Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 Stephanie Kuduk Weiner General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of ...

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Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 Stephanie Kuduk Weiner

General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; and Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Titles include: Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity

10.1057/9780230599680 - Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner

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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

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Stephanie Kuduk Weiner



Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874

© Stephanie Kuduk Weiner 2005

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–9335–9 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–9335–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kuduk Weiner, Stephanie, 1972– Republican politics and English poetry, 1789–1874 / Stephanie Kuduk Weiner. p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–9335–1 (cloth) 1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Republicanism— Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Republicanism—Great Britain—History—18th century. 6. English poetry—18th century— History and criticism. 7. Political poetry, English—History and criticism. 8. Republicanism in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR585.H5K83 2005 821′.609358—dc22 2005041953 10 14

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Love and harmony combine, And around our souls intwine, While thy branches mix with mine, And our roots together join.



for Mark



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Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1 Republican Demystification in Politics for the People and Blake’s Songs of Experience

17

2 Two Defence[s] of Poetry: Shelley and the Newgate Magazine

35

3 Cooper and Linton: Chartist Prophets and Craftsmen

66

4 Landor, Clough, and European Republicanism

97

5 Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne, 1867–1874

133

Conclusion

177

Notes

181

Index

213

vii



Contents

Barbara Gelpi, Herbert Lindenberger, Joss Marsh, and Peter Stansky oversaw the earliest version of this work, and I am deeply indebted to their criticism and support. For their help in conceiving this project, and their support throughout, I also wish to thank Florence Boos, Lisa Cody, Regenia Gagnier, Robert Kaufman, Purnima Mankekar, Monica Moore, and the Victorian Studies Group at Stanford University: Helen Blythe, Kenneth Brewer, Jason Camlot, Lisa Jenkins, Diana Maltz, Richard Menke, Paul St Amour, Ardel Thomas, and Kate Washington. I am grateful to the many faculty members and students at Wesleyan University, and friends in New Haven, who offered support and, in many cases, read and commented upon portions of the manuscript. I wish to extend a special thanks to Henry Abelove, Steve Angle, Yaron Aronowicz, Sally Bachner, Sarah Bilston, Christina Crosby, Gertrude Hughes, Aaron Kunin, Mary Livingston, Sean McCann, Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Jamie Novogrod, Joel Pfister, Jill Rapaport, Joe Reed, Kit Reed, Shelley Rosenblum, Julia Simon-Kerr, Ori Simchen, William Stowe, Khachig Tololyan, and Katie Trumpener. Casey Quinn was an indefatigable research assistant. I am grateful also to the reviewers and editors whose comments contributed to the revision of this book. My thanks to Joseph Bristow go back to his days at the Humanities Center at Stanford. I thank him for all his critical engagement and encouragement. I am happy to acknowledge the assistance I have received from the librarians and staff at the British Library, the Bishopsgate Institute, Stanford University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University, and I wish in particular to thank the interlibrary loan and special collections librarians in Wesleyan’s Olin Library. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint a revised version of two earlier articles, ‘ “A Sword of a Song”: Swinburne’s Republican Aesthetics,’ Victorian Studies 43.2 (Winter 2001): 253–79 and ‘Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper’s Purgatory of Suicides,’ Victorian Poetry 39.2 (Summer 2001): 165–86, which appear here in Chapters 3 and 5. Finally, I thank my sister, Andrea, and my parents, Dave and Cathy Kuduk, for years of enthusiasm and boundless generosity. With love and deepest gratitude of all, for all his gifts, not least the inspiration he has provided me and his faith in me as a scholar and writer, I dedicate this book to my husband, Mark S. Weiner. viii



Acknowledgements

This book examines the poetic life of republican political ideas in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Analyzing the work of poets who espoused republican ideals, from William Blake to W. J. Linton to Algernon Charles Swinburne, this study shows how republican poems reflected and refracted the theories of political change that animated the expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Beginning with songs of demystification written in the wake of the French Revolution, I trace the history of nineteenth-century republican poetry through poets’ contributions to the rebuilding of republican politics during the 1820s, the proliferation and diversification of republican poetry during the 1840s and 1850s, and its dispersal into aestheticism, advanced liberalism, and secularism during the 1870s. Through this historical approach, I tell the story of the intertwined fate of republican politics and republican poetry, connecting the philosophical debates, organizational practices, cultural institutions, and political events of republican politics to the formal strategies of republican verse. The argument advanced here has two principal parts. First, this book asserts the importance of republicanism to the literary history of Romantic and Victorian England. To some extent, that importance has been axiomatic within the study of Romantic poetry, whose relation to the French Revolution has long been a subject of literary-historical analysis. Yet the central place of republican thought and political commitment within nineteenth-century English culture has been obscured by the pride of place afforded within studies of literary radicalism to the proto-socialist and socialist political tradition and by period divisions between Romantic and Victorian literature. Attending to republican poetry—Romantic and Victorian, popular and elite—reconfigures the literary history of the century to reveal a new series of ties across class and period, highlighting 1



Introduction

both continuities and changes in England’s cultural engagement with the idea of representative government, by any account one of the central issues of English political history and the broader history of Western modernity. The structure of this book follows from this part of my argument, attending both to change over time and to poets’ intersecting contributions to each historical moment. Second, this book argues that the political work of poetry inheres not so much in its hortatory messages as in its intellectual efforts. On one level, this argument follows the claims made by republican poets themselves that poetic forms were essential to the political role of poetry. They tended to ally formal innovation with political progress, and they also typically defined poetry’s agency in emotional and epistemological terms: poetry, they believed, cultivated readers’ ethical sympathies and opened their minds to a clear vision of the world as it is and could be. On another level, this argument bypasses poets’ intention. Poetic forms, I argue, made possible a unique richness and complexity of political ideas by offering poets a unique set of tools for making meaning. As a discursive medium characterized by explicit formalism, compression, and multivalence, poetry organized knowledge and experience in ways that shaped, as well as conveyed, republican ideas. Consequently, the contribution in intellectual and imaginative energy that poets made to republican political movements took place within, as well as through, poetic dynamics. The methodological approach of this study, as I will discuss in greater detail below, reflects this emphasis. My focus on poetic events and their relation to political matters requires an interdisciplinary methodology that combines formalist criticism with historical analysis. The story of republican poetry follows that of republican politics. Nineteenth-century English republicanism not only drew upon, but also differed from, the civic humanist and commonwealth traditions with which it shares the name ‘republican,’ as it did from the American, Irish, and European democratic and nationalist movements that also went under that banner. Emerging from the political upheaval and realignments of the 1790s, this was a republicanism at whose center stood the ideal of representative government: a polity organized according to the principles of popular sovereignty and an expanded, ultimately universal suffrage. It was anti-monarchical, at least in theory and emphatically in spirit, and democratic, justifying the political participation of a wide section of the citizenry as a good in its own right. This configuration of political ideas represented a startling recombination of languages and positions that had long been opposed to one another. Most unexpectedly, it fused elements of both the civic humanist



2 Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874

republicanism and the natural rights discourses whose contrariety had structured British politics from the mid-seventeenth through the eighteenth century.1 Civic humanist, ‘classical’ republicanism viewed politics as a struggle between virtue and corruption. Its ideal was the virtuous, active citizen, whose arms-bearing and ownership of property, especially land, guaranteed his independence. As in the Renaissance thought to which it was indebted, this early modern republicanism espoused an essentially pessimistic theory of history and viewed commerce and trade as tending toward luxury and, eventually, decadence. By contrast, natural rights proponents such as John Locke embraced progress, commerce, and broader definitions of property. Alongside these two important bodies of political thinking stood schools of thought, elements of which would persist into the nineteenth century, that justified the power of the Commons or the people in terms of Leveller populism and the ancient constitution. Over the course of the eighteenth century, civic humanist republicanism and natural rights theory moved closer together. In part owing to the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment, republican thought adopted a more pro-commercial stance and a more optimistic, progressive model of history.2 In the wake of the Restoration, anti-monarchism gave way to support for a mixed government of Commons, Lords, and King, and republican thought was increasingly identified with a program of parliamentary reform seeking wider and more substantive representation; but these new reforms were justified in traditional civic humanist terms: the need to bolster independence, fight corruption, and check the power of the crown.3 By mid-century, some reformers, such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, began to mix civic humanist and natural rights arguments for an extended suffrage. Republican thinkers were also conceiving of the virtuous participation of the citizenry more broadly, placing emphasis not only upon the franchise but also on jury service and activity in the broader civil sphere, which brought new prominence to calls for freedom of the press and freedom of speech.4 These trends prefigure the realignments of the 1790s, but often in unexpected ways. During that decade, a republican discourse that in 1785 would have been nearly unrecognizable was among the new political languages to emerge from the cauldron of controversy, revolution, and war. Political historians disagree about the precise nature of these transformations, but there is broad agreement that a fundamental realignment of the political landscape occurred at this time and that, as Mark Francis and John Morrow write, ‘nineteenth-century English political thought was distinct from that of the eighteenth.’5



Introduction 3

The republicanism that emerged at this time was shaped by two main developments. The first was the placement of popular representation at the center of republican thought. In part this involved the application, in texts such as Rights of Man (1791–92), of an American model of republican government to an old world that had been made new by the French Revolution. That model of ‘a republic of virtually any extent’ included a written constitution, an elected executive, and a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of association, press, and religion.6 Most crucially, however, its foundation was the principle of democratic representation.7 This principle was now supported by a panoply of arguments, particularly Lockean natural rights theories and also constitutionalist and utilitarian analyses.8 While traces of the classical republican idiom persisted, the primary justifications for the franchise were no longer property-holding or checking the power of the crown. Yet just as the idea of popular participation took up its place at the center of republican discourse, the course of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars rendered that idea anathema in Britain. As a result, republican thought moved to the margins of British political debate. The second development was the emergence of a new ideal republican citizen. This change also involved alterations in the vocabulary of civic humanist republicanism, in this case that of the notion of ‘virtue’ into an ideal of full personhood in a broadly humanist sense.9 On the one hand, the virtuous, independent citizen became the modern individual and, as Mark Bevir argues, ‘an ideal of social harmony replaced that of constitutional balance, and this meant that rights became a way of protecting autonomous individuals [. . .] not a product of a contract with a sovereign.’10 Each citizen possesses a right to participation in the civic realm and to protection from unjust interference, nineteenth-century republican arguments claimed, because such rights are essential to the exercise of individual selfhood. David Wootton describes this shift as the replacement of virtue with happiness, Frank Prochaska as the evolution of virtue into the ideal of a ‘higher, risen politics,’ and David S. Ferris as the transformation of freedom into a synonym for self-development and self-actualization.11 On the other hand, the position of republicanism at the margins of British political life, along with its egalitarian commitments, made republican thought the location in which ‘the problem of poverty and the claims of the working classes’ were addressed in unique and powerful ways.12 Gregory Claeys argues that this development ‘constitutes one of the main turning points toward modern social and political thought.’13 British republicanism simultaneously contained, as a result, an individualistic and a deeply communitarian politics. A new




sort of virtuous citizen, everywhere present in nineteenth-century republican rhetoric, though rarely spoken of in those terms, emerged to bridge the gap—by finding self-actualization in seeking, and in performing, a political role that would secure not his own self-interest but those of ‘the people.’ This republican citizen bears a striking resemblance to the Romantic lyric subject that had suffered so many of the same trials of war and revolution, a ‘lyric identity,’ as Anne Janowitz writes, ‘which is differentiated without being fully individuated, and in which residual communitarianism is inflected by the voluntarism of liberal subjectivity.’14 These two developments point toward a central paradox in the republican poetry of nineteenth-century England. As a political movement, republicanism operated on the margins of British politics. From the mid-1790s to at least the 1850s, while its ideals and goals were central to the tradition of popular radicalism linking the London Corresponding Society to Chartism,15 they were seen as beyond the pale by the majority of politicians, as well as by most periodical writers, clergymen, poets, and other shapers of public opinion. It was not until mid-century that respectable reformers began to applaud republican movements abroad, and only in the 1860s was republican thought embraced by a critical mass of liberal intellectuals and politicians, producing the new platforms of ‘popular liberalism’ and ‘advanced liberalism.’ At the same time, throughout the nineteenth-century republican poets, philosophers, editors, and artists contributed to some of the most vibrant and vital strains of intellectual and artistic life. The democratic commitments of these figures—Blake, Bentham, Landor, Shelley, Byron, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Mill, Lewes, Clough, Morley, Meredith, William Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, Dante Rossetti, Spencer, Harrison, Swinburne, Morris—connected republican thought to the canonical tradition of British art and letters. The history of republican poetry, thus, revolves around a paradox. Politically, republicanism was a marginal movement marked by repeated failures and disappointments; intellectually, it was a powerful stream running through the main currents of culture. That paradox stands behind the structure of this study, which follows republican poets as they traverse the worlds of dissident popular republicanism and the progressive intelligentsia. Spanning the canonical and the non-canonical, the aristocratic and the working-class, the poets I examine were like modern diplomats shuttling back and forth between two realms, sending their poems across the divides of station and respectability. The mid-century alliances of popular radicals and elite reformers were forged, in fact, by poet-ambassadors such as Thomas Cooper,



Introduction 5

Linton, and Walter Savage Landor, who were fellow members of the Society of Friends of Italy and published their works in one another’s periodicals. More subtly, republican poems record the mutual shaping of elite and popular republicanism. Inspired by popular reform, Percy Shelley composed poems that influenced working-class poets such as Elijah Ridings. Chartist writers such as Cooper adapted techniques from Byron and Landor, and in turn Arthur Hugh Clough created a sympathetic hero in a Chartist poet. James Thomson studied Shelley, and Swinburne wrote a critical biography of Blake. Such interconnections knit together republican poetry and the larger republican movement in which it played a part. The paradoxical position of republicanism at the margins of politics and the center of intellectual life was the product not only of political but also of cultural history, for it was deeply shaped by the ideas about public poetry circulating in Romantic and Victorian England. These ideas touched upon changing conceptions of both poetry and the public sphere, as well as upon claims for the relative autonomy of art from civil society and the capitalist marketplace. In particular, republican poetry represented one manifestation of a more general interaction between poetry and modern democracy that has been part of the story of English cultural history at least since William Hazlitt explained the innovations in William Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘model[ed]’ on the ‘revolutionary movement’ and inspired by a ‘levelling Muse.’16 Republican politics has been seen to shape not only those who experienced the ‘very heaven’ of being ‘young’ in the first ‘dawn’ of the French Revolution,17 but also those who came of age in time to witness subsequent uprisings, whatever conclusions they drew about politics and art, from Robert Browning’s early years in what his biographers call ‘Shelley’s School’ to the lessons Alfred Tennyson drew from the political activities of his fellow Apostles.18 Wordsworth’s own account of his muse and methods, though, was of particular importance, for it reformulated the public role of the poet in widely influential ways. His definition of poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [. . .] emotion recollected in tranquillity’ and his decision to be a ‘Prophet[ ] of Nature’—to ‘dwell[ ], above this Frame of things / (Which, ’mid all revolutions in the hopes / And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) / In beauty’—configured the relation between the French Revolution and poetry rather differently.19 It was not only in the angry disgust of second-generation Romantic poets at this and other apostasies of the first, but also in the force of Wordsworth’s claims for emotion, natural beauty, and aesthetic autonomy that his poetics shaped those of




the republican writers who followed him. These claims are refracted in Shelley’s theory of the ethical value of sympathetic identification, in Swinburne’s images of nature’s bounty and creative power, in George Meredith’s ‘crisis odes,’ and in Landor’s assertions that his poetic integrity rested on his separation from the political fray. One of the continuities running through republican poetry, perhaps surprisingly, is its engagement with the mode of Wordsworthian Romanticism New Historicists have described as a displacement of politics through a theory of transcendent imagination.20 This seeming contradiction is partly explained by Wordsworth’s status as an ethical teacher. The canonical tribute to Wordsworth as moral guide, John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), shows how this educative role stitched together a commitment to public and political causes with a poetics of private emotion and aesthetic remove. As ‘the very culture of the feelings,’ Wordsworth’s poems taught Mill how to find ‘a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.’ ‘Wordsworth taught me this,’ he adds, ‘not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings.’21 In this way, Wordsworth and poets like him were ‘public moralists’ par excellence.22 In contrast to Mill’s solemn gratitude, other writers endowed the poet as ethical guide with the weighty responsibilities and powers of the prophet. Thomas Carlyle, for instance, influentially wrote that ‘Hero, Prophet, Poet’ are but ‘many different names’ for the same ‘grand fundamental character.’23 ‘[T]he true Literary Man,’ for Carlyle, ‘is the light of the world; [. . .] guiding it, like a sacred Pillar of Fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time.’24 He is one of ‘those who by wise teaching guide the souls of men.’25 Such claims demonstrate the ways older conceptions of the poet as a public figure were transmuted in the cultural watershed of Romanticism. The shift from the mirror to the lamp reformulated, but did not abandon, the didactic and political aims that explicitly structured eighteenthcentury public poetry. In patriotic and partisan lyrics, Augustan satire, Jacobite poetry, historical dramas, antiquarian ballad collections, and discussions of the bardic tradition,26 eighteenth-century writers ‘thought of poetry as a useful—indeed, recommended—vehicle for commentaries on issues of great public significance for the nation and for society,’ as Suvir Kaul argues. Even lyric poems registering a ‘self-conscious inscription of inwardness,’ Kaul asserts, were seen as ‘a viable and even vital way of



Introduction 7

intervening in, and molding, public discourse.’27 With this history in mind, it is possible to see in Romantic and Victorian prophets and moralists the persistence of older ideas about public poetry, while also keeping in view the ways that a claim for a public role could be enunciated through the use of genres associated with this tradition, particularly historical dramas, songs and ballads, occasional poems, and satires. Exemplary instances of such poems in the nineteenth century— Prometheus Unbound (1820), Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866), Landor’s occasional odes, or Don Juan (1819–24)—convey no nostalgia. Instead, they are imbued with a sense of being made in and for a particular historical moment, with the sort of historical consciousness Georg Lukács traced to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and that many scholars have described as typically Victorian.28 That historical awareness also shaped critical writings about poetry, inflecting accounts of poets’ public role with pronouncements about the growth of democracy, whatever their opinion about it was. Writers such as John Sterling, in his review of Tennyson’s Poems (1842) for instance, asserted that poetry ‘must wear a new form’ in light of the ‘[g]reat movements’ of ‘our age,’ the rising democracy through which ‘[t]he vote of the cobbler’ and ‘the tailor’s and the brazier’s voice does really influence the course of human affairs.’29 W. J. Fox, similarly, urged poets to write poems that lived up to ‘the great law of progression that obtains in human affairs,’ while Charles Kingsley instructed them to write a ‘lofty poetry’ to counteract the crumbling of Christian beliefs and old social hierarchies that marked their ‘democratic age.’30 The modern ‘hunger after “the ideal”, “progress”, “salvation”, “a church”, “a republic”, “a kingdom of God”, “a heaven”, “an eternity”—call it what you will,’ he wrote, ‘must be looked at, and analysed, and taught to help and to understand itself.’31 In the 1860s, Matthew Arnold called on culture to counteract the anarchy of what he termed the ‘new democratic force,’32 even as liberal critics who welcomed ‘an age of democratic advance,’ such as Richard Simpson, looked to poets to counteract the ‘constraining force’ of ‘[p]ublic opinion.’33 This aesthetic echo of Mill’s On Liberty (1859) culminated in Oscar Wilde’s claim in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) that poets and philosophers—‘the men of culture’—were the only real individuals left.34 Poets’ public roles also shifted with changing understandings of the public sphere. Civil society, as distinct from the state, was the special province of men of letters—‘our most important modern person[s]’ and a ‘singular phenomenon’ of the modern world, according to Carlyle.35 Declaring that ‘Literature is our Parliament too,’ he asked, ‘does not,




though the name Parliament subsists, the parliamentary debate go on now, everywhere and at all times, in a far more comprehensive way, out of Parliament altogether?’36 Print defines the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century public sphere, permeating its other institutions from coffee houses to gentlemen’s clubs.37 All the public poses the poet might assume, from ethical guide and prophet to occasional poet, drew their public function from the fact of publication and the expectation of a reading audience, and from the assumed centrality of print culture to civil society.38 Moreover, print was widely believed to be a specifically ‘democratic’ public sphere, in which the ideas and interests of the public were articulated and advanced. ‘Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy,’ Carlyle wrote, predicting that ‘Democracy virtually extant will insist on becoming palpably extant.’39 Republican writers, too, credited the public sphere of print with forwarding democracy, both directly through the ideas it disseminated and indirectly through its dialogic and leveling tendencies. The ‘power, in a physical point of view’ of ‘despots,’ London Corresponding Society orator John Gale Jones predicted, ‘cannot stand against a single Printing Press.’40 Such pronouncements were fueled by the pivotal role actual presses played within republican political life from the 1790s to the 1870s. During these decades, both elite and popular republican movements were organized around publishing concerns, particularly the periodical press. A history of republicanism could be told through the papers that served as the organs of groups of activists and writers, from Thomas Spence’s Pigs’ Meat to The Examiner to the mid-century Reasoner to The Fortnightly Review, and they provide a skeletal support to this history of republican poetry. Additionally, participation in republican politics typically involved interacting with these papers, not only reading but also debating, singing, and reciting their excerpts of political theory, news reports, editorials, poems, and serialized novels. Republican activists also sent original poems, reports of meetings, and letters to the editor, and these communications linked local republican groups and their activities to others around the country and around the world. As a result, reading and writing were tangible—often the most tangible, as in the moments of difficulty and defeat when poetry flourished—modes of political action available to republicans. The print culture of republicanism connected the structure of its political communities to its theories of the agency of its texts. When the text in question was a poem, such theories expanded political meaning beyond explicit content. In this sense, Carlyle’s and Gale Jones’s equations of print with democracy resonated with Hazlitt’s discussion of



Introduction 9

Wordsworth’s ‘democratic muse,’ for all three attribute political significance to something other than explicit political argument—to a text’s printedness, or its use of the ‘language really used by men.’41 As Hazlitt’s reading of Wordsworth suggests, such non-substantive claims for the politics of a work of art read political meaning in a poem’s status as art and its formal dynamics. The idea that the specifically aesthetic properties of a work of art carry their own political significance was part of the intellectual climate of Romantic and Victorian culture, and it circulated, as scholars have shown, in such varied discourses as Romantic Hellenism, linguistics, philosophical aesthetics, and antiquarian and literary nationalism.42 Non-substantive claims for the politics of a work of art straddled the fault line severing the aesthetic realm from the economic and political spheres. Insofar as republican poems were written and interpreted within a milieu that understood both the materiality of print and the formal markers of the aesthetic in political terms, they deny the autonomy of the aesthetic realm and repudiate art-for-art’s-sake arguments for poetic value. Yet republican poets also relied upon the idea of aesthetic autonomy in justifying their work, and they were molded by the same historical forces that tended to motivate writers to locate value in the uniqueness of the aesthetic. The centrality of emotional sympathy and private ethics to republican conceptions of the poet’s public role represents one significant instance of these trends, as do the epistemological goals of republican verse. Perhaps most explicitly, the idea of aesthetic autonomy appears in republican poets’ rejection of direct didacticism, their descriptions of the agenda of republican poetry as transcending or surpassing that of mere propaganda by including elements of intellectual insight, imaginative vision, and critique. Republican poets did not escape the ‘miseries and indignities of commodification’ that scholars such as Terry Eagleton have argued helped produce claims for aesthetic autonomy.43 The poets of the popular movement were continually aware of the low price their poems could fetch in the pages of the republican press, and many made up the difference in suffering, as when Thomson moved from one cheap rooming house to the next. These poets benefited, though, from the ready means of publication they found at their fingertips. More elite poets found it difficult to publish their political work. Blake’s selfpublishing inaugurates a long tradition of canonical republican writers with contentious relations to respectable publishers: Shelley’s inability to publish his most explicitly political poems, the appearance of Byron’s later works with John Hunt rather than John Murray, Clough’s printing




of Amours de Voyage (1858) in a progressive American magazine, Meredith’s exclusion from Mudie’s library and his complaints that he wrote novels because he could not support himself with poetry, and finally Swinburne’s recourse to pornographer and transatlantic literary pirate John Camden Hotten. It seems accurate to understand republican arguments for the special value of poetry as, in part, reactions against such politico-economic strictures. Republican pronouncements about the power that print endowed upon a poem, when seen from this angle, look like markers of the traumas of isolated intellectuals and culture producers. I agree with Alan Sinfield that ‘[a]s poetry’s potential public became remote and indefinite—anyone who could read—its claims became both more ambitious and more general.’44 Moreover, as I argue more thoroughly in Chapter 2, the idea that the aesthetic is a unique, removed sphere seems to be enunciated more and more emphatically as detractors dismiss it as irrelevant to modern life. The debates carried out in recent decades among Marxist critics such as Eagleton and New Historicist, post-structuralist, and formalist scholars have generated a complex portrait of the cultural landscape produced by these economic and political trends. It is clear, at least, that a binary between autonomy and engagement cannot hold. Art-for-art’s-sake almost always included social claims about ethical effect. The idea of aesthetic autonomy, meanwhile, underwrote explicitly political poetry, for it not only secured a separate space for artists but also elevated them to a vantage point from which they could offer a uniquely powerful, often oblique, critique of the world of economic and political struggles. This study examines both the ways republican writers described the politics of poetry and the unarticulated historical forces that shaped their descriptions. The claims I make for the political significance of republican poetry, as a result, are quite different from those made by republican poets. I treat the theories of poetry advanced by republican writers not as accounts of actual effect to be endorsed or disproved, but as evidence crucial to my own account of how republican poems participated in their political movements—through the responses to their moment that they wrought in and through poetic forms. The methodological approach taken in this book, accordingly, draws on both historical and literary scholarship about politics and about poetry. More specifically, this study combines the theoretical frameworks of political history in the wake of the linguistic turn with the strategies for close reading associated with formalist criticism. In this approach, I draw on political historians’ examination of cultural documents, the ‘ballads, banners, cartoons, handbills, statues, architecture, the uses of



Introduction 11

time and space, and the rich vein of ceremonial and iconographic forms’ that James Vernon describes as the ‘much neglected traces’ of political history.45 For these scholars, the historical significance of such cultural forms inheres in their meaning-making function: ‘[t]heir meanings are made and not found,’ Patrick Joyce explains; ‘meanings cannot be derived from an originary “experience” [. . .] what matters is the way in which people put this experience together’ through language, ritual, symbols, and gestures.46 Yet the categories and techniques of formalist criticism, as old as poetry itself yet sometimes seen today as irrelevant to the politics of poetry, remain indispensable. For the how of the meaning-making of cultural forms, this putting together of experience, is a matter not only of content but also—even principally—of form. My approach thus also draws on literary scholarship that demonstrates the close compatibility of historicism and formalism. This book follows in the path of studies such as Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges, which argues that ‘formal elements do not exist “apart” from but play a part in the semantic order,’ and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism, which views literary form as ‘a particularly rich and significant kind of historical evidence, as a palimpsest of the patterns, transformations, and reversals of literary, intellectual, and political history.’47 More broadly, the argument advanced here seeks to contribute to our growing understanding of the politics of nineteenth-century English culture. This study shares many themes with analyses of the politics of individual poets like Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s; discussions of the political shaping of Romantic and Victorian verse, such as Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition and Isobel Armstrong’s Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics; and investigations of the role of the novel in political change, such as Catherine Gallagher’s The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Like these scholars, I am interested in the ways in which literary texts refract and forward political ideas, and I investigate these dynamics by bridging divides separating canonical and non-canonical writers, and literary and nonliterary discourses. This study also shares with Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour an effort to trace a political tradition that spans the nineteenth century. This book departs from the literary history of political expression in two main ways. First, it follows political and intellectual historians in foregrounding republicanism, whereas most literary scholars with an interest in English radicalism focus on the socialist or proto-socialist tradition. Second, this book challenges a subtle bias in many scholarly




discussions of politics and poetry: the tendency to assign positive political effect principally to poems that make directly political arguments or appeals to a mass audience at moments of peak mobilization. Implicit in this tendency are several theoretical positions that I take to be its unintended product: a theory of poetic efficacy that privileges content over form, explicitness over subtlety, and audience over author, and that tends to suspect formal mastery as a surrender to reactionary conceptions of art and society; a theory of poetic composition that supposes the transposition of previously constituted ideas into available verse forms; and a theory of political change that assumes the importance of peaks over valleys. This bias often results in a dismissal of formal matters in favor of thematic analysis, a phenomenon Ellen Rooney describes as ‘the trivialization of the concept of textuality [. . .] and the generalization of reading-as-paraphrase.’48 Another result is a proliferation of covert normative judgments, an elevation of political evaluation over historical and literary analysis. These dynamics represent a meaningful point of convergence between investigations of non-canonical authors and analyses of the politics of canonical poets. This book, by contrast, emphasizes formalist analysis because its theory of the politics of poetry centers on the intellectual rather than the hortatory efficacy of verse and assumes that a poem’s form shapes its political ideas. Moreover, the approach taken here finds significance in the troughs as well as the high points of political struggle, and it emphasizes transformations and movements rather than breaks and moments—an emphasis that makes visible the intellectual labor poems perform for republican politics even, perhaps especially, during times of defeat and rebuilding. Political historians such as J. G. A. Pocock view republicanism as having been ‘a language, not a programme.’49 It was a way of understanding politics rather than a precise agenda for political reform. This emphasis on the epistemological and hermeneutic functions of republican discourse is particularly apposite in relation to its poets, who for all their devotion to republican ideas worked to resist the pressures of ideology, and were typically critics as well as advocates of republican movements. In reading republican poetry, I have found, with John Burrow, that it is ‘more helpful [. . .] to think of political theories as vocabularies we inhabit, with their various claims, opportunities, and constraints, than as doctrines to which we subscribe.’50 While it has sometimes been necessary to mark the boundary lines between republicanism and other political discourses, it has not seemed useful to insist the republican poets obeyed them. Likewise, rather than any single, intrinsic, or necessarily republican style or form—say, transparency or the ode—I have found in



Introduction 13

the poems I examine a range of responses to republican ideas and dilemmas. I approach each poet with two aims: to locate precisely his relation to republican political activity and philosophy and to investigate the formal dynamics at the heart of his poetic engagement with them. Over the course of this book, I seek to understand the ways republican poetics changed over time in response to particular challenges, both those internal to republicanism and those posed by its relation to the larger political and intellectual climate. My account begins in the years following Britain’s declaration of war against republican France in 1792. In Chapter 1, I examine the ways in which Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) and the anonymous ‘New Songs’ that appeared in Daniel Isaac Eaton’s periodical Politics for the People (1793–95) sought to free their readers from what Blake called ‘mind-forg’d manacles.’51 My discussion highlights the differing understandings of republican perception that shaped the two groups of poems, as well as exploring the ‘double song’ structure they share. Chapter 2 examines the theories of the political agency of poetry developed in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 by Shelley in A Defence of Poetry (written 1821, published 1840 [1839]) and by three writers in the Newgate Monthly Magazine (1824–26), a journal published by a group of radical republican prisoners. These theories credit poetry with a special power to transform defeat into ultimate victory by cultivating readers’ sympathy and imagination. In the face of the collapse of a politically mobilized populace, these writers crafted theories of poetry’s effect as a function of the transformation of individual, isolated readers. In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine republican poems of the 1840s and 1850s. During these years, republican thought moved toward the center of political and intellectual life, fostering a proliferation of republican poetry and an expansion of its styles, perspectives, and ambitions. Chapter 3 examines Cooper’s ‘prison rhyme,’ The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), which employs the elite form of the epic to tell a republican history of the nation, and the definitional poems of Linton, which meditate on the meaning of words such as felony, duty, and progress. In these poems, philosophical and conceptual concerns take on a new importance in the poetry of the popular movement. Chapter 4 turns to poets inspired by Italian and French republicanism. Clough’s hexameter ‘tragi-comedy’ Amours de Voyage, set in the Roman Republic during the French siege of 1849, uses irony to examine the current state of republican politics and thought, by simultaneously presenting and undercutting the disillusioned meditations of a young intellectual who witnesses the French attack. The occasional poems




Landor wrote about France and Italy over the course of 1848, which begin as straightforward celebrations of the events of that year and of the poetic inspiration they provide, quickly become meditations on the unpredictable course of political events, the questionable ethics of their agents, and, by extension, the difficulties of the public poet’s role. In the multiplicity of their poetic expression of republican ideals, the poets examined in Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated the relevance of their artistic practice to a range of political, intellectual, and cultural issues. Ironically, this very demonstration led, in the 1860s and 1870s, to the final stage of English republican verse. By drawing connections between republicanism and various spheres of Victorian life, the poets of mid-century enabled later writers to interweave republican theories and practices of art into other literary movements of their time. As I show in Chapter 5, Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise (1871), the poems Thomson wrote for the militant National Reformer, and those Meredith published in The Fortnightly Review provide a record of the confluence of republican poetics with the cultural life of aestheticism, secularism, and advanced liberalism. They reveal how, at this moment, republican poetry experienced its greatest influence, percolating through the art and intellectual culture of the avant garde and the establishment alike—and, thereby, faded from view, dispersing into other modes of art. The shape of this book might be envisioned as a cone whose point lies in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution and whose scope widens over time. Just as the poems I examine in the final chapter assert their continuity as well as their distance from republican poems stretching back to the 1790s, I try to tell a cogent story that balances an analysis of change over time with an interest in how each moment in the history of republican poetry makes possible the one that succeeds it. Like any work of scholarship, in telling its story this book sacrifices the telling of another, and a few words about those choices might be helpful here. First, this book does not analyze in depth any women poets. A few women were present in the popular movement from at least the 1820s, and Mary Wollstonecraft was but one of several important female republican intellectuals.52 Yet the taverns and publishing houses of popular republicanism were a male preserve, and those women intellectuals who were republicans were not primarily poets. Second, this book does not discuss in detail poets whose youthful radicalism gave way to a more moderate or even conservative politics, such as Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or those who wrote sympathetically about republicanism from a liberal position, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert



Introduction 15

Browning. The place of republican politics in the work of such conservative and liberal poets has already received some scholarly attention, and a comprehensive survey of the literary ramifications of various reactions to republican politics over the course of the nineteenth century would be either vast or cursory. I have tried instead to isolate a strain of writers whose commitments to republicanism were explicit, sustained, and closely tied to their work as poets. In an essay originally published in The Fortnightly Review, Walter Pater describes the ‘chief question which a critic has to answer’ as involving ‘the peculiar quality’ of an artist’s work, that ‘which we cannot get elsewhere,’ and he notes that this is the case ‘especially when he has to speak of a comparatively unknown artist.’53 The artist Pater has in mind, Botticelli, may not have presented undue challenges to a formalist critic such as Pater, for his work is indisputably great, however comparatively neglected it may have been. The artistic quality of many of the poems examined in this study, on the other hand, is typically assumed to be so low as to disqualify them from close reading and consign them to the thematic summaries bemoaned by Rooney. Without arguing directly for the poetic value of all republican poems (merely hinting that many are of much greater interest and complexity than might appear on first glance), I would insist that even the most conventional and formulaic among them are best understood through an interpretive lens that recognizes their poetic form. Partly, such a recognition involves attending to the structure of conventions and formulas, an approach exemplified in the work of scholars such as Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson.54 More broadly, it involves a robust formalist criticism that disjoins notions of value from discussions of artistic strategy. For various reasons, while this uncoupling has been accomplished in studies of the novel and narrative more generally, in studies of poetry the continued purchase of the idea of quality persists in an apparently value-neutral vocabulary of innovation and experiment. The category of innovation, though important for the republican poets who linked it to democratic rebellion, plays a minor role in this study, and its place is filled by other formal matters, from the anti-experimental ethos of classicism to generic codes to patterns of sound. In these strategies lie the individual preoccupations of both canonical and non-canonical republican poets and, as I hope to show, their ‘peculiar quality’ as well.




Republican Demystification in Politics for the People and Blake’s Songs of Experience

In a passage from Political Justice (1793) that Thomas Spence reprinted in his one-penny periodical Pigs’ Meat, William Godwin argues that ‘it must be laid down as a first principle, that monarchy is founded in imposture.’ ‘To conduct this imposture with success,’ he continues, ‘it is necessary to bring over to its party our eyes and our ears,’ to ‘dazzle our sense and mislead our judgment.’1 Central to this monarchical project, Thomas Paine asserts in Rights of Man (1791–92), were ‘those songs and toasts which are calculated to enslave, and operate to suffocate reflection.’2 Counter-songs of demystification, accordingly, played a key role in the republican campaign against ‘kingcraft.’ The republican poems I examine in this chapter, William Blake’s Songs of Experience (1794) and a group of anonymous ‘New Songs’ published in D. I. Eaton’s Politics for the People (1793–95), are united by their efforts to depict and prompt an epistemological liberation from what Blake calls ‘mind-forg’d manacles.’3 These poems explicitly present themselves as counter-songs, operating against the songs of kingcraft and, often, its partner, ‘priestcraft.’ Their acts of demystification, as a result, typically occur when a monarchical song is exposed as false and a republican song, perhaps the poem itself, assumes its authority. The republican song is thus a kind of ‘double poem,’ marked by this struggle even as it seeks its symbolic resolution.4 The authority the ‘New Songs’ wrench from monarchical songs is complicated by tensions rooted in the popular republican culture of the mid-1790s, which was both written and oral, and at once committed to rhetorical transparency and filled with parody, allegory, and poetry. Like the ‘New Songs,’ Blake’s Songs of Experience examine both how monarchical songs generate illusions and the possibilities of hearing additional layers of meaning within and beneath them. Yet when Blake comes closest to the concerns and techniques of the ‘New Songs,’ his divergence from 17



1

them is most readily apparent as well, for the commitment of those texts to transparency is identified by Blake as the limits of the rationalist demystification against which he offers his own republican poetic perception. While the Songs of Experience, to a degree unequalled in Blake’s oeuvre, expose the everyday, concrete realities of suffering and poverty in the fallen cityscape of 1790s London, they do so within an artistic practice that is, as Blake later wrote, ‘Visionary or Imaginative.’ For Blake, the task is not only to see clearly but to see fully, to come to use one’s ‘Corporeal or Vegetative Eye’ like ‘a Window’—that is, to ‘look thro it & not with it.’5 The song was not the only literary form republican poets took up during the revolutionary decade. Political novels by Charlotte Smith and Godwin, verse dramas such as Wat Tyler (written 1794), odes like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Destruction of the Bastille’ (written 1789), the ballad and the lyrical ballad, even the conversation poem, all can be understood as bearing a republican form as well as subject matter. But the song stood in a unique relation to many of the core tenets of the republican thought that was cohering at this time. Blake’s songs and those of the periodical press exemplify the anti-decorous, anti-monarchical ethos of popular radicalism and the ‘gut republicanism’ James Epstein sees running ‘strong and deep in working-class culture.’6 Further, the songs of Blake and other republican writers, especially Robert Burns, have been described by critics such as W. R. Johnson as anomalies in a period in which ‘the meditative lyric [. . .] becomes the dominant form in modern lyric.’7 In this regard, though their songs share much with the lyrical ballads—metrical innovations,8 straddling of high and low, oral and written modes—they remain closer to the ‘ancient tavern’ in which, Johnson speculates, English song, like Greek lyric before it, must have originated.9 Close to its folk roots and infused through the daily life of church, chapel, and tavern, the song encourages widespread participation as a good in itself and presupposes an egalitarian relation among singers and their audiences. *

*

*

The ‘New Songs’ were published in a period defined on either side by an edict against sedition. That era ended in November 1795, when Parliament passed the Two Acts against treasonable practices and seditious meetings, modifying the law of treason to include speech and writing as well as overt acts and requiring the permission of a magistrate for meetings of more than 50 persons.10 In their wake, aboveground




republican politics disappeared.11 Three years earlier, the less stringent 1792 royal proclamation against seditious writings ordered magistrates to investigate the authors, publishers, and sellers of seditious and blasphemous texts. Combined with the onset of war, the proclamation hampered the freedom of republican activists—and thus encouraged oblique modes of political expression and small-scale meetings. ‘[W]hat can hinder small companies from meeting in a free and easy convivial manner and singing their rights and instructing each other in their songs?’ Spence asked.12 The republican political culture of these years, within which Eaton published Politics for the People and other republican texts such as Rights of Man, also included free-and-easies and tavern singing, political chalking, and metal tokens whose slogans were imprinted upon the markings of crown currency.13 Eaton and other writers, booksellers, and popular intellectuals such as John Thelwall were charged under the proclamation, an ordeal that confirmed their beliefs about monarchical power. ‘Were it possible to deprive the numerous hoards of mankind [. . .] of their rational faculties—to divest them of thinking—to restrain them from speaking— to draw a veil over occult powers,’ Spence wrote, ‘it would be perfectly conformable with prevailing politics to attempt the experiment.’14 These ‘prevailing politics’ also included George III’s renovations of the royal residences and experiments with new forms of royal ritual. Inspired by the state festivals of revolutionary France, ‘[o]fficially sponsored patriotic celebrations were thus made, as far as possible, identical with celebration of the king,’ as Linda Colley writes.15 Republicans also saw around them ample evidence of the king’s priestcraft power as head of the established church.16 According to Robert Hole, ‘the whole spectrum of Anglicans argued the religious case for social hierarchy consistently year after year.’17 They insisted that ‘[i]n the subordination and gradation of persons and rights, consists the very life and health of every well constituted state,’ as Edward Tatham, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, argued: ‘this political arrangement [was] made not by the wisdom or the will of man, but by the invisible hand of Providence.’18 Classic republican texts of the 1790s, from Paine’s The Age of Reason (1793) to d’Holbach’s System of Nature (first English translation 1795–96) and Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1792), are united in their abhorrence of the ‘state hirelings’ under whose spell, Paine wrote, ‘the mind of man is bewildered as in a fog.’19 Conservative organizations covertly purchased and handed over political literature, pressured pub owners to refuse space for republican meetings, directed mobs armed with ‘Church and King’ placards to attack the homes of radical leaders, distributed a veritable



Republican Demystification 19

‘flood of propaganda,’ and staged rallies in which they burned Paine’s effigy and sang the national anthem.20 In this context, Eaton and other republican publishers and writers saw themselves as joining in cultural battle.21 A central weapon in that battle was the printing press. In the 1780s, John Wilkes had forged a link between popular politics and the press, but it was Eaton who molded the radical press into the form that would endure through the nineteenth century. Eaton believed that print was an inherently democratic medium, as he argued in his satirical tract, ‘The Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing upon Society, Exposed.’ Print, he claimed, promoted class mobility, enabled the people to call their governors to account, exposed religion as an instrument of fear, and made citizens out of readers.22 The textual juxtapositions of diverse material in Politics for the People ‘ha[d] a levelling effect on the content,’23 as did affording readers’ contributions—including poetry—the same status as news and political commentary. Readers’ verse likely enhanced the appeal of the journal, for editors viewed the publication of poetry and other literary pieces as essential to the commercial success of any paper well into the nineteenth century.24 In early 1794, Eaton announced that the journal would ‘in future, be printed in a style better calculated to contain a greater variety of original matter’ composed by those members of his audience who ‘employ their talents in the discussion of these momentous subjects.’25 And Politics for the People did reach a significant audience that crossed boundaries of class and education.26 Robert Southey nearly became a contributor, and many of those who did send in their poems were undoubtedly men not unlike him: young, idealistic, well educated though of humble origins, straddling the worlds of the elite and ‘the people,’ just as their texts echo the forms and tone of Wat Tyler (which might have gone unpublished but for the unsought intervention of republican printer W. T. Sherwin in 1817).27 Eaton published twenty anonymous ‘New Songs’ over the life of Politics for the People, between 1793 and 1795.28 These songs were probably written by attendees of Spence’s free-and-easies and other tavern meetings, where in turn they may have been among those read aloud, debated, and sung.29 While they were only a handful of the more than 150 songs that appeared in Politics for the People, the ‘New Songs’ exemplify the ways popular songs of demystification sought to supersede the old songs of priest and king. ‘The Triumph of Reason. A New Song,’ for example, portrays the pageantry and songs of royalist rituals, describing the ‘horrid chorus’ of ‘Lords and Parsons’ who ‘rais’d [. . .] a cry of consternation / [. . .] That Church and State were tumbling down, and ruin hover’d o’er us.’30




‘In ev’ry town thro’ this good realm, poor Paine was executed, / And what their logic could not reach the faggot has confuted,’ the song continues. Offering itself as an antidote to the ‘horrid chorus’ that ‘rav’d of plots and treason,’ this song will ‘venture here to sing the truth.’ Its author works to assign transparent language to his act of republican demystification (‘truth’) and to connect delusive, figurative, and literary language in the rhetoric of his opponents (from the heavily ironic ‘logic’ to ‘cry,’ ‘confuted,’ ‘chorus,’ ‘plots,’ and ‘rav’d’). Yet the phrase ‘sing the truth’ fuses literariness and transparency, and the song’s success lies in its vivid portrait of the stirring patriotic celebrations, which provide the foil for the songwriter’s courage to sing. This song registers its tension between commitments to transparency and to literariness in more subtle ways as well. Many of the decade’s classic texts of republican plain-speaking, in the course of arguing against appeals to the imagination, took up the matter of how words work. Paine had attacked ‘mysterious’ and ‘fanciful’ words at several key points in his criticism of Edmund Burke’s rhetoric and political theory in Rights of Man.31 A similar concern is evident in Charles Pigott’s Political Dictionary (1795), Horne Tooke’s republican grammar Diversions of Purley (1786–1805), and Spence’s invention of a phonetic alphabet, which he hoped would make the written word universally accessible and ‘reduce[ ] to order’ the English language.32 That Spence, himself a poet, seeks such a reduction signals the extent to which republican thinking about language ‘identif[ies] the surplus of power with the surplus of signs,’ as Jon Klancher puts it. ‘The radicals’ verbal truth,’ he continues, ‘insists upon its reference, the squaring of signs with things.’33 Hence the attempt of the author of ‘The Triumph of Reason’ to expose conservative hyperbole. Ridiculing his enemies’ ‘cry’ about the imminent ‘tumbling down’ of ‘Church and State’ is part and parcel with an earlier description of ‘these disast’rous dismal days of riot, law, and libel, / When men almost suspect the right they have to read the Bible.’ These lines lay the groundwork for the less clear-cut dismissal of the conservatives who ‘rav’d of plots and treason,’ the italicized words conveying an intense irony. That irony cuts both ways, however, exposing the poem’s own rhetorical license and that of popular republicanism. For how excessive are the terms? If republicans are not plotting the end of the monarchy, what exactly are they doing when they meet to sing and toast together in their London taverns? The range of answers to such questions are all uncomfortable. A rhetorical agenda of absolute transparency problematizes radical culture, and the attempt to negotiate it leaves its mark upon this song—as it would upon many others over the next decades.




Parody was an important literary strategy in this negotiation. Many of the ‘New Songs’ sought to replace the delusive songs of kingcraft by parodying them directly. ‘A New Song. Tune—“God save the King,” ’ a parody of the national anthem beginning ‘God save great THOMAS PAINE,’ concludes with the promise that ‘PAINE, and his Rights of Man, / Shall be my song.’34 ‘A New Song. Tune—“Rule Britannia,” ’ similarly, describes how corrupt songs will be replaced by the ‘songs of liberty’: Let pensioned placemen rail and rave, And swine-like treat us free-born souls; The body chain, the mind to enslave[.] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] Still Britons ever, ever will be free, And sing the songs of liberty.35 The simultaneous presence of the patriotic song and its republican counter-song provides the humor that must have been a prominent feature of the collective singing of these parodies. Republican culture was filled with such impudent, parodic texts, and literary strategies of substitution and subversion appear to have been popular forces tugging against the rigors of pure transparency. These songs are, further, more thoroughly ‘double’ than many songs and ballads that set new words to old tunes. Unlike a similar American song, ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee,’ for instance, these songs never move far enough from their originals to take on an independent life. Their originals remain palpable because the desire to discredit them is ultimately stronger than the urge to supplant them; the parodies imply that the project of demystification is still primary and unfinished. ‘A New Song, Appointed to be sung in all Streets and Alehouses, through the Kingdoms of Great Britain, France, Ireland, and Corsica’ is less explicit about its effort to discredit the national anthem, whose tune it adopts, and it is correspondingly more nimble.36 Rather than describing ‘God Save the King’ as delusive, it exposes a true content lurking beneath celebration of the monarch: If with disease opprest, Or by dull cares distrest, You need but sing; Soon all your pains will fly, Each weeping eye be dry,





If nought but rags alone Cover your skin and bone, Let your voice ring; Then fear not cold or rain, All other care is vain, Sing but this sacred strain, God Save the King. When times, like these, are bad, And food’s not to be had, Still you must sing; No hunger then you’ll feel; Better ’tis than beef or veal, To sound this noble peal, God Save the King. Here, the national anthem is attacked as a practice of political delusion, a sleight of hand by which the populace is hoodwinked into mistaking the well-being of the sovereign for its own. ‘God Save the King,’ this song argues, resolves the distress of the people by praying for the health of the monarch; it recasts misery as patriotism. The poem ends with a declaration of the poor’s right to sing: ‘Poor men no rights can have / But to chaunt this noble stave.’ These lines criticize the winnowing of popular political rights, but they also celebrate the way in which republicans exploit singing as a narrow wedge of civil liberty, registering an oblique critique of patriotism and established powers. The chorus of the song furthers this critique: ‘It is most notorious / We’re happy and glorious; / May we prove victorious, / And Great Rogues swing.’ In Politics for the People, the chorus is printed at the very end of all the verses, where it culminates the political argument of the song. Its benedictory entreaty (‘May [. . .]’) is emboldened by the present-tense verbs of the first two lines and the vivid final image of the monarch on the scaffold. As it would have been communally sung, however, the chorus would have punctuated each verse, repeatedly interrupting the ironic mode by introducing a straightforward expression of the desire for republican revolution. The king/swing rhyme, connecting ‘God Save the King’ to ‘Great Rogues swing,’ links the verses to the chorus, straddling the two modes and to an extent reconciling or harmonizing them. The relatively chaotic organization of the song as it would have



Join but the full-mouth’d cry, God Save the King.

been sung exists like an echo within the printed song, which moves in a linear progression from parodic demystification toward explicit announcement—paralleling the presence of the rowdy, playful oral culture of the tavern within the serious and rigorously rational ethos of print journalism.37 Another way of understanding this doubleness is to read it as a signal of the tendency throughout popular republican culture to equate demystification with liberation itself. Partly this tendency partook of a larger ‘belief that principles, activities, and structures which stage the subversion of power actually subvert the exercise of power within a society.’38 More particularly, the equation of demystification and liberation was fueled by assertions in texts such as Rights of Man that ‘for a Nation to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it.’39 Republican writers also had a deep faith in the universal intelligibility of their political program, in the self-evidence of their truths. In ‘A Fragment of an Ancient Prophecy’ (1796), for instance, Spence wrote, ‘The simplicity and truth of this system will be so obvious and will so instantaneously convince the understanding that the minds of men will shrink from the electric shock and become for a period stupified and powerless, as the eye when blinded by the splendour of the source of the day.’40 In that moment, ‘a beautiful and powerful new republic instantaneously arise[s] in full vigour,’ akin to the initial creation of the Earth: ‘it is like the Almightly saying “Let there be light and it was so.” So the people have only to say “Let the land be ours,” and it will be so.’41 Dawn, indeed, is the fundamental metaphor for demystification. ‘The sun arises, and his light / Dispels our gloom away,’ Spence wrote in a poem called ‘Alteration’: ‘No longer blind [. . .] The magic spell is broke; / We hail the bright reforming age! / And cast away the yoke.’42 Similarly, ‘Song. [Written for the 14th of July 1793]’ declares, ‘Yes, Gallia, thy beams / Shall dispel monkish dreams— / Shall unveil filthy courts and their dark murd’ring schemes.’43 ‘The Tyrants’ Downfall: A New Song’ offers a detailed portrait of the simultaneity of demystification and political transformation, with a refiguring of Biblical themes.44 As the ‘trumpet of Liberty sounds through the world, / And the universe starts at the sound,’ the song dissolves the power of kings and priests: How noble the ardour that seizes the soul, How they burst from the yoke and the chain, What force can the fervor of freedom controul, Or its terrible vengeance restrain?




