Romanticism and Millenarianism

Romanticism and Millenarianism Edited by Tim Fulford Edited by Tim Fulford 10.1057/9780230107205 - Romanticism and M...

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Romanticism and Millenarianism Edited by

Tim Fulford

Edited by Tim Fulford

10.1057/9780230107205 - Romanticism and Millenarianism, Edited by Tim Fulford

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Romanticism and Millenarianism z

First published 2002 by PALGRAVETM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y.10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0-312-24011-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romanticism and millenarianism/edited by Tim Fulford p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-24011-2 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Millennialism in literature. 3. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History— 18th century. 4. Religion and Literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799—Influence. 6. Blake, William, 1757–1827—Views on millennialism. 7. Apocalyptic literature—History and criticism. 8. Millennialism—Great Britain—History. 9. End of the world in literature. 10. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Fulford, Tim, 1962– PR575.M54 R63 2002 821’.709382—dc21 2001035852 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: January 2002 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

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Printed in the United States of America.



ROMANTICISM AND MILLENARIANISM © Tim Fulford, 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.



To Morton D. Paley, in honor of his outstanding contribution to the study of Romanticism, this volume is dedicated

Morton D. Paley at the Millennium



—Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook” The omnisecular spirit keeps the old with the new also. Nothing at all has suffered erasure. There is life not of our time. He calls ungainly bodies As beautiful as the grace of horses. He is weary of nothing; he watches air-planes; he watches pelicans —Robinson Jeffers, “Pelicans” Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like; Friendship is a sheltering tree; 0! the joys that come down shower-like, Of Friendship, Love and Liberty. —S. T. Coleridge, “Youth and Age”



It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source.



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Acknowledgments List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors 1. Millenarianism and the Study of Romanticism Tim Fulford 2. Cowper’s Ends Adam Rounce 3. “To Milton’s Trump”: Coleridge’s Unitarian Sublime and the Miltonic Apocalypse Peter J. Kitson 4. Romantic Apocalypses John Beer 5. The Morning (Post) After: Apocalypse and Bathos in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude” Michael Simpson 6. Pantisocracy and the Myth of the Poet Nicholas Roe

ix xi xiii xv 1 23

37 53

71 87

7. Ecological Apocalypse: Privation, Alterity, and Catastrophe in the Work of Arthur Young and Thomas Robert Malthus Gary Harrison

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8. Pagodas and Pregnant Throes: Orientalism, Millenarianism and Robert Southey Tim Fulford

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9. Blake, the Apocalypse and Romantic Women Writers Anne K. Mellor


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Contents

Contents

10. The Angels of Byron and Moore: Close Encounters of Another Kind Philip W. Martin

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11. Robert Hawes and the Millenium Press: A Political Microculture of Late-Eighteenth-Century Spitalfields David Worrall

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12. Blake’s Visionary Heads: Lost Drawings and a Lost Book G. E. Bentley, Jr.

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13. Word as Image in William Blake Martin Butlin

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14. The William Blake Archive: The Medium When the Millennium Is the Message Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi Appendix: A Bibliography of Morton D. Paley’s Studies of Romanticism Tim Fulford, with the assistance of D. W. Dörrbecker

Index

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241



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T

his book dates from a boat ride across Halifax harbor and a conversation with Joe Viscomi. As we bounced over the water, Joe talked of his enthusiasm for Bo Diddeley and his admiration for Morton Paley. My thanks to Joe for passing on the idea for the book. One day I’ll get to hear his rhythm ‘n’ blues drumming too. Along the way from idea to print, many others lent a hand. Detlef Dörrbecker gave useful advice; Peter Kitson brought his deep knowledge of millenarian dissent; Debbie Lee read drafts and coped with my not infrequent recourse to the double negative; Gunnel Tottie gave me the requisite information and kept quiet when it mattered. Marilyn Gaull made it all possible. Several libraries allowed me to reproduce pictures in their possession. I thank the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce William Blake’s Laocoön print, “Jehovah & his two Sons, Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubin” (copyright Fitzwilliam Museum). The Trustees of the British Museum let me reproduce John Martin’s “And a mighty angel took up a stone like a giant millstone and cast it into the sea” (copyright British Museum). Above all, thanks to Morton Paley for his scholarship and friendship, for the talks and for the walks, in Somerset, Wales and Marin—when he always brought with him the Morton Anthology of English Literature.



Acknowledgments




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illiam Blake, the Laocoön print, or “Jehovah & his two Sons, Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubin,” 26.2 x 21.6 cm; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. p. 213 Works in the William Blake Archive page: www.blakearchive.org. p. 226 Object-View Page for The Book of Thel copy O plate 2, with Text & Image Options menu opened showing the following options available to user: Image Enlargement, Illustration Description, Textual Transcription, and Object & Textual Notes: www.blakearchive.org. p. 227 Object-View Page for The Book of Thel copy O plate 2, with Transcription, Enlargement, and Illustration Description in “child” windows: www.blakearchive.org. p. 229 The Book of Thel copy O plate 2, with Compare All Copies option invoked, displaying the copies of plate 3 from the other copies of The Book of Thel in the Archive: www.blakearchive.org. p. 232



List of Illustrations




BL BPW BR BRS CC CL CM CN CPW C&S Curry EOT Erdman

Friend H Works KL

Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1983). CC, VII George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford, 1980–86) G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969) G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records Supplement (Oxford, 1988) The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV (Collected Coleridge) The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1956–71) S. T. Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 5 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1980-). CC, XII The Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 5 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J. 1957-) The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London, 1912) S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State, ed. J. Colmer (London and Princeton, N.J., 1976). CC, X New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1965) S. T. Coleridge, Essays on his Times, ed. David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1978). CC, III The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, with commentary by Harold Bloom, newly rev. edn. (Berkeley, Calif., and Garden City, N. Y., 1982) S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. Rooke, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1969). CC, IV The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930–34) The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958)



List of Abbreviations

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List of Abbreviations

W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1969) Lects 1795 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (London and Princeton, N.J., 1971). CC, I Lects 1808–19 S. T. Coleridge, Lectures 1808–19 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1987). CC, V LS S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (London and Princeton, N.J., 1972). CC, VI Prelude William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (New York and London, 1979) Shelley Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York and London, 1977) SL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964) SWF S. T. Coleridge, Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1995). CC, XI TT S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (London and Princeton, N.J., 1990). CC, XIV Watchman The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton (London and Princeton, N. J., 1970). CC, II WProse The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1974) WPW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940–49)



LB

John Beer is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse. His work on Romanticism includes Coleridge the Visionary (1959), Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence (1977), Blake’s Humanism (1968), Blake’s Visionary Universe (1969), Wordsworth in Time (1979), and Providence and Love (1998). He has edited Coleridge’s Poems for Everyman’s Library (1993), his Aids to Reflection for the Collected Works (1993) and is General Editor of Coleridge’s Writings. G. E. Bentley, Jr.’s The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake was published in March 2001. He is also the author of Blake Records (1969) and its Supplement (1985), and of Blake Books (1977) and its Supplement (1995). Martin Butlin was, until he retired in 1989, Keeper of the Historic British Collection at the Tate Gallery. He is now a consultant for Christie’s. Among his publications are The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) and, with Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner (1977). D. W. Dörrbecker teaches art history at the University of Trier. His research interest, in British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and art theories in general, and in the group of artists now thought to be “centered” around William Blake in particular, dates back to the 1970s. It was then that he first met Morton Paley. Dörrbecker’s publications include books, articles, and bibliographies concerned with Blake, Flaxman, Fuseli and Martin Archer Shee; most recently, a catalogue devoted to a contemporary Scottish artist, Colin Ardley: Works 1975–2000, appeared on the occasion of an exhibition in Berlin. Morris Eaves, Professor of English at the University of Rochester, has co-edited Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (and its predecessor, the Blake Newsletter) with Morton Paley since 1970 and is a co-contributor to the Blake Trust series of illuminated books. Eaves is also a co-editor of the William Blake Archive and author of books and articles on Blake, technology, artistic theory, and editor-



Notes on Contributors

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Robert N. Essick is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He has written several books on William Blake, including William Blake Printmaker (1980), The Separate Plates of William Blake (1983), William Blake and the Language of Adam (1989), and William Blake’s Commercial Book Illustrations (1991). He is one of the three co-editors of the online William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org). Tim Fulford is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. Among his books are Landscape, Liberty and Authority (1996), Romanticism and Colonialism (1998, co-edited with Peter J. Kitson), and Romanticism and Masculinity (1999). Gary Harrison is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he teaches British Romanticism, World Literature, and Literary Theory. He is the author of Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse (1994), and coeditor of Western Literature in a World Context (1995); he has recently published several articles on John Clare, on whom he is presently writing a book. Peter J. Kitson is Professor of English at the University of Dundee. For many years the editor of The Year’s Work in English Studies, he has published many articles on Romanticism. Among his books are Romanticism and Colonialism (1998, co-edited with Tim Fulford), Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the Romantic Era (1999, co-edited with Debbie Lee) and Placing and Displacing Romanticism (2001). Professor Philip W. Martin is Director of the English Subject Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Byron: A Poet before his Public (1982), Mad Women in Romantic Writing (1987) and articles on Clare, Byron, and other Romantic topics. He is an editor of the journal, Literature and History and joint editor of Reviewing Romanticism (1992), and he is currently President of the British Association for Romantic Studies. Anne K. Mellor is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on British Romantic writing, most notably Blake’s Human Form Divine (1974), English Romantic Irony (1980), Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988), Romanticism and Gender (1993) and Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing In England, 1780–1830 (2000). She is continuing to work on the intersection of gender, race and sexuality in Romantic literature.



ial theory. He is currently working on Posterity, a study of the posthumous power of audiences.


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Adam Rounce is Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He has published articles on John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, and contributes the “Eighteenth Century Poetry” section to The Year’s Work in English Studies. He is currently writing a book on mid to late eighteenthcentury poetry. Michael Simpson is a Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and has also taught in the United States. He is the author of Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley and of numerous essays on Romantic poetry. He is also the editor of a special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language (41:4, 1999) devoted to the theme of Romantic drama in place. Joseph Viscomi, James G. Kenan Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Prints by William Blake and his Followers and Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993). He is the co-editor of volumes 3 and 5 of the Blake Trust edition of Blake’s illuminated books and one of the editors of the William Blake Archive, a hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress. David Worrall is Reader in English Literature at St. Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. He is Associate Editor of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, the editor of William Blake: The Urizen Books (1995) and (with Steve Clark) Historicizing Blake (1994) and Blake in the Nineties (1999).



Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. His books include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (1988), Keats and History (1995) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life (2001).




Millenarianism and the Study of Romanticism Tim Fulford

I give you the end of a golden string Only wind it into a ball: It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall. (Jerusalem, Plate 77; Erdman, p. 231)

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lake’s lines from the second decade of the nineteenth century remind us that millenarianism did not die in 1795 with the confinement of Richard Brothers in a madhouse. Deep into the nineteenth century, large numbers of Britons continued to expect the imminent arrival of the New Jerusalem, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth predicted in the Bible: “the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come. And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call” (Joel 2:28–32). In 1780 most Britons, whether they were Anglicans or dissenters, accepted the conventional Christian teaching that the millennium was a distant event. They believed in the gradual passage of the present, sinful, world into the reign of Christ at some unknown time in the future. After a thousand years of Christ’s kingdom on earth, judgment and apocalypse would occur. By the 1790s, things had changed: after the unprecedented upheaval



Chapter 1 z

Tim Fulford

of the French Revolution many abandoned the conventional view and expected the millennium to arrive in their own lifetime, preceded by apocalyptic destruction. This expectation was shared by poets and political leaders as well as sectarians and self-styled prophets. It was reflected in the verse of self-taught writers such as Joanna Southcott and William Blake and in the prose of university-educated scholars such as G. S. Faber and S. T. Coleridge. Social reformers, clerical conservatives and religious revolutionaries all preached versions of the ancient belief, set down in the books of Daniel and Revelation, that the world would be convulsed by apocalyptic destruction only to be renewed in a millennium of peace and plenty. In the words of historian W. H. Oliver, millenarianism was “distributed over English society as a whole, and was felt by every group, from landed proprietors to out-ofwork factory hands.”1 One of the groups marked by expectation of the millennium was composed of writers and artists. But how exactly did this expectation shape— and how was it shaped by—the literature, art and politics of the period we now call Romantic? What does understanding this expectation have to tell us now, as we encounter that literature, art and politics at the beginning of a new millennium? These are the questions that this collection addresses in a series of essays on millenarians both famous and forgotten.2 Coleridge and Cowper, Blake and Byron are featured, but these literary figures are placed in new contexts created by original research into the artistic and political subcultures of radical London, into the religious sects surrounding Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott, and into Orientalism and empire. The result is an extensive and multi-faceted representation of millenarianism’s pervasive effects. An expanded and rehistoricized canon of writers and artists is assembled, a group united by a common tendency to use figurations of the millennium to interrogate and transform the worlds in which they lived and moved. New views emerge, questioning the conventional groupings of texts and ideas that are effected by the terms Romanticism and by the academic separation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Brief History of Millenarianism 1790–1832 The essays collected here speak to historians as well as literary critics. Although several historical and literary studies of millenarianism have appeared, most of the former have paid little attention to literature and art, whereas many of the latter have dealt only with a single author. Nevertheless, collectively, they indicate a burgeoning interest in the nature of British millenarianism and in the culture from which it sprang. All are in debt, as is this collection, to the groundbreaking assessment of millenarian and radical politics in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class



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(1963).3 Thompson’s discussion of the impact on nineteenth-century society of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott ensured that popular millenarianism would no longer be dismissed as the fantasy of crackpots. Subsequently, more detailed work by Clarke Garrett and J. F. C. Harrison revealed the sheer extent to which millenarianism—and the interconnected practices of mesmerism, mysticism and popular medicine—shaped British radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution.4 Millenarianism was not an addition to radical politics but one of the principal discourses in which that politics was formulated—and not only for the urban laboring class but also, as Garrett and Oliver reveal, for “respectable” middle-class dissenters such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. Indeed, it was Price who, in a 1789 sermon to the London Revolution Society, imagined that events in France would bring about an era in which the nations “would beat (as Isaiah prophesies) their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.”5 Priestley went further still, abandoning his earlier belief in a gradual progress to a distant millennium and announcing that the violence of the French Revolution was fulfilling Daniel’s prophecies that a fifth monarchy, ruled by the Son of Man, would supersede all others.6 The flavor of this radical conflation of contemporary world events and biblical texts is revealed in the diary of Thomas Holcroft. On 20 February 1799, after Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt, Holcroft called on William Sharp, the engraver and radical campaigner, and paid him for his print of The Sortie of Gibraltar; which he said . . . was the last on such a subject, meaning the destruction of war, that would ever be published. . . . The wisdom of the Creator had occasioned all our miseries: but the tongue of wisdom was now subdued, meaning Egypt, which was not only a slip of land resembling a tongue, but the place in which the learning of the world originated. Thus, by the help of a pun and a metaphor, he had double proof . . . Syria, Palestine, and all these countries are soon to be revolutionized; and those who do not take up arms against their fellow men, are to meet at the Grand Millennium.7

Horrified at this kind of optimistic interpretation of revolutionary violence, Edmund Burke depicted Price, Priestley, and their fellow millenarians as dangerous subversives, comparing them with the regicide sectarians of Britain’s revolution of the 1640s. From then on, millenarianism, real and accused, became a crucial factor in the vituperative war of words that polarized British politics and precipitated the imprisonment of many opponents of the government. Millenarianism became a feature of the urban, artisan culture that produced the political societies that the government feared would bring about



Millenarianism and the Study of Romanticism

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revolution. William Sharp was a not untypical example: a member of the London Corresponding Society, he associated with other millenarians and sectarians, including William Bryan. Like many dissenting Londoners, he already had a history of millenarian faith. Followers of Emmanuel Swedenborg (including, for a short time, William Blake) believed that the millennium had already arrived. Faced with dissension in their New Jerusalem church, however, many transferred their allegiance to the most famous and extraordinary millenarian prophet to emerge in the 1790s—Richard Brothers. Brothers (1757–1824), as Morton D. Paley has shown, had begun prophesying in 1792.8 Then, he had declared that Britain’s war with revolutionary France presaged the “fall of Monarchy in Europe.”9 By 1795 he was announcing that God had commanded him to bear witness that George III would deliver up his crown to him. London was Babylon; the British monarchy was the Beast of the Book of Revelation: both would be destroyed by an apocalyptic earthquake with only those who followed Brothers to Jerusalem escaping to found a new millennium there. Brothers announced himself to be the prince of the Israelites, sent by God to lead the Hebrews back to the promised land. Alarmed by his statements, the ministry had him arrested and questioned before the Privy Council. Deciding he was mad, the Lord Chancellor confined him to an asylum. Brothers seemed dangerous to the government because the millenarian ideology of reformers such as Price and Priestley, taken into the working classes by charismatic figures such as Brothers, resembled the radical Protestantism of the seventeenth century. Then, groups such as the Muggletonians had supported the overthrow of the monarchy in the name of millenarian religion. Now, dissenters were consciously reviving their ideas and those of men such as the regicide John Milton, who, in his political tracts, Of Reformation and Areopagitica, had identified the English republic of the 1640s with the prophesied second coming of Christ, the “shortly-expected king.” This heady brew of prophecy and politics had issued in the execution of Charles I. Now, Pitt and his ministers, after George III was attacked in his carriage on the way to open Parliament, were desperate to prevent a repeat. They had Coleridge, admirer of Priestley and Milton and writer of millenarian poetry that condemned Britain’s rulers, spied upon. And as a warning to millenarian radicals, they had Gilbert Wakefield, a retiring classical scholar influenced by Milton’s writings, thrown in prison. Wakefield had been typical of many dissenters in adopting the tones of a seer, as this example of his work from 1796 reveals: I see that deluge of mighty waters gradually subside into their wonted channel: I see them flow with a majestic tranquility to the ocean, and all the traces of their former ravages obliterated by one extensive and expanding Paradise of verdure, fertility, and beauty.10



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Wakefield’s flood is the deluge of the French Revolution. He welcomes it because it promises, in the pattern of millenarian religious dissent, a paradise of beauty after its awful destructiveness. Wakefield’s imprisonment told other millenarian writers that a gentlemanly education and a retiring scholarly life would not save them from prosecution. Prophetic texts, as well as agitation on the streets, could put one’s liberty in danger. By 1798 Brothers languished in a madhouse, Wakefield rotted in jail, Priestley fretted in America. Government repression seemed to have stamped out religious radicalism. Millenarianism proved a hardier plant than the ministry expected, although it persisted in different forms, some simply less visible, others less immediately worrying. A less visible form was Mesmerism, a practice based on the belief that humans could learn to channel, for the benefit of others, the universal ether of which the world was created. To orthodox scientists and priests, Mesmerism and millenarianism went together. They were an infectious new plague: the Edinburgh chemist John Robison, for instance, feared the “almost irresistible” influence of an association dedicated to “rooting out all the religious establishments, and overturning the existing governments of Europe.” The members of this association were, he diagnosed, “Magicians—Magnetisers—Exorcists, &c.”11 And for former radical W. H. Reid, millenarian medicine threatened London itself: a set of “Infidel mystics,” “made up of Alchymists, Astrologers, Calculators, Mystics, Magnetizers, Prophets, and Projectors,” had embraced the politics of France and were spreading democracy among the “lower orders.”12 Mesmerism and millenarianism appealed to the “lower orders” because they gave them power— to men like William Bryan, who after visiting the secret Society of Avignon became a healer and magnetist in Bristol. The painter Phillipe De Loutherborg also thought himself to be empowered to manipulate divine grace for medicinal purposes. He became a faith healer as well as a kabbalistic hermeneutist and apocalyptic artist. If faith healing was a displaced form of millenarianism (an attempt to realize the prophet’s role at the level of the body), then so was the political philosophy of William Godwin, himself a lapsed dissenting minister. Godwin’s Essay Concerning Political Justice (1793) was ostensibly atheist. Yet, although he rejected the Christianity he had once taught, Godwin retained in his secular vision of historical progress the pattern of millennialist belief. As men became more rational and desires withered, government would also die away because men would act for what they reasoned to be right—the greater good of all. Even sexual desires would be replaced by a recognition of what was reasonable. Godwin attacked marriage as “the worst of all laws” and “the worst of all properties,”13 and envisaged a slow, natural progression to a rational, communal society, to an anarchistic millennium in which people




Tim Fulford

would live without private property or government, in equality and peace. He offered, that is to say, a secularized and politicized version of the Christian belief in a slow transition of this world to the millennial one, without apocalyptic destruction intervening. Because of this long timescale, and because Godwin thought the transition was inevitable, requiring no immediate political action to bring it about, the government did not prosecute him. And his vogue was in any case brief. Nevertheless, Godwin was a continuing influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth, who retained the imprint of his ideas even though they came to reject his exclusive emphasis on rationalism. And Godwin inspired Percy Shelley, helping to shape some of the greatest millenarian poetry of the age in Prometheus Unbound. Godwin’s philosophical millennialism may have appealed to poets, but it revolted conservative politicians and Christian philosophers. In 1798 the Revd. Thomas Malthus challenged it in a seminal work whose continuing cultural power often obscures the fact that it was the mirror image of the millennialist system it was designed to refute. Malthus charged Godwin with naive prophesying and set out to refute him in statistical and empiricist terms. But Malthus also adopted prophetic tones: he adapted the language of the Bible and of Milton to depict humanity facing a perpetual apocalypse without a millennium to follow it: The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.14

Malthus’s arguments achieved great and lasting power. He had spoken to Britons’ fears about increasing population and poverty among the laboring classes and had voiced their anxieties about national immorality and possible defeat in the war with France. Much of the public subscribed to Malthus’s apocalyptic vision of a nation deserving war, plague, famine and pestilence, as Revelation suggested, if it did not mend its ways. So convincing was Malthus’s combination of statistical “proof ” and prophetic rhetoric that the government introduced measures designed to discourage the poor from having large families. For many churchmen too, Malthus had proved the habits of rural laborers to be not only immoral but a threat to national prosperity. Malthus’s apocalyptic scenario encouraged Evangelical clerics to



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reform the poor, while his analysis prompted secular economists to apply statistics to the study of society. Joanna Southcott had plenty of experience of rural poverty and the social tensions it provoked. A former servant in rustic Devon, she had little education or wealth. But she had self-belief, and a gift for prediction that appealed to people (especially women) of her background all over rural England. So when she arrived in London in 1802, she was already a self-proclaimed prophet with an established following.15 She rapidly attracted many of Brothers’ followers, including William Sharp the engraver, who tried to make William Blake a Southcottian too.16 Although Brothers himself disowned her, Southcott continued to win support, hinting that she was the woman mentioned in Genesis 3:15 whose “seed” would bruise the head of the serpent. She offered visions of the New Jerusalem in which her followers would live after the “woman clothed with the sun” had given birth to “a man child, who was to rule all nations.”17 This event, according to the Book of Revelation, would precipitate the apocalyptic battle in which Satan would be cast down. Southcott gained a remarkable hold on the popular imagination—as many as 100,000 may, by 1808, have accepted the seals of salvation she issued. And the hold was long-lived, for even after she died, in 1814, having announced she was pregnant with the child who would rule in the coming millennium, many of her followers continued to look for the Shiloh she had borne. At least two men tried to fill the role—testament to the continuing need throughout the Romantic period to believe in a divine intervention that would transform living conditions and bring about peace, security and wealth on this earth. To a nation facing economic depression and unprecedented social change, the appeal of Southcott is understandable. Southcott steered deliberately clear of the political radicalism with which Brothers had been associated. Her writing was avowedly loyal to the government and in this it was similar to the millenarian prophecies of a number of well-educated, higher-class, exegetes of scripture. The appeal of millenarianism was not confined to urban artisan radicals and to the laboring poor by any means. Bishops and dons also felt the need to interpret the European war that followed the French Revolution as the fulfillment of Old Testament predictions. They differed, however, from Priestley, Price and Brothers on the question of whether Britain was to be singled out by God as one of the sinful monarchies deserving destruction or whether it would be the nation chosen to restore the Jews to the New Jerusalem. Samuel Horsley was a successful churchman—a bishop and a fellow of the Royal Society—when, responding to the French Revolution, he turned to prophesying. Horsley regarded the “French Democracy, from its infancy to the present moment,” as “a conspicuous and principal branch at least of the




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western Antichrist.”18 The rise of the Antichrist would, as predicted in Daniel, accompany “a dissolution of the whole fabric of the external world” and then the second coming.19 Napoleon’s appearance was a stage in the rising of the Antichrist too: it was Britain’s prophetic destiny to resist him. G. S. Faber, fellow of Lincoln College Oxford and then prebend of Salisbury Cathedral, agreed. Like Horsley, a successful pillar of the established church, Faber was no radical. He too saw the progress of the French Revolution as evidence that the triumph of the Antichrist was at hand, preceding apocalypse and the return of the Jews to the New Jerusalem. The battle of Trafalgar, Faber thought, might be evidence that Britain was the great “maritime power,” the messenger nation of Isaiah 18, which would alone be saved like “a column in the midst of surrounding ruins [w]hile mighty empires totter to their base, and while Antichrist advances with rapid strides to his predicted sovereignty over the inslaved kings.”20 James Hatley Frere was still more specific in his identification of Napoleon as the Beast of Revelation who would reign in Rome and Palestine as a false Messiah. In their many books, Horsley, Faber and Frere ranged their millenarianism against the political radicalism that colored the prophetic interpretations of contemporary history made by men such as Price, Priestley, and, at least in the 1790s, Coleridge too. Britain, they implied, was far from being one of the sinful monarchies to be cast down, as the Bible predicted. Instead, it might be the nation chosen by God to lead people to the New Jerusalem. Faber and Frere were interpreters, men whose activities were confined to writing. But by the 1820s one of their students had turned to action. Millenarian prophecy often went hand-in-hand with new and “alternative” practices in which the body was viewed as the source of spiritual power. This was the case in the church of the Revd. Edward Irving, a Scots preacher and protégé of Coleridge, whose apocalyptic sermons won him fame in 1820s London. Irving credited Coleridge with helping him to see the “error under which the whole of the Church is lying, that the present world is to be converted unto the Lord, and so slide by a natural inclination into the Church—the present reign of Satan hastening, of its own accord, into the millennial reign of Christ.”21 Influenced by Coleridge’s views, Irving came to believe in the necessity of an apocalypse to convulse the sinful world into a millennial one. But he became a far more literal and dogmatic interpreter of scripture than Coleridge ever was. The French Revolution, he believed, had precipitated the pouring out of the six vials of wrath upon the Beast. Now, after thirty years, the seventh was about to be poured. Destruction and renewal was at hand; the dead would live again on earth with the returned Christ. These views, announced in stirring sermons, made Irving a fashionable sensation and drew to his Regent Square church a devoted following. But



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Irving’s views were not in themselves extraordinary, for he was himself a follower of Frere who interpreted the Napoleonic wars in the light of the Bible and espoused, as a result, anti-democratic politics. Irving had offered himself to Frere “as your pupil, to be instructed in prophecy” in 1824 (CM, II, 71n.). And his own views revealed Frere’s influence. Coleridge, though by the 1820s sharing their dislike of political radicalism, found them both too literal and blindly subjective: he wrote that they took “out of their Bible what they had themselves put in” (CM, II, 71). Yet Coleridge himself was sure that the predictions of the Bible prophets would come true, if unsure of when or how. In 1830 Thomas Chalmers reported him “unfolding his own scheme of the Apocalypse—talking of the mighty contrast between its Christ and the Christ of the Gospel narrative, Mr. Coleridge said that Jesus did not come now as before—meek and gentle, healing the sick and feeding the hungry, and dispensing blessings all around, but he came on a white horse; and who were his attendants?—famine, and war, and pestilence.”22 Still millenarian after all those years, Coleridge admired Irving’s prophetic person if not his actual interpretations. In 1829 he declared that the Scot had “more of the Head and Heart, the Life, the Unction, and the genial power of MARTIN LUTHER than any man now alive.”23 Irving seemed to embody the vatic role that Coleridge had previously seen as the prerogative of Wordsworth (whom he likened to a prophet in his “Lines to William Wordsworth”). He was a Romantic genius, “a mighty wrestler in the cause of Spiritual Religion,”24 albeit one in need of guidance. Ironically enough, it was Irving’s assumption of spiritual power, his attempt to be a prophet in person rather than just, like Frere and Faber, an interpreter of prophecy, that brought about his downfall. By 1831 he was presiding over church services in which those who came to hear his oratory began to writhe in ecstasy. The London air was thick with unknown languages as his followers found themselves, like the apostles, speaking in tongues, “prophesying,” and performing miracles of spiritual healing. Irving believed that the Holy Spirit was making itself manifest in their bodies; the renewal of the human by the spiritual that was promised at the millennium materialized in his congregation’s flesh. It was all too literal and untrammeled for the church authorities. Irving was deprived of his ministry and condemned for heretical doctrine. Although Coleridge bemoaned his treatment and regretted his excesses, Irving was set on his path: he established his own church, in which glossalalia and faith healing still featured, until dissension broke it apart and he fell into obscurity. Irving’s failure was by no means the end of millenarianism. As W. H. Oliver records, exegetes and sect leaders continued, as the nineteenth century wore on, to promise the coming of Christ’s kingdom on earth. But Irving was the last millenarian to make a strong impression on, and to have a




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strong impression made on him by, Romanticism. By 1832, with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic war long over, millenarianism was no longer a cultural force and religious mode through which young intellectuals defined themselves. The poverty and unrest that helped to fuel it still existed— the year 1831 saw rioting on a countrywide scale as rural laborers suffered hunger. But too many prophets had prophesied, too many days of predicted destruction gone without incident, for most people to view political strife as a sign of the coming apocalypse. If the French Revolution had once seemed a millennial “new dawn” and an apocalyptic “blood-dimmed tide,” it had by now become a familiar, compromised affair. Yet the French Revolution was never the sole cause of the intensification of millenarianism that characterized the Romantic period. Movements such as Southcott’s and Irving’s, with their emphasis on miraculous occupation of the body by the Holy Spirit, bespoke the need of many in the period to restore power to the human, in an country where more and more people were subjected to the inhuman discipline of factory, clock and technology and where knowledge was increasingly institutionalized and bureaucratized, taken out of ordinary people’s hands. Southcott and Irving were, that is to say, simply extreme cases, physically literal versions, of a response that many in contemporary Britain felt compelled to make, turning to the Bible as one of the few authorities with which they could resist the domination of life by technologies and institutions. Reduced to “operatives,” many Britons found their very identity dominated by machines, machines whose concentration of power was such that they, and not the people who worked them, seemed sublime. Studying Millenarianism in Romanticism No writer or artist dedicated more genius to restoring sublimity to people, rather than to machines and institutions, than Blake. And Blake has been the main focus for literary studies of millenarianism in Romanticism. Northrop Frye, in 1947, discussed Blake’s vision of Jerusalem as a city and a garden,25 while David V. Erdman brought its revolutionary elements to the fore in Prophet Against Empire (1954).26 In 1963 Harold Bloom published Blake’s Apocalypse,27 a work in which he established the coherence of the late visionary books Milton and Jerusalem. Later, in The Ringers in the Tower (1971), Bloom was to explore the relationship of Blake’s apocalyptic vision to the Jewish merkabah mysticism that stemmed from Ezekiel’s vision of the heavenly chariot.28 The most influential scholar in the area has been Morton D. Paley, whose 1970 book Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought29 was the first to show in detail how central Blake’s changing un-



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derstanding of the apocalypse was to the developing form and style of his work. Paley argued that Blake, “despairing of the revolutionary millennium he had once expected . . . turned to an apocalyptist who saw history as outside human control” (p. 164). Whereas he had once, like Joseph Priestley, welcomed the American and French revolutions as the millennium occurring within history, and as “eruptions of long-repressed energies, now freed to transform the conditions of life” (p. 161), he adopted, after 1795, “an apocalyptic view promising an other-worldly fulfillment” (p. 164). The Messianic kingdom of peace was not about to be realized in the political convulsions of contemporary society; instead, Paley showed, Blake anticipated a spiritual kingdom in which men would become as angels. For the intra-historical apocalypses of “A Song of Liberty” and America, Blake substituted a “psychological equivalent—regeneration in the individual” (p. 244), a process that echoed the visionary texts of mystics William Law and Jacob Böhme and which Jerome J. McGann was later to highlight in Wordsworth and Coleridge as the Romantic Ideology. Whether or not Blake’s development was characteristic of Romanticism generally remains open to question. It is a fact, however, that Paley’s scholarship reveals considerable affinities between Blake and the path taken by several other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century millenarians. Subsequently, Paley was to demonstrate as much of Coleridge, a demonstration that implies that what many of the so-called Romantics had in common was less a unique ideology than a shared renegotiation of millenarian belief in the light of historical events—a renegotiation that many preachers, politicians and self-appointed prophets also tried to effect at the time. Paley’s 1973 article, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” not only established historical connections between Blake and the followers of Brothers and Southcott, but revealed similarities in the form and style of their writings about the millennium, similarities that, however, throw their differences into sharper relief.30 Blake emerges as a man of his time and place—part of “a contemporary ferment of ideas about what Jerusalem was or ought to be”31—a man whose claims to be a visionary were not exceptional but typical of an artisan culture that produced figures such as William Bryan and John Wright, who left London for the millenarian and secret Society of Avignon, and Joseph Bicheno and Francis Dobbs, who forecast the imminent return of the Jews to Jerusalem. These figures, and others like them, had a literal belief in the coming of a New Jerusalem on earth. Brothers, as Paley showed in his next monograph The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (1983), even published detailed descriptions and street plans of the millennial city that he thought would shortly be founded. It was to feature




Tim Fulford a noble palace, on the north side of the square that incloses the park, or Garden of Eden, for the public to walk in. The square is formed by a range of twelve private palaces on each side, including the king’s, which makes fortyeight in all. Each palace is 444 feet long, with a space of 144 feet between each; to every one is a lawn in front, and behind it is a spacious garden. What a noble square to excite admiration! Each side of it is near a mile and a half in length! Such is to be the centre of the future Jerusalem, and round it the city is to be built. . . . I have delineated the whole under God’s direction, as he ordered to be laid down about 2,360 years ago, in the last nine chapters of Ezekiel.32

Unlike Blake, Brothers possessed a mad certainty that he had been chosen to make the New Jerusalem a present reality in the Holy Land. Blake nevertheless formed a similarly detailed and precise model of the city in his visionary poetry. Golgonooza, Paley reminds us, resembles Brothers’ Jerusalem because it is compounded of contemporary London and an imaginary city developed from readings of Ezekiel. Blake’s vision had its literal and material side, just as Brothers’ did. Golgonooza is both here and to come, a city existing now and “after the abolition of Time” (p. 136). And it is not simply the content of Blake’s New Jerusalem, but the form of its expression, that is explicable in the context of millenarian thought. Paley shows that Jerusalem the prophetic book is non-linear and can be understood best in the terms by which millenarian thinkers such as Joseph Mede understood the Book of Revelation—as a “visionary” and “Apocalyptick Theatre,” a non-chronological stage, “simultaneously vision and artefact” (p. 287). Since Paley’s discussions of Jerusalem in monograph and edition, work on Blake’s relationship to millennium has intensified. Vincent A. De Luca and Robert N. Essick have considered his prophecies in relation to the prophetic books of the Bible, while David Worrall and Jon Mee have discovered further Blakean connections, social, intellectual, stylistic, with millenarian activists in nineteenth-century London.33 Mee has pointed to similarities between the form of Blake’s work and that of popular millenarians such as Garnett Terry: the disjointed collections of prophecies published by Terry . . . can be seen as employing the friction between the mélange of extracts they reproduce to rouse the spiritual faculties of their readers. The editor of Wonderful Prophecies defended the prophetic obscurity of the collection as designed to “exercise human sagacity.” Blake’s own challenging use of text and design together with his other formal innovations may be an extension of a desire to break through the deadness of the letter to the life of the spirit typical of the culture of enthusiasm. His revisions and inversions of biblical paradigms go much further in their iconoclasm than most enthusiastic examples, but they may share origins in the same visionary self-confidence.34



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Prophecies of apocalypse and visions of millennium are to be found in others among the writers we have come to call Romantic, as M. H. Abrams showed in Natural Supernaturalism (1973).35 Wordsworth, Shelley and Godwin all set out secularized versions of the thousand-year reign of peace and plenty; Byron and Mary Shelley imagined apocalyptic destruction. In the 1790s, Coleridge was, like his hero Priestley, adapting Daniel and John of Patmos to predict that the French Revolution heralded God’s destruction and remaking of the earth. As Coleridge himself later said, I argued, I described, I promised, I prophecied: and beginning with the captivity of nations I ended with the near approach of the millennium, finishing the whole with some of my own verses describing that glorious state out of the Religious Musings: Such delights As float to earth, permitted visitants! When in some hour of solemn jubilee The massive gates of Paradise are thrown Wide open, and forth come in fragments wild Sweet echoes of unearthly melodies, And odours snatch’d from beds of Amaranth, And they that from the chrystal river of life Spring up on freshen’d wings, ambrosial gales! (BL, I, 181)

Millenarianism was a central part of Coleridge’s Unitarian belief as well as his political creed. The exact reasons for this commitment, and its duration in Coleridge’s writing, have been debated by E. S. Shaffer, Peter J. Kitson and Ian Wylie.36 Coleridge’s millenarianism is put in new perspective by Morton D. Paley’s account of the “apocalyptic grotesque” in his work. In a series of articles and subsequently in Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999), Paley shows that poems such as “The Devil’s Thoughts” and “Fire, Famine And Slaughter” constituted a new and distinct strain of radical poetry. Extremely popular in their time, they used the biblical and Miltonic figures beloved of millenarians (figures Coleridge himself used in his prophetic poetry) to sardonic effect—and influenced Shelley, who would later do the same in “The Mask of Anarchy.” Apocalyptic rhetoric had enormous critical power, even when used with black humor rather than vatic belief—as Paley reveals was the case with Byron as well as Coleridge. Examining all the canonical Romantics, Apocalypse and Millennium demonstrates the power of millenarianism’s influence, as a literal belief, a prophetic style and a symbolic mode for exalting social and political aims to the level




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of spiritual ideals. Paley puts millenarianism at the center of English Romanticism as it has traditionally been conceived, revealing the variety of literary and political uses the New Jerusalem was made to serve. He also shows that it became progressively harder, as the “new dawn” of the early 1790s was followed by repression, industrialization and war, for writers to imagine the age of peace and happiness that would follow the apocalyptic destruction that seemed all too likely. Romanticism, on this model, becomes a struggle not just to envision a new age but to retain the capacity for vision at all. It is this struggle that gives it its ambivalence, tension and also pathos, and that accounts, in part, for its frequently unfinished and fragmentary nature. So, for example, Paley calls Prometheus Unbound “the most ambitious and least unsuccessful Romantic attempt to unite apocalypse and millennium” (p. 275). Here he is not giving faint praise, but showing that the very qualities that make a powerful Romantic poem are those that make it impossible for the poet to share the certainty of a convinced millenarian believer. The poet embraces the doubt, complexity and ambiguity that such believers ignore, but still tries to generate, at least as a possibility realized within the space/time of fiction, a vision of a New Jerusalem. In “The Mask of Anarchy,” Shelley adapts the structural and verbal forms used by contemporary millenarians in order to give authority and immediacy to a political argument. It is human effort, rather than divine authority, that will bring a blissful new society, but that effort seems destined to succeed because Shelley describes it in the tones of certainty employed within the prophetic tradition. A significant parallel to that tradition, Paley shows, was the practice of contemporary painters. When Shelley called Anarchy a skeleton he may even have been alluding to John Hamilton Mortimer’s picture Death on a Pale Horse, in which Death is represented with a skull for a head. Mortimer’s picture was well known, a new version of a popular motif that Benjamin West, De Loutherborg and Blake himself had all painted. In The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986), Paley examines this and other millenarian images in the work of these painters and of J. M. W. Turner, John Martin, Samuel Colman and Francis Danby. These artists revised each other’s images from Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation, each vying to create a more sublime vision than their rivals. In several cases, this process was bound up with the painters’ expectation of the imminent arrival of the spiritual kingdom on earth, heralded by apocalyptic destruction. Thus Blake’s and De Loutherborg’s versions of Death on a Pale Horse revealed their own millenarian interpretations of Hebrew tradition. De Loutherborg was a student of the Jewish Kabbala (as indeed was Coleridge). Both artist and poet were searching for an interpretative tradition that would allow the inner, spiritual meaning of biblical prophecy to be un-



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Hokemah, the divine essence of love . . . is sent down by Binah, the source of illumination and spirit of mercy, from Heter, the everlasting crown, or source of all perfection, into the resigned and contrite heart of man, whereon the word Hokemah is again inscribed, and which is depicted as rising from the darkness of fallen nature with the wings of self-will drooping, yet partially elevated by the magnetic influence of inward grace.37

As Paley shows, painters depicted the apocalypse as well as the millennial relationship between God and man. They viewed the sites that industry was transforming as being apocalyptic in their terrible and destructive power. De Loutherborg, looking at iron furnaces in Coalbrookdale, imagined “the Industrial Revolution as Hell, foreshadowing John Martin’s perception of the Black Country as an image of the final conflagration.”38 Contemporary Britain’s “dark Satanic mills” were, for others as well as for Blake, symbols of an apocalypse, and it was the mission of artists to supersede these symbols with prophecies of a millennium in which humanity would be renewed. Morton D. Paley and Romanticism and Millenarianism Morton Paley stands behind this book, for it is not too much to say that our whole understanding of Romanticism’s and millenarianism’s relationship is shaped by his work. And so this book honors him for his forty years of pioneering the study of the overlapping cultures of literature, art, and religion in that period from which our contemporary, twenty-first century civilization emerged. Romanticism and Millenarianism builds on Paley’s methodology—a historically contextualized examination of genres, styles and figures in literary and artistic works—but uses it to investigate further some areas that Paley opened up for research. In what follows, I outline the investigations pursued by the individual contributors, sketching out some of the arguments and debates that emerge from their work. Adam Rounce investigates a poetic oeuvre that influenced both artists and poets. Milton’s sublime, he shows, was developed in a uniquely desperate direction by William Cowper, who identified himself with Satan. Adapting Miltonic language, Cowper produced a poetry in which history gave way to a repeatedly deferred crisis of destruction, an apocalypse and millennium from which, however, Cowper felt himself excluded. Cowper’s was a revision of Milton and an understanding of history that left him both powerful and



raveled. De Loutherborg’s illustrations of Ecclesiasticus, for example, attempted to realize in pictorial terms the kabbalistic understanding of the penetration of the mortal by divine grace, as he explained in the text he attached to the picture:

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powerless—prophetic of his own impotent excision from millennial bliss. As such it meditates on the pitfalls of claiming prophetic authority, manifesting a self-consciousness that, Michael Simpson argues, appears only as an unfocused anxiety in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude.” Coleridge’s uneasiness about his own Miltonic prophesying relates to a growing political uncertainty about his continued enthusiasm for radicalism. In the face of this uncertainty, he recycled the apocalyptic rhetoric of his earlier years but simultaneously exposed the hollowness of the rhetorical claims to certainty used elsewhere in the political arena. Like Cowper, Coleridge had reached an impasse caused by a sensed self-division that the certainties of millenarianism seemed no longer to resolve, only to exacerbate. For Cowper and Coleridge, Milton’s legacy was difficult and divisive, as well as seminal. He gave both poets a language that allowed them to write with oracular and biblical authority about the exigencies of politics and history. But lacking Milton’s confidence and certainty, they found that language to be a temptation and a danger. Yet Milton’s verse was an enabling force behind Blake’s, Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s millennial visions, as is apparent in the imagery of this passage from Queen Mab portraying revolution as the apocalypse preceding millennium. Let the axe Strike at the root, the poison-tree will fall; And where its venomed exhalations spread Ruin, and death, and woe, where millions lay Quenching the serpent’s famine, and their bones Bleaching unburied in the putrid blast, A garden shall arise, in loveliness Surpassing fabled Eden. (iv, 82–89; Shelley)

Milton’s politics remained important to the religious radicals who campaigned for a republic. In this volume, Milton’s legacy to millenarians is considered in detail by Peter J. Kitson, who examines the work of dissenting radicals including Coleridge, Gilbert Wakefield and Joseph Priestley. Milton was both an icon and an influence, a radical hero and an exemplar at the level of rhetoric. Fundamental for Coleridge, powerful for Shelley, Milton is the returning spirit who haunts many of the millenarians discussed here. He is certainly a haunting presence in John Beer’s essay. Starting from Paley’s work in Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry, Beer analyzes the effect of the French Revolution on the Miltonic verse with which Coleridge and Blake prophesied forthcoming apocalypse. He shows how, in abandoning faith that events signified the large-scale destruction and



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remaking of heaven and earth, both poets turned to forms of displaced apocalypse and millennium. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Beer concludes, is a masterpiece that emerged from the failure of Coleridge’s explicitly millenarian poetry: out of the mental uncertainty that followed the collapse of his prophetic writing came a new, internalized, revelation in which the values that he had hoped would triumph at the millennium were now deposited, ambiguously, in a fictional vision—“His apocalypse, his revelation, like Wordsworth’s in the Alps, was that a poem could be at one and the same time fraught with contradictions, crossing as it did all the major lines of one’s discourse, and yet still be possessed of a remarkable unity—the unity, one might say, of its ‘chant’—so that however incomprehensible it might seem once one began asking questions of it, it would remain secure in the wholeness of its appeal to the three qualities he valued most: light and energy and love.” When Robert Southey reviewed “The Rime” he found it to be a Dutch (i.e., nonsensical) attempt at German-style sublimity. This finding was in line with Southey’s growing suspicion of all apparently irrational discourses, discourses he had come to equate with religious enthusiasm and revolutionary fanaticism. Tim Fulford examines Southey’s developing views, putting his suspicion of millenarianism into the context of colonialism. For Southey, he demonstrates, the millenarianism of Richard Brothers and his followers was an Oriental infection, another licentious import from the empire, symptom of a decadent fashion for all things Eastern. This approach, engaging with the enquiry into imperialism begun by Edward Said, refocuses our view of some aspects of both millenarianism and Orientalism. The popular discourses that Southey so disliked were highly significant in Blake’s London. They were risky too. Publishing works that predicted the downfall of the kingdom and its replacement by a “political millennium” in which hierarchy was abolished and property shared in common, was a sure way to give the authorities the evidence they needed to imprison one. Turning prophecies into print, as David Worrall’s essay here reveals, was an essential part of a radical London culture—part of its developing political consciousness with its own means of expression and dissemination. It was considered revolutionary enough for author/printers such as Thomas Hawes to attract intense surveillance by spies and informers. Using newly discovered archival sources, Worrall restores to our attention a neglected part of urban political history, not only increasing our knowledge of the millenarian radicalism of the late eighteenth century, but showing it to be as characteristic of the times as the self-conscious historicism that the critic James Chandler has made their defining feature. Self-conscious historicism reached a peak of anxiety in the period in the work of Malthus, concerned as it was to show that its arguments about




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population increase were simply observations of an inevitable and universal historical process. Here, Gary Harrison puts Malthus in the context of a neglected part of late eighteenth-century rural history. Examining discussions about enclosure, agricultural improvement and laboring-class poverty, Harrison shows that Malthus, like the agricultural writer Arthur Young, effected an alienation of the laborer from the landscape. In addition, he pictured the rural poor as an apocalyptic force that threatened, because it proliferated so fast, to destroy all prospect of harmony between humankind and nature. An apocalypse without millennium to follow, Malthus’s image of population increase, Harrison shows, had a dangerous effect that is felt to this day in the arguments of ecological campaigners who view humanity—especially third-world humanity—chiefly as a destructive Other. Malthus’s apocalyptic sublime, in other words, still dogs some of the most vital debates we face today, so rhetorically attractive is it as a prophecy of doom. Malthus was opposed by middle-class writers such as Coleridge and Southey, but also by the organized campaigning of artisan groups. The Spenceans imagined a future more like Godwin’s than like Malthus’s, but, unlike Godwin, they acted to try to bring it about. Attacking Malthus, they imagined a paradise on earth, achievable by land redistribution, in which, tending the earth like a garden, all would be able to live in plenty. The Spencean movement reveals that early nineteenth-century politics were in part a matter of an ideological contest for power between different interpretations of apocalypse and millennium. As the work of Anne K. Janowitz and David Worrall has shown,39 the rhetoric of Romanticism can be understood as just one version of a politico-religious language available to radicals and reactionaries of different positions. From this perspective, Southey’s and Coleridge’s radical millenarianism, and their opposition to Malthus’s discourse, look like individualistic versions of the millenarianism that the Spenceans expressed in collectivist song. While Worrall extends our knowledge of metropolitan culture, Nicholas Roe offers an equally historicized account of rural and suburban versions of millenarian rhetoric. Taking Coleridge and Southey as his subjects, Roe suggests (developing an argument of Paley’s) that a common “millennium in microcosm” links their idealizations of rural peace. Their vision of rustic and suburban paradise on earth, is, Roe argues, a withdrawal from the public sphere of radical activism, as represented by their Pantisocracy scheme. Abandoning their plans to set up a community in America, they pioneered instead a politically and spiritually subdued millennium contrasting with the fervent and public radicalism of the Spenceans. Millenarianism, Roe implies, was a feature of a radicalism pushed back into the rural fringes as much as it was of the revolutionary “underworld” of London, with Southey’s 1797



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poems particularly influential. Identified with the “cottaged dell,” the Romantics’ millennium continues to this day to shape the tastes and desires of suburban Britons. Millennialism was and remains (vestigially) an essential part of the continuing tension between country and city. If expectation of the millennium shaped the rhetorics of class struggle and geographical tension, it also, as Anne K. Mellor reveals, divided the nineteenth-century nation along gender lines. Mellor takes the collection’s focus beyond the London radicals and the nature poets, to settle on a number of non-canonical women writers and to ask a number of bold questions of those who would uphold the male Romantics’ claim to universality. Writers such as Lucy Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld eschewed the apocalyptic millenarianism of Byron’s “Darkness” or Coleridge’s “Religious Musings.” Instead, they affirmed a belief in gradual improvement as had their fellow Unitarian Joseph Priestley in the years before 1789. Even those women who did write in apocalyptic terms—women such as Mary Ann Browne and Mary Shelley— avoided the constructions of time characteristic of the male authors. Mellor, like Fulford, discusses Joanna Southcott: together, their essays show that Southcott’s “pregnancy” with the returning Shiloh was, among other things, a bodily event symbolizing the union of the eternal with the mortal. Southey, as Fulford shows, was revolted by the idea that the two could be believed to unite in the grotesque body of an old woman. For women writers, Mellor reveals, the pregnancy was a far more attractive metaphor for the occupation of the human world by the divine. Women’s bodily experience of childbirth disposed them toward imagining the millennium as a “gradual growth or evolution over time and within [the] body” rather than a new state following apocalyptic breakdown. Mellor’s argument is complicated—as well as confirmed—by the contribution of Philip W. Martin, who investigates the figurative offspring of the sexual coupling of angels and mortals—a coupling that Southcott’s claim to have become pregnant through an immaculate conception made highly topical. Martin shows that some, at least, of the male Romantics were not hostile to the idea, and wrote about the loves of the angels and the progeny of those loves. Byron, Moore and Lamb all entered this theologically unorthodox area, imagining in their fiction the kind of union in which Southcott and her followers literally believed. For Lamb the fruit of this union, the child-angel, was pictured living on earth but marooned in childhood by a suspension of time. Here the Wordsworthian ideal of the innocent child was sustained by a whimsical reworking of Southcott’s bodily millenarianism. Lamb’s unaging angel-children were forever young, forever trailing clouds of glory from their eternal home. Among its other achievements, Martin’s essay reminds us that much millenarian writing was theologically dangerous as well as politically risky.




Tim Fulford

Taking scripture literally could lead to charges of heresy and madness—as William Blake discovered. Blake’s literal approach—his insistence on the reality of the figures he saw in his visions—is analyzed here by G. E. Bentley, Jr. Bentley discusses Blake’s “visionary heads,” the drawings of historical and eternal figures, including Wat Tyler, Shakespeare and Satan, whom Blake claimed to have visited him. Bentley suggests that it was precisely Blake’s habit of making exact material representations of the spiritual that disconcerted his contemporaries and led to his being taken, like Brothers and Southcott, for a religious lunatic—even by fellow poets such as Southey and Wordsworth who themselves employed millennial figures and claimed prophetic insight. Bentley then completes an extensive survey of the heads, identifying for the first time a missing sketchbook in which many were contained—a lost work that remains to be located. Blake’s literal approach (in the root sense of that adjective) is the subject of Martin Butlin’s contribution. Blake wrote letters and words—Hebrew and English—all around his engraving of the Laocoön. The result, a composite print, was one in which words became part of the image—not simply an appended text but a feature integral to the visual design. Butlin sees this late development of Blake’s work as a culmination of his visionary re-orientation of existing religious art, as a “probably unconscious recreation of the emphasis on two rather than three dimensions and the combination of word and pictorial image found in early Christian and Medieval religious art. Word has become image and, insofar as Blake saw himself as a fount of divine wisdom, word and image—God’s word—have become God.” Bentley and Butlin add to our historical knowledge of the apocalyptic and visionary art that Morton D. Paley categorized as the “apocalyptic sublime”; together, they make Blake the collection’s shifting, elusive center. Although the main subject of only three essays, he remains a touchstone in many of the others—the great visionary so similar to, yet different from, his Romantic and radical peers and acquaintances. Many of the essays here are brought into relationships with each other by their use of Blake as a reference point, even as they recontextualize his work by examining the art and politics of those who surrounded him. Joseph Viscomi, Robert N. Essick and Morris Eaves investigate the materiality of Blake’s text, asking what modern media of reproduction tell us about the translatability of Blake’s prophecies beyond the physicality of the books that he personally controlled in all their aspects. How does a virtual Blake, available on the world’s computer screens, translate his visions at the start of a new millennium? Notes 1. W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland and Oxford, 1978), pp. 15–16.



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2. This book adopts the term millenarianism to describe the belief that Christ’s second coming and/or an apocalypse would precede the coming of a millennium; millennialism is used to denote the belief in a gradually approaching millennium without preceding apocalypse. See J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1979). 3. The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). 4. Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, Md. and London, 1975) and Harrison, The Second Coming. 5. Quoted in Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), p. 41. 6. Joseph Priestley, The Present State of Europe Compared with Ancient Prophecies (1794, facs. rpt. Oxford, 1989). 7. Quoted in Erdman, Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn. (Princeton, N. J., 1977), p. 343. 8. Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews, and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93 (p. 261). On Brothers, see also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1968). 9. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and the Times (London, 1794), II, 19. 10. Gilbert Wakefield, A Reply to the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. to a Noble Lord (London, 1796), p. 31. 11. J. Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe (Dublin, 1798), pp. 11, 6. 12. W. H. Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), pp. 91, iii. 13. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, vol. III of Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp (London, 1993), p. 453. 14. I quote from the 1798 edition in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, 8 vols. (London, 1986), I: An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden, pp. 51–52. 15. On Southcott, see James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, Tex., 1982). 16. As Paley shows (“William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews,” p. 281). 17. Revelation 12:1, 5. See Joanna Southcott, Song of Moses and the Lamb (London, 1804) and A Continuation of Prophecies (Exeter, 1802). 18. Critical Disquisitions on the Eighteenth Chapter of Isaiah (1799), quoted in Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists, p. 52. 19. “Letters to the Author of Antichrist in the French Convention,” quoted in ibid., p. 53. 20. G. S. Faber, quoted in ibid., p. 61.




Tim Fulford 21. Quoted in ibid., p. 106. 22. Chalmers quoted in John Beer, “Transatlantic and Scottish Connections: Uncollected Records,” in The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas McFarland, ed. Richard Gravil and Molly Lefebure (London, 1990), pp. 308–43 (p. 327). 23. C&S, p. 143, quoted in ibid., p. 326. 24. Coleridge quoted in ibid., p. 326. 25. Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, N.J., 1947). 26. Blake: Prophet Against Empire. A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (Princeton, N. J., 1954). 27. (Garden City, N.Y., 1963). 28. (Chicago and London, 1971). 29. (Oxford, 1970). 30. See note 8. 31. The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford, 1983), p. 162. 32. Richard Brothers, A Letter to the Subscribers for Engraving the Plans of Jerusalem, the King’s Palace, the Private Palaces, College-Halls, Cathedrals, and Parliament-Houses (London, 1805), pp. 18–19, quoted in ibid., p. 164. 33. Vincent A. De Luca, Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime (Princeton, N. J., 1991); Robert N. Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford, 1989); David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (London, 1992); Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). 34. Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm, p. 36. 35. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London, 1973). 36. E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1972); Peter J. Kitson, “The Whore of Babylon and the Woman in White: Coleridge’s Radical Unitarian Language,” in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of John Beer, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–14; Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford, 1989). 37. Quoted in The Apocalyptic Sublime, pp. 67–68. 38. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists, p. 69. 39. Anne K. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), Worrall, Radical Culture.



