Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

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Romantic Cosmopolitanism

Esther Wohlgemut

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Stirling; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Glasgow Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries — whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity.

Titles include: Scott Black OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Claire Brock THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750–1830 Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, sentiment, and slavery, 1760–1807 E. J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18TH-CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740–1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Elizabeth Eger BLUESTOCKINGS Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (editors) BOOKISH HISTORIES Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 Ian Haywood BLOODY ROMANTICISM Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832

10.1057/9780230250994 - Romantic Cosmopolitanism, Esther Wohlgemut

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin

Michelle Levy FAMILY AUTHORSHIP AND ROMANTIC PRINT CULTURE Robert Miles ROMANTIC MISFITS Tom Mole BYRON’S ROMANTIC CELEBRITY Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy Nicola Parsons READING GOSSIP IN EARLY EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND Erik Simpson LITERARY MINSTRELSY, 1770–1830 Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish and American Literature Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789–1832 Esther Wohlgemut ROMANTIC COSMOPOLITANISM David Worrall THE POLITICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY, 1787–1832 The Road to the Stage

Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series Standing Order ISBN 978-1-4039-3408 6 hardback 978-1-4039-3409-3 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN’S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature

Esther Wohlgemut



Romantic Cosmopolitanism

© Esther Wohlgemut 2009

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For my parents




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Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

1

A Cosmopolitan Nation?: Kant, Burke and the Question of Borders

10

‘A Great Federacy’ of Nations: Internationalism and the Edinburgh Review

34

An Alternative Formulation: The Idea of National Literature in Staël and the Edinburgh Review

54

Porous Borders: Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity

71

Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World

95

Cosmopolitan Figures and Cosmopolitan Literary Forms

119

Epilogue: Reactionary Cosmopolitanism

143

Notes

155

Bibliography

179

Index

190

vii



Contents

I have been fortunate to receive a great deal of help over the years that I have been working on this book. My deepest intellectual debt is owed to Ina Ferris. She has provided wise council and invaluable feedback at every stage of my project, and I have benefited enormously from her own thinking about nationness and the Romantic period. I am also grateful to Marilyn Butler for her generous advice early on in the process and to Stephen Behrendt and Jane Magrath for their helpful comments near its end. For institutional support in seeing this project through its final stages, I thank the University of Prince Edward Island. I would also like to thank my research assistant Sean Curley for his help preparing the manuscript for submission. My thanks and love to my partner Isaac Grant whose endless patience and unwavering support made it possible for me to bring this book to completion. I am also obliged to my children, Saul and Una, for accommodating this book in their first years. In appreciation of the boundless encouragement they have given me over the years, I dedicate this book to my parents, Horst and Sharon Wohlgemut. Portions of Chapters 3 and 5 rework material from ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity’, Studies in English Literature 39 (1999) and ‘“What Do You Do With That at Home?”: The Cosmopolitan Heroine and the National Tale’, European Romantic Review 13 (2002). An abridged version of the argument on Byron that appears in Chapter 4 is revised from ‘Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World’, Dalhousie Review (2008).

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Acknowledgements

In his influential Imagined Communities (1983) Benedict Anderson claims that the modern nation is given existence in part through its representation as a definable community. Symbol and narrative, he argues, subsume diverse and often conflicting components under the rubric of a uniform national identity.1 If the modern nation required such a representational (if not actual) unity in order to come into being, however, what conceptions of nationness had to be excluded or suppressed in order to achieve this unity? Early nineteenth-century British writing provides a useful focus for examining this question because it demonstrates a complex response to political and philosophical upheavals both on the continent and within imperial Britain itself and sets out the terms for future debate over the question of nation. In popular Romantic forms such as the national tale and the lyrical ballad, British writers (both English and Colonial) struggled to found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood, and geography. While such formulations have recently come under critical scrutiny, most critical study continues to assume a unified model of the nation. My interest in this book, by contrast, lies in the nonunified formulations of nationness that were also circulating at the time, notably in the notion of cosmopolitanism.2 Cosmopolitanism subordinates the historical inescapability of place to a trans-historical, trans-national ethical constant, creating a form of nationness that Bruce Robbins, drawing on Immanuel Kant, describes as ‘situatedness-indisplacement’.3 Understood in a Kantian sense, cosmopolitanism does not mean the absence of all national attachment or the elimination of national boundaries in the creation of a single world state. Rather, it involves the co-existence of national demarcations and universal belonging, of form and freedom, and in early nineteenth-century Britain, 1



Introduction

it appears alongside Romantic nationalism in the struggle to represent the nation. To think about the nation in terms of alternative understandings of nationness such as cosmopolitanism is to complicate assumptions about the genesis of the modern nation. The French Revolution has generally been understood as signalling a pivotal shift in European thought from eighteenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanisms to nineteenthcentury Romantic nationalisms. In this formulation, nationalism is defined in counter-enlightenment terms as a fundamental departure from or reaction against eighteenth-century religious, intellectual, and political universalisms. More and more, however, cultural historians are re-interpreting this shift by emphasizing continuities between Enlightenment philosophy and the concept of the nation. Important work by Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva, for example, has drawn attention to how the universal works in close association with the national in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French thought, and more recently, Martin Thom has shown that the eighteenth-century ideal of the city continues to operate as an important source of value well into the age of nations.4 Focussing on the idea of cosmopolitanism in early nineteenth-century British writing, this book participates in this re-interpretation, tracing the relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and the idea of the nation as it unfolds within the British context, a context that has so far been only peripheral to such discussion. It is important to remind ourselves at the outset that by no means was cosmopolitanism’s relationship with nationalism a stable one in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, as a quick look at two of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s early nineteenth-century uses of the term will serve to illustrate. Writing in The Friend in 1809, Coleridge states that the patriot ‘knows, that Patriotism itself is a necessary link in the golden chain of our affections and virtues, and turns away with indignant scorn from the false Philosophy or mistaken Religion, which would persuade him that Cosmopolitism is nobler than Nationality, and the human Race a sublimer object of love than a People’.5 Coleridge’s use of ‘cosmopolitism’ in this passage presents cosmopolitanism as something inherently antithetical to nationalism, and it this understanding that is privileged in the OED’s entry on the term. But the word ‘cosmopolitism’ appears again shortly after in the same essay, and this second appearance points to a more complex understanding of the term in the period. ‘This is indeed Cosmopolitism’, Coleridge declares, ‘at once the Nursling and the Nurse of patriotic affection! This, and this alone, is genuine Philanthropy, which like the Olive Tree, sacred to concord and to wisdom,



2 Romantic Cosmopolitanism

3

fattens not exhausts the soil, from which it sprang, and in which it remains rooted, it is rooted in the soil of the nation: nourished and nourishing the national soil’ (323–4). Cosmopolitanism here is not an abstract notion unconnected from all national attachment but rather something that arises out of it: it is ‘rooted in the soil of the nation’. Coleridge’s organic metaphor is telling. Just as the Olive tree draws subsistence from and at the same time fertilizes its soil, so cosmopolitanism both draws subsistence from and fertilizes the nation. Together cosmopolitanism and patriotism make up an ecosystem. The key point, however, is that here the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism is not oppositional but rather mutually constitutive: cosmopolitanism is ‘at once the Nursling and the Nurse of patriotic affection’. Understood in this second sense, cosmopolitanism does not supersede or transcend patriotic feeling. Indeed, Coleridge goes on to suggest, the best cosmopolitans are also patriots. To recover this second, non-oppositional, understanding of cosmopolitanism is the purpose of my inquiry. My primary intention is not to delineate a Romantic cosmopolitanism distinct from its Enlightenment predecessors so much as to establish continuities between Enlightenment philosophy and the idea of the nation as it unfolds within the British context. As I see it, eighteenthcentury political philosophies like Kant’s had two major implications for the cosmopolitanism propounded by the nineteenth-century writers discussed in this book. The first is the notion of heterogeneity or asymmetry as it applies to the internal structure of the nation: the conception of the nation as a non-unified unity. The second is also structural, but has to do with the nation as part of an international structure. Here, the important implication is that the internal integrity of a nation depends – paradoxically – on something outside itself. Each of the following chapters examines a different Romantic inflection of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, examining the ways in which nineteenth-century writers draw on eighteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals in their thinking about national borders and their negotiation. This book, then, is a study of cosmopolitanism in early nineteenthcentury Britain, and it approaches cosmopolitanism as an alternative and often overlooked approach to the question of nation in the early nineteenth century. I am interested in particular in how cosmopolitanism in this period offers a non-unified formulation of nationness that stands in contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke’s which represent the nation as a self-contained and organic whole. This book traces this non-unified formulation of nationness not only in British political thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century (such as



Introduction

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Richard Price’s Discourse on the love of our country (1789), and the discourse of the Edinburgh Review) but also in poetry and fictions of the period as well (such as Maria Edgeworth’s Irish tales, Byron’s Childe Harold (1812–18) and Don Juan (1818–24), Charles Maturin’s Milesian Chief (1812) and Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)). It is no accident that the majority of the writers discussed in the book were citizens of Great Britain – two of whom resided in Ireland. Rooted in homogeneity and historical continuity, the Burkean nation failed to take into account Scotland’s distinctive role in a unified Britain and belied promises of Irish–English union. It makes sense, then, that among those who turned to Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to address new issues centred around the nation in the early nineteenth century were Scottish writers such as Edinburgh reviewers Jeffrey and Mackintosh and Anglo-Irish ones such as Edgeworth and Maturin. The book consists of six chapters. The first three chapters contextualize the notion of cosmopolitanism within British political thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and the last three examine how this notion operates in representative poetry and fictions of the period. To frame the analysis, Chapter 1 directs attention to continental political philosophy in order to produce a more precise understanding of cosmopolitanism in the period. It focuses in particular on two of Kant’s important essays on the topic: ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784) and ‘On Perpetual Peace’ (1795). Kant is a key figure in the establishment of continuity between philosophies of enlightenment and nation: not only does he summarize much of eighteenth-century debate about cosmopolitanism in his work, but he has been seen as both complicit in and hostile to nationalist projects of the nineteenth century. For my purposes, his notion of ‘unsocial sociability’ and its political manifestation as interaction between national and international politics provides a model of nation that is at once bordered and borderless. Kant’s thought builds out of a liberal tradition of political philosophy that postulates a social contract whereby individuals accept governance in order to preserve their freedom. For Kant, government reconciles individual freedom and the freedom of others under the universal law of right, a political extension of his categorical imperative. Nations should likewise enter a society of nations or international federation in order to guarantee their freedom: such a federation would reconcile the freedom of the nation with freedom for all nations, a reconciliation that would occur also according to the universal law of right. Although national boundaries are retained at the




5

international level, the centrality of the universal law of right to the model underlines a continuing primacy of individual over nation as primary unit of political social organization. I argue that it is this nonunified model of nation that accounts for the confusion surrounding Kant’s relationship to nationalism, a confusion that also appears in public reception of early nineteenth-century British writers working out of the same tradition. The second part of Chapter 1 begins investigation of cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth-century British context by looking at the debate between Richard Price and Edmund Burke over the notion of patriotism. In late eighteenth-century Britain, patriotism was much on the public mind. For radicals such as Price, it extended beyond national borders to embrace a larger cosmopolitan ethic, and his interpretation of ‘love of country’ entails an understanding of nation as civil union. For others such as Burke, however, patriotism was first and foremost an attachment to hearth and home, and his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) evokes a very different understanding of nationness. In Reflections, Burke attempts to increase the political distance between England and revolutionary France through his presentation of the English nation as historical continuity, and his well known argument anchors national identity in attachment to one’s ‘little platoon’. By casting his understanding of nationness in the insular terms of inheritance and local attachment, Burke evokes a correlative banishment of cosmopolitan ideals as nationally disruptive (hence he criticizes figures like Voltaire, Helvetius and Rousseau, as well as English Jacobins like Fox). This Burkean paradigm then informs conservative interpretations of the French Revolution and supports an ongoing equivalency in early nineteenth-century thought between Enlightenment philosophy and Jacobinism. Chapter 2 moves to an analysis of how eighteenth-century notions of cosmopolitanism were refracted in official critical discourse in the early decades of the nineteenth-century. The chapter focuses on the Edinburgh Review under Francis Jeffrey, concentrating on the early years when the Whig quarterly was the most influential periodical in Great Britain (1802–15). Arising out of the eighteenth-century tradition of moral philosophy, the Edinburgh Review viewed itself as an instrument of political enlightenment, making the point immediately by a review of Villers’ Philosophie de Kant in its first volume. How, then, did it respond to the question of the cosmopolitan under the national pressures generated by the Napoleonic war? In a climate where even qualified endorsement of cosmopolitan ideals met with charges of Jacobinism, the Edinburgh Review turned to the political economy of Adam Smith as



Introduction

a means of voicing its approval of certain cosmopolitan tenets of the Scottish Enlightenment. In particular, Smith’s Wealth of Nations offered the Edinburgh reviewers a cosmopolitan model of commerce based on the interdependence of nations. Arguing against the protectionist polices of the mercantilist system, Smith posits individual self-interest as the primary motor of the national economy, and for him, individual selfinterest – and thus also national interest – is best served through free trade. In this model, what goes on inside national borders is dependent upon what goes on outside them. Following Smith, Edinburgh reviewers such as Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Francis Horner argue that Britain’s national economy is not self-contained or self-sufficient but is intimately connected to and shaped by foreign economies, and their writings on topics such as the Orders of Council and Free Trade re-introduce cosmopolitanism into a nationalistic political climate by rewriting it as a commercially-based internationalism. Chapter 3 establishes a continuity between the Edinburgh Review’s economic agenda and its literary–critical one. As other British periodicals limited their reviews of foreign literature as a precaution against charges of Jacobinism during the Napoleonic wars, the Edinburgh Review remained unapologetically international in scope, and the literary patriotism that develops during this period relies on a cosmopolitan formulation of national literature, one that accommodates rather than excludes heterogeneity and foreign influence. The chapter explores this cosmopolitan line on literature through the relationship between the Edinburgh Review and Germaine de Staël, focusing in particular on how reviewers such as Francis Jeffrey, James Mackintosh, and Thomas Carlyle drew on Staël’s socio-political approach to literature in their attempts to negotiate the question of national literature. Emerging out of the Scottish enlightenment, the socio-political approach to literature broached by Staël and the Edinburgh reviewers foregrounds the relationship between literature and social and political institutions, and it entails an understanding of national literature quite different from the more essentialist formulations affiliated with Romantic nationalisms such as Burke’s. These opening chapters provide a framework for discussing the problem of nationness in four literary figures of the period: Maria Edgeworth, George Gordon Byron, Germaine de Staël, and Charles Robert Maturin. The critical juncture between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is a vexed one for all of these writers, and is continually being renegotiated in their work. Maria Edgeworth, immersed in continental enlightenment thought and herself affected by the nationalist upsurge in the 1798 Irish




7

Rebellion, domesticates cosmopolitanism in her construction of a rational patriotism. Chapter 4 explores this process primarily in relation to her Irish tales, Castle Rackrent (1800), Ennui (1802), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817). In her influential rewriting of Anglo-Irish identity in these tales, Edgeworth re-articulates Burkean local attachment with philosophical cosmopolitanism. Her rewriting implies an understanding of nationness that is neither tightly bordered (such as those based on historical premises like blood or inheritance) nor borderless (such as those based on rational premises of universal inclusion). The chapter concludes by examining the consequences Edgeworth’s understanding of nationness has for British identity in her philo-semitic novel Harrington (1817). In Edgeworth’s hands, the nineteenth-century national tale intersects with eighteenth-century enlightenment narratives such as the philosophical tale. Chapter 5 turns to the nineteenth-century import of the figure of ‘philosophical traveler’ or ‘cosmopolitan’, a figure central to enlightenment narratives such as Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762). Julia Kristeva has defined this figure as the ‘alter ego of national man, one who reveals the latter’s personal inadequacies at the same time as he points to the defects in mores and institutions’.6 Seen positively, the cosmopolitan reveals ‘the tribe’s hidden significance’; seen negatively, he is ‘an intruder who destroys the consensus’ (147). Oscillating between these two poles, the figure appeared regularly in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature, but the most celebrated example remains that constructed by Lord Byron. His cosmopolitan Childe Harold challenged the political insularity of war-time Britain: a border figure, he was both inside and outside national attachment. But for Byron’s enemies, both pilgrim and poet were deemed traitors to the nation and unceremoniously pushed outside Britain’s borders. Early reviews characterized Byron as waging a Jacobinical challenge against established politics, and claimed that his writings ‘run directly counter to very many of our national passions’.7 And in Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon (1816), he appears as a politically suspect Irish–Italian exile who returns from the continent to lead the 1798 Irish rebellion. In response to such critiques, Byron created one of the most infamous cosmopolitans of the nineteenth century, Don Juan. Chapter 6 begins with the cosmopolitan heroines of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne; or Italy (1807) and Charles Robert Maturin’s Milesian Chief (1812), focusing on how these dissonant figures challenge romantic fantasies of national union advanced in the nineteenth-century national



Introduction

tale. Like the cultural figure of Byron-the-cosmopolitan, I argue, the cosmopolitan heroine appears as a cause of social disorder, a ‘social symptom’ that must be eliminated for national stability to be restored. From cosmopolitan figures in national literary forms, the chapter moves to cosmopolitan literary forms. Cosmopolitanism is a discourse that explodes organic conceptions of literature, such as that of Coleridge, and Maturin’s strange and heterogeneous Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) offers a striking literary embodiment. Its early reviewers characterized Maturin as a literary insurgent who – if left unchecked – threatened to overthrow the institution of British literature. In Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin renders concrete the existential restlessness of Byron’s Childe Harold, rewriting the cosmopolitan Byronic hero as a satanic pilgrim. Indifferent to all borders (abstract and concrete), Melmoth the Wanderer throws into question the very idea of borders. The narrative structure of Melmoth the Wanderer, I argue, invites a sort of scattered cosmopolitan reading which stands against the more concentrated ‘national’ reading demanded by dominant novels of the period like those of Walter Scott. Because eighteenth-century Enlightenment cosmopolitanism ultimately supports conservative as well as liberal political agendas, the book concludes with a brief look at the reactionary cosmopolitanism of Robert Southey and Mary Shelley, focusing in particular on their postNapoleonic works The Colloquies (1829) and The Last Man (1826). In different ways, the Enlightenment idea of a universal history shapes both of their responses to the problem of post-Napoleonic politics, offering them a moral framework by which to understand recent political developments. Their contrasting interpretations of eighteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals are an important reminder that cosmopolitanism does not always serve progressive ends. To trace the relationship between Enlightenment philosophy and the idea of the nation as it unfolds within the British context is not only to complicate assumptions about the genesis of the modern nation; it is also to contribute to our present-day struggle to create alternative, non-unified ways of thinking about nationness. In ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’ (1998), Amanda Anderson notes that ‘[c]osmopolitanism has repeatedly emerged at times when the world has suddenly seemed to expand in unassimilable ways’.8 If the critical attention that cosmopolitanism has received lately is any indication, today is one of those times. In the last two decades much has been published on the topic, including Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Bruce Robbins’ ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’ (1992), James Clifford’s ‘Traveling Cultures’ (1992), Tim Brennan’s At Home




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in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997), Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah’s edited collection of essays Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998), Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Culture of Detachment (2001), Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s edited collection of essays, Cosmopolitanism (2002), and Kwame Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). Perhaps still most well known, however – in the North American context anyway – is the debate surrounding Martha Nussbaum’s short essay, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’. Published in 1994, Nussbaum’s essay provoked twenty-nine responses in the Boston Review, and, in 1996, the essay and some of the responses to it were published together as For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. This debate offers a useful starting point for thinking about some of the affinities between the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism of today and that of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, the period in which the debate’s key concepts were emerging. In ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, Nussbaum attempts to resuscitate cosmopolitanism as an alternative to patriotism, arguing that ‘we should give our first allegiance to no mere form of government, no temporal power, but to the moral community made up by the humanity of all human beings.’9 She thus advocates a ‘cosmopolitan education’ in which students are taught to see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the world. Such an education, Nussbaum suggests, will not only teach students more about themselves by teaching them to discriminate between what is local (particular) and what is shared (universal), but will help them to recognize their moral obligations to the rest of the world and will set the groundwork for solving international problems. That Nussbaum’s essay elicited strong responses from everyone from Robert Pinsky to Judith Butler is of no surprise, for the implications of her argument touch on everything from school curriculum to immigration and foreign policy. What is more interesting, however, is that many of the respondents made the same point: patriotism and cosmopolitanism are not – or need not be – oppositional terms. They see patriotism and cosmopolitanism as complementary rather than contradictory, and trope cosmopolitanism itself as something ‘rooted’, something ‘grounded’ in the local, the particular. Indeed, in general the new cosmopolitanism resembles less the ‘old’ Stoic ideal evoked by Nussbaum and more the ideals being broached in the Romantic period by writers such as Francis Jeffrey, Germaine de Staël, Maria Edgeworth, and Byron.



Introduction

A Cosmopolitan Nation?: Kant, Burke and the Question of Borders

In his influential Nationalism (1960) Elie Kedourie casts Kant as the philosopher of nineteenth-century nationalism; in his equally influential Nations and Nationalism (1983), Ernest Gellner casts him, by contrast, as an eighteenth-century internationalist.1 This divergence provides a useful frame for thinking about the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism at a crucial historical moment in modern European history. For both Kedourie and Gellner, Kant functions as a sort of shorthand for a number of ideas associated with eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, but the role he plays in each in relation to nationalism points to the instability of the idea of cosmopolitanism itself. Considered alternately as representative of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and as precursor to Romantic nationalism, Kant’s political philosophy has remained pivotal in recent attempts to theorize the nation: not only does he summarize much of eighteenth-century debate about cosmopolitanism in his work but his political thought also combines the cosmopolitan and the national to create a non-unified model of nation confounding those critical formulations that map the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in strictly oppositional terms. Elie Kedourie defines nationalism as a doctrine invented in early nineteenth-century Europe whose main tenet is ‘that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government’.2 A concept of self-determination is central to this doctrine of nation.3 Kedourie explains: ‘Nationalism, which is itself, as will be seen, largely a doctrine of national self-determination, found here [in self-determination] the great source of its vitality, and it has therefore been necessary to

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examine how self-determination came to have this central importance in ethical and political teachings’ (31). For Kedourie, the concept of self-determination was theorized most thoroughly not in the political writings of French philosophes or revolutionaries, as might be expected, but in those of the seemingly unrevolutionary German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kedourie argues that Kant’s philosophy underwrote Enlightenment assertions about the inalienable natural rights of humankind, replacing the scepticism inherent in eighteenth-century epistemologies of sensation with a new certainty when he claimed that each individual holds within himself a universal law and that it is in obedience to this internal law that morality consists. Individuals do not possess liberty and equality because individuals are part of the natural order; rather, they determine liberty and equality for themselves. Kedourie attributes to this notion of self-determination radical changes in European political thought, and he sees Kant, as the philosopher of self-determination, to be instrumental in the formation of European nationalism. This does not mean that Kant was a nationalist. As Kedourie explains in an ‘Afterward’ to Nationalism written twenty-five years after its original publication, he is not claiming Kant for the nationalist camp: ‘The argument, rather, is that the idea of self-determination, which is at the centre of Kant’s ethical theory, became the governing notion in the moral and political discourse of his successors, notably Fichte’ (142). In thus insisting on the shared ground between Kant and Romantic nationalism and on the break Kant makes with eighteenth-century political philosophy, Kedourie downplays the particularly cosmopolitan aspects of Kant’s political philosophy. Ernest Gellner interprets nationalism differently than does Kedourie, but he too dismisses Kant’s cosmopolitanism in order to solidify a model of nationalism. Gellner argues that nationalism is ‘primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’.4 For him, the roots of nationalism lie in a new form of social organization, one based on the equivalence of culture and state. This form arises with the advent of industrialization, and it is sparked by modern social conditions such as homogeneity, literacy, and anonymity. In Gellner’s view, nationalism appears as the necessary product of a new configuration of society, culture, and polity, a view markedly different from Kedourie’s, in which nationalism (as Gellner puts it) is a ‘contingent, avoidable aberration, accidentally spawned by European thinkers’ (142). Gellner sees Kant himself solely as an adherent of a cosmopolitanism that is narrowly understood as the antithesis



A Cosmopolitan Nation?


Kant’s identification of man with that which is rational and universal in him, his fastidious and persistent, highly characteristic distaste for basing anything of importance on that which is merely contingent, historical or specific, makes Kant a very model for that allegedly bloodless, cosmopolitan, emancipated ethic of the Enlightenment, which romantic nationalists spurned and detested so much, and which they so joyously repudiated in favour of a more earthly, shamelessly specific and partial commitment to kin or territory or culture. (131)5 By positioning Kant as ‘a very model’ of the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism ‘spurned and detested’ by Romantic nationalists, Gellner draws a firm line between Kant and nationalism: ‘If a connection exists between Kant and nationalism at all,’ he concludes, ‘then nationalism is a reaction against him, and not his offspring’ (134).6 In their formulations of nationalism, then, Kedourie and Gellner position Kant quite differently: where Kedourie tries to tuck Kant under the edge of early nineteenth-century nationalism, Gellner firmly forces him back into eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism. What their debate underlines is a dubious exclusionary logic that identifies Kant as either nationalist or cosmopolitan. But, as Andrew Hurrell points out in ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’ (1990), this split tradition of interpretation derives from a doubleness in Kant’s thought itself. Although Hurrell does not include the Kedourie-Gellner debate in his study, he points out that on one side scholars such as F. H. Hinsley, Ian Clark, and Patrick Riley downplay the universalist and cosmopolitan side of Kant’s writings, focusing on the idea of a limited association of independent states put forth by the philosopher in later essays such as ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’; on the other side, scholars like Hedley Bull and Martin Wight accentuate the cosmopolitan or universal paradigm in Kant’s writings by turning to earlier writings such as ‘Idea of a Universal History’.7 Hurrell himself attributes this split to Kant’s ‘attempt to come to terms with both the deep rootedness and benefits of statism on one hand and the increasing moral and practical demands of cosmopolitanism on the other’.8 In his opinion, there is no single Kantian solution to the international problem. Rather, there are two interlaced approaches deriving from Kant’s recognition that what happens within a state cannot be separated from what happens outside



of nationalism. For him, Kant’s commitment to the universal leaves no room for the cultural and ethnic specificities of nationalism:

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the state. Kant’s political philosophy strives to reconcile the seemingly incompatible demands of political realism and moral idealism, the particular needs of the nation and the universal needs of all individuals.9 In this reading, Kant is both statist and cosmopolitan; moreover, this doubleness is the core of his achievement. Hurrell’s ‘double logic’ offers a more satisfactory approach to Kant’s political thought, and a rereading of Kant’s key political essays with such a logic in mind points to a greater complexity both within late eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism and in its interaction with nationalism.

