we both always feel at the sight of a Butterfly. I told him that I used to chase them a little but that I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, and did not catch them—He told me how they used to kill all the white ones when he went to school because they were frenchmen [sic]. (101)

As Jane Spencer has carefully discerned, figuratively speaking, the only walking backwards and forwards occurring on this morning is done individually, in their respective memories of childhood.73 William entered the Hawkshead Grammar School a year after their mother died. Dorothy was already a year away from home with Aunt Elizabeth Threlkeld. William remembers a schoolboys’ game of killing little Frenchmen disguised as white butterflies. Dorothy remembers being enchanted by the beauty of nature, most likely while living with the Threlkelds. Left unspoken on this memorable morning is the perhaps unspeakable reality of having been separated as young children and thus deprived of actually sharing this childhood joy. It is appropriate that this fancy work occurs in the domestic space, for, as Ellison points out, the work of fancy has long been associated with the household arts, such as needlework and the mending of clothes, thus its female gendering.74 William and Dorothy do not work to recover a lost childhood experience in the sense of recuperating the past; instead they work to re-cover—to weave over—history and the fact of separation in order to build a castle they can share. Moreover, in the context of illness, fancy helps them recover by generating a unified collaborative consciousness. If art for the Romantics is, in Geoffrey Hartman’s terms, “a means to resist the intelligence intelligently,”75 then the Wordsworths might be seen here as resisting the intelligence of their childhood separation by very unselfconsciously re-covering that knowledge in a myth of togetherness. In this brief moment, Wordsworth reveals his own version of John Aikin’s wish for reunification with his sister, except that the dynamics are reversed. Whereas Aikin wishes to “meet again,—to part no more,” Wordsworth, who was to write in Home at Grasmere, “Long is it since we met to part no more,” instead performs the mystical act of putting infinite possibility back into their childhood experience, something the “Immortality Ode” might have convinced us was impossible.76 By inseminating memory with new potential, this moment of sibling collaboration enabled Dorothy and William Wordsworth to reconcile separate experiences of two consciousnesses in the intimate act of creating poetry, an act in which they conceived themselves anew. “Louisa,” a poem whose perspective informs the whole of Poems, in Two Volumes, likewise evokes memories of childhood and friendship. Written in the tradition of Barbauld’s “Verses Written in an Alcove” and “The Invitation to Miss B[elsham],” and of Anna Seward’s sonnets to Honora Sneyd,77 “Louisa” unabashedly revels in the simplicity of female friendship and its removal to the intimate aesthetics of alcoves and bowers—or nooks

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and caves in this case. Distanced from any sort of competition or ambition, the poem begins with a meeting “in the shade,” after which Louisa’s features and nature’s enclosures become the focus of attention: And she hath smiles to earth unknown; Smiles, that with the motion of their own Do spread, and sink, and rise; That come and go with endless play, And ever, as they pass away, Are hidden in her eyes. // . . . Take all that’s mine “beneath the moon,” If I with her but half a noon May sit beneath the walls Of some old cave, or mossy nook, When up she winds along the brook, To hunt the waterfalls. (1807 15–16)78

The obvious difference between Barbauld’s poems and Wordsworth’s is that the former foreground a shared creative, intellectual, or poetic experience. For Barbauld, competition is anathema to poetic creation and therefore does not figure in any of her writing relationships, whether with Elizabeth Belsham, William Enfield, or her brother. What is more, she brings a profoundly egalitarian ethos to those relationships, something Wordsworth does not do with Dorothy. His placing “To a Butterfly” under the rubric “Moods of My Own Mind” emphasizes the elision of his imagination’s partner. Thus the Wordsworths’ collaborative relationship is noncompetitive but also nonegalitarian. Dorothy receives neither recognition nor encouragement in the poetic endeavor, and her subordinate, supporting role is simply taken for granted. Yet, it remains evident that the poet’s gaze in the shorter lyrics frequently derives from a shared, bi-gendered vision, a vision no less sophisticated than that of “Resolution and Independence” or the “Intimations Ode” merely because focused on apparent simplicity. Coincident with this vision is the poet’s willingness to surrender—to be dispossessed of self-assuredness by the seemingly slight, the commonly overlooked. It is a surrender that exclaims, “Take all that’s mine ‘beneath the moon,’ ” in the hopes of being possessed by the joy of unselfconscious and unassuming simplicity. Wordsworth’s willingness to surrender as such—to be “surprised by joy”—is not as apparent in the longer works, though still recognizable. Marlon Ross, generalizing the condition of the Romatic poet, argues that in his various relations to society, to peers, and to forebears, the “poet is thrown back upon his power of self-possession, a power that is repeatedly willed in the poetry by both overt and subliminal appeals to the virility and masculinity of his creative project, and a power repeatedly reconfirmed through his specific relations with the feminine in his poetry and his life” (28). And for Ross, Wordsworth is perhaps most exemplary of this condition. Drawing on Wordsworth’s image from the 1815 “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the poet in the “condition of Hannibal among the Alps,” shaping “his own road,” and then coupling it with The Prelude’s moment

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of discovery at the Simplon Pass, Ross argues that Wordsworth’s momentary insight—an act of “conquest”—is attributable to an Imagination that “fathers itself.” “Through imagination [Wordsworth] is able to fulfill the promise of conquest,” and in so doing he “defeminizes the conquest that has been made possible through the good auspices of feminine nature” (47). Howsoever apparent this perspective might be in the larger works or designs thereof, it is conspicuously muted in the 1807 Poems.79 Even so, the moment of insight in the Simplon Pass must necessarily be contextualized with the stage of its development, for in 1805 it represents a destabilizing moment not of self-possession but of surrender to an ineffable power that overtakes the poet, inseminating and thereby feminizing him. If we juxtapose the 1805 version with the 1850 quotation used by Ross we can discern in the former a submissiveness utterly foreign to Ross’s argument: 1805 (ll. 525–38) Imagination!—lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my song Like an unfathered vapour, here that power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me. I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now, recovering, to my soul I say “I recognize thy glory.” In such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old.

1850 (ll. 592–602) Imagination—here the Power so called Through sad incompetence of human speech, That awful power rose from the mind’s abyss Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, At once, some lonely traveler. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say— “I recognize thy glory”: in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed The visible world, doth greatness make abode.

Not surprisingly, these are some of the most critically well traveled of Wordsworth’s lines; I quote them here to draw attention to the way in which, in 1805, desire is inflected with submission, not mastery. Neither of these passages is about self-possession, especially not the 1805 version, in which the poet is ravished by the seemingly external force of imagination. This is neither rape nor conquest; it is submission, and the pleasure derived is from

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powerlessness. To schematize the moment along gendered lines is to apply the same critical standards used in 1807 reviews of Poems, in Two Volumes and to misconstrue the implications. What Francis Jeffrey saw as emasculation was in actuality a pleasure irrespective of gender that he and other critics were incapable of conceptualizing. 80 Wordsworth offers here an alternative to gendered vision and representation, thanks to the period between 1795 and 1805, with 1802 as the apex, during which he had become heavily influenced through the creative intercourse with Dorothy, resulting in their uniquely bi-gendered, collaborative mode of seeing. Traces of that vision are all but absent from the 1850 Prelude and recoverable only by returning to the 1807 Poems and the collaborative vision of 1802. Just as the intimacy of the Wordsworths’ relationship is multivalent and therefore resistant to encapsulation, so neither are their individual desires readily conceivable along a strict dichotomy. The image of Hannibal in the Alps—“the poet as man of action, as masculine quester, as ruler of visionary empires”—becomes almost comical when confronted with the public face of William Wordsworth in 1807, etched on the first page of his latest book where we find him tripping with intoxication over “thee, sweet Daisy!” That same fascination is evident in “To the Small Celandine” and its companion piece, “To the Same Flower.” In the former, the very idea of conquest is undermined by the poet’s equating his discovery of the celandine to the astronomer’s “finding of a star”: Eyes of some men travel far For the finding of a star; Up and down the heavens they go, Men that keep a mighty rout! I’m as great as they, I trow, Since the day I found thee out Little flower!—I’ll make a stir Like a great Astronomer. (1807 31)

In the follow-on poem, the same attitude, heedless of imperial ambitions and almost mocking of “men that keep a mighty rout,” deflates the very idea of conquest and empire with a reference to Magellan: Let, as old Magellen [sic] did, Others roam about the sea; Build who will a pyramid; Praise it is enough for me, If there will be but three or four Who will love my little Flower. (38)

Here Wordsworth clearly contrasts his own life choice with that of others in pursuit of economic empire. Could Wordsworth have been thinking about his brother John, who went to sea in service of the East India Company a year and a half before?81 Could he have been comparing his lot, dedicated to the domestic life with Dorothy, with John’s, dedicated

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to serving the nation and its expansion? The poem’s final line, “Who will love my little Flower,” which masquerades as a question, is answered by a question in the first line of the next poem: “Who is the happy Warrior?” Following one upon the other, these lines underscore the underlying tension between duty to family and duty to society, initially expressed at the end of “To the Same Flower” and then expanded into that poem’s relationship with “The Character of the Happy Warrior.” Similar tension is implicit between the lyrics of the orchard and the poems addressing social and political concerns, including the sonnets on liberty. Previously discussed as the fulcrum balancing “Elegiac Stanzas” and “Louisa,” the second volume’s “The Small Celandine” naturally looks back, as well, to the earlier celandine poems, thus bridging the ethical tension of competing duties across the breadth of the entire work. In Home at Grasmere, Wordsworth confronts this conflict of duties again when he declares that something must be done. I must not walk in unreproved delight These narrow bounds and think of nothing more, No duty that looks further and no care. (MS. D, ll. 665–68)

His duties to the realm of domesticity are strained by the clarion call of nation. Just before announcing his design in the Prospectus to The Recluse, Wordsworth echoes Othello (3.3.347–57), making it clear that of the possible duties to the nation, his will be poetic (and prophetic), not soldierly: Then farewell to the Warrior’s schemes, farewell The forwardness of Soul which looks that way Upon a less incitement than the cause Of Liberty endangered, and farewell That other hope, long mine, the hope to fill The heroic trumpet with the Muse’s breath! Yet in this peaceful Vale we will not spend Unheard-of days, though loving peaceful thoughts. (ll. 745–52)82

The tension registered in the 1807 Poems derives from the conflict of duties Wordsworth long felt, going back to the end of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads project and extending through the lyrical profusion of 1802; it would not subside until he recommitted himself in earnest to work on The Recluse in 1805.83 Sounding very much like he wants Wordsworth to be Hannibal in the Alps, Coleridge, in a letter to Thomas Poole, articulates his long-standing displeasure with the poet’s inattention to The Recluse, complaining that the Lyrical Ballads had induced Wordsworth to indulge in lyrics, diverting him from his “former mountain Track to wander in Lanes & allies” (CL 2.1013). In a notebook privately addressing Wordsworth, Coleridge associated such devious wanderings, because focused on “taking Delight in [nature’s] Beauty,” with ill health and emasculation, suggesting that they are “deleterious to the Health & manhood of Intellect” (CN 1.1616). A measure of just how long

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Coleridge had been frustrated over this issue can be ascertained from this letter to Wordsworth himself in 1799: I am anxiously eager to have you steadily employed on “The Recluse” . . . I do entreat you go on with “The Recluse”; and I wish you would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes. It would do great good, and might form a part of “The Recluse,” for my present mood I am wholly against the publication of any small poems. (CL 1.527)

Of course, “small poems” are precisely what Wordsworth wrote instead, as he turned away from Coleridge and toward Dorothy: to walk in those lanes and allies, to slake the rills, and to dance among the flowers. Perhaps as Wordsworth conceived it, the mountain road was not to be climbed along a “simple linear ascent from youthful innocence to troubled selfconsciousness”; perhaps his Hannibal was to pause, to double back, and to detour into untrodden ways, allowing for a “continual readjustment of perspective,” as Curran notes, “between the simple and complex, the quotidian and cosmic.”84 When in the poem to Jane Marshall’s daughter, on the occasion of Christmas, 1827, Dorothy says that she and Jane “parted, sorrowful; by duty led,” she makes unambiguous reference to Jane’s marriage, but embedded in that line is the implication that she, too, followed duty, dedicating herself, like Antigone, to her brother and the divine law of the family.85 In a remarkable inversion of “Resolution and Independence,” she later apostrophizes, almost reflexively: And now, dear Girl, I hear you ask Is this your lightsome, chearful task? Of hopes extinct, of childish fears, Why cast among us thoughts of sadness When we are seeking mirth and gladness? (ll. 78–83)86

These exquisitely poignant lines, which forecast the “despondency and madness” that Dorothy, “more than half a poet,” would soon face, emphasize the toll of a sacrifice such as hers.87 William would eventually follow the dictates of human law by marrying and setting himself a course for public service in the role he knew best. Yet, for a time, William, eschewing social duties at home and familial duties abroad, and attending rather to those of the orchard and of “My Father’s Family,” imaged in the flight of a butterfly, almost appears an Antigone figure himself, caught in the tension between the duties of divine and human law. Even when he enters into the marriage with Mary Hutchinson, he cannot wholly negate the commitment to Dorothy, the mock wedding ceremony with her serving as a consecration of rites in which the old relationship is buried—negated—only to resurface as an aspect

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of the new domestic arrangement. A sentence from Hegel’s Phenomenology strikingly encapsulates Wordsworth’s situation: “He passes from the divine law, within whose sphere he lived, over to human law. But the sister becomes, or the wife remains, the head of the household and the guardian of the divine law” (275). This perfectly straightforward sentence possesses a wonderful irony in the context of Dove Cottage, where the commingling of divine and human laws induce a bifurcation of consciousness whose split is even more pronounced because of its once collaborative unity. But the marriage to Mary Hutchinson ultimately signaled the closing of a chapter begun along the banks of the Wye and a shift toward the duty Wordsworth felt to a society in need of redemption. The imperative mood of the epigraph to the “Intimations Ode,” “Paolo majora canamus,” supports this shift, as it speaks not only in a communal voice but also, implicitly, in the voice of a collaborative friendship about to be renewed. But 1802 had to bear its fructus before Wordsworth was ready to sing of larger themes; only then could he turn again toward other duties, toward The Recluse, and toward Coleridge.

Chapter 4

I nc or p or at i ng t h e L i t e r a ry Fa m i ly

From crowded streets remote, Far from the living and dead wilderness Of the thronged World, Society is here: A true Community, a genuine frame Of many into one incorporate. (MS. D. 612–16)

The familiar lines from Home at Grasmere in the epigraph to this chapter

encapsulate the essence of collaborative and familial intimacy, and in what follows I pursue the implications of familial incorporation for Coleridge as he sought affiliation first with Southey and the Frickers in the family of Pantisocracy, and then later with the Wordsworths and Hutchinsons in Grasmere’s literary family. To contextualize Coleridge’s literary relationships, I begin by looking at two other models of literary-familial collaboration; in doing so I borrow and extrapolate from Naomi Tadmor’s notion of “incorporation.” As a way of describing “the alliance of two kinship groups” through marriage,1 incorporation involves specific naming conventions that extend the applicability of terms such as brother, sister, mother, and father beyond strict blood relations. I rely on Tadmor’s formulation to demonstrate the suitability of this term to the business model of the literary family and to elucidate the means by which different literary families sought to “incorporate” themselves. Such mergers, however, are never without risk. The businesslike literary family runs the hazard of transforming rivalry into competition, particularly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time when the literary marketplace was most often characterized by a masculine ethos of competition. Important to this chapter are two examples that challenge such an ethos and offer alternative visions of collaboration at the familial level: the Barbauld-Aikin family and the Taylors of Ongar. In looking to these alternatives, I seek to reexamine the famous competition of

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Wordsworth and Coleridge and to place it in a wider landscape and within a larger array of forces—competitive and acquisitive, certainly, but also cooperative and assimilative. Wordsworth and Coleridge remain Romanticism’s exemplary instance of literary partnership, embodying both its collaborative promise and its potential for competitive demise. Their collaborative relationship has been considered from a host of critical positions. Commentators such as Thomas McFarland, Paul Magnuson, and Wayne Koestenbaum have studied the internal mechanisms of the Wordsworth-Coleridge relationship, focusing on, respectively, evidence of poetic dialogism, psychological and linguistic symbiosis, and homoeroticism, as manifested not just in the Lyrical Ballads but throughout the authors’ prose, poetry, and correspondence. 2 Others, including Jack Stillinger and Norman Fruman, by carefully documenting intellectual debts, have ably debunked romantic myths of solitary genius surrounding these and other writers.3 Fruman and Stillinger are nicely complemented by Lucy Newlyn, whose article “Coleridge and the Anxiety of Reception” fully implicates Coleridge in an agon with contemporary readers and audiences whose leveling will to criticism threatened to undermine the “sacred authority which attaches to the writing-subject” (210). The facility with which Coleridge plagiarized stands here in ironic contrast to the anxiety he felt over critical assessments that might either misunderstand him or point out personal shortcomings in poetry, lecture, or prose.4 Reading Newlyn’s brilliant revision of Bloom along with the earlier studies of Fruman and Stillinger leads one to the inescapable conclusion that literary influence is most certainly overdetermined.5 Book-length studies have placed Coleridge and Wordsworth in wider spheres as well. One writer, Regina Hewitt, even goes so far as to suggest that Wordsworth and Coleridge can be considered the founders of a poetic sociology and therefore forerunners in verse of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead. 6 Richard E. Matlak, meanwhile, has placed what he calls the psychological and biographical “microcontext” of the relationship in relief against the “macropolitical scene of the 1790s” (3), while Elizabeth Fay and John Worthen focus on relationships beyond those of William, Dorothy, and Coleridge.7 Of such recent works, Gurion Taussig’s Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–1804 (2002), stands out by comprehending Coleridge’s various relationships in terms of friendship as a social institution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.8 With such contextualizations in mind, I explore herein the intersection of two discourses—sociology and literary criticism—in order to locate the literary family in the wider sphere of Romanticism and authorial competition. In doing so, I situate Coleridge’s literary relationships within the affective and competitive sphere of the literary family. I rely on two excellent sociological studies: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987) and especially Tadmor’s aforementioned Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (2001).

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Through precise attention to relational terms used by actual historical figures, Naomi Tadmor challenges traditional definitions that situate the family within either “nuclear” or “extended” models.9 She introduces the term “household-family” to describe the relational unit that could “comprise related and non-related dependants living together under the authority of a householder” (272). Among those who might be included as nonrelated members of the family were “friends,” a term encompassing multiple connotations, from kinship ties to occupational and economic relationships. She explains that “affective friendship relationships were increasingly tied with instrumental and occupational relationships. At times it seemed that these related ‘friends’ simply pooled their labour and resources, and then redistributed them to their mutual advantage” (177). Family and Friends reveals that an eighteenth-century business model centered on the family and its kinship/friendship networks was a commonplace. And although Tadmor concentrates primarily on the life of one eighteenth-century family, as seen through the pages of Thomas Turner’s diaries (1754–1765), she reads this family history alongside working-class conduct treatises and popular novels, including Clarissa and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, in order to cross-reference discourses of friendship and family.10 What Tadmor’s study leaves open for consideration is the extension of this business model into the realm of the literary family as it emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and flourished in the early nineteenth. The insights of Family and Friends are equally applicable to the Aikins of Warrington, for example, whose familial publishing activities included inhouse printer William Eyres, and to the Taylors of Ongar, whose seventythree published books were “mainly illustrated by their own drawing and engraving” (Davidoff and Hall 68). Adapting Tadmor’s conceptual framework to the realm of the literary family enables reassessment of certain tenets of Romantic poetry and aesthetics, particularly those tied to literary production. Thus, this chapter seeks to establish the literary family as the collaborative publishing unit underlying Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s own thinking, since both sought integration as a means of satisfying desires for both physical and intellectual intimacy. As I intend to show, this is especially true of Coleridge, that famous “Friend.” Instead of focusing exclusively on his later relationship with Wordsworth, I seek to place Coleridge in a context of literary-familial incorporation, first with the Pantisocratic literary family and then with the Wordsworths. In each case competitive tension vitiated collaborative potentiality, and I will trace that tension through Pantisocratic correspondence and through the critical controversy over the Biographia Literaria. Whereas Michelle Levy argues that “Coleridge’s poetic aspirations, particularly through his literary collaborations, were bound up with his personal search for a domestic ideal and with a wider cultural romance with the family” (46), I argue that Coleridge was a man forever in search of a literary family. The difference is this: his “domestic ideal” already included a vision of literary and intellectual partnership. Thus the personal and poetic searches were not twin entities bound up with each other at all; they were

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one and the same, for Coleridge’s vision of familial harmony was entirely predicated upon the precondition of literary harmony. Coleridge was not interested in or swayed by “a wider cultural romance with the family”; what absolutely captivated him, however, was the emerging romance of the literary family. Part one of this chapter will briefly address the collaborative culture of the literary family as it existed in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From such names as Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the Lambs, the Brontës, the Shelleys, the Hunt brothers, and Charlotte Smith and her sister Catherine Anne Dorset, I will narrow the focus to two, Barbauld and Edgeworth, in order to illustrate how one literary family pursued incorporation with another along the lines of a business merger. Barbauld emerges here as a cultural, commercial, and literary authority whose established literary family eschews the advances of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and his competition-laden scheme. Part two will look at a different model of “incorporation” as seen with the Taylors of Ongar. In this section I will suggest that the onset of conservatism following the politically turbulent 1790s affected the literary family in two ways, both of which can be read as reactions in part to the political activism and unflagging republicanism of Anna Barbauld and John Aikin. First, the literary family witnessed the return of patriarchal oversight, evidenced by the supervisory roles of Richard Edgeworth and Isaac Taylor, Sr.; and second, the literary family sought to extend its collaborative circles by incorporating outside friends, as evident in the production of The Associate Minstrels, the poetic collaboration whose planning by Josiah Conder, Jane Taylor, and her sister Ann—reminiscent of better-known collaborative planning in 1797—occurred “during a walk from Colchester to Nayland on a summer evening.”11 Against this background, part three will address Coleridge’s early collaborative career by exploring the unrealized scheme of Pantisocracy as a search not only for an egalitarian political and familial community but for an egalitarian literary community as well, one that imagined an ideal readership whose critical acumen would be commensurate with the intellectual caliber and political views of its authors. Pantisocracy envisioned cultural change through the realization of a georgic-pastoral ideal—a harmonious balance between leisure and labor. A competitive spirit, however, sullied the picture and ultimately led to the plan’s demise. What emerges, finally, from this period in Coleridge’s career, is a clear indication of his desire to wed intellectual and sexual intimacy through integration with a literary family. For Coleridge, the collaborative consciousness sought intimacy through an incorporated relationship with a fellow author and related wives. Instead of seeking a Miltonic ideal—an Eve—with whom he could share both intellectual and sexual intimacy, Coleridge split the ideal in two, seeking foremost an intellectual peer and secondarily a spouse who, through incorporation, would make his fellow writer his “brother.”12 After following the rise and fall of Pantisocracy, I will explore what Coleridge self-diagnosed as his “schematism” at a more elemental level by

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reading it alongside Kant’s formulation of the schema in The Critique of Pure Reason. Doing so makes clear that Coleridge’s misreading—his misapplication of experience to conceptions of the understanding—represented a pattern of behavior, indeed a chronic affliction that affected his writing and relationships. Part four will consider Coleridge’s place in the Wordsworth literary family and his recovery from such experiential misreading through an analysis of “Dejection: An Ode.” The chapter will conclude by attending to the falling out between Wordsworth and Coleridge and its public display in Wordsworth’s Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, his Essay Supplemental to the Preface in the 1815 Poems, and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. An effect of their former collaborative intimacy, I suggest, the criticism Wordsworth and Coleridge offer each other in these writings at times simply translates perceived personal shortcomings into literary critique.

I In 1804, while Coleridge was returning from a tumultuous trip to Malta, Anna Barbauld was compiling her Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder and preparing the accompanying preliminary essay in which she drew the comparison between books and their authors, “that one generation passeth away and another cometh.” Fittingly, she was to receive a letter from a member of the coming generation, Maria Edgeworth. A copy of Barbauld’s recently published edition of Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence (1804), an early example of literary biography, was warmly received in Edgeworthstown, but the design of Maria’s letter on this occasion was not congratulatory; it was entrepreneurial. “I proceed to mention a scheme of my father’s,” she tells Anna after her warm greeting; she then explains Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s concept for a merger of families in the business of a “periodical paper, to be written entirely by ladies.”13 The extraordinary exchange that follows, in which Richard Lovell Edgeworth violates what H.J. Jackson calls the “intimacy convention” of familiar correspondence by opening and then answering Anna Barbauld’s response to Maria, will merit a close reading and occasional quotation at length.14 In her correspondence, Barbauld both reestablishes friendship ties with Edgeworth, whom she met in 1799, and offers, as befitting a mentor, thoughtful insight and caution regarding the so-called scheme, a term that evokes the venture’s literary and commercial designs. Imbued with commercial associations, the very term scheme, which spawns in the correspondence a number of business-related metaphors, carries with it the taint of marketplace competition, which proves to be one of the women’s chief objections. Maria ends the matter in the first letter with a request: “If you approve, tell us what would be the best method of proceeding. Would a paper in the Monthly Magazine put the business in train?” (84). By 1804, it should be remembered, the Aikin family was firmly established in the literary magazine business—indeed had risen to such prominence, as we have seen in chapter two, that Richard Edgeworth could refer to “the Aikin school,” a designation that at once invokes the family’s pedagogical history, its critical taste,

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and its currency as a literary industry unto itself.15 John Aikin’s editorship of the Monthly Magazine had commenced with the magazine’s inception in 1796, and therefore Maria’s comment, clearly reflective of her father’s intent, proposes a figurative marriage of the “The Lady’s Paper” (87) to the Monthly Magazine by putting the “business in train”—connected to and attendant upon the established journal. Barbauld’s warm response, wherein she apologizes for not having “obeyed the dictates of my heart” and written sooner, expresses her reciprocal “sentiments of esteem and regard” and then proceeds with consideration of the scheme. Of particular concern to Barbauld is the idea of exclusive female authorship, as it betrays patriarchal assumptions about women, their writing, and their political positions. In pointing out the shortcomings of Richard Edgeworth’s patronizing vision, Barbauld also counsels Maria as to its gender-related pitfalls: As to the scheme of a periodical paper, there is no one who would not be delighted to see it undertaken by yourself and Co., provided the Co. was in any measure adequate to the first of the firm, but I do not know what to say to the idea, which seems to be a leading one in your plan, of inviting the literary ladies to join it. All the literary ladies! Mercy on us! Have you ever reckoned how many there are, or computed how much trash, and how many discordant materials would be poured in from such a general invitation. I feel also doubtful of making it declaredly a lady’s paper. There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin. But suppose a sufficient number willing and able to co-operate, which I am willing to think might probably be found, still I do not see why it should be ostensibly “The Lady’s Paper.” Many would sneer at the title, they would pretend to expect, however unreasonably, frivolity or romance. There is a great difference between a paper written by a lady, and as a lady. To write professedly as a female junto seems in some measure to suggest a certain cast of sentiment, and you would write in trammels. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 86–87)16

The remarkably candid thoughts regarding the compatibility of certain authorial personalities reveals Barbauld’s respect for Edgeworth as a writer and trusted colleague; this and her humorous treatment of the prospects of a “general invitation” to the population of women writers implies an intimacy whose subsequent invasion by Richard Lovell Edgeworth marks an egregious, indeed abusive, breach of social propriety. And it is about precisely that kind of invasiveness that Barbauld warns Edgeworth: “you would write in trammels”—a cautionary reminder that she and others in the writing “firm” would become shackled by the same patriarchal vision that concocted the scheme and therefore would be unable to write with a sense of independence. Barbauld’s dexterous use of “trammels” also reinforces the image such a female writing body would portray, as the term also describes the plaits, braids, or tresses of a woman’s hair.17 Barbauld pushes for Edgeworth’s

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independence, all the while understanding that she herself has enjoyed a writing career untrammeled by such patriarchal infringement. Yet in the very next portion of her letter, she shrewdly suggests Mr. Edgeworth’s inclusion as a contributor in order to make her inclusive, collaborative alternative more saleable: With regard to the scheme in general, I am apt to think there is room for one . . . A paper is a pleasing mode of writing, as it admits equally the lightest and the gravest subjects; the most desultory, and the most profound, if treated concisely; but humour and character, the manner and modes of the times, seem to be the subject more particularly called for. And why if you can find gentlemen, should not gentlemen be admitted. I am sure we have not any writer of that sex who ought not, and I believe who would not, be proud to join with Miss Edgeworth; and surely Mr. Edgeworth at least would give his assistance, and would not Dr. Beddoes? (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 87–8)18

And is there not, just as surely, at least a touch of Barbauld’s wry humor in her treatment of Mr. Edgeworth? As she concludes her assessment of the plan, Barbauld declines regular participation but offers, with a display of substantial business acumen, to assist in the project’s undertaking by making her literary kinship network available for “incorporation.” From her egalitarian perspective, too, editorship could belong to either gender, and her inclusive pronoun usage—“him or her”—should be of interest to anyone who argues that the masculine form was long accepted as being applicable irrespective of gender. One thing my own judgment is clear in, that there ought not to be more than half-a-dozen principals in such a scheme, occasional correspondence should also be admitted, but by no means without selection, and a very strict one too, otherwise you would be overwhelmed with trash; and if you print in London, the person who selects must live there, and perhaps the same person as Editor should have the care of the paper, so far that it should be on him or her to see that the press did not stand still . . . With regard to myself, I would offer you my assistance, and should feel highly gratified in all respects if you permitted me to join my name with yours, did I feel that fertility and flow of fancy which is requisite for the undertaking . . . I should not dare to bring upon myself an obligation . . . of supplying the press at stated times . . . but I would rank with pleasure among the occasional contributors. If I can be of any service by sounding or inviting anybody that I know in London, male or female, to the scheme, command me. We have here Miss Baillie, Mrs. Opie, give me leave to add my niece Lucy Aikin, and many others; Mr. S. Rogers I rather think would not be averse to join a scheme of this kind. But you—you are a host in yourself. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 89–90)

It is not without some surprise that the contemporary reader will encounter, in the next letter of this sequence, Richard Edgeworth’s confession to Barbauld that “as Maria’s literary partner,” he decided to “open [your letter] in her absence” (92).19 Not only did he read the letter, however; he wrote back

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without so much as sharing his thoughts with his “literary partner,” who was left having to respond somewhat blindly on her own. For Barbauld, a year Mr. Edgeworth’s senior, it could well have been construed as disrespectful treatment. For Maria, at thirty-seven and older than all the first-generation Romantics, it could have appeared a personal violation and an act of oppression. Edgeworth follows his prefatory formalities with the presumption that he will retake control of his scheme, albeit with Barbauld’s gender modifications. “To prevent all cavil as to female authorship,” he writes, trivializing Barbauld’s objections, “let the paper be announced as the work of a society of Gentlemen and Ladies” (92–93). He then offers an economic conceit in which the paper becomes currency, the preliminary submissions representing a buildup of the bank’s coffers: Bankers, I mean honest, solvent bankers, keep two-thirds of whatever may be demanded from them in constant readiness, we may therefore not only collect two-thirds of the original stock, but each of the society may engage to furnish one additional paper as soon as one of their writings has been published.— The editor would thus be tolerably secure of sufficient support. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 93)

Here, as if to compete with Barbauld through the male discourse of economics, Edgeworth borrows from Adam Smith’s discussion of the circulation of paper money; as Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them. (389)20

The nation’s banks have a responsibility to keep enough gold and silver stock on hand as can underwrite the disbursement of promissory notes; the periodical must likewise bankroll circulation demands with sufficient writing stock, authors being required, according to Edgeworth’s formula, to reimburse the stock whenever their literary checks are cashed through publication. That this business undertaking constitutes a family merger is unmistakably reinforced when Richard Edgeworth comments, regarding Barbauld’s literary kinship network, that “the names you mention are highly approved of in this family” (93; emphasis added). Indeed, the incorporation of these names— the marriage of the two families—would mean an increase in Edgeworths’ own familial-literary stock, yet the implication is that the patriarch retains final authority to approve such a union. If Richard Lovell Edgeworth had not already discredited himself by presuming to open and answer Anna Barbauld’s letter, he only compounds the injury by condescending to offer his criticism—two pages’ worth—of Richardson’s Correspondence, a move so misguided as to include a swipe at

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the whole of the “female sex,” which adds a corrective hint about the candid remarks offered in Barbauld’s letter: We have read the greatest part of Richardson’s Life and Correspondence. Your criticisms are excellent, and your censures of the indecent passages in your author are highly becoming and highly useful. As your sex becomes more civilized every day, it is necessary that they should become more circumspect in conversation and in all the paraphernalia of modesty . . . We have learned some good precepts from your criticisms, and in return I have mark’d two or three careless passages in the early part of your life of Richardson. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 94–95)

Any compliment quickly gives way to a challenging tone—“Why do you quote Sedley’s lines, they are un peu trop séduisants [sic]”—and there is no doubt that Edgeworth is attempting to extend the controlling hand of patriarchy into the Aikin-Barbauld family sphere (96). “On my return home yesterday,” writes Maria Edgeworth in her separate response, “I had the pleasure of your letter; my father would not forward it to me, but kept it, as he said, on purpose to increase my agreeable associations with home” (97). 21 Out from under the patriarchal roof, Maria Edgeworth could be, as Barbauld was, dangerously independent, and here we see just one aspect of the psychological yoking that secondgeneration literary families used to keep a tight rein on their women writers. Now in the difficult position of having to display solidarity on two different fronts—to her family and to a female writer/potential patron— Maria must be judicious in her response. At her father’s command, she distances herself from the scheme, a move no doubt intended to dissuade Barbauld from treating her as an independent decision-maker—the real entrepreneur—in her next response. Barbauld ignores any such inference and does just the opposite. As Edgeworth continues, she perceptively carries Barbauld’s chief concern to its logical (competitive) conclusion, explains that she has not seen her father’s letter, and then closes the matter by requesting that the venture be underwritten through the imprimatur of “Barbauld”: With respect to the Lady’s Paper, my father desires me to tell you, dear Madam, that it was his proposal, not mine; I am glad that your objections have appeared to him satisfactory. I agree with you perfectly in thinking that to provoke a war with the other sex, would be neither politic nor becoming in ours. Our literature should never be placed in competition with theirs to plague them, it should be added to the common stock of amusement and happiness . . . As I was not at home, when my father answered your letter, I am perhaps repeating the very things which he has said . . . To one thing in your letter, dear Madam, I must object, even if my father has not dared to do so: I must remonstrate against your being only an occasional correspondent. I am not surprised, that you should not like to bind yourself to feed the press with daily delicacies, but . . . you would never be exposed to this tremendous necessity. I hope therefore that . . . you will consent to give credit to our firm, by placing your name

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foremost as the acting partner. We should rejoice to have the able, and elegant assistance of Miss Aikin, of your brother, and of Mr. Rogers, Miss Baillie, and Mrs. Opie. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 100–1)

In one important respect, Barbauld’s final response is difficult to interpret: did the Aikin-Barbauld literary family earnestly consider joining the scheme, or did Anna and John simply seek a discreet way of declining this marriage/ merger proposal? As was mentioned in chapter one, they were now neighbors, and thus we have no written record of the conversations that took place. The answer hinges on how we read Barbauld’s comment regarding John’s demurral and her consequent offering of William Taylor of Norwich, her former Palgrave student, as an alternate managerial candidate. In light of supporting indicators, my reading of the letter suggests that the Aikin family, while entirely respectful of Maria Edgeworth, held Richard Lovell Edgeworth in low esteem and, unwilling to incorporate his name into their own, offered William Taylor as a tactful means of refusal.22 In terms reminiscent of Adam Smith’s remark that money represents “the great wheel of circulation” (388), Barbauld begins with further business advice, noting, “there is no very recent experience of an undertaking of this kind in the feuille volante” (102). She stresses the importance of finding a bookseller who is “disposed to push such a scheme, not to let the papers sleep in his shop for want of advertisements” (102). Barbauld then approaches the matter of managing the venture: Then as to the coadjutors, as it is no longer necessary they should be all ladies, I have been this long while23 attacking my brother on the subject, but on account of his other engagements, I cannot get him to think of more than an occasional paper, which I dare say he would now and then offer. There is a person, whom I should think very proper for such an undertaking, and I think it not unlikely that it might suit him, as, with a good deal of genius, he has not, that I know of, any important literary work in hand; I mean Mr. William Taylor of Norwich. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 102–3)

After enumerating Taylor’s qualifications, which include possessing a “great deal of ingenuity and critical acumen” and being a skilled translator of German literature, Barbauld makes an important statement whose implications regarding business and gender bear special notice: “I was on the point of mentioning the scheme to him, but I thought it was right you should first know what he was” (104). That anyone from the literary world in 1804 could not know the translator of Bürger’s “Leonora,” not to mention Goethe’s Iphigenia, is difficult to imagine. John Aikin’s 1791 Poems included an imitation of Bürger’s famous ballad called “Arthur and Matilda” with a note explaining that “the idea of this Piece was taken from a ballad translated by an ingenious friend [Taylor] from the German of Buirgher [sic].”24 In 1794 Barbauld herself read Taylor’s translation to an Edinburgh audience, inspiring Walter Scott to write “William and Helen.” And it scarcely needs mentioning that “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which Coleridge and Wordsworth originally thought of publishing in Aikin’s Monthly Magazine,