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he last decade of William Cowper’s life and work has proved an elusive one for criticism; the years immediately before his death in 1800, and the diverse writings they produced, give some indications of the complexity of understanding Cowper’s place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetry. It was once possible to see Cowper as singularly antithetical to the emergent Romantic poetics of the 1790s. In such readings, the fact of his demise coming in the first year of the new century was thus explained as something of an accident; what is to be done with this odd figure who strays into a later world to which he does not properly belong? This is the old model of Cowper as the sentimentalized “stricken deer,” more “Augustan” than Romantic, of David Cecil’s account.1 Perceptions of Cowper in the last thirty years have suggested a more involved, politicized, contemporary figure, and have deliberately avoided the older model of defining the nature of his work by periodization, or by over-rigid attention to biography. Vincent Newey, in the most comprehensive modern account of the poetry, makes the important claim that “we should always be wary of casting Cowper simply as a figure of despair and as a refugee from despair.”2 By resisting such biographical fallacies, Newey finds new areas of interpretation in the poetry. Yet all critical accounts have to deal with Cowper’s undoubted masterpiece, The Task, being completed by 1785, leaving the final fifteen years of his life as something of an interpretative puzzle, given a desire for a sense of artistic cohesion. Many of these fifteen years were miserable, isolated and suffocatingly depressed, yet Cowper still completed his blank-verse Homer translations, meant, in a sense, to rival Alexander Pope’s earlier in the century.3 He also wrote, although often not for publication, some remarkable poems. Nevertheless, this fifteen-year period remains difficult to interpret; Cowper’s art, after the hard-fought spiritual uplift that ends



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The Task, is often dark and obsessive, returning to the same struggles and defeats. Cowper’s last decade on earth does not always indicate a great amount of cohesion, except in its repetitive concerns with damnation and depression. This chapter will try to locate an artistic cohesion in Cowper’s 1790s’ writings, by looking at the recurrent millennial and apocalyptic anxieties of these works, anxieties that are intertwined with Cowper’s relationship to the poetry (and artistic model) of John Milton. Such cohesion makes Cowper a more typical end-of-century writer than is usually thought to be the case. Cowper’s writings in the 1790s, with the exception of the Homer translations, can be generally described as being in something of a recurrent cycle, a pattern whereby Cowper attempts to escape the present by obsessively moving toward a past—a past that cannot be reached, only gestured toward or recreated through reference to myth, whether classical or Miltonic. Cowper’s obsession with the past in this period was fueled by his own immanent and ever-increasing sense of himself as reprobate, cast out from God’s Elect for failing to fulfill His ordained purpose. He had convinced himself that this purpose was to kill himself, in 1773, amid his troubled engagement to Mary Unwin.4 Cowper’s sense of his failure to provide this sacrifice is most prominent in his correspondence. In January 1794, the start of his last and most absolute depression, he writes of his recurrent sense of being spoken to by voices, on awaking: Dear Sir—— My new year has begun with added shades of Misery and despair. Yesterday when I awoke I heard as follows. “spend the rest of your life in sighs and groanings.” This morning I awoke with these. “Make a fool of me no more—I will never begin.” That is to say—I will never begin to deliver you. So I understood them at the moment, and so I understand them still.5

Cowper goes on to ask, rhetorically, “Can there be yea and nay with God?” The answer, in his view, is negative: “He considers me as a traytor, and acts toward me as he does, for that reason.” Cowper’s correspondent here was Samuel Teedon, an Olney schoolmaster and Chadbandesque mystic who became the interpreter of Cowper’s dreams, offering the poet a spurious, quasiEvangelical salvation from out of his visions’ apparent damnation. While the schoolmaster was undoubtedly something of a humbug, the friendship with Teedon shows another aspect of the revelatory nature of Cowper’s late writings, with the judgment of the Last Days being always imminent. Ulti-



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mately, however, the harsh voices that Cowper heard could only be interpreted in one way; his sense of wretchedness and reprobation would be reaffirmed, because he sought an answer to these accusations in his failures of the past. This feeling of predestined sin in his inevitable failure is crucial, in that the fearfully melancholy Cowper awaited something that he feared would answer and punish his guilt even further. His tortuous “Spiritual Diary” of 1795, written just before a move to East Dereham that Cowper found shattering, painfully relates this feeling of a mind controlled and imprisoned by the past: What opportunities of Suicide had I, while there was any Hope, except a miserable, a most miserable moment, in 73? that moment lost, all that follow’d was as sure as necessity itself could make it. How are such opportunities to be found where the intention is known, watch’d and guarded against? Oh monstrous dispensation! I cannot bear the least part of what is coming upon me, yet am forced to meet it with my eyes open wide to see its approach, and destitute of all means to escape it.6

The heartfelt pleading of such writing comes from its desperate sense of the inevitability of failure; Cowper’s resolution to his problems (the grisly route of suicide) is always in the past, and consequently unreachable. Of similar importance is his irrevocable involvement with each impending tragedy, however imaginary; Cowper was bound to his sufferings, in ways that have important consequences for his late writings. If Cowper cannot reach the beginnings of his trials, still less can he achieve their inevitably damned ends. It is possible that this sense of existing in limbo produces a certain approach toward the past in his writings of this decade. The past is unreachable, so Cowper presents it, and tries to understand it, through mythology, especially the mythology of epic. In this attempted presentation of the past as mythic, Cowper’s relationship with Milton becomes of the utmost significance. The anguish of Cowper’s leaving his apparent haven of Weston in 1795 was itself expressed in Miltonic terms: Cowper’s letters of the 1790s are all too eager to identify their author with the original reprobate, Satan. To this end, the most well-known expressions of Milton’s apostate, such as “Me miserable” and “infinite despair” serve as almost inevitable refrains in Cowper’s communications of the period. Before leaving Weston, Cowper engraved the following lines on a window-shutter: Farewell dear scenes—for ever clos’d to me, Oh for what sorrows must I now exchange you. Me Miserable—How could I escape Infinite Wrath, and Infinite Despair,



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The inscription is a remembering, in part, of Satan’s lines from two parts of Paradise Lost: “Farewell happy fields” (Book I, 249), and the famous cry of anguish from Mount Niphates: “Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?” (Book IV, 73–74).8 That Cowper cannot consider this idea of flight, but has the more earthbound “escape,” suggests a hemmed-in, imprisoned mind that has all of Satan’s damnation but even less power of movement. The identification is perhaps strengthened through Cowper’s phrase: Satan in Book X “fled, not hoping to escape, but shun / The present” (339–40). Cowper’s identification with Satan is relevant to his sense of involvement in his damnation—he is forced to follow the dictates of a (sometimes unjust) God, even when he knows it will lead him into future punishment and remorse. Cowper’s reading of Milton is not, therefore, the liberating Satanic re-reading explored by such contemporaries and near contemporaries as Blake and Shelley. Blake cast Milton unconsciously in the “Devil’s party,” in order to harness for himself the potential rebellious energies of Satan in Paradise Lost, and Shelley appealed to the “grandeur and the energy” of Milton’s figure, in brilliant mis-readings that could liberate Milton’s epic from the apparent conservative straitjacket of its theology, and inspire rewritings such as Blake’s Milton, and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Yet Cowper’s reading of Milton results in the formation of a Satanic poetic identity that is far from liberating: instead, this identity is fixed through its exploration of guilt, reprobation and damnation, rather than any liberating, rebellious impulse. Coleridge’s description of the psychology of Milton’s Satan, in The Statesman’s Manual of 1816, is relevant here: . . . in its utmost abstraction and consequent state of reprobation, the will becomes Satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in the relations of the spirit to itself, and remorseless despotism relatively to others; the more hopeless as the more obdurate by its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its superiority to toil and pain and pleasure; in short by the fearful result to find in itself alone the one absolute motive of action, under which all other motives from within and from without must be either subordinated or crushed. This is the character which Milton has so philosophically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of his Paradise Lost. Alas! too often has it been embodied in real life! (LS, p. 65)

Cowper possesses this Satanic monomania, with none of its external results or supposed rewards; the obsessive self-investigation for the “absolute motive of action” and the impending sense of doom preclude any “sensual impulses.” Cowper’s Satanic identification has none of the glorious attractions



Whom Death, Earth, Heaven, and all combin’d to ruin, Whose friend was God, but God swore not to aid me.7

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Within the history of criticism, Milton’s Romantic interpreters enjoy special status, for under their aegis we pass from simplistic reception of Milton’s poetry into a deep critical understanding of it. In the history of Milton criticism, it is the Romantics who mediate “between passive reception and active understanding” and who thus disclose meanings that previous generations resisted, even shielded.9

This notion of a revolutionary Romantic re-reading of Milton that throws away the complacencies of eighteenth-century criticism is incapable of accommodating Cowper’s response to Milton. Cowper’s reading of Milton does not resist or shield the meanings of the poetry; instead, it represents, in its vivid identification, the problems with centering Milton’s epic poem around Satan’s interiority. The Satanic figure emerges in Cowper’s work not as an inspirational literary archetype, but as an hubristic, guilt-ridden overreacher, whose potential grandeur is further highlighted by his ruin. The effects of the writings of Cowper’s last decade are very much bound up with the sense of pathos resulting from this identification. Cowper could not creatively misread Milton in order to find inspiration in the sublimity of Satan. Cowper’s faith (for all his paradoxical loss of it since his conviction of being cast out from God in 1773), committed him to the mythology that Milton created, even when the potential consequences of this myth were, to him, inefficacious. Cowper’s poetic identity was so bound up with Milton that he was as bound to the message of Paradise Lost as he was to its God, howsoever vengeful and vindictive he threatened to be. Cowper’s involvement with Paradise Lost takes various forms, but the constant factor is the manner in which the certainties of Milton’s poem (even the certain damnation of its protagonist) contribute to Cowper’s retreat from the evils of the present into the mythic past. Cowper’s attempt to shun the present in the 1790s also takes various forms, a common factor being his recourse to myth, Miltonic or otherwise. The importance of Milton’s epic myth (and what it represented to Cowper’s presentation of himself as reprobate) is also shown in the notably Miltonic Homer translations, and in the unfinished commentary on Paradise Lost. Cowper’s translation of Milton’s Latin and Italian poems was to form part of an edition, illustrated by Fuseli, that incidentally introduced Cowper to his future biographer, the Miltonist William Hayley.10 Cowper’s projected edition was suspended by 1793, possibly because of the declaration of war with France. In his letters, Cowper is delighted to be relieved of the burden.11 It has been



of Satan’s rebellion, as seen by Blake and Shelley, but much of the fallen angel’s ruined grandeur, nobility and dignity. Cowper’s relationship with Milton contradicts Joseph Wittreich’s claim that

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speculated that the commentary on the earlier books of Milton’s poem would have subjected him too painfully to the prospects of hellfire, and indeed, Cowper the correspondent feared that “the First Book of the Paradise Lost is in truth so terrible and so nearly akin to my own miserable speculations in the subject of it, that I am a little apprehensive, unless my spirits were better, that the study of it might do me material harm.”12 However, the commentary that we have (extending only to the first three books) hardly serves as evidence for this fearful state of damnation at all. Cowper’s remarks are mainly queries or additions to Thomas Newton’s important commentary in his edition of 1749 (which had reached its ninth edition by 1790), or small technical issues of poetic admiration. What is interesting is that Cowper only has to write about the later details of Satan’s fall—as the commentary did not extend to Book V or VI, he did not have to look at the origins or beginnings of Satan’s guilt. This relates to the idea of Cowper in the 1790s as a Satanic figure who can only accept immediate guilt, not being able to look into the past or anticipate the future directly. The end of the commentary, referring to Book III, 341, “God shall be all in all,” is perhaps the most revealing section, referring as it does to atonement in terms that go far beyond the context of Milton’s poem. Cowper starts by praising the theology of Paradise Lost: Man, in the beginning, is placed in a probationary state and made the arbiter of his own destiny. By his own fault he forfeits happiness both for himself and for his descendents. But Mercy interposes for his restoration. That Mercy is represented as perfectly free, as vouchsafed to the most unworthy; to creatures so entirely dead in sin, as to be destitute even of a sense of their need of it, and consequently too stupid ever to ask it. They are also as poor as they are unfeeling, and were it possible that they could affect themselves with a just sense and apprehension of their lapsed condition, have no compensation to offer to their offended Maker, nothing with which they can satisfy the demands of his justice, in short, no atonement. In this ruinous state of their affairs, and when all hope of reconciliation seems lost for ever, the Son of God voluntarily undertakes for them.13

The description of atonement here is telling, in that Cowper uses as an example of its workings “creatures so entirely dead in sin,” and “poor as they are unfeeling” to explain the concept. The principal action of Milton’s poem does not offer examples of such figures, so lost in sin as to be unaware of the workings of “Mercy.” The contrast between this Heavenly “Mercy” and the rigorous jurisdiction of the “demands of [God’s] justice” (two coexistent features of Cowper’s own idea of the deity) indicate Cowper’s own religious interpretation rather than Milton’s. Cowper’s theological speculations are always impossibly caught between the need and desire for this for-



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giveness, and the crushing absoluteness of divine justice. Cowper imaginatively extends the implications of atonement in Paradise Lost beyond what the poem offers in terms of providence, in order to dwell on the details of suffering. The commentary on Paradise Lost ultimately shows Cowper not to be petrified by Milton’s hellfire and damnation, nor suffering from a Bloomian sense of “anxiety,” so much as fascinated by the poetic representation of a theodicy that was, for him, unattainable because it could root itself in the past and the future through its explanation of causation and its providential possibilities. Cowper had no such rootedness to call on, yet his reading of Milton’s epic, in the Commentary and in his poems, is a vital part of his poetic identity. What Cowper’s engagement with Milton ultimately shows is that Cowper’s sense of recurrent punishment and alienation from any scheme of eternal reward was absolute. It can be seen to permeate his later poetry. In “Yardley Oak,” his unfinished, Miltonic poem written around 1791 or 1792, Cowper’s fascination with the past and history is only equaled by his difficulty in confronting its workings. This results in some very ambivalent poetry: Who lived when thou wast such? Oh, could’st thou speak, As in Dodona once thy kindred trees Oracular, I would not curious ask The Future, best unknown, but at thy mouth Inquisitive, the less ambiguous Past. (“Yardley Oak,” 40–44)

The standard trope of avoiding the uncertainties of the future through meditation on and recreation of a remembered past is familiar from such famous eighteenth-century debates on the problems of memory and posterity as Gray’s Elegy and Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. Cowper shares with these poems the central problem of unifying the ambiguities of the past through writing—the aged tree cannot simply be an Edenic metaphor, once the train of meditation has begun. Thus, the “less ambiguous past” is itself made ambiguous by Cowper, not least because of the conviction with which he defines the qualities of nature as those of necessary decay: What exhibitions various hath the world Witness’d of mutability in all That we account most durable below! Change is the diet, on which all subsist Created changeable, and Change at last Destroys them. Skies uncertain, now the heat Transmitting cloudless, and the solar beam



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(69–80)

That this diet of change is absolute in effect is illustrated by the way in which the lines are syntactically brought round to the inevitable pauses that describe the process of decay, such as “destroys them” and “mars them.” This pattern of causation, with the flow of these sentences within the blank verse, and their invariably abrupt conclusions, mark Cowper’s skill in the absorption of Miltonic syntax and control of caesura. The cold, severe sense of these lines draws attention to Cowper’s sense of nature as a process of necessary destruction, and anticipates the malevolence of nature in his last poems. The innate mutability of nature in “Yardley Oak” is neither benign nor reconcilable to the workings of the supposedly “less ambiguous” past, since it presupposes an ambiguity in this past, through its existence. The question then becomes where to take the poem after this acknowledgment. Cowper chooses to take it even further into the past, a past that is understandable only through myth. By tracing back to beyond the beginnings of history, Cowper can move beyond its workings and erosions, its decays and ruthless conclusions. In lines that were later excised in the manuscript, the poem goes back to before the Flood, to the “Prediluvian race” and then to Homer, with the similar sense of life’s brief span as being inevitably evil, and controlled by an impersonal force of change that cannot be other than destructive. The final section of the poem follows the logic of this pattern, in moving yet further backwards to the primal religious myth of origin; only in Eden can we avoid this impending sense of ravage and degeneration: One man alone, the Father of us all, Drew not his life from woman; never gazed, With mute unconsciousness of what he saw, On all around him; learn’d not by degrees, Nor owed articulation to his ear; But, moulded by his Maker into Man At once, upstood intelligent, survey’d All creatures, with precision understood Their purport, uses, properties, assign’d To each his name significant, and fill’d With love and wisdom, render’d back to Heaven In praise harmonious the first air he drew. He was excused the penalties of dull



Now quenching in a boundless sea of clouds, Calm and alternate storm, moisture and drought, Invigorate by turns the springs of life In all that live, plant, animal, and man, And in conclusion mar them.

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(143–61)

If the Golden Age is necessarily always in the past, Cowper’s has to be before the past, in order to make History redundant. As has been recently suggested by Tim Fulford, “the lines contrast the timeless spiritual reciprocity of Edenic speech with writing, showing the latter to be a penalty rather than a gift, of human rather than divine origin.”14 Postlapsarian writing here is therefore itself an implicitly fallen and failed form of communication. The consequence of this for Cowper’s writing is profound, in that by writing he is perpetually reinscribing his own failure, incompleteness and lack of spiritual belonging, as a metonym of this larger Fall. Cowper represents the past through myth in order to escape this inexorable logic that he finds in it. He is not so much diluting the past as trying to circumvent its workings by moving beyond it, but the discovery of the impossibility of such a movement being written into the poem makes a strong case for the unfinished poem ending on a note of profound desperation. Its unfinished status thus seems more appropriate, since it is hard to see where else the poem could have been taken. The same sense of desperation, along with the apocalyptic sense of the past, even as myth, becoming less controllable and understandable, also emerges in Cowper’s penultimate poem, “On the Ice Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean,” written in Latin and translated into English couplets the day before Cowper started “The Castaway,” in March 1799. The poem was apparently stirred by a report of icebergs seen in the North Sea read to Cowper from a newspaper. By this stage, his intense conviction of his own punishment had given him a millenarian paranoia that interpreted natural, external forces as implicitly threatening. Thus, in 1795 he described himself as The most forlorn of beings I tread a shore under the burthen of infinite despair, that I once trod all cheerfulness and joy. I view every vessel that approaches the coast with an eye of jealousy and fear, lest it arrive with a commission to seize me.15

The familiar metaphor of the sea as the struggle for faith in spiritual autobiography, so prevalent in Cowper’s poetry, is here turned into a symbol of paranoia that views anything approaching the coast as explicitly malign, threatening and unknowable. By 1798, Cowper (writing to Lady Hesketh,



Minority. No tutor charged his hand With the thought-tracing quill, or task’d his mind With problems. History, not wanted yet, Lean’d on her elbow, watching Time, whose course, Eventful, should supply her with a theme . . .

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The country that you have had in prospect, has always been famed for its beauties; but the wretch who can derive no gratification from a view of nature even under the disadvantage of her most ordinary dress, will have no eyes to admire her in any. In one day, in one moment I should rather have said, she became an universal blank to me, and, though from a different cause, yet with an effect as difficult to remove, as blindness itself. . . . My state of mind is a medium through which the beauties of paradise itself could not be communicated with any effect but a painful one.16

This corresponds to Coleridge’s description of the Satanic consciousness, with its “subjugation of sensual impulses.” The result of Cowper’s reprobation is almost an inversion of the Burkean sublime, where his internal vision erases the possibility of the beautiful. His perspective is terrified by the uncertainty of anything unknown. To such a perspective, an iceberg is not only remote but by extension malign in its portentousness. Consequently, “On the Ice Islands” is usually read as a companion to “The Castaway,” with the icebergs forming some malevolent symbol of Cowper’s psyche. Within this broad reading of the poem, it is interesting that Cowper has a sense of attraction toward these portentous objects: In ages past, old Proteus with his droves Of sea-calves, sought the mountains and the groves, But now, descending whence of late they stood, Themselves the mountains seem to rove the flood; Dire times were they, full-charged with human woes; And these, scarce less calamitous than those. What view we now? More wondrous still! Behold! Like burnish’d brass they shine, or beaten gold; And all around the pearl’s pure splendour show, And all around the ruby’s fiery glow. (“On The Ice Islands, Seen Floating In The German Ocean,” 5–12)

The mention of Proteus, the shape-changing sea God, recalls Milton’s description of “Old Proteus” in Paradise Lost (III, 605), where his “various shapes” are called up in order to try and mimic the light of the sun, as part of the search for the philosopher’s stone. Cowper’s mention is more significant when Proteus’s prophetic qualities are considered, as the poem gestures toward a sense of contemporary portentousness to equal the past “human woes” of mythology. The nature of such “calamitous” times has been little explored, and it is hard to locate even a general sense of contemporary in-



who was visiting Clifton in Bristol) was aware of the aesthetic blindness that his sense of damnation gave him:

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volvement in Cowper’s writings of this last year of his life, yet the reference to the flood would seem to indicate that the coming of the icebergs is for him a symbol of human history on the brink of destruction, an entirely appropriate theme for a poem written in the last year of the century. It is possible that Cowper’s description of the unearthly qualities of these objects, their being like “burnish’d brass” and “beaten gold,” recalls a phrase from Book III of Dryden’s Aeneid, where Palinurus looks to the stars and finds “bright Orion, armed with burnished gold” (677). At this point in the poem, Aeneas’s ship is leaving Crete because of the misinterpreted advice of the oracle of Delos that had taken it there. The significance of this becomes clearer when Cowper adds a creation myth to the apocalyptic description of the icebergs: By slow degrees uprose the wond’rous pile, And long successive ages roll’d the while, Till, ceaseless in its growth, it claim’d to stand Tall as its rival mountains on the land. Thus stood, and, unremovable by skill, Or force of man, had stood the structure still; But that, though firmly fixt, supplanted yet By pressure of its own enormous weight, It left the shelving beach, and with a sound That shook the bellowing waves and rocks around. Self-launch’d, and swiftly, to the briny wave, As if instinct with strong desire to lave, Down went the pond’rous mass. So bards of old, How Delos swam th’Ægean deep, have told. But not of ice was Delos; Delos bore Herb, fruit, and flower; she, crown’d with laurel, wore Even under wintry skies, a summer smile; And Delos was Apollo’s fav’rite isle. But, horrid wand’rers of the deep, to you He deems Cimmerian darkness only due. (39–58)

The peculiar turn here is achieved through the attempt to fit the icebergs into a classical myth—that of the wandering island of Delos later chained to the seabed for Apollo—and the subsequent utter rejection of the attempt. The “summer smile” of Delos, its fixed place as an imaginative symbol of poetic inspiration, contrasts with the unknowable icebergs, whose malevolent course and nature cannot be understood. This is reiterated in the clarity and visibility of the etymology of “Delos” itself, and by the earlier reference to the third book of the Aeneid, where Palinurus eventually finds the right



Cowper’s Ends

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course, once Apollo’s oracle is interpreted correctly. By contrast, the icebergs represent a wrong, obscure and threatening course; Cowper’s dismissal of the icebergs’ presence in this myth means that they cannot be associated with Apollo, the God of poetry (with the subtext that they are not a fit subject for poetry at all, an indication of Cowper’s difficulty in accommodating the unknown). Repulsion replaces his former attraction, and they are banished. The icebergs cannot fit into Cowper’s creation of a mythical past, so they instead have to represent a malevolent force of nature. This force cannot but be malign, given that its workings are mysterious and obscure. The latent tension between the “less ambiguous past” and the “future, best unknown” of “Yardley Oak” is here made explicit, and Cowper is left with no alternative save an automatic dismissal of the subject (a dismissal that confirms the peculiar sense of impending tragedy that is so suggestive in the poem). What seems to happen here again is that Cowper fears, and has to avoid, whatever cannot be directly reconciled to the past in his own terms. Instead, in his failure to account for the icebergs’ origins, they become a symbol of apocalyptic ends. This pattern of the beginning sending the reader to the end, and the end to the beginning (which cannot often be located), the recurrent cycle in Cowper’s late writings, reaches its well-known climax in “The Castaway,” a poem so concerned with the dual meaning of its allegory of damnation that it both meditates on its own existence, and then ends by sending its reader back to its start, in order to confirm the sense that, in its famous conclusion: No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone, When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each, alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he. (55–66)

Whether or not we follow Vincent Newey in reading in this “a personal stature” that is “the self ’s tribute to its own suffering and to its steadfast resilience and resourcefulness,” the poem’s sense of the speaker as “destined wretch” is merely a more direct statement of the subtext of all Cowper’s late writings.17 The image of castaway or shipwreck is of course a familiar image of the damned; Cowper’s own use of it in his earlier “On The Receipt Of My Mother’s Picture Out Of Norfolk” (1790) merely confirms the strength it held on his mind: But me, scarce hoping to attain that rest, Always from port withheld, always distress’d—



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Cowper’s Ends

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Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-toss’d, Sails ripp’d, seams opening wide, and compass lost, And day by day some current’s thwarting force Sets me more distant from a prosperous course.

Again, memory, by condition of the vagaries of its resemblances and the lack of surety it presents beyond its ideal, is eventually a conduit to the present sense of unfinished guilt and always potentially worse punishment. Being this “tempest-toss’d” figure, with a past that cannot be acknowledged and a future of even more potential incoherence, is a precondition of Cowper’s late writings.18 He cannot acknowledge the remorselessness of history or the workings of the past, with their necessary degenerations and further evils, yet he has to move toward a sense of closure, and can only deny it by warding it off, or creating it in apocalyptic terms. While Cowper’s late writings do not align him to the millenarian excesses of a Richard Brothers or a Joanna Southcott, still his projection of endings, with its fear and attempted denial of the consequences of history, makes him a more central figure in the end of the century, with its overtones of ruin and revolution, than is usually realized. The older idea of Cowper in his last years as a man out of time is deceptive; the artistic cohesion of his final bleak vision, his formation of a poetic identity out of an imaginative sympathy with Milton (and the necessary complicating corrective this makes to the celebration of the Satanic energies of Paradise Lost that were being untapped at the same time), and his insistence not on “human nature being born again,” but on the nature of history as a cyclic mutable force that is finally unknowable, whatever model or myth we may try to understand it with, are all central concerns of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and the confusions surrounding its conclusion. The ends of Cowper’s writings relate to more generalized concerns of the 1790s, in ways that are not often connected, but with a more frenetic movement toward (and repulsion from) inevitable closure. Notes 1. David Cecil, The Stricken Deer, or, The Life of Cowper (London, 1929). 2. Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool, 1982), p. 276. See also Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London, 1983), who bases his work on the similar idea that Cowper’s creation of a “poetic voice” is “not simply a result of character, but of technique as well” (p. 3). 3. James King, in William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, N. C., 1986), finds Cowper’s Homer translation “the great undertaking of his life” and, in its use of Milton as a model, an attempt “to forge a literary identity as if Pope had not existed” (p. 189).



(100–05)

Adam Rounce 4. Cowper’s struggles of 1773 were in many ways a reprise of his earlier suicide attempts of 1763, the difference being the absolute conviction of his reprobation, after a dream in early 1773. See King, William Cowper: A Biography, pp. 86–88. 5. Letter of 2 January 1794, in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1979–86), IV, 444. 6. Letters and Prose, IV, 467. 7. All quotations from Cowper’s poetry, unless otherwise stated, are taken from The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1980–95). 8. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, 1968). The Miltonic tenor of the inscription is such that Cowper may also have been recalling the remorseful expressions of Adam and Eve, on being fully aware of their inevitable expulsion (Book X, 720–25; Book XI, 268–73, 300–07). 9. Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting “Samson Agonistes” (Princeton, N. J., 1986), pp. 383–84. 10. See Letters and Prose, V, xxii-xxiii for an account of the projected edition and its difficulties. 11. On 30 November 1793, Cowper writes of the edition being “postponed on account of the war, which leaves the world no leisure for literary amusements” (Letters and Prose, III, 435). 12. Letters and Prose, III, 242. King (William Cowper: A Biography, p. 237), claims that the Commentary highlighted for Cowper “the apparent discrepancy by which God’s mercy was bestowed on others and yet withheld from him,” thus ensuring that Cowper’s remarks were brought to “an abrupt termination.” Dustin Griffin, in Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), finds the Commentary “haunted by Satan” and “especially sensitive to the plight of the damned” (p. 219). 13. Letters and Prose, V, 178. 14. Tim Fulford, “Wordsworth, Cowper and the Language of Politics,” in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 117–33 (p. 125). 15. Letter of 27 August 1795, in Letters and Prose, IV, 450. 16. Letter of 13 October 1798, in Letters and Prose, IV, 463. 17. Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment, p. 312. 18. The epithet “tempest-toss’d” also recurs in a similar context in “To the Reverend Mr Newton on his Return from Ramsgate” (1780), and in “Temptation,” in the Olney Hymns.



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“To Milton’s Trump”: Coleridge’s Unitarian Sublime and the Miltonic Apocalypse Peter J. Kitson

M

uch recent criticism of the reformist and dissenting politics of the 1790s has stressed the fact that radical writers attempted to manufacture a transparent prose style in which to propagate political ideas.1 It is generally argued that this was in reaction against Edmund Burke’s use of a rhetoric of the sublime and his appropriation of the mode of sensibility (the latter until then a discourse associated with progressive and reformist ideas).2 Writers such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Cobbett eschewed the highly rhetorical and emotive style of Burke’s writing, preferring a rational discourse where a plain style was utilized to bring about as close as possible a correspondence between words and things. Of course, as many have pointed out, all language is metaphorical and Paine’s and Wollstonecraft’s own political writing was heavily rhetorical, although in a way that attempted to disguise its own metaphoricity.3 Despite the close attention paid to political writing in the period, including a wealth of criticism of the apocalyptic aspects of dissenting discourse, the survival of a Miltonic political sublime has not received the attention it merits.4 The argument of this chapter is that Milton’s apocalyptic writings provided a rhetorical model of the “political sublime” that Burke attempted to aestheticize and empty of radical meaning. This Miltonic political sublime was, however, available to writers in the 1790s and, although not the dominant reformist and radical style, was nevertheless a distinctive presence. Morton D. Paley has indicated how William Blake’s prophecies and his long poem Milton struggled to replace Burke’s authoritarian sublime



Chapter 3 z

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The Miltonic Political Sublime Scholars continue to argue about the nature of Milton’s politics; nevertheless, there is a clear strand of the poet’s writing that shows a strong millenarian tendency. Milton accepted John Foxe’s belief that it was the historic mission of the English people to stand out against the Antichrist. In Of Reformation (1641), he wrote how England received this “grace and Honour from GOD to bee the first that should set up a Standard for the recovery of lost Truth, and blow the first Evangelick Trumpet to the Nations.”6 The Reformation had been “a shaking of the powers of darkness” and a “scorning the fiery rage of the old red dragon” (MCPW, I, 524–25). In the 1640s Milton strongly believed that the means for accomplishing reformation prior to the establishment of an earthly millennium was a regenerate and godly people, “a great and Warlike Nation instructed and inur’d to the fervent and continuall practice of Truth and Righteousness.” Milton concluded the tract with a sublime, millenarian prayer to Christ, “that sittest in light and glory unapproachable” to protect the nation from those “that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions, to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness.” Milton anticipated that Christ, “the Eternall and shortly-expected King,” was about to establish an imminent millennium, putting an end to “all Earthly Tyrannies, proclaiming thy universal and milde Monarchy through Heaven and Earth” (MCPW, I, 616). Those who are regenerate, Milton concluded, shall receive in Christ’s thousand-year rule: above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal addition of principalities, legions, and thrones into their glorious titles, and in supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clap hands with joy and bliss, in overmeasure for ever. (MCPW, I, 616)

This linking of vision, millennium and apocalypse is what I designate the Miltonic political sublime. Milton’s prose works of the 1640s frequently show how political events could be interpreted in terms of the apocalyptic scheme of the scriptures. This passage from Eikonoklastes (1649), which combines scriptural material from Revelation with Psalm 149, is typical of his linkage of his spiritual and political concerns:



with a human-centered sublime; while less thoroughly revisionary, the apocalyptic writings of Gilbert Wakefield, Joseph Priestley and the young S. T. Coleridge demonstrate that a highly rhetorical political sublime existed as a counter to the Burkean variety.5

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To bind thir kings in Chaines, and thir Nobles with links of Iron, is an honour belonging to his Saints; not to build Babel (which was Nimrod’s work the first King, and the beginning of his Kingdom was Babel), but to destroy it, especially that spiritual Babel: and first overcome those European Kings, which receive their power, not from God, but from the beast; and are counted no better then his ten hornes. These shall hate the great Whore, and yet shall give thir Kingdoms to the Beast that carries her; they shall commit Fornication with her, and yet shall burn her with fire, and yet shall lament the fall of Babylon . . . until at last, joyning thir armies with the Beast, whose power first rais’d them, they shall perish with him by the King of Kings against whom they have rebell’d; and the Foules shall eat thir flesh. This is thir doom writt’n (Rev. 19). (MCPW, III, 598–99)

It is in his Areopagitica (1644) that Milton’s political sublime is most strongly enunciated as he expresses his spiritual politics in apocalyptic language. Here the regenerate nation on the verge of the millennium too easily congratulates itself on its achievements, yet there is work still to be done if the millennium that is closer than people think is to be attained: We boast our light; but if we look not wisely on the Sun it self, it smites us into darknes. Who can discern those planets that are oft Combust, and those stars of brightest magnitude that rise and set with the Sun, until the opposite motion of their orbs bring them to such a place in the firmament, where they may be seen evning and morning? (MCPW, II, 550)

For Milton, the regenerate nation’s strenuous pursuit of truth is leading to an apocalypse, an unveiling, which is the millennium itself. The nation is represented in sublime terms, metonymically, as the city of London, “this vast City; a city of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with His protection.” The nation is close to becoming “a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies” fit to witness the onrushing millennium, “we reck’n more then five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already” (MCPW, II, 554). Milton images the nation as “rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” and as “an Eagle muwing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain it self of heavenly radiance” (MCPW, I, 558). Milton’s faith in an imminent millennium in the 1640s, expressed in a sublime apocalyptic style, was dimmed by events that culminated in the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. His belief in a regenerate nation shrank to a faith in a saving remnant, a view expressed in later tracts such as The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1659), which he wrote on the eve of the Restoration itself. Although there is much debate



“To Milton’s Trump”

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Peter J. Kitson

Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise The Serpent, prince of air, and drag in chains Through all his realm, and there confounded leave; Then enter into glory, and resume His seat at God’s right hand, exalted high Above all names in heav’n; and then shall come, When this world’s dissolution shall be ripe, With glory and power to judge both quick and dead, To judge th’unfaithful dead, but to reward His faithful, and receive them into bliss, Whether in heav’n or earth, for then the earth Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Than this of Eden, and far happier days (Paradise Lost, XII, 453–65)

Here we have millennium and sublimity; the politics, however, remained necessarily unstated, though implied. The millennium would end earthly kingdoms and antichristian hierarchies, including that under which Milton then wrote. Its imminence, however, could no longer be wished for. Milton’s idiosyncratic blend of the apocalyptic and millenarian sublime was certainly available to those who admired his work. He was a revolutionary poet for a revolutionary age, a poet who could be variously invoked from a variety of differing political persuasions. His presence in the Romantic period was clearly a political as well as a literary one. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, he was a republican hero, an example of virtue and morality, who stood out against the corruption of the times in which he lived. In his sonnet “London,” composed in 1802, Wordsworth apostrophized the elder poet: “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour,” representing him in an image of republican austerity and virtue: Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea. (WPW, III, 116)

In another sonnet he idealized the Commonwealthsmen: “the later Sydney, Marvel, Harrington / Young, Vane, and others who called Milton Friend.” These were “Great Men” no longer “among us” in this world, a world that, deprived of their presence, lacked a “master spirit” and manifested “a want of Books and Men!” (WPW, II, 116).



about the politics of Paradise Lost, it is clear that Milton retained a faith in a literal millennium, though indefinitely postponed. In Book 12, Adam is vouchsafed a vision of this promised end:

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Like Wordsworth, Coleridge was deeply influenced throughout his life by the seventeenth-century republicans, especially Milton and James Harrington. In his radical pamphlet The Plot Discovered (1795), Coleridge appealed to those “Sages and patriots” who “do yet speak to us, spirits of Milton, Locke, Sidney, Harrington!” (Lects 1795, p. 290). The indebtedness of Wordsworth and Coleridge to Milton and the Commonwealthsmen for their early radical views, as well as their later conservative opinions, has now been established beyond doubt.7 Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were as familiar with the writings of Milton’s left hand, as they were with the works of James Harrington and Algernon Sidney.8 Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered, which laments the expiring of liberty under William Pitt’s repressive regime, draws on Milton’s jeremiad, The Ready and Easy Way, which deplored the prospect of the imminent return of Charles II. Wordsworth and Coleridge were hardly alone in their admiration for the seventeenth-century republicans. The Commonwealthsman tradition, maintained throughout the eighteenth century by a small group of republican thinkers such as John Toland, Walter Moyle and James Burgh, flamed up again in the early 1790s. In the debate about the French Revolution, Richard Price and others frequently invoked Milton’s name. His prose works were readily available in Toland’s three-volume edition of 1698 (Toland also edited an influential edition of Harrington’s works) and in versions of Thomas Birch’s edition of 1738. These editions were standard until Charles Symmons’s new six-volume edition of 1806. The radical publisher Joseph Johnson also produced editions of Milton’s and Sidney’s political works. In addition, Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio and Areopagitica were translated into French in several editions in the early days of the French Revolution.9 Milton was also the subject of several influential biographies in the period. William Hayley, who was to be the patron of William Blake, published an adulatory Life in 1794 (revised 1796). Of all the available lives, Hayley’s was the most important for the Romantic poets and artists. Hayley emphasized the independence, energy and power of Milton’s self; he was “the man of our country most eminent for energy of mind, for intensity of application, and for frankness and intrepidity” and was “all of men living, the most perfectly blameless in his sentiments of government, morality, and religion.”10 Hayley was reacting against the view of Milton as an austere and dangerous radical, deriving from Samuel Johnson and David Hume. Hume’s influential History of England (1762) had deplored that the “greatest genius” of the age should have engaged with “fanatics” and “prostituted his pen in theological controversy” in the cause of “the most violent measures of party.”11




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Milton’s reception in the Romantic period was, therefore, an uneasy one, combining an admiration for his poetical achievement with a more partisan view of his political career and ideas. It was during this time that Milton became the paramount poet of the sublime, and Paradise Lost, along with the Bible, its most sustained and successful exemplar. Thomas De Quincey commented, “in Milton only, first and last, is the power of the sublime revealed.”12 However this process involved an emptying or even a forgetting of the Miltonic political sublime and an aestheticization of his life and work. It was Edmund Burke, more than any other writer, who established Milton as the sublime poet for the Romantic Age, albeit at the cost of omitting his political efficacy. Burke’s view of the Puritan revolutionaries of the 1640s is, like so much of his thought generally, complex and ambiguous. I have shown elsewhere how in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) he identifies the prophetic and millenarian quality of Richard Price’s Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1790) with that of seventeenth-century Puritan fanaticism. Burke comments how Price’s sermon was of a strain not heard in the country “since the year 1648, when a predecessor of Dr Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters, made this vault of the king’s own chapel at St. James’s ring with the honour and privilege of the saints.”13 Peters was Cromwell’s chaplain, an Independent minister and propagandist for the army, who was chiefly known for his sermons justifying the execution of Charles I. Burke takes particular exception to Peters’s fondness for citing Psalm 149, a text often used by the godly to justify the destruction of earthly tyrants. Burke comments that the saints with “the high praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged their hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron.”14 Psalm 149 was, of course, one of the key texts for Milton’s Eikonoklastes. Yet Burke’s censure of Peters and Price for their conflation of “politics and the pulpit” and for their reading of prophecy in political terms significantly does not extend to Milton, although he was a Puritan, a millenarian, an apologist for the execution of Charles I and secretary to the regicide and usurper Oliver Cromwell, whom Burke calls “one of the great bad men of the old stamp.”15 Milton is not mentioned at all by name in the Reflections. Nevertheless Burke can berate Price for his enthusiasm at the forced return of Louis XVI to Paris and his breaking “forth into hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which, despite the murderous intentions of the crowd, appears like the precursor of the millennium, and the projected fifth monarch, in the destruction of all church establishments.”16



The Burkean and Miltonic Sublimes

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Burke’s most noted discussion of Milton occurs in his earlier A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). In his attempt to define the aesthetic concept of “the Sublime,” Burke famously turns to Milton. Burke argues that Milton understood better than anyone “the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things.” He uses the figure of Death from the second book of Paradise Lost as an example of this where “all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible and sublime to the last degree.” Later, illustrating the same point, Burke instances Milton’s description of Satan in Paradise Lost (I, 589–99), commenting that Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical picture consist? In images of a tower, an archangel, the sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs, and the revolution of kingdoms. The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.17

Burke also uses Milton, “Our great poet,” to illustrate how light and darkness contribute to the effect of the sublime, instancing “a light which by its very excess is converted into a species of darkness.”18 Milton was certainly regarded by other eighteenth-century critics as a prime exemplar of the mode of the sublime, but it was Burke who became noted for his re-introduction of politics into this category, albeit politics very different from those that preoccupied Milton. Burke used the sublime in his later political writings to dignify and mystify eighteenth-century mechanisms of government, most famously in his description of the French monarchy and Marie Antoinette in Reflections, and in his adamant refusal to allow any luster of the sublime to enhance the revolutionaries themselves, however terrible he perceived their actions to be.19 It could thus be argued that Burke appropriated the Miltonic political sublime for his own purposes, while at the same time depoliticizing Milton’s own writings. The Unitarian Political Sublime: Wakefield and Priestley Milton, however, did remain a fully political presence for other writers. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the French Revolution excited millenarian speculations in many radicals and dissenters.20 Richard Price applied the idea of the millennium to events in contemporary history, in particular the American and French Revolutions, combining millenarian and apocalyptic themes: “Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting AMERICA free, reflected to FRANCE, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates EUROPE!”21 In his A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, Price viewed contemporary events in




Peter J. Kitson

France as the prelude to the millennium. This prophetic view of politics was shared by Joseph Priestley, the leading Unitarian thinker and writer of the day. Priestley’s and Price’s writings were only a notable part of a substantial and widespread body of prophetic literature current among the middle and lower classes, yet in terms of the dissenting group to which Coleridge and others belonged, their views were highly significant. Priestley’s reading of the millennium underwent much change through his life, but there is general agreement that he moved from a belief in an internal spiritual millennium to one that was external and historical. His most developed discussion of this eschatology is contained in his Fast Sermon of 1794, The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies. Here Priestley argues that the millennium is near and that political events can be read as the predicted signs of the times. It is the beginning of those “very calamitous times.” Priestley claims that the millennium is imminent and that it is to be a literal event, encompassing the overthrow of kingdoms. This will involve the destruction of earthly, anti-christian hierarchies. Priestley, however, does not write in a highly charged Miltonic style; nevertheless, his interpretation of prophecy utilizes the mode of the Miltonic political sublime in its selective and apposite quotation of scripture. Priestley, unlike Blake, does not rewrite Daniel and Revelation but incorporates their sublime effusions into his theo-political text.22 Here is his interpretation of the French Revolution: This great event of the late revolution in France appears to me, chap. xi. 3 “And the same hours there was a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men (or literally, names of men) seven thousand, and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to God.” An earthquake, as I have observed, may signify a great convulsion, and revolution, in states; and as the Papal dominions were divided into ten parts, one of which, and one of the principal, was France, it is properly called a tenth part of the city, or the mystical Babylon.23

Here and elsewhere Priestley incorporates the sublime and terrible passages from Daniel and Revelation to construct “a highly wrought picture of the destruction and slaughter of men that will precede this glorious period in which ‘God will take to himself his great power and reign.’” He depicts Daniel’s dream of the four monarchies and Revelation’s account of the downfall of the great whore, along with Christ’s arrival on his white horse with eyes “as a flame of fire.” After these events come the pouring of the third vial and the destruction of the anti-Christian powers, followed by the physical descent of Christ’s throne.24 Although Priestley does not himself write in the sublime style, his selective and extensive interweaving and in-



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terpreting of the apocalyptic texts recalls the mode of the Miltonic political sublime. This is certainly a different kind of discourse from that he used in his more overtly political writings, such as his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) or his Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (1792), yet it is an equally political utterance, expressed in an alternative though traditional political rhetoric. A further example of the Miltonic political sublime can be found in the writings of the dissenting scholar, Gilbert Wakefield. Wakefield was a member of the Unitarian and dissenting circle situated in Cambridge in the 1790s, which included such figures as Benjamin Flower, William Frend, George Dyer and S. T. Coleridge. Wakefield, who left the Church of England in 1779 and adopted Arian or Unitarian sympathies, was personally known to Coleridge. He was chiefly a classical scholar who taught at the dissenting academies—first at Warrington, then at Hackney. Gradually becoming more politically radical during the 1790s, Wakefield issued a series of political works, entering the Revolution debate of the day. In 1798 his reply to Richard Watson’s Address to the People of Great Britain led to his imprisonment on charges of seditious libel. Wakefield certainly regarded Milton as a friend to civil and religious liberty. In his Evidences of Christianity (1793), he praised Milton’s “discourse on the liberty of the press.” Recalling Milton’s Areopagitica led Wakefield into a sublime defense of intellectual and religious liberty: And what wonder? Truth, though exhibited in a different attire through the medium of a thousand intellects, refers her origin to the inexhaustible fountain of all perfection; as the rays of light, infinitely diversified as they may be in colour and direction, all diverge from the same candid and unremitting blaze of glory.25

Wakefield’s most sustained use of the Miltonic political sublime is in his pamphlet of 1794 The Spirit of Christianity, Compared with the Spirit of the Times in Great Britain. He begins the pamphlet by quoting Mammon’s counsel for “dismissing quite / All thoughts of war” from Paradise Lost (II, 278–83). His tract is primarily an attack on the prosecution of the war with France and the brutalities and corruptions that it occasioned. Wakefield argues that war destroys commerce and trade as well as men. Against those who claim that the present war is conducted in defense of the Christian religion, Wakefield thunders a millenarian warning to the “petty ravagers” and “mighty potentates”: It were good, possibly for these wasters of the best works of the Creator, had they never been born (Matth. xxvi. 24). It were better for them, if they could




Peter J. Kitson atone in this life, by the shedding of their own blood, for the blood of thousands and tens of thousands, that is crying against them for vengeance from the earth: if, after slaying with the sword, they could perish with the sword; and thus escape the retribution of a more awful sentence, that awaits, upon the authority of Christ himself, the rebels to his gentle and pacific reign, at his second coming to judge the earth.26

Wakefield’s observation of the actions of his own countrymen caused him to speculate that the established religion is in fact, “a genuine part of that grand apostacy, a limb of the antichrist, predicted in scripture” (p. 22). The alleged Christians and adherents to good order and stable government “blow up the trumpet of war in Sion” and “desolate the globe with torrents of human blood” (pp. 24–25). Wakefield castigates his own country for its crimes in the East, its participation in the slave trade and its part in the wars against the French republic. The supposed crimes committed by the French republicans have largely been in response to the invasion of their territories by the allied armies. Churchmen have simply exacerbated the situation by their silence or by their wholehearted support of the invasion. This support leads Wakefield to his most powerful and evocative use of the Miltonic political sublime, linking politics and apocalypse: For what fellowship hath Christ with Belial? (2 Cor. ix. 5.) or the garments rolled in blood, with the white raiment (Revel. iii. 18.) of the saints? What agreement have the blasphemies of the soldiers and the confused noise in the battle of the warrior (Isaiah ix. 5.), with the sounds of grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ? (1 Tim. i. 2.) And when we think of one prelate in particular, instinct with fire and nitre, my Lord of Rochester, I mean; can we forebear associating with that idea, the lines of Milton? ——————————on the other side Incens’d with indignation Satan stood Unterrify’d; and, like a comet burn’d, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In th’arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and War. Let this redoubtable champion of hierarchical usurpation exchange his crosier for a Parisian pike, and his sword for the spirit (Eph. vi. 17.) for a welltempered weapon of true carnal steel: and prick forth on his pale horse (Revel. vi. 8) to bear down republicans and atheists! (pp. 28–29)

The apocalyptic sublime here deflates to what Morton Paley calls the “apocalyptic grotesque.”27 Nevertheless Wakefield uses the apocalyptic, the sublime and the political to make his point. Interestingly, he cites the sublimely terrible Miltonic Satan to illustrate the diabolic nature of the Bishop of



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Rochester’s politics, returning to the Miltonic sublime a political meaning that Burke had been inclined to ignore. Ultimately, Wakefield espouses a Priestleian necessitarianism and optimism that allows good to issue from this temporary evil according to the divine plan of the “supreme controller of events.” God, Wakefield believes, uses the present government and its crimes to “hasten the melioration of our political condition” as a prelude to the millennium itself, that “alarming catastrophe, which the signs of the times indicated . . . to be rapidly approaching.”28 Coleridge’s Unitarian Sublime The most significant and sustained usage of the Miltonic political sublime is to be found in Coleridge’s early poetry, in particular the poems that came to be known as “The Destiny of Nations” and “Religious Musings.” At the time that Coleridge was writing these poems, he was a believer in an imminent millennium and an admirer of Milton’s writing.29 Like Milton, Wakefield and Priestley he looked to the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation as an aid to understanding the extraordinary events through which he lived. For him, the fulfillment in history of the events prophesied in scripture was a major proof of the truth of Christianity. By 1795 he possessed a good knowledge of both Milton’s poetry and prose, filling the Gutch memorandum notebook with allusions and references, especially to Of Reformation, Areopagitica, Animadversions, and The History of Britain (CN, I, 39n., 106–10, 113–15, 118–19). As Kelvin Everest points out, Milton was the Unitarian Coleridge’s “most obvious literary model.”30 Coleridge was at this time also keenly aware of the problematic of political language, and was concerned to find a political rhetoric that would do justice to his own dissenting ideas.31 He admired the beauty, power and potency of Burke’s writing but deplored the ends to which it was put. In a notebook entry on Burke’s style he commented on the Reflections: “what (Burke’s book) repugnant feelings did it ex-cite? I shuddered while I praised it—a web wrought with admirable beauty from a black bag of Poison!” (CN, I, 24). It is no wonder then that Coleridge wished to return to a political sublime that he found in Milton’s prose writings, a sublime that he could combine with the larger narrative of Paradise Lost. The poem that became “The Destiny of Nations” attempted to combine a poetical supernatural machinery of “Preternatural Agencies” with an apocalyptic political sublime. Morton Paley has recently charted the various revisions of the poem from the lines that Coleridge contributed to the collaborative Joan of Arc of 1794 to the revised self-contained work printed in Sibylline Leaves (1817).32 Coleridge attempted to fashion a Unitarian theodicy in response to Milton, not so much a Natural Supernaturalism as




Peter J. Kitson

a Preternatural Supernatural. I have elsewhere argued that “The Destiny of Nations” and “Religious Musings” are millenarian poems combining apocalypticism with radicalism, partially inspired by Milton’s example.33 Coleridge tried to provide an optimistic and necessitarian philosophy of man and nature fused with a millenarian theology, re-working and revising aspects of the Miltonic theology for an enlightened 1790s audience. This involved a projected synthesis of the works of Newton, Liebniz, Hartley, Priestley and others.34 But the attempted synthesis was difficult; grafting the revengeful story of Revelation onto an optimistic philosophy caused Coleridge continual difficulties. “The Destiny of Nations” and “Religious Musings” were not artistic and intellectual successes but they were powerful contributions to the political debate rather than mere commentaries on it. In both poems, Coleridge, like Wakefield and Priestley, adopts a political rhetoric combining millenarianism, apocalypticism and reformist ideas in the mode of the Miltonic political sublime. After the quasi-Miltonic account of the origin of good and evil in “The Destiny of Nations,” Coleridge has Joan witness the apocalyptic triumph of liberty and freedom as the teachings of the American Revolution spread to France: And soon from forth its bursting sides emerged A dazzling form, broad-bosomed, bold of eye, And wild her hair, save where with laurels bound. Not more majestic stood the healing God, When from his bow the arrow sped that slew Huge Python. Shriek’d Ambition’s giant throng, And with them hissed the locust-fiends that crawled And glittered in Corruption’s slimy track. (432–39; CPW, I, 146)

This Revelation-inspired presentation of the transmission of liberty from America to France and of its eventual triumph is given more substance in “Religious Musings.” Composed between 1793 and 1796, this poem is Coleridge’s most fully-developed development of the Miltonic political sublime. Indeed, as well as dominating the poem’s stylistic mode, Milton is also physically present in it since it is “To Milton’s trump” that the millennium begins. The “Thousand Years,” Coleridge declares, commence their “mystic dance,” the throne of Christ descends and the “mighty Dead / Rise to new life” (359–62; CPW, I, 122). “Religious Musings” contains a versification of Coleridge’s Unitarian belief and his optimistic necessitarian theology. It develops a critique of contemporary politics in the manner of Wakefield’s Spirit of Christianity, attacking the war, the corruption and ambition of politicians and Britain’s



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Yet is the day of Retribution nigh: The Lamb of God hath opened the fifth seal: And upward rush on swiftest wing of fire The inummerable multitude of wrongs By man on man inflicted! Rest awhile, Children of Wretchedness! The hour is nigh And lo! the Great, the Rich, the Mighty men, The Kings and the Chief Captains of the World, With all that fixed on high like stars of Heaven Shot baleful influence, shall be cast to earth, Vile and down-trodden, as the untimely fruit Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm. (303–14; CPW, I, 120–21)

Unlike Priestley and Wakefield, Coleridge incorporates the apocalyptic style of Revelation into his own poetic discourse, appropriating in Miltonic mode the language of apocalypse for his own explicitly political reading. As in Milton’s Of Reformation and Areopagitica, Coleridge links millenarian apocalypticism to a political program to be accomplished by a regenerate nation, led by an elect. Antichristian hierarchies will be destroyed, wars will cease and the world will be as a “vast family of Love” with all enjoying “the equal produce” they have raised from the “common earth” by “common toil” (341–43). Coleridge’s millennium is thus a global version of his communitarian, pantisocratic ideals. It is a period to be followed “by the passing away of this Earth and by our entering a state of pure intellect: when all Creation shall rest from its labours” (CPW, I, 122). The transformation of Coleridge’s apocalyptic millenarianism into a spiritualized politics followed shortly after these poems were written. As H. W. Piper has shown, Coleridge naturalized and internalized the themes and language of Revelation in his supernatural poetry, taking them out of the realm of the directly political.35 Additionally, Elinor Shaffer has convincingly demonstrated how Coleridge subsequently became absorbed in the German Higher Criticism of the Bible, in particular, the work of J. G. Eichhorn. Eichhorn returned Revelation to the historical thematic of the fall of Jerusalem, removing the apocalypse from contemporary political reference.36 Morton Paley has also demonstrated how the apocalyptic would survive in Coleridge’s poetry shorn of its millenarian content as the mode of “apocalyptic grotesque.”37 Certainly the failure of the Revolution, for whatever reason, to transform into a peaceful and democratic republic and the



participation in the slave trade. Then it moves from the local and temporary to the universal and apocalyptic. Versifying the sixth chapter of Revelation, Coleridge situates the French Revolution in the context of prophecy:

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non-appearance of King Jesus rendered the Miltonic political sublime an inappropriate and cumbersome mode within which to conduct political debate. Nevertheless, it was a mode of writing that Coleridge’s contemporaries did understand, however uncomfortable they later found it. It was also a coherent part of the political debates of the 1790s and a style of communication to which a significant part of the radical and dissenting community could give ear. Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” is certainly a work of the committed imagination and it belongs to a time when poetry, politics and religion were still capable of unified expression within a sublime framework. Notes 1. See, for instance, Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996); John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000). 2. See Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York, 1993). 3. See Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984). 4. See, however, Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke and New York, 1999). 5. Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), p. 50. See also Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). 6. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–82), I, 525. All further references to this edition are given in the text as MCPW, followed by volume and page numbers. 7. See Zera S. Fink, “Wordsworth and the English Republican Tradition,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 4 (1948), 107–26; see also Peter J. Kitson “Coleridge, Milton and the Millennium,” The Wordsworth Circle, 17 (1987), 61–66; “‘The electric fluid of truth’; The Ideology of the Commonwealthsman in Coleridge’s The Plot Discovered,” in Coleridge and the Armoury of the Human Mind: Essays on His Prose Writings, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Thomas N. Corns (London, 1991), pp. 36–62; “‘Sages and patriots that being dead do yet speak to us’; Readings of the English Revolution in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution, ed. James Holstun (London, 1992), pp. 205–30. Also relevant are Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (Basingstoke, 1988), John Morrow, Coleridge’s Political Thought: Property, Morality and the Limits of Traditional Discourse (Basingstoke, 1990). 8. Particularly influential were Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Of Reformation, Areopagitica, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, Harrington’s Oceana, and Sidney’s Discourses.



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9. John T. Shawcross, “A Survey of Milton’s Prose Works,” in Achievements of the Left Hand, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst, Mass., 1974), pp. 292–391; John T. Shawcross, ed. Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972), p. 8; Kitson, “Sages and patriots,” p. 226. Editions of separate works were also available and, as Shawcross points out, Milton’s works were accessible in English or original Latin for any interested reader in the eighteenth century. 10. Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1986), p. 32. 11. Shawcross, Milton 1732–1801: The Critical Heritage, p. 237. 12. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., ed., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, Oh. and London, 1970), p. 480; see also Peter J. Kitson, “Milton: the Romantics and After,” in the Blackwell Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford, 2001), pp. 463–81. 13. Kitson, “Sages and patriots,” pp. 209–11; Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 40–44. 14. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1964), pp. 9–10. 15. Ibid., pp. 10, 45. 16. Ibid., p. 70. 17. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London, 1958), pp. 59, 61–62. 18. Burke, Sublime and Beautiful, p. 80. 19. Ibid., pp. 68–76. 20. Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93; Jack Fruchtman, The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 73 (Philadelphia, 1973); Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarianism and the French Revolution in England and France (Baltimore, Md., 1975); W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland and Oxford, 1978); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979); Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm. 21. Richard Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind (London, 1787), pp. 51–56. Quoted in Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, p. 20. 22. For this distinction between interpreter and prophet as applied to Blake and popular millenarian prophets such as Richard Brothers, see Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm. 23. Joseph Priestley, The Present State of Europe Compared with Antient Prophecies; A Sermon Preached at The Gravel Pit Meeting in Hackney, February 28, 1794 (London, 1794), p. 26. 24. Ibid., pp. 11–15.




Peter J. Kitson 25. Gilbert Wakefield, Evidences of Christianity: Or a Collection of Remarks Intended to Display the Excellence . . . and Evince the Authenticity of the Christian Religion, 2nd edn. (London, 1793), p. 44. 26. Gilbert Wakefield, The Spirit of Christianity Compared with the Spirit of the Times in Great Britain, 3rd edn. (London, 1794), pp. 11, 15–16. 27. Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1986), pp. 184–86; Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 140–53. 28. Wakefield, Spirit, pp. 35, 39. 29. Kitson, “Coleridge, Milton and the Millennium.” 30. Kelvin Everest, Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1793–98 (Sussex and New York, 1979), p. 32. 31. See Peter J. Kitson, “The Whore of Babylon and the Woman in White: Coleridge’s Radical Unitarian Language,” in Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–16. 32. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 91–103. 33. See Kitson, “Coleridge, Milton and the Millennium.” 34. See Ian Wylie, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford, 1989). 35. H. W. Piper, The Singing of Mount Abora: Coleridge’s Use of Biblical Imagery and Natural Symbolism in Poetry and Philosophy (London, Cranbury, Mississauga, 1987), pp. 43–59. 36. Elinor Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1972). 37. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 140–53.



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I

t was particularly appropriate that the coming of the millennium in the year 2000 should be marked by the appearance of Morton Paley’s study Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry,1 since he there concerns himself not only with the part played by those concepts in the thinking of the early English Romantic poets but with its place in Western thinking generally. Although the biblical account of the Last Things, “eschatology,” as it came to be called, was always there, waiting to provide a framework for events that seemed to have a corresponding quality, Paley also notes that it did not have a finally authoritative organization among its elements. A point that he stresses in consequence, and that gives much of the shape to his study, is the degree to which the idea of the apocalypse and that of the millennium tended to go together, while still remaining separable, so that at certain times people would concentrate particularly on the one or the other. It was not very clear, for instance, whether the thousand years were to be a period preceding the Last Judgment or whether they would be a paradisal state to follow it for those who had been judged among the righteous. An interpreter could simply choose which elements to emphasize, therefore, and if in doubt place them in the order that seemed most appropriate. Although traditionally the two ideas, those of the apocalypse and of the millennium, have gone together, the first, with its sense of doom, has recently been more prominent. We saw something of this when preparations for the year 2000 coincided with premonitions of disaster, which usefully crystallized into the idea that many of the most crucial computers in the world would fail when they tried to bring up the first date of the year 2000. This, it was thought, by halting many important electronic functions, would lead to a collapse of civilization and so bring about the disasters of the apocalypse. This already illustrates the way in which the meaning of the



Chapter 4 z

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word itself has shifted in recent times. Originally it meant simply “revelation,” the name given to the English version in the New Testament, and it has always retained some of that sense. The last chapters, with their visionary picture of the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, were particularly popular. But by way of the other events described it also came to emphasize the violence of the final events—and particularly, of course, the destructive conflict that was envisaged as marking the future end of human history. Historically, there have been several occasions when the biblical Book of Revelation seemed particularly relevant to its readers. In the seventeenth century, when individual lay interpretations became prominent, those who came to it freshly were eager to find in its prophetic books—and especially this one—texts that could be applied to their current world. The mention of Babylon, the great Whore, suited those who were looking for ammunition against the Roman Catholic church, while the various uncomplimentary things said about the “kings of the earth,” including the prophecy that they would hide in the dust, encouraged all who were of a republican frame of mind. In one sense, then, it was predictable that the French Revolution should re-arouse such thinking. This was not the first response, however. In 1788, as a matter of fact, England had been celebrating the centenary of the English Revolution of 1688, when William of Orange was thought to have brought proper democracy to the British people and so warded off dangerous developments such as those that had provoked what was happening in France. When the Revolution first broke out it was thought at first, therefore, that France was simply following in England’s footsteps into the adoption of a more democratic form of monarchy. But as the events in France unfolded, with the deposition of the king and the realization that the state being set up was atheist in nature, together with the exaltation of Reason, and when the lurking destructive potentialities became evident with the Reign of Terror, minds began to turn to the prophecies concerning the Last Days when the Devil would have power for a time. And when in the festival of Reason, a whore was crowned as its representative, the parallel with the Great Whore of Revelation seemed all too close. Surely this was a sign that civilization was passing into its apocalyptic phase. In the 1790s events moved so quickly that the interpretative framework might have to be shifted equally quickly to adapt to them. This was particularly true in the first part of the decade. In 1793, Wordsworth’s mind had been moved primarily by the fact that France and England had gone to war, thus enlisting Englishmen against figures such as the Girondins with whom he had thrown in his lot. But the matter was further complicated later that year when Robespierre, who felt that the Girondins were dragging their feet in their support of the Revolution, initiated the events leading to the Terror,



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in which many of Wordsworth’s friends were executed. When, in the summer of 1794, news reached him that events had taken yet another turn, with Robespierre himself now dead, he found himself breaking into the rhapsodic mood described in The Prelude, striding along the sands by the Leven estuary where he had ridden as a boy and exulting in his belief that the ideals of the Revolution were after all going to be realized: “ . . . Thus far our trust is verified; behold! They who with clumsy desperation brought Rivers of blood, and preached that nothing else Could cleanse the Augean Stable, by the might Of their own helper have been swept away. Their madness is declared and visible, Elsewhere will safety now be sought, and earth March firmly towards righteousness and peace.” Then schemes I framed more calmly, when and how The madding Factions might be tranquillised, And—though through hardships manifold and long— The mighty renovation would proceed. . . . (Prelude (1805), X, 546–57)

In the previous months, with the grim, never-ending spectacle of massacre, he had found himself gazing into the heart of darkness. The revolutionary operation had seemed, indeed, like a terrible engine, consuming human beings only to demand more even as it did so (Prelude (1805), X, 33–46). Whereas Wordsworth found the fall of Robespierre a straightforwardly hopeful event, (even if he would then be sunk into despondency during the subsequent period), the young men whom he was shortly to meet were responding in a slightly different way. Coleridge and Southey heard the news during the summer when they were planning Pantisocracy and were equally delighted—and indeed set out to write a drama on the subject, The Fall of Robespierre, but had a more complex response, since in many respects they admired the Jacobin leader. They found him a resourceful, highly talented and purposeful man who had been driven to an utterly erroneous course of action—largely, Coleridge thought, through his one great failing of impatience. So there was not much of the apocalyptic in their account, more an attempt to discover how such a gifted individual might have ended up so mistaken. As a result the drama that the two poets quickly turned out was described by Coleridge, privately at least, as a “tragedy.” Yet of the political significance there could be no doubt, as witnessed by their further decision in 1794 to produce a drama on the subject of Joan of Arc. Harmless enough, one might think, just another historical epic; but not in the mid-1790s, when England had just gone to war with France.