The Kantian model Kant’s foray into the field of political philosophy in 1784 resulted in two essays, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ and ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”’. It was through these two essays that Kant established the central concept of his cosmopolitanism, the ‘cosmopolitan purpose’. He begins ‘Idea for a Universal History’ by directing his inquiry away from metaphysics and towards the world of phenomena. Since humanity does not appear to follow any rational purpose of its own – neither ‘pursu[ing] [its] aims purely by instinct’ like animals nor following some ‘prearranged plan like rational cosmopolitans’ – it would seem that the task of writing a universal history is not a feasible one.10 Kant argues, however, that this is not the case. Just as pattern can evolve out of apparently random marriages, births, and deaths when they are collected together into national statistics, so too pattern can evolve out of the randomness of historical event if only historians extend the horizon of their inquiry. ‘[W]hat strikes us in the actions of individuals as confused and fortuitous’, he explains, ‘may be recognised, in the history of the entire species, as a steadily advancing but slow development of man’s original capacities’ (41). Thus the historian must not look to the singular and chaotic movements of individuals or even nations but to the gradual progress of humanity as a whole through time if he is to make sense of human history: ‘Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that, while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance along a course intended by nature’ (41). Through his notion of universal history, Kant unifies the disparate actions of individuals and nations, and points to a singular purpose governing human existence. Ultimately, all human actions, both individual and collective, are to be judged according to their contribution to this universal or cosmopolitan purpose.




For Kant, the cosmopolitan purpose coincides with the development of human reason. The capacity for reason is universal in that it belongs to every individual, but Kant stresses that it exceeds the finite limits of the individual: ‘In man (as the only rational creature on earth), those natural capacities which are directed towards the use of his reason are such that they could be fully developed only in the species, but not in the individual’ (‘Universal History’, 42). The goal of reason in enlightenment is made clear in ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’, written in the same year as ‘Idea of a Universal History’. Reason is not to be won at one blow through violent political upheaval; rather, it is a gradual reform in thinking, an ‘emergence’ from one’s ‘self-incurred immaturity’, and it brings political change along with it.11 True reform comes not through revolution but through freedom, specifically the freedom to make public use of one’s reason. Freedom to think leads to the freedom to act, and ‘[e]ventually, it even influences the principles of governments, which find that they can themselves profit by treating man, who is more than a machine, in a manner appropriate to his dignity’ (‘What is Enlightenment’, 59–60). ‘If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age’, Kant writes in a famous formulation, ‘the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment’ (58). Enlightenment as the uncompleted emergence of reason overlaps with the cosmopolitan purpose of universal history. In particular, both extend beyond the individual: ‘There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself’, Kant claims, than of an individual throwing off the ‘ball and chain of his permanent immaturity’ (55).12 Although each individual is capable of reason, reason itself is fulfilled through the development of society as a whole. Understood in this way, the realization of enlightenment is co-terminus with the realization of cosmopolitan purpose: ‘after many revolutions, with all their transforming effects, the highest purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop’ (‘Universal History’, 51). The ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ behind Kant’s idea of a universal history is thus the development of humanity’s capacity for reason, its ongoing progress towards enlightenment. This teleology of reason positions Kant ideologically within the eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism usefully analyzed by Thomas Schlereth in The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (1977). Schlereth identifies three different strains of thought gathered under the rubric of cosmopolitanism: the construction of an elite intellectual class of cosmopolitans, the prevalence of theological and epistemological universalisms, and the establishment of political internationalisms.




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Kant does not figure largely in The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, but his writings fall into all three of Schlereth’s categories. In the ‘Contest of the Faculties’ (1798), for example, Kant writes in the first strain, putting forward philosophers as a unique, transnational class of intellectuals with the freedom to judge without government (national) interference. The famous three critiques, where he posits reason as universal to all individuals, clearly fall into the second category, while notions like ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ and ‘enlightenment’ extend the traditional eighteenth-century conception of universal reason by encompassing the progress of reason through time, making it universal in a new sense: as human teleology. It is Kant’s relation to the third strain of cosmopolitanism (internationalism), however, that is most important here. Schlereth defines internationalism as primarily ‘the political doctrine or belief that world peace may be attained by the friendly association of all nations on a basis of equality and without sacrifice of national character for the securing of international justice and for cooperation in all matters of worldwide interest’.13 His definition supports a reading of cosmopolitanism as more than the elimination of nations and the creation of a world state. By understanding internationalism as the ‘friendly association’ of nations ‘without sacrifice of national character’, he points to a sense of nation within eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, a sense often overlooked so as to maintain a convenient and easily manipulated binary between eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism and nineteenthcentury nationalism. Schlereth’s argument helps draw attention to the way in which the cosmopolitan Kant works with rather than dissolves the notion of nation. Even in ‘Idea of a Universal History’, a work generally considered the most cosmopolitan of Kant’s political writings, a positive conception of nation takes its place alongside formulations of ‘cosmopolitan purpose’. In particular, Kant broaches in this essay a notion of ‘unsocial sociability’ which points to a non-unified model of the nation at the core of his cosmopolitan political philosophy. The notion of ‘unsocial sociability’ is at the heart of Kant’s notion of the civil state. Kant founds his political philosophy in the well-known eighteenth-century concept of the original contract. Unlike Rousseau, however, who argues that society distorts the true nature of individuals, Kant argues that the individual is truly himself only within society. In ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice”’ (1793), he describes the original contract as the voluntary forfeiture of individual freedom in order to regain freedom within a larger society of individuals. Its goal, like that of all social contracts, is the union of individuals. Kant notes, however, that ‘a union as an end in




itself which they all ought to share and which is thus an absolute and primary duty in all external relationships whatsoever among human beings (who cannot avoid mutually influencing one another), is only found in a society in so far as it constitutes a civil state, i.e. a commonwealth’.14 He defines this ideal civil state as one based on three a priori principles: freedom, equality, and independence; and these principles, he argues elsewhere, are best fulfilled through a republican constitution. What sets in motion the development of this civil state is the paradox Kant terms ‘unsocial sociability’ (‘ungesellige Geselligkeit’) in ‘Idea of a Universal History’: ‘Man has an inclination to live in society, since he feels in this state more like a man, that is, he feels able to develop his natural capacities. But he also has a great tendency to live as an individual, to isolate himself, since he also encounters in himself the unsocial characteristic of wanting to direct everything in accordance with his own ideas’ (‘Universal History’, 44). Kant locates these conflicting impulses within human nature, and he argues that they rouse us out of our lethargy and instil in us the desire for honour, power, and property. These desires in turn drive us ‘to seek status among [our] fellows, whom [we] cannot bear yet cannot bear to leave’ (44). It is therefore our asocial tendencies (for example, our ‘social incompatibility, enviously competitive vanity, and insatiable desires for possession or even power’) that, paradoxically, serve to effect social union (45). And it is social union that prepares us for the step out of barbarism and into culture: ‘a beginning is made towards establishing a way of thinking which can with time transform the primitive natural capacity for moral discrimination into definite practical principles; and thus a pathologically enforced social union is transformed into a moral whole’ (44–5). What Kant means here by ‘a moral whole’ (described in ‘Metaphysics of Morals’ as a ‘state of right’) is a national union in keeping with cosmopolitan purpose. This, the highest purpose of nature, ‘can be fulfilled only in a society which has not only the greatest freedom, and therefore a continual antagonism among its members, but also the most precise specification and preservation of the limits of this freedom in order that it can co-exist with the freedom of others’ (‘Universal History’, 45). The co-existence of individual freedoms demands the enforcement of limits, and enforcement comes with the adoption of a constitution. From social union, then, we move to national union. In ‘Metaphysics of Morals’ (1797) Kant argues that the step out of barbarism is contingent on the ‘union of an aggregate of men under rightful laws’ (status civilis) or, in other words, the formation of a state (civitas).15 Citizens of a state, he reasons, ‘will not intermix with any neighbouring




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people who live in a state of nature, but will consider them ignoble, even though such savages for their own part may regard themselves as superior on account of the lawless freedom they have chosen’ (‘Metaphysics of Morals’, 164). Savages may ‘constitute’ national groups, but ‘they do not constitute states’ (164). According to Kant’s logic, national groups are natural entities while states are civil ones. And national groups become states through union. For Kant, this national union, like social union, is based in antagonism: ‘The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order’ (‘Universal History’, 44). If the state begins as a ‘pathologically enforced social union’, and if antagonism is indeed the cause of its creation, then faults exist in its very foundation. What these faults imply for Kant’s model of nation is asymmetry: the nation is not a faultless homogeneity but a faulty heterogeneity. The centrality of unsocial sociability to Kant’s understanding of nationness appears in his use of a standard analogy of the period. Individual development, he argues in ‘Idea of a Universal History’, is like that of a tree in the forest: ‘In the same way, trees in a forest, by seeking to deprive each other of air and sunlight, compel each other to find these by upward growth, so that they grow beautiful and straight – whereas those which put out branches at will, in freedom and in isolation from others, grow stunted, bent and twisted’ (‘Universal History’, 46). While unrestricted freedom warps tree and individual, restricted freedom beneficially directs their development. Kant explains: Man, who is otherwise so enamoured with unrestrained freedom, is forced to enter [a] state of restriction by sheer necessity. And this is indeed the most stringent of all forms of necessity, for it is imposed by men upon themselves, in that their inclinations make it impossible for them to exist side by side for long in a state of wild freedom. But once enclosed within a precinct like that of civil union, the same inclinations have the most beneficial effect. (‘Universal History’, 46) Kant is drawing on an established tradition of political thought in such arguments, but his emphasis falls less on the public benefit of private vices (as in Mandeville’s well-known fable) than on the matter of interdependence: the individual (the tree) is a self-contained entity yet remains dependent upon its relations with the containing unit (the forest) to fulfil its natural capacities. The components of Kant’s nation state are thus distinct yet dependent.




Kant returns to the same image in ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795), but this time to describe the state directly: ‘It is a society of men, which no-one other than itself can command or dispose of. Like a tree, it has its own roots, and to graft it on to another state as if it were a shoot is to terminate its existence as a moral personality and make it into a commodity.’16 His description draws on an organic vocabulary – the state has ‘its own roots’ – that recalls the discourse of the nation in Romantic nationalism. Kant’s tree, for example, bears a marked similarity to Edmund Burke’s well-known image of the oak of England found in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). But unlike Burke’s oak, which rises organically out of itself, Kant’s tree, though autonomous, cannot be grafted. This is not because it is in essence ungraftable but because grafting ‘contradicts the idea of the original contract, without which the rights of a people are unthinkable’ (‘Perpetual Peace’, 94). National union is an artificial (civil) process in Kant’s view, not an already-given natural state, as it is in Burke’s. The similar vocabulary used to effect different understandings of nationness (Burke’s solitary oak is not Kant’s ungraftable tree) points to the proximity of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and it goes some way towards explaining the confusion surrounding the notion of cosmopolitanism. Unlike Burke’s unified nation, however, Kant’s state is non-unified: it is founded in antagonism (rather than inheritance), and heterogeneity lies at its core. This does not mean that it lacks integrity; it is a unit, after all. But the integrity of Kant’s non-unified nation depends on something outside itself. Its union is secured through international union. In the seventh proposition of ‘Idea of a Universal History’, Kant claims that a universal cosmopolitan existence cannot be realized independently of a certain configuration of international relations. In fact, ‘[t]he problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved’ (‘Universal History’, 47). Evidently, the same antagonism which urges human beings to social and then national union also propels states into union as well: ‘Nature has thus again employed the unsociableness of men, and even of the large societies and states which human beings construct, as a means of arriving at a condition of calm and security though their inevitable antagonism’ (47). Just as individuals for Kant forfeit unrestricted freedom for restricted freedom within society, so too must states forfeit unrestricted freedom for restricted freedom within a world government if there is to be political stability. In concrete terms, this means the creation of and participation in a ‘federation of




19

peoples’ (47). While Kant acknowledges the sceptical reception accorded to previous manifestations of this idea in the works of philosophers such as Rousseau and Abbé St Pierre, he nonetheless posits it as the inevitable outcome of antagonism between states, even as he acknowledges that such a federation is a distant and as yet unreachable goal. As long as states hold political and geographical expansion as a priority and continue to curtail the process of enlightenment within their populations, such a federation is not possible: ‘The human race will no doubt remain in this condition [of antagonism] until it has worked itself out of the chaotic state of its political relations in the way I have described’ (49). But Kant feels that certain developments are slowly guiding the peoples of the world towards union. In war, he argues, the growing uncertainty of outcome for both parties, the increasing debt incurred, and the spreading internal opposition to it will lead states to re-evaluate the merits of war and inch them towards the adoption of some system of united power. As well, growth in international trade means that nations must consider how they appear to other nations. Internal injustices, he explains, are even now incurring external sanction: ‘civil freedom can no longer be so easily infringed without disadvantage to all trades and industries, and especially to commerce, in the event of which the state’s power in its external relations will also decline’ (50). Kant’s example points to a larger three-fold political structure in which the freedom of the individual is contingent on the state, and the freedom of the state on international peace. Realization of the cosmopolitan purpose according to this structure entails both internal (domestic) and external (international) components. Kant’s cosmopolitan political philosophy, then, entails a non-unified notion of nation (the state as heterogeneity) and a theory of inter-state relations (federation of states). Indeed, realization of his cosmopolitan purpose is contingent upon both national and international union. Thus understood, the cosmopolitanism of ‘Idea of a Universal History’ is not as distant as often thought from ideas in later writings such as ‘Perpetual Peace’ and ‘Metaphysics of Morals’. In fact, these later essays, written after the French Revolution, expand rather than depart from the political philosophy introduced in ‘Idea of a Universal History’. In ‘Perpetual Peace’, Kant reworks the notion of unsocial sociability into a practical theory of international relations. He argues that ‘Peoples who have grouped themselves into nation states may be judged in the same way as individual men living in a state of nature, independent of external laws; for they are a standing offence to one another by the very fact that they are neighbours’ (‘Perpetual Peace’, 102). The practical antidote for such inter-state antagonism is the second definitive article of




peace which reads: ‘The Right of Nations shall be based on a Federation of Free States’ (102). The article makes it clear that the internal integrity of the state, its ability to preserve the rights of its citizens, depends upon something external to the state: inter-state relations. Importantly, Kant here rejects the notion of a world state in which borders between composite states disappear because it contradicts the freedom of nations guaranteed by international right. Furthermore, antagonism between states is preferable to ‘an amalgamation of the separate nations under a single power which has overruled the rest and created a universal monarchy’ (113). Instead he posits a ‘federation of free states’ in which the borders between individual states are preserved: ‘This federation does not aim to acquire any power like that of a state, but merely to preserve and secure the freedom of each state in itself, along with that of the other confederated states, although this does not mean that they need to submit to public laws and to a coercive power which enforces them, as do men in a state of nature’ (104). Federation (of states) preserves national identity: it is not itself an identity. In the first part of ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’ called ‘The Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right’, Kant reminds us that mere federation does not ensure perpetual peace. He argues that when states are restrained in a union (for example, Europe’s balance of power) they can achieve temporary stability (‘Metaphysics of Morals’, 165). Punitive wars or wars that threaten the existence of a state can be prohibited. However, it is ‘[o]nly within a universal union of states (analogous to the union through which a nation becomes a state) can such rights and property acquire peremptory validity and a true state of peace be attained’ (171). What Kant means here by ‘universal union of states’ lies in his bracketed analogy between international union and national union. He explains: ‘Since the state of nature among nations (as among individual human beings) is a state which one ought to abandon in order to enter a state governed by law, all international rights, as well as all the external property of states such as can be acquired or preserved by war, are purely provisional until the state of nature has been abandoned’ (171). Until a ‘universal union of states’ occurs, national union remains provisional. The combination of centrifugal and centripetal drives in Kant’s political philosophy has recently attracted Julia Kristeva, who argues in Strangers to Ourselves (1991) that ‘the acknowledgement of difference is inscribed at the very heart of [Kant’s] universal republic’ (172). That is, states do not disappear into an amalgamation or universal monarchy but rather coexist, their distinctness preserved through language and




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religion: ‘Thus separation and union would guarantee universal peace at the core of this cosmopolitanism, understood as coexistence of the differences that are imposed by the technique of international relations on the one hand and political morality on the other. In short, since politics can only be moral, the fulfilment of man and of the designs of Providence demand that it be “cosmopolitical”’ (173). Building on this reading of Kant in her more explicitly political Nations without Nationalism (1993), she reclaims cosmopolitanism as a viable alternative to nationalism in our own time. Positing the possibility of ‘nations without nationalism’, Kristeva seeks to reinstate into contemporary nationalisms a universal principle of humanity. She claims for herself the denomination ‘cosmopolitan’, defining the term as a ‘transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries’.17 Kristeva’s formulation draws attention to the importance of boundary crossing in Kant’s practical cosmopolitanism. In ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, Kant argues that the globe is of limited dimensions (‘a determinate whole’), and it rightfully belongs to all: ‘all nations are originally members of a community of the land’ (‘Metaphysics of Morals’, 172). This communal possession of a finite globe gives individuals the right to ‘attempt to enter into a community with everyone else and to visit all regions of the earth with this intention’ (172). Although he posits this cosmopolitan right ‘to visit’ as universal, he does not include within it the universal right to settle where one wills. Cosmopolitan right is similarly restricted in ‘Perpetual Peace’, where Kant insists that although universal hospitality entails ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory’, it is not equivalent to the ‘right of guest’ which entitles the foreigner to become a member of the native household for a time (‘Perpetual Peace’, 105, 106). Rather, universal hospitality is a ‘right of resort’ which enables foreigners to enter into relations with native inhabitants (106). For Kant, individuals may traverse all borders within the world, but borders remain nonetheless. In national terms, this means that nations may settle alongside other nations only after drawing up treaties and only if no attempt is made to appropriate the other nation for oneself. So Kant complains that in European encounters with foreign states, such as the Spice Islands and East India, visitation is the same as conquest (106). Balancing cosmopolitanism and statism, Kant makes the world’s borders permeable to individual visitation but impermeable to national appropriation or colonization. In keeping with the co-existence of freedom and restriction in his notion of unsocial sociability, his cosmopolitanism allows for the free movement between borders but not the elimination of them.





Kant’s model was not the model that prevailed in post-Revolution Britain as it engaged in war with France, not even when it was a question of uniting with other nations to defeat the French.18 Thus in ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’ (1792), Edmund Burke dismisses the proposition that a Congress of all European powers be formed so as to create a defensive alliance against France: ‘It is so perfectly absurd, that if that, or any thing like it, meets with a serious entertainment in any Cabinet, I should think it the effect of what is called a judicial blindness, the certain forerunner of the destruction of all Crowns and Kingdoms.’19 Indeed, such an alliance ‘is so evidently impossible, is such a chimera, is so contrary to human nature, and the course of human affairs, that I am persuaded no person in his senses, except those whose Country, Religion, and Sovereign, are deposited in the French funds, could dream of it’ (401). Burke’s outright rejection of a cosmopolitan solution to Europe’s problems runs directly counter to Kant’s conviction that national security is found only within international union, and his influential Reflections on the Revolution in France adumbrates a unified model of the nation that ultimately excludes the cosmopolitan. But in this text Burke was responding to a cosmopolitan line of thought within Britain akin to that of Kant, and this cosmopolitan line kept in play alternative notions of the nation even within the post-Revolutionary British state. Burke introduces his Reflections by distancing his work from the London Revolutionary Society’s ‘Congratulary Address to the National Assembly of France’, which praised the French Revolution and voiced the hope that together England and France could effect a general reformation in the governments of Europe. Burke casts himself as a politically astute Englishman: I certainly take my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been done, or is doing, on the public stage; in any place antient or modern; in the republic of Rome, or the republic of Paris: but having no general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state, and being bound up in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should think it, at least improper and irregular, for me to open a formal public correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the express authority of the government under which I live.20 Couched as a private letter to a French acquaintance, Burke’s Reflections fall within the boundaries delimiting national concern: they are the



Debating the nation in Britain

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speculations of ‘a citizen of a particular state’. By contrast, the Revolutionary Society’s ‘Congratulary Address’ is a pointed public document of apparently corporate or official origin (misleadingly so, Burke argues) which initiates a political collaboration with the French government. Thus the ‘Address’ falls outside the boundaries delimiting national concern: its proponents are not English citizens so much as citizens of the world, participants in a ‘general apostolical mission’. Burke’s desire to close such improper avenues of political relations with France and to re-found English politics in England (as opposed to the world at large) prompts the conservative model of nation developed in Reflections. Burke’s Reflections are, in part, a reaction to a sermon given by the outspoken English Dissenting minister Richard Price on 4 November 1789, a sermon Burke believed was the impetus for the Revolutionary Society’s ‘Congratulary Address’.21 Price’s sermon, published that year as A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, and read by Burke in January 1790, addresses the notion of patriotism, a notion widely discussed during the eighteenth century and one which fell under increasing scrutiny with the advent of the French Revolution. Price’s interpretation of this crucial notion entails an understanding of nationness that complements rather than contradicts a cosmopolitan agenda but is at odds with the understanding of nationness Burke sketches in his Reflections. Price begins his interpretation of patriotism or what he terms ‘love of country’ by defining ‘country’ so as to bring it in line with eighteenthcentury understandings of nation as civil contract: ‘by our country is meant, in this case, not the soil or the spot of earth on which we happen to have been born, not the forests and fields, but that community of which we are members, or that body of companions and friends and kindred who are associated with us under the same constitution of government, protected by the same laws, and bound together by the same civil polity’.22 According to this definition, ‘country’ is not a geographical location, not a place of birth or residence. Rather, it is a space delimited by common laws and a common constitution. Price goes on to insist that despite this dry and legalistic definition, national belonging still demands a certain attachment or ‘love’. This love, however, ‘does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries, or any particular preference of its laws and constitution of government’ (Discourse, 178). Individuals may have a natural partiality to what is close by, but they should combine this partiality with ‘right opinions’, so making love of country a moral obligation or duty (178). Price establishes the significance of his definition of love of country by laying out the practical consequences that result from other definitions of the two key terms: ‘What has the love of their country hitherto been




among mankind? What has it been but a love of domination, a desire of conquest, and a thirst for grandeur and glory, by extending territory and enslaving surrounding countries? What has it been but a blind and narrow principle, producing in every country a contempt of other countries, and forming men into combinations and factions against their common rights and liberties?’ (179). When ‘country’ is understood as geographical location, ‘love of country’ justifies the territorial conquest of other nations. And when ‘love’ is understood as preference resting on perceived superiority, ‘love of country’ justifies the enslavement of other peoples. However, when ‘country’ is understood as shared laws and shared constitution and ‘love’ as moral duty, the result is quite different. It becomes possible to fulfil Price’s ideal and love one’s country ‘ardently, but not exclusively’ (181). Price’s definition of ‘love of country’ thus allows him to open patriotism to a cosmopolitan ethic: ‘Though our immediate attention must be employed in promoting our own interest and that of our nearest connextions, yet we must remember that a narrower interest ought always to give way to a more extensive interest. In pursuing particularly the interest of our country we ought to carry our views beyond it’ (180–1). Indeed, individuals should consider themselves ‘more as citizens of the world, than as members of any particular community’ (193–4). If patriotism is consistent with an attitude of universal concern, the English patriot can extend his reach beyond England’s borders to embrace the world at large. For Price, this means, among other things, actively supporting the French Revolution. His sermon presents the national revolutions of England, America, and France as a continuum: the three fundamental principles that constituted the ‘spirit’ of the English Revolution of 1688 (that all civil and political authority is derived from the people, that the people have the right to resist this authority in the case of misconduct, and that the people have the right to liberty of conscience in religious matters) also guided the American and the French Revolutions. All three revolutions are ‘glorious’, and each participates in what Price describes as a world-wide struggle for liberty: ‘And now, methinks, I see the ardor for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs, the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience’ (195). Price’s coming ‘dominion’ of law, reason, and conscience is not circumscribed by national borders but by the world itself, and one’s patriotic duty is to work towards its realization. In the Reflections, Burke methodically separates what Price has joined, removing England from the events occurring in France and from the




25

‘general amendment beginning in human affairs’ so enthusiastically heralded by Price. Through these important separations, he sets up the oppositional relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism that was to inform mainstream British reception of cosmopolitanism throughout the nineteenth century.23 Burke begins this process of separation by challenging the convergence of French and English Revolutions claimed by Price. He declares that the Glorious Revolution did not set a precedent guaranteeing the popular election of sovereigns, as Price suggests. Rather, it was a ‘small and temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession’ that was necessary ‘for the peace, quiet, and security of the realm’ (Reflections, 68). Indeed, the principles of the Revolution of 1688 lie not in Price’s ‘hitherto unheard-of bill of rights’ (which includes the people’s right to choose its own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to form a government for themselves), but in the Declaration of Right, which ‘indissolubly’ binds together the rights and liberties of individuals with rules for hereditary succession (66, 67). Instead of eliminating hereditary succession altogether, which would have been a feasible proposition in 1688, the English chose only to refine the means of determining succession. If England has no precedent in place guaranteeing the people’s right to choose their sovereign, its constitution is not a forerunner to France’s new constitution as Price intimates. Such misconceptions, argues Burke, are but ‘counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty’ (76).24 Burke draws on the language of international trade to make his point: ‘raw commodities’ are exported to France, and manufactured ‘wares’ imported to England. His chosen image of international smuggling makes such cross-cultural exchange into something fraudulent or illicit. England is set up as organic: French manufactures are alien to British soil and should be stopped at the border. Burke’s ability to draw an uninterrupted line from the Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right is essential to his model of the English nation. It allows him to present England as a historical continuity. He writes in an often-quoted passage: We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we have