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no doubt owing to the editor’s demonstrated interest in such works, traces its birth, in part, to this chain of ballads.25 Maria Edgeworth may not have known William Taylor personally, but she surely knew “what he was.” The point Barbauld emphasizes, signaled by her italicized “you,” is that she is treating Maria Edgeworth as a businesswoman and decision maker, leaving it to her to decide whether to pursue Taylor’s services. She thus shows deference and respect to the younger author and models an alternative kind of business leadership—female leadership—that does not presume, as would a patriarchal model, to speak for her. Further underscoring this point is Barbauld’s invitation to Maria (alone) to travel to London—because “I am convinced it is necessary for such a scheme as this, that you should yourself come to town,” not only to meet key people and coordinate the plan’s details, but also to “enjoy your own celebrity” (104). For the remainder of the letter Barbauld praises Maria’s work and talks of literary goings-on in London. Then, with the breeziness of an afterthought, she offers Richard Edgeworth what I suspect is one of the most perfectly understated rejoinders ever crafted: And now, if I were not so near the bottom of my paper, I should turn to Mr. Edgeworth, and thank him for the favour of a charming letter, which, if I possessed a share of his sprightliness, I would endeavor to answer. I am very sensible to the obliging things you both say on the subject of Richardson, and I kiss the rod with regard to the verses of Sedley. To own the truth, my conscience did remonstrate a little, but I was seduced by the beauty of the verses. (Qtd in Le Breton, A. 106)

Without granting Edgeworth, whom she renders a busybody, genuine acknowledgment of his comments, Barbauld parries his previous thrust with humor and puts him in his place, offering a parody of chastened deference even as she does so. Moreover, her claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Barbauld’s modeling of an alternative language of female business leadership implicitly offers a supremely effective response to Edgeworth’s inherently competitive and masculine economic discourse. Although this particular scheme never came to fruition, it effectively illustrates an aspect of familial incorporation whereby one literary family could endeavor to effect a merger with another. Noteworthy, too, are the complications involved with intergenerational incorporation, especially in light of the patriarchal strictures under which a second-generation literary family like the Edgeworths existed. Paradoxically, the older generation Aikins proved the more liberal-minded familial model, at least in terms of gender roles. As this brief series of letters makes plain, Anna Barbauld was a powerful leader in the literary world and one whose leadership style challenged the competitive, male alternative. And as the Monthly Magazine appears to have been Richard Edgeworth’s intended partner in this arrangement, protocol likewise appears to have contravened circumventing the editor’s sister, meaning that Barbauld was accorded respect—even if grudging—in this business environment. The Aikin family model of literary collaboration and production was not only distinguished by its egalitarianism and political activism but

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also by the internal nature of its familial collaboration. While serving between 1796 and 1809 as editor of two major literary periodicals (Monthly Magazine and The Athenæum) John Aikin came to rely on the family and its kinship network to supply contributors.26 As editor of the Anuual Review (1802–1807), Arthur Aikin benefited from similar networking: “Among the chief contributors were the editor’s father, Dr. John Aikin, the editor’s aunt Mrs. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and his sister Lucy Aikin, Robert Southey, and William Taylor of Norwich.”27 Yet with respect to the production of its own works, the Aikin family model of collaboration was, on the whole, exclusionary. Although John Aikin did collaborate, especially as an editor, with colleagues like William Enfield and the prison-reform activist John Howard, the collaborative intimacy did not lead to familial incorporation through marriage.28 What holds true for the episode with the Edgeworths—that the Aikin family as a unit did not intermix with another family name in the business of literary incorporation—holds true for individual collaboration as well. Thus we find, as though held in perpetuity, a work like John Aikin’s popular Calendar of Nature (1785) enlarged by his son Arthur in 1799 and published as The Natural History of the Year. And whereas Lucy Aikin, who never married, appears not to have collaborated in her published work, her brothers, Arthur and Charles, together produced A Dictionary of Chemistry and Mineralogy.29 The Aikin literary family model therefore bears a greater resemblance to what Tadmor calls the “lineage-family” than it does to the “household-family,” the latter being prone to expansion through incorporation: [Thomas Turner’s] reference to the family of Cobham conveys a concept of the family which is different from the concept of the household-family, used so often by Turner in his daily accounts. Whereas membership in Turner’s household-family could be gained and lost contractually, membership in a lineage such as the Cobhams’ was essentially transmitted by birth and blood . . . In this context, the family name appears as an important emblem, marking familial unity and continuity . . . We suggest calling the concept of the family conveyed here the concept of the lineage-family. (74)

For the purposes of Tadmor’s study, the Cobhams also represent a “noble family” for whom property and a “relation to its ancient seat” is of great importance (74). With regard to the Aikin family name, the longevity and breadth of “Aikin” authorship speaks for itself, but their form of lineage is tied neither to a coat of arms nor to property. Their ancient seat is figurative, represented only by the Warrington Academy, and thus their lineage, properly speaking, derives solely from a legacy of Dissent. Traced not along patrilineal but rather along matrilineal lines, this lineage reaches back to John and Anna’s maternal great-grandfather, the conscientious dissenting clergyman John Jennings, who refused to sign the Act of Conformity instituted by Lord Clarendon. His son, John Jennings II, wrote the poem about Anna Laetitia Wingate Jennings—“The generous Muse, whom harsh constraint offends, / At Anna’s call with ready homage

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bends”—the very poem Anna once cited in a letter to John, thus borrowing the intimate language of poetic inspiration handed down to them from the earlier generation. As with nobility, family name itself is also important to the Aikins. Yet unlike nobility, which relies, Tadmor notes, on “male progeny” to continue the line of succession, Aikin lineage is traced through female progeny, as the lineage and inspiration of this authorial family lies not in the name Aikin so much as in “Anna Letitia,” the family’s most recognizable name. It not only descends from the seventeenth century; “Anna Letitia” lives on for more than two hundred years—indeed beyond Aikin—to mark it as well.30

II Diverging from the Aikins’ lineage-family model, the Taylors of Ongar, known primarily through the work of sisters Ann and Jane, famous authors of children’s literature, are a second-generation literary family whose authorial collaboration led to a household-family model of incorporation. 31 Perhaps the best example of the Taylors extending the collaborative enterprise through incorporation is a collection of poetry called The Associate Minstrels (1810), which includes contributions from two generations of two different families. Here, Davidoff and Hall describe the extensive collaborative network that grew from Taylor family connections: Ann and Jane had met Josiah Conder, son of a London bookseller, through the Strutts. In 1810 together they collaborated in a book of poetry for adults, The Associate Minstrels. Both Josiah’s father who published the book and Isaac senior [Ann and Jane’s father] as well as Josiah’s future wife contributed. London publishing contacts through the Conders, Darnton and Harvey, and Uncle Charles Taylor were crucial in promoting the literary enterprise of all the Taylors but particularly for Ann and Jane—young, female, and isolated in the provinces. (66)

Thus the collaborative intimacy emphasized by these two models is different in kind: the Aikin-Barbauld family model tended toward a more concentrated intimacy between authorial figures within the family, whereas the Taylor family model witnessed an effusion of intimacy that embraced other families and even spawned a marriage—a true instance of literary-familial incorporation. Yet, in spite of its incorporating aspect, this authorial family still fell under the sway of patriarchal governance. Political engagement, so integral to the writing of Barbauld and Aikin, disappeared from the literature produced by the Taylor family model: “Unlike their predecessor, Mrs. Barbauld, who wrote both children’s books and radical pamphlets . . . Ann Martin [Taylor] and her daughters wrote exclusively for women and girls or nursery aged children” (Davidoff and Hall 68). Ann and Jane were scrupulous in following parental guidance, which, as Davidoff and Hall observe, viewed women’s involvement in “professional

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literary work both precarious and inappropriate” (67). 32 The conservative turn here serves as a corrective for what were perceived as indecorous literary excesses. And yet it represents something more, for the implication is that without strict patriarchal oversight children could pose a destabilizing threat to social order. For second-generation literary families in England, the lesson of John Aikin and Anna Barbauld was not unlike that of Antigone: Absent their father’s will, children could disrupt and threaten the hierarchical order. 33 Maintaining hierarchical contiguity meant widening the collaborative sphere both inside and outside the family so as to prevent unsupervised collaboration. Inside the family, both parents themselves became authors. Indeed, as one commentator notes, “the success of [Ann and Jane’s] books . . . set the whole family writing” (Barry xiii). Ann Martin Taylor became an accomplished author in her own right, collaborating with Jane on Correspondence Between a Mother and her Daughter at School (1817) and writing didactic works such as Practical Hints to Young Females on the Duties of a Wife, a Mother, and the Mistress of a Family (1815) and Reciprocal Duties of Parents and Children (1818). Their father, Isaac Sr., likewise took up the pen, authoring “many books for youth, among which were The Biography of a Brown Loaf and Advice to the Teens.”34 Isaac Jr., the oldest of the children, became an extension of his father’s will, and despite Jane’s interest in politics and impulses to write otherwise, she often “assumed the didactic tones which the two Isaacs and the editor of the Youth’s Magazine expected of her” (Barry xxxii–xxxiii). And it is Isaac Jr. who would eventually compile the Taylor family memoir, The Family Pen: Memorials, Biographical and Literary, of the Taylor Family of Ongar (1867), a title whose emphasis on Family is suggestive of the patriarchal trammels about which Barbauld warned Maria Edgeworth.35 In a poem called “Moral,” first published in the Youth’s Magazine and later compiled in The Contributions of Q. Q., Jane Taylor bristles against precisely that kind of editorial constraint: To find a moral where there’s none Is hard indeed, yet must be done: Since only morals sound and sage May grace this consecrated page: Then give us leave to search a minute, Perhaps for one that is not in it.36

At the poem’s end, Taylor achieves one of her satirical triumphs by offering a conclusion from the eye of a moralizing (and journalizing) toad, who answers the ultimate question: And then, again, he lets us know That length of days is length of woe. His long experience taught him this, That life affords no solid bliss: Or if of bliss on earth you scheme, Soon you shall find it but a dream;

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The visions fade, the slumbers break, And then you suffer wide awake. What is it but a vale of tears, Though we should live a thousand years?

Here Jane Taylor satirizes moralizing as skillfully as she does satire itself.37 In the satiric mode she could write against the puritanical grain without losing a unique style of spiritual realism that enabled her to “undo the very essence of satire” (Curran “Jane Taylor” 150). Doing so under the strictures of patriarchal oversight meant Taylor managed, if incompletely, to create a literary space of her own. Establishing her niche as a satirist is symbolically enacted in this undated letter to a friend. Here, Taylor describes clearing out attic space to create a study: One of my first engagements, on my return home, was to fit up an unoccupied attic, hitherto devoted only to household lumber; this I removed by the most spirited exertions, and supplied its place by all the apparatus necessary for a poet, which, you know, is not of a very extensive nature: a few book-shelves, a table for my writing-desk, one chair for myself, and another for my muse . . . My study . . . possesses one advantage which . . . surpasses them all—it commands a view of the country—the only room in the house, except one, which is thus favored; and to me this is invaluable. (Qtd in Barry 7).

As an unused attic allowed Jane Taylor to seek a room of her own, so the satiric mode offered her a space in which she could make her uniquely vernacular mark on early nineteenth-century poetry. Whereas satire most effectively admits just the one collaborative partner accommodated by Jane Taylor’s extra chair, the poetry of mourning, as Mary Louise Kete suggests in her discussion of the nineteenth-century “sentimental lyric,” often assumes the habiliments of communal collaboration.38 Kete’s observations are germane to The Associate Minstrels, a work of poetic mourning powerfully inscribed with collaborative intimacy, the collection in part representing an extended variant of Kete’s “sentimental lyric.”39 This status is signaled simultaneously by Conder’s endnote for “To the Memory of Charles Wickens” and by the elegiac strain running through roughly the first half of the collection. Wickens, who died of consumption at nineteen, was a friend of the group, a fellow writer and young doctor whose “attainments were much beyond his years” (213). Seven different authors contributed to The Associate Minstrels: Josiah Conder and his future wife Elizabeth Thomas, Ann and Jane Taylor, Susan Conder (Josiah’s cousin), Josiah Conder, Sr., and Isaac Taylor, Sr.40 What becomes apparent in several of the poems is the effect Wickens’ loss had on the circle of friends. In his endnote to the poem, which, coming alone at the end of the text, also figures as an endnote to the work as a whole, Conder observes that all of Charles Wickens’ papers were destroyed prior to his death, leaving “no record of his talents and his virtues, except what is inscribed on the hearts of all who knew him” (213). Offering a brief portrait that helps inform a reading of the work, Conder also discusses the advancement of

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Wickens’ disease: And to those who have witnessed the slow progress of the deceitful disorder to which he fell a victim, it will appear an interesting and a singular fact, that, from the very moment that he felt the night air strike to his vitals, he considered it to be his death-blow: and though months elapsed before alarming symptoms appeared; and though even the physicians who attended him hesitated at first as to their nature, he was never deceived. He submitted to every thing which was thought likely to prolong his life, while he calmly and silently perceived the constant though fluctuating progress of his disorder. (213–14)

Retrospectively apparent from these comments about Charles Wickens is that what was inscribed on the hearts of his friends—the mute legacy of his character and writings—in turn becomes inscribed in the work as poetic tribute and thus constitutes a kind of collaboration between the living contributors and their silent friend. Moreover, from the storm presaged in the volume’s opening poem, “Silence,” through the “winterly ruin” afflicting “The Withered Oak,” to the “cold entombing snows” of “On Some Primroses Killed by the Frost,” the first portion of the collection enacts, through pastoral decay, the degenerative, “fluctuating progress of his disorder.” The collection’s opening poem, “Silence,” blankets the first half of the work in the tones of foreboding and grief, as Conder explores silence as both “dread usher of the coming storm” and a soothing presence in which to “find a refuge and a friend.”41 At three hundred lines, it is the longest poem in the collection—a sustained meditation on stillness and fate that includes this depiction of funerary rites: Hushed is the voice which o’er the opening tomb Spake the sweet promise of a world to come: The white-robed priest has blest the weeping train, Who mournful seek their saddened home again. How the heart shuddered at the creaking cord! The pattering earth o’er kindred ashes poured!— Then Stillness reigned, and mute was every tongue; While awe-struck Mirth forsook the sable throng. (ll. 187–94)

The shift in tense in this passage, from a timeless present, wherein events such as war are forever ongoing (“conflicting powers display their fatal strength” [68]), to a definite past, signals the introduction of historical specificity: the death of Charles Wickens. In “Domestic Farewell to Summer,” the second poem of the volume, Ann Taylor laments, “The same entangled shade, / The mossy, green recess” that once afforded pleasure to the pastoral scene now only evokes loss. Nature remains able to “flaunt and bloom;—but incomplete / This happy circle” since the day “one loved companion” was laid to rest (20–21). The silence with which the volume opens now extends its presence: The chilly, sighing gale No music would convey;

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Hushed every songster of the vale; And leafless every spray: To Sorrow’s ear, to Sorrow’s eye, How mute the forms of beauty lie! (21)

Yet this silence, which emanates from the opening poem and pervades the first half of the work, is of a double aspect. On the one hand it signifies absence—the incomplete circle of friends. On the other, however, silence registers a palpable presence that threads together the poems of mourning between “Silence” and the sequence’s formal closing, Ann Taylor’s “To the Memory of Charles Wickens” (213). And, as the first poem suggests, it is the collaborative nature of silence and song that can produce the most powerful lyrical harmony. Likening such harmony to the subdued tints of a twilight sky, Conder evokes the title of another poem in the volume, “Morning and Evening,” even as he draws the comparison: And thus when Silence oft her empire shares With heaven-born Melody; and solemn airs, Combined with pensive stillness, gently rise On Morning’s breeze, or blend with Evening’s sighs, How witching then her power! (ll. 218–22)

In 1815 Josiah Conder and Elizabeth Thomas were married, and they continued for nearly a decade to write occasional and other poetry, which they then published in The Star in the East; with other Poems (1824). Among the entries appearing under the heading “Domestic Poems,” one, “On the Death of an Infant Son,” exemplifies the variant type of sentimental lyric found in The Associate Minstrels. For Kete, who explicates a similar poem— “Lines on the Death of Warren S. Gould who died April 6th 1843”—collaborative mourning functions as a democratizing means of communal incorporation. The circulation of a poem within a community of friends and family becomes a figurative circulation of the dead allowing everyone to feel a part of the main. The instructive differences between this nineteenthcentury American poem, written by Warren’s mother Harriet Gould, and that written by the Conders, involve the speaking voice and its use of firstperson plural. The American poem is noteworthy for its momentary shift from first-person singular to an abstract, democratic “we”: When one we love is born away And we are left behind How thick the beacons of memory play And cluster round the mind. (ll. 29–32) 42

Thus, Kete observes, the poem apostrophizes “at various levels in an effort to meld all the various readers, including the poet and the copyist, into a corporate ‘We’ ” (72). The Conders, in contradistinction, speak of “we” and “our” in an exclusively personalized way. Theirs is not one authorial voice incorporating the mournful sympathy of a democratic community. Rather,

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it is an inwardly intimate voice seeking to reconstitute parental and familial subjectivity—a voice for whom mourning remains an intensely private experience: [Jesus] takes a hostage of our love, To draw the parents’ hearts above. // There stands our child before the Lord, In royal vesture drest; A victor ere he drew the sword, Ere he had toil’d, at rest. No doubts this blessed faith bedim: We know that Jesus died for him. (114)

To find a democratizing spirit within this literary family’s poetry of mourning, we must return to The Associate Minstrels and the memorializing of Charles Wickens. No one voice claims the privilege of singing a Shelleyan, “I weep for Charles Wickens—he is dead!”43 On the contrary, in the one poem explicitly dedicated to his memory, no first person pronoun even appears until the final two lines, and then it is we: Sweet spirit! thine early access Yon triumphing seraphs may hail; But we—‘tis the balm of distress— Must weep as we traverse the vale. (86)

The Associate Minstrels situates the activity of collaborative healing and communal reformation in the body of the text itself. Individual poems are gestures of mourning and remembrance, the whole thus constituting a communal ceremony. Although this collective aspect of the text aspires to democratic inclusiveness, we find a greater expression of egalitarianism in a series of poems written by three of the women—key to its imagining of a noncompetitive literary community. The elegiac portion of the volume is followed by a lighter sequence of occasional poems celebrating birthdays, friendships, and familial relationships, which can be read as the work’s continuing process of reconstituting relational bonds and subjectivities: healing the incomplete circle. Three of these poems, written and appearing in order by Jane Taylor, Elizabeth Thomas, and Ann Taylor, are titled “To a Sister, on her Birth-day.” And although each author commemorates the birth of her own biological sister, the sequence itself suggests a celebration, too, of poetic sisterhood. If the sequence seems also suggestive of a pastoral singing contest, that impression quickly loses viability. Almost as if to dissociate the sequence from any intimation of competition, Ann begins with and sustains a self-deflating posture: Since Jane and Eliza have taken the lyre, The birth of a Sister to hail, My fingers recoil in affright from the wire, Too sure that its music must fail. (116)

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Jane herself abhorred the competition of the literary marketplace and wrote of competition in general, “No rank, nor age, escapes that vulgar sin, / Breath’d in its nurseries,—in its schools worked in” (qtd in Barry 108).44 In a letter to Josiah Conder she says, “ ‘I am weary of the sickening, fatiguing struggle for competition.’ ” Conder, observes Barry, “had accused her of a morbid humility; but Jane loved her friends too well . . . ‘I allow my pieces to rank as the leaves,’ she explains, ‘which are, you know, always reckoned a necessary and even pleasing part of the bouquet’ (xviii). What Jane’s self-effacing stance underscores is the incorporating nature of this household-family model of collaboration and, furthermore, the noncompetitive ethos that characterizes collaboration when inf luenced by the presence of female authorship. Despite her own reservations about even the appearance of competition, Ann is nevertheless moved to honor her sister’s birthday, offering an important caveat regarding critical reception and audience: I sung, and I fingered, and listened to hear If judges could think I played well.— // They could not: I found ‘twould be labour in vain To hope they would smile on the lay:— But ‘twas not for the critics; it was for my Jane; And so I took courage to play. (118)

Ann’s explicit rejection of an external, critical audience underscores the congenial aspect of this poetry. Her verses are reserved for an ideal readership with which she enjoys a collaborative and intimate sympathy. And the pleasure with which that audience receives what amounts to a poetic gift takes precedence over any external judgment of poetic merit. Through a kind of collaborative group consciousness made cohesive by the sympathetic bonds of intellectual, emotional, and physical intimacy, the circle of friends and family becomes a self-contained literary community wherein the roles of poet, audience, and critic are interchangeable and mutually supportive. The idealized, egalitarian literary community to which Ann Taylor’s birthday poem aspires, born out of the incorporation of authors into a householdfamily model of collaboration, finds a similarly aspiring forebear in the Pantisocratic literary community envisioned by Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

III Coleridge’s admission to Southey in December of 1794 that his engagement to Sara Fricker resulted from having “mistaken the ebullience of schematism for affection” is revealing in a number of ways.45 On its face, the comment is straightforward enough: his enthusiasm for Pantisocracy became displaced onto a woman associated with it: he engaged her when he really wanted to marry the scheme. It suggests a conflation of Southey’s friendship and Sara Fricker’s affection, the potent combination giving rise to a marriage proposal.

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And yet Coleridge’s italics also bring to mind Richard Edgeworth’s machinations toward incorporation with the Aikin circle through negotiations with Barbauld: the Pantisocracy scheme was to be a similar catalyst for incorporating Coleridge and Southey into one literary family. Edgeworth’s “lady’s paper” and Pantisocracy, though schemes in one sense—expositions in outline, or drafts of projected literary work46 —were also business arrangements and therefore plagued by the specter of economic competition. Several questions arise from Coleridge’s mistaking—or misreading—but I will begin with the most fundamental: What concept or model of intimacy was Coleridge imagining when he proposed to Sara Fricker, and how did Pantisocracy become mistaken for that concept?47 To address this question I will first consider Coleridge’s definition of such an ideal model, then measure what he saw in Pantisocracy—its great potential—against that definition. Competition enervated the plan’s collaborative promise, eroding it from a grand transatlantic ambition to a backyard Welsh alternative and finally to a West Indian chimera. There is an entry in the Marginalia that J. Robert Barth sees as perhaps the clearest articulation Coleridge has given us of what he deemed the most personally fulfilling model of intimacy: a “happy marriage” of intellect, sex, and friendship. In Coleridge and the Power of Love, Barth calls this combination of intimacies a “married friendship”—Coleridge’s “preferred model”— and cites the passage from the Marginalia: Friendship satisfies the highest parts of our nature; but a wife, who is capable of friendship, satisfies all. The great business of real unostentatious Virtue is—not to eradicate any genuine instinct or appetite of human nature; but—to establish a concord and unity betwixt all parts of our nature, to give a Feeling & a Passion to our purer Intellect, and to intellectualize our feelings & passions. This a happy marriage, blessed with children, effectuates, in the highest degree, of which our nature is capable.48

Four shared components make up the formulation: friendship, intellect, sexuality, and family. That Coleridge wishes here to “intellectualize our feelings & passions” aligns him with Milton, who wrote in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that conjugal happiness could not exist without “sympathy of mind,” by which he meant, above all, an intellectual compatibility.49 By arguing that an intimate partnership should do more than merely suppress an “appetite of human nature,” Coleridge responds, in line with Milton, directly to Paul, whose first epistle to the Corinthians advised the unmarried to remain so, “as I am,” unless “they are not practicing self-control . . . For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion” (1 Cor 7.8–9).50 For Coleridge, marriage involves more than the satisfaction of sexual desire; his ideal conception of intimacy—his happy marriage—is a generative amalgamation of intellect, sex, and friendship. Needless to say, he set a high standard; conceptualizing and finding such an ideal would be two different things. Coleridge therefore appears to have compromised by seeking in two people what he could not find in one.

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In Robert Southey, Coleridge found his first intellectual soul mate. “You have left a large Void in my Heart,” Coleridge wrote following the failure of Pantisocracy, I know no man big enough to fill it. Others I may love equally & esteem equally: and some perhaps I may admire as much. But never do I expect to meet another man, who will make me unite attachment for his person with reverence for his heart and admiration of his Genius! (CL 1.173)

Their correspondence during 1794–1795 bespeaks an uncommon intensity of feeling, each “I am longing to be with you” returned with seemingly greater feeling. In one instance, parting company leaves Southey lamenting to a friend, “Coleridge left me yesterday. It was like losing a limb to part with him” (NL 1.71). Intellectually, it seemed a perfect fit; after the fallout, Coleridge told Southey, “as a Poet, my Vanity knew no keener gratification than your Praise” (CL 1.173). And indeed Coleridge viewed their intellects as complementary halves of one imaginary, amalgamated whole: “I think, that an admirable Poet might be made by amalgamating him & me. I think too much for a Poet; he too little for a great Poet” (CL 1.293). Although Alison Hickey avers that “the obvious impossibility of amalgamation with Southey only draws attention to the incompleteness of both partners” (an assertion at least complicated by Southey’s prior remark), both men sought to approximate amalgamation through familial incorporation.51 “Make Edith my Sister,” Coleridge enthused, “—Surely, Southey! We shall be frendotatoi meta frendous. Most friendly where we are all friends. She must therefore be more emphatically my Sister” (CL 1.103). Here we see Coleridge’s compromise: incorporation through marriage to sisters, the sexual union with them being an approximation of his ideal, something akin to sharing one wife and thus sharing each other. Yet even the compromise must have had, for a time, a passionate feeling of the kind of “concord and unity” Coleridge sought. Regardless of his contradictory claims to Southey about Sara—“I certainly love her. I think of her incessantly & with unspeakable tenderness,” on one hand; and referring to her as “a woman whom I do not love,” on the other—it is difficult to imagine the impassioned verses of “Lines Written at Shurton Bars” (titled “Ode to Sara” in the 1797 Poems) or the sheer beauty of “The Eolian Harp” springing from disingenuousness. Perhaps it was the regulating, compressing effect of poetic form that allowed Coleridge, who, in thinking “too much for a Poet” often expressed his philosophical musings with utter formlessness, to distill emotion and intellect so deftly into these poems.52 At the end of “Lines Written at Shurton Bars,” Coleridge goes so far as to anticipate consummation: How oft, my Love! with shaping sweet I paint the moment, we shall meet! With eager speed I dart— I seize you in the vacant air,

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Here was the sought-after sexual element to the equation, yet underlying the longed-for “ecstasy” is disquiet. Of Coleridge’s contributions to the 1797 collaboration with Lloyd, this poem stands out because it has the lengthiest footnote. It actually has two, the first being a shorter reference to the first stanza’s phrase “green radiance,” which, Coleridge explains, “is borrowed from Wordsworth.”53 Because of its length, the second note has a most interesting effect on the pagination, which breaks the final stanza into three couplets spread over three succeeding pages. The note itself is an unnecessarily tedious digression about the “very curious phenomenon” observed in Sweden by a “M. Haggern, lecturer in natural history” of light seemingly flashing from flowers (93). Apparently anxious about the stanza’s sexual charge, Coleridge thus displaces attention from the erotic simile to the natural and scientifically explicable causes for such things, a move that parallels his own penchant for self-analysis and continual retreat from “what I needs must feel” into “abstruse Reasearch.” Later reflecting on this tendency, Coleridge put it like this to William Sotheby in 1802: For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still & patient all I can; And haply by abstruse Research to steal From my own Nature all the Natural Man; This was my sole Resource, my wisest Plan! And that, which suits a part, infects the whole, And now is almost grown the temper of my Soul! (Qtd in Parrish, Coleridge’s Dejection 7–8)54

Effectually draining erotic energy from the final stanza, Coleridge’s note can be read as an expression of equivocation toward the impending marriage, an ambivalence brought on by the realization that his conjugal motives suddenly looked far more Pauline than his concept of the happy marriage would permit. Indeed, his lament to Southey that the engagement felt wrong precisely because it served only “the removal of a desultory Appetite” suggests Coleridge’s growing awareness of the disjunction (CL 1.145). No uneasy note distracts us from the sotto voce of “The Eolian Harp” (1796), and here Coleridge memorably contemplates a life with Sara in their future cottage home: My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is

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To sit beside our cot, our cot o’ergrown With white-flowered jasmine, and the broad-leaved myrtle, (Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!) And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light, Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve Serenely brilliant (such would wisdom be) Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents Snatched from yon bean-field! And the world so hushed! The stilly murmur of the distant sea Tells us of silence. (ll. 1–12)55

By October 1802, the “desultory breeze” generating harmonious thoughts of “One Life” here in “The Eolian Harp” was to have surged into a “squally blast” of “desultory appetites” and dejection. If Coleridge’s oscillating effusions suggest emotional inconsistency regarding Sara, we might simply conclude that he loved her as part of the Southey-Fricker compromise, his feelings rising or falling according to the harmony of the whole. For that compromise to appear whole—to mimic the conception of the happy marriage—Pantisocracy, the engine of incorporation, had to stand in as family. It is a remarkable yet overlooked fact that Southey, the Frickers, Coleridge, and the Wordsworths were all orphaned. Thus they had no “family fortunes” on which to rely: no family engraving trade, no firmly established name in the publishing world. Moreover, they had fewer ties keeping them in England and virtually no patriarchal oversight to stop them from emigrating. Southey’s Aunt Tyler was perhaps patriarchy’s nearest representative. When she heard of Robert’s plans to marry and emigrate, she disowned him, never to communicate with him again (Ashton 54). “Last Friday I was turned out of doors by my Aunt,” Southey wrote, “because my resolution was fixed on going to America and marrying one to whom Fortune had allotted a doom very similar to my own” (NL 1.82). Still, the Pantisocratic hopefuls were freer than most to carry out their plan and to create new familial ties in the process. Pointing to a different feature of familial incorporation—his adoption as a son—Coleridge writes Southey, “Remember me to your Mother—to our Mother—am I not affiliated?” (CL 1.99).56 For Southey, the desire for incorporation was mutual, and he explicitly associated it with Pantisocracy. Perhaps it is no mere coincidence that his depiction of the collaborative scene in the following quote appeared at the same time he and Coleridge were cobbling together The Fall of Robespierre.57 “When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree we shall discuss metaphysics; criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo, and write sonnets whilst following the plough. Our society will be of the most polished order . . . Our females are beautiful amiable and accomplished—and I shall then call Coleridge my brother in the real sense of the word” (NL 1.72). Alison Hickey reads these lines as an affirmation of the fraternal over the conjugal/familial marriage serving merely as “a certification of manliness necessary for entry into the homosocial fraternity” (312).58 Though family is often underestimated, as here, in favor of fraternity, the familial component to Pantisocracy bears substantial import for the plan’s conception as well as its demise. Even while maintaining that “family for

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Coleridge is an ideal to which friendship aspires,” Taussig similarly contends in favor of fraternity, suggesting that the “cultural urge in the 1790s to create friendship ex nihilo by an effort of will, [is] exemplified in Coleridge and Southey’s scheme of Pantisocracy” (27, 31–32). Yet in Coleridge’s pursuit of “married friendship,” and in his and Southey’s mutual aspiration to become “brothers” through marital incorporation—long before which Southey once told his brother Thomas to “sojourn with our brother Coleridge” (NL 1.74)—it is more accurately family, not friendship, that Pantisocracy engendered “ex nihilo.” What Coleridge saw in Pantisocracy, masquerading in its constituent parts of friendship, sexual love, and family, was the happy marriage of a literary family. The combination was undoubtedly seductive. And there were other benefits, too. By incorporating a literary family through Pantisocracy, Coleridge would obtain in dowry an ideal reading audience, something he searched for all his life. It is no secret that Coleridge disdained anonymous critics, who were simply antithetical to an intimate, sympathetic reader. Lucy Newlyn highlights this point when she mentions that Coleridge indeed “preferred the immediacy of spoken communication, ‘with its possibility of intimate unity between speaker and listener,’ to more distanced forms of connectiveness.” He thus “replaced,” continues Newlyn, “unknown readers whose tastes he could not anticipate with intimate reading-circles, frequently made up of friends and family” (208).59 With the first measures falling into place, the next step was to put this concept into action by radically expanding the household-family model of collaboration into a self-contained writing community beyond anything the Taylors and Conders ever envisioned. And to get away: away from government restrictions and anonymous critics, away from dim economic prospects and the competitive literary marketplace, away to a harbor sheltered from the brewing millennial storm. What else, after all, were such liberal minded writers without patriarchal oversight to do? Given their educations, of course, Southey and Coleridge (Wordsworth, too, for that matter) might well have pursued ecclesiastical or legal careers. Had they been so disposed, they could possibly have followed Thomas Southey’s path into the Navy; but these were politically contentious times. Rosemary Ashton sums things up this way: “The armed forces were out of the question given their views on Pitt’s Government—so that it is difficult to imagine what careers were left open to young men with scruples but no private fortune” (54).60 For aspiring authors with no established credibility, collaboration offered, on the one hand, a possible way to earn money and establish a reputation; on the other hand, however, collaboration could also attract undue suspicion, as it was doing with the London Constitutional Society and the London Corresponding Society (and would do later with the “Spy Nozy” incident).61 Pitt’s suspension of Habeas Corpus in the summer of 1794, and the trials that followed, were an even greater hindrance to the liberal-minded writer.62 Decrying the situation in The Plot Discovered, Coleridge writes, If even a friendly letter or in a social conversation any should assert a Republic to be the most perfect form of government, and endeavor by all argument to

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prove it so, he is guilty of High Treason . . . It will be in vain to allege, that such opinions were not wished to be realized, except as the result of progressive reformation and ameliorated manners; . . . still he would be guilty of high Treason. (Qtd in Taussig)63

To these economic and political obstacles, Pantisocracy represented a twofold solution: an incorporated literary family and a new home for free speech. Having looked at the familial side of Pantisocracy and its fulfillment of Coleridge’s desire for intimacy, I would like to consider the scope and collaborative aspirations of Pantisocracy as a cultural experiment and writing community. Eventually marred by internal friction and competitive impulses, Pantisocracy nevertheless built its theoretical foundation on a principle of georgic-pastoral unification and possessed, for a time, great potential for cultural re-visioning. Such ambition, however, required some thoughtful planning. The summer and fall of 1794 were heady days. Coleridge and Southey were thoughtful planners, and despite the lingering critical perception that Pantisocratic emigration was but the fanciful dream of young radicals, they had done their homework—read Brissot and Cooper, perhaps even Gilbert Imlay. They understood well the advantages and disadvantages of different geographical regions, the climate, the agriculture, the potential hazards, along with the logistical demands of such an endeavor. 64 “In short,” writes J.R. MacGillivray, “they had approached the scheme in what a business man,—and this is praise indeed—might have called a practical manner” (133). Their greatest obstacle was not lack of planning; it was lack of funding and, ultimately, resolve. In the face of funding shortfalls, within a year the grand transatlantic outlines of June 1794 were scaled back to a Welsh alternative. Still, in spite of f lagging resolve, Coleridge and Southey carried out part of the plan by marrying Sara and Edith Fricker in the fall of 1795. By year’s end, however, the plan was all but scrapped. 65 Writing to Southey in the fall of 1794, Coleridge refers to meeting “a most intelligent young man,” Thomas Cooper, recently returned with intelligence from America. The two men discussed economic and other details, including the cost of land and of transatlantic passage, labor estimates, and the prospect of assistance: “He was of our School,” he tells Southey, and comes regularly every evening . . . He says two thousand pound will do—that he doubts not we can contract for our Passage under £400—that we shall buy this Land a great deal cheaper when we arrive at America . . . That twelve men can easily clear three hundred acres in 4 or 5 months—and that for six hundred Dollars a thousand Acres may be cleared, and houses built upon them . . . Every possible assistance will be given us. (CL 1.99)

Among those who might provide such assistance was of course Joseph Priestley, whose home and laboratory still stand today in Northumberland, at a northern fork in the Susquehenna. To Priestley there was no reason to

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doubt the plan’s efficacy. “At the time of my leaving England,” he recalls in his Memoirs, my son in conjunction with Mr. Cooper, and other English emigrants, had a scheme for a large settlement for the friends of liberty in general near the head of the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania. And taking it for granted that it would be carried into effect, after landing in New-York, I went to Philadelphia, and thence came to Northumberland, a town nearest the proposed settlement. (Qtd in MacGillivray 154)

Perhaps Priestley foresaw the rekindling yet again of Warrington Academy spirit, this time in America. Certainly Southey’s vision of a “varied day of toil, science and relaxation” (NL 1.73) would have appealed to him, and he would have welcomed such industrious, poetic, and liberal-minded neighbors. But the business was not all about work. There was to be leisure and poetry, too.66 Paying tribute to Thomas Chatterton, who, as a symbol of unfulfilled poetic talent, is honored almost as Pantisocracy’s patron saint, Coleridge imagines the young poet as one of his neighbors sharing in the day’s toil and leisure, and reinforces Southey’s vision of combining manual and liberal arts: O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive! Sure thou woulds’t spread the canvass to the gale, And love with us the tinkling team to drive O’er peaceful Freedom’s undivided dale; And we, at sober eve, would round thee throng, Would hang, enraptured, on thy stately song, And greet with smiles the young-eyed Poesy All deftly masked, as hoar Antiquity. (ll. 148–55)