Fall, Tyrants, fall, &c [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] The cruel dominion of priestcraft is o’er, Its thunders, its faggots, its chains, Mankind will endure the vile bondage no more, While virtue our freedom maintains. Words such as ‘ardour’ and ‘virtue,’ like the emphasis in this song on the independence of awakened humanity from any ‘restrain[t],’ registers the civic humanist roots of modern republican rhetoric. Songs such as this one at once celebrate the new ideal citizen whose capacity, as well as right, to participate in national political affairs was a foundational tenet of republican thought, and at the same time initiate their readers and listeners into that independence and virtue, inculcating in them a new way of seeing the world. In this sense, the widespread insistence that demystification and liberation were synonymous signals both a political naiveté and an acute apprehension of the challenges facing republican progress. If, as Kevin Gilmartin argues, radical print culture imagines the end of all political desire, it does so in texts such as this with both immediate and final aspirations in mind.45 And in that, it shares much with Blake’s songs of demystification, to which I now turn. *

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There is an imaginative element to the visions presented in ‘New Songs’ such as ‘The Tyrants’ Downfall,’ as there are literary elements in their use of figurative language, parody, and the song form. Yet their fundamental commitment to rhetorical transparency ensures that their strategies for demystification rely centrally on a rationalist ideal of seeing clearly that was more akin to the objective vision of the scientist than to the transformative vision of the poet. This contrast was all the sharper in relation to a poet who believed that ‘Mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception’ and who claimed that ‘for My self I do not behold the Outward Creation [. . .] to me it is hindrance.’46 Yet when Blake insisted that ‘This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision’ he was not advocating the mystic’s preference for a world existing only in the mind: ‘I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike.’ ‘[T]o the Eyes of the Man of Imagination,’ he wrote, ‘Nature is Imagination itself. [. . .] You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World.’47 Like David Erdman’s Prophet Against Empire and Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm,




the analysis that follows examines the resonances between Blake’s work and the expressive culture of popular radicalism, showing how ‘[r]adical discourse is often operative in [. . .] and informs Blake’s language.’48 In so doing, it also marks his critique of that culture, the ‘thinking beyond’ that Heather Glen emphasizes in Vision and Disenchantment and that Saree Makdisi describes as Blake’s ‘disruption of the philosophical, conceptual, and political narratives underlying the discourse of “liberty.”’49 Blake’s descriptions of his poetic project as one of demystification reveal both his affinity with and his departure from the ‘New Songs.’ In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), for instance, he describes his ‘desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite’: this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. (pl. 13, 14) The need to remove ‘apparent surfaces’ to see the world ‘as it is’ echoes Paine and Godwin’s calls for republican demystification and the techniques employed by the writers of the ‘New Songs.’ But what is revealed here—‘the infinite’—is not concrete exploitation and suffering, not the particulars that the Songs of Experience finds ‘hid’ within the songs of priest and king: the hunger of the charity schoolchildren in ‘Holy Thursday,’ the contrast between the cold church and the warm alehouse in ‘The Little Vagabond.’ Moreover, unlike in the ‘New Songs,’ there is no clear ground from which to view the world Blake portrays; the reader is continually implicated in the ethical dilemmas of the poems and can never safely look down upon the tricksters and tyrants. As the prophecies insist, Urizen is not apart from but rather one of the essential human faculties whose reunification Blake prophesies in The Four Zoas (written 1796–1807), his first major work after Songs of Experience. In that poem, the visionary and prophetic aspects of Blake’s project more thoroughly shape its work of demystification, as Blake repeatedly depicts the tools of tyrannical mystification: many a net is netted; many a net Spread & many a Spirit caught, innumerable the nets





While the counter-song structure persists in the ‘soothing flute’ and ‘corded lyre,’ here the scale is cosmic, as the poet describes ‘innumerable’ and all-encompassing veils. This shift in scope and emphasis suggests the degree to which the Songs of Experience represents for Blake a unique experiment in earthly details, concreteness, and accessibility. In ‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ Blake reveals the profit gained by Priest and King from the misery of the poor. Importantly, his vehicle for this demystification is a poetic critique of the songs of ‘woe’ imposed by church and state: The Chimney Sweeper A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil’d among the winters snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King Who make up a heaven of our misery. Blake represents the boy’s cry, ‘sweep, sweep,’ as ‘weep, weep,’ a typographical unveiling, removing the ‘s’ to reveal the true song beneath his ‘notes of woe’ (2). The poem points out, at the end of the second stanza, that these ‘notes of woe’ are ‘taught’: they mark the boy’s transition from child happy on the heath to chimney sweeper calling his trade in the city (8). The connections the poem draws between his ‘career’ and his parents’ Christianity and loyalism imply that the ‘notes of woe’ are songs taught by the establishment in several ways, invoking church music and patriotic songs. The song he has learned obscures the boy’s true experiences, enabling his parents to mistake his crying for celebration,



Innumerable the gins & traps; & many a soothing flute Is form’d & many a corded lyre, outspread over the immense In cruel delight they trap the listeners, & in cruel delight Bind them, condensing the strong energies into little compass[.] (II, pp. 29–30)

to believe they have done him no harm. Heard through ‘mind-forg’d manacles,’ as his parents hear it, the song convinces the listener of the boy’s happiness. That the parents hear the song this way is made clear by their response: they head for the church to praise ‘God & his Priest & King’ (11). Their action echoes and reveals the delusion through which the priest and king have recast misery as good fortune. This delusion has at least two valences. First, the lines lambaste the notion that meekness and obedience on earth will secure for the poor a bountiful hereafter (forming a future heaven out of present misery). Second, the lines suggest that the priest and king construct their own heaven on earth, using the suffering and oppression of the poor as their building materials. That is, they build comfortable lives out of tithes, taxes, and the products of poor people’s labor. These two axes of critique hinge upon the ambiguity of the phrase ‘make up’ in the poem’s final line. Significantly, in addition to the meanings just discussed, the phrase is strongly associated with theater and deception. ‘Make up’ means to concoct, invent, fabricate (as in ‘I made it all up’), to extemporize, improvise (‘I made it up as I went along’), and to prepare an actor for the stage by means of costume and cosmetics (the origin of the noun ‘make-up’). Blake originally ended the poem with the line, ‘Who wrap themselves up in our misery.’ This earlier line clarifies the poem’s argument that the priest and king construct from the poor’s misery their own comfort. It also alludes to yet another meaning of ‘make up’: to make clothing from cloth, a definition that in turn echoes the poem’s earlier concern with the sweeper’s ‘clothes of death,’ his soot-filled garments. Like the significances related to theater and lying, the tailoring definition of ‘make up’ re-appears in the last line as Blake revised it, the image of the priest and king wrapping themselves up in the warm blanket made of misery persisting as if visible through a palimpsest. Such multiplications of meaning are characteristic of Blake’s multivalent approach to words, the opposite of approaches seeking linguistic transparency and a reduction of possible meanings. It is precisely by exploiting multivalence that Blake’s counter-song hears a deeper meaning within the sweeper’s song and exposes the delusions of priest and king that lie behind it. ‘Holy Thursday’ also offers a counter-song, one that is poised not so much against the earlier ‘song of innocence’ as against the establishment song it had subjected to an ironic, rather than a direct, critique. As Glen shows, the Innocence ‘Holy Thursday’ (1789) ‘thrusts “pity” before the reader as a problem’ by its poetic vision of the scene: a crowd of poor children, ‘these flowers of London town,’ streaming ‘like Thames waters flow’




into St Paul’s Cathedral for the annual service for charity school pupils (5, 4). Glen emphasizes the ‘process of imagination’ involved in the heavily metaphorical description Blake offers here: ‘the shaping of images of harmony and wholeness, which breaks free from the determining pressures of conventional ways of seeing and articulates an alternative “reality” to that which they define. [. . .] it is this imaginative transformation, this “Poetic Genius”, that the poem implicitly defines as that “pity” which must be cherished.’50 The Songs of Experience ‘Holy Thursday,’ by contrast, emphasizes not the creative potential most viewers miss in the scene but rather the suffering it violently hides. This ‘Holy Thursday’ begins by directly questioning what the Innocence poem wanted, on its own terms, to affirm—‘Is this a holy thing to see?’ (1): Holy Thursday Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reduced to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand? Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there. For where-e’er the sun does shine, And where-e’er the rain does fall: Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall. Blake exposes the charity service as a delusive ritual that recasts cruelty as altruism and illustrates the more straightforwardly demystifying claim he makes in ‘The Human Abstract,’ that ‘Pity would be no more, / If we did not make somebody Poor: / And Mercy no more could be, / If all were as happy as we’ (1–4). The Holy Thursday service, which publicly enacts the alliance between the Church and the philanthropic organizations, is meant to illustrate the beneficence of both parties. Blake exposes this church–charity alliance as a partnership in perpetuating poverty,




one in collusion with the larger social forces that ‘reduce’ babes to ‘misery’ (a word that, as in ‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ connotes both material deprivation and psychic pain) in the first place. For instead of altruism, the schoolmasters and clergy exhibit miserly greed, feeding the hungry babes with ‘cold and usurous hand.’ The word ‘cold’ conveys the cold-hearted and unfeeling attitude of the school and church officials, while the word ‘usurous’ suggests that an exhorbitant payment is extracted in return for the meager aid. Blake does not elaborate here on the terms of this usurous agreement, but other poems in the volume offer clues of what they might be. ‘The Little Vagabond’ posits ‘bandy’ legs, ‘fasting,’ and ‘birch’ (12), in other words hunger, self-denial, submission to punishment, and a posture of fear. In ‘Holy Thursday,’ the children’s song, which follows directly on the ‘usurous hand,’ may be another measure of the payment. The song lies at the center of the Holy Thursday parade, after all. As seen through the eyes of the Songs of Innocence witness, the song makes possible a vision of the faith and ‘innocence’ (a word Blake uses twice) of the children who, when they ‘raise to heaven the voice of song,’ rise up themselves until ‘Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor’ (1, 8, 9, 11). As seen through the eyes of the Songs of Experience speaker, however, the song reveals the children’s hunger and the guardians’ cruelty. Just as in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ Blake exposes the sweeper’s song as ‘notes of woe,’ here he denotes the children’s song a ‘trembling cry’: ‘Is that trembling cry a song? / Can it be a song of joy? / And so many children poor?’ (5–7). Blake counterposes the ‘song of joy’ the children are meant to be singing, undoubtedly a hymn praising God (& his Priest & King?) with the message it conveys beneath the lyrics, a trembling cry. That the children should tremble suggests they sing out of fear and weakness rather than joy. The third of these questions is actually a lament: the multitudes of children provoke Blake to mourn the fact that ‘so many’ children are poor, a thought that further undermines the ‘joyous’ surface appearance of the Holy Thursday service. It cannot be a ‘song of joy,’ at least not to the experienced listener, because it is sung by ‘so many’ poor children. As it turns out, Blake’s worry about ‘so many’ poor children must be posed as a question, because it is part of what the final line of this stanza explains. The stanza ends with Blake’s outraged conclusion, ‘It is a land of poverty!’ (8). The ‘it’ here is slightly ambiguous. Having established ‘it’ as the ‘trembling cry’ in the second line, an anaphoric urge carries that




referent forward to the final line, suggesting that the song itself might literally be (as it is the sign of) a land of poverty. Certainly the poem interprets the song as the expression of the barrenness of the children’s landscape, which it proceeds to describe in the next two stanzas. The ‘apparent surface’ of Britain is of a ‘rich and fruitful’ land (2), but for the children, Blake charges, it is ‘eternal winter’ (12). On one level, these stanzas literalize the children’s hunger in a description of their natural surroundings. The bleak and bare fields, filled with thorns, are the landscape equivalent of the miserly heartlessness of the charity schools ‘celebrated’ in the annual St Paul’s service. Blake uses landscape to express the condition of other figures in Songs of Experience, as when the chimney sweeper’s move from heath to city marks his transition from freedom and happiness to exploitation and harm. On another level, like the earlier analysis of a ‘song of joy’ that is also a ‘trembling cry,’ these stanzas articulate a critique of the social organization by which a ‘land of poverty’ and a ‘rich and fruitful land’ can be the same place. Blake presents it as axiomatic that ‘where-e’er the sun does shine,’ the fields are fruitful and hunger an impossibility (13). But because the fruits of the fields are not accessible to all, the fields may be overflowing while hunger persists alongside. The dislocation of the poor from the land, food shortages exacerbated by the war, and the enclosure of previously common lands are the conditions leading to both hungry children and fertile fields. Blake does not specify which of these social and economic causes he has in mind here. What he does say is that the simultaneity of child poverty and a rich land defies the laws of nature. In this way, he voices, with all the wisdom of experience, Innocence’s repeated lament for the loss of the ‘ecchoing green.’51 By unveiling the ‘land of poverty’ that exists within the ‘rich and fruitful land,’ Blake links the responsibility for the hunger of all children to the miserly usury of the charity schools and the theater of holiness of the St Paul’s service. The ideological mystifications of the establishment—the song, the parade of angelic children and ‘wise guardians’—reinforce the illusion of shared prosperity in a bountiful land. To witness this Holy Thursday service is, in the end, to see not a ‘holy’ thing but an ‘appalling’ one (1, 12), the obfuscation of hunger, poverty, and greed. In ‘London,’ Blake gathers together the sights and sounds described throughout Songs of Experience. As he wanders through the city, he interprets the significance of the many ‘trembling cries’ and ‘notes of woe’ he has portrayed in other poems. In many ways the quintessential poem of demystification, ‘London’ begins by evoking political rights, law, the powers of the crown, the regulation of commerce, and





the geographical segregation of rich and poor, all through the word ‘charter’d’:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. Blake perceives ‘marks of woe’ in ‘every face,’ corporeal manifestations of the ‘woe’ he has described in earlier poems.52 By now the word conjures up the chimney sweeper’s ‘notes of woe’ and the plight of children throughout the city. So too, as in ‘every cry’ and ‘every voice’ ‘[t]he mind-forg’d manacles I hear,’ Blake reveals the mental oppression fettering an entire city, shifting the locus of critique from individual speakers to their community (5, 7, 8). Yet, because ‘every’ conveys ‘each’ as much as it signifies ‘all,’ Blake presents a cacophony of voices without forfeiting a sense of specificity. His ability to retain a sense of the individual cries has important consequences, for in this poem he grants the cries themselves the power to make visible their true meaning. He hears ‘how [. . .] the cr[ies]’ make a physical mark, synesthetic descriptions that unite the earlier stanzas’ attention to both sight and sound as well as physical and psychic manifestations (9). The word ‘appall’ both links ‘London’ to ‘Holy Thursday’ (as the reappearance of the sweep links it to ‘The Chimney Sweeper’) and conveys the complexity of the sign that the sweeper’s cry registers on the churches’ walls. In an earlier draft, Blake had written ‘blackens



London

oer the churches walls,’ a line that more closely parallels the description of the Soldier’s sigh ‘run[ning] in blood down Palace walls,’ and that suggests that Blake pictured the cry intensifying the churches’ blackness (12). The cry blackens, that is stains and stigmatizes, the churches, marking them with ‘marks of woe’ (4). It casts a pall, throwing an atmosphere of gloom over the Palace. The black surface of the church walls exposes the ‘Heaven’ of ‘Priest & King’ as soiled and tarnished, exploitative rather than redemptive. The revision forfeits this symmetry for the force of the word ‘appall,’ which also means to cause to decay and to cause to pale or dim, the latter meaning being the word’s etymological root, though a rarer usage (10). In one reading, the cry causes the churches’ already blackening walls to decay, weakening them. In another reading, the sweeper’s cry turns the black walls of the church a paler shade, registering the shock conjured up by the word (‘appalling’) as much as the soot that covers sweeper and parson alike. The strength of the poem results, of course, from this multivalence. What is clear in either understanding of the line is that the third stanza describes the physical manifestation of the Londoners’ songs (8). The stanza imagines the sweeper’s cry and the soldier’s sigh producing legible signs of the suffering that also engraves faces with ‘marks of woe’ and imprisons minds with steel-strong fetters (4). For while it is the Church and the Palace that are defaced, and while the poem fiercely criticizes the priest’s and king’s trade in misery and blood, the reality that Blake uncovers is the strength of the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ in the minds of every resident of London (8). The reader is not immune from these shackles. For proof of this, one need only consider that ‘The Human Abstract,’ ‘Infant Sorrow,’ and ‘A Poison Tree,’ the three poems that follow ‘London,’ are among the most discomfiting in the volume. While Blake’s antinomian Christianity led him to insist, against ‘Persons such as Paine & Voltaire,’ that ‘You cannot have Liberty in this World without <what you call> Moral Virtue & you cannot have Moral Virtue without the Slavery of that half of the Human Race who hate <what you call> Moral Virtue,’ he was also sure that demystification could allow one to ‘live in Paradise & Liberty’ even in this world: ‘You may do so in Spirit,’ he wrote, for ‘Error or Creation [. . .] is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it.’53 Over the following decades, tropes of demystification were used as a poetic shorthand by republican writers seeking to identify themselves with the democratic politics of their day and with poets such as Blake, whose mantle they wished to assume. Images of unveiling, dawn, and awakening, along with an interest in the ethical development of readers,




were strongly identified with republican verse by republican poets themselves. Yet the meanings of demystification changed as the particular tensions that shaped the songs of the 1790s ceased to be central to republican political and cultural life and were replaced by a new series of dilemmas and new poetic negotiations aimed at resolving them—as we will see in the chapters that follow.




Two Defence[s] of Poetry: Shelley and the Newgate Magazine

Raymond Williams has noted that Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, like other Romantic theories of poetry, is ‘evidently compensatory,’ for ‘the height of the artists’ claim is also the height of their despair.’1 Williams traces this compensatory claim to the belief on the part of Romantic poets that the values they heralded as central to art and, often, to a just society, were precisely the opposite of ‘the principles on which the new society was being organized.’2 Yet Shelley’s position within this cultural landscape was further fraught, because the most vocal advocates of the new society were not enemies but allies: philosophical radicals such as Jeremy Bentham, infidel republicans such as Richard Carlile, and liberal anti-monarchists such as Thomas Love Peacock and William Hazlitt. What’s more, all of these thinkers were—or, significantly, had become in the 1820s—contemptuous critics of poetry. Peacock’s attitude toward poetry is perhaps more wry than contemptuous: critics have long described his The Four Ages of Poetry (1820) as half-serious, and his correspondence with Shelley suggests that his animosity toward poetry was intensified by his annoyance with Barry Cornwall and other authors of ‘drivelling doggrel’ and ‘mawkish sentiment with an absolute negation of reason and knowledge.’3 Yet scholars such as Marilyn Butler have also argued that The Four Ages ‘puts the genuine utilitarian case—though it is in a deliberately provocative and extreme form.’4 Indeed, despite stylistic differences between popular and elite republicanism and philosophical differences between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian thought, a remarkably unified critique of poetry cohered during these years, partaking of shared metaphors, vocabulary, and substantive arguments. Poetry, then, needed defending, and republican writers rose to the task. This chapter examines two republican defenses of poetry, Shelley’s famous essay (written 1821) and a cluster of articles in the atheist and 35



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republican Newgate Monthly Magazine (1824–26) by T. R. Perry, one of the magazine’s editors, imprisoned in Newgate for blasphemy; Elijah Ridings, a weaver and member of the Republicans of Manchester and the Miles Platting Reading Society; and an enigmatic contributor, ‘C.,’ whose identity remains unclear. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and the Newgate Magazine are characteristic of republican apologies for poetry of the 1820s in that they adopt a defensive posture, argue within a utilitarian idiom for poetry’s usefulness, appeal to a liberatory history of poetry, and insist upon the political value of the heart and emotion. Yet, whereas Shelley rejects didacticism and embraces ‘high poetry,’ the Newgate Magazine writers do the opposite. Here, where their projects diverge, their shared debts to republican criticisms of poetry, and to the larger political climate of the decade, are most visible. Distance—from audience and political organization through exile and imprisonment, from the enlivening past and the utopian future—was the dominant spatial and temporal frame for republicanism in the 1820s. A decade marked by the defeat, dissolution, and despair that overtook both popular radicalism and the republican elite in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the 1820s witnessed fragmentation and in-fighting among pro-reform activists. Republican culture, too, suffered from despair and disintegration during these years, with the collapse of many of the popular movement’s newspapers and political clubs and the retreat of the post-war liberal intelligentsia, as cultural critics such as Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Leigh Hunt took refuge in autobiographical writing and curmudgeonly nostalgia.5 Poets stepped back from the urgency of their post-war verses, and exposés of despotism and calls to action such as Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (written 1819), or the Spencean activist Allen Davenport’s The Kings; Or Legitimacy Unmasked (1819), gradually gave way to commemorative verse, philosophical meditations, and the consolation of utopian visions. Shelley’s situation in Italy unexpectedly parallels that of radicals such as Davenport, who retreated to the London suburbs early in the 1820s: both were writing in exile, amidst the fragmentation that followed the collapse of the mass platform. The defeat of popular radicalism touched Shelley from afar, by deflating his hopes for reform, exacerbating his publishing difficulties, and facilitating radical intellectuals’ withdrawal from the political fray. In the final two years of his life, Shelley’s sense of his audience was shrinking to a circle of close friends as his inability to publish his most politically engaged poems, and the limited popularity of those that were issued, propelled his recourse to coterie circulation. These dynamics inform the




philosophical speculations about the power of poetry in the Defence, speculations which have their roots in earlier poems and prose writings such as ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ and ‘Speculations on Morals’ but which are shaped by the political situation of the early 1820s and Shelley’s relation to it. As an elite poet dedicated to what he calls ‘high poetry,’ and linked through purely textual connections to a largely inattentive if not unreachable audience, Shelley needed to reconcile his defense of poetry’s utility with the anti-didactic stance of high art and the distance between the elite poet and his audience, and he accomplished this reconciliation by means of the claim that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’ Scholarly treatments of Shelley’s later work have tended to account for his sense of distance and alienation from his audience in biographical terms, pointing to Shelley’s failure to find a publisher for the ‘popular songs’ of 1819 or citing an inward turn intensified by marital and romantic problems. Within Shelley studies, A Defence of Poetry stands somewhat awkwardly between Prometheus Unbound (written 1818–19) and Epipsychidion and Adonais (both written 1821), seeming both to retain the early poems’ promise of political transformation and to justify the turn toward fulfillment through ideal love and poetic genius. I argue that the crucial watershed is not only biographical but also political—for Shelley, as for the Newgate Magazine writers and all other committed republicans, the collapse of the mass platform seemed to sound a death knell to reform in their lifetimes. This consciousness of defeat, which separates the Defence from Prometheus Unbound, also separates Hazlitt’s Table Talk (1821–22) from his Political Essays (1819) and The Four Ages of Poetry from Peacock’s early poems. As Williams writes, Shelley’s description of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ communicates ‘the felt helplessness of a generation.’6 *

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Republican philosophical and political criticisms of verse in the 1820s partook of a tradition stretching back as far as Plato’s Republic, which excluded poets from the ideal society on the grounds that ‘poetry is likely to distort the thought of anyone who hears it, unless he has the knowledge of [. . .] things themselves as they truly are.’7 Shelley’s Defence, as Timothy Webb shows, ‘was as much a reply to Plato as to Peacock.’8 Republican suspicions of poetry also had more immediate roots in Enlightenment theories of language and dissenting critiques of priestcraft, which overlapped in venerating plain-speaking and transparency in communication. Yet these ideas had been balanced by traditions of



Two Defence[s] of Poetry 37

republican literariness. In the post-war years, Hazlitt’s well-known assertions that ‘[t]he language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power’ and that the imagination is an ‘aristocratical’ faculty and the understanding a ‘republican faculty’ were offset by Shelley’s declaration that poems such as The Revolt of Islam (1818) ‘sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language [. . .] in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers, a virtuous enthusiasm for [the] doctrines of liberty and justice.’9 By the 1820s, this balance had been disrupted by a variety of forces including the political apostasy of the first generation of Romantic poets and the polarization of cultural politics that helped to produce it; the growing allegiance between reform politicians and philosophical radicalism; the visibility of scientific advances in agriculture and manufacturing; the increasing popularity of political economy as a tool for understanding society and guiding political and social policy; and the despair about the failure of the post-war agitations and their expressive culture. The critique of poetry was espoused by thinkers at the centers of popular, bourgeois, and elite republicanism, and in its most important publications, from Carlile’s The Republican to Hunt’s The Liberal. Moreover, such opposition to poetry resonated with progressive rationalism, dovetailing with the republican ideal of an egalitarian public sphere in which rational debate triumphed over interest and emotion, a conception of the public that, as Kevin Gilmartin shows, structured the political aspirations and organizational tactics of radicalism during these years.10 Certainly, the fact that so many of those authors who were still advocating for economic justice and political reform—or even, as Butler describes Hazlitt’s appeal during the early 1820s, ‘speak[ing] to the educated, displaced urban reader, who no longer has anything to hope for from social goals, but retains a kind of imaginative approximation to them, a concept of revolution in his mind and memory’—should denounce poetry seemed to signal an alliance between a hostility toward verse and a commitment to progress.11 Poetry’s republican critics made precisely this claim. They drew sharp distinctions between the progress that would come from reason and the fruitless idling of poets. Bentham famously compared poetry’s value to that of a game of pushpin in The Rationale of Reward (1825), where he argued that poems are ‘useful only to those who take pleasure in them.’12 For Carlile and Peacock, too, ‘useful’ was a talismanic word. The title ‘poet,’ Carlile wrote, is a ‘designation [that] embraces nothing either, great, good, or useful.’13 Peacock argued that poetry ‘can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man.’14 Poetry is simply ‘not useful’ (170); it even impedes usefulness because ‘in




whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study’ (171). Unlike science and philosophy, which have ‘permanently useful ends and aims,’ poems are ‘empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion’ (171). Peacock heralded the growing ‘subordinacy of the ornamental to the useful’ (172), signaling the close ties between utilitarianism and empiricist opposition to the ‘Ornaments’ Locke classed among the chief ‘Abuse of Words’ in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).15 ‘[I]f we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow,’ he wrote, that ‘all the artificial and figurative applications of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.’16 Peacock’s objection to poetry as ‘ornamental and figurative language,’ an ‘exquisite and fastidious selection of words’ that obscures whatever is being expressed with the ‘laboured polish of versification’ (163) draws on Locke’s rigid semantics, as does Carlile’s claim, ‘Poetry is a dress of language: it may be elegant or inelegant; but I prefer to look upon, and contemplate the naked body.’17 The link between such ‘improper play with words’ and monarchical tyranny is typically quite explicit.18 Carlile asserted that ‘words are [more] often used as the balls for state jugglers to play their tricks with, than money or metal counters.’19 A related criticism asserted an ancient link between poetic prophecy and monarchical and priestly power. The first job of the ‘bard,’ Peacock asserted, was to ‘trac[e] the genealogy of his chief to any of the deities in his neighbourhood with whom the said chief may be most desirous of claiming relationship’ (160). The ‘familiarity with the secret history of gods and genii’ that these earliest poets claimed in the process ensured that they acquired a ‘reputation of inspiration’: ‘thus they are not only historians, but theologians, moralists, and legislators: delivering their oracles ex cathedrâ, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity: building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose’ (160–61). For Peacock, poets’ status as ‘legislators’ is a marker of their collusion with priests and chiefs, evidence of the illegitimacy of their authority. Carlile agreed: Poets have been the most detestable and most mischievous of mankind,— the precursors of priests,—the syrens of human language, that have lured men to destruction,—the general corruptors and the authors of THE FALL OF MANKIND. We want knowledge,—no hypothesis, no speculation, no poetic fictions, no lies, no religion.20




Hazlitt succinctly updated the position when he argued that the idea that the people ‘have no rights [. . .] is what kings at present tell us with their swords, and poets with their pens.’21 Similarly, the long-standing opposition between ‘things as they are’ and the illusions of poetry played a central role in the republican antipoetics of the 1820s. According to The Four Ages of Poetry, Wordsworth and the Lake Poets had ‘contrived, though they had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was, to see her only as she was not, converting the land they lived in into a sort of fairy-land, which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras’ (168). Bentham, too, argued that ‘between poetry and truth there is a natural opposition’ (206). ‘Truth, exactitude of every kind,’ he asserted, ‘is fatal to poetry [. . .] the poet always stands in need of something false’ (206). Hazlitt also alleged that the poet is ‘clogged by no dull system of realities, no earth-bound feelings, [. . .] but is drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation and fancy.’22 For all of these writers, poetry stands apart from, even hindering, the progressive spirit of the age. Carlile periodically forswore any further publication of verse in his journals, opposing the ‘march of intellect’ to the enervating effects of poetry on the mind: ‘It is our intention to exclude all Poetry from the future pages of “The Republican” [. . .] We are among those who do not think it any ornament to common sense, and bad Poetry is calculated to spoil it!’23 ‘While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance,’ Peacock explains: ‘The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward’ (169, 170). Hazlitt writes, ‘poets [. . .] make bad philosophers and worse politicians. They live, for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be as well if they were confined to it’ (151).24 Peacock justified the movement of his energies—and, he claimed, those of ‘all whose attention is worth having’—from poetry into ‘moral, political, and physical science’ on the grounds that social and political progress was to be generated from these spheres, an argument long advocated by Bentham and seconded by Carlile.25 Hazlitt, conversely, seems to have been seized by disappointment. Speaking of the man who, like himself, cannot cease to care about the state of the world, Hazlitt described how his ‘views become jaundiced, sinister, and double’ (92). He insisted that he no longer ‘look[ed] forward with much confidence or hope to the brilliant illusions held out by the future’ (22). Instead, he stated, ‘I have naturally but little imagination [. . .] I am not at all given to building castles in the air’ (21–22). The connection between Hazlitt’s




political despondency and his irritation with poetry is revealed clearly when he faults the poet for being ‘[o]f all people the most tormenting’ because he will always ‘bid you hope in the midst of despair’ (150). In ‘On Living to One’s-Self,’ written during the same weeks Shelley was composing the Defence of Poetry, Hazlitt argued that the wise man responds to this era of despair by ‘look[ing] at the busy world through the loop-holes of retreat’; he aspires ‘to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things [. . .] but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it’ (91). Hazlitt advocates a policy of disengagement from political affairs in the face of what he called ‘repeated disappointments and vain regrets’ (92). Yet the doubleness of Hazlitt’s views is also apparent in ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ published in The Liberal in 1823, in which he was able both to excoriate Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘small, feeble’ will and to credit him with ensuring that ‘my understanding [. . .] did not remain dumb and brutish, [and] at length found a language to express itself.’ Thanks to Coleridge, Hazlitt had found ‘a light before me, it was the face of poetry,’ an illumination that ‘has not quitted my side!’26 For his part, Carlile was never entirely successful in eliminating poetry from his papers, let alone from the culture of popular radicalism, nor did Bentham achieve the abolition of honorary posts, pensions, and other ‘public [. . .] expense’ designed to ‘cultivat[e] the arts and sciences of amusement and curiosity’ (212). Even as poetry’s republican critics were arguing so adamantly for its fundamental uselessness, there was ample countervailing evidence of poetry’s relevance: Byron’s anti-monarchical The Vision of Judgment and Heaven and Earth, which appeared in The Liberal in 1822 and 1823, and the first of which Carlile reprinted in The Republican;27 Leigh Hunt’s support of poets and composition of his own poems from the center of respectable reform circles; conservative reviewers’ apparent need, into the 1830s, to attack what they saw as the second generation’s successful alignment of poetry with political freedom;28 and the range of ‘defenses’ of poetry that appeared in the republican press. In this sense, it may be more accurate to view the decade not as one in which poetry was endangered but as one in which the idea that poetry needed defending proved particularly productive for radical theorists of verse—on both sides of the question. *

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At the center of the defense of poetry offered by writers in the Newgate Magazine lay the claim that poetry is a more effective didactic vehicle




than prose. Perry, Ridings, and C. drew implicitly on Horace’s dictum that poetry’s object is to ‘teach and delight,’ or, as Byron had rendered it in Hints from Horace (1824), ‘to please, [and] to improve.’29 Arguing that poetry deserved a secure and privileged place within republican discourse by virtue of this ability to join pleasure and instruction, they tried to rescue poetry from its association with deception and falsehood. The first stage in their battle was fought over the issue of poetry’s relation to reason, and it began in 1822, when Ridings wrote a letter to The Republican praising the poets who were contributing to what he called their ‘Age of Intellect.’ A self-taught weaver from Newton, near Manchester, Ridings was deeply embedded in the semi-formal networks of republicanism.30 In addition to his friendship with one of the Newgate Magazine editors, he had ‘long been known’ to them all ‘as a staunch friend of the principles we advocate.’31 Converted to atheism while still in his ‘budding youth’ by the agency of d’Holbach’s materialist classic, System of Nature (1770), Ridings had been ‘transformed into a bitter foe / Of spiritual idols.’32 As a member of the Miles Platting Reading Society and the Republicans of Manchester,33 he served as their correspondent with the national press and spoke at public meetings and Thomas Paine birthday commemorations.34 Ridings wrote theological essays for The Republican under the pen name ‘Epicurus,’ and he launched his poetry battle in its pages—not as the freethinking philosopher ‘Epicurus’ or as ‘E. R.,’ the initials under which he submitted an earlier poetic ‘Address to Britons,’35 but instead in his own name, and as the spokesperson for the republican societies to which he belonged. He was thus born into a full authorial identity as an advocate of verse, and through the medium of republican political correspondence. The communication was a conventional letter ‘To Mr. R. Carlile, Dorchester Gaol,’ ‘solicit[ing] [him] to receive the sum of Two Pounds Seven Shillings.’36 After offering the usual denunciations of ‘kings and priests, those vital enemies,’ and the requisite praise of Carlile’s ‘endeavours to forward the cause of universal liberty,’ Ridings offered this, more unusual, comment: The liberal and enlightened literati of the present day have opened a wide field for the mind of a reader to range in—have planted in it the vigorous and ever-verdant oak of inflexible and manly genius— beneath whose shade, the sweet-scented flowers of rhetoric and poesy lie scattered—around whose solid base the delicious fruits of unsophisticated sentiment are spread—upon which the man of taste may banquet, and the man of feeling lay his heart, in sacrifice. The





These writers, Ridings asserted, were engaged in the ‘noble pursuit’ of ‘rescuing the human mind from the power of the priest.’38 Ridings’s letter indicates the ways in which republican politics provided not only a rhetoric for his analysis of poetry, but an occasion for writing, a vehicle, and a forum. The subscription letter allows him to meditate informally on current events such as Shelley’s recent death and to ground his praise of poetry in the collective authority of the societies on whose behalf he writes. Whereas Shelley sends his most political works to his publishers with as little effect as the messages he had floated in bottles in Bristol Channel as a young man, Ridings’s letter, dated in Carlile’s atheist convention ‘November 11, 1822, of the Carpenter’s Wife’s son,’ appeared in The Republican little more than a month later, on 13 December. Yet no extended discussions of poetry appear in the nine-year history of The Republican. These would have to wait for the Newgate Monthly Magazine. That journal emerged from Carlile’s world, and powerfully expanded it. In May 1824, several workers in Carlile’s shop were arrested for selling texts containing blasphemous libels, Paine’s The Age of Reason (1793), Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature (1801), and issues of The Republican.39 These shopmen, along with new recruits fresh from the provinces, acted on their conviction that it was an ‘imperative duty of every man to resist oppression and uphold the oppressed’ by keeping the shop open, ‘form[ing] a phalanx against the persecuting spirit’ of the authorities.40 All told, ten persons made a quick journey from ‘resist[ing] oppression’ to being oppressed themselves, as they were arrested, tried, and ‘as a matter of course, found guilty.’41 ‘In all,’ as Joss Marsh writes, ‘Carlile’s volunteers served between them two centuries in jail,’ an experience they made good on by launching from prison a new serial ‘wherein will be discussed all subjects relating to men, manners, and opinions.’42 The Newgate Magazine editors espoused a republican faith in the power of a free press to advance democratic change, declaring that ‘[t]he fact of an unshackled press being in operation, however little ability there might be embarked to direct its progress, speaks volumes in the cause of freedom.’43 They interpreted religion as the main source of human ignorance, charging in their opening editorial, for instance, ‘Priests of every denomination, it is you who destroy the germ of human intellect.’44 And they believed that it was a want of knowledge that ‘creates tyrants and slaves, the oppressor and the oppressed.’45



productions of Shelley, Byron, Moore, Keates, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Lady Morgan, &c., have created a new age in the literary world.37

The Newgate Magazine obliquely acknowledged the difficulty posed by The Republican for a ‘young and true poet.’46 ‘That publication,’ wrote one of the Newgate Magazine editors, ‘was not the right sort of work to help on a rising genius.’47 The Newgate Magazine, on the other hand, envisioned itself as just the right sort. In a decidedly literary vein, it published sketches of daily life in Newgate, autobiographical accounts of conversions to atheism, and some forty-four poems, more than two per issue.48 At least one of its editors, Perry, was a poet, or perhaps became one over the course of the project. In contrast to The Republican’s vows not to publish poetry, the Newgate Magazine began soliciting poems on the covers of its first issues, which called for submissions to a ‘Prize Poem’ competition. The author of the best poem was to receive the ‘tempting prize’ of twelve free numbers of the magazine.49 The winning poems, ‘O Sapientia et Justicia Dei!’ and ‘The Character and Doctrines of St. Paul’ recount Biblical history from a secularist viewpoint, translating the journal’s concerns with republican atheism into verse.50 The Newgate Magazine also printed a steady stream of poetry criticism, most numbers containing at least one such essay, letter, or review. Yet poetry was not uniformly embraced by the editors and readers of the Newgate Magazine. The paper’s theory of political verse emerged not through a gradual accretion of consensus but through fierce debate and disagreement. This debate involved fundamental questions about poetry’s worth as well as attempts to define precisely what poetry does, and how, for republican radicalism. The paper’s first substantial discussion of poetry was a review of Ridings’s first volume of verse, a thirty-six-page pamphlet entitled The Fairy Maid, and Other Poems (1825). The review served the dual purpose of puffing a friend’s pamphlet and staking a claim to a republican theory of poetry. ‘[A]s lovers of truth,’ the editors wrote, they ‘fe[lt] bound’ to argue that ‘[f]iction should be banished from poetry, as well as from prose, and genius, high and low, should exert itself to body forth concealed realities; to polish our sentiments of the things that are, and not to fill young and weak heads with ideas of things that are not.’ At the close of the article, the editors pledge that they will be ‘glad to assist the author, in his future flights toward the top of Mount Parnassus, with our [. . .] pages.’51 The Newgate Magazine’s invitation must have seemed like a lifeline to the young poet Ridings. His response was a ‘Critique on the Story of Ruth. Written for the Newgate Monthly Magazine,’ which elaborated the review’s endorsement of poems that revealed ‘the things that are’ into a full-fledged account of poetry’s powers for education.52 In this




essay, Ridings compares the Biblical narrative of Ruth to similar scenes in James Thomson’s ‘Autumn’ and a forgotten opera. Criticizing the ‘want of perspicuity’ and the ‘obscurity’ of Biblical language, the essay seeks to expose the meaning behind words that ‘serve[ ] as a cloak for something.’ In contrast to the Bible, Ridings avers, Thomson ‘has given us some good poetry, which always strikes the heart as it is its own legitimate language, and as much superior to the dull, stiff and obscure prose of the “sacred writers,” as the light of the golden sun at noon-day, is to [. . .] a black and cheerless, lowering and broken cloud.’53 By aligning poetry with light, and relegating Biblical language to the dark cloud, Ridings connects poetry to demystification. Calling poetic language ‘legitimate,’ Ridings employs a keyword of republican discourse, which featured it in titles such as Davenport’s The Kings; Or Legitimacy Unmasked and in ‘Political Dictionaries’ such as one excerpted in the Newgate Magazine.54 As the Age of Reason would succeed the ancien régime, poetry would replace the Bible. Two responses to Ridings’s essay were quickly fired off and appeared in the April 1825 issue. W. C., one of the editors of the paper, urges Ridings to do ‘better’ and stop endorsing the works of ‘frivolous’ writers whose ‘productions please, without requiring from the reader the trouble of thinking.’55 A letter to the editor by ‘Scrutator’ suspects Ridings of being ‘rather eager to set himself up as one of the “ungentle craft,” ’ that is, as a poet.56 Such a move would cause Scrutator but ‘little sorrow’ were it not for his belief that Ridings ‘would confer a greater benefit on society, and more effectually assist virtue in her moral struggle against vice, by producing some substantial essays on solid principles; similar to his more early ones inserted in “The Republican,” and signed Epicurus.’ He complains, ‘Epicurus now vitiates his articles with a “flaunting verbiage,” upon the manner of writing, until the principle on which he writes is rendered obscure.’ By accusing Ridings of being ‘obscure’ and verbose, Scrutator attempts to restore the dichotomy between transparent republican discourse and poetic language. The core of Scrutator’s response, however, is a somewhat confused claim that paying attention to style implicates Ridings in the obscurities he seeks to denounce. Bringing in the allpowerful icon of Thomas Paine in order to dispute Ridings’s treatment of the language of the Bible, Scrutator argues that Paine’s method was to bring before ‘the court of Reason’ the case of ‘BIBLE versus BIBLE’ and demonstrate its internal contradictions—not to argue against it on stylistic grounds. ‘I should be sorry to object to the Bible, because that [sic] its literary characteristics are [as Ridings had put it], “a turgid swell and a frigid flatness, an inflated spirit and an empty




bombast,” ’ Scrutator writes, asserting ‘rather, that it is an engine which destroys the nobler faculties of man.’ Ridings responds in turn to Scrutator, and in this response he offers his most explicit and sustained defense of poetry.57 Ridings begins by refuting Scrutator’s analysis of Paine’s attitude toward style and literary technique. Redefining Paine as a literary genius rather than an ultrarationalist critic, Ridings argues that Paine ‘was not one of your dull writers,’ but instead was ‘fond of poetry and could write verses’ and was possessed of a ‘finished style’ and an ‘ear and a mind alive to all the various powers of his native tongue.’ Calling Paine’s works ‘true and legitimate,’ Ridings describes them in terms that would be equally applicable to his conception of republican verse: He appealed to the heart as well as to the mind, to the fancy as well as to the judgment [. . .] the mourning fancy of Paine culled the purest and the lovliest, not the gaudiest, flowers and scattered them upon his page, where they still bloom in all the sweetness of flowery beauty, and give knowledge and pleasure to admiring millions.58 Ridings argues that manner is as important as matter because an effective style creates lasting change. The power of Paine’s works to convert loyalists and Christians to republicanism and atheism needed no asserting in the pages of the Newgate Magazine, for they were filled with proclamations of the power of the texts Carlile and the shopmen were in prison for publishing and selling. Ridings needs merely suggest that Paine’s works possess this power by virtue of their ability to give both ‘knowledge and pleasure.’ By applying the vocabulary of poetry—the word ‘fancy’ and images of flowers—to Paine’s corpus, Ridings aligns the project of republican verse with the core goals and tactics of infidel and republican politics. That same month, in a subscription letter written on behalf of the ‘friends to free discussion’ in Manchester, Ridings calls on ‘[a]ll men of talent [. . .] to rouse from their waking dreams.’59 Conceding that poets have ‘attempt[ed] to render beautiful and permanent antique error, [. . .] grasping at a shadow and losing a reality, like the dog in the fable,’ Ridings agrees with the editors that poems should ‘body[ ] forth concealed realities.’ Yet, even as he narrows the proper scope of poetry, Ridings prepares to expand its importance. Praising Don Juan (1819–24) as a ‘most extraordinary’ poem that joins didactic lessons with poetic pleasure, combining ‘beauty of language, truth of sentiment, fine satirical wit and natural philosophy,’ Ridings writes that Byron has ‘united poetry with philosophy,




and both with liberty.’60 Such poetry is a more effective instrument of enlightenment than prose, one that is ‘calculated to produce greater effect on the minds, of the audience, than either a sermon or a discourse of any kind.’61 Such statements point directly toward the arguments C. was unfolding in his series ‘The Essayist.’ In these articles, which appeared in the Newgate Magazine in 1825–26, C. made the full case for poetry as republican instruction.62 Devoting all but two of his articles to the ‘Character and Writings of Shelley’ (the others discuss King Lear and the unshackled mind), C. supports his claims for poetic didacticism with analyses of Shelley’s poems and prose writings, particularly the Preface to The Revolt of Islam. Though C.’s identity remains unclear,63 it is evident that he was thoroughly immersed in republican politics and literature, and in the poetic life of the paper.64 The core of C.’s theory of poetry is the claim that poetry instructs the reader by reaching the imagination. C. describes the ‘imagination’ as the most important of ‘[t]he distinctive powers of the poet.’65 Arguing that ‘Shelley’s [works] are the result of an ardent and enthusiastic imagination, often purely imaginative,’ C. asserts that ‘his incidents are so finely extended, that the severest ken of human capability is scarcely able to follow him.’66 The reader’s imaginative capacity is thus ‘stretched’ as he attempts ‘[t]o follow [. . .] [the] sublimer strain / To the extremest verge of human thought.’67 Through our sympathetic identification with the hero and heroine of The Revolt of Islam, for example, ‘we see the power of thought, of reason, of truth; a power that will ultimately crush error and oppression—the only power that can renovate the world.’68 For C., there is no contradiction between a poem’s appeal to the imagination and its message of ‘reason’ and ‘truth.’ In his discussion of Queen Mab (1813), C. explicitly dismisses Carlile’s assertions of poetry’s collusion with irrationality and falsehood, turning them around as evidence for his own claims for poetry’s special powers: Poetry has in all ages been closely linked with superstition, and has, I think, tended more than any thing else to give a reality and to preserve the supernatural images which fancy has woven. But at the worst, it can only be said, that a good thing has been turned to a very bad use. A proof that it is good, that it is a powerful medium of conveying information exists in the very fact for which it is condemned. While the measured declamation, or the profound reasoning of prose has sunk into neglect or indifference—has been read and passed by, the productions of verse have been preserved and perused with a zest





C.’s assertion of the superior didactic power of verse depicts prose as transient and poetry as lasting and implicitly credits the pleasures and complexities of poetry with their power.70 For C., the progress of poetry spells not the perpetuation but the downfall of falsehood. What makes the force of poetry irresistible? In a telling passage, C. meditates on the value of poetic expression: The same feeling—the same detestation of tyranny and falsehood is conspicuous [in The Revolt of Islam] but with less energy, or distinctness, than in the last-mentioned work [Queen Mab]. The same sentiments are expressed, in a more refined, and a more allegorical language. They are adorned with all the wildness of poetic imagery, and extended with the flights of an ardent imagination. [. . .] Were it to be measured by the standard of utility, its value would be found to be less than Queen Mab, but for finely wrought language, and all the qualities of poetic excellence, its value is as much greater.71 Even as C.’s concession that The Revolt of Islam is less useful than Queen Mab opens an apparent rift between beauty and utility, he finds another, even ‘greater’ value in ‘poetic excellence.’ C. approves of poetic techniques elsewhere as well, noting the complexities of ‘the long Spenserian stanza,’ praising a ‘vivid description’ as ‘a finely drawn picture, and highly poetical,’ and lauding Shelley for the ‘more than ordinary strength and vigour of [his] language.’72 In this way, C.’s theory of poetic imagination leads him to praise poetic language and imagery. It would be left to T. R. Perry, however, to defend metaphor and figure.73 Perry never granted much credence to the republican critique of verse. He began his most important essay on poetry, ‘Poetry and Music,’ with this coy statement: ‘I venture to step aside from the considerations of theology and polemics, to disquisitions of a less abstruse nature, [and] I trust the character of this publication will not be deteriorated, or the taste of the reader vitiated thereby.’74 As one of the magazine’s editors, Perry was in a good position to discuss its ‘character.’ Though he had ‘long been an enthusiastic admirer of poetry’ (371), like Ridings he seems to have come to writing through his involvement with atheism and republicanism. Arrested on a charge of blasphemy for selling Principles of Nature, found guilty, and sentenced to two years imprisonment in



undiminished. Let falsehood be attacked through the same medium and it will be found to give way in the same ratio with its progress. The force of Queen Mab will be found in most cases to be irresistable.69

July 1824,75 Perry began to write and publish poetry of his own in the Newgate Magazine in 1826. Noting that some writers have ‘insinuate[d], that the perusal of a beautiful composition is of a criminal nature,’ and ‘ “has its source in the weakness and effeminacy of the human mind” ’ (371–72), Perry reverses poetry critics’ use of a vocabulary of crime and gender: That man must possess an uncommon severity of temper, who can find any thing to condemn in the practice of embellishing truth with additional charms, and winning the heart by captivating the ear; in uniting roses with the thorns of science, and joining pleasure with instruction. A taste for the beauties of composition, is so far from being a mark of any depravity in our nature, that I should think it may be considered as an evidence of the moral rectitude of our mental constitution. (372) Perry’s reversal links critics of poetry with the ‘Six Acts’ passed after Peterloo, which restricted the publication of cheap, radical newspapers and which republicans saw as criminalizing ‘free discussion.’ By arguing that a ‘taste’ for beautiful writing evinces moral strength rather than weakness, Perry subtly asserts that true moral strength must join intellect with aesthetic experience. Perry also directly addresses what he calls the ‘greatest objection that can be advanced against the cultivation of a poetic taste,’ namely that ‘it rests too much on figure and fiction’ (372). ‘But even this may be made subservient towards illustrating the most philosophical truth,’ he explains, for poetry ‘without fiction [. . .] breathes an elevation of sentiment’ (372). He concedes that poets, ‘[t]hose who have cultivated this art, aware of its general influence on the human mind, have often employed it with success to grace even a bad cause’ (375). ‘But this I apprehend can be no argument against its utility,’ he insists: ‘Eloquence has its sourse in poetical imagery, and the metaphorical figures of speech, and it is only a cultivated taste, that can distinguish and separate true eloquence from sophistry; but when employed in the cause of truth and humanity, its force is irresistible’ (375). To claim that poetry’s force was ‘irresistible,’ as C. had also done in reference to Queen Mab, seems to have been a shorthand for the defense of the didactic power of poetic expression. Pointing to the formal features of poetry, metaphor, and imagery (as he earlier praised ‘the measure of poetry’ as its ‘melody’ [372]), Perry uses these formal elements to defend poetry’s utility, a utility rooted in poetry’s ability to train the mind to recognize truth and to detect illusion.




From Ridings to C., and culminating in Perry, the Newgate Magazine writers embarked on a quest to defend poetry from its republican critics. Their journey involved a movement away from Carlile, Bentham, and Peacock’s demands for transparent language and toward a new emphasis on the power of poetic lexis. Yet even Perry could never abandon his allegiances to the rhetoric of transparency. Nor could he justify poetry outside an idiom of utility. As in C.’s claim that poetry’s appeals to the imagination intensified its ‘power’ to convey ‘thought, [and] reason, [and] truth’ to the reader, Perry measures poetry’s usefulness by its unique capacity to forward ‘the cause of truth.’ The Newgate Monthly Magazine could not imagine, as Shelley had, a defense of poetry founded upon a value other than didacticism. Nor could the idea of a breach between themselves and Shelley ever have occurred to C. or Ridings, the two Newgate Magazine writers most intent upon Shelley’s legacy, or even to Perry. For Shelley’s renunciation of didacticism would appear only in 1839, when A Defence of Poetry was finally issued in print. The breach was, thus, one not only of argument but also of access—and not only republican intellectuals’ access to Shelley’s unprinted work but also, more importantly, I will argue, Shelley’s access to publication. *

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A Defence of Poetry begins with acknowledged legislators. ‘In the youth of the world,’ Shelley tells us, poets were known as either ‘legislators or prophets’ because ‘a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.’76 Here, in the third paragraph of the Defence, Shelley explains: [the poet] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. (482–83) Acknowledged legislators, poets are endowed with special power by virtue of their ability to see intensely, to recognize the world ‘as it is’ and ‘ought to be,’ and to convey such visions to the reader. It is this faculty of seeing that ‘comprises and unites’ the poet’s functions as legislator and prophet. Here, Shelley advances a republican understanding of poetry’s agency as a practice of demystification, helping the reader to see as the poet does, with unblinded eyes.




In Shelley’s youth, too, poets were legislators and prophets. In the Preface to Laon and Cythna/The Revolt of Islam (1818), he argues that the poem sought to effect ‘the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the bloodless dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious frauds by which they had been deluded into submission.’77 ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (written 1819, published 1832) declares its unveiling strategy in its very title, and opens by exposing Castlereagh, Eldon, and Sidmouth’s allegiances to murder, fraud, and hypocrisy. Prometheus Unbound (written 1818–19, published 1820) celebrates another moment of unmasking, this time the falling away of humanity’s old beliefs to reveal the true ‘man’ beneath: The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—but man: Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree,—the King Over himself; just, gentle, wise—but man[.] (III: 193–97) The ‘Ode to Liberty’ (1820), similarly, imagines writing the ‘impious name / Of King into the dust,’ exposing its power by ‘cut[ting] the snaky knots of this foul gordian word’ (211–12, 218), Which weak itself as stubble, yet can bind Into a mass, irrefragably firm, The axes and the rods which awe mankind; The sound has poison in it, ’tis the sperm Of what makes life foul, cankerous, and abhorred. (219–23) Significantly, apart from ‘The Mask of Anarchy,’ all of these texts were published in Shelley’s lifetime, and their ideas of poetry as a practice of demystification were approvingly noted in the popular republican press. In ‘The Essayist,’ for instance, C. reprinted a lengthy excerpt, including the passage quoted above, from the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, and he praised Queen Mab as a poem of demystification: ‘Kings, Priests, and Statesmen, are exhibited as their actions render them, odious and detestable. The chicanery of king and priestcraft are justly exposed, and that in language bold and forcible.’78 Shelley’s declaration in the Defence, then, that the poet is a legislator who ‘beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered’ (482–83), might




be read as a gloss on his corpus to date. Yet Shelley’s more famous comparison of poets to legislators is his claim in the text’s final paragraph that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World.’ Shelley had first used this phrase in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (written 1819), but it only acquires full power in the Defence, where it encapsulates a line of argument that Shelley launches immediately after his rearticulation of the theory of demystification. Why did Shelley need to move from acknowledged legislators and the theory of demystification to unacknowledged legislators and a theory of poetry’s indirect role in political progress? On one level, the defense of poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators’ responds to the debates about poetry that simmered among republican intellectuals throughout the early 1820s. Many of the arguments in the Defence resonate with those forwarded in the Newgate Magazine and directly refute the claims made by poetry’s republican critics; for example, Shelley counters utilitarian arguments by stressing poetry’s use value, reverses the privileging of reason by arguing for the preeminence of imagination and emotion, and credits poetry with forwarding political change rather than retarding it. But Shelley’s idea of ‘unacknowledged legislators’ bears a more complex relation to republican criticisms of verse, for it relies centrally upon his repudiation of didacticism. That repudiation is, from a republican perspective, counterintuitive. After all, the republican critique of poetry focuses its harshest ire on precisely the elements of poetry that Shelley’s rejection of didacticism defines as most central: its use of figurative language, its cultivation of the imagination, and its indirect means of advancing a moral purpose. Shelley’s rejection of didacticism represents not a symmetrical response to his allies’ denunciations of poetry but rather an attempt to preserve what is most poetic about poetry and to proclaim it as the source of poetry’s power to transform the world. For Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, poetry is not another mode of instruction; its power to teach is, in fact, a trap that ensnares those poets ‘in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense’ (488). On another level, Shelley’s theory of indirect poetic agency responds to the political situation in England, and to his ambivalent and attenuated relation to it. The disintegration of the reform coalitions in Britain weakened Shelley’s faith in the likelihood of political progress, hindered the publication of his most overtly political works, and balkanized the pro-reform literary intelligentsia that ought, logically, to have been his anchor of support. The claim for poetry’s indirect agency eliminates the problem of a scarcity of political momentum, readers, and support, as critics have long recognized, but it does so in a way that has not fully




been appreciated. By locating poetry’s actions in the ethical responses of readers, the Defence forwards a theory of the indirect political effect of the poetic text. From his position of self-imposed exile, a continent away from the events he wanted so desperately to influence, Shelley developed a theory of poetic agency in which the written word acted not only in its own time and place but also, as he said of Dante’s poetry, in ‘all succeeding times’ (500). In this analysis, I draw on two long-standing interpretive trends within Shelley scholarship, the first of which reads the Defence as part of Shelley’s retreat from politics into idealist philosophy and ideal love, as an ‘acknowledge[ment] that the primary responsibility of the poet is to himself rather than to political principles,’ in Timothy Webb’s words;79 and the second of which emphasizes what Stuart Curran calls the ‘ringing affirmations’ of the text and argues that Shelley remained ‘fully committed to the betterment of this world.’80 In my reading of the Defence, the very phrase ‘unacknowledged legislators’ indicates the mutual presence of both political commitment and retreat in Shelley’s thinking at this time. This phrase, and the Defence generally, are best understood as a compromise, as a negotiation of the difficulties of Shelley’s political commitments, his poetic ambitions, and his moment of composition. Shelley had not been bothered by the problem of didacticism early in his career. He told Elizabeth Hitchener ‘my opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral—that metaphorical language ought to be a pleasing vehicle for useful & momentous instruction.’81 He unabashedly described the versification of Queen Mab in these terms, noting that ‘[t]he didactic is in blank heroic verse, & the descriptive in blank lyrical measure.’82 Likewise in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam, though Shelley claims that the poem is ‘narrative, not didactic,’ he qualifies his claim by noting that it applies only ‘with the exception of the first Canto’ and he writes that his ‘succession of pictures’ illustrates, as if in a blueprint for the radicalization of the reader, ‘the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind.’ This illustration, he declares, ‘is the business of the Poet.’83 Even when he uses the term ‘didactic’ disparagingly, he objects to a pedantic tone and manner rather than to the presence of ethical aims. Such an objection is implicit in the Preface to The Cenci (1819): Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects





Here, in addition to objecting to a didactic posture as a matter of strategy or subtlety, Shelley lays down the heavy burdens of instruction. The turn toward literary historicism and the ‘colors’ of his own imagination is driven by a renunciation of ‘visions’ and ‘dreams.’ As Shelley distances himself further from didacticism, the Preface to Prometheus Unbound announces, ‘Didactic poetry is my abhorrence’ (135), while still insisting that his poetry conveys moral lessons: to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust. (135) In the Defence, the balance shifts still further toward rejection of didacticism and ‘direct moral purpose’ (498). Shelley’s repudiations of didacticism in the Defence, significantly, first arise in the context of Peacock’s critique. As he moves from defining poetry to ‘estimat[ing] its effects upon society,’ Shelley counters Peacock’s claim that poetry is useless and marginal, as well as his view that its figurative language and appeals to the imagination condition the reader to accept falsehoods that uphold monarchy and religion (486). ‘The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry,’ Shelley replies, ‘rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man’ (487). Shifting the ground deftly from poetry’s immorality to its moral powers, Shelley claims that arguments such as Peacock’s are derived from faulty arguments in praise of poetry’s moral powers; both assume that poetry acts directly. In fact, Shelley argues, poetry ‘acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness’ (486). The word ‘unapprehended’ initiates the strain of argument that will culminate in the word ‘unacknowledged’ in the Defence’s final paragraph. Shelley’s denunciation of the directly didactic mode arises within his defense of poetry from charges of its association with falsehood. Shelley does what the Newgate Magazine writers attempt to do in



incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality. I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content to paint, with such colors as my own heart furnishes, that which has been. (237)

a different way, to protect poetry from the hollowing out of its unique expressive powers in the name of a critique of delusion. ‘A Poet,’ Shelley writes here, ‘is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why’ (486). Shelley introduces two layers of inapprehension between the poet and his audience: the listeners’ inability to see the bird or understand ‘whence or why’ its song affects them, and equally importantly, the interiorization of the poet’s motivation. Shelley defines the poet’s sense of his responsibility solely in terms of his own emotional condition, ‘to cheer its own solitude.’ The nightingale’s loneliness, in stark contrast to Keats’s bird’s ‘full-throated ease,’ recalls a similar moment in ‘To a Sky-Lark,’ written the year before, in which Shelley compared that bird to the ‘Poet hidden,’ who ‘Sing[s] hymns unbidden, / Till the world is wrought / To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not’ (36–40). The ‘entranced’ auditors of the Defence’s nightingale at least ‘feel’ that they are ‘moved and softened’ by the song. The nightingale passage paves the way for Shelley to refute the charge of poetry’s immorality, its collusion with priestcraft and kingcraft. He has already redefined the charge of immorality as a ‘misconception’ of poetry’s ‘moral’ actions, and so an elaboration of these actions constitutes a rebuttal of Peacock: ‘The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry [. . .] enlarges the circumference of the imagination [. . .] strengthen[ing] that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’ (487, 488, my emphasis). So successful is Shelley’s reconfiguration of the debate about poetry’s morality, we must struggle to remember that his assertion that poetry strengthens readers’ ethical muscles operates as a refutation of the claim that poetry conditions the mind to accept falsehoods. A clue to the continuing, now subterranean battle with Peacock is provided when even this exalted claim for the moral effects of poetry’s cultivation of the imagination does not stand on its own. It is qualified by the same relation of inapprehension that marked the nightingale passage: A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither. [. . .] Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense [. . .] have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in





Though Shelley insists that poetry has moral effects, he also insists that a poet can neither strive to create them nor ‘compel’ his readers to be affected. Here the rejection of didacticism exceeds a preference for illumination and subtlety. Instead, he sets any direct moral purpose against a desire solely to cultivate the imagination—and trust in the good that comes from its enlargement. Thus, the culmination of these two paragraphs about poetry’s function in the world is at once a renunciation of any mindful practice of that function and an insistence on its inevitability. As in the previous passage, the Defence tends generally to link the repudiation of didacticism to claims for the particular agency of the very best poetry. When Shelley is defining poetry, his tendency is quite the opposite, to enlarge its boundaries to include philosophy, linguistic development, democratic institutions, and the mystical connections that link humans to one another. Yet when he is discussing how poetry acts, he often contracts his scope to great poems. So in his analysis of the social transformations wrought by Milton and Dante, Shelley considers poetry not as a protean mode of language, as early in the text, but as a ‘high’ art. Milton’s ‘bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is,’ he writes, ‘the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton’s genius’ (498, my emphasis). In arguing that Dante was ‘the first awakener of entranced Europe,’ Shelley writes: All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed. A great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed[.] (500) Writing here of ‘high poetry’ and ‘great Poem[s],’ he defines their height and greatness in terms of their capacity to reach into the future, to have ‘effects [. . .] upon their own and all succeeding times’ (500). Shelley’s use of the metaphor of the veil in this passage further signals the ways his increasing emphasis on ‘high poetry’ contributes to the development of the argument for poets as ‘unacknowledged legislators.’ In the latter parts of the Defence, his veil metaphors shift away from



exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose. (488)

conventional republican demystification. Some of these metaphors posit unveiling as a revelation of ideal truths, as when he credits the ‘authors of revolutions’ with being poets by virtue of the fact that their ‘words unveil the permanent analogy of things’ (485). He asserts that the ‘truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths’ in the writings of the classical poets (486), that ‘[p]oetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world’ (487), and that it ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms’ (505). In these passages, he adopts a Platonic idealism in which the act of demystification reveals not so much the world as ‘its spirit,’ a ‘truth’ that is ‘hidden’ by ‘familiarity’ and custom, but revealed by the renewal of language and perception that Shelley defines as poetry early in the Defence, in his claim that poetic ‘language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension’ (482). Still other uses of the veil metaphor compare poetic language itself to a veil, as when he writes that poetry ‘veil[s] [. . .] the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, [. . .] in language or in form’ and that it ‘spreads its own figured curtain’ (505). This seems to be Shelley’s meaning when he states that ‘[v]eil after veil may be with undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed’ (500). William Keach argues that the gradual and persistent darkening of the poetic process as Shelley imagines it in the latter part of the Defence [. . .] is consistent with this pattern that the metaphor of language as veil pervades the closing paragraphs of the Defence. Perpetuating the ‘before unapprehended relations of things’ [. . .] come[s] to be identified with veiling them.84 The movement away from unveiling as a mode of demystification, then, parallels and propels the shift from poetry to ‘high poetry.’ Against these exalted claims for the ‘infinit[y]’ of ‘high poetry,’ Shelley juxtaposes the immediate utility of the ‘mechanist’ and the ‘political oeconomist,’ who perform tasks often assigned to republican poets, such as ‘dispersing the grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage’ (500–501). As in the Preface to The Revolt of Islam quoted earlier, Shelley had often claimed for his own poetry the power to disperse priestly illusions and to cultivate fraternity among men, though he had always advocated that such community be based on principles of justice rather than accommodated to self-interest.85 The




derision conveyed by denominating priestcraft’s delusions ‘grosser’ and limiting the cultivation of brotherhood to ‘mutual forbearance’ distances Shelley not only from political economy but from his own oeuvre and the poetry of republican politics. In assigning to ‘great Poems’ the power to transform society, the Defence gradually defines agencial poetry as ‘high poetry,’ differentiating it from writings seeking the more immediate goals of demystification and awakening, goals that he had earlier embraced and that continued to be central for poets who did not aspire to join the ranks of Homer, Milton, and Dante. Thus his theory of poetry’s role in societal transformation applies most fully to ‘high poetry,’ which alone has an ‘infinite’ capacity to act ‘upon [its] own and all succeeding times’ (500).86 At the same time, this differentiation is complicated by Shelley’s subtle alliance of republican politics to ‘high poetry’ and of loyalist politics to ‘unimaginative’ and ‘degrad[ed]’ verse (491). The enlightening power of Dante’s poems is traced to his political milieu, as when Shelley calls him ‘the Lucifer [i.e., light-bearer] [who] shone forth from republican Italy’ (499). Similarly, Milton is praised for his—unintentional— criticisms of Christian theology and for having ‘stood alone illuminating an age unworthy of him’ (491), a republican in a period of resurgent monarchy. On the other hand, ‘the extinction of the poetical principle’ in medieval Europe was ‘connected with the progress of despotism and superstition’ (496). The chief example Shelley offers of didactic poetry is loyalist drama, which he denounces as kingcraft: in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes [. . .] a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness [. . .] all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree [. . .] The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. (491) ‘High poetry’ is exalted as an infinite source of wisdom working through the cultivation of the reader’s imagination while ‘decay[ed]’ poetry is condemned as unimaginative, didactic, compromised, and false, even not poetry at all: ‘The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in its constitution, ends’