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Meanwhile, as the developments on a larger stage proceeded, it was not the events of the Revolution that were now seen as apocalyptic so much as the declaration of war against France. And whereas people in England had not minded very much so long as revolutionary events were thought of in the context of the English Revolution, the new situation changed things still further. The various monarchies lining up with England to attempt defeat of the new republic could look very much like the “kings of the earth” in Revelation—who if that scenario was to be played out would end up vanquished. And in these circumstances, when there were not lacking people ready to rise up and declare themselves prophets, the most notable one being Richard Brothers, whose 1794 book, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, affirmed, for example, that “the English government, both what is called civil and ecclesiastical, in its present form, will, by the fierce anger and determined judgment of the Lord God, be removed, annihilated, utterly destroyed,”2 there was room for alarm. The authorities, always fearful for the spread of sedition, and never more so than on occasions like this when the country was at war, took alarm at Brothers’ sayings, which were spread by some of his associates, and had him imprisoned. There was both excitement and fear in the air, affecting the writings both of Blake and of Coleridge—which were in fact strangely similar at the time. As Jon Mee has also noted,3 two of their writings used the birth of Christ as a point of reference. Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” are written as if composed on the days before Christmas in 1794; Blake’s Europe as a parody or pastiche of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”: The deep of winter came What time the secret child, Descended thro’ the orient gates of the eternal day: War ceas’d, & all the troops like shadows fled to their abodes. (Plate 3, 1–4; Erdman, p. 61)

Coleridge at the opening of “Religious Musings” figured himself as transported by his imagination to become one of the lowly shepherds who witness the heavens explode with the vision of angels proclaiming the good news of universal peace. He too introduces a note of cosmic vision, writing in the first version: Ah not more radiant, nor loud harmonies Hymning more unimaginably sweet With choral songs around th’ETERNAL MIND, The constellated company of WORLDS Danc’d jubilant: what time the startling East Saw from her dark womb leap her flamy Child!4



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When the poem was re-published in the following year he omitted these lines, thinking perhaps that they looked too pantheistic; but in 1794 they were firmly there, envisioning the birth of the sun as a cosmic event. Blake, meanwhile, in Europe, was picturing a similar birth of energy—but in more terrible form. In his “Preludium,” the Nameless Shadowy Female finds herself about to give birth, but the son she produces is Orc, a being of unrestricted energy, to be experienced by her with unrelieved terror: I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames. And thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad And leave me void as death: Ah! I am drown’d in shady woe, and visionary joy. (Plate 2, 9–12; Erdman, p. 61)

Blake presents her vision ironically, since in addition to seeing energy as terrible, she also glimpses the possibility that it might be humanized, which so far from being terrible would be a mixture of the human and the divine. She glimpses it as a divine child, in fact, not an infinite energy at all but wrapped in swaddling clothes like the infant Jesus; not a consuming fire but a baby needing to be fed, like the infant Zeus or the Messiah prophesied by the prophet Isaiah, with milk and honey. And at this point she is totally nonplussed, unable to understand at all the world in which she is living: And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band? To compass it with swaddling bands? And who shall cherish it With milk and honey? I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past. (Plate 2, 13–16; Erdman, p. 61)

These parallel visions of Coleridge’s and Blake’s give the tone of their responses to the events in France. When Blake reaches the end of Europe, his vision is again one of terror: But terrible Orc, when he beheld the morning in the east, Shot from the heights of Enitharmon; And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury. (Plate 14, 37–15,2; Erdman, p. 65)

The book ends on the same note: Then Los arose his head he reard in snaky thunders clad: And with a cry that shook all nature to the utmost pole,




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The final tone is somber, relieved only by the illumination, which shows what seems to be the honest man trying to save his family in the midst of destruction. In the cases of both Blake and Coleridge detailed chronology is particularly important, since the shift of events from year to year or even from month to month, could mean that the appropriate interpretation also changed. In the middle of the decade, for instance, the fact that Blake could follow his America and Europe with much shorter books bearing the titles of “Africa” and “Asia” suggests strongly that he had still been anticipating a world-wide movement that would take in all four continents, yet that his conviction was beginning to fade. Throughout his career, as Paley demonstrates, the theme was to recur, with the millennial suggesting, most often, less a period of time than a state of renewal. He came to believe that the Last Judgment would be realized in terms of good and bad art: The Last Judgment when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with Questions concerning Good & Evil or Eating of the Tree of those Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God turning all into a Consuming Fire When Imagination, Art & Science & all Intellectual Gifts all the Gifts of the Holy Ghost, are [despisd] look’d upon as of no use & only Contention remains to Man then the Last Judgment begins & its Vision is seen by the [Imaginative Eye] of Every one according to the situation he holds. The Last Judgment is not Fable or Allegory, but Vision Fable or Allegory are a totally distinct & inferior kind of Poetry. Vision or Imagination is a Representation of what Eternally Exists. Really & Unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is Formd by the daughters of Memory. Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of Inspiration who in the aggregate are call’d Jerusalem Fable is Allegory but what Critics call The Fable, is Vision itself (“A Vision of the Last Judgment”; Erdman, p. 554)

Coleridge, by contrast, was developing his “Religious Musings” in a much more optimistic manner. Whereas Blake leaves Europe on the point of apocalypse, with no suggestion as to what might come after, Coleridge conjures up a large and hopeful future: For in his own and in his Father’s might The SAVIOUR comes! While as to solemn strains The THOUSAND YEARS lead up their mystic dance, Old OCEAN claps his hands! the DESERT shouts!



Call’d all his sons to the strife of blood. (Plate 15, 9–11; Erdman, p. 65)

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And soft gales wafted from the haunts of Spring Melt the primaeval North! The mighty Dead Rise to new life, whoe’er from earliest time With conscious zeal had urged Love’s wondrous plan, Coadjutors of God. To MILTON’s trump The odorous groves of earth reparadis’d Unbosom their glad echoes: inly hushed, Adoring NEWTON his serener eye Raises to heaven: and he of mortal kind Wisest, he first who mark’d the ideal tribes Down the fine fibres from the sentient brain Roll subtly-surging. Pressing on his steps Lo! PRIESTLEY there, Patriot, and Saint, and Sage, Whom that my fleshly eye hath never seen A childish pang of impotent regret Hath thrill’d my heart. Him from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies mad’ning the blind multitude Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying he retir’d, And mus’d expectant on these promis’d years.5

As we all know, there was to be no such overwhelming event in the late 1790s, or after, although there were numbers of sane people, including Priestley himself, who made such connections—which involved a course of thinking still dominated at this time by the last book of the Bible. Even at the time of its original writing that text may itself have had a political dimension, since it was possible to interpret some of the prophecies in it as covert underminings of the Roman Empire. It was a book that was being circulated among various provinces of the Empire, and so those who were responsible for its appearance there may well have been anxious for its meaning not to be too plain, a fact that may account for some of the obfuscations in it. At all events, there were in every age elements that caught the eye of those who were looking for its fulfillment. Overarching all was the prophecy of the Last Things, including universal ruin, and of a new kingdom lasting a thousand years. But how these things were interpreted was partly a matter of individual temperament. At this time, in the 1790s, as has been suggested, such considerations were dominated by horror at the violent outcome of the French Revolution, and then by a feeling of being let down when the seemingly imminent apocalypse failed to happen. It is this latter element that may now be focused on. Paley’s study has much that is important to say about the other major Romantic poets, since apocalyptic thinking did not cease with the turn of the century. Byron, in particular, enjoyed using images drawn from the biblical apocalypse, though




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he was deeply skeptical about any advent of the millennium in his time; Shelley, on the other hand, constantly projected visions of a millennial age about to dawn. There had also, as Paley points out, been an interesting development at the turn of the century owing to the failure of the apocalypse to happen. It was as if all the poetic energy that had been pent up in preparation for the event needed to be used somehow, and now emerged in political commentary. So we find three poems by Coleridge in particular, “Fire, Famine and Slaughter,” “The Devil’s Thoughts” and “The Two Round Spaces on the Tombstone,” poems that Paley groups under the term the “apocalyptic grotesque,”6 in each of which, familiar “apocalyptic” elements appear, at the service of a sardonic imagination. These poems are of a very different nature from the meditative poems of the period, which were to contribute particularly strongly to Coleridge’s lasting reputation, but their contemporary success should not be overlooked. There was some risk involved in writing verses that were not only politically offensive but had touches of blasphemy—which was no doubt one reason why Coleridge was anxious to conceal his identity as writer. On publication “The Devil’s Thoughts” sold several hundred extra sheets of the Morning Post, according to its editor, and copies were in demand for weeks afterwards. The events at the turn of the century had already provided the true seedbed of a more radical response to the failed apocalypse, however, with precedents extending to the beginning of Christianity itself. We might remember at this point the career of a figure about whom much was heard earlier in the twentieth century, Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer, as came to be well known, began his career as a theological student, working on the New Testament. As he studied the events and records of that time, it became clear to him that certain German scholars who claimed that in the early years members of the Christian church believed that the apocalypse was about to happen in their own lifetimes must be correct. Not only that, however, but he also came to believe that Jesus of Nazareth had himself shared this belief. In other words, while he continued to believe in the divine inspiration of Christianity, Schweitzer came to believe that Jesus himself had shared human frailty to the extent of being mistaken about the exact course of future events. In the face of this realization he produced a book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910), setting out his views, and asked himself meanwhile what he could be sure about. He came to the conclusion that there were at least two things on which he could build his views: one was the fact of human suffering, bringing with it the need to remedy it in any way one could, and the other was the permanent value of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Accordingly he made himself one of the great experts on Bach’s organ music for his time and also went to take over a medical mission in the Congo, where he worked for the rest of his life.



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Schweitzer’s views were influential in England, where the theory that the early Christians had lived in a time of imminent eschatology, expecting the Last Things to happen in their own lifetime, had hardly penetrated from Germany, so that the initial impact of his views was powerful. Gradually, however, an explanation was produced by some scholars who spoke of what they called a “realized eschatology,” arguing that as the early Christians came to understand things better they came to grasp that in one sense what were regarded as the Last Things had already elapsed, leaving only the real end still to happen. Now it can be suggested that something not altogether dissimilar happened to the first Romantic writers: that in their state of confusion when the expected apocalyptic events did not after all materialize they turned back to their own experience and came to believe that the apocalypse had in one sense already happened—in their own consciousness. This process of “internalized apocalypse,” as it may be termed, can I believe be traced in each of the three major poets. After the years 1793 to 1795, the pivotal years for English apocalyptic thinking, Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge had found themselves in a confused position. All three had been thinking apocalyptically, although only Coleridge, perhaps, had been ready to think millennially as well. But whereas earlier it had seemed quite logical to think in terms of an imminent apocalypse the balance of probabilities had now shifted so dramatically that it seemed more prudent to expect that nothing on that scale would after all happen. And of course such a shift was very difficult to record in poetry. One could not easily write an ode to a non-apocalypse; Coleridge allowed “Religious Musings” to be reprinted in 1797, and again in 1803, but then for twenty five years omitted it from collections of his poems. Meanwhile, however, all three poets had been passing through a crisis on the lines I suggested, which caused them to internalize their sense of apocalypse. Blake allowed the prophetic books to run out into works such as the Book of Los (1795), The Song of Los (1795), and The Book of Urizen (1794) where he was no longer concerned with apocalyptic events but rather with setting up his own creation myth, in order to account for the state in which humanity eventually found itself. And these in turn became part of the framework for his much longer poem, conceived on an epic scale, which was first called “Vala” and then “The Four Zoas” (1797). This did in fact enclose an apocalyptic section—indeed in one sense most of it could be regarded as an apocalypse—concluding with a last book in which, without mentioning a thousand years, Blake pictured humanity restored to a paradisal state of harmony. “The Four Zoas” was never completed, however, and one must suspect that this had something to do with the difficulty of producing an epic poem that was viewed as happening within a single human being. The result was




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that when Blake set out to write a long poem that he would think good enough to produce in printed form it still had a strong apocalyptic flavor but was constructed differently. This was the long poem Milton (1804). Instead of building it round a central character to be called the Eternal Man, Blake wrote it around the idea of Poetic Genius, that same Genius that had been identified in an earlier poem as “the Bard.” In the Songs of Experience only a few years before the Bard had been seen as possessing immense powers of knowledge, as the figure “Who Present, Past, & Future sees” (“Introduction,” line 2; Erdman, p. 18); for the purposes of this poem he appeared first as Milton and then as himself. This was not quite so arrogant as it may sound, since the picture of genius that emerges in the poem as it proceeds is that it is a kind of humility and self-emptying. The heroic action of the poet comes when he realizes that it is his task not to overcome Satan and try to replace him, but simply to teach Men to despise death & to go on In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn Thy laws & terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues as webs I come to discover before Heavn & Hell the Self righteousness In all its Hypocritic turpitude. . . . & put off In self annihilation all that is not of God alone: To put off Self & all I have ever & ever Amen. (Plate 38, 40–44, 47–49; Erdman, p. 139)

This act of the Poetic Genius corresponds also to the moment of inspiration, which in Blake’s view has nothing to do with ordinary time. In these terms each period less than a pulsation of an artery is equal to six thousand years: For in this Period the Poets Work is Done: and all the Great Events of Time start forth & are concievd in such a Period Within a Moment: a Pulsation of the Artery. (Plate 29, 1–3; Erdman, p. 127)

Just such a moment of “the Poet’s Work” occurs at the end of this “Prophetic Book,” when Blake brings it to a climax in a kind of Last Judgment: And I beheld the Twenty-four Cities of Albion Arise upon their Thrones to Judge the Nations of the Earth; And the Immortal Four in whom the Twenty-four appear Four-fold Arose around Albions body: Jesus wept & walked forth From Felphams Vale clothed in Clouds of blood, to enter into Albions Bosom, the bosom of death, & the Four surrounded him



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Terror struck in the Vale I stood at that immortal sound. My bones trembled, I fell outstretchd upon the path A moment, & my Soul returnd into its mortal state To Resurrection & Judgment in the Vegetable Body, And my sweet Shadow of Delight stood trembling by my side. Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felpham’s Vale, And the Wild Thyme from Wimbletons green & impurpled Hills, And Los & Enitharmon rose over the Hills of Surrey. . . . (Plate 42, 16–31; Erdman, pp. 143–44)

Wordsworth’s experience of renewal was very much less dramatic. During the same years he had been passing through a time of severe disillusionment; in a well-known passage in The Prelude, he describes how in contemplating the apparently insoluble problems of the time he, “sick, wearied out with contrarieties, / Yielded up moral questions in despair” (Prelude (1805), X, 899–900). Interestingly, Blake’s perception concerning Milton’s self-emptying seems to have struck Wordsworth independently, since at about the same time he was writing the sonnet, which describes Milton as “Pure as the native heavens, majestic, free,” and then continues: So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. (WPW, III, 16)

For Wordsworth, as he came to value Milton more, it was precisely Milton’s ability to reconcile the opposites of the human condition, to walk humbly as well as to write sublimely, that impressed him most. And the ability to reconcile opposites, to seize contradictions and somehow turn them into an artistic unity, came to him to seem the supreme poetic gift. This struck him with particular force when he recalled walking through the Alps as a young man and how the moment of highest revelation had come not when he reached the highest part and began to descend again, because as it turned out he had not even noticed when that happened, but in the aftermath, when he and his companion walked on down the Pass, where he found himself as “sick and wearied out with contrarieties” as he would be when he tried to think morally. Yet in spite of this, in spite of the woods



In the Column of Fire in Felpham’s Vale; then to their mouths the Four Applied their Four Trumpets & them sounded to the Four winds.

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that seemed to be decaying, yet never to complete the process, or the winds that were thwarting one another, or waterfalls that were frozen by distance so as to seem stationary, or clouds that seemed moving without any restraint against the background of a clear blue sky, he had a strong sense of unity and harmony. This was the moment when apocalypse became truly revelation: The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of water-falls, And everywhere along the hollow rent Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears— Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them—the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving stream, The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light Were all like workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree, Characters of the great apocalypse, The types and symbols of eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end. (Prelude (1805), VI, 556–72)

Where Blake dramatizes his own internal sense of apocalypse, Wordsworth projects his, into the very forms of nature. Something of the same experience of apocalypse internalized came also to Coleridge, who showed few signs of doubts and failing confidence at the time, yet was nevertheless to recall a generation later in Biographia Literaria how, in his small Somerset cottage, he had found himself at sea in his faith. I retired to a cottage in Somersetshire at the foot of Quantock, and devoted my thoughts and studies to the foundations of religion and morals. Here I found myself all afloat. Doubts rushed in; broke upon me “from the fountains of the great deep,” and fell “from the windows of heaven.” The fontal truths of natural religion and the books of Revelation alike contributed to the flood. . . . I began then to ask myself, what proof I had of the outward existence of any thing? (BL, I, 220–21)

This state of his mind needs to be taken into account when we consider the background to his major poems of the time. It helps to account for the diversion of his energies into what Paley has termed the “apocalyptic grotesque,”



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but also helps to explain much more, including the contradictions to be found in the unfinished Christabel, “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Like other works I have examined, the last-mentioned can be regarded as a poem of failed apocalypse, as an aspect of the condition of mind in which people—and particularly young people—were left after the French Revolution turned sour. I do not want to face this matter directly, since it is in any case very complex, but instead to look at how Coleridge dealt with it through an associated brief composition that was also poetic, yet not so much a straightforward poem as a riddle. It takes the form of an epigram of four lines that was published in the Morning Post for 24 January 1800. We would hardly know anything about it, in fact, were it not that he mentioned it himself in a footnote to Biographia Literaria, where, in describing how he had contributed the three Higginbottom sonnets in 1797, he went on to give another such anecdote, recalling how he had heard that an amateur performer wanted to meet him, but had been hesitant on the ground that he had written a severe epigram on “The Ancient Mariner” which had given Coleridge great pain. Coleridge says that he replied by saying that if the epigram was a good one he would be delighted to hear it, whereupon he recited to him the epigram that he himself had written for the Morning Post—which he records as follows: To the author of the Ancient Mariner Your poem must eternal be, Dear sir! It cannot fail, For ’tis incomprehensible And without head or tail. (BL, I, 28n.)

It appears an innocent enough little story, introduced no doubt in order to show that Coleridge can not only take a joke against himself but even produce one if necessary. There are some strange features, however. The first is that the record is not true.7 If one turns up the Morning Post for 24 January 1800, the poem is there all right, but it is not addressed to the author of “The Ancient Mariner” at all. It is entitled “To Mr Pye,” who was the current Poet Laureate. Henry James Pye is, in fact, the subject of one of the most scathing entries in the Dictionary of National Biography, where he is described as “poetaster and poet laureate” and where his poems are described as of uniform dullness. As was the custom at the end of a century, Pye had produced a “carmen seculare”—literally, a “century poem”—and Coleridge’s full title runs “To Mr Pye on his carmen seculare (a title which has by various persons who have heard it been thus translated, ‘A poem an age long’).”




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The second point worth noting is that it is based on a poem by Lessing, the title of which translates as “On the eternity of certain poems.”8 But this is something of a red herring, since the idea of the poem (“must be eternal because . . .”) is all that Coleridge took: Lessing’s poem is quite different, completing the assertion by saying that it must be eternal because there will always be poets ready to write such boring stuff. Thirdly, however, one must ask what the point of the epigram is anyway. Why does Coleridge lay such stress on the words “eternal” and “incomprehensible,” words that he actually italicizes in his original Morning Post version, and the phrase “without head or tail?” I have suggested that it is not so much an epigram as a riddle, and for an answer to the riddle we need to look elsewhere in his writing. In his first major poem, “The Eolian Harp,” he embarks on several brilliant intellectual speculations and then recoils from them: For never guiltless may I speak of him, The INCOMPREHENSIBLE! save when with awe I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels . . . 9

And the word was not idly chosen: within a few months he was writing to John Edwards: “has not Dr Priestly forgotten that incomprehensibility is as necessary an attribute of the First Cause, as Love, or Power, or Intelligence?”10 He was still making a case for the incomprehensibility of the divine thirty years later.11 And as for his second point we may turn to one of the most interesting letters he ever wrote, to Joseph Cottle on 7 March 1815, where he tried to intimate tactfully that he could not think that what Cottle was aiming at could very easily be conveyed, continuing, The common end of all narrative, nay of all Poems, is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion—the snake with it’s Tail in it’s Mouth. (CL, IV, 545)

He goes on to relate this to the knowledge possessed by the Divine Being, who sees Present, Past and Future and whose knowledge will be wholly englobed, in a way that human knowledge cannot be. And since the serpent with its tail in its mouth is a well-known image for eternity, a narrative which achieved that status would be the nearest an artist could get to not only to the divine but also to the eternal. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that when Coleridge wrote his poem about Mr. Pye the terms he was using did not make very good sense concerning Pye except in a very general way, but they did define the quali-



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ties that a truly eternal poem would have: it would be, like the divine, incomprehensible, yet like the highest form of narrative it would resemble the snake with its tail in its mouth, and so would quite literally have neither head nor tail. Recently Coleridge himself had published just such a poem. It was hard to understand because full of contradictions. One never knows just who is in control of the universe in which the Ancient Mariner moves: is it the figures of Death and the woman “far liker Death than he” who play dice for the Mariner’s fate, or is it the Spirit that bideth by himself in the land of mist of snow and who loved the bird who loved the man who shot him with his bow? And if one is looking for poetic justice why is it that, as Leslie Stephen pointed out long ago, the Mariner, who, after all, committed the crime, is the only one who survives, while his shipmates, who did nothing more than approve his action at one point, die in agonies of thirst?12 Is the Mariner’s unquestioning faith in “Mary Queen” and his own kind saint enough to account for all that happens? If one looked at the poem with such questionings in mind, it was incomprehensible. And yet it was also a narrative with its tail in its mouth. Following the Mariner’s act in extremity, an act of blessing that came from outside himself, he had, in the strange logic of the poem itself, been restored to the country from which he set out and seen it as if for the first time: is this indeed The light-house top I see? Is this the Hill? Is this the Kirk? Is this mine own countrée? (469–72; CPW, II, 1043)

So if I am right in seeing Coleridge’s poem as a riddle, and if it is here read aright, the reason that after twenty years he remembered his poem addressed to Mr. Pye as a poem addressed to the author of “The Ancient Mariner,” was because he knew at another depth of his mind that it was. As an attempt to probe the meaning of things it was incomprehensible, thwarting readers who looked for a satisfactory beginning, a middle and an end, yet also giving them a curious sense of provisional satisfaction. The best comparison, I suggest, is with one of those designs by M. C. Escher which incorporate an impossible geometry. The staircase around the building goes on and on for ever, since when one looks at it more carefully the apparent rising of each separate flight of steps is thwarted by the overall design. It is worrying when one first notices, yet the permanent effect is aesthetically pleasing, and one ceases to be concerned at its impossibility. His considered opinion, many years later, was that it was “a poem of pure imagination”; he also said that it “might be excelled but could not be imitated”




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(TT, II, 359.). This is another riddle. John Sterling argued (TT, II, 359n.) that it was hard to make sense of the remark, since it would be only too easy for poets to try their hands at Gothic tales of the kind; he wondered if Coleridge meant simply that it corresponded to his ideal. But I think he may have meant something else—that other poets could and perhaps would write finer imaginative poems, but that no one would ever be in quite the same position to create the kind of poem that he now saw his to be. His apocalypse, his revelation, like Wordsworth’s in the Alps, was that a poem could be at one and the same time fraught with contradictions, crossing as it did all the major lines of one’s discourse, and yet still be possessed of a remarkable unity—the unity, one might say, of its “chant”—so that however incomprehensible it might seem once one began asking questions of it it would remain secure in the wholeness of its appeal to the three qualities he valued most: light and energy and love. In that respect its tail would always be firmly disappearing into its mouth, giving it unity. Coleridge had to accept—ruefully, perhaps—that his early readers showed no signs of making such connections; yet he could not escape the fact that for him its success was the result of his own internal apocalypse, the revelation of the very power of the imagination itself. And for any reader who was sufficiently seized by the attractions of the poem, the same would in some sense remain true: its positive qualities and its music would be such as to ensure that, contradictions or no, its appeal remained, in some sense, eternal. Notes 1. (Oxford, 1999). 2. Quoted in Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992), p. 29. 3. Ibid., pp. 43–46. 4. Lines 9–14 in the 1796 edn: cf. CPW, I, 109, app. cr., and John Beer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems (London, 1993), pp. 78–79. 5. Lines 359–402 in the 1796 edition: cf. CPW, I, 122–23, app. cr., and Beer, Coleridge: Poems, p. 90. For the modern reader the effects of Coleridge’s religious poems are somewhat confused by the fact that they have generally been included in collections (including my own) in accordance with the date of their first coherent publication. So The Destiny of Nations is placed after “Religious Musings,” although its most interesting lines were contributed to Southey’s Joan of Arc in 1796, while the remainder in 1797 took up the theme of Joan of Arc in Coleridge’s own words; then, for the collection Sibylline Leaves, twenty years later, he wrote yet more lines. 6. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 140–53. 7. For bibliographical details, see CPW, II, 959 and BL, I, 28n.



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8. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sammtliche Schriften, 30 pts. in 15 vols. (Berlin, 1796), I, 11. 9. Lines 50–52 in the 1796 edition: cf. CPW, I, 102 and Beer, Coleridge: Poems, p. 65. 10. Letter to the Revd. John Edwards of 20 March 1796: CL, I, 193. 11. See S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (London and Princeton, N. J., 1993) (CC), pp. 338–39 and n. 12. Hours in a Library (London, 1892), III, 359.







The Morning (Post) After: Apocalypse and Bathos in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude”1 Michael Simpson

Etiam disjecti membra poetae —Horace

E

ven if we cannot quite imagine what X-rated breakfast television might be like, the narrator of Coleridge’s poem “Fears in Solitude” seems to have found the late eighteenth-century equivalent: Boys and girls And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal! (104–107; CPW, I, 256–63)2

The object of the poem’s vigorous censure is the morning newspaper, in which women and children begin their day by reading about the end of someone else’s. And yet four years after this poem was first published in a quarto pamphlet, extracts from it appeared in the Morning Post of 14 October 1802. What happens to project this text into a context that it previously deplored? How can the poem denigrate newspapers in 1798 and then fall into one in 1802? My answer to this question will be that the poem was at



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the outset so constitutively uncomfortable with itself that it could later accommodate itself to the Peace of Amiens and a historical defusing of the poem’s topical anxiety. Caught between distinct versions of itself, “Fears in Solitude” is able to shift its context from apocalypse to bathos, from virulent criticism of newspapers to an equable place in them. To start the argument I’ve just summarized, I want to characterize this tension between the two versions that the text offers of itself with reference to a footnote that does not itself form part of the text and that features only on an autograph manuscript: “NB The above is, perhaps not Poetry,—but rather a sort of middle thing between Poetry and Oratory—sermoni propriora—Some parts are, I am conscious, too tame even for animated prose.” Since this stage direction is not included in the published version of the poem, while the same tag “sermoni propriora” had already featured as the epigraph to “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement,” it seems to me that the text is not in fact able to become a middle thing and that it oscillates instead between the alleged extremes of poetry and oratory. Such a suggestion is independently and much more emphatically prompted by a reading experience of the poem, as it is shunted between, on the one hand, a depiction of the dell and the speaker’s response to it, and, on the other, his publicly phrased admonitions. What is at stake in this oratory can be experienced empirically if we return to our first quotation: We send our mandates for the certain death Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal! (102–07)

The allegation of this discourse’s power of causation, asserted by the word “mandate,” is dramatized by the text itself, as we presume, on a cursive reading, that “Boys and girls, / And women” are instances of, because in syntactic apposition to, the “thousands and ten thousands,” before we discover that they are, in fact, subjects of the verb “read.” The potential force of language is proven affectively, since it can horrify us with the scenario of murdered innocents even when this event is unreal and only momentarily read. But this verb “read” that resolves the syntax, and that lexically identifies us, does not identify us with the “Boys and girls, / And women” who read, as we do, but who read the newspaper and not the poem. Whereas the real complicity of these “innocents” in English aggression abroad rebounds on them merely as an “amusement,” as their “mandates” are returned to them in accomplished



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but bathetic form, the poem deflects these amusing objects as they rebound and vectors them so that they can strike us with the possibility that they might literally rebound on these “innocents.” Although these figures might be destroyed, as we first imagined that they might, they would this time be destroyed by “all-avenging Providence” because of their unthinking complicity in the prosecution of the war. Tricked into seeing murdered innocents, we are just as quickly shown those victims as complicit bystanders who might now be murdered on quite other grounds. Having thus demonstrated both the power and mendacious misuse of oratory, the text elaborates on how this oratory is capable of the most extreme imperial effects. The power and the problem of these mandates derives from the fact that there is nothing behind them to determine the limits of their application; they are not grounded in any empirical understanding that might circumscribe their scope; driven by an absolute vacuum, they career forwards to an unstoppable completion. The speaker condemns this irresponsible discourse in terms that may recall the facile circulation, then as now, of technical terms in newspapers: All our dainty terms for fratricide, Terms which we trundle smoothly o’er our tongues Like mere abstractions. Empty sounds to which We join no feeling and attach no form. (113–16)

Tim Fulford and others have illuminated this kind of critique in Coleridge’s earlier writing as a manifestation of his engagement with Horne Tooke.3 The ideal alternative to this empty but paradoxically powerful rhetoric is, of course, modeled in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “a language arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets.”4 Such a language seems at first to be only an ideal because everyone is implicated in its prevailing antithesis: We gabble o’er the oaths we mean to break; For all must swear—all and in every place, All, all must swear, the briber and the bribed, Merchant and lawyer, senator and priest. (72–75)

By disrupting the customary codification that regulates the otherwise arbitrary relations between words and ideas, this hypocrisy also de-regulates the relations that the social contract entails. Once the institutional compact



Apocalypse and Bathos in Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude”

Michael Simpson

co-ordinating words and ideas is undone, the state, into which individuals are contracted, begins to lose coherence and so cannot enforce the ground rules of civil society. What remains, then, is an amorphous, debased national unity configured internally by a commonly corrupt semiosis and externally by an arrogant colonialism that bears “to distant tribes slavery and pangs, / And deadlier far our vices, whose deep taint / With slow perdition murders the whole man, / His body and his soul!” (50–53). Since we are all said to be embroiled in this web of hypocritical corruption and decaying institutions, which seems to extend beyond the Test Acts into the social contract itself, a desperate question is forced. Can we ever escape, and if so, how? There is a sense in which the text offers an escape clause in its very account of this ubiquitous perjury. By phrasing this account as a critique, the text begins to suggest that such auto-critique is at last an advance on, because a resistance to, a complacent indulgence in the debased and mendacious language of newspapers. What is more, the text actually offers such a position of auto-critique to us in its very representation of the omnipresence of a corrupt rhetoric. To the precise extent that the poem characterizes itself and us as complicit in this rhetoric, by its sweeping public address in the first person, it provides us, vicariously, with a critical mission in relation to ourselves. Approximately half of the poem features a “we,” which on its first appearance is accompanied by the phrase “Oh my countrymen,” at line 41. Variations of this phrase then appear at lines 124 and 154. The text thus speaks for, to and about the nation, as first, second and third persons converge in a kind of integrated trinity characteristic of Unitarian doctrine. Even as this travesty of the nation speaks its escape clause of auto-critique, it further empowers its audience, and ultimately itself, by offering a position from which mutual critique can be undertaken. Having excoriated the empty rhetoric of the newspaper as it complacently describes and prescribes “megadeaths,” the text then tries to distinguish its own desired war from the kind of hostility that it condemns. Of the French who were in the process of invading Ireland in the spring of 1798, the poem declares: Stand we forth— Render them back upon the insulted ocean, And let them toss as idly on its waves As the vile sea-weed, which some mountain-blast Swept from our shores! And oh! May we return Not with a drunken triumph, but with fear, Repenting of the wrongs, with which we stung So fierce a foe to frenzy! (146–53)



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Whether this martial passage is rationalized by the argument that it advocates a purely defensive war, as Kelvin Everest has suggested, or by the argument that the poem’s critique of oratory has proleptically purified further uses of it, or indeed by the argument that this war is a punishment of our previous sins and a test of our present righteousness, there is still a sense in which this passage militates against the poem’s earlier polemic against rhetoric.5 The metaphorical phrasing of the exhortation seems to rehearse those same oratorical tropes that the text has critically identified with both newspapers and with the ceremonial moments of social contracting. Like those figures, the poem’s image of “sea-weed” and its portentous phrases “stand we forth,” “Render them back,” seem to be both disposably bombastic and yet potentially lethal. To this extent the text becomes hypocritically susceptible to its own critique of hypocrisy. Just as the poem criticized us, as part of its project of national address, so it furnishes grounds on which we can reciprocate that criticism. To reject the authority of this national address, however, is to accept it. By convicting the text of instantiating some of the very rhetoric that it condemns, we accept and extend that gesture of condemnation. There is, then, no available vantage beyond the complementary exercises of using rhetoric as power and exposing rhetoric as trope: we are a nation of shopkeepers who take in and sell one another’s dirty laundry without actually cleaning it. Such negative national bonding is not, however, a sufficient unity in the context of the alarm that seemed to confront Britain in 1798. The subtitle of “Fears in Solitude” declares, after all, that the text was written “during the alarm of an invasion.” As it disingenuously and self-consciously circulates it own dirt, the country is said to face the most apocalyptic prospect of all: And what if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words? . . . (124–27)

Just imagine the prospect of all the screaming in every word being suddenly unlocked. This question concerning “our words,” which are both intimate and public, serves to bring the apocalypse much closer to home than do comparable passages representing the war as apocalypse in either “Religious Musings” or “The Destiny of Nations.” To avoid answering the rhetorical question posed here in “Fears in Solitude,” we must do more than merely expose the vacuum that underlies the words of others and ourselves. Averting the apocalypse of actually experiencing the meaning of our unregenerate words requires that we use a new language that instantaneously conveys its




Michael Simpson

meaning as it is used. But where might this language originate, and who might teach it to us? “Fears in Solitude” answers the first part of this question by a discernible shift in tone and diction that re-situates the poem in the landscape of the dell. Opening the poem, but then displaced by the lofty abstractions of the text’s oratorical center, the dell is the kind of rural scene favored by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a place of stable, re-affirmed relationship between word and experience. It is just this relationship that can configure a positive version of the nation capable both of replacing the regime of hypocrisy and of supplementing the polemic against it. The component in this relationship that renders it so capable is the fact that a language growing authentically out of nature into culture, as it must do, effectively constitutes the nation itself as the mediating category between nature and culture. Nation is the pivot between soil and society, and language is its visible, aural manifestation. Against the backdrop of a persistent humanizing criticism of Romanticism, it is difficult to over-emphasize this characteristically Romantic modulation from nature to nation. Love of nature leads to love of mankind, as Wordsworth maintained, but it does so only through the love of nation, which is the love, not always speaking its name, that links the other two loves. “Fears in Solitude” discloses this largely organic process by remedially retracing its course from its most negative end-product, which is irresponsible empire creating continental war, back to the emergence of nation from place. What the text actually retraces, however, are the very discursive vicissitudes in which it participates: the extreme product of reckless yet recriminating rhetoric is drawn back through a mode of patriotic address to a pastorally inflected loco-description. The mediating mode of patriotic address is marked by the apostrophes to “Oh dear Britain! O my Mother Isle!” (176), “O native Britain! O my Mother Isle” (182) and “O divine / And beauteous island!” (193–94). The main function that these apostrophes seem to serve is to expose, by their evident artifice, both the conventional nature of the earlier address to “my countrymen” and the fact that this address pretends otherwise by implicitly identifying the audience of the poem with the national public that it projects. As soon as the patriotic apostrophes to an abstraction appear, the previous address to “we,” etc., figures as similarly rhetorical. What, then, remains to the poem’s audience, to us, as the text aspires to a poetry that measures its distance from the oratory previously embracing an audience? In the event, we do seem to have an assigned function. As the text shifts gear from oratory to poetry, we are effectively offered a perspective from which we might distinguish between a rhetoric that claims that any gap between audience and national public is already closed, and, by contrast, a po-



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etry maintaining that their disjunction might eventually be closed. It may even be that “Fears in Solitude” addressed one sector of its audience with the especially tantalizing, and dangerous, prospect of that constituency joining the national public. Insofar as the Unitarians were particularly averse to swearing the required oaths, the poetry of the text might well have offered an attractively conditional promise of incorporation. Whatever the case, locating the significant discursive distinctions is quite an awkward matter. Although the paragraphing of the verse seems to be correlated with significant shifts in tone, the latter occur just before or after the spatial breaks. Between lines 28 and 29 and lines 175 and 176 are obvious junctures, but even line 175 is divided between two verse paragraphs. Despite the typographical interval, the most plausible lexical division is postponed by half of a line. The converse of this minor disjunction between a lexical and a typographical mapping of the text occurs at line 201, where a modulation from the oratorical tone of public apostrophe to a description of landscape anticipates the change from one verse paragraph to another by one and a half lines. The effect of this disjunction is to multiply the possible separations indicated by the paragraphing. In addition to these shifting shifts, there is the more general difficulty that the Earl of Chesterfield had outlined: “Though Poetry differs much from Oratory in many things; yet it makes use of the same figures of Rhetoric; nay it abounds in metaphors, similes, and allegories; and you may learn the purity of the language, and the ornaments of eloquence, as well by reading verse as prose.”6 In place of the hypocritical project of detecting hypocritical rhetoric, the text, as it becomes a poem, seems to promote us from this futile moral mission to the aesthetic practice of distinguishing between all forms of rhetoric, including our own, and its alleged antithesis, poetry. It is this change from moral to aesthetic criticism that permits the poem’s audience to become a national public. Chopping up the text successfully, dividing it from itself, paradoxically connects audience to public. Such promotion into the aesthetic, however, involves a significant liability: our elevation above the merely moral comes at the expense of a demotion in relation to the disproportionately exalted poet who so transcends the moral and rhetorical that only he can perceive the positive moment of landscaped national unity around Stowey. Instead of being able to drag him down or pull ourselves up, as before, we are effectively obliged to accept the relationship that he offers and to apprehend the nation vicariously. The narrator speaks as a poet: This burst of prospect, here the shadowy main, Dim-tinted, there the mighty majesty Of that huge amphitheatre of rich And elmy fields, seems like society




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Michael Simpson Conversing with the mind, and giving it A livelier impulse and a dance of thought.

“Society” here is relegated, since the connection between itself and mind is forged exclusively by the mind, in an uneven triangulation. What is visible here is not society and the mind in equipoise, but the mind as subject actively pressing elements of experience into the service of an analogy involving society and mind as objects. So prominent is the poet’s activity here that no precise correlation is established between the “shadowy main” (215) and the “huge amphitheatre” (217) on one side and mind and society on the other; more important than such details is the fact that the analogy is made. This analogy, moreover, is part and parcel of a larger process in which the “I” of the poet detaches itself from the “we” of rhetorical declamation in order to guarantee the necessary alternative of a national poetry. Emerging as late as line 153, the poet serves as an authenticating adjunct of this alleged poetry and is consequently instrumental in the modulation of nature into nation. He is cast, in fact, as the pivot between them, since his words remain anchored in a particular locale, ostensively described, and yet are addressed outwards to the same broad audience as the earlier rhetoric. Despite this looming pre-eminence of the poet over nature and ourselves, our job remains that of differentiating this poetry from an ambient rhetoric. So long as we can divide up the poem, we know that we are looking over the poet’s shoulder at our own nation; looking at the poem correctly entails that we can look at the national landscape.7 It is because we are challenged, permissively but powerfully, to divide up the text that a particular biblical paradigm, otherwise registered by the text, is deflected and inverted. Since the text invites its readers to sift the graven images of rhetoric from the authentic inspiration of poetry, the poem’s narrator can specifically eschew, at this juncture, the role of Moses on the mount. Even though the poet is a commanding figure, grounded in nature and speaking the nation to us, we are still equipped with our own mission. Not genuflecting to the false gods of rhetoric, and so able to assume the profile of the chosen people, we do not induce the narrator to break his tablets and then return to Sinai, or the Quantocks, for more. Able to make the crucial distinction, we approximate the figure of the autonomous national public and avoid the character of a mere audience that must be told which words to reject in order to accept ourselves. Consequently unlike the outraged prophet, the narrator comes down from the mountain, neither bringing nor breaking any tablets, which are instead left behind as bombast in the dell, and he walks into the promised land while we remain behind, gazing after him because equipped with the



(215–20)

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promise of that land in the form of the talent to distinguish between talent and tablet, poetry and rhetoric. In this inversion of the Mosaic paradigm, the graven images are the tablets themselves, ultimately jettisoned as portentous “bodings” (210). This inversion does not, however, entail that the poet can be plausibly identified with Christ, since the poet descends into a version of earthly paradise rather than ascending into heaven. Mighty as he is, and potentially constitutive, in his own estimate, of the nation, the poet ranks himself with neither of the great law-givers of the Old and New Testaments. Such delicacy permits at least the possibility of a terrestrial paradise for all within the nation. Although I agree with Morton Paley when he argues that Coleridge’s apocalypse becomes increasingly bereft of a millennium throughout the 1790s, I propose that our ability to carve the text from itself, on which depends both our ability to relate ourselves as audience to ourselves as public, and also the narrator’s stalwart refusal of the Mosaic role, are all a composite of the millennium.8 If, however, we cannot make this discrimination as readers, all bets are off, and we are lost in the empty but violently propulsive oratory of newspapers. Although potentially displaced in 1798, the oratorical tablets do make their return in the Morning Post of 14 October 1802. A good deal of the oratory is here recycled, little if any of the so-called poetry and none of the critique of newspapers. The passage recycled is, in effect, the section beginning at line 129 and ending at line 197 in the previously published poem. Just as the text encourages us to divide it up, so Coleridge himself accepts the invitation and cuts the text literally, not unlike the hypothetical child at the beginning of the poem who pulls off the insect’s leg.9 What is cut, or pulled, is, among other things, this very image of violence. And all this drastic slicing provokes a big question. Having engineered a symbolic escape from the mire of national rhetoric and the hypocritical polemic against it, why does Coleridge make a hypocritical return to it in the pages of the Morning Post? A predictable answer is baldly economic. Coleridge, as usual, needs the money.10 Behind the transcendental claims that “Fears in Solitude” makes on behalf of poetry and its legitimating adjunct of the poet lies the brutal commercial reality that Raymond Williams11 first taught us to read Romantic poetry as cosmetically disguising. This reality is registered in the following letter to William Sotheby in which Coleridge describes his work for the Morning Post: And now I will tell you what I am doing. I dedicate three days in the week to the Morning Post. . . . The Poetry, which I have sent, has been merely the emptying out of my Desk. The epigrams are wretched indeed; but they answered Stewart’s purpose better than better things-/. I ought not to have given any signature to them whatsoever. (CL, II, 876)




Michael Simpson

But a full signature he did give. Unlike the anonymous contributions, in verse and prose, that Coleridge often made to the Morning Post, the extracts from “Fears in Solitude” were explicitly credited to “S. T. Coleridge.” The fact that these extracts and the ode were reprints, or revisions, of earlier poems was also made clear. Introducing “France: An Ode,” which accompanied the extract from “Fears in Solitude,” the editorial voice of the Morning Post declares: The following ODE was first published in this paper (in the beginning of the year 1798) in a less perfect state. The present state of France, and Switzerland, gives it so peculiar an interest at this present time, that we wished to re-publish it, and accordingly have procured from the Author, a corrected copy.

The extracts from “Fears in Solitude” are then similarly described. One consequence of these disclosures is that the commercial circuitry of this writing was made at least partly visible: S. T. Coleridge had been and was again selling and being paid for these poems. Even the earlier, larger version of “Fears in Solitude” had registered the increasingly precarious working of patronage and, by implication, the corresponding force of the literary market: And now, beloved Stowey! I behold Thy church-tower, and, methinks, the four huge elms Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend; And close behind them, hidden from my view, Is my own lowly cottage (221–25)

Tom Poole’s “mansion,” which might compositely incorporate the residences of Coleridge’s other benefactors, the Wedgwood brothers, is prominent. The poet’s own “lowly cottage,” however, is absent. Even in a national landscape of the poet’s own figuring, in the portion of the text that most poetically renders the nation, the poet has no visible place. More than mere patronage is evidently necessary to pay the bills. Even Lord Byron would come to experience the limitations of his own considerable self-patronage and would resort instead to the literary market, in order to turbo-charge it. There is a sense, indeed, in which Coleridge’s submissions to the Morning Post in 1802 and 1803 rehearse in microcosm the mutual infiltration of poetic writing and commercial society that Jerome Christensen has ascribed to Byronism after Waterloo and during the high tide of European commercial traffic.12 Selling off parts of “Fears in Solitude” is more than a purely practical financial act, however. If it were not, it would be no more than a hypocritical regression to those very commercial values connected with buying and read-



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ing newspapers that the text has already condemned. As it is, there is much more at stake here. Intersecting with Coleridge’s financial need is a partial transvaluation of commercial values wrought by the shifting sands of history. In the context of the Treaty of Amiens, which suspended hostilities between Britain and France from March 1802 to May 1803, the selling of this poem can be read as a moment of participation in a newly recharged matrix of commerce. After almost ten years of radically interrupted traffic between Britain and her largest trading partner, the channels of exchange and communication were again open, and a new old world of commercial possibility beckoned. In this world, the epic shifts between militarized colonialism and a new moral order, between war and peace, between rhetoric and poetry, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, between apocalypse and millennium, and between patronage and the market are all mediated, miniaturized and dispersed by the market’s governing paradigm of the circulation of the commodity. Even the selling and buying of images of war may sustain the peace. After his verse from 1798 completes one cycle of selling and buying, Coleridge then sells the expurgated version of “Fears in Solitude” to Daniel Stuart, the proprietor of the Morning Post, and so ends a relationship with the text; Stuart simultaneously buys the text and so begins a relationship with it; he then sells the text and the newspaper to us and so ends his relationship; we buy the text at that same moment and begin our own relationship with it. Perhaps the culmination of this process is Stuart’s selling of the Morning Post lock, stock and barrel in 1803, just as the peace comes crashing down. The getting and spending of the market system may well lay waste our powers, as Wordsworth claimed, but these practices do so to others as well, in a process of taming and making banal the evils of history. While Wordsworth responded to the uneasy peace by visiting Annette Vallon, Coleridge instantly embarked on a journalistic jag that almost qualified him as a staff writer for the Morning Post throughout 1802. Alan Liu has rightly characterized Coleridge’s journalism for the Morning Post in this period, in both poetry and prose, as increasingly bellicose.13 In doing so, however, Liu tells this phase as part of a process of tergiversation that seeks to make a virtue out of the Post’s known inconstancy of political alignment. Coleridge’s similarly shifting commitments are thus presented as an enduring “impartiality,” loudly indifferent to the preferences and fixations of government and populace alike. The more cynical, and realistic, reading of Coleridge’s changing investment in the counter-revolutionary war, as represented in the Morning Post, is that “Recantation, quite simply, sold newspapers” (420). I have to concur with Liu’s argument, as far as it goes, but I would want to push it further. Since Coleridge was evidently willing to cut up his earlier poem to make an “extract,” the content of the poem and what happens to the poem evidently bear a disjunctive relationship to




Michael Simpson

one another. It is in this disjunction that we might read the extract as preaching war but practicing peace through its vaunted functioning as a commodity in exchange. This disjunction might also be read in the recycled “France: An Ode” and, by extension, in other examples of Coleridge’s journalism in the Post during the Peace of Amiens. What might also signify the unlimited ironic status of the declaration of war in the extract are two further factors: first, the perception of “crying wolf ” that it might otherwise provoke and, second, the skeptical question that all prophecies of impending doom, in the street or in print, ought to elicit: if it’s all coming to an end, why aren’t you doing something more rational than wasting your time telling me this? Selling and buying images of war need not entail a selling out to and a buying into those images. The recycling of these images in the extract from “Fears in Solitude” is, in one sense, a moving picture of peace coming out of war, and to that extent, this extract contains within itself two of the numerous swerves that Liu identifies in Coleridge’s shifting attitude to the hostilities. Peace here is the ongoing process of invoking the war as a finished product. It does so, however, not only as a logical contrary but also in the sense that wars, as the U.S. President Andrew Jackson said, are assessed in relation to the peace that they do or do not achieve. How the counter-revolutionary war ending in 1802 will fare is, as Mao would go on to say of the French Revolution, too soon to say. In the meantime, peace can be performed, cautiously, by merchandising images of war. Coleridge, in effect, had a good war, especially when it might have been over. The set of assumptions on which this equation between peace and trade reposes is fully articulated in the debate about commerce and virtue that unfolded in the eighteenth century. In J. G. A. Pocock’s compelling reconstruction of this debate, commerce and virtue are ultimately incompatible, but in “the intermediate perspective,” they can cooperate: In the intermediate perspective, commerce and the arts could be seen as contributing to sociability and even to liberty and virtue, just as it was possible to establish a positive relationship between passion and reason; but the ultimate incompatibility remained. Commerce had taken the place of fortune; the republic could not control its own history forever or resist its own corruption; the particular and the universal remained at war. It was possible at this point to restate the vision of history as an anakuklosis, in which republics were transformed into empires by their own virtù and then corrupted and destroyed by the subsequent luxury. But to the eighteenth century, highly confident in its own culture, the intermediate perspective could seem of a surpassing importance, more positively fortified than the saeculum or historical present of Christian thought, and the moment of corruption more remote than the tribulations of the Christian apocalypse.14



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In contrast to Pocock’s sequence here, Coleridge’s Britain has already fallen into the corruption of empire and may now have emerged into another “intermediate” phase in which buying, selling and reinvestment might generate necessary social values. The alternative to such flowing traffic and the rhetoric that facilitates it is, of course, a civic virtue founded on the rural estate and its “mansion,” along with the vitally national poetry that the estate patronizes. Although the terms “commerce,” “frugality” and “luxury” that characterize eighteenth-century political debate do not translate precisely into those terms mobilized by “Fears in Solitude,” there is a considerable degree of overlap.15 What there is can certainly ramify Mary Favret’s fine reading of the text in which she argues that the public sphere, usually occupied by the upright “citizen-soldier,” is here rendered decadent and feminized, while the private domestic realm, normally the preserve of women, is here occupied by masculine virtue in the form of the “sons, brothers, husbands” (134) on whom the narrator calls to defend “my Mother Isle” (176).16 Since Favret does not pursue “Fears in Solitude” into its later, compressed incarnation, however, she does not take account of the text’s re-launching of rhetoric as a commodity that is both private property and yet available to all who can buy it. It is, in effect, this trick of the commodity that allows rhetoric to assume the same public value that a private poetry of the nation also possesses and yet hides, just as it hides itself in the cut poem. Fueled by virtuous wealth rooted in landed property, and thus impervious to speculative accumulation, the text’s poetry is able to invoke the nation because this poetry is a form of words that is as close to nature as the disinterested possession of that nature. The commodity of rhetoric, in an internationally recharged commerce, is able to undertake a similar function from the opposite direction. Although propelled by a promiscuously mobile wealth, the rhetoric of this text, invested first in quarto pamphlet and then in the Morning Post, posits, by this repetition, an ideal public that links the two audiences receiving that rhetoric, and it is from this public that these words draw the legitimacy of their meaning. The commodity of rhetoric, in the event, begins to supersede rather than to oppose national poetry, symbolically securing the nation in a network of international trade and prompting an active, rehabilitated public to emerge from this matrix of exchange. So the world has changed, from war to peace, and in doing so has changed the text; rhetoric, bought and sold, is now cool. But the text, in addition, has changed itself. Rhetoric may be back, without a vengeance, but the poetry of the nation has disappeared, and this event poses a question. How can such a mighty discourse vanish so? And what has happened to its ideal of the desirable proximity of its referents? One answer is that this poetry can disappear because it has already done its work of deactivating the




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oratory in “Fears in Solitude.” After this poetry has immunized the nation against the contagion of French ideas, a freer circulation can begin. What we read in the Morning Post is the historical curiosity of a dumped discourse, quoted at a distance and so no longer replete with urgency. There may, indeed, be more than a mere coincidence in the fact that Scott’s antiquarian Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border was published and sold successfully in this same year. Another, additional answer is that this poetry is simply elsewhere, awaiting the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens and ready either to remain silent in the case of success, or to reintroduce the tight relation between subjects and objects and between words and objects, should the renewed trading of objects and words between subjects collapse back into war. It is this historical uncertainty that reinstates us as readers into the kind of deciding position that we previously occupied in relation to the dichotomy between poetry and oratory in the earlier version of the text. Instead of trying to decide where the poetry and oratory lie, however, we are induced to read the portents, in the newspaper as elsewhere, about whether or not the peace will stand.17 This difficulty is not unlike the British predicament in the Beef War of the 1990s, although the stakes are very different. The page of the Morning Post on which appears the abbreviated oratorical version of the text portends both rhetoric and poetry: on the one hand, there is a report of British nobility attending a levée with the “Chief consul,” who diplomatically takes the occasion to enquire after English institutions, and, on the other, there are two contiguous accounts of the Chief Consul inspecting his troops in France while the Duke of York inspects the “first battalion of the first Regiment of Guards” in England. Between these two opposed scenarios of peace and war is poised Coleridge’s text, selling itself within a new dispensation of international commerce while haunted by its corona of exalted national poetry. How will it all end? The recantation in “France: An Ode” might be endlessly republished, but will “Fears in Solitude” re-appear in its full apocalyptic extent or will it be excerpted and excerpted until it bathetically vanishes?18 Notes 1. My own fears in solitude while drafting this piece were alleviated, even when also caused, by the helpful readings of Tim Fulford and Barbara Goff; and I thank Theresa M. Kelley for useful criticism of a very early draft. 2. All quotations of this poem are from CPW. 3. Tim Fulford represents the critique of language in “Fears in Solitude” as deriving from Horne Tooke’s work and also suggests that the empirically divorced language castigated by the poem resembles Coleridge’s later model of a specifically poetic language: Coleridge’s Figurative Language (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 22–23. Whether Coleridge’s notion of language in the poem con-



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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

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tradicts his subsequent model or not, the practical inefficacy of it is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that it is theoretically impossible according to the theories of a normative, working language enumerated for the period in Stephen K. Land’s From Signs to Propositions: The Concept of Form in Eighteenth-Century Semantic Theory (London, 1974), pp. 21–74. For an amplification of Fulford’s assumption that Coleridge’s notions about language are thoroughly coherent, see James C. McKusick’s Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language (New Haven, Conn., 1986), and especially pp. 38–52, where an accommodation with Tooke is alleged. Steven E. Cole, in “Coleridge, Language and the Production of Agency,” Modern Philology, 88.2 (1990), 102–25, 109–12, provides a useful overview of how criticism has discussed Coleridge’s notion of figurative language. Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London and New York, 1963, rev. 1965, rpt. 1981), p. 245. Everest’s account of the poem is especially alert to what it understands as the contradictions between the cultural position of the narrator, predicated partly on his politically eccentric argument for an exclusively defensive war, and the more aggressive popular opinion that the poem is addressing. He also regards the poem as “Coleridge’s best public poem,” reading it as a “sustained effort to move beyond the narrow audience of retirement.” See Coleridge’s Secret Ministry: The Context of the Conversation Poems 1795–1798 (Sussex and New York, 1979), pp. 270–80, 271. Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope), Letters Written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. (1774), 4 vols. (London, 1806), I, 146, Letter XLIII. Nicholas Roe reads this retreat into a domestic landscape as a more negative moment than I do. See Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford, 1988), pp. 263–68. While I can acquiesce in a good deal of Roe’s reading, I do see the poem as more resourceful, and more riven, in its ideological articulation. See Paley’s remarks on the attrition of a millenarian dimension in Coleridge’s shorter poems in the 1790s in Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), p. 115. This argument is applied specifically to “Fears in Solitude” at pp. 138–39. What is left of this dimension, which was, in its turn, based on the pantisocratic endeavor, is the recurring figure of the dell in the revised “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” and in “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement.” Tim Fulford shows how typical is the dell in “Fears in Solitude” and how it, along with the nearby mount, is refracted through Cowper’s modeling of retirement. See Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 234–36. See also Peter Larkin’s exploration of the dell in “Fears in Solitude,” The Wordsworth Circle, 22 (1991), 11–14. The debate about Coleridge’s revisions has recently become very interesting. For quite different approaches and arguments, see Zachary Leader, Revision and Romantic Authorship (Oxford, 1996) and Jack Stillinger, Coleridge and




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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York, 1994). My own “Coleridge’s Swinging Moods and the Revision of ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,’” Style, 33.1 (1999), 21–42, is partly an effort to negotiate between these notions of revision even as it tracks toward Stillinger’s model. Richard Holmes provides details of the annuities arranged by Poole and donated by the Wedgwood brothers in Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1989), pp. 176 and 119. See also p. 304 for Poole’s refusal of a loan. See Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Harmondsworth, 1961, rpt. 1976), pp. 48–64. See Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore, Md. and London, 1993). See Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford, Calif., 1989), pp. 413–26. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, N. J., 1975), p. 493. This overlap is very compelling in the case of “The Destiny of Nations,” which stands closely behind “Fears in Solitude.” Mary Favret, “Coming Home: the Public Spaces of Romantic War,” Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 539–48. James Chandler’s fixation on 1819 as a climax of historical self-consciousness is, on the evidence of 1802, no more than a climax. See James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago and London, 1998). In the event, the cutting continued, but only in one instance, when Coleridge republished the poem in a version in The Friend of 8 June 1809. In 1803, however, anything could have been done to the poem.