Here Coleridge anticipates in poetry what Pantisocracy was supposed to embower in practice: a harmonious unification of the georgic and the pastoral.67 And this was indeed a kind of real-life generic experiment. Thus, whereas no poetic respite accompanies Virgil’s harsh “jangling of bridle in the stall,” Coleridge’s nimble adjustments soothe the discord into a “tinkling team” of lyricism and cultivation.68 Further, Virgil’s Olympian and imperial steed, which “when worn with disease or sluggish through the years” is to be “shut up indoors” and not pitied for “his inglorious age,” is replaced by Coleridge’s Christian and democratic “Young Ass,” whom Pantisocracy embraces as an equal: I hail thee Brother—spite of the fool’s scorn! And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell, Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride, And Laughter tickle Plenty’s ribless side! How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play, And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay!69

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As William Keach points out, the third line of this excerpt originally reinforced the egalitarian message with an overt invocation of the scheme: “Where high-souled Pantisocracy shall dwell” (CP 453 n.). And yet the conception of georgic-pastoral harmony was not simply hopeful thinking. Acquaintances of the group recorded their own impressions of the projected blend of labor and leisure. Joseph Cottle was partly skeptical in citing Robert Lovell’s calculations: Robert Lovell stated, with great seriousness, that, after the minutest calculation and inquiry among practical men, the demand on their labour would not exceed two hours a day; that is, for the production of absolute necessaries . . . A large portion of time, he said, would still remain for their own individual pursuits, so that they might read, converse, and even write books. (Qtd in MacGillivray 132)70

Thomas Poole made similar observations: Their plan is as follows: Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles are to embark with twelve ladies in April next [i.e., 1795] . . . Each man would labor two or three hours in a day, the produce of which labor would, they imagine, be more than sufficient to support the colony . . . A good library is to be collected, and their leisure hours are to be spent in study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children. (Qtd in Sister Eugenia 1072)

One source of these man-hour estimates, as both Sister Eugenia and MacGillivray note, is Brissot’s New Travels in the United States: “A man in that country works scarcely two hours in a day for the support of himself and family; he passes most of his time in idleness, hunting or drinking.” 71 Southey had another source in mind—The Wealth of Nations—when he wrote to Horace Bedford: “According to the computation of Adam Smith— one man in twenty is employed in providing the necessaries and comforts of life” (NL 70). Based on a division of labor, Southey’s metrics yield the same estimate: “two hours a day”—the time saved allowing each person to “enjoy his mental faculties” (70).72 Poole’s remarks about “a good library” and “liberal discussions,” and Cottle’s not disinterested comment that they might “write books,” reinforce the understanding that this community was being conceived for literary ends.73 If in hindsight Pantisocracy resembles something of a cult, the likeness might best be attributed to the original social implications of the term cultus, from which derive both culture and cultivation. The primary sense of the term—to worship—is inseparable from the condition of leisure that makes such worship possible. A day of rest, though long detached from the import it once possessed, is nonetheless built into our scheme of time—the workweek—and into our consciousness as a symbol of pastime. Conceptually, temporary freedom from the demands of manual labor was to encourage not so much mechanical worship as spiritual contemplation. And most assuredly the Pantisocrats would have given part of their

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free time to religious devotion. And yet the opportunity offered by modern economic theory to minimize georgic labor meant a virtual surplus of leisure, the excess being available for something more. That surplus could now include the three contemplative pursuits envisaged by Southey: metaphysics, criticism, and poetry. Undoubtedly Coleridge, who coined “Pantisocracy” from the Greek was mindful, too, that the Greek conception of leisure— skhole—was also relevant to the scheme.74 This community represented a school of thought, members being, like Thomas Cooper, “of our School,” and sought to engage adherents in a hellenic conversation, contemplating the verse of Chatterton, as it were, during the leisure time of day. Thomas Poole’s casual remark is apropos: “their leisure hours are to be spent in study, liberal discussions, and the education of their children.” Children’s education, a virtual battleground for ideological struggle during the period, would thus proceed according to a domestic, Dissenting model, but one undoubtedly fashioned with Rousseau in mind. Distancing himself from the Aikin school, Coleridge’s “wish [expressed to Southey] . . . that the two Mothers were not to go,” because they would inevitably “tinge the Mind of the Infants with prejudications” (CL 1.123, 119), aligns his pedagogical stance more closely with Emile than with Hymns in Prose.75 But if they were to borrow, at least in part, from the school of Dissent, who better to assist than Priestley, the former Warrington Academy tutor and polymath. The vision of Pantisocracy was comprehensive. His hopes undiminished, Southey told his brother in May 1795 that the American colony was “still the grand object in view” (NL 93), and so it was: a new family, a new land, a new way of living. With this broader scope now in perspective, we might fairly assess that Pantisocracy was not just a family, but something much greater, indeed a whole culture, which Coleridge and Southey sought to create ex nihilo. And if all this seems to point vaguely in the direction of Romantic detachment, the authors of Pantisocracy accordingly charged for being “culpably disengaged from worldly life” (Taussig 133), then we have missed the point. As a collaborative re-visioning of culture, in which familial incorporation was to become grafted onto a georgic-pastoral scene, Pantisocracy offered at least a momentary glimpse of egalitarian promise. As with the reunion of the Warrington sphere in London shortly before Priestley’s emigration, the Pantisocratic community offered the benefit of assembling sympathetic minds in one geographical spot, which meant conversation could supplant correspondence, a boon for poetic criticism and production. Letters from this period remind us that the periodical press was but one source of literary criticism. Intimate writing circles such as these were another, and they engendered personal responses that counterbalanced anonymous criticism. In the course of these exchanges Coleridge in fact rewrites so many of Southey’s lines that, as Hickey observes, his collaborative emendations belie his own claims about poetic creation in the Biographia, for the finished poem appears not as “the product of some magical fusing power . . . [nor] the natural issue of an ‘own mind’ that is itself whole by definition. Rather, it is mechanically constructed by one partner out of the other’s fragments” (317). To live as neighbors in the Pennsylvania colony meant

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that the critical dialogue and sharing of poems previously carried on through correspondence could take place, as it did for Anna Barbauld and John Aikin in Stoke Newington, face to face and on a daily basis. As to receiving the critical acclaim of one’s peers, George Burnett wrote that the plan’s meritocratic designs were to have ensured that “no man would gain applause or distinction from his fellow-men, unless by superiority of genius and virtue” (qtd in Taussig 126). Indeed, to be included in such a privileged conversation meant proving one’s worth by demonstrating this said genius. A telling portion of the letter wherein Coleridge discusses logistics shows that radical politics alone would not assure Pantisocratic incorporation. After informing Southey of economic matters, Coleridge mentions two Pantisocratic hopefuls: The younger Le Grice . . . and Favell who goes to Cambr. Next October twelve-month—have entreated me that they may be allowed to come over after us when they quit College. This morning Favell put this Sonnet into my hand— Flashes of hope that lighten o’er my Soul! . . . I gaze at the Vale, where bloom in fadeless Youth Love, Beauty, Friendship, Poesy, and Truth. My Brethren! O my Brethren! then I cry. And you, Ye mild-eyed Forms! a Brother’s Kiss Give me! that I may drink of your love-bowl And mix in every draught the high-wrought Soul, And pluck from every Bank the Rose of Bliss! . . . Both Le Grice and Favell have all the generous ardent feelings that characterize Genius—they are 19 years old—and beg their fraternal remembrances to you. (CL 1.100)

This makes for an interesting juxtaposition, the financial detail with a sonnet of affection. The sonnet’s appeal certainly lies in its impassioned wish for amalgamation through the power of “Love, Beauty, Friendship, Poesy, and Truth”: a disciple’s hopes for admission to the school of Pantisocracy. Accession, however, required the approbation of the community’s literary critics. By transcribing the sonnet to Southey and affirming latent “genius,” Coleridge, as arbiter of taste, granted his stamp of approval, which, in this instance, one might guess owed more to an effluence of sympathy from the Pantisocratic “love-bowl” than to a demonstration of poetic genius. Of course, this is the benefit of such an intimate literary community. As with Ann Taylor’s birthday poem, only one critical audience counts: the recipient. For the young Favell, as for Taylor, that recipient also represents an ideal reader—one with whom the author shares sympathetic ties. Favell’s lines express a desire for affiliation with the brotherhood (the familial unit) he hopes to join in the vale of all good things; and given his preference for an intimate, sympathetic reading audience, Coleridge would have understood this better than anyone. This seems all well and good. Yet there is something unsettling about this apparently benign celebration of brotherly love. The problem with

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Favell’s offering is that it comes with expectations, and in this seemingly insignificant moment we can discern the embryonic outlines of corporate competition. Favell’s fourteen lines do not replicate an exchange from Barbauld’s “gift economy,” 76 nor do they fit with the trading of birthday poems in The Associate Minstrels; but they represent an exchange nonetheless. In a parodic inversion of an aristocrat buying his way out of military service, Favell curiously prefigures Edgeworth’s banking metaphor by offering Coleridge an investment of verse in hopes of substantiating his literary worth and gaining a future seat in the community. Hence, his sonnet bears the hidden watermark of currency, which perhaps accounts for its mawkish blend of sycophancy and affection. And this brings us to a seemingly incidental line from the letter we have been reading. Toward the end of the litany of logistical detail, Coleridge, as if to assure Southey that there will be more to Pantisocratic life than liberty, fraternity, and subsistence farming, accentuates the message from America “that literary characters make money there” (CL 1.99). Southey’s entrepreneurial description of carrying on “our literary business” in the countryside . . . till we can raise money for America” (NL 93), while generic enough on its face, nonetheless reinforces their commercial aspirations. Indeed, when Coleridge refers to himself, “Southey, Lovell, Burnett & Co” as being “some 5 men going partners together” (CL 1.150), he prefigures the language of Barbauld’s letter to Maria Edgeworth and further divulges the venture’s corporate underbelly. This was the business end of Pantisocracy, and what politics of one sort dispelled with “aspheterism,” Coleridge’s neologism for the abolition of property, politics of another would reconfigure as intellectual stock. Competition would merely shift fields. Hickey’s assessment regarding the battle between Southey and Coleridge over the relative worth of intellectual labor is perfectly germane: “True authorship [for Coleridge] is characterized by the labor of thinking,” not the number of pages composed (320). In the midst of collaborating, Coleridge had chided Southey for not acknowledging the amount of intellectual energy he had directed toward revising Joan of Arc and some of Southey’s poems: “We ought to appreciate,” writes Coleridge, “our comparative Industry by the quantum of mental exertion, not the particular mode of it: By the number of thoughts collected, not the number of Lines, thro’ which these Thoughts are diffused” (CL 1.172).77 Hickey sees this as a struggle for authority over the texts themselves in which Coleridge devalues Southey’s contributions; his “greater quantum of labor yields a greater ‘interest’ in the text,” she argues, thus authorizing Coleridge to “recollect the ‘true biography’ ” of the collaborative work (320). To pursue Hickey’s thoughtful analysis in a slightly different direction, I would suggest that Coleridge is arguing for a kind of critical authority over the text. It is Coleridge’s valuation of The Fall of Robespierre as a whole, for example, that putting two names on the title page of “such a Work” would “appear ridiculous” (CL 1.106). The critical assessment here is based on Coleridge’s implied ability to measure intellectual expenditure: Robespierre was too hastily written to merit the weight of two creators. In the end, collaboration is sullied by bickering over whose were the more valuable contributions: Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose this is

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not. On the title page of The Fall of Robespierre, Coleridge, despite having written but one of the play’s three acts, affixed his name alone “because,” he told Southey, “it will sell at least an hundred Copies at Cambridge” (CL 1.106). So much for “going partners together.”78 So much for the “ebullience of schematism.” I doubt not that Coleridge fell deeply in love. He fell in love with a refracted projection of his own unified ideal, his lovely but schematic mind mistaking the distorted colors for a rainbow. Coleridge’s argument about the expenditure of thought leaves us with an utterly idiosyncratic method of evaluating literature, for how is one to assess a work by the quantity of thought that went into it? What Coleridge demands of Southey is a sympathetic understanding of, and credit for, the mental labor that went into the poem. By that thinking Coleridge establishes a standard based on sympathy, which leads to an irreconcilable critical paradox. Favell may have thought long and hard in writing his sonnet, but eventually Coleridge would have had to face the fact that, Pantisocratic sympathy or no, Favell’s poetry was not very good. To get in the door at the nascent literary corporation “Coleridge, Southey, Lovell, Burnett & Co,” Favell had to rely on favoritism. In theory, sympathy should allow us, as Wordsworth insisted, “to read with the feelings of the Author”; but, as we noted in the previous chapter, had Sara Hutchinson read “The Leech-Gatherer” with the author’s feelings she necessarily would have been insensible to that which, for her, became “tedious” (Letters 1.367). Does Sara Hutchinson’s assessment of the poem mean that she lacks sympathy with the author—that she was an “impatient” reader, as Wordsworth charged? Not likely. But by Wordsworth’s standard, the issue was nonnegotiable; the poem is either perfect or it is “very bad”— there was “no intermediate state” (1.367). You either agreed or disagreed. And if you disagreed you were wrong and had better “ask yourself,” as Dorothy counseled, “whether you have hit upon the real tendency and true moral” of the poem (1.367). The paradox leads to a dilemma: Does Sara Hutchinson voice a contrary opinion again or just remain silent for sympathy’s sake? A lack of further controversy suggests she kept herself in check, probably for the good of familial harmony. Coleridge, on the other hand, was not willing to go so quietly.

IV It is rather a cliché that repeating the same behavior and expecting different results is a definition of madness. Perhaps equal parts “despondency and madness” led Coleridge to divorce his first literary family and cleave to the Wordsworth circle, but the similarities between the two families are hard to ignore, as each offered bonds of friendship, intellect, sexual attraction (accompanied by physical, though not sexual intimacy), and family. After the Pantisocratic fallout with Southey, Coleridge looked to Lloyd and Lamb but was unable to replace the intense intellectual connection he had with the former “sheet Anchor” of his virtue. In his self-published pamphlet of sonnets in 1796, one might even find a symbolic effort to connect with William

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Lisle Bowles, around whom Coleridge assembled in print a small family of writers, including Lamb, Lloyd, Southey, Thomas Warton, and Charlotte Smith: a “striking collaborative effort” in which Coleridge had effectively “assimilated a school” (Curran, PF 35, 36). The spirit of Pantisocracy’s conversation lived on, but not until he met Wordsworth did Coleridge see himself a “little man by his side,” as he told Cottle. To Southey, the very man who had left a “Void in my Heart” too big to fill, Coleridge gushed, “Wordsworth is a very great man—the only man, to whom at all times & in all modes of excellence I feel myself inferior” (CL 1.325, 1.334). He was in love again. But perhaps the repeated behavior was not so much a product of madness as of yet another bout of ebullient schematism. For this partnership, too, was stirred by the excitement of literary planning, first the abortive Wanderings of Cain project and then the Lyrical Ballads. Here, finally, the great collaborative potential was to achieve unprecedented heights. And here, too, was a family to which he could incorporate himself, this time as a friend sharing in the labor of the (poetic) household. But before considering Coleridge’s relation to his new family, we must revisit the term schematism and examine a pattern of behavior and thinking that would steer his affections and leave its mark in both poetry and criticism. After “Christabel” had been excluded from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge expressed his disappointment to John Thelwall in phrasing that should ring familiar: “As to Poetry, I have altogether abandoned it, being convinced . . . that I mistook a strong desire for original power” (CL 1.656). In Biographia Literaria Coleridge attributes the irritability of some poets to precisely this kind of misinterpretation: In whatever country literature is widely diffused there will be many who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic genius for the actual powers and original tendencies which constitute it. But men whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of their own power become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to anger. (20)

Mistaking a desire for something without actually possessing it: as is so often the case in the Biographia (and elsewhere), here Coleridge’s fault-finding bleeds into a stubborn palimpsest of self-assessment. Others were witness to his misreadings. Dorothy Wordsworth, who knew Coleridge perhaps as well as anyone, made a similar assessment concerning “his love for [Sara Hutchinson],” which she deemed “no more than a fanciful dream” (Letters 2.398). Sara Coleridge’s knowledge of her husband came at a price; during the time of the falling out with Wordsworth, she expresses frustration with Coleridge’s “fair promises” of settling in London yet remains compassionate toward the “poor fellow” in this letter to Thomas Poole: When C. was here in Febry he was cheerful & good natured & full of fair promises—he talked of our settling finally in London . . . [and] of making a livelihood by his writings so as to enable us to live in great credit there—I listened, I own, with incredulous ears, while he was building these “airy castles”

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and calmly told him that I thought it was much better that I and the children should remain in the country until the Boys had finished their Schooleducation . . . His promises, poor fellow, are like his Castles,—airy nothings! (Qtd in Ashton 278)

As we have seen with Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Pollard, there is something truly endearing about the fanciful castle-building of youth. To carry this particular feeling of childhood into the powers of adulthood, however, is another, potentially detrimental, matter. Jane Taylor describes castle building in terms almost approaching addiction: But to be serious . . . I do believe that this habit of castle-building is very injurious to the mind. I know that I have sometimes lived so much in a castle, as almost to forget that I lived in a house; and while I have been carefully arranging aërial matters there, have left all my solid business in disorder here. To be perpetually fancying what might be, makes us forget what we really are; and while conjuring up what we might have, we are negligent of what we really possess. (Qtd in Barry 6; emphasis in the original)

The dual consciousness Taylor describes, though benign in this context, applies equally to the mentality of addiction, whether the dependence is on opium or on castle-building. Indeed, the latter is symptomatic of the very condition Coleridge applied to himself—schematism—which describes not only a “schematic method of presentation” but also, remarkably, an “excessive addiction to this” (OED). Simply put, Coleridge was addicted to outlining. As Hickey points out, he routinely convinced himself that “brainstorming is a necessary step toward a whole work,” but that, more often than not, “wholeness remains a mere projection” (322). These final words, “wholeness remains a mere projection,” not only encapsulate Coleridge’s grand castles of Pantisocracy, The Recluse, Bibliographia Britannica, and the all-encompassing “Opus Maximum”79 —massive frameworks constructed on loosely fitted and unstable joinery—they also recall mistaking the constituent parts of his happy marriage for a wholeness of which he yearned to be a part. Kant’s formulation of the schema in The Critique of Pure Reason offers further insight, at a more elemental level, into Coleridge’s misreadings. The schema is the mediating faculty between conceptions of the understanding and experiential phenomena. Although an oversimplification in terms of Kant, Coleridge’s schematizing the phenomenon of the Pantisocratic family under the conception of the happy marriage is a fruitful analogy. The analogy oversimplifies because Kant’s concepts of the understanding do not comprise such things as love or affection; they are far more elemental, having to do with, for instance, quantities (unity or plurality) or relations (cause and effect). With regard to Coleridge’s mistaking, we might consider the error in terms of Kant’s category of “community”—reciprocal relations of things such as heavenly bodies—and thereby suggest that Coleridge was a man who felt himself to be standing outside of others, almost non-coexistent with them, unless he was able, in his own (Lockean) phrasing, to “pass out of myself, and to exist in the form of others,” something he described

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as “an instinct of my Nature” (qtd in McFarland 65).80 His description is applicable, in this context, to amalgamation and familial incorporation, and it allows us more clearly to comprehend Coleridge’s error in assigning the scheme of Pantisocracy to his concept of the happy marriage. For he must have felt, for a time, a sense of oneness with the fledgling community such that it could be misperceived as coexistent harmony—a momentary confluence of all constituents, including himself, into an intimate whole. He saw unity when in fact there was division. However, by the time he published “Dejection: An Ode” on Wordsworth’s wedding day, Coleridge had recovered from this perceptual erring, and, intentionally or not, revised Kant in the process.81 Governing the internal mechanism of the schema is time, for time is transcendent, applying to all conceptions always. The schema therefore has a built-in temporal framework that allows us to understand that event A, for example, precedes event B. In the first Critique’s third analogy of experience, regarding the principle of coexistence, Kant illustrates a point with an interesting example. Because perceptions of two different objects can follow one another reciprocally, one is able, through the law of community, to conclude their coexistence. “Thus, I can perceive the moon and then the earth,” writes Kant, “or conversely first the earth and then the moon; and for the reason that my perceptions of these objects can reciprocally follow each other, I say, they exist contemporaneously. Now coexistence is the existence of the manifold in the same time. But time itself is not an object of perception.”82 Coleridge raises an interesting question respecting this assertion with the opening of “Dejection: An Ode” by quoting and then reiterating these lines from the Scottish ballad “Sir Patrick Spence”: “Late, late yestreen I saw the New Moon, / With the Old Moon in her arms” (CD 48). 83 Although the trope of the two moons as harbinger of a “deadly storm” is not to be read literally, commentators have taken the image for granted, without investigating its potential relevance to simultaneity, coexistence, or the perception of time.84 As tempting as it might be to read “Dejection: An Ode” as “a kind of ironic epithalamion, for himself rather than for his friend” (Barth 100), doing so delimits the interpretive focus. Too narrow a perspective potentially misses the subtleties touching Coleridge’s relationship with the Wordsworth literary family from which, since publication of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, he was becoming more and more estranged. By including the epigraph from the “grand Old Ballad” Coleridge implies that the Scottish Bard’s centuries-old forecast is as valid today as it was for Sir Patrick Spence—that indeed temporal distance does not necessarily negate coexistence. The very act of juxtaposing the ballad with his own opening lines throws doubt on Kant’s premise about coexistence, for not only do the two poems (and poets) coexist in space and time; the two moons, though shining centuries apart, shine in these lines as one: WELL! if the Bard was weather-wise, who made The grand Old Ballad of Sir Patrick Spence,

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This night, so tranquil now, will not go hence Unrous’d by winds, that ply a busier trade Than those, which mould yon clouds in lazy flakes, Or this dull sobbing draft, that drones and rakes Upon the strings of this Œolian lute, Which better far were mute. For lo! the New Moon, winter-bright! And overspread with phantom light, (With swimming phantom light o’erspread, But rimm’d and circled by a silver thread)85 I see the Old Moon in her lap, foretelling The coming on of rain and squally blast. (1–14)

The shift from past to present tense in the opening lines quickly underscores the temporal concerns of this poem: the old forecast is valid today. And to paraphrase the speaker, “This is the same moon the old Bard saw.” They do not see it contemporaneously, of course, but that is exactly the point. Only here, in the space of the poem, can the old Bard and the new stand sideby-side, witness the new moon embracing the old, and brace for the everbrewing oncoming storm. Despite Kant’s assertion to the contrary, Coleridge then goes beyond the metaphorical to demonstrate that time can indeed be perceived. Using a well-known image to substantiate this point, Coleridge puts the wind in the service of art—music—for although we cannot see the wind, we can hear it, and when it plays upon the Eolian harp, we can measure (or mark) time by the duration of the notes. Longer than any other section of the poem, the penultimate stanza signals its antistrophic movement by shifting attention away from the “dark distressful dream”: “I turn from it and listen to the wind.” As if measuring time in its very lengthiness, the stanza redoubles its temporal emphasis by ushering in the timeless clash of human conflict, as pertinent to the British in France as to the Greeks in Troy.86 Here, the stanza’s pronounced undulation mimics the “Mad Lutanist’s” irregular notes both in tone and duration as the wind rises and falls. Thou Actor, perfect in all tragic sounds! Thou mighty Poet, ev’n to frenzy bold! What tell’st thou now about? ‘Tis the rushing of an host in rout, With many groans of men with smarting wounds— At once they groan with pain, and shudder with the cold! But hush! there is a pause of deepest silence! And all that noise, as of a rushing crowd, With groans and tremulous shudderings—all is over! (102–10)

In what amounts nearly to an internal counterturn, Coleridge then juxtaposes the sounds of war with “a tale of less affright” told in both the “tender lay” and plaintive cry of Lucy Gray: It tells another tale, with sounds less deep and loud— A tale of less affright,

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In commingling the timeless sounds of human suffering, from the clash of arms to the cries of a lost child—from Homer, as it were, to Wordsworth— Coleridge attunes us to “the still, sad music of humanity.” And by orchestrating the stanza along a poetic continuum, he echoes the poem’s earlier alignment with “Sir Patrick Spence,” elucidating the human condition as one of continual suffering, the pain essentially shared, the sufferers coexistent. Coleridge’s poem is a meditation on the proper relations of things, most of all the proper relation of himself to the phenomena of his sensory perception. On the one hand, Coleridge has grown to see himself in proper relation to the external world, specifically the world of the Wordsworth-Hutchinson circle into which he formerly longed to be subsumed—to pass out of himself and “exist in the form of others.” His image in “A Letter to—” of three bodies entwined as one, joined both physically and emotionally, is apt: It was as calm as this,—the happy Night When Mary, Thou, and I, together were, ... Dear Mary!—on her Lap my Head she lay’d— Her hand was on my Brow, Even as my own is now; And on my Cheek I felt thy Eye-lash play—(CD 99–107)

To complete the image, Sara’s head must necessarily be in Mary’s lap, too, in order for her eyelash to touch Coleridge’s cheek. Three bodies are masquerading as one, and the image recalls “I see the old Moon in her lap.”87 Importantly, this is one of the images of intimate wholeness omitted from the substantially pared-down version of the poem published in the Morning Post. Moreover, the published version’s conspicuous omission, made visual by a series of asterisks, removes lines the intimate circle had previously seen.88 And that portion—the dark dream from which he turns—combines images of unity, like that above, with those of the pain (“thou art weak and pale with Sickness, Grief and Pain”) and regret (“And I—I made thee so!) occasioned by his “complaining Scroll” (115, 128–29). By omitting this internal strife, the later poem fine tunes the enlarged perspective Coleridge was acquiring, one in which he no longer needed to exist “in the forms of others” but could coexist alongside and apart from them. Having severed its umbilical tethering to the microcosmic community of the Wordsworths and the Hutchinsons, the Morning Post version of the poem shifts its communal emphasis from those who “dwell together in one quiet Home” to the symbiosis of soul and nature: the “strong music in the soul.”89

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“Gazing at the Western sky,” Coleridge notes all the minute particulars of the firmament: “those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, / That give away their motion to the stars; Those stars, that glide behind them, or between, Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen; Yon crescent moon, as fix’d as if it grew, In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue, A boat becalm’d! a lovely sky-canoe! I see them all, so excellent and fair— I see, not feel, how beautiful they are! (ll. 28, 31–39)

These lines accentuate the triangulation of the poet, the external world, and Wordsworth, the balance indicating that Coleridge sees each in proper relation to the other. The counter-turn that follows these lines—“My genial spirits fail”—is a serious reminder that there is a tradeoff involved in achieving Coleridge’s new vision.90 The sober ability to see clearly means not being swept up in feeling, in the “ebullience of schematism,” for instance, which led him to write lines like these: Pantisocracy—O I shall have such a scheme of it! My head, my heart are all alive—I have drawn up my arguments in battle array—they shall have the Tactician Excellence of the Mathematician with the Enthusiasm of the Poet— The Head shall be the Mass—the Heart the fiery Spirit, that fills, informs, and agitates the whole—Hardwood!—Pish! (CL 1.103)

This exuberance is commonplace in the letters to Southey, and one can imagine being swept up in the “Enthusiasm of the Poet,” who was wont playfully to reprimand himself for such effusiveness: “My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle—but you see I was in the humour for metaphors” (CL 1.84). What has made his transformation possible is a newly adjusted sense of time. Coleridge has recalibrated his schema, so to speak, and synchronized himself within a continuum of human suffering, dejection, recovery, and poetry. How, then, can we read the publication of “Dejection: An Ode” on Wordsworth’s wedding day, the very anniversary of Coleridge’s own marriage to Sara Fricker? In one sense, October 4 is, like the image of the moon, the same October 4 of seven years ago, the same “soft floating witchery of sound” heard now in Gallow Hill as then in Clevedon, Somersetshire.91 Blessed by Coleridge, Wordsworth enters his new stage of life listening to that music, knowing that the suffering and the joy go on. To see Coleridge as dejected because he cannot marry Sara Hutchinson is somewhat reductive. A typical reading comes from Benthall. Borrowing from astrological meanings of the words, he offers that “marrying Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth was no doubt in ‘exaltation,’ leaving Coleridge to suffer romantic disappointment over her sister Sara in ‘dejection’ ” (609). Is there some truth in this? Certainly so, but the view overlooks the repose Coleridge had gained

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and the broader context of his vision, a context that contains another anniversary and another October 4. Coleridge famously addressed five different names in the course of this poem’s evolution: Sara, Wordsworth, Edmund, William, and Lady. He interchanges them most visibly in the oft-quoted couplet: “O EDMUND! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live” (48–49). Most critics agree that the changes reflect different emphases and a desire to address both William and Sara.92 At the same time, “the original poem,” as Parrish says, “was more about Coleridge than about Sara” (CD 18). Unquestionably, the poem also has Dorothy Wordsworth in mind, for she was perhaps Coleridge’s most sympathetic reader at this time. In short, this poem is addressed to the Wordsworth literary family. From this vantage we can consider Coleridge’s recent standing with regard to that family. Before the “Dejection Ode,” Coleridge’s last offering of poetry to the Wordsworth circle was “Christabel,” and its omission from the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, as suggested in the last chapter, marked a decisive shift in the relationship, one whereby Coleridge slowly became an outsider—no longer part of the “many into one incorporate.” Given Coleridge’s desire to be a part of that literary family, and his concomitant desire to please Wordsworth with a contribution of poetry, his exclusion must indeed have been painful. It is a remarkable coincidence, but the decision to reject “Christabel” occurred exactly two years before Wordsworth’s wedding—to the day, though not the date. After working hard on his poem in Keswick, Coleridge had arrived in Grasmere on Saturday evening, October 4, 1800. “We talked till 12 o’clock,” Dorothy recorded in her journal, and that night everyone seemed “exceedingly delighted with the 2nd part of Christabel” (43). Sunday morning, “Coleridge read a 2nd time Christabel—we had increasing pleasure.” Monday was a rainy day. “Christabel” was cut, and Coleridge went home. Two years later Wordsworth awoke to bless his sister with a ring ceremony and then set off for his wedding; it was Monday morning, and the Morning Post was once again calling for rain. Coleridge’s visible omission of portions of the Morning Post poem, then, also functions as a signifier of exclusion: his own exclusion from the familial harmony contained in the redacted verses and the omission of “Christabel,” which led to that disharmony. If Coleridge’s personal dejection in 1802 accumulated from a sense of loss, or of lost opportunity, it was a disappointment not about Sara Hutchinson per se, but about the literary family for which she stood. His hopes for a new affiliation—of being an integral part of “many into one incorporate”—were winding to the end of a long, slow decline that began with Wordsworth’s turn to Dorothy at the end of the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge’s frustration over Wordsworth’s lyrically wandering “backwards and forwards” with Dorothy, instead of joining him in the mountain path of philosophical work, signaled his own realization that Dorothy was indeed supplanting him as primary collaborative partner. By 1800, the ties between Coleridge and Wordsworth were already unraveling, and the distancing was palpable. It was felt in Dove Cottage on the Sunday morning during the final reading of “Christabel” prior to its rejection, and then two years later in editorial

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omissions of the “Dejection Ode” that seem conscious of that exclusion. By the fall of 1802, the exclusion was material, for the Wordsworth household literally had no more room for Coleridge, the once frequent sojourner. What doubly impresses the sense of unhappiness in the “Dejection Ode” is Coleridge’s recognition, his nearly heroic acceptance, that he was a man apart, no longer coexistent, or even dreaming of a happy coexistence with those around him. Although not a healing, there is a sobering that emerges from the poem: Coleridge recognized in himself a schematic pattern and its failure to produce familial harmony. The publication of the Morning Post version of Coleridge’s poem was but a mild precursor to the publicity his estrangement from and discord with Wordsworth would garner in years to come. What might be seen as another case of misinterpretation occurred with the famous fallout of 1811–1812, the cause of which were remarks by Wordsworth, repeated to Coleridge by Basil Montagu, that “he had no hope” of his former collaborator and friend.93 Not that the remarks themselves were misinterpreted; rather, Coleridge had misunderstood his footing with respect to the Wordsworths, indeed had misinterpreted his own effect on those around him. It may be true that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” 94 but in the Lake District Coleridge appears to have been the common source of woe for more than one household. Were it not for the diligent and lengthy efforts of Henry Crabb Robinson, who spent the better part of a year acting as go-between, in the end even assisting in the writing of reconciliation letters, the two poets might never have spoken again.95 Despite the good auspices of Crabb Robinson, the bonds were all but severed. The final public display of the partnership’s demise was to be in 1817 with the publication of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. In its pages he would set the record straight and reclaim the critical authority he felt belonged to him alone. Although it is certainly speculative to try and locate first causes for the kind of rift that was played out in public through the Biographia, two of Wordsworth’s critical assessments bear notice. The first is Wordsworth’s memorable criticism of “The Ancient Mariner” in the note to that poem as it appeared in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. There he finds fault with the Mariner for displaying very Coleridgean traits: “no distinct character” and not acting but being “continually acted upon.” Wordsworth does, however, applaud the poem’s “unusual felicity of language” (qtd in Brett and Jones 276). The second of Wordsworth’s critical statements noteworthy in this context comes in the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” in the 1815 Poems. Speaking of Shakespeare, Wordsworth credits the Germans with being the only foreign critics “approaching towards a knowledge and feeling of what he is”; furthermore, Wordsworth asserts that “in some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the Poet” (CPW 745). Given Coleridge’s standing as the preeminent English lecturer on Shakespeare, and in light of his respect for a sympathetic bond between critic and writer, crediting a foreigner (A.W. Schlegel primarily) with critical superiority was no small insult.96

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And so it comes as no surprise when Coleridge takes a moment in the Biographia to “declare once and for all in what points I coincide with [Wordsworth’s] opinions, and in what points I altogether differ” (170). One of the points in which he coincided seems almost plagiarized, and it underscores, though not a sudden, certainly a dramatic sense of peripety: unprecedented collaborative creativity had become banal competitive bickering. One of the “excellencies” Coleridge identifies in Wordsworth merely repeats Wordsworth’s only compliment of “The Ancient Mariner” (its “unusual felicity of language”). Coleridge, in a kind of parodic gift exchange, applauds the “curiosa felicitas of [Wordsworth’s] diction” (268).97 Thus Coleridge cleverly found a way to air his disagreements in terms that pointed to, what for him at least, were their sources. Making controversy public, it seems, was something for which Coleridge had a special penchant, and in the final chapter I will consider the ways in which critical disagreements among literary families were drawn along generational lines, the younger poets of Coleridge’s generation eventually becoming reactionary in their treatment of the older, established order.