(490). It is perhaps not surprising that Shelley exiles loyalist ‘hymns’ from the category of ‘poetry,’ but it is important to see how and in what terms he does so: he calls them unimaginative, and he claims that they are self-consciously didactic. He levels a similar blow at ‘the Theseids of the hoarse Codri of the day’ (507). In a final allusion to The Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley states that he ‘can readily conjecture what should have moved the gall of the learned and intelligent author of that paper’ and ‘confess[es]’ to being ‘like him unwilling to be stunned’ by their poetaster contemporaries (507). ‘But,’ Shelley insists, ‘it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than confound’ (507). In other words, inferior poets do deserve the sort of condemnation Peacock has articulated, and A Defence of Poetry does not pretend to defend them. Instead, its philosophical rigor demands their exclusion. Conversely, Shelley wants to claim the unapprehended and indirect progressive influence of the great poets of his time. In the final paragraph of the text, he links his own ‘memorable age’ to Milton’s: ‘we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty’ (508). Yet just as Milton’s theological advances were unintentional, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey’s ‘comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit’ are ‘less their spirit than the spirit of the age. [. . .] even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul’ (508). The indirect and unintentional effect of Milton’s verse, which follows as a matter of history from the irrelevance of his Christian intentions, and thus suggests as a matter of poetic strategy the value of his ‘bold neglect of a direct moral purpose’ (498), provides a lens for understanding the effects of the great poets of his own ‘memorable age.’ Shelley’s claims for the ‘supremacy of Milton’s genius’ (498), the ‘great[ness]’ of Dante’s ‘high poetry’ (500), and the ‘surpass[ing]’ talents of the best poets of his time are thus not superlatives of praise but intrinsic and essential elements of his defense of poetry. It is at this point that Shelley closes the Defence with a series of metaphors for poetry’s power: Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. (508)




The metaphors in this passage transpose Shelley’s initial claim for poets as legislators and prophets who ‘behold intensely’ and spark their readers’ unblinded seeing. Rather than legislators ‘discovering’ the world ‘as it is’ and ‘ought to be,’ this passage offers ‘unacknowledged legislators’ who are mirrors of futurity’s shadows. Clear vision becomes mere reflection, and that which is seen changes from the unveiled present and ideal future to shadows. Similarly, instead of prophets, this passage lauds ‘hierophants,’ the presiding priests of ancient Greek ritual. To interpret the mysteries of revelations, as the OED glosses the job of the hierophant (citing this passage as this definition’s first usage), differs from the project of demystification in a similar way: visionary power has shifted from the poet to the deity who initiates the revelation, and understanding is withdrawn, for the hierophant’s inspiration is ‘unapprehended.’ The metaphors that follow develop the implications of these transformations. All the emphasis falls on the unintentional, uncomprehending, and indirect power of poets—they do not understand the words they express or feel the emotions they inspire. Poetry’s moral, political, and social work is unacknowledged, once again in two senses: to the poet himself, who has no direct moral purpose, or whose moral purpose is unrelated to the ethical effect of his poems; and to readers, who are worked on by the poem indirectly, cultivated rather than exhorted to specific ideas or actions. The poet has no moral purpose of which he can be mindful, and the reader cannot understand the effect of the poem. Shelley’s rejection of didacticism allows him not simply to refute republican criticisms of poetry but to transform the debate about poetry’s moral powers. Whereas the Newgate Magazine writers are unable to defend poetry without recourse to a vocabulary of utility and a theory of poetic didacticism, Shelley transcends the demands of utilitarian analysis without forfeiting claims for poetry’s agency—indeed, he brings these claims to a new level, in the process occluding many of the markers of the controversy that more explicitly structures the Newgate Magazine. Moreover, in sacrificing intentionality, Shelley responds to the collective and personal disillusionment of the 1820s in a still broader way. His rejection of didacticism does more than advance republican poets’ position against poetry’s detractors; it also addresses the textual bases of poetry’s morality in a world in which poetry does its cultural and ethical work primarily in print. Shelley’s quest to reach an audience that would experience, and thus confirm, the power of his political writing, a quest that has long been understood as central to his career, began with his first publications




and continued to his death in 1822.87 The quest became acute, however, as it became clear to Shelley that the outcome of Peterloo would not be a violent confrontation between ‘the rulers’ and the people, as he had initially predicted, but instead the disintegration of the proreform coalitions and the ‘postpone[ment of] the great struggle.’ In response to news of the Cato Street Conspiracy, Shelley wrote that ‘[e]very thing seems to conspire against Reform.’ By January 1820, he was ‘struck with horror at the proceedings in England’ and lamenting his own faltering muse: ‘These are not times in which one has much spirit for writing Poetry.’ Political disappointment deflated his desire to write and publish,88 politically motivated hostile reviews enervated the sales of those works which were printed, and the ‘Six Acts’ sealed his publishers’ reluctance to issue his most overtly political works. He asks Peacock in July 1820, ‘I wonder why I write verses, for nobody reads them. It is a kind of disorder.’ And in November, he confesses, ‘I have great designs, and feeble hopes of ever accomplishing them. [. . .] To be sure, the reception the public have given me might [go] far enough to damp any man’s enthusiasm. [. . .] I can compare my experience in this respect to nothing but a series of wet blankets.’ In February 1821, as he was writing the Defence, he told Peacock that ‘nothing is so difficult and unwelcome as to write without a confidence of finding readers; and [. . .] I despair of ever producing anything that shall merit them.’89 Yet he was writing poems all the while. The poems attempt to glorify distance as integrity and the lonely life of genius. The ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (written 1820, published 1824), for instance, opens with a depiction of the poet as a spider who seeks ‘fame’ only ‘in those hearts which must remember me / [. . .] making love an immortality’ (12–14). Adonais, which Shelley began immediately after completing the Defence, ends with his description of his ‘spirit’s bark’ being ‘borne darkly, fearfully, afar / [. . .] driven, / Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng’ (488–92). This drifting away parallels his decision, over the course of 1820, to direct his writing to a small and elite readership. By the time he sent Epipsychidion (written January and February 1821, as he was working on the Defence) to Charles Ollier, he indicated that it was ‘to be published simply for the esoteric few.’ Similarly, he warned Ollier that Adonais was ‘little adapted for popularity,’ imagining his friends John and Maria Gisborne as ‘some of the very few persons who will be interested in it and understand it.’90 The printed texts of Epipsychidion and Adonais circulated more like coterie manuscripts than published poems. His very late lyrics, moreover,




were almost entirely ‘published’ only through their enclosure in letters, which Stephen Behrendt reads as a ‘conver[sion]’ of Shelley’s poems into ‘very private gifts’ which were ‘bestowed not upon a general and faceless public but upon intimate private friends.’91 His late lyrics sometimes imagine, without much hope of realizing, a moment of their reconversion into dialogue or performance, as in the final lines of the ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ (310–15) and throughout the lyrical drama Hellas (written 1821, published 1822). More often, though, they revel in their secrecy. Shelley’s recourse to coterie publication suggests the extent to which friendship, ‘the purest sort of community’ in Behrendt’s words, structured republican politics at the elite as well as the popular level. 92 If a public audience cannot be achieved through print, then a private audience will have to stand in, at least temporarily. The coterie lyrics can also be read as a continuation of his long-standing struggle with the power of the literary text upon the reader. As Susan Wolfson writes, ‘if the public poems seem haunted by their inefficacy, the private poems struggle with a dependency on social effect.’93 As coterie texts, his late lyrics collapse two modes of relationship—poet and reader, poet and friend—and in so doing signal the problems that he faced with direct, public print communication, particularly beginning in the winter of 1820–21. Linked through words in newspapers and letters to news of England, Shelley’s understanding of the political situation is as attenuated as is his sense of poetic audience. A Defence of Poetry, like the poems and letters Shelley wrote during and after the winter of 1820–21, also defends a poet whose communication with his audience transpired, in both directions, almost entirely through the written word; a poet in self-imposed exile, whose friends even were far away. In this, Shelley’s situation represented an extreme version of republican political organization after the collapse of the mass platform. During the 1820s, republican culture revolved around printing presses, periodicals, and textual networks. Shelley was not unique in participating in republican politics through reading and writing; during these years, Elijah Ridings and the imprisoned editors of the Newgate Magazine also participated chiefly through print. What was unusual was how completely Shelley relied on print. Shelley’s relationship to his political moment was almost entirely textual. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that though republicans of all stripes and classes loudly proclaimed the liberatory power of the printed word, Shelley alone provides a sustained and compelling




account of how that power operated—not, as the worship of the printing press as an ‘Iron God’ might suggest, by magic or a process akin to divine revelation, but instead through the cultivation of imaginative vision and ethical strength by means of the insights and practice of sympathetic identification. Throughout the Defence, Shelley locates the action of poetry upon the reader in these terms: ‘The great secret of morals is [. . .] a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own’ (487). In order to be ‘greatly good,’ Shelley argues, ‘[a] man [. . .] must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own’ (487–88). This is the experience Shelley imagines for Homer’s readers: ‘those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses’ (486), and it is the same experience he imagines for those who first heard Homer’s poems recited: ‘the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations’ (486). In the drama, too, ‘[t]he imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived’ (490). The cumulative effect of each reader’s ethical engagement is the transformation of society. Alan Sinfield notes that ‘[a]s poetry’s potential public became remote and indefinite—anyone who could read—its claims became both more ambitious and more general.’94 Only two decades earlier, Wordsworth had forwarded a private theory of authorship—emotion recollected in tranquility—along with a public theory of the text—a man speaking to men. Shelley, though, recognizes that when mediated through print the poetic text undergoes a metamorphosis of voice: a nightingale singing for itself, a man speaking and, far away in time and space, other men and women hearing without full comprehension, without reciprocity. The problem of audience for Shelley, thus, is also a problem of the indirectness of print communication, a problem whose only solution is continued faith in the power of the written word. Shelley argues that ‘the gentleness and the elevation of mind’ that results from the reader’s identification with ‘beauty’ has the power to ‘render men more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self’ (497). Precisely by virtue of its indirect action, poetry





The sacred links of that chain have never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. (493) Shelley makes the correlation between republicanism and poetry explicit when he argues that ‘[t]he enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with these emotions; and whilst they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe’ (505). This link between the structure of representative democracy and that of poetic agency is extremely significant, for it not only reasserts the republican nature of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry but also signals that it is not simply a theory of poetry but a theory of politics and historical change. In its indirectness, the idea of ‘unacknowledged legislators’ echoes Adam Smith’s faith that individual economic men pursuing their selfinterest could produce a greater prosperity, even happiness, for the community. Shelley’s is an incremental theory of unintended positive effects in the realm of political life inflected by Smith’s own emphasis in moral philosophy on sympathetic identification. Equally, Shelley’s emphasis on indirect progress argues against cyclical theories of history, which denied the possibility of enduring progress, and Malthusian models of the indirect action of population pressures on societal wellbeing, which dictated repressive social controls and callousness toward one’s fellow men and women. His approach also avoids revolutionary and millenarian theories of apocalypse, which were tainted by the experience of anarchy and the necessity of divine intervention. In Shelley’s conceptualization of indirect historical transformation as the cumulative effect of individual actions whose actors are unaware of their significance, the possibility of human agency is both enervated and retained, and the possibility of positive change is rendered both oblique and inevitable. As a theory of history, the Defence bears the scars of the disillusionment of the course of the French Revolution and the collapse of the reform movements during the 1820s. But it also bears the growth marks of the intellectual maturation of republican thought during these years.



enables community; it mediates between individual and collective in the same way as does representative government:

In a sense, Shelley’s negotiation of the ravages of political despair, publishing difficulties, and the demands of ‘high’ art takes the form of the familiar Shelleyan paradox of Hope. Like the revolutionaries in Prometheus Unbound whom Shelley presciently depicted having no choice but to contemplate the wreck of Hope until, from its very ashes, rises the possibility of rebirth and renewal, the unacknowledged legislator-poets have no choice but to produce poems redolent of an absence of efficacy and condemned to an audience unable consciously to appreciate their power—until, slowly, from this wreck of poetic agency, emerges, indirectly and obliquely, a social transformation more complete than any poet, even Shelley, could ever imagine.




Cooper and Linton: Chartist Prophets and Craftsmen

Thomas Cooper and W. J. Linton, two of the best-known and most politically influential of the band of Chartist poets produced by that movement for parliamentary reform, believed that the poet was both vates and poeta, gifted with what Linton called ‘[c]lear vision’ and ‘artist-like control.’1 ‘God’s angels,’ Linton wrote, ‘[b]ehold him with clear eyes,’ and ‘day and night they speed his dread evangels / Over the world’ while he uses his ‘poet-fire’ to forge ‘fit iron.’2 Linton made his living as a writer and as an engraver, considering himself Blake’s heir and joining the work of prophet and craftsman in his everyday, as well as his poetic, existence. Even after Cooper abandoned the artisanal life of the shoemaker for that of the writer and editor, he too understood poetry in these terms. He wrote two epic dream visions in Spenserian stanzas, and he counseled budding Chartist poets to cultivate a ‘knowledge of the mechanism of verse,’ and to avoid ‘[i]nflation of expression—over-swelling words—sound without sense.’3 What tied together vision and poetic craft, for both men, was republican politics. Cooper wrote that without ‘the political strife in which I have been engaged [. . .] [I] could scarcely have constructed a fabric of verse embodying more than a few poetical generalities.’4 Linton, similarly, defined ‘The Poet’s Mission’ as an effort to be of ‘such use as the world’s need may ask’ and to engage in ‘daily strife.’5 Cooper described the first ‘vision’ in his The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), as having ‘t[aken] its tinct from the mind’s waking throes,’ from ‘patriot blood on field and scaffold shed’ and the world of men who ‘live [their] brother’s slave.’6 In uniting poetic craft and prophetic vision, Cooper and Linton spearheaded an expansion and diversification of the poetry of the popular movement that had important consequences for republican poetry and politics. They were part of a new group of ambitious poets 66



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who challenged, made more complex, and in some cases abandoned the conventions of popular republican verse. Their poems owe much to the hortatory tradition, and in the journals they edited they published pugilistic poems that recycled the stock tropes and images of popular republican rhetoric, and no doubt they continued to believe that such works would spark and sustain the dissident spirit of the people. But their own poems are more notable for their departures from that tradition: their deliberateness and seriousness, their explicit formalism, and their movement toward a wider range of topics, styles, genres, and formal techniques. This chapter examines Cooper’s epic ‘prison rhyme,’ The Purgatory of Suicides, and a group of poems by Linton that I call definitional lyrics, which set out to define the meaning of key words for republican politics. In these texts, poetic craftsmanship signals and enables engagement with philosophical, theoretical, and historical issues. As Cooper employs the elite form of the epic to tell a republican history of the nation and Linton forges a lyric form designed to fix linguistic meanings, they strive to apply poetic insight to political necessity. For Cooper, the key tools of that effort are dialogic structures, the epic convention of introductory exordia followed by philosophical dream visions, and images of hunger. For Linton, the essential tool is the idea of poetic lexis, the power and malleability of words. In departing from the aesthetic culture that had reigned within the popular movement for fifty years, Cooper and Linton looked to the precedent of Blake, Byron, and, especially, Shelley. When it finally appeared in print in 1839, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry fostered innovative poetic modes by endorsing poeticalness itself as central to a poem’s political effect. Shelley’s elevation of poetic form over explicit didactic content meant that any poem could aid the progress of democracy, and it lent support to both Romantic innovation and classical perfection. When Cooper and Linton reprinted Shelley’s works in their periodicals, as they often did, they stressed this concept. Cooper, for instance, published excerpts of the Defence under the headline ‘Morality and Imagination,’ including the crucial passage in which Shelley describes poetry as ‘[t]he great instrument of moral good,’ which ‘enlarges the circumference of the imagination’ and ‘strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.’7 By 1850, Cooper had taken Shelley’s advice so much to heart that he asked, ‘Why should any school of Poetry be set up as the only school?’8 Such ecumenicalism signaled the demise of the acrimonious debates of the 1820s in Richard Carlile’s The Republican concerning which poets and types of poems were acceptable (the vast majority were not), and



Cooper and Linton: Chartist Prophets and Craftsmen 67

those of the 1830s in The Poor Man’s Guardian and the Chartist organ, The Northern Star, involving which poets qualified as ‘working-men’s poets.’ Instead, by the 1840s, The Northern Star was publishing more poems by a wider variety of poets than ever before, and the range of forms visible in the ‘late Chartist’ journals of the years after 1848 is remarkable. Gerald Massey brought heptameter lines to the popular movement in his ‘Song of the Red Republican’ and argued that ‘the highest kind of poetry’ was ‘poetry to be lived,’ a body that included non-political poems that kept beauty alive in the hearts of the poor. ‘[A]ll this is meant for us, with its beauty and its plenty, its freedom and its happiness,’ he wrote, his ‘all this’ pointing toward both the natural world and the pastoral poems it inspired.9 Ernest Jones published a Chartist epic, The New World (1851), as well as democratic-socialist poems resonant with the popular tradition. The inclusion of poems and articles about poetry by women such as ‘Silverpen’ (Eliza Meteyard) and ‘Panthea’ (Sophia Collet) further diversified the aesthetic of the radical press. In addition, these periodicals granted a new visibility to American poets, especially James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier (subject of a biography by Linton), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Radical Members of Parliament, too, such as Joseph Cowen and W. J. Fox, provided not only financial support but also poems to the republican press. Alongside excerpts from Shelley and Byron appeared passages from poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Walter Savage Landor, and other contemporary poets.10 The dissolving barrier between elite living poets and dissident radical writers was part of a larger integration of the popular movement with the middle- and upper-class advocates of radical reform, a process that would eventually produce ‘popular liberalism,’ the dominant political ideology of the 1860s and 1870s. After 1845, the year Cooper was released from the prison term during which he wrote Purgatory of Suicides, Chartism began to decline as a mass movement, a process accelerated after 1848. Chartist activists, led by poets such as Cooper and Linton, began to kindle—or rekindle, if a longer view is taken—alliances with progressives to forward the causes of European republicanism, free trade, and parliamentary reform. These alliances were both the result and an agent of a movement of republican thought from the margins toward the main currents of political and intellectual life. The philosophical and historical concerns explicit in Cooper and Linton’s poetry, as well as their formal ambitions, asserted the importance of popular republicanism to a range of political, intellectual, and cultural issues. Within this context, Cooper’s appropriation of the high canonical form of the epic and Linton’s





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For that I boldly spake these words of fire; And the starved multitude,—their minds full fraught With sense of injury, and wild with ire,— Rushed forth to deeds of recklessness, but nought Achieved of freedom, since, nor plan, nor thought Their might directed;—for this treason foul ’Gainst evil tyrants, I was hither brought A captive[.] – Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides When The Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books appeared in 1845, its title page announced that its author was ‘Thomas Cooper, The Chartist.’ Written from prison, Purgatory of Suicides begins by translating into verse a speech for which Cooper was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to Stafford Gaol for two and a half years. The speech, delivered in the turbulent August of 1842, counseled workers in north Staffordshire to ‘cease [all labour] until the People’s Charter becomes the law of the land.’11 As the poem put it, ‘Toil we no more renew, / Until the Many cease their slavery to the Few!’ (I: 1). Purgatory of Suicides emerged from the ‘three years’ deliberation and serious reflection’ of Cooper’s prison term, during which he passed through a crucible of religious doubt and political despair.12 The poem is a philosophical epic, Cooper’s meditation on the possibilities of democratic change in Victorian Britain. Its structure is based on a pendulum movement. The beginning stanzas recount the ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech for which Cooper was convicted, setting the pattern for the exordia of each of the poem’s ten books, which detail Cooper’s experiences as a ‘captive leveller’ (II: 2), the traumas of his fellow prisoners, and the larger political realities of the day. The exordia, in turn, prompt a series of dialogues among historical and literary figures, from Nero and Sappho to Judas and Castlereagh, who have committed suicide and are confined together in purgatory for their sin. Taking the form of dream visions, the dialogues explore the merits of republican and monarchical government, issues of economic exploitation and poverty,



concerns with language and meaning acquire two additional layers of significance: the preoccupations they share with other mid-century poets, and the political meaning of their poems as agents of rapprochement.

and the role of religion in maintaining social and political oppression. The energy of the poem builds through its strophe and antistrophe movement between descriptions of contemporary political reality and investigations of its historical and philosophical roots. This movement culminates in a final dream vision of a peaceful republican revolution, brought about by the enlightenment of the people through the agency of ‘Knowledge’ and poetry. Cooper’s appropriation of epic forms represents a radical intervention into the high-canonical discourse of epic poetry. Given the elite cultural status of the genre, an epic poem written by a self-educated author testified to the intelligence, even the genius, of working-class people and underwrote their claim to be worthy of the franchise. Moreover, epic conventionally had been dedicated to telling the triumphant story of a society, as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (whose stanza form, shown by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to ‘admit[ ] the utmost freedom,’ Cooper adopted), which celebrated English institutions such as the monarchy and the established church.13 Looking to Paradise Lost for inspiration, Cooper’s ‘Chartist Epic’ appropriates the genre to criticize those same institutions.14 Defying the ‘absolute epic distance separat[ing] the epic world from contemporary reality’ that Bakhtin identifies as the heart of the genre, Purgatory of Suicides seeks to elevate the present into a ‘peak time,’ a moment of definition for the nation.15 The epic form enables Cooper to assert that Chartism is the contemporary instantiation of a centuries-old struggle for British liberty, and to harness the insights of political theory and history for the ongoing struggle for democracy. For Cooper, the issues raised by Chartism—monarchy, aristocracy, and poverty; violence, despair, and hope—can be understood only when placed on a world-historical stage and evaluated in terms of the lessons that philosophy and history have to teach humankind. Yet they remain the issues of the present. Cooper aspired to the condition of the epic poet Shelley described in A Defence of Poetry, ‘whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and political conditions of the age in which he lived.’ Only then could his relation to ‘the ages which followed [. . .] develop[ ] itself in correspondence with their development.’16 In translating the ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech into verse, the initial stanzas of Cooper’s poem inaugurate his attempt to view the immediate, volatile political issues of his day through the philosophical and historical perspectives characteristic of the epic. This effort to interpret individual narrative events through the lens of political theory, a centerpiece of radical argument and a central goal of radical poetry, manifests itself in




his use of epic forms. In particular, Cooper employs dialogic and openended structures, the epic convention of introductory exordia followed by philosophical dream visions, and recurring images of hunger. These strategies enrich his political argument, and they formally assert its importance to the future of the nation. Cooper believed that political transformation would result from the spread of knowledge by the working class, from their movement from the darkness of ignorance and passivity to the light of intellectual and political awareness. His use of dialogue reflects this belief. Through it, he invites his readers to participate in ongoing philosophical and political debate and thereby encourages their intellectual growth. Like the struggle for democracy, Cooper’s poem is open-ended, requiring for its closure the readers’ action.17 In the opening two stanzas of Purgatory of Suicides, for example, Cooper joins his own voice to a chorus of colliers, weavers, potters, and other workers across the North of England. Quotation marks fill the stanzas, in which seven different acts of speech occur in eighteen lines. His opening injunction to the assembled miners and potters of North Staffordshire, ‘Slaves, toil no more,’ uses the second person voice to speak directly to the audience and symbolically to place the reader within it. Cooper then poses a rhetorical question, ‘Why delve, and moil, and pine, / To glut the tyrant-forgers of your chain?’ (I: 1). He solicits a response by inviting his audience to ‘[s]ummon’ the colliers and together ‘swell the strain / Of liberty’ (I: 1). By the end of the stanza, a collective chorus declares ‘Toil we no more renew’ as the silenced ‘lordlings’ look on (I: 1, my emphasis). Stanza two adds the voice of the Manchester weavers: ‘ “We’ll crouch, and toil, and weave, no more—to weep!” / Exclaim your brothers from the weary loom’ (I: 2). Though the colliers speak ‘as one man,’ theirs is one collective voice among many, including those of Cooper, the weavers, and the reader— whose voice is always solicited (I: 1). Significantly, Cooper emphasizes the process of coming to voice rather than positing an already-existing unanimity, imagining song as a vehicle for this call-and-response of collective expression. As we have seen, for at least fifty years song had been a central organizing tactic of republican politics, from the Spenceans’ practice of ‘singing our rights’ to the Leicestershire Chartists under Cooper’s leadership, who wrote radical hymns and organized song-filled marches and outdoor ‘camp’ meetings in the form of Wesleyan revivals.18 The verse-and-chorus structure of song, its familiarity, and its association with communal moments of expression all contribute to the power of the form to both foster solidarity and allow for a multiplicity of voices. The first two stanzas of Purgatory of Suicides draw on




the power of collective singing, as well as the actual event of the speech and the grassroots organization of Chartism, to ground the poem in a specific instance of political dialogue. This early emphasis on dialogue in the first stanza of Purgatory of Suicides forecasts the larger architecture of the poem, which portrays a series of encounters among the historical figures condemned to the purgatory of suicides. The structure is inspired, in part, by Dante’s Divine Comedy.19 Two more recent republican endeavors also stand behind the structure of the poem. The first is Linton’s mock-epic Bob-Thin, The Poorhouse Fugitive (1840), which teaches the insights of republican politics through one man’s exemplary story of poverty and inequality.20 The second is Landor’s nine-volume series of Imaginary Conversations (1824–29, 1848, 1853), which stages debates about political philosophy, history, and literature among various historical figures, several of whom would appear in Purgatory of Suicides.21 Cooper’s method is to present the biographies and ideas of his figures and to provide assiduous notes pointing readers to original sources whenever their interest might be sparked, from Paradise Lost, Richard II, and a host of classical writers to ‘Captain Seely’s enthusiastic description of “Keylas the Proud,” among the caverned temples of Elora’ (I, note 4). As Porcia and Arria discuss the ways in which religions founded in compassion and enlightenment are transformed into institutions of tyranny and ‘Falsehood’ (IX: 33), or as Sappho, Antony, Nero, and Lycurgus debate the relative merits of monarchy and democracy, the poem records Cooper’s conversations with these political theorists, politicians, poets, and philosophers. The reader is invited to join this ‘jubilee / Of thought,’ the ‘rightful attribute’ and inheritance of all readers and thinkers (IV: 61, 62). Cooper’s faith in the revolutionary potential of such dialogues is made clear in the poem’s final book, in which workers emerge as active political agents through self-education. Pointing to the irreversible liberation of the ‘feudal serf’ from the mental oppression of religious superstition and faith in monarchy, Cooper declares that ‘[t]he spell is burst!—the dark enchantments fade / Of wrinkled Ignorance!’ (X: 15): The sinewy artizan, the weaver lean, The shrunken stockinger, the miner swarth, Read, think, and feel; and in their eyes the sheen Of burning thought betokens thy young birth Within their souls, blithe Liberty! [. . .] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]




Ay, they are thinking, at the frame and loom; At bench, and forge, and in the bowelled mine; And when the scanty hour of rest is come, Again they read—to think, and to divine How it hath come to pass that Toil must pine While Sloth doth revel: how the game of blood Hath served their tyrants; how the scheme malign Of priests hath crushed them; and resolve doth bud To band, and to bring back the primal Brotherhood. (X: 16, 18) The issues about which workers must read and think, it is no coincidence, are precisely those Cooper raised in the ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech for which he was convicted of seditious conspiracy: intellectual and manual labor, priestcraft and kingcraft, inequality and exploitation, and Chartist solidarity (see I: 1–6).22 Cooper’s anaphoric use of ‘how’ phrases emphasizes that these workers contemplate the social, economic, and political means by which injustice occurs and is perpetuated, rather than simply railing against it. The political potential of dialogic structures was a concern for Cooper throughout his prison writings. His lyrical ‘Smaller Prison Rhymes’23 and the short stories he composed in Stafford Gaol also experiment with dialogue, suggesting a larger interest in applying dialogic techniques across genres. His short story, ‘Merrie England—No More!’ (1845), which depicts a group of well-read and politically sophisticated Chartists disagreeing with one another about religion, the middle class, and physical force Chartism, ends by asking, ‘What are your thoughts, reader?’24 The conclusion of Purgatory of Suicides also brings its lessons home to his audience. Its final stanza interrupts the dream vision of ‘the universal reign of Pity and Mercy, Goodness, Love, and Truth’ (Proëme) to return Cooper to his prison cell: I awoke to find my home A dungeon,—thence, to ponder when would come The day that Goodness shall the earth renew, And Truth’s young light disperse old Error’s gloom,— When Love shall Hate, and Meekness Pride subdue,— And when the Many cease their slavery to the Few! (X: 126) The dream vision of a utopian future is tempered by the realities of the present. By returning to the vocabulary of the ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech—whose refrain had been ‘Toil we no more renew, / Until the




Many cease their slavery to the Few!’—he concludes the poem at the same moment, and in the same place, that it began. Through his use of the conditional voice and repeated ‘when’ clauses, he suggests the uncertainty of the realization of utopia. The dashes that link ‘thence, to ponder’ to his ‘dungeon’ emphasize that the prison cell is the location from which change will have to occur—here, as throughout the poem, Cooper implies that all of Britain is a jail of tyranny and poverty. His even iambic pentameter rhythms reinforce this emphasis on ‘thence,’ which receives stress from the pause generated by the dashes and its placement in the line. As readers set down the poem, they too awake to find their home a dungeon, and are left to contemplate error and slavery and, in doing so, to advance the earth’s renewal. The interweaving of concrete reality and dream vision is a significant feature of the poem as a whole. He opens each book in the style of Romantic lyricism or radical social realism, detailing his daily experiences of prison life, the overheard traumas of other prisoners, and the larger realities of poverty and exploitation outside the jail, from the ‘Beggary’s rags’ of London’s ‘huge crowds’ (VII: 2, 1) to the ‘want / Of bread’ that ‘banishe[s] thoughts of Robin’s chaunt’ in rural England (IV: 13). The books then turn to a philosophical dialogue, written in the elevated diction of philosophical and epic poetry, which interprets the issues raised in the exordia within multilayered frames. In Book I, after recounting the ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech, he explains how its recollection sparked a dream vision rooted in his immediate political situation: I had a vision, on my prison-bed, Which took its tinct from the mind’s waking throes. Of patriot blood on field and scaffold shed; Of martyrs’ ashes [. . .] of Evil that arose Within the universe of Good, and gave To sovereign Man the soul to live his brother’s slave. (I: 10) Rooting the vision in the speech and its aftermath, his ‘waking’ obsession, the passage joins concrete images and abstract ideas—blood, ashes, Good and Evil, soul—and juxtaposes poetic words such as ‘vision’ and ‘tinct’ with the material connotations of ‘throes,’ a word that emphasizes the grounding of visionary power in labor. Each of the books that follows repeats this yoking of concrete descriptions and abstract analysis, knitting the two together through thematic continuities and recurring images. Book III, for instance, is structured




around images of the sun. The exordium begins by invoking the ‘glorious Sun,’ the ‘captive’s friend’ (III: 1), a metaphor for compassion and illumination streaming into Cooper’s prison cell. The sun ‘bringest up the train / Of childhood’ and reminds him of his mother (III: 1). He grieves for her hardships, the ‘[t]axes for king and priest [that] a knave was wont / To filch from my poor widowed mother’s toil’ (III: 6), and her hunger, as ‘she toiled to win her child a crust, / And, fasting, still toiled on’ (III: 7). Placing her experiences in a larger political frame, he declares: Mother, thy wrongs, the common wrongs of all To labour doomed by proud and selfish drones, Enduringly have fixed the burning gall Deep in my veins—ay, in my very bones. I hate ye, things with surplices and crowns! (III: 5) His ‘rhymes rehearse’ his mother’s tenderness and hard work, memorializing her and praising her womanly sacrifices in sentimental terms (III: 7). Returning to the sun, he joins its power as a tactile presence in his prison cell with its metaphorical power to bring mercy and compassion, writing that the sun’s beams ‘amerce’ his heart and assuage his anger and regret (III: 7). Exploring the issues raised in the exordium, and continuing its sun imagery, the dialogue turns first to the frame of history. Judas, the central orator of the book, reproaches his interlocutor, the early nineteenthcentury politician Viscount Castlereagh (one of the arch-villains of radical discourse in the post-war years), for ‘treason to Ireland’ and ‘Oppression of the Poor’ (Proëme): [while] millions starved and suffered [. . .] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] not a tear-drop in behoof Of suffering from thy stony eyes was wrung For one of all the thousands that thy treachery stung! (III: 79) [ . . .

. .

According to Judas, specific historical actors are culpable for the ‘wrongs’ of hunger and exploitation. Judas’s analysis of blame is also philosophical and theological, for he, too, has been guilty of a want of compassion and sympathy. He believes that his betrayal of Jesus began long before the eve of Jesus’s crucifixion; his true crime was to remain ‘dark and frozen still’ as ‘the sun of goodness on me shone’




(III: 107, 105). He ‘slighted’ Jesus’s compassion toward the poor (‘Goodness that wept with those / Whom grief constrained to weep’) and his effort to ‘spread, enhance, perfect, eternize human weal!’ (III: 107, 106). As Cooper weaves together the sun imagery, the issue of poverty, and the necessity of compassion, he salvages Christ’s ethical model while still condemning the ‘things with surplices and crowns.’ The sun’s power to warm his cell and ‘amerce’ his grief becomes a metaphor for Jesus’s compassion for the poor and his efforts to improve human society. Seen through these lenses, Cooper’s mother’s poverty not only becomes a noble sacrifice, as the sentimental vocabulary of the exordium suggests, but also testifies to her generosity in a theological framework in which it is the epitome of human goodness. The ‘king and priest’ who taxed her meager salary, the stock villains of radical verse, give way to past historical actors, Judas and Castlereagh, whose accounting of blame is historically and ethically complex. Through the dialogue, Cooper finds a way of explaining the issues raised in the exordium, his mother’s suffering, the power of the sun streaming through his window, and the difficulty and necessity of assigning blame for ‘common wrongs.’ For Cooper, the physical effects of poverty on the body had long been the most salient fact in his personal history, as it had been in the lives of many working people who became Chartists. In addressing his mother’s ‘wrongs’ in his trial defense, for instance, he described how she ‘procured me bread by the labour of her own hands; and I have often known her give me the last bit of food in our humble home, while she herself fasted. I frequently knew, in childhood, what it was to go shoeless, and to wear ragged clothing.’25 Similarly, he began a letter to ‘the Chartists of England’ by declaring, ‘Brother Democrats,—I am surrounded by starving men: an experience to which the majority of you are no strangers.’26 It is no surprise, then, that hunger offers Cooper a way of sealing the connection between political reality and republican argument. As images of hunger recur and refract through the poem, they both become figures for the material consequences of undemocratic government and act as a hinge linking the immediate political situation to the concerns of history and political theory. Furthermore, through their imagistic power, they seek to shatter the ideological illusions propagated by priestcraft and kingcraft. Just as Purgatory of Suicides is a Chartist counter-epic, so these images counteract the mystifications of church and state. The ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ speech of the poem’s opening lines introduces an image of hunger to the poem in the form of the starving bodies of





And, while the millions swear, fell Famine’s gloom Spreads from their haggard faces like a cloud Big with the fear and darkness of the tomb. How, ’neath its terrors, are the tyrants bowed! (I: 2) from the scourged crowd that piled, Of yore, the pyramids, to the dwarfed child Whose fragile bloom steam and starvation blast. (I: 11) In the first image, in stanza two, the bodies of the poor provide a legible message that reinforces their song. Hunger reveals the immediate political situation from which the speech emerges and that it addresses, and the image of ‘Famine’s gloom’ speaks the truth of this situation in an incontrovertible language beneath which the ‘tyrants bowed.’ Stanza eleven places the image of the starving child alongside that of the slaves who built the pyramids, a conventional symbol of tyranny, thereby suggesting the tyranny of modern British society. While the ‘gloom’ of famine in stanza two signifies the terrible truth of poverty, the child operates as a material sign for it. Cooper uses these starving bodies not as metaphors or symbols of injustice but as direct images of it—as distillations of injustice. The ‘haggard faces’ and the ‘dwarfed child’ are not related to the abstraction injustice by virtue of sharing one like quality; instead, they are congruent with injustice, condensing it into a single, stark image. In another passage from ‘Slaves, toil no more!’ Cooper offers an image of hunger that explicitly seeks to expose the mystifications of priestcraft: Away!—the howl of wolves in sheep’s disguise [priests] Why suffer ye to fill your ears?—their pride Why suffer ye to stalk before your eyes? Behold, in pomp, the purple prelate ride, And, on the beggar by his chariot’s side Frown sullenly, although in rags and shame His brother cries for food! (I: 5) This formulation becomes central for Cooper, and he uses it repeatedly.27 First, he decries the false speech and delusions of priests, which he casts in terms of visual and auditory mystification. He emphasizes the strength and pervasiveness of the delusions of priestcraft, which ‘fill



poor workers, an image repeated and intensified a few stanzas later in the image of a hungry child:

[one’s] ears’ and take up one’s entire field of vision. He then offers the visible and audible truth, the rag-covered body of the beggar and his ‘cries for food.’ The extremes of wealth and poverty are captured in the contrasting image of the ‘purple prelate’ and the starving beggar. In addition to demonstrating the material consequences of the abstract ideas of oppression and priestcraft, this image presents as simultaneously self-evident and revelatory the ‘pride’ of priests and their collusion in the suffering of the people. The sensationalism of the image of the priest and the beggar signals the ideological weight with which Cooper invests images of hunger. Similarly, he later downplays his own authorial role and endows images of hunger with the power to speak their own truths, writing that he is the vehicle through which ‘starving toil’ can ‘tell its own strange story’ (I: 96): ’[I] point thee to the life its millions drag,— Its famine-stricken millions,—eager, glad, To find a putrid dog for food, or rag To hide their nakedness: gaunt man driven mad By hunger and oppression [. . .] [’] (I: 94) By presenting these narrative vignettes as poverty’s ‘own strange story’ telling itself, he denies his own authorial work. He merely ‘point[s]’ to images. These images are stark and emotionally wrought in part because they are burdened with the heavy responsibility of telling their own narrative and revealing their own meaning. For Cooper, the sensationalism of the image endows it with great expressive power. By representing the material consequences of abstract concepts such as oppression and injustice, Cooper’s images of hunger, like his use of dialogue and the structure of exordia and dream visions, connect concrete reality to philosophy and political theory, and thereby further the radical political project of Chartism. He thematizes this function of hunger, and argues for its political significance in his own life story, in Book X. There, the physical reality of hunger acts as a hinge in an autobiographical passage that describes his political transformation from passive observer to committed activist. Describing his conversion to Chartist politics and to republican poetry in terms of a recognition of the fact of starvation, he writes: From boyhood, Greece, and our old Commonweal I worshipped; but ’twas gnawing hunger’s pain




I saw your lank and fainting forms reveal— Poor trampled stockingers!—that made me feel ’Twas time to be in earnest, nor regard Man’s freedom merely as a theme for zeal In hours of emulous converse, or for bard Weaving rapt fancies in pursuit of Fame’s reward. (X: 22) In his account, it is literally ‘hunger,’ as ‘reveal[ed]’ in the stockingers’ ‘fainting forms,’ that sparks his political ideas and poetic ambitions into action.28 Though he rejects the ‘pursuit of Fame,’ Cooper stresses that he does not reject his early ‘worship’ of republicanism or poetic treatment of ‘man’s freedom.’ Instead, spurned on by stark images of hunger, he now acts ‘in earnest’ on his commitment to republicanism, and understands poetry as capable of more than ‘merely’ utopian ‘fancies.’ His poetry will now address the subject of ‘man’s freedom’ as part of an ongoing political movement whose particular and concrete ends the poem will serve. Indeed, the very image that sparked Cooper into action becomes a central technique in this poetry. ‘I threw me in the gap,’ he explains in the next stanza, ‘[a]nd this hath come of it,—that I have worn / The fetters for your sake’ (X: 23). ‘And this hath come of it,’ he might have added, pointing to the poem. For Cooper’s narrative of political activation hints at three important conditions of possibility of Purgatory of Suicides, and of the republican verse of Chartism more generally. Cooper’s allusion to his childhood ‘worship’ of ‘Greece, and our old Commonweal,’ first, suggests the centrality of self-education to his political and poetic life.29 As a young man working to survive in the sweated sector of the shoemaking industry, Cooper read widely in literature, history, science, and philosophy, also learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, geometry, and algebra. (He also learned to rock back and forth while reading in order to ward off sleep and cold during the winter nights.)30 The autodidact tradition had been central to political poetry from at least the 1790s. Most of the poets of the popular movement of the first half of the nineteenth century were largely self-educated: Allen Davenport, Ebenezer Elliott, Linton, Robert Nicoll, William Thom and many of the other writers whose work is collected in Brian Maidment’s The Poorhouse Fugitives. Second, Cooper’s emphasis on ‘wearing the fetters’ signals the importance of imprisonment to the composition of this Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books. Beginning with Thomas Spence’s ‘The Downfall of Feudal Tyranny’ and ‘The Rights of Man for Me,’31 composed while he was being held without charge in Newgate Prison in 1794, and continuing with T. R. Perry’s poems and




essays in the Newgate Monthly Magazine, republican authors had transformed their experiences of persecution into opportunities for political expression. Other Chartists composed prison rhymes, from George Binns’s ‘To the Magistrates Who Committed Me to Prison Under the Darlington Cattle Act’ (1840), to Ernest Jones’s The New World, the other great Chartist Epic, which also was written from prison.32 Finally, and crucially, the emphasis Cooper places in this passage on political action suggests the extent to which his political activity enabled, as well as motivated, his poetry and that of other writers of popular republicanism. Cooper signals how deeply his sense of himself as an author was bound up in his political commitments in his decision to sign Purgatory of Suicides ‘Thomas Cooper, The Chartist.’ On the title page of his work, his authorial identity merges with his political identity. Cooper’s contemporaries read the poem in precisely these terms. The Chartist press typically referred to Purgatory of Suicides as the ‘Prison Rhyme,’ and to its author as ‘Thomas Cooper, The Chartist.’33 The poem’s early readers also understood it as a powerful tool for democratic politics. The Chartist George Hooper, writing for a freethinking Chartist paper, The Reasoner, argued: ‘In the “Prison Rhyme” we have unadulterated democracy. There is to be found the complete expression of the yearnings of many minds.’ Calling Cooper ‘the real voice of a great, powerful, and rapidly advancing democracy,’ Hooper locates the poem’s ‘strength’ in its emergence from the democratic politics in which Cooper was involved and which animate and invigorate the poem.34 Reviewers praised the poem as a measure of the ability of a poor man to harness the people’s fervent commitment to republicanism for a ‘lofty’ and ‘sacred’ poetic project. Hooper wrote that ‘Thomas Cooper’s “Prison Rhyme” indicates how deeply democracy has struck its roots—how loftily it is destined to shoot its branches,’ while famed self-improver Samuel Smiles called Cooper a ‘poet of the people,’ who had charted the way in which ‘[b]y the very force of circumstance the working man of England has been enrolled in this sacred prophetic band.’35 That the poem was read beyond the confines of Chartism is also significant. By 1845, when Cooper was released from prison and the poem was published, his identities as poet and Chartist were leading him in new directions. Through them, he forged literary and political alliances with a wide range of progressive writers and activists, activity that placed him on the front lines of the rapprochement that was beginning to characterize reform politics. The poem received attention from William Howitt, W. J. Fox, and other members of the radical intelligentsia, and favorable notices and discussions appeared




in papers associated with the ‘radical reform’ wing of Parliament.36 Howitt remarked, for example, ‘[h]ere, then, we have a striking instance of what are, and are likely to be, the fruits of general education and mechanics’ libraries,’ asserting that the poem was ‘the actual produce of that spirit and tone of the great mass of the population of this country.’37 As Howitt’s enthusiasm—and its close resonance with Hooper’s remarks—suggests, it was becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate Chartism from radical reform. After his release, Cooper began publishing poems, letters, and reviews in journals across the liberal-left spectrum and he launched his own Plain Speaker and Cooper’s Journal with the backing of the radical reformers.38 Along with Cooper, other Chartist poet-activists such as Linton, Hooper, Gerald Massey, and Charles Mackay used their poems to open new channels of communication. Those channels ran, as it were, in both directions. And they resulted not so much in the popular radicals being co-opted by liberal hegemony,39 but rather in bourgeois and aristocratic reformers undergoing a democratization of their political ideology, as Eugenio Biagini and others have demonstrated.40 ‘[M]ost of the ingredients of Gladstonian Liberalism,’ Biagini argues, such as ‘independence, anti-State attitudes, free trade, [and] anti-clericalism, had all been energetically supported by plebeian radicals since the days of Thomas Paine.’41 They became central to popular liberalism through the alliances forged during the late 1840s and 1850s, as radicals of all stripes pooled their energies for the causes of municipal politics, land reform, parliamentary reform, free trade, reform of the Corn Laws, aid to European republicans, and secularism and freethought.42 While the goal of securing the fundamental machinery of a more democratic state, particularly through electoral reform, provided the cement that held these radicals together,43 continental republican movements reinforced the bonds. The People’s International League, founded by Cooper, Linton, and others in late 1846, boasted members as diverse as Fox, Howitt, Thornton Hunt (son of Leigh Hunt), Douglas Jerrold, and a group of radical Unitarians that included future cabinet minister James Stansfield.44 Its successor organization, the Society of Friends of Italy, established in 1851, drew an even larger and more varied membership that included Landor, George Henry Lewes, W. E. Forster, Francis Newman, Edward Miall, and Joseph Cowen.45 Thus, though the course of Italian and French republican nationalism would run rough and engender new tensions within these British reform coalitions (Miles Taylor characterizes them as ‘the most profound’ of the century46), events in Europe proved




essential to the formation of the friendships—and the debates—that would produce a more radically egalitarian mode of liberalism. In fact, given the importance of poets to the cross-fertilization of organization and ideology that made republican politics a viable platform in the short term and that made democratic ideas successful in the longer term, it could be argued that Purgatory of Suicides and Linton’s definitional poems are the most influential Chartist poems of all. Unlike the hortatory poems of mass mobilization of years such as 1839 or 1842, usually assumed to be the most agencial Chartist verses, the poems of the late 1840s and 1850s helped remake popular politics. Their innovative and ambitious forms, their philosophical and poetic sophistication, and the unyielding advocacy of the ideals of the popular movement they combined with an aversion to rigid ideology all opened up lines of communication between Chartism and elite progressives. In so doing, they participated in the conversations and arguments that gave birth to the most powerful political force of the next two decades. Linton’s definitional poems, to which I now turn, take us to the tense and often heated debates through which popular radicals and radical reformers influenced one another. In attempting to bring Joseph Mazzini’s brand of republican thought to English radicalism and to inculcate a wider vision of Irish and European politics among his readers, Linton paved the way for the new pro-reform alliances. But in his desire to fix the meaning of the words that anchored republican discourse, he also reveals the difficulties in opening the vistas of popular radicalism. *

*

*

TRUTH Healthfullest life of thought, look, word, and deed: Of endless worth the never failing seed. – W. J. Linton, ‘Words and Meanings’47 Wisely the poet (Lowell) says— LET US SPEAK PLAIN: there is more force in names Than most men dream of; and a Lie may keep Its throne a whole age longer, if it skulk Behind the shield of some fair-seeming name. – W. J. Linton, ‘Holyoake versus Garrison: A Defence of Earnestness’48




William James Linton was a man of many words. One of the most prolific writers of nineteenth-century radicalism, he edited several journals and contributed hundreds of poems and articles to papers published by his fellow radicals. He published five volumes of poetry, two autobiographies, four biographies, two histories of wood engraving, numerous children’s books, and five anthologies of English, French, and American poetry. He possessed the energy and productivity characteristic of his age, and was to republican letters what Anthony Trollope was to the novel. As a republican, though, Linton inherited a theory of language that stressed transparency and directness, and so he sought to wield his many words carefully and precisely. As in his quotation of the American poet J. R. Lowell above, Linton endorsed republican critiques of kingcraft and priestcraft, and his own poems often operate by means of demystification. The quotation from his poem ‘Words and Meanings’ shows how he extended this republican theory of rhetoric in such poems—in his mid-century poems of definition. Poems consisting of a single, abstract-noun title and a poetic elaboration of its meaning, the definitional poems sought to bring ‘thought, look, word, and deed’ into line with one another.49 In ‘Words and Meanings,’ it is ‘truth’ that gives ‘life’ to this quartet of old and earthy Anglo-Saxon words, that unites these four levels of knowing and acting in the world.50 In the definitional poem ‘Integrity,’ similarly, Linton entreats his readers, ‘Let us be true! / Thought, word, and deed, even as our cause is, pure.’51 In ‘Honesty,’ too, trustworthy use of language is defined as a fusion of all these terms: ‘Honesty is truth in action, / Truth made manifest in deed: / Wisdom’s weapon, life’s attraction, / Honour’s ripeness, triumph’s seed.’52 All the definitional poems delineate the meaning of the noun they take as their title, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes more obliquely through metaphor, image, or vignette. Sometimes, these poems embed definitions within a short ode to a virtue, and sometimes, as in the poems ‘Infamy’ and ‘Felony,’ Linton’s emphasis shifts from forwarding a definition to interrogating—and only a word with connotations of hostile questioning and police powers can convey his posture in these texts—the processes of signification itself. For Linton, thus, the definitional poem serves several purposes. It seeks both to offer a definition and also to inspire his readers to weave the republican virtue in question into their own lives. The point of defining a concept such as ‘Truth’ or ‘Integrity’—or ‘Duty,’ ‘Purpose,’ ‘Service,’ ‘Faith,’ ‘Progress,’ ‘Devotion,’ ‘Thanksgiving,’ or ‘Self-Culture,’ titles from a series of definitional poems grouped under the heading ‘Services’53—was not only to fix its meaning in a republican register but to extend its significance to the heart, mind,




vision, and action of his readers. In this sense, his verse definitions partook of two other, less immediate, meanings of the word: ‘The setting of bounds or limits; limitation; restriction’ and ‘the condition of being made, or of being definite, in visual form or outline; distinctness: spec. the defining power of a lens or optical instrument, i.e. its capacity to render an object or image distinct to the eye’ (OED). A definition restricts, and a lens is measured by its definition: if it is a good one, it allows the viewer to see something distinctly and clearly. Definition is a quality of seeing. Linton’s definitional poems employ all these valences of the word. Not evidently sophisticated or innovative, it is only when seen as a group—as an obsession, really—that these poems are revealed in their complexity as definitional poems and therefore poems about language and poetry itself. His experiments with definition knitted his poems together into a sustained meditation on poetic meaning-making, on the relation between poetic lexis and the everyday language that is the medium of poetry and that poetry in turn transmutes through compression, figures, and form. The definitional poems analyze political struggles over rhetoric, highlight gaps between authoritative utterances and the plain-speaking of common folk, and in the process which explores how poetry participates in political speech. Linton defined ‘The Poet’s Mission,’ in a poem of that name, in definitional terms. In that poem, he advances a ‘higher apprehending / Of the Poet’s task,’ in which it is understood as the labor by which the ‘Ore of mighty thought’ is ‘wrought’ into ‘Fit iron,’ made strong for use in political action (1–2, 4, 6).54 ‘The passionate impulse furnaced / In the Poet’s heart,’ he writes, extending the metallurgic metaphor, ‘[m]ust weld stern word and action earnest’ (7–9). ‘Poet word and deed’ must exist ‘[i]n harmony’ (10–11). The parallel Linton establishes between ‘poet word’ and ‘stern word,’ and his continued preference for the singular form of the noun (as if to remind the reader once again, ‘We speak here of the abstract quality’55), makes explicit his idea of poetry as a labor whose material is everyday language transformed by poetic technique. These phrases, ‘poet word’ and ‘stern word,’ which recall the kennings of Anglo-Saxon poetics, sound the tension that the poetic wrench twists into its component units. That this poetic lexis should be ‘stern,’ that is, unflinching, severe, strict, and even hard, tells us much about the immediate challenges Linton saw this ‘passionate impulse’ rising to meet, about the way Wordsworthian ideas of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ as well as more general understandings of the close ties between poetry and feeling, were recast in the mold of grassroots




politics. The heat and danger contained in the welding metaphor suits this stern mood, and the fundamental transformation that occurs when two metal objects are welded together echoes the mutual constitution of word and action that the poem advocates. But this metallurgical change, in which two become one and undergo an alteration of chemical composition in the process, jars uneasily against the ideal of ‘harmony’ presented in line 11. By preserving the integrity of each part, harmony offers a different, even an opposite, theory of connection between word and act. At the heart of this poem that strives to define the poet’s mission, then, there lies an incoherence, a contradiction. The best of his definitional poems generate such contradictions, out of Linton’s striving for poeticalness, and out of the overflow of meaning produced by the very poetic techniques he so deliberately and creatively pursues. The syntactic inversions and archaic verb forms in his declaration in the next stanza, ‘Then only he his mission comprehendeth’ (15), convey not only his fervent wish for the ‘clear vision’ (13) that results from these fusions and harmonies, but also his yearning for a poetic voice adequate to its expression. In the autobiography he wrote at the age of seventy-four, Threescore and Ten Years (1894), Linton tellingly traced the origins of his radical thought to the youthful discovery of a dictionary. ‘[M]y early readings,’ he noted, were strictly orthodox: he particularly remembered the ‘first grand quarto editions’ of Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake (1810), Marmion (1808), and Rokeby (1813), and his boyhood instruction in religion and the Bible at the hands of his mother.56 His ‘first perversion’ toward infidelism and republicanism came when an older friend introduced him to Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764).57 Inspired, he pursued a rigorous autodidactic course of reading in democratic letters—Queen Mab (1813), Volney, Godwin, Paine, Owen—and cultivated a series of friendships with reform writers and politicians such as Cooper, Sarah and Eliza Flower, Fox, Mary Leman Gillies, George Julian Harney, Mary and William Howitt, Thornton Hunt, Jerrold, Louis Kossuth, the Abbé Lamennais, Landor, Mazzini, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, William Bell Scott, Joseph Toynbee, Thomas Wade, and James Watson. The list reads like a who’s who of British and continental radicalism, and it includes plebeian republicans, Unitarian radicals, Members of Parliament, avant-garde artists, and political theorists, a capaciousness reflecting the cross-fertilizations that characterize Linton’s career and the political movements he helped to shape. Linton began his political activities in about 1837. His first periodical, National: A Library for the People (1839), reprised the format of the plebeian




magazines of the 1790s such as Politics for the People and Pigs’ Meat, featuring excerpts from classical political theory and elite poetry alongside original stories and verse, much of it by Linton himself—a format he would retain though other radical papers had shifted their emphases to news and analysis. National also echoed the self-education emphasis of the periodicals of the 1820s, setting the tone for all of Linton’s future work as a writer and editor in its dedication to assisting the ‘Unmonied in their pursuit of knowledge’ by opening up the ‘sealed books’ of the ‘best writers.’58 Blake and Shelley towered over this work, the ‘literary [and] poetic [. . .] Action’ in ‘the Cause of the people,’ which he called ‘the real travail of my soul.’59 His admiration of Blake’s poetry and art stretches back to his political awakening in the 1830s, when he first copied Blake’s engravings, an act of education and homage he repeated through the 1840s and 1850s and when he later undertook to engrave the illustrations for Alexander Gilchrist’s biography of Blake.60 Likewise, he owed a deep debt to Shelley, whose poems he published in his periodicals and studied as models for his most ambitious literary undertakings.61 John Milton grew in importance for Linton as his poetry matured, his influence most directly recorded in ‘To the Future,’ which Linton wrote in response to the 1848 revolutions. When he sent this poem to Landor, it prompted Landor to write an occasional poem lauding him as a ‘Praiser of Milton! Worthy of his praise!’ and calling ‘To the Future’ a ‘hymn august’ that ‘[s]ounds as the largest bell from Minster tower.’62 The esteem in which Landor held Linton was more than flattery, and it extended to entrusting his own work to Linton’s journals and his legal affairs in Linton’s capable hands. If it seems surprising now, this respect illuminates the conversations that the poets of the popular movement had with elite writers, even their influence upon them. Indeed, one contemporary observer argued for the influence of Linton’s poems ‘The Dirge of the Nations’ (1848) and ‘To the Future’ on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and on Swinburne’s ‘Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic’ (1870) and his Songs before Sunrise poem ‘The Eve of Revolution’ (1871).63 Linton’s first definitional poems were hortatory and centered around the virtues he hoped to inculcate in his readers. An exemplary group of these lyrics, in their formal strategies and in their sense of definition as essential to ethical exhortation, the ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised,’ appeared in the freethinking, ‘late Chartist’ paper The Reasoner, in 1848.64 Comprising five poems, ‘Integrity,’ ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Courage,’ ‘Faith,’ and ‘Industry,’ the series defined the virtues of constancy and discipline that Linton believed were especially needed in the wake of the failed




presentation of the Charter in April and the revolutionary upheavals across the continent. The poems initially appeared under his pseudonym, ‘Spartacus,’ an allusion to Roman history and to the transformation of slaves to men that many republican poems reported happening in their own time. Inspired by the political philosophies of Mazzini and other theorists of European nationalism, Linton was attempting to inject their emphasis on duty, religion, and nationality into a British republican movement whose dedication to individualism and liberty was as strong as its commitment to communitarian ethics. ‘Faith,’ the fourth poem in the series, exemplifies this project, and the poetic and rhetorical strategies it involved: Let us have faith! Faith, which is patience when Time lags behind: The healthful mind Works calmly in the certainty of faith. Let us have faith! Faith, which o’erbridges gulfs of wide disaster; Which can o’ermaster Most desperate odds; which doeth all it saith. Let us hold faith! Even in our own attempt, our victory’s pledge: The mighty wedge That rives the toughest obstacle is faith. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this poem’s definitions of ‘faith,’ which appear directly in line 2 and metaphorically in lines 6–8 and 10–12, is their secular quality. The first definition’s equation of faith with ‘patience,’ and later associations of it with ‘certainty,’ locate the power of faith squarely among the believers, not in the entity or cause they believe in. Each definition of faith also operates as a promise, an incentive to the reader to foster his own faith and ward off the temptations of despair, which, rather than doubt, is the nemesis of faith for Linton, as his definition of ‘despair’ makes crystal clear: ‘The shadow of a slave who turns his back / On the light, and cries – The universe is black.’65 The poem is organized according to its pattern of definitions and its overriding urge toward consolidation. The chiasmus formed by ‘faith’ and ‘is’ in lines 2 and 12 structures the poem in an envelope pattern that itself responds to the prosodic scheme, the same throughout the