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Pantisocracy and the Myth of the Poet Nicholas Roe

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tepping into the bookshop at the corner of High Street and Corn Street, Bristol, late on a spring afternoon in 1796, to escape the uproar for a moment or two, a reader so inclined might have paused to turn over the sheets of one of Joseph Cottle’s new publications: Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, Late of Jesus College, Cambridge. Alighting by chance at page 160, the clamor of the street outside would have been overlaid by Mr. Coleridge’s thunderous declamation: Yet is the day of Retribution nigh: The Lamb of God hath open’d the fifth seal: And upward rush on swiftest wing of fire Th’innumerable multitude of Wrongs By man on man inflicted! Rest awhile, Children of Wretchedness! The hour is nigh: And lo! the Great, the Rich, the Mighty Men, The Kings and the Chief Captains of the World, With all that fix’d on high like stars of Heaven Shot baleful influence, shall be cast to earth, Vile and down-trodden, as the untimely fruit Shook from the fig-tree by a sudden storm. Ev’n now the storm begins . . . 1

Our reader, who knows the Bible by heart, has no need to turn to the note on page 174 to appreciate the reference to the sixth chapter of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. Nor is she surprised to find Mr. Coleridge predicting, after apocalyptic “FRENZY” and “RUIN,” the “blest future” of the



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. . . the great Sun, when he his influence Sheds on the frost-bound waters—The glad stream Flows to the ray and warbles as it flows. (Poems [1796], p. 168)

“Mr Cottle: this Mr Coleridge—you say ‘late of Jesus College Cambridge’? – Mr Cottle, pray,” for this was a gentle reader down from Clifton, or over from Bath, “pray, Mr Cottle, may I hear more about him?” “Very late of Jesus College, ma’am, and more lately domesticated with Mrs Coleridge at Clevedon, ma’am, and now away at Nether Stowey to Mr Poole’s. This is Mr Coleridge’s ‘Watchman’ ma’am . . .”—Cottle was waving a hand over a stack of back issues. Our reader took a copy and glanced through it, read something at random about contributions welcomed from “Disciples of Paley,” replaced it and, recollecting something, quickly stepped out of the shop and along the High Street in the evening sunshine. Cottle’s visitor wasn’t surprised by “Religious Musings” because the narrative in which apocalypse is succeeded by millennium was well-known in that Bible-literate age, and because to some—like Coleridge—it seemed urgently relevant to contemporary history. Morton Paley gives us the following succinct account of the sequence Coleridge evokes in his poem: What is important is that the narrative go from a revelation of human history, usually accompanied by great upheavals, to a society characterized by harmony and justice for a very long period of time, though not necessarily a thousand or any other fixed number of years.2

The “storm” in Coleridge’s poem is glossed in his own notes as “The French Revolution,” emphasizing how for Coleridge contemporary history might be understood in terms of the Old and New Testament prophecies it seemed to be fulfilling (see Poems (1796), p. 175). But, as Paley emphasizes, Coleridge and other millenarian contemporaries found that historical events prevented them from supplying the millennial sequel to the apocalypse of revolution; when Coleridge anticipated a “blest future” in “Religious Musings” he was welcoming a promised conclusion already rapidly receding into the future. This disalignment of millennial vision and historical actuality affected the forms of Coleridge’s poetry, unsettling the inevitability with



millennium with its “promis’d years” leading up to the end of all things, and “Heights most strange!” More intriguing are the quieter sentiments of the poem’s conclusion, where the strains of “heart-stirring song” and “th’empyreal air” give way to the natural music of daybreak in a familiar, winter scene:

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which the close of “Religious Musings” moves from spiritual awakening to its appropriate image in the rising of “the great Sun,” which brings the frostbound streams to musical life.3 Sullied by history, that pristine correspondence between the visionary and the earthly was relocated from a biblical context to various Romantic “microcosms of the millennium,” one of which Morton Paley identifies as the rural “cot or cottage.”4 For Coleridge and Robert Southey a significant stage in the domesticating of the millennium was the Pantisocracy scheme of 1794–95, which Paley identifies as the focus of the “earliest stages” of Coleridge’s millennial thought.5 Writing to Southey in August 1795, when enthusiasm for Pantisocracy had waned somewhat, Coleridge made the link explicit when he observed that “it’s realization is distant—perhaps a miraculous Millenium” (sic; CL, I, 158). In this essay I want to investigate how Pantisocracy enabled Coleridge and Southey to move from the millennial prospect of a “blest future” to the homely, domesticated scene of life in a rural cottage, transposing one major Romantic topos, the millennium,6 onto an equally prominent Romantic theme, the reclusive life of retreat and retirement. To explore this development means that we have to take the Pantisocracy scheme more seriously than has often been the case hitherto, for the pattern I wish to trace is one that moves from the realm of ideals to life as it was actually lived by Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth from the later 1790s onwards. Let’s recall how the French Revolution was welcomed in its early years, 1789 to 1792. “It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for”; “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners . . . to reform the world”; “that blest future rushes on my view!”; “The woods cast a more refreshing shade, and the lawns wear a brighter verdure, while the carols of freedom burst from the cottage of the peasant, and the voice of joy resounded on the hill and in the valley.”7 In his undergraduate rooms next to the lavatories at the back of Balliol College, Robert Southey joined in welcoming the revolution: “If France . . . enjoys tranquillity who knows but Europe may become one great republic?”8 One year later, Robespierre’s Terror brought him to despair: “The murder of Brissot has compleatly harrowed up my faculties & I begin to believe that virtue can only aspire to content in obscurity.”9 Gathering his wits, he announced that he intended to emigrate, assuring his friend: “Tis not . . . a momentary frenzy that says this. Either in six months I fix myself in some honest means of living or I quit my country” (Curry, I, 54). Southey never did “quit [his] country” entirely, and by 1813 he had fixed up a thoroughly dishonest means of living as Poet Laureate. But we can appreciate, perhaps, how for Southey in 1794 an emigrant adventure would solve his cash problems and enable him to escape the gathering storm of a British revolution. Or so Southey himself believed when, on meeting



Pantisocracy and the Myth of the Poet

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Oxford in June 1794, they put together their scheme for an emigrant community, located at first in Kentucky. The destination soon changed to Pennsylvania10 at the confluence of the East and West branches of the Susquehanna River, near the township of Milton and just a little upstream from Liverpool, Seven Stars and the little haven of Independence. Their settlement would be close to the house of Joseph Priestley, the Unitarian scientist forced out of England who had now reconstructed his laboratory in the New World. Southey and Coleridge, both of them broke and with nothing to their names, saw some advantage in setting up a community in which property would be held in common. Coleridge invented the term “aspheterism” to describe their system: “we really wanted such a word,” he informed Southey (CL, I, 84). So all was now set. “My resolution with regard to America is taken,” Southey announced in August 1794: “Calmly and firmly—after long deliberation I pronounce—I am going to America. It is my duty to depart” (Curry, I, 70); “[N]o prospect in life gives me half the pleasure this visionary one affords.”11 What exactly was the “vision” Southey had in view? I imagine Southey had taken more than a bowl of punch when he wrote out this prospect: fancy me in America. Imagine my ground uncultivated since the creation & see me wielding the axe now to cut down the tree & now the snakes that nestled in it. Then see me grubbing up the roots & building a nice snug little dairy with them. Three rooms in my cottage, & my only companion some poor negro whom I have bought on purpose to emancipate. After a hard days toil see me sleep upon rushes, & in very bad weather take out my cassette & write to you . . . do not imagine I shall leave rhyming or philosophizing. . . . 12

A root-dairy? Bob Southey asleep on rushes? All of this explains why the “Pantisocratic system” has been regarded as a preposterous, mad-cap fantasy put together by excited undergraduates amid the fug of tobacco smoke and libations of spiced wine in Southey’s college rooms. How on earth could it become actuality? How would they have crossed the Atlantic to the Susquehanna?—Sailing to the millennium by starlight? with Coleridge at the helm, and Southey on the masthead, squinting at the horizon from what Captain Scoresby (senior) would, a quarter century in the future, invent as the “crow’s nest?” Imagine the tools necessary to clear uncultivated ground, and the wishlist of equipment and supplies they would have had in the hold: the great auger, the plow-sock, the sacks of flour and sugar, the rip-saw, axes, boxes of sea salt, the cast-iron skillet, the meal ark, the ropes and barrel-hoops, salted herrings and salted pork, helves and handles, tallow candles, pewter candlesticks, the keg of powder, the griddle, the dozen bags of seed, the cradle, the



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mahogany desk, the casks of rum, and the bath with claw feet. This catalogue of pantisocratic bric-a-brac comes, of course, from Paul Muldoon’s esteeseeophilic romance, Madoc: A Mystery, and a poem appropriately associated with the materialist philosopher Democritus, so-called laughing philosopher of ancient Greece.13 “Democritus” amasses the astonishing clutter necessary had Pantisocracy “actually” got underway, and it is divided between pantisocratic roles for the men and women in the settlement. Childbirth and the cradle might seem obvious enough, but smuggled into the list too is “the cast iron skillet.” Not any old cast-iron skillet, notice, and evidently the same one that Coleridge would write to Southey about, from the tedium of his “lime-tree bower”: “dear Sara accidently emptied a skillet of boiling milk on my foot, which confined me” (CL, I, 334)—a detail which reveals that, rather than grubbing-up roots, STC would have been hogging the fire, warming his feet on the fender. There was nothing more effective than a cast-iron skillet and a pint of scalding milk to return Pantisocracy to the struggling sphere in which ideas are buffeted, or in this case scorched, by actualities. As a prospective Pantisocrat, dear Sara Fricker had married Coleridge on 4 October 1795, making Southey, who had married Edith Fricker, Coleridge’s brother-in-law. Here is the catalogue of domestic items drawn up by Coleridge as he began married life, “quite domesticated at Clevedon” in a “comfortable Cot!”: “A riddle slice; a candle box; two ventilators; two glasses for the wash-hand stand; one tin dust pan; one small tin tea kettle; one pair of candlesticks; one carpet brush; one flower dredge; three tin extinguishers; two mats; a pair of slippers; a cheese toaster; two large tin spoons; a bible; a keg of porter; coffee; raisins; currants; catsup; nutmegs; allspice; cinnamon; rice, ginger; and mace” (CL, I, 160). Here we glimpse some of the other tin-pan practicalities of Pantisocracy—the arrangements necessary to make it work (or not) like the many other emigrant settlements in America since William Penn founded Philadelphia, Quaker “City of Brotherly Love.” Next, I want to look at how the experiment in pantisocratizing would unite ideal possibilities and the homely, transforming and domesticating the revolutionary millenarianism of earlier years. In a slightly longer perspective the scheme set the agenda of Southey’s Poems of 1797, a collection that expresses the feelings of an inner émigré sharply at odds with reactionary, repressive England. In the concluding poem of that collection we shall see Pantisocracy incorporated into one of the “cottaged” microcosms of the millennium, and then absorbed into a Romantic myth of the poet’s development. Southey had thought of emigrating to America before he met Coleridge. He had read in The Rights of Man and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations arguments in favor of settling in America. “As America was the only spot in




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so also was it the best in the natural world. . . . Its first settlers were emigrants from different European nations, and of diversified professions of religion, retiring from the governmental persecutions of the old world, and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but as brothers.14

It’s worth mentioning here that, when Paine was writing, “emigrant” was quite a new word, dating from 1754 and referring originally to German emigrants to Pennsylvania. An earlier usage, which as we’ll see was relevant to Pantisocracy, was the seventeenth-century sense of emigration as the migration or departure of the soul from the body at death or through an ecstatic rapture. Intriguingly, “immigrant” comes into use rather later in 1792—just before Pantisocracy came out of the smoke—and the related adjective, as in “immigrant Pantisocrats,” was first used by Southey in 1805. The two senses of emigration—physical removal and spiritual elation—coincided for dissenters like William Hazlitt (father of the critic), Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Cooper and Coleridge, for whom religious liberty was an inspiring motive to emigrate. More down-to-earth, if not yet on the rush bed, Southey was impressed by Adam Smith’s analysis of the costs of settling: fifty or sixty pounds is . . . a sufficient stock to begin a plantation with. The purchase and improvement of uncultivated land, is there the most profitable employment of the smallest as well as . . . greatest capitals. . . . Such land, indeed, is in North America to be had almost for nothing, or at a price much below the price of the natural produce; a thing impossible in Europe, or, indeed, in any country where all lands have long been private property.15

Smith’s calculations were attractive. “According to the computation of Adam Smith,” Southey announced in August 1794, “the comforts of life may be procured by the daily toil of half an hour!” (Curry, I, 70). His letter continues: would that state of society be happy where every man laboured two hours a day . . . where all were equally educated, 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? Such a system we go to establish in America. (Curry, I, 70)

Southey recognized that Smith sought to increase output by dividing labor, but upended Smith’s theory so as to justify a minimal amount of “daily toil”:



the political world, where the principles of universal reformation could begin,” Paine wrote,

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there would be leisure for rhyming and philosophizing after all. This mixture of pragmatism and optimism later appeared in Southey’s projections for the sale of his bulky poem Madoc as an article of furniture that the “gentry” would buy to fill up their bookshelves. Theoretical backgrounds for Pantisocracy came from Paine and Smith, and the necessary “motive to virtue” from Godwin’s Political Justice. And there were practical handbooks about transatlantic emigration too, written by the French Revolutionary Brissot, by Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover Gilbert Imlay, and by the Manchester Radical Thomas Cooper. First-hand acquaintance brought valuable advice, as reported by Coleridge to Southey from what was evidently a snug bar in the “Salutation and Cat” Ale-House in Newgate Street, London. “We have a comfortable Room to ourselves—& drink Porter & Punch round a good Fire,” Coleridge writes, adding with a surge of Pantisocratic ardor: My motive for all this is that every night I meet a most intelligent young Man who has spent the last 5 years of his Life in America—and is lately come from thence as An Agent to sell Land. . . . He says, two thousand pounds will do— that he doubts not we can contract for our Passage under 400£.—that we shall buy the Land a great deal cheaper when we arrive at America—than we could do in England. . . . That 12 men may easily clear three hundred Acres in 4 or 5 months—and that for 600 hundred dollars a Thousand Acres may be cleared, and houses built upon them—He recommends the Susqusannah from it’s excessive Beauty, & it’s security from hostile Indians—Every possible assistance will be given us—we may get credit for the land for 10 years or more as we settle upon it—That literary Characters make money there. . . . He never saw a Byson in his Life. (CL, I, 99)

What we overhear from the “Salutation and Cat” is an account of colonizing as big business: “That literary Characters make money there” suggests Coleridge’s aspheterist ideals were attenuating. Nevertheless, the Pantisocrats would take out a contract for the voyage; they would deal with a land agent, seek credit for purchasing and clearing the land, and build houses for the community that would be established, Coleridge said, “on the principles of an abolition of individual property” (CL, I, 96). Taken altogether, the economic infrastructure that would make Pantisocracy viable was in place (of course millions of others did go to America and settle in various kinds of communities), and Southey was actively raising funds with subscriptions for his epic poem Joan of Arc (Curry, I, 71–72). “We go at least twelve men with women and children,” Southey announced, confident that “[b]y this day twelve months the Pantisocratic society of Aspheterists will be settled on the banks of the Susquehannah” (Curry, I, 71–72).




Nicholas Roe

So who was to join the Pantisocratic society? In August 1794 the count was 12 men with women and children. Included were Southey’s mother; his fiancée Edith Fricker with her four sisters Elizabeth, Martha, Mary and Sara, and their mother Martha Fricker; George Burnett, an Oxford friend and early convert to the scheme, who proposed unsuccessfully to Martha Fricker; Robert Allen, acquainted from school and university with Coleridge and Southey; Robert Lovell, a Bristol friend and poetic collaborator of Southey’s, who married Mary Fricker; and Coleridge who married Sara Fricker. This made up the core of twelve emigrants, but recruiting went on in Bristol, London and Cambridge and a month later the group was described by Southey as: Lovell, his wife, and two of his sisters: all the Frickers—my mother, Miss Peggy, and brothers; Heath, apothecary and man and wife; G. Burnett—S.T. Coleridge—Robt Allen and Robert Southey. Of so many we are certain, and expect more. (Curry, I, 75)

That is, four Lovells; seven Frickers; five Southeys plus cousin Margaret (Peggy) Hill; three Heaths (apothecary plus man and woman servant); and the four others. A total of 24, which rose to 27 and beyond in the month following. It’s possible to draw up a roll call of prospective Pantisocrats from Southey’s and Coleridge’s letters in 1794–95, and it is possible that the community would have amounted to some 38 individuals (there were probably more that I haven’t been able to identify).16 In the planning of Pantisocracy the Fricker factor was a considerable one. For all Southey’s and Coleridge’s theorizing about equality and aspheterism, Pantisocracy was to be at heart a family settlement establishing the homes that neither Southey nor Coleridge had known since early childhood.17 In one sense a visionary prospect in keeping with the revolutionary 1790s, Pantisocracy was also a practical scheme for domesticating the millenarian impulse “in the Dell / Of high-soul’d Pantisocracy to dwell.”18 That line comes from Coleridge’s splendid poem, which commiserates with “a Young Jack Ass”: Poor little Foal of an oppress’d Race, I love the languid Patience of thy Face! And oft with friendly hand I give thee Bread, And clap thy ragged Coat & pat thy Head . . . How askingly it’s steps toward me bend— It seems to say—‘And have I then one Friend?’ (CL, I, 142–43)

The Young Ass and Southey’s dog Rover were included as Pantisocrats too, and hailed as “brother” along with the servant Shadrach Weeks who had been persuaded to come along (doubtless hoping for reduced working



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O, CHATTERTON! that thou wert yet alive! Sure thou would’st 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, Hanging, enraptur’d on thy stately song! And greet with smiles the young-eyed POESY All deftly mask’d, as hoar ANTIQUITY. Alas vain Phantasies! the fleeting brood Of Woe self-solac’d in her dreamy mood! Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream, Where Susquehannah pours his untam’d stream; And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side Waves o’er the murmurs of his calmer tide, Will raise a solemn CENOTAPH to thee, Sweet Harper of time-shrouded MINSTRELSY! And there, sooth’d sadly by the dirgeful wind, Muse on the sore ills I had left behind. (Poems (1796), pp. 10–11)

Chatterton, poet of the “antique” Rowley poems and (perhaps) a suicide at the age of 17, was the self-destructive genius of Romantic myth—one of the “mighty poets in their misery dead.” Here he is glimpsed in a context that identifies Pantisocracy as a poetic idyll, a release from “sore ills” and untimely death—hence the Cenotaph overlooking the Susquehanna, not just a memorial but, cannily, an empty tomb from which Chatterton, like Christ, has emigrated. Chatterton as a Pantisocrat is vigorous and commanding, a powerful poet of “stately song.” This is the alternative Chatterton of Romantic tradition—Chatterton as a liberal hero, the champion of liberty who had ambitions, like Southey and Coleridge, as a political journalist and poet of social critique.20 Right at the center of the community we might imagine the house and laboratory of Joseph Priestley. Together the Cenotaph and Priestley’s house represented the complex dynamics of the Pantisocracy scheme, reminders of the old world as also of their idealistic and, they hoped, practical quest for “new life new hope new energy.”21 As one might suspect, Coleridge had a theory to explain how “new life” might be gathered to and diffused from Pantisocracy:



hours). With them was Thomas Chatterton: dead since 1770, Chatterton would be aboard as a kind of poetic and spiritual guide.19 Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” in Poems on Various Subjects (1796) included the following lines:

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This comes in a letter to Southey, 13 July 1794, in which Coleridge (who was on a walking tour of Wales) announces that he has “positively done nothing but dream of the System of no Property every step of the Way” (CL, I, 90). It suggests that “home-born Feeling” was the emotional center of Pantisocracy, which through a process of assimilation and concretion—and a little help from his friends—would bind the community together and attract new “congenial” participants. Taking Coleridgean theory literally we might sketch out a plan of how Pantisocracy would embody physically, in its layout, the ideals and practicalities of the scheme that I’ve been exploring so far. The community is located at the confluence of the west and east branches of the Susquehanna River, close to Joseph Priestley’s house. Instead of forming a dispersed or strip settlement along the riverbank, it has a circular layout with at its center a Unitarian meeting house in which pantisocratic decisions are taken. Up on the hills behind the settlement is the Chatterton Cenotaph, and carved on it, in curious writing, are these words: Now doeth Engolonde weare a bloudie dresse And wyth her champyonnes gore her face depeyncte; Peace fledde, disorder sheweth her dark rode, And thorow ayre doth flie, yn garments steyned with bloude.22

Pantisocracy was an attempt to sustain millenarian idealism by withdrawing from the increasingly violent arena of political activity in England and moving to a new (“microcosmic”) transatlantic community based around family and private attachments. But when that impulse faltered (because of public events, and personal circumstances) we can see how emigration would grow increasingly remote, leaving disengagement and retirement as alternatives. The scheme for Pantisocracy was famously short-lived, brought back from America and briefly relocated in Wales23—and then abandoned altogether when Southey and Coleridge quarreled. But the idea of “dwelling in the dell” persisted, relocating millenarian idealism in the personal, the private, the homely—in poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” and Wordsworth’s “Home at Grasmere,” which, as part of the Recluse, was intended to address the consequences of revolutionary failure. Indeed “dwelling in the dell”—a microcosm of the millennial ideal—serves as a catch-all description of the Romantic retreats of Southey and Edith Fricker, Coleridge



The ardour of private Attachments makes Philanthropy a necessary habit of the Soul. I love my Friend—such as he is, all mankind are or might be! The deduction is evident—. Philanthropy (and indeed every other Virtue) is a thing of Concretion—Some home-born Feeling is the center of the Ball, that, rolling on thro’ Life collects and assimilates every congenial Affection. (CL, I, 86)

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and Sara Fricker, and the Wordsworths at Nether Stowey, Alfoxden, Dove Cottage and Keswick. Then there were Leigh Hunt and Marianne Kent at the Vale of Health, taking “A long, deep draught of silent freshfulness, / Ample, and gushing . . .”—and Seamus and Marie Heaney, “landed in the hedgeschool of Glanmore” where “a rustling and twig-combing breeze / Refreshes and relents . . .”—and, finally, the numberless bolt-holes of John Betjeman’s “Metroland,” a belated, suburban, relocation of Pantisocracy “Out into the outskirt’s edges, / Where a few surviving hedges / Keep alive our lost Elysium . . .”—to which commuters from the city return to recuperate, with “sandwich supper and the television screen.”24 In the suburban “lifestyle” Coleridge’s blest future has finally come to town! Coleridge, at least, was aware that such a way of life might be a temptation to throw up the cause altogether, “sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment” (CL, I, 527). The “titles of domestic attachment” are foregrounded in Southey’s 1797 Poems. This is a collection that has been more or less overlooked by studies that focus on the Coleridge-Wordsworth axis of English Romanticism, studies announcing that one “looks in vain in Southey for the imagination, the power of mind, the sense of the numinous, that distinguish the greater Romantics.”25 I want to suggest that to look for these “High Romantic” qualities in Southey’s 1797 book is wrong from the start, and that some of the book’s significance appears in themes close to the Pantisocracy episode, themes that were explored as well by some female poets of the time. A principal significance of Southey’s Poems (1797) is in avoiding the egotism and self-assertiveness of Wordsworth-Coleridge Romanticism—the Romanticism, that is, of “Tintern Abbey” and “Dejection.” What we find in Southey’s book is a strikingly miscellaneous gathering of poems, a variety comparable with Southey’s mastery of different genres in later life as a professional “man of letters.” The collection opens with a sonnet “To Mary Wollstonecraft” in praise of “Woman triumph[ant]” in past and present generations; the next poem, “The Triumph of Woman,” takes a biblical parable to illustrate this theme. Then follow poems on the slave trade; a clutch of odes; eight inscriptions; the “Botany Bay Eclogues” (a different kind of emigration); ten sonnets; a monologue by Sappho just before her suicide—introducing a feminine counterpart to Chatterton, in a poem competing with Mary Robinson’s 1796 sonnet sequence “Sappho and Laon.” Next are some melodramatic lyrics; and the concluding blank verse meditation, the “Hymn to the Penates”—that is, a “Hymn” to the sustaining deities of the Roman household, the “Gods dwelling in the store-cupboard” alongside the Lares who protected the household. On reading through the whole collection, however, “home” seems to be mentioned only because it has been left behind, lost, or is out of reach—a




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scene of alienation that might be related to the dislocation of the apocalypsemillennium sequence. In Poems (1797) we find a world populated by outcasts and beggars, slaves and strangers, wanderers, widows and wronged women, travelers and paupers, exiled prisoners, discharged soldiers and sailors, madmen and murderers. And then there is the poet figure himself, introduced in the prefatory sonnet as “a Pilgrim woe-begone,” “roving” on “Life’s sad journey,” a “solitary” and, in another poem, “On the Death of a Favourite old Spaniel,” a melancholy schoolboy “with the thought of distant home” (here is the seed of “Frost at Midnight”). These are all figures of “forlorn humanity,” all from “from their poor and peaceful homes [expelled], / Unfriended, desolate, and shelterless.” In the background are the friendless individuals on the heath in Act 3 of King Lear, cast out into a storm of apocalyptic intensity which brings home to Lear the unaccommodated reality of human existence—“the thing itself.” I suspect that another influence on Southey (which was also indebted to Lear) was Charlotte Smith’s 1793 poem The Emigrants. Smith gives an account of royalist émigrés from revolutionary France, “whose dejected looks” proclaim them Men Banish’d forever and for conscience sake From their distracted Country . . . (I, 95–98)26

Set against home forsaken is the “sighed for” prospect of a “lone Cottage, deep embower’d” (I, 43); this is a pastoral prettifying of Lear’s “hovel,” and one of the motifs of the Pantisocracy idyll. I suspect that Southey’s idea of emigrating owed as much to Charlotte Smith’s poem as to Paine, Adam Smith and the American pamphleteers, and that he was indebted to her for the more radical vision of humanity in his collection of poems. Smith’s The Emigrants juxtaposes the plight of the French émigrés with this (quasiShakespearean) image of alienated humankind: Poor wand’ring wretches! whosoe’er ye are, That hopeless, houseless, friendless, travel wide O’er these bleak russet downs; where, dimly seen, The solitary Shepherd shiv’ring tends His dun discolour’d flock . . . Poor vagrant wretches! outcasts of the world! Whom no abode receives, no parish owns; Roving, like Nature’s commoners, the land That boasts such general plenty . . . (I, 296–300; 303–6)



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This passage from The Emigrants supplies the keynote for Southey’s 1797 volume, which develops the idea of houseless, friendless humanity in poems we might think of as individual studies of “nature’s commoners” (and this, remember, before Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” and Lyrical Ballads). Some of the poems such as the “Botany Bay Eclogues,” “The Soldier’s Wife” and “The Widow” articulate “Jacobin” social protest directed against the legal and penal systems, against war, poverty, and irresponsible aristocracy. The “Botany Bay Eclogues,” written in 1794, are a kind of antipodean Pantisocracy, a series of exile monologues that are set at different times of the day—as Smith’s two-part émigré narrative, published in 1793, had also been. Linking all of the poems together is not a call to revolutionary action, nor is there anything resembling Coleridge’s belated millenarian prayer in “Religious Musings.” This was the climactic visionary poem which concluded Coleridge’s 1796 collection, in which he was still anticipating that a “blest future” was about to “rush upon [his] view” (Poems (1796), p. 163), but whereas Coleridge was looking forward to a spiritual revolution at the millennium, Southey chose as the final statement of his own collection a poem that brings everything back home. The “Hymn to the Penates” finds the domestic “hallowed hearth” better fitted for “visionary joys” and for “pondering loftiest themes” (as Coleridge discovers in “Frost at Midnight,” when with the “inmates of [his] cottage, all at rest,” he is left to the solitude “which suits / Abstruser musings,” 4–6). In the same passage, Southey reintroduces his figure of the poet “driven / Amid the jarring crowd,” and he does so not by way of reaffirming the attractions of the “hallowed hearth” of home attained, but to introduce a brief retrospect of an alternative settlement now abandoned: I have strayed Where o’er the sea-beach chilly howl’d the blast, And gaz’d upon the world of waves, and wished That I were far beyond the Atlantic deep, In woodland haunts—a sojourner with PEACE.27

Elsewhere in the poem Southey gives us a prospect when gazing “From some high eminence on goodly vales / And cots and villages embower’d below,” and remarks, The thought would rise that all to me was strange Amid the scene so fair, nor one small spot Where my tir’d mind might rest and call it home. There is a magic in that little word;




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Poems by Robert Southey derives some of its coherence from the pantisocratic radicalism of earlier years, specifically in a faltering millenarianism for which Southey substitutes a domesticated sociable endeavor. It might be thought of as “The Book of Pantisocracy”—a book that, incidentally, Coleridge had projected (CL, I, 115) but never completed: perhaps the manuscript was eaten by Rover. As we read through the “Hymn to the Penates,” however, we find a significant reformulation of Pantisocracy; it is now located within a myth of the poet’s development as an ideal destination that is compelling yet forever out of reach (much as Charlotte Smith had found that no “cot sequestered,” no “substantial farm” would “terminate [her] walk”). The “Hymn” concludes with looking to a time when humanity “shall” feel the “sacred power” of domestic peace, living (as in Pantisocracy) “in the equal brotherhood of Love.” The concluding sentiment of Southey’s “Hymn,” and the book as a whole, is “meantime, all hoping. . . .” Here Southey is setting the human scene (as Coleridge’s “blest future” does not) for one of the High Romantic insights supposedly beyond his genius. I’m thinking of the recognition that came to Wordsworth as he was writing The Prelude, when he recalled his crossing of the Alps and, as he did so, experienced an overpowering sense of alienation—“lost as in a cloud.” Recovery from this mood brings an elated recognition: “our home / Is with infinitude—and only there; / With hope it is . . . / Effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be” (Prelude (1805), VI, 538–42). Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey had pointed the “woe-begone” outcast route to that High Romantic intuition, in which Pantisocracy is transformed into the “something” to which Wordsworthian imagination aspires through a transcendental emigration. Through such ecstatic “visitings” we glimpse not America but an “invisible world,” and the sublime “harbour” that guarantees the self-sufficing power of the mind, blest in thoughts That are their own perfection and reward— Strong in itself, and in the access of joy Which hides it like the overflowing Nile. (Prelude (1805), VI, 545–48)

“[N]o prospect in life gives me half the pleasure this visionary one affords,” Southey had written of Pantisocracy, in a context where the pleasure of the



It is a mystic circle that surrounds Comforts and Virtues never known beyond The hallowed limit.28

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visionary—the “overflowing Susquehanna”—was sharply juxtaposed against the “jarring” and “chilly blast” of an age of revolutions. In so doing Southey alerts us to the disquieting actuality overlaid by Wordsworth’s poetry. This is an image of the 1790s that is equally applicable to the modern world at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the world of the houseless dispossessed, of economic migrants, of asylum seekers and, latest descendant of all the Pantisocrats, the refugee. Notes 1. Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge (Bristol, 1796), pp. 160–61. Hereafter Poems (1796). 2. Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford, 1999), p. 4. 3. See Seamus Perry, “Coleridge’s Millennial Embarrassments,” Essays in Criticism, 50 (January 2000), 1–22. 4. For some Blakean connections, see Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 83 and 85; for Coleridge, see pp. 116–17, 120, 121–24. 5. Ibid., p. 115. 6. See ibid., pp. 1–2. 7. See Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, ed. H. Collins (1791; Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 168; Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Charles W. Hagelman, Jr. (1792; New York, 1967), p. 84; S. T. Coleridge, “Religious Musings,” line 370; Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790, quoted in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1998), p. 151. 8. For Southey’s rooms, see Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1989), p. 61; for France, see Robert Southey to Grosvenor Bedford, 21 October 1792, in Curry, I, 10. 9. This letter of October 1793 is in the collection of manuscript letters of Robert Southey at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hereafter BSL. 10. The change of plan occurred some time between 1 August and 22 August 1794; see Curry, I, 67 and I, 71. 11. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols. (London, 1849–50), I, 193–94. 12. BSL. 13. See Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (London, 1990). 14. See The Rights of Man, pp. 181–82. 15. See Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1776), I, 505–06. 16. For more on the “roster” of Pantisocrats, see Kenneth Johnston, “The Political Sciences of Life: From American Pantisocracy to British Romanticism,” in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford, 2001), pp. 47–68.




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17. See, in particular, Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, esp. pp. 21–24, and Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford, 1997), pp. 6–7. 18. See Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 116–17, on Pantisocracy as an “unrealisable” attempt to integrate imagination and communitarian ideals. As my discussion indicates, I take an approach similar to Paley’s but wish to emphasize the (potential) practicality of the scheme. 19. See ibid., pp. 116–17. 20. See David Fairer, “Chatterton’s Poetic Afterlife, 1770–1794: A Context for Coleridge’s Monody,” in Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, ed. Nick Groom (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 228–52. 21. Southey’s words: Curry, I, 81. 22. From “Eclogue the First” in Thomas Chatterton, Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1794), p. 204. 23. “As to the Welsh scheme—pardon me—it is nonsense—We must go to America,” CL, I, 132, letter to Southey of 9 December 1794. 24. “Sonnet to Hampstead. VI” (1815), from The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, ed. H. S. Milford (Oxford, 1923), p. 238; “Glanmore Sonnets, II and III,” from Field Work (London, 1979); “Middlesex,” from A Few Late Chrysanthemums (London, 1954). 25. See Jonathan Wordsworth’s Introduction to Robert Southey, Poems (1797; Oxford, 1989). 26. Quoted from The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York and Oxford, 1993). 27. See Southey, Poems, p. 207. 28. Ibid., p. 218.



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Ecological Apocalypse: Privation, Alterity, and Catastrophe in the Work of Arthur Young and Thomas Robert Malthus Gary Harrison

I

n the final decade of the twentieth century, ecologists, social scientists and literary critics called our attention to the alarmist rhetoric of recent environmental writing. In his influential study of environmental perception in American culture, The Environmental Imagination (1995), Lawrence Buell argued that global pollution, genetic engineering, and the technologies of nuclear destruction have fostered a new millenarianism. Works such as Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring (1962), Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982), and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), among many others, imagined the devastating consequences of human actions on the fragile environment and deployed a “rhetoric of apocalypticism” to press the urgency of their common message, that “the fate of the world hinges on the arousal of the imagination to a sense of crisis.”1 While the apocalyptic scenarios of contemporary environmental works vary, almost all of them rest on the fear of scarcity—the spectacle of an imminent shortage of energy, air, water, and food.2 Thus, while revitalized by the threat of nuclear war and environmental degradation, contemporary environmental apocalypticism conjures up a dismal prospect of life lived perilously close to the bone in an atmosphere of fierce competition. This foreboding prospect, of course, issues from an earlier era of apocalyptic thinking, when in 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus presented the sublime specter of scarcity as a simple, but immutable, law of nature.



Chapter 7 z

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As Jonathan Bate reminds us, “the Reverend T. R. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population . . . was among the first works to predict environmental catastrophe.”3 According to Bate, if Rousseau’s Second Discourse gave to ecological thinking its “myth of origins,” Malthus’s 1798 Essay4 provided its “myth of ending (Apocalypse).”5 Malthus introduced his myth of ending to warn against another myth—the myth of progress, particularly as espoused by Condorcet and William Godwin. “Malthus . . . wrote his essay,” Donald Worster says, “to refute utopian dreams” as well as to dispel “nostalgic, agrarian idylls.”6 Among those dreams and idylls were those touted by Arthur Young, Thomas Spence, and others, who, despite political differences, shared a common belief that agricultural improvement, technological advances, and basic human ingenuity would forestall indefinitely any shortage of food.7 These utopian dreams of improvement and dystopian nightmares of population, as I will discuss in my conclusion, impinge on our current ecological debates. Like the utopians of the early nineteenth century, our contemporary ideologues of progress tend to overestimate the benefits of agricultural improvement, as well as the capacity of the earth to sustain agricultural growth; similarly, like Malthus, our contemporary neo-Malthusians deliver their ecological jeremiads using an apocalyptic rhetoric that demonizes the subaltern and diverts attention from the intricate complex of factors contributing to scarcity. Following Lawrence Buell’s caveat that we should examine even “the most searching works of environmental reflection to find disclosed . . . both the pathologies that bedevil society at large and some of the alternative paths that it might consider,”8 in this chapter I will examine the early nineteenth-century discourses on improvement and population in order to tease out their inherent pathologies and contradictions, and to show how both the Malthusian myth of ending and the myth of progress stigmatize the laboring poor as a subaltern presence that threatens the body politic with disorder, disease, and ecological disaster. I will conclude by looking briefly at writers, such as Thomas Spence and William Godwin, who opposed the apocalyptic vision of Malthus with a millenarian vision that combined the myth of progress articulated by Young and his followers with an egalitarian vision of terrestrial paradise. On Improvement Throughout the 1790s war drove up the cost of imported grain, and a succession of poor harvests kept home prices high; the high prices in turn put pressure on the poor, whose visible and sometimes vocal discontent drew attention to their plight, as well as to their numbers. For some writers, such as Burke and Malthus, the poor were to bear the burden of inflation without



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government intervention, because, as Burke put it in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, “The labouring people are only poor, because they are numerous.”9 Others, however, such as the agriculturalist Arthur Young, seized on the crisis as a call to revitalize Britain’s agriculture. For Young and other advocates of agricultural improvement, enclosing the wastes and commons, as well as introducing better drainage, new crops, and new technologies, would convert Great Britain into a virtual cornucopia that could remediate the poverty and vice of the agricultural laborers and hold off indefinitely the threat of famine. Improvement and enclosure would expand production and restore reasonable prices for grain, as well as convert the idle poor, who increasingly and alarmingly relied on the parish rates, into industrious workers. The enlightened thinking of Young and his followers often reinforced a negative image of the poor consistent with the one figured in Malthus’s Essay. Celebrating the orderly landscapes of enclosure, the agricultural improvers portrayed the commons and wastelands as sites of transgression and vice. The wastelands, commons, and their inhabitants, when not idealized as models of rustic simplicity, were often represented as savage places and savage people living according to outmoded principles that promoted misery. The image of the rural poor emerging from the discourse on enclosure, like the 1801 census, seemed to corroborate Malthus’s sensational display of the irrationality, potent sexuality, and voracious appetite of the “lower orders.” Before the surveyors laid down their domesticating grids on the fearful asymmetry of the open fields and wastes, Young and other proponents of enclosure had already begun to form in the consciousness of the readers of the Annals of Agriculture an enlightenment template that would stamp its orderly patterns on the landscape. The succession of enclosure acts provided a steady record of the triumph of new methods of husbandry over the old, the triumph of private property over the commons. Young’s treatises on landscape and the reports of the commissioners generated hundreds of tables and charts, plotting the engulfment of the wastes and commons by the schemata of rational improvement—what William Pitt in the General View of the Agriculture of the County of Northampton (1809) described as “the improved police of agriculture,” designed to create “a system of finding employment for the many and yielding a large gross product for their support. . . .”10 Moreover, Young’s Annals of Agriculture frequently paused to praise enlightenment rationality, as exemplified in the improvements and agricultural experiments of landowners and farmers. His praise of Mr. Elkington’s system of drains and trenches to supply water to certain fields near Sutton Coldfield was typical: Such works . . . have infinite merit and do great credit to the talents of this very ingenious and useful man, who will have the merit, wherever he goes, of



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setting men to think. No inconsiderable step, and which leads to all sorts of improvements. Get rid of that dronish, sleepy, and stupid indifference, that lazy negligence, which enchains men in the exact paths of their forefathers, without enquiry, without thought, and without ambition, and you are sure of doing good. What trains of thought, what a spirit of exertion, what a mass and power of effort have sprung in every path of life, from the works of such men as Brindley, Watt, Priestley, Harrison, Arkwright, and let me add my fellow-traveller Bakewell!11

Agricultural improvement promised nothing less than the abolition of superstition and the awakening of reason. The dialectic of enlightenment had dawned on the English landscape. In praising the orderly landscapes of improvement, Young and other agricultural reformers and contributors to the Annals, including William Marshall, Henry Homer and John Howlett, bracketed off the commons and wastelands as sites of transgression, as liminal spaces outside the reach of the laws of production, property, and propriety. They saw the commons and the wastes as polluted spaces in need of policing, as well as unmapped colonial territories to be inscribed with imperial signs of improvement—new crops (planned rotations of clover, turnips, barley, rye, and wheat), trenches and drains, neatly aligned cottages, fences and hedgerows. William Marshall went so far as to call for “straight lines and right angles” as the “first principles” of efficient agricultural management;12 Blake knew well of what he spoke when he wrote “Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius” (Erdman, p. 38). Thus, enclosure would remake the landscape with visible signs of order overtaking chaos, of enlightenment defeating ignorance. The wastes, especially, but the commons as well, were repeatedly associated with alterity in the forms of disorder, promiscuity, scarcity and disease, while the enclosed lands were associated with their opposites—order, virtue, fecundity and health. The commons and wastelands were both places where indiscriminate mixing, what William Pitt called “promiscuous assemblage,” compromised the health of livestock and the morality of the poor.13 Thus, these were liminal spaces in which no patterns were realized; as Nathaniel Kent’s Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property proclaimed, the wastes were “little more than blanks in the kingdom.”14 Like the blank spaces on the map of Africa that spurred Marlow’s imagination in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, these spaces represented the potential for being shaped by the patterns of improvement. What Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger has called an “anxiety over bodily boundaries,” where the margins become dangerous while the center seems secure, permeates the debates about enclosure.15 As Douglas ex-



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plains, such spaces symbolize “both danger and power,” because while their shapelessness suggests a troubling non-identity, it also suggests the possibility for the beholder to remake these spaces according to his or her own design (p. 94). Indeed, the Burkean sublime of privation seems to haunt the imagination of the agricultural improvers, leading them to invest these liminal sites with a sense of anxiety.16 Like the shadowed spaces of a Salvator Rosa painting, these undefined pockets of land in the heart of rural England were seen as breeding grounds for “sloth, vice, and poverty,”17 populated by “half-naked, half-starved women and children, with pale meagre faces, peeping out of their miserable huts, or laying and lounging about after a few paltry screaming geese, or scabby worthless sheep. . . .”18 Enclosure was intended to remove such spectacles of deprivation and disorder, to transform these sites of idleness and squalor into arable fields for grazing or for crop production. If enclosure would save the nation by eliminating these pockets harboring disease, vice and misery, it would also save it from residual feudalism, ignorance and the internalized colonial Other. Enclosure promised to shore up the boundaries of Britain itself, establishing a self-sustaining center from which to conduct its foreign affairs and embark on its colonial enterprises. In On the Appropriation and Inclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands (1801), William Marshall claimed that, while the open field system might once have been “well adapted to the state of ignorance, and vassalage, of feudal times,” it was now outmoded.19 Maintaining the open field system with its concomitant system of customary rights in 1800, however, would lead to nothing less than scarcity for all and barbarism among the laboring classes: “Though famine threatens at the gate,” he contended, otherwise productive tracts of land “lie nearly in a state of wild nature! which were never inhabited! . . . unless by freebooters and homebred savages. Yet these uncultivated savage districts lie within the limits, in the very bosom, of our own circumscribed territory” (p. 7; my italics). Marshall invoked the topoi of imperialist discourse and of Malthusian alarm to figure the commoners and farmers as “homebred savages,” whose ignorant practices must be subjected to the rational imperatives of improvement, and who must be disciplined to conform to the normative practices that constitute the “circumscribed territory.” Marshall was not alone in his fears. Similarly figuring the commons as “foreign” territories afflicting the national body, John Sinclair dilated on Marshall’s comparison of the open-field system to a “savage district.” In strained tones, Sinclair declared war “against our domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom. . . . Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer




Gary Harrison

Hounslow heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.”20 The natives had become enemies, politicized bodies whose resistance must be thwarted by force. Sinclair’s argument was an unmistakable example of enclosure functioning as internal colonialism, what W. J. T. Mitchell in “Imperial Landscape” calls the desire to transform the landscape from Blake’s “green & pleasant land” into “an emblem of national and imperial identity.”21 Finchley Common, Hounslow Heath, Epping Forest, interpellated here as colonial territories, had become sites of undesirable difference, barbarous spaces in need of rational conversion. The bodies of the commoners and the illicit spaces they occupied threatened to infect the entire body politic and to retard the ability of the metropole to sustain itself as a homogeneous entity. In the textual space of the discourse on enclosure, the subjection of the land to the surveyor’s glass went hand-in-hand with the subjection of the subaltern body of the rural poor. Where to put the commoners, Britain’s natives—the domestic equivalent of colonial subjects—as their communal centers were engulfed by the maws of commerce? For Young, the ideal solution was to relocate the poor to “homes of industry.”22 Young envisioned a land where the former commoners would have acquired small lots of property as tenant farmers; property, however small, would serve as “the great engine wherewith the poor may be governed and provided for the most easily and the most cheaply.”23 Like the Wordsworth of “Michael,” Young believed that property would inspire industry, thrift and hope to those who were formerly at the margins of society. Young, who had been advocating the virtues of enclosure since 1771, eventually recognized that his utopian vision would not be realized, and in his writings after 1800 he settled for a kind of representative ownership. Since the principles of property, he believed, were universal, any property at all was better than none and would link its owner with the nation: “He who cannot possess an acre may be the owner of a cow; and the man will love his country the better even for a pig.”24 A cow, a pig, or—to remember Wordsworth’s “Last of the Flock,” a sheep—would by dint of metonymy guarantee that those commoners who did not own land would still have some stake in England’s prosperity. But even this hope was disappointed, for in most cases rather than a cow or a pig, the displaced commoners possessed only their labor, which they had to sell on the open market in order to lay claim to some share in the body politic. While Young recognized the injuries done to the agricultural poor and eventually became more guarded in his advocacy for enclosure, he never abandoned his role as champion of agricultural improvement and never withdrew his support for enclosure. Young’s unwillingness to relinquish his utopian dreams about enclosure was a sign of the power of the discourse on enclosure to thwart its critics and fulfill the desires of its proponents. In-



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voking the Burkean sublime by raising up figures of vacuity, obscurity, contagion, and alterity, this discourse constructed the commons and wastes as a kind of dark colonial territory occupied by an unruly population of shadowy Others engaging in illicit, possibly threatening, play in the very heart of England. By means of these tropes, the discourse helped to seal the fate of the rights of common in England and allowed the familiar “Commons” of villages such as John Clare’s Helpston to be transformed into commodities that could readily be measured, mapped, bought and sold. Moreover, the threat of scarcity and dependence, as well as the implicit sexualization of the working-class body, paved the way for, and overlapped with, the Malthusian discourse on population. On Population In Ecological Literary Criticism (1994), Karl Kroeber describes Thomas Malthus as a “quintessential romantic,” because his Essay shared with other Romantic writings “an informed skepticism about merely political solutions to solve major social problems and an acute awareness of the physical circumstances in which social groups must function, as well as of the possible effects upon those circumstances of specific social actions.”25 Like his Romantic contemporaries, Malthus set up an opposition between the realms of necessity and freedom, between the body and consciousness. Furthermore, like Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Malthus’s Essay staged the high Romantic drama of human consciousness struggling to wrest itself free from the inexorable laws of nature. In contrast to Condorcet and William Godwin, the targets of his initial critique, Malthus’s muse was tragic, painting human history as a Sisyphian labor where the gravity of population and scarcity inevitably pulls down all millennialist projects to create a just and equal society. As Malthus explained in Chapter 10, a state of equality governed by Godwinian principles would most certainly collapse into a system of private property, social stratification, and individual competition for scarce resources. Balance between necessity and freedom, he suggested, was impossible: Alas! what becomes of the picture where men lived in the midst of plenty, where no man was obliged to provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, where the narrow principle of selfishness did not exist, where Mind was delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support and free to expatiate in the field of thought which is congenial to her. This beautiful fabric of imagination vanishes at the severe touch of truth. The spirit of benevolence, cherished and invigorated by plenty, is repressed by the chilling breath of want.26




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Like a vampire poised at the neck of its victim, want—desire for food and for sex—froze the warm hopes of utopian desire. Malthus’s ghastly figure of want, just one of many figures of terror introduced throughout the Essay, took its victims primarily from among the ranks of the poor. Distinguishing between preventive checks on population increase (those deriving from foresight and reason) and positive checks (those deriving from the immediacy of physical deprivation), Malthus was at pains to show that attempts to remediate the sufferings of the poor would in fact prolong their misery. Since it was “beyond the power of man” to prevent recurrent misery, Malthus concluded that the hardship faced by the poor was not only inevitable but necessary to curb their sexual desire and spur them to industry (p. 38). Even as Malthus showed that the harsh forces of nature— hunger, misery, and vice—were primarily gnawing away at the body of the poor, he intimated that the entire body politic would languish. As Thomas Pfau argues, “The apocalypse conjured up by Malthus’s vision of unchecked reproduction involves the specter of redistributing the nation’s wealth (e.g., taxation for the Poor Laws), rather than that of global starvation.”27 Malthus was not the first to raise the alarm about scarcity lurking among the laboring classes, nor the first to suggest that hunger was a positive incentive to the industry of the poor. Twelve years before the publication of the Essay, Joseph Townsend’s Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786) anticipated many of Malthus’s arguments and marked the poor as the likely source of a spreading scarcity. Moreover, Townsend, like Malthus, argued that hunger served as a positive, civilizing force in society.28 Townsend’s presentation of the law of population, which has been little discussed, fully anticipated Malthus’s population dynamics, but it did not provide what Thomas Pfau calls the “seemingly irrefutable syllogistic rigor” of the Malthusian ratio— population grows geometrically; food supply grows arithmetically—that immediately seized, and has continued to seize, the imagination of Malthus’s readers.29 Concluding that “in England we have more than we can feed, and many more than we can profitably employ under the present system of our laws” (p. 47), Townsend worried that England had not yet felt the full effects of this overpopulation. To forestall a crisis that might affect all ranks of society, Townsend, like Malthus, recommended the abolition of any kind of compulsory relief to the poor; the ensuing pressure of hunger, the logic went, would increase their industry, frugality and sobriety, while those who still found themselves destitute would be safely left to voluntary charity. Most important, Townsend anticipated Malthus’s distinction between preventive and positive checks, that is rational and physical checks, when he argued that the poor could not exercise sufficient reason to imagine the consequences of their actions, and so must be left to answer only to hunger and misery. Hunger served as “the needful check” that would, in his words



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“blunt the shafts of Cupid, or at least . . . quench the torch of Hymen” (p. 44). Here Townsend’s use of classical tropes to figure the sexuality of the poor pointed to a key difference between his treatment of population and Malthus’s. Drawing on the rhetoric of pastoral, the genre in which rustic sexuality was conventionally framed, Townsend almost naturalized the sexuality of the poor. Given his otherwise blunt descriptions of brutal competition between species, these euphemisms struck an anomalously concordant tone—for they displaced the urgency of what Malthus would perceive as a crisis of the social body. Thus, even though Townsend’s arguments anticipated Malthus’s, his text lacked the rhetorical power Malthus mustered to capture the political imagination of his contemporaries and ours. What was lacking, of course, in an era of apocalyptic crisis, was a matching rhetoric, the call for which Malthus’s Essay would answer.30 As Frances Ferguson notes, when Malthus entered into the population debate, “he was considerably revaluing a topic that had long been invested with a sense of crisis.”31 By means of the metaphor of apocalypse, as well as the syllogistic simplicity of its unproved ratio, the Essay brought a new intensity to the debates over population, scarcity and the regulation of the poor, who were pictured, as in the discourse on enclosure, as sexualized bodies threatening the stable order of the body politic. Using sublime personifications and portraying population on the monstrous model of Milton’s Sin, Malthus, according to Tim Fulford, “made the sublime a matter of social and moral discipline.”32 And perhaps nowhere did the biblical or apocalyptic sublime appear so dramatically as in Chapter 7, where Malthus painted population (sexual passion) and famine as an interlocked pair of rapacious giants meting out the fixed laws of nature. In allusions to Revelation, Malthus implied that England’s poor had fallen under the sway of the fornicating Whore of Babylon: Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete; gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world. (pp. 51–52)33

Here the sublime of privation implicit in the discourse on enclosure takes on an apocalyptic visage. Having just argued in this chapter that overpopulation and undernourishment cause plagues and other epidemics, Malthus




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now puts his reader in mind of the vision of last days given to John after the opening of the seventh seal. Vice, epidemics, pestilence, and plague are personified here as the advance guard of the angel of destruction, famine. Readers would be reminded of the “seven last plagues” of Revelation 15 and 16, which afflict the unrighteous before the gathering of the army of destruction at Armageddon (Revelation 16:16). The enormity of the destruction—the plagues mowing down “their thousands and ten thousands”—suggests the sublime spectacle of the extermination of the nations of the unclean who serve those who have “committed fornication and lived deliciously” with the Whore of Babylon; indeed, Revelation 18:8 describes her plagues as “death, and mourning, and famine.” Following the logic of these allusions, those who will be stricken, those whom Malthus targets, are precisely those unclean masses who are guilty of the crime of fornication—that is, those whom Malthus identifies with the poor. While Malthus’s sense of human submission to necessity at first seems inclusive of the social body as a whole, the Essay nevertheless shows that the inexorable laws of nature—procreation and survival—operate with greatest force among the poor (p. 9). Conceding that even “some men of the highest mental powers, have been addicted not only to moderate, but even to an immoderate indulgence in the pleasures of sensual love,” Malthus then describes the laboring poor as a group little likely to attain the powers of reason required to restrain their sexual desire or to prevent them from having families they cannot support (p. 79). The laboring-class body emerges from Malthus’s argument as a powerful, yet dangerous, engine of reproduction that threatens the stability of the entire body politic. In particular, Malthus places the burden of misery on laboring-class women. In Chapter 10, Malthus argues that poor women lacked the modesty and moral delicacy that evolved among their superiors as a preventive check to sexual activity. This “superior disgrace which attends a breach of chastity in the woman” (p. 73), a kind of second nature or custom by which society curbs or controls female desire, “operates with the greatest force on that part of society, where, if the original intention of the custom were preserved, there is the least real occasion for it” (pp. 73–74). In other words, while middle-class women behave themselves, poor women cannot. The daughters of those “unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank” (p. 74) lack what he calls “female delicacy” (p. 73). To compensate for this lack of rational restraint, poor women and their families must be denied any form of poor relief, for the only way to curb their desire is to expose them to the force of the positive checks of hunger and misery. Incapable of rationality, the poor must be subjected to the logic of the body, following the simple calculus of sex and hunger. In Catherine Gallagher’s words, Malthus places the body, and especially the female body, at “the very



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After Malthus Like the texts of the agricultural improvers, Malthus’s Essay configured the body of the sexualized poor as a kind of illicit space, an embodied theater where the forces of nature—sex and hunger—played out their cyclic battle. From these texts the poor emerged as an ominous Other or subaltern presence that needed to be disciplined in order to maximize production, prevent social disorder and preserve Britain’s national independence. Both discourses politicized the body of the poor, which came to be seen after Malthus as “the pivotal figure in a cultural and economic order, as well as the emergent cause of that culture’s continued instability and potential apocalypse.”35 Not a few of the agrarian and ecological utopians of Malthus’s time were quick to recognize the Essay, if not its trope of the body, as a nexus of cultural, economic and political discussion. Like Burke’s Reflections, Malthus’s text set off a flurry of replies and attacks that has not subsided even in our own time. Although I can give them only a cursory glance here, critics such as William Hazlitt, William Godwin and Percy Shelley, among many others, attacked Malthus for his rhetoric and for his politics. Moreover, they presented an alternative vision of abundance and plenty to counter the Essay’s spectacle of scarcity and to challenge its sublime excess. In 1807 Hazlitt accused Malthus of abusing language so as to seem a harbinger of doom: “Population was, in fact, the great devil, the untamed Beelzebub that was only kept down by vice and misery, and that, if it were once let loose from these restraints would go forth, and ravage the earth.”36 Personifying famine, Hazlitt continued, was the rhetorical strategy that held Malthus and his readers in its grip: “In the present instance our author has been hurried into an unfounded assumption by having his imagination heated with a personification. He has given to the principle of population a personal existence, conceiving of it as a sort of infant Hercules, as one of that terrific giant brood, which you can only master by strangling it in its cradle. . . .” (p. 90). Similarly, William Godwin portrayed Malthus as the angel of apocalypse, noting that in an England “which has just begun to be reclaimed from the tyranny of savage nature Mr. Malthus has thought it opportune to blow the trumpet of desolation.”37 Percy Shelley, too, as Timothy Morton reminds us, recognized the potential for the Essay to insinuate its dismal politics to the unsuspecting reader. In the Preface to Laon and Cythna, Shelley described Malthus’s



center of social discourse,” where it becomes an object of fear, of analysis and of social control—a control that would be attempted more fully in the Benthamite workhouses and in the Poor Law of 1834, both of which were outgrowths of the Malthusian doctrine.34

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work as a collection of “sophisms . . . calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph.”38 Against the apocalyptic threat of famine, Godwin and Hazlitt, among others, counterposed a promise of surplus that drew on the millenarianism of Thomas Spence.39 Sharing Young’s optimistic projections of improvement and plenty, while rejecting Young’s political conservatism, Spence believed that the abolition of property would transform the land into an earthly paradise, which he variously named Crusonia, an egalitarian community paradoxically evolved from Robinson Crusoe’s capitalist island, or Spensonia. In “A Further Account of Spensonia,” Spence envisioned the abolition of property, followed by an age of equality and plenty. Alluding to the popular folktale of “Jack the Giant Killer,” as well as to biblical eschatology, Spence portrayed the revolutionaries as messianic folk heroes, delivering the world from the evil of property: “these [landlords] are the monster, or giants, that the world wants to be rid of. The extirpation of these should employ the philanthropic giant killers, the deliverers of mankind.”40 Eliding the logic of improvement with the politics of radical reform, Spence imagined what Anne Janowitz calls a “People’s Farm”; here, as Spence put it in Pig’s Meat, citizens would collectively spend time “planting and taking in waste grounds” in order to convert the now collectively shared land to what amounted, as in this description, to a new Eden.41 I can never enough admire the beauty of the country; it has more the air of a garden or rather a paradise than a general country scene; and indeed it is properly a continuation of gardens and orchards. For besides the infinite number or real gardens, all the fields, even for meadow and pasture, are strewed very thick with fruit-trees and appear like as many herbs.42

Here the landscape pleases the eye as well as the stomach, and it merges the lands of production with the landscapes of beauty. Resembling the pantisocratic commune envisaged by Coleridge and Southey during their revolutionary years, Spence’s millennial vision constitutes what Janowitz calls a “utopian georgic,” which brought together the ideals of labor and leisure, the people’s farm and the landscape garden, that landscape aesthetics tended to keep separate in the late eighteenth century.43 As Janowitz shows, Spence’s millenarianism was to influence other nineteenth-century visions of revolution and reform, including those of Shelley, the chartist poets, and William Morris.44 Spence’s visions of a terrestrial paradise that would follow revolution or reform constituted a reassertion of the 1790s millennialist politics to which Malthus had been objecting. William Godwin, the radical millennialist who had been Malthus’s chief target, also reasserted those politics. In Of Popula-



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How delightful a speculation then is it, that man is endowed by all-bountiful nature with an unlimited power of multiplying his species! I would look out on the cheerless and melancholy world . . . and imagine it all cultivated, all improved, all variegated with a multitude of human beings, in a state of illumination, of innocence, and of active benevolence. . . . I would count up the acres and the square miles of the surface of the earth, and consider them all as the estate in fee simple of the human intellect.45

Both Godwin and Hazlitt countered Malthus by insisting on the earth’s infinite capacity to sustain life: “Nature has presented to us the earth, the alma magna parens, whose bosom, to all but the wild and incongruous ratios of Mr. Malthus, may be said to be inexhaustible.”46 Thus, these early critics of Malthus, whom we might call millennialist ecologists, envisioned a land of prosperity and abundance as an alternative to Malthus’s future of scarcity. The problem with this logic of cornucopia, however, was that in the end, like Young’s politically more conservative vision, it promoted an ideology of production that downplayed the limits of human technology and underestimated the biophysical limits of the earth.47 Based on a faith in unlimited and ever renewable resources, the millennialists postulated infinite riches from the soil and carried forward, albeit with different political agendas, Young’s ideology of improvement—a position that may itself be ecologically unviable. Whereas the sublime rhetoric of improvement and the apocalyptic jeremiads of population portrayed the mechanistic management of land and the disciplining of the poor as the last best hope for England, the utopian language of millennialist reform constructed an ideology of progress that more often than not is today aligned with techno-capitalist enterprises that threaten the environment. The often complacent confidence in human ingenuity and technological progress that characterizes such enterprises tends to avert attention from, and stall or obstruct efforts to remedy, what may in fact be an impending environmental catastrophe. Indeed, it is ironic that the myth of ending associated with Malthus may actually serve to moderate the myth of progress that legitimates the domination of nature today. As M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer argue, the new millenarianism in environmental writing “represents a radical attempt to replace the ideology of progress and to dislodge from power its primary perpetuators and beneficiaries in big business, big government and big science. . . .”48 Thus the apocalyptic scenarios of contemporary environmental writing, as Lawrence Buell believes, may be necessary to bring us a needed sense of ur-



tion, he waxed ecstatic in his vision of a bountiful earth yielding up produce under the technological mastery of human invention:

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gency. Indeed, Buell argues that “apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”49 Whatever other metaphors contemporary environmental writing deploys—machine, web, organism, economy, order, household, among others—none will serve the need to awaken us from our slumbers unless it conveys “the sense of imminent environmental peril.”50 In that Malthus introduced the apocalyptic metaphor and compelling ratio that riveted our attention to the dynamic relationship between nature and human beings, his work may be a founding document in ecology. In Ecological Literary Criticism, Kroeber aligns Malthus with the “fundamental romantic ‘ideology’ . . . that political attitudes must be grounded in awareness of every human society’s peculiar interrelations with its natural environment.”51 Yet, if Malthus enforces this ideology, he also betrays it. As Eric Ross observes in The Malthus Factor, Malthus not only provided an apologetics for dominion over nature and over the lower orders of society, but his apocalyptic rhetoric has distracted us from seriously considering the multiple factors that influence the politics of scarcity. Ross writes, “in presenting over-population as the root cause of most human ills, [the Malthusian argument] could always threaten us with such apocalyptic scenarios that reasoned debate about alternative explanations has been consistently overwhelmed.”52 Millennial ecology risks oversimplifying the issues and, as in the case of population, focusing our attention on a single, rather than on a concatenation of causes of environmental and social deterioration.53 Moreover, given that the population logic is at best misleading, we must recognize that popular millenarian ecologists such as Garret Hardin, Paul and Ann Ehrlich, and others who contribute to the haunting of our society by what Murray Bookchin calls “nightmares of an ecological apocalypse,” may be misdirecting our attention from the cause of our ecological imbalance to its symptoms.54 Kroeber believes that from Malthus we can learn “that social analyses are valid only to the degree that they take account of the natural consequences of cultural activities.”55 What ecologists, sociologists, and economists recognize more fully today is that ecological analyses are valid only to the degree that they take account of the consequences of social, cultural, and political activities. In our own drive to promote ecocentrism and to foster the “greening” of the earth, we can learn from the discourse on improvement and the discourse on population that we need to search out the pathologies and contradictions within our own era to avoid demonizing others in the name of improvement or catastrophe. Given the complexity of our relationship to nature today, as well as the massive impact industry and technology has on the environment, we should not ignore the ideas that Romantic agrarians and ecologists, such as Young, Malthus and Spence, have contributed to our



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Notes 1. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995), p. 285. 2. As Craig A. Rimmerman observes in “Critical Reflections on the Doomsday, Apocalyptic Vision,” in The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (Syracuse, N. Y., 1998), p. 283. 3. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), p. 14. 4. Malthus revised his Essay substantially in later editions. It is the original publication (London, 1798) on which I focus here. 5. Ibid., p. 38. 6. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 1994), p. 150. 7. Ibid., p. 150. 8. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 2. 9. Edmund Burke, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, in Works, 16 vols. (London, 1826–27), VII, 376. 10. William Pitt, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Northampton Drawn up for the Board of Agriculture, and Internal Improvement (London, 1809), p. 263. 11. Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture, vol. 16, no. 95; rpt. in Tours in England and Wales by Arthur Young, The London School of Economic and Political Science Series of Reprints of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science, No. 14 (London, 1932), p. 269. 12. William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Yorkshire (London, 1788), p. 125. 13. See Pitt, General View, p. 69. 14. Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property (London, 1776), p. 107. 15. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966; rpt. 1985), p. 94. 16. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (1990; rpt. Oxford, 1998), Edmund Burke identifies the sublime of privation with “vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence” (p. 65). As empty, vacant spaces, the wastelands are charged in the discourse on enclosure with a sense of negation that heightens their transgressive character. 17. Annals of Agriculture, 33 (1799), p. 34. 18. John Howlett, Enclosures (London, 1787), p. 80.



environmental imagination, but we must also move beyond the dyad of famine and cornucopia and recognize the political limitations, as well as the rhetorical excesses, of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideologues of progress and apocalypse.

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19. William Marshall, On the Appropriation and Inclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands (London, 1801), p. 5. 20. Quoted in Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure (Folkestone, 1980), p. 88. 21. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London, 1994), p. 17. 22. Arthur Young, The Farmer’s Letters to the People of England, Containing the Sentiments of a Practical Husbandman (London, 1771), I, 79. 23. Arthur Young, An Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Wastes to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor (Bury, 1801), p. 7. 24. Ibid., p. 13. 25. Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York, 1994), pp. 82, 84. 26. Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in On Population, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York, 1960), p. 69. All subsequent references to the Essay are from this edition. 27. Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 352. 28. Joseph Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws By a Well-Wisher to Mankind (London, 1786; rpt. Berkeley, Calif., 1971), p. 27. 29. Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, p. 346. 30. See Marilyn Gaull, “Malthus on the Road to Excess,” in 1798: the Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (New York, 1998), pp. 93–107, for a detailed assessment of the context in which Malthus wrote his treatise. 31. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York and London, 1992), p. 114. 32. Tim Fulford, “Apocalyptic Economics and Prophetic Politics: Radical and Romantic Responses to Malthus and Burke,” Studies in Romanticism, forthcoming (2001/2). 33. See note 26 above. 34. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), pp. 83–106 (p. 85). 35. Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, p. 349. 36. William Hazlitt, A Reply to the “Essay on Population” by the Rev. T. R. Malthus In a Series of Letters, to which are added Extracts from the “Essay” (1807; rpt. New York, 1967), pp. 4, 56. 37. William Godwin, Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind; Being an Answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on that Subject (1820; rpt. New York, 1964), p. 447. 38. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Preface to Laon and Cythna, in Shelley’s Prose: Or, the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque, N. M., 1954), pp. 315–320 (p. 317). For a discussion of Shelley’s critique of Malthus, see Timothy Morton’s Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 207–15.



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39. See Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, 1998). 40 Thomas Spence, “A Further Account of Spensonia,” in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Newcastle on Tyne, 1982), p. 29. 41. See Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, pp. 92–95, on the “People’s Farm.” Janowitz calls attention to Spence’s juxtaposition of “the rhetoric of biblical prophecy with that of enlightenment” (pp. 73–74). Thomas Spence, from Pig’s Meat, III (London, 1795), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, p. 3. 42. Thomas Spence, “A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, Being the History of Crusonia, or Robinson Crusoe’s Island” (Newcastle on Tyne, 1782); in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, pp. 5–15 (p. 6). Janowitz calls attention to this passage in Lyric and Labour, p. 92. 43. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, p. 92. 44. See Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, chapters 5, 6 and 7. 45. Godwin, Of Population, p. 451. 46. Ibid., p. 498. For Hazlitt’s objections, see his Reply to the “Essay on Population,” p. 37. 47. John M. Gowdy discusses the problems of our overreliance on technological solutions to current environmental problems in “Biophysical Limits to Industrialization: Prospects for the Twenty-first Century,” in The Coming Age of Scarcity, ed. Dobkowski and Wallimann, pp. 67–101 (p. 80). 48. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, “Millennial Ecology: The Apocalyptic Narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming,” in Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America, ed. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown (Madison, Wis., 1996), pp. 21–45 (p. 22). 49. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 285. For a different view, see Killingsworth and Palmer, who note that apocalyptic rhetoric may not always be effective (“Millennial Ecology,” pp. 41–42). 50. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, p. 305. 51. Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism, p. 84. 52. Eric Ross, The Malthus Factor: Population, Poverty and Politics in Capitalist Development (London and New York, 1998), p. 7. 53. See Ross, The Malthus Factor, p. 7; also Stephen Devereux, Theories of Famine (New York, 1993); Carolyn Bledsoe, “‘Children are like young bamboo trees’: Potentiality and Reproduction in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Population, Economic Development, and the Environment, ed. Kerstin Lindahl-Kiessling and Hans Landberg (Oxford, 1994), pp. 105–38; and Laurie Ann Mazur, “Beyond the Numbers: An Introduction and Overview,” Beyond the Numbers: A Reader on Population, Consumption, and the Environment (Washington, D. C. and Covelo, Calif., 1994), pp. 1–20. 54. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston, 1990), p. 20; quoted in Killingsworth and Palmer, “Millennial Ecology,” p. 23. 55. Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism, p. 82.