Chapter 5

Ge n e r at ions: C on f l ic t, C on t i n u i t y, a n d t h e G E N I U S FA M I L I A E

In September of 1802 the Southey household welcomed its first child, Margaret Edith, and the increasing “financial responsibilities” of parenthood prompted her father to begin working for the new Annual Review, edited by Arthur Aikin.1 Writing for the Annual was generally considered “conscientious hack-work” because it paid so poorly, 2 and Southey himself grew impatient with the job, telling a friend in 1807 that “there is nothing I do with so little satisfaction, and therefore it is of all work the slowest” (NL 1.461). Because the compendious review saw increasing delays in publication, no doubt in part because of that very slowness mentioned by Southey, Aikin was fired in 1808. Southey exhibited a personal dislike for Aikin, whom he referred to as “King Arthur,” but in the following letter, which mentions Aikin’s dismissal, Southey leaves the distinct impression that the ill will went beyond individual differences. Indeed, the implication is that the friction between Southey and Aikin was merely symptomatic of a larger, intergenerational hostility, defined along specific familial lines, which lay at the heart of literary politics. The immediate source of Southey’s outrage was his having been supplanted by an Aikin family member as reviewer of Wordsworth’s 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes: “King Arthur is deposed for misconduct in unnecessarily delaying the review,” he writes, and it is well for him he is, as otherwise, I should have made a desperate home thrust at him, for having had the impudence to omit the reviewal of Wordsworth’s poem[s], which he received from me, and inserting an Aikinish one in its stead. But as he has been already cashiered, I shall resent this in no other way than by dropping all acquaintance with the said King Arthur and his whole generation.3

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Since Arthur Aikin and Robert Southey were born just a year apart, the swipe at a “whole generation” initially seems misplaced.4 Yet the more telling reference is to an “Aikinish” review, which clarifies Southey’s narrower use of “generation”: the Aikins and their posterity as a literary family. Coleridge recorded a similarly low opinion of the Aikins in a notebook entry from 1805: “The monthly magazine a milliped Louse: & M rs B. & Dr A two of the forelegs—or the whole Aikin family.”5 The Aikinish label itself is revealing on a number of levels. Not only does the term generalize a family into a school of thought; it points to the indistinguishability of writers within that school, something reminiscent of reactions to Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. Moreover, the epithet places a familial signifier on a critical stance, a signifier then able to stand in for the larger population of criticism that took aim at the “Lake school”—or as Donald Reiman puts it, a stance “of the eighteenth-century school resisting Wordsworth’s growing introspectiveness.”6 Finally, the label invokes the lineage—poetic, educational, dissenting, and critical—to which the family name was irrevocably linked. Southey’s frustration with an Aikinish review corroborates McCarthy and Kraft’s supposition that the oft-cited anecdotal friction between Coleridge and Barbauld points to “a generational struggle we have insufficiently imagined” (SPP 29). In the eyes of the rising generation, the Aikins, to stay with the prevailing trope, were of the old school and had come to stand for everything outdated in poetry. To be sure, this was not always so, nor were intergenerational relations reducible to simple aesthetic contraries. This chapter seeks to understand intergenerational literary relations by looking at the effects of the ideological/aesthetic responses of one literary generation to its precursor. The relationship of Barbauld and Coleridge is emblematic. It began with a cordiality approaching warmth but gradually assumed a hostile, competitive aspect, the cause of which seems in large measure to have been a scathing anonymous review of Charles Lamb’s John Woodville (1802) that appeared in Arthur Aikin’s Annual Review and was misattributed to Anna Barbauld.7 Both Southey and Coleridge reacted adversely to the review, the latter with extraordinary harshness. “That ill-natured attack upon John Woodville is Mrs. Barbauld’s doing,” complains Southey: As a drama it could not be censured too severely, but Mrs. B. and the brimstonefingered oatmeal-eaters have both omitted to notice its peculiar beauties, for which it would be difficult to find terms of adequate praise. I am the more angry with Mrs. Barbauld because she sneers at the conclusion without even appearing to feel its force. (NL 1.327)

For his part, Coleridge, with unseemly asperity, vowed revenge: “I likewise read Mrs. Barbauld’s [review] on Lamb & if I do not cut her to the Heart, openly & with my name, never believe me again” (CL 2.1039). It was a promise Coleridge would later keep. Part one of this chapter seeks to address these individual skirmishes as part of a larger agon to which Lucy Newlyn has drawn our attention,

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as quoted in the preceding chapter, and which resulted in Coleridge’s “contempt for the reading-public”—the newly empowered audiences with which he found himself in another kind of competitive struggle. 8 Newlyn’s insightful and provocative refiguring of the authorial agon from a family romance of patrilineal contestation, to a wider, socially relevant array of contending interests, invites further consideration and augmentation. The pressure Newlyn places on Bloom’s configuration of the agon directs attention to its essentially communal aspect, and indeed, the agon becomes distorted from the perspective of individual contestation.9 This chapter complements Newlyn’s analysis by suggesting that the intergenerational conflict that emerged between the “Aikin school” and the “Lake school” was a contest of “significant groups” drawn along lines of literarycritical authority and gender.10 The question at issue was about who the arbiters of literary taste would be. The intergenerational hostility, I maintain, developed into a systematic effort on the part of Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, who formed the core of resistance to the Aikin school, to discredit Barbauld and tarnish her reputation. This portion of the chapter begins with a pairing and close reading of Barbauld’s “Verses Written in an Alcove” and Coleridge’s “Songs of the Pixies” and then moves into analysis of “To Mr. S.T. Coleridge,” correspondence, literary reviews, and critical reception. Ironically, had she died young, leaving us just the 1773 Poems, not only would she have survived in literary history, she would have been considered one of poetry’s greatest losses.11 The first generation of male Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, developed a vexed relationship with the past in general—past hopes, an earlier generation of writers, and their former selves. Like Falkland’s secret crime in Caleb Williams, the past hounded them throughout their lives. Nor could they escape it. The ghost of Wat Tyler was to raise an accusatory finger at its radical creator; Leigh Hunt’s Examiner sharply reminded everyone of Coleridge’s pamphleteering days; and Wordsworth, forever tracing and retracing his memories, would always feel the quiet yearnings of a shadow family across the channel.12 Swept up by the revolutionary spirit of the early 1790s, the first Romantics set out to emulate the radicalism of their predecessors, and there was no shortage of worthy examples: Frend, Thelwall, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Priestley, and Barbauld were just a few.13 And yet the initial impulse of these young writers to extend a legacy of religious and political dissent soon turned into a swift retreat from what appeared to be evidence of, to invoke a later sense of the word, collaborating with the enemy. Just as insistently as the early Romantics fled the taint of 1790s radicalism, Percy and Mary Shelley rushed to embrace it. In doing so, they established a noncompetitive, intergenerational model of collaboration. Deriving inspiration from the Godwin-Wollstonecraft relationship, the Shelleys at once resuscitated and reunified its collaborative consciousness in a marriage of creative and physical intimacy. Percy’s awareness of his union with this collaborative and radical legacy is made explicit in the “Dedication to Mary——” prefixed to Laon and Cythna (later The Revolt

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of Islam). He calls Mary a “Child of love and light,” born of “glorious parents,” one of whom . . . then left this Earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory; still her fame Shines on thee . . .14

Had Shelley written the equally plausible “shines on in thee,” it would have been suggestive of what Stuart Curran describes as a generational model of mother-daughter authorship in which Mary Shelley’s “employment of her mother” figures as a “reanimation” of Mary Wollstonecraft’s spirit in the aesthetics and politics of her own writing (Curran, “Mothers” 159). Part two of this chapter discusses the Shelleys collaborative relationship from three intergenerational trajectories: their education and inspiration at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft; their extensions of Godwin and Wolstonecraft in their own works such as Frankenstein, “Ode to the West Wind,” Valperga, and the prefatory poem to Laon and Cythna (The Revolt of Islam), “Dedication to Mary——”; and the convergence of all these familial voices in an astonishing display of intertextuality found in “Euthanasia’s Narrative” in Valperga: in short, the continuation of their forebears’ literary legacy both in life and in print.

I Nearly thirty years after Barbauld composed “Verses Written in an Alcove,” Coleridge himself turned to the familiar terrain of the poetic bower—the “wildly-bowered sequestered walk”—for his “Songs of the Pixies.”15 The poets were each close to twenty when they wrote the poems, Barbauld’s youthful vision having created a space apart from the din of the literary marketplace wherein the fruits of poetry and female friendship could be shared.16 Reinforcing the noncompetitive ethos that suffuses Barbauld’s “Alcove,” her muse is both “easy, blith, and debonair,” and “all unknown to fame and glory” (ll. 49–50). Although “Songs of the Pixies” partakes of a similarly mirthful air, there are pronounced differences between these poems, and Coleridge’s understated insinuation of competitive desire marks but one way in which he swerves from his predecessor.17 Compressed in the lines of these two poems are traces of the larger tensions that were to characterize the Barbauld-Coleridge relationship and to pit one generation against another. As a revision of “Verses Written in an Alcove,” Coleridge’s “Songs of the Pixies” represents a pattern of thinking in which the collaborative and shared becomes the solitary and performative; female creativity is traded for objectified female beauty; and a carefree female muse becomes a male poet-hero. “This is sure the haunt of fairies,” says Barbauld, setting the poem’s scene: “In yon cool Alcove they play” (9–10). Her enclave of female friendship and

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poetry, governed by these benevolent spirits, sits tucked beneath a woof of greenery: Here between the opening branches Streams a flood of soften’d light, There the thick and twisted foliage Spreads the browner gloom of night. (ll. 5–8)

Coleridge’s prefatory note to “Songs of the Pixies” signals its first revision of “Verses Written in an Alcove” by establishing his bower as a male space. His note tells of “an excavation called the Pixies’ Parlour,” the “ceiling” to which is formed by “the roots of old trees.” In boyhood the author and his brothers carved their initials there, leaving behind “ciphers,” as he calls them, symbolically marking the retreat as a male colony with familial heritage (CP 62). For Coleridge’s Pixies, who themselves belong, William Keach observes, “to the realm of ‘Faery’ ” (452 n.), the embowered space is a haven from the sun, and its likeness to the “Alcove” is apparent: “We to the cave retreat,” sing the Pixies, O’ercanopied by huge roots intertwined With wildest texture, blackened o’er with age: Round them their mantle green the ivies bind, Beneath whose foliage pale Fanned by the unfrequent gale We shield us from the Tyrant’s mid-day rage. (ll. 26–32)

The similarities, however, end here. Although both hideaways represent sanctuaries for poetry, the male Romantic imagination turns Barbauld’s space of shared poetic experience into a theater for a solitary poetic performance before a female audience. In explaining the occasion of the poem, Coleridge begins to demarcate gender so as to accord with an eighteenthcentury aesthetic vision.18 Having intimated the importance of the “parlour” to boyhood fancy, the preface turns to present-day fantasies: “To this place the Author, during the Summer months of the year 1793, conducted a party of young ladies; one of whom, of stature elegantly small, and of a complexion colourless yet clear, was proclaimed the Faery Queen. On which occasion the following Irregular Ode was written” (CP 62). Yet before the poem honors the most beautiful of the ladies as the Pixies’ mortal queen (she “Whose tearful cheeks are lovely to the view, / As snow-drop wet with dew”), Coleridge fashions himself a “youthful Bard” whose visit to the Pixies’ cell evokes memories of the past: Thither, while the murmuring throng Of wild-bees hum their drowsy song, By Indolence and Fancy brought, A youthful Bard, “unknown to Fame,” Wooes the Queen of Solemn Thought And heaves the gentle misery of a sigh

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It is both ironic and fitting that Coleridge’s quoted phrase, “unknown to Fame,” which sounds unspecific enough to elude annotation, should be borrowed from Barbauld’s description of her “easy, blith, and debonair” muse and transferred to the solitary male poet, in this case a twenty-year-old already growing obsessed with fame and reputation.19 With its “rudely sculptured name[s]” this rustic place of memory, to which Coleridge brings his female audience, looks forward to Sara Hutchinson’s Rock and the Lyrical Ballads’ “Poems on the Naming of Places,” some of which were indeed supplied by Coleridge.20 And thus as early as 1793 Coleridge participated in an ethos (and an aesthetic) of solitary poetic performance before an admiring and sympathetic female audience, the kind of audience he would seek, for varying reasons, in Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Sara Hutchinson. For wooing the “Queen of Solemn Thought” and shedding tears of sensibility, the “youthful Bard” receives the Pixies’ spiritual blessing and the promise of greatness: Weaving gay dreams of sunny-tinctured hue We glance before his view: O’er his hush’d soul our soothing witcheries shed And twine the future garland round his head. (ll. 33–46)

He is rewarded with distinction, figuratively garlanded before his admirers with the promise of fame, and therein lies an important departure from Barbauld: the same serpent of competition, which we saw lurking in the vale of Pantisocracy, has subtly found its way into the Pixies’ Parlour. Although competition is not explicitly represented in the poem, the desire for distinction and recognition clearly is. Whereas Barbauld’s poem celebrates poetry for its own sake and adheres to the carefree, collaborative, and unselfconscious nature of the Alcove’s genius loci, Coleridge’s is governed by a spirit at once solitary, performative, and desirous of admiration.21 Moreover, Coleridge’s is a privileged (male) space to which women must be invited. There, a woman is rewarded for beauty, a man for poetry. Formally, Coleridge signals his departure from Barbauld by writing what he calls an “Irregular Ode” and effectively conferring upon himself (and the “Faery Queen”) a song of praise whose lineage can be traced to Pindar’s Victory Odes. In revising Barbauld, then, Coleridge chooses a form that is itself imbued with competitive connotations. And yet the agon here ought not to be seen as a purely individual struggle. With its spirit of the “parlour’s” familial/ancestral witnesses (“many a rudely sculptured name”) and its contemporary “party of young ladies” as audience, the poem and its public garlanding of the poet-hero are evocative of the communal nature of the agon. Underlying these revisions are hints of the competitive tension that would drive a wedge between members

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of the Pantisocratic family and eventually sever Coleridge’s ties with the Wordsworth-Hutchinson literary family. Yet there is also the unmistakable trace of an agonistic ethos that regards the individual as an extension of a familial-communal significant group, an ethos that was to shape the Lake school’s antipathy toward its forebear. What was to deteriorate into acrimonious rivalry, however, began on a much more collegial note, complete with overtures of alliance if not familial incorporation. In 1797, Coleridge, the self-appointed emissary of his poetic generation, walked forty miles from Stowey to Bristol to meet the renowned “Mrs. Barbauld,” and it was this first encounter that prompted Barbauld to write the commonly anthologized “To Mr. S. T. Coleridge.”22 Early on, Coleridge was concerned mainly with bolstering his own reputation; he not only admired Barbauld, but as a “youthful Bard, ‘unknown to Fame,’ ” he sought her critical recognition. Coleridge’s respect for England’s first woman of letters is evident in early correspondence that applauds “that great and excellent woman” and expresses admiration: “The more I see of Mrs. Barbauld, the more I admire her—that wonderful Propriety of Mind! She has great acuteness, very great” (CL 1.393, 1.577–8). Even before meeting her, Coleridge was assiduous in stipulating that she receive copies of his works. A letter dated April 1796 to Cambridge friend and publisher Benjamin Flower, in which Coleridge sought assistance in publishing his first edition of Poems, also contains his request that Flower forward copies of his political pamphlets, The Plot Discovered and Conciones ad Populum, to Barbauld. Praising the rhetorical skill of the Baptist minister from Bristol Robert Hall, Coleridge wishes that he “could reach the perfection of his style,” and then offers a flattering comparison: “I think his style the best in the English language—if he have a rival, it is Mrs. Barbauld” (CL 1.197). Similar requests were made of Joseph Cottle, whom Coleridge enlisted to send Barbauld the 1796 Poems, and later of Thomas Longman, who was responsible for sending her a copy of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads.23 If the young dissenter was looking for support from the elder, one way was to familiarize her with his works and hope for favorable reception. Robert Southey’s fledgling reputation received a boost from John Aikin’s review of Joan of Arc, and Coleridge might well have anticipated similar good fortune. And as this letter to Joseph Cottle implies, there was more to be earned from a good review than mere reputation; here Coleridge alludes to the networking that led to Aikin’s review, and his emphasis hints at the advantageous consequences for the bookseller: “Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Dr. Aikin, was the person who reviewed Joan of Arc in the Analytical Review—& you owe that Review to Estlin’s praises of the Poem at Mrs. Barbauld’s” (CL 1.201).24 In October of 1798, en route to Germany, Coleridge, with characteristic hyperbole, informs Sara Coleridge of his calling on Barbauld and meeting her publisher Joseph Johnson: “In London I visited Mrs. Barbauld; but before that I had introduced myself to Johnson, the Bookseller, who received me civilly the first time, cordially the second, affectionately the third—& finally took leave of me with tears in his eyes.—He is a worthy man” (CL 1.420). On the one hand this early contact with members of the Aikin family circle suggests

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emulation, for the young Coleridge can be seen with his early writings and activism as patterning a career, in part, on the success of his forebears. On the other hand, his overtures convey the sense that Coleridge was potentially interested in endorsement from, if not incorporation with, Dissent’s most recognized literary family and its famous publisher. Following his break with the Pantisocratic family, Coleridge was at least prudent enough to keep his options open by leaguing with a “member of the literary ‘establishment,’ ”25 indeed with one of its acknowledged leaders, as the Edgeworths’ correspondence and bid for familial incorporation pointedly demonstrate. If he was to wield influence on the literary scene, forging a connection with the Aikins and their long-time publisher made sense. If Coleridge’s early esteem for Barbauld can be measured in the walk to Bristol, Southey’s consistent disdain can be summed up in a statement undoubtedly implying a comparison: “Mrs. Barbauld I would not walk ten yards to see” (NL 1.195). Nor did he care for the poem she wrote as a result of Coleridge’s famous pilgrimage. As he related to his alliterative correspondent Charles Watkin Williams Wynn, 26 “Mrs. Barbauld has written some lines to Coleridge advising him to abandon metaphysics. The poem is not good. If however you are inclined to see it I will copy it for you” (1.148). Barbauld wrote her poem to the young poet in September of 1797, a month after their first meeting. It remained in private circulation until appearing in the Monthly Magazine for April 1799. That Southey could offer to copy the poem for Wynn in a letter dated September 22 suggests that Coleridge was not hesitant in handing it out, and one might even conjecture that a certain pride attended its distribution. At the least, he was achieving some notoriety from it. Lisa Vargo’s compelling reading of the poem places it in dialogue with Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” and identifies an important Unitarian context to the timing of its publication. Before leaving for Germany in 1798, Coleridge had been debating whether to accept Josiah Wedgwood’s offer of a lifetime annuity or to become a Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury. Vargo contends that, due to “her disappointment that Coleridge had overthrown the ‘fair exertion’ of the Unitarian ministry, [Barbauld] seems to have felt that it was time to make her admonition public” (62).27 What at first blush might seem a “tribute” poem is in actuality a highly wrought piece of criticism that also serves as advice from an established poet to an aspiring one.28 What Barbauld offered Coleridge was both poetic criticism and mentorship in verse. Invoking her allegory, “The Hill of Science: A Vision” from Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, Barbauld begins, Midway the hill of Science, after steep And rugged paths that tire th’ unpractised feet A Grove extends, in tangled mazes wrought, And fill’d with strange enchantment:—dubious shapes Flit thro’ dim glades, and lure the eager foot Of youthful ardour to eternal chase. (ll. 1–6)

That “To Mr. S.T. Coleridge” is a poem about writing poetry is signaled in the dual referentiality of (Coleridge’s) “unpracticed feet” and “eager foot.”

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Although a somewhat thudding metrical wordplay, it registers its point. On a practical level she cautions the younger poet not to allow the seductive “maze of metaphysical lore” (l. 34) to mire him in indolent reflection at the expense of “fair exertion, for bright fame sustained” (l. 40). If indeed Barbauld is responding to “Religious Musings”—a poem she would have found in the 1796 Poems sent to her by Cottle—she is also responding to Coleridge’s schematizing tendencies, and her criticism is remarkably prescient. As we have seen in chapter one, Barbauld had keenly developed notions about aesthetically blending sentiment and religious devotion. “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste,” reprinted in the 1792 edition of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, opposes the “zeal of a systematic spirit” and finds philosophers to blame “for [tracing] the great outline of nature but neglecting the colouring which gives warmth and beauty to the piece” (Works 2.239). The reference is to sermons, a subject dear to the young Coleridge, but we will recall that in pursuing theory into practice Barbauld developed her own aesthetic for the combination of sentiment and religious devotion in the Hymns in Prose. That Coleridge understood the connection can be gleaned from a rather late entry in the Notebooks, where we find him quoting from that work’s Hymn XIV and complaining about the attempts of some of the sentimental Unitarians, ex. gr. Mrs. Barbauld, to give a religious Splendor to the Man, Jesus as p. 93 of her Hymns for Children—Who is he that cometh to burst open the Prison Doors of the Tomb; to bid the Dead awake, and to gather his Redeemed from the 4 winds of Heaven? He descendeth on a fiery Cloud—the sound of a Trumpet goeth before him—1000s of angels are on his Right Hand! It is Jesus, the Son of God!—Now all this is, part, insincere falsehood, meaning one thing & conveying another—and part, the Lord Mayor’s Show—only not so well contrived. (4.4707)29

What Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” lacks is the Hymns’ simplicity of style. Even the young Charles Lamb, sounding very Wordsworthian, recognized this: “Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart, and carries into daylight its own modest buds and genuine, sweet, and clear flowers of expression.”30 Heavy doses of metaphysics render poetry, especially that of “unpracticed feet,” cumbersome and obscure; moreover, such philosophical digressions tend to hamper the progress of both poet and poem. Here Barbauld warns against the pitfalls of chasing intellectually perplexing “scruples” into “tangled mazes” and “dim glades,” and in doing so, draws again on the metrical trope: Scruples here With filmy net, most like th’ autumnal webs Of floating Gossamer, arrest the foot Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope And fair ambition, with the chilling touch Of sickly hesitation and blank fear. (ll. 13–18)

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Metaphysical puzzles are more likely to engender “blank fear” than blank verse, and with it the “sickly hesitation” of writer’s block. Barbauld’s rich layering of the poetic dialogue with Coleridge is also signaled in the poem through a sympathetic fusing of the enchanted bowers found in “Verses Written in an Alcove” and “Songs of the Pixies”: Here each mind Of finer mold, acute and delicate, In its high progress to eternal truth Rests for a space, in fairy bowers entranced; And loves the softened light and tender gloom; And, pampered with most unsubstantial food, Looks down indignant on the grosser world And matter’s cumbrous shapings. (ll. 25–32)

This exquisite passage momentarily levels all difference between the poet who follows the “easy, blith, and debonair” muse in joyous pursuit of poetic friendship and the one who “Wooes the Queen of Solemn Thought.” Both could find themselves “pampered” by the “unsubstantial food” of wit and deep reflection, yet both understood that to fritter away the hours in such self-indulgence was to betray the utilitarianism at the core of their shared dissenting background. As with the “sports of children and the toils of men” in “Washing-Day,” the poetic and the philosophic are reduced here to unsubstantial bubbles.31 With inverted sense Barbauld likens the repose of “each mind” looking “down indignant on the grosser world” to that of the Pixies, shaded by aspen trees and “Veiled from the grosser ken of mortal sight” (l. 52). And the deft interleaving of Coleridge’s and her own images conveys the deeply dialogic nature of their poetic intercourse. Vargo points out that “her sympathy is part of her rhetorical strategy” (59), but Barbauld is not employing that strategy in so quotidian a pursuit as the Unitarian ministry. Sympathy here is writerly. It is the bond of Unitarians, yes; but it is primarily that of poets. She recognized the poet in Coleridge and, assuming the role of practiced mentor, urged him to ply his trade, “for bright fame sustained,” as a poet who subordinates metaphysics to poetry and not the other way round. “Youth belov’d / Of Science—of the Muse belov’d” (ll. 32–33): the heavier praise rests in the end of the chiasmus. Coleridge’s early overtures to Barbauld may not have brought forth the accolades he imagined, but he was certainly shrewd enough to recognize what Barbauld had offered instead: her own version of the Pixies’ garland. Even if Coleridge had sensed a somewhat patronizing tone from Barbauld, it appears not to have negated the poem’s creative sympathy, and as a relationship of individuals, theirs was one of mutual respect. Prior to 1804 nothing suggests disharmony between the two on an individual level, which is to say that not until Southey reminded Coleridge about the group he had effectively abandoned did acrimony emerge. When it did, its essence was communal, not individual. What instigated Coleridge’s pledge to “cut her to the Heart, openly & with my name” was Barbauld’s alleged attack

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on Lamb and the school of poetry he represented. Coburn suggests that “Coleridge must have heard the rumour of [Kathleen Barbauld’s] authorship from private sources” (CN 2.1848 n.), but it is scarcely conceivable that anyone familiar with her writings should have reached this conclusion. The writing is unmistakably not Barbauld’s.32 Not only is it abundantly inferior; it also displays sexist language in its treatment of poetry—something unlikely to emanate from a female poet of any age. After his discussion of John Woodville proper, the reviewer turns to a poem “and some fragments” appended to the primary text.33 “What precious nonsense!” begins the lengthy conclusion, from which I excerpt a representative sample: But this is a specimen of that canting, whining style, or rather slang of poetry, which is now-a-days offered to us as the very essence of simplicity and pathos! . . . A school of poetry has within a few years been set up by Mr. Lamb, and some others, whom it would be indecorous to enumerate, as their works are not before us, where all harmony of numbers is despised, all the regularities of rhythm, and variety of cadence, are disregarded, and from which all the graces of language are contemptuously banished. (Annual Review 692)

Thus far, the complaint is a fairly standard one, commonly heard since the critical pronouncements against the Lyrical Ballads. Yet the ensuing description of this school’s figurative rape of poetry, along with a sneering treatment of the victim, should give us pause: This school, in order to reform the taste of the age, and enamour it with the charms of simplicity, not content with stripping poetry of her superfluous embellishments, and arranging tastefully those which would really adorn her person, and set off her beauties, has absolutely deprived her of the common decencies of dress. The nymph is now always pouting, always melancholy, always discontented and fretful; and she may well be ashamed of her nakedness, for she really is not fit to be seen. In this school too, she has been taught such an abominable lesson of affectation! . . . the affected little minx is always sighing and crying, her eye is always downcast, her look demure, and countenance deceitful . . . It is for the sole purpose of rescuing her . . . that we have been induced thus loudly to plead in her behalf, and to express our hopes that the school may be speedily broken up and forgotten. (Annual Review 692)

Lamb alone had received the first volley, but now Coleridge and Southey, guilty by association, were also among those suffering the reviewer’s ire. Coleridge was so fixated with the review’s conclusion that he copied nearly all of it into his notebook in early 1804.34 At the end he writes, “M rs Barbauld Review of Lamb’s John Woodvil Annual Review p. 692” (CN 2.1848). That the style here is utterly unlike Barbauld’s would be beside the point, except that it raises the issue of gender ambiguity and its effect on cultural authority: How does cultural authority stabilize itself when its anonymous voice can be misread as male or female? Barbauld was particularly threatening, a variant of Foucault’s “dangerous individual,” because her writing could be mistaken for a man’s. One explanation of the characterization might be that

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she often wrote in male-dominated genres: essays, political pamphlets, literary reviews. Formal considerations and conventions can certainly produce audience assumptions and expectations. Because Barbauld commanded an array of written forms for over fifty years, reaching an immeasurably extensive audience, it is no surprise that at points along the way some discrete fraction of that audience should conclude that she “wrote like a man.” But on this point I am apt to favor Newlyn’s view that Barbauld’s writing, reflective of her own stance, strongly resisted “gender-oppositions” (Reading 157). The ability to destabilize the male world of the literary review was particularly threatening since she could do so under the convention of anonymity. And such destabilization was not without its ironies. Writing to his wife, Coleridge recounts a case in point: “Malthus just published an appendix in answer to his Review—he told Mrs. Smith, that he had attributed the Review to Mrs. Bare-bald, but now found it was Mr. Southey. He praised the power of the Review, but abominated its temper” (CL 2.1091).35 Faced with the problem of ambiguity, these male writers accentuated gender difference through name calling and stereotyping; they stripped “Barbauld” into “Bare-bald” as a way of stabilizing that which was distastefully Aikinish. In doing so, they target Barbauld as Presbyterian school mistress, cold wife, and unattractive woman, de-sexing her and exhibiting misogyny to an embarrassing degree, which is perhaps why a male-dominated critical establishment subsequently tended to ignore and thereby abet its original effects. The battle lines of an intergenerational agon were firmly established when Southey, invoking the near-constant reality of international conflict for his generation, suggested to Coleridge that it was time he and Lamb pursue the continuation of literary politics by other means36 “Why have you not made Lamb declare war upon Mrs. Bare-bald? He should singe her flaxen wig with squibs, and tie crackers to her petticoats till she leap about like a parched pea for very torture.”37 Southey’s punning on squibs suggests the option of prosecuting this war in print, an option I believe he pursued years later in the Quarterly Review.38 Still, he demonstrates abundant skill on the puerile field of name calling. For his part Lamb earns credit for dubbing Elizabeth Inchbald and Anna Barbauld the “bald ladies,”39 and an early hint of the brewing intergenerational strife comes in his well-known rant to Coleridge about “the cursed Barbauld Crew.”40 Written in October of 1802, however, Lamb’s invective reached Coleridge in the Lake District at a time when he was far too absorbed in his own dejection to join the mocking, were he even inclined to do so. But two years later he seems almost rejuvenated with the prospect of having an enemy he could “cut to the heart” and a group of friends he might win back by doing so. Although Southey “appears to have initiated their childish punning on [Barbauld’s] name” (Vargo 56), Coleridge did not scruple to join in. According to a letter written in 1805, “Mrs. Barebald” is what “Coleridge always calls her, saying the name is a pleonasm of nakedness” (SL 1.314). Southey’s emphasis on “nakedness,” coming on the heels of the Annual Review’s suggestion that poetry, having been stripped, “may well be ashamed of her nakedness” is probably not mere coincidence. Coleridge seems to have

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been obsessing over the Lamb review as late as 1810, when he complained of “Reviewers—ex. gr. Mistress BARE and BALD,” who “attack a contemporary poet of nascent reputation” (CN 3.4035). Elsewhere, he poses as the defender of Wordsworth and makes Barbauld stand in for a generalized group of “enemies”: “Wordsworth’s enemies—especially that Mistress Bare and Bald—the reason—that his works make them restless by forcing them in on their own worthless Selves—and they recoil from their Heart, or rather from the place where the Heart ought to be, with a true Horror Vacui” (CN 3.3965).41 Chapter four of the Biographia Literaria contains the most noteworthy use of the male circle’s nickname for Barbauld, and the group undoubtedly shared a laugh at its inclusion. Speaking of the parodists who made a living of mocking the Lake School, Coleridge uses the Barbauldian label as a catch-all for everything that is “counterfeit” in criticism: That a downright simpleness, under the affectation of simplicity, prosaic words in feeble metre, silly thoughts in childish phrases, and a preference of mean, degrading or at best trivial associations and characters, should succeed in forming a school of imitators . . . and that this bare and bald counterfeit of poetry, which is characterized as below criticism, should for nearly twenty years have well-nigh engrossed criticism, as the main, if not the only butt of review, magazine, pamphlet, poem, and paragraph; this is indeed matter of wonder. (BL 45; Emphasis added)

It would have been an inside joke, but Coleridge had managed once again to belittle his quondam role model. In the Coleridgean worldview, Barbauld was supposed to bestow a song of praise, befitting the Pixies’; she offered instead her own version of mentorship: tough, critical, demanding—just what an addict did not want. She was supposed to be a beautiful audience and enjoy the genius of the male poet; she became a voice of cultural authority instead. In short, she did not fit that worldview, and therefore unwittingly invited disdain and a competitive urge to discredit her. Coleridge finally made good on his promise to get back at her—openly and with his name—in 1812, which was a turbulent year for both of them. Crabb Robinson says he was personally offended when he heard Coleridge attack Barbauld’s “Hymn to Content” over niggling points of poetic imagery, one of which was the supposed impropriety of the use of “brown” to describe a hamlet.42 Crabb Robinson was a friend of the family and just two weeks before he had accompanied Mrs. Charles Aikin to Coleridge’s lecture on King Lear and Othello (Diary 1.192). On January 27, during his final lecture on Milton, the Sage of Highgate was concluding, says Crabb Robinson, “with a few strokes of satire; but I cannot forgive him for selecting alone . . . Mrs. Barbauld. She is a living writer, a woman, and a person who, however discordant with himself in character and taste, has still always shown him civilities and attentions. It was surely ungenerous” (Diary 1.194). Perhaps unwilling to take his revenge using his name alone, Coleridge implicated Wordsworth, saying these were “ ‘criticisms which Wordsworth made to me at Charles Lamb’s two years ago.’ ”43 Coleridge thus managed to drag

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Wordsworth and Lamb into what was now a public display of the intergenerational conflict. To his credit, Wordsworth did not condescend to join in the petty squabbles; he effectively remained independent and was, albeit infrequently, a social guest of the Aikin family.44

II It was at “Mary Wollstonecraft’s tomb,” writes Janet Todd, “where “Shelley clothed the daughter in the ‘radiance undefiled’ of her mother’s ‘departing glory,’ as the dedicatory stanzas of The Revolt of Islam later expressed it.”45 Todd refers of course to these famous lines from the poem: They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth, Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child. I wonder not—for One then left this Earth Whose life was like a setting planet mild Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled Of its departing glory; still her fame Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name. (ll. 100–08) 46

By drawing a connection between Wollstonecraft’s gravesite and “Dedication to Mary——,” Todd recalls not only Shelley’s role as tutor for his sixteen-yearold pupil but also the importance of Wollstonecraft’s writing to the young couple’s joint education. “Dedication to Mary——,” whose blanks scarcely conceal “Wolstonecraft Godwin,” begins with Shelley’s transformation of those names in his depiction of Mary as the “Child of love and light” (l. 9), and it was indeed the wedding of domestic sensibility and rationalism that produced Britain’s eighteenth-century answer to its seventeenth-century natural genius. If Shakespeare sometimes appeared the mythological offspring of the Avon itself, there was no doubting the origin of Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin. She was the first immortal issue from the rise of Britannia’s literary family.47 And yet the genial spirit of the Avon finds a rival in St. Pancras Churchyard. Whereas the Avon is governed by a genius loci, the “spirit of the place” elucidated by Geoffrey Hartman in regard to the Thames, Eton College, and Tintern Abbey,48 St. Pancras is inhabited by a different type of genius: the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft herself, who became the inspiration for two authorial generations in Godwin and the Shelleys. Indeed it might be said that the genius loci of the English landscape was giving way to the genius familiae: the spirit of the (English) literary family.49 And as the genius familiae becomes accommodated in our conceptions of Romantic authorship, it necessarily displaces another genius even further into the periphery. Because it is a collaborative spirit, the genius familiae, whose various faces we have encountered in this study, further distances and de-mythologizes the increasingly lonesome figment of the solitary genius. Well before P.B. Shelley ever visited St. Pancras and the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, he sought affiliation with the venerable “One voice” (l. 109)

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of his “Dedication”: William Godwin, the man he had read and admired from afar.50 It was during his turbulent residence at University College, Oxford, that Shelley was “materially influenced” (PBSL 1.227) by Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, a work that resonates throughout Shelley’s corpus, perhaps most distinctively in Queen Mab (1813), widely viewed as “Godwin versified.”51 Though personally unacquainted with Godwin, Shelley nevertheless addressed him in initial correspondence in terms and with emotions customarily reserved for relationships of long-standing intimacy. Mitigating the tone of familiarity in the first of many letters, Shelley refers to Godwin at one point in the third person: “From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles,” he writes, “I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations” (PBSL 1.220). His reasoning for such license was consonant with Godwinian principles, on which he relied in order to “outstep the limits of custom’s prescription” that might inhibit warm expressions of affection and admiration (1.220). Even so, Shelley conceded in his second letter the propriety of making himself known more formally, since, as he put it, “I am not an individual to you,” and “intimate as I am with your character and your writings, intimacy with yourself must in some degree precede this exposure of my peculiarities” (1.227). After the perfunctory validation of his person, the second letter takes things a step further, revealing not only the young man’s wish to be Godwin’s disciple but also his desire for an intellectual, indeed a substitute father: “The habits of thinking of my Father and myself never coincided. Passive obedience was inculcated and enforced in my childhood: I was required to love because it was my duty to love” (1.227). Knowing that custom and the imposition of such a “duty” were inconsistent with the principles of Political Justice, Shelley employs these terms so as to gain a sympathetic reception, and in this he succeeded. Like Southey, who once described the nineteen-year-old Shelley as the ghost of his own youth,52 Godwin was suddenly confronted with a shadow of his former self. When Southey made the comment he was recalling being turned out of his aunt’s home for planning to marry Edith Fricker and join the Pantisocracy. Shelley himself, Southey told a friend, had been “turned out of doors by his father” for upholding similarly radical politics (qtd in PBSL 1.219 n.). Turned away by one family, Shelley looked to become affiliated with another: Political Justice had given birth to another son in another generation, making the “Dedication to Mary” all the more poignant in its honoring of her revered “Sire” (l. 108). And thus P.B. Shelley, the intellectual son of the former dissenting minister Godwin, joined hands with an intellectual sister in Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; together they pursued the fulfillment of that Dissenting model of education enjoyed by the Aikins and looked forward to in girlhood by Dorothy Wordsworth. For the young couple St. Pancras was to become a retreat for education, love, and conversation—with each other and with authors both living and dead. “I will learn Greek,” Mary wrote, “but when shall we meet when I may tell you all this & you will so sweetly reward me—oh we must meet soon for this is a dreary life” (SLMWS 3–4). And

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although Percy was indeed the willing tutor, this model of education was different from those of the Aikins and Wordsworths because these pupils could also be lovers—could consummate the collaborative consciousness’s desire for complete sexual and intellectual unification. In a remarkably ungracious moment, P.B. Shelley once said that Southey’s wife was “very stupid” and “Mrs. Coleridge is worse,”53 but the examples served some end, for in Mary Shelley he would identify the intellectual equal needed in order to actualize what Coleridge had unfortunately only dreamt of: the “happy marriage” of intellect and passion. As partners, the Shelleys embraced the same spirit of “egalitarian affection”54 that characterized the Godwin-Wollstonecraft relationship; in their collaborative education, they embraced their forebears’ minds. As Gilbert and Gubar so nicely put it, “Mary Shelley may be said to have ‘read’ her family and to have been related to her reading” (223). She thus enjoyed the benefit, to invoke a term from the educational debate, of her parents’ “prejudices,” something that the parental figure Victor Frankenstein denied his own offspring, thereby repeating the mistake of his father and leaving the creature intellectually unprepared for the disappointing shocks of human nature.55 Faced with such unremitting shocks, the creature sought an end reminiscent of Euthanasia’s thoughts on suicide.56 Suicides are those, reflects Euthanasia, whom we may call the “true philosophers”—those who “seek in the grave for a wisdom and a happiness, which life cannot bring us” (312). Euthanasia’s words indicate a dialogue with Godwin’s “Of Suicide,” from Political Justice, and it is this kind of intertextuality that permeates the writing of Mary and P.B. Shelley, the intertextuality that points to the collaborative consciousness of two minds actively extending the generational continuity of the literary family. An appreciation for the intergenerational continuity between the Godwins and the Shelleys, that is, the Shelleys’ collaborative extension of the Godwin-Wollstonecraft legacy, begins with an examination of just what Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave meant to the members of this family. In part, the answer lies in Godwin’s writings. If the second Mrs. Godwin felt betrayed when her own daughter, Jane Clairmont, joined Mary and Percy to “worship the dead saint,” as William St. Clair puts it (368), she had only her husband to blame, for it was his Essay on Sepulchres (1809) that taught his daughter to “attribute a certain sacredness to the grave of [a loved one],” and “feel an attachment to the spot where [her] body [had] been deposited.”57 In the provocative opening to her essay “Loves of the Triangle: William, Mary, and Percy Bysshe,” Nicola Trott draws attention to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin’s familiarity with the Essay on Sepulchres to underscore the notion that, “in [her] thinking . . . [her mother’s] corpus, her body of work, was very closely identified with her corpse, the remains of the grave.”58 More recently, Julie Carlson’s England’s First Family of Writers explores the “crucial foundation” that Essay on Sepulchres provided Mary Shelley in negotiating the vicissitudes of loss and mourning that shaped her life (165–71). Trott pursues her trope to suggest that a “powerful motive for writing” is the “resurrection of the dead” (2), which becomes the fate of William Godwin’s