Burke’s emphasis on the natural development of one ‘original’ plant through time and his insistence that this development has been removed from all external or ‘alien’ influence supports his understanding of the English nation as an organic whole: ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’ (147). His notion of the ‘little platoon’ or, as he terms it elsewhere, the ‘locality of patriotism’ testifies to the insularity of this understanding of nation.25 Unlike Price, who adds a cosmopolitan ethic to patriotism, Burke anchors national belonging in local affection: ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind’ (Reflections, 97–8). First affections must be in place before the circle of attachment can expand; in this way, Burke grounds the nation in the particular rather than the universal. Unlike Price, who reformulates ‘love of country’ to enable England to reach beyond itself and secure rights for all individuals and all nations, Burke turns England in upon itself, creating an England which is unified and self-enclosed. In order to cast the nation as an organic unified whole, Burke rejects several notions of civil union circulating in eighteenth-century political thought. In particular, his model of nation demands a correlative banishment of cosmopolitanism as nationally disruptive. Thus in Burke’s Reflections, the cosmopolitan Price becomes a participant in a worldwide political conspiracy, ‘a man much connected with literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theological politicians, both at home and abroad’ (Reflections, 61); and the Revolutionary Society becomes a secret society, the unsigned ‘Congratulary Address’ proof of their Jacobinical intentions. Similarly demonized are those ‘literary caballers’ and ‘intriguing philosophers’ such as Rousseau, Voltaire, and Helvetius, whom Burke believes in part responsible for the French Revolution. Burke’s hostile treatment of the universalism perpetrated by the French philosophes signals a darkening in the British reception of continental cosmopolitanism, and establishes a connection between cosmopolitanism and Jacobinism that continued to be perpetuated even after the war with France was over.26



hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. (81)

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In Burke’s opinion, the French philosophes facilitated the French Revolution through their philosophical one.27 It is one continuous path, he insists, from their Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to the French Revolution: ‘In the groves of their academy, at the end of every visto [sic], you see nothing but the gallows’ (Reflections, 128). The Enlightenment philosophy of the philosophes, he explains, is a ‘barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings’ (128).28 Sacrificing the concrete particulars of everyday life to abstract universals, it breaks down the foundations upon which civilization rests. In particular, it undermines the traditional values Burke places at the heart of the nation: love of hearth and home. ‘On the principles of this mechanic philosophy’, he declares, ‘our institutions can never be embodied’ (129). These abstract principles fail to ‘create in us [the] love, veneration, admiration or attachment’ that are the true constituents of national belonging (129). What the philosophes advocated in their writings, the revolutionaries put into practice. Even now, Burke suggests, the National Assembly is guided by the ‘polluted nonsense’ of these philosophes, schooled in its cosmopolitan tenets by sundry intellectuals and ‘clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations’ (118). Burke’s most methodical criticism of the French philosophes is found outside the Reflections and is directed towards Rousseau. Burke’s treatment of him re-engages the criticism of the universalism he began in Reflections, and it helps to sharpen the connection he introduced there between Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the French Revolution. In ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ (1791), Burke claims that Rousseau’s ‘ethics of vanity’ form the core of the new French constitution.29 At their centre (and thus at the centre of the French constitution) is a ‘benevolence to the whole species’ (‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, 315). The consequence of this universal benevolence is an absence of affection for what is local. In Rousseau’s case, this takes the form of parental neglect of his five children, whom he placed in a foundling hospital. Rousseau, Burke concludes famously, is ‘a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred’ (315). Having adopted Rousseau’s ‘ethics’, France commits the same error. It too fails to recognize the importance of local affection. In particular, it has ceased to value that first circle of attachment in the series that constitutes national belonging, the family: ‘Your masters reject the duties of this vulgar relation, as contrary to liberty; as not founded in the social compact; and not binding according to the rights of man; because the relation is not, of course, the result of free election; never so on the side of the children, not




always on the part of the parents’ (315–16). For Burke, national belonging begins with love of hearth and home and not with the universal rights of man. Since Burke sees the French Revolution as a product of the French enlightenment, he argues that England’s safety lies in an absence of enlightenment. As he exclaims in his Reflections: ‘We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire, Helvetius has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers’ (Reflections, 137). The English nation is defiantly unenlightened: ‘You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them’ (138). In contrast to the enlightened French, the English are a people of ‘untaught feelings’ and lasting ‘prejudices’, the very qualities in fact that secure the Burkean nation. Noting that from Bacon onwards, Englishness was closely associated with an anti-theoretical common sense, David Simpson has recently argued that Burke added an important twist to this anti-theoretical tradition by implicating theory in a ‘cosmopolitan, internationalist initiative that could only survive by breaking down the local and national structures (imaginary structures) upon which his own preferred political order depended’.30 With Burke, he suggests, theory becomes not only anti-English, but also anti-national. It is not only foreign to English thought; its internationalism is hostile to the existence of all nations. Set against Burke’s model of nation, the new France is ungrounded in two senses: it is founded on an abstraction (the rights of man) rather than on historical continuity (inheritance), and its abstract foundation disrupts the natural correspondence between local ground and national belonging that secures the nation. This second sense of ungroundedness becomes significant in Burke’s examination of the National Assembly’s restructuring of France’s territory, population, and finances. Here Burke points to the disjunction between the forms of national organization and the organic nation the forms are to organize: ‘In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in any light you please, I do not see a variety of objects, reconciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction’ (Reflections, 229). In the old France, historical nation and political nation corresponded, but in the new France




29

they do not.31 This non-correspondence is most apparent in France’s geographical re-territorialization, where the borders and boundaries constituting the old France have been erased and redrawn with mathematical precision: the ‘ebb and flow of various properties and jurisdictions’ have been cut into Cantons, Communes, and Departments (221). For Burke, such re-territorialization does not create a new nation but prevents the formation of any nation at all by eliminating the core of national belonging, attachment to place: ‘No man ever was attached by a sense of pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square measurement. He never will glory in belonging to the Checquer, No 71, or to any other badge ticket.… Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill’ (244). If national belonging lies in an attachment to one’s ‘little platoon’, elimination of this attachment will ultimately eliminate national belonging. Intellectual commitment to an abstraction fails to elicit the emotive attachment that results from instinctive love of place. Indeed, Burke goes so far as to predict that ‘instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is, that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country’ (244). Burke’s understanding of nation thus not only leads him to judge the new France as ungrounded compared to England but also leads him to put its status as nation, its very ‘nationness’, into question. But if France is no longer exactly a nation for Burke, what is it? In his ‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’ (1796), Burke calls France a ‘faction’. This denomination makes France a collection of disparate individuals joined together for political dissension, and gestures towards the sort of non-unified nation put forth by Kant and Price. Neither ‘local nor territorial’, post-revolutionary France is ‘not a new power of an old kind’ but rather ‘a new power of a new species’.32 It is a ‘general evil’ that takes France for its centre and Europe for its circumference (265).33 What Europe is facing, then, is more a ‘civil’ war of doctrine than a ‘foreign’ war of territory: ‘It is a war between the partizans of the antient, civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which mean to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France’ (267). As Burke explains elsewhere, France initiates the destabilization of other nations by introducing ‘other interests into all countries, than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances’, most notably, cosmopolitan ideas such as the rights of man (‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, 341).




As a cosmopolitan system of political organization, Jacobinism threatens the very existence of the Burkean nation. According to Burke, ‘with this Republick nothing independent can co-exist’ (‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 290). Jacobinism and nations are mutually exclusive alternatives, and Burke’s later political writings argue more and more vehemently that England’s security, like the security of all nations, depends on the complete extinction of Jacobinism. Writing on French affairs one year after the Reflections, for example, Burke worries that disruptions in France will influence stability elsewhere: ‘Never shall I think any country in Europe to be secure, whilst there is established, in the very centre of it, a state (if so it may be called) founded on principles of anarchy, and which is, in reality, a college of armed fanatics, for the propagation of the principles of assassination, robbery, rebellion, fraud, faction, oppression, and impiety’ (‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, 305–6). By the next year, fear of influence has sharpened into a fear of infiltration. Burke sees Jacobinism reaching outside the boundaries of France and establishing itself within other nations: ‘This evil in the heart of Europe must be extirpated from that center, or no part of the circumference can be free from the mischief which radiates from it, and which will spread circle beyond circle, in spite of all the little defensive precautions which can be employed against it’.34 The benign circles of attachment that start with the ‘little platoon’ and lead to national belonging are transformed into malignant circles of Jacobin contagion that start in France and then expand to erode national belonging everywhere. Where Burke’s benign circles are expansive, each circle building on the previous one, the malignant circles of Jacobinism eradicate all previous circles, leaving nothing in their wake. But the real threat is posed by English Jacobins, as ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’ (1793) makes clear. Burke declares the nation’s primary problem to be the ‘zeal of the Partisans of Jacobinism’, a zeal he identifies with French sympathizers such as Charles Fox, whose Jacobinical tendencies he methodically documents in a full fifty-five points.35 His ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’ (1795) develops this earlier sketch of the English Jacobin. In it he warns that English Jacobins are ‘worse than lost to their country’ because ‘their hearts are abroad’.36 Burke laments that although England’s Alien Act of 1793 facilitates the expulsion of foreigners, English Jacobins are still allowed to visit France ‘to cabal, and to be corrupted, by every means of cabal and of corruption; and then return to England, charged with their worst dispositions and designs’ (‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 105). Such travellers carry the alien seeds of rebellion back to England and plant them there. Burke’s




31

characterization of the English Jacobin foregrounds the border between England and France: the Jacobin deposits his heart over the border in France, and he carries French ideas back over the border to England. His crime, it appears, is that of crossing over. Indeed, Jacobinism itself for Burke straddles the borders between England and France: it ‘is a Colossus which bestrides our channel. It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil’.37 For Burke, the internal threat of Jacobinism is in fact far more dangerous than the external threat of France, and he concludes in the ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’ (1796) that ‘a change in the national spirit is the most terrible of all revolutions’ (188). He bases his conclusion in part on the calculation that there are eighty thousand ‘pure Jacobins’ residing within England and Scotland (224). He does not include Ireland in this calculation, but Burke’s writings on Ireland at this time also evoke Jacobinism as a pressing threat to national security. However, in this case emphasis falls more on achieving national unity than on maintaining national borders. Burke argues that the only protection against Jacobinism in Ireland is a unified Ireland, and unification demands Catholic emancipation. In a ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ (circa 1792), for example, he claims that patriotism cannot exist in a ‘country of monopoly’ such as Ireland, where a minority (Protestant Ascendancy) oppresses a majority (Irish Catholics) and effectively excludes them from citizenship. In such a nation, he says, ‘[t]here may be a party spirit–but a public spirit there can be none’.38 As always for Burke, where patriotism is absent, Jacobinism is present. Thus patriotism must be restored in Ireland if it is to be saved from Jacobinism, and to achieve restoration Ireland must emancipate its Catholic population. Only emancipation will transform Ireland’s ‘Protestant Parliament’ into a ‘Patriot Parliament’ (650). In letters such as ‘Letter to William Smith’ (29 January 1795), ‘Second Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe’ (26 May 1795), and ‘Letter on Affairs of Ireland’ (1797), Burke builds on this argument, suggesting that the Protestant Ascendancy’s continued discrimination against Irish Catholics not only subverts patriotism but also turns discontented Catholics towards Jacobinism. In a ‘Letter to William Smith’, for instance, he defines Jacobinism as ‘an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of the persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people’).39 His definition not only emphasizes Jacobinism’s connection to the cosmopolitan program of universal enlightenment but also ascribes to it the eradication of ‘prejudice’, a central component in the Burkean nation.40 The specific prejudice Burke has in mind here is religion. In ‘Letter on Affairs




of Ireland’ he warns that punitive measures against Catholics weaken religious prejudice and create Jacobins rather than the hoped-for Anglicans. The disappearance of Catholicism in Ireland thus signals the triumph less of Protestantism than of Jacobinism. In Ireland, Catholicism in fact forms ‘the most effectual Barrier, if not the sole Barrier, against Jacobinism’.41 Although advocating a different solution to the threat of Jacobinism (Catholic emancipation rather than eradication of enlightenment thought), Burke’s Irish writings nonetheless echo his English ones in their wish for a united and patriotic people. What Burke sets up in his Reflections and develops in his later writings is not so much an opposition between two nations, England and France, as an opposition between two political ideologies, one national and one anti-national. ‘Jacobinism’ appears as a political manifestation of cosmopolitan ideals that must be eliminated before England and all other nations can consider themselves safe. This reading of Jacobinism was not of course restricted to Britain. It governed the notorious Barruel, who indicts Kant, along with Weishaupt, in an international conspiracy of philosophes, Freemasons, and Illuminati who ‘[i]n the name of their equality and disorganizing liberty … trampled under foot the altar and the throne … stimulated all nations to rebellion, and aimed at plunging them ultimately into the horrors of anarchy’.42 For Barruel, Kant is the father of a ‘new species of Jacobins’ and his cosmopolitanism incites his followers to revolution: [Kant’s] colleagues in the universities do not teach his principles with his coolness; the disciples become violent; the Jacobins smile; and as the system spreads, the offspring of both these teachers [Kant and Weishaupt] unite and form alliances in their tenebrous abodes. Under pretence of this perpetual peace that is to be enjoyed by future generations, they have begun by declaring a war of cannibals against the whole universe; nor is there to be found scarcely one of their offspring, that is not ready to betray his country, his laws, and his fellow citizens, to erect that Cosmopolitan Empire announced by the Proffessor Kant, or to enthrone the Man-King of the modern Spartacus. (4: 527–8) Here Kant, philosopher of union, becomes a philosopher in union with Weishaupt and his Illuminati, a prominent participant in Jacobin conspiracy. In Barruel’s reception of him, Kant’s desire for perpetual peace is reinterpreted as a ‘war of cannibals against the whole universe’, and his complex notion of the citizen of the world transformed into simply a traitor to nation.43




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The influence of Burke’s own conspiracy theory was not restricted to conservative thinkers. His model of the causes of the revolution entered into anti-Burkean discourse as well, even though differently interpreted. In one of the most celebrated responses to Burke, for example, James Mackintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae. A defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers, against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1791), the author accepts Burke’s argument that two primary groups were responsible for the French Revolution: the monied class and the French philosophes. But instead of denigrating the monied class, as Burke does, Mackintosh suggests that these citizens of the world are ‘less prejudiced, more liberal, and more intelligent than the landed gentry’ because their views are ‘enlarged by a wider intercourse with mankind’.44 Indeed, Mackintosh makes commerce instrumental in overturning the feudal and chivalrous system nostalgically evoked by Burke: The manners of the middle age were, in the most singular sense, compulsory: enterprising benevolence was produced by general fierceness, – gallant courtesy by ferocious rudeness; and artificial gentleness resisted the torrent of natural barbarism. But a less incongruous system has succeeded, in which commerce, which unites men’s interests, and knowledge, which excludes those prejudices that tend to embroil them, present a broader basis for the stability of civilized and beneficent manners. (435) Mackintosh’s ‘less incongruous system’ of international relations is the product of a Europe more intellectually but also more economically interconnected, and implies a Kantian rather than a Burkean understanding of nation. National borders are opened to accommodate the foreign traffic of goods, and animosity between nations is reconciled in international union. Mackintosh’s recuperation of cosmopolitanism as international commerce (rather than international conspiracy) draws on an already-established tradition of economic cosmopolitanism in Britain, and it was this economically inflected cosmopolitan line that the Edinburgh Review was to take up in the early decades of the nineteenth century.




‘A Great Federacy’ of Nations: Internationalism and the Edinburgh Review

Despite the spread of a Burkean type of hostility towards cosmopolitanism in Britain during this period, it did not disappear from official public discourse. In fact, it enters into the pages of the most influential periodical of the time, the Edinburgh Review. Arising out of the eighteenth-century tradition of moral philosophy, the early Edinburgh Review viewed itself as an instrument of political enlightenment, making the point immediately in its first volume not only by a review of Villers’ Philosophie de Kant but also by actively setting itself against the Burkean paradigm.1 In that first volume, reviewers characterized the ‘Burke and Windham school’ of politics as ‘alarmist’ and countered Burke’s conspiracy theory with a socio-economic interpretation of the French Revolution, along with a vindication of the French philosophes.2 They also defended the French economists against charges of Jacobinism, and advocated an ‘innocent cosmopolitanism’ of intellect to atone for national animosity.3 Such a stance represented a certain risk in the charged context of the Napoleonic wars, and the Edinburgh Review was repeatedly attacked as unpatriotic: ‘the watchword of Government was let loose upon us; and we were accused of wishing to lower the flag of England to her former rebellious colonies; and, in conjunction with our Transatlantic brethren, to aid Bonaparte in his views of universal empire: – and this because we were wanting in that truly British feeling, which is ready to sacrifice every opinion to that of the Minister of the day’.4 Indeed, it was an article on the war in 1808 that led to the founding of the Quarterly Review as a conservative countervoice by Walter Scott and other Tories.5 But the cosmopolitanism of the Edinburgh Review was formulated as often in economic as political terms, as it pursued its crusade on behalf of the new, home-grown discipline of political economy. From 1802–15, 34



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writers such as Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, David Buchanan, and James Mill drew on the political economy of Adam Smith to advocate a commercially-based internationalism. In particular, Smith offered the Edinburgh reviewers a formulation of international free trade that figured prominently in their liberal model of Europe. Smith’s political economy may have underwritten empire, as often charged, but it is important to distinguish its cosmopolitan inflection early in the century from the better known imperialist inflection of the later nineteenth century.6 By mid-century, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ itself was placed rather differently. When ‘cosmopolitan’ surfaces in J.S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), for example, it refers to capital and to the free migration of commodities and labour across the globe: ‘A tendency may, even now, be observed towards such a state of things; capital is becoming more and more cosmopolitan; there is so much greater similarity of manners and institutions than formerly, and so much less alienation of feeling, among the more civilized countries, that both population and capital now move from one of those countries to another on much less temptation than heretofore.’7 Mill’s ‘cosmopolitan’ economy supports an imperialist agenda in a way that Smith’s does not. Mill advocates the expansion of Britain’s commercial market (Britain’s border is pushed out) whereas Smith advocates Britain’s unlimited participation in international trade (Britain’s border is made permeable).

Smith’s cosmopolitan political economy In a discussion of the cultivation of benevolence in Principles of Penal Law (1843), Jeremy Bentham argues that legislators should ‘direct the affections of the citizens to this object; to repress the wanderings of benevolence; to make them feel their own interest in the general interest; to make them ashamed of that spirit of family – of that esprit de corps which militates against the love of country – of that unjust love of country which turns to hatred against other nations’.8 Unlike Burke’s circles of attachment which build one upon the next, Bentham’s expanding circle consumes those in its wake: ‘I prefer my family to myself,’ Bentham quotes Fenelon, ‘my country to my family, and the human race to my country’ (563). Somewhat surprisingly, Bentham traces the notion of universal benevolence not to the eighteenth-century moral philosophy of Shaftesbury or Hutcheson but to the political economy of Adam Smith: ‘The work of Adam Smith is a treatise upon universal benevolence, because it has shown that commerce is equally advantageous for all nations – each one profiting in a different manner, according to its



‘A Great Federacy’ of Nations

natural means; that nations are associates and not rivals in the grand social enterprise’ (563).9 Bentham draws attention to the combination of asymmetry and mutuality in Smith’s political economy: nations profit differently from international trade, yet they profit equally. But the main point is that commerce opens the borders of national concern to the world at large, thereby engaging in practical terms the cosmopolitan ideals introduced earlier in the eighteenth century. Bentham’s reading of Smith points to the late eighteenth-century intersection of moral philosophy and political economy that was to be crucial to the public persistence of cosmopolitanism during the early nineteenth century in Britain.10 It is an intersection whose eighteenth-century roots deserve some attention. Eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism, as Thomas Schlereth has shown, rests on a critique of seventeenth-century mercantilism, producing out of this critique ‘a constructive theory for domestic and foreign free trade.’11 David Hume’s ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (1758) is exemplary.12 Hume departs from (still dominant) mercantilist assumptions to argue for a correspondence between the good of a particular nation state and the general good of all nation states: Were our narrow and malignant politics to meet with success, we should reduce all our neighbouring nations to the same state of sloth and ignorance that prevails in MOROCCO and the coast of BARBARY. But what would be the consequence? They could send us no commodities: They could take none from us: Our domestic commerce itself would languish for want of emulation, example and instruction: And we ourselves should soon fall into the same abject condition, to which we had reduced them. I shall therefore venture to acknowledge, that, not only as a man, but as a BRITISH subject, I pray for the flourishing commerce of GERMANY, SPAIN, ITALY, and even FRANCE itself. I am at least certain, that GREAT BRITAIN, and all these nations, would flourish more, did their sovereigns and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards each other.13 Where mercantilists advocated an oppositional approach to foreign commerce in which Britain’s economic triumph rested on the economic defeat of other nation states, Hume outlines a model based on a more reciprocal view of international trade relations. He argues that domestic commerce depends on foreign commerce both to stimulate its industry and to provide Britain with a ready market. To make his point more strongly, Hume adopts the vocabulary of moral philosophy, decrying




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the ‘narrow and malignant politics’ of mercantilism in contrast to the ‘enlarged and benevolent sentiments’ of free trade. Hume’s early reading of Britain’s political economy emphasizes the important role played by foreign nations in Britain’s domestic economy. What Hume presents here in kernel form is later expanded by his friend Adam Smith in the landmark An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).14 Adam Smith is most often considered a philosopher of self-interest, whose privileging of the individual pursuit of wealth as a means to achieve the common good founds the ethos of modern capitalism. Less noticed, however, is the extent to which his political economy participates in an older cosmopolitan discourse. In Wealth of Nations, Smith transfers familiar cosmopolitan ideals from eighteenth-century moral philosophy to the new field of political economy to posit a system of international trade that rests on the interdependence of nations. In an important move, Smith sets up his discussion of international free trade with an economic reading of modern European history in which national development is seen as a product of foreign commerce. In Book Three of Wealth of Nations, Smith declares that the most profitable commerce of any civilized state takes place between the town and country: the country provides the town with rude produce, and the town, in turn, provides the country with products of manufacture. Both town and country profit from this division of labour, so that, as with all divisions of labour for Smith, the ‘gains are both mutual and reciprocal’.15 Commerce, however, is not limited to activity within the nation state: foreign commerce is added to the basic system of exchange between town and country. Smith then casts this tripartite system of intra- and inter-national trade as a narrative of societal progress: ‘According to the natural course of things, therefore, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is, first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce’ (160). Agriculture is cultivated before towns are developed, and domestic industry and manufacture are established before foreign commerce is introduced. In modern Europe, however, politics have inverted the ‘natural course of things’ laid out in this narrative of societal progress: ‘through the greater part of Europe the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country’ (192).16 Moreover, although certain domestic manufactures have arisen ‘naturally’ through the refinement of needed household furnitures, others must be attributed to an outside impetus. In such cases, foreign commerce has influenced domestic taste and created a market for new products. Growing demand




for new products has then prompted domestic industry to manufacture those products for itself. By motivating domestic industry in this way, foreign commerce has in the end improved domestic agriculture, which is pushed to meet increasing demands.17 The economic history of modern Europe thus reverses what Smith himself deems the ‘natural course of things’, in that national development does not unfold organically from domestic agriculture to domestic industry and then outwards to foreign commerce. Rather, it tends to be initiated by foreign commerce. This formulation of national improvement as a movement from outside-in puts stress on the borders of the nation state in a way that the ‘natural’ order of things does not. Indeed, national borders become permeable in both directions, casting doubt on the possibility of a self-contained nation. Thus in Book Four of Wealth of Nations, Smith criticizes protectionist policies based on the balance of trade and posits in their stead a largely unregulated system of international trade composed of interconnected national economies, each hinging on an amalgamation of individual interests rather than on a singular national interest. Smith begins his criticism of the mercantilist system by denying the equation between specie and wealth that underlay protectionist policies prohibiting the exportation of domestic coin and bullion. He explains that a wealthy state is not like a wealthy man: its wealth does not lie in the amount of gold and silver it possesses but in ‘rendering a greater part of that capital active and productive’ (125). National wealth is a question of trade potential not specie held. If wealth does not rest in specie but in trade, a mercantilism which devotes itself to the augmentation of gold and silver within the nation state is a misguided system of political economy. Smith’s minimization of the role of specie in national wealth opens the way to a more pointed criticism of the two ‘great engines’ supporting the mercantilist system, both of which work to increase the amount of silver and gold held within the nation state: restraints upon importation (which include restrictions on importing what can be produced domestically) and encouragements to exportation (which include drawbacks, bounties, advantageous trade treaties with other nation states, and colonial trade) (220). Designed ‘to enrich the country by an advantageous balance of trade’, these policies give domestic merchants the advantage in international trade. ‘The laudable motive of all these regulations’, Smith sarcastically writes, ‘is to extend our own manufactures, not by their own improvement, but by the depression of those of all our neighbours, and by putting an end, as much as possible, to the troublesome competition of such odious and disagreeable tasks’ (337).