series though always, as here, with variations of meter: a4b10b4a10// a4c10c4a10//a4d10d4a10. The use of only four rhymes knits the poem tightly together. The metrical format connects the dimeter first and third lines of each stanza, while at the same time tugging the rhymed lines apart. As the rhyme and the meter pull in opposite directions, the prosody generates multiple layers of connection, here linking ‘faith’ not only to the word it sight-rhymes with, ‘saith,’ but also joining it through shared line length to ‘mind’ (3) and to overmastering long odds and tough obstacles (7, 11). These effects reinforce the consonance of ‘faith’ with plain-speaking and thoughtful deliberateness, two core themes of the series. Equally importantly, they point to the poem’s central tactic, a marshalling of all its prosodic resources in the service of cohesion and interconnection. The poem introduces variation in order to multiply opportunities for connection. The first poem in the series, ‘Integrity,’ intensifies this effect by using only three rhymes (abba//acca//abba) and yet allowing less exact-word repetition. There, the ‘a’ rhyme charts a course for progress, beginning in integrity and moving through action to result: true/view/do/ensue. The ‘b’ rhyme, pure/sure/endure, suggests that purity guarantees stamina and promises eventual victory, and the ‘c’ rhyme, deeds/needs, insists that acts and goals mirror one another. Line 10 of ‘Integrity,’ quoted above, unifies the whole poem, bringing together all the key words of the poem: ‘Thought, word, and deed, even as our cause is, pure.’ The central idea of the definitional poem appears here as a structural device, a means of connecting the poem’s final summary stanza to its first two through-word repetition (‘deed’ also appears in stanza two, ‘cause’ and ‘pure’ in stanza one). This device echoes the line’s insistence that all its elements respond to one another by sharing the quality of purity. Linton’s use of rhyme in the ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised’ points directly toward the poems he would write over the next year and later collect as Ireland for the Irish, tellingly subtitled Rhymes and Reasons Against Landlordism (1867).66 In these less hortatory poems, Linton’s methods turned toward demystification, and he used definitions mainly to show the contrasts between two views of the Irish Famine. Whereas the ideology of ‘Landlordism,’ for instance, in a poem by that name, sees ‘the lazy Irish peasant,’ the republican lens shows the reader ‘toilers fever-stricken’ and ‘[w]anting bread to eat’ even ‘’[m]id the shocks of wheat’ that fatten the landowner’s ‘purse and paunch.’67 ‘Free Trade,’ similarly, pleads, ‘let the words be true,’ and calls a definition of the term as ‘[f]ree to sell, and free to buy’ ‘half a lie,’ opposing it with a counterdefinition, ‘Free to toil for famine wage; / Free to reap, and free to die.’68 The definitions of ‘landlordism’ and ‘free trade’ expose the terms as




tools in a system of misrepresentation. ‘Free Trade’ asserts that ‘ “Export” should not mean despoil’ (13), making explicit a claim running throughout Ireland for the Irish, that the political rhetoric surrounding the Famine is built upon illogical and meaningless linguistic manipulations. ‘Export’ and ‘despoil’ are unrelated semantically, their only connection drawn from what Linton interprets as a perverse political situation. The same could be said of ‘lazy’ and ‘peasant.’ It becomes necessary to define the central terms of political discourse when their usage has become so distorted. The volume thus contains numerous poems that seek to define or redefine such terms: ‘Property,’ ‘Extermination,’ ‘Tenant Farming,’ ‘Burthens,’ ‘Exports,’ ‘The Poor-House,’ ‘Eviction,’ ‘Revenge,’ ‘Emigration,’ ‘Crop-Lifting,’ and ‘Patriotism,’ to name a few. If these poems answer the question prompted by Linton’s repeated use of noun-titles, ‘What is the Famine?’ or ‘What is Property?’, the volume as a whole answers the implied questions ‘What is Ireland?’ and ‘Why is she starving?’ Taken together, these ‘Rhymes and Reasons’ posit a poetics of linguistic self-evidence, an assertion that the reasons or rational arguments forwarded by republicans are underwritten by the rhymes they employ, that the truths of republicanism are irrefutable because they are stored in language itself. The tautology of the collection’s title, Ireland for the Irish, plays off the symmetry of near-repetition with its cognate key words. Defining Ireland and the Irish people in terms of one another, the circular title rests on a trope of obviousness grounded in grammar, a trope of the self-evidence of linguistic relatedness. In contrast to the arbitrary and distorted connection between ‘export’ and ‘despoil,’ ‘Irish’ responds to ‘Ireland’ the way a rhyming word responds to the word that initiated its pattern of likeness and progression. Other definitional poems Linton was writing at the same time, though, undo these very arguments. ‘Infamy’ and ‘Felony,’ which appeared in The Reasoner in 1848, cast doubt on the assumptions behind the other definitional poems.69 To their faith that a poetic definition, through demystifying the true meaning of a misused word, can restore the word to its ‘purity’ and ‘truth,’ these two poems answer with analyses of how institutions authorize and shape their participants’ uses of words. ‘Infamy’ and ‘Felony’ recognize that the arbitrary nature of signification opens up a space between name and entity, and they assign that space to the domain of power. To the other definitional poems’ bombastic tone, these poems add a sense of worry about troubles within radical discourse, particularly problems of history. And to their confidence that poetic technique is always an ally of republican argument, these poems respond with techniques that threaten their own substantive political assertions. Though they seek




emphatically to array and then cement a lexical field in which some words—liberty, industry, speak, heart—are on ‘our’ side and others are on ‘theirs’—lies, felony, curse, death—this attempt continually crumbles as the flexibility and productivity of poetic meaning-making cause meanings to proliferate rather than freeze. In fact, poetic technique generates so much excess signification in these poems that their arguments are undermined almost to the point of disintegration. What emerges from Linton’s struggle with these dynamics is two poems about signification itself. In these poems, the radical poet works under the weight of words and beneath the shadow of slander. Republicanism shares its labels of excoriation with the establishment, and it draws some of its rhetorical energy from this treacherous overlap. In ‘Infamy,’ Linton tries, and fails, to turn multivalence into a single, enduring signification: Infamy Let the name of Russell be Gibbeted eternally! If our later Russell claim All the honours of the name, Let that name for ever be More abhorr’d than Castlereagh! Russell’s name no longer be Dear to English memory! Lo, the least of his great house Brands his name ‘felonious.’ Russell living, why should we Slander Pitt or Castlereagh? Let the name of Russell be The synonym of Infamy: While a Russell’s felon laws Override the People’s Cause, While in Sydney’s England we Suffer Russell-Castlereagh! This poem echoes its close temporal neighbors the ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised’ with its prayerful ‘let’ clauses, and the ‘eternally’ of line 2 transposes the issue of time that permeated those poems: if radicals need to have infinite patience, they also have long memories. But its definitional strategies have become muddy as Linton veers away from




virtuous nouns to negatively connoted words, and words about naming. The meaning of ‘infamy’ turns out to require no definitional elaboration since it is simply its precise correlation with ‘Russell.’ Linton’s prayer is that ‘the name of Russell’ be hung up by chains, punished—forever. In a linguistic execution, the word ‘Russell’ is to become ‘[t]he synonym of Infamy.’ Here is a fantasy of the power to assign conclusive meaning to words. Linton flags his focus on naming by using the word ‘name’ three times in the first stanza, twice in the second, and once in the last. Never used as a verb, the word ‘name’ is yoked to ‘Russell’— ‘Russell’s name’ (st. 2) and ‘the name of Russell’ (st. 1, 3)—in order to emphasize its status as a tag. This name, long evocative of the constitutionalist glories of the seventeenth century, will from now on be synonymous with the felonious deeds of this moment, entirely wiping out all the past signification and replacing it. But the word ‘infamy’ contains a warning against this sort of wish by threatening an infinite regress of names lacking referents. The earliest definition of ‘Infamy,’ and the one Linton provides as a gloss in ‘Felony,’ is ‘Public scorn,’ which emphasizes the word’s naming function. ‘Evil fame or reputation; scandalous repute; public reproach, shame, or disgrace,’ as the OED puts it, ‘infamy’ involves the relation between a name and the person named, and it applies only under conditions of general agreement (OED, 1). ‘Russell’ and ‘infamy’ will not be synonymous until the situation described in the poem’s final four lines has reversed itself. Public scorn is a necessary precondition if the term ‘infamy’ is to do more than point, if it is to signify ‘[t]he quality of character of being infamous or of shameful vileness’ (OED, 2). Two names have already achieved this status, at least within radical discourse, ‘Castlereagh’ and ‘Pitt’. This precedent of successfully ‘gibbeting’ a name, though, clutters up rather than clears the path, for the old enemies will not make way for the new. In this and other ways, history proves something of a problem for the poem. The second stanza seems to criticize historical backsliding, to rebuke a radical movement whose enemies—and, with them, whose structures of analysis, blame, and understanding—are outmoded, even defeated. By this account, the relation between historical precedent and current events is perverse. In the second stanza, Linton recognizes the extent to which radical discourse in the late 1840s remains stuck in the 1790s and 1810s, the discursive baggage scholars beginning with Gareth Stedman Jones define as the peculiar discourse of Chartism.70 Linton’s criticism begs republicans to abandon their ire for recent enemies, Pitt and Castlereagh, and more radically their homage to distant Commonwealth heroes such as Russell. This plea is undone, though, in the final two lines of the poem, in which Linton takes




up another Commonwealthman, Sydney, as an enduring presence, a sort of guardian angel of the People’s England, and conflates ‘RussellCastlereagh’ in a single name that confounds the passage of time. Naming dissolves, and names with it. By the final lines, proper nouns have been transformed into possessive adjectives—‘Russell’s felon laws,’ ‘People’s Cause,’ ‘Sydney’s England’—and entities in their own right, collapsing the gap between public opinion and person named—‘Russell-Castlereagh.’ What does it mean to say that a proper name is a ‘synonym’ for a word that itself is about naming and calling? A ‘synonym’ is a different word with the same meaning, and for Linton this sameness involves the truthful consonance of appearance and depth that was the hallmark of radical transparency. In ‘Fairness,’ he defined the title word in this way: Fairness synonymeth Beauty, Truth of soul, and form, and hue.71 This frankly unexpected definition of ‘fairness,’ a word that as the poem opens seems to be called upon purely in its ethical register, comes as a reminder that in poetry no word is ever severed from any of its fields of connotations and contexts—and it does so by thrusting the entire poem from ethics to aesthetics (and race). But this is a thoroughly republican idea of art. The lines seem to open up connections and meanings by defining a word through its synonyms, but they also demand a fixing of meaning, a narrowing: the truth of absolute correspondence. The second line explains the first: both fairness and beauty are ‘true’ to their innermost essences and to the shapes they take. This attention to manifestation and essence echoes the concerns of ‘Infamy,’ where Linton attempts to make Russell’s ‘name’—his outward ‘form’ and ‘hue’— commensurate, perfectly ‘true’ to the ‘soul’ they body forth. The OED’s third definition of infamy suggests what is at stake in these poems, and another layer of connection to the ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised.’ It is in a legal register: ‘The loss of all or certain of the rights of a citizen, consequent on conviction of certain crimes’ (OED, ‘Infamy,’ 3) Perhaps more than even ‘Public Scorn,’ at issue are the rights of a citizen— which for Linton as a republican and a Chartist cluster around the vote. So in ‘Felony,’ the ‘great house’ is transformed, with no diminution of mocking irony, from Russell’s family estates to the houses of Parliament: Felony Who are the Felons? — O, not we





Who are the felons? — Answer ye, Robbers of Industry! Ye whose laws are fraudful lies, Ye whose acts are infamies; Whose vile breath were Freedom’s hearse Had your will such power to curse. Who are the felons? — Never we Who speak advisedly: Though your pestilential breath Sentence us to worse than death, England’s heart and English sense Holds us clear of your offence. Who are the felons? — Who but ye, Gaggers of Liberty! Though your Honorable House Votes Truth ignominious, Yet shall Public Speech be free, Spite o’ the law of felony. Stand forth, convicted felons, ye Ex-liberal Ministry! Ye who stole the Patriot’s name For a shabby Whigling’s game; Ye who in reforming guise Keep a fence for tyrannies. Felon! thine own ancestor That same brand of ‘felon’ wore; Murder’d by the law which thou O’er his grave invokest now: Thou has Russell’s name, but he Shareth not thine infamy. Take thy name of ‘Felon’ back! Public Scorn is on thy track; Scorn, on which thou dared’st to call



Who plead for Poverty; We who claim the Right of Man; Equity republican, We are not felonious; we Would discourage felony.


This poem is a continuation of ‘Infamy’ in more than its ongoing rage against Russell; the word ‘infamy’ appears in lines 10, 36, and 42, and its primary definition also appears, ‘Public Scorn’ (38), suggesting the degree to which Linton had this sense of the word at the forefront of his mind. ‘Felony’ and ‘infamy’ echo one another, and are connected in the ‘a’ rhyme, which runs throughout the entire poem and appears in every stanza at least once (twice in st. 1 and 4), so that ‘we’ / ‘felony’ (5–6) and ‘free’ / ‘felony’ (23–24) are connected to ‘he’ / ‘infamy’ (35–36) and ‘sea’ / ‘infamy’ (41–42). This power of rhyme to knit together the crimes of the enemy overflows its objective, though. The poem tries to set up a clear dichotomy between ‘we’ and ‘ye’. The whole poem is based on this dichotomy—we who are called felons are not; you who call us felons are. But the poem’s ‘a’ rhyme connects ‘we’ and ‘ye’ (forms of which appear twenty-six times), beginning in the first stanza, in which ‘we’ twice rhymes with ‘felony.’ ‘Ye’ can also be linked to ‘liberty,’ as in line 20. The rhyme draws together what the poem otherwise works to separate. The poem’s lexical strategies also exceed Linton’s grasp. Stretching its gulf between ‘we’ and ‘ye,’ the poem associates different registers with each side. ‘Ye’ is connected to a register of death (‘hearse,’ ‘pestilential,’ ‘death’ [11, 15, 16]); of deceit (‘fraudful,’ ‘lies,’ ‘guise’ [9, 29]); and of crime (‘felons,’ ‘robbers,’ ‘infamy,’ ‘offence,’ ‘ignominious,’ ‘convicted,’ ‘[s]tole,’ ‘murder’d’ [1, 8, 10, 18, 22, 25, 27, 33]). ‘We,’ on the other hand, are ‘clear’—innocent, vindicated, transparent, pure, truthful (18). But other registers forge strong connections. The speech register is shared (we ‘plead,’ ye are ‘gaggers’ who ‘invoke’ [2, 20, 34]), as are the legal register (containing both our values, ‘equity’ and ‘free,’ and their power, ‘rights’ and ‘acts’ [4, 23, 3, 10]) and the governmental register (joining ‘right’ and ‘republican’ to ‘ministry,’ ‘patriot,’ and ‘Whigling’ [3, 4, 26–28]). This overlap also infects Linton’s careful attention to verbs. The republicans take active verbs, and ones appropriate to political speech: ‘plead,’ ‘claim,’ ‘discourage,’ ‘speak’ (2, 3, 6, 14). The felons, on the other hand, are not shown acting; instead, the emphasis is on defining their actions: ‘Ye whose acts are fraudful lies, / Ye whose acts are infamies’ (9–10), and they are associated with forms of the verb ‘to be’ throughout, most evidently in the refrain ‘Who are the Felons’? (1, 7, 13, 19). The poem is a record of a struggle—and it is that struggle in poetic



Hails thee to thy shameful fall: Fool! that think’st to stay the sea With thy petty infamy.

form—of definition. The poem’s speaker attempts to order the ‘ye’ to speak on republican terms. ‘Answer ye,’ the enemy’s strongest verb in the opening stanzas, is not an action but a command, whose agency remains with the collective ‘we’ of the poem’s voice (7). But when the third stanza moves to the felons’ power of public speech, they acquire active verbs of their own: ‘Though your pestilential breath / Sentence us [. . .]’ (15–16) is the first of these verbs, and it secures a toehold innocently enough in a subordinate clause. A form of power that operates through speech, ‘sentence’ upsets the balance of power the poem has been working to establish. Now, the republican actions—plead, claim, discourage, and speak—indicate not only agencial participation in public debate but also the circumscribed speech of the courtroom. These are the speech acts undertaken by litigants, not judges. The tables have turned. The ‘felonious’ ‘ye’ of the poem exercise other empowered speech acts as well: The House ‘[v]otes’ (22). They have the ‘power to curse’ (12). Most dangerous of all, the poem’s opponents possess the power of naming: ‘Ye who stole the Patriot’s name,’ ‘O’er his grave invokest now: / Thou has Russell’s name,’ ‘thou dared’st to call’ (27, 34–35, 39). As with ‘infamy,’ Linton seems to be fully aware of a full range of applications and connotations of his key word, ‘felon’ or ‘felony.’ Notably, early OED definitions stress the words’ poetical and figurative valences. It is only a later definition that offers the most common association: ‘one who has committed a felony,’ a definition that is itself grouped with a more figurative meaning: ‘a vile or wicked person, a villain, monster.’ But most interesting of all is the root of the legal meaning of the word, which lies in feudal law. A ‘felony’ is ‘an act on the part of a vassal which involved the forfeiture of his fee’—of his land, of hierarchies of reciprocity, of the hereditary rights of a serf. Like ‘Infamy,’ ‘Felony’ involves a tragic miscarriage of historical precedent; it presents a world characterized by its perversion of established norms, particularly norms of justice. The felons of 1848 are the men in power, and far from forfeiting their rights by virtue of their evil deeds, they retain and shore up their ‘power to curse’ and rob and gag and murder. This is a world in which felonies are not only committed with impunity but rewarded. Meanwhile, serfs have lost their hereditary rights; not only have hierarchies of reciprocity evaporated along with the people’s connection to the land—still very much a staple of radical discourse: witness the Chartist land plan, or the emphasis on land in Ireland for the Irish—the people also are ‘robbed’ of the produce of their ‘Industry’ and their heroes’ names are ‘stolen.’ What is at stake is the ‘forfeiture of lands and goods,’ in a system that operates according to law, and whose




deviations are met with law—but it is an entirely perverse legal order, an inverted relation between justice and reward. The aesthetic project Linton discovers in his definitional poems ties them closely to a larger set of cultural and intellectual concerns that defined mid-century thought more generally. In this, as well as in their topical preoccupation with European and Irish politics, they point toward the poems discussed in the next chapter. The possibility of intersubjective communication, or even communion, has been identified by Isobel Armstrong as the central issue confronted by the ‘mid-century voices’ of Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris. Armstrong discusses these poets under the rubric of their engagement with language and discourse, arguing that in their work, ‘The question of representation [which structures Victorian poetry as a whole] is more tentatively explored as a gap between sign and meaning; language becomes that which possesses an independent life eluding consciousness. It is seen as that which makes communal understanding impossible by its inherent ambiguities and fatal capacity to invite misprision.’72 Linton’s definitional poems insist the opposite: that correct uses of language made communal understanding possible, and that poetic lexis and prosody were allies in this effort. But at the height of their deliberateness and self-consciousness, in ‘The Poet’s Mission,’ ‘Felony,’ and ‘Infamy,’ the poems crack under the pressure of their own demands and ambitions, letting in worries about language and communion. Ironically, it is those worries that carry the poems to a new level, transforming them from mere hortatory verses into a sustained analysis of poetry, its forms and words, and their connection to republican thought and deed.




Landor, Clough, and European Republicanism

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound describes the middle of the nineteenth century as ‘[t]he period when England no longer had room for, or welcomed her best writers.’ Walter Savage Landor and Robert Browning were in Italy, Pound writes, and Alfred Tennyson’s poems were ‘the official literature of England.’1 Arthur Hugh Clough, too, had left his post at Oxford out of religious scruples and lived for stretches of time in Rome and, later, Venice, where he composed two of his most important works, Amours de Voyage (1858) and Dipsychus (1865). Pound’s formulation suggests that an affinity with Italy bore some intrinsic relation to the ‘best’ poetry of those years, that it marked an alienation from an ossified and narrow-minded ‘official’ culture. In the case of Landor and Clough— the two poets on whom this chapter concentrates—a crucial element of their affinity with Italy lay in their enthusiastic support of its republican movement. A more moderate support also characterized Browning’s connection, and inspired a number of artists Pound does not discuss to create works sympathetic to republicanism, among them Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851); Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnets ‘At the Sun-Rise in 1848,’ ‘Vox Ecclesiae, Vox Christi,’ ‘The Staircase of Notre Dame, Paris,’ and ‘Near Brussels—A Half-way Pause’ and his dramatic monologue ‘A Last Confession (Regno Lombardo-Veneto, 1848)’ (all 1848); William Holman Hunt’s painting (the first he exhibited as a Pre-Raphaelite) Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice (1848–49); and Sydney Dobell’s ‘spasmodic’ debut The Roman: A Dramatic Poem (1850). Indeed, the irony was that the cause of Italian republicanism met with a more widespread approval across English society than did the writing of its great poetic advocates, Landor, Clough, and Browning. The fact that the cause of the Risorgimento could be assimilated to the political worldview of mainstream liberalism stood behind much of this approval, but did 97



4

not limit the effects of sympathy with the Italian cause. Republican thought and politics were beginning to emerge from the shadow in which they had largely dwelt since the middle of the 1790s. The poems Landor and Clough wrote about Italy in and after 1848 were shaped by this double dynamic, at once registering a critical distance from ‘official’ British poetry and leading the groundswell of enthusiasm for the Italian cause that helped carve out a space for republicanism within intellectual, political, and cultural life. Though republicanism never became a mainstream ideology, its newfound legitimacy had far-reaching cultural effects. It lent weight and drew wider attention to Chartist poets such as Thomas Cooper and W. J. Linton, whose work I examined in the previous chapter, who were fellow members with Landor in the Society of Friends of Italy and published his writings in their journals. As it moved in from the margins, moreover, republican poetry came into contact with a range of concerns at the heart of Victorian Britain. Clough and Landor joined other ‘public moralists’ as they struggled to understand the nature of nationality, liberty, and equality; the tension between individualism and service to others; the course of a civilization’s movement through history; the search for meaningful work in an industrialized and commercialized economy; the significance of new ideas in science, archeology, religion, and philosophy; and the tragic, ubiquitous juxtaposition of hunger and plenty. For Clough and Landor, as for Cooper and Linton, their expanded concerns found a formal counterpart in the diversity of genres and styles they adopted. And, as for Cooper and Linton, the relation between the formal dexterity and ambition of their poems on the one hand, and the political events they sought to record and influence on the other, was forged by difficult labor as well as inspiration. Clough’s hexameter ‘tragi-comedy’ Amours de Voyage, set in the Roman Republic during the French siege of 1848, manages through an all-encompassing irony at once to affirm republican ideals and to criticize their operation in current political struggles. Landor’s occasional poems about France and Italy in 1848 find the negotiation of ideal and real equally treacherous, prompting a meditation on the ethics of the political poet. *

*

*

In an imaginary conversation first published in 1828, Landor has one of his speakers offer the following defense of the Greek orator Demosthenes: ‘his questions are occasional: but one great question hangs in the centre, and high above the rest; and this is, whether the




Mother of liberty and civilization shall exist, or whether she shall be extinguished in the bosom of her family.’2 It is an apt defense of the poems Landor himself would write twenty years later. Inspired by events in European cities such as Paris, Naples, Rome, and Florence, Landor composed a series of occasional lyrics with a ‘great question’ at their center. What would be the fate of these cities, in and after 1848, and what would become of the ‘liberty and civilization’ to which they could claim to have given new life? The urgency of this question, and the uncertainty of its answer, brought ‘a new vitality’ to the poems Landor wrote in this, his seventy-third, year.3 His renewed sense of energy and purpose is conveyed in the epigraph he chose for Italics (1848), the volume in which he collected several of these poems: ‘When God commands to take the trumpet / And blow a shriller and a louder blast, / It rests not in Man’s will what he shall do, / Or what he shall forbear.’4 A quotation from John Milton, a crucial presence throughout the 1848 poems and one marker of their ambitions, the epigraph places Italics in a republican poetic tradition and aligns it with the prophetic authority and the courage Landor sought to adopt in his own political writings. Yet even as the continental revolutions awoke in him what Blake had called ‘the vioice of honest indignation’ that ‘cared not for consequences but wrote,’5 it is not the political poet’s enthusiasm, but rather his difficulties, that most shaped the poems he wrote over the course of the year. These difficulties were partly endemic to occasional poems, their ethereal topicality and danger of slipping into mere propaganda, and partly the consequence of the instability and ethical uncertainty of the particular events Landor was chronicling. As he confronted these difficulties, the poems’ central question involving the future of liberty and civilization became intertwined with another, more poetic, dilemma, involving the role and responsibilities of the republican poet. The enduring interest of these poems lies in Landor’s attempt to grapple with this republican aesthetic dilemma, for it drives the poems’ metapoetic agenda, and it compels their formal dexterity. The occasional poem held a special attraction for Landor. The classical and Renaissance tradition of epideictic rhetoric included some of his most beloved poets, Catullus, Pindar, and Milton. These poets appear in Italics and in the poems Landor published that year in The Examiner, and they do so as authors of occasional poems, especially political ones: Pindar as the poet who ‘sat among’ tyrants such as Hiero and Gelon and ‘prais’d’ them ‘in deathless song’6; Milton as the author not of Paradise Lost but of sonnets praising military leaders, the pastoral elegy ‘Lycidas,’ and the ode ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.’ Landor’s 1848 poems



Landor, Clough, and European Republicanism 99

adopt epideictic conventions such as an ornate style, a central theme of honor and dishonor, and a modus operandi of praise and blame. He assumes in these texts the authority traditional to epideictic poets from classical Greece and Rome to early modern Britain, ‘community-approved speakers who celebrate community values at a time when these values require commemoration.’7 This authority made him a popular poet laureate—all the more powerful for not being appointed by the monarch— who speaks to and for the nation. Poets were ‘public moralists,’ to use Stefan Collini’s term, and they were the ethical clerisy of that limited populace, the nation, as much as of the larger category of humanity. As Suvir Kaul shows, this conception of the poet was coincident with the rise of nationalism and the expansion of empire, and closely tied to the idea of nationality itself, so much at issue in 1848.8 For Kaul, both canonical poets and those ‘near-anonymous (and now forgotten) propagandist[s] who write[ ] satire or polemical poems on urgent sociopolitical issues’9 enjoyed full confidence in ‘the role played by poets in crafting the imagination, and at least some of the public debate, of the nation.’10 At the same time, the inward turn associated with Wordsworthian Romanticism had expanded the scope of poetic occasion to include private as well as public affairs.11 Byron had then fused the two, especially in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18), joining psychological depth with the world-historical traumas of modern nations. Unlike the popular poet laureate, however, both the Wordsworthian recluse and the Byronic hero were outsiders. In this they marked a crucial cultural watershed. The figure of the outsider-poet was fired in the kiln of aesthetic autonomy, the cordoning off of the realm of literature from the civic worlds of the market and the polis. The identification of poetry with emotion most famously argued in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay ‘What Is Poetry?’ and in his discussion of Wordsworth and Byron in his Autobiography (1873) entailed a critique of overt didacticism and an argument for the autonomy of the poetic sphere. Thus Mill drives a wedge between poetry and eloquence, disinterestedness and purpose: eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. [. . .] Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.12 Under this view, occasional poetry was particularly suspect, since the authenticity of the grief or euphoria expressed in the elegy or the ode




was seen to be undermined by its public expression and the financial and professional gain the poet stood to reap from the performance.13 In crucial ways, the occasional poem has never regained its age-old prominence, a casualty of the severing of poetry from oratory. But in other ways, the occasional lyric has only honed its power. In Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1840 [1839]), as in Dobell’s theory of spasmodic verse, the autonomy of poetry and the centrality of emotion to its sphere underwrote a republican aesthetic that gave priority to the ethical effects of sympathetic identification. The outsider-poet had other roots as well. He was also cast in the mold of the opposition politician, the young Disraeli who modeled himself on Byron and the heroes such as Phineas Finn who were soon to be celebrated in the novels of Anthony Trollope.14 This ethos was perhaps closest to the outsider posture Landor adopted during 1848, the voice of the stubbornly bellicose dissident forced to trumpet his own values in the face of a corrupt, hypocritical establishment. Whether speaking as a popular laureate or as an outsider, Landor suffered no diminution of authority. He was always a public moralist, standing proudly upon a dais that was both elevated and apart. Landor suffered no illusions about the costs the poet paid for his pulpit. He was highly aware of the conventionality of those sentiments that were endorsed by communal agreement, and of the marginality of those that were not. This sort of awareness has been identified by twentiethcentury poet-critics as Landor’s particular genius. For Pound, Donald Davie, and Robert Pinsky, Landor stands alone among nineteenth-century poets for his ability to express conventional wisdom with such stylistic control and self-consciousness as to grant it new and original force. This expression is typically mildly ironic, highly refined, and reliant upon subtle modulations of diction, rhythm, and tone for its success. In Pinsky’s formulation, ‘Landor’s procedure is to revitalize, through profound energies of understanding and a cleanly exactitude of style, an already established situation or observation.’15 The ‘stylistic perfection’ that results, Pinsky continues, ‘demonstrates the degree to which the chosen commonplace has been comprehended.’16 What Pinsky terms ‘stylistic perfection,’ Davie calls ‘purity of diction,’ and Pound calls ‘hardness’— and, fascinatingly, ‘research’ (as opposed to inspiration).17 For these poet-critics, Landor earned his special place in the history of English poetry by ‘preferring “a manner of writing” to the living language,’ as Pound puts it.18 One might also say that he preferred eloquence to emotion, oratory to meditation. By this account, Landor staked his claims to originality not on the typically Romantic grounds that his experiences and insights were themselves new and unique, but rather




on the strength of his expression of commonplace truths and shared experiences. It is his poetic skill that makes his poems, in Pinsky’s words, ‘personal and original.’19 Davie and Pound agree that Landor’s technique set him apart from the main streams of English poetry in the nineteenth century, but they disagree about whether this was an asset. For Davie, Landor’s technique amounted to an ‘obstinate wrong-headedness’ that consigned him to marginality, while Pound thinks it earned him a place in the ‘[s]equence of authors through whom the metamorphosis of English verse writing may be traced.’20 (Pinsky’s aims in Landor’s Poetry do not involve constructing a canon, but he seems to like Landor almost as much as Pound does—to like him as much is perhaps impossible, for who else could demand, ‘Why isn’t Walter Savage Landor more read? [. . .] Has England ever produced an all-round man of letters of equal stature?’21) To a certain extent, too, Landor stood apart from other republican poets of the century. Compared to Cooper, Allen Davenport, Byron, and Barrett Browning, he seems uninterested in interpreting and explaining contemporary political problems, preferring to evaluate particular events and actors. Unlike Linton, Spence, and the anonymous authors of the ‘New Songs’—and, one might add, almost all other political poets of the time—Landor rarely adopts a hortatory mode. His ‘interventionist’ agenda, to use Anne Janowitz’s term,22 relies not on exhortation but rather on praise and blame. And unlike the writers who wrote songs and poems for the occasions of radical dinners, Chartist meetings, and the issuing of new journals, Landor draws his occasional forms from classical prosody rather than the song tradition or the rituals of republican culture. Yet it would be a mistake to place too great an emphasis on these differences. For if Landor’s ‘hardness’ and ‘purity of diction’ distinguish him from his Romantic and Victorian peers, both republican and nonrepublican, many other elements of his poetry resonate with those of the other writers in this study. These include his lifelong commitment to republican thought and interest in translating its ideas into poetic form, adoption of a public poetic role, participation in political organizations, engagement with republican poets from Milton to writers of his own time such as Gerald Massey and Linton, decisions to publish in newspapers and magazines (including, significantly, those of the popular movement as well as of elite progressive politics), and thematization of the function and place of verse in republican politics. He also subordinated personal gain to the benefit of the cause, ‘from his first attempt to publish “The Birth of Poesy” in 1794 to the publication of Savonarola four years before his death,’ by dedicating the profits of




publication ‘to the service of a cause or an individual that seemed to him worthy and needy.’23 Landor’s poems also partake of conventional republican arguments, images, and strategies. They are full of sunrises, scattering fogs of priestcraft and kingcraft, the people coming to collective voice through song, and pleas for justice and equality. His emphasis on conversation, finally, resonates with a dialogic strain that runs deep in republican poetry. In turn, Landor’s works shaped the contours of republican poetry. I have already noted the influence of Imaginary Conversations (1824–29, 1848, 1853) upon Cooper’s The Purgatory of Suicides (1845). The impact of the 1848 odes was felt immediately as well, most directly perhaps in Linton’s ‘To the Future’ (1848), a Pindaric ode that reaches for the high diction of Landor’s poems and that draws from them classical techniques of praise and blame, and a discourse of honor and dishonor read through a civic republican vocabulary of virtue. Landor also influenced the poets who came of age during the 1850s, especially Algernon Charles Swinburne. Pound, Davie, and Pinsky exclude Landor’s political poems from his special technique, dismissing them as lapses in judgment. Pinsky calls them ‘hyperbolically ardent,’ the reverse of the control and skillful expression he values, and adds that Landor’s ‘personal refusal to generate the mere impression of complexity by means of a Shelley-like vagueness [. . .] limit[s] most of Landor’s poems of republican feeling to fustian or sloppy assertion.’24 More recent scholars, conversely, have identified republican politics at the heart of Landor’s poetic project—though they cannot value him as a poet, as the earlier poet-critics had. For Richard Cronin, Gebir (1798) exemplifies the genre he identifies as Jacobin poetry, perhaps a subgenre of republican verse.25 Regina Hewitt has argued that the Imaginary Conversations ‘create a republican past as a precedent for a republican future.’26 Her analysis, which connects Landor to Shelley in a republican trajectory of writing about the past, interprets the Imaginary Conversations as ‘designed to valorise the habitual questioning of authority, a crucial habit for the maintenance of the kind of republican government Landor advocated. [. . .] They thus challenge the authority of the past to determine the future while they model the practice of republican citizenship.’27 Titus Bicknell even sees Landor’s republicanism in his Latin compositions, arguing that ‘Landor’s use of Latin invokes an alternative to English authority,’ expressing the ‘contempt’ in which ‘he held British politicians and the monarch of the day.’ For Bicknell, Landor’s recourse to Latin creates an ‘Urbs Romana’ that is ‘the metonym of Roman Republicanism.’28 Mohammed Sharafuddin understands Landor as a republican critic of empire. ‘He favoured a sort of




republican internationalism,’ Sharafuddin explains; ‘[a]t its centre was a repudiation of monarchy as the keystone of the old despotic regime.’ Landor emerges in his analysis as a visionary and a political thinker whose poems ‘suggest that human beings are cruel and unjust, not because of what they are, but because of what their own past and traditions have obliged them to be, and that all one has to do to achieve collective happiness is to throw off, in the name of nature, the superficial and unnecessary burden of inherited institutions.’29 Perhaps a return to Pound will help explain why these scholars praise Landor’s republicanism but not his poetry. Pound writes, in his characteristic shorthand, ‘LANDOR 80% retrospective.’ The paradox of Landor’s aesthetic project is that, though he worked to preserve a tradition, ‘[h]e was so far ahead of his British times that the country couldn’t contain him’; though he was ‘driving piles into the mud, and preparing foundations,’ they have ‘been largely unused by his successors.’30 Landor’s innovations, not taken up by the poets who succeeded him, have become invisible. His special genius for style and eloquence rather than the spoken language has become like a lost technology to us, as inexplicable and invisible as an aqueduct covered with ivy. As Pound writes, ‘a great part of Landor’s longer poems are still inaccessible because the language is so far removed from any speech ever used anywhere.’31 It requires a leap of imagination to recover Landor’s republican aesthetics, to connect his poetic technique to the political conversations in which his poems so evidently participated. Over the course of 1848, Landor published more than a dozen poems and letters in the weekly newspaper The Examiner. The paper had retained its liberal slant under the editorship of Landor’s friend and future biographer, John Forster. In his biography, Forster calls Landor’s contributions ‘outbreaks,’ suggesting the extreme currency of these ‘vehement contributions to matters of public controversy.’32 Composed no doubt with some haste as well as evident care, the poems appear in the same numbers as the news reports to which they respond. By virtue of their shared concentration on the revolutions in Germany, Italy, and France, they form a series in the truest sense of the term. This seriality reinforces the immediacy of the poems and the pathos of their reactions, by turns euphoric, wary, and distressed, and always unsure of the future. Such is the case with a sub-series of three odes, each addressed to a new president of the French Republic, as Alphonse de Lamartine, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, and Louis Napoleon in turn assumed the post. As each successive president takes office, the poems turn increasingly away from the presidents themselves and toward the capacity of the occasional poem—to warn as well




as praise, to speak to an English public as much as a French leader, and to thematize the poet’s relation to political events. ‘To Lamartine’ appeared on 29 April 1848 and celebrates the Romantic poet and politician’s election six days earlier to the National Assembly and to the presidency of its executive committee.33 Landor begins his poem with the word ‘not,’ introducing a list of three possible motivations for writing an ode to Lamartine, and denying each one in turn. The first such denied occasion is Landor’s admiration for Lamartine’s own odes: ‘Not that the Muse, with brow benign, / Looks on the crown which circles thine, / And points thee out with finger strait’ (1–3). ‘Nor,’ he continues, ‘is it that where Arno flows / We sought and found the same repose,’ dismissing the biographical ties to Italy that link the two authors together—and in turn join them to an icon of republican poetry, for theirs was a ‘[r]epose which Dante never knew’ (9–11). Landor maintains that personal affiliations are not the focus of this poem: ‘Nor that our friendships were the same / With many a bright enduring name’ (13–14). His real motivation, he declares, is collective and political: No; but that France, with fond appeal, Calls thee to guard her Commonweal; And Europe, echoing back her voice, Applauds the wisdom of the choice. (15–18) The trochaic or spondaic first foot ‘No; but’ brings the negations to a close, slows the poem down with the first of two caesura in the line, and presses all the emphasis of duration and stress onto the word ‘France,’ whose act of decision is praised as much as the man chosen. The elections, the first since the February Revolution and its declaration of universal manhood suffrage, represented a decisive victory for the moderate republicans, headed by Lamartine, over the radical republicans whose leaders included socialists such as Louis Blanc.34 For Landor, the ‘wisdom’ of this course establishes a harmonic call-and-response between the voices of France and Europe, implying that the continent is (moderately) republican, that the exile of monarchs is the mark not of a pariah nation but of one that expresses the wishes of the region. Landor claims to hear Europe’s voice, and, as the poet bringing that voice to an English newspaper, suggests that he speaks for it. Landor’s privileged voice, reinforced by the close relationship to Lamartine that the first stanza of the poem obliquely establishes, is that of the popular laureate. The second stanza moves back in time, to Lamartine’s exile and the prophecy of future glory that he received then, ‘when thy laurel’d head




hung low’ (19). ‘A prophetess, not always mad,’ Landor writes, ‘With potent speech thy tears forbad, / And show’d [. . .] The glories of thy future way’ (20–24). Veering away from the register of triumph in the first stanza, this biographical turn is the poem’s antistrophe, a countermovement that introduces a complication that seems to be biography itself, the personal and individual nature of these ‘glories.’ The resolution that will unite collective wisdom and personal glory is given in the poem’s epodic final stanza: She spake: the glories she foreknew, The virtues half-escaped her view, She saw not Man’s true right divine (Safe in few hands, but safe in thine) Is not to prune the deadly tree, But wrench the root of Royalty, And sprinkle with black salt the ground, Exhausted, and for years unsound. Unhoped for under eastern skies, She saw not this fresh dawn arise. Europe, now free of kingly fraud, Stands up unfettered and unaw’d; And soon shall Africa alone In her worst wilds that curse bemoan. (29–42) The profusion of negatives that marked the first stanza returns here, once again to clarify the poet’s motivations and purpose. The true subject of the poem appears to be the republican vision Lamartine prompts in Landor’s own eyes, a vision of the elimination of monarchy. The poem seems to move away from Landor and Lamartine and toward an (almost) worldwide republican future, outward from a personal center to a human destiny. Yet the final stanza places as much emphasis on Landor-as-poet as it does on the content on his vision. He turns out to be a better seer than the prophetess, who was, after all, merely ‘not always mad’ (21): she saw glory while its justification ‘half-escaped her view,’ twice she ‘saw not’ what the poet sees.35 In order to depict his vision, Landor draws on the conventional terms of republican poetry, the language of universal ‘right’ and imagery of a dawn that removes the ‘fetter[s]’ of ‘kingly fraud.’ The poem’s closure lies in the conviction conveyed in the final stanza of the poet’s capacity to see rightly, and of republican poetry’s capacity to judge the significance of a leader’s ascension to power.




This belief in the capabilities of poetry pulses through the entire poem. A successful Horatian ode, it is thoughtful and measured, ending with a resolution fitting to the issues raised in its course. Landor skillfully handles what he indicates in the first stanza is a political commonplace, shared by all of Europe. This awareness generates a slightly ironic tone in the first stanza, in which Landor classes himself among the ‘great ones’ who must ‘behold more great’ and the ‘poor children of the earth’ who ‘[g]row envious of exalted worth’ (4, 7, 8). He is careful not to overstate his case for Lamartine’s ‘glory,’ a word with connotations of exalted heights and haloes of light and a central word for Landor in 1848. Lamartine’s only halo is his crown of laurel. The word ‘glory’ reinforces Landor’s introduction of a light register into each stanza—‘bright enduring name’ (14), ‘into light again’ (28), ‘fresh dawn arise’ (38)—to chart the movement of the poem from individual fame toward collective worthiness and liberation. Such stylistic control also appears in the consonance of tone and subject matter throughout the poem, and in subtle modulations of rhythm, as in the opening trochee of line 32, ‘Safe in few hands, but safe in thine,’ which interrupts the iambic meter to stress the word ‘safe,’ and twice. ‘To Lamartine’ stands with its arms akimbo, unhesitating and confident of its strength. In ‘To Cavaignac,’ by contrast, republican poetry labors under heavy strain.36 It was written less than two months later, after the victory of moderate republicanism had been trumped by the June days and tenuously recaptured with Cavaignac’s brutal suppression of the workers’ revolt. Lamartine had been deposed and on 28 June, four days later, Cavaignac assumed the presidency. The poem reflects the chaos and disruption wrought by these events. It opens with the word ‘and’ and with two questions that raise the spectres of anarchy and the reign of terror: And shall the bloody wave again, Dissevering freedom’s bravest men, Dash all ashore? and civic fight Demolish wrong, establish right? Alas! it must be! Well for France, Awakening from her frantic trance, She finds at last a virtuous man To regulate her rushing van. (1–8) The ode begins by admitting its inability to evaluate the events it heralds. As Landor trades republican conventions for conservative icons in the image of the mob as a ‘bloody wave’ and transposes the trope of awakening




from kingcraft to the ‘trance’ of violence, the poem signals its own ideological confusion. The rhetorical questions emphasize the poet’s uncertainty, and their implied answers point in opposite directions, despite the conjunction ‘and’ between them. Only a very troubled sort of ‘right’ entails the ‘dissevering’ of the ‘bravest men’ into factions and the ‘dash[ing] all ashore’ in the process. The language of civic republicanism is available to name Cavaignac’s violence ‘civic fight’ and call him a ‘virtuous man,’ but the poem fails to believe in its own rhetoric. Its praise, ‘Well for France,’ is weak and tempered by the lingering criticism of ‘at last.’ As in ‘To Lamartine,’ the second stanza shifts its address to the ode’s subject and his virtues. Landor mistrusts Cavaignac’s virtuousness, however, and the tone of warning and wariness intensifies in another moment of tepid praise: Never wilt thou, sage Cavaignac! Pursue Ambition’s tortuous track. The shade of Glory seems to tend That way, but melts before its end. (9–12) Here, ‘glory’ is infected by ambition, tainted by registers of darkness (‘shade’), illusion (‘seems’), dematerialization (‘melts’), and death (‘end’). Similarly, while Landor calls Cavaignac ‘sage,’ he reproaches him for being in danger of folly. After the remainder of the stanza cautions Cavaignac not to repeat the costly mistakes of Napoleon Bonaparte— not to have ‘well survey’d the battle-field’ while considering ‘ill what that soakt soil should yield’—the poem closes with a stern warning to be ‘[m]indful of Washington’ (16–17, 21): Remember, First of Men! that thou To thy own heart hast made the vow That France henceforward shall be free . . . Henceforward is her trust in thee. (23–26, original ellipses) Cavaignac’s ‘heart,’ the poem hopes, can resolve the ‘bloody wave’ and blood-soaked field of the poem’s first two stanzas. Like ‘To Lamartine,’ this ode has a strophe-antistrophe-epode structure, presenting Cavaignac’s election, warning him about ambition, and then enjoining him to remember and emulate a model of civic republican virtue, to seek for himself and for France a fate of freedom. Unlike in ‘To Lamartine,’ however, the epode fails to resolve the issues raised in the earlier




stanzas. A plea rather than a prophecy, the third stanza bespeaks Landor’s sense of poetic worry as loudly as that of ‘To Lamartine’ enunciated his confidence. The seer becomes a watchdog, and praise doubles as warning. Landor could simultaneously declare his close ties to Lamartine and deny that they motivated his ode because Lamartine was a figure with whom Landor could unambiguously seek to be identified. Cavaignac, by contrast, carries violence and carnage into his ode, the first two stanzas of which are saturated with images of blood and physical injury.37 On the surface of the poem and in much commonplace wisdom of the day, Cavaignac was a figure for order and moderation; just beneath, he is a figure of slaughter no less frightening for having been ‘regulate[d]’ in his restoration of calm in the streets of Paris. In this way, the problems faced by the poet mass in the center of the ode and grow like a cancer to fill its entire space. In the final poem of this series, ‘To the President of the French Republic,’ Landor’s strategy of taking refuge in a double discourse of praise and blame generates more severe dissonance, even impenetrability, and the ethical dilemma of the political poet takes up the hollow space in the center of the ode.38 On 10 December, casting himself as the defender of law and order, Louis Napoleon defeated a field of candidates that included Lamartine, Cavaignac, the republican François Raspail, and the democratic-socialist Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. Louis Napoleon’s electoral victory launched the events that would be ‘consummated’ in his coup d’état three years later, the ‘second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire’ that prompted Karl Marx famously to reflect that ‘all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. [. . .] the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’39 The rise to power of Louis Napoleon also moved Landor to meditate upon the patterns of history: History lies wide open: the first page Of every chapter blood illuminates, And ductile gold embosses, dense and bright. Not children only, but grave men admire The gaudy grand distortions; hippogryphs, Unicorns, dragons, infant heads enlarged To size gigantic, seraph visages, And scaly serpents trailing underneath. (1–8) The first line unfolds slowly across the page, each word transforming the meaning of the sentence as it develops. The first two words hint at




the idea that history itself deceives us, and the first clause suggests that history has been ruptured or broken, that it is vulnerable. Uneasiness troubles the meter of the line, too, which begins with a trochaic foot and resists a smooth iambic rhythm, the long duration of the vowels in ‘lies wide open’ pulling against the iambs while the final two syllables, ‘first page,’ assert themselves in a disorienting spondee. Here again the light register (‘illumination,’ ‘bright’) is darkened by violence (‘blood’), illusion (‘distortions’), and death (‘grave’). The crux of the passage is the fourth line, in which ‘grave men’ are said to ‘admire’ history’s ‘gaudy grand distortions,’ to succumb to an interpretive error that would be forgivable only in children. Louis Napoleon is a historical monstrosity like the mythical hippogryph, half monarch and half elected ruler, whose angelic face masks a devilish body—but serious men fail to see him clearly. The visual register strongly present in the first eight lines of this poem shifts to an auditory register in the lines that follow, and the book of history gives way to song and poetry—and to a claim of silence, a refusal to perform the poet’s appointed task: ‘I trill no cymbal, and I shake no bells / To thee, pacific ruler!’ (9–10). Two other shifts point the way toward interpreting these lines, the first into an even iambic meter and the second into an ironic, even sarcastic, tone. By placing stress in line 9 on ‘trill’ and ‘shake,’ not on the repeated ‘I,’ and in line 10 on ‘thee,’ the iambic rhythm suggests that Landor repudiates this leader rather than the role of epideictic poet. ‘Pacific’ is a word Landor used to describe Louis Napoleon one week earlier in an article in The Examiner, where it was laden with heavy irony, for Landor suspected the French of harboring territorial ambitions. ‘Pacific as are the declarations of Louis Napoleon,’ he wrote, ‘France must employ her armies.’40 Yet even as Landor derides the ‘seraph visage’ of Louis Napoleon’s ‘mild and beneficent [. . .] temper,’ he defends the right of the French Republic to pursue its own foreign policy and that of the populace to elect its own leaders, arguing, ‘we have no right whatever to interfere.’41 ‘Placing a Napoleon at the head of a republic seems much the same sort of operation as putting an extinguisher on the top of a candle,’ the paper editorialized a week earlier in an article entitled ‘The Republic Without Republicans,’ but it was a ‘capital doom’ to which the people had condemned themselves.42 In these ways, like that of other liberal and republican British observers, Landor’s position is a complex and even internally contradictory one—and so lines 9–10 can also be read as proclaiming his intention to praise Louis Napoleon in his own way. While other voices ‘cheer’ him, Landor advises Louis Napoleon to be cautious and declares his




own intention to save his praise until ‘the day is o’er, / And other notes are silent all around’ (13–14).43 This double discourse of simultaneous praise and blame does not seem very honorable, however. The central section of the poem, its next nineteen lines, sets the troubled case of Louis Napoleon aside and considers the ethics of any poem written for a political leader. When done well, Landor thinks, such a poem is both ethically and aesthetically defensible, a position he elaborates by considering Milton’s sonnet ‘To the Lord General Cromwell’: ‘’Twas not unseemly in the bravest bard’ to ‘crown his country’s saviour with a wreath / Above the regal’ (15, 17–18). With this republican laurel of ‘few [. . .] words, but strong,’ Milton ‘gave / The notes to Glory,’ and they inspired his contemporaries and continue to ‘sound[ ] through all ages and all climes’ (18, 21–22, 19). Landor suggests that Milton’s courage, generosity, and republican virtue ensured that his poem would further his cause. Curiously, apart from the significant description of Oliver Cromwell as England’s ‘saviour,’ Landor does not suggest that the ethical stature of the leader in question shapes the ethics of a poem in praise of him. Instead, it is the ethics of the poet that determines whether the poem is ‘unseemly’—a word that strongly introduces a moral valence while echoing the ode’s early concerns with delusion and right seeing. Perhaps the implication is that, like Cromwell, the presidents of the French Republic must shed blood to save their country—the word ‘blood’ is the first of twelve verbal echoes from the sonnet. Yet unlike Milton, the poets Landor sees around him in 1848 are driven to write by selfish and corrupt motivations: In our dull misty day what breast respires The poetry that warms and strengthens man To glorious deeds, and makes his coronet Outlive the festival, nor droop at last? Alas! alas! the food of nightingales Is foul; and plumeless bipeds who sing best Desert the woods for cattle-trodden roads, And plunge the beak, hungry and athirst, in mire. (27–34) That the degradation of poetry endangers the progress of a cause in need of ‘glorious deeds’ and faithful persistence was a theme with which Landor became obsessed over the course of the year, and that will reappear in my discussion of Italics below.44 In this poem, the theme works together with the homage to Milton to authorize Landor’s occasional odes. The final lines of the poem make this clear—but





Prince! above princes! may thy deeds create A better race! meanwhile from peaceful shores Hear, without listening long (for graver cares Surround and press thee), hear with brow benign A voice that cheers thee with no vulgar shout, No hireling impulse, on thy starry way. (35–40) While Landor’s ethical self-justification is clear enough, the implications of the passage prove more difficult to parse. The return of vocabulary introduced in the poem’s first lines—‘graver,’ ‘cheers,’ ‘above’—at once inverts the significance of these words and reasserts the critique they initially articulated. Landor seems to exculpate himself, but the lines also level a devastating indictment: he now excuses those with ‘graver cares,’ he ‘cheers’ a ‘prince’ and elevates him ‘above’ his peers (rather than a poetic ‘crown [. . .] above the regal’), and he calls Louis Napoleon’s visage a ‘brow benign.’ Similarly, the laureate of Cromwell becomes the poet of Paradise Lost, and Louis Napoleon its tragic hero pursuing his ‘starry way.’45 Lucy Newlyn has demonstrated that Romantic allusions to Milton are ‘not the register of ideological certitude, but of moral and political angst.’ Romantic writers turn to Milton, she explains, ‘at moments when they are perplexed by the relation between politics and morality, or intrigued by the nature of individual motivation, or fascinated [. . .] by the distinctive characteristics of the tyrant.’46 Rather than solving the problems raised in the ode, the presence of Milton in ‘To the President of the French Republic’ provides Landor with a vehicle for exploring these difficulties, as a matter of poetics as well as politics. Milton also appears in all of the Italics poems,47 beginning with the opening lines of the first, ‘Ode to Sicily’: ‘Few mortal hands have struck the heroic string, / Since Milton’s lay in death across his breast’ (1–2).48 Alluding to ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ in which the angels sing a hymn to herald the birth of Christ—‘music sweet’ that ‘never was by mortal finger strook’—Landor establishes a parallel between the passing of the classical age into the Christian era and the overthrow of monarchy by republicanism.49 The ambivalence expressed in the Nativity Ode, which simultaneously mourns and welcomes the loss of the classical world, finds its counterpart in ‘Ode to Sicily’ and the other poems in Italics, in which Landor’s celebration of events in Italy is tempered by his criticisms



they do not eliminate the doubleness that has characterized the poem thus far:

of Great Britain. Along with praise and blame, several paired tropes lend structure and unity to Italics—crowns and haloes, height and depth, speech and muteness, sight and blindness, words and deeds. Italics articulates an argument about the relation between politics and art, that heroic deeds create not only great nations but great poets. As they generate coherence and meaning through repetitions of techniques, words, and images, the poems also imply more troubling ideas about political verse, that suffering is tethered to art, and that visions become inscrutable when they are realized. Like so many fine republican poems of midcentury, these poems are deceptively simple and propagandistic, and their full meaning comes to light only with close and careful reading. The opening image of ‘Ode to Sicily’ is one such case. The ‘lyre’ that ‘lay in death across [Milton’s] breast,’ has for many years lain at ‘rest,’ gathering the ‘vilest dust upon it’ (2–4). This dust is the stuff of Christian mortality, lying ‘upon’ the instruments of immortal art—lyre, hand, breast—and prophesying the ‘spring eternal’ (‘To Saint Charles Borromeo,’ 16) when another ‘bard’ will ‘rise’ and the people pronounce their final judgment on the Bourbon monarchy: ‘down with it; dust to dust’ (‘Ode to Sicily,’ 44, 45, 58). The dust is also that which inhibits clear seeing on ‘this globe, where dust obscures the signs’ (‘[I told ye],’ 8). Only the great artist triumphs over it, for he has eyes that are free from ‘the illusion[s] of a mind distraught’ (‘[I told ye],’ 18), in the case of Milton, and leaves a legacy that triumphs over mortality, in the case of Pindar: Death pursues And overtakes the fleetest of them all[.] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] Ages shall sweep off All lighter things, but leave thy name behind. [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] Pindar is Pindar, Hiero is but king.50 Pindar is one model for Landor in Italics, his paeans to the despotic ruler whose invitation brought him to Sicily a ‘deathless song’ though they ‘prais’d [. . .] weaker deeds’ than those Landor sees around him (‘Ode to Sicily,’ 42). As we have seen, Milton is another, the blind seer who ‘closed his eyes’ and saw ‘[h]is own pure wisdom,’ and the teacher who ‘[s]hows me the way [. . .] [d]raws me a line and teaches me to write’ (‘[I told ye],’ 9, 10, 20, 21). But the inspiration for Italics comes from the Sicilian republicans whose uprising in early 1848 sparked the Italian revolutions of that year. It is they who first overturn death in ‘Ode to




Sicily’—‘But thou, O Sicily! art born again’—and it is they who ‘create’ the poet capable of praising their great deeds in a ‘[h]eroic song’ (‘Ode to Sicily,’ 6, 45; ‘[I told ye],’ 2). The word ‘heroic’ pertains to the classical age and to epic poetry (OED, 2, 3—both definitions employing an illustrative quotation from Milton), but its primary signification deals with extraordinariness, with ‘bravery, virtue, or nobleness of character, exalted above that of ordinary men’ (OED, 1). The Sicilians inspire Landor with their ‘heads and stout arms of men’ engaged in battle, a sight that rises above the glories they achieved in antiquity, ‘[f]ar over chariots and Olympic steeds’ (7, 8). ‘I see,’ he writes, ‘[a]nd will record (God gives me power!) their deeds’ (8–9). (When the poem appeared in Italics, it read ‘God give me power.’) The strophe movement of this Pindaric ode describes these actions, many of which take the form not of sight but speech, a ‘call[ ]’ that ‘[s]wells up’; the antistrophe turns to a criticism of Great Britain, the ‘free nation[ ]’ that ‘will not let there be / More nations free’; and the epode finds resolution in the relation of heroic deeds to poetic words (19, 27–28): One is left to laud ye. Years have marr’d My voice, my prelude for some better bard, When such shall rise; and such your deeds create. (43–45) Landor’s humble allusion to his own age connects through the trope of height to an earlier passage in which he states that ‘around all kings / For ever springs / A wasting vapour that absorbs the fire / Of all that would rise higher’ (23–26). These passages express the belief that the ‘better bard’ will be created out of a republican Italy, that it will give birth to a poet equal in stature to Pindar and Milton—and exceeding their legacy in freedom and poetic strength as the Commonwealth republican succeeded the laureate of Hiero. In ‘[Few poets beckon to the calmly good],’ Landor seems to count himself among a less illustrious, though perhaps more capacious, band of poets who are made when republican actors ‘rise up’ (14). ‘I stand where Tiber rolls his turbid wave,’ Landor writes, and ‘see two men,’ probably Pius IX and King Carlo-Alberto, who early in 1848 seemed to be allies of the republican movement (13–14) (Landor omitted the reference in later publications of the poem.) ‘By your hands be done / God’s work,’ he bids them, calling them ‘creators of immortal bards’ (17–18). In this poem, Landor differentiates himself from the hireling, vulgar poets he criticizes in ‘To the President of the French Republic,’ but not in order to justify his own poem. Here, he argues that to be a true poet,





Few poets beckon to the calmly good, Few lay a hallowing hand upon the head Which lowers its barbarous for our Delphic crown: But loose strings rattle on unseasoned wood, And weak words whiffle round, where Virtue’s meed Shines in a smile or shrivels in a frown. (1–6) Not only poetic talent, it seems, but republican virtue is necessary to produce great poetry. Whereas naïve poets seek the rewards granted by virtue, mature poets cultivate virtue itself, the ‘inward fire’ that ‘wake[s] to vigorous life the germ within,’ a spark he has attributed to Milton and to the Italian revolutionaries (‘[I told ye],’ 27, 29). Silence—to ‘beckon’ is to ‘make a mute signal’—and idle or impure uses of speech— ‘barbarous,’ ‘whiffle,’ ‘rattle,’ even ‘hallow’—are rejected just as those who are ‘calmly good’ prove subjects as unfit as kings. A more fitting subject is, unsurprisingly, the overthrow of kings. In ‘[Sleep, tho’ to Age so needful, shuns my eyes],’ a series of ‘visions, brighter than Sleep brings, arise’ before Landor’s sight (2). He stresses the vividness that contemporary events bring to these images drawn from history and epic poetry: ‘I hear the Norman arms before me ring, / I see them flash upon a prostrate king’ (3–4). ‘To Francis Hare, Buried at Palermo,’ the final poem of the volume, is also about the relation between imagined republican victory and the insurrections of 1848:51 Hare! thou art sleeping where the sun strikes hot On the gold letters that inscribe the tomb, And what there passeth round thee knowest not, Nor pierce those eyes (so joyous once) the gloom; Else would the brightest vision of thy youth Rise up before thee, not by Fancy led, But moving stately at the side of Truth, Nor higher than the living stand the dead. (1–8) The registers of light and legibility established in the first two lines are intensified in the second stanza, as Landor describes the realization of Hare’s—and Landor’s—youthful vision. Such realized visions measure



it is not enough to serve the ‘God of light and song,’ for ‘[t]he breast must glow / Not with thine only, but with Virtue’s fire’ (11–12):

up to those of ‘Fancy,’ and the heroic deeds of Landor’s contemporaries are of stature equal to those of old. ‘Not higher,’ this most celebratory of Landor’s 1848 poems is careful to say, but perhaps by the end of the year he had come to a new reverence for the past and more moderate aspiration for ‘the living.’ Holding on to ‘the brightest vision of thy youth’ within the wisdom of age is no easy task. Its difficulty—and importance—is also a central theme in Clough’s Amours de Voyage, to which I now turn. *