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corpus through Frankenstein. Whereas Trott sees Godwin’s resurrection as a prelude to father-daughter contestation in which “Mary Shelley may be seen as conducting her critique of Godwin in Godwinian terms” (9), I would like to focus on the intergenerational continuities that emerge from a fuller consideration of Godwin’s Essay. We tend to “cut ourselves off from the inheritance of our ancestors,” observes Godwin, when instead we should work to “preserve the memory of our progenitors” (Sepulchres 38, 53), a sentiment that informs the lives and writing of Mary and P.B. Shelley. In “Ode to the West Wind,” Godwin’s essay resonates in the shudder of leaves falling to rest, “each like a corpse within its grave,” and in a world entombed beneath the “dome of a vast sepulcher” (ll. 8, 25). In Valperga, Godwin’s voice rejoins Mary Wollstonecraft’s and P.B. Shelley’s to speak with uncanny intensity during an intertextually charged moment in “Euthanasia’s Narrative,” whose multivalence is a conception of the genius familiae. Moreover, what we find in the figure of Euthanasia is a collaborative composite of mother and daughter, for if in the heroine we see the “reanimation” of the mother through the authorship of the daughter, it is as through a “persona”—the mask through which the reanimated spirit speaks, a mask that functions “to transform and thereby to unite or, perhaps more fundamentally, to unite and thereby transform”59 mother and daughter. Godwin presented Mary a copy of Essay on Sepulchres on May 14, 1814, just a month before she proclaimed her love for P.B. Shelley at her mother’s tomb.60 The Essay offers an argument for establishing a permanent national system of erecting and preserving memorials for the “illustrious dead.” In negotiating the delicate territory of expense for such a proposition, especially in view of England’s growing poor population, Godwin’s argument appeals almost exclusively to ancient myth and to what would have been considered as superstition.61 In an extended note on the “two kinds of fire” in mythology, Godwin speaks about the virtuous “fire of Vesta,” a “purer element” than that of Vulcan and one “which burned evenly and was never extinguished. By this emblem it is signified . . . a fervour and enthusiasm . . . more admirable and divine than any other of which an intellectual being is susceptible” (74–5). The purest and hottest flame, Godwin then asserts, resides in the calmest breast: The hottest fire is not that which on every slight incentive blazes on the surface, but that which is close pent up in the recesses of the heart . . . In a word, the sincerest warmth is not wild, but calm . . . If the image of permanent and celestial fire can be justly applied to any thing human, it best accords with the fervour of genius; and Shakespeare, who possessed that quality in the greatest abundance of any earthly creature, was noted by his contemporaries for a man of equable carriage, and the most admirable serenity of temper. (75–6) 62

Thus when P.B. Shelley’s dedicatory poem describes Mary Shelley as inwardly possessing the “vestal fire burning” and outwardly bathed in the radiant light of a “setting planet mild,” he generates a portrait of this Godwinian

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ideal, which, while illuminated by the example of Wollstonecraft, is also implicitly a reflection of Shakespeare. In a work that Mary and P.B. Shelley enjoyed reading (and rereading) together, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft reinforced her belief in the inextinguishable nature of that flame in a moving passage included by Godwin in her Memoirs: “The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.”63 When P.B. Shelley tells Mary Shelley that “still” her mother’s immortal “fame / Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild,” he may well have been appealing to this volume of correspondence. In it Wollstonecraft voices her faith in the impossibility “that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should only be organized dust—ready to fly abroad the moment the spring snaps, or the spark goes out, which kept it together. Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable—and life is more than a dream” (Letters 281). In a time of conservative conflagration, Godwin and Wollstonecraft taught the Shelleys to embrace political radicalism and the freedom to live differently. And although this family eventually became unhappy in its own way, the roots of disagreement were most often found in Political Justice. Perhaps because written by a young philosopher, it is a work readily embraced by the young. Idealism and some measure of naivete help to create the impression that a new world is indeed dawning. For Godwin, however, who had “survived only to outlive himself” (Trott 2), unbounded promise had long since met stark reality head on. It was one thing to face the storm alone; it was quite another to watch loved ones do so. Having witnessed the vilification of his first wife, Godwin feared for his daughter. But if in Political Justice we find sources of familial discontinuity, even as we encounter its continuities in the second generation of writing, the Essay on Sepulchres holds a consistent place in the lives and writing of both generations. Images of the grave and the pyre, drawing fresh import from Godwin’s Essay, exhibit remarkable poetic fecundity in both Laon and Cythna (later The Revolt of Islam) and “Ode to the West Wind.” Pursuing his discussion of the vestal flame and the genius of Shakespeare, Godwin, envisioning a visit to Milton’s grave, describes a somewhat softer dispersal of knowledge but one yet related to that in “Ode to the West Wind”: “Some spirit shall escape from his ashes, and whisper to me things unfelt before” (Sepulchres 77). In other words, from the poet’s destruction comes the creation of “things unfelt before,” and it might be said that the genial spirits of Laon and Cythna rise from the pyre after their ceremonial sacrifice to influence the “Ode” with some of its most potent imagery. The oncoming storm of the “Ode,” which harks back to Coleridge’s “Dejection Ode” (and “Sir Patrick Spens”), recalls most immediately, however, the opening of Laon and Cythna: For, where the irresistible storm had cloven That fearful darkness, the blue sky was seen Fretted with many a fair cloud interwoven

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Most delicately, and the ocean green, Beneath that opening spot of blue serene, Quivered like burning emerald: calm was spread On all below; but far on high, between Earth and the upper air, the vast clouds fled, Countless and swift as leaves on autumn’s tempest shed. (ll. 28–36)64

In both “Ode to the West Wind” and Laon and Cythna, the approaching storms possess a “calm characterized by intense vitality”65 and thus partake of Godwin’s vision of the equipoise that overspreads the vitality of true genius. The “Ode” implies a powerful sympathy between storm and poet: to engender his own legacy, the latter must calmly submit to the genial flame. In the imperative turn of its final stanza, Shelley’s “Ode” seems doubly aware of Godwin: Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! (ll. 63–67)

On the one hand, the double awareness is evinced in what Pamela Clemit terms a “poetic revitalization of Godwin’s philosophical ideas” through the “sparks and beacons which transmit knowledge to posterity.”66 On the other, that awareness is keenly attuned to the vestal flame—the “unextinguished hearth”—which is indeed the repository for both creation and destruction: flame and ash. Clemit’s “revitalization,” related to Curran’s “reanimation,” is particularly apt in the case of Shelley’s “Ode,” whose ashes possess an ancestral spirit; they are “my words,” yes, but they are formed in part by the spark of reanimation. As each of the “sweet buds” springs from “a corpse within its grave,” so the poet’s words, like “things unfelt before,” emanate from the ancestral pyre. But at a price. The poet, too, must submit to the flame—must suffer, as the mother in childbirth, destruction as the cost of creation. And in this act of poetic immolation, there is a deliberate submissiveness, a sublime rushing forth, as a leaf that sails into the tempest, to meet the creative “friction” and face “the conflation of contrary forces” that enable the poet’s “willing self-destruction” (Curran Annus Mirabilis 168). In Valperga, P.B. Shelley’s “Ode” presages the storm that arrives in the penultimate chapter, and in an act of seemingly deliberate submission to the oncoming friction, Mary Shelley writes Euthanasia into the arms of that storm in a collaborative but suicidal embrace of creative destruction.67 With Valperga, Mary Shelley seems to have provided the dedicatory counterpart to Frankenstein, for if her first novel receives much from “the author of Caleb Williams,” as she puts it in her dedication to Godwin, her second is no less enriched by the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. That she began writing Valperga even as she was still working on Frankenstein underscores the inference that there was a design at work to extend the twin legacies of father and mother.68 And yet, in each novel the markers of influence

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are by no means exact. Anne K. Mellor, for example, first suggested that in Frankenstein “the incarnation of Mary Wollstonecraft” is visible in Safie, who sojourns with the De Lacey family.69 In her analysis of Valperga, Tillotama Rajan has noted that Godwin’s “On History and Romance” offers theoretical background for the novel,70 and that anchoring is clearly evident. There are limitations to both history and romance, says Godwin; while history risks being a “dry and frigid science” (361) through the accumulation of incidents devoid of human passion and motivation, romance falls short because authors can neither imagine nor account for human behavior in all situations. To do so would require godlike foresight: “a sagacity scarcely less than divine” (372). Godwin therefore extols the synthesis of “historical romance”—the blending of imagination and fact—which produces a “bolder species of romance” (369), indeed a truer picture of things as they are. What interests Godwin most are the lives of historical figures—the minute particulars of those lives. His famous expression about desiring to know a historical figure intimately, not just to see him “upon the public stage” but to “follow him,” as we do young Caleb Williams, “into his closet,” applies to any biographical figure but especially to the ancients. “The ancients were giants,” he declares, “but we, their degenerate successors, are pygmies” (364). Even in otherwise vapid historical accounts, individual lives stand out and capture our imagination, as with “the biographical collection of Plutarch,” an author who is “neither lucid in his arrangement, eloquent in his manner, nor powerful in his conceptions” (364–65).71 Employing a metaphor from the artist’s studio, Godwin professes that the “men I would study on the canvas of history, are men worth the becoming intimately acquainted with” (363). Yet at times those figures are almost too sublime to behold, unless softened by historiography: The excellence indeed of sages, of patriots and poets, as we find it exhibited at the end of their maturity, is too apt to overwhelm and discourage us with its luster. But history takes away the cause of our depression. It enables us to view minutely and in detail what to the uninstructed eye was too powerful to be gazed at; and by tracing the progress of the virtuous and the wise from its first dawn to its meridian luster, shows us that they were composed of materials merely human. (362)72

Godwin’s observation seems to inform the narrative scheme of Valperga, wherein Mary Shelley combines imagination and fact to portray her characters. In tracing from early youth the details of her characters’ lives, she adheres to Godwin’s implied precept that a figure deserving our veneration, or in this case a worthy and believable character, can only be faithfully represented by a series of minute brushstrokes. And it is precisely this kind of care that she takes with all her characters. With an explicit reference to portraiture, Mary Shelley displays before Castruccio’s gaze the “almost divine beauty” of Beatrice: Her deep black eyes, half concealed by their heavy lids, her curved lips, and face formed in a perfect oval, the rising colour that glowed in her cheeks, which,

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though her complexion was pure and delicate, were tinged by the suns of Italy, formed a picture such as Guido has since imagined, when he first painted a Virgin or an Ariadne, or which he copied from the life when he painted the unfortunate Beatrice Cenci. (169–70)73

The ekphrasis here puts us in mind of yet another portrait: that of Mary Wollstonecraft painted in 1797 by John Opie, from which Godwin derived inspiration and solace. He hung it above the fireplace of his wife’s study, into which he moved after her death: “I hope to be made wise and more human by the contemplation of the memory of a beloved object,” he wrote (qtd in St. Clair 180). Opie’s portrait was later displayed in the home at Skinner Street, upstairs from the bookshop, where it served as a household spirit, even despite Mary Jane (Clairmont) Godwin’s presence, an act in keeping with Godwin’s reverence for the ancients and their ceremonies regarding the dead. Hartman observes that among the ancients “there existed . . . ancestral masks called imagines, which were kept in the home as a guardian influence” (331). As with the grave at St. Pancras, then, the spiritual presence of the mother offered yet further inspiration for the daughter. That Wollstonecraft in the painting is visibly pregnant with Mary only intensifies the idea of generational continuity and collaborative unity. Drawing especially on the historical example of her mother, Mary Shelley writes feminist history back into fourteenth-century Italy by imagining through that example the possibility of a character such as Euthanasia, whose equanimity stands in stoic contrast to the volatility and ambition of Castruccio—“The bubble is yours,” she tells him: “I do love peace” (240).74 Euthanasia’s example therefore recalls Wollstonecraft’s appeal to reason throughout A Vindication of the Rights of Men in answer to the emotionally charged sentimentalism of Burke’s Reflections.75 Valperga’s attention to female inheritance, which is most obviously signaled by Euthanasia’s receiving the castle of Valperga, as she says, from “my mother’s hands” (282), also signals Wollstonecraft’s presence. But mother-daughter continuity is stressed in other ways, too. Euthanasia’s response to Castruccio’s question about her motivation for not forming alliances underscores the leadership contrast between the two figures: She smiled; but then, collecting herself, answered seriously, “When I first inherited my mother’s power, I gave much attention to this very question; not of forming a separate republic of my poor villages, but of incorporating them, as many nobles have done, and as doubtless the lords of Valperga will one day be obliged to do, with some neighboring and more powerful republic.” (133–34)

Euthanasia’s smile—her brief but knowing acknowledgment of Castruccio’s naiveté in blindly accepting the male view that alliances are good for consolidating power—subtly reveals her wisdom and graciousness. Whereas she could perhaps be argumentative, instead she simply states her reasoning, openly and without the slightest hint of intrigue that so insidiously

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permeates the novel’s political world. Moreover, her response demonstrates an independence of mind and a willingness to do the unexpected based on the strength of her convictions, even in the face of prevailing skepticism. And the implication is that she does so after her mother’s example. It is not merely the sign of power—the castle—that Euthanasia’s inherits; it is also a benevolent and compassionate example of leadership. The appeal to benevolence and a sense of social equality characterizes the leadership of another figure patterned after Wollstonecraft, Cythna, whose “Can man be free if woman be a slave?” (2.379) is a clear invocation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. P.B. Shelley’s portrayal of Cythna’s sense of justice and benevolence honors both Wollstonecraft’s writing and the lost potentiality of her leadership. Here, appropriately, the Godwinian figure of the hoary sage tells Laon of the “young maiden’s” power of speech and democratic principles76: The tyrants send their armed slaves to quell Her power;—they, even like a thunder gust Caught by some forest, bend beneath the spell Of that young maiden’s speech, and to their chief’s rebel. XXI

Thus she doth equal laws and justice teach To woman, outraged and polluted long. (4.177–182)

Between characters in texts, then, we also see a kind of female inheritance at work, as Cythna’s example inf luences the Countess of Valperga’s exercise of authority. The circumstances surrounding Beatrice’s history are perfectly apropos, for she too signifies a daughter infused with her mother’s spirit: “It seemed to me as if her mother’s soul had descended into her” (181). Yet Valperga takes the bonds of women beyond lines of maternal inheritance to the realms of friendship, consolation, and inspiration. When Beatrice’s health is failing she seeks the gentle spirit lingering quietly among the novel’s pages, just below the surface of city-state politics and male ambition: “Breathe on me, Euthanasia, breathe on my hands, my eyes; perhaps some portion of calm may f low from your bosom to mine” (378). In the extraordinary chapter titled “Euthanasia’s Narrative,” that same spirit of benevolence and strength is again at work. This time, however, it is not alone, for it surfaces in an astonishing conf luence of familial writing: a material manifestation of the genius familiae and its collaborative consciousness. I quote at length (though piecemeal) in order to demonstrate the deftness with which Mary Shelley resurrects and incorporates the literary voices in her life. Referring to a three-month stay in Rome, Euthanasia says, “I spent my life among the ruins of Rome; and I felt, as I was told, that I appeared to be, rather a wandering shade of the ancient times, than a modern Italian. In my wild enthusiasm, I called on the shadows of the departed to converse with me, and to prophesy the fortunes of awakening Italy.” This exquisite tableau begins with

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Mary Shelley following the guidance of her father’s Essay on Sepulchres— “How delightful must it be,” he writes, “to wander among the scenes of ancient Greece and Rome” (62)—and bestowing that education upon Euthanasia, who imbibes the ruins’ genius loci so thoroughly that she appears to be one of its “shades.” There is, however, another Godwinian text pertinent to our consideration of this passage. In 1806 Godwin published The Pantheon: or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome under the pseudonym Edwin Baldwin. As a school text it was to have an immeasurable impact on more than one generation of students, among which was the young Keats. “It was one of his favourite books and he knew it from cover to cover. It was among the volumes he took with him to Rome which were found after his death” (St. Clair 426). In the novel, the setting for Euthanasia’s inspiration and education recalls not only the title of Godwin’s (Baldwin’s) school text but also the Essay on Sepulchres. Moreover, as the following excerpt illustrates, it is also the site where Mary Shelley restages the scene from P.B. Shelley’s “Dedication to Mary——” with which we began: I can never forget one evening that I visited the Pantheon by moonlight: the soft beams of the planet streamed through its open roof, and its tall pillars glimmered around. It seemed as if the spirit of beauty descended on my soul, as I sat there in mute extacy; never had I before so felt the universal graspings of my own mind, or the sure tokens of other spiritual existences, as at that moment.

Here Mary Shelley has translated “Dedication to Mary——” to the language of the novel, the voice of her heroine, and ruins of Rome. On the one hand, she effectively returns the gift she has received by writing Percy’s stanza into her novel. On the other, she also translates the site of poetry and inspiration from St. Pancras to the Pantheon. The implication is that the genius familiae is not fixed (or landed), as is the genius loci. Its essence is both collaborative and democratic—free, as was Shelley himself, to eschew titles and seek a different family model: a fitting resurrection for any adherent of Political Justice.77 What is most striking, however, is that this temple, originally a shrine to “All Holy Ones,” became a church in 609 CE dedicated to “Sancta Maria ad Martyres.”78 Thus not only does Wollstonecraft emerge here as one of the “Holy Ones,” but Mary Shelley situates Euthanasia among martyrs, within whose political ranks she effectively will be counted at novel’s end. Moreover, by choosing this location as Euthanasia’s site of inspiration, and by invoking her mother’s spirit as the source of that same inspiration, Mary Shelley subtly displaces one Mother Mary with another. What makes this remarkable instance of intertextuality possible is the genial spirit and collaborative consciousness of the literary family, for indeed Mary Wollstonecraft’s presence is found in “the soft beams of the planet” looking down on her novelist daughter and filling both the work and its main character with the “spirit of beauty.” The final lines of this

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striking passage disclose the uncontrollable effects of receiving the breath of inspiration: Oh! could I even now pour forth in words the sentiments of love, and virtue, and divinest wisdom, that then burst in upon my soul, in a rich torrent—such as was the light of the moon to the dark temple in which I stood—the whole world would stand and listen: but fainter than the moon-beams and more evanescent are those deep thoughts; my eyes glisten, my cheeks glow, but words are denied me. I feel as it were my own soul at work within me, and surely, if I could disclose its secret operations, and lay bare the vitals of my being, in that moment, which would be one of overwhelming extacy—in that moment I should die. (112–13)

Here, then, is the inspirational moment of creation and destruction as Mary Shelley infuses her narrative with P.B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”—the flame and ash of the artist-martyr whose self-sacrifice brings forth enduring possibility. In the passage’s reconstitution of the authorial family, however, one final voice is heard: Mary Wollstonecraft’s, from the Letters Written in Sweden. Representations of the arctic in Frankenstein have been noted for their resemblance to Wollstonecraft’s vision of the sublime in the Letters, and here in Valperga, her solitary vigil of witnessing night turn into day serves as a beautifully resonant counterpart. I contemplated . . . a night such as I had never before seen or felt to charm the senses, and calm the heart. The very air was balmy, as it freshened into morn, producing the most voluptuous sensations. A vague pleasurable sentiment absorbed me, as I opened my bosom to the embraces of nature; and my soul rose to its author, with the chirping of the solitary birds, which began to feel, rather than see, advancing day. I had leisure to mark its progress. The grey morn, streaked with silvery rays, ushered in the orient beams,—how beautifully varying into purple!—yet, I was sorry to lose the soft watry clouds which preceded them, exciting a kind of expectation that made me almost afraid to breathe, lest I should break the charm. I saw the sun—and sighed. (268)

If ever one work drew the breath of inspiration from another, it was surely the soul of Valperga being filled by the sigh of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters. As the mother expired in bringing life to the daughter, so too that poetic last line passes the ancestral spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft to Euthanasia, generating, finally, a composite portrait of mother and daughter.

E pi l ogu e

In 1799, when agents from London’s Home Office put Wordsworth and Coleridge under surveillance to determine just how subversive the pair’s collaborative activities were, they not only gave us the colorful “Spy Nozy” story; they also voiced concern that there might be “a Press in the House” at Alfoxden.1 By expressing apprehension regarding the possibility that a public press was at work in the domestic sphere, the agents pointed to the subversive potential of a household model of literary production. Furthermore, their report implicitly acknowledged that the literary family had emerged a major publishing force by the end of the eighteenth century. The image of a press in the house brings to mind William Eyres, the in-house printer at the Warrington Academy, and the works produced there during the early life of its literary family. Dr. William Enfield, one of the first friends incorporated into that literary family, had turned to John Aikin for support with the printing and editing of Hymns for Public Worship, the first book to feature the work of Anna Aikin. As much a part of the family as Joseph and Mary Priestley, Enfield had occasionally passed hours of leisure with Anna in the friendly exchange of bouts rimés: “a List of Words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a Poet, who was to make a Poem to the R hymes in the same Order that they were placed upon the List.”2 “ ‘Both bouts rimés, and vers de société,’ ” writes Lucy Aikin, “ ‘were in fashion with the set’ ” (qtd in Bright 14). A testament to the strength of the collaborative bond forged with Enfield during the literary family’s formative years can be found in Barbauld’s “Epistle to Dr. Enfield, on his Revisiting Warrington in 1789,” which contains Barbauld’s retrospective view of life at Warrington addressed to the “friend of those years” with whom she shared a poetic liaison through bouts rimés. Written in elegiac meter, the poem is reminiscent of Gray’s “Elegy,” and in it a ref lective Barbauld mourns the losses of the Academy itself, the Muse, and her father, Dr. John Aikin, D.D., Warrington tutor from 1758 until his death in 1780. 3 “Epistle to Dr. Enfield” offers a unique opportunity to compare the poetic vision of Anna Barbauld, at forty-six, with that of Anna Aikin, at about twentythree, when she wrote “The Invitation” (ca. 1765, published 1773). At twenty-three, Anna projects her vision into the future, picturing Warrington from the vantage point of her older self—“thro’ the long perspective of distant years” (l. 134). At forty-six, Barbauld, formerly one of England’s most acclaimed and promising poets, writes from a dual perspective, reconstructing her earlier poetic self in the remembrance of

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things past while summoning that poetic self to address her friend in the here and now. Reading the poems together reveals that time has suffused Warrington so completely in an atmosphere of affection and poetry that it nearly loses its identity in the later poem as a space of intellectual inquiry and development. Intimacies formed through association with the literary family and nurtured through the bouts rimés and other collaboration with Enfield, emerge in the “Epistle” to eclipse previously admired features of the Warrington landscape. Excerpted by Enfield in his Speaker, “The Invitation” summons Elizabeth Belsham to join Anna in surveying the prospects of Warrington, newly alive with spring’s “first pale blossom.” Together, the two young women imagine the students as “callow chiefs and embryo statesmen” who will someday answer the nation’s call “to fix her laws” and “light up glory thro’ her wide domain” (ll. 42, 83, 137–38). “The Invitation” celebrates the poetic alcove and “sequester’d shade” as spaces of both carefree, lyrical friendship as well as the “learned labour” of the “embryo statesmen” (ll. 144, 42). More than twenty years later, Barbauld’s “Epistle to Dr. Enfield” reconstructs the landscape of Warrington’s “plains now but seen in distant perspective” (l. 58). As an elegy, “Epistle to Dr. Enfield” concerns the loss of youth, exemplified by Anna’s poetic life at her Warrington home, and the loss of her father. Warrington’s importance as an academic institution—the “seats where Science loved to dwell” (l. 17), even as a site of female friendship—becomes displaced in the poem by its significance as a domestic, familial space where poetry seemed naturally to flourish. Imagining “desolation” now shrouding her former home in a “gloomy veil,” Barbauld contrasts the present, in which “trade’s harsh din” has all but silenced the “Muse’s song” and its inspirational past. Here, shifting address from Enfield to Warrington itself, Barbauld imbues the Academy’s muse-like, ornamental “dome” with its etymologically domestic connotation: Your rising dome With what fond joy my youthful eyes surveyed; Pleased by your sacred springs to find my home, And tune my lyre beneath your growing shade! (ll. 21–24)

As an address to a collaborative partner and member of the literary family, “Epistle to Dr. Enfield” reveals, through the language of mourning, a unique intimacy between Barbauld and her friend—a connection deeper than ties of sympathy. Unable to be there in person (her last visit to Warrington was in 1783), Barbauld mourns her father through the body of Enfield, whom she asks physically to share the experience of her grief. In the final stanza she exhorts him to Go seek the turf where worth, where wisdom lies, Wisdom and worth, ah, never to return! There, kneeling, weep my tears, and breathe my sighs, A daughter’s sorrows o’er her father’s urn! (ll. 69–72)

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Mourning here is not, as Freud and traditional elegy would have it, an autonomous undertaking; Barbauld desires to suffer grief as a shared labor.4 She does not ask Enfield to say a prayer, nor is she simply paying her respects, now nine years after her father’s death. Moreover, this is not a ventriloquizing of grief; she in effect obligates her friend to live the physical, emotional experience of her sorrow in terms that place gender on ambiguous ground; here, the collaborative consciousness conceives Enfield capable of feeling and expressing the emotions of a daughter. In spite of its verging on the brink of hyperbole, this profoundly intimate moment is also reminiscent of the bouts rimés convention of exchange and response. Barbauld supplies Enfield with the theme and the emotions; he is to complete the gesture of mourning: all expressed in epistolary verse that remained a private expression of shared intimacy until first published in The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin in 1825.5 Crucial to the transformed landscape of Warrington viewed now by Barbauld as a distant prospect is the indelible imprint of the family, manifestly evident in the presence of her “father’s urn” but also in the memories that she and Enfield share—memories of the literary family in domestic harmony. Barbauld’s decision to end the poem on the word urn reflects more than the necessity to complete a rhyme. It invokes another meaning of the word associated not with death but with a source of inspiration, typically, as in Thomas Love Peackock’s The Genius of the Thames, a river. As evidenced by these opening lines to part two of Peacock’s poem, this usage is deeply rooted in myth: Oh Genius of that sacred urn, Adored by all the Naiad train! Once more my wandering steps return To trace the precincts of thy reign.6

Barbauld’s choice of urn in the context of “Epistle to Dr. Enfield” underscores the presence and importance of the family as a guiding, creative spirit. It is now Barbauld’s father, source of the literary family, whose memory overshadows the once “easy, blithe, and debonair” vision of Warrington, in which a sprightly genius loci illuminated the shady bowers and sequestered walks along the Mersey with the light of youthful friendship. Thus, in the English Romantic landscape, not only do we find a “Press in the House”; we find the genius familiae supplanting the genius loci. In Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” the poem most notably echoed by Barbauld’s “Epistle to Dr. Enfield,” there is only one father: “Father Thames,” to whom the poet apostrophizes, “thou hast seen / Full many a sprightly race / Disporting on thy margent green” (ll. 21–23). The literary family’s transformation of poetic space is likewise palpable in Dorothy’s immutable presence near the Wye in “Tintern Abbey”; its inspiration lives in St. Pancras Churchyard and at the Pantheon in Valperga; and its promises of poetic community are even inscribed in the georgic visions of Pantisocracy.

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Figure E.1 collection.

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Taylor family titles listed in The Family Pen Vol. 2 (1867). Author’s

In 1864, Isaac Taylor, brother of Jane and Ann, wrote a brief memoir of his literary family. He called it The Family Pen, and he opened with these lines: “A pen which has been moist with ink—ink destined for the eye of the compositor—has been passing from hand to hand, within the circuit of a family—it is now more than eighty years; and it is still in course of consignment to younger hands of the same stock” (1.1). Taylor was seventyseven years old in 1864 and surveying three generations of one literary family (figure E.1). Lucy Aikin had died that January. Time was moving on. In March Abraham Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant to be the “Commanding General of the Armies of the United States,” and just over a year later the Civil War would come to an end. Soon even the prolific Victorians would fade from view in the turn toward aestheticism and in the heightened anticipation and anxieties that seem always to attend the closing of a century. As Barbauld observes in her Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian and Freeholder, “It is equally true of books as of their authors, that one generation passeth away and another cometh”: the era of the literary family, its ink finally expended with Taylor’s memoir, had come to a close.

A ppe n di x : “To M r s. Ba r b au l d, at Ge n e va”

From John Aikin’s Poems (London: Joseph Johnson, 1791); reprinted here

from Lucy Aikin’s Memoir of John Aikin, M. D. (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824). From Yare’s low banks, where through the marshy plain He leads his scanty tribute to the main, On sea-girt Albion’s furthest Eastern bound Where direful shoals extend their bulwark round,— To thee I turn, my sister and my friend! On thee from far the mental vision bend. O’er land, o’er sea, freed Fancy speeds her flight, And now the chalky cliffs behind her fly, And Gallia’s realms in brilliant prospect lie; Now rivers, plains, and woods and vales are cross’d, And many a scene in gay confusion lost, ’Till ’mid Burgundian hills she joins her chase, And social pleasure crowns the rapid race. Fair land! by nature deck’d, and graced by art, Alike to cheer the eye and glad the heart, Pour thy soft influence through Laetitia’s breast, And lull each swelling wave of care to rest; Heal with sweet balm the wounds of pain and toil, Bid anxious, busy years restore their spoil; The spirits light, the vigorous soul infuse, And, to requite thy gifts, bring back the Muse. For sure that Muse, whose far-resounding strains Ennobled Cyrnus’ rocks and Mersey’s plains, Shall here with boldest touch awake the lyre, Soar to new heights, and glow with brighter fire. Methinks I hear the sweetly-warbled note On Seine’s meand’ring bosom gently float; Suzon’s rude vale repeats the charming voice, And all around the vine-clad hills rejoice: Now all thy grots, Auxcelles! with music sound; From crystal roofs and vaults the strains rebound: Besançon’s splendid towers the song partake, And breezes waft it to the Leman lake. Delightful lake! whose margin gay and green

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A ppendix Smiles in soft contrast to the rugged scene Of stern brow’d Alps, where storms eternal roll, How must thy varied charms entrance the soul! With what high passions must thy prospect move The heart that beats to liberty and love! Around, fair Freedom builds her lofty throne, And rocks and valour guard it for her own; While deep within embowering shades conceal’d, To none but Cupid’s mystic band reveal’d, Clarens! Thy roofs ascend, with turrets crown’d, And love and Julia fill th’ enchanted ground. Such, my Laetitia, on thy ravish’d eyes Bursts the bright scene, the vivid landscape rise; While from my sight the air-drawn pictures fade, And Fancy’s glass bedimm’d denies its aid; The colours melt, the lines dissolve in space, And cold realities usurp the place. What different scenes succeed!—a steril shore, Long level plains, the restless ocean’s roar, The rattling car, the shipwright’s sturdy toil, The far-spread net, and heaps of finny spoil, Keen Eurus here sweeps o’er th’ unshelter’d land, Shakes the strong dome, and whirls the loosen’d sand: Fair Flora shrinks, the trees averted bend, While their thin boughs a scanty shade extend: And, for the flowering thicket’s cheerful notes, Here hungry sea-fowl stretch their clamorous throats. And yet, e’en here, the soul-directed sight, Which nature’s views in ev’ry form delight, May catch, as o’er the brighten’d scene they gleam, Grandeur’s strong ray, or beauty’s softer beam. Frequent along the pebbly beach I pace, And gaze intent on ocean’s varying face. Now from the main rolls in the swelling tide, And waves on waves in long procession ride; Gath’ring they come, till, gain’d the ridgy height, No more the liquid mound sustains its weight; It curls, it falls, it breaks with hideous roar, And pours a foamy deluge on the shore. From the bleak pole now driving tempests sweep, Tear the light clouds, and vex the ruffled deep, White o’er the shoals the spouting breakers rise, And mix the waste of waters with the skies: The anchoring vessels, stretched in long array, Shake from their bounding sides the dashing spray; Lab’ring they heave, the tighten’d cables strain, And danger adds new horror to the main. Then shifts the scene, as to the western gales Delighted Commerce spreads her crowded sails. A cluster’d group the distant fleet appear,

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A ppendix That scatt’ring breaks in varied figures near: Now, all illum’d by the kindling ray, Swan-like, the stately vessel cuts her way; The full-wing’d barks now meet, now swiftly pass, And leave long traces in the liquid glass: Light boats, all sail, athwart the current bound, And dot with shining specks the surface round. Nor with the day the sea-born splendours cease: When evening lulls each ruder gale to peace, The rising moon with silvery luster gleams, And shoots across the flood her quivering beams. Or if deep gloom succeeds the sultry day, On ocean’s bosom native meteors play, Flash from the wave, pursue the dipping oar, And roll in flashing billows to the shore. ’Tis thus, within this narrow nook confined, I strive to feed with change th’ insatiate mind, But surer aid the Muses’ stores impart, With each new world of science and of art; And, more than all, the joys of sacred home Forbid my heart to pant, my feet to roam. Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast, And points one darling object unpossess’d: How many years have whirl’d their rapid course Since we, sole streamlets from one honour’d source, In fond affection as in blood allied, Have wandered devious from each other’s side; Allowed to catch alone some transient view, Scarce long enough to think the vision true; O then, while yet some zest of life remains, While transport yet can swell the beating veins, While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat, And fancy still retains some genial heat, When evening bids each busy task be o’er, Once let us meet again,—to part no more!

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No t e s

Preface 1. Cf. Stuart Curran, “Romantic Poetry: Why and Wherefore?” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge UP, 1993): “Ages are marked by literary fashion as much as by their political settlements of upheavals” (216). For another view on the range of genres published during the Romantic period, see Rajan and Wright, Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre (Cambridge UP, 1998). 2. See also Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages. 1932. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000. 3. David Richard Jones, Great Directors at Work: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Kazan, Brook. Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1987. p. 6. 4. I derive this idea of a mediating network from the plenary talk given by Clifford Siskin during the “Contesting Creativity: 1740–1830” conference at the University of Leeds on September 12, 2008. 5. See William McCarthy’s forthcoming biography, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (JHU Press, 2008). 6. See William McCarthy, “The Celebrated Academy at Palgrave: A Documentary History of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s School.” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 8. Ed. Paul J. Korshin. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1997. 7. The poem in question was most certainly written for an intimate, occasional context, the conventions for which encouraged effusions of sentiment that would in other contexts appear clumsy and ill-fitting. Wollstonecraft must not have acknowledged such context, and she simply could not understand how a poem like “To a Lady, with some painted Flowers” could stand side-by-side in the same collection with a poem like “To Mrs. P(riestley), with Drawings of Birds and Insects,” a poem she actually praises. But that, it seems to me, is exactly the point with Barbauld: she was capable of negotiating a wide range of audiences without ever being disingenuous (see the introduction to SPP for a discussion of Barbauld’s ingenuousness). 8. See Vargo, who asserts that Coleridge fabricated the story about his response to Barbauld’s criticism of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in order to bury her career forever. 9. The most current title that intersects with this study at a number of points is Michelle Levy’s Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (Palgrave, 2008). Other titles include Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818 (Cambridge, 2004); Carol Sherman’s The Family Crucible in Eighteenth

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Century Literature (Ashgate, 2005); and Jane Spencer’s Literary Relations: Kinship and the Canon 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2005). Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Ed. John Wood Warter. 4 Vols. 1856 (London). New York: AMS Press, 1977. (2.17). McCarthy and Kraft’s comment refers to the oft-cited but inadequately understood rift between Barbauld and Coleridge, but the comment is equally applicable in this instance. Composed on the occasion of the Barbaulds’ trip to France in 1785. First published in Poems (1791). London, Joseph Johnson. Here, the excerpt is taken from Lucy Aikin’s Memoir of John Aikin, M. D. Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1824. The poem is reprinted in its entirety on pages 64–66. See Jung’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Part III), excerpted in The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell. New York: Viking, 1971. (148 ff.); I owe this observation to a recent discussion with Pat Hoy III, director of expository writing at NYU and one of the most influential teachers of my life. See Locke’s discussion of the transferability of consciousness between individual persons (or “souls”) in Book II, Chapter XXVII, §12 ff. of Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I am gratefully indebted to David Fairer of the University of Leeds for suggesting this connection.

1

Collaborative Dissent: Barbauld and Aikin’s Sibling Pamphlets

1. They had been apart since Anna married and left the Warrington Academy in 1774. John remained at the Academy as an instructor while Anna and Rochemont settled in Palgrave, Suffolk, and began oversight of the Palgrave School. 2. Letters that might have illuminated this remarkable period are believed to have , been destroyed during World War II. 3. McCarthy, personal correspondence. The paper’s date was March 25–27, 1790. 4. The third stage, as I have conceptualized it, results as the logical outcome of two long and active careers in writing—creative, critical, educational, and political. I have chosen not to explore this period in depth because the collaborative connections are difficult to trace. There is no extant correspondence between the siblings from this period, which is most certainly attributable to their having lived across the street from each other. That they discussed their respective works cannot be doubted, for they had long practiced habits of sharing work and offering each other advice. My intent in focusing on the first two stages in greater depth is to expose the dialogic patterns in their work and to explicate their significance. Although this type of methodology could be brought to bear on works in the third phase, the scope of those works, namely the two major collections, represent a different kind of dialogue altogether, one belonging to the rhetoric of cultural production, not aesthetic, social, or political discourse. 5. The students, too, were from diverse backgrounds, and the quality of the education was so high that it even attracted sons of Anglican families. Nonconformists disagreed with the Anglican Church on a number of grounds, ranging from the use of vestments, which established rank among the clergy, to the swearing of oaths to the Church itself. The

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7. 8.