Pagodas and Pregnant Throes: Orientalism, Millenarianism and Robert Southey Tim Fulford

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August 1814. After a long day’s work, the Prince Regent’s carpenters had put the finishing touches to the great pagoda that was to feature in the celebrations of the Grand Jubilee.1 The pagoda, a wooden structure rising from a Chinese bridge, was the centerpiece of the lavish party Prince George was throwing in St. James’s Park. As evening drew on, thousands of Londoners crammed together to mark their new ruler’s splendor. The climax was a massive firework display and the crowd gasped in astonishment as, at its height, the pagoda burst into flames, lighting up the sky and then collapsing into the water. What the crowd did not realize was that the burning of the pleasure dome was not a pyrotechnic plan but an accident. Gaslight had set the flimsy timber tower on fire. Several of the carpenters were burnt to death.2 “Stick to the East” Byron advised Thomas Moore: “the public are Orientalising.”3 George’s burning pagoda is an apt emblem of this fashion for Orientalizing, of its glamour and of its dangers. For if Eastern culture was exotic and desirable in Regency Britain, it seemed to many to be dangerously insubstantial and without foundation. If Orientalism spelt luxury and showy magnificence, it also spelled corruption and fanaticism. Not everyone enjoyed pagodas as much as George. A naval officer visiting the Coromandel coast was appalled by the sight of “Pagans of many sects, who have a great number of Pagodas or Temples in which they worship Images of different kinds of Animals etc., being grossly impos’d upon by their Priests and Brahmins.”4 The Orient meant religious superstition and sexual display.



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One visitor observed an Indian temple in which young women kissed the penis of a holy man. They worshiped, he said, “the living Priapus, and taking him devoutly in their hands, kist him, whilst his bawdy Owner stroked their silly heads, muttering some filthy prayers.”5 To satirists, such images made temples and pagodas apt buildings for the famously priapic Prince Regent. They called him Kouli Khan, an Asiatic emperor taking his corrupt pleasure under the Oriental domes of Brighton Pavilion.6 No one was more interested in the sexuality and superstition found in pagodas than Robert Southey. He had reason: a supporter of the monarchy, he wished the Prince Regent to give it respectability not notoriety. An Orientalist poet too, he hoped his Eastern poems would reinvigorate the dying epic genre with the great deeds and myths of India. His Curse of Kehama (1810), depicted a “huge Pagoda” as a sublime setting for the human sacrifice that forms its climax: Lo! how the Steed, with sudden start, Turns his quick head to every part; Long files of men on every side appear. The sight might well his heart affright, And yet the silence that is here Inspires a stranger fear; For not a murmur, not a sound Of breath or motion rises round, No stir is heard in all that mighty crowd; He neighs, and from the temple-wall The voice re-echoes loud, Loud and distinct, as from a hill Across a lonely vale, when all is still. 7. Within the temple, on his golden throne Reclined, Kehama lies, Watching with steady eyes The perfumed light that, burning bright, Metes out the passing hours. On either hand his eunuchs stand, Freshening with fans of peacock-plumes the air, Which, redolent of all rich gums and flowers, Seems, overcharged with sweets, to stagnate there. Lo! the time-taper’s flame ascending slow Creeps up its coil toward the fated line; Kehama rises and goes forth, And from the altar, ready where it lies, He takes the axe of sacrifice.7



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Southey’s fascinated gaze into the temple, however, alienated more readers than it impressed. Many simply aligned the English poet with his Indian hero and portrayed his epic poem as an edifice, like George’s pagoda, that threatened to bury Britons under Indian superstitions. One reviewer declared that Southey required “readers who reverence and adore his deities” and another that he resembled “his own Seeva; for he stands forward . . . like a column of fire; and myriads of years must elapse before his partners in the Godhead can reach either the surprizing height of his extravagance, or the terrible profundity of his bathos.”8 Southey was the double of the Hindu gods he described and his verse was like one of their temples—showy, flimsy, stagnant, superstitious. What reviewers wrote of Southey, he said of others. This chapter examines how and why he did so, investigating the effect of Orientalism on the politics and poetics of his Romanticism. The story begins in 1795, when Orientalism came to London in an unexpected way, provoking anxiety and alarm. This is what one anonymous pamphleteer had to say: may the People of Great Britain see—in time see—the innumerable herd of villains, the Marats, the Robespierres, and the Mahomets, who would spill their blood, drain their treasures, and subject them at last to the most gross slavery, that of the mind, beneath the debasing yoke of Fraud and Superstition.9

The pamphleteer was referring to events that seemed to portend an apocalypse. And the destroying angels that he feared were revolutionary France and militant Islam—both seen as infectious mental illnesses, as “mental slavery” or fanaticism. The pamphleteer was alarmed by a particular man, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830). Halhed is a forgotten figure now, but in the 1790s he was alarming to more than just one pamphleteer. To his fellow members of Parliament, Halhed seemed to embody a dangerous combination of Orientalism and Jacobinism. And for Southey, Halhed was living proof of the threat to Britain posed by revolutionary and religious enthusiasm. He was a test case who revealed that the British state was endangered by a fanaticism bred not just in France but in the cultures Britons ruled in India. Halhed, as it turned out, precipitated Southey’s move from radicalism toward an antiJacobinism that was also deeply anti-Orientalist. Some details about Halhed: he was a East India Company official during the governorship of Warren Hastings. In India, he became a scholar of ancient Hindu laws, which he began to translate as part of Hastings’ effort to rule the colony by adapting its own traditions.10 Returning to Britain in 1785, he continued to study Indian scripture, in correspondence with



Pagodas and Pregnant Throes

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Charles Wilkins, whose translation of the Bhagavadgita suggested parallels between ancient Indian and Christian theology.11 Halhed, therefore, was part of the most advanced Orientalist scholarship of his day.12 He did not remain solely a scholar. In 1791 he became an MP, using his position to support the cause of Hastings, who was being prosecuted for his conduct as Governor General by the Foxite Whigs. A supporter of Pitt’s ministry, Halhed had an unremarkable record of hostility to the French Revolution and those who admired it until, in early 1795, he staggered all who knew him. On 29 January he announced himself a follower of Richard Brothers (1757–1824), the self-appointed prophet who claimed to be the prince of the Israelites, sent by God to lead the Hebrews back to the promised land. As Morton D. Paley has shown, Brothers had begun prophesying in 1792.13 Then, he had declared that Britain’s war with revolutionary France presaged the “fall of Monarchy in Europe.”14 By 1795 he was announcing that God had commanded him to bear witness that George III would deliver up his crown to him. London was Babylon; the British monarchy was the Beast of the Book of Revelation: both would be destroyed by an apocalyptic earthquake, with only those who had followed him to Jerusalem escaping to found a new millennium there. Brothers, with Halhed’s computational assistance, scheduled the earthquake for 4 June. Unfortunately for him, he was not by that time on his way to the Holy Land, but confined, by order of the Lord Chancellor, in a private madhouse. Alarmed by Brothers’ statements, the ministry had had him arrested, on 4 March, on the charge of “wickedly writing, publishing, and printing various fantastical prophecies, with intent to cause dissension and other disturbances within the realm.”15 According to the Times, the arrest was justified, for Brothers had “become the tool of a faction, employed to seduce the people, and to spread fears and alarms.”16 Visited by known radicals,17 Brothers, in the ministry’s eyes, threatened to bring about revolution and regicide by harnessing religious fervor to democratic politics—and this at a time of millenarian preaching by reformers such as Joseph Priestley, who viewed the French Revolution as the beginning of the Last Days, heralding apocalypse. James Gillray illustrated the government’s fear with a caricature in which Brothers appears as an agent of revolutionary France, against a backdrop of a burning London.18 After interrogating Brothers, the Privy Council decided on a madman’s asylum rather than a treason trial. And the sensational affair might have ended there, had it not been for Halhed. Convinced that Brothers was “the Man that will be revealed to the Hebrews as their Prince, to all Nations as their Governor, according to the Covenant to King David, immediately under GOD,”19 Halhed fired off volleys of speeches and pamphlets against



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the government. It was this defense by a gentleman, scholar and MP that kept Brothers in the news. The polite classes were shocked that an educated man should believe in and defend a popular cult. Pamphlets attacking Halhed abounded, but they only confirmed him in his belief. He went so far as to sell his library in anticipation of the forthcoming walk to Jerusalem. He even dated the commencement of the new millennium exactly: it would begin on 19 November. Despite a violent storm on the preceding day, neither the apocalypse nor the millennium materialized to time. With Brothers still in confinement, Halhed went quiet and became a recluse—and a supporter of Brothers’ successor, Joanna Southcott. Brothers himself carried on prophesying from his asylum, but his support had waned. He was released in 1806, largely forgotten by the public. Southey, however, writing in the following year, remembered him. In the fictional persona of a Spaniard visiting England and sending letters home, Southey described Brothers’ glory days and Halhed’s strange career: Mr. Halhed was the other of these converts, a member of the House of Commons, and one of the profoundest oriental scholars then living. This gentleman was in the early part of his life an unbeliever, and had attempted to invalidate the truths of holy writ by arguments deduced from Indian chronology. The study of Indian mythology brought him back to Christianity, and by a strange perversion of intellect the Trimourtee of the Hindoos convinced him of the doctrine of the Trinity; and as he recovered his faith he lost his wits. To the astonishment of the world he published a pamphlet avowing his belief that Richard Brothers was the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, and that in him the prophecies were speedily to be fulfilled.

To Southey the Brothers affair was menacing. He commented “when a madman calls himself inspired, from that moment the disorder becomes infectious.”20 The population had shown itself dangerously open to the infection, revealing by following him that “there never was any age or any country so favourable to the success of imposture and the growth of superstition, as this very age and this very England” (p. 443). Halhed made the danger worse, for he showed that even educated men could fall prey to the disease. Halhed’s disease, for Southey, was Oriental in origin. Halhed’s Oriental scholarship had perverted his mind: it had restored his faith at the cost of his wits, so that the differences between Christian and Hindu doctrine were blurred and he was left open to infection by enthusiasm for Brothers. Here Southey’s interpretation of Halhed’s religious politics is reflected in a reading of his verse. For Halhed was, like Sir William Jones and Southey himself, an Orientalist poet.21 He had written poems praising the “simple science of the one supreme”—the “pure” Hinduism that worshiped “One great eternal, undivided




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Lord”—rather than the idolatrous and polytheistic version practiced in contemporary Bengal.22 Clearly Halhed was willing, at least when writing with poetic license, to find in Hindu scriptures a monotheism resembling that of Christianity, and to borrow biblical language to describe it. On Southey’s reading, Halhed had begun to credit the fancies expressed in his writings, and so had come to believe that Hinduism and Christianity were different forms of true knowledge of God. His argument with Halhed, that is to say, was partly about poetic Orientalism and the kind of belief it requires of poet and reader. In Southey’s opinion, it was the Orientalism of Brothers that made Halhed keen to believe in him. The metempsychosis that formed the basis of Brothers’ doctrine was not new but bore “a general resemblance to that doctrine as held by the Orientals” (p. 428). Another critic also detected Indian influences. Brothers, he wrote, would pass for a prophet among the Hindus but not by comparison with Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.23 Halhed himself argued that his faith in Brothers stemmed from the interpretative methods he had honed in decoding “the old Hindu writings.” Viewing the “Hindu triad of Energies . . . Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva” as allegories of matter, space and time equipped him to detect specific political allegory in the book of Daniel. He could “read the modern history of Europe in the prophetic records of the Old and New Testament,” a reading from which he would confirm the accuracy of Brothers’ prophecies.24 For Southey, what made Halhed’s belief in Brothers especially alarming was what it suggested about Britons’ susceptibility to revolutionary creeds. Fanaticism, on his reading, had brought about regicide and terror in France: Jacobinism was a mental infection stalking the streets in the mobs of Paris. Brothers had imported it to the common people of London but Halhed brought it to the very center of imperial power, to the arena in which rational judgment about government at home and abroad was made—the House of Commons. For Halhed had protested there when the ministry had had Brothers confined: Mr. Halhed made a speech in parliament . . . the most extraordinary perhaps that ever was delivered to a legislative assembly. It was a calm and logical remonstrance against the illegality and unreasonableness of their proceedings. They had imprisoned this person as a madman, he said, because he announced himself as a prophet; but it was incumbent upon them to have fairly examined his pretensions, and ascertained their truth or falsehood, before they had proceeded against him in this manner. Brothers had appealed to the Holy Scriptures, the divine authority of which that house acknowledged; he appealed also to certain of his own predictions as contained in the letters which he had addressed to the king and his ministers;—let them be produced, and the question solemnly investigated as its importance deserved. According to the rules of the House of Commons, no motion can be debated or put to



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This passage shows Halhed to have attempted to infect Parliament with the disease of enthusiasm. Rational and logical research into prophetic and miraculous claims was exactly what had characterized Halhed’s research into Hinduism; now that his research had been colonized by belief in the objects of his investigation he had lost his ability to judge where the proper limits of rational enquiry lay. Halhed had asked the Commons to make “cool and dispassionate investigation of the grounds of [Brothers’] assertion” and to receive his own annotated copy of Brothers’ works to save “much labour of reference.”25 To Southey, Halhed had “gone native” even though he appeared to adhere to British standards of enquiry. In arguing for detailed investigation of Brothers’ prophecies he had elevated formal method over common sense. Halhed would have been threatening if his fellow MPs had not regarded him as an embarrassment. Failing to spread his corrupted reason to other legislators, he nonetheless remained a warning to Southey’s readers that Orientalism might infect powerful and educated people with the same kind of irrational belief as that which uneducated people had contracted in ignorant credulity. Fanaticism, Southey feared, was a disease of British India that might leave the educated unfit to govern the uneducated—and the uneducated had already contracted a revolutionary version of it from France. Thus Oriental belief, in Southey’s account, became an infection potentially threatening the British government at its very center. In a review he quoted Burke’s remark that many Englishmen were unbaptized by crossing the ocean to India. z

z

z

Such is an account of Southey’s reading of the Brothers affair. But why was he so fascinated by religious enthusiasm and why did he fix on the figure of Halhed to embody his anxieties? After all, by 1807 Brothers was discredited and Halhed forgotten. The answer, I think, is that he recognized Halhed as his alter ego, the Hyde to his Jekyll. He needed to revile Halhed—but also understand him—precisely because he resembled him so much. After all, everything he accused Halhed of, he had been accused of himself. Southey was a better-known Orientalist poet and scholar than Halhed, and his epic The Curse of Kehama was criticized for introducing the infectious and filthy beliefs of the East to Britain, corrupting Christianity by collapsing it into Hinduism. For John Foster, Southey’s rendition of Indian mythology revealed a mistaken notion of the proper purposes of empire, as if colonies existed to supply religious wisdom rather than raw materials to Britain. Foster



the vote, unless it be seconded; Mr. Halhed found no one to second him, and his proposal was thus silently negatived.

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the same strong perception of the ludicrous, as we should feel in seeing a fine British fleet, in full equipment and appointment, sent out to India just for the purpose of bringing back, each ship, a basket of the gods of crockery, or some portions of that material with which the Lama of Tibet is reported to enrich the craving hands of his devotees, and at length coming into the channel with flags flying, and their cannon thundering, in celebration of the cargo.26

Southey had, the simile suggests, reversed the direction of imperial commerce in a manner that would be dangerous were it not for the obvious filth and absurdity of the religious objects he had imported. The allusion to the Tibetan Lama is used to reduce all Eastern spirituality to the level of the most undesirable of commodities—shit. In response to criticism such as this, Southey was forced to apologize for his poetic method. Although he required readers to suspend their disbelief in Hindu scripture in order to enter into his story, he did not want them to become Oriental outside the space of the poem. He asked them to give enough credence to Hindu stories to enjoy his fiction, but to disapprove of claims that those stories might be facts about the world. Belief must stop at the end of the verse lines, for Hindu scriptures were, after all, “monstrous fables.”27 But it was too late for tortuous apologies to impress Southey’s readers. He had let the genie out of the bottle, and intricate distinctions between poetry and religion, imaginative engagement and true faith, did not redeem his poetic reputation. He remained for most people the poet who wanted to colonize English readers with the unintelligible and superstitious beliefs of Orientals. He also, of course, remained for most an ex-Jacobin, one who had succumbed to the revolutionary fanaticism of France that he now claimed to fear so much. Looking back on the 1790s, Coleridge remembered his and Southey’s political radicalism as a kind of superstitious enthusiasm. They had been enthralled, like the true believers who had been willing to sacrifice themselves to the Aztec priests (Friend, II, 146–47). Southey’s Halhed, Orientalist poet and scholar, millenarian enthusiast, looks, in this light, like a figure that Southey depicts in order to exculpate himself. Halhed, it is apparent, is what he himself might have become if he had not grown disenchanted with the beliefs of France and India. Halhed, then, exists in Southey’s prose to show the public what might have happened to him if he had not known where to stop. Unfortunately for Southey, the public was not convinced that he did know. For many, Southey resembled Halhed all too well: he was his doppelgänger, not his opposite, for both men had come to



felt that Southey was asking Britons to believe as Hindus did and he reacted to this request with

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resemble the Hindus they had written about. And so Southey continued needing to stigmatize Orientalism and Jacobinism to try to distance himself from the movements with which he was most associated. Women were easier to make into symbols of the evils of Jacobinism and Orientalism than were gentleman scholars, precisely because they were culturally expected to remain modest, chaste and politically inactive. Edmund Burke had attacked the French Revolution by embodying it in monstrous and promiscuous women: The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally “all monstrous, all prodigious things,” cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.28

From the time of his first Oriental epic, Thalaba (1801), Southey followed Burke’s rhetorical ploy. He used female figures to image all that seemed to him dangerous in Oriental beliefs. Thalaba includes a portrait of an enchantress and witch, Khawla. She is like Burke’s revolutionary women because she is a fanatic and has the capacity to inspire men with fanaticism. But she is not French but Arabian, not a revolutionary but a pagan. Yet, as a figure of Eastern religion, she resembles Burke’s Frenchwomen in that her body expresses the supposed monstrosity of her mind—and therefore, of the beliefs of the people whom she symbolizes. Khawla’s body is deceitful and disgusting: it corrupts heaven with the evil by which it has been impregnated. “The witch,” Southey writes Began a magic song, One long low tone, thro’ teeth half-closed, Thro’ lips slow-moving, muttered slow; One long-continued breath, Till to her eyes a darker yellowness Was driven, and fuller swoln the prominent veins On her loose throat grew black. Then looking upward thrice she breathed Into the face of Heaven; The baneful breath infected Heaven . . . 29

Khawla seeks out “the secrets of the Grave” (II, 182). She represents devilish and deathly beliefs, and Southey compares her actions to a series of




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superstitions, some “Mohammedan,” some Christian (II, 180), some gathered from English accounts, some from manuscripts in Arabic and Spanish. Yet Southey’s “witch” differs from the Burkean poissardes of Paris. Burke was revolted by the revolutionary fanatics. Southey is disgusted, but enthralled as well. Khawla, ironically enough, reveals not just his desire to stigmatize Oriental beliefs but his fascination with them. He himself declared that “the description of Khawla filling herself with the Devil [was] among the most powerful lines I have ever written.”30 He was right: fear, awe and admiration are all present in the portrait. He could no more dismiss Khawla than he could Halhed. If Halhed was his doppelgänger, then Khawla was his femme fatale. She fascinated him because she represented his own ambivalence with regard to the power of religious belief to infect people with fanaticism—but also because she was female. As a woman made powerful by her capacity to bewitch others she was powerfully different from the innocent sisters and daughters whom he explicitly idealized. Khawla, that is to say, embodied Southey’s illicit desire to encounter a woman—and a culture—that escaped the confines of enlightenment rationality, sexual propriety and orthodox religion. As a sorcerer able to change her shape, able to make the world of spirits penetrate the world of mortals, able to alter space and time, Khawla configured Southey’s attraction to, as well as fear of, the millenarianism that, as an increasingly orthodox moralist and political conservative, he wanted to extirpate from Britain. Southey’s attraction to and fascination with the Other of the Britain he was trying to construct are evident under Khawla’s skin. But he did, of course, explicitly identify her as evil, as a source of infection. Yet this gave him room: with Khawla ostensibly condemned and safely resident in foreign climes, Southey had leeway to explore aspects of his desire which he did not wish to face too close-to-home. At the safe distance of a remote East that was safely under the control of his poetic justice he could explore his fascination by fanaticism and by powerful female sexuality. But it was not, of course, the woman who was evil or demonic: Southey and the culture for which he spoke branded her as such having made her represent what it seemed taboo and dirty to desire (while desiring her the more for that reason): the power of female sexuality and knowledge. It was, then, against their own repressed sexual desire as well against their anxiety about religious and political fanaticism that Southey wanted to inoculate his readers. Unfortunately for him, many of those readers worried that this inoculation would simply communicate the full disease. Reviewers saw as much: Thalaba displayed “perverted taste” and “fanaticism” was “one of the worst . . . topics for a poet.”31 Against such hostile reviews, Southey argued that he was depicting the dangers of fanaticism so as better to contrive its defeat. In this argument



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there was a degree of wish-fulfillment, since in Eastern poems he could show Khawla and what she stood for being destroyed, when the defeat of Jacobinism in Britain was not so predictable or controllable. Thus his Orientalist fiction allowed him an opportunity both to explore dangerous enthusiasms and to arrange for their suppression. It was, as it turned out, a useful resource for interpreting British culture too. Khawla’s monstrous body served him as a model for what millenarianism revealed about the British body politic. It did so because of a coincidence—the fact that the most popular follower of Brothers’ and Halhed’s Orientalist millenarianism turned out to be a woman, Joanna Southcott, whose claim to power was her body. Southcott arrived in London in 1802, already a self-proclaimed prophet.32 She rapidly attracted many of Brothers’ followers, including William Sharp the engraver, who tried to make William Blake a Southcottian too.33 Although Brothers himself disowned her, Southcott continued to win support, hinting that she was the woman mentioned in Genesis 3:15 whose “seed” would bruise the head of the serpent. She offered visions of the New Jerusalem in which her followers would live after the “woman clothed with the sun” had given birth to “a man child, who was to rule all nations.”34 This event, according to the Book of Revelation, would precipitate the apocalyptic battle in which Satan would be cast down. Southcott gained a remarkable hold on the popular imagination—as many as 100,000 may, by 1808, have accepted the seals of salvation she issued. In the judgments of E. P. Thompson and Morton D. Paley, however, her movement was not a force for social and political change as Brothers’ offered to be.35 Southey, however, was not so sanguine. In his Letters from England he saw Southcott as a considerable social threat and described her in similar terms to those he had already used to describe Khawla in Thalaba. “Old, vulgar, and illiterate,” Southcott gained a hold over her followers that was attributable to her excessive and improper femininity: “The filth and the abominations of demoniacal witchcraft are emblematical of such delusions; not the golden goblet and bewitching allurements of Circe and Armida” (pp. 433–34). Unable to explain her mental and spiritual appeal to native Britons, Southey instead identified her as a foul and devilish body, as he had done the Oriental Khawla. Both are females out of the place in which Southey would keep women. They neither appeal through their beauty nor impress by their rationality. Southcott’s popularity showed much of Britain was also out of rational order: “where such impious bedlamites as this are allowed to walk abroad, it is not to be wondered at that madness should become epidemic” (p. 443). “Bedlam is the place for such half lunatics, half imposters, because they infect others.”36 By locating Southcott’s appeal in a body he had made witchlike and infectious Southey could argue for an immediate answer to the threat she posed his ideal Britain: he recommended the same physical confinement as that imposed on Brothers.




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Bodily confinement, however, could not extirpate the public’s desire to follow apocalyptic preachers any more than identifying Southcott’s body as the source of the “infection” could explain it. Bodily confinement in a different sense proved to be the issue that made and unmade Southcott, for in 1814 she took her previous hints literally. She identified herself as the “woman clothed with the sun” and claimed to be pregnant with Shiloh, the returning Messiah—thus identifying her body as the seat of her prophetic and holy power in a manner that brought public interest to fever pitch. Sixty-four years old when she announced her pregnancy, Southcott died four months later (probably of the dropsy from which her body had swollen). Although her body was preserved, the son of God did not emerge. But if this event showed her body to be limited and mortal rather than to be inhabited by the divine, many of her followers did not believe so, and in 1825 Charles Twort and George Turner both claimed to be the Shiloh she had borne. For the Southcottians, her body remained the flesh in which the human and the divine again met, while for Southey it remained the site of a superstition that infected Britain like the Oriental disease of fanaticism. Hazlitt made a similar analogy when he compared the religious mysticism of Coleridge’s Lay Sermon to Southcott’s “whimsies and pregnant throes.”37 Excessive spirituality had become easily stigmatized as the uncertain, diseased flesh of a woman’s body—a body foreign either by birth or by virtue of what was thought to be carried within it. z

z

z

To Southey, “excessive” belief remained a political, as well as religious, threat and he did his best, in journalistic essays and reviews, to live down his own reputation for entertaining such belief—both Jacobinical and Orientalist. With the fervor of a recent convert, he tried to make his early nineteenthcentury compatriots see the danger in his terms. As a political writer, he repeatedly constructed an exclusive definition of Britishness, in terms of purity and rationality, that relegated whole groups in Britain, as well as foreigners, to a position of impurity, irrationality and fanaticism. He then Orientalized these groups, seeing them as the Brothers affair had conditioned him to. So it was with Irish Catholics, whom he treated as a rebellious, fanatical, alien mass, corrupting Britain from within. “Religious madness is infectious,” he wrote, and the revival of monasteries in Ireland allowed the Catholic clergy to “communicate the contagion” to the people at large. This contagion would become political as well as religious if Catholics were allowed official roles, for emancipation would “introduce Irish priests into our army and navy; men acting under orders from a church which Buonaparte has ostentatiously restored.”38 Equating religious enthusiasm with political treachery, Southey implied that the credulous Irish peasants were as prone to fanatical



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support of the French Revolution as they were to believe in the superstitions peddled by priests. Irish Catholics were effectively Hindu in their attachment to the irrational and cruel: their religious processions ritualized blind belief in the same way as did the Hindu custom of sati (the burning alive of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre). The Irish, like Indians, should not be trusted but should be treated as the most recent Governor General had treated the subcontinent, with measures that “none of our statesmen—except perhaps Marquis Wellesley—would be hardy enough to adopt—nothing but a system of Roman conquest and colonization—and shipping off the refractory savages to the colonies.”39 In his reactionary attitude to Ireland and opposition to Catholic emancipation, Southey was viewing nineteenth-century issues through the lens of his own past. Halhed’s Orientalization of Brothers, that is to say, helped him link millenarianism with the East and both with pro-French Jacobinism. Halhed both alarmed him and gave him a convenient political route—a means whereby he could stigmatize popular religion and revolutionary politics as not only irrational but un-British too. Coleridge also came to demonize radicals and laborers as being Oriental in body and mind, having first characterized the Oriental in terms of fanaticism and superstition. He did so in terms he had learnt from Southey: Jacobinism, he wrote in The Courier (1814) “still walks in Great Britain and Ireland” (EOT, II, 385). It persisted, “like the Kehama” of Southey’s Orientalist poem, a “blind but hundred-armed giant” threatening “to undermine the foundations of the social edifice.” It was a “contagion most widely dispersed” by “confederated enthusiasts” who manipulated the “poor and ignorant” populace. Its leaders were like “Priests and Prophets” exploiting “Irish superstition, and the barbarism and virulence of Irish clanship” (EOT, II, 384, 388, 383, 376, 387, 405). It must be kept in check by the same means that India’s fanatical populace must be governed—by a missionary effort to introduce Protestant civilization, backed by judicial and military authority. In the case of Ireland this entailed supporting the Orange associations, despite information that they carried out deliberate intimidation of their peaceful Catholic neighbors. Once radicals themselves, Coleridge and Southey were, by 1814, alarmist conservatives. But their turn to anti-Jacobinism was made by a move against toleration of the East—or the East as represented in Orientalist works such as Halhed’s and Southey’s own Kehama. They alienated radical politics, made them un-native to Britain, portrayed them as imports from a France that they assimilated to a still more distant and “Othered” source—India. AntiJacobinism was rewritten as anti-Indianism, and the consequence was that war in both France and India could be justified, as could repression of those Irish who betrayed “Oriental” tendencies to support radical politics. This was




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a path that De Quincey was also to take in his journalism concerning the Indian mutiny, the Chinese opium wars, and the Irish question. Nineteenthcentury politics, for these Romantics, replayed the millenarian “fanaticism” of the revolutionary 1790s. They were not alone: fear of popular millenarianism helped fuel the Evangelical revival in the established church as middle-class Victorians fought to retain control over the hearts and minds of the growing working class. Southey’s domestic alarmism played to this Evangelical audience. And his articles on the colonies made converts too. In The Quarterly Review he advocated sending missionaries to turn the Hindus Protestant: “India would be trained up in civilization and Christianity, like a child by its guardian, till such tutelage was no longer needed: our protection might be withdrawn when it ceased to be necessary.”40 William Wilberforce took up the campaign in the House of Commons, arguing “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent. Theirs is mean, licentious and cruel.”41 Able to apply pressure in press and parliament, the pro-missionary lobby began to change India policy. In 1813 the East India Company was forced to allow missionaries to operate in its territories. By 1844 Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and Anglicans were able to claim many thousands of converts. One missionary declared that Southey’s writings had been crucial in winning public support for the cause.42 Churches would, thenceforth, replace the polytheism that Indians practiced in their pagodas. And missionary schools would spread the right kind of Romanticism to Indian pupils: Wordsworth’s Excursion was on the curriculum.43 The Curse of Kehama and Halhed, with their fascination for the religion of “huge Pagoda[s] lined with fire,” were not.44

Notes 1. Of his father’s reign. 2. See Venetia Murray, High Society: A Social History of the Regency Period, 1788–1830 (London, 1998), pp. 217–18. 3. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London, 1973–82), III, 101. 4. Anon., A Narrative of the Transactions in the East Indies During the Late War (London, 1751), p. 27, quoted in Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1998), p. 57. 5. Alexander Hamilton, quoted in James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, p. 57. 6. Anon., Kouli Khan, 3rd edn. (London, 1820). 7. Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected By Himself, 10 vols. (London, 1853), VIII, The Curse of Kehama, book VIII, The Sacrifice, lines 83–109.



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8. The Monthly Mirror, and The Critical Review, 1811, quoted in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London, 1972), pp. 134, 137. 9. Anon., A Word of Admonition to the Right Hon. William Pitt (London, 1795), p. 19. 10. In 1774 Hastings commissioned from Halhed a translation of the compendium of Hindu law that had already been translated from Sanskrit to Persian. Halhed also composed a grammar of Bengali and several works interpreting Hindu scripture which he left unpublished. See A Code of Gentoo Laws, or, Ordinations of the Pandits. From a Persian Translation, Made from the Original, Written in the Sanscrit Language (London, 1776), and A Grammar of the Bengal Language (Hooghly, 1778). These, and other details about Halhed, are from Rosane Rocher, Orientalism, Poetry, and the Millennium: The Checkered Life of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed 1751–1830 (Delhi, Varanasi, Patna, 1983). 11. Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta (London, 1785). 12. This antiquarian scholarship, begun under Hastings’ governorship and continued by Sir William Jones, culminated in Jones’s discovery of the Indo-European language family. It also constituted part of an attempt to govern India more firmly by manipulating Hindu law and scripture rather than imposing overtly British systems. On the significance of this scholarship in Romanticism, see Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s “History of British India” and Orientalism (Oxford, 1992). 13. Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews, and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93 (p. 261). On Brothers, see also E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1968). 14. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and the Times (London, 1794), II, 19. 15. The Times, 6 March 1795, quoted in Paley, “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews,” p. 261. 16. The Times, 5 March 1795. 17. As James K. Hopkins reminds us, many of the reformers most feared by the ministry were, even before Brothers’ appearance, millenarians. Several, including William Sharp, became followers of Brothers. See A Woman To Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, Tex., 1982), pp. 152–53. 18. James Gillray, “The Prophet of the Hebrews,—The Prince of Peace, conducting the Jews to the Promis’d-Land,” 5 March 1795. 19. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Testimony of the Authenticity of the Prophecies of R. Brothers and of his Mission to Recall the Jews, 2nd edn. (London, 1795), p. iv. 20. Letters from England, ed. Jack Simmons (London, 1951), p. 428. All further quotations from this work cited in parenthesis in the text. 21. On Jones’s verse, see Michael Franklin, “Accessing India: Orientalism, anti‘Indianism’ and the Rhetoric of Jones and Burke,” in Romanticism and




22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

Tim Fulford Colonialism: Writing and Empire 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 48–66. Rosane Rocher, “Alien and Emphatic: The Indian Poems of N. B. Halhed,” in The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia Before Dominion, ed. Blair B. King and M. N. Pearson (Honolulu, 1979), pp. 215–35 (p. 225). Thomas Williams, The Age of Credulity: A Letter to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed in Answer to his Testimony in Favour of Richard Brothers (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 11. Halhed, Testimony, p. 10. On other prophetic interpretations of Daniel that intrigued Romantics, see Tim Fulford, “Coleridge, Kabbalah and the Book of Daniel,” Prose Studies, 13 (1990), 63–77. The speech is printed in Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, A Calculation on the Commencement of the Millennium, 4th edn. (London, 1795). Halhed, A Calculation, p. 144. The Curse of Kehama: Preface, pp. xxiii, xvi, xxiv. From A Letter to a Noble Lord, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 17 vols. (Oxford, 1981-), IX, 156. Thalaba the Destroyer, 2 vols. (London, 1801: facs. rpt. Oxford and New York, 1991), II, 177 (book IX). Journals of a Residence in Portugal 1800–1801 and a Visit to France 1838, ed. Adolfo Cabral (Oxford, 1960), pp. 127–28. Francis Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh Review, 1802, and William Taylor, in The Critical Review, 1803, quoted in Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Madden, pp. 90, 93. On Southcott, see Hopkins, A Woman To Deliver Her People. As Paley shows (“William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews,” p. 281). Revelation 12:1, 5. See Joanna Southcott, Song of Moses and the Lamb (London, 1804) and A Continuation of Prophecies (Exeter, 1802). Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 420; Paley, “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews,” pp. 280–81. New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1965), I, 468. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London, 1930–34), XVI, 101. See Essays Moral and Political, 2 vols. (London, 1832), II, 280. Quoted in Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and his Age, The Development of a Conservative Mind (London, 1960), p. 80. As Governor General of India, Wellesley had waged war with little reference to what he called “that loathsome den, the India Office,” conquering Delhi and much of the Deccan plateau. See Arthur Bryant, Years of Victory 1802–12 (London, 1975), p. 108. Quarterly Review, 1 (1809), 193–226 (p. 211). Quoted in James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, p. 224.



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42. John Eimeo Ellis, Life of William Ellis Missionary to the South Seas and Madagascar (London, 1873), p. 207. 43. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (London, 1989), p. 54. 44. The Curse of Kehama, book XIV, Jaga-naut, line 209.





Blake, the Apocalypse and Romantic Women Writers Anne K. Mellor

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s Morton D. Paley trenchantly reminded us in The Apocalyptic Sublime in 1986, apocalyptic subjects were “a permanent and distinctive aspect of Blake’s imagination—a lifelong engagement with the idea of divine revelation penetrating history and bringing it toward a Day of Wrath and Last Judgement.”1 I need not rehearse Blake’s commitment to a vision of the future that entailed a sudden and radical break with the past. That break could happen either at the level of the individual who comes to perceive his or her absorption into the human form divine, or at the level of an entire social group that is finally empowered, as Blake prophesies at the end of his epic poem Jerusalem, to converse together . . . in Visionary forms dramatic which bright Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age [;] (Jerusalem 98, 28–33; Erdman, p. 257)

Blake’s commitment to apocalyptic thinking at the end of his century was shared by many of the male writers of his time, inspired as they were in the 1790s and later by the heady promise of the French revolutionaries’ call for immediate and universal liberty, equality and fraternity. Enthusiastic visions of a sublime revelation and the advent of a New Jerusalem on earth appear not only in Blake’s prophetic books and illustrations for the Book of



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Revelation, but also in Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” and, in a more individual, secular mode, in Wordsworth’s climactic ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude. Such positive apocalyptic thinking also animates Percy Shelley’s celebration, in his epic Prometheus Unbound, of the capacity of poetic language to transform and redeem human consciousness. Not all male writers of the Romantic era responded so positively to the end of the century and the ideals of the French Revolution, of course. Negative visions of the apocalypse were articulated in Byron’s “Darkness” (1817), in Thomas Campbell’s “The Last Man” in 1823 and in Thomas Hood’s “The Last Man” in 1826. The visual arts of the time were equally focused on sublime images based on the Book of Revelation, as visions of the Last Judgment and paradise regained wrestled with equally potent images of the end of the world, in such large-scale paintings as Philippe de Loutherbourg’s Deluge (1790) and Creation (1800), John Martin’s The Deluge (1834) and The Last Judgment (1851), Samuel Colman’s The Edge of Doom (1836), and Francis Danby’s The Deluge (c. 1837–40). But when I asked myself who among the many women writers I have been reading from the Romantic period engaged in such apocalyptic thinking, the answer was—with only three exceptions to which I shall return— “None of them.” I then asked myself the obvious question: why was the female imagination during the Romantic period on the whole not inspired by millenarian, apocalyptic thinking? In this chapter I attempt to answer this question. Apocalyptic thinking involves either what Foucault would call an epistemic break, a sudden and complete rupture between one cultural system and another, or it involves the sense of an ending, of teleological completion, of attaining what Percy Shelley called “this far goal of time.”2 Such ways of thinking are antithetical to what I will, for the purposes of my argument here, call the “feminine mode of thought” in the Romantic period. I define this “feminine mode of thought” in the terms developed by such recent feminist epistemologists as Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding. This mode of thought is inter-relational and communitarian. Derived from Marxist standpoint theory, feminist epistemology assumes that there is no clear break between the observer and the object of observation, that the standpoint or subjective position from which one sees or speaks always already determines what one can see or say, and that “strong” as opposed to “weak” objective knowledge can be gained only by including the widest possible range of standpoints.3 If one assumes that a relationship exists between the knower and the object of knowledge, then one conceptualizes time in one of two similar ways. Either one thinks of time as continuous, as linking the perceiver and the world it perceives in an ongoing process. This process might be circular, re-



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gressive or forward-moving, but it cannot be ruptured or broken with ultimate finality. Or one thinks of time as linear, as always moving toward a future, but this is a future without ending, an infinite progression to no terminus. Any individual perceiver may die, of course, but time and the universe continue forever. I would further ground the “feminine mode of thought” in biology, in the differential modes of male and female reproduction. Females physiologically give birth through a process of commingling (in the womb), separation (of the fetus from the womb), and renewed commingling (through breast-feeding). Males physiologically give birth through a process of ejaculation and separation. For nine months thereafter they have neither direct bodily knowledge nor certain intellectual knowledge that they have in fact inseminated a child. In other words, the male birth process is one of creation and complete rupture. I would suggest that this produces the epistemological fiction of the theoretical isolation of the subject from the object, of what many scientists still think of as “objective” knowledge. It also produces the conception of time either as breakable, rupturable, full of gaps and holes, or as capable of coming to a complete stop. Such a biological and epistemological explanation may well be too simplistic an answer to the question of why women writers did not embrace apocalyptic or millenarian thinking during the Romantic era, but the fact remains that their writing consistently represents time as continuous, as sustaining the production and reproduction of human communities, and as a never-ending process of birth, death, and rebirth. Numerous novels by women engage in varying versions of the courtship plot, in which the female protagonist progresses from adolescence to marriage and motherhood. Or if not to marriage and motherhood, then to a supportive, all-female community that rears the next generation like those envisioned in Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1762) or Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804). The female-authored histories of the Romantic period, whether by Catherine Macaulay, Mary Hays, Cornelia Knight, Lucy Aikin, or Anna Jameson, all embrace a notion of time as continuous, even progressive,4 as do their historical poems. Lucy Aikin’s polemical answer to Pope’s Essay on Man, her brilliant poem Epistles on Women (1810), which offers a revisionist account of the history of women from the Creation and the Garden of Eden through the mid eighteenth century, deliberately rejects Pope’s notion of time as fixed—“Whatever is, is Right.”5 Instead Aikin details the degradation that the females of all species have experienced in all historical periods and world cultures. In opposition she asserts the primary equality of the sexes and argues that only the maternal instinct has preserved all species from the havoc wreaked by male “pride of power.” She ends with a call to arms to her sisters to improve their condition in the future. Even Anna



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Letitia Barbauld’s jeremiad announcing the decline and fall of British civilization, her superb poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, does not proclaim the end of liberty or of civilization as she understands it. Rather, in a final affront to her British readers, she asserts that liberty and freedom of thought have left the hallowed halls of England only to flourish elsewhere, to move westward, specifically, in her vision, to Venezuela in South America.6 The three exceptions I have found, three female-authored texts that do engage in apocalyptic thinking, are exceptions that only prove the general rule. I turn first to Mary Ann Browne’s “A World without Water,” published in 1832 and reprinted both in Paula Feldman’s and in Andrew Ashfield’s recent anthologies of Romantic women poets.7 In this powerful poem, Browne envisions a world on which no rain has fallen for months, in which all the springs and rivers are dry, in which even the sea has become a shrunken, stagnant mass, stranding both fish and the monsters of the deep, lifeless, on the shore. On land, everyone is dying of thirst. The cities were forsaken, For their marble wells were spent; And their walls gave back the scorching glare Of that hot firmament: But the corses of those who died were strewn In the street, as dead leaves lay, And dry they withered—and withered alone, They felt no foul decay! (45–52)

And yet, within this poem’s relentless catalogue of the horrors of a world without water, comes a single—and I would argue extremely significant— moment of satiated thirst. A mother held her child to her breast And kissed it tenderly, And then she saw her infant smile; What could that soft smile be? A tear had sprung with a sudden start, To her hot feverish eye; It had fallen upon the faint child’s lip That was so parched and dry. (76–83)

The only succor provided in this poem is that of a mother to her infant. But for the rest of the world’s inhabitants, no succor comes. As the narrator concludes:



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But no drop fell, like an angel’s tear— The founts of heaven were dry: The birds had perished every one; Not a cloud was in the air, And desolate seemed the very sun, He looked so lonely there! And I began to feel the pang— The agony of thirst; I had a scorching swelling pain, As if my heart would burst. My tongue seemed parched; I tried to speak— (114–24)

Byron and Campbell concluded their apocalyptic dystopian visions at this point with universal darkness and the death of the last man. But Mary Ann Browne does not move to this final ending. Instead she insists that her vision is only a dream: The spell that instant broke; And, starting at my own wild shriek, In mercy I awoke. (125–27)

She explicitly rejects as mere nightmarish fantasy the apocalyptic thinking that her male peers embraced. Mary Shelley’s Gothic visions of death and the annihilation of the human species similarly reject such apocalyptic finalities. Significantly, in Shelley’s original manuscript ending for Frankenstein, the Creature is not “lost in darkness and distance” as Percy Shelley revised it, but rather disappears only from the viewpoint of the sea captain Walton, who “soon lost sight of him in the darkness and distance.”8 Thus Mary Shelley’s original version of Frankenstein sustains the possibility that her “hideous progeny” the Creature is still alive. More central to my argument is Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, published in 1826, which purports to be a prophetic account of the annihilation of the human species by a universal plague. But remember that Lionel Verney is still alive at the end, still seeking human companionship. And he is alive because he alone in the novel has been infected by the plague and recovered. We need to look closely at this episode of Verney’s infection because it encodes an alternative to the tale of apocalyptic destruction, which the novel otherwise represents. Verney succumbs to the plague when, hearing a moan, he compassionately but incautiously enters a dark room where he is “clasped” by “a negro half clad, writhing under the agony of the disease” who




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convulsively embraces Verney: “I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer; he wound his naked festering arms round me, his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals.”9 From this unwilling but powerful embrace of the racial Other—this is the only time that a “negro” is specifically mentioned in the novel—Verney both contracts and recovering, becomes immune to the plague. This episode suggests that if human beings were forced to embrace the racial Other rather than being allowed to define it exclusively as “foreign” and “diseased,” then they might escape the final destruction threatened by both the biological and the sociological plague in Shelley’s novel. Such a reading gains support from the “Author’s Introduction” to The Last Man, in which the Editor insists that The Last Man is a prophecy, only one possible vision of the future years 2073–2100. Moreover, this vision has been arbitrarily and, the Editor suggests, perhaps inaccurately assembled from fragmentary sybilline leaves. By establishing three simultaneous time-scapes in her novel—the classical era of the Sibyl’s oracle, the nineteenth century in which the Editor finds and assembles the sibylline leaves, and the late twenty-first century in which the narrative proper is located—Mary Shelley is writing not so much “the end of the world” as the possibility of alternative beginnings, of never-ending new births. Indeed, we might read Shelley’s The Last Man as initiating that “Futuremindedness” that Susan Sontag has suggested is characteristic of postmodern American society, an era not so much of a millennial Apocalypse Now as of an Apocalypse From Now On.10 Moreover, if we place Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in the context of such contemporary feminist science fictions as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), we might read The Last Man not as a prophecy but rather as a warning. Shelley is showing us the universal human destruction that could occur if—but only if—all political leaders are male, all narrators are male, all females are oppressed, and all “foreigners” are defined as “diseased”—as they are in the dystopic narrative of The Last Man. My last exception to the claim that women did not engage in apocalyptic thinking in the Romantic period, and again an exception that in my view only proves the rule, is the extraordinary career of the millenarian prophet, Joanna Southcott. Born in April 1750, in the small East Devon village of Gittisham, the fourth daughter of a peasant farmer, Joanna Southcott rejected all offers of marriage to pursue a career in Exeter as a domestic servant and upholsteress. In 1792, at the age of 42, she had her first prophetic vision, in which God or “her spirit” informed her that she had been chosen to announce the Second Coming of Christ, to overcome the sins of Satan, and to save her people. Over the next 20 years, by dint of indefatigable corre-



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spondence with leading Christian clergy, letters to the editors of major newspapers and journals, over 65 publications in book or pamphlet form, and frequent public appearances in the Midlands and London, Joanna Southcott developed an enormous following. By 1807, at the height of her popularity, she had converted at least 14,000 believers; some estimates of her followers range as high as 50,000. As James Hopkins has argued in his superb study of Southcott’s career,11 her remarkable success was grounded on three factors. First, in an era of political unrest and social dislocation caused by the French Revolution, the wars with France, and widespread famine in England during the mid 1790s, Southcott’s prophecies of imminent millenarian salvation held special appeal to the dispossessed farm laborers and weavers of the West Country where she lived. These were men and women who felt they had nothing more to lose and already inhabited what Hopkins reminds us was “a pre-industrial culture in which supernatural experiences were tightly woven into the warp of life.”12 Second, Southcott’s insistence that God had selected not a man but a woman through whom to reveal Himself had an obvious feminist appeal. As Southcott announced, This is a New thing Amongst mankind, for a woman to be the Greatest Prophet that ever came into the World, to bring man out of darkness, into My Marvellous light, and make every Crooked path straight before you, and bring every mountain to a plain, and all dark Sayings shall be brought to light.13

Moreover, Southcott insisted that not Eve but Satan was responsible for bringing evil into the world. And since Christ the redeemer had been born from a woman’s body, only a woman could once again save the fallen world. As her “spirit” insists in A Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (1802), No, this is done to shew the man, How I must first appear; And must be in the woman’s form, To make my Gospel clear.14

Joanna herself was to be that “Woman clothed in the Sun,” the Bride of Christ heralded in the Book of Revelation, the one chosen by Jehovah to interpret and clarify his Gospel. As her divine “spirit” asserts in Southcott’s A Word to the Wise, published in 1803: When I did make the woman first, I said from her the good shall burst:




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Or as her Spirit put it two years earlier in Southcott’s The Strange Effects of Faith, the testimonial she published in 1801 after wrestling with Satan for ten days: Could’st thou bring forth the world as she has done? Or, like the woman, bear my only Son, Without her aid, as she did without thine? I tell you, men, the myst’ries are behind. As from the woman, you did all proceed, Took from your side, man is pronounc’d the head; But you must know, you are not the perfect man, Until your bone is join’d to you again. So both together must in judgment sit: And tell me, men, if her disputes were right, To say my honour I had still maintain’d, And plead with Satan as she hath began: The both together you shall surely know, I have gain’d my honour by his overthrow; For if the woman stands so much my friend, You all shall find, I’ll stand hers in the end. If from herself this love and courage came, I tell you plain, she is the head of man.16

As James Hopkins rightly observes, “what Joanna offered was the emancipation of women from the burden of the Fall, of Eve’s role in tempting Adam to sin. . . . In her, women found a deliverer from the inferior status bequeathed to them by the Christian tradition.”17 Southcott’s followers were overwhelmingly peasants, domestic servants and factory workers in the West Country and such urban centers as Liverpool, Manchester and London; of those followers, 63 percent were women.18 And of those women, the great majority were unmarried mill workers and domestic servants, single women who were not only acutely aware of their low class status but were singularly vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. What Southcott gave to these workers was a new sense of selfesteem, of being singled out and valued in a society that had hitherto denigrated both their labor and their persons. Moreover, as Southcottian congregations sprang up throughout the country, these believers achieved a renewed sense of community, one that replaced those rural communities shattered by economic or geographic dislocation.19



For man could not be good alone, The woman must his helpmate come. And now his helpmate doth appear With prophecies no man can clear.15

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Third, Southcott’s success rested on her extraordinary ability to market her prophecies. She was an exceptionally prolific writer: she published over sixty-five volumes totaling over 4,500 pages of visions, prophecies, messages and testimonials between 1792 and 1814. These volumes went into numerous editions; by 1816 over 108,000 copies of her works had been printed.20 She became an effective public speaker and proselytizer, tirelessly touring the Midlands and London. Moreover, she developed a remarkably effective scheme for enrolling her followers. To those who wished them, she gave her “seal”: a slip of paper with the believer’s name at the top and Southcott’s signature at the bottom, containing this inscription: The Sealed of the Lord, the Elect Precious Man’s Redemption to Inherit the Tree of Life To be made Heirs of God, & Joint Heirs With Jesus Christ

This paper was folded over and sealed with wax; on the wax were impressed the letters I C, an emblem that Joanna had once found on a scrap of paper while sweeping the floor of a printer’s shop. She believed that these letters signified Jesus Christ; she immediately took them as a heavenly sign of her appointment as the true prophet of God’s word. During her lifetime, Southcott “sealed” over 20,000 followers. So popular became these seals that a brisk commercial trade developed in them. Although Southcott insisted her seals were not for sale, they could be purchased from her so-called followers for as little as sixpence or as much as a guinea. Here I wish to draw attention, not so much to the sources of Southcott’s enormous appeal to the dispossessed workers of her day, but rather to the source of her final failure, a failure that resulted directly from that “feminine mode of thinking” I described earlier. Joanna Southcott had repeatedly insisted that deliverance from evil could come only through the body of a woman. As Christ asserts in this verse from Southcott’s True Explanation of the Bible, Revealed by Divine Communications on 15 October 1804, To conquer Hell, you all know well, I said I’d come again; To conquer death, and bring all forth, My Gospel I’ll maintain. To conquer man, I said I’d come; Like children to appear, But must be in the woman’s form, Or man must conquer here.21




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After 1810, Southcott’s following began to decline drastically; her prophecies of a French invasion went unfulfilled, and greater prosperity came to England. Increasingly upset by the failure of her mission, Joanna Southcott came to believe not only that the Second Coming was at hand, but that she herself had been chosen to become the Mother of Shiloh, the second Christ. In The Third Book of Wonders, Announcing the Coming of Shiloh published in March 1814, her Spirit proclaimed that “This year, in the sixty-fifth year of thy age, thou shalt have a SON, by the power of the MOST HIGH.”22 Southcott solemnly swore that she was still a virgin, and even went so far as to claim that the validity of the first Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ depended on her own forthcoming pregnancy: if the visitation of the Lord to me now does not produce a Son, this year; then Jesus Christ was not the Son of God, born in the manner of spoken by the Virgin Mary; but if I have a Son, this year; then, in like manner our Saviour was born.23

Southcott then became visibly pregnant; as the reputable doctor Richard Reece testified on the basis of an external examination of her body (she would not permit an internal examination), her breasts were swollen, and her belly was enlarging in a manner consistent with pregnancy.24 Thousands of new converts flooded to her movement. A hot trade in Southcottian seals developed, since they were seen as guaranteed entrance tickets to the New Jerusalem. Believers sent numerous gifts for the new baby messiah—laced caps, embroidered bibs, a mohair mantle worth 150 pounds, pap-spoons and a caudle-cup shaped like a dove. Most remarkable—and most widely described in the press—was the extravagant crib or “Manger” built by Mr. Seddons that cost over two hundred pounds. On view to the public in his shop window in Aldersgate, this crib was framed in satinwood, ornamented with gold, lined in blue satin, with a head-cloth bearing an embroidered gold crown, under which the word SHILOH appeared in Hebrew characters in gold spangles. Over the crib was a canopy of blue satin and white muslin, topped with a golden dove holding an olive sprig in its beak and resting on a white ball; around the rim of the canopy was inscribed in gold letters: “A free-will offering by Faith to the promised Seed.”25 Others, including William Blake, were far more skeptical, of course. Blake had long been troubled by Southcott’s commitment to celibacy, as well as by her insistence that Christ would speak to the present age only through the body of a woman. When William Sharp the engraver tried to convert Blake to Southcott’s sect in 1814, Blake refused to join. As John Flaxman later sardonically commented on this episode to Crabb Robinson, “such men as Blake are not fond of playing the second fiddle,” and Robinson con-



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curred, “Hence Blake himself a seer of visions & a dreamer of dreams wod not do homage to a rival claimant of the privilege of prophecy.”26 It was either at this time, when Southcott’s pregnancy was a subject of national discussion, or 12 years earlier when she first announced her mission as the bearer of Christ’s word in A Dispute between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness in October 1802, that Blake jotted down his epigram in his Notebook,27 titled “On the Virginity of the Virgin Mary & Johanna Southcott”: Whateer is done to her she cannot know And if youll ask her she will [tell you so del] swear it so Whether tis good or evil none’s to blame No one can take the pride no one the shame.28

As I read this epigram, Blake here suggests that if Southcott (like the Virgin Mary) is merely a vessel or vehicle—whether for the work of the Lord or of Satan—she can neither take credit nor be held responsible for whatever is “done to her.”29 When after ten months, Joanna Southcott’s pregnancy proved false, her movement was entirely discredited; she died two months later, on 27 December 1814. My point is not that Joanna Southcott was a religious imposter or “a dreaming insane old woman,” as the dissenter Matthew Aikin called her in 1823.30 Rather, my point is that because she was a woman, Joanna Southcott could conceptualize the Second Coming of Christ only as a literal pregnancy and birth, only as an event in time. She was incapable of separating her comprehension of Revelation from her physical body. So convinced was she that God had selected her to “bear the word” of Shiloh that her stomach literally swelled ever larger for nine months. Rather than proclaiming the second coming as a sudden and complete break with the past, as Blake and other millenarian writers did, Joanna Southcott envisioned the apocalypse as a process of growth or gradual transformation within historical time, as a biological process within the female human body. Mary Ann Browne, Mary Shelley, Joanna Southcott—each in her own way invoked eschatological prophecy and apocalyptic vision, but each did so in order to affirm rather than deny the gradual evolution of the human species through historical time. Each finally endorsed her female peers’ belief that both individual human development and the progress of civilization occur as a historical process within time rather than outside of time. Each finally opposed Blake’s millenarian vision of a future in which “Time was finished!” (Jerusalem, 94: 18; Erdman, p. 254), in which mankind experiences a radical, epistemic break with the past and achieves a New Jerusalem on earth.




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1. Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New York and London, 1986), p. 71. 2. Prometheus Unbound, Act III, Scene iii, line 174. 3. On feminist stand-point theory and its derivation from Marxist theory, see Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York, 1983; rpt. Boston, 1985), pp. 231–32, and Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity’?,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York, 1992), pp. 49–82. 4. On British women’s historical writing in the Romantic era, see Lisa Kasmer, “My Heart Will Stand the Test”—Women Writing History in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, UCLA Ph.D. diss., 2002. 5. Pope, “Essay on Man,” line 286. 6. On these historical poems by Lucy Aikin and Anna Barbauld, see Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation—Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), chapter 3. 7. Mary Ann Browne’s poem first appeared in the literary annual Winter’s Wreath (London, 1832); it has been reprinted in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore, Md. and London, 1997), pp. 155–59, and in Romantic Women Poets 1788–1848, ed. Andrew Ashfield, vol. II (Manchester and New York, 1998), pp. 163–66. 8. On the revisions made by Percy Shelley to Mary Shelley’s manuscript of Frankenstein, see Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London, 1988), pp. 57–68; and Charles E. Robinson, ed. The Frankenstein Notebooks—A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Manuscript Novel, 1816–17 (New York and London, 1996), Part Two, p. 643. 9. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826; rpt. Lincoln, Neb. and London, 1965), p. 245. 10. Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1988), p. 98. 11. James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin, Tex., 1982). 12. Ibid., p. 33. 13. The University of Texas at Austin, Joanna Southcott Collection, 340, 3 June 1802, f. 61. 14. Joanna Southcott, A Dispute between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (London, 1802; facs. rpt. Poole and New York, 1995), p. 106. 15. Joanna Southcott, A Word to the Wise; Or a Call to the Nation, That They May Know the Days of Their Visitation from the Prophecies That Are Given to Joanna Southcott, with the Reasons Assigned Why the Spirit of Prophecy is Given to a Woman; And Which is Explained from the Scriptures in the Following Pages (Stourbridge, 1803), p. 12. 16. Joanna Southcott, The Strange Effects of Faith; With Remarkable Prophecies (Made in 1792, & c.) of Things Which Are to Come: Also, some Account of My Life (Exeter, 1801), pp. 36–37.



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17. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People, p. 85. 18. J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, N. J., 1979), p. 110. 19. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People, p. 87. 20. Harrison, The Second Coming, p. 88; Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver Her People, p. 84. On Southcott’s career, also see Anon., The Life and Prophecies of Joanna Southcott (London, c. 1814); G. R. Balleine, Past Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors (London, 1956); Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore and London, 1975); Ronald Matthews, English Messiahs: Studies of Six English Religious Pretenders, 1656–1927 (London, 1936); and W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland and Oxford, 1978). 21. Joanna Southcott, The True Explanation of the Bible, revealed by Divine Communications to Joanna Southcott, Part the First (London, 1804), p. 93. 22. Joanna Southcott, The Third Book of Wonders, Announcing the Coming of Shiloh; With a Call to the Hebrews (London, 1814), p. 4. Shiloh (“peace”) was the sacred first site of the Ark of the Covenant; as the dying Jacob prophesied, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be” (Genesis 49:10). Christian theologians had long associated this prophecy with the second coming of Jesus. 23. Ibid., p. 6. 24. Morton Paley reprints the testimony of Dr. Richard Reece, who also performed the autopsy on Joanna Southcott and identified her womb after death as being the size of a small pear, in his “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93 (pp. 286–87). 25. The “manger” or crib and gifts to Shiloh are described at length by M. Aikin, Memoirs of Religious Imposters from the Seventh to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1823), pp. 113–14. 26. William Sharp the engraver’s attempts to convert William Blake to Southcottianism in 1814 and the subsequent exchange between John Flaxman and himself was noted by H. Crabb Robinson in his diary on 30 January 1815, as recorded by G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), p. 235. 27. The date of this epigram is uncertain. In his facsimile edition of Blake’s Notebook, David Erdman dates the poem “not long after October, 1802” (The Notebook of William Blake—A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile, ed. David V. Erdman, with the assistance of Donald K. Moore (rev. edn. New York, 1977), p. 13). Erdman bases this dating on the fact that the epigram is written at the top left of page two over a sketch of a naked man placed in a window above a gateway by a friendly elephant who thereby saves him from the tiger crouching below. Erdman connects this sketch to Blake’s engraving dated 1 June 1802 for William Hayley’s ballad “The Elephant.”