*

*

Clough once described Amours de Voyage (written 1849–58, published 1858), his long poem about an English intellectual who loses his love during the French siege of the Roman Republic, as a ‘5 act epistolary tragi-comedy or comi-tragedy.’52 Comedic in its mock hexameters, colloquial diction, and dramatic and poetic ironies, the poem is tragic in its plot structure, refusing to marry its young lovers and ending instead with isolation and dislocation. Amours de Voyage also follows the momentum of tragedy in its movement toward discovery, the anagnorisis that Northrop Frye defines as ‘not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him [. . .] but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken.’53 In its concern with knowledge and insight, tragedy takes place in the world of experience, of unsentimentalized and unidealized existence. Claude, the protagonist of Amours de Voyage, suffers Hamlet’s fate of having ‘looked truly into the essence of things’ and seen that his ‘action could not change anything.’54 ‘Knowledge kills action,’ as Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, and Claude—and Clough—have been taken to task by readers ever since for espousing this very un-Victorian idea.55 Yet as Clough’s mixed genre suggests, as Blake knew, and as Nietzsche argues, the ‘terrible wisdom’ of experience exists in ‘necessary interdependence’ with the ideals of innocence, for it is those ideals that form the epistemological ground from which the poet voices his critique of the world as it is.56 The discovery Claude and the reader ultimately make is not that of the futility of action; rather, it is that a capitulation to knowledge and inaction, critique alone, creates for Claude a barren life.57 His anagnorisis conforms to convention, involving the tragic gap between the life he has made and the life he has forsaken. The life Claude forfeits is not only one of love but also one of political commitment and aesthetic experience. In his final letter, he bids




‘farewell’ to politics (not for the first time), calling it ‘things o’er / Which I can have no control,’ and he describes himself as dead to art, ‘hav[ing] no heart [. . .] for any marble or fresco.’58 Over the course of the poem, he has come to the knowledge that love, politics, and art are all ‘delusions,’ ‘factitious’ realms of falsehood and deception (passim). His final inaction in the realm of love, the element of the plot that has received the lion’s share of attention from the poem’s critics,59 takes place in the comparatively neglected contexts of his renunciation of politics and his despairing conclusion that even ‘Art is delusion,’ that his ‘recentest shape of an idol’ is ‘[b]eaten and broken-to-be like the others,’ as a passage in an early draft puts it (pp. 650–51). Claude’s obsession with exposing delusions aligns him with republican adherents of transparency and demystification—and like Cooper, Linton, and Landor, he worries particularly about the relation between language and action, words and deeds. In a draft, he calls ‘factitious’ ‘my own favorite word’ (p. 636). Yet this statement is, in keeping with the tone of the poem, deeply ironic. In Claude’s affection for exposing falsehoods, the reader sees the care and energy devoted to the things thus exposed: republican politics, Roman art and architecture, and falling in love with Mary Trevellyn. The reader further understands the poem’s allegiance with ‘factitiousness’ itself: a work of fiction rather than fact, in an ironic rather than transparent style, it scrupulously marks—and, in the process, covertly celebrates—the moment when imaginative vision takes off from eye-witness sight. The poem endorses the ‘painful’ and ‘abid[ing]’ knowledge Claude gains, but whereas his will collapses under its weight, the poem harnesses this knowledge for a critique of the world that produces it—and that possesses the terrible power to trump the intelligence and creativity of a young man of considerable talents (V: 201, 198). The final lines of the poem make clear this dynamic: So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil? Go, little book! [. . .] Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer. Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, Say, ‘I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days; But,’ so finish the word, ‘I was writ in a Roman chamber, When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.’ (V: 217–224)60




As the poem itself assumes the status of a positive action, Clough refrains from sentimentalizing its agency (sure to be deemed ‘evil,’ it ‘flits’ among ‘feeble and restless’ readers). Instead, the poem is emphatically real, a textual object that will be evaluated by critics, a historical document produced through human labor at a specific time and place. These lines convert the poem, in the words of Katharine Chorley, into ‘a redemption’— a redemption not so much of Claude as of the ideals he could not embrace: republican politics in an ‘inglorious’ age, art in a world of derision and destruction, and loving communion with others at a moment of war.61 In affirming the ideals of innocence within an unsentimentalized world of experience, then, the poem does precisely those things Claude cannot. In the face of Claude’s critique of delusion, the poem testifies to the legibility of language—not by embracing transparency and direct argument but by making use of fiction, image, and irony. Additionally, the poem heralds itself as an act of creation amid destruction, testifying to the value of republican ideas amid their perversion by the French and their defeat in the fall of Rome. Finally, Claude ends Amours de Voyage bound for Egypt, a symbolic movement backward in time to a more distant and remote civilization. The poem, on the other hand, everywhere declares its allegiance to the here and now of Europe, in its concern with the immediate and the everyday, in its use of colloquial language, in its modernized and controversial hexameters, in its epistolary form and novelistic ethos—and in its mixed genre of tragedy and comedy, affirming ideals without sentimentality, in part by laughing at them and those who hold them dear, in part by putting them into relation with the real world. Like Wordsworth’s Prelude (1850), to which passages of Amours de Voyage have often been compared, Clough’s poem was written in ‘times of fear’ and ‘melancholy waste of hopes o’erthrown,’ a ‘time / Of dereliction and dismay.’62 Before setting out for the Roman Republic, where he began the poem, Clough wrote mockingly of the ‘glorious anniversary of the great revolution of 48,’ which by year’s end had brought to power Louis Napoleon and seemed to promise his installation as ‘President for life,’ and of the movement among the ‘Great Powers’ to ‘restore the Pope! and crush the renascent (alite lugubri) Roman republic.’63 ‘The millenium,’ he concluded wryly, ‘won’t come this bout.’64 Unlike The Prelude, however, Amours de Voyage refuses to find succor in domestic peace, poetic vocation, or the powers of nature and transcendent imagination. The tragic ending of Amours de Voyage sounds this refusal, and seeing it in this context reveals something of its radical charge. Instead, Amours de Voyage negotiates the ideal and the real in a way that refuses both




sentimentality and the ‘spirit of withdrawal and seclusion from, and even evasion of the actual world’ for which Clough would later criticize Wordsworth.65 In its spirit of critical engagement with the ‘actual world,’ Amours de Voyage is Clough’s Songs of Experience (1794). So, too, it is Clough’s revision of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, to which it frequently alludes, another poem about the republican ideals of an individual poet in an age of resurgent monarchs and empty libertarian rhetoric. And in the abiding ‘hopefulness’ of which Clough declared himself still full in the letter quoted above, the poem recalls the poets and critics of the 1820s, who wrenched hope from the jaws of defeat. Amours de Voyage reminds us that republican poetry was always an aspirational art, and it was best when it was not only aware of the barriers to the realizations of its hopes, but also aware of the problems embedded in the hopes themselves. In other words, republican poetry rose to its artistic and political height when it married idealism and realism, when it was critically engaged with republicanism itself as well as with the world in which democracy would have to be realized. During the late 1840s, Clough was known around Oxford as ‘the wildest and most écervelé republican going.’66 ‘Citizen Clough,’ Matthew Arnold’s ‘republican friend,’ was said by contemporaries to possess an ‘excessive regard for the more democratic and socialist tendencies of opinion, both here and in France.’67 Clough’s republicanism may have been deemed ‘excessive’ because it earnestly applied political and economic theory to his own situation and privileges. His friend J. A. Froude reported that ‘Clough and I had come to a conclusion that we had no business to be “gentlemen”, that we ought to work with our hands, etc.’68 Unlike the ‘democratic speech[es]’ of the other young men at the University, according to R. W. Church, Clough’s avowal of ‘Chartism’ inspired ‘more dread’ because it was not ‘a pastime, and nothing more.’69 Ralph Waldo Emerson described the young Clough as full of ‘interest in life and realities,’ in the ‘questions so rife’ of the day, especially the ‘state of woman’ and ‘Communism.’70 He was, Emerson thought, the ‘best pièce de resistance, and tough adherence, that one could desire.’71 Arnold blamed what he saw as Clough’s artistic failures—and his early death—on these republican convictions. ‘Some life of men unblest / He knew,’ Arnold explains in ‘Thyrsis’ (1867), and as a result ‘his piping took a troubled sound’ (46–48). Abandoning the ‘happy, country tone’ of his early poems, Arnold says, Clough ‘learnt a stormy note / Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,’ and it proved too much for him: it ‘tasked thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat / It fail’d and thou wast mute!’ (222–26). F. R. Statham, writing at the turn of the twentieth




century, agreed that politics lay at the center of Clough’s artistic project. The ‘true key to Clough’s work and character,’ he argued, lay in ‘his deep and at times almost painful appreciation of the inequalities and unrealities of social existence.’72 To their peers’ vision of Clough as a thoroughgoing republican, Arnold and Statham add their conviction that—for good or ill—he was a republican poet, an author for whom the idea of democracy gave life and energy not only to his understanding of religion, society, and ethics, but to his theory of art, his practice of composition, and his sense of vocation.73 As his friendship with Emerson suggests, Clough was enmeshed in a transatlantic republican intelligentsia whose most prominent members also included William Allingham, Thomas Burbridge, Froude, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Francis Palgrave. Nearly as prominent at the time as was Emerson, Lowell played a more central role in knitting together British and American progressives, maintaining friendships with radicals including Linton and Clough, and publishing his republican and anti-slavery poems in British periodicals such as The Reasoner. In his capacity as editor of the new magazine The Atlantic Monthly, in turn, he published Amours de Voyage there in 1858. Clough’s ties extended not only westward but, as it were, downward to the world of popular republicanism. His frequent allusions to Chartism, coupled with his appropriation of its conventional rhetoric in poems such as ‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’ (1855),74 indicate his sympathy with popular radicalism. Take, for example, a canceled passage from the poem ‘[God be with you]’ (1849), which addresses a Scottish lass: Thrice blessed, oh, the life wherewith, new blood of strength and health Thy pure and democratic lips endue the child of wealth, Oh blessed hundredfold, to hold enfranchised by thy kiss The charter, and the freeman’s fee of unfactitious bliss: Of the lies of breeding, birth, and rank confession made, the grace Of absolution plenary to gain in thy embrace[.]75 These lines convey some sense of the attraction Chartism and republicanism held for middle- and upper-class intellectuals such as Clough, an attraction that went beyond disinterested concern for the working man and feelings of guilt or implication in exploitative political and social hierarchies. Being of wealthy parentage, a sort of bondage, sin, and falsehood, finds its antidote in cross-class love, which sets the wealthy man free, absolves him of wrongdoing, and gives him




access to truth.76 Offering liberation to rich and poor alike, Chartist and republican equality offers a vocabulary and an ideal of social relations that the poem playfully celebrates by grafting it onto the scene of romantic love. Men of wealth had, of course, long seduced poor Scottish lasses, and in the process they may well have employed, perhaps even believed, such leveling rhetoric. That Clough is in earnest (as well as aware of the humor) is clear from the full description of the emancipatory power of the Scottish girl’s ‘pure and democratic’ love that he gives in The Bothie of Toper-Na-Vuolich: A Long Vacation Pastoral (1848).77 In this long poem, also in hexameters, published six months before Clough began Amours de Voyage, the hero Philip Hewson finds resolution to his political and romantic trials in his love for Elspie, a Scottish girl whose cottage gives the poem its name. In his marriage to Elspie and emigration with her to New Zealand, Philip, ‘a radical hot’ and a ‘chartist,’ and also ‘a poet,’ is able to harmonize his commitments to art, politics, and love (I: 125; IX: 124; I: 124). The completeness of this resolution owes something to the sentimental glow that illuminates every element of The Bothie—its setting in bucolic Scotland, its vision of the joys of human integration with the natural world, its idealized portrait of feminine innocence and beauty, and its antipodal resolution, which some critics have deemed escapist.78 From the perspective articulated in The Bothie itself, the poem achieves this resolution by insisting that the ideal is intertwined with the world of the real. As his friend Hobbes explains, Philip’s marriage is ‘an allegory’ for the ‘duality, compound, and complex’ that unites ‘[o]ne part heavenly-ideal’ and ‘the other vulgar and earthy’ in all spheres of human endeavor, most especially politics and art (IX: 166, 169–70). ‘So the good time is coming, or come is it? O my chartist!’ he teases Philip, comparing his project to that of Gothic revival architecture: ‘So the Cathedral is finished at last, O my Pugin of Women[!]’ (IX: 151–52). In Amours de Voyage, the sentimental glow, exposed as veneer, has been wiped away. For Claude, neither love nor politics nor art has the power to rescue the world from its own corruption. Set in ‘[r]ubbishy’ Rome, a ‘disappoint[ing]’ city that quickly becomes a scene of international conflict, Amours de Voyage is fiercely unsentimental (I: 20, 13). Its portrait of respectable English womanhood, intellectual manhood, and gender relations, like its hero’s condemnation of the factitiousness beneath the rituals of bourgeois courtship, republican politics, and the grand tour, emphasizes at every turn the distance between the ideal and the real. Claude, with his unstable political allegiances, his letters, his




failure to propose, and his lonely travelling, is Philip’s doppelganger, condemned to live in the world of experience even if he cannot enjoy it. Yet the possibility of a ‘compound and complex’ connection between the real and the ideal only becomes more crucial as the ‘vulgar and earthly’ is gazed at keenly, without rose-colored glasses. Such was Clough’s commitment when he turned to Amours de Voyage. Accordingly, the plot follows Claude as he looks—witnessing the siege, gazing at the Sistine Chapel, watching Mary and her family—and as he meditates on what he has seen. Observation and vision are central themes in all three of the poem’s interlocking plots about love, art, and politics, as they are agents of plot and character development, fodder for formal experimentation, and a recurring analogy for knowing and, sometimes, for participating in the world. The first thing Claude ‘see[s] with my eyes’ when he arrives at Rome is that it is ‘vanity’ (I: 18).79 The politics of Claude’s response to Rome is implicit in his rhetoric of demystification and anticlericalism and in the charged significance, palpable for contemporary readers, of this city in the past and at this moment in history. It is also conveyed in the republican vocabulary Claude uses to describe the chafing at ‘limitation’ and longing for ‘freedom’ he feels throughout the city (I: 7, 216). He writes that he must ‘shrink and adapt myself’ to Rome, where ‘a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression / Still, wherever I go, accompanies [. . .] me’ (I: 35–37). Yet in the first Canto, it is only the Trevellyns who explicitly understand Rome—and Claude—in political terms. It is Georgina who tells her correspondent what any Briton in Italy would have known, that ‘the English are mostly at Naples’ and, as a canceled passage puts it more directly, that ‘people declare there is danger’ (I: 57, p. 619). Mrs Trevellyn hits the nail on the head when she ‘[q]uotes, which I hate, Childe Harold’ (I: 209). And it is Mary who sees that Claude is ‘frightfully selfish’ (I: 270), an observation that, coming in the last line of the canto, acts as a benchmark for his character as the poem unfolds. Claude’s selfishness is shaken in the opening letter of Canto II. The French have begun their siege, and Claude is thrust into the role of war correspondent: ‘I who avoided it all, am fated, it seems, to describe it’ (II: 15). What ensues is a sort of political awakening, even a conversion experience: I, who nor meddle nor make in politics,—I, who sincerely Put not my trust in leagues nor any suffrage by ballot, Never predicted Parisian millenniums, never beheld a





By emphasizing not only Claude’s previous disengagement from politics, but his particular aversion to visionary, revolutionary, and Chartist republicanism, Clough presents the siege as an event that upsets old allegiances—as a world-historical event.80 Claude becomes a critic not only of French aggression but also of ‘my stupid old England,’ which ‘a twelvemonth ago said nations must choose for themselves’ and ‘now, when a nation has chosen,’ refuses to ‘interfere’ (II: 23–25). That this moment of sympathy is a challenge to ‘his idols of thought and selfknowledge’ is clear in a passage included in early drafts, in which Claude ‘recant[s] and acknowledge[s]’ that politics ‘have something / Generous—something organic Creative and Art-like in them’ (p. 627). He attributes ‘the fervours / Of my republican heat’ to being ‘in love’ (p. 638). For a moment, Philip’s harmony of art, love, and politics seems within Claude’s grasp. In the letters that follow, Claude persists in his selfishness, however, electing not to join the Romans in their defense of the city and, famously, rationalizing his way out of the lowest threshold of masculine honor by answering ‘Really, who knows?’ to the rhetorical question, ‘Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female?’ (II: 67, 66). In Cantos III–V, Claude pursues his devastating critique of delusion, and disengagement intensifies into renunciation. ‘Farewell, Politics, utterly!’ he says, ‘What can I do?’ (III: 60). As Rome falls, he gives up his pursuit of Mary (V: 113–17). ‘[I]t is over, all that!’ he writes, in lines that merge his renunciation of politics and his abandonment of love: ‘I have slunk from the perilous field in / Whose wild struggle of forces the prizes of life are contested’ (V: 82–83). The original draft signals even more completely the negation of the playful, liberating fusion of love, art, and politics that animated poems such as ‘[God be with you]’ and The Bothie: ‘I have turned from the furious war, in / Whose wild struggle at best I could only have blown at the trumpet’ (p. 645). Tellingly, these lines sneer at the conventional image of the republican poet. They convey a dismissal of political verse. The insight that stands behind these renunciations is that the conception of republican politics he glimpses as the siege begins ‘is delusion, of course, as the rest’ (p. 627). As he does with his capacity to be seduced by ‘the rest’—Rome, love—Claude relegates his political



New Jerusalem coming down dressed like a bride out of heaven Right on the Place de la Concorde,—I, nevertheless, let me say it, Could in my soul of souls, this day, with the Gaul at the gates, shed One true tear for thee, thou pour little Roman republic! (II: 16–22)

enthusiasm to the realm of fantasy.81 The idea of participating in the defense of the city is a ‘waking [. . .] dream’ in which he hears the Marseillaise with ‘a sword at my side and a battle-horse underneath me’ (II: 58–59, 62). Similarly, his feeling after an early battle that he is ‘thankful they fought, and glad that the Frenchmen were beaten’ is undermined by its complicity in the ‘illusion’ he finds in the Romans’ patriotic hysteria, in which ‘men and women and papers / Scream and re-scream to each other the chorus of Victory’ (II: 161, 151, 159–60).82 In lines that anticipate Barrett Browning’s ambivalent portrayal of republican victory songs in ‘Mother and Poet’ (1862), Claude finds that the ‘chant of the martyr’ turns out to be ‘easier far, to intone’ than the ‘transparent delusion[s]’ voiced in exultant hymns, that ‘the kings of the earth are gathered and gone by together; / Doubtless they marvelled to witness such things, were astonished, and so forth’—as Claude brilliantly deflates such conventional republican rhetoric (II: 149, p. 629; II: 146–47). The idea of dying for democracy may be a ‘noble’ one, he writes, but the reality is quite another thing (II: 151). When the ‘smoke of sacrifice rises to heaven, [. . .] there is nothing remaining but ashes and dirt and ill odour’ (II: 153–55). Even the idea of the ‘organic Creative’ energy so central to his earlier ‘recantation’ of disengagement comes under assault as a dream: ‘Let us talk not of growth; we are still in our Aqueous Ages,’ Claude declares more than once (III: 59, 97).83 Yet this moment of critique and renunciation is not the end of the story. Just as he is in love even after he has given up the search for Mary, Claude continues to be ‘disturb[ed]’ by unfolding events and to possess visionary hopes even after he bids ‘Farewell, Politics, utterly!’— if anything, his vocabulary and analysis become more explicitly republican (p. 649, III: 60). This dynamic is most evident in early drafts of the poem. There, Claude had answered his rhetorical question, ‘Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle?’ with a vision of the agency of sacrifice: Lo they enter when least you expect it the soul of the tyrant Sowing division and doubt in the rigorous heart of the victor [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] inspiring Sons and daughters that yet shall be born to belie their fathers [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] in magnanimous might, emancipate, free, unimpassioned, [. ..] they move in the air and pass in the spirits of nations. (V: 118, p. 647)84




Even in the Atlantic Monthly text, in regard to which Clough told Lowell, ‘the poem [. . .] has been suppressed to the orthodox maturity of the ninth year,’85 Claude derides ‘the priests and soldiers’ who ‘possess’ Rome after the fall of the Republic, asking ‘ah! which is worst[?]’—a question elaborated on in the draft: ‘Which the saddest perversion and ruin of poor human nature?’ (V: 186–87, p. 649). Before the declaration ‘Time, I suppose, will subsist; the earth will revolve on its axis,’ manuscript A offers a full accounting of the political struggles that seem so intractable, so much contemporary instantiation of the enduring corruption of the world (V: 191, p. 650). Yet, if the Atlantic Monthly text is less explicit about the political meaning of the fall of the Roman Republic, less hopeful about its capacity to be remade as a prophet of democratic change, it is more complete in its own affirmations. There, in the final lines of Canto V, the poem itself assumes the function earlier drafts gave to the ‘souls of the brave,’ ‘go[ing] forth to the world’ and ‘flitting about many years from brain unto brain of / Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days’ (V: 217, 221–22). What is lost in specificity is made up in the scope of the poem’s ambitions. The siege becomes, like Philip’s marriage, an allegory whose significance lies not in the particular international power plays that produce it but, instead, in the ‘duality, compound, and complex’ that unites the ‘heavenly-ideal’ with the ‘vulgar and earthy’ in politics, love, and art (The Bothie, IX: 169–70). Amours de Voyage thematizes this duality as a matter of substantive argument, and it experiments with it as a matter of form. Take, for example, Claude’s visit to the Montorio hills, just before he leaves Rome in pursuit of Mary. In this passage, insight comes from the celebration, rather than the policing, of the boundary between those sights he sees directly with his own eyes, and those he infers, imagines, or wishes to see.86 The lines begin with an entirely imaginary vision of what he would see if he were not at Montorio but were instead overlooking Horace’s farm from the Sabine hills nearby: Tibur is beautiful, too, and the orchard slopes, and the Anio Falling, falling yet, to the ancient lyrical cadence; Tibur and Anio’s tide; and cool from Lucretilis ever, With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandusian fountain, Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:— So not seeing I sung[.] (III: 214–19) Not only in the particular landmarks, but also in its elliptical syntax, repetition, solemnity, and proper names, the passage echoes Horace’s




odes, one of which it loosely translates. The ideal manifests itself as the aesthetic here, as a vision conjured up by (and in) poetry and described in terms of its beauty. The beauty of Clough’s poem is emphasized in the process. The second line of the passage offers a tiny gloss on the hexameters, for example, connecting the downward movement of the river to their pattern of stress and dividing the feet neatly between the key words: ‘Falling, / falling / yet, to the / ancient / lyrical / cadence.’87 The boundary between the seen and the unseen is dwelt on, savored— never erased. In the lines that follow, Clough foreshadows the fall of the Republic, reminding readers that it was from the Montorio hills that the French would soon make their final, successful strike. The boundary between seen and unseen is more emphatically mapped in terms of the ideal and the real, the past and the ‘now’: So not seeing I sung; so now—Nor seeing, nor hearing, Neither by waterfall lulled, nor folded in sylvan embraces, Neither by cell of the Sibyl, nor stepping the Monte Gennaro, Seated on Anio’s bank, nor sipping Bandusian waters, But on Montorio’s height, looking down on the tile-clad streets, the Cupolas, crosses, and domes, the bushes and kitchen-gardens, Which, by the grace of the Tiber, proclaim themselves Rome of the Romans,— But on Montorio’s height, looking forth to the vapoury mountains, Cheating the prisoner Hope with illusions of vision and fancy,— But on Montorio’s height, with these weary soldiers by me, Waiting till Oudinot enter, to reinstate Pope and Tourist. (III: 229–39) In these lines, the attraction of the ideal realm of art is cast as a sort of enchantment or trance, in contrast to the unsentimentalized actual world Claude witnesses before him. Claude endows the prosaic sights of the city, its ‘domes’ and ‘kitchen-gardens,’ with the significance of metonym, making them stand for the residents in their claim to Rome’s ancient republican legacy. The passage denies this connection to the pastoral idyll of the Sabine hills, as the refrain ‘But on Montorio’s height’ reinforces. Shorn of proper names, Rome is described in plural common nouns that convey ubiquity rather than uniqueness. Yet these common nouns are not entirely divorced from the world of the aesthetic and the ideal, for they include picturesque tile-clad streets and gardens as well as




the architectural details that define the city at the heart of Christendom. Similarly, as Claude sees for a moment through the eyes of the Romans, glimpsing the ‘illusions’ they read in the ‘vapoury mountains’ from which, we know, destruction will come, he piles on word after word signaling factitiousness. This, too, is a sort of aesthetic vision, a reaching for the ideal, and it is part of Claude’s adamantly realistic description of the city. The real is everywhere animated by the ideal. The real and the ideal are further connected by their shared status as images. Appealing to the reader’s sense of sight, hearing, taste, and touch, the images testify to the immediacy and tangibility both of Claude’s imagined scene and the scene he sees at a distance. Yet another level of tangibility lies in the poem itself, which transforms Claude’s visions into hexameter verses that take on a physical existence when published, and whose effect as poetry is palpable and, in that sense, real. The emphasis on sound reinforces this layer of poetic reality, the assonance of the vowels rooting the experience of reading on the tongue and in the body, and the sonorous sensuality of the Italian names making poetry of places, all of which the reader must imagine. In these ways, the poem counteracts Claude’s attempt to demarcate the real and the ideal—and to choose between them.88 The poem does not undermine Claude’s analyses of the Romans’ illusions or the unreality of Horace’s Italy. What it does is incorporate them into a wider worldview. In the refrain ‘So not seeing I sung’ Claude emphasizes his ‘not seeing,’ while the poem uses accent, duration, and alliteration to emphasize ‘so,’ ‘see,’ and ‘sung,’ linking both imaginative vision and eye-witness sight to art and to the political lens through which Claude views the city. Barbara Hardy has asserted that ‘Clough’s lyrical utterance is given its intensity by being connected with a full sense of life in a way that usually works against the lyric grain.’89 In Amours de Voyage, the converse is also true, in that the poem’s sense of life is given its intensity by the vigor and fullness of Clough’s lyrical utterance. The poem’s poetic language—its imagery, rhythms, syntax, and above all its words and their ironic depth of meaning—proves remarkably vital and robust. It moves from philosophical meditations to colloquial oaths within the space of a few lines, as in a letter in which Claude admits he is beginning to fall in love, and then predicts that abstract thought will save him: But I am in for it now,—laissez faire, of a truth, laissez aller. Yes, I am going,—I feel it, I feel and cannot recall it,— Fusing with this thing and that, entering into all sorts of relations,




Tying I know not what ties, which, whatever they are, I know one thing, Will, and must, woe is me, be one day painfully broken,— [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] though the Rope sway wildly, I faint, crags wound me, from crag unto crag reBounding, or, wide in the void, I die ten deaths, ere the end I Yet shall plant firm foot on the broad lofty spaces I quit, shall Feel underneath me again the great massy strengths of abstraction, Look yet abroad from the height o’er the sea whose salt wave I have tasted. (I: 227–31, 247–52) The fullness of Clough’s language—and its resistance to Claude’s singleminded opposition to all things factitious—lies in large part in its many layers of irony.90 The ironies of this letter extend from Claude’s selfconscious portrayal of marriage as a sort of trouble or punishment and his punning on emotion, memory, and agency to his unintentionally revealing description of thought as akin to a noose and hyperbolic vision of ‘d[ying] ten deaths.’ The elliptical syntax of the second half of the passage also renders an ironic judgment on Claude, implying that he follows a less logical thought process than he professes. The hexameter, too, highlights the ironic layers of the passage. As early readers such as Henry Sidgwick noted, the meter is doused with irony: ‘Clough’s line is, and is meant to be, conscious of being a hexameter [. . .] the metre seems to belong to a style full of characteristic self-conscious humour.’91 But the effect goes deeper than this. In the second half of this passage, the hexameter’s emphasis on the stressed first syllables of the lines signals the importance of these words—rope, bound, yet, feel, look—and provides a gloss on the passage, one that reveals not its surface meaning but its ironic undercurrents, and those of the poem as a whole. Clough praised as ‘democratic’ language that was, as this passage is, not transparent but rather a ‘new and living instrument’ for the poet and his culture.92 In the first part of this passage, ‘our ordinary every day speech [is] rounded with grace, and smoothed into polish, chastened to simplicity and brevity without losing its expressiveness; and raised into dignity and force without ceasing to be familiar,’ as Clough wrote approvingly of the poetic language forged by Dryden in the wake of the English Civil War.93 Claude uses idiomatic and clichéd expressions, ironically invokes the rhetoric of political economy, and swings from hyperbole to self-mocking bathos. The looseness of the hexameter’s accentual meter allows these lines to mimic speech, while the falling rhythm pulls against the expectations bred in English readers by the prevalence




of rising iambs, a slightly disorienting effect that heightens the letter’s artifice. This craftedness is also signaled by plocic repetition of words and sounds, which creates balance within and across individual lines. ‘You may call it,’ as Clough did, ‘a democratic movement in the language.’94 As Isobel Armstrong argues, Clough achieves this democratization not so much through the importation of everyday speech into poetry as through its transformation into poetic lexis. Armstrong describes Clough’s poetry as ‘tightly disciplined, exacting eloquence from the most unimportant particles and phrases.’95 This discipline and care allow him ‘to evolve a form to which a politics was intrinsic and a language which was necessarily a democratic language.’96 The language of the second half of this passage is, for Armstrong, equally democratic despite its more elevated diction, for it too is the product of social relations, the particular language of a man of Claude’s time, place, and station.97 For John Goode, too, Clough’s language enacts the ‘radical significance of the thematic content of the poem.’ ‘Only a form which is in itself an experiment, which is prepared to float language and watch it become what it didn’t set out to be,’ he claims, ‘could have achieved [. . .] the poem’s radical discovery.’98 For the first readers of the poem, its hexameters were its most striking formal experiment, whether they approved of them or not—and most did not. While John Addington Symonds approvingly wrote, ‘His hexameters are sui generis, unlike those of any other writer in any language [. ..] he sets prosody at defiance,’ Clough’s friend J. C. Shairp complained, ‘[t]he Hexameters still do not go down with me. They give me a sense of Travestie.’99 As Joseph Phelan explains, Clough’s modernized hexameters align him with critics of ‘the deadening effect of the ancient universities on British intellectual and cultural life’ and with advocates of the ‘modern poem.’100 The power of the hexameter lay in its sense of capaciousness, its beauty, and the metrical freedom that came from the difficulty of translating it into English prosody. The dash in the above passage, severing ‘re-bounding’ mid-word, captures some of this liberation. Clough’s hexameters resemble Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung rhythm in more than their affinity with accentual meter; they, too, provided an escape from more engrained and well-trodden English prosodies by providing a new set of conventions that could be experimented with in new ways. As such, though they nod to classical prosody, they more powerfully resist Claude’s retreat into the art of the past and declare its relevance to the aesthetic debates and experimental currents of Clough’s day. Just as Clough’s language and prosody burst with life, his allegiance to fiction and its forms signals the commitment of Amours de Voyage




to a vital and dynamic interaction with the here and now. Claude’s critique of ‘factitiousness’ occurs in the context of a poem that emphasizes its craftedness and artificiality, makes truth claims founded in verisimilitude rather than fact, and models itself after that most contemporary of art forms, the realist novel. Like Aurora Leigh (1857), another verse novel about democratic politics, Amours de Voyage shares with the Victorian novel an emphasis on social relations, a structural reliance on intertwining love and political plots, and a deep interest in the psychological ramifications of political events. Whether one reads the poem as a novel of plot, a novel of character (as Stefanie Markovits does), or a novel of Bakhtinian carnivalesque hybridity (as Meg Tasker reads The Bothie, asserting that ‘the novelization of poetry is, in many ways, its democratization’101), the narrative elements of Amours de Voyage owe much to Clough’s understanding of the novel. ‘The modern novel is preferred to the modern poem,’ he would later write, because the novel ‘attempt[s] to include these indispensable latest addenda—these phenomena which, if we forget on Sunday, we must remember on Monday—these positive matters of fact, which people, who are not verse-writers, are obliged to have to do with.’ What Claude meant by ‘positive matters of fact’ was more than a realist method, certainly more than an urban setting or a love plot. He wanted poetry to consecrate the world of the real and the everyday. It should, he said, ‘convert into beauty and thankfulness, or at least into some form and shape [. . .] the actual, palpable things with which our every-day life is concerned.’ It should connect the ‘grievously narrow’ world in which each individual lives to ‘some central, celestial fact.’102 The idea of a ‘central, celestial fact’ captures something of Clough’s insistence on the mutual constitution of the ideal and the real, the world of ideas and the world of experience. Importantly, his belief in poetry’s ability to reconcile the two was founded as much in the unique expressive powers of poetry as in an agenda for mimetic content. Writing in 1853, Clough understands the appeal of the novel, its ability to ‘shake the hearts of men,’ but he chooses throughout his period of greatest productivity, between 1847 and 1851, to write poems, and no small number of them.103 Amours de Voyage seeks to ‘convert’ an exposé of the failures of ideals in the ‘actual world’ of experience into ‘beauty,’ into ‘form and shape.’ Ultimately, it is as Nietszche says of the hero of tragedy, ‘[h]ere, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing [. . .] Art saves him, and through art—life.’104 Or, as Seamus Heaney writes of poetry in particular,




when a poem rhymes, when a form generates itself, when a metre provokes consciousness into new postures, it is already on the side of life. When a rhyme surprises and extends the fixed relations between words, that in itself protests against necessity. When language does more than enough, as it does in all achieved poetry, it opts for the condition of overlife and rebels at limit.105 The final assertion of Amours de Voyage, accordingly, concerns its own status as art. ‘[S]o finish the word,’ the poem ends, speaking in its own voice, ‘I was writ in a Roman chamber, / When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France’ (V: 223–24). As Dorothy Mermin writes, ‘the last two lines remind us that the political events recorded in the poem were real ones, part of a long-continuing struggle between freedom and tyranny.’106 These lines place the poem in that ongoing struggle, and—as the emphasis on ‘the word’ implies—suggest that Amours de Voyage participates in republican politics not so much through direct argument about the local details of its political moment as through an artistic grappling with the deeper and more abiding issues it raises. Amours de Voyage acts through a poetic reckoning with the value of ideals in an ‘inglorious age’ that is marked above all, and at every turn, by their degradation and defeat. That Amours de Voyage is more than propaganda for the republican cause signals its importance in the history of republican poetry. It also reveals important aspects of the state of republican verse at midcentury. The formal ambitions and experimental energies of the poem suggest how the idea of democracy continued to inspire a poetics of freedom and liberation, a formal republicanism as much as a mimetic representation of it. These energies, which are present in Cooper, Linton, and Landor, suggest the power of republican thought to attract and inspire the most creative and incisive minds of the day. Both Cooper and Clough seek an aesthetic union of high and low modes of republican verse, one that parallels and propels the convergence of the elite and popular movements for democratic reform in Britain and abroad. Landor, Cooper, and Clough share a resurgent interest in classical forms, an engagement with the past that, as it had for Byron, fueled poetic intervention in the present. And, like Landor and Cooper, but far more completely, Clough exemplified the radical anti-didacticism of republican verse during the 1840s and early 1850s. A strong movement away from hortatory verse can be seen throughout republican poetry at this time, and is characteristic of the best works within it.




The sheer expansiveness of the topics explored in the poem—and, as a result, of the topics republicanism was seen to illuminate by ‘juxtaposition,’ to use another of Claude’s favorite words—demonstrates the extent to which republican thought had moved from the cultural and political margins into the turbulent center of Victorian life and thought. In Amours de Voyage, as in The Bothie before it, democracy touches on love, art, natural beauty, a young man’s vocation, international politics, the relation between an individual and his social worlds, the past and the present, and the power of poetic form itself. Italics, Linton’s definitional poems, and Purgatory of Suicides, too, are animated by a sense of the relevance of republican thought to the debates and dilemmas of the day, personal, philosophical and political. But in Clough, more than any other writer of his time, we see clearly the capaciousness of republican thought during these years and the extent of its reach into mid-Victorian life and letters. This diffusion of republican ideas into Victorian culture and society enabled the democratization of liberal thought and politics that produced popular liberalism in the 1860s. In a parallel development, it facilitated the incorporation of republican poetry into the theory and practice of art within ‘advanced liberalism,’ atheist freethought, and aestheticism—an incorporation that would spell both the triumph and the end of nineteenth-century English republican poetry.




Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne, 1867–1874

‘[O]ne must, I think, be struck more and more,’ Matthew Arnold mused in Culture and Anarchy (1869), ‘to find how much, in our present society, a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and, far more still, on what he reads during it.’1 In newspapers and especially in books, a man could gain access to the intellectual currents swirling around his private experience; he could get ‘a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits’ (5). It was a ‘time for ideas,’ Arnold thought, ‘an epoch of expansion; and the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas’ (57). Taking the pulse of his time, he traced its quickening pressure to the idea of democracy. ‘A new power has suddenly appeared,’ he wrote, a ‘new and more democratic force,’ urging its theories of government, humanity, and social relations upon members of Parliament and members of the public (43). The ‘old middle-class liberalism’ of mid-century had been replaced by the new democratic force, still so inchoate as to be ‘impossible yet to judge fully’ (43). John Morley, editor of The Fortnightly Review, also saw new, still unformed ways of thinking about democracy on the horizon, as he wrote in 1867, ‘There is in newspapers and in social conversation—which in an ordinary way is a dilution of newspaper—a great mass of shapeless, incoherent, fragmentary, vapoury ideas about democracy.’2 As men of letters, Morley and Arnold sought to use their writings to bring clarity to these ideas. Though they agreed on little else, they both believed that the written word stood at the heart of the politics of democracy in their ‘time for ideas.’ What was new about the ‘democratic force’ Arnold describes was that it encompassed both revolutionary republicanism, which he called anarchy, and the intellectual wing of liberal politics, which its proponents such as Morley, much to Arnold’s annoyance, tended to call culture. 133



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Both the atheist activist Charles Bradlaugh and the Comptean humanist Frederic Harrison had been caught in its sweep. As the cases of Morley and Harrison exemplified, over the course of the 1850s and early 1860s, the intellectual elite had come to embrace not only the extension of the franchise but ‘the ideal of democratic government, until then regarded as revolutionary by the educated classes.’3 They expressed deeply rooted aspirations for a more egalitarian society and agitated for the democratic ideal of equality as well as the more broadly shared ideal of liberty.4 Republican thought had become the ‘fiercer spirit,’ in George Meredith’s words, within the varied political and intellectual life of those who advocated for progress.5 The poetry produced within these spheres drew its energy, too, from that ‘fiercer’ republican spirit. As it did so, republican poetry was woven into the ideas about art that were emerging within secularism and advanced liberalism, from the nihilism of James Thomson in the National Reformer to the aestheticism of Algernon Charles Swinburne in Poems and Ballads (1866) and Songs before Sunrise (1871). This chapter begins with the poems Meredith published between 1867 and 1874 in The Fortnightly Review, which embody its conception of the role of the intellectual in ‘cultivat[ing] the true republican sentiment’ among its readers.6 I then turn to Thomson’s National Reformer poems, which exemplify the process through which secularist thought and atheist poetry drew upon, and transformed, republican antecedents. These dynamics come together in Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, in which a group of republican poems incorporates the democratic mythos of antitheism, the humanism and intellectual rigor of advanced liberalism, and the formalist emphases of aestheticism. In Swinburne, moreover, the republican poetry of these years found its historian and theorist. In his book William Blake (1868), both a critical biography and a manifesto of radical poetics, Swinburne describes republican verse as the ‘fusion’ of the political and artistic ‘senses’—a conception that in itself suggests his own fusion of various aesthetic and political programs.7 More particularly, Swinburne believed with Blake that the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ of ideological oppression supported the brute force of the state, and that poetry had a unique ability to sever these manacles.8 Formal strategies designed to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ were for him, too, at once the poetic expression of republican philosophy and a weapon in the war against ‘priestcraft’ and ‘kingcraft.’9 William Blake defines the nexus of formal and political agendas at which Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne wrote. In their own ways, all three experimented with the power of poetry, as Swinburne wrote, to ‘break and melt




in sunder’ the ‘clouds and chains’ binding the ‘[e]yes, hands, and spirits’ of humanity.10 They wrote from the centers of the republican thinking of their day, and with an abiding consciousness of the fervent debates about democracy that raged around them, in books and periodicals, across dinner tables and parliamentary aisles. Thomson published nearly all his works in his friend Bradlaugh’s militantly secularist and republican National Reformer, the organ of the clubs and lecture circuit that structured the ultra wing of committed democrats. By 1871, at the height of their agitation, the clubs claimed between six and ten thousand members and the National Reformer printed 6000 copies of each number.11 More élite republican opinion was centered around The Fortnightly Review under Morley’s editorship, with a circulation of about 30,000,12 the venue not only for Meredith’s republican poems of these years but many of the lyrics that would appear in Songs before Sunrise. Despite differences of opinion and strategy both within and between these circles, they shared commitments to antitheism, continental republicanism, and parliamentary reform. Thomson reviewed Meredith and Swinburne in the National Reformer, knitting the two circles together, and more ‘respectable’ radicals and secularists were known to frequent ‘infidel London,’ as when Swinburne and Meredith appeared at secularist events.13 Friendships facilitated these connections, particularly the close and lifelong relationship of Swinburne and Meredith, and also the correspondence Thomson maintained with William Michael Rossetti and, later, Meredith. Their poems reflect, as they helped to create, the sense of anticipation that characterized republican thought during these years, a period that has been called the ‘False Dawn’ of republican antitheism.14 Between 1865 and 1875, as a result of the success of continental democratic movements, the victory of the North in the American Civil War, and a surge in anti-monarchical sentiment in Britain, the proverbial republican sunrise seemed imminent. The sense of the relevance of democratic thought to a myriad of intellectual issues, forged at mid-century by writers such as Arthur Hugh Clough, came to full flower during these years, as republican thinkers interwove their vocabulary with those of secularism, advanced liberalism, humanism, and progressive sciences of the mind, society, and biology. They wrote about democracy as a cluster of interrelated ideas, a way of thinking and of understanding the world, as much as a theory of government. Yet even during these years, disappointment as well as triumph loomed on the horizon. The Second Reform Act of 1867 enfranchised



Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne, 1867–1874 135

urban male householders and fundamentally altered the rationale behind the suffrage from a theory of interest to one of representation, yet by the fall of 1868 supporters of the reform had grown disillusioned and dismayed by its effects. ‘The new voters have come into power,’ Morley wrote with frustration, ‘and they have returned the old kind of men, on the old principles.’15 He concluded that ‘[t]he persons who believe that a mere change in political forms, without a change in moral or religious ideas, or in the material circumstances of the community, is able to produce a revolution, ought to have their eyes opened.’16 Similarly, the defeat of Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian War was tempered by the memory that he had initially been elected under the auspices of universal suffrage, and it was followed not by stability but by the Paris Commune. The Commune fractured the alliances that had emerged under the banner of a ‘democratic and social republic’ in the late 1840s, splitting the extreme left wing of radicalism into socialists and republicans, and it seemed to confirm wary liberals’ fears regarding the dangers of popular sovereignty and the unfitness of the working class for political power. James Fitzjames Stephen spoke for such liberal anti-republicans in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), which ridiculed the excesses and dishonesty of those who held these ideals ‘as a religious faith,’ a group he thought alarmingly large: ‘It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human race collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love.’ Between himself and such notions he drew a line in the sand, categorically stating, ‘I do not believe it.’17 The liberal reaction against democracy articulated with such sparkling invective by Stephen signaled a larger tendency toward fracture and disunion that characterized progressive circles during these years as much as, if not more than, the cross-fertilizations embodied in the work of Thomson, Swinburne, and Meredith. If it was a ‘time for ideas,’ it was also a time for ideological upheaval. As Jeffrey Paul von Arx argues in his study of this generation, ‘the sixties and seventies was not a time of optimism and confidence among young radicals,’ a fact their compulsive talk of inevitable and rising progress should not obscure. They were, he believes, ‘a group fundamentally uncertain of its role and dissatisfied with the direction of public affairs.’18 Paradoxically, that uncertainty generated less handwringing than motivation, less confusion than insistence on their responsibility to shepherd in the changes they continued to hope hovered on the





horizon. That responsibility, as the case of Meredith shows, was well-suited for the special talents of an intellectual and a poet. *

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For the future, whoever attempts to estimate the direction and momentum of social tendencies in this country must count upon a close and ever-increasing sympathy between culture and democratic opinions, or he will omit what is probably the most important of all elements in the conformation of our political and social future. The extreme advanced party is likely for the future to have on its side a great portion of the most highly cultivated intellect in the nation, and the contest will lie between brains and numbers on the one side, and wealth, rank, vested interest, possession in short, on the other. – John Morley, The Fortnightly Review (1867) Morley had been editor of the Fortnightly for four months when, in April 1867, he heralded this alliance between ‘culture and democratic opinions.’19 A new era in British political life had been opened, he believed, by the election of an intellectual, John Stuart Mill, to Parliament and by the publication of a collection of Essays on Reform written mainly by university men in their twenties and thirties, members of what Morley called a ‘new generation’ of ‘men with ideas.’20 Morley’s friend Meredith was another of these ‘men with ideas,’ a poet, novelist, reviewer, and sometime editor whose association with the Fortnightly dated from its founding in 1865 under the editorship of George Henry Lewes. His novel about the Italian revolution of 1848, Vittoria, had appeared there in 1866, as would Beauchamp’s Career, in which a young radical candidate stands for Parliament, in 1874. Between these two bookends, Meredith published a series of poems that embody the ‘sympathy between culture and democratic opinions’ for which Morley and the Fortnightly circle had such high expectations. Meredith’s poems exemplify their effort not only to defeat ‘possession’ but also, in the words of historian Frances Knickerbocker, ‘to remake their minds’—and those of their nation—‘in the midst of an outer and an inner revolution.’21 Morley’s use of the word ‘culture’ paralleled Arnold’s in the soonto-be-serialized Culture and Anarchy.22 Literature and the arts were central to the realm of ‘highly cultivated’ intellectual endeavor comprised in the term. In addition to Meredith, the review published works by William Morris, Walter Pater, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Bell Scott,



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Swinburne, J. A. Symonds, and Anthony Trollope. This emphasis followed from the Fortnightly circle’s ambition to effect its inner revolution among what they called the ‘influential class,’ a term Morley’s biographer D. A. Hamer glosses as ‘a combination of the enlightened, progressive element in the middle class and the working-class leadership of the day.’23 They valued this revolution as highly as the parliamentary reform they vigorously supported, because they saw it as both the underpinning and the full realization of progress.24 ‘Those who most eagerly hope for an ultimate modification of existing institutions,’ Morley wrote in 1868, ‘most clearly perceive that for such a change as they desire to be enduring, there must first be a leavening of public opinion with ideas to which at present only a few men have reconciled themselves.’25 ‘What we all have to seek is the modification and instruction of the current feelings and judgments of our countrymen,’ he told fellow contributor Harrison in 1871, adding, ‘[t]his is the only way to ripen them for change.’26 Harrison agreed, arguing in an essay the following year for ‘[s]ocial, moral, and intellectual remedies,’ rather than political acts.27 The particular issue in question in Harrison’s essay was ‘the ultimate adoption of the republican form’ of government.28 Though the Fortnightly afforded a forum to a wide range of liberal opinions, as ‘advanced thinkers’ most of its writers were republicans.29 As John Burrow explains, ‘[i]t was the democratic and republican enthusiasms’ of this ‘generation of young radical liberals, in the fifties and sixties, which cut them off from the more cautious Whiggism’ of their forefathers.30 These intellectuals embodied what Eugenio Biagini calls the ‘remarkable’ incorporation of radical and republican political thought into the ideology of ‘ruling elites,’ creating the popular liberalism that Meredith identifies in the early 1870s as ‘the active force in politics.’31 Yet theirs was a new mode of republican politics, a republican liberalism. They believed that ‘the ultimate adoption of the republican form’ of government was ‘as certain as the rising of to-morrow’s sun,’ but they also believed that ‘all practical men have agreed to await’—not to hurry—‘its coming.’32 ‘Better than all attack on monarchy is the cultivation of the true republican sentiment,’ Harrison argued. 33 For Meredith, the priority granted to fostering a ‘republican sentiment’ shaped the contours of progressive art. Poems and novels, rather than speeches or petitions, would pave the way for the democratic cause. A specifically moral and cultural agenda had been laid out for republican progress—and the Fortnightly was its special vehicle. As one of the poets of the party of advanced thinkers, Meredith espoused a rigorously intellectual conception of poetic craft and the role




of poetry in society. It is ‘the ideas of men,’ he claims in Beauchamp’s Career, that constitute ‘the centre and throbbing heart’ of ‘[t]his day, this hour, this life, and even politics.’ Whereas in novels such as Beauchamp’s Career, which he was composing during these years, he attempts to illustrate the force of ideas in the world, to ‘paint for you what is,’ in his poems he seeks to anatomize the structure of ideas in the mind itself.34 The techniques that Meredith develops in his Fortnightly poems, particularly his use of metaphor and character, constitute a poetic technology for investigating and changing ‘the ideas of men.’ These techniques relate to the larger mission of the Fortnightly in at least two ways, by translating its prose rhetoric into poetic forms and by embodying at a most fundamental level its ambition to remake the minds of its generation. In Meredith’s poems, the advanced liberal appears in the guise of a supple yet disciplined mind, ‘fighting for poor humankind’ against the forces of vested interest and bourgeois comfort, the ‘men who what they are would be,’ content in their ‘rapacity’ and ‘[p]enned in their narrow day.’35 Echoing Morley’s division of the political landscape into ‘brains and numbers’ and ‘possession,’36 Meredith describes the poet as the exemplar of the progressive intelligentsia, ‘forewarning[ ]’ the nation that ‘[s]he destruction drinks in gold’ and working for ‘the growth of brains.’37 The poet’s allegiance to ‘growth’ in ‘Aneurin’s Harp’ (1868) signals a more general metaphorical scheme that structures alike the Fortnightly’s political rhetoric, particularly in Morley’s discussions of parliamentary reform, and Meredith’s verse. That scheme involves the contest, in Morley’s words, between ‘the party of movement and the party of obstruction,’38 the dominant metaphor of the sonnet Meredith wrote for Morley in June, 1867: try thy steel. Thou [. . .] wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful through. (‘Sonnet to —’ 10–14). Strong as ‘steel,’ Morley’s writings show their power not by their rigidity but by the movement they produce. The word ‘motion’ and metaphors of movement become a code in Meredith’s writing for political reform (as in The Egoist [1879], where it stands in without any other referent for the 1867 Reform Bill).39 Meredith told fellow Fortnightly contributor Moncure Conway, for instance, that Beauchamp’s Career was ‘an attempt to show the forces round a young




man of the present day, in England, who would move them, and finds them unalterably solid.’40 To his friend Frederick Maxse, he wrote, ‘Democracy must come and the sooner it overflows rulers who are cowardly, the better for all. We say—Democracy, as if it were some deadly evil; whereas it is almost synonymous with Change. Democracy never rests. The worst of it is that it can be violent in its motion.’41 The democratic change that ‘overflows’ recalcitrant rulers like a swelling tide appears in ‘Lines to a Friend Visiting America’ (1867—the friend is Morley), in which the ‘experimental’ spirit of America ‘[d]rive[s] onward like a flood’s increase.’42 In ‘Aneurin’s Harp,’ the people of Britain are a ‘tide of races / Rolled to meet a common fate’ (129–130). Meredith’s tendency to find images of motion and obstruction in nature reveals much about his theory of metaphor. As Gillian Beer explains, he believed metaphors ‘enable’ writers, and in turn their readers, to ‘understand levels of our being which would otherwise remain inchoate and beyond the reach of reason.’43 The natural world represents a link between such abstractions and our everyday powers of perception and understanding. Meredith illustrates this idea when, in Beauchamp’s Career, Cecilia Halkett comes to understand the ‘political exposition’ she has heard the night before by finding its reflections in the natural world she sees during a solitary walk—a journey that, in typical Meredith fashion, becomes another metaphor for thought: ‘it was only by mentally translating it into imagery that she could advance a step.’44 Cecilia’s journey is from the mind, through natural images, back to the mind, where she ‘advances’ toward a new understanding. So, too, Meredith uses images drawn from nature as a vehicle for opening up and transforming his readers’ thoughts, to make them as supple as the flowing water that wears down the ‘barrier rock’ of conventional and habitual thinking (‘Sonnet to —’ 13). As George Trevelyan writes, Meredith’s metaphors are ‘directed more to the mind than to the eyes and ears,’ even when they evoke ‘the richness of his imagination’ and its lively interaction with the natural world.45 In his ‘Fragment on Sandro Botticelli,’ which appeared in the Fortnightly in August, 1870, Pater describes the Italian painter’s use of nature in similar terms. Departing from ‘mere naturalis[m],’ Botticelli uses natural forms in a ‘visionary’ way: the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data before it as the exponents of ideas, moods, visions of its own; with this interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante, the