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One of his favourite targets is the Act of Navigation. Under this Act, foreign ships that did not have owner, master, and three-quarters of the mariners British subjects were prohibited from trading with British settlements; furthermore, even ships that did meet these requirements were penalized by double duties if they imported goods categorized as ‘foreign’. For Smith, the Act is not only hostile to foreign nation states (its inception, as he points out, was motivated by national animosity to Holland) but also contradicts the basic tenet of his economics: to buy cheap and sell dear. By limiting foreign trade primarily to British exportation, the Act forces foreign ships to come without cargo, a journey too expensive for most. This constricts the market of buyers and sellers, forcing British merchants to buy dear and sell cheap, a practise far from economically desirable for the nation. Smith sees protectionist policies such as the Act of Navigation creating trade monopolies, and such monopolies do not advance the national economy: ‘The monopoly raises the rate of profit, but it hinders the sum of profit from rising so high as it otherwise would do’ (287). Instead of the protectionist policies of the mercantilist system, Smith posits individual self-interest as the primary motor of the national economy: ‘It is [the individual’s] own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society’ (223).18 National interest for Smith becomes an amalgamation of diverse and conflicting individual interests best served through free trade. Just as division of labour between individuals proves to be the most efficient means of domestic production, so division of labour between nations is the most efficient for all nations: ‘If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage’ (226). Although it may be possible to produce claret and burgundy in Scotland, for instance, other nations can produce them more cheaply. It therefore makes economic sense to import foreign wine rather than artificially to stimulate Scottish wine-making through bounties or drawbacks. The important theoretical point is that Smith’s extension of the notion of division of labour into the international sphere produces a co-operative rather than competitive model of international commerce. In his scheme, foreign trade does not penalize one nation to reward another, as the mercantilist system assumes, but benefits all the nations concerned: ‘They all derive great benefit from it, though that in which the merchant resides generally derives the greatest




as he is generally more employed in supplying the wants and carrying out the superfluidities of his own, than of any other particular country’ (216). Hence Smith advocates the gradual implementation of free trade between nation states as the best means to improve the national economy not just of Britain but of all nations. His political economy, then, not only reformulates national interest into a non-unified concept (an amalgamation of conflicting individual interests) but also makes national interest (like national improvement) dependent upon foreign economies. One of the implications of Smith’s political economy, as his late eighteenth-century compatriot Dugald Stewart recognized, is a congruence of national and international good.19 Stewart relies on this congruence in his discussion ‘Of Patriotism’ (1828) in which he suggests that patriotism benefits from a cosmopolitan perspective. The discussion begins with an examination of the founding assumption of patriotism: the disunion of the human species. Stewart argues that (paradoxically) this disunion has its origin in the social nature of humankind: affection for tribe or country divides humankind into various groups or nations. But such disunion is not fundamental, merely contingent, for it derives from circumstance and from ‘the ignorance of men, which is apt to mistake a diversity of arbitrary signs and arbitrary ceremonies, for a diversity of opinions and of moral sentiments.’20 Indeed, ‘as government advances to maturity, and as the moral causes of hostility among nations (arising from the diversity of language and of manners) cease to operate upon men of enlightened and liberal minds … the tendency of civilized society is to diminish the dissensions among different communities, and to unite the human race in the bonds of amity’ (181). To strengthen his point, Stewart turns to Adam Smith, whose observations on political economy confirm this vision of international amity: national interest is best served through international cooperation, not competition. Stewart’s reformulation of the founding assumption of patriotism supports his presentation of patriotism as an imaginative (as opposed to substantive) attachment to countrymen and country. Moreover, it allows him to claim patriotism and cosmopolitanism as compatible moral positions. If disunion is not a priori, if nations are the result not of some ‘original malignity’ but of social union, then love of country need not entail enmity to other countries (180). Stewart thus calls for a ‘rational’ rather than ‘instinctive’ patriotism, one based in reflection and a sense of duty instead of ‘blind impulse’ and sensibility (185). As he sees it, knowledge of the other (both geographical and temporal) removes prejudice by expanding one’s sphere beyond the immediate, thereby preparing the ground for a rational rather than instinctive patriotism: ‘By transporting




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us in imagination over the surface of this planet, and by assembling before our view the myriads who have occupied it before us, [the study of history] serves to define to our thoughts more distinctly the particular community to which we belong, and strengthens the bond of relationship that unites us to all its members’ (186–7). Oddly enough, then, it is by adopting a cosmopolitan perspective that proper national attachment is to be achieved. The notions advocated by Stewart, drawing on Smith, were to become orthodox before the Victorian period, but in the 1790s Stewart (like many other writers associated with the Scottish enlightenment) was seen as a radical, sometimes even associated with Jacobinism.21 And Lord Cockburn recalls the ‘sensation’ of Stewart’s Lectures on Political Economy in Edinburgh: The opening of these classes, made a great sensation. The economical writings of Hume and Smith, though familiar with the liberal youth, had so little impregnated the public mind, that no ordinary audience could be collected to whom the elements and phraseology of the science were not matters of surprise. The mere term ‘Political economy’ made people start. They thought that it included questions touching the constitution of governments; and not a few hoped to catch Stewart in dangerous propositions.22 As an essentially liberal discipline, political economy was (as Cockburn’s comment suggests) a perilous site of inquiry during the Napoleonic wars. But amongst students at the University of Edinburgh it was also a popular one. Listening to Stewart during this time were Francis Horner, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham, all of whom took up his teachings in their own writings (Memoir of Dugald Stewart, liv–lv).23 They not only brought the central concepts of Smithian political economy to the middle-class reading public in their writings for the Edinburgh Review but also (like Stewart) turned to political economy to support certain cosmopolitan tenets of the enlightenment within a politically fraught post-enlightenment atmosphere.

Free trade, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Edinburgh Review From 1802 to 1815 Edinburgh reviewers such as Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, David Buchanan, and James Mill appropriated the language of Smithian political economy to counter the Burkean understanding of nationness. Their writings on international




trade criticized Britain’s protectionist trade policies, re-introducing cosmopolitanism into a nationalistic political climate by re-writing it as a commercially-based internationalism. Following Smith, the reviewers saw Britain’s national interest as part of an international community of interests, and the internationalism they broached in the pages of the early Edinburgh Review underlined Britain’s dependence on foreign nations for its own domestic well-being. Written shortly after the peace of Amiens, Henry Brougham’s review ‘Politique de tous les Cabinets de L’Europe’ in the first volume of the Edinburgh Review (January 1803) provides a useful reference point for the question of cosmopolitanism in the Edinburgh during the Napoleonic wars. One of the Edinburgh’s founding reviewers and a long-time contributor, Brougham was influential in directing the periodical’s early political orientation (often to accord directly with his own political ambitions at the time). In ‘Politique de tous les Cabinets de L’Europe’, Brougham attempts to revive the eighteenth-century notion of ‘balance of power’ as a viable structure for international relations, defending the notion against various ‘disclaimers’ and ‘reasoners’ whose criticisms, he suggests, are at odds with one another: Now – the balance of power is an unintelligible jargon, invented to cover every scheme; to furnish pretexts for every act of national injustice; to lull the jealousy of the people in any emergency; or to excite their alarms upon any occasion. Now – it is useless and superfluous; an interference with the natural order of things; or an attempt to effect that which would happen at any rate. Now – it is pernicious in the extreme; the parent of wars and offensive alliances; the exciting cause of national violence; the watchword of ambitious princes and destroying commonwealths; a refinement only of injustice; and a system of nothing but treachery or caprice.24 Appearing alternatively as counter-productive (encouraging rather than discouraging international conflict) and as irrelevant (merely echoing the natural state of things), the balance of power emerges as an overdetermined concept, one capable of supporting diverse and often opposed political agendas. Brougham’s own defence of the concept at this time was itself contentious. He argued for the interdependence of nationstates, and thus challenged the dominant paradigm that emphasized England’s self-sufficiency and singularity. In his review, Brougham casts the eighteenth century as a period whose most distinguished achievement was the improvement of international




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relations: ‘that perfect knowledge of the arts of administration, which has established certain general rules of conduct among nations; has prevented the overthrow of empires, and the absorption of weak states into the bodies of devouring neighbours; has set bounds to the march of conquest, and rendered the unsheathing of the sword a measure of the last adoption’ (348). Governing these ‘rules’ and ‘bounds’ was the notion of the balance of power: The grand and distinguishing feature of the balancing theory, is the systematic form to which it reduces those plain and obvious principles of national conduct; the perpetual attention to foreign affairs, which it inculcates; the constant watchfulness over every motion in all parts of the system, which it prescribes; the subjection in which it tends to place all national passions and antipathies to the views of remote expediency; the unceasing care which it dictates of nations most remotely situated, and apparently unconnected with ourselves; the general union, which it has effected, of all the European powers in one connected system – obeying certain laws, and actuated in general by a common principle; in fine, as a consequence of the whole, the right of mutual inspection, now universally recognized among civilized states, in the rights of public envoys and residents. (353–4) Deploying a rhetoric of visual survey reminiscent of Bentham’s panoptic gaze, Brougham describes the balance of power as an international system of ‘watchfulness’ in which national interest is subordinated to the general (international) good. This disciplinary model moves into the foreground the importance of foreign affairs to the nation: the eye of the nation must be directed outwards as well as inwards, and it must include in its field of vision all nations, even those ‘apparently unconnected’ to itself. The balancing system Brougham defends in this review is not the series of treaties and alliances that characterized eighteenth-century international relations but the underlying ‘principles’ of the system, principles more consistent with eighteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals than with actual eighteenth-century political history. In theory Europe is a ‘united whole’, a ‘great federacy … united by certain common principle, and obeying one system of international law’ (354). Included within this federacy is Great Britain, which for Brougham is no longer removed from the Continent either economically or politically: ‘it is an abuse of language to talk of her being separated from the continent of Europe by the straights of Dover’ (355). At the heart of Brougham’s defence of the balance of




power, then, is a commitment to international order, an order that will eventually lead to ‘the establishment of equal rights, and rational systems of regular government over the whole of Europe’ (364). He foresees an enlightened Europe where all nations are joined under one system of ‘certain general and invariable laws’ that will ‘reduce every eccentricity of course, and … correct all accidental inequalities or alterations in the system’ (364). It is important that coincident with this system is the reduction of national complexities, eccentricities, and inequalities: in so far as the nation adopts equal rights and a rational system of regular government, it becomes like all other nations in the system. But it is even more important that international union for Brougham involves something more than pragmatic connections between self-sufficient Burkean nations: in his formulation of international union, nations are very much shaped by what is going on outside their borders. Following the renewal of war between France and Britain in 1803, the vision of a ‘great federacy’ tended to be stripped of its overt political context (i.e. the advocation of equal rights and rational governments) and began to appear more often as a commercially-based internationalism. Thus Francis Horner, another member of the Edinburgh Review’s inner circle, posed the question of nation in economic rather than political terms in his ‘Observations on the Bounty upon Exported Corn’ (October 1804). Horner, himself an economist, drew on Adam Smith’s ideas about an international economy to criticize the protectionist Corn Laws introduced in parliament on July 30, 1804. Advocates of the new legislation claimed that since the 1773 repeal of the bounty, corn prices had risen and the balance of the corn-trade turned against England.25 They believed a return of the bounty would at once encourage production, secure adequate profit for farmers, and lower the price of corn. But for Horner, their logic involved a fundamental contradiction: the price of corn cannot at the same time be raised so as to encourage production and lowered so as to benefit the consumer. It is true, he admits, that this contradiction could be resolved by a distinction between the ‘real price’ (paid to farmer) and the ‘money price’ (paid by consumer), but he still remains doubtful that bounties actually increase real price and decrease money price. For support, he turns to Adam Smith, who reversed the logic put forth by bounty advocates. As Horner explains, Smith argued that corn bounties ‘can have no effect in equalizing prices, because there is no surplus to be reserved in years of scarcity: that there can be no such surplus, because the bounty gives no additional encouragement to agriculture: that it can give no such encouragement, because it occasions no advance of the real price of corn: and, lastly, that its effect is to raise,




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not to lower, the average money-price of that commodity’.26 But Horner goes beyond Smith in emphasizing the connection between the foreign market and the enhancement of price. For Horner, the real price of corn increases in part because of extended demand in the foreign market, and this foreign demand will ultimately increase the money price as well. If both the money price and the real price of British corn are influenced by foreign demand, Britain’s domestic economy can no longer be so easily protected. Conservative trade policies such as the 1804 Act to Regulate the Importation and Exportation of Corn still assumed a self-contained domestic economy, and for Horner they represented a crucial blindness to the inter-national framework within which Britain was necessarily situated. In a suggestive moment, Horner speculates in his Edinburgh Review article that the 1804 Act to Regulate the Importation and Exportation of Corn reflects a growing anxiety about Britain’s dependence on foreign states. He suggests in particular that the British worry they are importing too much corn and quickly losing their status as an independent agricultural nation. Such fears regarding Britain’s agriculture he finds unwarranted, but Horner does concede that British dependence upon foreign corn is troubling. If self-sufficiency is the foundation of national defence, then the importation of foreign corn indicates a weakness in Britain’s defence. Accordingly, Horner recognizes the immediate need to increase the domestic production of corn, recalling his mentor Smith, who also warned that national wealth must at times be sacrificed to national defence. But this does not mean that Horner accepts the 1804 Act. Rather, he suggests an alternative solution to Britain’s problem. Instead of recommending that bounties be attached to corn exportation and corn importation prohibited, he proposes that Britain legislate complete freedom of importation but combine this freedom with temporary bounties on production when necessary. His solution maintains the openness of free trade but allows for war-time adjustments. And he casts his argument in moral terms: ‘the minister who tampers, for a present purpose, with his own maxims, and indulges individuals in their frivolous fondness for making laws, instead of opposing, to temporary interests, the spirit of a general policy, cannot be true, either to his own fame, or to the lasting prosperity of Britain’ (‘Observations on the Bounty’, 208). Since the bounties and trade restrictions that constitute the Act are in opposition to national economic prosperity (as defined by Smith), any minister who proposes such acts, Horner intimates, is negligent, even immoral. Smith’s political economy, in other words, implies a moral economy as well.




The editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, activates the same relationship between political economy and moral philosophy two years later in ‘The Frauds of the Neutral Flags’ (April 1806), when he criticizes Britain’s 1756 rule of war prohibiting trade between neutral nations and French colonies. Jeffrey begins his criticism of the 1756 rule of war by discriminating between national interest and national right. He argues that although it may be in Britain’s interest to restrict neutral trade with the French colonies, it has no right to do so: ‘We cannot annihilate the foreign trade of the rest of the world, in order to diminish the comforts, or cut off the resources, of the nation with which we happen to be at war.’27 Each nation has a ‘natural right’ to trade with any other wishing to trade with it, and this right ‘relates to all who can be affected by the acts it permits or prohibits; and it is formed upon an impartial view of the interests of the whole’ (18). Although the right to trade may not seem fair (the French colonies, for instance, are prospering more during war than peace because of their guaranteed trade with neutrals), it is universal, and national interest must be subordinated to it. Jeffrey thus concludes: ‘Upon the whole, then, we conceive that the rule of the war 1756 is not agreeable to the analogy of any rule universally received as part of the law of nations, or to those views of general expediency and justice in which this law has its foundation; and that its unqualified revival at this moment would be a measure of which the neutral nations would be fairly entitled to complain’ (31). More than bringing Jeffrey’s argument to a close, however, the conclusion opens up an alternative possibility. If the law of nations is both ‘expedient’ and ‘just’, as Jeffrey suggests, then perhaps national interest is not incompatible with morality after all. The 1756 rule of war is not just, but it may not be in Britain’s best interest either. While Horner and Jeffrey considered the moral implications of Britain’s protectionist trade policies in the pages of the Edinburgh Review, Britain’s government confidently led the nation into a trade war with France. On 21 November 1806, international trade took centre stage when Napoleon passed the Berlin Decree closing Continental ports to British vessels. In retaliation, the British Parliament passed Orders in Council on 9 January 1807, blockading France and all tributary states. Less than a year later (11 November 1807), it added another Order stating that all vessels having on board the certificate of origin demanded by Napoleon’s blockade could be seized, and that all neutrals wishing to trade with France must stop in Great Britain to pay a duty before proceeding on to trade with the enemy. Napoleon responded later that month with the




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Milan Decree, which authorized the seizure of ships caught complying with the British Orders. The Edinburgh Review viewed the Orders in Council as nationally punitive and openly criticized them until they were fully revoked by Parliament on 23 June 1812. In ‘Examination of the late Orders in Council’ (January 1808), for example, Brougham declared that by implementing the Orders in Council England had lost the moral high ground in its contest with France. His argument focuses on the mercantilist assumptions from which the Orders arose, and he claims that in effect the Orders force neutrals to trade with France in a way that seems (according to mercantilist assumptions at least) profitable to Britain. By making neutral ships pass through British ports and by demanding that the ships pay duties to Britain before trading with France, the Orders bring foreign (neutral) money into the country. But at the same time, Brougham points out, the Orders fail to fulfil their political goal of punishing France. Indeed, the Orders do not prevent trade with France so much as they make Britain a paid pander between France and the neutral nations. Brougham suspects, however, that as long as the Orders are believed to be financially advantageous, their political failure will be overlooked. Public opinion, then, is to be swayed through economic argument: When they find that we have been violating the rights of foreign states, and breaking through our own constitution, for nothing – nay, to our great and manifest injury in point of profit; – that we have been breaking all laws public and municipal, and gained nothing – nay, lost a great deal by it; – they may be disposed to review their former contemptuous judgement upon the value of those sacred principles which bind nations and individuals together; and to reprobate as unjust and unlawful, that conduct which they find to be ungainful.28 Brougham predicts that the Orders will prove unadvantageous or perhaps even disadvantageous to Britain. In an international economy, violation of the universal right to trade brings no profit. In fact, Britain’s violation will ultimately exact a toll on its own domestic economy. Brougham’s intimations concerning the negative consequences of the Orders are followed up in a subsequent review summarizing contemporary opinion on the legislation. In ‘Baring and others on the Orders in Council’ (April 1808), an anonymous reviewer comments favourably on Brougham’s April 1 speech before the House of Commons in which Brougham rehearsed an argument similar to that put forth in




his January 1808 article. The reviewer concurs with Brougham’s political points, but his interest lies in the economic claim. He substantiates, for instance, the claim of loss of trade (British trade with America dropped from twelve million to four million dollars a year), and insists upon the negative global impact of Britain’s trade restrictions. They have had a deleterious effect both at home and abroad, ‘interdicting the commerce of the greater part of the world; and not only cutting off, without necessity, the comforts and profits of their own peaceful population, but paralyzing the hand of industry and arresting the progress of society in nations separated from the scene of tumult, by the intervention of half the globe’.29 Over and over again, the Edinburgh Review made the point of national and international harm, continuing to hammer the principle behind the Orders even after they were repealed in June 1812.30 The conservative Quarterly Review, however, saw the Orders quite differently, defending them against criticism directed from both inside and outside the nation, and its interpretation of the trade wars between Britain and France highlights by contrast the cosmopolitan political economy that dominated the Edinburgh’s criticism during this period. In ‘America – Orders in Council’ (March 1812), John Barrow and William Gifford defend the Orders in Council against American complaints that they are politically ineffective and that they punished neutral nations. The best proof of the Orders’ general effectiveness, they argue, is that while French commerce has come to a virtual stop, British and American commerce have increased. Since the Orders have benefited rather than harmed America, there must be another motive for American hostility to Britain, and Barrow and Gifford attribute American complaints about the Orders to American sympathy with France. In particular, they deem Thomas Jefferson a ‘modern philosophe’, ‘pupil of Rousseau’, and ‘patron of cosmopolites’.31 Central to the Quarterly Review’s interpretation of the Orders in Council was the idea that Britain’s domestic economy could exist without foreign commerce. In ‘Capt. Pasley on the Military Policy of Great Britain’ (May 1811), for example, Robert Southey and John Wilson Croker argue that Pasley’s concern over Napoleon’s anti-commercial decrees is misplaced because foreign commerce constitutes only one eleventh of Britain’s total commercial property.32 Even if all external trade were to cease, they suggest, internal trade would quickly expand to make up the difference. Southey and Croker see the popular assumption that profit is best gained through foreign trade as fallacious as well. If a British hatter and a British cabinet-maker were to exchange their products, they explain, both families would benefit: the hatter’s home would




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be better furnished, the cabinet-maker’s family would wear better hats. Moreover, national wealth would be augmented by the profits of two persons. If, on the other hand, the hatter were to trade with a foreigner, national wealth would be augmented only by the profit of one person. Thus, they conclude, the nation profits more from internal commerce than it does from external commerce. It is important that Southey and Croker figure Britain’s national economy as a national tale about a hatter and a cabinet-maker. It is equally important, however, that they figure it as a closed system. For the Quarterly Review, Britain’s national economy (like the nation itself) was self-perpetuating, self-sufficient and self-contained. When peace came in the spring of 1814, the Edinburgh Review joined in the general jubilation, but peace with France for Francis Jeffrey and his fellow reviewers was but the first step on both the national and international level. On the international front, there remained the problem of Poland. In ‘State and Prospects of Europe’ (April 1814), Jeffrey deplores the ‘extinction of [Polish] national dignity – this sore and unmerited wound to their national pride’.33 By depriving the Poles of their ‘political being’, he argues, the partition of Poland not only destroyed an ‘antient kingdom’ but ‘struck also at the root of [the] individual happiness and prosperity’ of the Polish people (39). But it is the international point that is central. ‘No one nation can be secure in its separate existence’, Jeffrey insists, ‘if all the rest do not concur in disavowing the maxims which were acted upon in the partition of Poland’ (40). Until Poland is set free, the ‘wholesome neighbourhood’ of Europe will be poisoned by its ‘noxious vapours’: ‘every independence within their range, sickens, and is endangered by the contagion’ (40). Brougham makes the same point in ‘Appeal of the Poles’ (January 1814) where he notes that even though Poland remains ‘rather a delicate topic’ among the Allies, the restoration of Polish independence is a necessary step if peace is to be permanently restored on the continent: ‘The restoration of European independence, is the object of every Statesman’s anxious hopes; – the revival of sound and consistent principle alone, can effect it; – and this cannot be thought possible, by any reflecting mind, without the complete re-establishment of Poland as an independent State’.34 For Edinburgh reviewers like Jeffrey and Brougham, the Allied victory over Napoleon confirmed the periodical’s long-standing contention that Europe’s future lay in international union, ‘a vigorous confederacy of the continental states;- a confederacy where people should have an interest’.35 But the following Allied meetings in Paris and Vienna




did not inaugurate the ‘dawn’ of a new ‘Millennium’ as the reviewers had hoped, and the Edinburgh Review soon began to criticize the Allies’ post-Napoleonic restructuring of Europe as arbitrary and unjust. Central to the Edinburgh’s criticism of the Allies’ restructuring of Europe was the violation of national rights. In his review ‘France’ (February 1815), for example, James Mackintosh accuses the Allies of re-drawing the political map of Europe to suit their own selfish ends. Rather than securing peace, he argues, the Treaty of Paris merely ‘exasperated’ French tempers by confining the nation to its pre-war borders, and the subsequent Congress of Vienna was little more than an opportunity for the Allies to divide up the ‘immense booty which they held in their hands’.36 Although the Allies talk of equal rights for all nations, Mackintosh explains, they are not willing to sacrifice their own national gains for international good while they see other nations choosing profit over principle: ‘It would indeed be childishness and imbecility, in any single State,’ they seem to agree, ‘to beggar and exhaust herself by their adoption, while all others were growing rich and powerful by their violation’ (506–7). For Edinburgh reviewers like Mackintosh, the international Congress of Vienna was not the hoped-for model of international confederation but rather a platform for partition, dismemberment, and restoration.37 On the national front, post-war depression led the Edinburgh to retreat from liberal political economy. In 1815 it joined Tory periodicals such as the Quarterly Review in supporting the reinstatement of the Corn Law. Some reviewers (Francis Horner and David Buchanan) continued to maintain the Edinburgh’s earlier position against trade restrictions and stood firmly against the Corn Law, but both Jeffrey and Brougham supported it, following the lead of Thomas Malthus, who became a contributor to the review in 1815. David Buchanan defines the split in ‘Corn Laws’ (February 1815), and helps to outline these two positions. In the review, Buchanan summarizes Malthus’ Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and a Rise or Fall in the Price of Corn on the Agriculture and general Wealth of the Country and The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importations of Foreign Corn. For Malthus, ‘a free exchange of produce’ is problematic because national jealousies and hostilities can interrupt trade, thereby depriving a country of markets for its surplus products as well as ‘those luxuries and conveniences for which she depended on foreign states’.38 Even worse, however, is the situation where a nation has come to depend on other nations ‘for the subsistence of a great proportion of its population’ (492). Malthus interprets free trade in corn as a loss of national independence: the unrestrained importation of corn depresses the price of domestic produce, discourages domestic production, and thereby puts England at the mercy of




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foreign states for its subsistence. In particular, it places it at the mercy of France, which can produce corn more cheaply. Malthus thus reasons that Britain should restrict importation to encourage British agriculture and to secure its independence from ‘both foreign supplies and foreign relations’ (494). Buchanan counters the Malthusian position by arguing that any decline in British agriculture due to free importation will not be permanent and by suggesting that fears about Britain’s total dependence on foreign nations for its subsistence are ‘quite chimerical’ (498–9). For him, international trade entails not total dependence but ‘mutual dependence’ or interdependence (494). This split over the Corn Laws marks the end of the Edinburgh Review’s war-time vision of a cosmopolitan political economy.39 In Nationalism and After (1945), E.H. Carr usefully divides the modern history of international relations into three overlapping periods: the first period ends with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the second with World War One, and the third with World War Two. During the first period, he explains, the nation is equated with the sovereign, and international relations are understood as relations between sovereigns. This period is characterized by the economic system of mercantilism, whose goal is to increase the power of the state (in other words, the sovereign). Domestically, mercantilism seeks to break down local markets and make the state the sole economic unit; internationally, it seeks to build national wealth at the expense of other nations, procuring their markets and their bullion. In this first period, the political unit coincides with the economic unit, and both are national. In the second period, however, the nation becomes equivalent to the people constituting it, and international relations become governed (at least theoretically) ‘by the collective interests, ambitions and emotions of the nation’.40 The period is characterized by the economic system of laissez-faire. And with laissez-faire, the prevailing economic unit is international rather than national: the world economy. Thus there is no longer a coincidence between political and economic units: ‘while in the previous period political and economic power had marched hand in hand to build up the national political unit and to substitute a single national economy for a conglomeration of local economies, in the 19th century a compromise was struck between political and economic power so that each could develop on its own lines’ (6). Carr argues that the ‘compromise’ between political nationalism and economic internationalism during the nineteenth century was secured by two illusions: first, that the world economic system was truly international; and second, that economics and politics were separate and independent.