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Geoffrey Keynes also dates this epigram on Southcott to 1800–1803, in The Complete Writings of William Blake with all the Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London and New York, 1957), pp. 415, 418. But since the epigram is written over the sketch, which is much fainter, it could have been added at a far later date. This page of the Notebook also contains in its center a sketch for the head of a tiger very similar to that appearing in Blake’s illuminated poem for Songs of Experience, “The Tyger,” published in 1794, thus suggesting that Blake had already used this page over a period of at least eight years (The Notebook of William Blake, p. N2). 28. I base this transcription (which differs in one slight respect from Erdman, p. 501) on the photographic facsimile of Blake’s Notebook (The Notebook of William Blake, pp. N2 and N2 transcript). 29. Blake’s epigram on Southcott has been interpreted in various ways. James K. Hopkins reads it as exemplifying “Blake’s complete tolerance of spiritual communications, no matter how outré” (A Woman to Deliver Her People, p. 161), and J. D. M. Derrett concurs, suggesting that Blake “couples the outcome of the two pregnancies (whatever they might be) as equally beyond the reach of the theologian and the skeptic,” thus showing neither hostility to, nor skepticism of Joanna but rather “a remarkable reserve” (J. D. M. Derrett, Prophecy in the Cotswolds 1803–1947 (Shipston-on Stour, Warwickshire: Blockley Antiquarian Society, 1994), p. 64). In contrast, Morton Paley argues that it articulates Blake’s “lifelong opposition to the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, with its concomitant elevation of celibacy and denial of the erotic.” Paley further points out that for Blake, “true virginity is an inner attitude of innocence not to be confused with evading experience. The worship of literal virginity is the worship of ‘Babylon the City of Vala, the Goddess Virgin-Mother’ (Jerusalem, 18: 29, Erdman, p. 163),” “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” p. 285. 30. M. Aikin, Memoirs of Religious Imposters, p. 55.



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The Angels of Byron and Moore: Close Encounters of Another Kind Philip W. Martin

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n 1822, Lord Byron and Thomas Moore published poems of preposterous imaginative ambition, which dramatized the sexual desire of angels for mortal women. Byron’s Heaven and Earth and Moore’s The Loves of the Angels have been given scant critical attention since the time of their controversial reception: neither poem was given any representative status in nineteenth-century collections or anthologies, and twentieth-century critics, almost without exception, have disregarded them. My attempt here to resurrect some interest is based on two claims for their value, the first historical, the second formal. Historically, both poems can be read as liberal texts that set out to challenge the strong presence of Christian Evangelical criticism in the culture of the 1820s, and as such they may be seen as representative of the way in which a liberal, “polite” and Romantic elite contested the conservative establishment of its time by breaching polite procedure. Formally, these texts can be located in the constituency of the literature of encounter, each having at its center the meeting between two separate kinds or species. The culture and literature of encounter operates consistently with such a meeting in which the common, the normative, or the familiar confronts the exotic or the improbable, and its historical parameters may be marked by encounters with the new world at one end, and encounters with alien new worlds at the other. This cultural form receives its power by way of the uncanny: that which is encountered as otherness is yet defined or subsumed in tropes or devices of familiarity, and the tension between the known and the unknown, however it is explored or resolved, provides a common pattern of form, if not a genre as such. The trope of encounter also involves discussions of species in negotiating distinctions of



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kind, as it hovers uncertainly around familiarizing otherness or alienating it by sustaining a reaction of wonder, or by the further elaboration of fantastical fictions. In his book about the wonder of the new world, Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt conducts a fascinating investigation of the literature of encounter in which he recognizes Descartes as the key philosopher whose models of the mind can accommodate the new-world experience. Explaining this recognition, and Descartes’ anxiety about the detrimental effects of the excess of wonder, Greenblatt argues that wonder is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls the “first encounter.” Here, says Greenblatt: wonder is an instinctive definition of difference, the sign of heightened attention, “a sudden surprise of the soul” as Descartes puts it, in the face of the new. The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the undeniability, the exigency of the experience.1

The first encounters of the new world are thus intricately caught up with Descartes’ models of knowing and unknowing, concepts of how functions of cognition inter-relate with the moral ordering of experience and the world itself. Wonder is always detrimental in excess because it refutes moral categories and produces a paralysis in the capacity to know. These first encounters have their imaginative counterparts in the “third encounters” of the late twentieth century, which fantasize meetings with aliens from other planets. Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the physical manifestation of the Alien body takes place in the presence of the human, is potentially productive of a similar excess of wonder, but it has been overtaken, fantastically, by the tabloid journalism accounts of those abducted by aliens which describe even closer physical manifestations. In these stories, aliens have sex with human beings. Somewhere between Descartes’ first encounter and these late twentiethcentury third or fourth encounters, we can locate what I have referred to in my title as close encounters of another kind: the stories of angels who not only visit the earth but copulate with its inhabitants. This is not simply a visitation therefore, but an encounter that proves embodiment by embodied penetrations, denying thereby the mark of difference in a scandalous act that simultaneously affirms it. Byron’s Heaven and Earth and Moore’s Loves of the Angels are works that invite their readers to contemplate this weird union. Such spectacles, of course, are not unique, and English literature has an intermittent fascination with the embodying of angelic form. In the sustained conceit of one of his most famous poems, “Air and Angels,” John



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Donne employs Aquinas’s version of angels’ insubstantiality; while the poem holds this as a universal truth about angels, its secular concerns threaten to undermine it by ironically playing upon the notion of embodiment, for “nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme and scatt’ring bright, can love inhere.”2 Nothingness cannot hold love any more than the diffused shards of pure light: it must, in the most literal of senses, be incorporated. The “inhering” of love is the point of contention between platonic idealism and secularism around which this remarkable poem twists and turns: the “taking of a body”—the taking of “limbs and flesh” precisely is the poem’s means of sustaining this daring fascination with the transfer of qualities between the human and the divine. Milton, famously, sexualized his angels as part of the humanist project of Paradise Lost, and there they have sexual encounters for pure pleasure, as do Adam and Eve before the Fall: the parallels are important, for they persuade the reader to recognize (as surely as the work of William Blake) the divine qualities that inhere in humanity, and humanity’s lost bliss that is Milton’s imaginative challenge. The interchange or transfer between the divine and the human is one that takes a sexualized form more commonly outside the Christian tradition, most notably in classical mythology, wherein the encounter is not distinguished by marks of hypostatic difference. Thus, that last Romantic, W. B. Yeats, seizes on one such moment in “Leda and the Swan,” to emphasize the divine taking of a body, sparing us no details in his excited description of the “feathered glory and the loosening thighs.”3 Simultaneously, and by way of Ovidian precedents, he renders the transfer in terms of species: the unthinkable interchange between the divine and the human is exceeded by the even more scandalous prospect of sexual intercourse between a swan and a woman. z

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The context in which I want to consider the poetry of Moore and Byron however is historical, and there are a number of key cultural events to which I wish to draw attention. First, and most important, polite literature of the early 1820s was subject to powerful Christian influences. Not only were there more and more poems with Christian intentions or polemic, but certain influential critical schools of thought were also driven by Evangelical and censorious doctrine. Thus, as is well known, the Satanic school is invented by Southey as a means of condemning the poetry of Byron and Shelley, and journals such as The British Review were patrolling the proper limits and concerns for contemporary literature in the names of Church and State, on behalf of what the review itself called “that part of the public who review religion as a vital principle.”4 Second, one of the pseudepigrapha, The Book of Enoch, had been rediscovered in the 1770s, and translated into English in



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a new version in 1821.5 Third, and not unconnected with this rediscovery, the radical publisher William Hone had challenged the notion of scriptural canonicity, and also drawn provocative attention to the dramatic mode in which Byron casts Heaven and Earth (and before that, Cain), that is, the mystery play—in his work of 1820, The Apocryphal New Testament. Interestingly, Hone followed up his interests in the mystery plays more fully in his book Ancient Mysteries Described, which was published the year after Byron and Moore published their narratives of copulating angels.6 The Loves of the Angels and Heaven and Earth are not the only texts of the period that engage with this ancient story. Samuel Chew, in his study of Byron’s dramas of 1915, identified a number of works that allude to this alternative account of divine and human relations before the flood, and these have subsequently been examined in Gayle Shadduck’s highly idiosyncratic study of 1990, England’s Amorous Angels, 1813–1823.7 The work of Chew and Shadduck draws our attention to James Montgomery’s 1813 epic, The World before the Flood, Thomas Dale’s Irad and Adah (1821/1822), George Croly’s The Angel of the World (1821), and Reginald Heber’s Poem on the World before the Flood, written some time between 1813 and 1817 but published posthumously. To this I would add Lindsay’s collection of plays, Dramas of the Ancient World (1819), a work, incidentally, annotated by Coleridge, whose interest in it stemmed from the debate about catastrophist theories of the flood.8 It is evident then, that there was a small but significant fashion for the telling of the story, and for the most part these productions are orthodox, broadly moral versions that attest to the divine punishment of mortal sins. Byron and Moore however, have different motives. In a letter of 1820 to his publisher, Murray, complaining about the state of modern poetry, Byron wrote the following: There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables—that I am ashamed to look at them.—I say nothing against your parsons—your Smedleys—and your Crolys—it is all very fine—but pray dispense me from the pleasure, as also from Mrs Hemans.—Instead of poetry if you will favour me with a few Soda powders—I shall be delighted—. . . .9

“Your parsons” is a telling phrase, referring in part to the John MurrayQuarterly Review circle that espoused reactionary Christianizing writings of the kind that Byron probably had in mind when he coined the phrase “cant religious.” There are no absolutely clear lines to be drawn on this: at least two prominent Christian critics, William Gifford and Thomas Mulock, defended Byron’s scriptural probity in his “Mysteries,” Cain and Heaven and Earth. Indeed, Gifford even made alterations to Heaven and Earth to prepare it for publication through Murray, who was already nervous, before Byron



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withdrew and published the drama, significantly, in The Liberal. But even while the establishment argued over Byron’s doctrine, some preferring to adopt him, others to execrate him, and much the same controversy ranged around Moore’s poem, there is ample evidence to suggest that Byron and Moore were testing the limits of polite literature. Both had reputations of course that made them well-equipped to do so: Byron’s place in the Satanic school was well established, and fortified by the reviews of Don Juan; while Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Poems of Thomas Little had given him a reputation for writing sexually suggestive poetry. Both, nevertheless, were regarded as “polite,” not “radical” writers. This testing is undertaken on two accounts: first by a mischievous undermining of Christian orthodoxy, and then by the erotics of the subject matter. The sources claimed by each poet are of considerable significance here. Byron, in a typically pointed reference in the title of his drama, claims his source is in Genesis. He provides an abbreviated quotation, which here is given in full: 1. And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2. That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3. And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 5. And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth . . . (Genesis 6:5.1–5)

The point of contention, of course, is the interpretation of the sons of God as angels rather than the sons of Seth, but Byron would have found license for doing so not only through some Christian commentators on Genesis but also from the recently rediscovered Book of Enoch, the first section of which expands on this allusion to describe the descent of an army of angels to the earth in pursuit of its women. According to Harold Bloom in his remarkable book Omens of Millennium,10 there are 2000 such angels; the translation of Enoch I am using provides only 200, and the passage reads as follows: 1. And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. 2. And the angels, the children of the heaven, lusted after them and said to one another: “Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.”




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4. And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them: “I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.” And they all answered him and said: “Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.” 5. Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. 6. And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. 7. And these are the names of their leaders: Samlazaz, their leader, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraquijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqlel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel. These are the chiefs of tens. 1. And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, 2. And they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. 3 And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: (Enoch 1:6–7)

Enoch continues with an account of how the angels advance their fraternizing by teaching men to work metal, to make weapons, eye make-up, fornication, enchantments, and astrology. This provokes the archangels to give an account of their conduct to God, who subsequently plans the deluge, first sending Uriel to Noah to warn him, and Raphael and Michael together to restrain and condemn to torture Azazel and Semjaza (Chapters 9–10).11 Harold Bloom asserts that the accounts of angels given in Enoch, far greater and more substantial in many ways than those in the Bible, have a deeper source in the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism; “Such doctrines as the existence of the Devil and the other fallen angels, and the resurrection of the dead, besides the entire world of supportive angelology,” he asserts, “seem to be Jewish, Christian and finally Muslim importations from Zoroaster’s Iranian spirituality.”12 This is of relevance to understanding Moore’s Preface and Notes, which in their final versions claim ancient Zoroastrian precedents for the narrative as well as sources in the Koran. Shadduck reminds us that this is evident in the fifth edition of Moore’s poem, but that previous versions had adopted a “pseudo-Judaeo-Christian mythological framework.”13 This is not quite the case, for Moore’s final Preface begins thus—“The Eastern story of the angels Harut and Marut, and the Rabbinical fictions of the loves of Uzziel and Shamchazai are the only



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sources to which I need refer, for the origin of the notion on which this Romance is founded”14—but Shadduck’s main point stands: the evidence suggests that Moore became increasingly nervous of his poem’s heterodoxy (The Loves of the Angels was one of the most widely reviewed poems of its time) and removed the epigraph from Enoch, which had prefaced the early editions, thereby distancing his tale from its Judaic source. While Moore was undertaking these revisions in 1823 he recorded in his diary that Lady Donegal would not allow her daughter to read the poem, and later in his Memoirs he noted that The Loves of the Angels “was doomed to rank with the rubbish of Carlisle [Carlile] and Co for ever.”15 The reference is significant: entering into controversies about scriptural authority in the early 1820s was always likely to allow the establishment to mobilize the invective it had prepared and rehearsed for the reviling of deism and William Hone or Richard Carlile. Moore clearly takes fright at this: if he and Byron were indeed testing the limits of polite literature, then Moore’s taste for it quickly waned before the response (which was generally condemnatory). Byron discouraged Moore from such alterations, writing in a letter of 20 February 1823, “And you are really recanting, or softening to the clergy! It will do little good for you—it is you, not the poem, they are at. They will say that they frightened you—forbid it, Ireland!”16 Byron’s playing on Moore’s nationalist sympathies here can be better understood, perhaps, in the context of John Wilson’s review of The Loves of the Angels in Blackwood’s, which represents the kind of animosity Moore faced. Complaining of the humanity of Moore’s angels, Wilson sneered, “not only are they men, but they seem as if they were Irishmen; for such furious love was never made out of the land of potatoes.”17 Dr Henry Muir’s recording of Byron’s conversation about this correspondence reveals equally telling references: To-day I rode and dined with Lord Byron. Speaking of Moore, he said he had received a letter from him, when about to publish his Angels, telling him that he intended to castrate them; that he found the style would not do—it was too warm—too much of the Houri; that he meant to alter his style of writing—the world was not yet ready for such luscious fruit. Lord B. added, “I told him he was wrong, that he would get no credit by it: but, on the contrary, do what he would with them, he would not please: that mutilated Angels could only make Mahometans at best, and never Christians, so that it was better to leave them Angels as they were.”18

Wilson’s crude racism operates in the same dimension as Byron’s more sophisticated ironies: differences of species are readily translated into racial differences, and indeed, for all the radical possibilities of Byron’s drama, it has




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yet to be noticed that its dominant language is one in which racial purity figures large: the source of Aholibamah’s defiance of Japhet is precisely that her race, as she calls it, “hath always dwelt apart from his.” However, my main point here is that Byron, for one, was convinced of the powerful erotics of Moore’s writing, and certainly some of the hostile reviews were only too pleased to condemn this dimension of the poem, the Monthly Censor complaining that not only did the poem ridicule religion; worse, it connected scripture with “silly, debasing, and licentious imaginations.”19 Even while Moore attempted to deflect attention away from this, by claiming in his revised Preface that the poem aims to provide an allegory of the soul’s falling from its original purity, or indeed, that its moral project is to demonstrate how the pursuit of the world’s “perishable pleasures” and the “presumptuous enquiry into the awful secrets of Heaven” will be punished by Divine justice, the poem still relies heavily for its drama on a specular dimension. Erotic attraction here depends on the visual, and on the realization of the force of desire. While there are allusions to spirituality, or the life of the soul, the narrative impulse proceeds by way of the device of attraction. Moore cannot evade the lines in Genesis, or in Enoch, which state simply that the angels (or sons of God) saw that the daughters of men were fair; in fact, his poetry revels in it: A vehement, but wandering fire, Which, though not love, nor yet desire,— Though through all womankind it took Its range, as lawless lightnings run, Yet wanted but a touch, a look, To fix it burning upon One . . . (“Second Angel’s Story,” 150–55)20

There is no doubt here about erotic embodiment: angels and humans move in a highly materialized universe as sensuous and desirous beings, and the attraction of the angel for the woman in each of the three cases or narratives that make up the whole of Moore’s poem is figured in terms of obsession. While (obviously) not being able to describe the act of copulation in the manner of Yeats, Moore’s poem nevertheless constructs a rhetoric of desire that invites its readers to speculate on the nature of the union. Charles Lamb, as we shall see, offers us an interesting example of the fascinations that Moore’s poem was capable of stimulating. Moore also hesitated over the title of his poem, and his final choice, even though it disappointed Byron, carries with it an important and provocative transgressive allusion, for The Loves of the Angels is surely a deliberate echo of Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789). As Tim Fulford has re-



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cently shown, Darwin’s poem elaborated on what was regarded as the sexual impropriety of Linnaeus, to represent, for example, female plants that are sexually promiscuous and seductive.21 Moore absorbs some of this language into his poem: as Darwin’s plants reveal their charms to lure on pollination, so Moore’s women are occasionally figured in the terminology of the promiscuous botany that Linnaeus and Darwin produced between them. The second angel’s story, for example, includes this description of his desire: Oh, ’tis not to be told how long, How restlessly I sigh’d to find Some one, from out that witching throng, Some abstract of the form and mind Of the whole matchless sex, from which, In my own arms beheld, possest, I might learn all the powers to witch, To warm, and (if my fate unblest Would have it) ruin, of the rest! Into whose inward soul and sense I might descend, as doth the bee Into the flower’s deep heart, and thence Rifle, in all its purity, The prime, the quintessence, the whole Of wondrous Woman’s frame and soul! (241–55)

Fulford points out that by the beginning of the century, The Loves of the Plants was identified by conservative critics as an example of Jacobinism, its sexual licentiousness being inextricably bound up with its political undermining of order.22 Moore’s choice of title resonates of this history. The language of Heaven and Earth is more varied, being composed partly, like that of Cain, of disputatious reasoning. Caroline Franklin has suggested in her analysis that the drama makes an aggressive intervention in the apocalyptic fascination with a righteous God’s punishment of innocent humankind, and it does this partly by espousing the cause of feminine sexuality that is used to undermine what Franklin calls “the moral hierarchy of the Judaic cosmos,” here represented by the exclusively male elect, and in addition, the pointed separation of soul and body.23 The meeting of angels and humankind is nevertheless treated suggestively, as Aholibamah’s incantation to her lover Samiasa demonstrates: For thou hast ventured to share life with me, And shall I shrink from thine eternity? No! though the serpent’s sting should pierce me thorough,




Philip W. Martin And thou thyself wert like the serpent, coil Around me still! and I will smile, And curse thee not; but hold Thee in as warm a fold as———but descend, and prove A mortal’s love For an immortal. (I, 1, 126–33; BPW)

Furthermore, the dramatic action of Heaven and Earth turns on the moment at which the angels, confronted with Raphael’s choice between “passionless” purity and passion (I, 3, 714–15), choose the passion of mortal love. The differences between Byron’s dramatic energy and Moore’s indulgent lyricism are considerable, but not so overwhelming as to occlude their prime common feature: both texts, in their distinctive ways, require their readers to imagine the impossible sexual act that is the scandalous revelation of Enoch. z

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In the literature of encounter there is much that is uncanny: that which is, or ought to be familiar, is made strange; that which ought to be so strange is captured by the trope of familiarity. Within Romanticism, we are accustomed to Wordsworth’s domestic figures taking on a cloak of spectrality, in converse relation perhaps, to those eighteenth-century uncanny precedents whose strangeness is tempered by satiric intent: thus Houyhnhnms become familiar stoical moralists, and Man Fridays subjects for instruction. The paradigm of the uncanny that governs the encounter is structured around temporary parallel suspension: that which is known and fixed is disturbed by the opposing qualities undermining such stability, yet that simultaneously confirm it by way of antithetically confirming the nature of the normative. The examples from Wordsworth, Swift and Defoe show this clearly enough, yet at the same time they are relatively tame examples that are not capable of distending the paradigm; in their own ways they tend to defuse its volatility by way of this normative consequence. The realm of literature’s “relevance” here is the social present: marvelous or uncanny devices are tendentiously harnessed to this end. My interest here is in close encounters of another kind, in which the uncanny is sustained in this suspense, as humanity confronts an extreme version of otherness that crosses species boundaries. An unlikely and bizarre postscript to the history of these promiscuous angels is to be found in Charles Lamb’s essay, “The Child Angel; A Dream” from The Last Essays of Elia. The essay begins as follows: I chanced upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear of. I had been reading the “Loves of the Angels,” and



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What “comes of it” in the dream is a child angel: Lamb speculates as to the progeny of the impossible union, and decides on an angelic child who lives in heaven as a child forever, deathless, but showing human weakness, signified by its lameness. But it turns out, in an interesting final twist, that there are two children, for there is also one on earth, who sits mourning on his mother’s grave. The correspondence between these two, Lamb asserts, “is not to be understood but by dreams.”25 Whatever the meaning, the existence of two child angels in Lamb’s whimsical essay is an entry of a kind into the argument about species, which centered emphatically on the capacity to reproduce. Linnaeus’s early attempts to fix species classification by way of external characteristics gave way before his own experiments with hybridization to Buffon’s hypothesis that the capacity to reproduce was the marker of species, but, most significantly, Buffon asserts that species is only proven by the offspring themselves being capable of reproduction.26 Lamb’s child-angel teases its reader in the suggestion that angels and humans can reproduce something as familiar as a child (in opposition to Enoch’s accounts of unnatural, monstrous and gigantic progeny), but by locking the offspring into permanent childhood, Lamb maroons them outside of species in the place of romantic, but freakish, incredibility.27 Lamb’s “sort of wonder,” as he calls it, returns us to Descartes’s “first encounter,” here repeated in the “exigency” of experience, which cannot be easily reconciled with the familiar by way of the extant knowledge-maps. Our own millennial fascinations are not dissimilar, as our culture circulates myths and fictions of extra-terrestrialism, cybermen, and androids, while our scientific debates focus on the ethics of genetic engineering and cloning. The preoccupations are, in a way, still those of the Enlightenment: we are unsure of where our species begins and ends. Moore and Byron venture into this territory in 1822 to produce texts that subvert the decorum of polite literature, and reproduce that excess of wonder that destabilizes religious, moral and scientific categories through the device of heretical revelation. Notes 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford, 1991), p. 20. 2. John Carey (ed.), John Donne (Oxford, 1990), p. 101. 3. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London, 1977), p. 241.



went to bed with my head full of speculations, suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had given birth to innumerable conjectures; and, I remember the last waking thought, which I gave expression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, “what could come of it.”24

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4. Quoted in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., and London, 1983), II, The Romantic Age, 1789–1836, p. 68. 5. Richard Laurence, Translation of the Book of Enoch, from the Ethiopic Ms in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1821). 6. William Hone, The Apocryphal New Testament (London, 1820); Ancient Mysteries Described (London, 1823). 7. Samuel C. Chew, The Dramas of Lord Byron (Baltimore, Md. 1915); Gayle Shadduck, England’s Amorous Angels 1813–1823 (Lanham, Md., 1990). 8. Coleridge’s annotations are in the margins of the edition of Lindsay’s dramas to be found in the British Library. As far as I know they are yet to be catalogued among his marginalia. It is evident from the nature of the comments that Coleridge’s reading of Lindsay was strongly inflected by his defense of the Mosaic account. 9. Leslie A. Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols. (London, 1977), VII, 200–01. 10. Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York, 1996). 11. http://www.artisanpublisherscom/bk_book_of_enoch_charles.html 12. Bloom, Omens of Millennium, p. 29. 13. Shadduck, England’s Amorous Angels, p. xiv. 14. Thomas Moore (ed.), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 10 vols. (London, 1868), VIII, 3. All subsequent quotations from The Loves of the Angels are taken from this edition. 15. Rowland E. Prothero (ed.), The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, 6 vols. (London, 1901), VI, 168. See also VI, 14, note 1. 16. Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals, X, 105. 17. Blackwood’s Magazine, XIII, 68 (January 1823), in John O. Hayden (ed.), The Romantic Reviewers, 1802–1824 (London, 1969), p. 225. 18. Prothero, The Works of Lord Byron, VI, 429–30. 19. Hayden, Romantic Reviewers, p. 225. 20. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works, VIII, 43. 21. Tim Fulford, “Coleridge, Darwin, Linnaeus: The Sexual Politics of Botany,” The Wordsworth Circle, 28 (1997), 124–30. 22. Fulford, “Coleridge, Darwin, Linnaeus,” 127. 23. Caroline Franklin, Byron’s Heroines (Oxford, 1992), p. 247. 24. Thomas Noon Talfourd (ed.), The Works of Charles Lamb (London, 1889), p. 471. 25. Ibid., p. 472. 26. For a summary, see Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 147–51. 27. There is a strong parallel between the scientific speculations about such progeny and the millenarianism of the Romantic age in which Joanna Southcott’s “pregnancy” looms large. Of course, Southcott’s claim was not that she had been impregnated by an angel but that hers would be a second virgin birth. Byron, who made numerous jokes about Southcott, com-



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mented that “her being with child at 65 is indeed a miracle, but her getting any one to beget it, a greater” (Letter to Murray, 2 September 1814). For further information about Southcott, and the claims about the virgin birth, see Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93.







Robert Hawes and the Millenium Press: A Political Micro-Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Spitalfields David Worrall

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he micro-cultures of late eighteenth-century London are bewilderingly complex. The wider master narratives directed by perspectives such as those offered by Linda Colley or James Chandler, stressing patterns of conformities dictated by Protestant integration, or an apparently infinitely extendable “Spirit of the Age,” have promoted a fairly stratospheric and imperial view of history that is not much help at the level of groundzero local contemporary culture.1 For example, unlikely though it may seem, London in 1789 accommodated at least two anti-Swedenborgian visionary authors who both worked in the city’s engraving trade. One of them was William Blake, the “mad” make-weight of respectable Romantic canonicity. The other was William Bryan, a copper-plate printer, Society of Avignon illuminé, receiver of visionary dictation and, with the ex-Swedenborgian carpenter John Wright, in later years a prominent follower of the prophet Richard Brothers.2 However finely they overlapped in 1789 by virtue of temporal location and common mentality, thereafter Blake’s and Bryan’s lives went in divergent directions. Whether we consider them marginal or central to their moment, both of them have to be regarded not only as symptomatic but also as constitutive of contemporary historical culture. Unfortunately, to adapt E. P. Thompson’s riposte to modern economic historians, they do not appear to have known they were only following the tram-lines of historical inevitability.3



Chapter 11 z

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Blake and Bryan were not the only millenarian Londoners whose historical roles have been neglected. This chapter will examine the work of an artisan publisher and radical who was, unequivocally, constitutive of late eighteenth-century English political culture. Although he was overwhelmingly involved with local perspectives, these perspectives were concurrent with activism at both national and international levels. I will show that not only did his career move in highly unpredictable patterns, regularly subject to government interference, but that government itself was fractured by similar ideological allegiances to those embedded in artisan culture. Finally, I will show how his working life culminated in a response to disastrous material events rather than to an underlying reception of Enlightenment ideology. The career of the obscure Spitalfields pamphleteer, type-founder and printer Robert Hawes follows a remarkable trajectory showing that ideas of natural rights and resistive politics were dispersed into one of London’s most impoverished communities many years before the French Revolution.4 Long before 1790s’ radicalism mixed with fashionable millenarianism, Hawes had not only articulated these ideologies but had developed the means, amid repressive conditions, to ensure their dissemination. His political impact was sufficient for him to fall, prior to the French Revolution, within the triangulations of surveillance of government informers in Croydon and then, during the early 1790s, of the ultra-loyalist Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (APLAP), culminating in a body of prosecution evidence retained by the Government’s Treasury Solicitor. Although he cannot be extensively considered here, Hawes’s close associate, Major Peter Labilliere, is in many ways an even more surprising figure, being a radical republican Christian soldier with links to panEuropean Huguenots in their Spitalfields community. Along with the editor, playwright and serving Royal Navy officer, Captain (or Commodore) Edward Thompson, Labilliere was also involved with the mid eighteenth-century interest in the classical republicanism exemplified by the Commonwealth canonical poet, Andrew Marvell.5 With Hawes’s assistance as printer, Labilliere provides an important transmission route for a major aspect of the collective memory of English seventeenth-century revolution. The “Master Book-Binder,” bookseller, stationer and printer Robert Hawes operated (save for one significant move to Croydon, south of London) from a number of premises in the Spitalfields area of east London from the mid-1760s through to the mid-1790s, at which time he disappeared from view. Hawes also owned a type foundry in London’s Moorfields between 1775 and 1789, a crucial circumstance that not only explains his extensive use of elaborate fonts, innovative layouts and typeset pictures but also his ability to retain control of his productions.6 Printing, politics and



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type-founding were closely connected in the contemporary London print trades. For example, John Bell, described as a “Vagabond Jacobin” in later years, and founder (with Blake’s bête noir, Dr. John Trusler) of the Morning Post and Della Cruscan-inclined World, ran an important and innovative type foundry between 1788 and 1789.7 So embedded was Hawes in the culture of the print trade that many of his productions have yet to be catalogued by the ESTC. As Paula McDowell has explained, we are only now learning how to evaluate texts produced by eighteenth-century printers whose notions of authorship were extremely different to their Romantic manifestations.8 Hawes started his publishing career in the 1760s when he was allied to Methodism, before flirting with Swedenborgianism in the early 1780s, then touching on the Universalism of the American Elhanan Winchester in the 1790s and subsequently becoming fully involved in the national issues of Paineite “rights of man” agitation around 1792. The last time his name resurfaces is as an advocate of an early form of co-operative organization among distressed Spitalfields weavers in 1796. The record of his presses gives some idea of the demography of his working life, although this is incomplete because of the ephemeral nature of his imprints. Hawes evaded, negotiated and innovated his way around contemporary restraints on print culture while at the same time remaining within definable London artisan communities as they passed through formulations of natural rights toward agitation on behalf of Paine, Gordon and the backlash of early 1790s anti-Revolution organization. From the mid-1760s to the mid-1770s, Hawes worked from his Moorfields foundry, before moving to Lamb-Street, Spitalfields, publishing works supportive of Wesleyan Methodism.9 At some time in the early 1780s he came across the beginnings of the Society of Avignon (a manifestation of the type of pan-European illuminism that gave Edmund Burke apoplexy) before quickly returning to a more local, political-rights-based, set of commitments. The circumstances of his early encounter with embryonic London Swedenborgianism are both extraordinary and highly indicative of the intricacy of contemporary social and belief structures. Not least, they show how radical theological discourses penetrated the highest ranks of government. In 1781 the Swedenborgian Freemason and prophetic healer Benedict Chastanier wrote to an unidentifiable, but apparently high-placed, acquaintance in the War Office, enclosing a printed prospectus trawling for subscriptions to a translated edition of Swedenborg’s works.10 Chastanier’s project claimed the support of such “high-society” figures as the Duchess of Devonshire and the wife of William Pitt. Whatever the immediate outcome of Chastanier’s “mail-shot,” one of the London venders included in the imprint of the first volume of the project was Robert Hawes, who sold Swedenborg’s Arcana



Robert Hawes and the Millenium Press

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Coelestia (1783) on behalf of the “society of gentlemen” commissioners, presumably a group that had links of personnel and correspondence with the Society of Avignon.11 Hawes probably came to Chastanier’s attention the previous year when he printed Swedenborg’s De La Nouvelle Jerusalem et de sa Doctrine Céleste (1782), a copy of which was owned (perhaps even commissioned) by Chastanier.12 In view of Hawes’s later career and connections, the episode is suggestive of the extreme social mobility of visionary religious discourses and how, in this instance, they were effortlessly co-opted into radical political agendas. Hawes’s precipitation into using print skills in the cause of radical politics was rapidly accelerated by his refusal to pay window-tax, an event Hawes commemorated in his broadside Window-Tax Memorial (1786). The episode is highly revealing of the ways in which the local politics of tax collection could easily be placed within the context of national discussions of natural rights, all framed within religious rhetoric. Hawes published his Window-Tax Memorial five days after the bailiffs broke down his door (for the second time) to distrain goods for non-payment. It is clear that the issue was a matter of stark religious and political principle (quite apart from being an aesthetic—“national grievance . . . blemishing many once convenient and uniform Houses”). Hawes considered window-tax “a direct Embargo of the Light of Heaven” and “one of the most oppressive and unconstitutional of the various unnecessary Burdens which the Industrious and Middle Classes of Society do at present bend beneath.” Within a short time, he issued another pamphlet giving the subject more development. Death at our Windows! Together with Oppression! Two Poetic Lectures, Humbly Addressed To the Majesty of the People made the “privation of light” symptomatic of government oppression.13 For this Spitalfields artisan working in the print trade, the issues implicated in the taxation of light provided an attractive metaphor for expressing opposition to overbearing and unresponsive government. The example shows very clearly how local community-based issues materialized, if they did not actually initiate, abstract Enlightenment notions. The ability of the government to enforce local tax gathering reveals how personally figures such as Hawes perceived the effects of what they considered to be oppression. Death at our Windows! (c. 1786) was Hawes’s first and most extended excursion into acrostics as well as his most sustained foray into poetic form. Hawes’s passion for acrostics tells us much about the readership he anticipated, where texts produced by eighteenth-century printers circulated in the sociocultural environment of the street, crossing between orality, reading and, in the case of acrostics, strongly implying communal or domestic locations of reception.14 Hawes’s consistent principle was that resistance to government tyranny should be based on local activism. Perhaps unexpectedly,



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Oppression sees Thee and shrinks back with fear, Nor dares she set her Foot within thy Wall: Death to Oppression! the Maternal Tear Of London shall repel her fiercest Ball— No: God dissolve it! GOD DIRECT US ALL! (Death at our Windows!, p. 16)

While the contemporary legislative system routinely ignored appeals for annual parliaments, the City of London mayors presented a pre-existing model for how public figures might “Resign their Year of State without a Stain” (p. 16). The immediate outcome of his window-tax evasion was Hawes’s move from Spitalfields to Croydon in London’s distant Surrey hinterland. This relocation appears to have coincided with a new inflection of prophetic language. Indeed, his London-published Window-Tax Memorial (1786) had also announced the appearance of his (lost) publication, the Millennium Star and Standard (which “contains in small Compass the most rational and solid Political Principles for promoting good Harmony in Government”). By 1787 Hawes had set up the Millenium Press in the High Street, Croydon, trading as a bookbinder, bookseller and stationer. Actually, Hawes’s Croydon Millenium Press was the second incarnation of this imprint. The previous year he had been much taken with the millennialist calculations of the anonymous author of Reasons from Prophecy, Why the Second Coming of Christ, And the Commencement of the Millenium, is Immediately to be Expected (1786), published from his Dorset Street premises under the “Millenium Press” imprint. It is possible that the author (“A Christian”) was Hawes himself. The work’s scriptural calculations are as intricate and ingenious as their superimposition onto European political and religious history. Calculating from internal evidence in the Book of Daniel, Reasons from Prophecy estimated that the world was nearing the end of a 1,335 year epoch that would terminate not in the year 1800 but in 1790. The author argued that the last 45 years were timed from 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion (a “futile attempt . . . to place the British Sceptre in the hands of a Popish Prince” (p. 31)). The work’s noticeably anti-Catholic politics are congruent with Hawes’s interest in Lord George Gordon, but the pamphlet also discussed the significance of increased activity in the Aurora Borealis as well as Newton’s prediction that a major comet would bypass Earth in 1789 (p. 32). This combination of Enlightenment science coupled to nationalist politics,



Hawes’s poem “On Viewing The City Regalia, &c. Addressed To The Late Lord Mayor Of London” regarded the annual mayoral office as a significant bulwark against corruption:

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all served up within apocalyptic Protestant Christianity, indicates something of the complexity of the available mentalities located in working-class metropolitan culture. Whoever wrote Reasons from Prophecy, Hawes’s willingness both to print it and to name his press after its assumptions (a “Millenium Press” presumably due to end in 1790), illustrates not only the loose doctrinal cohesion revealed by the disputatious estimates of the millennium date but also the beginnings within London’s artisan subcultures of the apocalyptic wave so vividly taken up Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott nearly ten years later.15 Notwithstanding his London experiences, Hawes confronted political and judicial authority again in Croydon when he took up the cause of a group of journeymen bookbinders imprisoned for forming an early type of trade union agitating for a one hour reduction in their 14 hour working day.16 However neglected Robert Hawes is now, evidently the rudimentary systems of surveillance in place prior to the Napoleonic war were sufficiently well organized to bring him to the attention of the local authorities because a copy of his A Letter to the Honourable Mr. Justice Ashurst, Occasioned by his Lordship’s Late Sentence Gainst[sic] Five Journeymen Book-Binders (1787) was forwarded to the Home Office.17 The incident is a significant one, pre-dating the oppressive measures of the early 1790s.18 That such tactics were systematic rather than coincidental is proven by the Croydon authority’s enclosure to the Home Office of another of Hawes’s works, a broadside poem with notes, The Rose and Lilly of Christian and Natural Liberty United, a somewhat cumbersome symbolic meditation on the equality of the sovereign (gold coin/ruler) and farthing (bronze coin/subjects) in the political economy.19 In the event, Hawes does not appear to have been prosecuted. Perhaps the tactic of burying subversive statements within acrostics implied such a sufficiently complex set of courtroom hermeneutics as to disable any prosecution but the changed context of British politics in the early 1790s was to be a different matter. During the controversies surrounding Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92), Hawes became an ingenious contributor to the swiftly polarizing national political climate. At this point his religious affiliations became less prominently expressed as his energies turned toward supporting the “new” natural rights agenda. Even so, the exact nature of his political and theological positions presents a considerable challenge to modern interpretation. For example, although Antinomianism is often found closely associated with radical subcultures, Hawes felt happy to publish John Fletcher’s Logica Genevensis Continued. Or, the First [and Second] Part of the Fifth Check to Antinomianism, 2nd edn. (1773) as well the same author’s A Third Check To Antinomianism (1775).20 Despite these unpredictable fractures in the microcultures of religious radicalism, Hawes took steps constantly to maintain direct links with his class.



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Social conviviality was a strategy of dissemination Hawes took seriously as the government’s repressive moves against seditious utterance took effect by the end of 1792—assisted by the surveillance offered by the extra-parliamentary APLAP. Having experienced surveillance in Croydon, Hawes developed evasion techniques that thwarted his arrest yet sustained his polemical effectiveness. Hawes turned to printing his protests on fragile “Tobacco papers” for distribution in taverns. No doubt the idea was to burn (or even “smoke”) the papers if spies were discovered in the room. Their circulation in a public house called the Koins in Kennington, on the “Surrey” side of the Thames, was quickly discovered by that loose organization of usually anonymous informers who kept the APLAP supplied with instances of seditious utterance. In early December 1792 a correspondent (who signed himself “Detector”) forwarded a copy of Hawes’s “inflammatory Paper” to the Association. The enclosure was a flyer for The Star of Liberty: Or The Constitutional Cockade!, a lost publication intended to include “Patriotic” toasts, acrostics on Tom Paine, Major Peter “Labelliere” [sic], George III and William Pitt as well as “V. The Rights of Man, an Acrostical Song. / [and] VI. the Proclamation of Liberty, an Acrostical Song.”21 This informationgathering by the APLAP appears to have been effective because another publication similar to The Star of Liberty became the subject of a prosecution by the Treasury Solicitor.22 Whether it was intercepted in a tavern is not known but the indicted publication contained an identical acrostic to the paper found by “Detector” attacking kingcraft and window-tax (“JAM P./UZZ. LED HO./W. TOLI VEW HIL:/EK ING. C. R. AFT/M.A. YA BUS EMY./RIG.H.T./SAND-TAX!/T.HE.JOY, SO F./D AY.”).23 Printed on one large piece of tobacco paper, this work was called The Triumph of LIBERTY: OR, The RIGHTS of MAN The MOST GRACIOUS Proclamation. Sung in the Grand Lodge of CONSTITUTIONAL WHIGS, and FRIENDS of the PEOPLE . . . Tune, “Hearts of Oak.” That Hawes intended it for communal singing is not only consistent with the sociability of tavern venues but, more important, his description in the imprint as “printer to the above society” indicates that at the beginning of the 1790s he was beginning to support the newly emerging corresponding and reformist groups. Although Hawes chose the most fragile of print mediums, the range of his political targets became ever more comprehensive. There was a double empowerment. The choice of tobacco papers and tavern venues was designed to ensure deep dissemination into artisan culture combined with the greatest likelihood of safety for readers. The APLAP’s surveillance proves how he successfully reached tavern audiences. Additionally, because many of Hawes’s own print strategies and political ideologies were developed during the 1780s, he was able to rapidly realign his work amid the polarizations around Paine and Burke. The Triumph of LIBERTY mocked Burke’s




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Proclamations we dread not—but rather desire, They say to the sleepers—“Arise and Enquire!” For the good of the Nation no more do we seek, Than a New Proclamation at least once a week.

Hawes’s visualization of a pamphlet war is definitive evidence of the existence of a late eighteenth-century plebeian public sphere although his tactics also incorporated formulations traceable back to much earlier modes of print culture. His tobacco paper broadside, Libertas Dei Gratia! The Proclamation of LIBERTY! A SONG continued a tradition of directly addressing the sovereign (“Ponder well this PROCLAMATION: / Read it, Britons, to each King!”) (c. 1792). Hawes had used a similar form in Death at our Windows! (“Perpend it, ye who Third in order reign: / Lets Kings by equal Laws their state maintain; / Each public grievance is a regal stain” (p. 2)), a feature common to some other artisan contemporaries such as the seditious Sudbury linen-draper pamphleteer Thomas Bentley.24 These addresses to the person of the king are a particularly late incarnation of what Paula McDowell has identified as features of early eighteenth-century print culture where distinctions between writing and speech were similarly blurred.25 The ultimate importance of Hawes’s publication strategies of the early 1790s was that he brought to the newer radical agendas the experiences of two decades. Tom Paine, as far as Hawes was concerned, was only the latest representative of the unenfranchized. His friend Peter Labilliere had a couple of years earlier declared the importance to national politics of the “approved friends of the poor and of the hand-bill . . . men distinguished by virtue, and not property . . . like Andrew Marvel.”26 For Hawes, Paine was the new Marvell. The taverns of Kennington were those hitherto idealized venues where, in Labilliere’s words, “the poorest, being animated by . . . the principles of the hand-bill” could read or sing The Star of Liberty and The Proclamation of LIBERTY! Deep in the working-class areas of Spitalfields and Kennington, in working-class taverns during the political infightings of the 1790s, debates about reformist, loyalist and even physical force strategies were directly related to a living historiography of seventeenth-century radicalism. Hawes was also influential beyond Spitalfields and the tavern culture he first addressed. He increasingly thought of himself as engaged with the wider Reformist movement, particularly as it became transformed into the relatively well-to-do organization of “master” craftsmen typical of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). As well as addressing a pamphlet to them (To



rhetorical skills (“Apostate! give over your eloquence pray!”) and defiantly encouraged counter-Proclamations against sedition:

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the London Corresponding Society, associated for effecting A Free and Equal Representation of the People in Parliament, &c. &c. (nd)), the exact intersection of Hawes and the LCS is evidenced by the seizure in May 1794 of one of his pamphlets in the government sweep that collected prosecution evidence for the treason trials brought against leading LCS members.27 The pamphlet they seized, Elegiac Stanzas in Memory of Louis XVI. Late King of the French: Who Was Beheaded, Jan. 21, 1793. At Paris, must have appeared immediately after the opening of hostilities between Britain and France and was one of the last pamphlets issued from his 107 Whitechapel Road premises. Predictably enough, it expressed clear anti-war sentiments: ENGLAND! The Death of Louis calls aloud, REFORM! and Peace Proclaim with ALL mankind; Revenge belongs to GOD!—Shall British Blood Be spilt for nought? Forbid it every mind! (p. vi)

The location of Hawes’s pamphlets amongst LCS papers shows the contemporary circulation of his printings at the forefront of the organized political reformist movement of the early 1790s. Hawes’s innocuous title (Elegiac Stanzas) concealed beneath its apparent sentimentality uncompromising attitudes toward kingship: “Monarchs! his fall proclaims—Imperial Power / Exists on tenures quite precarious here!” (p. i). Once in the hands of the Treasury Solicitor—had the treason trials been successful—such pamphlets would have been useful to the government in securing further convictions.28 The circulation of Hawes’s works in the Kennington tavern is definitive proof of how he reached a predominantly artisan audience. Despite possible disturbance by the Treasury Solicitor’s interest, it is significant that Hawes chose to stay in this community, although at the end of 1792, or beginning of January 1793, he re-located to another Spitalfields location in WhiteRow. The period coincides with Hawes’s return to the prophetic register earlier explored in Reasons from Prophecy (1786). His Letter from a Citizen in London to his Friend in the Country: With a Copy of a remarkable Prophecy, relative to the Present Times, lately found under a Wall in Paris, dated August 1793, shows a remarkable coincidence of publication with Blake’s prophetic works America and Visions of the Daughters of Albion of the same year. The prophetic statements, supposedly “engraved on a flagstone of two yards square, in Hebrew characters,” echo the Hebraic foundations of prophetic utterance claimed as marks of the authenticity of Richard Brothers. Indeed, as well as stating the belief that “The Millennium will soon come, I have long been satisfied in my own mind,” the Letter uncannily suggests the presence of Richard Brothers a full year before his national notoriety: “O may




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we live to see the really illustrious descendant alluded to; who if this be true, must be now alive, past Infancy, probably in Europe; perhaps in England.” It is not important whether Hawes knew Brothers but rather that his Letter from a Citizen in London was so finely tuned to the contemporary political climate where belief in Brothers’ prophetic role was gathering increasingly large numbers of followers. However, it is unlikely Brothers was the sole impetus behind Hawes’s return to prophecy and to its Hebraic ancestry in particular because he was also a regular prison visitor to the Hebrew convert Lord George Gordon, then languishing in Newgate.29 Gordon died there of “gaol fever” (typhus) in November 1793 and became the subject of Hawes’s An Acrostical Tribute Of Respect, To The Memory Of The Late Right Honorable[sic] Lord George Gordon, Who Died In Newgate, November 1. 1793. In Which Are Introduced Some Prophetic Ideas Relative To the Call Of The Jews, Expected Very Shortly To Commence. Hawes’s relationship with Gordon appears to have been very personal. Not only was the Acrostical Tribute dedicated as a traumatized testament of affection (“To LORD GEORGE GORDON’s memory, this verse / HAWES writes, who almost envieth his hearse” (p. 4)), but its acrostic spelled out a rare degree of personal anguish: “Lover and friend hath thou separated from me and hid mine acquaa[sic]intance in the earth[?]” Hawes viewed Gordon as a prophet heralding the millennium: Awhile I hop’d my just departed Friend, In Hebrew vers’d, might probably become No mean proclaimer of the glorious End The Gospel wills JERUSALEM and Rome. (p. 4)

Eighteen months later, the “Prince of the Hebrews” Richard Brothers was carefully cross-examined by the Privy Council about the extent of his adherence to Gordon.30 Indeed, Hawes’s prison visits to Newgate and his eulogy on Gordon were themselves events with distinct political dimensions in the finely tuned cultural registers of contemporary radicalism. The whole episode of Gordon’s death in Newgate had become a cause célèbre for those radical dissidents imprisoned alongside him. In the stand-off between the government and the LCS in early 1794, Newgate prisoner Thomas Lloyd’s Impositions and Abuses in the Management of the Jail of Newgate (1794), essentially a condemnation of the government denial of “the existence of the Jail-distemper, raging in this place, [at] the latter end of last October, and the beginning of November” (p. 3), itself became the subject of a prosecution. Equally interesting, its publication also signaled the coming together of



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a formidable coalition of radical pressmen including Daniel Isaac Eaton, H. D. Symonds, Daniel Holt and Thomas Spence.31 The collective organizational ability of bodies like the LCS, as well as the highly agile (and more radical) groupings of like-minded publishers such as those listed above, are indicative of how Hawes represented a type of activism that by the mid-1790s was already somewhat outmoded. Hawes’s roots were in a radical print culture of solid independence, loud and vigorously individualistic yet also safely obscured beneath acrostics. It is typical that, before he disappeared from view in 1796, the new cause to which he became attached was one based in Spitalfields showing the beginnings of a workers’ co-operative aimed at combating the shortages caused by the forestalling of grain in the wake of 1795 harvest failure. The co-operative’s beginnings can be found in A True Description of the Real Causes and Principles of the British Fraternal and Philanthropic Community, United against Monopoly and Extortion (1796), a pamphlet printed at Hawes’s press but written by Andrew Larcher who founded the society at a tavern meeting in Bethnal Green in early 1796. The names of Larcher’s co-signatories strongly suggest the Huguenot populace of Spitalfields’ notoriously impoverished silk-weaving industry. The proposal to set up co-operatively owned storehouses of coal and corn is a significant development in the maturity of the radical movement out of Enlightenment natural rights agitation and into economic realities. Hawes also printed Larcher’s A Remedy For Establishing Universal Peace And Happiness, Against Universal Oppression, And Dangerous Tumults, Or, The Friendly Dictates Of Common Sense, To All Working People, Especially To The Silk Weavers Of London . . . ONE FIRMLY UNITED FRIENDLY AND PHILANTHROPIC SOCIETY OF FREE TRADESMEN (1796). As well as the hint of millenarianism in its title, Hawes may also have welcomed the inclusion of Larcher’s poem in A Remedy (“Go, plan of pure philanthropy, / Extend thy good to all mankind: / Go and chastise monopoly, / To feed the poor and lead the blind”). By the time of the publication in January 1797 of the society’s constitution in Fraternal and Philanthropic Policy, or Articles of the British Fraternal and Philanthropic Community, United against Monopoly and Extortion, Hawes’s name was missing from the imprint as, indeed, it is from the London trade directories for that year. It seems likely he died in 1796. The articles of the Community require payments into a “friendly society” aimed at providing such things as pensions at the age of 55, the education, clothing and care of orphan children and the re-distribution of weaving employment in times of hardship. In another revealing sign of the progressive impact of new attitudes on even the most stubborn “old Jacks,” female “sisters” were introduced as equal partners—provided they kept up with their payments. As a fitting epitaph for a life spent immersed in print culture, radical politics and dissenting religion deep inside one of London’s poorest areas,




David Worrall

Hawes would have been interested to know that a copy of his handbill, British Fraternal, and Philanthropic COMMUNITY (“Fraternal Endeavours United for Reciprocal Advantages”), with his name proudly inscribed in the imprint as “Printer to the Community,” was forwarded for inspection to the Privy Council, a body similar in magnitude to today’s Cabinet.32 Even if he is unfamiliar to us today, the government already had in its departmental files a considerable dossier of documents relating to Hawes and his lifetime in political activism. Of all the achievements of Hawes’s disputatious life, it is the Fraternal and Philanthropic Community that most precisely contradicts James Chandler’s thesis in England in 1819. Although Hawes was thoroughly immersed in poetry and print culture, contemporary social and economic conditions demanded developments that do not appear to fall within the sort of reflexive “casuistry” of events Chandler elaborates. The Community was a discrete response to a set of problems relating to poverty and subsistence. Although, as I have shown, Hawes continuously advocated various political and religious ideologies through his publications, the Spitalfields Fraternal and Philanthropic Community did not “frame” itself as a “case” respective to any notion of its own historicism. To understand what this really means, one must turn to another, grimmer, facet of late eighteenthcentury print culture. There exists a stark set of late 1790s pamphlets instructing well-meaning individuals how to set up “soup kitchens” and charitable food depots in Spitalfields and adjacent areas.33 Obviously, the motives behind their inception were the maintenance of social order as much as humanity (soup was chosen because “its saves porter and small beer by not exciting thirst”) but, when read closely after a hermeneutical model not dissimilar to Chandler’s, the pamphlets reveal the intensity of the area’s material deprivation. With just a little imagination, we can also visualize the impact on the lives of individuals. Printed pro-formas (specimen samples were included) were to be used, counter-signed by persons willing to testify to the recipients’ good character, which allowed free food to be obtained from “cook shops” and potato wholesalers in Spitalfields. Surveillance was now integrated into subsistence. One of the most distressing mute records of these times appears in the engraved specimen layouts for the soup kitchens. Their design is easily recognizable to any modern visitor to a major international airport. The numbers of claimants anticipated necessitated the provision of “zig-zag” barriers to contain and control the constant flow of people. These pamphlets were issued in 1797, again in 1799 and once more in 1800 as harvests failed, grain was forestalled and starvation threatened. Now where, one might ask, is the “casuistry” in that?



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1. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998). 2. The classic founding works on 1780s Swedenborgianism and the cult of Richard Brothers are Morton D. Paley, “William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford, 1973), pp. 260–93; Morton D. Paley, “‘A New Heaven is Begun’: William Blake and Swedenborgianism,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 12 (1979), 873–91, rpt. in Blake and Swedenborg: Opposition is True Friendship, ed. Harvey F. Bellin and Darrell Ruhl (New York, 1985), pp. 15–34. See also David Worrall, “William Bryan: Another Anti-Swedenborgian Visionary Engraver of 1789,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 34 (2000), 14–22. 3. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 275. 4. Reproduced in David Bindman et al., The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London, 1989), cat. 70. 5. Captain Edward Thompson, The Works of Andrew Marvell, Esq. Poetical, Controversial and Political, Containing Many Original Letters, Poems, and Tracts, Never Before Printed, with a New Life of the Author, 3 vols. (London, 1776). Thompson’s edition was the first to include Marvell’s three Cromwell poems (“An Horatian Ode,” “The First Anniversary,” and “A Poem Upon the Death of O. C.”). 6. H. R. Plomer, G. H. Bushnell and E. R. McC.Dix, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford, 1932), p. 120; Ian Maxted, The London Book Trades, 1775–1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Folkestone, 1977). 7. Stanley Morison, John Bell, 1745–1831: Bookseller, Printer, Publisher, Typefounder, Journalist, &c. (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 13–25, 100. 8. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford, 1998). 9. See Mary Fletcher, Jesus, Altogether Lovely: Or A Letter To Some Of The Single Women In The Methodist Society (1766); John Wesley, A Calm Address To Our American Colonies (1775). His other printings from this period include An Extract Of The Christian’s Pattern: Or A Treatise Of The Imitation Of Christ . . . By Thomas A Kempis (1774); Charles Wesley, Gloria Patri &c. Or, Hymns To The Trinity, 6th edn. (1775). 10. P[ublic] R[ecords] O[ffice], Kew: War Office 34/130. 175, 16 February 1781; B[enedict] C[hastanier], Prospectus pour La Publication de Quelques Traités Theologiques, Originairement Écrits en Latin, Par le seu, Emanuel Baron de Swedenborg . . . Par seu Nicholas de La Pierre . . . B.C. (c.1781). 11. Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia: Or Heavenly Mysteries Contained In The Sacred Scriptures . . . Now First Translated From The Original Latin Of Emanuel Swedenborg, By A Society Of Gentlemen. Volume The First (1783).



Notes

David Worrall

12. Emanuel Swedenborg, De La Nouvelle Jerusalem et de sa Doctrine Céleste (1782). Chastanier’s copy is in the British Library (BL). 13. The full title is, Death at our Windows! Together with Oppression! Two Poetic Lectures, Humbly Addressed To the Majesty of the People. To which are Added, Some Moral and Political Aphorisms, In Several Very Curious Acrostics. By the Author of a Poetic Lecture on Lotteries. The Second Edition, with Large Additions, Particularly Solomon’s Advice to his Son! Or the Touch-Stone of Patriotism, A Poetical Sermon (c. 1786), p. 3. 14. For printers and oral culture, see McDowell, The Women of Grub Street, pp. 139–40. 15. Hawes’s knowledge of the chronological basis of scripture must have been aided by his printing of the third volume of Henry Hunter’s Sacred Biography: or, the History of the Patriarchs from Adam to Abraham Inclusively, 6 vols. (London, 1783–92). 16. Ellis Howe, The London Bookbinders, 1780–1806 (London, 1988), chapters 1 and 2. 17. PRO H[ome] O[ffice] 42/12. 229–231, c. September 1787. 18. By late 1792 there was a loyalist “Croydon Constitutional Society” whose declared object was “to discourage and suppress all seditious and Inflamatory publications,” PRO HO 42/23. 113, 4 December 1792. 19. The Rose and Lilly of Christian and Natural Liberty United. Or, A Sovereign Proclamation against every Species of Political and Commercial Evil, in an Acrostical Meditation on a Farthing (Croydon, c. 1787). 20. On radical Antinomianism, see Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford, 1992). 21. BL Add Ms 16,922, ff. 2, 12, 13; 11 December 1792. 22. PRO T[reasury] S[olicitor] 24/3/174, c. 1792. 23. “I am puzzled how to live while kingcraft may abuse my rights and tax the joys of day.” 24. Thomas Bentley, A Short View of some of The Evils and Grievances, which at this time oppress, The British Empire, through The Corruption of its Government: And which are Utterly Contrary to the Spirit and Precepts of REASON and Christianity (1792); PRO TS 11/579/1904. 25. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street, chapter 3. 26. Peter Labilliere, Letters to the Majesty of the People (1784), p. 31. 27. PRO TS 11/952/3496 (2). 28. On the scale of the LCS arrests, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 190–93. 29. Iain McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counterculture,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 22.1 (1998), 95–110. 30. PRO P[rivy] C[ouncil] 1/28/60, PC 1/28/61; 5 March 1795. 31. Impositions and Abuses in the Management of the Jail of Newgate; Addressed to the late Grand Juries of the City of London and County of Middlesex. by Thomas Lloyd, A citizen of the United States of America and an Officer in their Army



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during the Late War. Now confined in that prison, for the publication of a supposed libel on Bastiles [15 January 1794] (D. I Eaton, Newgate-Street; James Ridgway, York Street, H.D. Symonds, Paternoster-row, Mary le bone Street; T. Spence, Holborn; Daniel Holt, Newark, and J. Philips, Leicester, 1794); PRO TS 24/3/150. 32. PRO PC 1/34/90. 33. An Account Of A Meat And Soup Charity, Established In The Metropolis, In The Year 1797, With Observation Relative To The Situation Of The Poor, And On The Means Of Bettering The Condition Of The Labouring People With Regard To Food; And Of Increasing Their Comforts In Other Respects, By A More Frugal Mode Of Living Particularly In The City Of London, And Its Environs (1797); The Economy Of An Institution, Established In Spitalfields, London, For The Purpose Of Supplying The Poor With A Good Meat Soup . . . With A View To The Establishment Of Similar Institutions, In Towns, Villages, And Populous Neighbourhoods (1799); Suggestions Offered to the Consideration of the Public, and in particular to the more opulent Classes of the Community, for the Purpose of reducing the Consumption of Bread Corn . . . by means of Soup Establishments &c. (1800). For the context, see Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1763–1803 (Gloucester, 1988).







Blake’s Visionary Heads: Lost Drawings and a Lost Book1 G. E. Bentley, Jr.