For Meredith, too, the natural image carries both ‘importunate reality’ and ‘ideas, moods, visions.’ His poem ‘In the Woods,’ which appeared in the same issue of the Fortnightly, exemplifies his intellectual and ‘visionary’ representations of the natural world.47 The first two stanzas establish the poem’s blend of naturalistic verisimilitude and symbolist weight: Hill-sides are dark, And hill-tops reach the star, And down is the lark, And I from my mark Am far. Unlighted I foot the ways. I know that a dawn is before me, And behind me many days; Not what is o’er me. (I: 1–9) Privileging spatial relations over visualizable imagery, the opening stanza at once evokes and strains emblematic instances of the greater Romantic lyric, the ‘steep and lofty cliffs’ that ‘connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’ and the midnight crisis of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode.’48 The hills that ‘reach’ only one, unspecified ‘star’ and the ‘lark’ that is somehow ‘down’ establish a psychological geography within which the distance of the poet from ‘my mark’ becomes intelligible. Meredith attempts the canonical resolution of the Romantic crisis ode, a renewed sense of the poet’s powers of creation and a virtuosic rendering of their inspiration and mirror, the fecund beauty of the natural world. Embracing ‘the light in me’ and renouncing the ‘spells’ and ‘charms’ of religion, he listens to the voice of the ‘woodland wave’ telling him to ‘Take up thy song from woods and fields / Whilst thou hast heart, and living yields / Delight’ (II: 4, 26, 27, 32; III: 1–3). Yet even as a ‘sunny March day’ dawns with all its ‘butterfl[ies]’ and ‘winged seeds,’ the poet reflects that there have been many times when ‘looked I on the



scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle structure of his, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes, that all may share it, with sensuous circumstances.46

green earth we are rooted in’ only to find ‘nothing of love’ but only ‘good and evil at strife, / And the struggle upward of all’ (IV: 2, 4, 5; V: 13, 15, 20–21). Even in a persistently naturalistic poem such as ‘In the Woods,’ Meredith imbues the natural world with the weight of social relations and philosophical problems. As Jack Lindsay observes, because his vision is social and political, nature for Meredith is ‘something more than a healing source to which man returns, a great force with which he aspired to identify himself in moments of exalted outpouring.’49 In the end, the poet embraces a middle way between a disillusioned materialism (very like that James Thomson would adopt) and a ‘lust after life’ that ‘clings to it’ and chokes it (VI: 6, 14). The middle way, becoming a ‘lover of life’ who ‘flings it’ away out of a sense of abundance, is explained most powerfully by an image: ‘The lover of life holds life in his hand, / As the hills hold the day’ (VI: 1, 18, 4–5). Returning to and transposing the opening images of the poem, Meredith’s metaphor secures resolution through a new mode of poetic virtuosity. For Lionel Stevenson, in this poem Meredith ‘gave utterance’ to a new ‘conviction’ about his poetry, one that clarified its relation to his verse novel Modern Love (1862), to his novels, and to the world for which he wrote. In ‘In the Woods,’ he ‘turned to presenting his poetic vision of reality through symbols and gnomic apothegms, rather than by literal portrayal of human types,’ and he found those symbols in natural forms, ‘trees and hills and the southwest wind [. . .] the poet’s best clues to the essential meanings of life.’50 The symbolism of ‘In the Woods’ opens it up to a reading as a political allegory. Such a reading is reinforced by other Fortnightly poems in which the wild wood symbolizes the contemporary situation of Britain, Morris’s ‘On the Edge of the Wilderness’ and ‘The Dark Wood,’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Cloud Confines.’51 Rossetti begins ‘The Cloud Confines,’ for instance, by declaring, ‘The day is dark and the night / To him that would search their heart’ (1–2). Like ‘In the Woods,’ Rossetti’s poem connects epistemological problems—‘Strange to think by the way, / Whatever there is to know, / That shall we know one day’ (10–12)—to political ones, since what is difficult fully to know is the meaning of war and peace. The sense that the late 1860s and early 1870s represented an ‘eve’ in a ‘world’ that ‘to me seemed nowise good,’ as Morris writes in ‘The Dark Wood’ (1–2), runs throughout the Fortnightly, a measure of the worries and pessimism that, as much as a faith in progress, united its writers. Yet the deep politics of ‘In the Woods’ are formal and conceptual rather than mimetic. As the genre most closely associated with the inner life of the individual, lyric poetry bore a close




relation to the advanced thinkers’ ambitions of remaking minds. But Meredith worries about the egoism and sentimentality he thought were endemic to the lyric mode. ‘[A] habit of lyrical composition’ vitiates the mind of the poet, he argues in a review of the poet Robert Lytton, for whereas ‘[a] large and noble theme has a framework that yields as much support as it demands[,] [l]yrics yield none.’ ‘[W]hen they are not spontaneous, they rob us of a great deal of our strength and sincerity. If they are true things coming of a man’s soul, they are so much taken from him: if the reverse, they hurry him rapidly to waste,’ he maintains. Nevertheless, the lyric mode offered the poet a means of reshaping the deepest emotional as well as intellectual instincts of his readers. ‘A great lyrist’ such as Swinburne could use the lyric for a higher purpose: ‘inflamed by the woes of an unhappy people throbbing for fulness of life and freedom, [he] sings perforce; but he has a great subject, and we do not see that it is his will which distinctly predominates in his verses.’52 The subordination of the poet’s will to the ‘great subject’ about which he writes is the theme of several of Meredith’s Fortnightly poems. ‘Lines to a Friend Visiting America,’ for instance, mentions the loneliness he suffers from his ‘lost kinsfellowship’ with Morley: ‘I [. . .] [f]eel shuddering like the winter tree, / [. . .] The leaf that clothed me is torn away; [. . .] I am bare, and bleed’ (st. vii–ix). The bulk of the poem, however, suppresses this emotion in favor of charging Morley with a mission in the United States, to heal the breach between American and British democrats opened up by the Civil War, during which British élites and newspapers supported the South. Similarly, in ‘Aneurin’s Harp’ the poet must rise to the task of writing about ‘England’s state’ despite his weariness (132). ‘Know we not our wrongs, unwritten / Though they be, Aneurin?’ he asks; and he complains, ‘Sword, / Song, and subtle mind [are] all ignored’ (114–16). In the final stanzas of the poem he musters his will and brings a stinging indictment against the nation. Meredith did not usually approach the ‘great subject’ of ‘England’s state’ with bardic declamations, however. In his novels and in most of his poems, he paired his interest in ‘mental action’ and metaphor with an enduring interest in character.53 He calls Nevil Beauchamp a ‘type,’ for instance, and claims that ‘his History’ is ‘a picture of the time.’54 The title character of his narrative poem ‘Phaéthôn’ (1867) is also a type, in this case for the unmitigated egoism that brings about tragedy.55 The poem, which tells the story of Phaéthôn’s fateful ride upon his father Phoebus’s chariot of the sun, does so largely by presenting the words and thoughts of the ‘tender youth’ and inviting the reader’s sympathy as well as condemnation (10). ‘ “Rule of day give me; give it me,”’ Phaéthôn says; ‘“Give me place




that men may see me how I blaze, and transcendingly, / I, divine, proclaim my birthright” ’ (14–16). He does good to others only at the moment of death, falling ‘as a glad rain-fall’ and bringing ‘revival to the greenery of our earth’ (118, 121). In a fitting reflection of this life-giving death, he finds new life in a beautiful form, as ‘a bruised purple cyclamen’ (125). In his lust for power, his desire to effect his own dawn, and his egoism, he is the sort of ‘figure[ ]’ that poetry can ‘animate’ in order to ‘reflect us, and on us,’ as Meredith explains this function of poetry in a letter to Morley.56 ‘Phaéthôn’ resembles one of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues in that its ‘morality is all sympathy,’ as Pater describes the ethics of Botticelli’s visionary realist paintings. ‘[I]t is this sympathy,’ Pater explains, ‘conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.’57 Consistently linked to Browning by reviewers for their ‘circuitous and somewhat recondite style,’ Meredith is also tied to him by their shared interest in character and its relation to what an early reviewer calls ‘social problems.’58 Like that of Meredith, Browning’s ethical aesthetics of character has a distinctly liberal cast. A self-proclaimed liberal poet with sympathies for Italian and French republicanism, during these years Browning published his masterpiece of ethical aesthetics and Italian history, The Ring and the Book (1868–69), and he composed Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society (1871), a long monologue in the voice of a man very like Louis Napoleon after his defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, as well as Balaustion’s Adventure (1871), in which the heroine risks her life to defend and rejoin Athenian democracy, ‘the life and light / Of the whole world worth calling world at all!’59 Balaustion secures her freedom, saves her comrades, and finds love all by reciting a play by Euripides, a playful yet sincere testament to the power of art in the service of civilization. These poems resonated deeply with the ideals and commitments of Meredith and the Fortnightly. Character was an important lens of analysis in the Fortnightly generally. Influenced by Meredith’s conviction that the lives of individual men and women opened a window onto their historical moment, Morley undertook biographical studies of the major figures of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.60 He wrote in relation to Byron, for instance, that ‘[t]he sublimer masters [. . .] come to us with the size and quality of great historic forces, for they represent the hope and energies, the dreams and the consummation, of the human intelligence in its most enormous movements.’61 Coming to understand such figures in all their complexity was to participate in the ‘process [by which] certain things




come to be regarded as right, and certain other things as wrong,’ ‘a moral movement, which follows after and depends upon a purely intellectual energy.’62 Discussion of particular characters, in this way, fostered the development of each individual reader’s character, his or her personal virtue. Morley and Meredith further agreed that this sort of character was under assault from a variety of sources, especially its erosion into mere selfishness or egoism. As one of Mill’s disciples—Stefan Collini calls him ‘Mill’s representative on earth’—Morley endorsed Mill’s praise of individuality in the face of the pressures of conformity.63 In the struggle between ego and the ‘common good,’ a revivified and robust model of character was a central weapon, and the very word ‘character’ became a watchword of this milieu.64 Meredith takes these ideas for granted when, in the ‘Prelude’ to The Egoist, he prescribes a course of literature to cure the ‘malady of sameness, our modern malady.’65 ‘Art,’ he says, ‘is the specific.’66 Morley’s essay on Byron appeared in November, 1870, as Meredith was working on the best known of his Fortnightly poems, ‘France—1870.’67 The essay, which Meredith called ‘admirable’ and whose style he confessed he envied, provides a backdrop for his ode, which took up the whole history of French republican government from the 1789 revolution to the stinging defeat of Louis Napoleon in the Franco-Prussian War.68 What the essay and the ode share in their most fundamental note of resonance is an attempt to harness republican poetry for the cause of advanced liberalism. Their reliance on the history and conventions of republican verse coexists alongside their critique of the excesses of republican thought and practice. Calling Byron the ‘poet of the Revolution,’ Morley finds ‘something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism of his poetic spirit’ even while he admits that Byron’s ‘idealisation of revolt’ and ‘[b]are rebellion’ means that ‘it is impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former generation.’69 For his part, Meredith praises the ideals of the 1789 revolution while condemning the French people for their lust for military conquest and the suffering and bloodshed it has wrought across Europe. His ode attempts to isolate those ideals from the violence France has unleashed in their name. In ‘France—1870,’ Meredith performs this isolation by way of an explication of the conventions of republican poetry. The ode echoes Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Swinburne’s ‘Ode on the Insurrection in Candia’ (1867), which Meredith called ‘the most nobly sustained lyric in our language, worthy of its theme’ and which he first reacted to with a feeling of ‘envy.’70 It figures democratic victory as a ‘dawn of splendour’ and revolution as a ‘fire’ that ‘kindle[s] bliss’ (V: 1, IV: 1, III: 11). The ode is




structured by a contrast between darkness and enlightenment, in which the blindness of superstition and mental oppression is lifted by a poetics of vision and demystification. Meredith’s most passionate Fortnightly poem, the ode is written in an elevated and emphatic diction mirroring his claim that in such ‘lyrics the originality lies in the fervour of the expression’ rather than in ‘poetic ideas or conceptions.’71 As Sheldon Amos would write the next month in his enthusiastic review of Songs before Sunrise, the poem’s ‘transports of passion[ ]’ are ‘transmuted [. . .] into patriotic sorrows [and] hopes.’72 ‘France—1870’ is Meredith’s most conventionally republican poem. Yet it also seeks at every point to rein in the energy and momentum it draws from republican poetry. The ode’s pattern of imagery, like its substantive argument, balances its enthusiasm for the legacy of the France that once was a beacon for republican thought against its recognition that this flame has been extinguished by militarism. The imagery of the beacon, in which France ‘sunlike stood / Upon the forehead of our day, / An orb of nations, radiating food / For body and for mind alway,’ is crushed by the appearance of its ‘iron heel’ (I: 1–4). Meredith’s new metaphor puts a check on the liberatory associations and theory of historical progression embedded within the trope of light. The opening stanzas of the poem develop the ramifications of this shift in metaphor from sun to iron heel, as Meredith uses a refrain, ‘That is France!’ to definitively tie the nation to its violent misdeeds rather than the utopian possibilities that inspired them. Similarly, the final lines fuse the conventional tropes of light, vision, and mental liberation that have appeared throughout this ode to the trope of rising water that appears in Meredith’s other Fortnightly poems: Strength give thee, like an ocean’s vast expanse Off mountain cliffs [. . .] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] as a river forward. Soaring France! Now is Humanity on trial in thee: Now may’st thou gather humankind in fee: Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll; Make of calamity thine aureole[.] (XI: 46–53) In these lines, the powerful waters of a ‘purer’ France that has abandoned its militaristic lust represent the victory of reason over the madness of war and superstition (XI: 21). The circle of light now surrounds ‘soaring France’ as it recognizes the false paths taken in the wake of the revolution




and finally learns reason’s lessons. The poem’s resolution, enacted in the conjoined metaphors of advanced liberalism and revolutionary republicanism, points the way forward. If republicanism needed liberalism to temper its extremes, liberalism also needed republicanism, as Meredith writes in Beauchamp’s Career, to give ‘spice’ to its ‘feast’ (114). ‘Delicious and rapturous effects are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a chance infusion of the fiercer spirit, a flavour of Radicalism,’ he reflects (114). Once again mixing his metaphors, he describes the relation between the two closely related schools of thought in a way that reveals their aesthetic as well as political interconnection. Meredith could claim some credit both for this ‘infusion’ of the ‘fiercer spirit’ of republican poetry into the literary culture of advanced liberalism, and perhaps also for the ‘inner revolution’ it sought to bring about in the hearts and minds of the readers of the Fortnightly. By the same token, republicans could claim some of the credit for the democratic reforms enacted by liberal governments over the following decade, from the 1872 adoption of the secret ballot to the 1884 Reform Bill and the 1885 Redistribution Act. By minimizing vote coercion, extending the vote to all but the poorest men, and standardizing electoral districts, these reforms fulfilled republican demands stretching back to the 1790s. The ‘inner revolution’ fomented by the ‘men of ideas’ had made good on the close alliance of ‘brains and numbers.’ The National Secular Society and its organ, the National Reformer, was also part of the liberal alliance, difficult to ‘distinguish,’ as Edward Royle writes, ‘from the rest of the radical wing of the Liberal party.’73 Yet for Thomson, to whom I now turn, the materialist atheism of the National Reformer posed deeper challenges to republican poetry than the advanced liberalism of the Fortnightly had for Meredith. In the end, the tropes and themes of republican poetry proved still more intrinsic to Thomson’s poems than to Meredith’s, providing not only their ‘spice’ but also the forms and strategies through which they contested and, ultimately, affirmed republican poetic ideals. *

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In 1874, the year his best-known poem, The City of Dreadful Night, appeared in Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer, James Thomson told William Michael Rossetti that he published his work there because ‘I can say in it what I like how I like; and I know not another periodical in Britain which would grant me the same liberty or license.’74 Beyond the




freedom to advocate the ‘extreme views,’ as he characterized them, of the National Reformer, Thomson’s liberty extended to dissenting from the paper’s own most cherished ideas.75 He repudiated its faith in the perfectibility of humanity and the imminent dawn of republican freethought, and he ridiculed its respect for poetry ‘only as a club to hit parsons and lords on the head with.’76 While the national reformers looked forward to what the title of a regular column styled as the ‘Day-Break,’ Thomson wrote poems about an eternal, dreadful night. Such inversions of republican tropes abound in Thomson’s poetry. ‘[T]he most Shelleyan poet of the nineteenth century,’ according to Isobel Armstrong, Thomson is Shelleyan not in his reproduction of the earlier poet’s visionary stance but in his interrogation of its assumptions, strategies, and claims.77 Thomson’s symmetrical relation to Shelley is described by Jerome McGann in terms of ‘myth’ and ‘anti-myth.’ The difference between the two, he explains, is ‘the difference between hope and despair. The movement of Shelley’s myth must be ultimately creative, whereas the movement of Thomson’s anti-myth must be ultimately entropic.’78 His dissent from republican hope leads Thomson to negate the central conventions of republican verse, but in so doing he reinforces their pivotal role, as in the refrain of ‘A Polish Insurgent (1863)’ (1866), ‘No hope!’ In his National Reformer poems, Thomson engages critically with the tropes and arguments of republican poetry, at times by harnessing them directly, but more often by inverting, parodying, or scrutinizing them—never by abandoning them. Thomson’s cantankerous relation to republican verse revolved around two principal nodes of dispute: the strategy of demystification and the ideal of an egalitarian fraternity of humanity. By turns embracing and refuting these cornerstones of republican poetry and politics, Thomson discovers a dialectical third, a set of atheistic tropes that simultaneously flag and differentiate themselves from their republican antecedents. In this way, Thomson’s secularist poetry emerges directly from his critical engagement with republican verse. His work exemplifies, at a high level of technical concentration and literary ambition, the roots of atheistic poetry more generally in its vigorous debate with republican poetry. That debate took place amidst the larger controversy surrounding democracy, poetry, and society that occurred during the 1860s and 1870s. As his equivocation about ‘liberty or license’ suggests, Thomson valued the National Reformer because in it he could ‘assert and put in practice an Englishman’s right’—presumably extended to a Scotsman living in London—‘to do what he likes,’ as Matthew Arnold described the desire of the people in the era of the Second Reform Bill.79 The irony




was that Thomson was following in Arnold’s poetic footsteps. Having written an early poem ‘Suggested by Matthew Arnold’s Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (written 1855), he continued to explore themes resonant with those of Arnold’s own youthful work, the possibility of meaning and action in ‘this sordid, restless life of ours.’80 Even the course of reading he prescribed for himself, in order to transform his juvenile effusion ‘The Doom of a City’ (written 1857) into a mature reckoning with the problem of theodicy in the nineteenth century, sought guidance from ‘the best that is known and thought in the world.’81 Yet one can only guess that Arnold would have found the work of the ‘laureate of pessimism’ to epitomize the ‘morbid’ poem in which ‘a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance.’82 While Bradlaugh was goading the masses to ‘break[ ] down the Park railings’ during the Hyde Park Riots, Thomson was indulging in a poetry that was the opposite of culture.83 Seen in this context, Thomson’s work, especially The City of Dreadful Night, takes on the beveled edge of a literate polemic. His poems display all the desire for erudition of a poet-critic such as Arnold, alongside all the pugnacity and moral righteousness of a secularist leader such as Bradlaugh. The two edges meet in the posture of the autodidact. Though better educated than Thomas Cooper, like him Thomson is simultaneously eager to display his learning and proud of the marginality that proves his political integrity.84 To the end of his life, Thomson considered himself an ‘outsider[],’ one of those ‘who have no Alma Mater to look back upon either with gratitude or contempt.’85 Through the scrim of all these poses shines the fiery and independent man who disagreed vigorously with the editor on whose patronage he depended and with the authors in whose footsteps he self-consciously trod. Equally importantly, however, this context suggests the antiestablishment stakes of Thomson’s poetic project—and the ways they inhered in aesthetic choices as much as substantive arguments. The morose tone of his poems, what Anne Ridler calls Thomson’s ‘monotony of self-pity,’ carries a political valence that cuts against both the fervent optimism of republican freethought and the demand for action and disinterestedness levied by Arnold’s ideal of culture.86 According to Bertram Dobell, Thomson’s biographer and literary executor, his first literary idol was Byron, whom, at fifteen, he ‘hugely admire[d].’ A ‘year or two later he fell under the dominion of Shelley, to whom he ever afterwards remained faithful.’87 This occurred in about 1850, while Thomson was training to become a schoolmaster in the army. Over the next thirty years, he wrote eight essays and a poem about




Shelley, took his middle initial for his nom de plume ‘B. V.’ (Bysshe Vanolis), and dedicated ‘Weddah and Om-El-Bonain’ ‘to the Memory of the Poet of Poets and Purest of Men, Percy Bysshe Shelley, with the gratitude and love and reverence of the author.’88 It was this poem that brought Thomson to the attention to William Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, including Swinburne,89 who was for his part second only to Shelley as the favorite poet of the National Reformer.90 These were authors Thomson knew well. Though he traced his lineage backward to Shelley and Blake, the Italian nationalist Leopardi, and the German Romantic poet Novalis (the third letter of whose name provided the other half of Thomson’s literary initials), he also avidly read and reviewed the work of his contemporaries, including Swinburne, Meredith, Browning, and Walt Whitman. Thomson interpreted these writers’ works in terms of their relation to republican and atheistic thought. He viewed Meredith, for instance, as a republican writer whose ‘great masterpieces’ were the novels about the mid-century Italian revolutions, Emilia in England (1864) and Vittoria, and he urged his readers to ‘study’ two sections of the latter that had recently been republished under the titles ‘Portrait of Mazzini’ and ‘Mazzini and Italy.’91 He used Henry David Thoreau’s claim for Whitman, ‘He is democracy,’ as the hermeneutic framework for his review of the American poet.92 Moreover, Thomson saw republican authors as a political tradition in literature. In his essay on Whitman, for example, he linked him to Swinburne, Blake, and Robert Burns as democratic poets with varying approaches to ‘the common world of reality.’93 For Thomson as for the National Reformer, republicanism and atheism were two sides of a single coin. As C. Maurice Davies pointed out in Heterodox London (1874), ‘the vast desert region of Infidel and Atheistical London’ was ‘largely allied with Republican London,’ as it had been for decades.94 In the 1860s and 1870s, moreover, many antitheists embraced the changes that had de-centered the Anglican Church from political, economic, and social power and heralded the growing ‘religion of humanity,’ which united upper-class positivist intellectuals such as Harrison, middle-class social missionaries, and working-class secularists around a vision of a worldwide human community. For Meredith and Swinburne, too, antitheism carried an explosively republican charge. In Thomson’s poetry, though, the interplay between republican and atheist theories, though ever-present, was not always smooth. In an essay on Shelley written about 1860, Thomson described the ‘great subjects’ that ‘fascinate[d]’ his poetic mentor in terms that anticipate his own preoccupations: ‘[t]he questions concerning the existence of




God, the moral law of the universe, the immortality of the soul, the independent being of what is called the material world, [and] the perfectibility of man.’95 Over the course of the next decade, Thomson came to reject all but one of these propositions.96 That one affirmation, which concerned the independence of the material world, would dictate his view on the other questions. ‘I find no hint throughout the Universe / Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse,’ he wrote in The City of Dreadful Night; ‘I find alone Necessity Supreme’ (XIV: 73–75). Because nature contained no record of divine creation, no ethical tendencies, no intrinsic yearning to aid humankind, he reasoned, its gross materiality had to be considered the beginning and ending of all existence, including human life. There could be no immortal soul, and humanity could never be released from its basest urges or the instinctive selfishness of an animal struggling to survive. The belief in human perfectibility was, he decided, one of the ‘frailties of vain hope which seduce even the best intellects.’97 He ridiculed reformers for their faith in it, parodying them in his satire ‘Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery’ (1871), the platform of an advanced thinker who earnestly advocates ‘that each shall annihilate in self the imperfect human nature, and create in self a perfect divine nature’ and ‘that the universe shall be made altogether and exactly such as the perfect men shall require.’98 Yet his dim view of humanity was not entirely incompatible with republican ideals such as equality and fraternity. In fact, it reinforced them by erasing invidious distinctions between the intellectual and the barbaric masses—the refuge taken up with gusto by James Fitzjames Stephen and other liberals recoiling from democracy during these years. ‘I cast my lot,’ Thomson wrote in ‘Vane’s Story’ (1866), with ‘poor ruffian thieves’ and ‘poor harlots steeping sin / And shame and woe in vitriol-gin’ (372–73, 377–78). He praised Whitman in similar terms in his review, written while preparing The City of Dreadful Night for publication: ‘He burns with such sympathy and brotherhood for all, high and low, rich and poor, noble and vile, thief, drunkard, and prostitute with the rest[.]’99 Yet Thomson’s materialism inflicted severe contusions upon conventional republican evocations of brotherhood and equality. In his poems, visions of the unity of humanity tend to be figured in terms of death, which is described as the reintegration of the individual self with the collective being of the universe. Even love, the communion of two individuals, occurs only in the midst of death. Assertions of identification with a fraternal band often ground themselves in the shared suffering wrought by a meaningless world. Thomson writes for a ‘sad Fraternity,’ he says in the ‘Proem’ to The City of Dreadful Night (36). At another point,




he calls his audience ‘Brothers of sad lives!’ (XIV: 79). This ‘sad Fraternity’ returns him to death, for it consists of those ‘[w]hose faith and hope are dead, and who would die’ (‘Proem,’ 28). The republican charge still coursing through Thomson’s uses of fraternity and equality is most easily discerned in The City of Dreadful Night. There, all the inhabitants of the city are made equal by their ferocious and inescapable pain. ‘[S]ome are great in rank and wealth and power, / And some renowned for genius and for worth,’ he explains, while ‘some are poor and mean’ (XI: 22–24). ‘[Y]et,’ he concludes, ‘these and those are brothers, / The saddest and the weariest men on earth’ (XI: 27–28). The familiar claim that all men are brothers, whatever their money or talent—or, more precisely, he cheekily says, their reputation for possessing it—persists.100 Yet insofar as it dispenses with traditional republican assumptions of the worthiness of the poor, Thomson’s tendency to find commonality in the sadness of the city-dwellers reverses the significance of the idea of brotherhood. The language of fraternity is subsumed into a cry of despair. A similar dynamic appears in fantasies of death as communion. In ‘To Our Ladies of Death’ (1863), for example, Thomson describes death as an ‘abdication of my separate soul / [. . .] Resolving into union with the Whole’ (193, 196). Moving from a register of monarchical unilateralism in ‘abdication’ to one of democratic decision-making in ‘resolving,’ the dissolution pictured here at once carries republican meanings and incorporates them into an atheistic rather than a populist idea of the ‘Whole.’ ‘One part of me shall feed a little worm, / And it a bird on which a man may feed,’ he writes later in the poem, spinning images for the unity of all creation, a ‘cosmic interchange of parts for all’ (204–205, 211). In an atheistic translation of the Christian mantra ‘dust to dust,’ Thomson imagines humans returning to the mud in which the worm feeds, to ‘lime the mould’ and ‘nourish insect-sperm’ (206). This process gives ‘new life’ to ‘earth’s general soul’ and is the opposite of the ‘isolated life’ of individual human existence in which one grows ‘[w]eary of hoping hopes for ever vain’ (215, 214, 218–19). For Thomson, the antidote to anomie is death. Integration with other people happens as a by-product of ‘resolving’ into ‘earth’s general soul.’ His vision of the essential unity of man in the matter of the body does not prompt, as it would in Swinburne, lofty claims for interpersonal communion in this life or for the union of humanity with the creative and beautiful forces of the universe.101 Emphasizing decay rather than growth, Thomson writes in The City of Dreadful Night, ‘Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, / Whose elements dissolve and merge




afresh / In earth, air, water, plants, and’—finally—‘other men’ (XIV: 52–54). At other moments, though, death provides a more immediate and more directly human form of communion. In one of the most powerful passages of The City, the narrator encounters a figure who describes a dream vision in which he splits into ‘[t]wo selves distinct that cannot join again’ (IV: 72). One of his selves falls to the ground in a ‘swoon’ as a woman approaches and brings with her the possibility of love, while the other stands, frozen, watching himself (IV: 74). It is the observing self that survives to tell the story. The woman ‘knelt and bent above that senseless me,’ he says, and ‘murmured words of pity, love, and woe’ while the watching self experienced his own paralysis as he ‘stood stonebound so near’ (IV: 90, 93, 96). In the end, in another telling contrast to Swinburne, Thomson’s sea brings communion through death: the tide Swept up to her there kneeling by my side, She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne Away, and this vile me was left forlorn; I know the whole sea cannot [. . .] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] wash those two apart[.] (IV: 97–103) In this passage, the trope of death as dissolution appears in a more emotionally charged situation, holding out the dream of love and comfort while insisting on the torture of living. As in Keats’s ode, the word ‘forlorn’ is like a bell tolling him back to his sole self. Condemned to imagine a full range of emotions that can never be experienced, either in this isolated life or in death’s ‘senseless’ state, he must endure an eternal paralysis, ‘bound’ to stone but not yet rejoined with it. Here, Thomson’s inversions of republican tropes acquire a more metaphysical valence. The idea of human connection has been transferred from the republican stage of life to the atheist scene of death. Joy comes not with birth but with being ‘borne / Away’ from life. Human communion is available only as idea, never as experience—and yet it remains the most moving idea there is. As such, paradoxically, it holds out another possibility. An indirect communion, achieved through the medium of the poem itself, might be able to unite one member of the ‘sad Fraternity’ with another. One of the conditions of life in the city is that its inhabitants ‘speak / To one another seldom, for their woe / Broods maddening inwardly and [. . .] if at whiles it grow / To frenzy which must rave, none heeds the clamour’ (I: 64–68). Instead of exchanging words, they ‘often murmur to themselves’





Yes, here and there some weary wanderer In that same city of tremendous night, Will understand the speech, and feel a stir Of fellowship in all-disastrous fight; ‘I suffer mute and lonely, yet another Uplifts his voice to let me know a brother Travels the same wild paths though out of sight.’ (‘Proem,’ 29–35). The passage recalls Clough, writing twenty years earlier, imagining his book reaching ‘restless youths born to inglorious days.’102 Or Cooper, writing from prison, or Shelley from Italy. Poetry had often provided a substitute for republican community or progress, a means of sustaining hope. Here, the importance of ‘fellowship’ persists—Thomson even selected the word over draft variants ‘comradeship’ and ‘sympathy’—but the possibility of connection eludes the speaker. The best Thomson can hope for is that a fellow wanderer will come to ‘know’ that somewhere, ‘out of sight,’ a ‘brother’ experiences the ‘same’ pain. If Shelley’s idea of the agency of poetry is made at once more profound and more indirect by his distance from his audience, Thomson’s understanding here hollows out the idea of poetic agency altogether. This brotherhood, forged through the poem, cannot alter the ‘all-disastrous fight’ or the course of the ‘wild paths.’ It cannot bring into being an intersubjective understanding that does not previously exist, expanding the reader’s moral capacity through empathy. Perhaps Thomson dismisses claims for such effects as sentimental or weak. In any case, even as his brotherhood of ‘weary wanderers’ recalls republican antecedents, it more powerfully denies them. The phrase ‘out of sight’ raises the possibility of seeing—and, with it, of poetic demystification. The ‘Proem’ implies that a deeper fellowship might be possible if the ‘brother’ were brought into sight, made visible—while at the same time holding out no hope for this manifestation. Thomson’s early poem ‘Shelley’ (1861) followed the structure of Queen Mab (1813) by opening with a dream vision in which ‘a lamp suspended’ brings light to a ‘theatre of air; / Whose curtain raised’ to show him ‘[a] sleepless dream, a seeing trance’ (11–13, 16). But it was ‘Lift Not the Painted Veil’ (1824) that influenced Thomson’s mature meditations on vision and demystification. In ‘Philosophy’ (1867), for example, he counseled his readers that ‘[t]hose eyes alone see well that view / Life’s lovely surfaces of form and hue’



(I: 64). The narrator of the poem does hear them, though, and records their ‘raving clamour’ and ‘inward brooding.’ And, in turn, the reader of the poem might hear:


His eyes [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] Looked through and through the specious earth and skies. They probed, and all things yielded to their probe; [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. ]

They pierced through beauty; saw the bones, the mesh Of nerves and veins, the hideous raw red flesh, Beneath the skin most delicate and fresh: Saw Space a mist unfurled around the steep Where plunge Time’s waters to the blackest deep; Saw Life a dream in Death’s eternal sleep. (II: 1–12) A faint echo of the cosmic vantage point of Queen Mab and ‘Shelley’ resonates in these lines’ depiction of a man able to peer into outer space and in their positing the existence of a dream from which the reader, aided by the poem, may awaken. Yet the force of this passage lies in its repudiation of clear seeing, troped as violence. The eyes ‘probe’ and ‘pierce,’ and bring their own violence back upon themselves. This duality structures the treatment of demystification in the ‘Proem’ as a whole. In the second stanza, Thomson answers his own rhetorical question, ‘why evoke the spectres of black night [and] blot the sunshine[?]’ (3–4), by offering with sharp bitterness a relatively conventional defense of poetry’s ability to inculcate a sense of agency by revealing the truth: Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles To show the bitter old and wrinkled truth Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth; Because it gives some sense of power and passion In helpless impotence to try to fashion Our woe in living words howe’er uncouth. (8–14) Inverting republican convention, the figure of the monarch is played here by ‘truth’ itself, a ‘bitter old and wrinkled’ body wrapped in a ‘vesture that beguiles.’ Guilty of a sort of truth-craft, it dons ‘false masks’ and spins ‘false dreams.’103 Similarly, giving words to that most Blakean of experiences, ‘woe,’ produces only a ‘sense’ of ‘power,’ one that is less real than the speaker’s ‘helpless impotence.’ Even the ‘living words’ are



(IV: 1–2). Offering his readers a warning, he describes the fate of a man who dared to look beneath:


O sad Fraternity, do I unfold Your dolorous mysteries shrouded from of yore? Nay, be assured; no secret can be told To any who divined it not before: None uninitiate by many a presage Will comprehend the language of the message, Although proclaimed aloud for evermore. (36–42) The first two lines of this passage present the ‘unfolding’ of ‘mysteries’ as a betrayal of trust or solidarity, more akin to revealing the ‘secrets’ of the masons than to exposing the realities of the world ‘as it is.’ Furthering the atheistic trope of fraternity discussed above, these lines definitively close off the possibility that the poem might spark a new communion. They evoke the figure of an unheard prophet, similarly, not as a measure of the power of ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ but rather as a reassuring image of inviolable fidelity. The secret, fittingly, is simply the reality of nothingness and meaninglessness. As an atheist lecturer in The City of Dreadful Night describes the ‘Universe,’ it is an ‘infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark, / Unlightened ever by the faintest spark / For us the fitting shadows of a dream’ (XIV: 73, 76–78). In the final section of the poem, the narrator agrees. Summarizing the lessons he has learned from his wanderings in the city, he writes that ‘all the oracles are dumb or cheat / Because they have no secret to express’ (XXI: 66–67). He continues, ‘none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain / Because there is no light beyond the curtain’ (XXI: 68–69). Instead of containing some hidden meaning, ‘all is vanity and nothingness’ (XXI: 70). The veil is an unending darkness, and so is the reality beneath it. To live in the city is to ‘pierce life’s pleasant veil of various error / To reach that void of darkness and old terror / Wherein expire the lamps of hope and faith’ (XI: 5–7). Yet, as with the trope of fraternity, Thomson could not abandon the strategy of demystification even after dismantling it. Other atheist poets writing in the National Reformer also take up and transform these two elements of republican verse, though in less strenuous ways. J. M. Peacock, who publishes poems alongside those of Thomson throughout the run of the paper, tends to use the rhetoric of demystification in the service of descriptions of a utopian secularist future. The final stanza of ‘The March



undermined, first by their ‘uncouthness’ and later by their transformation into ‘weak words’ (26). A more explicit rejection of demystification comes in response to another rhetorical question in the final stanza of the ‘Proem’:

of Truth’ (1867), for example, describes the progress of ‘Freedom’ as a function of the success of atheist enlightenment rather than of political change: ‘Error old is giving way, / With his helpmeet, Superstition, / Growing feebler every day, / Sinking into inanition. / Still upheld by priestly wrong, / Kingly force a fierce supporter; / But as truth is growing strong, / Freedom’s road is getting shorter.’104 In ‘Verses on the Death of Austin Holyoake’ (1874), he imagines the moment when ‘the darkness is gone to which ignorance clings.’ In its wake come both political and mental liberation: ‘the light of a lovelier day’ in which ‘long-suffering nations are free’ and ‘the temples of error, and tyranny strong [. . .] pass[ ] with their shadows away.’105 A similar harnessing of republican energy occurs when the National Reformer claims poets for an atheistic pantheon. Typically, such claims are founded upon a prior claim for the poet as a republican writer. Burns, for instance, is credited with resisting the anti-democratic attempts by priests ‘[t]o gull the mob and keep them under’ in a poem that goes on to describe the evils of priestcraft, to expose their ‘pious fraud.’106 The priority accorded to the secularist critique of ‘Superstition’ here and in Peacock’s poems subsumes, but does not abandon, republican ideals. The articulation of the atheist position relies entirely upon republican tropes and conventions, the idiom within which atheist poets wrote. Thomson’s National Reformer poems reveal not only this debt, but the reconsiderations of philosophy, political thought, and poetic practice that it demanded. Demystification and fraternity may have been two ‘frailties of vain hope’ which ‘seduce’ great minds away from the world as it is—but they are the bricks with which Thomson’s poetry is built. In this sense, his contentious engagement with republican poetry provided the glue binding his despair to its articulation as art. When that engagement came under greatest strain, during the years he composed The City of Dreadful Night, the strain constantly threatened to annihilate Thomson’s capacity to write poetry at all—and ‘seven songless years,’ 1874–81, followed on the heels of its completion.107 When he returned to poetry, he rediscovered republican poetics. In 1882, he hailed his ‘Muse of hope and faith and joy and love,’ telling her, ‘we yet may dream and love and sing!’108 These late poems are more thoroughly and conventionally republican than ever. In his last poem, he describes the idea of democracy as pure poetic agency. There, he proclaims, ‘[t]hese thoughts transmute themselves to dynamite.’109 *

*

*

In December 1868, on the pages immediately following an essay about Arthur Hugh Clough by J. A. Symonds, the Fortnightly printed Swinburne’s




poem ‘A Watch in the Night.’110 The poem asks a series of speakers, including an exile, a watchman, and a statesman as well as personfications of France, Italy, and Germany, ‘what of the night?’ (1). None of these figures can discern the events taking place in the darkness, and they respond with confusion, fear, or sophistry. Only the final interlocutor, ‘Liberty,’ can see the daybreak on the horizon: All the distance is white With the soundless feet of the sun. Night, with the woes that it wore, Night is over and done. (143, 147–50) Three years later, the poem would form part of Songs before Sunrise, Swinburne’s ‘Lyrics for the Crusade’ of republicanism.111 Like Meredith’s hero Nevil Beauchamp, who planned a radical newspaper to be called The Dawn, Swinburne believed in the sunrise of democracy—and in the power of the conventional metaphor to capture its promise.112 Unlike Thomson in The City of Dreadful Night, Swinburne found the conventions of republican poetry amenable to the articulation of his own democratic vision, in all its complexity. That complexity derived from his dual commitment to republican political thought and to the experimental formalism of aestheticism. In the above passage, for instance, a straightforward assertion of the breaking dawn is expressed in distinctly Swinburnean forms, from its alliteration and the synesthesia of the first two lines to the rapid iambic-anapestic rhythm. To understand Swinburne’s republican aesthetics is to grasp the political content of his formal experiments, his attempt not only to harness great art for a republican crusade but also to read democratic ideas into poetic forms. Though Swinburne often is regarded as one of the foremost formal innovators of the Victorian age, the intimate connections between his poetic practice and political program are all but unnoticed by scholars today. Explorations of his politics have tended to focus on his treatment of religion and, more recently, sexuality and gender. Isobel Armstrong, for example, illuminates the centrality of sexually transgressive material to Swinburne’s poetry, arguing that scandalous sexuality ultimately displaces the republican and antitheist claims he makes for the moral seriousness of his work.113 Richard Dellamora, similarly, indicates the ways in which recent attention to Swinburne’s sexuality has been accompanied by a neglect, even a dismissal, of his republicanism. He calls Songs before Sunrise ‘disappointing’ because in it Swinburne ‘nearly ignores the awareness of sexual difference’ that motivated his earlier verse. ‘Instead,’ Dellamora writes, ‘Swinburne conflates the “democratic” poet




with an abstract “Democracy,” ’ in the process not only ‘deeroticiz[ing]’ republican poetry but ‘depoliticiz[ing]’ it, ‘since the awareness of sexual difference is basic to [its] politics.’114 An analysis of Swinburne’s democratic verse, however, reveals that the strategies to which Dellamora and Armstrong object do not represent a departure from political poetry, but instead a new understanding of it. Songs before Sunrise charts Swinburne’s discovery of a vibrant, republican literary practice that renewed and deepened his understanding of poetry—as a political tool and as a mode of art. From the late 1860s through the 1870s, Swinburne developed his understanding of poetry and political aesthetics within the republican and antitheist communities centered around The Fortnightly Review, European exiles, and avant-garde artists. He moved in a world of European and British republicans that included leaders such as Joseph Mazzini and the democratic-socialist Alexandre Ledru-Rollin,115 as well as intellectuals and artists such as Meredith, William Rossetti, Morris, William Bell Scott, and cofounder of the Oxford ‘Old Mortality Society’ John Nichol, who has been credited with ‘finally destroying Swinburne’s religious faith and confirming him in atheism and republicanism.’116 This interwoven community of British and exiled European democrats shaped Swinburne’s political ideas and his aesthetic practice. It was through poetry that he became involved in republican politics, becoming known, in the words of Mazzini, as the ‘apostle of [the] crusade.’ Mazzini enjoined Swinburne to ‘transform us, to rouse the sleeping, to compel thought to embody itself into Action,’ arguing that ‘[t]hat is the mission of Art; and yours. [. . .] [S]hake us, reproach, encourage, insult [. . .] tell us all that we have a great Duty to fulfill.’117 Emphasizing the power of art to move the reader beyond passive agreement into active involvement, Mazzini articulates, in relation to Swinburne, ideas about political poetry that circulated among both continental and British democrats. From Blake’s cry, ‘England! awake! awake! awake!’ in Jerusalem (1804–20) to Gerald Massey’s ‘The Awakening of the People’ (1854), poets had long exhorted ‘living heroes,’ in Massey’s words, to ‘[s]tart up [and] awake from the slumber of ages.’118 Swinburne, too, believed in the power of poetry to rouse a sleeping people. He insisted that his role in social progress was as a poet, repeatedly refusing offers to become involved in political organizations, from the Reform League to the Social Democratic Federation, by pointing to his poetry as political work. He wrote to Karl Blind in 1876: It is a very great honour, and I trust you know and believe how dearly it is prized by me, to be accepted as a fellow-soldier (though





Recruited by Mazzini as the apostle of the crusade, Swinburne claimed for himself the ‘apostolic succession’ of republican poets. As George Ridenour writes, Swinburne believed that he had been brought into the Shelleyan line by the hand of Walter Savage Landor.120 To the end of his life he insisted that his republican poems were the most important of all his work, claiming that while ‘other books are books, Songs before Sunrise is myself.’121 Swinburne most powerfully articulated his theory of republican poetry in William Blake, where he portrays Blake’s work as the pinnacle of both artistic and political radicalism and the model for their integration. From the introductory epigraph from Charles Baudelaire, whose Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) a younger Swinburne had taken as a model for the ethical and artistic value of aesthetic autonomy,122 he asserts that poetry and political criticism are inextricably interwoven: ‘Tous les grands poëtes deviennent naturellement, fatalement, critiques. [. . .] Il serait prodigieux qu’un critique devînt poëte, et il est impossible qu’un poëte ne contienne pas un critique’ [‘All great poets become naturally, inevitably, critics. [. . .] It would be extraordinary for a critic to become a poet, and it is impossible for a poet not to contain within himself a critic’ (my translation)]. For Swinburne, Blake’s genius was to conjoin political and religious radicalism with innovative poetic form. Where other radical poets remained reasoners, translating argument into measured verse, Blake was a prophet, experimenting with anarchical forms. ‘In Blake,’ Swinburne argues, ‘the moral and the imaginative senses were so fused together as to compose the final artistic form. [. . .] To serve art and to love liberty seemed to him the two things (if indeed they were not one thing) worth a man’s life and work.’123 For Swinburne, this ‘final artistic form’ consists not in a particular genre or meter but instead in a dedication to formal experimentation. For Swinburne, Blake’s fusion of artistic and political energies is exemplified in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93), which he calls ‘the quintessence and the most fine gold of Blake’s alembic.’124 By combining prose, biblical verse, a ‘song of liberty,’ free verse, and ballad meters, Marriage illustrates the alliance Blake forged between poetic innovation and political and religious liberation. ‘Rules which are useful or necessary for household versifiers,’ Swinburne writes, ‘may well be permitted to relax or even to dissolve when applied to one who has attained to see



but a humble private and good only as trumpeter or flag-bearer to some small regiment) in the great and noble army of which you are one of the generals.119

with unblinded eyes and to speak with adequate words of matters so far above them.’125 The political function of Blake’s formal innovation exceeds rebellion against established poetic conventions; instead, it is, as Blake put it, ‘raising other men into a perception of the infinite.’126 One role of the republican poet, Swinburne discovers in Blake, is to find ‘adequate words’ to convey to the reader what one sees with ‘unblinded eyes.’ The poet’s liberation from convention acquires meaning as an expression of his own rebellion and as the simultaneously political and aesthetic means of awakening the reader. Swinburne constructs from Blake’s poetry a further role for the republican poet: to use prophecy as a vehicle for remembering a democratic human mythos. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake describes how priests have appropriated communal myths for hierarchical ends. As Swinburne quotes him: thus began Priesthood, Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales; And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.127 A deity, it seems, is just a stolen metaphor. Blake’s explanation of religion’s origin in the shift from a multitude of shared ‘poetic tales’ to a single story imposed from above suggests that presenting a range of ‘poetic tales’ about a variety of deities will return spiritual and political power to the people.128 This claim concerning the connection between political tyranny and spiritual impoverishment motivates many of the poems in Songs before Sunrise. These verses are united by what Swinburne describes as ‘the very root or kernel of this creed’: ‘not the assumed humanity of God, but the achieved divinity of Man; not incarnation from without, but development from within; not a miraculous passage into flesh, but a natural growth into godhead.’129 His republican antitheism aligns the claim that the people are the source of all legitimate authority with the assertion that humanity is itself divine, the source of an infinite variety of spiritual poems and stories. Thus in Songs before Sunrise, poems like ‘Hertha,’ ‘Before a Crucifix,’ and the ‘Hymn of Man’ express explicitly republican political arguments within the context of a visionary spiritual prophecy. Songs before Sunrise puts into practice the aesthetic theories Swinburne developed in conversations with republican activists and in reading Blake’s work. Two early poems, the ‘Dedication to Joseph Mazzini’ and ‘The Eve of Revolution,’ articulate Swinburne’s theory of political poetry




and begin to experiment with formal strategies for realizing that power. The ‘Dedication’ indicates how Swinburne’s poems derived agency from their political purpose. Here, Swinburne describes Songs before Sunrise as ‘the seed of your sowing’ and ‘the dew of your word kept growing’ (2, 5). Mazzini’s doctrines, as well as his political movement, enable the poems actively to forward republican politics: I bring you the sword of a song, The sword of my spirit’s desire, Feeble; but laid at your feet, That which was weak shall be strong, That which was cold shall take fire, That which was bitter be sweet. (19–24) Shifting the tenor and the vehicle of the sword/song metaphor over the course of the stanza, Swinburne describes the poems as ‘the sword of a song,’ endowing the songs with the strength associated with a sword, then as ‘the sword of my spirit’s desire,’ endowing the sword with the power of Swinburne’s spirit. Similarly, the song/strong and desire/fire rhymes exemplify the fusion of one man’s specifically literary endeavor and the fiery power of republican politics. The poem’s concern with this fusion culminates in the three anaphoric lines at the end of this stanza; containing increasingly formulaic metaphors, they suggest an attempt to secure the complex relation between song and sword, to make automatic the political power of poetry. Swinburne elaborated upon this theory of poetry’s political agency in the volume’s first poem, ‘The Eve of Revolution,’ which he called the ‘mainspring of [my] volume.’130 The revolution alluded to in the title is brought about by shattering the mutually reinforcing bonds of priest and king: I set the trumpet to my lips and blow. [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] [. . .] to break and melt in sunder All clouds and chains that in one bondage bind Eyes, hands, and spirits [. . .] [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] The hands are mighty, were the head not blind. Priest is the staff of king, And chains and clouds one thing, And fettered flesh with devastated mind.





In the rhetorical shorthand of ‘Priest is the staff of king,’ Swinburne places himself in the long-standing republican critique of priestcraft. As had many poets before him, he uses the claim that ideological and physical oppression are ‘one bondage’ to argue that poetry can break both ‘clouds and chains’ by provoking the reader’s awakening. Here, he enacts this argument formally by aligning ‘break’ with ‘clouds’ and ‘melt’ with ‘chains,’ conveying the interchangeability of mental and physical oppression. The link between opening one’s soul to see and freeing one’s wrists and ankles is direct and immediate: the mere recognition of truth, sparked in part by the synesthesic alignment of ‘break’ with ‘clouds,’ restores quickness to a once-devastated mind and ‘mighty’ strength to once-fettered hands. The ‘Hymn of Man’ represents a sustained poetic attempt to ‘break and melt in sunder’ these ‘clouds and chains’ by appropriating the Christian hymn form for democratic ends. Swinburne’s harnessing of Christian poetic forms parallels his persistent use of the metaphor of spiritual awakening, a simultaneous reliance on and transformation of Christian worship. The poem was written for the ‘Congress of Freethinkers’ that convened in 1869 in Rome. The freethinkers met in response to an announcement that the Oecumenical Council would ‘proclaim the doctrines of the Syllabus,’ which denounced ‘liberalism and modern civilization’ as well as an affirmation of the infallibility of the Pope. 131 As William Rossetti and Swinburne were composing a letter of support to the Freethinkers, which they sent in November of 1869, Swinburne planned to write a ‘Hymn for this Congress [. . .] to sing the human triumph over “things”—the opposing forces of life and nature—and over the God of his own creation, till he attain truth, self-sufficience, and freedom.’132 The letter forms the rhetorical companion to the hymn, and articulates its intellectual underpinnings. Arguing that Christian creeds ‘inflict, not (as some Kings of our past) upon the flesh, but upon the souls of men, the hideous and twofold penalty of blindness and eviration,’ Swinburne and Rossetti contrast the oppressions of priest and king with the liberatory creed of republicanism. ‘Freedom,’ they assert, ‘expects no non-natural message from above or from without; but only that which comes from within— faith, born of man, in man, which passes in contagious revelation from spirit again to spirit; without authority and without sign.’133 Swinburne and Rossetti portray the spread of republican faith as a ‘contagious’ and



Open thy soul to see, Slave, and thy feet are free; Thy bonds and thy beliefs are one in kind[.] (113, 145–47, 152–58)

‘natural’ process, one impeded only by the ‘non-natural’ and ‘hideous’ mental oppression of organized religion. The ‘Hymn of Man’ is intended to participate in this process by sparking ‘revelation’ in its readers. For the ‘human triumph’ over the ‘god of his own creation’ to occur, Swinburne argues in the poem, humanity will need to awaken to its own power, coming to understand both that the Christian God is a human creation and that humanity could create a more humane spirituality. As McGann writes, Swinburne’s alternative [to Christianity] is to drive men to an exalted view of themselves by constantly opening up possibilities of new and unexpected visions of things. In this way he suggests the vastness of man’s creative powers which are able to hold the world in sets of internal relations. Nor is there any limit upon the patterns those relations may take [. . .] All are equally human.134 Swinburne’s antitheism demands the reader’s participation in the creation of a republican spirituality. As Margot Louis writes of ‘Hymn of Man,’ ‘[l]ike all Romantic prophecies, it strives to enact its own fulfillment within the mind of the reader.’135 In so doing, humanity can achieve not only ‘triumph’ over the ‘God of his own creation’ but ‘freedom’ from the diverse forms of political tyranny ‘inflicted’ by monarchical governments. To this end, the poem not only reiterates the central claims of the letter but also expresses them in a poetic form designed to provoke its readers’ awakening. Like Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ and ‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ the ‘Hymn of Man’ is a counter-song designed to replace the hymns of religion. In Swinburne’s revisionary hymn, in the beginning, there was the word, but it was human rather than divine expression: In the grey beginning of years, in the twilight of things that began, The word of the earth in the ears of the world, was it God? was it man? The word of the earth to the spheres her sisters, the note of her song, The sound of her speech in the ears of the starry and sisterly throng, Was it praise or passion or prayer, was it love or devotion or dread, When the veils of the shining air first wrapt her jubilant head? (1–6) From this early emphasis on ‘the word,’ the ‘Hymn of Man’ replaces the divine word with human expression as the source of material and poetic creation. The exuberant song of creation is a chorus of praise, prayer, and singing. According to Swinburne, unlike this jubilant creation story, the Bible offers a narrative of divine manipulation: ‘Thou madest man





When her eyes new-born of the night saw yet no star out of reach; [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] Eyes that had looked not on time, and ears that had heard not of death; Lips that had learnt not the rhyme of change and passionate breath, The rhythmic anguish of growth, and the motion of mutable things, Of love that longs and is loth, and plume-plucked hope without wings. (7, 11–14) As if to signal the place of innocent birth before the beginning of poetry, Swinburne strips his lines of one of his favorite poetic strategies, synesthesia: eyes have not looked, ears have not heard, and lips have not spoken. And, indeed, if pain is part of the process of coming into life, the result is poetry: ‘the rhyme of change and passionate breath, / The rhythmic anguish of growth.’ Swinburne’s emphasis on rhyme, an emphasis central to the poem’s formal innovations, coalesces with his insistence that growth is change. Through its structure of both repeated and changed sounds, rhyme captures the way growth is at once anguish and fulfillment. In the opening section of the poem, Swinburne transforms the hymn by moving from the Bible’s univocal narrative toward a resounding chorus of human expression. The poem further displaces Christian hymns by adopting, and radically altering, the hymn form. The traditional hymn stanza, abab, has been doubled so that each line contains an internal rhyme (a) and an end rhyme (b); tetrameter quatrains become hexameter couplets. Take for example a later description of the collectivity of humanity: Men are the heartbeats of man, the plumes that feather his wings, Storm-worn, since being began, with the wind and thunder of things. (63–64) The couplet features the rhymes man/began (a)—a rhyme that appears numerous times in the hymn and is significant in linking humanity to creation—and wings/things (b). Though the internal rhyme always falls on the third beat, Swinburne’s loose shifting between anapestic and iambic feet destabilizes the form. After the mid-point man/began



in the garden; thou temptedst man, and he fell; / Thou gavest him poison and pardon for blood and burnt-offering to sell’ (95–96). But in fact the fall from innocence is the result of experience, not divine tricks. To be alive is in part to experience pain:

rhyme, the rhythm of each line diverges. Line 63 follows the internal rhyme with an iamb (the plúmes), while line 64 offers an anapest (with the wínd). Such fluctuations of rhythm appear throughout the poem. This stanza form is a hymn only in name and echo; Swinburne has taken a familiar genre, one associated with the most communal moments of Christian worship, and harnessed it for a radically communitarian message of human power. This oscillation between familiarity and newness encapsulates on the level of form the poem’s reworking of Christian liturgy, as both the old myth and its modes of celebration are transformed. While the formal innovations of ‘Hymn of Man’ rely upon the very associations with Christian worship that Swinburne wishes to replace, in ‘Hertha’ he develops new stanza forms and experiments with rhyme and meter to forge a poetry as democratic as its message. This poem exemplifies Swinburne’s attempts to put into practice both the ‘fusion’ of artistic and political energies and the elaboration of ‘poetic tales’ that he explored in William Blake. A comprehensive critique of Victorian religion, ideology, and resistance to democracy, ‘Hertha’ is, according to Swinburne, ‘another mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic poem.’136 Written in the voice of a goddess who embodies the human power of growth and creativity, ‘Hertha’ advocates the destruction of hierarchy and inequality. Swinburne describes the process of writing ‘Hertha’ as an attempt to balance his political message with its enactment in the poem’s structure: ‘I have tried not to get the mystic elemental side of the poem, its pure and free imaginative part, swamped by the promulgation of the double doctrine, democratic and atheistic, equality of man and abolition of gods,’ he writes to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the same letter, he states that he hopes the entire volume will satisfy you from the artistic side as well as myself from the prophetic or preaching side. I trust you to ‘cut close and deep’ [. . .] if you find anything to pare away of the spouting or drawling, vociferous or predicative kind. I think if this has been duly avoided I may hope to have put enough colour and movement of passion and imagination in to the book to make it a serious work of a higher order than a versified pamphlet or leading article.137 The solution to the danger of propaganda lies in a sophisticated formal strategy designed to embody the content of the poem. When Swinburne praises ‘Hertha,’ he emphasizes its artistic status by highlighting the




ways it integrates appeals to the imagination and emotion with political argument: he considered it his ‘highest single piece, finding in it the most of lyric force and music combined with the most of condensed and clarified thought. I think there really is a good deal compressed and condensed into that poem.’138 Swinburne’s choice of verbs, ‘compressed and condensed,’ reveal his efforts to use the rich density of poetic language and form, echoing his praise of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as an ‘alembic’ in which thought and music are distilled into a pure and ‘clarified’ form. ‘Hertha’ exemplifies the type of ‘poetic tale’ Blake describes as abundant in the world before priestcraft. Though she speaks with the pronoun ‘I,’ Hertha’s voice is meant to be communal because she is literally coextensive with humanity—as she defines herself, ‘man that is I’ (200). Thus her commands operate as projections of human wisdom, not as dictates from an outside or superior being. Swinburne’s metaphors are meant to evoke, but not contain, the goddess: even the organizing metaphor of the goddess is just a moment of understanding human power. Unlike organized religion, which freezes spirituality in a particular metaphor, Swinburne’s goddess is fluid and malleable, replaced in a few moments by a new articulation, another poem. Indeed, in Songs before Sunrise, ‘Hertha’ precedes ‘Before a Crucifix’ and ‘Hymn of Man,’ in which humanity topples a hierarchical god, and ‘Tenebrae,’ in which a parade of deities concludes with a personification of Liberty, ‘sole mother and maker, / Stronger than sorrow, than strife; / [. . .] Spirit, and savior, and life’ (131–35). Hertha unites all the metaphors and images of the poem in her position as a temporary metonym for humanity. The poem repeatedly collectivizes human experience, integrating individual lives into the ongoing life of ‘man’: All forms of all faces, All works of all hands In unsearchable places Of time-stricken lands, All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands. (131–35) Hertha dissolves all false hierarchies, beginning with the dichotomy between soul and body, which Swinburne sees as undergirding the hierarchy between god and humanity in Christianity’s denigration of the





I the mark that is missed And the arrows that miss, I the mouth that is kissed And the breath in the kiss, The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that is. (21–25) At first glance, the images early in the stanza appear unrelated to the unification of soul and body that completes it. However, they revolve around ephemerality and concreteness, mirroring the soul/body pairing. The concrete images are given first—mark, arrows, mouth—only to be undone: the mark ‘is missed’; the arrows ‘miss’; and the kiss becomes ‘the breath in the kiss.’ Body and soul come together in Hertha, for she is both breath and mouth. The lines are sparse, especially for Swinburne, and the only words to receive stress are the nouns and verbs, which tend to melt into one as a result of being strung together by non-stressed syllables. The lines become a litany of stressed entities: I, mark, missed, arrows, miss, I, mouth, kiss, breath, search, sought, seeker, soul, body, is. The body–soul dichotomy is formally integrated into the all-powerful ‘I’ of Hertha. Swinburne links his attack of false dichotomies to an explicit critique of hierarchy in the next few stanzas of the poem, in which the separation between human and divine is resolved: But what thing dost thou now, Looking Godward, to cry ‘I am I, thou art thou, I am low, thou art high’? I am thou, whom thou seekest to find him; find thou but thyself, thou art I. (31–35) Here integration is again realized in the meter of the stanza as well as in the content. The simple equations of the third line and the simple distinctions in the fourth line work to undermine their sense: they sound like nursery rhymes or rote lessons. The final line, however, is a sustained antimetabole that integrates the parts in a much more complex way, which can be typographically indicated as follows: I am thou, whom thou seekest to find ....... him; find thou but thyself, thou art I.



flesh. The poem integrates such false dichotomies in Hertha’s spirituality of growth and creativity:


I am thóu, whom thou séekest to fínd him; find thóu but thysélf, thou art Í. ‘I’ and ‘thou’ each receive a stressed beat, as do ‘seek’ and ‘self.’ In contrast to the integration of the final line of this stanza, the short lines emphasize the hierarchies underlying their division of self and other. The separation provided by the commas in lines 3 and 4 exemplifies the individualism of the sentiments: ‘I am low’ follows not only from ‘thou art high’ but from the stark division of self from other in ‘I am I, thou art thou.’ Swinburne’s use of the short lines to express faulty oppositions and the longer line to convey complexity and integration allows this stanzaic form to speak. He uses a modified version of this stanza in ‘A Marching Song,’ there allowing the long fifth line to resolve the pain of contemporary life, which he describes in the four short lines. This experimental stanza proves flexible and malleable, capable of applying a concept like ‘liberty’ to meter and rhythm as Swinburne contrasts the cage-like cadence of short, rhymed lines with the emancipated flow of the long line expressing liberation. Here, instead of differentiating between oneself and God, Swinburne insists that to find oneself is to find a universal spirit, a connection with something much larger than oneself. For this reason, Hertha’s only command to the reader is to live a free life: ‘I bid you but be; / I have need not of prayer; / I have need of you free’ (156–58). Refusing worship, Hertha requests that the reader be free, but refuses to compel even this: Be the ways of thy giving As mine were to thee; The free life of thy living, Be the gift of it free; Not as servant to lord, nor as master to slave, shalt thou give thee to me. (81–85) The structure of living, and hence of decision-making and morality, is based not on self-abnegation but on liberty. Several stanzas in the middle of the poem reinforce the links between liberty and community by anchoring themselves with rhymes with ‘free’: ‘be’, ‘thee’, ‘me’, and ‘we’ are all coupled with ‘free.’