9.

10.

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basic principles on which Dissenters stood in opposition to the Church of England are recounted by Baptist minister John Evans in A Sketch of the Several Denominations into which the Christian World is Divided (London, 1795): “The principles on which the Dissenters separate from the church of England . . . may be summarily comprehended in these three; 1. The right of private judgment. 2. Liberty of Conscience, and 3. The perfection of scripture as a Christian’s only rule of faith and practice” (73). Many exponents of “enlightened” or rational Dissent took issue, too, with the concept of the trinity, believing instead that Jesus Christ was either, on the one extreme, fully human (a Socinian position) or, at the other, a lower ranking being than God, a being whose existence preceded manifestation in the human body of Christ, but who was by no means an incarnate extension of the Godhead. The best study of the intersections of Dissent and Romanticism is Daniel White’s Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). For other consideration of eighteenth-century Dissent, see Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). See also James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990); and Richard Brown, Church and State in Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1991). Aikin concludes his Address to the Dissidents with the following postscript: “I have addressed you by an unusual title, but one which I should be glad to see adopted in your public proceedings. The effects of the different associations frequently annexed to words of nearly the same import, will not be neglected by those who are attentive to the various circumstances which operate upon the mind; and I think in the present instance that difference would be advantageous to your cause. Yourselves and the public in general might thereby be led to form juster ideas of your condition; and that court, which, in the beginning of the present reign, thought fit to offer a strong memorial to the Polish nation in favour of the restoration of the DISSIDENTS OF POLAND to all the right of citizens, might possibly be induced to blush at an unwillingness to render the same justice to the DISSIDENTS OF ENGLAND.” The Test Act was the House of Commons’ response to Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, which endorsed Catholic participation in the public sector. The Substance of the Speech delivered by Henry Beaufoy, Esq. in the House of Commons, Upon the 28th of March, 1787, on his Motion for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London: Cadell and Robinson, 1787). Excerpts of this text are printed in Barbauld’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002). From the report of Burke’s speech during the Debate on the Army Estimates, February 5, 1790. The Parliamentary History of England (London: Longerman et al., 1816), 28: 351–71. Qtd in SPP, 492. From William Pitt’s speech in The Debate in the House of Commons, on the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, March 2d, 1790 (London: John Stockdale, 1790), p. 15. Qtd in SPP, 493. Regium donum: “king’s gift”—high party money used, as Aikin, points out, to pacify dissenters willing to accept it and to divide the opposition (as Aikin indicates it did). Emphasis in the original. One underlying message here is that Dissenters were indispensable to the national economy precisely because they were so fully invested as members of the burgeoning middle class. For the most

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14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

Notes comprehensive discussion of this topic, see White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent, especially chapter three. Braithwaite is probably thinking also of Aikin’s other pamphlet from 1790, The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church Compared (London: J. Johnson). Johnson included this title in his list of works dealing with the Parliamentary debate over repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (p. 42 of the third edition of Barbauld’s An Address to the Opposers). See Le Breton, A.L. 4–5. I am indebted here to Toni Bowers (University of Pennsylvania) for her questions during the 2007 annual conference of the America Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Atlanta, GA, which caused me carefully to think through Lucy Aikin’s account of this episode in her family’s life. Although she portrays her father has having shouldered most of the decisionmaking and therefore the psychological burdens experienced in Yarmouth, we cannot overlook the possibility that the decisions leading to the dispossession of home, friends, and livelihood were as much influenced by Martha as by John. Moreover, it could well be the case that the family as a whole willingly, even readily, accepted dislocation as a matter of principle. Nothing in the historical record discounts this possibility. My tendency to focus on John as the decision-maker, and on the negative effects of his decisions on the family, depends almost exclusively on inference. First, I infer that John Aikin, as the family’s primary source of income, and as the Dissenting voice singled out by loyalists in the Yarmouth community, felt an especial sense of responsibility for any alienation experienced by his wife and children, regardless of the degree to which they were willing to suffer the loss of friendships and standing in the community. Second, I also draw inferences from Lucy Aikin’s critically overlooked Memoir of her father. Her language clearly points to difficult and trying times for everyone, not just her father. Given that literary and social decorum seems to have induced LA and other memoirists, in particular Le Breton, to remain highly circumspect about revealing details of physical and/or emotional pain and suffering within the family (evidenced especially in the euphemistic allusions to domestic abuse and insanity), inference leads me strongly to conclude that LA’s descriptions serve merely to gloss what were far more taxing episodes of family endurance. Of course, this presumption is utterly dismantled in the Birmingham riots just a year later, July 14, 1791. Milton’s Treatise on Civil Power, in Ecclesiastical Causes; shewing that it is not lawful for any Power upon Earth, to compel in Matters of Religion (1659), reprinted, sits right alongside the others on Johnson’s shelves. Qtd in Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1979), 163. The two are: A Vindication of [The Test Act] by Capel Lofft, Esq. and A Letter to the Right Rev. the Archbishops and Bishops of England, pointing out the only sure Means of preserving the Church from the Dangers that now threaten her, by an upper graduate. Helen Braithwaite recently argues that Johnson’s reputation as a liberal publisher has been overstated, that in fact the many medical and scientific publications, along with some politically conservative titles such as those mentioned earlier, indicate a much more politically moderate stance, one that gave voice to both sides of issues. Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing, and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). My sense, however, is that Johnson was being shrewdly radical by allowing a

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21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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trickle of conservatism to fend off government attention. The imbalance of liberal to conservative tracts advertised suggests as much. Including Milton, too, serves as a brilliant means of putting the pamphlets in a long national tradition of religious debate—a way of placing the imprimatur of England’s greatest poet on the entire catalogue. Qtd in Braithwaite, Romanticism, Publishing, and Dissent, 96. William McCarthy’s notes that “nothing is known of this or any play by JA . . . Probably ‘The Man of Pleasure’ was written for private production at Warrington Academy” (PALB 251 n. 29). It should be noted that these kinds of theatrical or musical performances may have been more common than we realize. McCarthy notes that the tutors “seem officially to have disapproved of student plays” (PALB 251 n. 29). The extent to which the Beaumont-Fletcher model of collaborative authorship influenced John’s own tendencies cannot be ascertained with any certainty, but Lucy Aikin felt her father’s interest in the Renaissance dramatists significant enough to mention in her father’s Memoir: “His correspondence with his sister was thickly interspersed with critical remarks on the Latin and English poets, not forgetting, among the latter, our early English dramatists, Massinger, Shirley, and Beaumont and Fletcher, whom some happy chance had introduced to his acquaintance, and for whom he had the courage to express all his admiration, at a period when the French taste had banished them almost entirely both from the stage and the closet” (15). Unfortunately no such correspondence has thus far surfaced; it may well have been lost with other family correspondence and papers during the World War II bombings of London. On the character of the brother-sister relationship in nineteenth-century literature, see Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature, from Austen to Woolf (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002). Oddly, in providing some background on the names we might associate with this culture, Sanders reaches back to the Fieldings but skips over without so much as a footnote the names Barbauld and Aikin. The Wordsworths receive limited attention from Sanders as the real starting point for the emergence of this phenomenon. The strength of the study lies in its consideration of the Victorians and early-twentieth-century Americans. Naomi Tadmor’s Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) provides excellent insight into the terms governing ties of both kinship and friendship, especially as manifested through occupational and economic relationships—and how that complex of relational ties defined and redefined the household. First published in PALB, 17–19. “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva,” written in 1785, published in Poems (1791). See appendix A for entire poem. London: Joseph Johnson, 1777, pp. 7, 9. See, for instance, “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva.” Poems. London: Joseph Johnson, 1791. Not to mention one of Britain’s. See Elizabeth Eger, “Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain,’ (1779).” Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830. Ed. Elizabeth Eger, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 104–132. It refers to Richard Samuel’s painting, The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain and the Bluestocking Circle’s cultural influence.

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29. This passage has been singled out by Daniel White as symbolic of the Aikinfamily model of collaboration that informed a sub-species of the public sphere he calls the “Dissenting public sphere” by bringing to it a middle-class, domestic (and philanthropic) ethos that could then be disseminated through national discourses of political and social reform. See “The ‘Joineriana,’ ” p. 511 ff. and White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. 30. We have only Lucy Aikin’s brief description of this time in her Memoir of her father. She includes an excerpt of one letter in which John mentions the essays on songwriting and confides in Anna his desire to become an author (p. 15). 31. During the same year, John edited William Enfield’s Hymns for Public Worship, which included five of Anna’s hymns (Hymns I–V). As the work represents group effort, it can, in a broad sense, be called a collaboration, but it does not feature the kind of sibling cooperation, nor the signposts of authorship, evident in Essays on Song-Writing. 32. This quotation comes from an undated edition of Essays on Song-Writing (London, printed for Joseph Johnson). Discussion with William McCarthy confirms our suspicion that this is a copy of the first edition printed by Eyres in 1772. 33. Various publishers had long requested that JA put out a new edition of the work. Consumer demand was high, especially after the exhaustion of the 1774 edition. For whatever reason, JA did not pursue this option until 1810. His doing so was in response to R.H. Evans’s unauthorized 1810 republication of Essays, which included “original” verse spuriously attributed to ALB, presumably to enhance sales. 34. See Tyson, Joseph Johnson, 58–59. 35. See headnote to the poem in SPP (59). 36. London: Joseph Johnson, 1772 (24–25). 37. Personal correspondence (October, 2003). Though John’s writing includes an essay on epigraphs (“On Mottoes”) and a number of Latin translations, I have no doubt, given their shared educational experience, that Anna could have selected the mottoes herself. Her Latin skills at this point would have been on a par with John’s; moreover, that John casually included Latin sentences in his correspondence to Anna argues for linguistic parity. 38. From Tacitus, Annales XVI. 35: “In these times to which you have been born, it would be useful to fortify your spirit with steadfast examples” (translation mine). Source: www.thelatinlibrary.com/tacitus/tac.ann16.shtml. Aikin mistakenly wrote “est” for “es.” 39. PALB (253 n.) 40. Loeb translation. The choice of this motto seems to have in view the failed action by General Paoli in Corsica. 41. Personal copy. Cautley inscribed his name on each work in 1780. The spine simply reads, “Aikin’s Songs.” 42. Gerald Tyson accounts Aikin instrumental in forming the Johnson circle. Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1979), 58 ff. 43. Conveniently advertised are the new edition of Anna’s Poems and twelve titles from John, including his own Poems (1791), the Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, and the View of the Character and Public Services of the late Mr. Howard. 44. The Poetical Works of William Collins, with a Prefatory Essay, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: T. Cadell, Jr. and W. Davies, 1797). 45. Reprinted in Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. McCarthy and Kraft (495–96).

Notes

173

46. The publication of Sins was announced in The London Chronicle for May 25–28, 1793. The Royal Proclamation had appeared in the London Chronicle for March 2–5, 1793. The full text of the Royal Proclamation can be found in Appendix C of SPP, 495–96. 47. In his prefatory address of Parliament, Milton writes: “Of civil libertie I have written heretofore by the appointment, and not without the approbation of civil power: of Christian liberty I write now; which others long since having don with all freedom under heathen emperors, I should do wrong to suspect, that I now shall with less under Christian governors, and such especially as profess openly thir defence of Christian libertie” (7: 243). Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 Vols, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953–1982). Subsequent references cited as YP (Yale Prose). 48. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent, chapter three. 49. Aikin’s phrasing seems to recall Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men: “Time may shew, that this obscure throng knew more of the human heart and of legislation than the profligates of rank, emasculated by hereditary effeminacy” (74). 50. About Aikin and Barbauld’s “Dialogue,” Dickson Preston writes, “Frederick soon knew the entire dialogue by heart. It described his own situation so precisely that it brought tears to his eyes, and much of his useful thinking on slavery was drawn from it almost word for word.” Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1980), 99. I discussed the transatlantic importance of “Dialogue between a Master and Slave” and its influence on Douglass during a panel presentation at the 2008 annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) in Toronto. For more on this topic, see chapter two. 51. Letter from John Aikin to Anna Barbauld, February 3, 1779 (qtd in Rodgers, 205). Henry Laurens was the president of Congress in 1777–1778 (Rodgers’ note). 52. Here is Burke on prejudice: “You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.Your literary men and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others, but they pay it off by a very

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full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste, because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments” (183–84). 53. Cf. Burke’s Reflections: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars” (119–20). 54. The only date given in Rodgers’ reprinting is “Feb 28th”; without the corroborating evidence of John’s letter or some other piece of temporal context, I can only conjecture that the year is 1791, Burke’s Reflections having been printed on November 1 of 1790, just four months earlier. The subtext seems to be that Wollstonecraft responded so quickly (and heatedly) that anything in her wake already seems tardy. 55. According to Michael Farrell’s formulation of the stages of development in collaborative groups, this convergence on London, ca. 1791–1792 mimics the seventh and final “Nostalgic Reunion” stage (which typically occurs ten– twenty years after the initial stage of collaborative production). However, as I have been demonstrating throughout, this is a collaborative relationship unlike those fitting Farrell’s model, for it simply adapted itself to life changes and never truly ended. This is why I have identified my stages according to the type of work done, not a generic phase in the life cycle of collaboration. Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics & Creative Work (Chicago: U of

Notes

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61.

175

Chicago P, 2001). Farrell’s seven stages are: Formation, Rebellion, Quest/ Creative Work, Collective Action, Disintegration/Individuation, Reunion. His chapter on the French Impressionists is probably the most illuminating for this theory. Qtd from The British Critic in SPP, 298. Burke’s later reference to France as home to “that voluptuous climate and that seductive Circean liberty” (238) seems to complete the allusion. Braithwaite sees moderation (“tempered views”) as being responsible for the popularity of Sins, 138–39. By mentioning the army estimates, Barbauld remembers Burke’s speech before Parliament in February of 1790, during the debate on the army estimates. It was during his speech that Burke warned of “our present danger” in England being “an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy” (qtd in SPP, 492). Through her signature “A Volunteer,” ALB arguably genders herself male. Once revealed, however, her gender could serve to dissuade the kinds of retributive actions taken against men. Men such as John Cartwright and Dr. James Currie wrote what were essentially antiwar tracts, but they did so in subtler tones, through alternate discourses such as homeland defense and economics. Even so, Currie, who wrote his work pseudonymously, suffered once he was exposed as the author. Cartwright, in The Commonwealth in Danger (London: Joseph Johnson, 1795), argues against foreign invasion, but uses martial and patriotic “hearth and home” rhetoric to advance his position : “It will be time enough to give the reins to our fury, when upon British soil we shall be called on to conquer or to die. If we are to meet the war at our own gates; if Britons are to bleed defending their own lands and laws, families and firesides, I trust that we shall be found equal to the task. Men with a free constitution in their hearts, and swords in their hands, are not to be conquered” (15–16). Currie relies on, among other things, Adam Smith’s economic theories to argue that the future is being mortgaged to pay war’s exorbitant costs today. A Letter, Commercial and Political, Addressed to the Rt. Hon. William. Pitt . . . , by Jasper Wilson, Esq. (London: G.G.J. & J. Robinson, 1793). Rpt in Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of James Currie Vol 2, ed. William Wallace Currie (London: Longman et al., 1831). On Currie’s death in August, 1805, John Aikin wrote his memoir for the Monthly Review. Aikin gives some sense of the risk involved in writing such a pamphlet if one’s identity were exposed: “One of the respondents took the unwarrantable liberty of directly addressing Dr. Currie, in print, as the author, at the same time affecting on very slender grounds the familiarity of an intimate acquaintance. It can scarcely be doubted that this infringement of the rules of liberal controversy was prompted by the malignant purpose of exposing Dr. Currie to popular odium, and injuring him in his profession” (qtd in Lucy Aikin’s Memoir, 478).

2

“The Aikin School”: Adopting an Aesthetic

1. The Wild Irish Girl (1806; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). Horatio, about to pursue the sound what he thinks is Glorvina at her harp, narrates, “ ‘It is Glorvina then,’ said I, ‘and alone!’ and down I sallied; but not with half the

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Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

intrepidity that Sir Bertram followed the mysterious blue flame along the corridors of the enchanted castle” (67). Ironically, Lucy Aikin made the same mistake as Sydney Owenson (see previous note) in her own father’s Memoir, accidentally referring to the fragment as “Sir Bertram.” Citations are from the 1773 edition (London: Joseph Johnson). Cf. Burke’s Enquiry (Part I, sections 2 and 3 on the relationship of pleasure and pain). Cf. Burke’s Enquiry (Part I, sections 2, 3 on the relationship of pleasure and pain). Burke uses the term “positive pleasure”; he asserts that the cessation of pain does not induce the experience of positive pleasure. In the context of John Aikin’s essay, the relief of suspense can be followed by sharper pain, or it can be released in the pleasure of the imagination’s creation of something approximating the fantastic. In the latter instance, the result comes not from the mere cessation of pain but by the accompanying influx of imagination. Cf. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. Trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1973). See note 19 in chapter two. Lucy Aikin identifies the work as being the Devotional Pieces in a footnote (Works 2.4). François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715). French prelate who alienated himself by embracing Quietism, characterized by the soul’s deep contemplation of God, rather than external objects. His liberal thoughts on education are expressed in a treatise specifically dealing with the education of girls, which may also account for the choice of this particular authorial allusion. De l’education des filles (Paris: Auboin, Emery, Clousier, 1687). Rpt Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1926. [The Education of Girls. Trans. Kate Lupton (Boston: Ginn, 1891).] Qtd in SPP (222 n.) from Joseph Priestley, Theological and Miscellaneous Works. Ed. John Towill Rutt. Vol. I (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1972), i:281. She is already beginning to answer Burke at this point. See especially Burke’s discussion of “Vastness” in Part 2, Section VII of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 66. It would not be long before Barbauld would, on the political front, part intellectual company with Burke. Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow: R. Foulis, 1747). And to Plato’s Republic before that; the work of the poet contributed to society by inspiring moral reflection and ethical action. The brief introduction to the collection itself occupies just a few paragraphs at the end of the 1775 edition’s prefatory essay. When “Thoughts” was later republished separately, that portion of the essay was omitted. Thus it does not appear in Barbauld’s Works or in the fourth edition of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose. For comprehensive discussion of the intellectual shift in critical theory from treating poetry as an imitative to an expressive art, see M.H. Abrams’ foundational study, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958). Commenting on Jones’s essay, M.H. Abrams says that, in combining theories from “Longinus, the old doctrine of poetic inspiration, recent theories of the emotional and imaginative origin of poetry, and [the] emphasis on the lyric

Notes

15. 16. 17.

18.

177

form and on the supposedly primitive and spontaneous poetry of Oriental nations, Jones earned the distinction of being “the first writer in England to weave these threads into an explicit and orderly reformulation of the nature and criteria of poetry and of the poetic genres” (Mirror 87). John’s letter was never published in the Monthly Review. See McCarthy “Mother of All Discourses” (passim). John had been editing the Monthly Magazine since 1796, routinely using “my influence among my friends to favour the work,” through which effort “Mrs. Barbauld has enriched the miscellany with several contributions” (qtd in Rodgers 221). His son Arthur, who had published his Journal of a Tour through North Wales in 1797, was editor of the Annual Review from 1802 to 1807. The younger Charles was pursuing interests in the science of vaccination and had published A Concise View of all the most important Facts which have hitherto appeared concerning the Cow-Pox in 1800. And Lucy, later distinguished as a historian, had edited Poems for Children in 1801. “Lost Needles, Tangled Threads: Stitchery, Domesticity, and the Artistic Enterprise in Barbauld, Edgeworth, Taylor, and Lamb.” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: U of Penn Press, 1994), 167–90. Carol Shiner Wilson, whose own collaborative work serves as a model for current scholarship, treats Barbauld’s life and career a bit too restrictedly, placing her in an oppressive marriage where, relegated to domestic servitude, she writes works that reinscribe that subjugation as a lot to be accepted: Although not biological mothers, Barbauld, Edgeworth, and Taylor were trusted as surrogate mother-teachers because of their reputation as writers of moral tales. Parents, then, could feel confident in choosing one of these texts as itself a safe domestic space from which children could learn in the actual domestic space of their homes . . . These writers . . . constructed an instructional present within the texts that would equip the girls—those in the stories and those who read the stories—for meaningful futures of habits, qualities, and values that would strengthen home and state” (171–72). It is surprising that Shiner Wilson does not acknowledge Barbauld’s status as adoptive mother to her nephew Charles. The article cites Anna’s story “The Flying Fish” as promoting the stoical view of “holding to class boundaries” (178), including gender boundaries, yet she does not credit a companion story, written by John—“The Discontented Squirrel”—which inculcates precisely the same lesson for a male who finds himself in trouble by venturing too far beyond his natural sphere. This sentiment is articulated even by John himself in “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva” (appendix A): ‘Tis thus, within this narrow nook confined, I strive to feed with change th’ insatiate mind, But surer aid the Muses’ stores impart, With each new world of science and of art; And, more than all, the joys of sacred home Forbid my heart to pant, my feet to roam.”

19. Lessons and Hymns were available for student use at Palgrave. Of the fifteen pieces Anna contributed to Evenings at Home, just three contain female figures. The rest are either fables or model a father-son dialogue. 20. The Vindications. 1790. Ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Toronto: Broadview, 1997). I take the idea of this new male subject from Davidoff

178

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes and Hall’s invaluable study, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987). This theme is revisited in Amy Weldon’s “ ‘The Common Gifts of Heaven’: Animal Rights and Moral Education in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and ‘The Caterpillar.’ ” Cardiff Corvey. Electronic Journal V2.I.2 2002. (http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc08_n02.html). Barbauld’s mouse has garnered a disproportionate amount of critical attention in light of her overall corpus. The work was collaborative. Although Charlotte Smith’s is the name on the title page, her sister, Catherine Anne Dorsett, also contributed to the collection. She authored the two poems mentioned here. See P. O’Brien, Eyres’ Press (1756–1803): An Embryo University Press (Wigan, Lancashire: Owl Books, 1993), an incredibly valuable yet scarcely acknowledged resource on the history of this fascinating provincial press. I take this bit of family history from pages 19–20. As in the case of Miscellaneous Pieces, none of the short readings in Evenings received attribution until Lucy Aikin published Barbauld’s Works. There, in the memoir of her aunt, she (somewhat regrettably) identifies the fourteen pieces she understood to have been authored by Barbauld (Works 1.xxxvi– xxxvii). I say this is somewhat regrettable because it belies the lack of concern Barbauld and Aikin always showed regarding attribution: one of the hallmarks of their egalitarianism as collaborative partners. Moreover, the identification seems almost to deny the possibility that any number of entries were not the result of shared intellectual effort. In 1740 Rousseau tutored for approximately one year and then gave it up for lack of enthusiasm and ability. Emile; or On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979): “Thus, the first education ought to be purely negative. It consists not at all in teaching virtue or truth but in securing the heart from vice and the mind from error. If you could do nothing and let nothing be done, if you could bring your pupil healthy and robust to the age of twelve without his knowing how to distinguish his right hand from his left, at your first lessons the eyes of his understanding would open up to reason. Without prejudice, without habit, he would have nothing in him which could hinder the effect of your care. Soon he would become in your hands the wisest of men; and in beginning by doing nothing, you would have worked an educational marvel (93). A second volume followed in 1799, similarly reprinted well into the nineteenth century. The Athenaeum only survived for two years (1807–1809); prior to this endeavor, John was editor of The Monthly Magazine for a decade (1796–1806). Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). Trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992). The letter is predicated on the assumption that people develop different skill sets that subsequently divide them along hierarchical lines. As long as human beings gather in large masses, there will be haves and have-nots: “Men, therefore, by the constitution of their nature, will ever tend to unite in large masses; and these masses will fall into the grand divisions of rich and poor, high and low, governors and governed. This is absolutely unavoidable, for even abolishing at once all the arts and conveniences of civilized life would not restore men to equality. Distinctions of power and influence subsist in the savage horde as well as in the luxurious city. But taking society

Notes

31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39.

179

with this necessary condition, there is still ample room for the operation of human wisdom in increasing its advantages and diminishing its evils” (203–204). See McCarthy and Kraft’s detailed notes and commentary on Barbauld’s proto-Marxism (SPP 345ff.) The article was printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1788. I quote from Betsy Rodgers (105–106). From Lucy Aikin, Correspondence with Dr. W. E. Channing (1874), p. 154. Letter of November 19, 1832. Baillie was a member of Rochemont Barbauld’s Hampstead congregation. See “The Celebrated Academy at Palgrave.” Important work has been and is being done in the area of the transatlantic book trade, but we have not fully comprehended the logistical, social, and political networks that must have been active in order to facilitate the republication of a work such as “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave” in such relatively short order. I have been able to locate only one accurate citation of authorship for the “Dialogue.” In an article called “The Active Virtue of The Columbian Orator,” Granville Ganter provides a footnote that identifies the source as Barbauld and Aikin’s Evenings at Home. The New England Review 70.3 (1997): 463–76 (p. 475). In Douglass’s later accounts—in My Bondage and My Freedom, e.g.—he amends the error. Bingham did not reprint Miller’s entire speech. Cf. Solomon: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever” (Ecclesiastes 1:4).

3

Walking “Backwards And Forwards”: The Wordsworths in 1802/1807

1. Composed as a verse epistle in 1785, the poem was later published in Aikin’s Poems (London: Joseph Johnson, 1791). The excerpts here are taken from Lucy Aikin’s Memoir of Dr. John Aikin (64–66). 2. “Aikin household” in this context refers to John and Anna when living and writing under one roof; “Barbauld” will refer to her domestic situation with husband Rochemont. Contrasting childhood and early youth with adulthood will necessitate the use of both names. 3. Studies in Romanticism 42 (2003): 75–98. 4. PALB, pp. 17–19. 5. For consideration of the term “childhood” and its conceptions in this period, see Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983); Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens: U. of Georgia P, 1978). Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); and Philippe Ariès, L’Enfant et La Vie Familiale sous l’ancien régime (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1960). Trans. Robert Baldick in Centuries of Childhood (New York: Knopf, 1962). It seems fitting that in the Aikin household, imbued as it was with such classical knowledge, the children both remained “dependents” until their late twenties, John marrying at twenty-six. He considered eighteen, the age at which he began medical school, an “immature age” (Memoir 12). Anna lived with her parents until the age of thirty.

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Notes

6. In this context, Anna’s line seems aware of Isaiah 11, the prophecy of a coming savior (cf. also Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue); specifically, the encircling with a band recalls 11:5, “Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.” The Vulgate, with which they were undoubtedly familiar, employs the substantive of the verb cingo, to be encircled. 7. Date of composition is conjectural. The poem first appears in Works (1825). Because the poem laments that John is “Too seldom seen” (l. 2), we can infer that Barbauld wrote it before moving to Stoke Newington in 1802. McCarthy guesses 1801, based first on the poem’s proximity in Works to “On the Death of Mrs. Martineau,” written in late 1800, and second on Lucy Aikin’s remark that the frontispiece engraving to her Memoir (1823) was taken from a portrait drawn “about twelve years since” (qtd in PALB 300). There was, however, another portrait painted of Aikin by J. Donaldson, which has not been found (PALB 300). The poem’s impassioned final lines bespeak, I argue, some measure of fear and palpable distress; moreover, the countenance she describes bears “a happier air,” presumably because John was recovering somewhat from his prolonged illness, which began in 1796, began to improve by 1798, but did not fully abate until 1801. Depression appears to have attended his apparently liver-related aff liction, as “the usual effects of similar maladies on the spirits, were in his case distressingly manifest” (Memoir 121). The air of the 1823 engraving is actually somber, not happy, but I am in possession of an early-nineteenth-century engraving by “Thompson” in which a younger Aikin’s air is indeed happy, without the sternness of the “Englehart” engraving used in the Memoir. It is certainly possible that the “Thompson” engraving is taken from the portrait referred to in the poem. I suggest 1798 as the year of composition because that is when John moved from Hampstead to Stoke Newington, for the express purpose of improving his health. The departure from London after six years near Anna, coupled with his uncertain health and depressed state of mind (the death of their friend William Enfield in 1797 only made matters worse) probably put Anna in the ref lective mood that occasioned the poem. 8. Cited in Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985), 256. 9. See, e.g., “To Mr. Barbauld, with a Map of the Land of Matrimony,” given to Rochemont with a copy of said map in the mid-1770s. (PALB 88). The scant record shows no detail concerning domestic unrest or abuse during the first few years of marriage. See note 10. 10. Accounts from inside the family, where the secret appears to have been kept, are characteristically guarded in their references to the situation. See Lucy Aikin’s “Memoir” in Works I and Le Breton, A.L., pp. 41–45. 11. Betsy Rogers excerpted the poem at length in her Georgian Chronicle: Mrs. Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958) (88–89). 12. In this way, the poem gestures toward the Greater Romantic Lyric as defined by M.H. Abrams. 13. Biographical facts are from Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth; Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography: The Early Years, 1770–1803 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957), 2 vols; John Worthen, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001); Ernest De Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1933); and Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989).

Notes

181

14. See, e.g., pages 139 and 103 of the Journals. 15. For an account of both Taylor’s and Thomas Bowman’s influence on Wordsworth at Hawkshead, see Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 27–31. Taylor is memorialized in the 1805 Prelude: While we were schoolboys he had died among us, And was born hither, as I knew, to rest With his own family. A plain stone, inscribed With name, date, office, pointed out the spot, To which a slip of verses was subjoined— By his desire, as afterwards I learned— A fragment from the Elegy of Gray. (10.493–8)

16. 17.

18.

19.

Taylor’s son, William Jr., was a student of Barbauld’s at Palgrave and became best known for his translations of German poetry and plays, including Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris and Bürger’s Leonore, the latter of which Barbauld read before a Scottish audience in Edinburgh in 1794; her reading, so he claimed, inspired Walter Scott to become a poet. As a side note, Barbauld had edited popular editions of both Akenside and Collins. All references are to The Prelude of 1805 unless otherwise stated. Dorothy’s use of the reflexive is a notably self-effacing gesture here, as though she and her grief ought not to stand out in the crowd of orphans. For a discussion of Dorothy’s self-effacing habits in the Journals, see Susan M. Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987), 17–18, 36–38. William Withering’s Arrangement of British Plants, According to the latest improvements in the Linnean System, with an easy introduction to the study of Botany. 4 vols (London: G. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1796). Fancy, often gendered female in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, is associated with rapid shifts in the noumenal landscape; the phrase “fancy work” also signifies typically domestic arts such as needlework. Imagination, considered in the same period to be more sophisticated, and thus often gendered male, is an associative and combinatorial faculty able to make the violent yoking together of ideas appear almost natural; its skill is being able to see the grand in the fragmentary or minute. See Julie Ellison: “ ‘Nice Arts’ and ‘Potent Enginery’: The Gendered Economy of Wordsworth’s Fancy.” Centennial Review 33 (1989): 441–67. See also her essay, “The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility.” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837. Ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 228–55. In the latter she discusses Anna Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” according to a model in which female fancy competes with and is cowed by male omnipotence. She does not distinguish Barbauld’s use of fancy from her use of imagination, the latter receiving no mention at all. The essay furthermore inadequately considers the ramifications of the religious and scientific context embodied in this poem. Fancy actually functions, in part, as an instrument of scientific investigation in “A Summer Evening’s Meditation,” exploring the universe but coming face to face with its own inadequacies before God. Barbauld’s prose writings at this time, especially Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, On Sects, and On Establishments, help establish the context, which is powerfully informed at this point by her relationship with Joseph Priestley. Barbauld’s poem offers an excellent contrast between the work of Fancy, which brings her into the

182

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

Notes realms of the universe, and that of Imagination, which turns the margins of the solar system into its “suburbs.” “Dynamics” (221–22). Thomas DeQuincey’s explanation for the rumors of incest is well known: “It is Wordsworth’s custom whenever he meets or parts with any of the female part of his own relations to kiss them” (qtd in Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth, 105–106; see same for fuller quotation). Ibid., 233. This may sound simplistic, but it rings true. We cannot discount Dorothy’s expressions of happiness. Moreover, we might see her self-sacrifice today as a way of gaining control over the instabilities that plagued her childhood environment. The survival mechanisms she employed early on—adapting to new households and making herself both useful and unobtrusive—are behaviors carried on well into adulthood and rarely changed without therapy. In this case, the child was the mother of the woman. I refer specifically to the critical tendency to put Dorothy in competition with William, as if there were no other way of discussing their relationship. Their model of collaboration was clearly noncompetitive, and I am not convinced that Dorothy ever considered herself, either in prose or verse, as William’s foil. Different from William, surely, but signifying what? If the respective halves of a collaborative pair opt to write on a similar topic, as Barbauld and Aikin did in their respective Addresses concerning the failed Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, or as William and Dorothy do in their poems regarding Grasmere, it is only fitting that one, being fully aware of the other’s work, seek to address the topic from a different, though not necessarily antagonistic, perspective. Yet the very terms of critical inquiry have, at times, turned conversation into competition: “These revisions of William’s poetics are in part strategies of evasion” [Susan J. Wolfson, “Individual in Community: Dorothy Wordsworth in Conversation with William.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 146] and “Setting her poetic concerns against William’s” (Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 144). Cf. Elizabeth Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian (Amherst: UMass Press, 1995). My primary interest is with the Grasmere Journals, to a lesser extent the Alfoxden Journal. The travel journals receive mention only in passing. Kurt Heinzelman discusses the work of writing in the Wordsworth household in relation to the georgic and pastoral traditions. Though he does not use the term “collaboration,” he sees their domesticity as a product of the “mutual labor” of writing. He also emphasizes Dorothy’s various roles in managing the domestic economy and improving their plot. “The Cult of Domesticity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth at Grasmere.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1988), 52–80. European Magazine 40 (1787), 202. Wordsworth did not meet Williams until 1820 (Gill 341), although he did intend to meet her when went to France in 1791, for he had procured an introduction to her from Charlotte Smith. See p. 109, Journals. Published as “Written in March, while resting on the bridge at the foot of Brother’s Water.” See pages 2 and 31 of Journals. Under collaborative circumstances such as that of the Wordsworths and Coleridge (or Barbauld and Aikin for that matter), where the habits of life

Notes

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

183

and language are fully enmeshed, it is “absurd,” says Worthen, “to try and determine who originated a phrase” (56). Intersecting f lashes of intertextuality can help establish connections, familiarity, and participation in a tradition; but tracing lines of intertextuality or determining who did what to whom contributes little to our understanding of the generative intimacies of authorial collaboration, nor of their manifestation in the poetry itself. The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1956–71). (1.330). Hereafter cited parenthetically as CL. Gittings and Manton, Dorothy Wordsworth, 47. T. Cadell Jr. and W. Davies republished Barbauld’s edition of Akenside several times between 1795 (the first edition) and 1825, the final, revised edition. I cite from Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination to which is prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: T. Cadell Jr. and W. Davies, 1796). Cf. Ann B. Shteir, “Botany in the Breakfast Room: Women and Early Nineteenth-Century British Plant Study.” Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979. Ed. Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1987), 31–43. This work informed her later Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1996). Compare Shklovsky’s well-known argument that art should remove objects from the “automatism of perception”; though related, the concerns expressed by Aikin and Shklovsky are divergent. Aikin wants to slow perception in order to see nature more clearly; Shklovsky wants to slow perception in order to see art more clearly. For an excellent genealogical survey of defamiliarization, see Carlo Ginzburg’s “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device.” Representations 56 (1996): 8–28. Ginzburg begins with the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and then generates a wonderful bridge to modernism by way of linkages from Montaigne through Bruyére to Voltaire, who comes to Shklovsky through Tolstoy. OED, 1a. At least by the seventh edition of 1830. The word “celandine” does not appear in the journals before April 30, 1802, when it had become the subject of Wordsworth’s poem (“To the Small Celandine”). The full name is “ranunculus ficaria.” Cf. Worthen (45). By “passive” here, I do not mean inactive, for she was active in many material ways; rather, I mean passive in the sense that her journals, for example, were culled for material without her direct, compositional input to the poetry. The viewpoint is generally accepted that she was not active in the composition, editing, or revision of poems. Granted, William might have felt especially obliged on this occasion to allow Dorothy final say, given what that particular poem signified and the emotions it was stirring in her. Nevertheless, that she exercised such privilege at this time, on a poem equally important to him, hints that perhaps what is unique about this instance is simply that she made it a point to record it in the journal. Again, see Levin’s discussion of Dorothy’s reluctance to use the first-person singular pronoun, typically choosing instead to elide herself in the communal “we” (Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 17–18, 36–38).