O

ne of the most perplexing of William Blake’s works is his huge suite of drawings of the illustrious dead called Visionary Heads. These were fostered by the enthusiastic and credulous artist and astrologer John Varley, chiefly in 1819–1820. The Visionary Heads are challenging in terms of what Blake saw—indeed whether he “saw” them—why he recorded them just then, how or whether the visitants were chosen, and whether the portraits (and the conversations with the sitters) are to be judged in terms of artistic license or of the paranormal. The Visionary Heads are perplexing also because many of the drawings and indeed whole books have disappeared. The Small Blake-Varley sketchbook of Visionary Heads was not discovered until 1967,2 the Large BlakeVarley sketchbook was discovered in 1989,3 and the Folio Blake-Varley sketchbook is identified (but not discovered) here for the first time. Blake’s Visionary Heads excited public comment during his lifetime,4 and after his death apparently firsthand accounts appeared in the Literary Chronicle (1 September 1827), John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and His Times (1828), John Varley, Zodiacal Physiognomy (1829), Allan Cunningham, Lives of the English Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830), Monthly Magazine (1833), Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (1841), Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (1841), Walter Thornbury, British Artists from Hogarth to Turner (1861), and John Sartain, Reminiscences of a Very Old Man 1808–97 (1899). Most arguments about Blake’s sanity deal anxiously or dismissively with the Visionary Heads.5 Naturally many who heard that Blake drew pictures of the famous and infamous dead and had conversations with his invisible



Chapter 12 z

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

visitants concluded that he must be mad. Any lingering suspension of disbelief was likely to be banished when they learned that some of the visitants were not long-dead men and women but heretofore unimagined beings, such as Gemini and Cancer and The Ghost of a Flea. So plain was Blake’s madness to some that they assumed he must have been confined in a madhouse.6 After 1820, most accounts of Blake refer to his Visionary Heads either as evidence of his madness or as something to be explained away—perhaps as a joke on Varley. Scarcely anyone allows for the possibility that Blake drew what he really saw and that what he saw was really there, an extraordinary or spiritual phenomenon. From Blake’s earliest appearances in public, his pictures and poems were characterized as the work of a madman. A review of the 1785 Royal Academy exhibition said that his “Bard . . . appears like some lunatic, just escaped from the incurable cell of Bedlam”; in 1797 the artist John Hoppner asserted that Blake’s designs “were like the conceits of a drunken fellow or a madman”; and in 1826 Southey praised his design of “The Reunion of the Soul and the Body” for Blair’s Grave in curiously ambivalent terms: “the highest genius alone could have conceived it, and only madness have dared to attempt the execution.”7 Often the grounds for the conclusion that Blake’s art is mad were that Blake represented the spiritual world in forms disconcertingly like those of the material, tangible world. In damning Blake’s Grave designs, Robert Hunt assumed “the utter impossibility of representing the Spirit to the eye” and concluded that Blake is “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.”8 Similarly, the unconventionality or wildness of Blake’s poetry was regularly taken to indicate madness, even by the best judges, Blake’s poetical peers. Wordsworth said of Songs of Innocence and of Experience “there is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the Sanity of Lord Byron & Walter Scott.”9 “Lamb used to call him a ‘mad Wordsworth’,” and Walter Savage Landor wished that Blake and Wordsworth “could have divided his madness between them.”10 Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, “held him for a decided madman . . . he showed S. a perfectly mad poem called Jerusalem,” and William Beckford said “the Tyger” “seems to have [been] stolen . . . from the walls of Bedlam.”11 Most of these men had not met Blake, and they drew their conclusions from his works rather than his person. However, even men who knew him well concluded, as Fuseli did, that “Blake has something of madness about him.”12 According to Crabb Robinson, Flaxman “did not join in the ordinary derision of him as a madman,”13 but he did speak of “Blake’s irritabil-



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ity,” and he said: “I very much fear his abstracted habits are . . . much at variance with the usual modes of human life.”14 William Hayley wrote of the “perilous powers of . . . [Blake’s] Imagination,” his “nervous Irritation,” and his “sensibility . . . so dangerously acute,” that he “has often appeared to me on the verge of Insanity.”15 Blake’s intimate friend George Cumberland said that “Blakes Cat. is truly original—part vanity part madness—part very good sense,” and he told his son that Blake “is a little Cracked, but very honest— as to his wife she is maddest of the Two.”16 Some of the most telling evidence comes from Crabb Robinson, a careful observer and a responsible reporter. Before he met Blake, Robinson described him in 1811 as “insane,” exhibiting “the union of genius and madness.”17 When he met Blake in 1825, Robinson did not change his mind, writing of him as a “Madman,” and of his “mad doctrines,” his “interesting insanities.”18 It is “his religious convictions [which] had brought on him the credit of being an absolute lunatic,” the “half crazy crotchets about the two worlds.”19 There seems to have been a change in Blake by 1820. His intimate friends John Flaxman and William Hayley had written of “Blake’s irritability” (2 January 1804), his “nervous Irritation” (3 August 1805), his “little Touches of nervous Infirmity” (15 July 1802) “on the verge of Insanity” (3 August 1805), like the mad William Cowper. Southey concluded from his visit to Blake in 1812 that “you could not have delighted in him—his madness was too evident, too fearful. It gave his eyes an expression such as you would expect to see in one who was possessed.”20 However, those who met Blake after 1820 were struck by his serenity. Crabb Robinson, who met him in 1825, said that “he had an air of inspiration—But not such, as without a previous acquaintance with him, or attending to what he said, would suggest the notion that he was insane. There was nothing wild about his look.”21 The young men who met Blake through Linnell not only did not think him mad; they thought him singularly sane. Samuel Palmer wrote: “I remember William Blake, in the quiet consistency of his daily life, as one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane man I have ever known.”22 According to John Linnell, “I never in all my conversations with him could for a moment feel there was the least justice in calling him insane—he could always explain his paradoxes satisfactorily when he pleased but to many he spoke so that ‘hearing they might not hear’.”23 Edward Calvert told Gilchrist, “I saw nothing but sanity . . . saw nothing mad in his conduct, actions, or character.” Francis Oliver Finch was sure that “he was not mad, but perverse and wilful; he reasoned correctly from arbitrary, and often false premisses.” John Varley’s brother Cornelius asserted that “there was nothing mad about him,” and “James Ward, who had often met Blake in society and talked with him, would never hear him called mad.”24



Blake’s Visionary Heads

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

Blake himself questioned the definition of madness, commenting on Swedenborg, “Who shall dare to say . . . that all elevation . . . is Enthusiasm & Madness?”25 To those who identified enthusiasm with madness, Blake said, “I am Mad or Else you are So[;] both of us cannot be in our right Senses.”26 According to James Ward, “Blake himself would sometimes . . . [say] that ‘there are probably men shut up as mad in Bedlam, who are not so: that possibly the madmen outside have shut up the sane people.’”27Blake viewed the world from the vantage point of enthusiasm; he believed that the world is moved by spirits, and he saw and spoke to these spiritual realities. Blake recorded many of the spirits whom he saw and spoke with. In what follows, I am concerned primarily to identify the three books in which most of his Visionary Heads appear—the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook, the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook, and the Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook, including surviving leaves that have been removed from them. I shall also identify some of the scores of Visionary Heads that have disappeared. Blake’s Visionary Heads In 1819, Blake began making Visionary Heads for John Varley. Many of these were drawn in three books provided by Varley: The Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook (discovered 1967), The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook (discovered 1989), and The Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook (not yet discovered). The first two were in use at the same time, for each bears the date 29 October 1819; the Folio Sketchbook may be a little later, for Lais and Pindar28 is inscribed “drawn by Blake Septr 18. 1820,” and The Egyptian Task Master was drawn in Fountain Court where Blake lived from 1821 to 1827 (see #696A). In addition, there are many loose Visionary Heads.29 The Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook 15.5 x 20.5 cm; watermark: 1806 <Butlin #692, now broken up> Page 5 12 22 23 24 25 27 36

inscriptions about the Empress Maud eight profiles details of a chapel, perhaps the Empress Maud’s; also a female (saint?) a woman, perhaps the Empress Maud, in a Gothic apse ground plan of the scene in p. 23 with a quotation from the Empress Maud a woman, perhaps the Empress Maud, in a canopied bed “Empress Maud” “Caractacus” 10.1057/9780230107205 - Romanticism and Millenarianism, Edited by Tim Fulford


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38 53 57 64 66 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92 93 94 96 98 99 102 103 104 106 108 110 131 a c

“Falconberg,” two profiles An angel and a female (saint?), with a quotation about Hotspur “Falconberg taking leave of King John & his [John’s] mother Queen Eleanor” A seated king in agony “Prince Arthur[?]” A head in profile with a pronounced nose and chin A standing figure with a crown and sceptre “Harrold killd at the Battle of Hastings” Herod?, a noble head of a man in armour Corinna? in profile Half length of a bound girl with bared breasts Figures (one crowned) beneath trees Antinous? King John? An archer with a sword Merlin30 Three figures before a cromlech Ghost of a flea, whole length “Milton’s first wife” Ghost of a flea, head in profile The Devil[?] and a man in armour The Man Who Built the Pyramids Drawings related to p. 102 Profile heads of a man with a crown and a woman Voltaire, in profile Edward VI? with a spiky collar Lais of Corinth the Courtesan? Quotations from Hotspur Richard Coeur de Lion Cancer

The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook 25.4 x 20.3 cm; watermark: C BRENCHLEY | 1804 <not in Butlin> Contents Listed in the Order in which Blake Probably Made His Drawings with the titles added by Varley or, occasionally, Linnell 31 Folio 89

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88? 87? 86? 85 84? 83r 82? 81v 80r 79v? 78? 77? 76? 75? 74? 73?

72? 71 70? 69v 68? 67v 66? 65v 64? 63? 62? 61v 60v 59v 58v 57v 56v 55v 54v

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

“Canute Dark Hair & Eyes” (Butlin #721) cut out “Solomon” counterproof (#702) cut out “Solomon,” “J Linnell from Mr Blake” (#701) cut out “List of Portraits Drawn by W. Blake from Visions . . .” “Cassibelane The British cheif” (#716) cut out “Cassibelane the British Chief,” “By Blake Octr 27. 1819 11 P.M.,” cut out and re-affixed to the stub of p. 82 “Boadica” counterproof cut out (#717) “Cassibelane” “Merlin” counterproof “Merlin” cut out (#757 [called “A Welsh Bard, Job, or Moses(?)”] “Queen Eleanor” counterproof (#727) cut out32 “owen Glendower” cut out (#743) “King John” (#731) cut out “Hotspur” (#745) cut out King John counterproof (#732) cut out “Wat Tyler by Wm Blake, from his spectre, in the act of striking the Tax Gatherer on the head. drawn Octr. 30. 1819. 1h A M” (#737) cut out “The Taxgatherer killed by Wat Tyler, from a spectral vision seen by Blake” (#742) cut out Blank “The Empress Maud mother to Henry. 2d” (#725), numbered “70,” cut out “Empress Maud,” now attached to 80v “Wat Tylers Daughter” (#741) cut out “Wat Tylers Daughter striving to get loose from the Tax gatherer” “Canute,” “Dark Hair & Eyes” replica(?) (#722), numbered “66” “Wat Tyler in the act of striking the Tax Gatherer” Wat Tyler counterproof cut out (#740), numbered “64” Wat Tyler Striking the Tax Gatherer replica (#738)33 cut out “Faulconberg the Bastard” cut out (#730), numbered “62” “The Bastard Faulconberg” “Hotspur” “Owen Glendower” “Alexander the Great” “Henry the 5th” “the Black Prince” “Robin Hood” “Pharoah who knew Joseph”



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53v 52v 51v 50v, 49v 48v 47v 46v 45v 44v 43v 42v 41v 40v 39v 38v 37v 36v 35v 34r-v, 33v 32v

31r 31v 30v 29v 28v 28r–27v 26v 25r-v, 24r-v 24r 23v 22v 21v 20v 19v 18v 7 6

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“Josephs Mistress,” i.e., Potiphar’s wife “Perkin Warbeck” “Vortigern” “Rowena” “Felton the assassinator of the Duke of Buckingham” “Milton when a Boy” “Milton when Young” “Charlemagne” “Miltons Youngest Daughter” “Miltons elder daughter” “Bertand de Gourdon who wounded Richard Coeur de Lion with an arrow” “The Captain to Richard the First who Flayd Bertand de Gourdon alive” “Jack Shepherd under the Gallows” “Colonel Blood who attempted to steal the Crown” “The Great Earl of Warwick Brother to Edwd the 4th Drawn by Wm Blake” “Queen Isabella wife of Edwd 2d and mother to Edwd the 3rd” “Robert Bruce King of Scotland” “Geoffrey of Monmouth” “Ossian” “Mother Brownrigg,” “Miss Blandy who poisoned her father,” “Pope Joan,” “Cornelius Agrippa,” “Eloise,” “Abelard,” and “Countess of Essex who Poisoned Overbury” A mitre “Catherine Hayes Burnt for the Murder of her Husband” An archbishop, perhaps Thomas à Becket “Thomas à Becket Preaching” (see also ff. 30v–31r) “Mary Queen of Scots” “Bothwell” “Tom Nixion the Idiot the author of the Prophecies” “Pisistratus” A prisoner in chains between two guards armed with spears “a Daughter of Shakespeare” “Xantippe wife of Socrates” “Olympia,” probably the mother of Alexander the Great “Shakespeare’s Wife” Richard “Savage the Poet” “Sir Robert Lucy. Shakespeares Persecutor” cut out, untraced cut out, untraced




G. E. Bentley, Jr.

In addition, Varley made two lists of Visionary Heads in the Large BlakeVarley Sketchbook. The lists are in different orders, and they correspond only occasionally with the order in the Large Book itself; for instance, in List A, #18–21 are on ff. 58, 60, 61, 59. Of the 50 designs that Varley lists, seven are still present in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook. Of the 43 drawings that were removed, 11 leaves still survive, and 32 are otherwise unknown except in other versions (13) such as counterproofs (2). Perhaps Varley made the lists when he removed drawings for Linnell and others. The Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook Varley’s Lists of Visionary Heads [List A, f. 85v] List of Portraits Drawn by W. Blake from Visions which appeared to him & Remained while he compleated them some of which are in other Books34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Caractacus [not otherwise known; see Small BVS, p. 36 and B20] Boadicea [f. 82(?) (counterproof)] Cassivelanus [ff. 83–84(?); see B29] Merlin [ff. 79(?), 80 (counterproof); see B5] a Druid [not otherwise known] Mohamet [not otherwise known; see B22] Saladin [not otherwise known; a copy (#728) is on paper 31.3 x 19.0 watermarked SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815] Richard [I] Coer de Lion [not otherwise known except in Small BVS, p. a; see B21] Queen Eleanor his Mother [f. 78(?) (counterproof); see B23] King John [ff. 74(?) (counterproof), 76(?), Butlin #733 (counterproof)] Prince Arthur [not otherwise known except in Small BVS, p. 66] Edward 1st [Butlin #735?; see B27] St. Dunstan [not otherwise known; see B25] Canute the Great [ff. 66(?), 88(?); see B6] Harrold [known otherwise only in Small BVS, p. 76 and URANIA (1825) (BR, p. 297)] King Henry 1st [not otherwise known; see B3, 28] Empress Maud [ff. 69–70(?); see Small BVS, p. 6, 22–27 and B1] Alexander the Great [see f. 58v] Hotspur [see ff. 60, 75(?)] Faulkenberg the Bastard [ff. 61, 62(?)]



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21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 43 44 45 46 47

191

Owen Glendower [ff. 59, 77(?)] Solomon [ff. 86(?), 87(?) (counterproof); see B24] Wm Wallace [not otherwise known as a separate portrait but see Edward I and William Wallace and B26] Mackbeth [not otherwise known; see B30] Lady Mackbeth [not otherwise known] Edward the 4th [not otherwise known; see B31] Jane Shore [not otherwise known; see B32] Rd the third [not otherwise known; see B13] Pharoh King of Egypt [f. 54v; see B37] Joseph [not otherwise known; see B38] Robert Duke of Normandy [not otherwise known; see B36] Wat Tyler [ff. 63(?), 64(?) (counterproof), 65, 72–73(?)] his Daughter [ff. 67, 68(?); see B2] the Tax Gatherer [f. 72(?); see A4] Guy Faux [not otherwise known; see B14] David Rizzio [not otherwise known; see B15] Julius Caesar [not otherwise known; see B9] Alfred the Great [not otherwise known; see B17] Henry 8th [not otherwise known, but see Butlin #747 and B8] Piseistratus [not otherwise known, but see Small BVS, p. 24–25 and B16] The Devil [not otherwise known, but see Small BVS, p. 99 (a Devil), Butlin #693–694 (Satan), Large Book (#762—a Fiend), and B18] Fair Rosamond [not otherwise known; see B12] A Flea whole length [not otherwise known, but see Small BVS, p. 94 (whole length), Butlin #750 (tempera), and B33] Portrait of the Same [not otherwise known, but see Small BVS, p. 98 (head in profile, and B33] Henry 2d [not otherwise known; see B11]

[Varley List B, f. 89r] Wednesday 29 Tuesday oct 29th 1819 Night35 [1] [2] [3]

The Empress Maud [see A17] Wat tyler & his Daughter Leorge[?] [see A32–33] Queen Mauds Dressing & Bedroom—gothic with inlaid wooden floor [not otherwise known, but see Small BVS, pp. 22–24]




[4] [5] [6] [7]

[8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]

[20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38]

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

The Tax Gatherer Killd by Wat Tyler [see A34] Merlin [see A4] Canute the Great [see A14] King John [see A10] Octr 1819 Portraits drawn by Wm Blake from the Spectres or visions of departed Persons King Henry 8 [see A39] Julius Ceasar [see A37] Shakespeare [not otherwise known] King Henry 2d [see A43] Fair Rosamond 2 Portraits [see A42] King Richard 3d [see A28] Guy faux [see A35] David Rizio [see A36] Pissistratus [see A40] King Alfred [see A38] The Devil [see A41] King Edy & his Queen Large Portraits [Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castille?, as in Blake’s engraving of “Edward & Elenor” (1793); not otherwise known] Caractacus [see A1] Rd Coeur de Lion [see A8] Mohamet [see A6] Queen Eleanor [see A9] Solomon [see A22] St Dunstan [see A13] Wm Wallace [see A23] King Edward 1st [see A12] King Henry 1st [see A16] King Cassibelane [see A3] Macbeth [see A24] Edward 4 [see A26] Jane Shore [see A27] A Flea—[see A43–44] Wild Thyme [not otherwise known] King Rufus [not otherwise known] Richard Duke of Normandy [see A31] Pharoh [see A29] Joseph [see A30]

The Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook 42 x 27 cm; watermark: W TURNER & SON <Butlin #706, 708, 710–711, 762> 10.1057/9780230107205 - Romanticism and Millenarianism, Edited by Tim Fulford


192

193

In the biography of Blake in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1830) (BR, p. 497), Allan Cunningham described “a large book filled with drawings,” which included “Pindar as he stood a conqueror in the Olympic games,” Corinna, Lais the Courtesan, the “taskmaster whom Moses slew in Egypt,” Herod, and “a fiend” who “resembles . . . two men . . . a great lawyer, and a suborner of false witnesses.”36 Only three of these Visionary Heads survive today: Pindar, Corinna, and Lais. The leaves of paper on which they are drawn are virtually identical in size: Pindar: 41.5 x 26 cm; Corinna 26.2 x 41.7 cm; Lais 26.7 x 41.9 cm. Note that leaves razored out of a volume are likely to differ significantly in width (as these do) but not much in height. No other Visionary Head recorded in Butlin is significantly like these in size. Furthermore, the drawings are on paper bearing the watermark W TURNER & SON,37 and this watermark is found on no other surviving drawing, manuscript, or print by Blake. All these drawings belonged to John Varley, for whom most of the Visionary Heads were made and who is apparently the “friend” who showed Cunningham the volume. Butlin 706* Herod 708 “Corrinna the Rival of Pindar,” and “Corrinna the Grecian Poetess,” two sketches 710* Pindar as he stood a conqueror in the Olympic games 711 “Lais the Courtesan” and “Pindar drawn by Blake Septr 18. 1820” 762* “A Fiend” who “resembles . . . a great lawyer, and . . . a suborner of false witnesses” —— The Task Master Whom Moses Slew in Egypt (lost); another, smaller, version of it (#696: 20.3 x 32.5 cm) is inscribed “The Egyptian Task master who was killd & Buried by Moses,” and a tracing of this version (#696A) is said to represent “a Vision by Wm Blake & Drawn while the same remained Before him, My Self J. Varley being Present, in his Front room first floor No. 3 Fountain Court near Exeter Change” Loose Visionary Heads Butlin # 693 Satan with a plumed helmet and a face like William the Conqueror, watermark JH | 1818 694* Satan as a fiend at Blake’s grated window 695* Lot 696 “The Egyptian Task master who was killd & Buried by Moses” and “Saul King of Israel somewhat Influenced by the evil Spirit” 10.1057/9780230107205 - Romanticism and Millenarianism, Edited by Tim Fulford



696A

696B 697* 698 699 700 703 704* 705 707* 709* 712 713 714 715 718 719 720 723 724 726

728 729 734 735

736 739

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

“The Egyptian Task Master slain by Moses,” “Seen in a Vision by Wm Blake & Drawn while the Same remained Before him, My Self J. Varley being Present, in his Front room first floor No. 3 Fountain Court near Exeter Change”; “This is Traced from the original,” presumably by John Varley “Saul under the Influence of the Evil Spirit,” “Traced from the original By Blake” (#696) presumably by Varley Saul “David”; watermark J WHATMAN(?) “Uriah the Husband of Bathsheba” and “Bathsheba”; watermark JH 1818 “Solomon”; watermark W 1815 Job; watermark SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815 “Nebuchadnezzar Coin as Seen in a Vision by Mr. Blake.” Watermark M & J LAY 1816 “Joseph & Mary & the room They were seen in” “Head of Achilles drawn by Willm Blake at my [Varley’s] request. 1825” A female head; watermark J GREEN 1819 “Lais” and a foot and ankle; watermark M & J LAY 1816 “Socrates”; watermark SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815 Socrates; watermark BASTED MILL 1820 A young faun; watermark M & J LAY 1816 Boadicea? “Caractacus” counterproof “Mahomet”; watermark SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815 Canute counterproof A king in archaic dress Queen Eleanor [of Poitou, Queen of Henry I—see Varley’s list A9 in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook—not the wife of Edward I as in Butlin] “The Assassin laying dead at the feet of Ewd 1st in the holy land” and “Saladin”; watermark SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815 “Rd Coeur de Lion. Drawn from his spectre,” “W Blake fecit Octr 14 1819 at 14 Past 12-Midnight,” . . . “William Wallace” and “Edward Ist” “King Edward the first as he now exists in the other world, according to his appearance to Mr Blake. He here has his scull enlarged like a crown”; Butlin suggests that the Monthly Magazine (1833) account of Edward III may refer to this drawing (Butlin #736 (BR, pp. 298–99)) Edward III?; watermark J GREEN 1819 Wat Tyler replica



194

744 746 747 748 749 750 751 752 753 754 755

756

758 759

760* 761* 763* 763A 764* 765 766* 767 768 ——

195

“Owen Glendower” replica “Gray the Poet” and “Friar Bacon” Henry VIII? as a youth “old Parr when young Viz 40,” “Aug 1820 W. Blake fect.” Watermark 1810 “The spirit of Voltaire by Blake” The Ghost of a Flea, fresco (tempera) Cancer replica of #692 c “The Man who built the Pyramids drawn by William Blake,” “Octr 18. 1819. 15 Degrees of [astrological symbol for] Cancer ascending” The Man Who Taught Blake Painting in His Dreams “Imagination of A man who Mr Blake has recd instruct[ion] in Painting &c from” counterproof “The Portrait of a Man who instructed Mr. Blake in Painting &c. in his Dreams” and “Imagination of a Man whom Blake has recd instruction &c from” replica (?by Linnell) “William Blake—I suppose it to be a Vision Indeed I remember a conversation with Mrs Blake about it. Frederick Tatham”; watermark RUSE & TURNERS(?) Head of Christ(?); “one of the Heads Wm Blake saw in Vision & drew this. attested Fredk. Tatham” Visionary Head: “one of the heads of Personages Blake used to call up & see & sketch, supposed rapidly drawn from his Vision. Frederick Tatham” The Lute Player and a Profile of a Man A king praying Two types of insanity; watermark J GREEN 1819 Two visionary heads Four visionary heads Five visionary heads of women Portraits Nine grotesque heads inscribed by Blake: “all Genius varies Thus Devils are various Angels are all alike” Nude woman seated by a window; watermark M & J LAY 1816 “Jonathan,” watermark JH | 1818, 25.4 x 18.4 cm, sold at Christie’s 9 July 1995, #110 (Colnaghi), and 9 July 1991, #85 (Christopher Powney)

* = untraced; the evidence for it is often anecdotal + = there is also a counterproof or tracing Most of the scattered Visionary Heads are of diverse sizes and watermarks:




196

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

#748 (large; paper size not recorded) #714 (22.5 x 18.5 cm) #709 (24 x 38.5), 736 (24.2 x 20.5), 763 (23.5 x 38) JH [in monogram] | 1818 #693 (23.2 x 31.1), #699 (20.3 x 32.6), “Jonathan” (not in Butlin) (25.4 x 18.4) M & J LAY 1816 #704 (size not recorded), 712 (22.7 x 19.4), 715 (22.7 x 18.9), 768 (18.1 x 22.7) RUSE & TURNERS[?] #756 (24.3 x 21) SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815 #702 (25.9 x 21.1), 713 (31.3 x 20.1), 720 (31.1 x 19.7), 728 (31.3 x 19.9) W 1815[?] #700 (25 x 21.3) J WHATMAN #698 (25.4 x 18) Of these, “1810,” “BASTED MILL 1820,” “RUSE & TURNER,” “W 1815,” and “J WHATMAN” appear only once among the Visionary Heads, and most of these watermarks are not found at all among Blake’s other drawings, engravings, and writings.38 Only “J GREEN 1819,” “JH | 1818,” “M & J LAY 1816,” and “SMITH & ALLNUTT 1815” were used as much as three or four times; if other sketchbooks with Blake’s Visionary Heads are identified, they will probably exhibit one of these watermarks. Blake’s Visionary Heads remain perplexing in their origins, their purposes, and their significance. But it is now clear that most of them originated in just three Blake-Varley Sketchbooks, which are differentiated in size (Small, Large, and Folio), and in watermarks.39 And if the dismembered leaves are re-membered, we can perhaps begin to see not only the order in which the drawings were made but the extent of the losses that have occurred since 1820. Almost all the Visionary Heads that survive came through the hands of John Linnell and of John Varley’s family. Perhaps most of the missing leaves went to collectors who did not hold Blake’s name in awe and discarded them or forgot that they were by William Blake.

Appendix Visionary Heads in Alphabetical Order with Contemporary References Name à Becket, Thomas Abelard Achilles

Location Large BVS 29 Large Book 32 Butlin #707



1810 BASTED MILL 1820 J GREEN 1819

Agrippa, Cornelius Alexander the Great Alfred, King Antinous? Antony, Marc Arthur(?), Prince Bacon, Roger Bathsheba Black Prince; see Edward Blandy, Miss, poisoner Blood, Colonel Boadicea Bothwell Brownrigg, Mother Bruce, Robert

Cancer Canute Caractacus Cassibelane or Cassivelanus Charlemagne Christ? Cleopatra

Corinna David

Devil Dunstan, St Edward I

197

Large BVS, p. 32 Large BVS, p. 58; Varley A18 UNTRACED; see Varley A38, B17; King Alfred “sat to him” (Gilchrist [BR, p. 237]) Small BVS, p. 86 Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298): Blake “knew the Roman, and named him at sight” Small BVS, p. 66, Varley A11 Butlin #746 Butlin #699 Large BVS, p. 32 Large BVS, p. 39 Large BVS, p. 82; Butlin 718?; Varley A2 Large BVS, pp. 27–28 Large BVS, p. 32 Large BVS, p. 36; Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298): “Bruce would now and then call to converse with him” Small BVS, p. c; Butlin #751 Large BVS, pp. 66? 88?; Butlin #723; Varley A14, B6 Small BVS, p. 36; Butlin #719; Varley A1, B20 Large BVS, pp. 81, 83, 84?; Varley A3, B29 Large BVS, p. 45 Butlin #758 UNTRACED; see Urania (1825) (BR, p. 297): “we have seen” the profile drawing; Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298): Blake chatted with her Small BVS, p. 80; Folio BVS; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Butlin #698; Literary Chronicle (1 September 1827): “he drew their portraits in his sketch-book, which portraits we have seen” Small BVS, p. 99?; Varley A41, B18 UNTRACED; see Varley A13, B45 Butlin #728, 734–35; Varley A12, B19, B27; Linnell copied it on 23, 26 October, 1 November 1819 (BRS, p. 104)—“I painted in oil the heads of King Edward & Wm Wallace for Varley from the drawings in black lead pencil” (BR, pp. 263–64);




G. E. Bentley, Jr.

Edward III

Edward IV Edward VI? Edward (Black Prince) Eleanor, Queen of Edward I Eleanor, Queen of Henry II Eleanor, Queen of Henry II Eleanor, Queen of Richard I Eloise Essex, Countess Faulkenberg (Falconberg, Faulconberg) the Bastard Faun Faux, Guy Felton Fiend

Cunningham (1830) (BR, pp. 496–97): drawn “on another sheet of paper,” “framed,” “the size of common life”; Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs (1840) (BR, pp. 261–63) describes “a small canvas, of the common portrait size” representing Wallace with “golden-tinted light-hair,” a “blue eye,” neck “entirely bare,” “a low breastplate of plain workmanship, half-covered by his plaid, broached on the shoulder” and Edward I “armed from head to foot, in a close and superb suit of mail . . . with the visor of his helmet open”—“my friend purchased them both; and . . . shewed them to me” (the surviving pencil drawings show only busts); a lost inscription given in J. Sartain, Reminiscences of a Very Old Man 1808–97 (1899) (BR, pp. 260–61) Butlin #736?; Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, pp. 298–99): “He painted the Monarch in oil, at three sittings,” c. 1825 UNTRACED; see Varley A26, B31 Small BVS, p. 108; Urania (1825) (BR, p. 297): “we have seen” the profile drawing Large BVS, p. 56; Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298): Edward “sate to him for a portrait” UNTRACED; see Varley B19 Small BVS, p. 57; Varley A9, B23 Large BVS, p. 78?; Butlin #726 UNTRACED; see Varley A9, B23 Large BVS, p. 32 Large BVS, p. 32 Small BVS, pp. 38, 57; Large BVS, pp. 61, 62?; Varley B20 Butlin #715 UNTRACED; see Varley A35, B14 Large BVS, p. 48 Folio BVS (#762; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497)



198

Flea, Ghost

Glendower, Owen Gourdon, Bertand de Gray, Thomas Harrold Hayes, Catherine, murderess Henry I Henry II Henry V Henry VIII Herod

199

Small BVS, p. 94 (whole length), 98 (profile); Butlin #750 (tempera); Varley A43 (whole length), A44, B33; the back of the tempera version is inscribed by Varley: “The Vision of the Spirit which inhabits the Body of a Flea & which appeared to the Late Mr. Blake . . . in my presence & afterwards till he had finished this Picture. A Flea he Said drew blood . . .” (BR, p. 264); long description in Literary Chronicle (1 Sept 1827); J. T. Smith (1828) (BR, p. 467); Varley, Zodiacal Physiognomy (1829) (BR, pp. 372–73); Cunningham (1830) (BR, pp. 497–98): the whole-length portrait exhibits “splendour of . . . colouring,” “glistening green and dusky gold, beautifully varnished,” “his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green”; Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298); Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (1841) (BR, p. 489 n.1); Walter Thornbury, British Artists from Hogarth to Turner (1861) (BR, p. 264) Large BVS, pp. 59, 77?; Butlin #744; Varley A21 Large BVS, p. 42 Butlin #746 Small BVS, p. 76; Varley A15; Urania (1825) (BR, p. 297): “we have seen” the drawing Large BVS, p. 31

UNTRACED; see Varley A16, B3, B28 UNTRACED; see Varley A43, B11 Large BVS, p. 57 Butlin #747; Varley A39, B8 Small BVS, p. 78?; Folio BVS; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Hezekiah UNTRACED; see Literary Chronicle (1 September 1827): “he drew their portraits in his sketch-book, which portraits we have seen” Hood, Robin Large BVS, p. 55 Hotspur Large BVS, pp. 60, 75?; Varley A19 Isabella, Queen of Edward IILarge BVS, p. 37 Joan, Pope Large BVS, p. 32 Job Butlin #703




G. E. Bentley, Jr.

John, King “Jonathan” Joseph Julius Ceasar Lais of Corinth Lot Lucy, Sir Robert Lute Player Mac(k)beth Mackbeth, Lady Mary, the Virgin Mary Queen of Scots Maud, Empress Merlin Milton, John Milton’s 1st wife [Mary Powell] Milton, elder daughter Milton, youngest daughter Mohamet (Mahomet) Monmouth, Geoffrey of Nebuchadnezzar Nixion, Tom Olympia, ?mother of Alexander Ossian Parr, Old Pharoah Pharoah who knew Joseph Pindar Pis(s)istratus (Piseistratus) Potiphar’s wife Powell, Mary Pyramids, Man Who Built the Richard I

Small BVS, pp. 57, 88?; Large BVS, pp. 71? 74? 76?; Varley A10, B7 Christopher Powney in 1991 (not in Butlin) Butlin #705; Varley A30, B38 UNTRACED; see Varley A37, B9 Small BVS, p. 110?; Folio BVS; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Butlin 695; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Large BVS, p. 18 Butlin #760 UNTRACED; see Varley A24, B30 UNTRACED; see Varley A25 Butlin #705 Large BVS, p. 28 Small BVS, pp. 23? 25? 27; Large BVS, pp. 69, 70?; Varley A17, B1 Small BVS, p. 92; Large BVS, pp. 79? 80?; Varley A4, B5 Large BVS, pp. 46, 47 Small BVS, p. 96 Large BVS, p. 43 Large BVS, p. 44 Butlin #720; Varley A6, B22 Large BVS, p. 35 Butlin #704 Large BVS, p. 26 Large BVS, p. 21 Large BVS, pp. 33, 34 Butlin #748 Large BVS, p. 54; Varley A29, B37 Large BVS, p. 54 Folio BVS; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Large BVS, pp. 24–25; Varley A40, B16 Large BVS, p. 53 Small BVS, p. 96 Small BVS, p. 102; Butlin #752 Small BVS, p. a; Butlin #729; Varley A8, B21



200


Saul

Savage, Richard Semirimas Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, his wife Shakespeare, his daughter Sheppard, Jack Shore, Jane Socrates Solomon Task Master of Moses Tax Gatherer Teacher of Painting Thyme, Wild Tyler, Wat Tyler, Wat, his daughter Uriah, Husband of Bathsheba Voltaire

UNTRACED; see Varley A28, B13 UNTRACED; see Varley A36, B15 UNTRACED; see Varley B36 UNTRACED; see Varley A31 UNTRACED; see Varley A42, B12 Large BVS, pp. 49, 50 UNTRACED; see Varley B35 Butlin #728; Varley A7 Butlin #693, like William the Conqueror Butlin #694; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 498): The drawing on paper shows Satan “looking fiercely at me through the iron grating of my staircase window,” “Its eyes were large and like live coals— its teeth as large as . . . harrow, and . . . claws” Butlin #696, 696B, 697; Literary Chronicle (1 September 1827): “he drew their portraits in his sketch-book, which portraits we have seen” Large BVS, p. 19 UNTRACED; see Monthly Magazine (1833) (BR, p. 298): she “was often bodily before him” UNTRACED; see Varley B10 Large BVS, p. 20 Large BVS, p. 23 Large BVS, p. 40 UNTRACED; see Varley A27, B32 Butlin #713–714 Large BVS, pp. 86? 87?; Butlin #700; Varley A22, B24 Folio BVS; Butlin #696, 696A; Cunningham (1830) (BR, p. 497) Large BVS, pp. 63? 65, 67, 72? 73?; Varley A34 Butlin #753–755 UNTRACED; see Varley B34 Large BVS, pp. 63? 64? 65, 72? 73; Butlin #739; Varley A32, B2 Large BVS, p. 68?; Varley A33, B2 Butlin #699 Small BVS, p. 106; Butlin #749; Crabb Robinson records Blake’s conversation with Voltaire on 18 February 1826



Richard III Riz[z]io, David Richard Duke of Normandy Robert Duke of Normandy Rosamond, Fair Rowena Rufus, King Saladin Satan Satan

201

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

Vortigern Wallace, William

Warbeck, Perkin Warwick, Earl of Xantippe, wife of Socrates

Large BVS, p. 51 Butlin #734; Varley A23, B26; see Edward I; Urania (1825) (BR, p. 297): “we have seen” the drawing; described in Cunningham (1830) (BR, pp. 496–97) Large BVS, p. 52 Large BVS, p. 38 Large BVS, p. 22

Butlin = loose drawings listed in Butlin BVS = Blake-Varley Sketchbook Varley = Varley’s list in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook Notes 1. I am grateful to my friends Martin Butlin and Bob Essick for extraordinarily valuable advice on a draft of this chapter. 2. It was reproduced in The Blake-Varley Sketchbook of 1819 in the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. Martin Butlin (London, 1969). 3. Reproduced in the Christie catalogue of The Larger Blake-Varley Sketchbook, 21 March 1989 (London, 1989). 4. Anon., Urania (1825) (Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), p. 297—hereafter BR). 5. One of the most influential analyses is Joseph Burke, “The Eidetic and the Borrowed Image: An Interpretation of Blake’s Theory and Practice of Art,” Chapter 13 (pp. 1100–27) of In Honour of Daryl Lindsay: Essays and Studies, ed. Franz Philipp and June Stewart (Melbourne, London, Wellington, New York, 1964). 6. According to Anon., “Hôpital des fous à Londres,” Revue Britannique (July 1833), in Bedlam, the author interviewed Jonathan Martin (the York Minster incendiary) and William Blake, “un homme grand et pâle. . . . Il conversait avec Michel-Ange, il causait avec Moïse, il dinait avec Sémerimas,” he was drawing there in Bedlam the Ghost of a Flea (BR, p. 299 n.1). The essay is plagiarized and embroidered from Anon., “Bits of Biography, No. 1: Blake, the Vision Seer, and Martin, the York Minster Incendiary,” Monthly Magazine (March 1833) (BR, pp. 298–99). 7. Blake Records Supplement (Oxford, 1988) (hereafter BRS), 8; BR, pp. 58, 326. The testimony about Blake’s madness among contemporaries who did not know him is close to unanimous: T. F. Dibdin (?Spring 1816): “absolutely lost his wits”; Literary Gazette (October 1828): “madness”; Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1830): “an amiable enthusiast, on the wrong side of the line of demarcation as it respected his sanity”; Monthly Review (March 1830): “extraordinary lunatic”; Fraser’s Magazine (March 1830): “Blake’s brain became fevered: he mistook the dreams of fancy for reality”; Edinburgh



202

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

203

Review (April 1834): “able but, alas! Insane”; Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (1841): “Blake was a visionary, and thought his fancies real—he was mad” (BR, pp. 244, 370, 379, 626, 380, 391, 489 n.1). Robert Hunt, Examiner (August 1808, September 1809); Blake’s exhibition is “fresh proof of the alarming increase of the effects of insanity” (BR, p. 215). Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences (1852) (BR, p. 536). Crabb Robinson’s letter of 10 August 1848 (BRS, p. 68) and J. Forster, Walter Savage Landor (London, 1869) (BR, p. 229 n.3). Crabb Robinson, Diary for 24 July 1811 (BR, p. 229); Beckford MS note on “The Tyger” in Benjamin Heath Malkin, A Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806) (BR, p. 431 n.1). The Antijacobin Review (November 1808) said of Blake’s Dedication to Blair’s Grave: “should he again essay to climb the Parnassian heights, his friends would do well to restrain his wanderings by the strait waistcoat”; according to The Eclectic Review (June 1824), Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Innocence “is wild and strange, like the singing of a ‘maid in Bedlam in the spring,’ but it is the madness of genius” (BRS, p. 80); Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote in The New Monthly Magazine (December 1830): “what a delightful vein of madness it was—with what exquisite verses it inspired him!”; and Cunningham (1830) wrote that in Poetical Sketches “there is . . . a great deal that is wild and mad, and all so strangely mingled” (BR, p. 480). Joseph Farington, Diary for 24 June 1796 (BR, p. 52). Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences (1852) (BR, p. 537). Flaxman letters of 2 January 1804 and 1 December 1805; Blake himself writes of “my Abstract folly,” “this spirit of Abstraction & Improvidence” (letter of 11 September 1801) (BR, pp. 238, 173). Hayley letters of 15 July 1802 and 3 August 1805 (BR, pp. 106, 164). Cumberland letters (13 November 1809, April 1815) (BR, pp. 219, 236). He also wrote in November 1809: “they say Blake was mad: If so Shakespeare & Milton were so too” (MS note in Cumberland’s copy of the Descriptive Catalogue now in the collection of my friend Professor Robert N. Essick). Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences; Vaterländisches Museum (1811) (BR, pp. 223, 448). Crabb Robinson, Diary for 10 December 1825, 18 February 1826; when Robinson met Samuel Palmer in Wales in 1836, he “soon satisfied him that in calling B insane I was not repeating the commonplace declamation against him” (BR, p. 363). Crabb Robinson, Vaterländisches Museum (1811) (BR, p. 448) and Diary for 24 December 1825. Southey letter of 8 May 1830 (BR, p. 399). Crabb Robinson, Reminiscences (1852), amplifying a description of 10 December 1825 (BR, pp. 539, 309). Samuel Palmer, “Fictions Concerning William Blake,” Athenaeum, No. 2498 (11 September 1875), 348–49. In a letter of 5 February 1881, he said




23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

G. E. Bentley, Jr. that Blake was “of all men whom I ever knew, the most practically sane, steady, frugal and industrious” (The Letters of Samuel Palmer, ed. Raymond Lister (Oxford, 1974), p. 1061). Linnell letter of 3 April 1830 (BR, p. 396). Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1942), pp. 320–23 (BR, p. 268). Seymour Kirkup, who knew Blake in 1810–16, said on 24 February 1870: “I used to think him mad then, but I think now he was quite sound” (BR, p. 221 n. 4), and Henry Francis Cary “abandoned, after he came to know him, the notion he had taken up of his ‘madness’” (Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1942), p. 321 (BR, p. 233 n. 1)). Marginalium (?1789) to Swedenborg, Divine Love and Divine Wisdom (London, 1788), p. 233. Public Address (The Notebook of William Blake—A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile, ed. David V. Erdman, with the assistance of Donald K. Moore (rev. edn. New York, 1977), p. 57). Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1942), p. 321 (BR, p. 268). Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1981) (hereafter Butlin), #711. Other groups of loose Visionary Heads may be associated by the numbers added to them. (1) “Socrates” (#713), “Uriah” and “Bathsheba” (#699), “David” (#698), “Solomon” counterproof (#702), “Canute” replica (#722), “Caractacus” counterproof (#719), Queen Eleanor (#726), “Joseph & Mary in the room They were seen in” (#705), and “Saladin” and “The Assassin” (#728), of varying sizes and watermarks, are numbered 6–13 at the bottom right (with a duplicate “8” on “Solomon”); (2) These same designs (#719, 713, 726, 722, 702, 728, 699, 705) are numbered 1–8 within parentheses at the bottom left; (3) “David” (#698), “Richard Coeur de Lion” (#692a), An Anglo-Norman Knight (#724), “Falconberg the Bastard” (#730), “The Empress Maud” (#725), King John (#731), Edward I and Wallace (#A734), “Mohamet” (#720), “Cassibelane” (#716), Hotspur (#745), “Cancer” (#692c), Merlin (#757), and Nine Grotesque Heads (#A767) of various sizes and watermarks, are numbered at the top left in Roman numerals I-VI, “VII & VIII,” IX-XIV. Butlin in his facsimile (1969) identifies the face as that of Job, and he remarks that it is very similar to #711, called “A Welsh Bard, Job, or Moses(?),” but it is probably what Varley’s lists (A4, B5) call “Merlin.” The leaves were foliated 1–89 (the last leaf was not numbered), and then 22 leaves (ll. 6–7, 62–64, 66–68, 70–79, 82, 84, 86–88) were razored out, although ll. 67 and 82 are still present. Of the replacements suggested here, Maud (f. 68), Wat Tyler’s Daughter (f. 66), and Wat Tyler Striking the Tax Gatherer (f. 63) are on paper watermarked C BRENCHLEY 1804 as in the Large Blake-Varley sketchbook, and all the other replacements appear in Varley’s lists (below), are appropriate in size, and were sold by the Linnell estate in 1918.



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32. The presumed original of Queen Eleanor (#726) is so small (19.7 x 15.5 cm) that it is unlikely to have been part of the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook (25.4 x 20.3 cm) unless it was much cut down. Varley’s note below (A9) makes it plain that this is Eleanor of Poitou, Queen of Henry I and mother of Richard I. 33. #738 is described by Butlin as “Apparently a replica of No. 737,” but it is probably the original, for it is almost exactly the same size (25.5 x 20.5 cm) as the leaves in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook (25.4 x 20.3 cm). #737, which Butlin calls “Probably the original of this composition,” is distinctly different in size (24.2 x 19.2 cm), as are another replica (#739: 25.1 x 17.5 cm) and a counterproof (#740: 25.4 x 18.8 cm). 34. Notably the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook and the Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook. 35. Varley was in some difficulty about the date, for the visions took place late at night, and he may not have been confident whether the event had occurred late on Tuesday night or early on Wednesday morning. It was, however, probably not 29 October 1819, which was a Saturday; the correct date may be Tuesday 19 October 1819. The list may have been added to when more Visionary Heads were drawn, as the numbers with no names beside them suggest; at any rate, the Visionary Heads of Wat Tyler (B2), the tax gatherer he killed (A34, B4), and his daughter (A33) were probably made about the same time as his drawing of 30 October 1819 of “Wat Tyler . . . Striking the Tax Gatherer on the Head.” 36. Butlin #710, 708, 711, 696 (a copy, on smaller paper [20.3 x 32.5 cm], of the untraced original of the Task Master), 706, 762—Herod (#706), Pindar (#710), and “A Fiend” (#762) could not be traced in 1981. 37. The watermark is not known for Pindar (#710), which has not been recorded since 1942. 38. “H WILLMOTT 1810” is in “Blake’s Chaucer: An Original Engraving” and “RUSE & TURNERS 1810” in letters of 1826–1827; “RUSE & TURNERS 1812” and “ . . . 1815” and WHATMAN are frequently used in Blake’s works in Illuminated Printing. 39. Two hundred two Visionary Heads are known, including some counterproofs and replicas. Of these, 38 are in the Small Blake-Varley Sketchbook, 103 in the Large Blake-Varley Sketchbook (including 30 known only from Varley’s lists), 6 in the Folio Blake-Varley Sketchbook, and 55 loose drawings, some of which probably originated in one of those sketchbooks.







Word as Image in William Blake Martin Butlin

“I

n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” These opening words of the Gospel according to St. John encapsulate the problem of the representation of God and the relationship of word and image that permeates the whole of Jewish, Christian and Islamic culture. Blake, as a man with a strong religious sense who expressed himself in both words and visual images, played a peripheral and partial, but significant, role in this tradition, with the late Laocoön print coming as the culmination of his own very personal solution of the problem.1 At its most extreme was the solution of Islam. Even the earliest decorative schemes, although often employing craftsmen brought up in the traditions of the Byzantine Church, did away with all representations of the human figure. The decoration of the Dome of the Rock, completed in 691, both internally, and until the sixteenth century refacing with tiles, externally, consisted largely of mosaic depictions of stylized vases and plants, with an important element in Kufic script, highly stylized but also providing intelligible Islamic texts. In the Great Mosque of Damascus (705–15) the arcade around the courtyard is decorated in mosaic with a vast panoramic landscape consisting of fantastic urban and rural buildings set along the banks of a river, but again with no representation of living beings. Soon, after the replacement of the Umayyads by the Abbasid Dynasty in 749, figuration was confined entirely to secular art and quotations from the Koran in Kufic script dominate all schemes of decoration in mosques and other religious buildings; here the iconography and decoration are literally the Word of God.2 Further west, in the Byzantine Church, there was also an iconoclastic crisis in which the representation of figures was banned, partly again under the



Chapter 13 z

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influence of Judaism, partly as a direct result of happenings in the Moslem world. Once Christianity has been recognized and the capital moved from Rome to Constantinople in 330 by Constantine the Great, a religious style of decoration that was fully figurative was developed, partly on Roman models. At first symbols such as dolphins, vases and sheep were common, but representations of Christ, the Mother of God, saints and scenes from the Bible soon predominated. That is, until the reign of Leo III, who significantly came from Syria in the East. In 730 a Council of the Church approved an Imperial Decree banishing all icons of Christ, the Madonna and Saints (as also of the Emperor and his Court, who had made a significant appearance in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna). But these figures were replaced not so much by the Word as by symbols, such as the simple cross that had already replaced the figure of Christ above the Palace gate in 726; an example is the cross in the apse of St. Irene. This prohibition lasted, with a break, until 843. Figurative art then reappeared in ecclesiastical decoration, although the representation of God the Father, following the Mosaic prohibition, was still frowned upon. Lettering, both as scriptural text and when used to identify individual figures, was an integral part of such decoration, and also included abbreviations in the form of monograms of Christ and of Alpha and Omega.3 In the West, which had escaped Iconoclasm, examples of the different uses of lettering can be taken at random from the churches of Rome, which would have been known to, if not appreciated by, Blake’s contemporaries, although not of course directly by Blake himself. In the comparatively twodimensional style of the time, the lettering played a part in the decorative effect of the whole. It could include the names of saints or rivers such as the Jordan, the monogram of Christ, or scriptural texts written along borders or as if on books or scrolls held by figures in the composition.4 Occasionally a figure’s utterance could be written out as in (a late example) Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in the Museo del Gesu, Cortona, where the Angel’s announcements are set out above and below the Virgin’s reply, which is written upside-down to indicate that it is coming from her mouth on the right of the picture.5 To bring the story closer to Blake’s time, one might expect the Protestant Reformation to have resulted in a ban on figurative imagery in church and chapel, but this did not prevent the Quaker Benjamin West from decorating the Royal Chapel in Windsor Castle with religious subjects. Certainly it was no bar to William Blake in his numerous illustrations to the Bible.6 Whether Blake was actually conscious of the early Christian and medieval tradition of ecclesiastical decoration is unknown; it is certainly unlikely, although two of his artistic circle, John Flaxman and William Young



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Ottley, were among the first Englishmen to appreciate Trecento art.7 In Blake’s case the problem of word and image was redoubled by his own almost unique position as an artist who worked in equal measure in words and visual images, and for whom the very act of having to decide each day, at least semi-consciously, which medium in which to express himself must have made him more rather than less conscious of the distinction between the two. Some artists have also written poetry, for instance Michaelangelo; some writers have also painted, for instance Victor Hugo and Strindberg. But the only other artists more or less equally proficient in both media are, perhaps significantly, followers of Blake such as D. G. Rossetti and, in the twentieth century, David Jones. The story of the varying importance of text and illustration in Blake’s illuminated books has often been told.8 He first developed a technique of relief-etching by which he could print both text and pictorial outlines at the same time. This technique, although Blake claimed in his address To the Public of 10 October 1793 that “it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense,” was in fact of less importance economically than in giving Blake complete control over all aspects of his books, from the writing of the text by way of the printing, coloring and publication to the actual sale. As he said in the same address, “Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works” (Erdman, p. 692). From the relatively decorative illustrations to Songs of Innocence (1789), hand-colored in delicate, transparent watercolor, Blake turned to a weightier, more somber style in Songs of Experience (1794), in the early copies of which he also developed his own personal technique of color-printing, following a first printing of text and outline in ink with a second one in thick pigments. In The First Book of Urizen, also of 1794, the illustrations not only dominate each page but often occupy whole pages of their own.9 In two subsequent developments the illustrations literally take over. First (or rather, chronologically, second, the date of both copies of the Small Book of Designs having now been established as 1796 rather than 1794)10 he issued some of the illustrations to his books in separate sets of small pictures alone, color-printed to give them pictorial weight “tho’ to the loss of some of the best things,” that is, the text.11 Even more drastic was the appearance in 1795 of at least some of the series of 12 Large Color Prints,12 again colorprinted although in a technique that is also found in The Book of Ahania and The Book of Los, also of 1795; in the books the text alone was printed in intaglio rather than in relief, leaving a blank field for the illustration, while in the Large Color Prints, with apparently the sole exception of God judging Adam in which there are traces of an etched outline below the color printed design,13 the color-printing was done on a blank plate, possibly of hardboard but more likely of copper.



Word as Image in William Blake

Martin Butlin

Meanwhile, in illustrations to texts by other writers, Blake continued to experiment with ways of relating text and illustration, those to Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (c. 1795–97) and the Poems of Thomas Gray of c. 1797–98 being done around (and sometimes as if behind) an inserted textpanel that was not even placed symmetrically in the overall page. He adapted the same format for his unfinished manuscript Vala or The Four Zoas, presumably because he was in part using spare printed pages from the Night Thoughts.14 His later books represent both the return to the manner of his early examples and a new development. In Milton (1804–10) and Jerusalem (1804–20) the illustrations no longer threaten to overpower the text as they do in Urizen, although full-page illustrations are retained.15 However, the whole effect of the page becomes more pictorial, the coloring, now again by hand in watercolor but in much richer, glowing colors, covering the whole page, which was also, significantly, only used on the one side. Some of the pages of the complete, fully colored copy of Jerusalem, probably done c. 1822, and all those in copy Y of Songs of Innocence and Experience, colored c. 1825, have decorative borders.16 This means that each page is seen equally as an individual work of art and as a section of a continuous book. The development of Blake’s use of words as part of his purely pictorial designs probably began, in a relatively small way, in the descriptive labeling of the scroll in The Making of Magna Charta (c. 1779) and on the tombstone in Pestilence (c. 1795).17 More significant is the case of his own trial engraving of one of his illustrations to Robert Blair’s The Grave (1805). Here the words “DEATHS / DOOR” appear as if carved into the stonework; significantly Schiavonetti’s re-engraving of Blake’s design in 1806 omits the words.18 In the Enoch print of 1806–7 texts in Hebrew occur written on the open book held by Enoch and on the scroll or tablet held by a floating figure on the right, just as similar inscriptions occur on books or scrolls in early Christian and medieval mosaics.19 A stranger use of lettering is found in the mysterious experimental print of, following Essick, c. 1805–22 (!) with its pseudo-Egyptian hieroglyphics in a band between the two pictorial elements.20 Blake’s tempera painting of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims,21 included in his exhibition of 1809, develops the idea of the inscription on Death’s Door in a long inscription giving the full name and particulars of the Tabarde Inne on the left; this inscription reappears in the various states of the engraving made after the picture.22 One can also find an increase in the use of inscriptions within the pictorial elements of the illuminated books. Plate 13 (10) of Europe (1794) is inscribed with the plague warning “LORD / HAVE MERCY / ON US” with a cross below, inscribed on the door behind the figures.23 Further scrolls inscribed in Hebrew, as in the Enoch print, occur on plate 15 of Milton



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(1804–10), where also the use of text on the title page is much more pictorial.24 Further labeling occurs on pages 29, 32 and 36 of that book. The same features can be found in Jerusalem (1804–20), figures being identified on the full-page plate 26, as on the separate copy of plate 51 in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. An inscription occurs on a scroll on plate 41, in reverse, as are the texts on the clouds on plate 81. On plate 93 the three nude figures at the top bear a complete sentence: “Anytus / Melitus / & Lycon / thought Socrates / A Very Pernicious Man / So Caiphas thought Jesus.” The symbolic disc on plate 54 is inscribed at the top “Reason,” with “Pity” and “Wrath” on either side, “This World” a bit below the center, and “Desire” at the bottom, while the globe shown on plate 72 bears, spiraling upwards around the outline of Africa, the text “Continually Building Continually Destroying because of Love & Jealousy.”25 Still more noticeable in its use of word as part of the image is the trial proof of plate 1, also in the Fitzwilliam Museum, in which long texts surround the gothic entrance and run across the top of the design; the text on the left of the entrance is in reverse.26 Although sometimes associated with the proofs seen by George Cumberland in 1807 or those exhibited by Blake in 1812, this proof, like others with proofs from Europe on the reverse, seems to date from later in the development of Jerusalem. I myself have dated some of the group to c. 1815 or later, Joseph Viscomi dates them to before 1820, and Detlef Dörrbecker to 1818 or later.27 The incidence of inscriptions on Blake’s individual watercolors also increases toward the end of his life. In the Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs” of c. 1820, a late variant of his various designs, mainly of the Last Judgment, which derive from Michaelangelo’s fresco of that subject in the Sistine Chapel, practically all the figures are labeled, often with qualifications such as “Abraham believed God,” “Sophronia Died in Childbed” and “She Died on the Wedding Day.”28 The second state of the engraving Mirth, based on a watercolor illustration to Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “ll Penseroso” of c. 1816–20,29 and itself dated by Essick to the last years of Blake’s life, c. 1820–27,30 similarly qualifies the identification of some of the figures: “SPORT / that wrinkled / CARE derides” and “LAUGHTER holding both his sides”; the print is also titled below with the comment “Solomon says Vanity of Vanities all is Vanity & what can be Foolisher than this.” Finally, a number of the less finished watercolors illustrating Dante, begun in 1824 and left unfinished at Blake’s death in 1827, bear inscriptions often critical of Dante’s ideas.31 These occur, following the traditional numbering, on designs 3, 7, 16 and 101; Blake also identified some of the figures on designs 4 and 99. These illustrations seem to have been designed as a series on their own without accompanying text so he presumably thought that some exposition of his ideas on the actual designs was necessary; how




Martin Butlin

much would have remained visible when he completed these particular designs in watercolor is unclear. Blake’s final important piece of book design involving words and image was the set of engravings illustrating the Book of Job.32 These were based on two sets of watercolors: that done for Thomas Butts c. 1805–6 and 1821–27,33 and that done for John Linnell in 1821.34 In the engravings, begun in 1823 and finished in March 1826, the original designs, pure illustrations without text, were surrounded by borders; although there are some sketchy preliminary drawings, it seems that most of the borders were added after the process of engraving had actually begun.35 Quotations from the Book of Job and from elsewhere in the Bible are placed above, below and at the sides of the rectangular fields reserved for the illustrations, and decorative elements of plants, clouds and sometimes figures are also added. On the plate of “When the Morning Stars sang together, & all the / Sons of God shouted for Joy” there are separate pictures of the first six days of the Creation on each side of the main composition, each labeled with the appropriate text such as “Let there Be Light.” Usually one of the quotations is emphasized by being in somewhat larger letters and serves as a title. The lettering sometimes follows the curving forms of clouds, and also occurs on books and scrolls, as in “I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee.” In the final engravings the borders and central pictures are kept separate but, during the proof stage, Blake experimented with two of the compositions, making the central picture burst into the border above. One was “Thou hast fulfilled the Judgment of the Wicked” where the angels accompanying God the Father and the surrounding mandorla are allowed to burst through the upper margin of the design. The other, more dramatic case occurs in Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind when the whirlwind itself has broken through the upper margin; in the final state of the print there is a somewhat anti-climactic blank below the flying figures and clouds in the upper border.36 The late states of three separate engravings, Joseph of Arimathea, The Accusers, and that based on the Laocoön group, although of different sizes, seem to have a certain unity in their use of earlier motifs, in two cases taken from a much earlier work of art, to express new and very personal ideas. Although there is no hard evidence to date the first two to the last years of Blake’s life, the 1826 watermark on one of the two copies of the Laocoön print37 and the general form of lettering of the inscriptions, suggest that all three may date from the 1820s. In Joseph of Arimathea38 the text below, as well as giving the original 1773 date of Blake’s engraving and its source in “an old Italian Drawing,” includes a long text identifying Joseph of Arimathea with “One of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages. . . .” Across the top right-hand corner of the design itself is Joseph’s name, placing him “among the Rocks of Albion” in allusion to the legend that Joseph came



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to England. In The Accusers39 the main title is again within the pictorial field, the three figures being identified by the continuation of the title, “the Accusers of / Theft,” “Adultery” and “Murder.” Below, an inscription places the composition in its new context, supplementing the information that “W. Blake inv. & sculp” with “A Scene in the Last Judgment / Satans’[sic] Holy Trinity The Accuser The Judge & The Executioner.” In the Laocoön print (figure 13.1) there is no distinction between pictorial field and border. Morton D. Paley has suggested that Blake may have originally been commissioned to engrave a commercial print after the Laocoön,

Figure 13.1




Martin Butlin

possibly with a landscape background as in the sixteenth-century engraving by Marco Dente. Having completed the sculptural group when the commission fell through, Blake then found himself with a blank space around the figures, which he filled with lettering. The information that the work was “Drawn & Engraved by William Blake” and the main title, “[Jehovah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubin,” are placed more or less where they would normally occur at the foot of the composition, but the main title is supplemented by a further line, “of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium,” linking the historical fact of the statue’s origin with Blake’s own theory that pagan art was the mere reflection of the glories of now lost, divinely inspired, works of art from the time of the Old Testament. Some of the text consists of more or less simple identifications such as “Evil,” and “Good” or, in Hebrew, “Angel of Jehovah” and “Yeshua,” and in Greek “Serpent-holder.” Most, however, are sentences, some of considerable length, setting out Blake’s views on religion and the arts. A few tiny decorative flourishes occur among the writings but fundamentally it is the words themselves that have become the pictorial element that surrounds the image of the historic sculpture. The inscriptions are written upwards, downwards and across, and in great curving sweeps following the contours of the figures’ heads and Laocoön’s raised right arm. This omnidirectional quality helps to reduce the three-dimensional quality of the plate as a whole and this strange pictorial unity may also symbolize for Blake the very close connection between sculpture as represented by the Laocoön and engraving as represented by the inscriptions. In the equation of word and image, Blake has passed beyond the early derivative Gothicism of his copies after the antiquities in Westminster Abbey and the works deriving from these to a much deeper but probably unconscious recreation of the emphasis on two rather than three dimensions and the combination of word and pictorial image found in early Christian and medieval religious art. Word has become image and, insofar as Blake saw himself as a fount of divine wisdom, word and image—God’s word—have become God. Notes 1. The news that Morton Paley was working on the Laocoön print may well have spurred me, if only unconsciously, into looking at this extraordinary work again. It also worried me that he might already have made the points I am trying to make. Luckily, when he kindly showed me his full text, although it covered every other point, it only touched on my argument in the briefest of ways. Part of his article, forthcoming, was the basis of his lecture given as part of the Blake symposium held at Tate Britain on 9 December 2000 with the title “Art and Nation in the Laocoön.” When this chapter was already in draft I stumbled on a reference in G. E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Books



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3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

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Supplement (Oxford, 1995), p. 505, to an article by D. S. Herrstrom on “Blake’s Redemption of God in the Laocoön” with the suggestive sub-title “Literal Incarnation and the Marriage of Picture and Text” (Bucknell Review, 30 (1986), 37–71); unfortunately I have had no time to follow up this reference and hope that I have not inadvertently stolen any of Mr Herrstrom’s ideas. See Erica Cruikshank Dodd and Shereen Khairallah, The Image of the Word: A Study of Quranic Verses in Islamic Architecture, 2 vols. (Beirut, 1981); I was first appraised of the importance of the Word in Islamic imagery by a lecture given by E. C. Dodd at the American University, Beirut, some years earlier. For a simple introduction to Iconoclasm, see Steven Runciman, Byzantine Style and Civilization (Harmondsworth, 1987), chapter 3. See Walter Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome (London, 1967). Reproduced in John Pope-Hennessy, The Paintings of Fra Angelico (London, 1952), pls. 8, 10–11. Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1986), pp. 577–81, etc. For Blake’s illustrations to the Bible, see Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1981), pp. 316–72 nos. 376–526, etc. Margaret Whinney, “Flaxman and the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (1956), 277, 281–82; David Irwin, John Flaxman 1755–1826: Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (London, 1979), pp. 123–228; Janice Lyle, “John Flaxman and the Outline Style in Rome: 1785–1800,” in The Anglo-American Artists in Italy, 1750–1820, ed. Corlette Rossiter Walker, exhibition catalogue, University Art Museum, University of California (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1982), pp. 805–06. While he was in Rome between 1784 and 1794 Flaxman copied the mosaics in Sta. Maria Maggiore and Sta. Maria in Trastevere and visited Trecento and Quattrocento decorative schemes with Ottley, and it was to Flaxman that Ottley dedicated his book on Early Florentine Painters in 1826. For the mosaics in Rome that incorporate texts and that would have been seen by Flaxman see Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome, pls. 9, 26, 27, 30, 31, and 33, and figs. 64, 171, 173, 197–99, 204, 207, 215, 216, 218, 220, 229 and 232. See, most recently, Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton, N.J., 1993). Michael Phillips, William Blake: The Creation of the “Songs” (London, 2000), chapter 5. I support Phillips’s idea that color-printing involved two printings although Viscomi, supported by Robert N. Essick, believes that it was all done in one process. For an early summary of the importance of Urizen in the development of the relationship between text and illustration, see my own review of the Blake Trust’s facsimile of The Book of Urizen in The Burlington Magazine, 101 (1959), 301–02. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 132–45. In the first copy of the Small Book of Designs, Blake retained the date 1794 on the title page of Urizen re-used as the title page here, altering the date to 1796 in




11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

Martin Butlin copy B. However, as a number of the pulls in both books have been shown to be successive pulls from a single application of the pigments, the date of both books must be 1796, and the same date can now be given to the Large Book of Designs. Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1957), p. 867. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 156–77 nos. 289–329. Since the discovery of watermarks dated 1804 on two of the prints in the Tate Gallery, Blake’s own dating of 1795 has had to be abandoned, at least in a number of cases; see Martin Butlin, “A Newly Discovered Watermark and a Visionary’s Way with his Dates,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 15 (1981–82), 101–03; Martin Butlin, “The Physicality of William Blake: The Large Color Prints of ‘1795’,” William Blake and his Circle: Papers Delivered at a Huntington Symposium (San Marino, Calif., 1989), pp. 1–18; and Martin Butlin, “The Large Colour Prints,” William Blake, 1757–1827 (Tate Gallery Collections: Volume Five) (London, 1990), pp. 82–105. David Bindman, “An Afterword on William Blake: His Art and Times,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 16 (1982–83), 234–35; Butlin, “The Large Colour Prints,” 82, 86. Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts,” ed. John E. Grant, Edward J. Rose and Michael J. Tolley, with David V. Erdman, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1980); Irene Tayler, Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray (Princeton, N.J., 1971) and Geoffrey Keynes, William Blake’s Watercolour Designs for the Poems of Thomas Gray (London, 1972); G. E. Bentley, Jr., “Vala or the Four Zoas.” A Facsimile of the Manuscript (Oxford, 1963) and Cettina Tramontano Magno and David V. Erdman, “The Four Zoas,” a Photographic Facsimile of the Manuscript (Lewisburg, Va., and London, 1987). Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, William Blake: Milton a Poem (London, 1993); and Morton D. Paley, William Blake: Jerusalem (London and Princeton, N.J., 1991). Robin Hamlyn and Michael Phillips, William Blake, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain (London, 2000), pp. 264–69. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, p. 21 no. 62 and pp. 74–75 no. 192. Since my catalogue appeared yet another version of Pestilence has been discovered in the Huntington Collections (see Shelley M. Bennett, “A Newly discovered Blake in the Huntington,” Huntington Calendar (July-August 1983), 2–4, repr.; Shelley M. Bennett, “A Newly Discovered Blake at the Huntington,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 18 (1984–85), 132–39; and Robert N. Essick, The Works of William Blake in the Huntington Collections (San Marino, Calif., 1985), pp. 115–18, repr.). The early provenance of this new discovery, a pencil drawing, up to the mid 1860s is almost certainly that given by me for my no. 192, and the drawing was probably done between my nos. 190 and 192. Robert N. Essick and Morton D. Paley, Robert Blair’s “The Grave” Illustrated by William Blake; A Study with Facsimile (London, 1982), fig. 13 and facs. facing p. 32.