In his discussion of the transition from the first period to the second, Carr makes an important point: ‘It is a mistake to contrast mercantilism with laissez-faire as if one were directed to national, the other to individual, ends. Both were directed to national ends; the difference between them related to a difference in the conception of the nation’ (5–6). Carr himself evokes the familiar romantic understanding of nation in relation to the turn of the nineteenth century, but the debate over the national economy in the Napoleonic era suggests that other models were also active in the period. For liberal writers of the Edinburgh Review such as Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, James Mill, and Francis Horner, the matter of laissez-faire economics provided a way of confronting rather than confirming the Burkean nation. What arises through their writings during the Napoleonic wars is not the ‘compromise’ between national political and international economic units suggested by Carr but rather a correlation between a cosmopolitan understanding of nation and a commercially-based internationalism. In this model, politics and economics converge rather than pull apart, as the very term ‘political economy’ helps to underline, and the political boundaries of the nation are drawn rather differently. Importantly, the cosmopolitan understanding of nation that supported the Edinburgh’s commercially-based internationalism also underpinned its understanding of literary and cultural exchange. A 1815 review, for instance, makes the free press the cornerstone of a liberal model of a new Europe. In ‘Liberty of the Continental Press’ (June 1815), the reviewer posits the press as the ‘palladium of civilized society’: its invention led to the improvement of the human mind in every country in Europe, and its continued existence is the ‘the grand source of hope’ for Europe’s advancement, and ‘the only effective security against its return to pristine wretchedness and barbarity’.41 The review argues that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between the liberty of a press and the liberty of a nation. The press is more free in England than in any other nation, for example, because the English have more freedom, and the English have more freedom because their press is more free.42 This mutually constitutive relationship between liberty and the press is not constrained by national borders however. The degree of liberty enjoyed by the French press, for example, influences the degree of liberty enjoyed in the rest of the Continent: ‘Celebrated books, published in France’, the reviewer declares, ‘can never be altogether excluded from any country in Europe’ (114). We may, therefore conclude, and that with a pretty full assurance, that whether the form into which Europe is about to be cast, shall be




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as highly favourable, or as unfavourable as possible to the interests of humanity, the press will enjoy, either by law, or in spite of law, a considerable degree of liberty; and books, tending to clear away deception, and to instruct the people in what manner their interests may be best consulted, will abound in some countries, and find their way into all. (113) Recognizing that what happens within a nation cannot be separated from what happens outside the nation, this vision of an international economy of books nicely intersects with the early Edinburgh Review’s cosmopolitan line on literature.




An Alternative Formulation: The Idea of National Literature in Staël and the Edinburgh Review

The last decades of the eighteenth century witnessed not only the rise of political and economic nationalism, but the rise of national literary paradigms as well, and the early Edinburgh Review followed current trends in organizing literature according to national identity, identifying authors and works according to national provenance. Most of the time, this was a fairly straight-forward process: English authors wrote English books; French authors wrote French books; German authors wrote German books. At other times, however, the process was more complicated: the German Grimm, for instance, makes his appearance in the Edinburgh Review as a French man of letters, his name securing a prominent place in the ‘recent history of French literature’, and the French émigré De Lille’s poem Malheur et Pitie, influenced by English literature, composed in French, written on English soil, and published in France is pushed outside national categorizations, becoming provocatively ‘European’.1 Such flexibility of affiliation points to an understanding of nationness in which national identity operates as an epistemological category rather than an ontological one. De Lille, for example, is able ‘to lay aside the gaudy costume of his country, and to accommodate himself to the taste of the other European nations’ (‘De Lille, Malheur et Pitié: Poëme’, 27). Moreover, he extends his literary reputation across national borders both by ‘abandoning his national peculiarities’ and by taking on the peculiarities of other nations. ‘He has recommended his works to general perusal, by departing, in a good measure, from the poetical style of his countrymen’; Jeffrey explains, ‘by adopting, freely, the beauties of the surrounding countries, and forming himself upon the model of all that appeared to him to be excellent in the poetry of modern Europe’ (26). This understanding of nationness underpins the Edinburgh’s cosmopolitan line on literature, and it complicates the periodical’s adherence to national literary paradigms. 54



3

National literature has generally been understood in terms of Romantic nationalisms such as Edmund Burke’s which consider the nation as a self-contained and organic whole. In this formulation, national literatures are distinct and discrete. Such formulations are coming under critical scrutiny more and more. Extending and complicating the foundational work of writers like Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha on the relationship between literature and the nation, critics are turning to the international and the transnational, drawing attention to the ways in which literature operates between and across national borders. In their recent collection of essays on Anglo-French literary and cultural exchange in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century, for instance, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever approach the modern novel as an ‘inter-national’ genre ‘that dwells at borders whose policing is crucial to the nationalist project’.2 Taking a different tack, comparativists like Bruce Robbins and Haun Saussy are reclaiming comparative literature as an antidote to the insularity of national literary paradigms, identifying the discipline’s intellectual genesis as a reaction against the Romantic nationalisms of the early nineteenth-century. ‘The logic of comparative literature is as old as literature itself’, Saussy asserts, ‘And yet this indeterminably ancient discipline has a particular origin in the era of nationalisms, which created the need for it.’3 As these examples suggest, most critical study still assumes a vital connection between Romantic nationalisms and the concept of national literature. Also circulating in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, however, was another formulation of national literature, notably, the socio-political approach to literature advanced by Germaine de Staël in France and the Edinburgh Review in Britain. Emerging out of the Scottish enlightenment, the socio-political approach to literature foregrounds the relationship between literature and social and political institutions, and it entails an understanding of national literature quite different from the more essentialist formulations affiliated with Romantic nationalisms. Like the commercially-based internationalism discussed in the previous chapter, the socio-political approach to literature advanced by Staël and Edinburgh reviewers such as Francis Jeffrey and James Mackintosh supports a cosmopolitan understanding of nation.

Stael’s socio-political approach to literature ‘Love of one’s country is a purely social attachment’, Staël writes in her influential treatise on Literature in Its Relation to Social Institutions (1800).4 Patriotism, she argues, is motivated by a desire for public recognition: it



An Alternative Formulation 55

is the ‘irresistible attraction of general esteem’ that extends an individual’s ambitions beyond the family to the nation (145). For Staël, literature develops and directs this public recognition, and is thus the cornerstone of national liberty. Cast in the terms of eighteenth-century understandings of patriotism as social attachment, Staël’s conception of the relationship between literature and the nation builds out of the social philosophies of Scottish philosophers such as Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, and it highlights not only an important instance of literary crossfertilization, but also an important continuity between Enlightenment and Romantic thought.5 In particular, the socio-political approach to literature that Staël formulates in Literature is integral to her later ‘romantic’ writings on nations, most famously, On Germany (1813), and is key to the development of Romantic literary criticism more broadly, including that of the Edinburgh Review. ‘My purpose’, Staël declares in Literature, ‘is to examine the influence of religion, custom, and law on literature, and the influence of literature upon religion, custom, and law’ (141).6 She begins her examination of the relationship between literature and social and political institutions with a history of classical literature. She starts with the literature of ancient Greece, attributing its ‘extraordinary success’ to the amount of liberty that existed in early Greek society (153).7 By encouraging individual incentive and by publicly honoring literary genius, she argues, the Athenian government created a climate in which individuals could come forward and compete for the nation’s literary laurels. This competition for renown ensured rapid improvement in all genres of literature, and, in turn, ‘[t]he nation was gratified to see such eagerness for its esteem’ (159). Finding Greek literature amenable with their own culture, Staël continues, the Romans adapted Greek forms to their own use. Where Greek literature was rooted in individual desire for public renown, however, Latin literature stressed utility. Concerning itself first and foremost with the good of the state, it acquired a ‘national spirit’ and ‘patriotic devotion’ that was lacking in the more self-centred genesis of Greek literature (168). Significantly, Staël limits the eminence of Roman literature to Rome under the Republic. As the political situation of Rome changed, and the Republic was replaced with emperors, she explains, the quality of Latin literature began to decline. The eloquence and purity that characterized the literature of the early Republic disappeared, and Latin literature grew superficial and affected. As a whole, Staël’s history of classical literature draws attention to the role of imitation and adaptation in the evolution of literature: Latin literature transforms its Greek foundation. It also illustrates the broader correlation between literature and




liberty at the core of Literature: if liberty advances literature by encouraging individual creativity and refining public taste, ‘tyranny gives a deathblow to literature by stifling emulation and corrupting taste’ (177). The overwhelming movement of literary history, however, is towards progress, as Staël makes clear in her chapter on the barbarian invasions. Responding to Enlightenment histories such as Gibbon’s that read the middle ages as a regression in the history of civilization, Staël argues that in fact the barbarian invasions moved culture forward. ‘The nations of the North’, she explains, ‘in eradicating for a time the literature and arts that reigned in the South, nevertheless acquired some of the knowledge of the vanquished; and the inhabitants of more than half of Europe, until then strangers to civilized society, shared its advantages’ (180). The invasions benefited the Southerners as well: ‘The enervated people of the South, mingling with the men of the North, took from them a certain energy and gave them a certain flexibility that was to help them perfect their intellectual faculties’ (181). Christianity was crucial to this mingling, binding together the Northerners and Southerners and ‘amalgamat[ing] opposite principles of conduct into one way of thinking’ (182). In Staël’s reading, the renaissance of letters that followed the invasions testifies to the ongoing – albeit hidden – advancement of culture throughout the dark ages: ‘If the human mind had not advanced even during these centuries in which we can hardly follow its history,’ she reasons, ‘should we have seen in the Renaissance men who, in morality, politics, and the sciences, far surpassed the greatest geniuses among the ancients?’ (183). Improving both Northern and Southern cultures, the barbarian invasions and their aftermath thus confirm rather than disprove the notion that humanity as a whole is continually moving towards a state of perfection. This notion of perfectibility underpins Staël’s socio-political approach to literature as well. For Staël, literature facilitates enlightenment by improving both individual and society. ‘The advancement of literature,’ she insists, ‘that is to say, the perfection of the art of thinking and of expressing one’s self, is essential to the establishment and preservation of freedom’ (146). If civilization advances literature for Staël, literature advances civilization also. Key to Staël’s socio-political approach to literature is a concept of national literature: I shall try to show the character that this or that form of government gives to eloquence; the moral ideas that this or that religious faith develops in the human mind; the workings of the imagination produced by what different nations are willing to believe; poetic qualities




that depend upon climate; the level of civilization most favourable to the vigor or perfection of literature; the various changes introduced in writings, as in customs generally, by the status of women both before and after the establishment of the Christian religion – in short, the universal progress of enlightenment resulting simply from the succession of eras … (152) For Staël, national literatures are shaped by a number of variables including form of government, religious beliefs, climate, class system, and status of women. English literature, for example, is a product of the English nation’s unique circumstances. ‘The English, separated from the Continent, Semotos orbe Britannos, did not share much at any time in the history and customs of the neighboring peoples’, Staël explains: ‘They have their own character in every genre’ (203–4). Shakespeare’s tragedies, for instance, demonstrate the love of liberty at the centre of English political history; the humour found in the comedies of writers such as Fielding, Swift, and Sterne derives from ‘the nature of the climate and national customs’; and the success of English domestic fiction testifies to the high social status enjoyed by English women (197–8, 201, 205–6). Importantly, Staël draws on several eighteenth-century theories of national character in her survey of English literature. Hume’s emphasis on the moral causes of national character is active, for example, as is Montesquieu’s concern with the material origins of national character. Such combination anticipates a larger ambiguity that can be observed in Stael’s own understanding of national character. In On Germany, for instance, national character appears at times quasi-ontological, but in Literature it remains primarily epistemological: ‘But what is a national character’, Staël asks rhetorically, ‘if it is not the result of the institutions and events that affect the happiness, concerns, and customs of a nation?’ (218). Equally important, however, is that Staël’s emphasis on the socio-political constitution of literature distinguishes her concept of national literature from the more essentialist formulations typically associated with the literary criticism of the Romantic period. For Staël, national literatures are not expressions or manifestations of pre-existing or unchanging national characters or spirits. Rather, they are the products of social and political institutions, institutions which are themselves in progress. One of the consequences of Staël’s concept of national literature is the possibility of affiliations between national literatures. In Literature, Staël divides modern literature into two ‘distinct literatures’, ‘that coming up from the South and that coming down from the North, that of which Homer is the main source and that of which Ossian is the




origin’ (191–2).8 Superficial, impassioned, and pleasure-driven, the literature of the South includes Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish literatures, along with French literature in the age of Louis XIV. Introspective, moral, and melancholic, the literature of the North includes English, German, Danish and Swedish literatures. Even as it highlights the difference between Northern and Southern cultures, such a division foregrounds affinities between national literatures. Different national literatures belong to the same literary tradition. Moreover, individual national literatures can combine Northern and Southern literary traditions. Early Spanish literature, for instance, Staël suggests, would have been much more successful if the Spanish had managed to unite ‘the imagination of the North with that of the South, the grandeur of chivalry with Oriental grandeur, the martial spirit continuous wars glorified with the poetry the beauty of the sun and climate inspired’ (189). This potential for international literary union recurs again and again in Staël’s later writings, perhaps most famously in the Anglo-Italian Corinne who combines the passion of the South with the melancholic imagination of the North, but the main point here is that Staël’s concept of national literature supports intra- and inter-national literary movements in a way that more essentialist formulations do not.9 Indeed, as Stael makes clear two years later in her Preface to Delphine (1802), movement across national borders is crucial to the health and ongoing improvement of national literatures. ‘[T]he great defects now threatening our literature’, Stael warns the French, ‘are sterility, frigidness, and monotony’.10 By only rewarding writers who imitate the already-accepted ‘masterpieces of French literature’, she complains, the French have created a literature that is stagnant, repetitious, and devoid of life (5–6). To revive French literature, the French need to look beyond their own borders to the literatures of other nations such as England and Germany. ‘[W]hen we read the writing of a nation whose outlook and feelings are very different from the French’, she explains, ‘our mind is excited by new comparisons, our imagination is enlivened as much by the audacities it condemns as by those it approves; and we might succeed in adapting to the French taste – perhaps the purest of all – original beauties that would give to the literature of the nineteenth century a character all its own’ (6). The perfection of a national literature, Stael suggests, relies on the nation’s acquaintance with literatures outside the nation: it is by reading foreign literature that the French improve their own national literature. Emphasizing the importance of international literary exchange to the well-being of national literature, her non-unified model of national literature resembles the cosmopolitan model of nation




broached by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Stewart. In Stael’s literary geography of Europe, national borders are permeable, open to outside influence. As she writes years later in On Germany, ‘[w]e have not yet, I imagine, come to wish to raise around literary France the Great Wall of China in order to prevent the entrance of all ideas from the outside’.11 Staël’s concept of national literature has implications for her understanding of national taste. In Chapter 12, ‘The Main Fault for Which Northern Literature is Criticized in France’, Staël asserts that the French are wrong in criticizing Northern literature as lacking in taste. The Northerners, however, she claims, are equally wrong in characterizing taste as ‘purely arbitrary’ (Literature, 195). Taste, Staël argues, functions like morality: all peoples consent to the same virtues, but various governments and national customs dictate the relative importance of each. Her analogy is not surprising considering the connection she establishes between literature and morality throughout Literature, but it is significant in that it makes taste neither completely relative nor straightforwardly universal. ‘[W]e must not confuse the principal bases upon which universal truths are founded with the modifications caused by local circumstances’, Staël warns (195). Taste may differ from nation to nation, in other words, but it is not arbitrary. In the end national preferences must give way to universal standards: ‘National taste should be judged upon [general] principles; the closer it approaches them, the nearer it is to truth’ (196). Recognizing both difference and similarity, the socio-political approach to literature that Staël broaches in Literature anticipates the larger tension between the national and the cosmopolitan that structures her comparative criticism in later works such as On Germany. What she proposes is not the nationless Republic of letters envisioned by Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Hume, but neither is it the array of self-generating and self-enclosed national literatures imagined by Romantics like Herder and Hegel. Rather, her socio-political approach to literature allows for the coexistence of national literatures and international literary movements, of national taste and universal standards. It was this combination of the universal and the particular that was to attract the attention of the editor of Britain’s influential Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey.

The literary patriotism of the Edinburgh Review ‘We are not acquainted, indeed, with any writer who has made such bold and vigorous attempts to carry the generalizing spirit of true philosophy into the history of literature and manners, or who has thrown so strong




a light upon the capricious and apparently unaccountable diversity of national taste, genius, and morality, by connecting them with the political structure of society, the accidents of climate and external relation, and the variety of creeds and superstitions’, writes Jeffrey in his fifty page review of Literature for the Edinburgh Review.12 For Jeffrey, Staël was ‘the most eminent literary female of her age’, and Literature ‘the fairest specimen … yet seen of the systematizing spirit of the author’ (2, 3). In the nationalistic climate of early nineteenth-century Britain, he, along with fellow reviewers such as James Mackintosh and Thomas Carlyle, not only introduced Staël’s writings to the British public in their writings for the Edinburgh Review, but also drew on Staël’s socio-political approach to literature in their own attempts to negotiate the question of national literature.13 In particular, their reviews of domestic and foreign literature activate Staël’s cosmopolitan notion of national literature in tandem with the nationalistic model current at the time. Demonstrating the familiar Romantic correlation between individual genius and national genius, Jeffrey’s well-known review of Southey’s Thabala in the periodical’s first volume usefully illustrates the nationalistic model. ‘Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion’, Jeffrey begins, ‘that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call into question.’14 In the review, Jeffrey takes particular issue with the Lake poets’ claims of originality. True, he asserts, the Lake poets have rejected traditional literary conventions. But they are far from independent. Their ‘doctrines are of German origin’, he complains, and their ‘leading principles … borrowed from the great apostle of Geneva’ (63). Indeed, instead of creating new literary forms of their own, the Lake poets have imported foreign ones, and the resulting poetry is an awkward combination of the foreign and the domestic: it combines the ‘antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau’ and the ‘simplicity and energy … of Kotzebue and Schiller’ with the ‘homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper’s language and versification, interchanged occasionally with the innocence of Ambrose Philips, or the quaintness of Quarles and Dr. Donne’ (64). Heterogeneous and dependent on foreign ideas and forms, the Lake poets’ poetry not only contradicts Jeffrey’s sense of what good literature should be, it also threatens the integrity of national literature. In this familiar Romantic formulation, national literatures (like individual works of literature) are distinct and discrete. As Jeffrey’s early review suggests, such a formulation of national literature is closely allied with Romantic models of nation such as Burke’s which posit the nation as unified and self-contained. Indeed, Jeffrey




activates the anti-Jacobin rhetoric of writers like Burke to depict Southey and his fellow Lake poets as Jacobin ‘conspirators’ trying to ‘seduce’ the English readership with their revolutionary poetry (64). But the question of national literature was cast in less insular terms in the early Edinburgh Review as well. While other British periodicals limited their reviews of foreign literature as a precaution against charges of Jacobinism during the Napoleonic wars, the Edinburgh Review remained unapologetically international in scope. The literary patriotism that reviewers such as Jeffrey and Mackintosh develop during this period calls on the same cosmopolitan understanding of the nation as non-unified and permeable that underpins the Edinburgh’s economic writings, and relies on another formulation of national literature, one that accommodates rather than excludes heterogeneity and foreign influence. ‘By a series of such biographical sketches, interspersed with enlightened criticism, and illustrated by occasional comparison with performances more familiar to an English reader,’ Jeffrey asserts in ‘Lord Holland’s Account of Lope de Vega’ (1806), ‘foreign literature may be most effectually naturalized, and most extensively disseminated among the reading classes of the community; the taste and intelligence of the nation may be gradually improved; our notions of excellence may be enlarged and corrected; and the objects of liberal emulation and the sources of innocent enjoyment may be multiplied among us to a considerable extent.’15 The idea that foreign literature can improve national taste underwrites the early Edinburgh Review’s commitment to reviewing foreign literature, and the understanding of national literature that supports such a comparative impulse links the literary patriotism of the early Edinburgh Review to socio-political approaches to literature such as Staël’s. Part of the Edinburgh Review’s mandate was to keep its readership informed about political and intellectual developments taking place outside of Britain, in particular those taking place on the Continent. In an important sense, the reviewers saw themselves as cultural mediators, not only bringing foreign literature into Britain, but also ‘naturalizing’ it for English taste. A frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review with personal ties to Staël and the Coppet circle, James Mackintosh was instrumental in interpreting Staël for the Edinburgh audience, and the comparative criticism that he champions in his positive review of Staël’s On Germany sets the measure for his own literary criticism.16 In the review, Mackintosh praises the ‘intrinsic and permanent importance’ of On Germany and, in particular, Staël’s desire ‘to make Germany known to foreign nations’ (198, 204).17 But what makes Staël’s work really unique, he observes, is her cosmopolitan ability to both register specific details




and establish general systems, to unite the particular and the universal: Staël is ‘one of those very few persons, who are capable at once of observing and painting manners, – of estimating and expounding philosophical systems, – of feeling the beauties of the most dissimilar forms of literature, – of tracing the peculiarities of usages, arts, and even speculations, to their common principle in national character – and of disposing them in their natural place as features in the great portrait of a people’ (204). To make his point, Mackintosh offers a comparison between ‘respectable travellers of the second class’ and ‘philosophical and poetical traveller[s]’ such as Staël. Where travellers of the second class ground their representation of nations in reason, offering readers compilations of facts and measurements, ‘philosophical and poetical’ travellers such as Staël activate the imagination. Such travellers can ‘catch the first aspect of a new country’ and theorize that aspect into a system, ‘combining the vivacity of first impressions with the accuracy of minute examination’ (204–5). Mackintosh’s description of the ‘philosophical and poetic traveller’ who can both ‘sympathize’ and ‘systematize’ recalls Enlightenment cosmopolitan travellers such as Goldsmith’s who is both sympathetic observer and detached philosopher, but the key point is that Mackintosh recognizes in Staël’s approach to Germany an example of the type of cosmopolitan criticism the Edinburgh was trying to achieve. Supporting this criticism is a particular formulation of national literature. ‘Poetry and eloquence may, and in some measure must be national’, Mackintosh confidently asserts in his review of Staël’s On Germany (200). Mackintosh begins his review by echoing Staël’s observations about the belatedness of German literature, arguing that although Germany was exemplary in terms of its early progress in the areas of science and theology, it – unique among the ‘civilized’ nations of Europe – remained ‘without a national literature’ until well into the eighteenth century (199). The widespread use of Latin for philosophical and scientific discourse in Germany coupled with the prevalence of French as the language of its multiple courts meant that vernacular German ‘continued to be the mere instrument of the most vulgar intercourse of life’ (199–200). And without its own literary language, he explains, Germany had ‘no exclusive mental possession’ – no national literature (200). It is important that for Mackintosh, as for Staël, it is the history of German literature – and in particular, its belatedness – that makes it most national, ‘perhaps the most characteristic possessed by an European nation’ (200). Equally important, however, is the idea that German literature inverts regular patterns of development: ‘German literature, various, rich, bold, and at




length, by an inversion of the usual progress, working itself into originality, was tainted with the exaggeration natural to the imitator, and to all those who know the passions rather by study than by feeling’ (200). The imitative and heterogeneous product of a nation only lately come into its own, German literature resists organic models of national literature. Mackintosh’s understanding of national literature takes clearer shape in his review of Samuel Rogers’ Poems (1813). Published in the volume following Jeffrey’s comprehensive review of Staël’s Literature and in the same volume as his own review of On Germany, ‘Rogers’ Poems’ draws heavily on Staël’s socio-political approach to literature to delineate an English literary history. In the review, Mackintosh takes up Staël’s argument, asserting that although the progress of literature is not subject to universal laws like science and other ‘useful’ arts, it does have a pattern: ‘Changes of religion and of government, civil or foreign wars, conquests which derive splendour from distance, or extent, or difficulty; – long tranquillity; – all these, and indeed every conceivable modification of the state of a community show themselves in the tone of its poetry, and leave long and deep traces on every part of its literature.’18 For Mackintosh, as for Staël, a nation’s literature is shaped by its social and political institutions. The tranquility and security of eighteenth-century England, for instance, produced poetry that was ‘calm, argumentative, moral, and directly useful’ (33). Equally important, a nation’s literature is shaped by social and political institutions outside the nation as well. It is no accident, Mackintosh contends, that the recent poetical revolution within English poetry coincides with the ‘political revolution which has changed the character as well as the condition of Europe’ (34). Highlighting the permeability of national borders, Mackintosh’s sociopolitical approach to literature puts pressure on formulations of national literature as distinct and discrete. ‘In the natural progress of society’, Mackintosh writes, ‘the songs which are the effusion of the feelings of a rude tribe, are gradually polished into a Poetry still retaining the marks of those national opinions, sentiments and manners, from which it originally sprung’ (34–5). He concedes immediately, however, that the only known nation that fulfills this Romantic ideal of organic literary generation is Greece. Although various aspects of Eastern culture made their way into Greece, he explains, Greek unfamiliarity with foreign languages and foreign poets meant that Greek literature developed without outside influence: ‘Greek poetry was … wholly national’ (35). All other national literatures have been informed by outside influences. English literature is no exception. ‘The first age of English poetry, in the reign of Elizabeth, displayed a combination, fantastic enough, of chivalrous fancy




and feeling with classical pedantry’, Mackintosh narrates: ‘But, upon the whole, the native genius was unsubdued; and the poems of that age, with all their faults, and partly perhaps from their faults, are the most national part of our poetry’ (35–6). English poets, he continues, soon exchanged these early ‘national’ models for foreign ones. Thus the ‘elegant correctness’ that characterized the poetry of writers such as Dryden and Pope, for instance, had much more in common with Continental literary forms than it did with English ones (33). By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the English importation of foreign models had weakened English literature to the point where the nation was ready for a revival of its own indigenous poetry. It is significant that Mackintosh’s English literary history includes interruptions in the national tradition, moments when English literature is not really ‘English’ at all. For Mackintosh, the history of English literature cannot be separated from the histories of other national literatures, French literature in particular. If national literature is not discrete for Mackintosh, however, neither is it entirely distinct. In the review, Mackintosh identifies Rogers’ Poems as part of the recent revival of indigenous poetry in Britain. He finds Rogers’ ‘Pleasures of Memory’ particularly representative of this revival: ‘destitute of foreign help’ and ‘patronized by no sect or faction’, the poem meets with unanimous approval throughout the nation, and the ‘pure, chaste elegance’ of its verses is ‘not surpassed … by any English lines’ (39). Mackintosh’s identification of a native ‘English’ poetry, however, is thrown into question shortly after by a note to Rogers’ poem, ‘Voyage of Columbus’. In the note, Mackintosh points to the similarity between Rogers’ description of the sea and one written by Staël in her novel Corinne: ‘By a coincidence which must have been accidental,’ he muses before quoting the earlier description in Corinne, ‘the same original conception presented itself to a writer of the first order of genius’ (47).19 ‘[B]y a coincidence equally casual’, he continues, Staël’s observation in Corinne that ‘[e]t n’est-ce pas en effet l’air natal pour un Anglois qu’un vaisseau au milieu de la mer?’ is ‘the basis of one of the noblest stanzas of English lyric poetry’, Thomas Campbell’s assertion in his nationalistic naval ode ‘Ye Mariners of England’ that ‘Britannia needs no bulwark, / No towers along the steep; / Her march is on the mountain wave, / Her home is on the deep’ (47).20 Drawing attention to moments when Staël’s thoughts are indistinguishable from those of Rogers and Campbell, Mackintosh’s note operates as a telling supplement to his delineation of a distinct English literary tradition. Even the seemingly most nationally identified passages within a national literature, the note suggests, are not necessarily unique to that nation’s literature.