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Notes

45. Compare her lackadaisical behavior on the day of William’s departure for Gallow Hill at the opening of the Grasmere journals (15–16). 46. Worthen, The Gang, 49. 47. The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar. Ed. James Butler (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 454–55. 48. The exact date is debatable because Dorothy included the story about a week later, after having left off writing for a short period of time. She reconstructs the last two weeks of September 1800 from memory, and by that account they met the Leech-Gatherer on the 26th, the day, she says, when they “returned from accompanying [Reverend Robert] Jones [home].” 49. For a detailed account of the collaboration, involving input from Coleridge, Mary and Sara Hutchinson, and, by way of the Journals, Dorothy, see Worthen, The Gang, 197–201. 50. For discussion of sympathy in this context, see Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. Ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002). 51. Susan Levin sees this as a moment of self-deprecation in which Dorothy “fears she has not created a ‘faithful’ record and uses her brother’s words to denigrate her effect” (Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 48). Now evident, however, is that the irony with which both brother and sister employed this word was only heightened by the occasion of Sara Hutchinson’s criticism. 52. Used also in the epigraph to Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode.” 53. William and Dorothy met the Leech-Gatherer on the Friday, September 26, 1800. The first part of the Preface was sent to Biggs and Cottle in a letter postmarked Tuesday, September 30, 1800: Keswick. The second part of the Preface was sent on or about October 2 (Letters 1.302–303). Letters to Cottle dating back into August 1800, in which William successively promises short arrival of the Preface, indicate that he may have been procrastinating with the writing. See, e.g., August 13: “The preface is not yet ready: I shall send it in a few days” (Letters 292). 54. William’s letter of September 15 requests that “if no part of the poem of Christabel is already printed off, the poems which I now send should be inserted before Christabel” (Letters 1.302). 55. See Journals (43). 56. I allude here to the famous lines Wordsworth penned on the manuscript of Barron Field’s biography of the poet: “I never cared a straw about the theory, and the Preface was written at the request of Mr. Coleridge out of sheer good nature. I recollect the very spot, a deserted quarry in the Vale of Grasmere, where he pressed the thing upon me, and but for that it would never have been thought of” (qtd in George Watson’s introduction to his edition of the Biographia Literaria. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1956. p. ix). 57. “Multum in Parvo: Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807.” Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. Ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill, NC: U of NC P, 1986), 234–53 (p. 236). 58. Qtd in Curran, “Multum in Parvo,” 236. 59. See especially Ross’s Introduction (pp. 3–14), wherein repetition bespeaks a disorderliness of desire that must in turn be checked by ideology. 60. See the following dates in the Grasmere Journal: October 15, 1800; November 16, 1801; and the following from 1802: March 17 (two separate times); March 23; April 17, 25, 28, 30; May 1, 14, 26; June 2, 12, 15; and July 7 (her last recorded entry from Grasmere before William and Mary’s wedding).

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61. I draw from the military source for the term, inherited by the marching band. A tradition still carried on today at West Point involves the assessment of “hours” to be walked as punishment for regulatory violations. Cadets so punished must walk backwards and forwards in a confined area, literally marking time for their offenses. 62. Qtd in Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 201–202. 63. From “I gave” to “fervently” is erased in the MS (Moorman’s note). 64. Home at Grasmere. Ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977). (MS. D. 211–16). All subsequent quotations from MS. D. unless otherwise specified. 65. I refer here to the 1793 version of the poem, in which the male is trailed by the “meeker” female [An Evening Walk. Ed. James Averill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984)]: I love beside the glowing lake to stray, Where winds the road along the secret bay; By rills that tumble down the woody steeps, And run in transport to the dimpling deeps; Along the “wild meand’ring shore” to view, Obsequious Grace the winding swan pursue. He swells his lifted chest, and backward flings His bridling neck between his tow’ring wings; Stately, and burning in his pride, divides And glorying looks around, the silent tides: On as he floats, the silver’d waters glow, Proud of the varying arch and moveless form of snow. While tender Cares and mild domestic Loves, With furtive watch pursue her as she moves; The female with a meeker charm succeeds. (ll. 195–209) 66. The Shorter Poems. Ed. Richard A. McCabe (New York: Penguin, 1999). Written in 1596, the poem celebrates the forthcoming “double wedding of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester, Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset” (Editor’s note 727). 67. Cf. Hollander, J. “Spenser’s Undersong.” Cannibals, Witches and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance. Ed. Marjorie Garber (Baltimore: JHU Press, 1987), 1–20. If there is something about the impending marriage in “Prothalamion,” that occasions an odd keening in Spenser’s “undersong” (l. 110), we might compare that to (i) Dorothy’s sadness under similar circumstances, (ii) their reading of the “Prothalamion” together, and (iii) the idea that female friendship suffers irrevocable severing, as often lamented in nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, through marriage. Exemplary of this last is Emma Embury’s “Stanzas Addressed to a Friend on Her Marriage.” American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Cheryl Walker (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995), 85–86. 68. “Stepping Westward,” 1807 (188–89). 69. “ ‘Nice Arts’ and ‘Potent Enginery’: The Gendered Economy of Wordsworth’s Fancy.” Centennial Review 33 (4): 1989. 441–67. 70. By transporting this poem into the realm of feminist film theory (K risteva’s male gaze), the critic contorts fancy into something it has not, at least yet, become. Such insight does support a genealogy of the male gaze; however, the choice of this particular poem, in the context of the

186

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

Notes larger collection, undermines not only such a genealogy but also, and most important to this study, the collaborative and bi-gendered aspect of that gaze. Ellison attributes this stanza to Wordsworth’s “fancy,” but in fact he does not use the word in this poem, as he does in Sonnet 1, e.g.: “How sweet it is, when mother Fancy rocks / The wayward brain.” I prefer the term barometer over Coleridge’s electrometer, as it more appropriately suggests changes in emotional pressure that might lead to the shedding of tears or the shouts of joy. “Dorothy’s account of their discussion,” writes Spencer, “suggests they were exchanging memories of childhood experiences not shared. In the poem past separation is transformed into imagined togetherness” (180) See “Wordsworth’s Fancy,” 441–43. “Romanticism and ‘Anti-Self-Consciousness.” Qtd in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton, 1970). The infinite possibility is what Schiller called “Bestimmbarkeit.” See “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.” Trans. Julius A. Elias in Two Essays (New York: Ungar, 1966). “Like the bower of Seward’s Sonnet no. 44, in which the poet sequesters herself to commune with an imagined Honora Sneyd, Barbauld’s alcove is explicitly understood to be a female space, on in which the rites of friendship are honored as a shared poetry” (Curran, “Dynamics,” 234). Wordsworth’s allusion is to King Lear 4.6: Edgar has led Gloucester to the “precipice” and tells him, “You are now within a foot / Of th’ extreme verge. For all beneath the moon / Would I not leap upright (25–27). The aesthetic context here is relevant, though subtle, for Edgar has just convinced his sightless father that he is in the midst of great sublimity: The murmuring surge That on th’ unnumb’red idle pebble chafes Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more, Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight Topple down headlong. (20–24)

79.

80.

81. 82.

It is the sublime that threatens “deficient sight” in this scene, and Edgar vows that he would not surrender to its power by jumping up (let alone forward) for all that’s “beneath the moon.” Wordsworth turns this formula around by offering to forfeit everything if only he can revel “half a noon” in the sightgiving beauty of nature’s intimate spaces. Ross mentions few of these poems. The three he does mention, “The Highland Girl,” “Resolution and Independence,” and the “Intimations Ode” do not receive sustained attention. Jeffrey’s review of the 1807 Poems appears in the Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807) and is reprinted in Donald Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972) part A, vol. 2: 437–38. The poem was written in May of 1802; John embarked aboard the Earl of Abergathenny in September 1800, in service of the East India Company. Othello’s lines begin: O, now, for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumèd troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue!

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83. He had “made a Beginning,” writes Coleridge in 1803 (CL 2.1013), but it was not until 1805 that Wordsworth truly dedicated himself to the task. 1805 will also be recalled as the year Wordsworth presented his latest version of The Prelude, which prompted Coleridge to write “To William Wordsworth,” and this might suggest that Wordsworth’s attention to Coleridge and to philosophical poetry was greater during the time period discussed than I have suggested. However, the only references to work on the Prelude between 1799 and 1804 are two entries in Dorothy’s Journals, both in December of 1801, where she calls it “the poem to Coleridge.” Significantly, no further mention of the poem appears, in letters or journals, until early 1804 [see the editors’ discussion of references to the poem’s development in The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. Ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 529 ff.]. Wordsworth’s engagement with The Prelude during this time is actually consistent with the larger scheme of conflicting impulses and duties. Mark Reed comments in the Cornell edition of The Thirteen-Book Prelude (Vol. 1) that during 1800–1803 the Prelude saw “halting steps and irregular consolidations,” which probably resulted in the Preamble/post-Preamble of Book I and “a few pencil drafts toward the commencement of Book III” (ix, x). Virtually all of the writing occurred, according to the Cornell edition, during 1804 and early 1805. If the Preamble was in fact composed during 1800–1803, its expressions of internal ambivalence, hestitation, and outright resistance to a longer, philosophical work (conceived variously as epic, romance, “philosophic song”) are also consistent with the competing impulses toward Dorothy and Coleridge. After contemplating taking up where Milton left off, or pursuing epic options with William Wallace (et al.), Wordsworth writes, But from this awful burthen I full soon Take refuge, and beguile myself with trust That mellower years will bring a riper mind And clearer insight. (1805 1.235–38) Rather than debate with himself in “infinite delay,” he resolves, for the time being, because “better far than this,” simply to stray about Voluptuously through the fields and rural walks And ask no record of the hours given up To vacant musing, unreproved neglect Of all things, and deliberate holiday. (1.252–56)

84.

85. 86. 87.

And as we have seen, the record of at least some of that so-called vacant musing is the 1807 Poems in Two Volumes. Curran, “Multum in Parvo,” 236. The aesthetic contrast between the straight and winding roads carries, aside from its gendered biases, even greater cultural and political weight when put in the context of England’s project literally to straighten roads in Scotland, implanting regulatory mile markers along the way. To wander deviously was not simply un-British; it was downright unpatriotic. Cf. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 263–89, esp. § 457. Qtd in Levin, Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism, 203. Dorothy refers to herself as “more than half a poet” on March 18, 1802 (p. 104).

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4

Incorporating the Literary Family

1. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 133. 2. Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988); Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981); Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989). Magnuson relies on Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism to argue that the WordsworthColeridge canon should be understood as a composite work whose internal turns and counterturns signal nothing less than an extended ode. “I have not,” writes Magnuson, “tried to generalize about a moving spirit in their poetic dialogue. I have, rather, tried to trace the variations in apparently similar statements to account for the discontinuities by which such a dialogue generates poetry” (10). Magnuson’s comment distances him from McFarland, whose interest in the “deeply symbiotic ties between Coleridge and Wordsworth” (64) sometimes suffers from a stance too reverential and a tendency toward psycho-sexual mystification. His treatment of Coleridge’s ability to become subsumed within the personality of another, e.g., marks “his relationship to Wordsworth . . . as a feminine principle to its masculine counterpart” (65). In the space of just a few pages, however, this unnecessary gendering suddenly results in a “masochistic Coleridge” (69); we are assured, however, that “Coleridge’s masochism did not diminish his luminous intelligence” (70). Koestenbaum’s argument privileges a decontextualized discourse of homoeroticism at the expense of sociohistorical contingency. The homoerotic energies of the Renaissance stage in England are highly informative for work such as Jeffrey Masten’s Textual Intercourse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), which is implicitly informed by Mark Breitenburg’s Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996); however, the rise of the family as both economic and affective unit during the long eighteenth century produced different kinds of energies, sympathies, and collaborative models of production, and not until the late nineteenth century does literary collaboration once again begin evincing a strong homoerotic consciousness. 3. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford UP, 1991); Norman Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (New York: George Braziller, 1971). Aside from its thoughtful but not exclusive treatment of Romantic figures, Stillinger’s text includes a valuable appendix enumerating scholarly works focused on collaboration. Fruman’s is a painstaking and repetitive work of intellectual indictment, but it provides invaluable insight into Coleridge the plagiarist, or, to borrow from Levi-Strauss by way of Derrida, the philosophical bricoleur. From his study (and complementary studies), one thing is clear: Coleridge was an inveterate deceiver. 4. Lucy Newlyn, “Coleridge and the Anxiety of Reception.” Romanticism 1.2 (1995): 206–38. Newlyn expanded this work into Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). 5. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (second edition) (New York: Oxford UP, 1997). A more apt title might have been The Anxiety of Reception: A Theory of Poetic Influence, for no true “theory of poetry” can discount the contemporary context.

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6. Regina Hewitt, The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), vii–xviii and chapters 3, 5, and 6. 7. Fay pays particular attention to the sibling relationship, asserting that “to the extent that Wordsworthian genius is socially impacted, it must be understood as doubly gendered, and collaboratively engendered” (2). Elizabeth Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian (Amherst: U of Mass Press, 1995). Chapter two of this study makes similar claims but focuses on a specific period of collaborative intimacy and its manifestation in the 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes. Although Matlak begins to establish a larger context, he admittedly remains focused on “the micro-perspectives of biography and psychobiography” (3). Richard E. Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). The preceding chapter is also informed by Worthen’s The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & the Wordsworths in 1802 (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001). Worthen’s title itself, by naming Coleridge first in the circle, suggests a response to Matlak, as does his further narrowing of the focus to one important year, 1802. Of such recent works, one, Gurion Taussig’s Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–1804 (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2002) stands out by comprehending Coleridge’s various relationships in terms of friendship as a social institution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 8. Taussig, Coleridge and the Idea of Friendship, 1789–1804. 9. Ibid., 35–37 and passim. 10. Tadmor, Family and Friends, 11–12. 11. F.V. Barry, Jane Taylor: Prose and Poetry (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), xiv. 12. Eve’s intellectual capacity is on a par with Adam’s; she is fully capable of understanding “what was high” (PL 8.50), but reserves her intellectual intercourse for Adam alone, being pleased to be his ideal audience. Milton can be seen as presenting in Paradise Lost his vision of an ideal spouse based on his previous arguments in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, wherein he argues that conjugal happiness is contingent on “sympathy of mind” [qtd in Selected Prose. Ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri Press, 1985), 147]. 13. This (of July 22) and the letters that follow are found in Anna Letitia Le Breton, Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), 84–106. To my knowledge, this is their only source. All parenthetical references to the letters are from Le Breton, and typos have been corrected (as in this first instance, where the text reads “seheme of my father’s”). 14. H.J. Jackson, ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), ix: “A third feature of the familiar letter is what might be called the intimacy convention. The familiar letter is generally a private communication and a tribute to friendship: it should evoke qualities both of the absent friend and of the friendship itself. It thrives on candour and minuteness, expressing sympathetic concern in the interests and anxieties of the correspondent, and taking a reciprocal concern for granted. So Coleridge unaffectedly gives accounts of his health, of distresses and successes, and urges his correspondents to write with similar frankness to him.” 15. RLE makes the comment in the letter to ALB quoted from this sequence. On the Aikins, see Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs. Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958); see also chapter one, note 68.

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Notes

16. Letter is dated August 30, 1804 (Stoke Newington). 17. OED. IV. 6. pl. 18. Dr. Thomas Beddoes, a chemist, was married to Maria’s sister Anna. He advised Coleridge about medicine for gout. 19. RLE’s letter is dated September 4, 1804. There is no consensus as to whether RLE was too controlling an influence on ME and her writing. Scholarship has portrayed ME in two different lights. On the one hand she is a mouthpiece for patriarchy; on the other, she exhibits independence of mind and expresses feminist points of view. As my concern here is not with ME’s works, but with her position as negotiator in the literary marketplace, I do not ground assumptions in the characters of a novel. My reading here, admittedly open to interpretation, attempts to glean nuances from the correspondence and its context, which dictates some imposition of meaning based on what is not said. Some critics who argue for ME’s independence do not necessarily argue for RLE’s benevolence. ME becomes an independent voice, in other words, in spite of her father. Others indeed exonerate RLE of any heavy-handedness, seeing instead a helpful, loving presence. Skillfully addressing the various sides in the debate is Caroline Gonda in Reading Daughters’ Fictions, 1790–1834: Novels and Society from Manley to Edgeworth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). I quote from Gonda’s chapter on Edgeworth to provide some balance: “I have been suggesting in this chapter that Maria Edgeworth’s uncritical, unconditional, and unquestioning love for her father, her state of perpetual daughterhood, is a myth: a myth with elements of truth in it, and one which Edgeworth herself did much to perpetuate in writing about her own life and her father’s, about their relationship and literary partnership . . . The myth of Maria as her father’s mouthpiece, puppet, dummy, creature, or as the dupe of utilitarianism or patriarchal values has been a way of denying her agency, power and responsibility, a kind of infantilization” (237). Cf. also Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Mitzi Myers, “My Art Belongs to Daddy? Thomas Day, Maria Edgeworth, and the Pre-Texts of Belinda: Women Writers and Patriarchal Authority.” Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century “Women’s Fiction” and Social Engagement. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2000), 104–46; and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford UP, 1991). 20. Cf. also 399–406. 21. ME’s letter is dated September 23, 1804. 22. HCR provides some insight regarding RLE’s character: “June 13th [1813] . . . The Edgeworths have not returned Mrs. Barbauld’s call, and I heard other anecdotes confirming my unfavourable impression concerning the father . . . June 19th . . . Mr. and Miss Edgeworth did, just before they left town, call for a quarter of an hour on Mrs. Barbauld, Mr. Edgeworth saying, on entering the room: ‘Madam, you are indebted to me for this lady’s company’ . . . July 4th . . . Edgeworth and the ladies called on the Godwins, and he behaved with a rudeness which would have been amusing had they been people to whom inattentions were matters of ridicule. He frightened the girls by queer half-jocular speeches, and Mrs. Godwin says Miss Edgeworth was in tears when they went away, and she supposes from vexation.” Henry Crabb Robinson On Books and their Writers. 3 vols. Ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1.128–9. 23. This final letter is dated January 28, 1805.

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191

24. London: Joseph Johnson, 1791. 25. According to Wordsworth, as dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843, “In the spring of the year 1798 [actually fall, 1797], [Coleridge], my Sister, and myself, started from Alfoxden, pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit London and the valley of Stones near it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expenses of the tour by writing a Poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine set up by Phillips the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aikin” (qtd in McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, 66–67). 26. “As this letter of John’s attests, he garnered support for the Monthly Magazine by occasionally [using] my influence among my friends to favor the work by sending gratuitously for insertion any matter fit for the purpose which they might have by them & meant for no other use. Upon this footing Mrs. Barbauld has enriched the miscellany with several contributions which I believe have been of much advantage to its reputation” (qtd in Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle, 221; dated March 20, 1799, Stoke Newington). 27. Donald Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), part A, vol. 1, p. 12. 28. And in all cases, it should be noted, he worked within dissenting circles only. For John and Anna’s contributions to Enfield’s Speaker and his Hymns for Public Worship, see chapter one. For an account of John Aikin’s editorial support of John Howard’s State of the Prisons in England and Wales (Warrington: William Eyres, 1777) and subsequent editions, see John Aikin, A View of the Life, Travels, and Philanthropic Labours of the late John Howard, Esq. (London: Joseph Johnson, 1789). 29. Arthur Aikin and Charles Rochemont. A Dictionary of Chemistry and Mineralogy, with an Account of the Processes employed in many of the most important Chemical Manufactures (London: J. & A. Arch and W. Phillips, 1807). 30. Anna Laetitia Wingate Jennings was born in 1687; Anna Letitia Le Breton, great niece of Anna Barbauld, published her Memoir in 1874. 31. Ann and Jane Taylor, whose collaborative career ran from 1804 until 1812, first cooperated on Original Poems for Infant Minds, which appeared in 1804; Rhymes for the Nursery and Original Hymns for Infant Minds followed in 1806 and 1808, respectively. In all, Ann and Jane produced fourteen different publications for children. Over 100 editions of Original Poems and Original Hymns appeared in America and England, and, like the Aikins’ Evenings at Home, these works remained in print until the early twentieth century. Works on the Taylors of Ongar include: D.M. Armitage, The Taylors of Ongar: Portrait of an English Family in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939); G.E. Harris, Contributions Towards a Bibliography of the Taylors of Ongar and Stanford Rivers (London: Crosby Lockwood, 1965); and C. Stewart, The Taylors of Ongar: An Analytical BioBibliography, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1975). 32. As we shall see, Jane did not simply acquiesce to the conservative pressure but wrote against it through satire. 33. At the end of Oedipus at Colonus, when Theseus tells Antigone and Ismene they cannot visit the grave of their father, Antigone remonstrates: “Why not? Majesty, king of Athens!” “Your father forbade it,” explains Theseus, “He commanded me / that no one may go near that place” (ll. 1979–981). Her challenge quelled, Antigone acquiesces: “So be it. If this is father’s will, / we will be content—we must” (ll. 1989–990). Upon arrival in Thebes, however,

192

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Notes Antigone is no longer subject to her father’s will, and she very quickly poses a threat to the social order in her confrontation with human law and its representative, Creon. Oedipus at Colonus in Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1984). Barry, Jane Taylor, xiii. The Family Pen (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1867). Perfectly applicable in this context is Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s observation concerning Maria Edgeworth that she “solved the problem of what we have been calling ‘the anxiety of female authorship’ by writing as if she were her father’s pen.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. Second edn (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 151. Gilbert and Gubar’s point is also noted in Elizabeth Kowalski-Wallace’s Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 22. Qtd in Barry, Jane Taylor, 175. See Stuart Curran, “Jane Taylor’s Satire on Satire.” The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period. Ed. Steven E. Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 139–50. Sentimental Collaborations (62); see the discussion of Barbauld’s “Epistle to Dr. Enfield, on his Revisiting Warrington in 1789” in chapter one. Here and in the subsequent discussion of Josiah and Elizabeth Conder’s later writing, I am distinguishing this particular mode of collaborative mourning from Kete’s in that this poetry, while certainly “attracting the collaboration of the reader in the operation of mourning” (72), facilitates the reconstitution of subjectivity and the “restoration of constitutive bonds” (62) primarily through the collaborative work of shared authorship. Of the fifty-two poems, just eighteen are by Conder. Jane and Ann Taylor account for nineteen, and Elizabeth Thomas ten. Susan Conder wrote three and the fathers contributed one each. That the bulk of the volume represents women writers is not acknowledged by Reiman. Josiah Conder, The Associate Minstrels and The Star in the East. Ed. Donald H. Reiman (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), ll. 88, 268. Sentimental Collaborations. Appendix 2, p. 214. Modified from first line of P.B. Shelley’s “Adonais.” The poem is titled “Competition.” CL (1.132) OED. 4a. It might be objected that I have substituted “intimate partnership” for “affection” here; however, Coleridge at this point in his correspondence (December 9, 1794) was attempting to make Southey feel guilty over the engagement. Coleridge was expressing his own displeasure, and by December 29 was complaining to Southey that he did not love Sara Fricker. Earlier correspondence, to be sure, belies that stance, but Coleridge was a verbal manipulator and by using “affection” was adopting a juridical posture, already distancing himself from the very term “love,” so as to better state his case later on. As will become clear, the concept in question, call it affection or love, was an ideal literary familial scene in which intellectual and sexual compatibility coexist in mutual harmony. J. Robert Barth, Coleridge and the Power of Love (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri Press, 1988), 15–16, 21. Barth cites from Marginalia. Ed. George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 1:751.

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49. See note 12. 50. NRSV. 51. Alison Hickey, “Coleridge, Southey, ‘and Co.’: Collaboration and Authority.” Studies in Romanticism 37 (1998): 305–49. 52. I allude not only to unfinished fragments toward (in theory) the Opus Maximus but also to the organization of the Biographia and to his famously meandering lectures, about one of which Crabb Robinson commented, “his disquisitions . . . were full of paradox” (Diary 1.191). 53. S.T. Coleridge and Charles Lloyd. Poems. 1797 (Poole: Woodstock Books, 1997), 88. Coleridge goes on to say that despite “occasionally harsh” versification and diction “too frequently obscure,” he deems Wordsworth “unrivalled among the writers of the present day” (88). 54. These lines appear in the “Letter to——” and were subsequently included with portions of that poem in a letter to Sotheby. In the pared down version of “Dejection” printed in The Morning Post on October 4, 1802, these lines were omitted. They return again in the 1817 Sibylline Leaves. 55. Originally published as “Effusion XXXV” in the 1796 Poems, in which there is one unobtrusive reference on page 99 directing the reader to “note 10” in the volume’s endnotes. Cited here from The Complete Poems. Ed. William Keach (New York: Penguin, 1997). 56. Inexplicably, Hickey errs by mistaking the etymology of affiliation, a term prefixed so as in no way to be confused with a shared origin: “Referring to Southey’s mother as ‘our Mother,’ he exclaims, ‘am I not affiliated?’ Reaching back to the etymological roots of ‘affiliation,’ he grasps at a more remote origin for his bond with Southey—an affiliation at the roots, not just ‘in law.’ Like Southey, Coleridge sees the male bond as mediated by the female body, but whereas Southey emphasizes male possession of the woman as a prerequisite to fraternity ‘in law,’ Coleridge wishes to legitimate the fraternity by imagining the mother paradoxically as a genetic source ex post facto” (“Coleridge, Southey, ‘and Co.,’ ” 313). 57. The letter quoted is dated August 22, 1794; the newspaper reports from which Coleridge and Southey extracted material for the play appeared on August 16 and 18, 1794. Ashton echoes the consensus that “Coleridge and Southey did little more than transpose these reports into enthusiastic blank verse” (51). 58. Hickey’s superb article explores critical reception and parody of the “new school” of poetry in journals such as the Anti-Jacobin. However, at this point the article draws a questionable distinction between Southey’s and Coleridge’s views of marriage as it pertains to the scheme. 59. Newlyn cites Tim Fulford, Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 2. In such symbiosis, Newlyn goes on to argue, inheres the dangerous (for Coleridge) potential of collapsing the gap between reader and author, the fear of which Coleridge famously distilled into invective against “the multitudinous public, . . . [which] sits nominal despot on the throne of criticism” (BL 34). Most troubling for Coleridge is the anonymity of that public, and it is therefore anonymous criticism that Coleridge routinely decries in his writings. 60. Coleridge’s short-lived, debt-induced stint in the Army as Silas Tomkyn Comberbache is not to be confused with a legitimate choice of profession. 61. A government spy was sent to check out activity at Alfoxden in the fall of 1797. See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1989), 127–128.

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62. After the suspension of Habeas Corpus, twelve men, including Thomas Hardy of the LCS, John Horne Tooke, Thomas Holcroft, and John Thelwall, a friend of Coleridge (and later of Wordsworth), were arrested on charges of high treason. “The court eventually found there was no case to answer, the defendants not having plotted the overthrow or death of George III, and the accused were released in November and December 1794.” Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53. 63. The Plot Discovered; or An Address to the People, Against Ministerial Treason. (Bristol, 1795) in Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion. Ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970), 289. 64. Thomas Cooper, Some Information Respecting America (London: Joseph Johnson, 1794); J.-P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America. Trans. Joel Barlow (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792); Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of North America (London: J. Debrett, 1792). For background on the travel literature and other accounts of America with which Southey and Coleridge became familiar, see Sister Eugenia. “Coleridge’s Scheme of Pantisocracy and American Travel Accounts.” PMLA 45 (1930): 1069–84; and J.R. MacGillivray, “The Pantisocratic Scheme and its Immediate Background.” Studies in English by Members of University College Toronto (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1931). Cf. Stuart Andrews, “Fellow Pantisocrats: Brissot, Cooper, and Imlay.” Symbiosis: A Journal of AngloAmerican Relations 1 (1997): 35–47. 65. Coleridge wed Sara on October 4, 1795; Southey and Edith followed on November 14. Occasional talk of some form of Pantisocracy lingered in Coleridge’s circles until 1801, when he expressed interest in including William and Dorothy Wordsworth; the new location for the ethereal minirepublic was to be St. Nevis in the West Indies. See Sister Eugenia (1083). 66. Cf. Daniel Malachuk, “Labor, Leisure, and the Yeoman in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s 1790s Writings.” Romantic Labor/Romantic Leisure. Romanticism on the Net. Issue 27, August 2002. 67. The linking of which represented a restoration of sorts. As Curran notes in Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford UP 1986), “the relationship between pastoral and georgic, as between shepherd and farmer, is intimately linked: Virgil subtly acknowledges the fact by repeating the first line of the Eclogues as the last line of the Georgics” (86). 68. Georgics (Loeb). Virgil’s phrase, “stabulo frenos audire sonantis” (3.184), employs the uncommon form sonans, which is specifically used to designate a noisy or harsh sound (Lewis and Short). As such, the translation of “sonantis” into “jangle” (used by L.P. Wilkinson in the Penguin edition, 1982), which also refers to the sound’s effect on the nerves, is more fitting than Fairclough’s use of “jingle” in the Loeb translation. The latter, like Coleridge’s “tinkling,” refers to a softer, more musical sound, and is thus more appropriate to a Pantisocratic poem than to Book III. I have amalgamated the translations here. 69. 3.95–98, Loeb translation; “To a Young Ass,” The Complete Works (66). Poetry quotations are from this edition unless otherwise noted. The ass becomes a symbol of Christianity in Matthew 21:5: “Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy king commeth unto thee, meeke, and sitting upon an Asse, and a colt, the foale of an Asse” (KJV, 1611 rpt). Cf. also the story of

Notes

70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

195

Baalam’s ass in Numbers 22 in relation to the “bray of joy” ejaculated by Coleridge’s ass. Lovell, who married another Fricker sister, Mary, collaborated with Southey on Poems: Containing The Retrospect, Odes, Elegies, Sonnets, etc. (Bath. R. Cruttwell, 1795). The poets signed their respective poems “Bion” (Southey) and “Moschus” (Lovell). Cited by both Sister Eugenia and MacGillivray, “The Pantisocratic Scheme,” 1072; 143. The paragraph in question is blotted by ink stains (indicated by brackets) but appears nevertheless to be an application of his earlier calculations to the group’s population: “Horace would that state of society be happy where [. . . labour . . .] two hours a day at some useful employment, where all were equally [. . .] where the common ground was cultivated by common toil, and its produce laid in common granaries, where none were rich because none should be poor, where every motive for vice should be annihilated and every motive for virtue strengthened?” (NL 70). Cf. Nicholas Roe’s “Pantisocracy and the Myth of the Poet,” which discusses the plan’s efficacy and the desire for a writing community. Romanticism and Millenarianism. Ed. Tim Fulford (London: Palgrave, 2002), 87–102. The discussion of cultus and skhole derives from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru (New York: New American Library, 1952). Coleridge refers to Mrs. Fricker and Mrs. Southey. Feelings of disappointment respecting his own mother may well have influenced Coleridge’s remarks. See chapter one and the discussion of the bouts rimés convention (note 27). Also cited by Hickey, “Coleridge, Southey, ‘and Co.,’ ” 319–20. Southey’s charges of Coleridge’s indolence were rejoined with the famous accusations of economic individualism concerning personal property. See Ashton (chapter two) and especially Taussig (chapter three). For Taussig, the collapse of Pantisocracy resulted from an impasse between Godwinian rationalism and Humean sympathy: Whereas sympathy should facilitate the acceptance, indeed the embracing of, personal (including moral) shortcomings, rationalism dictates not only pointing out such shortcomings but also rejecting them. The epitome of the former sentiment lies in Christianity, which, as I see it, is why Coleridge eventually returned home to the Church. It was the only family that would accept him with all his blemishes. Also known as the Logosophia, for an account of the “Opus Maximum” scheme, see Fruman, Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, chapter 13. Inquiring Spirit; A New Presentation of Coleridge from his Published and Unpublished Prose Writings. Ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Pantheon, 1951), 68. Cf. McFarland’s discussion of Kant in the introduction to Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, “Fragmented Modalities and the Criteria of Romanticism.” As noted earlier, McFarland sees this quotation as evidence of Coleridge fulfilling a “feminine principle to [Wordsworth’s] masculine counterpart” in their relationship. Coleridge was of course aware of Kant’s first two Critiques at this time, probably having first read them in Germany (1798–1799). See Biographia Literaria chapter nine. But this is not to suggest that Coleridge was consciously responding, though the possibility surely exists. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1990), 138.

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Notes

83. I quote here from the version published in The Morning Post on October 4, 1802. (CD 48–62). 84. One notable exception is R.A. Benthall’s “New Moons, Old Ballads, and Prophetic Dialogues in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode.’ ” Studies in Romanticism 37 (Winter 1998): 591–614. Benthall attends more to the scientific causes and actual occurrences of this phenomenon, tracking the possible sightings by the Wordsworth circle through Dorothy’s Journals. 85. Benthall offers excellent insight on these lines by reading them in view of Dorothy’s description of the same phenomenon on March 8, 1802, in the Journals: “Both passages seem to describe not merely a new crescent moon with the old moon still visible, which is rare enough. Dorothy’s description is ambiguous, and may suggest two crescents, ‘like a gold ring snapped in two and shaven off at the ends,’ which enclose the old moon in lunulae, or ‘little moons,’ the name Erasmus used for ‘parentheses.’ . . . Coleridge has not only described this appearance, but illustrated it as well, enclosing the ‘swimming phantom light’ of the old moon in graphic lunulae” (603). 86. The war with France was temporarily halted at the time of the poem, the Peace of Amiens lasting from March 1802 until May 1803. 87. Line 13 in both versions. Benthall notes the “feminine personification” but does not mention the image of Mary’s lap in “A Letter to——” (600). 88. William and Dorothy were an early audience for “A Letter to——” (See CD 11–13). 89. “A Letter to——” (134); “Dejection: An Ode” (61). The verse letter’s version of the second line reads, “strange music in the Soul,” the use of “strange” suggesting an unfamiliarity, indeed an alienation that disappears in the published version. 90. Cf. “Tintern Abbey”: “Nor, perchance, / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay” (ll. 112–14). 91. “The Eolian Harp” (l. 20). Coleridge composed the poem in Clevedon, Somersetshire, at the site of the couple’s first cottage home. 92. Although “Edmund” refers to Wordsworth unambiguously at line 114, the name can be seen as an “amalgamation of William Wordsworth and Coleridge” (Matlak, The Poetry of Relationship, 85). Support is given this idea by the title of Charles Lloyd’s novel Edmund Oliver (1798), written in response to Coleridge’s attachment to the Wordsworth circle, which was seen as an abandonment of Lamb and Lloyd. Matlak suggests that the novel “constituted an attack on the relationship” between Wordsworth and Coleridge. 93. Gill, William Wordsworth, 289. Gill himself is paraphrasing, but these are the words that Wordsworth himself did not deny saying. Of the supposed insults, this one, understandably, stung Coleridge the most, for these were the words (“no hopes of him”) Coleridge virtually insisted that Wordsworth retract. HCR was the go-between in May of 1812, during which the two men exchanged letters of reconciliation. See HCR’s account of the affair in On Books and Their Writers. Ed. Edith J. Morley. 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1938), 1.74 ff. 94. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: Knopf, 1992). 95. On Books (see note 94). 96. And those who knew Coleridge also knew of his penchant for plagiarism, which Fruman fully investigates in this context. Wordsworth himself told Crabb Robinson after Coleridge’s death that “on many occasions he had begged Coleridge to make proper acknowledgments, to no avail” (Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel, 276).

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197

97. The irony here is even deeper because as early as 1802 Coleridge was beginning to express disagreement specifically about poetic diction. See Stephen Maxfield Parrish, “The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy.” PMLA 73 (1958): 367–74.