Additionally, in this poem, the stressed words shift over the course of the line, emphasizing the poem’s insistence on the integration between Hertha’s ‘I’ and humanity’s ‘thou’:


Thought made him and breaks him, Truth slays him and forgives; But to you, as time takes him, This new thing it gives, Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives. (186–90) Here mutuality is encoded in the lines with the reciprocity of ‘love, the beloved Republic’ and the transformation of ‘feeding’ into a nourishing rather than a cannibalistic metaphor, as Swinburne often describes the Eucharist.139 Feeding upon freedom results in more freedom and more love. Liberty becomes the cornerstone for all just allegiances as Swinburne unites his criticism of the division of the body and soul, the hierarchy of god over man, and the imposition of political tyranny over human communities: One birth of mine bosom; One beam of mine eye; One topmost blossom That scales the sky; Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I. (196–200) As Swinburne concludes, Hertha is subsumed back into humanity. After appearing to evoke for humanity its own power and divinity, she retreats back ‘in[to] the human breast,’ where, Blake asserted, ‘[a]ll deities reside.’140 The poem’s prophetic agency emerges from its ability to unite a critique of hierarchy of all kinds with a vision of a sustainable republic of love, community, and equality. Swinburne’s innovative verse form, his use of chiasmus and line structure, and his metaphors all embody the republican message of ‘Hertha’. In ‘Christmas Antiphones,’ Swinburne employs a new set of formal strategies to advance republican ideals, experimenting with voice and rhyme, and attempting to dissolve the inequalities present in poetry itself, chiefly that between poet and reader. ‘Christmas Antiphones’ represents Swinburne’s major attempt to grapple with the concept of equality and his clearest moment of resonance with the poetic strategies



Hertha’s synthesis of false dichotomies and hierarchies becomes at this point a call for an end to tyranny of all kinds, religious and political. She reports that ‘God trembles in heaven’ (180) because:

of the republican poets of the popular movement, such as Thomson, Cooper, and Linton, who insisted upon the importance of equality to republicanism.141 Equality was the element of republican thought most identified with popular republicanism and most difficult for aristocratic republicans like Swinburne to negotiate.142 Whereas liberty and fraternity could be made to resonate with the rhetoric of Victorian liberalism, equality retained its Paineite and revolutionary charge throughout the century.143 James Fitzjames Stephen, for instance, insisted that ‘[m]en are fundamentally unequal, and this inequality will show itself, arrange society as you like.’144 ‘Christmas Antiphones’ is divided into three sections, each written in a different voice. Swinburne described the first two ‘antiphonal songs’ as ‘the one, of worshippers in church, the other of sufferers outside,’ and the third section as ‘the foresong of democracy and humanity [. . .] answering the second song as it [answered] the first.’145 The poem thus moves from Christian parody to antitheist critique to republican prophecy. Swinburne uses the dueling voices of the antiphonal structure to highlight the contrast between the poetic voice of Christianity and that of republican antitheism. The poem moves from the subservient worshippers, whose address to Jesus locates spiritual and poetic power outside humanity—‘Thou whose birth on earth / Angels sang to men’ (1.1–2)—to a collective chorus addressed by humanity to humanity. Whereas the first section, ‘In Church,’ begins with the word ‘thou,’ the second section, ‘Outside Church,’ begins with the word ‘we.’ Despite the title, Swinburne uses Christ’s crucifixion rather than his birth as the central metaphor for the place of the poor in a Christian nation. Echoing his earlier statements about the ravages of mental tyranny, Swinburne begins ‘Outside Church’ with a critique of the way in which priestcraft enslaves the poor: We whose mind is blind, Fed with hope of nought; Wastes of worn mankind, Without heart or mind, Without meat or thought. (2.6–10) Swinburne links the spiritual deprivations of Christian religion to the material deprivations of a class society: the poor live ‘without meat or thought.’ The only sustenance given to the poor is the empty promise of a sweet hereafter, the ‘hope of nought.’ Written in the voice of the poor of England, ‘Outside Church’ takes on the collective persona of




the oppressed. Swinburne abandons his typical mode of prophecy, in which he speaks from a powerful position outside the humanity the poems address: the goddess Hertha, for instance, or the anonymous songwriter of the ‘Hymn of Man.’ In ‘Christmas Antiphones,’ the democratic potential of Hertha’s claim to speak for all of humanity is re-envisioned as Swinburne attempts to identify with and give voice to the most oppressed members of the human community. In the process, he exposes both the scope and the limits of his republican commitment to equality. On the one hand, the poor have ‘no thought’ and ‘no mind,’ suggesting a gap between the author and his collective persona in the poem. While Swinburne knows the poor are locked in ideological oppression, the poor apparently do not—an irony he seeks to overcome by democratizing the voice of prophecy. Employing the first-person plural pronoun ‘we’ and speaking in the present tense, he attempts to break down the divide between poet and reader. The connection between material and spiritual poverty is extended in the following stanzas, as Swinburne uses the Eucharist to describe the exploitation of the poor by the rich: Ye whose meat is sweet And your wine-cup red, Us beneath your feet Hunger grinds as wheat, Grinds to make you bread. [ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] We whose blood is food Given your wealth to feed, From the Christless rood Red with no God’s blood, But with man’s indeed[.] (2.16–20, 36–40) The Eucharistic sacrifice is both literal and figurative. The suffering that is inflicted on the poor by the rich is real, whereas the metaphorical or narrative suffering of Christ on the cross at once vividly describes the suffering of the poor and subtly mocks the Christian veneration of suffering. Swinburne literalizes the Eucharistic metaphor: the rich feed off the poor, and the Church converts the suffering of the poor into its own power. Louis writes that in passages like this Swinburne confronts the material realities of English class society, echoing radical incarnations of the labor theory of value, which interpreted the assets




of the rich as, literally, the theft of the value generated by the poor through labor.146 In these stanzas, Swinburne echoes Blake’s critique in ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ of the ‘God & his Priest & King’ who ‘make up a heaven’ from the ‘misery’ of the poor.147 In ‘Beyond Church,’ the third section, Swinburne moves from poor people’s reproach of the rich to a prophecy of the coming republic. Here he speaks of the poor as ‘[y]e that weep in sleep, / Souls and bodies bound’ (3.1–2). He also includes himself in the poem, differentiating himself from the people just long enough to prophesy the integration of ‘me and thee’ in the coming world. In this context, Swinburne elaborates his understanding of equality and its role in the republican future. Man, he argues, will do what God cannot – bring about an egalitarian new world: Brotherhood of good, Equal laws and rights, Freedom, whose sweet food Feeds the multitude All their days and nights With the bread full-fed Of her body blest And the soul’s wine shed From her table spread Where the world is guest, Mingling me and thee, When like light of eyes Flashed through with thee and me Truth shall make us free, Liberty make wise. (3.16–30) These stanzas evoke watchwords of republican thought—truth, community, and liberty—in the context of a radically egalitarian communalism. Describing freedom as a ‘sweet food’ and liberty as the ‘body blest’ at the ‘table spread’ for all the world, Swinburne reverses the poem’s earlier pairing of material and spiritual want. He thus links community to equality as he ‘mingles [. . .] me and thee’ into an undifferentiated community by transposing the phrase as ‘thee and me’ in line 28; the rhyme is merely the mirror of the original phrase. Further, these words are rhymed with ‘free,’ recalling the prevalence of these





What of thine and mine, What of want and wealth, When one faith is wine For my heart and thine And one draught is health? For no sect elect Is the soul’s wine poured And her table decked; Whom should man reject From man’s common board? Gods refuse and choose, Grudge and sell and spare; None shall man refuse, None of all men lose, None leave out of care. (3.36–50) As with his earlier inversion of ‘me’ and ‘thee,’ Swinburne dissolves the distinction between ‘thine’ and ‘mine’ in this passage. He shows how community involves both the destruction of hierarchy—there will be ‘no sect elect’—and the dissolution of material inequality. By addressing the material realities of Victorian Britain in the ‘Outside Church’ section of the poem and alleviating them in his vision of the republican future, ‘Beyond Church,’ Swinburne places economic and social concerns at the center of his prophetic project. In the process, he adopts a communal voice, linking the dissolution of poetic hierarchy to the abolition of material want. In the end, the antiphones become an ode, as instead of two voices responding to one another in alternate verses the poem offers a strophe/antistrophe of subservient worship and collective critique, followed by an epode of republican resolution. The collectivity of the chorus, along with the prophetic vision of ‘Beyond Church,’ transcends the formal and political tensions between those situated ‘In Church’ and those ‘Outside Church.’ The content of Swinburne’s republican vision resonates with the entire tradition of republican poetry as he returns to metaphors surrounding the idea of enlightenment to prophesy a secularized new day dawning:



rhymes in ‘Hertha.’ Swinburne insists that the egalitarian republic will abolish all forms of hierarchy:


All shall see and be Parcel of the morn; Ay, though blind were we, None shall choose but see When that day is born. (3.91–100) The ability to see the sun as ‘one,’ unified, and ‘Right’ represents the moment of transformation when ‘all men shall have light.’ Swinburne’s claim that Blake had ‘attained to see with unblinded eyes and to speak with adequate words of matters so far above’ his peers comes full circle as in the utopian future all men will see unblindedly.148 There will be no matters above them, and all words will be adequate. The ‘rhyme of change and passionate breath’ and the ‘to and fro’ of the ‘breath’ of ‘life and death, [. . .] earth and sea’ will again sound clear as on that first day, described in the ‘Hymn of Man,’ ‘when the veils of the shining air first wrapt [earth’s] jubilant head.’ The fusion of aestheticism and republicanism in Songs before Sunrise was praised by the volume’s first sympathetic readers. Sheldon Amos, writing in the Fortnightly, describes Swinburne’s verse as ‘[i]mpatient of limit or control, insatiable in desire and aspiration, resentful of every artificial or even every conceivable bond, lending a painfully sympathetic ear to each pulse of struggling, outraged, or frantic humanity.’149 For Amos, Swinburne’s innovative, even rebellious, attitude toward poetic form is connected to his ‘sympathetic ear’; the distinctive sounds of his poetry, its rhythms and rhymes, are tied to his capacity to listen to the ‘pulse’ of humanity. For later readers, however, Swinburne’s poetic techniques acquired a more purely literary, apolitical significance, and it was as the foremost poet of aestheticism that he bequeathed his gift to literary history. Oscar Wilde writing in 1889, for instance, describes the sound of Swinburne’s poetry in terms of the artifice and anti-realism of f in-de-siècle aestheticism: ‘Alliteration tyrannizes over him. Mere sound often becomes his lord. He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.’150 Similarly, William Butler Yeats’s theory of the ‘purpose of rhythm,’ which owed much to his reading of Swinburne’s verse, emphasizes the power of rhythm ‘to prolong the



But the sun is one, And the sun’s name Right; And when light is none Saving of the sun, All men shall have light.

moment of contemplation, [. . .] in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols.’151 For Yeats, the ‘pulse’ of Swinburne’s poetry lay in its symbolist aestheticism. In these ways, the republicanism that for Swinburne and his first readers was an inseparable element of his most successful and characteristic poems was subsumed beneath the banner of his rebellion against received forms and his masterful manipulation of poetic sound. Something similar could be said of Meredith, whose literary reputation centrally as a republican writer gives way by the f in de siècle to a role as a writer whose experimental novels resisted the demands of the reading public. Wilde praises Meredith as ‘a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father,’ whose ‘style would be quite sufficient of itself to keep life at a respectful distance.’152 And Ernest Dowson describes him as the antidote to Charles Dickens, ‘freer from the slightest taint of sentiment than anybody I know[,] brilliantly clever—& hard & cold as a piece of crystal.’153 Like Swinburne, Meredith was remembered in literary rather than political terms. Yet the ‘fiercer spirit’ of republicanism can be glimpsed even within fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In Wilde’s description of alliteration ‘tyrannizing’ over Swinburne and in Yeats’s vocabulary of ‘liberation,’ republican keywords of twenty years earlier show through the palimpsest of literary history. Even aestheticism’s insistence on the autonomy of art, stated in apolitical terms in Wilde’s discussion of Swinburne and Meredith, was given a political gloss in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), where the independence of the artist from ideological and economic pressures, the ‘respectful distance’ between ‘life’ and art, is what enables the artist to resist the tyranny of collectivism. Moreover, beyond the confines of late nineteenth-century aestheticism, Morris’s Chants for Socialists (1884–85), Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy (1883–1902), and women’s suffrage novels such as Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert (1907) echo earlier republican works and suggest the continued purchase of the ideal of representative government to the intellectual wing of late nineteenth-century British socialism and feminism. For Swinburne, Meredith, and Thomson alike, republicanism’s ‘fiercer spirit’ animated poems whose cultural legacies ramified in diverse and sometimes unexpected ways. In the end, that those legacies exceeded and reshaped the political contours within which Swinburne, Meredith, and Thomson wrote testifies to their poems’ intellectual and aesthetic vitality, to the ways in which republican writers since Blake had remade both poetry and political ideas by striving to bring each to bear upon the other.




This study has rested on the assumption that historicism and formalism are complementary and synergistic approaches in literary analysis. Having drawn the arc of republican poetry from Blake to Swinburne, I wish now to highlight one particular feature of historicist formalism as an interpretive perspective as well as to suggest the special inheritance republican poets gave to both English verse and Anglo-American political life. Roland Barthes claims ‘that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.’1 One might equally say, consistent with his vision of literary analysis, that a lot of history brings one back to matters of form. The artists I have examined in this study, all of them passionately political in their motivations, chose to express themselves through poetry. They strove in their work to counter the common belief that, as J. G. A. Pocock writes, the consciousness of the republican citizen ‘is very much a consciousness of the mind as expressed, and the world as seen, in prose.’2 Their work was founded on formal experiment, multivalent language, ironic expression, and imaginative play—on all of the aspects of poetry that make it resistant to paraphrase. Their ‘songs’—whether they were hymns or meditative lyrics, epics or ballads—were all ‘songs before sunrise,’ a ‘fusion’ of the political and artistic ‘senses’ that Swinburne found in Blake’s work. And yet, not only to appreciate their formal, artistic qualities but also to understand their historical significance, this study has contextualized each poem in its specific moment in the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century republican politics. This was a world whose touchstones were not multivalence, irony, and the imagination but rather the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the 1848 French Revolution, and the Reform Bill of 1867—a world in which committed republicans faced particular political challenges in 177



Conclusion

the course of concrete historical events. Republican poets faced these challenges as well, and they sought to meet them in the way and through the form with which they were best equipped, that of poetry. These challenges do not determine, and cannot explain, the artistic and historical meanings of republican poems; they show what was at stake in them, and in doing so they lead us away from a historical explanation of republican poetry toward an explanation of that poetry’s place, as poetry, in history. That place was something republican poets had actively to claim. What was at stake, that is, was not only the particular dilemmas poets sought to think through in their verse but the power of poetry to perform this intellectual and imaginative work. Republican poems continually justify their own existence as poems; they contain within themselves a theory of poetry and poetic agency—that is, a theory of the aesthetic—that emerges as a consequence of their remarkable selfreflexivity. Those theories of poetry were as many and as diverse as the range of republican poets: some were Romantic, others anti-Romantic, some directed toward the ethical capacity of readers and others toward a reconceptualization of central concepts within republican discourse. For Blake, the theory of republican poetry arose from the challenge represented by the intersection of visionary poetics, antinomianism, and republican demystification; for Landor, from the immediacy and uncertainty of occasional poetry; for Clough and Thomson, from the urgency of their republican critique of republicanism. Uniting them was an insistence on the special expressive powers of poetry and a rejection of a purely propagandistic account of poetry’s role in republican politics and democratic life. For the poets examined here, poetry was never one mode of rhetoric among many but always a special means of expression. When they described this special poetic expression, nineteenth-century writers tended to use a language of imagination or even magic where we might employ the analytical terms of poststructuralism, but the assumption was the same: poetry was a particular kind of discourse that did not simply record previously constituted ideas but shaped them. Throughout this book, I have argued that the importance of republican poetry, both as poetry and as a politically engaged literature, was to be found in this shaping. Poetry’s contribution to republican politics inhered not so much in advancing its arguments as in the intellectual and imaginative negotiation that took place in poetry, at particular moments in time, between political ideas and poetic forms. The most interesting republican poems of the nineteenth century are those that




bear the marks of this negotiation both formally and substantively, speaking alike to the poetic life of political ideas during the nineteenth century, to the literary history of the time, and to the larger relation between politics and art. Indeed, seen from the widest historical perspective, republican poetry’s status as poetry can be understood as a basic contribution to the political history of Anglo-America—for republican poets fought and won a battle with the anti-poetic ethos of republicanism, the allegiance Pocock describes between democracy and the ‘consciousness of the mind as expressed, and the world as seen, in prose.’ That allegiance dates back to the beginnings of republican thought itself. When Plato exiled poets from his Republic, he said that the ‘quarrel between [poetry] and philosophy’ was already ‘ancient.’3 The opposition he drew—between poetry as a realm of emotion and illusion and the Republic as one of reason and reality—also often defined their relation in the modern era. Renaissance republicans forged a newly historical consciousness that distanced politics from the ‘timeless universals’ that were associated not only with Christian and classical thought but also with poetry.4 Seventeenth-century republicanism and Enlightenment empiricism, with their preference for straightforward transparency in prose and suspicion of imagination and emotion, reinforced the antagonism of republican thought to poetry. That antagonism persisted through nineteenth-century English republican thought and politics. It was not only Shelley in A Defence of Poetry who needed to contest Plato and Peacock. The primacy of transparency in republican rhetoric exerted an almost crippling pressure upon the ‘New Songs’ of Politics for the People, the defenses of poetry in the Newgate Monthly Magazine, and Linton’s definitional lyrics, and it served as one standard against which Thomson rebelled in his National Reformer pieces. Blake’s Songs of Experience, Shelley’s Defence, Clough’s Amours de Voyage, Meredith’s Fortnightly poems, and Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise, too, contest the semantics of transparency in favor of a literary approach to language that stresses multivalence, indirection, irony, metaphor, and sound. Every poem examined in this study asserts its value as poetry, a point that would be too obvious even to state were it not so fundamental to each poem’s assertion. That republican poets succeeded in their defenses of poetry is a testament not only to their poetic skill but to their political insight. Indeed, the vision of a democratic citizen whose consciousness was confined to the worldview of prose is a terrifying prospect, one that the history of twentieth-century totalitarianism makes all too easy to imagine. The



Conclusion 179

republican poets studied here helped save poetry for democracy and avert the reduction of art to the meanly utilitarian ends of propaganda that was a possible outcome of republican progress in the nineteenth century. Their historical achievement lies, thus, both in their poetic negotiation of political ideas and in the example they continue to offer of that effort.




Introduction 1. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 2003); David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Blair Worden, ‘English Republicanism,’ The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450– 1700, ed. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443–75; Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 2. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, pp. 423–505; Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Liberty, Virtue, and the Rule of Law, 1689–1770,’ and Richard B. Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce,’ both in Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, pp. 197–232 and 368–402. 3. Frank Prochaska, The Republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London: Penguin, 2000), especially Chapter 1; Wootton, ‘Introduction,’ Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, pp. 1–14. 4. Mark Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790s,’ The Journal of Political Philosophy 6.3 (1998): 235–62, 242. 5. Mark Francis and John Morrow, A History of English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s, 1994), p. 4. 6. Gregory Claeys, ‘The Origins and the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796–1805,’ Journal of Modern History 66 ( June 1994): 249–90, 254–55. 7. Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790s,’ p. 252. 8. Gregory Claeys, ‘Introduction’ to Political Writings of the 1790s (London: Pickering, 1995), pp. xvii–lvi, xxxi–xxxii; James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 6. 9. Paul A. Rahe, ‘Antiquity Surpassed: The Repudiation of Classical Republicanism,’ and Wootton, ‘Introduction,’ both in Wootton, Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, pp. 233–69 and 1–41. 10. Mark Bevir, ‘English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century,’ History of Political Thought 17.1 (Spring 1996): 114–27, 120. 11. Wootton, ‘Introduction,’ Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, p. 33; Prochaska, Republic of Britain, p. xv; David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–15. 12. Claeys, ‘The Origins and the Rights of Labor,’ p. 257. 13. Ibid. 181



Notes

14. Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 7. 15. That centrality has been the subject of significant historiographical debate since its most compelling statement in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966). Thompson described Paineite republicanism as the master-theory by which the working class was made, enabling it to break with eighteenth-century aristocratic models of reform and launch a proto-socialist, egalitarian, class-based movement. Beginning in the early 1980s, historians began to challenge Thompson’s account by arguing that the 1790s saw not the triumph of Paine’s brand of anti-historical natural rights doctrines but the reassertion of the constitutionalist arguments that Thompson claimed Rights of Man had defeated. See John Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism, and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England,’ Social History 6.1 ( Jan. 1981): 1–32 and ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985); Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Gregory Claeys, Machinery, Money, and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) and Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-politics in Early British Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Most recently, the linguistic turn has sparked a reevaluation of these issues and a resurgence of interest in republicanism. See particularly James Vernon, ‘Notes Toward an Introduction,’ Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–21, and the articles contained therein, especially Antony Taylor, ‘Republicanism Reappraised,’ pp. 154–78. 16. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr. Wordsworth’ [1825], Selected Writings, ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 348. 17. Wordsworth, The Prelude [1805], William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), X: 692–93. 18. William Irvine and Park Honan, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 13; Robert Bernard Martin, Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 114–27. 19. Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, The Major Works, p. 611; The Prelude, XIII: 442, 448–51. 20. Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 21. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography [1873], ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 121. 22. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 23. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History [1841], ed. Archibald MacMechan (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1901), pp. 89, 90. 24. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 180. 25. Ibid., p. 186. 26. Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Murray G. H. Pittock,



182 Notes

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); William Jewett, Fatal Autonomy: Romantic Drama and the Rhetoric of Agency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), p. 8. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962). The ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Victorian Age’ in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 1045, describes the period’s ‘sharp new sense of modernity, of a break with the past, of historical self-consciousness.’ John Sterling, review of Tennyson, Poems [Quarterly Review lxx (Sept. 1842): 385–416], in Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830–1870, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Athlone Press, 1972), pp. 125–47, 125–28. William Johnson Fox, review of Tennyon, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical [Westminster Review xiv (Jan. 1831): 210–24], in Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies, pp. 71–83, 71; Charles Kingsley, review of Matthew Arnold, Poems [Fraser’s Magazine xlix (Feb. 1854): 140–49], in Victorian Scrutinies, pp. 173–85, 173. Kingsley, in Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies, p. 185. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 43. Richard Simpson, review of Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book [North British Review li (Oct. 1869): 97–126], in Armstrong (ed.), Victorian Scrutinies, pp. 259–87, 277. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism [1891] in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 257. Carlyle, On Heroes, pp. 177, 178. Ibid., p. 188. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This expectation stands equally for the plebeian radical press, often read aloud to those who could not read, in coffee houses, taverns, and workshops. Carlyle, On Heroes, pp. 188, 189. The Republican vol. 5, no. 8 (22 Feb. 1822): 233. Wordsworth, ‘Preface,’ p. 597. Ferris, Silent Urns; Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984); Richard Marggraf Turley, The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 66–92; Laura L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Frances



Notes 183

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism; Kaul, Songs of Nation. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 64. Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 13. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 6. Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 12. Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 3; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, p. xv. Ellen Rooney, ‘Form and Contentment,’ MLQ 61.1 (Mar. 2000): 17–40, 26. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction,’ The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 15. J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 5. ‘London,’ The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), p. 8. Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). Walter Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli,’ Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 105. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998); Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).

1 Republican demystification in Politics for the People and Blake’s Songs of Experience 1. William Godwin, ‘On Kings. From Godwin’s Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ Pigs’ Meat, ed. Thomas Spence, vol. 1, pp. 219–21, 219–20. 2. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle and Practice (London, 1792), in Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 208. 3. William Blake, ‘London,’ The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), line 8. All subsequent references are to this edition. 4. For the ‘double poem,’ see Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993). 5. Blake, ‘[A Vision of the Last Judgment,]’ Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 555, 566. 6. James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 10. 7. W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 7. 8. On Blake’s far-reaching experiments in prosody, especially in Songs of Innocence and of Experience, see George Saintsbury, Historical Manual of English



184 Notes

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1910); Paul Fussell, Jr, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965). Johnson, Idea of Lyric, p. 5. Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 387–89. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 145. In 1795, Spence ceased publication of Pigs’ Meat and Eaton closed down his journal Philanthropist, which had followed on the heels of Politics for the People. Both men continued to publish and sell radical tracts, but periodicals designed to reach a wide audience were abandoned. Spence and Thomas Evans, Spence’s Songs [1811], quoted in Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 22. David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 26–30; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 66–82. Thomas Spence, ‘The Case of Thomas Spence’ [1792], in Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Avero Publications, 1982), pp. 15–21, 19. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 216. See also Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). The republican critique of priestcraft united Enlightenment political philosophy with the anticlericalism that pervaded dissent and freethought. Harnessing widespread suspicions of the social role of clergy, respectable when directed against Popish tyranny but bellicose when leveled against Anglican ministers, the critique ‘stemmed from a culture at once republican and evangelical,’ as Jay Fliegelman writes in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 38. Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order in England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 128. Edward Tatham, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke on Politics [1791], quoted in Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order, p. 128. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology [London: Eaton, Part I, 1795; Part II, 1796] (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 184. Hole, Pulpits, Politics, and Public Order, pp. 101–03, 101. According to Colley, Britons, p. 209, it was between 1780 and 1800 that ‘God Save the King’ began to be called the ‘national anthem’ and to assume a consistent role in public events. See ‘The Trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton, for publishing a supposed libel, intituled [sic] Politics for the People [. . .]’ (London: Eaton, 1794); ‘The Proceedings, on the trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton [. . .] for selling a supposed libel, ‘The Second Part of the Rights of Man[”]’ (London: Eaton, 1793); Wood, Radical Satire, pp. 57–95; Michael Scrivener, ‘John Thelwall and Popular Jacobin Allegory, 1793–95,’ ELH 67.4 (2000): 951–71. Antitype [Daniel Isaac Eaton], ‘The Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing upon Society, Exposed. A Short Essay: Addressed to the Friends of Social Order’ (London: Eaton, 1793).



Notes 185

23. Wood, Radical Satire, pp. 89–95, 89. See also Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), pp. 85–87. 24. Michael Harris, The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1986), pp. 20, 21, 109. 25. Eaton, ‘Introduction,’ Politics for the People vol. 1, Part 2 (1794): 2. 26. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late EighteenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), pp. 9–42, argues that all newspapers were read by audiences spanning the class spectrum. Eaton and Spence are unique in explicitly addressing their publications to an audience that included workers and issuing them in such readers’ price range. No price appears on the title page of Politics for the People; however, in an advertisement for Eaton’s publications in his tract ‘Pernicious Effects of the Art of Printing,’ he lists 2d. as the price of the paper. Harris, Press in English Society, p. 23, points out that public houses were the most important access points for most readers of newspapers, whatever their class. 27. Daniel McCue, Jr, ‘Daniel Isaac Eaton,’ Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals vol. 1: 1770–830, eds. Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), pp. 140–44, 141. 28. In addition to its Biblical resonances, the title ‘New Song’ had roots in the ballad tradition. See Roy Palmer, The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 147. 29. Both Politics for the People and Pigs’ Meat published many of the same poets. ‘A New Song. To the Tune of—Rule Brittania,’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 30 appeared as ‘A New Song. Tune—Rule Brittania,’ in Pig’s Meat II: 67–68. The anonymous ‘1694,’ Politics for the People vol. 1, part 1, no. 5 (1793): 68, appeared in Pigs’ Meat II: 201–03, as ‘On Kings.’ ‘Independence,’ Politics for the People vol. 1, part 1, no. 12 (1793): 179, appeared as ‘The Independent Bard,’ Pigs’ Meat III: 164–66. Also both printed the poetry of W. D. Grant. 30. Anon., ‘The Triumph of Reason. A New Song,’ Politics for the People vol. 1, part 2, no. 1 (1794): 3, 4. 31. Paine, Rights of Man, pp. 213, 224. 32. Charles Pigott, Political Dictionary (London: Eaton, 1795); Horne Tooke, Diversions of Purley (London: 1786–1805); Spence, The Important Trial of Thomas Spence (London: Spence, 1802), reprinted in Political Works of Thomas Spence, pp. 92–103, 96. 33. Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 110. 34. Anon., ‘A New Song. Tune—“God Save the King,” ’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 287–88; Palmer, The Sound of History, pp. 25–26, identifies the author of this song as Joseph Mather of Sheffield (1737–1804). 35. W. Y., ‘A New Song. Tune—“Rule Britannia,” ’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 365–66. 36. Anon., ‘A New Song, Appointed to be Sung in all Streets and Alehouses, through the Kingdoms of Great Britain, France, Ireland, and Corsica,’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 255–56. 37. See Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for two excellent



186 Notes

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

accounts of the relation of oral and visual political cultures to print. Vernon argues, p. 147, that print ‘imposed fixed, verbatim meanings’ and, far from being democratic, consolidated power in the hands of a few editors. Gilmartin stresses, pp. 108–09, the dialogic structure of popular print media, arguing that it ‘encouraged a diffusion of authority’ and ‘systematically unraveled the whole logic of inside and outside, production and reception, text and context.’ Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 168. Paine, Rights of Man, p. 172. Thomas Spence, ‘A Fragment of an Ancient Prophecy’ [1796], in Political Works of Thomas Spence, pp. 45–46, 45. Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State (London: Spence, 1801), in Political Works of Thomas Spence, pp. 69–103, 78. Spence was convicted of seditious libel for this text. [Thomas Spence], ‘Alteration,’ Pigs’ Meat, II: 2. Anon., ‘Song. [Written for the 14th of July 1793],’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 285–86. Anti-Trulliber, ‘The Tyrants’ Downfal [sic]: A New Song,’ Politics for the People vol. 2 (1794): 124–25. Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 7. Blake, ‘THERE is NO Natural Religion [b]’; ‘[A Vision of The Last Judgment],’ Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 2, 565 Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 702. Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 1; David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). Heather Glen, Vision and Disenchantment: Blake’s Songs and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 170; Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 19–20. Glen, Vision and Disenchantment, p. 128. For an analysis of the political significance of narratives of a ‘lost golden-age,’ see Patrick Joyce, ‘The Constitution and the narrative structures of Victorian Politics,’ in James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 179–203, 185–86. See, for example, the repeated use of the word in ‘The Little Girl Found’: her parents look for her ‘[a]ll the night in woe,’ ‘[t]ired and woe-begone,’ while she walks ‘[w]ith feet of weary woe’ (1, 5, 19). ‘[A Vision of the Last Judgment],’ Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 564, 565.

2 Two Defence[s] of Poetry: Shelley and the Newgate Magazine 1. Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 40. 2. Ibid.



Notes 187

3. Peacock to Shelley, 4 Dec. 1820, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters, 2 vols, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), II: 245–46. ‘Barry Cornwall’ was the pen name of the Hunt-circle writer Bryan Waller Procter. 4. Marilyn Butler, Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in His Context (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 290. 5. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 164–75; Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 199–224. 6. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 47. 7. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), book X, pp. 265, 266. 8. Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. 27. 9. William Hazlitt, Review of Coriolanus production, Examiner (15 Dec. 1816): 792–94, 792–93; Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Preface’ to Laon and Cythna [/The Revolt of Islam] [1817], reprinted in Shelley’s Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry, Jr (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 44. 10. Gilmartin, Print Politics, pp. 1–64. 11. Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 173. 12. Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (London: John and H. L. Hunt, 1825), p. 205. All subsequent references are to this edition. 13. ‘Note by R. Carlile’ in a letter from William Carver, ‘To Mr. R. Carlile, Bookseller, London,’ The Republican vol. 8, no. 4 (1 Aug. 1823): 125. 14. Thomas Love Peacock, ‘The Four Ages of Poetry,’ [Ollier’s Literary Miscellany (1820)] in Shelley’s Critical Prose, pp. 158–72, 170. All subsequent references are to this edition. 15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), book III, chapter X, paragraph 34. 16. Locke, Essay, book III, chapter X, paragraph 34. 17. ‘Note by R. Carlile,’ p. 125. 18. Richard Carlile, ‘To Mr. Allen Davenport,’ The Republican vol. 6, no. 21 (18 Oct. 1822): 662–70, 669. 19. Carlile, ‘To Mr. Allen Davenport,’ p. 669. 20. Prompter (1 Oct. 1831): 819. 21. William Hazlitt, Preface to Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters [1819], vol. 7 of The Complete works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 10. 22. William Hazlitt, ‘On Paradox and Common-place,’ Table-Talk; Or, Original Essays [1821], vol. 8 of Complete Works, p. 149. All subsequent references are to this edition. 23. Richard Carlile, ‘P.S’ to A——M B——T, ‘A New Creed,’ The Republican vol. 5, no. 20 (17 May 1822): 625–27, 627. 24. The particular poets Hazlitt has in mind in this essay, ‘On Paradox and Commonplace,’ are Shelley and Coleridge. 25. Shelley Letters, II: 245, note 7. 26. W[illiam] H[azlitt], ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets,’ The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South [London: John Hunt, 1822–23] (Salzburg, Austria: Institut



188 Notes

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

Für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1978), vol. 2, no. 3 (1823): 23–46, 24, 27, 35. ‘The Vision of Judgment’ appeared in The Liberal, no. 1 (1822): 3–39 and was reprinted in The Republican vol. 9, no. 10 (5 Mar. 1824): 289–309. Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 11–56. Lord Byron, ‘Hints from Horace,’ The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), vol. 1, line 530. ‘Review of Books. The Fairy Maid, and Other Poems. By Elijah Ridings,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Jan. 1825): 232–35, 232. ‘Review of Books,’ p. 232. [Elijah Ridings], ‘Fragment of “The Atheistiad,” ’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Dec. 1825): 170. Republican vol. 6, no. 29 (13 Dec. 1822): 906–08, 906. E. Ridings, ‘To the Editors of the Newgate Magazine,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Apr. 1826): 381. E. R., ‘Address to Britons,’ Republican vol. 5, no. 8 (22 Feb. 1822): 251–52. Ridings is positively identified as the author of the poem in ‘Celebration of the Anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence at Manchester,’ Republican vol. 6, no. 9 (26 July 1822): 280. Elijah Ridings, ‘To Mr. R. Carlile, Dorchester Gaol,’ The Republican vol. 6, no. 29 (13 Dec. 1822): 906–08. Ridings, ‘To Mr. R. Carlile,’ pp. 906–07. Ibid., p. 907. William Campion was arrested on 9 May 1824, on a charge of blasphemous libel, for selling The Age of Reason and Principles of Nature. See The Republican vol. 9, no. 20 (14 May 1824): 632–36. When John Clark opened Carlile’s shop on Monday, 17 May, he was ‘[d]etermined to keep it open until some re-inforcements arrived from the country.’ Though he then refrained from selling Age of Reason, The Vision of Judgment, and Principles of Nature, he was arrested for selling a sixpenny pamphlet of the seventeenth number of The Republican. See The Republican vol. 9, no. 21 (21 May 1824): 659–62, 660, 672. William Campion, ‘To The Public,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Sept. 1824): 1–5, 2. The title of the journal was probably a satirical allusion to the New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal (1821–36). Campion, ‘To The Public,’ p. 2. Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in NineteenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 70; Campion, ‘To The Public,’ p. 2. ‘Preface,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (n.d.): v–vi, v. Campion, ‘To The Public,’ p. 3. Ibid., p. 2. ‘Review of Books,’ p. 233. Ibid., p. 233. Additionally, there were 76 significant (four or more line) poetic quotations, many of which were longer than a page. By way of contrast, there were fewer than thirty poems published in the Republican over this time frame, and it appeared weekly. Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Aug. 1825): 539.



Notes 189

50. Junius, ‘The Character and Doctrines of St. Paul,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (August 1825): 539–46; W. V. H., ‘O Sapientia et Justicia Dei!’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Feb. 1825): 282–86. 51. ‘Review of Books,’ pp. 233, 235. 52. Epicurus [Elijah Ridings], ‘Critique on the Story of Ruth. Written for the N—— M——M——,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Feb. 1825): 269–75. 53. Epicurus, ‘Critique on the Story of Ruth,’ pp. 270, 273. 54. ‘A Political Dictionary,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (June 1826): 463–68 and (July 1826): 502–12. 55. W. C., ‘Observations on “Scrutator,” ’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (April 1825): 365. ‘W. C.’ may be William Campion or William Cochrane. 56. Scrutator, ‘To the Editors of the Newgate Monthly Magazine,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (Apr. 1825): 362–64, 362. The quotations that follow in this paragraph are all taken from pages 362–63. 57. Epicurus [Elijah Ridings], ‘Epicurus on Style,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (June 1825): 456–60. This number also includes two other pieces by Ridings, a ‘Sonnet to Percy Shelley’ on p. 460 and a letter ‘To the Editors of the Newgate Magazine’ on pp. 475–78, discussed below. 58. Epicurus, ‘Epicurus on Style,’ p. 457. 59. E[lijah] Ridings, ‘To the Editors of the Newgate Magazine,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (June 1825): 475–78, 475. 60. Ridings, ‘To the Editors,’ pp. 475, 477. 61. Epicurus, ‘Critique on the Story of Ruth,’ p. 274. 62. Newgate Monthly Magazine I (April 1825): 374–78; I (June 1825): 466–67; II (Sept. 1825): 36–39; (May 1826): 415–22; (June 1826): 469–76; (July 1826): 517–27; (Aug. 1826): 570–71. There are seven essays, after the first of which they are numbered two to eight, but there is no article number seven. 63. Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980), pp. 234–35, has suggested that C. is Richard Carlile, but it seems extremely unlikely that poetry’s most virulent critic would experience such an abrupt change of heart—and then return immediately to his prior hostility. If the great enemy of poetry did adopt this alias in order to defend poetry so eloquently and persuasively, the extent to which the rationalist biases of The Republican constrained discussion would be proved beyond measure—perhaps Carlile himself could not escape his own vitriol. More likely candidates for ‘C,’ in any case, are several editors of the magazine, William Campion, William Cochrane, John Clarke, and John Christopher. Of these, Clarke and Christopher seem the most probable candidates, since either Campion or Cochrane is probably the ‘W. C.’ who was a frequent contributor. C. may well be a reader. 64. In addition to what seems to be an echo of Ridings’s initial letter to The Republican in ‘The Essayist. No. III. On The Character and Writings of Shelley,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Sept. 1825): 39, C. explicitly links Ridings’s poem ‘The Atheistiad,’ which appeared in the Newgate Monthly Magazine over the course of 1825 and 1826, to Lucretius’s anticlerical didactic poem, On the Nature of Things, in support of his claim that ‘Atheism for a poet is rather a phenomenon.’ See ‘The Essayist. No. IV,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (May 1826): 415–22, 415. Similarly, C. opens one of his articles with an epigraph from a poem by Arthur Brooke, whose works appear frequently in the Newgate Monthly Magazine and who was discussed in



190 Notes

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86.

the review of Ridings’s The Fairy Maid as an exemplar of realistic verse. See ‘The Essayist. No. V. On the Writings of Shelley.— The Revolt of Islam,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (June 1826): 469–76, 469; ‘Review of Books,’ p. 233. C., ‘The Essayist. No. VIII,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Aug. 1826): 570–71, 571. He is approvingly quoting from an essay on Shelley in the Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine. C., ‘Essayist. No. III,’ p. 39. C., ‘Essayist. No. V,’ p. 469. Here C. is quoting from a poem by Arthur Brooke, which C. has taken as an epigraph for his article. C., ‘Essayist. No. V,’ p. 476. C., ‘Essayist. No. IV,’ p. 416. Such claims for the superior didactic power of poetry abound in the Newgate Magazine. See John Hooper, ‘Defence of Byron,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Sept. 1825): 30–34, 34. C., ‘Essayist. No. V,’ p. 469. C., ‘Essayist. No. V,’ p. 469; ‘No. IV,’ p. 419; ‘No. III,’ p. 36. In ‘The Essayist. No. IV,’ pp. 416–17, C. advocates metaphors like those Ridings uses, which are drawn from nature: ‘Materialism, certainly, has no knowledge of those conveniant [sic] personages under the description of spirits, faries [sic], nymphs, genii, and half a thousand others: it is confined to matter-of-fact natural occurrences; but surely here is a field sufficiently wide and variegated for the most luxurious imagination. Nature’s periodical revolutions, her natural energies, the animated products of her womb, all present themes of song and service, without having recourse to an ideal world, which can never aid, but may bewilder the reasoning powers of mankind.’ T. R. P. [Thomas Ryley Perry], ‘Poetry and Music,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 2 (Apr. 1826): 371–75, 371. ‘Petition of T. R. Perry to the House of Commons,’ Newgate Monthly Magazine vol. 1 (June 1825): 472–75. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 481, 482. All subsequent references are to this edition. Shelley’s Critical Prose, p. 45. C., ‘Essayist. No. V,’ pp. 469–70; ‘No. III,’ p. 39. Webb, Violet in the Crucible, p. 114. See also Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975), p. xix. Shelley Letters, I: 98. Ibid., I: 352. Shelley’s Critical Prose, pp. 45–46. William Keach, Shelley’s Style (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 32. The foundation of community on justice rather than ‘personal advantage’ is a crucial point in Shelley’s ethics, and links them to Hazlitt’s idea of the imagination as a way to ground sympathy outside self-interest. This is not to criticize Shelley as an elitist. As Neil Fraistat has argued, ‘Illegitimate Shelley: Radical Piracy and the Textual Edition as Cultural Performance,’ PMLA 109 (1994): 409–23, during the 1820s what Shelley calls ‘high poetry’ was being claimed for conservative culture. All the commentators Fraistat



Notes 191

87.

88.

89.

90. 91. 92.

93. 94.

discusses agreed that the ability to read great poetry was related to civic capacity, the ability to participate in the public life of the nation. For Shelley’s search for readers, see Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Richard Holmes, Shelley, The Pursuit (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975); Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 209–58; Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 195–206; Anne Janowitz, ‘ “A Voice from across the Sea”: Communitarianism at the Limits of Romanticism,’ At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 83–100. He decided ‘not [to] trouble myself to finish [the “Philosophical View of Reform”] for this season’ (Shelley Letters, II: 164) and sent Hunt ‘England in 1819’ saying ‘I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please’ (Shelley Letters, II: 167). Shelley Letters, II: 153, 164, 169, 176, 213, 244–45, 262. Peacock’s response, Shelley Letters, II: 245, was to argue that ‘to a rational ambition poetical reputation is not only to be desired, but more earnestly to be deprecated.’ Where Shelley had recently placed his hopes in the ‘elect’ he saw as the intended audience for Prometheus Unbound, Peacock argues here that ‘there is no longer a poetical audience among the higher class of minds.’ Shelley Letters, II: 263, 294, 299. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences, p. 245. Ibid., p. 245; Ronald Tetreault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p. 236, sees these late lyrics as an ‘exten[sion]’ of the ‘principle of co-operation [. . .] from the political to the poetic sphere,’ arguing that Shelley ‘made poetry an harmonious occasion for friendship’; Jeffrey N. Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues for the importance of friendship networks to the poetry of the Cockney School centered around Hunt, and reads the Defence, as well as Adonais, as emerging from Shelley’s friendship with Keats; Donald H. Reiman, ‘Shelley and the Human Condition,’ Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 9, sees the final poems as speaking to ‘the intellectual community of friends who are bound together by multiple sympathies that fuse the various meanings of the complex English word love[, which] becomes the ideal toward which all social amelioration must tend.’ Wolfson, Formal Charges, pp. 207–08. Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson, p. 13.

3 Cooper and Linton: Chartist prophets and craftsmen 1. W. J. Linton, ‘The Poet’s Mission,’ in Peter Scheckner, An Anthology of Chartist Poetry (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), pp. 252–53. 2. Linton, ‘The Poet’s Mission.’



192 Notes

3. Thomas Cooper, ‘To the Young Men of the Working Classes. Letter III,’ Cooper’s Journal vol. 1 (2 March 1850): 129–32, 132, 131. 4. ‘Advertisement’ to Purgatory of Suicides: A Prison-Rhyme in Ten Books (London: J. How, 1845), p. iii. 5. Linton, ‘The Poet’s Mission.’ 6. Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides (London: J. How, 1845), Poetical Works of Thomas Cooper, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1886), book I, st. 10. All subsequent references are to this edition. Extracts of the poem appear in Scheckner, Anthology of Chartist Poetry, pp. 136–38; Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), pp. 127–32. The poem also is available in the Goldsmith’s-Kress Library of Economic Literature microfilm collection and the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Database. 7. ‘Prose Thinkings, from the Poet Shelley,’ Cooper’s Journal vol. 1 (6 Apr. 1850): 215. 8. Cooper, ‘To the Young Men of the Working Classes. Letter IV,’ Cooper’s Journal vol. 1 (6 Apr. 1850): 209–13, 209. 9. Bandiera [Gerald Massey], ‘Poetry to be Lived,’ The Red Republican vol. 1 (6 July 1850): 19. Cooper reprinted the ‘Song of the Red Republican’ in Cooper’s Journal vol. 1 (15 June 1850): 376, along with thirteen other poems and an essay by Massey. 10. The Reasoner alone printed an excerpt of Casa Guidi Windows under the title ‘Italy’s Call to Humanity,’ vol. 13 (1852): 217–18; a review and long passages from ‘Tennyson’s Princess,’ vol. 4 (1848): 175–76; Robert Browning’s ‘The Confessional in Spain,’ vol. 6 (1849): 140. They also printed George Herbert, ‘Constancy,’ vol. 1 (1846): 239; Robert Southey, excerpt from ‘St. Antidius,’ vol. 1 (1846): 247; Anna Barbauld, ‘The Unknown God,’ vol. 5 (1848): 208; Barry Cornwall, ‘The Complaint of an Outlying Christian,’ vol. 12 (1852): 318. 11. Quoted in Robert Fyson, ‘The Crisis of 1842: Chartism, the Colliers’ Strike and the Outbreak in the Potteries,’ in The Chartist Experience, ed. James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 207. 12. Northern Star vol. 10, no. 432 (21 Feb. 1846): 8. Cooper lost his faith in 1835. From then until his reconversion in 1855, he was an atheist for whom the example of Jesus’s life nevertheless retained power as a model of compassion and ethical behavior. See The Life of Thomas Cooper, written by himself (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), hereafter cited as Life. 13. Cooper, Life, p. 251. 14. See Purgatory of Suicides, II: 8–25 and notes 8 and 11–15; and Life, p. 252. 15. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 13. 16. Percy Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 499. 17. I owe this insight to Lisa Jenkins. 18. On the Leicestershire Chartists’ literary activities, see Life, pp. 164–78 and passim; Stephen Roberts, ‘Thomas Cooper in Leicester, 1840–1843,’ Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society vol. LXI (1987): 62–76; J. F. C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leicester,’ Chartist Studies, ed. Asa Briggs (London: Macmillan, 1959), pp. 99–146.



Notes 193

19. Cooper’s use of the dream vision may also draw on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The dream vision structure of Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s use of Spenserian stanzas in Childe Harold also stand behind Purgatory of Suicides, as Cooper acknowledges in his Life, pp. 251–52. Among the influences Cooper does not explicitly discuss may be Allen Davenport’s longer poems, The Kings; Or Legitamacy [sic] Unmasked (1819) and his collection The Muse’s Wreath (1829); Cooper certainly knew Davenport’s poetry, as his sonnets to Davenport on his death testify. 20. William James Linton, Bob-Thin, The Poorhouse Fugitive, in the Illuminated Magazine, which Linton edited (London, 1845), originally published in about 1840 as ‘The Life and Adventure of Bob Thin, a Poor-Law Tale’ (London?, 184?). 21. Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, in Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. T. Earle Welby and Stephen Wheeler (London: Chapman & Hall, 1927–36). Cooper acknowledges this influence in note 51. 22. See also my extended treatment of the speech, as recounted by witnesses and Cooper himself at his trial and reformulated at the start of Purgatory of Suicides, ‘Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper’s Purgatory of Suicides,’ Victorian Poetry 39.2 (Summer 2001): 165–86. 23. ‘Chartist Chaunt,’ ‘The Woodman’s Song,’ ‘The Old Man’s Song,’ and two songs entitled ‘Chartist Song,’ Poetical Works of Thomas Cooper, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1886). 24. Thomas Cooper, ‘Merrie England – No More!’ in Wise Saws and Modern Instances vol. 1 (London: Jeremiah How, 1845), pp. 201–17, 217. Partially reprinted in Ian Haywood, ed., The Literature of Struggle (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1995), pp. 53–59. 25. Cooper, ‘Address,’ in Samuel Smiles, ‘Poets of the People. No. III: Thomas Cooper, Author of “The Purgatory of Suicides,” ’ Howitt’s Journal vol. 3 (1848): 226 and 242–47, 242. Cooper’s defense was not published, but it is liberally excerpted here and in the Life. In addition, Northern Star for 1 April and 8 April 1843 provide lengthy trial transcripts. 26. Thomas Cooper, ‘To the Chartists of England,’ English Chartist Circular vol. 2, no. 76 ([July 1842?]): 94. 27. See, for example, III: 81–82; VI: 57–58. 28. Cooper made the same point a different way in his trial defense: ‘It was my actual experience of the truth of this distress which kindled in me the resolution to espouse openly, manfully, and decidedly, the cause of the suffering and oppressed operatives’ (Cooper, ‘Address,’ in Smiles, ‘Poets of the People,’ p. 243). 29. Richard Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 256, describes Cooper as the exemplary autodidact, acquiring through individual diligence something approximating an elite education. 30. Cooper, ‘Address,’ in Smiles, ‘Poets of the People,’ p. 242. 31. ‘The Downfall of Feudal Tyranny’ and ‘The Rights of Man for Me,’ Pigs’ Meat III: 249–51. 32. George Binns, ‘To the Magistrates Who Committed Me to Prison Under the Darlington Cattle Act,’ Northern Star (9 May 1840), reprint in Scheckner, Anthology of Chartist Poetry, 119; Ernest Jones, The New World: A Democratic Poem, Notes to the People vol. 1, no. 1 (1851): 1–15. 33. See, for example, ‘The New Year’s Wreath,’ Northern Star vol. 10, no. 425 (3 Jan. 1846): 3.



194 Notes

34. Eugene [George Hooper], ‘The Purgatory of Suicides,’ Reasoner vol. 1 (6 Aug. 1846): 150 and (13 Aug. 1846): 168. 35. Eugene, ‘Purgatory of Suicides,’ p. 150; Smiles, ‘Poets of the People,’ p. 226. 36. In Life, pp. 271–76, Cooper explains that Purgatory of Suicides was published with the aid of Douglas Jerrold, who helped him to secure a publisher, Jeremiah How, and showed the poem to Charles Dickens. See also Life, pp. 278–83, for the attention the poem received once published from Howitt, Fox, future founder of the Birkbeck Schools William Ellis—who gave Cooper one hundred pounds after hearing him lecture in October—and Thomas Carlyle, who also gave Cooper money on two occasions. See Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), for the activities of the radical reformers and their relations with Chartists and other leaders of the popular movement. 37. Howitt, ‘Recent Poetry,’ Eclectic Review (Dec. 1845): 672–73. 38. During these years, Cooper published in Northern Star, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Household Words, The Reasoner, Leicestershire Movement, The Leader, The Northern Tribune, Linton’s English Republic, Howitt’s Journal, The People’s Journal, and The People. 39. Sally Ledger, ‘Chartist Aesthetics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Ernest Jones, a Novelist of the People,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 57.1 (June 2002): 31–63; Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, pp. 169–84. 40. Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 9. 41. Ibid., p. 6; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 27–55, also argues that popular radicalism shaped the emergence of popular liberalism at mid-century. While Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), argues for a fundamental and contentious division between working-class and middle-class radicals at mid-century (one fueled in part by disagreements over intervention in European republican struggles), she too concludes that the debates that resulted from these breaches produced Gladstonian liberalism in the late 1860s. 42. Taylor, Decline, pp. 99–123. Taylor points out, Decline, p. 105, that though Chartism was waning in 1848, the larger political reform movement was very much alive. In the Parliamentary session of 1847–48, 510 petitions for ‘universal suffrage’ were submitted—but 7,350 were submitted for an extension of the franchise. After 1848, he writes, 106, most Chartist leaders had ‘drifted back into the fold of mainstream radical reform.’ Republicanism and socialism remained minority positions within the reform movement—but its goals remained consonant with republican political thought. These goals may not have been revolutionary, but they were democratic. 43. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform, p. 15; Taylor, Decline, p. 105. 44. Finn, After Chartism, pp. 71–72. Taylor, Decline, p. 193, dates the formation of the PIL to late 1846; Finn indicates 1847. 45. Taylor, Decline, p. 197; Finn, After Chartism, pp. 166–67. The spasmodic and republican poet Sydney Dobell is said to have cofounded a ‘Society of Friends of Italy’ as well, but I believe this is a separate, parallel group.



Notes 195

46. Taylor, Decline, p. 191. But for Taylor this was not, as Finn argues, a class-based division: ‘The evidence for the reform movement splitting along “class” lines over European affairs is thus not very compelling’ (201). 47. W. J. Linton, ‘Words and Meanings,’ English Republic vol. 2 (1852–53): 182. 48. W. J. Linton, ‘Holyoake versus Garrison: A Defence of Earnestness,’ English Republic 2 (1852–53): 259. 49. Linton wrote scores of poems with abstract titles; it seems to have been a central interest over the course of his career. The definitional poems I examine in this chapter explicitly offer a definition of the concept named in the title. In other words, I do not consider poems that take their title as a theme. Nevertheless, the presence of these more theme-driven poems and their consonance with definitional poems further bespeaks Linton’s deep interest in the various ways poems can amplify the meaning of words. His effort to remold British republican ‘thought, word, and deed’ also motivated his contemporaneous prose writings, some of which also adopted a definitional format. A ten-part series of articles in The Red Republican called ‘Republican Principles,’ for instance, took up and defined ten principles in turn. See The Red Republican 1 (21 Sept. 1850): 110–11; (5 Oct.): 124–25; (12 Oct.): 132–33; (26 Oct.): 147–48; (2 Nov.): 156; (9 Nov.): 164; (16 Nov.): 172; (23 Nov.): 178–80; (30 Nov.): 186–87. The English Republic ran a group of articles with titles such as ‘Honesty,’ ‘Valour,’ ‘Gentleness,’ ‘Faith,’ ‘Self-Possession,’ and ‘Religion,’ each of which was capped off by a poem of the same title. These pieces begin with etymological evidence (‘Religion from religo—religare, to bind together’), proceed to discuss the various meanings and the proper and improper uses of the word, and end with a concatenation of lexical associations (‘True—healthy—worthy—valiant’). English Republic 2 (1852–53): 148–84, 152, 169. The index to the English Republic lists the poems separately, giving them the same titles as the articles; within the pages of the volume, the poems are not separately titled and follow the prose articles with a line half-scoring the page just above them. ‘Words and Meanings,’ quoted in the epigraph above, was a sort of culmination to this entire series, on pp. 181–84. But it did not bring the definitional mood to a close. See also ‘Success,’ for example, on pp. 263–64. 50. Linton, ‘Words and Meanings,’ p. 182. 51. Spartacus [W. J. Linton], ‘I.——Integrity,’ in ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised,’ The Reasoner 4 (1848): 279. See also ‘Thought and Deed’ and ‘Word and Deed,’ People’s Journal 3 (n.d.): 49, 69; W. J. L[inton], ‘Thought, Word, and Deed,’ English Republic 2 (1852–53): 340. 52. ‘Honesty,’ English Republic 2 (1852–53): 148. 53. The English Republic 2 (1852–53): 105–08. 54. ‘The Poet’s Mission,’ in Scheckner, Anthology of Chartist Poetry, pp. 252–53. 55. ‘Faith,’ The English Republic 2 (1852–53): 158. 56. W. J. Linton, Threescore and Ten Years, 1820–1890. Recollections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), pp. 5, 16. 57. Linton, Threescore and Ten Years, pp. 17–18. 58. ‘Introduction,’ National: A Library for the People no. 1 (5 Jan. 1839) [London, 1839] (New York: Greenwood Reprint Corp., 1968), p. 3. 59. Quoted in Francis B. Smith, Radical Artisan, William James Linton, 1812–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 93.



196 Notes

60. He first copied ‘Death’s Door’ and discussed Blake’s engraving technique in the National, and later in ‘Death’s Door. From a Design by William Blake,’ Howitt’s Journal 2 (20 Nov. 1847): 321–22. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (London: Macmillan and Co., 1863). For Linton’s engagement with Blake’s work, see Smith, Radical Artisan, especially 147–51; Robert F. Gleckner, ‘W. J. Linton, a Latter-Day Blake,’ Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 85.2 (Summer 1982): 208–27. 61. Traces of Prometheus Unbound can be found in ‘Dirge of the Nations’; of ‘Mask of Anarchy’ in ‘Jubilee of Trade’; and of ‘Ode to Liberty’ in ‘To the Future.’ H. Buxton Forman notes, ‘William James Linton as Poet,’ Gentleman’s Magazine (1879): 575–92, 580, that ‘under Mr. Linton’s auspices,’ ‘Mask of Anarchy’ was published ‘as a threepenny pamplet in 1842.’ 62. Quoted in Threescore and Ten Years, p. 125. 63. Forman, ‘William James Linton,’ p. 585. 64. ‘Songs for the Unenfranchised,’ Reasoner 4 (1848): 279–80. The same poems, in the same order, appeared as ‘Hymns at Our Work’ in English Republic 1 (1851): 367–69. 65. ‘Words and Meanings,’ p. 181. 66. Ireland for the Irish is a series of fifty short lyrics written in 1849. They appeared in full in the Irish paper The Nation, and again in The English Republic; some of them also appeared, often under different titles and grouped under new headings, in The Reasoner, The Friend of the People, Republican 1848, and other late Chartist periodicals. The volume was separately issued ‘with a Preface on Fenianism and Republicanism’ in 1867 in New York by the American News Company. All fifty lyrics are available under the title Ireland for the Irish in the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry Database. Many, but not all, of these poems are definitional. Nearly all of them have single-noun titles. 67. ‘Landlordism,’ lines 2, 13, 14, 16, 17. 68. ‘Free Trade,’ lines 3, 9–11, 14. 69. Spartacus [W. J. Linton], ‘Infamy,’ Reasoner 4 (1848): 308; ‘Felony,’ Reasoner 4 (1848): 350. 70. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–178. 71. Spartacus [W. J. Linton], ‘Fairness,’ Reasoner 7 (1850): 405. 72. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 168.

4 Landor, Clough, and European republicanism 1. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 120. 2. Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor, ed. Charles G. Crump, 6 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1891), vol. 4, p. 40. 3. R. H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1954), p. 380. 4. For the epigraph, Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. T. Earle Welby (London: Chapman & Hall, 1927). Interestingly, Landor had previously discussed this passage, drawn from Milton’s ‘Treatise on Prelaty’ and rendered from its original prose into verse, in ‘The Poems of Catallus,’ [Foreign Quarterly Review (1842)] Works of Walter Savage Landor vol. 11, pp. 177–225, 189–90.



Notes 197

5. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), plate 12. In a letter to Landor written in the wake of the publication of Italics, his friend Lady Blessington told him, ‘Your honest indignation has been ignited [. . .] and has sent forth a bright flame’ (quoted in Super, Landor, 380). 6. Walter Savage Landor, ‘Ode to Sicily,’ Italics [1848], in Works of Walter Savage Landor vol. 15, lines 41–42. Subsequent citations to Italics poems—‘Ode to Sicily,’ ‘To Saint Charles Borromeo,’ ‘Gonfalionieri,’ ‘[Few poets beckon to the calmly good],’ ‘[Sleep, tho’ to age so needful, shuns my eyes],’ ‘[I told ye, since the prophet Milton’s day],’ and ‘To Francis Hare, Buried at Palermo’— are to this edition, which uses the first published version of each poem and scrupulously notes Landor’s subsequent revisions. ‘Ode to Sicily’ and ‘To Saint Charles Borromeo’ appeared first in The Examiner. 7. John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (New York and London: St Martin’s and Macmillan, 2000), p. 2. 8. Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 9. Kaul, Poems of Nation, p. 9. 10. Ibid., p. 23. 11. For the Romantic transformation of occasional verse from public to private events, see Dolan, Poetic Occasion and Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 12. John Stuart Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’ [Monthly Repository (Jan. 1833)] reprinted as ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill vol. 1, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 348–49. 13. John Dolan, Poetic Occasion, discusses this suspicion of occasional verse as a function of the evolution in the structure of poetic labor from patronage to the market. 14. For Disraeli’s Byronism, see Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 6. The Trollopian pleasures of opposition are memorably explained to Phineas Finn, in the novel that took his name, by his mentor, Mr Monk, for whom joining the government is a sacrifice in both enjoyment and integrity. The idea of the opposition poet may also owe something to the power of the independent Members of Parliament, whose importance to radical politics Miles Taylor documents in The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 15. Robert Pinsky, Landor’s Poetry (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 26. 16. Ibid. 17. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952); Ezra Pound, ‘The Hard and Soft in French Poetry,’ Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. and intro. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Connecticut and New York: New Directions, 1954), pp. 285–89; Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 70. 18. Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 174. 19. Pinsky, Landor’s Poetry, p. 26.