‘[S]ince at least the late eighteenth century and in increasingly official form since the late nineteenth, a crucial vehicle for establishing and negotiating the relevant sense of national identity has been provided by that symbolic and emotionally charged selection of writing known as “English literature”’, writes Stefan Collini.21 In his book, he extends the Whig interpretation of history to English literary history, arguing that nineteenth-century histories of English literature exhibit the same ‘celebratory’ and ‘consensual’ qualities as Whig interpretations of history. Francis Palgrave’s interpretation of English literary history in his 1816 review ‘Goethe’s Life of Himself ’ for the Edinburgh Review is in this sense paradigmatic. ‘It has been our good fortune’, writes Palgrave, regular contributor to the Edinburgh Review and future editor of Britain’s ‘true national anthology’, the Golden Treasury, ‘that the canonical succession of genius amongst us has never been interrupted, but has been transmitted, in regular descent, from the first fathers of poetry and eloquence, to the present inheritors of their glories.’22 Anchored in a Burkean understanding of nationness, Palgrave’s ‘Whig interpretation’ of English literary history entails an understanding of national literature as self-generating and self-contained: ‘The rugged and moss-grown oaks of the sacred forest [of English literature] are still standing in green old age’, Palgrave asserts, employing a familiar Romantic metaphor, ‘in the midst of the towering and vigorous stems which have sprung from the same roots, and have been nourished in the same healthy soil’ (305). Like Burke’s well-known image of the oak of England in Reflections, Palgrave’s description of the ‘sacred forest’ of English literature stresses homogeneity and historical continuity: new oaks spring from old roots. In contrast, grounded in the socio-political discourse of the Enlightenment, Mackintosh’s English literary history evokes an understanding of national literature as heterogeneous and receptive to outside influence. Indeed, appearing at the beginning of the process of consolidation described by Collini, the early Edinburgh Review registers not one coherent ‘Whig interpretation’ of national literature, but rather an important tension between ‘nationalistic’ formulations such as Palgrave’s and ‘patriotic’ ones such as Mackintosh’s.23

Eating ‘plum pudding at Vienna’: national taste and the Edinburgh Review Not only did the socio-political approach to literature that informed the literary patriotism of the early Edinburgh Review challenge Romantic




formulations of national literature as distinct and discrete; it also figured in the larger debate about the influence of foreign literature on national taste that was taking place during the period. In particular, it underpinned a cosmopolitan understanding of national taste that was at odds with the insular understandings cultivated in Britain during the Napoleonic wars and their immediate aftermath. Jeffrey’s review of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise sets up the terms of this debate nicely. Jeffrey begins the review by asking if the current English taste for German literature is a taste for German literature or whether it is a taste for German imitations of French and English literature: ‘A traveller may very erroneously suppose that he relishes German cookery, when he gormandizes on fricandeau or plum-pudding at Vienna’; Jeffrey muses, ‘but if he take delight in sour krout and wild-boar venison, he may rest assured that he is under no mistake as to the proficiency he has made, and that he has completely reconciled himself to the national taste of his entertainers.’24 Stressing a strongly desired correlation between national identity and national literature, Jeffrey’s anxiety about the ‘Germanness’ of German literature demonstrates the same preoccupation with homogeneity and literary independence that appears in his earlier review of Thabala. Containing no traces of either French or English literature, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise is ‘as genuine sour krout as ever perfumed a feast in Westphalia’ (149). Echoing Burke’s well-known understanding of nationness as love of hearth and home, Jeffrey anchors national taste in local attachment: we are naturally fond of our own national cuisine. At the same time, however, he suggests that it is possible to develop an appreciation for foreign fare: we can acquire a cosmopolitan palate. Although Jeffrey shuts down this possibility here, reassuring his reader at the end of the review that ‘there is still a considerable difference between the national taste of German and of this country’, the idea that national taste might be extended to include other national literatures loosens the relationship between national taste and national identity (154). Indeed, even as Jeffrey’s review confirms the vital connection between national identity and national literature that underpins literary nationalisms such as Palgrave’s, his gustatory metaphor opens the possibility of alternative affiliations: what happens when one ‘gormandizes on fricandeau or plum-pudding at Vienna’? Not surprisingly, the cosmopolitan understanding of national taste that Jeffrey carefully qualifies in his 1806 review is more pronounced in the pages of the post-Napoleonic Edinburgh Review. ‘There are very few things that at first sight appear more capricious and unaccountable, than the diversities of National Taste’; Jeffrey asserts in his 1825 review of




Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, ‘and yet there are not many, that, to a certain extent at least, admit of a clearer explanation.’25 In ‘Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’, Jeffrey argues that diversities in national taste can be accounted for by two main factors: a nation’s stage of civilization and the ‘accidental causes’ affecting a nation’s ‘character and condition’, including its social and political institutions, its geography and climate, its relation to other nations, and its literary history (409). Like Staël, Jeffrey turns to Scottish Enlightenment narratives of progress to make his point about the evolution of literature, extending the stadial arguments of the Scottish philosophers to the development of literature. Just as all nations pass through a series of stages as they advance, moving from hunting to pasturage to agriculture to commerce and manufacture, Jeffrey explains, so national literatures pass from verse to prose, ‘from marvellous legends to correct history – exaggerated sentiments to just representations of nature’ (410). In this model, the process of advancement is universal, but each national literature advances at its own pace: ‘They not only start in the great career of improvement at different times,’ he asserts, ‘but they advance in it with different velocities – some lingering longer in one stage than another – some obstructed and some helped forward, by circumstances operating on them from within or from without’ (410). As in Adam Smith’s description of national progress, the progress of national literature is influenced by developments taking place both inside and outside national borders. Where Staël supports her claims about the progress of literature with the abstract notion of perfectibility, however, Jeffrey anchors his in the concrete discourse of political economy, in particular, in the principles of international commerce. Just as increased commerce between nations gradually reduces differences between nations, Jeffrey argues, so the growing international commerce of literature is gradually minimizing differences between national tastes. Even the French ‘have been compelled to recede considerably from many of their exclusive pretensions’, a result he ascribes to ‘those circumstances in the recent history of Europe, which have compelled our ingenious neighbours to mingle more than they had ever done before with the surrounding nations – and thus to become better acquainted with the diversified forms which genius and talent may assume’ (413–14). Admittedly, as Jeffrey sees it, the desired result of such increased international ‘mingling’ is to bring other European nations – and France in particular – more in line with English taste. But the key point here is that in Jeffrey’s ‘literary Europe’ all national tastes are becoming more and more cosmopolitan.





While we hold out the work therefore as a curious and striking instance of that diversity of national tastes, which makes a writer idolized in one place who could not be tolerated in another, we would be understood as holding it out as an object rather of wonder than of contempt; and though the greater part certainly could not be endured, and indeed could not have been written in England, there are many passages of which any country might reasonably be proud, and which demonstrate, that if Taste be local and variable, Genius is permanent and universal. (449) For Jeffrey, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is unmistakably a work of ‘German’ literature: ‘by the general consent of all Germany’, it is the ‘greatest work of their very greatest writer’ (414). Judging it according to English ‘principles of judgement and habits of feeling’, however, Jeffrey finds it ‘eminently absurd, puerile, incongruous, vulgar, and affected’ (414). For now, German taste is not English taste. At the same time, Jeffrey suggests, individual passages within Wilhelm Meister transcend national identity to please universally: ‘there are many passages of which any country might reasonably be proud’ (449). Underwriting Jeffrey’s socio-political explanation of the diversities of national taste, then, is an Enlightenment belief in universal standards: ‘if Taste be local and variable, Genius is permanent and universal’. The cosmopolitan understanding of national taste that appears in the early Edinburgh Review persisted through the nineteenth-century, countering the insularity of literary nationalisms by actively encouraging readers to familiarize themselves with foreign literatures. So Thomas Carlyle, for example, who started writing for the Edinburgh Review in 1827, echoes the literary patriotism of earlier reviewers such as Jeffrey and Mackintosh when he argues that national taste should extend beyond national literature to embrace other national literatures. In his well-known review of the ‘State of German Literature’ (1827) for the Edinburgh Review, Carlyle draws on Jeffrey’s model of a new ‘literary Europe’ to justify his survey of German Literature: ‘surely if the grand principle of free intercourse is so profitable in material commerce’, he reasons, ‘much more must it be in the commerce of the mind, the products of which are thereby not so much transported out of one country into another, as multiplied overall, for the benefit of all, and without loss



Importantly, Jeffrey is careful to keep his understanding of national taste from tipping over into cultural relativism, as his discussion of the English reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister demonstrates.

to any.’26 In this win–win international economy of the mind, the good of the nation is best served not through insularity and national prejudice but rather through openness and cosmopolitan tolerance. Indeed, for Carlyle, it is one’s national ‘duty’ not to isolate oneself from foreign literature (306). Here, national literatures are both interconnected and interdependent, ‘for so closely are all European communities connected’, Carlyle observes, ‘that the phases of mind in any country […] are but modified repetitions of its phases in every other’ (337). In a suggestive moment, Carlyle speculates about the potential effects such a cosmopolitan understanding of national taste might have on the politically tumultuous climate of post-Napoleonic Europe: ‘Perhaps at the present era this duty is more essential than ever; an era of such promise and such threatening, – when so many elements of good and evil are everywhere in conflict, and human society is, as it were, struggling to body itself forth anew, and so many coloured rays are springing up in this quarter and in that, which only by their union can produce pure light’ (306–7). For Carlyle, as for fellow reviewers Jeffrey and Mackintosh, recent social and political developments in Europe have changed the face of European literature. Equally significant, however, Carlyle reminds his readers, is Staël’s point that literature changes social and political institutions as well. Europe’s future stability, he proposes, depends on international understanding, an understanding best facilitated through exposure to foreign literatures. It is ‘only by their union’, Carlyle asserts, that the ‘coloured rays’ of Europe’s national literatures will ‘produce pure light’. In his hands, the literary patriotism of the early Edinburgh Review becomes a platform for World literature. ‘It is becoming a commonplace that the institution of literature works to nationalist ends’, states Simon During in his influential essay, ‘Literature – Nationalism’s other?’ (1990).27 In his essay, During asks us to trouble the easy relationship we have drawn between Romantic literature and Romantic nationalism. For During, not all literature legitimates nations: ‘At the very least’, he argues, ‘it becomes important to examine varieties of nationalism as well as the historical dislocations between literature and legitimations of nation (140). If – as During so persuasively argues – it is important to examine the ‘varieties of nationalism’ that complicate the relationship between Romantic literature and Romantic nationalism, so too is it important to recognize the literary ‘institutions’ that make up the other half of the equation. As the next three chapters will argue, the cosmopolitan understanding of nation I have outlined in these first three chapters operates not only in non-fictional writings of the period but in fictional ones as well.




Porous Borders: Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity

The question of borders was not only crucial to how Britons understood Britain’s relationship with other nations; it was also a fundamental one when it came to their understanding of Britain itself. In particular, the question arose in the early years of the century in relation to Ireland, now a member of the British polity as a consequence of the 1801 Act of Union. Ireland’s incorporation put pressure on the dominant Burkean conception of nation, and in response, writers on both sides of the Irish Sea turned to alternative models that better represented the new political situation. Pro-union and pro-Catholic emancipation, the Edinburgh Review generally drew on Smith’s political economy to figure Irish–English political relations in terms of international trade, and this model underlies Maria and Robert Lovell Edgeworth’s commentary on Ireland in the journal. Their co-written review ‘Carr’s Stranger in Ireland’ (April 1807) formulates union as the free circulation of citizens and goods between Ireland and England: ‘it is a farce to talk of an incorporating union having taken place between two countries’, they insist, ‘whilst the inhabitants cannot pass or repass from either country, without undergoing a search as rigorous as if they were in an enemy’s territory: whilst the duties and drawbacks of excise operate as checks upon the transfer of property, and even upon locomotion’.1 Such a formulation of union recalls Kant’s ‘union of states’ in that it allows for the free movement across borders but not the elimination of them, and entails a particular understanding of nationness. In ‘Virtue, travel and the Enlightenment’ (1995), Séamus Deane points out that at the turn of the nineteenth century Enlightenment forms of narrative like the philosophical tale were threatened by a ‘newly assertive nationalism, predicated on notions of national character’.2 The kind of national narrative he has in mind is represented by a figure like 71



4

Edmund Burke, but the same Anglo-Irish milieu that produced Burke also produced Maria Edgeworth, who offered a rather different reading of national identity in the same period. Her writings on Ireland, especially her early Irish tales, offer an important rearticulation of Burkean local attachment and philosophical cosmopolitanism to produce an understanding of the nation as neither tightly bordered (like nations based on historical premises such as blood or inheritance) nor borderless (like those based on rational notions of universal inclusion). Edgeworth’s own Anglo-Irish allegiance is central to this project, but her effort to rethink nationness makes her more than the colonial writer who tends to figure in much current criticism.3 Herself both immersed in continental Enlightenment thought and personally affected by the nationalist upsurge of the 1798 Rebellion, she used her writing to reconsider the meaning of the denomination ‘Anglo-Irish’.4 And through her interrogation she reinterpreted both cosmopolitan and national definitions of belonging so as to reconstitute ‘Anglo-Irish’ less as a category than as an ongoing mediation between borders.5 In the Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke attempted to increase the political distance between England and revolutionary France by presenting the English nation as a historical continuity. The nation becomes the organic culmination of history: hereditary rank and inherited property preserve the constitutional freedoms enjoyed by the English people, a ‘patrimony derived from their forefathers’.6 Burke couples this notion of historical continuity with affinity to place, the rudimentary ‘germ’ of public affection (97). As we saw in Chapter 1, national identity begins with local attachment and extends outward, encompassing neighbourhood, province, and ultimately nation. In order to reinforce the point, Burke draws on the vocabulary of familial relations: ‘In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars’ (84). Kinship – ‘relation in blood’ – ensures the historical continuity that defines the English nation. It is also the departure point for the series of social relations that compose national affection: ‘We begin our public affections in our families’ (244). By troping national identity as an inheritance, specifically ‘an inheritance from our forefathers’, Burke activates the standard conflation of political and domestic in the period to create a self-enclosed England (81). If nationness is historical continuity perpetrated though local attachment, then French nationality has been upset first by the cosmopolitan philosophy




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of the French philosophes and later by the French Revolution itself. In his narration of this upset, Burke repeatedly casts the political in domestic terms: he describes the infiltration of the French domestic circle by the religious and moral heresies of the French philosophes; the ensuing violence inflicted by revolutionaries against the French Royal Family, most notably in his celebrated account of the removal of the Queen; and the disrespect the ‘illegitimate’ national assembly shows for established hereditary rule.7 If England is to maintain its integrity against France, it must prevent French influence from penetrating its national boundaries. By thus casting his understanding of nationness in the insular terms of inheritance and local attachment, Burke evokes a correlative banishment of cosmopolitan ideals as nationally disruptive; hence in the Reflections he criticizes figures like Voltaire, Helvetius, and Rousseau. Burke’s banishment of cosmopolitan ideals serves to mark the late eighteenth-century generic shift from Enlightenment narrative to Romantic national tale noted by Séamus Deane. Writing just a few years after Burke, however, Maria Edgeworth rethinks Burke’s nation and its familial trope.8 Her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), is a biting commentary on the founding English metaphor of patrilineal descent. Subtitled ‘An Hibernian Tale taken from facts and from the manners of the Irish squires before the year 1782’, the novel chronicles the moral and financial downfall of the Rackrent family. The first Rackrent heir is Sir Patrick, famous for his lavish entertainments and his propensity for drink. Immensely popular because of his generosity, Sir Patrick ‘lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality’.9 In contrast, his son, Sir Murtagh, exploits those around him. He manipulates the Irish law as a tool by which to secure his own wealth, among other things refusing to pay for his father’s extensive debts and filing legal suits against his tenants for even the most trivial of misdemeanours. The third heir, Sir Kit, takes a hands-off approach instead. He assigns the running of the estate to an agent and then moves to England, where he gambles away his fortune. In an effort to escape bankruptcy, he marries a wealthy Jewess and returns to Ireland. He imprisons his new wife when she refuses to hand over her jewels and subsequently makes the most of his freedom by courting other women.10 The Rackrent legacy does not come full circle, however, until the advent of the last heir of Castle Rackrent, Sir Condy. Of the same ‘blood’ as Sir Patrick (figuratively as well as literally), Sir Condy follows in his ancestor’s footsteps, squandering his fortune on high living. Consequently, he loses the family estate once and for all, which is bought by the estate manager, Jason Quirk. Importantly, this new master of Castle Rackrent is not an heir but rather the business-minded son of the family retainer. Edgeworth’s narrative



Porous Borders

treatment of patrilineal inheritance has distinct political implications. For the liberal Edgeworth, a nation based on inheritance is susceptible to systemic corruption and to oppressive authoritarianism. Her ‘Hibernian tale’ is not a Burkean one. Edgeworth destabilizes Burke’s model of the nation not only through her sardonic view of patrilineal inheritance but also by highlighting Ireland’s dual status as an English colony and as a foreign, non-English nation. The preface to Castle Rackrent, for instance, introduces the novel as a foreign tale directed towards an English audience. ‘[T]o those who are totally unacquainted with Ireland’, the editor warns, ‘the following Memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or they may appear perfectly incredible’ (63). Consequently, the editor has included a series of notes ‘[f]or the information of the ignorant English reader’ (63). These informational notes attempt to explain Irish dialect and culture to English readers and present Ireland as exotic, foreign. But the preface suggests at the same time that Ireland is destined to be something other than foreign to England. ‘Nations as well as individuals gradually lose attachment to their identity’, the editor warns, ‘and the present generation is amused rather than offended by the ridicule that is thrown upon its ancestors’ (63). Thus it is that ‘[w]hen Ireland loses her identity by a union with Great Britain, she will look back with a smile of good-humoured complacency on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence’ (63). When Ireland loses its identity (independent parliament), the Irish will cease to identify themselves with ‘ancestors’ like the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of their past, thereby reinforcing the antiinheritance model of nation but incorporating Ireland into the synthetic model of Great Britain. The key point, however, is the play with borders (temporal, geographical, political) enacted by Castle Rackrent in the editorial epilogue to the novel. Departing from the chronicles of the Rackrent family, the text moves in its final lines to contemporary Irish politics, specifically to the impending union between Ireland and England. Consistent with the editor’s emphasis on the foreignness of Ireland in the preface, glossary, and footnotes to the tale, the editorial comment begins with the boundary separating Ireland and England: ‘Indeed, the domestic habits of no nation in Europe were less known to the English than those of their sister country, till within these few years’ (121). But it ends with a question that suggests something more porous: ‘Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer? or did they learn from the Irish to drink whiskey?’ (122). This question, drawing together nation-specific customs of Ireland and England, opens the possibility




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of an overlap between the two nations. In Edgeworth’s formulation, a cultural ‘learning’ occurs on both sides of the border, facilitating an international cross-over of customs.11 This figure of inter-national cross-over will prove the cornerstone to Edgeworth’s rewriting of Burkean nationness, and the notion of learning supporting such a cross-over links her rewriting to eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism.12 In Edgeworth’s Irish novels, education is the key to both individual and national improvement: it is the foundation of the well-governed estate and the foundation of the well-governed nation. More specifically, a slow process of education instils trans-national understanding in the Irish people while retaining the bonds of local attachment by which the nation is secured. The centrality of education to national improvement in Edgeworth distinguishes her writing from constructions of national identity as national character and links her thought to earlier cosmopolitan constructions of universal human subjects. It is no accident that she chooses to conclude her discussion of education in the Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth with the following words of her father, in which national identity is presented as the product of a specific education on a universal subject: ‘Did God give different minds to different countries? No! the difference of mind arose from education. It therefore became the duty of Parliament to improve as much as possible the public understanding – for the misfortunes of Ireland were owing not to the heart, but the head; and the defect was not from nature, but from want of culture.’13 By claiming that national difference was anchored in education (‘culture’ rather than ‘nature’), Edgeworth gave to national identity a socio-cultural foundation, and thereby opened a space in which change could take place.