5

Generations: Conflict, Continuity, and the G ENIUS FA MILI A E

1. Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 156. 2. Donald H. Reiman, ed., The Romantics Reviewed (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), Part A. vol. 1, p. 12. 3. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Ed. John Wood Warter. 4 Vols (1856 (London). New York: AMS Press, 1977), 2.17. 4. Aikin in 1773; Southey in 1774. 5. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 4 Vols (New York: The Bollingen Foundation and Princeton UP, 1961–1990), 2.2303. Hereafter cited as CN with volume and entry number 6. From Reiman’s synopsis of the very review Southey was upset about, the Annual Review’s article on Poems, in Two Volumes. Cited in The Romantics Reviewed (New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), Part A. vol. 1, p. 13. 7. Annual Review I (1803), 688–92. See Coleridge’s Notebooks (Vol. 3 4035 n.). See also New Letters of Robert Southey. Ed. Kenneth Curry (New York: Columbia UP, 1965), vol. 1, 327–28, and Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (third edition) 1872. Ed. Thomas Sadler (New York: AMS Press, 1967), Vol. 1, 197. 8. Lucy Newlyn, “Coleridge and the Anxiety of Reception.” Romanticism 1.2 (1995): 207. Paul M. Zall argues that writers such as Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer were largely responsible for creating not only the taste by which Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads could be appreciated but also the mass reading audience for such literary work. Their reform efforts in educating the poor, combined with works such as Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts, it turns out, helped create Coleridge’s rival, the despotic “multitudinous PUBLIC.” P.M. Zall, “The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Mrs. Barbauld’s Crew & the Building of a Mass Reading Class.” Wordsworth Circle 2 (1971): 74–79. 9. As Gerald Malsbary explains, “the spirit of the agon, or ‘contest,’ ” inherent to the Greeks’ conception of pietas, was not individualized but rather communal: “Simply put, each athlete was not competing for himself, but for his family and city-state. The group was already involved.” “Pietas and the Origins of Western Culture.” Logos 4.2 (2001): 93–116. p. 97. Cf. Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Second edn (New York: Oxford, 1997). To isolate and pit one “strong poet” against another is to misread—perhaps intentionally—the spirit of the agon as explained by Malsbary: “Pindar’s incessant warnings against pthonos or envy indicate the public dimension of competition for the Greeks: when someone achieves, the achievement radiates outward to the entire group, and is not meant as the exclusive enjoyment of an individual in isolation. The ideal was not absolute competitiveness, but public-spirited or friendly competition for the sake of excellence itself, understood as a gift of the gods” (102). It should also be noted that “the spirit of the agon or ‘contest’ ” embraces more than athletic competition, providing “a key to understanding the common spirit of

198

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes the various specialized achievements of the Greeks in mathematics, science, art, literature, morals and metaphysics. Here, more than anywhere else, can ancient Greek pietas be experienced” (Malsbary, “Pietas and the Origins of Western Culture,” 97). I allude to Thomas McFarland’s discussion of the “significant group” (Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, chapter three. See especially 148–52). Cf. Stuart Curran, “Romantic Poetry: The I Altered.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 185–207. Southey wrote his dramatic poem Wat Tyler in 1794. It was anonymously republished in 1817, but the secret of its authorship was soon exposed and widely disseminated. For an account of the episode, see Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), 253–60. Coleridge’s noteworthy pamphlets are The Plot Discovered and Conciones ad Populum. See Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 266–68, for the episode with Hunt’s Examiner (November 25, 1810). Coleridge was nearly imprisoned for sounding off at William Frend’s trial for publishing Peace and Union in 1793. See Jonathan Wordsworth’s introduction to Peace and Union (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991). Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), ll. 9, 101–106. Barbauld’s poem first appears in the 1773 Poems, but McCarthy and Kraft’s estimate puts the author at nineteen when she wrote it ten years earlier, making her slightly younger than the twenty-year-old Coleridge when he wrote “Song of the Pixies” in 1793 (published in 1796). Qtd in CP, line 54. See chapter one, part one. For a discussion of the term swerve (clinamen) in the context of poetic influence, see chapter one of Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. The diminutive as beautiful accords with Burke’s Enquiry in particular. Cf. also Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in EighteenthCentury Britain: The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). It is left without annotation by Keach, and I have found no other source suggesting the debt to Barbauld. Wordsworth to Biggs and Cottle (October 6 or 7, 1800). Letters 1.305. I refer here to Geoffrey Hartman’s “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci” from Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970), 311–36. The account of Coleridge’s walk to meet ALB is found in CL 1.341 (n. 1). The two met at the home of John Prior Estlin, a dissenting minister and mutual friend, in August of 1797, and the meeting occasioned Barbauld’s “To Mr. S.T. Coleridge, 1797” (Works 1.209–10). The poem’s earliest manuscript dates from September, and it remained in private circulation until April 1799, when it was published as “To Mr. C—ge” in the Monthly Magazine (PALB 296 n.). See CL 1.201 and CL 6.1013, respectively. Estlin is John P. Estlin. Of the Joan of Arc reviews Kenneth Curry writes, “Joan of Arc established Southey’s reputation as a writer and opened to him the doors of literary employment. Three favorable reviews were: Analytical Review, XXIII (1796), 170–177; Monthly Review, Second Series, XIX (1796), 361–68; Critical Review, Second Series, XVII (1796), 182–92” (NL 1.108 n.). Marilyn Butler discusses the power of the literary review from the

Notes

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

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standpoint of its ability to shape the readerships’ taste and thereby generate cultural capital: “Just as all modern advertising stimulates the public’s appetite both to acquire things and to win the prestige that comes from acquiring the right things, so the journal works most effectively at a level on which the interests of the booksellers are not visibly involved.” Coleridge’s letter provides just a glimpse of the invisible machinations that indeed involve the interests of the bookseller and betrays his implicit expectation that readers would purchase books based on reviews. Marilyn Butler, “Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review.” The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 120–47 (123). McCarthy and Kraft. Introduction to SPP (29). Of Wynnstay near Wrexham Denbigshire. As for the rationale behind publishing the poem in April of 1799, two other possibilities can be derived from different contexts. First, Coleridge had visited Barbauld before leaving for Germany and may well have discussed his aspirations for further philosophical inquiry while abroad. Because the poem appeared while he was away, it could serve as a reminder to his readers (and countrymen in general) that they were potentially losing a promising poet to German metaphysics. Rhetorically, the poem’s appearance beckons the poet home. The second possibility can be seen as a more sober plea for Coleridge’s return home, for his son Berkeley had died in February, but Coleridge had not come home for the funeral. Against this backdrop, the poem’s final line—“Now Heaven conduct thee with a Parent’s love”—assumes new significance. In her shrewd critique of contemporary anthologies, whose editors run the risk of subordinating Barbauld to the more recognizable Coleridge when they choose to include this poem, Vargo rightly asserts that the choice ultimately “undervalues” Barbauld: “To select as important a poem written in tribute to Coleridge constructs Barbauld in a role that undermines her own authority” (63). I couldn’t agree more, but I contend that the authority in question is that of the critic, the one epithet Vargo does not apply to Barbauld in this instance. The entry appears in July–November of 1820. Kathleen Coburn’s note explains the “Lord Mayor’s Show”: “From 1298 onward, a procession on Lord Mayor’s Day, Nov. 9, in which the Lord Mayor of London with the aldermen and other dignitaries paraded to and from Westminster to receive the assent of the Crown to his election. Coleridge was objecting to the theatrical extravagance that accompanied it, making it a travesty on the serious responsibility of public men in government.” Given that Barbauld’s images are essentially paraphrases of scripture, the complaint is an odd one, to say the least. Coleridge’s transcription of Hymn XIV is almost letter perfect. The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb. Ed. Edwin Marrs, Jr. 3 Vols (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975–1978), 1.60–1. Cited in Paul Magnuson, “The ‘Conversation’ Poems.” The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Ed. Lucy Newlyn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 32–44 (33–34). The closing lines of “Washing-Day” use the image of the world’s first hot air balloon, flown by Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, to level the differences between the sublime and the beautiful, between toil and play: Sometimes thro’ hollow bole Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

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Notes The floating bubbles, little dreaming then To see, Mongolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant thro’ the clouds—so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them—this most of all. (“Washing-Day,” ll. 79–86)

32. Crabb Robinson received confirmation that no one in the Aikin family was responsible during an evening in 1812. “A call on the Aikins,” he writes. “The whole family full of the praises of Charles Lamb. The Doctor termed him a brilliant writer. The union of so much eloquence with so much wit shows great powers of mind. Miss Aikin was not less warm in her praise. She asked why he did not write more. I mentioned, as one cause, the bad character given him by the reviewers. I then spoke of the Annual Review (Arthur Aikin, the editor, was present) as having hurt him much by the notice of ‘John Woodvil.’ She exclaimed, ‘Oh! that Tommy [not identified]; that such a fellow should criticise such a man as Lamb!’ I then mentioned that some persons had attributed the article to Mrs. Barbauld. I was impressed with the sincerity and liberality of the Aikins, in acknowledging a merit so unlike their own. They evinced a universality of taste which I had not supposed them to possess” (Diary 1.197). 33. Annual Review 1 (1802): 688–92 (p. 691). The date should not be misleading. The year 1802 represents the year in which all the reviewed works were published; the review itself was not available until well into the following year. In this case, the correspondence between Coleridge and Southey suggests late 1803. The Annual’s layout—nearly one thousand double-column pages—and its ambition to review the entire year’s prominent publications may offer some hint as to why its arrival grew increasingly tardy. 34. CN 2.1848. Coleridge’s transcription begins with “A school of poetry” in the excerpt cited earlier. He quotes in full the remainder of the article, filling nearly a page of Coburn’s Notebooks. 35. Thomas Robert Malthus was a student of the Warrington Academy and friend of the Aikin circle. He is best known for An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he argued that food supplies increase along a arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), whereas population increases along a geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.), leading to what he imagined would be crises of overpopulation and starvation. 36. The allusion to Clausewitz is only slightly anachronistic, as he was building the philosophical foundations for his posthumously published masterpiece, Vom Kriege (1832), during the very period under consideration. The work was not translated into English until 1873. 37. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. Ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey. 6 Vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), 2.275. Interestingly, the second edition of this work, which appeared the next year, omits the second sentence here quoted and adds the following editorial note: “This was written under the impression that Mrs. Barbauld was the author of a very unjust and much censured article in the Annual Review upon Lamb’s John Woodville. Since the first edition of this work was published, I have been informed by a friend who was intimate with all parties, that the review in question was not written by Mrs. Barbauld or any member of the Aikin family” (2.275–6).

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38. I believe sufficient evidence exists to support that Southey, not Croker, authored the infamous review of Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a position I intend to advance elsewhere. 39. See McCarthy and Kraft: Introduction to SPP (p. 30). 40. The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb. Ed. E.V. Lucas (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, LTD. New York: AMS Press, 1968). Lamb was complaining of “Mrs. B’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s [educational] nonsense”: “Damn them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and Child” (1.326). 41. Perhaps one of the fairest reviews of Poems, in Two Volumes, however, came from Barbauld, who analyzed the work according to the principles outlined in the Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. Although she finds fault with Wordsworth’s definition of a poet because “one who really deserves the name of a poet, must certainly add another faculty which is not even hinted at in this definition—we scarcely know how to name it, but it is that kind of fancy, akin to wit, which ‘glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,’ pervading as it were, the whole world of nature and of art, snatches from each its beauteous images combines, adapts, arranges them by a magic of its own, peoples with them its new creations, and at length pours forth in one striking brilliant, yet harmonious whole” [Annual Review VI (1808): 521–29; cited in The Romantics Reviewed Part. A. vol. 1, p. 15]. There are complaints of language that is “prosaic” and “intolerably prolix”; yet there are moments of generous praise, including this, which certainly must be one of the most gracious to have been offered: “But when he takes for his theme the youthful feelings connected with the sight of a butterfly, and the song of the cuckoo, he has struck a right key, and will wake an answering note in the bosoms of all who have mimicked the bird or chased the insect. There is an exquisiteness of feeling in some of these little poems that disarms criticism” (ibid., 20). 42. The line in question is “In what brown hamlet dost thou joy” (l. 38). See McCarthy and Kraft’s note in PALB (p. 264). “He offended me by an unhandsome and unmanly attack upon Mrs. Barbauld” (On Books and Their Writers, 1.62). 43. Qtd in Henry Crabb Robinson, On Books and Their Writers, 3 vols. Ed. Edith J. Morley (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1938), 1.62. 44. Of particular note, HCR and Wordsworth spent an evening at Charles Aikin’s with ALB, JA and family, Jane Porter, James Montgomery, and William Roscoe’s son on May 13, 1812. (Diary 1.200). See discussion later. 45. Introduction to Mary/Maria: Mary Wolstonecraft. Mathilda: Mary Shelley. Ed. Janet Todd (New York: NYU Press, 1992), xv. 46. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 96–101. 47. To put the title of Howard Weinbrot’s Britannia’s Issue in familial terms. Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). 48. Discussed in “Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci.” When the spirit of the place lured the poet, this meant “a meditation on English landscape as alma mater—where landscape is storied England, its legends, history, and ruralreflective spirit” (319). 49. In choosing between gens and familia, I opted for the latter’s stronger resonance during the period in question with the rise of the household family. And because domesticity is so important to considerations of this and other literary families of the period, the latter choice, though connoting domestic

202

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

62.

Notes slaves in ancient Rome, is, I think, more appropriate than a reference to bloodlines, which bears associations with royalty. Godwin wasted no time in adopting Fanny Imlay, and it is that kind of incorporation that familia accommodates. So far, in fact, that he had believed Godwin dead when he learned otherwise, probably from Robert Southey. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 Vols. Ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964), 1.220 n. 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically as PBSL. George Watson, “The Reckless Disciple: Godwin’s Shelley.” Hudson Review 39.2 (1986): 212–30 (214). Letter to Grosvenor Bedford, January 4, 1812. Cited in PBSL (1.219 n.). The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 Vols. Ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964), 1.219. Introduction to Godwin’s Memoirs (22). Cf. Lawrence Lipking, “Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques.” Frankenstein. 1818. Ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: Norton, 1996), 313–31. It seems to me that, among other things, Frankenstein’s abandonment of the creature results in a Rousseauean educational experiment whose outcome can be nothing but bad, given the human prejudices awaiting him. As with Alphonse Frankenstein’s failure to explain his “prejudices” against the outdated scientists, Victor fails by not imparting a Barbauldian sense of “prejudice” in the form of practical knowledge. Cf. Godwin’s “On Suicide.” Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 3 Vols. Ed. F.E.L. Priestley (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1946), 1.138–140. Also reprinted in the Broadview edition of Memoirs. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres: or, A Proposal for Erecting some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in all Ages on the Spot where their Remains have been Interred (London: W. Miller, 1809), 18. Nicola Trott, “Loves of the Triangle: William, Mary, and Percy Bysshe.” Wordsworth Circle 31.1 (2000): 2–13. C. Kerényi, “Man and Mask.” Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks. Ed. Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960), 151–67 (155). William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family (Baltimore, JHU Press, 1989), 549 n. 2. The inscribed text is in the Carl Pforzheimer Collection in the New York Public Library. The sixteen-yearold Mary proclaimed her love for P.B. Shelley at St. Pancras Churchyard on June 26, 1814 (ibid., 358). Consider this passage from the outset of the essay, which addresses the loss of a hypothetical friend: “I cannot love my friend without loving his person. It is in this way that every thing which practically has been associated with my friend, acquires a value from that consideration; his ring, his watch, his books, and his habitation. The value of these as having been his, is not merely fictitious; they have an empire over my mind; they can make me happy or unhappy; they can torture, and they can tranquillise; they can purify my sentiments, and make me similar to the man I love; they possess the virtue which the Indian is said to attribute to the spoils of him he kills, and inspire me with the powers, the feelings, and the heart of their preceding master” (6–8). This cannot have been written without some consciousness of his own disposition in contrast to that of, e.g., Coleridge. See the concluding pages to

Notes

63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

203

Hazlitt’s chapter on Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), 55–59. See Memoirs (61). Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. 1796. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. 7 Vols. Ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: NYU Press, 1989), Vol. 6, 243–348 (272). The letters were written to Gilbert Imlay; Wollstonecraft was in Scandinavia executing business on his behalf. Of Wollstonecraft’s Letters Godwin wrote, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001), 95. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. 10 Vols (New York: Gordian Press, 1965), vol. 1. p. 258. Hereafter cited parenthetically with Canto and line numbers. Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1975), 157. Pamela Clemit, “Shelley’s Godwin, 1812–1817.” Durham University Journal. 85.2 (1993): 189–201 (190). Mary Shelley quotes these lines from “Ode to the West Wind”: “His voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, / And tremble and despoil themselves” (ll. 40–41). Modified from “Thy voice,” the lines refer to the ocean’s vegetation, in sympathy with plant life ashore, reacting to the winds of the oncoming storm (275). Stuart Curran, “Valperga.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 103–15 (112). Anne K. Mellor, “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” Romanticism and Feminism. Ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), 220–32 (223). Recent feminist approaches to the novel have found important connections to motherhood and Mary Shelley’s own experiences with pregnancy. See Mary Poovey, “My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism.” PMLA 95 (1980), also treated in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 121–31. Tillotama Rajan, “Between Romance and History: Posibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley’s Valperga.” Mary Shelley in Her Times. Ed. Betty Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2000), 88–102. In a somewhat surprising observation, Rajan suggests that what many see as a reflection of Mary Wollstonecraft is an “androgynously Shelleyan Euthanasia” (89). Although the article suggests that Euthanasia is “the character most like P.B. Shelley” (89), Rajan also acknowledges the influence of Wollstonecraft on her character. Perhaps indicating another instance of Godwin’s footprint in Frankenstein, Plutarch’s Lives is one of the works read by the creature (along with Paradise Lost and The Sorrows of Young Werther). Cf. Shelley’s first letter to Godwin: “I had been accustomed to consider him [Godwin] a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him” (PBSL 1.220). Guido is “the painter Guido Reni (1575–1642); the portrait of Beatrice Cenci (which is in Guido’s style but is not by him, nor of her) was a major attraction for visitors to Rome” (Curran’s note, p. 170). Cf. P.B. Shelley’s The Cenci (1820), partly inspired by the painting.

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Notes

74. Cf. Rajan, who argues that Euthanasia represents unattainable possibility in a world governed by Castruccio’s necessity. 75. Even though her own rhetoric becomes at times filled with emotion. 76. Mary Shelley’s note to the poem identifies this figure as patterned after Dr. Lind, Shelley’s teacher at Eton (Complete Works 1.409); however, Godwin’s presence is also felt. 77. I developed this insight from a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Samet about Political Justice, property and the genius familiae. 78. The New Century Classical Handbook. Ed. Catherine B. Avery (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962), 813. Among the dead buried there are a number of artists, including Raphael, “who stands in general foremost of the first painters,” according to Reynolds (81), and whose School of Athens is germane to the contexts of Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchres and Reynolds’ discussion of light and shade, of which Mary Shelley seems fully aware in her depiction of this scene.

Epilogue 1. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1989), 79. 2. Definition taken from Addison (Spectator 60) as cited in the OED. For details on Hymns for Public Worship, see the editors’ note on page 254 of PALB. Dedication page cited from the third edition of Enfield’s Speaker (London: J. Johnson, 1779). 3. In 1783 teaching at the Warrington Academy was suspended; it was closed permanently in 1786. Its successor, the Manchester Academy, eventually became what is today Manchester College, Oxford. The standard works on the Warrington Academy are: Herbert McLachan, Warrington Academy: Its History and Influence (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1943); P. O’Brien, M.D. Warrington Academy 1757–1786: Its Predecessors and Successors (Wigan, Lancashire: Owl Books, 1989); and Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England: Their Rise and Progress and their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1914). 4. In her study of collaborative poetic mourning in nineteenth-century America, Mary Louise Kete contrasts traditional elegy and Freud’s conception of ego restoration in “Mourning and Melancholia” with the shared, communal experience of mourning that “is not interested in autonomy or liberation but in the restoration of constitutive bonds, which make subjectivity possible.” Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999), 62. 5. See McCarthy and Kraft’s note on the poem in PALB (283–84) 6. The Genius of the Thames: A Lyrical Poem in Two Parts (London: T. Hookham, Jr., 1810), 63.

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I n de x

Abrams, M. H., 38, 176nn13,14, 180n12 Act of Conformity, 106 addiction as castle-building, 127 and Coleridge, 127 agon, 96, 136–7, 140 intergenerational, 146 Aikin, Anna Letitia. See Barbauld, Anna Letitia Aikin, Arthur, xii, 8, 45, 66, 136 editor of Annual Review, 106, 135, 177n17, 200n32 in familial advertisement, 19 Southey calls “King Arthur”, 135 Aikin, Charles Rochemont, xii, 8, 35, 177nn17,18, 201n44 adopted by ALB, 40 ALB’s intended audience, 41–3 letter requesting adoption of, 29–30 Aikin, John, DD, 11, 55 education of children, 12 Aikin, John, MD authorial aspirations, 10 belittles Burke’s Reflections, 24 engravings of, 180n7 in family advertisements, 20–1, 28 and Joseph Johnson, 19 moves next door to ALB, 51 prompted to write by ALB, 15 review of Southey’s Joan of Arc, 141 and RLE’s incorporation scheme, 100

writes memoir of Dr. James Currie, 175n61 and Yarmouth community, 7, 169n6, 170nn13,15, 171n23, 172n42, 191n28 Address to the Dissidents on their Late Defeat, 5–10 Athenaeum, The (editor), 106 Calendar of Nature, 66 Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, 13, 65 Essays on Song-Writing, 15–16, 18–19 Evenings at Home, 47, 65; “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave”, 23, 47–51 Food for National Penitence, 21–4; signals alliance with ALB in, 21–2 Letters Written from a Father to His Son, 45 “Man of Pleasure”, 10–11 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (with ALB); anonymity in, 30; Charles James Fox’s response to, 30; “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”, 31–4; responsive collaboration in, 33–4; “Sir Bertrand, A Fragment”, 30–3 Monthly Magazine (editor), 100, 104 Poems (1791), 104 “To Mrs. Barbauld at Geneva”, 53–7, 88, 163–5 Vocal Poetry, 16, 19, 21

218

Index

Aikin, Lucy, xii, 7, 18, 25, 30, 41, 43, 101, 106, 159, 162–3, 170n15 Aikin, Martha, 8, 30, 40, 170n15 “Aikin school”, 41 Akenside, Mark, 19, 58, 64, 181n15, 183n35 Annual Review, 135–6, 145–6, 177n17, 197n6, 200nn32,37, 201n41 Antigone, 8, 93, 108, 191n33 Associate Minstrels, 98, 107, 109, 111–12, 124 Athenaeum, The, 45, 106, 178n28 Barbauld, Anna Letitia (née Aikin) abolitionist rhetoric, 22–3 adoption request to JA, 29–30 adopts JA’s son Charles, 40 breadth of audience, 28 and Burke’s Reflections, 24–5, 26 compared to Dorothy Wordsworth, 55 contributes to JA’s Essays on Song-Writing, 16 in familial advertisements, 19–21, 28 marriage, 56, 180n9 mistaken as reviewer of Lamb’s John Woodville, 145–6, 177n18, 199n28 moves next door to JA, 51 reviewer of Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes, 201n41 and RLE’s incorporation scheme, 99–107 teaches young women boarders, 46 and Wollstonecraft, xi, 167n7 An Address to the Opposers of the Corporation and Test Acts, 1–2, 6–8 British Novelists, The, 3 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 99, 102–3, 105 “Corsica”, 17, 34

Devotional Pieces, 35–40 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem, 34 “Epistle to Dr. Enfield”, 159–61 “Essay on Akenside’s Poem on the Pleasures of the Imagination”, 64–5 Evenings At Home (with JA), 15, 23, 28, 34, 43–5, 47–51, 65, 173n50 Hill of Science, a Vision, 142 Hymns in Prose, 25, 34, 38–41, 68, 122, 143 “Invitation to Miss B[elsham]”, 80, 88, 160 Lessons for Children, 40–3, 47; ALB coordinates printing with JA, 42 Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (with JA); anonymity in, 30; Charles James Fox’s response to, 30; “An Enquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensations”, 31–4; responsive collaboration in, 33–4 “Mouse’s Petition, The”, 34, 41–2 “On the Death of Mrs. Jennings”, 14 “On the Origin of Songwriting”, 60 “On Prejudice”, 43–5 Poems (1773), 10, 15–19, 41, 54 Poems (1792), 25, 28 “Prologue to the Man of Pleasure”, 10–11, 13, 16, 18 Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation, 10, 20–2, 25–8; signals alliance with JA’s Food for National Penitence, 21–2 “Thoughts on the Devotional Taste”, 35–40 “Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions”, 45–6

Index

219

“To Dr. Aikin, upon his Complaining that she neglected him”, 12, 17, 54 “To Mr. S. T. C[oleridge]”, 137, 141–2, 198n22 “To Wisdom”, 18–19 “Verses Written in an Alcove”, 88, 137–40, 144 “Washing-Day”, 144, 199n41 Barbauld, Rochemont, 2, 3, 40, 56–7 Barker-Benfield, G. J., 38 Barth, J. Robert, 114 Beaufoy, Henry, 4 Behn, Aphra, ix Bingham, Caleb Columbian Orator (editor), 23, 48–50 Bloom, Harold, 96, 137 Boswell, James, 17 bouts rimes, 159–61 Bowers, Toni, 170n15 Braithwaite, Helen, 7, 26, 170nn13,18, 175n58 Burke, Edmund, 4, 22–6, 34, 43–4, 173n52, 174nn53,54, 175nn57,59, 176nn4,9 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 6–7, 155 Burns, Robert, 46

and Pantisocracy, 119–25 relationship with ALB, 136, 141–4, 146 schematism, 125–9 “Songs of the Pixies”, 137–40 Coleridge, Sara (Fricker), 115, 126, 141 collaborative consciousness, xiv, 31, 33, 51, 53–5, 62, 64, 69–70, 74, 77, 88, 98, 137, 150, 156–7, 161 collaborative networks, ix Columbian Orator, 23, 47–51, 179n36 competition, 62, 82, 89, 95–6, 98–9, 103, 112–14, 124, 140, 182n23, 197n9 Conder, Josiah, 98, 107, 109, 111, 113 Conder, Susan, 109, 111 conjugal v. consanguineal families, xiii, 40, 114 conflicting duties between, 7–8 Cooper, Thomas, 119–20, 122 Cottle, Joseph, 75, 121, 126, 141, 143 Cromwell, Oliver, 24 Curran, Stuart, 61, 77, 85, 93, 138 Currie, Dr. James, 27, 175n61

Carlson, Julie A., xii, 150 castle-building, 61, 87–8, 126–7 Charles II, 3 Chatterton, Thomas, 120, 122 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 33 childhood, 53–61, 87–8 Clarendon Code, 4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xi, 39, 51, 62–4, 66–7, 74–9, 92–9, 104 Biographia Literaria, 147 Christabel, 63, 75–6, 79, 126, 132 “Dejection Ode”, 128–34 “Lines Written at Shurton Bars”, 115

Darbishire, Helen, 73 Darwin, Erasmus, 65 Davidoff, Leonora, 42, 96–7, 107, 177n20 Denman, Thomas, 47 De Selincourt, Ernest, 58 dissent, 2–8, 10–12, 14, 21, 23, 25, 31, 36, 38, 41, 43–5, 49, 54, 58, 68, 77, 106, 122, 136–7, 141–2, 144, 149 “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave”, 48–51 reprinted in The Columbian Orator, 23, 47 Dorsett, Catherine Anne, 65, 178n22

220

Index

Douglass, Frederick, 23, 47–51 ideal reader of “Dialogue Between a Master and Slave”, 49 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 47 Edgeworth, Maria, 99–105, 108, 124 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 98–100, 102, 104, 121 relationship with Maria, 190n19 scheme for a “Lady’s Paper”, 99 education, 3, 12, 28, 40–3, 46–50, 53–4, 58, 60–1, 65, 68, 118, 121–2, 127, 136, 148–50, 157 Ellis, Grace, 17 Ellison, Julie, 84, 88, 181n19 Enfield, William, 37, 57, 89, 106, 159–61 Eyres, William, 17, 42–3, 97, 159 family, familial conjugal, xii, 117 consanguineal, xii, 40 household model, x, 159 incorporation, xiii, xiv, 95, 97–8, 101–2, 105–7, 111, 113–15, 117–18, 122–3, 128, 141–2, 174 lineage model, 106–7 fancy, 32, 55, 57, 61, 84–5, 87–8, 101, 139, 181n19 Farrell, Michael, 174n55 Fay, Elizabeth, 96 Five Mile Act, 7 Foucault, Michel, 145 Fox, Charles James, 30, 83 French Revolution, 6, 24, 93 Fricker, Edith, 119, 149 Fricker, Sara, 95, 113–14, 117, 131 friendship coteries, ix Fruman, Norman, 96, 188n3 Gamer, Michael, 76 General Evening Post, 2

genius familiae, 148, 151, 156–7, 161, 204n77 genius loci, 140, 148, 157, 161 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan, 150, 192n35 Gill, Stephen, 196n93 Ginzburg, Carlo, 183n37 Godwin, Mary Jane (Clairmont), 155 Godwin, William, 48, 98, 137–8, 148–57, 202n49 Caleb Williams, 137, 153–4 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 48, 149–50, 152, 157 Essay on Sepulchres, 150–2, 157 Pantheon, (Edwin Baldwin), 157 Goldsmith, Oliver, 19, 65 Gould, Harriet, 111 gothic, 30–1, 33, 35, 75–6, 78 Greville, Frances, 63 Hampstead, 2, 25, 46, 180n7 Hartman, Geoffrey, 88, 148, 155 Haygarth, John, MD, 24 Hegel, G. W. F., 78, 82, 94 Heinzelman, Kurt, 182n26 Hewitt, Regina, 96 Hickey, Alison, 115, 117, 122, 124, 127 Howard, John, 106 Hutcheson, Francis, 38 Hutchinson, Sara, 140–1 criticism of “The LeechGatherer”, 72–3 relationship with Coleridge, 125–6, 131–2 Imlay, Gilbert, 119, 203n63 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 146 incorporation Coleridge overtures to ALB, 142 Coleridge’s attempts with Pantisocratic family, 95, 115, 117–18, 122–3, 128, 141 defined, 95

Index RLE’s attempt with Aikin family, 98, 101–2, 105–6; ALB’s rejection of RLE’s effort, 105 Taylors and Conders, 107, 111, 113 intimacy, xiv, 3, 8, 35, 40–1, 51, 53–5, 59, 60, 62, 74, 78–9, 83, 91, 95, 97–100, 106–7, 109, 113–14, 119, 125, 137, 149, 160–1, 189n7 complexity of Wordsworths’, 61 Jennings, Rev. John (ALB’s greatgrandfather), 7, 11, 14, 106 Johnson, Joseph, 1–2, 7–8, 10, 15, 17, 19, 22, 35, 40, 64, 141 Johnson, Samuel, 56 Jones, Sir William, 36, 39 Kant, Immanuel Critique of Pure Reason, 99, 127–9 Keach, William, 121, 139, 198n19 Kete, Mary Louise, 109, 111, 192n39 Kibworth Dissenting Academy, 11–12 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 96, 188n2 Kraft, Elizabeth, xiii, 7, 45, 136, 168n11 Lake School, 136–7, 141, 147 Lamb, Charles, 125–6, 136–7, 143, 145–8 comments about ALB, 146 John Woodville (review of), 145 Leech-Gatherer, 69, 72–4, 76–7, 83 encounter with WW and DW, 72 and Grasmere Journal, 72–3 Levy, Michelle, x, 97, 167n9 literary family, x-xii, 8, 11, 19, 73, 95–9, 104–7, 112, 114, 118–19, 125, 128, 132, 136, 141–2, 148, 150, 157, 159–62 Lloyd, Charles, 125–6, 196n92 London Constitutional Society, 118

221

London Corresponding Society, 118 Longman, Thomas, 141 Lovell, Robert, 121, 124–5, 195n70 Lowth, Bishop Robert, 36 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 38–9 Magnuson, Paul, 96, 188n2 Malsbary, Gerald, 197n9 McCarthy, William, xiii, 7, 15–18, 40, 42–3, 45, 47–8, 136 McFarland, Thomas, 96, 188n2, 195n80, 198n10 mediating network, ix, x, 8, 167n4 merger, 95, 98–9, 102, 104–5 Miller, Rev. Samuel, 49 in Columbian Orator, 50, 179n38 Milton, John, 6, 18, 21–4, 28, 77, 83, 98, 114, 147, 152, 171n18, 173n47, 189n12 advertisement in ALB’s Address to the Opposers, 8–10 Monthly Magazine, 43, 99–100, 104–6, 142 JA’s editorship of, 106, 177n17 STC’s denigration of, 136 Moorman, Mary, 58, 87 More, Hannah, 100, 197n8 Morning Post, 130, 132–3, 193n54, 196n83 Myers, Mitzi, 41, 190n19 Newlyn, Lucy, 96, 118, 136–7, 146, 193n59 Oedipus at Colonus, 191n33 Opie, John, 155 Othello, 92, 147, 186n82 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) The Wild Irish Girl, 30, 176n2 Palgrave School, xii, 11, 35, 41–2, 44, 47, 56, 167n6

222

Index

Pantisocracy, 95, 126–8, 131, 140–2, 149, 161, 194n68 as business venture, 121, 123–5 and Chatterton, Thomas, 120 cult, 121–2 demise of, 115 as familial incorporation, 97, 113–14, 117–18 as literary community, 98, 113, 118–19 Paoli, General Pasquale, 17, 172n40 Pentateuch, ix Perry, Ruth, xiii, 167n9 Petrarch, ix, 83 Pitt, William, 4, 6, 24, 27, 118, 175n61 plagiarism, 96 Poe, Edgar Allan, 31 “Imp of the Perverse,”33 “William Wilson,”33 Polish Dissidents, 3, 169n6 Pollard, Jane (later Marshall), 58, 60, 64, 68, 79, 81, 127 Pollard, Julia, 81 Poole, Thomas, 92, 121–2, 126 prejudice, 6, 22, 25, 46, 150 ALB’s response to Burke, 26 ALB’s views, in “On Prejudice”, 43–4 Burke’s usage, 173n52 in JA’s Letters from a Father to Son, 45 JA’s response to Burke, 24 Preston, Dickson, 47–8, 50, 173n50 Price, Richard, 6, 24, 83 Priestley, Joseph, 8, 17, 25, 36, 41, 46, 137, 159 disapproval of ALB’s Devotional Pieces, 36 and Pantisocracy, 119–20, 122 Priestley, Mary, 17, 159 public v. private sphere, 2, 30–1, 41 Quarterly Review, 146

Rajan, Tillotama, 154, 203n70 Reform Act (1832), 47 Regium Donum, 5 Reiman, Donald, 136, 192n40, 197n6 responsive collaboration, 10, 16–17, 28, 53 Richardson, Samuel, 99, 102–3, 105 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 133, 147, 190n22, 193n52, 196n96, 200n32 Rodgers, Betsy, 12, 174n54, 179n32 Roe, Nicholas, 195n73 Rogers, Samuel, 30, 101, 104 Ross, Marlon, 78, 89–90 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 43–5, 122, 178n25 education of children, 44 Emile, 122, 178n26 Royal Proclamation of 1793, 10, 20–1, 25, 27 Samet, Elizabeth, 204n77 schematism, 98, 113, 125–7, 131 scheme, 98–105 Schiller, Friedrich, 186n37 sentimental, 31, 33–5, 109, 155 Septuagint, ix, x Shelley, Mary, xiv, 137–8, 148, 150–8 Frankenstein, 138, 150–1, 153–4, 158 Valperga, 156–8 Shelley, Percey Bysshe, xiv, 112, 150 “Dedication to Mary ___ ___,” 137–8, 151, 157 Laon and Cythna (Revolt of Islam), 148, 152, 156 “Ode to the West Wind”, 153, 158 seeks out Godwin, 149 Shklovsky, Victor, 183n37 Sidney, Sir Philip, 39

Index Smith, Adam Theory of Moral Sentiments, 184n50 Wealth of Nations, 102, 104, 121, 175n61 Smollet, Tobias, 31 Southey, Margaret Edith, 135 Southey, Robert, xiii, 51, 95, 106, 113–26, 131, 135, 144–6, 149–50, 195n78, 198n12 and “Aikinish” label, xiii, 136 antipathy for Aikin family, 135–7, 142 Joan of Arc, 141 Spencer, Jane, 88, 186n73 Spenser, Edmund, 81 “Spy Nozy” incident, 118, 159 St. Clair, William, 150, 155, 157 Stoke Newington, 3, 51, 55–6, 123, 180n7 Tadmor, Naomi, x, 106–7 defines incorporation, xiii, 95 Family and Friends, x, 96–7 Taussig, Gurion, 96, 118, 189n7, 195n78 Taylor, William of Norwich, 58, 104–6 Taylors of Ongar, 51, 95, 97–8, 107, 118 Ann (daughter), 107, 110–13, 123 Ann Martin (mother), 107–8 family advertisement, 162 Isaac, Jr. (brother), 108, 162 Isaac, Sr. (father), 98, 107–9 Jane (daughter), 107–9, 112, 127 teaching, 23, 41, 43, 56, 68 ALB takes in young women boarders, 46 Thomson, Heidi, 62 Threlkeld, Elizabeth, 57, 88 Threlkeld, Thomas, 58 Todd, Janet, 148 Toleration Act (1689), 4 Trott, Nicola, 150–2

223

Unitarian, 3, 58, 142–4 Vargo, Lisa, 142, 144, 199n28 Virgil, 66, 120, 180n6, 194nn67,68 Wakefield, Gilbert, 8, 25 Wakefield, Priscilla, 65 walking, 59 backwards and forwards, WW and DW, 60, 75, 77–9, 80–1, 83, 88 while composing, WW, 75, 79–80 Warrington Academy, xii, 2–3, 10–12, 15, 17–19, 23, 25, 30, 34, 37, 42, 47, 49, 54, 56–8, 80, 106, 120, 122, 159–61 White, Daniel, xii, 22, 31, 168n5, 170n12, 172n29, 173n48 White, Gilbert, 65 Wickens, Charles, 109–12 Wikipedia, ix Withering, William An Arrangement of British Plants the next words according to the latest Improvements of the Linnean System, 66–8 Wollstonecraft, Mary, xi, 6, 41, 65, 83, 98, 137–8, 148–52, 154–8 Female Reader, The, 30 Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 152, 158 Vindication of the Rights of Men, 25, 155 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 153, 156 Woof, Pamela, 77–8 Wordsworth, Christopher, 59 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 51, 53, 55–84, 87–9, 91, 93, 96, 125–7, 132, 140, 149, 161 Grasmere Journals, 60–5, 67, 69, 72, 74, 77, 79, 83 “Irregular Verses”, 81–2 Wordsworth, John, 59

224

Index

Wordsworth, William, x, xi, xii, 36, 39, 51, 53–7, 95–7, 99, 104, 116–18, 125–8, 130–7, 147–8, 159 “Elegiac Stanzas”, 85, 92 An Evening Walk, 82 Home at Grasmere, 82, 88, 92, 95 “Louisa”, 85–9, 92 Lyrical Ballads, Preface to, 36, 69, 72, 74–7, 99, 184nn53,56; Christabel’s disharmony with, 75–6; DW’s involvement in, 75–7 Pedlar, The, 69–74 Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), 66–9, 77–9, 83–5, 87–92;

celandine poems in, 66–9, 81, 84–7, 91–2 Prelude, The, 59–60, 74, 79, 83, 89–91, 181n15, 187n83 Ruined Cottage, The, 70–1, 74 “Sparrow’s Nest, The”, 67, 87 “Tintern Abbey”, 36, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61–2, 69, 72, 74–7, 79, 99, 148, 161 “To A Butterfly”, 68, 87–9 “To the Daisy”, 84–5 Yarmouth, 2, 25–6, 57, 170n15 JA and family forced to leave, 7–8 Zall, Paul, 197n8