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19. Robert N. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton, N.J., 1983), pp. 55–59 no. 15, repr. fig. 30. 20. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake, pp. 52–53 no. 14, repr. figs. 28–29. 21. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 475–76 no. 653, repr. pl. 878. 22. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake, pp. 60–89, no. 16, repr. figs. 35–38. 23. D. W. Dörrbecker, William Blake: The Continental Prophecies (London, 1995), pp. 141–283, repr. pp. 241 and supplementary illustrations 8 and 10. 24. Essick and Viscomi, William Blake: Milton a Poem, repr. 25. Paley, Jerusalem, repr. 26. Paley, Jerusalem, additional pl. iii. 27. G.E. Bentley, Jr., Blake Records (Oxford, 1969), pp. 187 n. 4, 231; Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 150–51 nos. 272–74A, repr. pls. 371–74; Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book, p. 339; Dörrbecker, The Continental Prophecies, pp. 173–74. 28. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, p. 536 no. 770, repr. pl. 967. 29. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, p. 395 no. 543 1, repr. pl. 672. 30. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue, pp. 93–97 no. 18, repr. pl. 49. 31. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 554–89 no. 812; Milton Klonsky, Blake’s Dante (New York, 1979) repr.; David Bindman, William Blake, The Divine Comedy (Paris, 2000), all repr. but in a new order. 32. Bo Lindberg, William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (Åbo, 1973); Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 409–423. 33. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 410–17 no. 550, repr. 34. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 418–23 no. 551, repr. 35. David Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (London, 1978), repr. pls. 625–46; the border designs Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, pp. 427–35 nos. 557 5, 7, 9, 11, repr. 36. Bindman, The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, pls. 641c and 638b. 37. Geoffrey Keynes, William Blake’s Laocoön: A Last Testament (London, 1976), repr.; Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue, pp. 98–101 no. 19, repr. fig. 51; Essick and Viscomi, William Blake: Milton a Poem, pp. 220–77, repr.; and the forthcoming article by Paley mentioned in note 1. For the watermark see Essick and Viscomi, William Blake: Milton a Poem, p. 241. 38. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue, pp. 3–9 no. 1, repr. fig. 2. 39. Essick, The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue, pp. 30–37 no. 8, repr. pl. 18.







The William Blake Archive: The Medium When the Millennium Is the Message Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi

I

t is easier than most people probably suppose to be millennial about editing. The closest thing to religious hope left to most of us may be found in the dreams of editors as they come to think of themselves as, modestly, the temporary guardians of important messages hurling down perilous lines of transmission from origin to unknown ultimate destination or, less modestly, as the foundation builders of a new age of enlightenment and understanding built on a cornerstone of perfect communication. All editors live vicariously through their authors, and Blake left no room for doubting the significance that he attributed to his works. He made claims to having tapped ancient veins of sacred communication and commanded readers to “Mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation” (Milton 2:25, Erdman, p. 96) as he promised them that his works put in their hands the ends of golden strings that would lead to the foundations of Jerusalem (Jerusalem 77, Erdman, p. 231).1 His “prophetic books,” as over decades they came to be known, bear an array of deeply mythical and religious titles that assert their importance cloaked in a veil of unfamiliarity: Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Europe a Prophecy, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Gradually, he managed to enlarge and elevate their momentousness even further by learning to suggest, through continuities of character, setting, and plot, that they might potentially be individual episodes in a single coherent narrative with the incorporated power to defeat the forces of created time and space and to connect any present life to an archetypal continuum from an ancient past to a profoundly desirable millennial future.



Chapter 14 z

Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi

The scope, however, of Blake’s communication has—fortunately for editors—been equally profoundly restricted by two factors: the obscurity of his magnificent messages and the grotesque inadequacies of conventional means to preserve and transmit the body of work that has come to seem, over two centuries, the most significant. By writing his texts backward with a quill in an acid-resistant liquid onto copper, and using the same substance to create designs with a combination of painters’ and etchers’ tools, Blake could use conventional etchers’ acids to create plates with printable surfaces in relief. After printing them on his own press with the assistance of his wife Catherine, he and she could share some of the work of watercoloring the impressions, separately or in batches as needed. The process was appealingly domestic and autographic, as well as reasonably fast, flexible, and inexpensive, at least by comparison with the standard methods of reproductive engraving. Both the form and its range of aesthetic effects seemed new enough to warrant a new name. Blake christened his works in the medium “Illuminated Books” in “Illuminated Printing” (Prospectus of 1793, Erdman, p. 693). Two aspects of the illuminated books—the obscurity of the content and the difficulty of adequately reproducing the form—open an abyss of potential confusion for all the “readers” who have discovered Blake somewhere in the fields of “posterity” where he invested his hope for a posthumous artistic future as prospects of a contemporary audience dwindled in his later years: “Posterity will judge by our Works” (Public Address, Erdman, p. 572). No one has done more to make clear judgment of these works possible than Morton Paley: in The Continuing City (1983) and in several later books he captured, for the first time, the musculoskeletal system of Jerusalem, the conceptual structure that gives form to the visual-textual body of Blake’s most complex millennial vision. This was a major achievement, but one whose magnitude was at first difficult to fully appreciate because in the 1980s there was no adequate edition of the very object of Paley’s pioneering historical and critical attention, at least none outside rare book collections. Most people who wanted to make the best of The Continuing City, that is to say, could not readily follow Paley’s lead because the anchoring landmark, Jerusalem, was missing. They would have to take refuge in one of the standard printed editions, an unfortunate choice because, no matter how indispensable those are, no more than half of Jerusalem, the “textual” half, makes it through the filter of the press into their pages. This, some may imagine, may usefully reduce the demands of an exceedingly demanding work on the reader, but it does so by radically distorting Blake’s artistic experiment and drastically shrinking the sum of information available for making sense of it. There may indeed be ways to simplify Jerusalem, and simplifying it isn’t necessarily a bad idea,2 but it would be extraordinarily coincidental if the line of useful



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simplification should happen to fall between text and image just because a machine has chosen that as the point of separation. Paley himself put text and image back together in 1991 by producing for the Blake Trust an illuminated edition of the only complete colored copy of Jerusalem that Blake ever created (Copy E).3 The three of us felt especially fortunate to have Paley’s carefully crafted Jerusalem in the background as we edited further illuminated books for two of the remaining volumes of the Blake Trust edition. Yet although we were (and are) proud of the work we did and of the accomplishment of the series as a whole, we gradually came to realize how severe the limitations of a printed edition of Blake are. Many of those limitations have to do with the economics of publishing. For example, most of Blake’s 19 illuminated works survive in more than one copy and often in several copies—each with its own history and features of interest. The Blake Trust edition took the expected and entirely rational course of printing a single “copy” of each “book,” that is, each “work,” if a work is the entity represented by the title (all the “copies” of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience, for instance), even though there has been sustained critical interest in multiple copies of the books, and even though only a remarkably small subset of the books— not even a useful cross-section—has ever been reproduced. But it is simply inconceivable that anyone will finance printed editions of all the surviving copies, or even of a critically and bibliographically meaningful sample of all copies. Considering the range of differences in printing style and coloring, not to mention textual differences and differing arrangements of plates, such limitations are at best harsh, at worst fatal to the chances of achieving an enlightened understanding of the artist’s work. The same technical, economic, and institutional limitations impinge on the quality of the reproductions and the number of pages allotted per volume, which in turn restricts the content. These are facts of life that may be all too well known. But editing Blake’s illuminated books, which were created in a medium and under conditions very different from those created by conventional print publication, puts an unusual degree of stress on these limitations. Failure, to some significant degree, is practically assured. And “practically” carries a world of meaning here, because Blake’s apocalyptic message was anything but practical, as all the world knows. He claimed to have “invented” illuminated printing in hopes of solving a previously insoluble problem for British “Genius”: “not even Milton and Shakespeare could publish their own works” (Prospectus of 1793, Erdman, pp. 692–93)—that is, until now, in the new medium he had “discovered.” But clearly he had more in mind than the ready propagation of printed poems, because the prospectus begins with a tribute to the undercompensated “Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician,” lays the blame



The William Blake Archive


on “a neglect of means to propagate” their works—which would include images and musical scores as well as poems—and goes on from Milton and Shakespeare to describe a “method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving.” In the early trials of his new medium he seems to have realized that it would be especially well-suited to deliver enriched messages that could not be carried by letterpress (the standard for words) or engraving (the standard for pictures) alone. Even as he came to understand, as in the long run he must have, the hard truth that his invention was not as wide in application, not as practical, as he might have imagined in his first flush of enthusiasm, he continued until nearly the end of his life to find new uses for it—a millennial medium, one might say, for millennial messages. Jerusalem is in that way its logical culmination, and, for editors as for readers, it is the Mount Everest of illuminated printing. The dominant tradition of Blake editing has been overwhelmingly literary, ruthlessly discarding visual information. On the art-historical flank a productive scholarly tradition of cataloguing has been complementary to but largely disconnected from its editorial counterpart on the literary flank. Consequently, many students and even professional scholars know either the textual or visual side of Blake’s work but not both, despite their interconnections at the source. But just before the curtain fell on the old millennium it was clear that those circumstances no longer prevailed. We witnessed the fortunate confluence of four phenomena during one brief span of time in the early 1990s: the completion of a broad base of mature and sophisticated Blake scholarship, capped by the publication of the first trustworthy map of the history of Blake’s illuminated-book production; the appearance of a technological formation sufficiently revolutionary to alter some fundamental assumptions in scholarly editing; the emergence of sound new technical standards sufficiently robust to check, if not eliminate, the formidable threat of overnight obsolescence for large electronic editorial undertakings; and, finally, the creation of an organization specifically devoted to giving technological form to the ideas of humanists. Together these four events combined to provide the cornerstone of integrated archival, editorial, and educational initiatives that would have been impossible ten years, and probably too risky even five years, earlier. Around the same time the technological assumptions on which editing and cataloguing had by necessity rested for the past several hundred years altered suddenly and radically under the influence of global network computing, which opened new perspectives on those old assumptions and the procedures that flowed from them and created new opportunities for achieving the previously unattainable. The Internet and World Wide Web made it possible to conceive a long-distance professional collaboration and an “edition” of Blake that would challenge the limitations of conventional scholarly



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editing and in the process close some of the gaps between the original works in restricted collections, the incomplete sets of expensive facsimiles in the rare book collections of some large libraries, and the indispensable but highly misleading printed editions on which readers had relied for their Blake since the Victorian Blake revival. It was this line of thought that first led us to wonder if the time had come to consider editing Blake in another medium. Changing media does not make problems disappear, for there will inevitably be losses as well as gains, but in changing the fundamental conditions it alters the nature and number of the problems, and what little we knew of the digital medium made us hope that it might eliminate some major problems outright, reduce some others, and offer unprecedented capabilities–functions—that would make the inevitable tradeoffs seem worth it. We were very unclear about what those tradeoffs might be, or what would be involved in trying to convert Blake into digital bits and turning “works” into “files” in computer “databases.” When we began tossing these thoughts around in 1992 and 1993, encouraged by Jerome McGann and John Unsworth at the University of Virginia, the World Wide Web was barely peeking over (our) far horizon, and the most common “browser,” an exotic new word at the time, was still Mosaic. Our uncertainty about the nature of the promise of what we came to know under an expanding set of terms as networked desktop computing, humanities computing, information technology, and new media, however, was itself part of the attraction—the allure of the half-known. The founding of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, with Unsworth as its director, gave us hope that our nearly millennial dream could be realized. As we shall go on to explain, that busy intersection of old problems and new opportunities led to the first thought-experiments that in turn led to the crude initial prototypes of a “William Blake Archive” at www.blakearchive.org. It also led to the priority we granted to the illuminated books—which were, after all, only one of several major compartments of Blake’s oeuvre, but their historical and critical dominance, our own recent editorial experience with them in the Blake Trust series, and, perhaps especially, the technical problems they presented in dealing with images and texts, made us decide to tackle them first. The challenges of the new medium, however, made us decide to reverse the priority that the Blake Trust had granted to the blockbuster Jerusalem. Any mistakes we made in handling its 100 plates would be all the harder to undo, and any technical advances that occurred would be all the harder to incorporate. We decided instead to start with the eight plates of The Book of Thel and hold Jerusalem for last. Getting it done would be, we thought, a kind of signal that we had finally arrived at the point where we could make our first big leap to the




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Multimedia Editing in an Electronic Environment As we mentioned, in 1993 we made an initial trial of our basic editorial principles and procedures in two printed volumes of the second Blake Trust series, William Blake: The Early Illuminated Books and William Blake: “Milton a Poem” and the Final Illuminated Works. Their reproductions, based on large-format transparencies, were rigorously controlled for color fidelity, and we devised a multi-layered editorial apparatus that we thought optimized the presentation of books in which graphic and textual elements converge. Some fundamental tenets of the editorial approach that we applied to the printed volumes seemed precisely correct for the Blake Archive, and we have adopted and extended them; others, including the principle of selection, were almost inconceivable in print but are within the reach of electronic editions. Principles of inclusion: Our printed volumes in the Blake Trust series presented the best current information about the production of Blake’s individual illuminated books, drawn chiefly from Viscomi’s revisionist scholarship in Blake and the Idea of the Book (1993). But in those volumes it was not feasible to reproduce more than a single copy of each work—and many of the copies most relevant to the history of production have never been reproduced. We are building the Archive on principles that, while we cannot ignore practical limitations that apply to electronic scholarly resources as to any other kind, incorporate a history of Blake’s artistic production for the first time into an edition. As we indicated previously, we chose the illuminated books as our starting point for several reasons: their historical and artistic value, the editorial and technical challenges they present, their relative coherence as an extensive group, the difficulties that their fragility and their widely dispersed present locations have created for scholars, and a new map of their place in Blake’s lifetime of artistic labor. We saw the illuminated books, once we had substantially achieved our first-phase goal of including one copy from every printing of every book, as a kind of archival and editorial backbone for the project. That backbone supports a twofold strategy: to evolve along lines that will achieve the greatest possible coverage of the range of Blake’s work while at the same time maintaining the greatest possible degree of scholarly coher-



other categories of Blake’s work. The remainder of this chapter will outline the discoveries we have made and the new things that are now possible, but also the hopes that have eluded us, the compromises we have learned to live with, and the limits, some old and some new, that we have accepted.

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ence. We maintain coherence by expanding the core with works that are closely related (historically, thematically, physically, etc.) to the core, and by giving priority to significant interrelated clusters (clustered by medium, such as the large color prints of 1795, by subject or theme, such as the Job and Milton illustrations in several media, etc.). Whenever possible, we assemble these individual clusters into larger ones. For instance, by the end of phase two, Blake’s work as a printmaker in several graphic media will be extraordinarily well represented—here again by expanding outward from the core of the illuminated books (typically watercolored relief etchings) to the other works designed and engraved by him, and then to those designed by him but engraved by others, and finally to those designed by others but engraved by him. We shall also incorporate Blake’s typographical works, which are all rare or unique, and his manuscripts. Fundamental units: The priority that we grant to the media, methods, and histories of artistic production has dictated a feature of the Archive that influences virtually every aspect of it. It is utterly fundamental: we emphasize the physical object—the plate, page, or canvas—over the logical textual unit— the poem or other work abstracted from its physical medium. This emphasis coincides with our archival as well as with our editorial objectives. Those central principles have too many implications to discuss fully here, but suffice it to say that they shape the entire editorial strategy, from the underlying structure of the SGML architecture,4 to the treatment of texts and pictures, to the user’s dynamic position among those texts and pictures. The part-to-whole path reinforced by print—which typically starts with a reading of Blake’s “poems” (often, in fact, transcriptions extracted from illuminated pages) and may or may not move along to a later, secondary look at “illustrations” (which often turn out to be a predetermined editorial selection of the pictures that seem most relevant to the words)—is reversed. Users of the Blake Archive are positioned primarily not as readers but as viewers of a visual field in which readable text may (or may not) be embedded. That situation will vary from “plate” to “plate,” or, more broadly, “object” to “object.” Perhaps the best way of describing our methodology is to present a brief account of some of its consequences, as they shape the choices available.5 A user looking for a work in the Archive typically moves down through the SGML hierarchy that is fundamental to the design of the whole. The user selects Works from the primary Table of Contents page. From the Works in the . . . Archive page, the user selects a category from a comprehensive list (figure 14.1) and then proceeds hierarchically to an index of available works in that category (Illuminated Books, the only category currently operative). Selecting a particular work (say The Book of Thel) in turn produces an index





Currently Available: Illuminated Books: electronic edition Coming Soon: • Commercial Book Illustrations • Designed and engraved by Blake • Designed by Blake and engraved by other engravers • Engraved by Blake after designs by other artists • Separate Plates and Plates in Series • Designed and engraved by Blake • Designed by Blake and engraved by other engravers • Engraved by Blake after designs by other artists • Drawings and Paintings • Pencil sketches • Pen and ink drawings • Monochrome wash drawings • Watercolor drawings • Color-printed drawings • Paintings • Manuscripts • Letters • Typographic Editions • Related material Figure 14.1

of copies available in the Archive (currently copies F, H, and O from the Library of Congress and J from the Houghton Library). This “generic workview” page also includes a brief introduction to the work and a full list of all extant copies and their current locations. A link provides access to a bibliography of critical studies of Thel. Selecting one plate from an index of plates in a copy of Thel, the user moves to a reproduction of the physical object, perhaps plate 2 of copy O. This, the “object view,” is the fundamental level of the Archive, to which all else is oriented (figure 14.2). Here we integrate the reproductions of individual objects into an array of tools and information sources that allow further investigation of the physical object itself and of its meanings in context. Each tool and information source has a designated place within the total scheme, and each is available to the user by means of a hypertextual link— which requires only a click of the mouse. From this point, our object-centered methodology can be most readily seen in the guidelines and standards we apply to the editing of texts, the re-



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Figure 14.2

production of pictures, and the informational contexts that we supply for both, and, finally, in the tools we give users to create their own information. Edited texts: Transcriptions of texts are, in the currency of textual criticism, as “diplomatic” as the medium allows. That is, in line with the archival dimension of our project, our texts are conservative transpositions of the original into conventional type fonts, retaining not only Blake’s capitalization,





punctuation, and spelling, but also (for the first time in a complete edition) an approximation of his page layout. Unlike printed editions of Blake, which have typically chosen among the textual features of various copies to produce a single printed text, the texts in the Archive are specific to individual plates: each transcription is of a particular plate in a particular copy and no other. Our editorial aids follow suit. Line numbering, for example, is strictly documentary. Rather than key our transcriptions to some standard—or average, since no standard prevails—derived from the priorities of printed editions, we number line by line from top to bottom without consideration to the contents of the lines. Poetry, prose, titles, part-headings, catchwords— any text that occupies horizontal space is given a line number for reference (figure 14.3). If Blake has mixed different kinds of text on a single plate, as he often has, then we ignore those differences in the numbering. The arrangement and the contents of Blake’s books often vary markedly from copy to copy. (The Book of Urizen is the easiest example—the arrangement of the plates is different in every copy, altering both the order of designs and the narrative sequences.) In general, printed editions such as Erdman’s must not only extract text from plates that are composites of text and design and convert them to conventional type but also must represent “the work” as a single work—The Book of Urizen—rather than as a collection of different visual and textual orders under one title. In such printed editions, differences are relegated to the editorial apparatus. In the Blake Archive, users can easily compare the texts of different etched copies side by side. As far as our transcriptions are concerned, however, our aim is to provide straightforward approximations—searchable and analyzable representations. We must recognize that they are, however accurate, necessarily approximations, primarily because any transcription of Blake’s irregular etched texts into the uniformities of conventional print is at best a translation. He can give his hand-drawn punctuation marks, for example, a variety of expressive graphical features more typical of handwriting than of printers’ fonts; he can invent punctuation that we cannot copy. But we can blame the old print medium for only some of our approximations; others we have to blame on the state of networked computing, where differences in operating systems, browsers, and monitors (among other factors) generate a frustrating proliferation of hard-to-predict variations in the way the “same” texts display on different monitors. In practice those variations—in size, color, and spacing—translate into some very unstable lines of poetry. Throw in a few other differences—different monitors set at different resolutions, different browsers in different versions, etc.—and any thought of producing what has been called a “type facsimile,” a close replica of Blake’s manuscript-style pages in conventional type forms, must succumb to more realistic expectations. But in this case at least, what the computer takes away with one hand



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Figure 14.3

it gives with the other: we feel no need to resort to elaborate typography and editorial sigla, the “barbed wire” that Lewis Mumford famously protested in modern scholarly editions, because the Archive permits users to examine transcriptions beside superior reproductions of the originals.6 Images: Fidelity in the reproduction of images is a top priority. Reproductions can never be perfect, and our images are not designed to be “archival” in the sense sometimes intended—virtual copies that might stand in for originals after a fire. But we recognize that, if we are going to contribute as we claim to the preservation of fragile originals that are easily damaged by handling, we must supply reproductions that scholars can depend upon in their research. Hence our benchmarks are calibrated to produce images accurate enough to be studied at a level heretofore impossible without access to the originals. In side-by-side comparisons, images in the Archive are more faithful to the originals in scale, color, and detail than the best photomechanical (printed) images in all but the most extraordinary instances. Our standard calls for first-generation color transparencies in 4 x 5-inch format or larger, with color bars and gray scales.7 The main object-view page provides reproductions at 100 dots per inch [dpi] compressed in JPEG format, a resolution high enough for most purposes. This image is linked to a 300





dpi enlargement (from the enlargement button at the bottom of every object-view page), which yields superb detail for close inspection of printing and coloring (figure 14.3). Our standards of reproduction are, in short, as high as we believe they can be under the present technological circumstances. Meanwhile, we try to anticipate technological advances that may change those circumstances for the better. We have been conducting trials with the new JPEG2000 (a standard now slated to be set in 2001) and with “layering” technologies that promise several major advantages in speed and utility over the present standard once it is widely adopted. But it is worth emphasizing again that all systems of representation have limits. Most printed pictures obey the rules imposed by halftones; digitized pictures obey the rules imposed by their imaging algorithms and their display devices. The structural priority we are granting to the physical object is apparent in our response to the art-historical principle that scale can be a significant aspect of the experience and meaning of an object. Thus we attempt to account archivally and editorially for the original size of Blake’s works, whether plates, paintings, drawings, manuscripts, or printed pages. We have done that in two ways, by displaying the actual size of every object directly beneath it, and by providing ImageSizer—a Java applet developed at IATH with the Blake project in mind—as a tool available from every object-view page. Retrieving the virtual object at its actual size is tricky, given the drastic differences among computer monitors. ImageSizer allows the user to calibrate and adjust, very simply, the size of any object—to display its actual size, or the size that fits the screen, or any convenient smaller or larger size. Here again, however, we run up against technological limits: as the size of a printed page limits the size of pictures that can be printed on them, so the size of a monitor limits the size of pictures that can be displayed. Even Blake, who never painted a Sistine ceiling and was a good deal more inclined to keep his images small than many of his contemporaries, produced a lot of problem cases. Works larger than 30 x 40 cm, such as the Canterbury Pilgrims watercolor and engraving, must be reduced manually in size to be viewed in their entirety on a monitor. The 300 dpi enlargements will still provide a wealth of visual information.8 Contextual information: The Archive strives to be much more than the gateway to a vast pile of accurate reproductions and faithful texts. This would be “access” and “preservation” of a kind, but not a very useful kind, because access depends largely on information. The Archive does its best to live up to the principle that works of art make sense only in context: the texts in the context of the pictures and vice versa, one illuminated book in the context of others, illuminated books in the context of drawings and paintings, and



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User-generated information: The principle that information and access are correlative is nowhere more evident than in the user’s ability to conduct comprehensive searches on texts and images in the Archive. The power of those searches depends on the information (about the content of designs, for instance) that we provide. Users can employ that information in turn to gain access to additional information and, ultimately, to create new combinations of information relevant to their specific interests (in Blake’s use of a visual and/or textual motif, for example). Text searches: From most pages in the Archive, including all object-view pages, the user can launch searches for any text in the Archive. At present the searchable texts are restricted to Blake’s works, their titles, and the general illustration descriptions written by the editors, but the aim is to make all texts in the Archive searchable—including all image descriptions, provenances, textual and object notes, and image-production records. Searches produce lists of matches or “hits” indexed by category, work, copy, and plate; choosing among those, the user is taken to transcriptions where the searchterms are highlighted in color. The search mechanism is, again, oriented to the individual object. (Users who want more conventional text searches that treat a poem as a single “work” have the option of searching the electronic version of Erdman’s edition in the Archive.) Image Searches: Similarly, the user can launch searches for virtually any combination of details in any and all of Blake’s images. This capability—unique as far as we know—uses a system of image description, developed by the editors, which employs a controlled vocabulary of characteristics. These search terms are organized for easy reference in a set of commonsense categories (figure—including character types and names, postures, gestures, etc.—animal, vegetation, object, structure, and text). The user can define a search using up to 19 terms at once (thus, for instance, simply “male”—a huge category—or, more limited, “bearded” “nude” “males” who are “crouching” in “fire” and “holding” “swords”). Like a text search, an image search produces a list of hits; choosing among those, the user is taken to textual descriptions of particular image details and then, choosing among those in turn, taken to plates zoomed to specific image-details displayed alongside the pertinent descriptions. New features have expanded the depth and range of the user’s ability to generate and control the information in the Archive from the object-view page. The most notable of these are a Comparison feature that allows users viewing any one illuminated print to compare it instantly with other impressions in the



all of Blake’s works in the context of historical information about them. Thus each object in the Archive is embedded in several sources of information, some layered, some overlapping, and some discrete, but all directly relevant to the “works” that are the contents of the Archive.


Archive printed from the same copper plate (figure 14.4); and a Navigator feature that allows users to move rapidly across the Archive’s collections, with a single click taking them from any work, copy, and plate, to any other work, copy, and plate. A final word on our editorial methodology. Although the Blake Archive is constructed on an archival editorial rationale that we believe is sound and fully justified, the overriding goal of the editors is not the maintenance of theoretical purity but the creation of a superlatively useful and durable scholarly (and pedagogical) resource that will be available free to all who have the means of access. Thus, although our online discussion group blake-proj is full of daily debates over minute editorial issues, we had no difficulty agreeing that we should incorporate David V. Erdman’s standard printed edition of The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake and make its texts searchable right along with the rest of the Archive. Although it is a fine edition in its own terms, we are including it not because it jibes with our theories about editing Blake but because we want the Archive to be much more than an edition, and we want it to be as convenient as possible to its users, who will often visit the site with Erdman’s edition as their point of departure. By similar reasoning, we have provided an extensive (and eventually searchable) bibliography of ref-

Figure 14.4



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erence works, biography, and criticism, which we shall revise and augment at intervals—the first of what we hope will be many supplementary study aids. We believe that it is helpful to perceive the Blake project as an extension of ongoing archival, cataloguing, and editorial enterprises into a new medium in order to exploit its radical advantages. Until now there has been no base of knowledge and technology sufficient to conceive, much less execute, an adequate comprehensive edition of the work of a multimedia artist. On the other hand, the Blake Archive and the electronic resources that make it possible have to live in the real world of matter and energy with ink, paper, dirt, flesh, and electrons no less than William Blake did. The technical and to some extent the political and economic base may have changed, but they remain a technical, economic, and political base—a lower limit of creation, Blake might have said, to which all things, including editorial things, must respond. Notes 1. Blake’s illuminated books are cited by title followed by plate and (when applicable) line numbers. 2. For Jerusalem the most interesting example is William Blake, Jerusalem: Prepared and Edited with Commentary and Notes by William R. Hughes (London, 1964). 3. Jerusalem, ed. Morton D. Paley (London and Princeton, N. J., 1991), vol. 1 of the Blake Trust edition of Blake’s Illuminated Books, gen. ed. David Bindman, 6 vols. (London, 1991–95). 4. SGML = Standard Generalized Markup Language, the system of encoding that is fundamental to the structure and appearance of the Blake Archive. 5. For a brief pictorial guide to the Archive illustrating the major points in the discussion below, see the Tour of the Archive in About the Archive from the online Archive’s Table of Contents page. <www.blakearchive.org>. 6. Lewis Mumford, “Emerson behind Barbed Wire,” New York Review of Books, 18 January 1968, pp. 3–5. 7. For the sake of consistency, if not also the quality of the image, we prefer film to digital images from our contributors’ collections, where equipment and protocols for digital capture vary. For further detail about the Archive’s methods and standards of reproduction, see Joseph Viscomi, “Digital Facsimiles: Reading the William Blake Archive,” Computers in the Humanities, Winter 2001, forthcoming. 8. All works 24 x 17 cm or less (which includes all illuminated books) are scaled 1:1, which enables them to be shown true size, with enlargements that are three times the size of the original. Works between 24 x 17 cm and 40 x 30 cm are scaled 1:1 but are resized manually in the object-view page to show the composition in its entirety; the enlargements are still three times the size of the original. Works larger than 40 x 30 cm are scaled 1:2/3 and resized manually, with enlargements that are twice the size of the original.







A Bibliography of Morton D. Paley’s Studies of Romanticism Tim Fulford, with the assistance of D. W. Dörrbecker

1. Books Editor. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Englewood Cliffs, N. J. Prentice Hall. 1969. Energy and the Imagination: A Study of the Development of Blake’s Thought. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1970. Editor (with M. Phillips). William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1973. Editor (with M. Eaves). America a Prophecy by William Blake. Albuquerque. Blake Newsletter/The University of New Mexico. 1975. Editor (with R. N. Essick). Robert Blair’s The Grave, Illustrated by William Blake. London. Scolar Press. 1982. William Blake. Oxford. Phaidon. 1978. German translation by P.-M. Hottenroth. Stuttgart. W. Kohlhammer. 1978. New printing: Ware, Hens. Omega Books. 1983. The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1983. The Apocalyptic Sublime. London and New Haven, Conn. Yale University Press. 1986. Jerusalem by William Blake. A newly edited text, with an introduction, commentaries on the poetry and the designs. Princeton, N. J. Princeton University Press. London. Tate Gallery Publications, for The William Blake Trust. 1991. 2nd corr. edn. 1998. Editor (with T. J. Fulford). Coleridge’s Visionary Languages. New York and Woodbridge. D. S. Brewer. 1993. Editor. The Last Man by Mary Shelley. With an introduction and notes. Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press. 1994.



Appendix z

236

A Bibliography of Morton D. Paley’s Studies of Romanticism

2. Articles “The Female Babe and ‘The Mental Traveller,’” Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1962), 97–104. “Blake in Nighttown,” A James Joyce Miscellany, 3rd ser., ed. M. Magalaner. Carbondale. University of Southern Illinois Press. 1962. Pp. 175–87. “Method and Meaning in Blake’s Book of Ahania,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 70 (1966), 27–33. “Tyger of Wrath,” PMLA, 81(1966), 540–51. Reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations (see above) and in William Blake: “The Tyger,” ed. W. Weathers. Columbus, Oh. Merrill. 1969. Pp. 80–103. “Cowper as Blake’s Spectre,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1 (1967–68), 236–52. “Blake’s Night Thoughts: An Exploration of the Fallen World,” William Blake: Essays for S. Foster Damon, ed. A. H. Rosenfeld. Providence, R. I. Brown University Press. 1969. Pp. 131–57. “The Blood Knot [by Athol Fugard],” American Book Collector, 20 (1969), 13–17. “Blakes at Buffalo,” Blake Newsletter, 4 ([1970-]1971), 81–86. (With D. Toomey). “Two Pictorial Sources for Jerusalem 25,” Blake Newsletter, 5 (1971–72), 185–90. “The Figure of the Garment in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem,” Blake’s Sublime Allegory, ed. S. Curran and J. A. Wittreich, Jr. Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. 1973. Pp. 119–39. “William Blake, The Prince of the Hebrews, and The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. M. D. Paley and M. Phillips. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1973. Pp. 260–93. “The Critical Reception of A Critical Essay [by A. C. Swinburne],” Blake Newsletter, 8 (1974–75), 32–37. (With R. N. Essick). “The Printings of Blake’s Designs for Blair’s Grave,” The Book Collector, 24 (1975), 535–52. “John Camden Hotten, A. C. Swinburne, and the Blake Facsimiles of 1868,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 79 (1976), 259–96. “The Truchsessian Gallery Revisited,” Studies in Romanticism, 16 (1977), 165–77. “‘Wonderful Originals’: Blake and Ancient Sculpture,” Blake in His Time, ed. R. N. Essick and D. Pearce. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 1978. Pp. 170–97. “Handlists of Four Blake Collections,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 11 (1977–78), 260–75. “John Camden Hotten and the First British Editions of Walt Whitman: ‘A Nice Milky Cocoa-Nut,’” Publishing History, 6 (1979), 5–35. “‘A New Heaven Is Begun’: William Blake and Swedenborgianism,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 13 (1979–80), 64–90. Reprinted in Blake and Swedenborg: Op-



Coleridge’s Later Poetry. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1996. 2nd edn. 1999. Portraits of Coleridge. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1999. Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1999.

237

position Is True Friendship, ed. H. F. Bellin and D. Ruhl. New York. Swedenborg Foundation. 1985. Pp. 15–34. “John Trivett Nettleship and His ‘Blake Drawings,’” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 14 (1980–81), 185–94. “A Victorian Blake Facsimile,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 15 (1981–82), 24–27. “What Is to Be Done?” Contribution to a special issue, “Inside the Blake Industry: Past, Present, and Future,” ed. M. Eaves, Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 425–27. “‘The Fourth Face of Man’: Blake and Architecture,” Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. R. Wendorf. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 1983. Pp. 184–215. “‘To Realize After a Sort the Imagery of Milton’: Samuel Palmer’s Designs for L’Allegro and Il Penseroso,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 46 (1983), 48–71; published simultaneously in Essays on the Blake Followers. San Marino, Calif. The Huntington Library, 1983. Pp. 48–71. “Further Thoughts on Night Thoughts,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 18 (1984–85), 183–84. “Milton and the Form of History,” Aligarh [India] Journal of English Studies, 10 (1985), 66–80. “The Art of ‘The Ancients,’” Huntington Library Quarterly, 52 (1989), 97–124; published simultaneously in William Blake and His Circle. San Marino, Calif. The Huntington Library, 1989. Pp. 97–124. “Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Apocalypse without Millennium,” Keats-Shelley Review, 4 (1989), 1–25. Revised reprint in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. A. A. Fisch, A. K. Mellor, and E. H. Schor. Oxford and New York. Oxford University Press. 1993. Pp. 107–23. “‘These Promised Years’: Coleridge’s ‘Religious Musings’ and the Millenarianism of the 1790s,” Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. K. Hanley and R. Selden. New York. St. Martin’s Press. Hemel Hempstead, Herts. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Pp. 49–65. “Blake’s Headgear: The Seventh Head of the Beast in Night Thoughts 345,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 24 (1990–91), 142–144. “Coleridge’s ‘Preternatural Agency,’” European Romantic Review, 1 (1990–91), 135–46. “Le dernier homme: The French Revolution as the Failure of Typology,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 24 (1991), 67–76. “Blake and Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 25 (1991–92), 75–78. “Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 54 (1991), 91–109. “Apocalypse and Millennium in the Poetry of Coleridge,” The Wordsworth Circle, 23 (1992), 24–34. “Coleridge and the Apocalyptic Grotesque,” Coleridge’s Visionary Languages, ed. T. J. Fulford and M. D. Paley. New York and Woodbridge. D. S. Brewer. 1993. Pp. 15–25. “Blake” and “Coleridge.” The Columbia History of British Poetry, ed. C. Woodring. New York. Columbia University Press. 1994. Pp. 327–52.





“Coleridge and the Annuals,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 57 (1994), 1–24. “Thomas Parkinson, 1920–92,” Yeats Annual No. 11, ed. W. Gould. New York. St. Martin’s Press. 1995. Pp.173–75. “‘To William Wordsworth’ and Coleridge’s Later Poetry,” The Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), 45–50. “Envisioning Lastness, Byron’s ‘Darkness,’” Romanticism, 1 (1995), 1–14. “Coleridge’s Later Poetry,” Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature, 8 (1995), 195–212. “Coleridge’s Limbo Constellation,” Studies in Romanticism, 34 (1995), 189–209. “Coleridge’s ‘To Mathilda Betham, from a Stranger,’” The Wordsworth Circle, 27 (1996), 169–72. “William Blake, Jacob Ilive, and the Book of Jasher,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 30 (1996–97), 51–54. “Apocalypse and Millennium,” A Companion to Romanticism, ed. D. Wu. Oxford. Blackwell. 1998. Pp. 470–85. (With R. N. Essick). “‘Dear Generous Cumberland’: A Newly Discovered Letter and Poem by William Blake,” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 32 (1998–99), 4–13. “‘To Defend the Bible in This Year 1798 Would Cost a Man His Life,’” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 32 (1998–99), 32–43. 3. Book Reviews—A Selection Blake and Tradition, by K. Raine. English Language Notes, 7 (1969–70), 304–10. Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. D. V. Erdman and J. E. Grant. Blake Studies, 4.1 (1971), 93–99. Blake’s Illustrations to the Poems of Gray, by I. Tayler. Criticism, 14 (1972), 93–96. Blake Studies, by G. Keynes. Studies in Burke and His Time, 15 (1973), 100–04. William Blake, by M. K. Nurmi. Review of English Studies, ns. 27 (1976), 475–77. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens, by H. Bloom. Studia Neophilologica, 49 (1977), 159–61. Blake Books, by G. E. Bentley, Jr. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 72 (1978), 396–400. The Shows of London, by R. D. Altick. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 12 (1978–79), 271–73. The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850, by J. F. C. Harrison. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 14 (1980–81), 104–05. The Poems of John Keats, ed. J. Stillinger. Modern Philology, 78 (1980–81), 99–101. William Blake’s Designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts: A Complete Edition, ed. J. E. Grant, E. J. Rose, and M. J. Tolley. Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 674–82. See also some “Further Thoughts” in Part 2 of this list, above. The Human Face of God, by K. Raine. The Burlington Magazine, 124 (1982), 772–73. Exhibition review: “Toronto and Yale: ‘William Blake: His Art and Times.’” The Burlington Magazine, 124 (1982), 789–90. The Gates of Memory, by G. Keynes. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 16 (1982–83), 233–35.



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Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible—Literary Texts and the Emergence of Painting and Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable, by R. Paulson. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 18 (1984–85), 223–26. The Life and Art of James Barry, by W. L. Pressly. The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, ns. 7 for 1981. New York. AMS Press. 1985. Pp. 281–82. Shelley the Radical, by M. H. Scrivener. Studies in Romanticism, 14 (1985), 572–74. The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 20 (1986–87), 53–56. William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job and Colour Versions of William Blake’s Job Designs from the Circle of John Linnell, ed. D. Bindman et al. for the William Blake Trust. The Burlington Magazine, 129 (1987), 747–48. Byron the Satirist, by F. L. Beaty. Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 598–600. The Social Vision of William Blake, by M. Ferber. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 86 (1987), 567–70. British Romantic Art, by K. Kroeber. Studies in Romanticism, 27 (1988), 442–46. (With G. Tottie). Äktenskapet mellan Himmel och Helvete by William Blake, ed. and trans. F. Isaksson. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 23 (1989–90), 209–210. Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics, by T. M. Kelley. Studies in Romanticism, 30 (1991), 136–41. Words of Eternity: Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime, by V. A. De Luca. The Wordsworth Circle, 22 (1991), 215–16. Nature into Art, by C. Woodring. Keats-Shelley Journal, 40 (1991), 167–69. Keats’s Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination, by D. P. Watkins. Studies in Romanticism, 31 (1992), 544–48. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s, by J. Mee. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 27 (1993–94), 86–88. Blake and the Idea of the Book, by J. Viscomi, The Wordsworth Circle, 25 (1994), 198–99. Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems, by J. Stillinger. Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), 635–41. Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law, by E. P. Thompson, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 28 (1994–95), 65–66. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Table Talk, ed. C. Woodring. The Wordsworth Circle, 26 (1995), 192–93. Keats and History, ed. N. Roe. BARS [The British Association for Romantic Studies] Bulletin and Review, 11 (1996), 10–12. William Blake by P. Ackroyd. Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, 30 (1996–97), 58–60. Coleridge in Italy, by E. Zuccato. Romantic Circles Reviews (online electronic journal) 1 (1997–98). The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834, by C. Burdon. BARS Bulletin and Review, 14 (1998), 14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Scholarship, by W. B. Crawford, with the assistance of A. M. Crawford, vol. III. Studies in Romanticism, 38 (1999), 315–22.




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Editor. Blake Newsletter (vols. 1–3). Published at the Department of English, University of California at Berkeley. 1967–1969. Co-editor (with M. Eaves). Blake Newsletter (vols. 4–10) and Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly (vols. 11-). Published by the Department of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and subsequently by the Department of English, University of Rochester. 1970-present. Editor. Studies in Romanticism (vols. 14–16). Published by Boston University. 1975–77.



4. Editorships

Abrams, M. H. 13 agricultural improvement 104–10 Aikin, Matthew 149 Aikin, Lucy 141–42 Alighieri, Dante 211–12 Allen, Robert 94 Angelico, Fra 208 Angels copulating with mortals 19–20, 154 apocalypse ecological 103–17 meaning 53–54 millennium and 53 privation and 111–12 Romantic 53–68 Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers (APLAP) 168, 173 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 141–42 Bate, Jonathan 104 Beckford, William 184 Beer, John on Coleridge 16–17 Bell, John 169 Bentley, Thomas 174 Bible German Higher Criticism 49 see also under names of books of Bicheno, Joseph 11 Birch, Thomas 41 Blair, Robert 210 Blake, Catherine 185, 220 Blake Trust 221, 223, 224

Blake, William “A Song of Liberty” 11 Accusers, The 212, 213 “Africa” 58 America 11, 58 apocalypse and 57–58, 61, 63, 139 Archive computers and 222, 223, 228–29 contextual information 230–31 edited texts 227–29 fundamental units 225–27 images 229–30 searches 231–32 inclusion, principles of 224–2 page layout 228 prototypes of 223 punctuation 228 text searches 231 user-generated information 231 using 225–27 “Asia” 58 Bible illustrations 208 biography written 41 Blake-Varley sketchbooks 183, 186–202 book illustrations 210, 211, 212 Book of Ahania 209 Book of Los 209 Book of Thel 223, 225–26 Book of Urizen 209, 210, 228 change in, 1820 185 Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims 210 Coleridge and 56–58 color printing, individual technique of 209, 220



Index

Index

copies of works, variations in 228 Death on a Pale Horse 14 Death’s Door 210 editing 221, 222–23, 224–33 editions 220 Enoch 210 Epitome of James Hervey’s “Meditations among the Tombs” 211 Europe 56, 57–58, 210, 211 Four Zoas 61–62, 210 Grave designs 184 illuminated books 209–14, 220, 221, 224 image and word 207–14 image/word combination 20 improvement, opinion of 106 inscriptions 210, 211 Jerusalem 1, 139, 210, 211, 220–21, 222, 223 Joseph of Arimathea 212 Laocoön print 212, 213–14 Making of Magna Charta 210 millenarianism of 10–11, 12, 58, 149 millennial city 11–12 Milton 26, 37, 62–63, 210–11, 224 Milton and 26 Mirth 211 obscurity 219, 220 page layout 228 Pestilence 210 Punctuation 228 sanity disputed 183–85, 186 Sharp and 7, 131 Small Book of Designs 209 Songs of Innocence and Experience 62, 184, 209, 210 Southcott and 7, 131 Swedenborg and 4 techniques 209, 220 Then the Lord Answered Job 212 Vala 210 Visionary Heads 183, 186–202 visitations 20 word as image 207–12

Bloom, Harold 10, 157 Böhme, Jacob 11 Bonaparte, Napoleon 8 British Empire corruption of 83 Brothers, Richard Gordon and 176 madhouse confinement 1, 4, 56, 124 millennial city 11–12 prophesying 4, 124 Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times 56 Southcott disowned by 7 Thompson on 3 Browne, Mary Ann 142–43 Bryan, William 4, 5, 167 Buell, Lawrence 103, 104 Burgh, James 41 Burke, Edmund 174–75 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 43 millenarianism and 3 Milton and 37, 42–43 Reflections on the Revolution in France 42, 43, 47, 129 sublime, rhetoric of 37 Thoughts and Details on Scarcity 105 Butts, Thomas 212 Byron, Lord George Gordon apocalypse and 59–60 Apocryphal New Testament 156 Cain 156 Don Juan 157 Heaven and Earth 153, 154, 156, 161, 162 millenarianism 13 orientalism 121 publishing and 80 Byzantine Church 207–8 Calvert, Edward 185 Carson, Rachel 103 Cecil, David 23 Chalmers, Thomas 9 Chandler, James 178



242

Chastanier, Benedict 169–70 Chatterton, Thomas 95 Chew, Sanuel 156 Christensen, Jerome 80 Christianity, influence of, 1820s 155–56 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor anti-Jacobinism 133 apocalypse and 49, 55, 56, 58, 60, 61, 64–68, 79, 87, 88 Bible prophecy and 8 Biographia Literaria 65 Blake and 56–58 Burke and 47 Christabel 65 as counter-revolutionary 81 Courier, The 133 “Destiny of Nations” 47, 48, 75 “Devil’s Thoughts” 13, 60 “Fears in Solitude” 71–84 “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” 13, 60 “France: An Ode” 80, 82 French Revolution and 65–67 “Frost at Midnight” 96, 99 Godwin and 6 Irving admired by 9 Joan of Arc 47 “Kubla Khan” 65 Lyrical Ballads 73, 76 millenarianism 13, 48, 49 Milton’s influence 40, 41, 47–50 money needs 79, 81 “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” 95 Morning Post, writings for 71–84 Napoleonic Wars, attitude to 82 pantisocracy and 87–101 Poems on Various Subjects (1796) 95 “Praeternatural Agencies” 47 radicalism and 9, 16, 133 “Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement” 72 “Religious Musings” 47, 48–50, 56–57, 58–59, 61, 75, 88–89, 140 republicans’ influence on 41

243

Revelation and 87 “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 17, 65, 67–68 Sibylline Leaves 47 Southey, quarrel with 96 spied upon 4 “The Eolian Harp” 66 The Plot Discovered 41 “Two Round Spaces on the Tombstone” 60 “Unitarian sublime” 47 unitarianism and 47–50 commons 105, 106–7, 108, 109 Commonwealthsmen 40, 41 Condorcet, Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de 104 Constantine the Great 208 Cottle, Joseph 66, 87, 88 Cowper, William “Castaway, The” 31, 32, 34–35 criticism on 23–24 damnation, sense of 24, 25, 26, 29, 32 Homer translations 23, 27 Milton and 15–16, 24, 25, 27–29, 30, 32, 35 Milton translations 27–28 myth and 27, 30, 31, 34 “On the Ice Islands Seen Floating in the Germanic Ocean” 31, 32–34 “On the Receipt Of My Mother’s Picture Out Of Norfolk” 34 past and 25, 27, 29, 30–31, 34, 35 Satan, identification with 26–27 Task, The 23, 24 voices 24, 25 “Yardley Oak” 29, 30, 34 Cumberland, George 185, 211 Cunningham, Allan 193 Daniel, Book of 171 Dante Alighieri see also Alighieri, Dante Darwin, Erasmus 160–61 De Quincey, Thomas 42, 134



Index

Index

Descarte, René 163 Dobbs, Francis 11 Douglas, Mary 106–7 Dryden, John 33–34 Eaton, Daniel Isaac 177 ecology 103–17 current debate on 104 editing 219 Edwards, John 66 Ehrlich, Paul 103 Empire, British 83 enclosure 105–9 Enoch, Book of 155–56, 157–58, 162 Erdman, David V. 10, 231, 232 Escher, M. C. 67 Essick, Robert N. 12, 210, 211 Everest, Kelvin 47, 75 Faber, G. S. 8 Favret, Mary 83 Ferguson, Frances 111 Finch, Francis Oliver 185 Flaxman, John 147–48, 184–85, 208–9 Fletcher, John 172 Foster, John 127–28 Franklin, Caroline 161 Fraternal and Philosophic Society 177–78 French Revolution apocalypse and 54–55, 56, 139–40 failure of 65 female figures 129 millenarianism and 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 13, 43 Revelation and 8, 49 Frere, James Hatley 8 Fricker, Edith 94 Fricker, Martha 94 Fricker, Sara 94, 97 Fricker sisters 94 Frye, Northrop 10 Fulford, Tim 111, 160–61 Gallagher, Catherine 112–13

Garrett, Clarke 3 George IV, King (and prince) 121 Gifford, William 156 Gillray, James 124 Godwin, William 5–6, 13, 104, 113, 114 Of Population 114–15 radicalism 114–15 Goldsmith, William Deserted Village 29 Gordon, Lord George 176 Gray, Thomas 210 Greenblatt, Stephen 154 Gurnett, George 94 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey 123–27 Harding, Sandra 140 Harrington, James 41 Harrison, J. F. C. 3 Hartsock, Nancy 140 Hastings, Warren 124 Hawes, Robert 168–78 A Letter to the Honourable Mr. Justice Ashurst 172 An Acrostical Tribute 176 Death at Our Window 170, 171 Elegaic Stanzas 175 Letter from a Citizen 175–76 Libertas Dei Gratia! The Proclamation of LIBERTY 174 Millennium Star and Standard 171 “On Viewing the City Regalia” 171 Reasons from Prophecy 171–72 Rose and Lily, The 172 Star of Liberty 173, 174 Triumph of Liberty 173–74 Window-Tax Memorial 170 Hayley, William 27, 41, 185 Hazlitt, William 113, 114, 132 Heath family 94 Hill, Margaret 94 Holcroft, Thomas 3 Holt, Daniel 177 Hopkins, James 145, 146



244

Hoppner, James 184 Horsley, Samuel 7–8 Hume, David 41 hunger 110–11 Hunt, Robert 184 Iconoclasm 208 images 207–8 improvement see agricultural improvement Internet 222 Irving, Revd. Edward 8–9, 9–10 Islam 207 Janowitz, Anne 114 Job, Book of 212 Johnson, Joseph 41 Johnson, Samuel 41 Jones, Sir William 125 Kent, Nathaniel 106 Killingsworth, Jimmie 115 Kroeber, Karl 109, 116 Labilliere, Major Peter 168, 174 Lamb, Charles 160, 162–63, 184 Landor, Walter Savage 184 Larcher, Andrew 177 Law, William 11 Leo III 208 Linnaeus 163 Linnell, John 185, 212 Liu, Alan 81 Lloyd, Thomas 176–77 London 12, 17, 39 London Corresponding Society (LCS) 4, 174–75, 176 London Revolution Society 3 Loutherborg, Phillipe De 5, 14–15 Lovell, Robert 94 Luca, Vincent A. De 12 McDowell, Paula 169, 174 McGann, Jerome M. 11 McKibben, Bill 103

245

Malthus, Thomas 6–7 environmental catastrophe foretold by 104 Essay on the Principle of Population 104, 105, 112–13 laboring-class women and 112–13 poor people, attitude to 105, 112–13 population and 104, 105, 109–10 scarcity and 103, 115 Marshall, William 107 Mee, Jon 12, 56 Mesmerism 5 Middle Ages ecclesiastical decoration 208 millenarianism ecology and 103–17 history of 2–10 politics and 3–4 radicalism and 3 romanticism and, study of 10–15 millennium apocalypse and 53 Christian teaching on 1 Milton, John apocalypse treated by 38–39, 40, 46 Areopagitica 4, 39, 41, 45, 49 Eikonoklastes 38–39, 42 influence of 16, 40, 63 millenarianism 39, 40 Of Reformation 4, 49 Paradise Lost 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 40, 42, 43, 45, 155 as poet of sublime 42 political sublime, influence of 37–50 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio 41 Ready and Easy Way, The 41 Romantic poets and 15, 16, 63 for effects on Romantic poets, see under names of poets Mitchell, W. J. T. 108 Moore, Thomas Bible and 157 Lalla Rookh 157



Index

Index

Loves of the Angels 153, 154, 157, 158–60 Poems of Thomas Little 157 Morning Post 60, 65, 71–84, 169 Morris, William 114 Mortimer, John Hamilton 14 Moyle, Walter 41 Muir, Dr. Henry 159 Muloch, Thomas 156 Mumford, Lewis 229 Murray, John 156 Napoleon Bonaparte see Bonaparte, Napoleon Napoleonic Wars 7, 8, 9, 55, 56, 124 Newey, Vincent 23, 34 Newton, Thomas 28 Oliver, W. H. 2, 9 Orientalism 121–24, 125–27 see also under names of writers Otley, William Young 208–9 Paine, Thomas 169, 172, 174 Paley, Morton D. Apocalypse and Millennium 13–14, 16, 53 Apocalyptic Sublime, The 14–15, 46, 139 bibliography of 235–40 on Blake 10–11, 37–38, 58, 213–14, 220–21 on Brothers 124 on Coleridge 13–14, 47, 49, 79, 88–89 Continuing City, The 220 Energy and the Imagination 10–11 influence of 10–11, 12, 13 Romanticism and Millenarianism and 14, 15–20 tribute to 15–20 Palmer, Jacqueline S. 115 Palmer, Samuel 185 pantisocracy 87–101 Peters, Rev. Hugh 42

Piper, H. W. 49 Pitt, William General View of the Agriculture of the County of Northampton 105, 106 Pocock, J. G. A. 82 Poole, Tom 80 poor, the 104–5, 109–13 population 109–13 press, Millenium 167–78 Price, Richard 3 Discourse on the Love of Our Country 42 Milton’s influence 41 revolutions approved of 43–44 Priestley, Joseph Essay on the First Principle of Government 45 French Revolution and 3, 44, 44–45 Letters to the Right Honorable Edmund Burke 45 millennium and 3, 44–45 Milton and 44 pantisocracy and 95, 96 The Present State of Europe 44 print trades 167, 169 pseudepigrapha 155–56 Pye, Henry James 65 Quarterly Review, The 134 racism 159–60 Reformation 38 Reid, W. H. 5 repression 172, 173 Revelation, Book of 8, 44, 54, 112, 124 Coleridge and 47, 48, 49 French Revolution and 49 Malthus and 111 political dimension 59 Robespierre, Maximilien 54–55 Robinson, Henry Crabb 184–85 Robison, John 5



246

Rochester, Bishop of 46–47 Ross, Eric 116 Schell, Jonathan 103 Schiavonetti, Louis 210 Schweitzer, Albert 60–61 Scott, Walter Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 84 Sexuality rural poor and 111 Shadduck, Gayle 156, 158, 159 Shaffer, E. S. 13, 49 Shakespeare, William King Lear 98 Sharp, William 3, 4, 7, 131 Shelley, Mary 13, 143–44 Shelley, Percy Godwin and 6 Laon and Cythna 113–14 Malthus, opinion on 113–14 “Mask of Anarchy” 13, 14 millenarianism 13, 60 Prometheus Unbound 6, 14, 26, 109 Queen Mab 16 Sidney, Algernon 41 Sinclair, John 107–8 Smith, Charlotte 100 Emigrant, The 98–99 Society of Avignon 169, 170 Sontag, Susan 144 Sotheby, William 79 Southcott, Joanna background 144–45 body of 131 Brothers disowns 7 death 149 Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness 145, 149 influence of 7, 131, 132, 145–47, 148 pregnancy 147, 149 Strange Effects of Faith 146 success, grounds of 145–47 Third Book of Wonders 148 Thompson on 3

247

True Explanation of the Bible 147 Word to the Wise 145–46 as writer 137 Southey, Robert anti-Jacobinism 133 Blake and 184 “Botany Bay Eclogues” 97, 99 Brothers and 125 Coleridge, quarrel with 96 Curse of Kehama 122, 127 enthusiasm, attitude to 128 “Hymn to the Penates” 97, 99–100 Irish Catholics, attitude to 132–33 Letters from England 131–32 millenarianism 18, 130, 133, 134 “On the Death of a Favourite old Spaniel” 98 Orientalism 122, 123, 125, 126, 127–32 Poems, 1797 18–19, 97–100 radicals and 132 “Soldier’s Wife” 99 Thalaba 129–31 “To Mary Wollstonecraft” 97 “Triumph of Women” 97 “Widow, The” 99 Spence, Thomas 177 agricultural improvement and 104 influence of 114 Spenceans 18 Sterling, John 68 Stuart, Daniel 81 style 37 surveillance systems 172, 173 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 4, 167, 169, 170 Swedenborgianism 169 Symmons, Charles 41 Symonds, H. D. 177 Teedon, Samuel 24 Terry, Garnett 12 Thompson, E. P. 2–3, 131, 167 Thompson, Edward 168



Index

Index

time 140–41 Toland, John 41 Tooke, J. Horne 73 Townsend, Joseph Dissertation on the Poor Laws 110–11 Turner, George 132 Twort, Charles 132 Unwin, Mary 24 Varley, Cornelius 185 Varley, John 185, 186 Viscomi, Joseph 211, 224 Wakefield, Gilbert 4–5, 38, 45–47 Spirit of Christianity 45–46 Ward, James 185, 186 wastelands 105, 106, 109 Watson, Richard 45 Wedgwood brothers 80 Weeks, Shadrach 94 West, Benjamin 14, 208 Wilberforce, William 134 Wilkins, Charles 124 Williams, Raymond 79 Winchester, Elhanan 169 Wittreich, Joseph 27 women writers 140–44 Wordsworth, William apocalypse and 55, 61, 64

Blake and 184 Coleridge’s admiration 9 Excursion, The 134 French Revolution and 54, 55 Godwin and 6 “Home at Grasmere” 96 “Last of the Flock” 108 “London” 40 “Michael” 108 millenarianism 13 Milton’s influence 40, 63 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” 109 Prelude, The 55, 63, 100, 140 republicans, attitude to 40–41 vatic role 8 World 169 World Wide Web 223 Worrall, David 12 Worster, Donald 104 Wright, John 11, 167 Wylie, Ian 13 Yeats, W. B. “Leda and the Swan” 155 Young, Arthur agricultural improvement and 104, 105, 108 Annals of Agriculture 105–6 enclosure and 108 Young, Edward 210



248

Romanticism and Millenarianism

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Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and human sciences

Romanticism and Form

Satire and Romanticism

Romanticism and colonial disease

Romanticism and Pleasure

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity

Romanticism and animal rights

Romanticism and gothic

Anger, revolution, and romanticism

Millennial Visions: Essays on Twentieth-Century Millenarianism

Political Romanticism

Introducing Romanticism

Introducing Romanticism

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Philosophical Romanticism

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

American Romanticism and the Marketplace

Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader

Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology

Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology

Romanticism and Millenarianism

Romanticism

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and human sciences

Romanticism and Form

Satire and Romanticism

Romanticism and colonial disease

Romanticism and Pleasure

Romanticism and Form

Romanticism, Sincerity and Authenticity

Romanticism and animal rights

Romanticism and gothic

Anger, revolution, and romanticism

Millennial Visions: Essays on Twentieth-Century Millenarianism

Political Romanticism

Introducing Romanticism

Introducing Romanticism

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Philosophical Romanticism

Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

American Romanticism and the Marketplace

Romanticism and Revolution: A Reader

Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology

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