‘Neither beef nor vael’: the Anglo-Irish in Maria Edgeworth’s early Irish tales Maria Edgeworth’s reconsideration of Burke’s metaphor of inheritance moves into explicit focus in her second Irish novel, Ennui (1809), which effects that reconsideration through two central notions: fosterage and the ennui of the title. The plot of the novel rests on an Irish nurse’s substitution of her own healthy peasant baby, Christy Donoghoe, for a sickly English aristocratic baby, Glenthorn, a substitution that does not come to light until well into the novel. The important point is that the education of the presumed lord Glenthorn forges a bored English aristocrat out of an Irish peasant, while the education of the presumed



Porous Borders

Christy Donoghoe leads him to become an Irish blacksmith. Edgeworth’s plot here resituates the traditional Irish practice of fostering within an enlightenment framework. In the practice of fostering, kinship becomes a matter of culture rather than blood (heredity).14 And this has significant implications for the determination of identity. When identity is determined according to inheritance, the border line between belonging and not belonging is relatively clear: I was born into this family rather than that one. If identity is determined according to education, however, this process is complicated. The border line between belonging and not belonging is not so clear: one can feasibly belong to more than one family, as is the case in fostering. In political terms, this non-blood kinship works towards an inclusive rather than exclusive definition of national identity. Despite an English inheritance, that is, the Anglo-Irish can belong to Ireland, and at the same time they can continue to belong to England. In Ennui, however, Glenthorn’s attempt to straddle English and Irish identities in such a way makes him politically suspect even before his Irish origin has been uncovered.15 He is in Ireland during the tense time of the 1798 uprising. The radical United Irishmen, as Ellinor reports to him, ‘said you was milk and water, and did not go far enough, and never would, and that it was not in you, and that you was a sleepy man, and not the true thing at all, and neither beef nor vael’.16 Here the possibility of a dual affiliation – Glenthorn as ‘milk and water’ – is shut down, robbing him of all affiliation: he becomes ‘neither beef nor vael’. Dual affiliation is no more accepted by his own peers than it is by the United Irishmen. When Glenthorn stands up in court for his ‘Irish’ foster-brother, Christy, who has been wrongfully accused of being a rebel, his Anglo-Irish peers wield the same exclusionary logic as the United Irishmen, denoting Glenthorn a ‘trimmer or a traitor’ to his national origin (247). Although Edgeworth herself was far from propounding such exclusionary logic, it seems that in her novel Anglo-Irishness must settle out as either Englishness or Irishness. In Ennui, the possibility of belonging to two nations ceases to be a narrative question as soon as Glenthorn’s Irishness is revealed.17 Removed from the problematic category of ‘Anglo-Irish’, Glenthorn ‘belongs’ only to Ireland. But the same turn in the plot that preempts Glenthorn’s reinterpretation of Anglo-Irishness as a dual affiliation also paradoxically confirms such a reinterpretation. That Glenthorn and Christy lived as Englishman and Irishman respectively until the revelation of their ‘true’ origins points to a disjunction between national identity and national origin: Irishness is not intrinsic to Irishmen, nor is Englishness




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to Englishmen.18 The disjunction here between national identity and national origin is by no means an isolated case in Edgeworth’s works. A similar disturbance occurs, for example, in The Absentee when Grace Nugent, presumed to be the last heir of an Irish family with Catholic connections, is revealed to be of English inheritance. Grace’s national identity is further confused when one considers the historical and political significance of her surnames. Both her ‘Irish’ surname (Nugent) and her ‘English’ surname (Reynolds) have specific meanings within an Irish context. Thus Edgeworth confuses national identity not only directly through plot (the revelation of Grace’s birth) but also indirectly in that supposedly ‘English’ names such as Reynolds have specifically Irish resonances in the period.19 If national belonging is a socio-cultural relationship, so too is its antithesis: foreignness. Through the central trope of the novel, ennui, Edgeworth suggests that foreignness is not so much a political classification as a psychological relationship between individual and surroundings. In the conventional discourse out of which she is working, ennui is attributed to the ‘monotony of situations’, that is, to overly familiar environments (249).20 Hence its logical cure is travel. But in the novel overcoming this condition entails something other than simply exchanging a familiar situation for a foreign one. Indeed, mere exposure to foreign countries fails to give relief: Glenthorn ‘rattled over half the globe without getting one inch farther from his ennui’ (144). Foreignness here is not a matter of being outside native ground but of having no local attachment to any ground, a constant condition of displacement. The ennui suffered by Glenthorn is defined as ‘an aversion to the place [one is] in’ (144). His general lack of interest in the world around him makes him as much a foreigner on his own English estate as he is in Europe or Ireland. When he is thrown from his horse and is close to death early in the novel, for instance, his peers and servants indifferently leave him for dead. Since foreignness, according to these terms, is made and not given (Glenthorn’s upbringing in ‘luxurious indolence’ is cited as cause for his ennui), Edgeworth can encourage its elimination (143). The last section of the novel simultaneously narrates Glenthorn’s reacclimatization to Ireland and the disappearance of his ennui: ‘Fired with ambition, – I hope generous ambition, – to distinguish myself among men, and to win the favour of the most amiable and the most lovely of women, all the faculties of my souls were awakened: I became active, permanently active. The enchantment of indolence was dissolved, and the demon of ennui was cast out for ever’ (305).21 Glenthorn’s engagement with his environment – both social and geographical – allows



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him to overcome his ennui. His impending return to Castle Glenthorn, announced at the novel’s close, will be that of a native this time, not of a stranger. To give a socio-cultural foundation to national identity is thus not only to redefine nationness so as to encompass the possibility of hybrids like Anglo-Irishness but also to redefine foreignness as a mobile and temporary condition rather than a permanent classification. Where the central focus of Ennui is the education of the hero – Glenthorn’s progression from ennui to engagement in the world – Edgeworth’s next Irish tale, The Absentee (1812), begins with a hero who is already properly educated. Lord Colambre’s education, we are told, has ensured that ‘English and Irish had not been invidiously contrasted in his mind.’22 It has permitted Ireland and England to co-exist within Colambre’s psyche. Co-existence does not mean a complete absence of borders between English and Irish, as would occur in the political universalism posited by some eighteenth-century cosmopolitanisms. Neither does it mean the ‘invidious’ contrast perpetrated by nationalistic formulations that prevent any sharing of alliance. Rather, it is the same combination of separation and union that underpins Kant’s political philosophy. English and Irish both retain a certain autonomy but an autonomy that is contained in a larger unity. In this case both national allegiances operate in one person, for in Colambre, the ‘sobriety of English good sense mixed most advantageously with Irish vivacity: English prudence governed, but did not extinguish, his Irish enthusiasm’ (6). The co-existence of Irishness and Englishness then provides the basis for an Irish patriotism based in intellectual judgement and demonstrated through ongoing concern, one at odds with both the unbridled sentiment of the partisan and the cosmopolitan indifference of the absentee. Set in post-Union Britain, The Absentee documents the circumstances behind the eventual return of the Clonbrony family (Anglo-Irish absentees) from the bottom crust of English fashionable society to their proper place in Irish society. When the novel opens, the Clonbronys have joined the post-Union exodus of Anglo-Irish to England. For Lords Clonbrony and Colambre, the move to England is a return only in a historical sense: they are of English inheritance but not of English birth. For Lady Clonbrony, by contrast, the return (as she insists) is to her place of birth. In both cases, however, the consequences of return cast doubt upon the relationship between the Anglo-Irish and England. Once a ‘great power in Dublin’, Lord Clonbrony becomes ‘a mere cipher in London’; and Lady Clonbrony, despite her English birth and cosmopolitan intentions, remains ‘a stranger, and from Ireland’ (35, 22). In London




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the Clonbronys enter into the limbo of absentee culture: they are not accepted as English, yet, having forfeited their Irish identity to English fashion, they are no longer quite Irish either.23 What is at issue in Edgeworth’s extended critique of absenteeism is the non-correspondence between Irish landlord and Irish estate: absenteeism rests in an absence of local attachment that is detrimental both to the absentee and to his forsaken property. The absentee Lord Clonbrony, for instance, is no better than other profit-hungry colonizers: ‘he’s a great proprietor, but knows nothing of his property, nor of us’, as one of his tenants explains: ‘He might as well be a West India planter, and we negroes, for anything he knows to the contrary – has no more care, nor thought about us, than if he were in Jamaica, or the other world’ (130). Clonbrony’s ignorance about his Irish assets is compounded by his absence from Ireland, which allows him to be easily misled in decisions regarding his Irish holdings: ‘He is at a distance, and cannot find out the truth’ (136). Truth in this case is a function of proximity (intellectual and geographical) and not distance. To see clearly does not mean distancing oneself from the estate but rather dwelling on it. Removed from his estate, for instance, Clonbrony pressures the good agent Burke to squeeze more money out of the tenantry, blind to the long-term consequences of such a strategy. When Burke refuses to do so, Clonbrony dismisses him and places the entire estate in the hands of a corrupt agent who has no more attachment to the land than his absentee master. Unlike Burke, who lives on the estate that he manages, the corrupt agent Garraghty lives in Dublin, appointing his brother as an under-agent to look after the day-to-day affairs of the Clonbrony estate. He himself sets foot on the estate only to collect money. In Garraghty’s hands, the tenantry is driven into poverty, the estate into ruin. Absentee culture is not limited to Irish absentees, however, as Edgeworth carefully points out. The English Sir John Berryl, for instance, is ‘an absentee from his home, his affairs, his duties, and his estate’ (48). The narrator makes the point explicit: ‘The sea, the Irish Channel, did not indeed, flow between him and his estate; but it was of little importance whether the separation was effected by land or water – the consequences, the negligence, the extravagance, were the same’ (54). A similar absence of local attachment appears in the borderless economy of international trade. Throughout the novel, national artefacts appear as décor: a brief survey of Lady Clonbrony’s home, for example, reveals Turkish tent drapery, Alhambra hangings, a Trebisond trellice, and Egyptian hieroglyphic paper, among other things (12–13). The opening chapters include spirited satire on such London fashion, with



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the narration focusing at one point on a ‘Chinese’ pagoda that Lady Clonbrony proudly displays to some guests. One of the guests, the disdainful Lady Langdale, pretends to herald the curiosity as a ‘real Chinese pagoda’, underlining her sense of its artifice by complimenting Lady Clonbrony for including ‘a comfortable English fireplace and plenty of Newcastle coal in China’ (36). The remark points to the incongruity between the ‘Chineseness’ of the pagoda and its supposed origin, China, a gap widened when Lady Clonbrony draws attention to a neighbouring vase and calls for lady Langdale’s judgement on (fine) ‘china’. This time, although the word ‘china’ still refers to the country, the reference is no longer an active one. The cosmopolitanism of the international marketplace has levelled national identity into sliding signifiers. The missing affiliations here between national product and nation parallel the missing affiliations of the absentee landlord: although the Irish absentee is still Irish, his national affinity to Ireland has become inactive. Against the rootlessness of absentee culture, Edgeworth reintroduces local attachment. This attachment, however, is not the spontaneous and emotive national sympathy suggested by the Burkean rhetoric of national affection: rather, it is a critical concern that positions its bearer as (in Grace Nugent’s words) ‘not a partisan, but a friend’ to Ireland (73). The weakness of partisan dynamics is illustrated by Edgeworth’s description of Colambre’s initial arrival at the Bay of Dublin: ‘He admired, he exulted in the beauty of the prospect; and all his early associations of his childhood, and the patriotic hopes of his riper years, swelled his heart as he approached the shores of his native land’ (80). This initial burst of unmitigated sentiment, however, quickly changes to disgust on closer view: But scarcely had he touched his mother earth, when the whole course of his ideas was changed; and if his heart swelled, it swelled no more with pleasurable sensations, for instantly he found himself surrounded and attacked by a swarm of beggars and harpies, with strange figures and stranger tones; some craving his charity, some snatching away his luggage, and at the same time bidding him ‘never trouble himself,’ and ‘never fear’. (80) Against Colambre’s early emotive and contradictory response to Ireland, Edgeworth juxtaposes the discriminating judgement of an English officer: ‘Sir James Brooke, had at different periods been quartered in various parts of the country – had resided long enough in each to become familiar with the people, and had varied his residence sufficiently




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to form comparisons between different counties, their habits, and characteristics’ (81).24 A self-described ‘friend to Ireland’, but without ‘personal interest’ in that nation, Brooke presents Colambre with a ‘just idea of the state of manners in Ireland’ (248, 81). However, Brooke’s ultimate marriage into the Irish nobility (Lady Harriet Oranmore) suggests that for Edgeworth a more successful orientation to Ireland includes not only critical friendship but personal interest as well. She concludes The Absentee with an evocation of the ideal Anglo-Irish position. A matured Colambre returns to Ireland, Lord and Lady Clonbrony in tow, ‘with the reasonable expectation that he will support through life the promise of his early character; that his patriotic views will extend with his power to carry wishes into action; that his attachment to his warm-hearted countrymen will still increase upon farther acquaintance; and that he will long diffuse happiness through the wide circle, which is peculiarly subject to the influence and example of a great resident Irish proprietor’ (260–1). The novel stresses that Colambre’s patriotic views and local attachment are tempered by disinterested reason to the ongoing benefit of Ireland. In Maria Edgeworth’s idealized model, neither partisan nor absentee landlord can qualify as properly Anglo-Irish: the partisan’s loyalty is uncritical and limited to one nation, while the absentee landlord’s removal from and lack of interest in Ireland prevents his full participation in the term. The ideal Anglo-Irish character, on the other hand, is marked by a combination of local attachment and critical judgement.

A positive cosmopolitanism Marilyn Butler has noted that Maria Edgeworth’s education bore the ‘intellectual stamp of a generation, or half a generation, earlier than that of her own adulthood’ (Maria Edgeworth, 66). That intellectual stamp came from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who took pains to establish a domestic atmosphere that upheld basic Enlightenment tenets such as self-determination, reason, progress, and religious tolerance.25 The unmarried Maria remained within this environment throughout her life, her thought guided in large part by the influential eighteenth-century principles absorbed from her father.26 It is therefore not surprising that she turned back to certain tenets of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in order to supplement the insular Burkean understanding of nationness, an understanding that proved inadequate when faced with the problem of Anglo-Irish identity. What Edgeworth proposes in her early writing on Ireland is not a singular national alliance that occludes all other national relations. Nor is it a complete absence of national affinity.



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Rather, she proposes that national affinity exist within a larger, more universal understanding of belonging, one based in local attachment but guided by critical understanding. Initially it may seem that Edgeworth’s rewriting of the Burkean understanding of nationness contradicts or at least problematizes her status as writer of national tales. But her cosmopolitanism and the patriotic genre of the national tale are not necessarily opposed, either generically or theoretically. In a recent discussion of the French Declaration of the Rights and Freedoms of Man and Citizen, for example, Julia Kristeva draws attention to the proximity of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the late eighteenth century. She observes that although the Declaration is based on an enlightenment understanding of universal human nature, slippage occurs between the universal notion ‘men’ and the political associations that preserve men’s rights: ‘the nation’.27 Testifying to the close relationship between cosmopolitan and national ideas, Edgeworth’s treatment of Ireland in her early Irish tales shares much with the specific formulation known as ‘patriotism’ in the eighteenth-century. As Joep Leerssen has argued in a discussion of Anglo-Irish patriotism, the word ‘patriotism’ in its eighteenth-century usage is a forerunner to liberal rather than nationalistic modes of thinking.28 He draws a distinction between a constitutionally-based conception of patriotism, arising out of eighteenth-century economic and political discourses, and a nineteenthcentury nationalist conception of patriotism, arising out of historical, cultural, and racial–genealogical discourses. Such analyses of patriotism provide a way of getting beyond the polarity implicit in nationalist understandings of patriotism that classify Anglo-Irish authors according to Irish or English loyalty. In the case of someone like Edgeworth, entitled to her English inheritance yet devoted to Ireland, what this opens up is the possibility of non-nationalistic patriotism or what Bruce Robbins terms ‘positive’ cosmopolitanism. Convinced of the practical impossibility of a purely negative cosmopolitanism yet anxious for an alternative to nationalisms, Robbins introduces the possibility of a positive cosmopolitanism, ‘a density of overlapping allegiances rather than the abstract emptiness of non-allegiance’.29 The Swiftian ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’ (1802), co-written by Maria and her father, exemplifies this positive cosmopolitanism, as well as giving a clear presentation of the ‘Anglo-Irish’ vantage point that underpins Edgeworth’s rewriting of Burkean nationness in her Irish novels. Although the Edgeworths play with the agricultural meaning of ‘bull’ (i.e. uncastrated male ox) throughout the essay, the ‘bull’ that is of primary concern here is a linguistic one: a blunder (conventionally associated




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with the Irish) that hinges on an incongruity between the usual, accepted meaning of the words said and the intended meaning. A quick example from the essay will illustrate: ‘A gentleman was complimenting Madame Denis on the manner in which she had just acted Zaire. “To act that part,” said she, “a person should be young and handsome.” “Ah, madam!” replied the complimenter naïvement, “you are a complete proof of the contrary.”’30 The Edgeworths announce their project as an attempt to determine the particular essence of the Irish bull, and in order to fulfil their goal, they engage in a method of exclusion: ‘Perhaps by ascertaining what it is not, we may at last discover what it is: we must distinguish the genuine from the spurious, the original from all imitations, the indigenous from the exotic; in short, it must be determined in what an Irish bull essentially differs from a blunder, or in what Irish blunders specifically differ from English blunders, and from those of all other nations’ (86). Through a sort of genealogy of bulls, the writers look to the roots of several Irish bulls, both linguistic and practical. However, each attempt to discriminate between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘exotic’ soon gives way to the conclusion that ‘[m]any bulls, reputed to be bred and born in Ireland, are of foreign extraction’ (87). The Edgeworths recount, for instance, a bull Joe Miller cites in his Natural History as an example of original Irish genius: An English gentleman was writing a letter in a coffee-house, and perceiving that an Irishman stationed behind him was taking that liberty which Hephæstion used with his friend Alexander, instead of putting his seal upon the lips of the curious impertinent, the English gentleman thought proper to reprove the Hibernian, if not with delicacy, at least with poetical justice: he concluded writing his letter in these words: ‘I would say more, but a damned tall Irishman is reading over my shoulder every word I write.’ ‘You lie, you scoundrel!’ said the self-convicted Hibernian. (88) Although the Edgeworths agree on this bull’s excellence, they discover its appearance in M. Galland’s ‘The Remarkable Sayings of the Eastern Nations’ and must conclude that the supposed Irish bull is in fact a traditional oriental anecdote (88). Another supposed Irish bull, which rests on the ambiguity of personal identity – ‘I hate that woman, for she changed me at nurse; (90) – is traced to the literatures of France, Spain and ancient Greece, again calling into question the category ‘Irish bull’. If the Irish bull is not a ‘species of blunder peculiar to Ireland’, if Ireland is not its origin, it has no claim to such a national distinction (89).



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Such reasoning, as Sydney Smith points out in his review of the ‘Irish Bulls’, puts the idea of national character into question. ‘For there are Goitres out of the Valais, extortioners who do not worship Moses, oat cakes over the Tweed, and balm beyond the precincts of Gilead’, Smith protests: ‘If nothing can be said to exist pre-eminently and emphatically in one country, which exists at all in another, then French men are not gay, nor Spaniards grave, nor are gentlemen of the Milesian race remarkable for a disinterested contempt of wealth in their connubial relations.’31 For Smith, to assert the transnational nature of ‘national’ characteristics is to eliminate national difference altogether. The key point here, however, is that the diverse and sliding origins of the bulls examined by the Edgeworths point to the bull’s existence as universal trope: not only do bulls occur elsewhere than in Ireland, but they also have the ability to transcend national boundaries, occurring in the lore of more than one nation. The Edgeworths even include a series of French bulls as an appendix to the ‘Essay on Bulls’. Despite the fact that their examination of bulls leads to such conclusions, the writers insist that stigma attaches to the Irish bull alone. The inconsistency of this situation appears more strongly when the focus is narrowed to Britain: ‘A free pardon is, and ought to be, granted by every Englishman to the vernacular and literary errors of those who have the happiness to be born subjects of Great Britain. What enviable privileges are annexed to the birth of an Englishman! and what a misfortune it is to be a native of Ireland!’ (‘Irish Bulls’, 104). If an Englishman makes a conversational mistake, it remains a mistake; but if the same mistake is made by an Irishman, it becomes a bull. The specious reasoning here, though tongue in cheek, emphasizes a division between the ‘born subjects of Great Britain’ (Englishmen) and the ‘natives’ of Ireland. This division between English and Irish gains significance at the end of the essay when contemporary politics enter into the equation. Here the Edgeworths voice their hope that under the new Union, English– Irish relations will improve. Since the Union includes both England and Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, the English ridicule of the Irish bull is recast as a practical bull committed by the English. By stigmatizing the Irish bull, the English stigmatize themselves; they place the fool’s bells on their own ‘imperial head’ (187).32 Although this concluding bull is not – and is not intended to be – a solution for English–Irish relations, the figure of the bull is a resonant one in this context. The Edgeworths dismiss the prevalent definition of the bull as an incongruity of ideas in favour of one based on its similarity to the oxymoron: ‘In the oxymoron contradictions meet: to reconcile




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these, Irish ingenuity delights’ (‘Irish Bulls’, 157). This second, revised definition of the bull as oxymoronic trope shares a marked affinity to the Edgeworths’ understanding of the Anglo-Irish position: the Anglo-Irish position is not a static deadlock or incongruity; rather, it is an active and ongoing reconciliation of contradiction. The figure of the bull also shares an affinity to the Edgeworths’ understanding of their authorial responsibility: ‘We enter into no invidious comparisons: it is our sincere wish to conciliate both countries; and if in this slight essay we should succeed in diffusing a more just and enlarged idea of the Irish than has been generally entertained, we hope the English will deem it not an unacceptable service’ (186). In order to fulfil their authorial aim, they claim a certain position vis-à-vis their subject: ‘As we were neither born nor bred in Ireland, we cannot be supposed to have this amor patriæ in its full force: we profess to be attached to the country only for its merits’ (186).33 In asserting their attachment to Ireland but insisting that this is an attachment based only on the ‘merits’ of the country, the Edgeworths combine the proximity of concern with the distance necessary for cosmopolitan judgement. Edward Said suggests a similar configuration in ‘Secular Criticism’ (1983).34 His project in this essay, as throughout his writing, is to direct Kant’s formulation of disinterested judgment back to the world. To do this, he posits critical consciousness as the cooperation between ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’. For Said, filiation works out of an instinctual or natural matrix and defines belonging in terms of biological continuity. Affiliation, on the other hand, works out of a cultural or social matrix and defines belonging in terms of institutions, associations, and communities. The cooperation of filiation and affiliation recognizes the situatedness of human experience, and it allows for a rooted yet still critical judgement. Said himself argues that there was a shift from filiation to affiliation in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought, a shift that reverses the often-noticed earlier move to filiation at the turn of the nineteenth century. In the context of Said’s argument, Edgeworth’s attempt to articulate Anglo-Irish identity at the moment of the filiative turn is highly suggestive. Working away on her father’s remote Irish estate, this genteel Anglo-Irishwoman could be said to approach Said’s late twentieth-century formulation of critical consciousness, albeit from a very different position. Her early writings on Ireland argue for a socio-cultural foundation to national identity that allows for multiple national allegiances. They imply a positive cosmopolitanism that cuts across the ideological shift from eighteenth-century cosmopolitanisms to nineteenth-century nationalisms, refusing binary



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oppositions and positing what might be called a rooted cosmopolitan judgment.35 Edgeworth’s positive cosmopolitanism is not to be confused with more liberal cosmopolitanisms, as her last Irish tale Ormond (1817) makes clear. Where Ennui and The Absentee hinged on a hero’s unfamiliarity with Ireland, Ormond presents an insider’s perspective. ‘In making Ormond belong to both worlds [Anglo-Irish and Irish]’, Marilyn Butler writes, ‘Maria has had to sacrifice the fresh response to Ireland that only an outsider like Glenthorn can experience’ (Maria Edgeworth, 386). Brought up in Ireland by his father’s friend, Ulick, Ormond is as at home in metropolitan Dublin as he is in the remote Black Islands. Indeed, the hero of Edgeworth’s fourth Irish novel is (in Butler’s words) ‘almost unnaturally at home everywhere’ (386). But if Edgeworth loses an outside vantage point, what she gains from her ‘homeless, fatherless, IrishEnglish’ hero, according to Butler, is a ‘view of Ireland that is both broad and intimate’ (386). Edgeworth’s Ormond is a Bildungsroman in which the hero learns to combine the broadness of cosmopolitanism and the intimacy of local attachment.36 Ormond’s travels through Ireland constitute the first part of his education. In particular, they allow him to witness first hand how Sir Ulick, King Corny, and Sir Herbert Annaly manage their estates: He liked to compare the different modes in which King Corny, his guardian and Sir Herbert Annaly managed these things. – Sir Herbert governed neither by threats, punishments, abuse, nor tyranny; nor yet did he govern by promises nor bribery, favour and protection, like Sir Ulick. – He neither cajoled nor bullied – neither held it as a principle, as Marcus did, that the people must be kept down, nor that the people must be deceived. – He treated them neither as slaves, subject to his will; nor as dupes, or objects on which to exercise his wit or cunning. – He treated them as reasonable beings, and as his fellow creatures, who he wished to improve, that he might make them and himself happy.37 A conformer, political trimmer, and government jobber, Sir Ulick is motivated by his own self-interest. He invests neither time nor money in his estates, turning a blind eye to what is happening there as long as it brings him a profit. When his tenants are forced to plunder shipwrecks in order to make their rents, for example, they do so unchastised by Ulick: ‘Oh! he was the man to live under – he was the man that knew when to wink and when to blink; and if he shut his eyes properly, sure his tenants filled his fist’ (168). In contrast, King Corny’s approach to estate




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management is more benevolent: ‘Born afore the present reformation in manners’ in Ireland, Corny is a feudal king who rules over his adoring subjects with paternal generosity (31). Full of good intentions, he is constantly initiating various and sundry improvements about the Black Islands. However, his improvements rarely come to fruition: the roof of Corny Castle still sits on stilts above its foundation, waiting for the walls to be built up to it, and the drawing-room is used as a make-shift granary, barn, barrack-room, and hospital, depending on whatever is most needed at the time. Sir Herbert Annaly represents Edgeworth’s ideal landlord in Ormond. Unlike King Corny, Herbert values justice more than generosity, governing his tenantry not with affection alone but with a just and even hand. And unlike Ulick, Herbert sacrifices his own immediate interests to change the morals and habits of the people for the long term, discouraging his tenants from plundering shipwrecks and encouraging them to be industrious by employing them in honest work such as building a lighthouse and manufacturing sail cloth. A conversation between Ormond and Ulick nicely sets up the distinction between Edgeworth’s ideal landlord and the not-so-ideal: ‘I never saw Sir Herbert till now – [,]’ Ormond tells Ulick, ‘I like him – I like his principles – his love of his country – his attachment to his family’ (161). Ulick sensibly concurs with Ormond’s initial evaluation of Herbert: ‘He’s a very fine fellow – no better fellow than Herbert Annaly – But as for his attachment to his family, who thanks him for that? Who could help it, with such a family? – And his love for his country – every body loves his country’ (161). Ormond’s response to Ulick – ‘More or less, I suppose’ – suggests that what is at issue is not whether or not one loves his country so much as how one loves it. In Edgeworth’s ideal landlord, ‘head and heart’ come together (170). Ormond’s travels through Ireland may teach him how to love his country, but his education is not finished until he has travelled outside his country as well. Although Ormond believes himself ready to marry Florence Annaly after his domestic tour, his friends advise him that he ‘should see more of the world before he settled for life’ (192). Hence he travels to that most ‘cosmopolitan’ of cities, Paris. There he is introduced into the society of Enlightenment Paris by his childhood friend, Dora, and her husband, Black Connal, both Irish expatriates. During his stay, Ormond learns to appreciate cultural difference. His first glimpse of high society, for instance, is a lesson in cultural de-coding. When Ormond enters the Théâtre François, he finds the French ladies to be surprisingly unattractive. In particular, he is repulsed by the artificial dot of rouge that decorates their cheeks. He is informed, however, that it is this very



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dot that marks them as ladies of rank and fashion. What seems unnatural or artificial to him is not so for everyone, and in time Ormond too finds the French ladies ‘charming’ and ‘full of vivacity’ (206). But for Edgeworth cultural tolerance does not mean cultural relativism, and she distances herself from the French milieu, home of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, characterizing Parisian society as superficial: ‘[Ormond] could not afterwards remember anything very striking or very solid that had been said, but all was agreeable at the moment, and there was great variety’ (204). Of particular censure is the loose morality of the Parisian ladies. Attending his first ‘petit souper’, Ormond is drawn away from the gambling tables by Dora’s aunt, Miss O’Faley, who enthusiastically relates to him the extramarital affairs of the ladies present. Only three of the ladies (besides Dora) have unblemished reputations: the ‘frightfully dressed’ Madame de la Rousse, the ‘[n]ouvelle mariée’ Comtesse de la Brie, and the ‘cold’ Madame de St. Ange who – though married a full year – has yet to choose a lover (205). For Miss O’Faley, wives taking lovers is part of the cosmopolitan ‘esprit de société’ of Paris, and she encourages Dora to do so (Ormond, 205). ‘How far [Parisian]society and correct female conduct be compatible’, Edgeworth muses, ‘is a question which it might take too long a time to decide’ (205). Her own position, however, is clear: ‘The moralist, who considers the essential interests of morality more than the immediate pleasures of society, will think [the end of such society] rather a matter of rejoicing than regret’ (205). Edgeworth’s condemnation of the loose morality of Parisian society recalls Burke’s charge that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism lacks an affection for what is local, a lack symbolized for Burke by Rousseau’s parental neglect. But if Edgeworth echoes Burke’s general criticisms of Enlightenment society, she does not dismiss it in toto, and she draws a fine line between Enlightenment philosophes: Ormond hears anecdotes about Rousseau and Voltaire, but he meets Marmontel, d’Alembert, and Marivaux. The key point, however, is that cosmopolitanism for Edgeworth (as for Said) does not replace but rather supplements local attachment. While Ormond’s outlook becomes more cosmopolitan as a result of his sojourn in Paris, his sensibility remains Irish: ‘Ormond, in his secret soul, preferred the bay of Dublin to all he then saw on the banks of the Seine’ (200). Thus his grand tour prepares him to marry Florence Annaly and settle down in Ireland: ‘The last few months, though they might seem but a splendid or feverish dream in his existence, had in reality been, he believed, of essential service in confirming his principles, settling his character, and deciding for ever his taste and judgement, after




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full opportunity of comparison, in favour of his own country – and especially of his own countrywomen’ (243). Importantly, Ormond’s time in France does not make him into a ‘thing … half Irish, half French’ like the cosmopolitan Miss O’Faley, whose ongoing struggle to be French in all things is ridiculed throughout the novel (123). He is ‘content to seem and be’ what he is (215). Nor does it make him into a Frenchified coxcomb like the worldly Black Connal, as Edgeworth makes clear in an early conversation between Ormond and Connal. While discussing Connal’s impending marriage to Dora, Ormond accuses Connal of lying about his intention to stay in the Black Islands. Ormond’s accusation draws from the worldly Connal a lecture on the levity such promises hold in fashionable society: ‘Why, even women, now-a-days, don’t lay such an emphasis on a promise’ (105). Thus when Ormond declines to condone Connal’s lie with a ‘smile of approbation’, Connal interprets his refusal as a sign of provinciality, beseeching him to let go of his ‘romantic’ notions and ‘[s]ee things as they are, as a man of the world’. Connal’s entreaty is met with outright rejection: “‘I am not a man of the world, and I thank god for it”, cried Ormond’ (105). Ormond’s firm insistence that he is ‘not a man of the world’ separates Edgeworth’s ideal of a cosmopolitanism rooted in local attachment from the relativism of Black Connal. It also points to the increasing need in 1817 for a writer like Edgeworth to distance her positive cosmopolitanism from more controversial cosmopolitanisms of the day, most notably, that of Lord Byron, whose celebrated Childe Harold was ethically, culturally, and politically unrooted.