198 Notes

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Davie, Purity of Diction, p. 196; Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 162. Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 66. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, passim. R. H. Super, The Publication of Landor’s Works (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1954), in Supplement to the Bibliographical Society’s Transactions, no. 18, p. x. Pinsky, Landor’s Poetry, p. 53. This dismissal has roots in the earliest writings about Landor. See, for instance, John Forster, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography [London, Chapman & Hall, 1869] (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co., 1869), p. 577. Richard Cronin, ‘Gebir and Jacobin Poetry,’ 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads, ed. Richard Cronin (Houndsmills and New York: MacmillanSt Martin’s, 1998), pp. 108–32. Regina Hewitt, ‘Landor, Shelley, and the Design of History,’ Romanticism on the Net 20 (Nov. 2000), paragraph 1. Hewitt, ‘Landor, Shelley, and the Design of History,’ paragraph 4. Titus Bicknell, ‘Calamus Ense Potentior Est: Walter Savage Landor’s Poetic War of Words,’ Romanticism on the Net 4 (Nov. 1996), paragraphs 10, 13. Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism: Literary Encounters with the Orient (London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1994), pp. 39, 42. Pound, ABC of Reading, p. 176. Ibid., p. 174. Forster, Walter Savage Landor, p. 577. ‘To Lamartine,’ The Examiner (29 Apr. 1848): 278. This split between the moderates, who were focused on building republican institutions, and the radical republicans, who were ‘social’ reformers intent on economic reforms, was reflected in the responses to the French situation among British radicals. See Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 142–87. The version of this poem in The Works of Walter Savage Landor silently amends line 31 to read ‘She saw that [. . .].’ Walter Savage Landor, ‘To Cavaignac,’ The Examiner (8 July 1848): 437. The language of injury is especially dense in the eight lines of the twenty-six-line poem that concern the misdeeds of Napoleon, who is unnamed and whose function is entirely yoked to Cavaignac’s dubious ethics. See lines 13–20. Walter Savage Landor, ‘To the President of the French Republic,’ The Examiner (30 Dec. 1848): 837. Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ The Marx–Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 594, 608. Walter Savage Landor, ‘Remarks on the Election of Louis Napoleon,’ The Examiner (23 Dec. 1848): 818. The word ‘pacific’ also appears in Milton’s sonnet ‘To the Lord Cromwell,’ one of the many echoes discussed below. Landor, ‘Remarks,’ p. 819. ‘The Republic Without Republicans,’ The Examiner (16 Dec. 1848): 801. Landor may allude to J. R. Lowell’s ‘To Lamartine, 1848,’ published six months earlier, which contains many of the same words and sentiments. The poems Landor published in the Examiner in the weeks leading up to this ode all lamented the ethical corruption of the poets of the day or the absence



Notes 199

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

of true public-spirited writers. See ‘To Aubrey de Vere’ (a figure for whom Linton also wrote a poem in 1848), The Examiner (7 Oct. 1848): 644; ‘Epistle to Arndt,’ The Examiner (23 Sept. 1848): 613; and ‘To Robert Eyres Landor,’ The Examiner (4 Nov. 1848): 710, which picks up on these themes and opens with an epigraph from Pindar. Forster’s article, along with Landor’s ‘Remarks on the Election of Louis Napoleon,’ appeared under the regular section of the paper entitled ‘The Political Examiner,’ The Examiner (16 Dec. 1848): 801, whose motto for the week outlined the ‘fate’ of the ‘impartial writer’ in these terms: ‘If he resolve[s] to venture upon the dangerous precipice of telling unbiassed truth, let him proclaim war with mankind—neither to give nor to take quarter. If he tells the crimes of great men they fall upon him with iron hands of the law; if he tells them of virtues, when they have any, then the mob attacks him with slander. But if he regards truth, let him expect martyrdom on both sides, and then he may go on fearless.’ The line echoes both the description of Adam and Eve’s departure from paradise—‘They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way’ (XII: 648–49) and Beelzebub’s question of the fallen angels, ‘who shall tempt with wand’ring feet / The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss / And through the palpable obscure find out / His uncouth way’ (II: 404–07). Paradise Lost: A Poem in Twelve Books, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York and London: Macmillan & Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962). Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 7, 92. The claim holds true for Cooper in Purgatory of Suicides as well. Milton appears by name in ‘Ode to Sicily,’ ‘Gonfalonieri,’ ‘[Few Poets Beckon to the Calmly Good],’ and ‘[I told ye, since the prophet Milton’s day]’, and by significant textual allusion in ‘To Saint Charles Borromeo,’ ‘[Sleep, though’ to Age so needful, shuns my eyes], and ‘To Francis Hare, Buried at Palermo.’ In Italics, the lines read ‘No mortal hand hath [. . .].’ John Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,’ Paradise Regained, The Minor Poems, and Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1937), lines 93, 95. Walter Savage Landor, ‘Hiero and Pindar,’ The Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor; comprising Heroic Idyls, &c, new edition, enlarged (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1859), pp. 129, 132. The clause ‘on the Insurrection of Sicily and Naples’ was added to the title of the poem beginning in 1853. Clough, The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), vol. II, p. 546. All subsequent references are to this edition, hereafter Corr. Clough similarly described the poem as ‘my Epistolary Comi-Tragedy’ (Corr., II: 540). Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 212. Friedrich Neitzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), section 7, p. 60. Neitzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 7, p. 60. Ibid., section 4, p. 45. By the end of the poem, Claude’s principled inaction strikes many readers as somewhat absurd. Any one of several simple actions could have secured for Claude the hand of his beloved, Mary—in other words, action is far from



200 Notes

58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

futile—while the self-important satisfaction he gleans from being true to his bleak vision of things seems to exceed the moral or existential danger posed by his rejected engagement in the world. On this point, see Robert Micklus, ‘A Voyage of Juxtapositions: The Dynamic World of Amours de Voyage,’ Victorian Poetry 18 (1980): 408; Katharine Chorley, Arthur Hugh Clough: The Uncommitted Mind: A Study of His Life and Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 206; J. A. Symonds, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough,’ The Fortnightly Review x (Dec. 1868): 602. Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, second edition, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), V: 188, 189–90, 194. All subsequent references are to this edition. Quotations from the published poem are given by book and line number, drafts by page number. For a summary of scholarly treatments of Claude’s inaction in his love plot, see Stefanie Markovits, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, and the Victorian Crisis of Action,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.4 (2001): 445–78. John Goode’s writing on Clough is a notable exception in its focus on politics, and I have learned much from it. See ‘1848 and the Strange Disease of Modern Love,’ in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Lucas (London: Methuen, 1971), pp. 45–76 and ‘Amours de Voyage: The Aqueous Poem,’ in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), pp. 275–97. The lines echo Socrates’s assertion in the Phaedrus, that when words ‘have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not; and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.’ Irwin Edman, ed., The Works of Plato (New York, 1928), p. 324. Chorley, Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 197. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): II: 448, 449, 456–57. Corr., I: 244. Ibid., I: 243. Clough, Selected Prose Works, ed. Buckner B. Trawick (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964), p. 119. Corr., I: 216. The context of the remark was somewhat ironic. Clough wrote to confirm to Tom Arnold the news he ‘will have heard’ about their mutual friend Palgrave, who had become ‘a very suspect person at Oxford’ and ‘next to myself is I suppose accounted the wildest and most écervelé republican going.’ Ecervelé means madcap, frenetic, or free-spirited—with a connotation of scatterbrained. Corr., I: 216; Arnold, ‘To a Republican Friend, 1848,’ in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), pp. 101–03; R. E. Prothero, ed., Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley [London, 1893, i. 390], quoted in [R. W. Church], ‘Clough’s Poems,’ Christian Remembrancer, xlv (Jan. 1863): 61–89, 66. All subsequent references to Arnold’s poems are to this edition. W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, 2 vols (Oxford, 1961–63): II. 527. Church, ‘Clough’s Poems,’ p. 67. Quoted in R. L. Rusk, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1949), p. 347.



Notes 201

71. Quoted in Rusk, Emerson, p. 347. 72. F. Reginald Statham, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough,’ National Review xxix (Apr. 1897): 200–12, 207. 73. It is important to be clear about this, since so many of his critics have confused the matter: Clough was a republican. He was not a ‘liberal of the future,’ as Francis W. Palmer first suggested and Michael Timko, Innocent Victorian: The Satiric Poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Ohio University Press, 1963), has affirmed, but he was something close: a republican of the sort that so powerfully shaped liberalism in its own image in the two decades after 1848. The fact that Clough was disappointed by the course of the February Revolution, that he was a critic of Louis Napoleon and Joseph Mazzini, that he distrusted the uses to which the old trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity were being put all signal that he was an intelligent and critical republican. Clough’s prominence as a Victorian thinker on the matter of faith and doubt need not be opposed to his republicanism. His reading of freethinking and comparativist philosophers and theologians such as Spinoza and Mirabeau, like his interest in evolutionary biology and the new classical studies, immersed him in schools of inquiry that were associated with, when they did not explicitly advocate, republicanism. For the best account of Clough’s thought, see Robindra Kumar Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough: Towards a Reconsideration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), especially chapters 2–5. 74. ‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’ [The Crayon 2, no. 5 (Aug. 1855): 71], in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 206. Isobel Armstrong discusses the poem’s use of the rhetoric of Chartist and working-class poetry in Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 194. 75. The title of the poem is in Greek. See The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. 589, for this cancelled passage. 76. Ironically, Clough may have been a ‘child of wealth,’ but he was never a wealthy man. For his family’s downward economic and social mobility, see Biswas, Arthur Hugh Clough, chapter 1. 77. The poem was originally published under the title The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich: A Long-Vacation Pastoral (Oxford: Francis Macpherson; London: Chapman & Hall) in 1848. Clough later revised and renamed the poem The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich, and it is this revised edition that appears in Mulhauser, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, and from which I quote. Citations are given parenthetically by book and line number in the text. Early readers of Amours de Voyage interpreted it in relation to The Bothie. J. C. Shairp, for instance, wrote to Clough, Corr., I: 275, ‘In the Bothie, though I was not its warmest admirer, there was strength and something positive in men’s characters and the Highland Hills—but here this fresh element is wanting and blasé disgust at men and things rampant.’ 78. For instance, Dorothy Mermin, The Audience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 113, calls it an ‘evasive solution.’ 79. His allusion to Ecclesiastes encompasses the explicit echo of verse 14 (‘I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit’) as well as a gesture toward the verses that follow, in which the prophet does as Claude will do over the course of the poem: ‘I gave my



202 Notes

80.

81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly’ only to find that ‘this also is vexation of spirit. / For in much wisdom is grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ Ecclesiastes, The Bible, Authorized King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), chapter 1, verses 14, 17–18. This emphasis also signals that Claude is most explicitly not Clough, a point Clough was at some pains to establish. A motto in the 1849 draft, ‘Nor digger him the gods had made, nor ploughman, / Nor wise in aught beside’ emphasizes the irony-producing distance between Claude’s ‘wisdom’ and that of the poem (p. 618). I take my translation from J. P. Phelan, ed., Clough: Selected Poems (London: Longman, 1995), p. 77. Similarly, Clough exclaimed to Shairp, ‘Gott und Teufel, my friend, you don’t suppose all that comes from myself!—I assure you it is extremely not so’ (Corr., I: 276). For Claude’s dream visions about art and love, see I: 154–66 and I: 234–52. For Clough’s critique of patriotism, see Walter E. Houghton, The Poetry of Clough: An Essay in Revaluation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 128–35. For the permutations of the theme of growth, see John Goode, ‘Amours de Voyage,’ pp. 282, 286–91. The lines echo Byron’s Marino Faliero: ‘They never fail who die / In a great cause: the block may soak their gore; / Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs / Be strung to city gates and castle walls— / But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years / Elapse, and others share as dark a doom, / They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts / Which o’erpower all others, and conduct / The world at last to freedom: What were we, / If Brutus had not lived? He died in giving / Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson— / A name which is a virtue, and a soul / Which multiplies itself throughout all time, / When wicked men wax mighty, and a state / Turns servile.’ Lord Byron, The Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), Act II, scene 2, lines 93–107. Corr., II: 538. See also Claude’s account of witnessing the siege and the murder of a priest, in which the line between illusion and reality blurs (pp. 102–03, 630). See A. L. P. Norrington, ‘Preface to the First Edition,’ Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, p. xviii, for an exceptionally clear discussion of Clough’s hexameters. See also Joseph Patrick Phelan, ‘Radical Metre: The English Hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich,’ Review of English Studies 50.198 (May 1999): 166–87, particularly his discussion of Clough’s use of the caesura, evident in this line. This line was singled out by J. C. Shairp as exemplifying the mere ‘[o]ne page or two’ of Amours de Voyage’s hexameters that ‘rise into music’ (Corr., I: 275). Claude also revels in the blurring of sight and imagination when he remembers his voyage to Rome while sitting at the Vatican (III: 56) and when he confuses recalled images of art and of his beloved (V: 156–61). By contrast, see Claude’s fantasy of integration with the world he sees around him (III: 151–81, 207–13). Barbara Hardy, Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (London: The Athlone Press, 1977), p. 33.



Notes 203

90. The best readings of Claude’s (and Clough’s) use of irony are Houghton, Poetry of Clough, pp. 119–55; Mermin, Audience in the Poem, pp. 109–26. 91. Michael Thorpe, ed., Clough: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), p. 286. 92. Clough, Selected Prose Works, p. 95. 93. Ibid., p. 94. 94. Ibid., p. 95. 95. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, p. 187. 96. Ibid., p. 178. 97. In a sense, this is just to repeat in a more politicized vein what Dorothy Mermin said of Amours de Voyage in Audience in the Poem, pp. 109, 111: ‘the attention given to the speakers’ use of language [is] an essential part of their engagement with that world. [. . .] Claude cannot find his appropriate voice without defining his relations with the social world of his English friends, the art of Rome, and the potentially heroic politics of the risorgimento.’ 98. Goode, ‘Amours de Voyage,’ pp. 277, 296. 99. Symonds, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough,’ p. 617; Corr., I: 275. 100. Phelan, ‘Radical Metre,’ p. 167. 101. Meg Tasker, ‘Time, Tense, and Genre: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Clough’s Bothie,’ Victorian Poetry 34.2 (Summer 1996): 193–211, 194. 102. Clough, Selected Prose Works, pp. 144–45. 103. Ibid., p. 144. 104. Neitzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, section 7, pp. 59, 60. 105. Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux: 2002), p. 355. 106. Mermin, Audience in the Poem, p. 126.

5 Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne, 1867–1874 1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy [1869], ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 5. 2. John Morley, ‘Young England and the Political Future,’ The Fortnightly Review vii (Apr. 1867): 491–96, 493. 3. Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy 1860–86 (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 11. 4. For the relation between republican and liberal thought and politics, see Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 82–83; Antony Taylor, ‘Republicanism Reappraised: Anti-Monarchism and the English Radical Tradition, 1850–1872,’ in James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 154–78, esp. 175–178; Anna Clark ‘Gender, Class, and the Nation: Franchise Reform in England, 1832–1928,’ in Re-reading the Constitution, pp. 230–53. 5. George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career [1874], revised edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), p. 114. 6. Frederic Harrison, ‘The Monarchy,’ The Fortnightly Review xvii (June 1872): 613–41, 640.



204 Notes

7. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay [London: Hotten, 1868], Complete Works vol. XVI (London: William Heinemann, 1926), p. 340. 8. William Blake, ‘London,’ Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, David V. Erdman, ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1988), line 8. 9. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Complete Poetry and Prose, plate 14. 10. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Eve of Revolution,’ Songs before Sunrise [1871], in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne vol. 2 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1904), lines 145–47. All subsequent references to Swinburne’s poetry are to this edition. 11. Biagini, Liberty, p. 83; Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 46–47. 12. D. A. Hamer, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), p. 84. 13. The Letters of George Meredith, 3 vols, ed. C. L. Cline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 1: 407–11. Hereafter Letters. 14. Royle, Radicals, pp. 2–9. 15. John Morley, ‘The Chamber of Mediocrity,’ The Fortnightly Review x (Dec. 1868): 681–94, 681. 16. Ibid., p. 681. 17. James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity [1872–1873, Pall Mall Gazette], ed. and intro. R. J. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 52, 53. 18. Jeffrey Paul von Arx, Progress and Pessimism: Religion, Politics, and History in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 5. 19. Morley, ‘Young England and the Political Future,’ pp. 491–92. 20. Ibid., p. 496. 21. Frances Wentworth Knickerbocker, Free Minds: John Morley and His Friends (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 40. 22. In the ‘Introduction’ to Culture and Anarchy that Arnold added to the 1869 first edition, he attempts to distance himself from Morley’s understanding of the word: ‘the frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, and many other liberals are apt to call it’ (33). 23. Hamer, John Morley, p. 83. 24. On the comparative priority accorded to moral and intellectual change rather than political action, see von Arx, Progress and Pessimism, p. 136; Hamer, John Morley, pp. 64–80. 25. Morley, ‘The Chamber of Mediocrity,’ p. 684. 26. Hirst, Early Life and Letters of John Morley [(1927), I: 188], quoted in Knickerbocker, Free Minds, p. 80. 27. Harrison, ‘The Monarchy,’ p. 636. 28. Ibid., p. 613. 29. Knickerbocker, Free Minds, p. 82. Even Walter Bagehot, whose English Constitution appeared in the Fortnightly, had by 1872 removed from his polemic his dire predictions about franchise reform. As Miles Taylor notes in his ‘Introduction’ to The English Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xxi,



Notes 205

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

‘Bagehot was not trying to save monarchy from a republican challenge—a challenge which was intense at the time of the publication of the second edition of The English Constitution in 1872, but barely perceptible in 1865— rather he was trying to explain how a monarchy which combined prerogative and symbolic power could actually make quasi-republican institutions work more effectively.’ J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 13. Biagini, Liberty, p. 86; Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, p. 114. Harrison, ‘The Monarchy,’ p. 613. Ibid., p. 640. Meredith agreed. He told his close friend and future model for Nevil Beauchamp, Frederick Maxse, in 1866, ‘I take no interest in Reform. I see no desire for it below. If there were, I would give it; I have no fear of Radicals. Democracy must come [. . .]’ (Meredith, Letters, I: 333). In another letter to Maxse in 1872, Meredith condemned Sir Charles Dilke’s ill-timed motion to investigate the Civil List and the Queen’s personal income: ‘The behaviour of the House of Commons was filthy. They are at red heat of loyalty, and I am persuaded that men anxious to serve the public would be wiser-minded in timing their motions. Think of it!—after the English have just seen a Republic overthrown by a Monarchy, they are expected to listen with decency to a pair of avowed Republicans!—and their Prince only lately well out of a typhoid bed! It is asking too much of them’ (I: 463). Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, p. 6. George Meredith, ‘Sonnet to—,’ The Fortnightly Review vii (June 1869): p. 696, lines 2, 3, 7, 11. Reprinted as ‘To J. M.,’ in The Poems of George Meredith, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), vol. 1, p. 296. Morley, ‘Young England and the Political Future,’ p. 492. George Meredith, ‘Aneurin’s Harp,’ The Fortnightly Review x (Sept. 1868): 255–59, lines 145, 140, 148. Reprinted in Bartlett, Poems of George Meredith vol. 1, pp. 363–69. Morley, ‘The Chamber of Mediocrity,’ p. 686. George Meredith, The Egoist [1879], ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 7. Meredith, Letters, I: 485. Meredith, Letters, I: 333. George Meredith, ‘Lines to a Friend Visiting America,’ The Fortnightly Review viii (Dec. 1868): 727, stanzas xii–xiii. Reprinted in Bartlett, Poems of George Meredith vol. 1, pp. 621–28. Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks. A Study of the Novels (London: Athlone, 1970), p. 97. Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, p. 251. George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), p. 9. Walter H. Pater, ‘A Fragment on Sandro Botticelli,’ The Fortnightly Review xiv (Aug. 1870): 155–60, 156–57. See also the revised version of the passage that appeared in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry [1873], in Walter Pater: Three Major Texts (The Renaissance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits), ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York University Press, 1986), p. 107.



206 Notes

47. George Meredith, ‘In the Woods,’ The Fortnightly Review xiv (Aug. 1870): 179–83. A later version is reprinted in Bartlett, Poems of George Meredith vol. 2, pp. 774–78. 48. William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey,’ William Wordsworth: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 5, 7–8. 49. Jack Lindsay, George Meredith, His Life and Work (London: Bodley Head, 1956), p. 51. 50. Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith, A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1953), p. 178. 51. William Morris, ‘On the Edge of the Wilderness,’ xi (1869): 391–94; ‘The Dark Wood,’ vol. xv (Feb. 1871): 219–20; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘The Cloud Confines,’ xvii (Jan. 1872): 14–15. 52. George Meredith, ‘Mr. Robert Lytton’s Poems,’ The Fortnightly Review ix (June 1868): 658–72, 660–61. 53. Meredith, Letters, I: 485. 54. Ibid. 55. Meredith, ‘Phaéthôn,’ The Fortnightly Review viii (1867): 293. Reprinted in Bartlett, Poems of George Meredith vol. 1, pp. 393–98. 56. Meredith, Letters, I: 410. 57. Pater, ‘Sandro Botticelli,’ pp. 157–58. 58. Unsigned review [Canadian Monthly ix (April 1876)] in Meredith: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 177. 59. Robert Browning, Balaustion’s Adventure, in The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 25–26. 60. Knickerbocker, Free Minds, p. 201. 61. John Morley, ‘Byron,’ The Fortnightly Review xiv (Nov. 1870): 650–73, 652. 62. John Morley, ‘A Fragment on the Genesis of Morals,’ The Fortnightly Review ix (Mar. 1868): 330–38, 333. 63. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 103; Harvie, University Liberals, p. 40, emphasizes the particular influence of On Liberty on this generation. 64. Morley, ‘Young England and the Political Future,’ p. 496. See Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 91–118, for the importance of ‘character.’ 65. Meredith, The Egoist, p. 4. 66. Ibid. 67. It appeared in Fortnightly xv (Jan. 1871): 86–94, and a revision was later printed in Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1898), where it appeared under the title ‘France, December, 1870,’ with three poems of more recent composition, ‘The Revolution,’ ‘Napoléon,’ and ‘Alsace-Lorraine.’ The volume was dedicated to his friend, by then ‘The Right Hon. John Morley, M. P.’ The poems are reprinted in Bartlett, Poems of George Meredith vol. 1, pp. 369–79. 68. Meredith, Letters, I: 432. 69. Morley, ‘Byron,’ pp. 650, 652. 70. Meredith, Letters, I: 353. 71. Ibid., I: 382. 72. Sheldon Amos, Review of Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise, The Fortnightly Review xv (Feb. 1871): 281–82, 281.



Notes 207

73. Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 218. 74. Quoted in Anne Ridler, ed., Poems and Some Letters of James Thomson (London: Centaur Press, 1963), p. vxii. All subsequent references to Thomson’s poetry, unless otherwise noted, are to this edition. The City of Dreadful Night first appeared, under Thomson’s pseudonym, B. V., and dated 1870–1874, in the National Reformer xxiii (22 Mar. 1874): 181–83; (12 Apr. 1874): 230–31; (26 Apr. 1874): 262–63; (17 May 1874): 310–11. It has been reissued in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880) and in an edition edited by Edwin Morgan (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1993). 75. Quoted in Ridler, Poems and Some Letters, p. xvii. Thomson had tried to place his poems in periodicals with less ‘extreme views,’ to little avail. His two successes in twenty years served only to prove the rule that the mainstream press was out of his reach. ‘Sunday up the River’ appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1869; and in the last year of his life an introduction provided by George Meredith to John Morley resulted in the publication in the Fortnightly of ‘A Voice from the Nile.’ Ridler, Poems and Some Letters, pp. xx–xxvi. 76. In the full quotation, Thomson writes, ‘the great bulk of its readers are poorly educated, and care little or nothing for poetry or any other art [. . .] but only as a club to hit parsons and lords on the head with’ (quoted in Ridler, Poems and Some Letters, p. xvii). Of the paper’s readers, Thomson may have been correct, though his assertion begs the question of why Bradlaugh would have taken up so much space in his paper for poetry and its discussion if he agreed his readers were largely indifferent to it. Several contributors were fervent advocates of poetry. A writer using the initials B. T. W. R., for instance, published, among other articles in which poetic quotations figured centrally, ‘Socrates, Christ, and Shelley,’ x (8 Sept. 1867): 148–49; ‘Emerson,’ x (20 Oct. 1867): 247; ‘Shelley,’ x (27 Oct. 1867): 263; ‘Queen Mab’s Work,’ xi (31 May 1868): 343; ‘Scepticism and Pantheism in Poetry,’ xiv (5 Sept. 1869): 149; ‘Nature, Matter, and Life,’ xiv (17 Oct. 1869), which quotes from Clough’s poem ‘Naples—Easter Day’; ‘Universalism; Or, Nature and Predestination,’ xiv (26 Dec. 1869): 405–06, which opens with Browning, twice quotes ‘Abt Vogler,’ and closes with a mention on Shelley. See also the pair of articles by ‘Ascidian,’ ‘Are the Poets With Us?’ xviii (30 July 1871): 75–76 and (6 Aug. 1871): 92–93, which discuss Browning, Morris, Swinburne, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arnold, and Shelley. And see the carefully crafted poems of J. M. Peacock, discussed briefly below, which appeared alongside those of Thomson throughout these years. 77. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 461. 78. Jerome J. McGann, ‘James Thomson (B. V.): The Woven Hymns of Night and Day,’ SEL 3 (1963): 493–507, 497. 79. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 52. 80. Thomson, ‘The Approach to St. Paul’s,’ p. 14. 81. Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ [1864], Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 268. Thomson wrote that in ‘Doom of a City,’ he was ‘lacking the



208 Notes

82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

knowledge and power to deal with the theme in its epical integrity.’ The Poetical Works of James Thomson (‘Bysshe Vanolis’), 2 vols, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Reeves and Turner, 1895), II: 442. Arnold, ‘Preface to the First Edition of Poems’ [1853], The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 592; Bertram Dobell, The Laureate of Pessimism: A Sketch of the life and Character of James Thomson (‘B. V.’) (London: published by the author, 1910). Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 52. Thomson attended the Royal Caledonian Asylum and received additional training in preparation for his short-lived career as a schoolmaster in the army. James Thomson, Shelley, a poem, with other writings to Shelley, by the late James Thomson (‘B. V.’): to which is added an Essay on The Poems of William Blake, by the same Author (Charles Whittingham and Co., 1884), p. 44. Ridler, Poems and Some Letters, p. xi. See also Linda M. Austin, ‘James Thomson and the Continuum of Labor,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 20 (1992): 69–98, which explores the political implications of Thomson’s ideas about vocation and work, the ‘indolence’ he often espoused and its relation to the milieu of radical reform. Dobell, Poetical Works of James Thomson, I: XV. B. V. [James Thomson], ‘Weddah and Om-El-Bonain,’ National Reformer xviii (19 Nov. 1871): 325. ‘Correspondence between James Thomson and William Michael Rossetti,’ in Shelley, pp. 79–100. See also Ridler, Poems and Some Letters, p. xx. In addition to Thomson’s intervention in the Poems and Ballads controversy (National Reformer viii [23 Dec. 1866]: 403–04), he discussed Swinburne’s biography of Blake in ‘Walt Whitman,’ National Reformer xxiv (30 Aug. 1874): 135. Among other citations, see the extensive quotations from Swinburne’s poems in Ascidian, ‘Are the Poets With Us?’ National Reformer xviii (30 July 1871): 75–76 and (6 Aug.): 92–93. G. W. Foote used a Swinburne quotation for the epigraph to ‘Another Royal Pauper,’ National Reformer xxiv (2 Aug. 1874): 68. ‘A Note on George Meredith,’ reprinted in The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery: Selected Prose of James Thomson (B. V.), ed. William David Schaefer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 285, 286. When the essay originally appeared in the Secularist (3 June 1876), it was as a review of Beauchamp’s Career. The version reprinted in Schaefer is from Thomson’s revision for Essays and Phantasies (London, 1881). B. V. [James Thomson], ‘Walt Whitman,’ National Reformer xxiv (2 Aug. 1874): 67. The essay appeared over several numbers that year: (26 July): 50–51; (2 Aug.): 67–68; (9 Aug.): 82–83; (23 Aug.): 124–25; (30 Aug.): 135; (6 Sept.): 148–49. ‘Walt Whitman,’ p. 135. C. Maurice Davies, Heterodox London: Or, Phases of Free Thought in the Metropolis, 2 vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1874), I: 20. Thomson, Shelley, p. 18. Dobell dates the essay as ‘a year or two earlier’ than 1860, its date of publication, in the ‘Prefatory Note’ to Shelley, p. viii. On Thomson’s development from pantheist to atheist, see Schaefer, Speedy Extinction, pp. 47–67.



Notes 209

97. See James Thomson (‘B. V.’), Poems, Essays, and Fragments, ed. John M. Robertson (London: Bertram Dobell, 1892), p. 263, a fragment dated 1873. Thomson’s position was more characteristic of the viewpoint of the labor leaders central to popular liberalism during the 1870s and 1880s. Biagini, Liberty, p. 50, notes that ‘Victorian plebeian radicals believed that the moral nature of man was sinful and—despite Darwin, Comte and the ideology of progress—basically non-evolutionary[.]’ 98. B. V. [James Thomson], ‘Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery,’ National Reformer xviii (27 Aug. 1871): 134. The article ran over several issues: (27 Aug.): 133–34; (3 Sept.): 147–48; (10 Sept.): 163–64; (17 Sept.): 179–81; (24 Sept.): 198–99; (8 Oct.): 230–31; (5 Nov.): 292–93; (12 Nov.): 308–09. A ‘shortened version’ is reprinted in Speedy Extinction, pp. 15–33. 99. ‘Walt Whitman,’ p. 135. 100. The implication was even stronger in the draft line, which read ‘Admired and envied and renowned for worth.’ 101. It is likely that Thomson knew of Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise by March, 1874, when The City of Dreadful Night began to appear in the National Reformer. On 26 March, E. H. G. published his enthusiastic review of Songs before Sunrise. Ridler notes, Poems and Some Letters, that Thomson’s copy of The City of Dreadful Night, the version from which the National Reformer set its text, bears ‘a good deal of fresh correction and rearrangement’ (p. 270). 102. Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, second edition, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), V: 222. 103. Thomson made a similar point in relation to nature, typically an image of transparency and truth in republican verse, in ‘Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery,’ National Reformer, xviii (3 Sept. 1871): 148: ‘She [nature] only keeps us alive by a complicated system of the most shameful illusions, falsifying beyond rectification life, death, and afterdeath. Having made us take part in this poor puzzling game of life, she has taken care that all the rules shall be unfavourable to us [. . .] Our sorrows are real and enduring; our joys deceptive and transient; our prizes of victory are not to be compared with our forfeits of defeat.’ The passage appears in Speedy Extinction, pp. 22–23. 104. J. M. Peacock, ‘The March of Truth,’ National Reformer ix (7 Apr. 1867): 222. 105. J. M. Peacock, ‘Verses on the Death of Austin Holyoake,’ National Reformer xxiii (26 Apr. 1874): 259. 106. Anon., ‘A Suppressed Poem. By Robert Burns,’ National Reformer xi (26 Apr. 1868): 263. 107. Quoted in McGann, ‘James Thomson,’ p. 493. 108. ‘The Poet and His Muse,’ lines 121, 150. 109. ‘Despotism Tempered by Dynamite,’ line 28. 110. J. A. Symonds, ‘Arthur Hugh Clough,’ The Fortnightly Review x (Dec. 1868): 589–617; Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Watch in the Night,’ The Fortnightly Review x (Dec. 1868): 618–22. As Margot K. Louis points out, ‘Swinburne, Clough, and the Speechless Christ,’ Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1987): 1–5, 3, though Clough’s poems were appearing, and being reviewed, in the years Swinburne composed many of the Songs before Sunrise poems, there is no direct evidence that Swinburne was reading them. The link between Swinburne and Clough was made as early as 1866 by James Russell Lowell



210 Notes

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

in ‘Swinburne’s Tragedies,’ My Study Windows (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), p. 211. Louis’s ‘Swinburne, Clough’ makes the link explicit. She writes, 1, that ‘[s]uch poets as Walter Savage Landor or Algernon Charles Swinburne [. . .] helped to sustain a theologically and politically radical tradition within English literature throughout the Victorian period,’ and she reads ‘Before a Crucifix’ by comparing it to Clough’s ‘Easter Day.’ Swinburne’s famous derisive couplet about Clough, ‘We’ve got no faith, and we don’t know what to do: / To think one can’t believe a creed because it isn’t true!’ was written very late in his life (1891) and is of dubious use in gauging his earlier opinions (Complete Works, 15: 283). Joseph Mazzini, Letter to Algernon Charles Swinburne (10 March [1867]), Ashley MS 4244, British Library, London. Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, p. 419. Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, pp. 402–19. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 91. Swinburne, Letters, 2: 55. Philip Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait of a Poet (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 27. Mazzini, Letter to Swinburne, n.p. Blake, Jerusalem, Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 233; Massey, ‘The Awakening of the People,’ in Maidment, Poorhouse Fugitives, lines 148–49. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Letter to Karl Blind (13 Dec. 1876), Blind Papers, Additional MS 40125, British Library, London. George M. Ridenour, ‘Swinburne’s Imitations of Catullus,’ Victorian Newsletter 74 (Fall 1988): 51–57, 54. Quoted in Edmund Gosse, Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne [1917], Complete Works vol. XIX (London: Heinemann, 1927), p. 178. See ‘Charles Baudelaire’ [1861], Complete Works vol. 13: 417–27. Swinburne, William Blake, pp. 340–41. Ibid., p. 255. Ibid., p. 96. Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,’ Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 39. Swinburne, William Blake, p. 256. Moncure D. Conway, Review of William Blake: A Critical Essay. Fortnightly Review ix (Feb. 1868): 216–20, emphasizes the importance of this passage to Blake’s work, and of Swinburne’s analysis of it to contemporary political and cultural life, writing, ‘This should be taken as the key-stone of Blake’s splendid arch. It is necessary again and again to recur to this [. . .]’ (218). Swinburne, William Blake, p. 259. Swinburne, Letters, 2: 95. Quoted in Margot K. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods: The Roots and Growth of an Agnostic Poetry (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 99. Swinburne, Letters, 2: 37. Ibid., 2: 54. Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 199. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods, p. 104. Swinburne, Letters, 2: 45.



Notes 211

137. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Letter to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (19 Feb. 1870), Ashley MS 5074, British Library, London. 138. Quoted in Gosse, Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, p. 178. 139. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods, pp. 21–49. 140. Quoted in Swinburne, William Blake, p. 256. 141. See, for example, Linton’s argument that without equality ‘liberty is only deception’: ‘Liberty, except upon the ground of equality, would be only the liberty of the stronger [. . .] We want equal liberty for all: because we want the various growth of all for the collective progress of Humanity’ (‘Republican Principles,’ The Red Republican vol. 1.14 [21 Sept. 1850]: 110–11). 142. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 46. 143. For the shifting valences of the term ‘liberty’ in mid-Victorian poetry, see Alan Sinfield, Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). For the resonances between republican uses of ‘liberty’ and those of popular Liberalism, see Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform. 144. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 208. 145. Swinburne, Letters, 2: 78. 146. Louis, Swinburne and His Gods, p. 63. 147. Blake, ‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ Complete Poetry and Prose, lines 11–12. 148. Swinburne, William Blake, p. 96. 149. Amos, Review of Songs before Sunrise, p. 281. 150. Oscar Wilde, ‘Mr. Swinburne’s Last Volume,’ The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 146. 151. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ [1900], Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 159. 152. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying,’ The Artist as Critic, p. 298. 153. Ernest Dowson, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (London: Cassell & Co., 1967), p. 88.

Conclusion 1. Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today,’ Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 112. 2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1795, 2003), p. 61. 3. The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992) book X, p. 278. 4. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, p. 61.



212 Notes

advanced liberalism 1, 5, 15, 132, 135, 137–47 aesthetic autonomy 6–7, 10–11, 100–1, 160, 176 aestheticism 1, 15, 132, 134, 158–76 Allingham, William 120 Amos, Sheldon 146, 175 anti-didacticism 10, 35, 37, 52–6, 59–60, 67, 100–1, 131 anti-monarchism 2, 3, 18, 35, 41, 135 Armstrong, Isobel 12, 96, 129, 148, 158–9 Arnold, Matthew 8, 96, 119, 120, 133, 137, 148–9 The Atlantic Monthly 120, 125 audience 2, 20, 33, 37, 58, 60–5, 71, 73, 74, 86, 100, 145, 147, 154, 164, 170–5 autonomy of art, see aesthetic autonomy Bakhtin, M. M. 70, 130 ballads 7–8, 18, 22, 160, 177 bards 7, 39, 79, 111, 113, 114, 143 Barthes, Roland 177 Baudelaire, Charles 160 Beer, Gillian 140 Behrendt, Stephen 62 Bentham, Jeremy 5, 35, 38, 40, 50 Bevir, Mark 4 Biagini, Eugenio 81, 138 Bicknell, Titus 103 Binns, George 80 Blake, William 1, 5, 6, 10, 14, 17–18, 25–33, 66, 67, 86, 99, 116, 134, 150, 155, 159, 160–1, 164, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 The Four Zoas 26 Jerusalem 159 Songs of Innocence and of Experience 14, 17–18, 25–33, 119, 179; ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ 27–8, 30, 32,

164, 173; ‘Holy Thursday’ 26, 28–31, 32, 164; ‘The Human Abstract’ 29, 33; ‘Infant Sorrow’ 33; ‘The Little Vagabond’ 26, 30; ‘London’ 31–3; ‘A Poison Tree’ 33 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 26, 160–1, 167 Blanc, Louis 105 blasphemy 19, 43, 48 Blind, Karl 159 Botticelli, Sandro 16, 140, 145 Bradlaugh, Charles 134, 135, 147, 149 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 15, 68, 86, 97, 102, 124, 130 Browning, Robert 6, 15–16, 68, 97, 144, 150 Burbridge, Thomas 120 Burke, Edmund 21 Burns, Robert 18, 150, 157 Burrow, John 13, 138 Butler, Marilyn 35, 38 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 5, 6, 8, 10, 41, 42, 43, 46, 67, 68, 70, 100, 101, 102, 131, 144, 145, 149 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 70, 100, 119, 122, 145 Don Juan 8, 46 ‘Heaven and Earth’ 41 Hints from Horace 42 ‘Vision of Judgment’ 41 ‘C.’ 35, 42, 47–8, 49, 50, 51 Campbell, Thomas 43 canonical poetry 5, 12–13, 16, 68, 100, 102 Carlile, Richard 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 50, 67 Carlo-Alberto 114 Carlyle, Thomas 7, 8, 9 Carpenter, Edward 176 213



Index

Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh 51, 69, 75, 76, 90, 91, 92 Catullus, Gaius Valerius 99 Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène 104, 107–9 Chartism 5, 6, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 91, 92, 95, 102, 119, 120, 121, 123 Chartist poetry 6, 66, 79, 80, 82, 98, 121 Chorley, Katharine 118 Church, R. W. 119 citizenship 3, 4–5, 20, 25, 103, 177, 179 civic humanism 2–3, 4, 25, 103, 108 civil sphere, civil society, see public sphere Claeys, Gregory 4 classical republicanism 3, 4 see also civic humanism Clough, Arthur Hugh 5, 6, 10, 14, 96, 97, 98, 116–32, 135, 154, 157, 178, 179 Amours de Voyage 11, 14, 97, 98, 116–32, 179 The Bothie 121, 123, 130, 132 Dipsychus 97 ‘[God be with you]’ 120, 123 ‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’ 120 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 15, 18, 41, 59, 141 Collet, Sophia 68 Colley, Linda 19 Collini, Stefan 100, 145 commonwealth republicanism 2, 91–2, 114 communitarianism 4–5, 87 constitutionalism 3, 4, 92 conversation poems 18 Conway, Moncure 139 Cooper, Thomas 5, 6, 14, 66–82, 85, 98, 102, 103, 117, 131, 149, 154, 171 ‘Merrie England—No More!’ 73 The Purgatory of Suicides 14, 66, 67, 68, 69–82, 103, 132 ‘Smaller Prison Rhymes’ 73

Cooper’s Journal 81 Cornwall, Barry 35 counter-songs 17, 22, 27, 28, 164–6 Cowen, Joseph 68, 81 crisis odes 7, 141–2 Cromwell, Oliver 111, 112 Cronin, Richard 103 crown, see monarchy Curran, Stuart 53 Dante, Alighieri 53, 56, 58, 59, 72, 105, 140 Davenport, Allen 36, 45, 79, 102 Davie, Donald 101, 102, 103 Davies, C. Maurice 150 De Quincey, Thomas 36 definitional poems 14, 66, 67, 82–96, 132, 179 Dellamora, Richard 158–9 democracy, see republicanism demystification 1, 17–18, 20–34, 45, 50–2, 57–8, 60, 76, 77, 83, 88, 89, 117, 122, 146, 148, 154–7, 162–3, 175, 178 d’Holbach, Paul Henri 19, 42 Dickens, Charles 176 didacticism in poetry 7, 10, 35, 41–50, 60, 67 see also anti-didacticism; hortatory poetry discourse, poetry as 2, 13, 178 Disraeli, Benjamin 101 Dobell, Bertram 149 Dobell, Sydney 97, 101 double poem 14, 17, 22 Dowson, Ernest 176 Dryden, John 128 Eagleton, Terry 10, 11 Eaton, Daniel Isaac 14, 17, 19 egalitarianism 4, 38, 98, 134, 148, 151–2, 170–5 Eldon, John Scott, Baron 51 elite republicanism 1, 5, 9, 35, 36, 38, 62, 82, 131, 134, 138, 171 Elliott, Ebenezer 79 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 68, 119, 120



214 Index

emotion 2, 6–7, 10, 35, 38, 39, 46, 52, 55, 60, 63, 64, 78, 83, 100–1, 128, 143, 147, 166–7, 179 epic 14, 66–80, 114, 177 epistemological theories of poetry 2, 10, 13, 71, 140–5, 147, 167 Epstein, James 18 Erdman, David V. 25 ethics of poetry 2, 7, 8, 10–11, 26, 33, 39, 49, 51, 52–60, 63, 64, 67, 76, 92, 98, 99–101, 109–12, 144–5, 154, 160–1, 178 European republicanism 2, 5, 14, 68, 81, 82, 85, 87, 96, 97–9, 104–16, 117, 122–7, 131, 132, 135, 144–7, 158, 159 The Examiner 9, 99, 104, 110 Ferris, David S. 4 Flower, Eliza 85 Flower, Sarah 85 form, poetic, see poetic form formalist criticism 2, 11, 12–13, 16, 177–80 Forster, John 104 Forster, W. E. 81 The Fortnightly Review 9, 15, 16, 133, 134, 135, 137–47, 157, 159, 175, 179 Fox, W. J. 8, 68, 80, 81, 85 franchise reform, see suffrage Francis, Mark 3 freedom of speech 3, 43 freedom of the press 3, 4, 20, 43 freethought, see secularism French republicanism 14, 15, 19, 22, 24, 81, 98–9, 104–12, 116, 117, 118, 122–7, 144–7, 158 French Revolution (1789) 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 15, 64, 144, 145 French Revolution (1848) 105, 177 Froude, J. A. 119, 120 Frye, Northrop 116 Gale Jones, John 9 Gallagher, Catherine 12 George III 19 Gilchrist, Alexander 86 Gillies, Mary Leman 85

Gilmartin, Kevin 25, 38 Gisborne, John 61 Gisborne, Maria 61 Gladstone, William 81 Glen, Heather 26, 28, 29 ‘God save the King’ 22–3 Godwin, William 17, 26, 85 Goode, John 129 Hamer, D. A. 138 Hardy, Barbara 127 Harney, George Julian 85 Harrison, Frederic 5, 134, 138, 150 Hazlitt, William 6, 9, 10, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41 Heaney, Seamus 130 Hewitt, Regina 103 hexameters 14, 98, 116, 118, 121, 126, 127, 129, 165 historicism 2, 11–13, 177–80 see also New Historicism history, theories of 3, 64–5, 109–10, 146 Hitchener, Elizabeth 53 Holbach, Paul Henri, see d’Holbach, Paul Henri Hole, Robert 19 Homer 58, 63 Hooper, George 80, 81 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 129 Horace 42, 125, 127 hortatory poetry 2, 36, 67, 82, 86, 88, 96, 102, 131 Hotten, John Camden 11 Howitt, Mary 85 Howitt, William 80, 81, 85 Hunt, John 10 Hunt, Leigh 5, 36, 38, 41, 43, 81 Hunt, Thornton 81, 85 Hunt, William Holman 5, 97 hymns 18, 27, 30, 31, 58, 71, 124, 163–6, 177 imagination 2, 7, 10, 14, 18, 21, 25, 29, 38, 40, 47, 48, 52, 54–6, 58, 63, 67, 117, 118, 125–7, 140, 166–7, 177, 178, 179 individualism 4–5, 8, 64, 87, 98, 132, 145



Index 215

intellectual work of poetry 2, 13, 178–80 Ireland 2, 22, 75, 82, 88–9, 95, 96 Italian republicanism 6, 14, 15, 58, 81, 97, 98–9, 104, 105, 112–16, 117–18, 122–7, 137, 144, 158 Jameson, Fredric 16 Janowitz, Anne 5, 12, 102 Jerrold, Douglas 81, 85 Johnson, W. R. 18 Jones, Ernest 68, 80 Jones, Gareth Stedman 91 Joyce, Patrick 12 Kaul, Suvir 7, 100 Keach, William 57 Keats, John 43, 55, 153 king, see monarchy kingcraft 17, 22, 55, 58, 73, 83, 103, 108, 134 Kingsley, Charles 8 Klancher, Jon P. 21 Knickerbocker, Frances 137 Kossuth, Louis 85 Lamartine, Alphonse de 104–7, 109 Lamb, Charles 36 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de 85 Landor, Walter Savage 5, 6, 7, 8, 15, 68, 72, 81, 85, 86, 97, 98–116, 117, 131, 160, 178 ‘The Birth of Poesy’ 102 Gebir 103 Imaginary Conversations 72, 98, 103 Italics 99, 111, 112–16, 132 Savonarola 102 ‘To Cavaignac’ 107–9 ‘To Lamartine’ 105–7, 108, 109 ‘To the President of the French Republic’ 109–12, 114 language 10, 12, 13, 14, 21, 26, 28, 39, 45–6, 50, 52, 56, 60, 67, 82–96, 101, 104, 117, 118, 128–9, 155–6, 179–80 see also poetic language law 18, 21, 31, 43, 48–9, 69, 79–80, 92, 93, 94–6, 109 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 85, 109, 159

Leopardi, Giacamo 150 Lewes, George Henry 5, 81, 137 The Liberal 38, 41 liberalism 5, 8, 15–16, 35, 81, 97, 132, 133, 136, 138, 144, 151, 163, 171 Lindsay, Jack 142 Linton, William James 1, 6, 14, 66–8, 72, 79, 81, 82–96, 98, 102, 103, 117, 120, 131, 171, 179 Bob-Thin, The Poorhouse Fugitive 72 definitional poems 14, 66, 67, 82–96, 132, 179 ‘The Dirge of the Nations’ 86 Ireland for the Irish 88–9 National 85 ‘The Poet’s Mission’ 66, 84, 96 ‘To the Future’ 86, 103 Locke, John 3, 4, 39 London Corresponding Society 5, 9 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 68, 120 Louis, Margot K. 164, 172 Lowell, James Russell 68, 82, 83, 120, 125 Lukács, Georg 8 lyric 5, 7, 18, 67, 74, 86, 127, 135, 142–3, 145–6, 167, 177 lyrical ballads 18 Lytton, Edward Robert 143 McGann, Jerome J. 148, 164 Mackay, Charles 81 Maidment, Brian 79 Makdisi, Saree 26 Malthus, Thomas Robert 64 Markovits, Stefanie 130 Marsh, Joss 43 Marx, Karl 109 Massey, Gerald 68, 81, 102, 159 Maxse, Frederick 140 Mazzini, Joseph 82, 85, 87, 159, 160, 161–2 Mee, Jon 12, 25 Meredith, George 5, 7, 11, 15, 134, 135, 136, 137–47, 150, 158, 159, 179 ‘Aneurin’s Harp’ 139, 140, 143, 176 Beauchamp’s Career 137, 139, 140, 143, 147



216 Index

The Egoist 139, 145 Emilia in England 150 ‘France—1870’ 145–7 ‘In the Woods’ 141–3 ‘Lines to a Friend Visiting America’ 140, 143 Modern Love 142 ‘Phaéthôn’ 143–4 ‘Sonnet to—’ 139, 140 Vittoria 137, 150 Mermin, Dorothy 131 Meteyard, Eliza 68 Miall, Edward 81 Mill, John Stuart 5, 7, 8, 100, 145 Milton, John 56, 58, 59, 86, 99, 102, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 ‘Lycidas’ 99 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ 99, 112 Paradise Lost 70, 72, 99, 112 ‘To the Lord General Cromwell’ 111 monarchy 4, 19, 21–3, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 39, 40, 54, 58, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110, 113, 119, 138, 155, 164 Moore, Thomas 43 morality, see ethics of poetry Moretti, Franco 16 Morgan, Lady, née Sydney Owenson 43 Morley, John 5, 133, 135–45 Morris, William 5, 96, 137, 142, 159, 176 Morrow, John 3 Murray, John 10 ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’ 22 Napoleon Bonaparte 108 Napoleon, Louis 104, 109–12, 118, 136, 144, 147 Napoleonic Wars 3, 4, 8, 14, 19 National Reformer 15, 134, 135, 147–57, 179 nationalist movements 2, 81 natural rights theories 2–3, 4, 31 nature 6–7, 25, 31, 40, 68, 104, 118, 121, 132, 140–2, 151, 163–4 New Historicism 7, 11

‘New Songs’ 14, 17, 18, 20–5, 26, 102, 179 Newgate Monthly Magazine 14, 35, 36, 37, 41–50, 52, 54, 60, 62, 80, 179 Newlyn, Lucy 112 Newman, Francis 81 Nichol, John 159 Nicoll, Robert 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 116, 130 The Northern Star 68 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg) 150 occasional poetry 8, 9, 14–15, 36, 98–116, 178 odes 13, 18, 83, 99, 100, 103, 105–14, 145–7, 174 Ollier, Charles 61 oral culture 17, 18, 23–4, 71, 94–5 Owen, Robert 85 Paine, Thomas 4, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 42, 43, 45, 46, 81, 85, 171 Palgrave, Francis 120 Palmer, Elihu 43, 48 parliamentary reform, see reform parody 17, 22, 24, 25, 138, 171 Pater, Walter 16, 137, 140, 144 Peacock, J. M. 156–7 Peacock, Thomas Love 5, 35, 37–40, 54, 55, 59, 61, 179 People’s International League 81 perception, see vision and perception periodical press 6, 9, 18, 20, 36, 40, 41, 49, 67–8, 102, 104, 105 Perry, T. R. 35, 42, 44, 48–50, 79 Peterloo Massacre 14, 36, 49, 61, 177 Phelan, Joseph P. 129 Pigott, Charles 21 Pigs’ Meat 9, 17, 86 Pindar 99, 103, 113, 114 Pinsky, Robert 101, 102, 103 Pitt, William, ‘the Younger’ 90 Pius IX 114 Plain Speaker 81 Plato 37, 57, 179 Pocock, J. G. A. 13, 177



Index 217

poetic form 1, 2, 10, 12–13, 14, 16, 48–9, 50, 53, 66, 67, 84, 96, 158, 160–1, 167, 175, 177 poetic language 14, 21, 38–9, 45–6, 48, 52, 54, 57, 67, 82–96, 113–14, 127–9, 167, 177, 179–80 see also language poetic technique 2, 10, 12–14, 16, 38, 39, 48–9, 52, 90, 175 poetry, theories of 2, 6, 9–11, 14, 35, 37–65, 66, 67, 68, 79, 159–63, 178–80 Politics for the People 14, 17, 19, 20, 23, 86, 179 The Poor Man’s Guardian 68 popular liberalism 5, 68, 81, 132, 137–47, 138 see also advanced liberalism popular radicalism 5, 18, 36, 41, 120 popular republicanism 1, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 17–21, 35, 38, 62, 66–8, 80–2, 85, 86, 102, 120, 131, 171 popular sovereignty 2, 4 post-structuralism 11, 178 Pound, Ezra 97, 101, 102, 103, 104 poverty 4, 18, 29–30, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75–6, 78, 80, 93, 151, 152, 171–3 Price, Richard 3 priestcraft 17, 19, 25, 37, 55, 58, 73, 76, 78, 83, 103, 134, 157, 163, 171 Priestley, Joseph 3 print, print culture 8–10, 11, 17, 18, 20, 24, 25, 26, 53, 60–5 Prochaska, Frank 4 propaganda 10, 20, 99, 113, 131, 166, 178, 180 prophet, poet as 6, 7–8, 39, 50, 60, 66, 80, 99, 106, 109, 156, 160, 161, 164, 166, 171–5 public poetry 6–10, 15, 99–104 public sphere 3, 5, 6, 8–9, 38 publishing, see print, print culture Pugin, Augustus Welby 121 Raspail, François 109 The Reasoner 9, 80, 86, 89, 120 reform 3, 6, 13, 36, 61, 68, 80–2, 131, 135, 138, 139, 147–8, 177 Reform League 159

religion 4, 18, 19–20, 21, 24, 26–31, 32, 33, 39, 43, 45, 46, 54, 58, 59, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 85, 87, 98, 113, 120, 141, 160, 161, 163–75 representative government 1, 2, 3, 4, 64, 136 The Republican 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 67 republicanism history of 2–6, 8–9, 13, 14–15, 18–20, 36–7, 61, 62, 68, 80–2, 97–8, 107, 110, 132, 134, 135–8, 147, 170–1, 175–7, 177–80 political theory of 2–6, 13, 20, 25, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81, 118, 119, 134, 135, 178–80 relation to British politics 4–6, 68, 82, 98, 132 see also elite republicanism; European republicanism; popular republicanism revolution 6, 23, 57, 70, 123, 136, 145, 147 Ridenour, George M. 160 Ridings, Elijah 6, 35, 42–7, 48, 50, 62 Ridler, Anne 149 Robins, Elizabeth 176 Romantic poetry 1, 5, 6–8, 12, 35, 38, 41, 67, 74, 100–1, 102, 105, 112, 141, 178 Rome 14, 98, 99, 103, 116–27 Rooney, Ellen 13, 16 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 5, 97, 137, 142, 166 Rossetti, William Michael 5, 135, 147, 150, 159, 163 Royle, Edward 147 ‘Rule Britannia’ 22 Russell, Lord John 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 Sappho 69, 72 satire 7–8 Scott, Walter 85 Scott, William Bell 85, 137, 159 secularism 1, 15, 44, 81, 132, 134, 135, 147–57, 158–9, 163–75 sedition 18, 19, 69, 73



218 Index

Shairp, J. C. 129 Shakespeare, William 47, 72 Hamlet 116 King Lear 47 Richard II 72 Sharafuddin, Mohammed 103–4 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 47, 48, 50–65, 67, 68, 70, 86, 101, 103, 148, 149–50, 154, 160, 179 Adonais 37, 61 The Cenci 53 A Defence of Poetry 14, 35, 37, 41, 50–65, 67, 70, 101, 179 Epipsychidion 37, 61 Hellas 62 ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ 61, 62 ‘Lift Not the Painted Veil’ 154 ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ 36, 51 ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ 37, 51 Prometheus Unbound 8, 37, 51, 54, 65 Queen Mab 47–8, 49, 51, 53, 85, 154, 155 The Revolt of Islam 38, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57 ‘Speculations on Morals’ 37 ‘To a Skylark’ 55 Sherwin, W. T. 20 Sidgwick, Henry 128 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, Viscount 51 Sidney, Algernon 90, 92 Simpson, Richard 8 Sinfield, Alan 11, 63 Smiles, Samuel 80 Smith, Adam 64 Smith, Charlotte 18 Social Democratic Federation 159 socialism 1, 12, 68, 105, 119, 136 Society of Friends of Italy 6, 81, 98 songs 1, 8, 14, 17, 18, 20–34, 71, 77, 103, 110, 143, 160, 171–5, 177 Southey, Robert 20, 59 Wat Tyler 18, 20 speech, see oral culture Spence, Thomas 9, 17, 19, 21, 24, 71, 79, 102

Spencer, Herbert 5 Spenser, Edmund 70 Stansfield, James 81 Statham, F. R. 119–20 Stephen, James Fitzjames 136, 151, 171 Sterling, John 8 Stevenson, Lionel 142 suffrage 2, 3, 70, 92, 105, 122, 135–6, 147, 177 sunrise 24, 33, 103, 106, 135, 145, 148, 174–5 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 86, 103, 134, 135, 136, 138, 143, 147, 150, 152, 153, 157–76, 177, 179 ‘Ode on the Insurrection in Candia’ 145 ‘Ode on the Proclamation of the French Republic’ 86 Poems and Ballads 8, 134 Songs before Sunrise 15, 86, 134, 135, 146, 157–76, 179; ‘Before a Crucifix’ 161, 167; ‘Christmas Antiphones’ 170–5; ‘Dedication to Joseph Mazzini’ 161–2; ‘The Eve of Revolution’ 86, 161–3; ‘Hertha’ 161, 166–70, 172, 174; ‘Hymn of Man’ 161, 163–6, 167, 172, 175; ‘A Marching Song’ 169; ‘Tenebrae’ 167; ‘A Watch in the Night’ 158 William Blake 134, 160–1, 166 Symonds, J. A. 129, 138, 157 sympathy 2, 7, 10, 14, 47, 55, 63, 64, 100, 101, 144–5, 151, 154, 175 Tasker, Meg 130 Tatham, Edward 19 Taylor, Miles 81 Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson 6, 8, 68, 97 Thelwall, John 19 Thom, William 79 Thomson, James (1700–48) 45



Index 219

Thomson, James (1834–82) 6, 10, 15, 134, 135, 136, 142, 147–57, 158, 171, 176, 178, 179 The City of Dreadful Night 147, 149, 151–7, 158 ‘Doom of a City’ 149 ‘Philosophy’ 154–5 ‘A Polish Insurgent (1863)’ 148 ‘Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery’ 151 ‘Shelley’ 154–5 ‘Suggested by Matthew Arnold’s Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ 149 ‘To Our Ladies of Death’ 152 ‘Vane’s Story’ 151 ‘Weddah and Om-El-Bonain’ 150 Thoreau, Henry David 150 Tooke, Horne 21 Toynbee, Joseph 85 tragi-comedy 14, 98, 116, 118 transparency 13, 17–18, 21–2, 25, 28, 37, 45, 50, 83, 92, 94, 117, 118, 179 treason 18, 21 Trevelyan, George M. 140 Trollope, Anthony 83, 101, 138 Trumpener, Katie 12 universal suffrage, see suffrage utilitarianism 4, 35, 36, 37, 38–9, 52, 60, 180 Vernon, James 12 Victorian poetry 1, 8, 12, 96, 97, 102, 132, 158 virtue 3, 4, 5, 25, 64, 83, 103, 105, 107–8, 111, 114, 115

vision and perception 2, 18, 25–6, 28–33, 50, 57, 60, 63, 66, 69, 70, 73–4, 77, 78, 84, 85, 104, 106, 111, 113, 115, 117, 122, 123, 124, 125–7, 134, 140–1, 144, 146, 148, 153, 154–5, 161, 164, 175, 178 Volney, Constantin Francois de Chasseboeuf, comte de 19, 85 Voltaire 85 von Arx, Jeffrey Paul 136 Wade, Thomas 85 Washington, George 108 Watson, James 85 Webb, Timothy 37, 53 Whitman, Walt 150, 151 Whittier, John Greenleaf 68 Wilde, Oscar 8, 175, 176 Wilkes, John 20 Williams, Raymond 35, 37 Wolfson, Susan J. 12, 62 Wollstonecraft, Mary 15 Wootton, David 4 Wordsworth, William 6–7, 10, 15, 40, 59, 63, 84, 100, 118, 119, 141 working-class poets 5–6, 68, 80 see also Chartist poetry; Cooper, Thomas; Linton, William James; ‘New Songs’; Perry, T. R.; popular republicanism; Ridings, Elijah; Thomson, James (1834–82) working classes 4, 8, 70, 71, 76, 136, 138, 171–2 see also poverty Yeats, William Butler

175–6



220 Index

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (LUP - Poetry and)

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Phraseology and Culture in English

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Culture and Politics in Indonesia

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Writing Poetry

Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Germany's New Right as Culture and Politics: Culture and Politics (New Perspectives in German Studies)

Writing Poetry

Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis?

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Writing and Cognition, Volume 4: Research and Applications (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing)

John Clare, Politics and Poetry

Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture

Shakespeare: Poetry, History, and Culture

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (LUP - Poetry and)

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

Phraseology and Culture in English

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Culture and Politics in Indonesia

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics

Writing Poetry

Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Minds, Bodies, Machines, 1770-1930 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Germany's New Right as Culture and Politics: Culture and Politics (New Perspectives in German Studies)

Writing Poetry

Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis?

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth-Century Law, Literature and History (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Writing and Cognition, Volume 4: Research and Applications (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing) (Studies in Writing)

John Clare, Politics and Poetry

Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture

Shakespeare: Poetry, History, and Culture

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