Jewish naturalization and the question of British identity As the more Francophobic moments in Ormond suggest, Edgeworth’s positive cosmopolitanism is circumscribed by British borders in a way that the Europe-centred cosmopolitanisms of writers like Byron are not, and it supports not only a particular understanding of Anglo-Irishness but a particular understanding of Britishness as well. ‘Time and time again, war with France brought Britons, whether they hailed from Wales or Scotland or England, into confrontation with an obviously hostile Other and encouraged them to define themselves collectively against it’, Linda Colley argues in her influential Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–183 (2002): ‘They defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power.’38 Significantly, Colley notes a crisis in British identity in the immediate wake of Waterloo: ‘How was Britishness to be defined now that it could no longer



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rely so absolutely on a sense of beleaguered Protestantism and on regular conflict with the Other in the shape of Catholic France?’ (322). Exacerbated by ongoing problems caused by Ireland’s incorporation into the British polity, pressure for parliamentary reform, and the growing British empire, she explains, this crisis in national identity pushed Britons to re-assess their understanding of Britain as a homogeneous Protestant nation (322–3). That Edgeworth’s positive cosmopolitanism shores up a non-unified and heterogeneous model of Britain is nicely demonstrated by Harrington, published alongside Ormond in 1817. Although advocating a different solution to the question of borders – Jewish naturalization rather than English-Irish union –, Harrington echoes the Irish tales in its call for a national identity that can accommodate multiple affiliations. At the same time, Edgeworth’s novel reworks the longstanding equation between the cosmopolitan and the nationless Jew, an equation that underwrites the cosmopolitanism of numerous other Romantic writers, including that of Byron and Maturin. Where writers like Byron and Maturin exploit the equation for their own political ends, appropriating the mythic power of the Wandering Jew to support their own rootless cosmopolitanisms, however, Edgeworth pulls the cosmopolitan Jew within the borders of nation. Edgeworth’s treatment of Jewishness in Harrington has often been read in relation to Anglo-Irish identity. Catherine Gallagher, for instance, reads Harrington as an ‘allegory about national groups that are out of place, inhabiting lands not their own by long descent but nevertheless contributing to the commonweal’.39 ‘[T]he Jews in Harrington are inverted renderings of the Anglo-Irish’; Gallagher explains, ‘to identify these economic “middlemen” and transform them from ragpickers and usurers into cosmopolitan financiers is simultaneously to brighten the image of the “middle nation” to which Edgeworth belonged’ (307). More recently, Sheila Spector has drawn attention to how Edgeworth ‘in her own ethnic quest for identity … frequently turns to the quintessential other, the jew, as a tool for measuring her own degree of alienation in the world of Great Britain’.40 She argues that ‘Edgeworth’s choice to include Jews in her fiction – both in that written before Harrington, as well as in her so-called novel of atonement – reveals less about her attitudes towards Jews than her changing outlook towards union’ (309). As these readings suggest, much is invested in the analogy between AngloIrishness and Jewishness.41 Both the Anglo-Irish and the Jews occupied ambiguous positions within early nineteenth-century Britain, and their prominence in Edgeworth’s thinking about nationness undermines any sense of Britain as a homogeneous Protestant nation.




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Set in the aftermath of the failure of the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Act, Harrington traces an English hero’s progress from anti-Semitic prejudice to tolerance. As in the Irish tales, the novel foregrounds the role of education in both the acquisition of national prejudice and its elimination: Harrington’s anti-Semitism is initiated by his nursemaid’s tales about evil Jews, strengthened in political discussions with his father and friends, and slowly eliminated through encounters with a series of good Jews who instruct him in Jewish literature, philosophy, and history.42 As in the Irish tales too, Edgeworth uses the novel’s marriage plot as a political metaphor. Having overcome his early prejudice, Harrington falls in love with the novel’s Jewish heroine, the Spanish-born American, Berenice Montenero. Significantly, Harrington proposes to Berenice with the full expectation that she will remain Jewish upon their marriage: ‘Miss Montenero could be secure of the free exercise of her own religion’, he promises her father: ‘You know my principles of toleration – you know my habits; and though between man and wife a difference of religion be in most cases a formidable obstacle to happiness, yet permit me to hope –.’43 Berenice’s Jewishness may be a ‘formidable obstacle’ to a happy marriage, Harrington concedes, but it need not be an insurmountable one. Indeed, married to the tolerant Harrington, her Jewishness would be protected and not eliminated. The larger polity of Britain, Edgeworth suggests, can accommodate both English Protestant and Jew. Certainly, that Berenice is ultimately revealed to be the daughter of an English-Protestant mother as well as a Spanish–Jewish father, and brought up in the Protestant faith, does much to undercut Edgeworth’s liberal vision of a heterogeneous Britain, as has been often noted.44 At the same time, however, Edgeworth’s play with Berenice’s identity is consistent with the identity-play that occurs in her earlier Irish tales where English characters are revealed to be Irish and Irish ones English, and – as in the tales – points to a cosmopolitan notion of universal subject. When seen in conjunction with the other instances of identity confusion in Harrington, in particular, when the anti-Catholic mob mistakes the Protestant de Brantfields as Catholic, and the Catholic Orangewoman, widow Levy, as Protestant during the Gordon Riots, Edgeworth’s play with Berenice’s identity may not be as much of a ideological retreat as it appears. Indeed, for Edgeworth, a common humanity underlies religious as well as national difference. As the widow Levy observes in the midst of the riots, ‘we were all brothers and sisters once’ (236). Central to Edgeworth’s argument in Harrington is the role that negative representations of Jews play in the perpetuation of anti-Semitism, and she purposefully counters literary and mythical stereotypes such



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as Shylock and the Wandering Jew by offering a series of exemplary Jewish characters from various social classes. Key to Harrington’s progress towards tolerance in the novel is Berenice’s father, the Spanish-born Jew and American financier Montenero. As a Spanish-born Jew, Montenero is already an international hybrid: ‘From his figure, you might have thought him a Spaniard – from his complexion, and East Indian; but he had a peculiar cast of countenance which seemed not to belong to either nation’ (142). Moreover, as an American citizen living in Britain, he is a transnational subject as well, attached both to America and Britain. Significantly, however, the international and transnational Montenero not only combines and traverses national identities, he transcends them as well: ‘He had that indescribable air which, independently of the fashion of the day or the mode of any particular country, distinguishes a gentleman – courteous and free from affectation’ (142). He is, Edgeworth asserts, a universal gentleman: He had travelled in almost every country in Europe, and joined extensive knowledge of books and a cultivated taste for the arts with a thorough knowledge of mankind and of the world – a knowledge which had not … lessened his natural generosity and benevolence of disposition, but had by enlarging his views increased his desire to be candid and tolerant and had given a certain suavity and polish to his manners, in which peculiar casts of people, as well as mere scholars or bookmen, are apt to be deficient. (108) It is important to Edgeworth’s criticism of Jewish stereotypes that she rewrites the cosmopolitan Jew as philosophical cosmopolitan. Generous, benevolent, and tolerant, Montenero demonstrates the ‘liberality and enlargement of mind’ and ‘philosophic calmness and moderation’ that distinguish the cosmopolitan heroes of eighteenth-century writers such as Voltaire and Goldsmith (161). But it is also important to her understanding of Britishness that neither Montenero’s Jewishness nor his philosophical cosmopolitanism are antithetical to good citizenship. In The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, Schlereth presents religious syncretism and universal humanitarianism as defining components of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. ‘In criticizing contemporary religion’s superstition, prejudice, intolerance, fanaticism, and particularism, the philosophes (including nonbelievers) subjected religion to a severe ad reductio analysis,’ Schlereth explains, ‘for in the process of purging religion of its historic idiosyncrasies and provincial incrustations, many philosophes also hoped to derive religion’s true cosmopolitan




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tenets – those by which all men, or at least all philosophers, might abide.’45 In an important qualification, Schlereth notes an anti-Jewish sentiment underlying the philosophes’ cosmopolitan religious syncretism: ‘Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Holbach especially, but Hume, Franklin, and even Richard Price to a certain degree, derided the idea of Jewish national consciousness that insisted upon common descent, purity of blood, and a tribal racialism that appeared to assume a superior spiritual leadership over the rest of the world’ (78). Grounded in ideas of inheritance and historical continuity, Schlereth explains, Jewish national identity ran counter to the philosophes’ notions of ideal citizenship: ‘In their opinion, the Jews throughout their history appeared intent on maintaining obstinate and national character; that is, the Jews seemed to remain singularly uncosmopolitan in their relations with other peoples, although they were dispersed everywhere throughout much of the world’ (79). Indeed, he suggests, the problem for philosophes like Voltaire was not that the Jews were too cosmopolitan but that they were not cosmopolitan enough. Troubling the opposition between national and universal definitions of belonging, Edgeworth shows the foreign Montenero to be a far better patriot than native-born subjects such as Harrington’s xenophobic father or the self-serving and intolerant de Brantefields whose English inheritance stretches back to ‘the time of the flood’ (Harrington, 94). Montenero, for instance, risks his own life and property to save Lady De Brantefield and her daughter from the mob during the Gordon Riots, and he uses his own personal assets to prevent Baldwin’s bank from going into bankruptcy, thereby saving a large number of British families – including Harrington’s – from financial ruin. The cosmopolitan Montenero’s critical attachment to Britain is in keeping with the ideal model of citizenship Edgeworth lays out in Ormond, and, in the context of post-Waterloo Britain, serves as an important reminder of Britain’s dependence on Jewish finance in securing its national debt during the Napoleonic wars. Edgeworth’s troubling of the opposition between national and universal definitions of belonging is brought to the foreground in Chapter Fifteen when Montenero is charged with the murder of a rioter who was attacking his home during the Gordon Riots. In his courtroom defense, Montenero claims the same rights as a native subject: ‘I had been taught to believe that in England every man’s house was his castle, and that he was justified by the laws of the country and by the dictates of nature in defending himself, when pushed to extremity’ (251).46 Shown to be innocent of the murder after all, Montenero’s defence becomes unnecessary and is dropped, but his conviction that English rights are not the



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sole property of English men gestures towards a cosmopolitan understanding of national rights, and highlights the slippage Kristeva and others observe between universal rights and the idea of nation during the period. In a suggestive moment at the beginning of the novel, young Harrington is asked by one of his parents’ guests why he thinks the Jews should not be naturalized. ‘Why, ma’am,’ he replies to great applause, ‘because the Jews are naturally an unnatural pack of people, and you can’t naturalize what’s naturally unnatural’ (87). Underpinning the anti-naturalization rhetoric of men like Harrington’s father, Edgeworth intimates, is a Burkean understanding of nationness: here national subjects are ‘natural’ subjects, born and not made. According to this paradigm, to oppose Jewish naturalization is to protect the integrity of the nation against the infiltration of foreigners, it is to be, as Harrington’s father declares, ‘an honour to my country, my family, and my party’ (87). Conversely, to support the Naturalization Bill, according to this paradigm, is to open the nation to foreign infiltration and thus to threaten the integrity and insularity of the nation; it is to be an ‘enem[y] to England; and … to religion’ (85). But Edgeworth is working within a different paradigm. Emphasizing the economic and political roots of the naturalization debate, Edgeworth argues that the constitutional extension of British rights to foreign-born Jews living in Britain is in the nation’s best interest. In particular, for Edgeworth, schooled in the cosmopolitan political economy of Adam Smith, the removal of the putative trade duties and port fees levied against foreign-born Jewish merchants would open up Britain’s borders to free trade, benefitting British commerce and thereby securing British economic and political stability. Indeed, anchored in the same bourgeois discourse of international trade, Edgeworth’s positive cosmopolitanism shares an important foundation with the commercially-based internationalism of Edinburgh reviewers such as Jeffrey, and it stands in contrast to the more ‘aristocratic’ cosmopolitanisms being broached during the period, including that of Lord Byron.




Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World

The early nineteenth-century figure of the cosmopolitan derives in large part from philosophical tales of the Enlightenment such as Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762). Most notably, Lord Byron turned to the figure found in such tales to counter the domestic patriot in native poets like Southey and Wordsworth.1 In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva defines the eighteenth-century figure of the cosmopolitan as the ‘alter ego of national man’, and to understand the cosmopolitan as the ‘alter ego’ of national man is to see him as both other (foreign) and part of the same (a second self).2 Kristeva’s conception of the cosmopolitan forms part of a poststructuralist reconceptualizing of identity as a differential process: a shifting between self and other, between the semiotic and the symbolic. In her reading, the cosmopolitan adopts various subject positions only to displace them, so that his stance is ‘temporary, moveable, changing … it knows neither root nor soil, it is traveling, foreign’ (Strangers to Ourselves, 39). Such a mobile stance undermines notions of identity both private and public, while its politics are disconcerting, for this kind of travelling figure cannot belong to any one nation. Kristeva’s delineation of the eighteenth-century cosmopolitan offers a useful starting point for thinking about the way in which the figure functioned in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Considered either an ideal patriot or a traitor to the nation (depending on one’s political outlook), the figure appeared regularly in British writing of the period, but the most celebrated example remains that of Lord Byron. ‘I am so convinced … of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander’, Byron wrote on his Continental travels in 1811, ‘that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our 95



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young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.’3 Travel produces a wider, more worldly perspective: ‘Here I see and have conversed with French, Italians, Germans, Danes, Greeks, Turks, Armenians … and without losing sight of my own, I can judge of the countries and manners of others. – Where I see the superiority of England (which by the bye we are a good deal mistaken about in many things) I am pleased, and where I find her inferior I am at least enlightened’ (Letters, 2: 3–35). If for Byron being a cosmopolitan meant escape from the ‘narrow prejudices of an Islander’ and from the tightening Burkean nationalism of war-time Britain, however, for his conservative critics it meant something more sinister. For them, the figure came to stand as the epitome of all that was wrong with liberal aristocratic thought: it was anti-national, anti-Christian, and immoral. And Byron himself, reacting to the critique, defiantly pushed the implications of his citizen of the world beyond the liberal to the libertine.

Citizen of the world Writing to Robert Charles Dallas in 1810, Byron declared that ‘all climates and nations are equally interesting to me; that mankind are every where despicable in different absurdities; that the farther I proceed from your country the less I regret leaving it … I would soon be a citizen of the world, but I fear some indispensable affairs will soon call me back; and as I left the land without regret, I shall return without pleasure’ (Letters, 1: 248–9). Byron’s use of ‘citizen of the world’ in such passages recalls Allan D. McKillop’s notion of ‘altruistic cosmopolitanism’. McKillop traces a shift from a strict philosophical cosmopolitanism in the first half of the eighteenth century, one that rejected all local attachment, to a more inclusive cosmopolitanism in the second half, one that was sympathetic to local attachment.4 But he also identifies an intermediate phase he associates with Oliver Goldsmith, one McKillop terms ‘altruistic cosmopolitanism’. The altruistic cosmopolitan takes for his concern the happiness of others, extending love of self to love of country and mankind, but he tempers this universal benevolence with reason. Goldsmith’s citizen of the world may be a sympathetic observer, but he is also a detached philosopher. He is both inside and outside local attachments, recognizing his attachment to place, but at the same time acknowledging that other places could serve just as well. This border position articulated by Goldsmith is important to Byron’s early nineteenth-century appropriation of the figure, and it merits a brief discussion.




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He should be a man of a philosophical turn, one apt to deduce consequences of general utility from particular occurrences, neither swolen with pride, nor hardened by prejudice, neither wedded to one particular system, nor instructed only in one particular science; neither wholly a botanist, nor quite an antiquarian; his mind should be tinctured with miscellaneous knowledge, and his manners humanized by an intercourse with men. He should be in some measure, an enthusiast to the design; fond of travelling from a rapid imagination, and an innate love of change, furnished with a body capable of sustaining every fatigue, and a heart not easily terrified at danger.5 Goldsmith’s citizen of the world is not a specialist but a general scholar, able to move with fluidity between different disciplines and spot the weaknesses in each. He is adaptable: his rapid imagination and innate love of change mean that he embraces new places and cultures with interest rather than anxiety or prejudice. Extensive travel fosters in him the critical ability to connect the particular and the general and to know ‘when to value and when to despise those national peculiarities which are regarded by some with so much observance’ (166). This latter point is central to Goldsmith’s model. Writing for the Royal Magazine in 1760, he asserts ‘I should esteem it my greatest happiness … could I enlarge one mind, and make the man who now boasts his patriotism, a citizen of the world; could I level those distinctions which separate mankind; could I teach the English to allow strangers to have their excellencies; could I mend that country in which I reside, by improvements from those which I have left behind.’6 Unlike the patriot, who values his own kind above all others, the citizen of the world, as Goldsmith notes in the text of the same title, ‘makes no private distinctions of party; all that are stamped with the divine image of the creator are friends to him; he is a native of the world’ (99). Where the patriot attempts to disunite society and kingdoms and favours his own nation to the detriment of others, the philosophical traveller attempts to ‘unite society more closely, and to persuade men to become citizens of the world’ (86). Hence he is a man of the world in terms of geography (he travels the world) and in terms of identity as well (he considers himself first and foremost a ‘native of the world’). This does not mean that Goldsmith’s philosophical traveller is apolitical. Rather, it implies a politics of mobility. Altangi, for example, retains an allegiance to his homeland, but he also embraces England. In fact, he absorbs a certain



Goldsmith defines the citizen of the world as a philosophical traveller:

Englishness during his residence: ‘I have interested myself so long in all the concerns of this people,’ he explains, ‘that I am almost become an Englishman; I now begin to read with pleasure of their taking towns or gaining battles, and secretly wish disappointment to all the enemies of Britain’ (345). Furthermore, Goldsmith’s traveller is not limited to two nations, as are Edgeworth’s Anglo-Irish heroes, for example. For him, national attachment is infinitely expandable: ‘As I consider myself in the light of a Cosmopolite’, Altangi explains, ‘I find as much satisfaction in scheming for the countries in which I happen to reside, as for that in which I was born’ (426). Thus one of the implications of being a citizen of the world for Goldsmith is a certain flexibility of allegiance. Since the cosmopolite can reside happily in any nation, he can also transfer his political allegiance to any nation, and he can scheme for any country. Such scheming can imply an amoral pragmatism, and Goldsmith is careful to keep his traveller within moral space by distinguishing him from what he calls the ‘vagabond’: ‘a man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is only a vagabond’ (41). The philosophical traveller, as McKillop puts it, is an ‘altruistic’ cosmopolitan. He travels to improve himself and, more importantly, to improve others. Such a traveller, Goldsmith suggests, ‘instructs the heart’. In contrast, the vagabond travels for travel’s sake, for his own pleasure: he ‘indulges the imagination’ (41). But it is difficult to draw a firm line between philosophical traveller and vagabond. As Séamus Deane has noted, in the end Goldsmith’s citizen of the world seems more vagabond than philosophical traveller.7 Altangi himself does not return to China and use his new knowledge to improve things there; nor does he settle in his adopted country like his son Hingpo or, for that matter, like Edgeworth’s Anglo-Irish heroes. Instead, he keeps right on travelling: ‘As for myself the world being but one city to me, I dont [sic] much care in which of the streets, I happen to reside, I shall therefore spend the remainder of life in examining the manners of different countries’ (476). For the epigraph to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron turns not to Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World but to Fougeret de Monbron’s Le Cosmopolite (1753). Significantly, the epigraph positions Byron’s poem in reference to a European rather than English literature, and he continues the dialogue in the following cantos (the third epigraph is also French, the fourth, Italian). Moreover, that it is unapologetically French (remaining in its original language) emphasizes Byron’s own membership in an




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international aristocratic class: French not only peppered the conversation of the Regency ‘bon ton’ at home but was the common linguistic denominator for travellers on the Continent as well. The key point here, however, is that Monbron’s definition of the cosmopolite offers a negative reflection of Goldsmith’s citizen of the world: L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j’ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a point été infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinence des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j’ai vécu, m’ont réconcilié avec elle. Quand je n’aurais tiré d’autre bénéfice de mes voyages que celui-là, je n’en regretterais ni les frais, ni les fatigues.8 The cosmopolite, de Monbron suggests, views his own nation as one page in a larger book. Extensive reading confirms that all pages are equally bad, but reconciles him to his own page. In contrast to Goldsmith’s benevolent citizen of the world, de Monbron’s malevolent cosmopolite travels for his own purposes. Denis Porter identifies this type of traveller as the ‘romantic rebel’. For Porter, the romantic rebel is a traveller who pursues ‘intense or novel forms of experience at or beyond the pleasure principle and culturally prescribed limits, often at great risk to the selfconserving ego’.9 In the politically-charged climate of war-time Britain, Byron rewrites Goldsmith’s figure of the citizen of the world as just such a romantic traveller.

Byron’s pilgrim: the romantic traveller In his attempt to define a postmodern ethnography, James Clifford has recently turned to the old trope of pilgrimage, seeing the ethnographer as a traveller or pilgrim who traverses various sites of culture. For Clifford, viewing ethnography as a pilgrimage is one way of getting beyond the subject/object binary implicit in most texts of cultural comparison, and the metaphor allows him to recast the ethnographer’s role as participant in intercultural encounter rather than observer of a delimited field of study. But the notion of pilgrimage is also part of a more general gesture of displacement. Clifford posits culture as something that travels rather than something organic and rooted, as in standard anthropological and ethnographical accounts. By looking at culture as travel, Clifford opens up the field of comparative cultural studies to various cultures of displacement and transplantation and to what he calls




‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms’.10 For him, these discrepant cosmopolitanisms complicate or ‘cross-cut’ the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and recognition of such cosmopolitanisms prompts a reconsideration of our notions about what constitutes a culture. As early as 1812, however, aspects of Clifford’s postmodern stance were anticipated by that most famous of Romantic pilgrims, Childe Harold. Like Clifford’s pilgriming ethnographer, Harold occupies a liminal position between the native and the stranger. Although often considered merely a travelogue in verse, the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) refigure the conventional grand tour into a critique of the Burkean model of nation. The poem opens with Childe Harold’s departure from England. His leaving means breaking though each of the concentric circles that Burke identified with national attachment: Childe Harold leaves ‘[h]is house, his home, his heritage, his lands’ (1: 11). War-time England is presented as insular and self-enclosed, ‘more lone than Eremite’s sad cell’ (1: 4). Harold’s departure from England means escape from that tightly-bordered cell. Nor does Childe Harold look back with much regret. Sailing from England to Lisbon, he deflates the notion of domestic attachment fundamental to Burke’s model of nation through a sardonic ballad that makes nostalgia its target. In the ballad, the singer’s page weeps because he misses his mother and father, while his yeoman mourns his separation from his wife and children in England. The singer himself, however, debunks their sentiment by invoking his dog, noting that although the dog may whine for him for a while, it will forget its master as soon as it is fed by someone else. Furthermore, when its master returns home, the dog will attack him as it would any other stranger. Domestic attachment is stripped of sentiment and becomes a product of physical need: the dog will be true to whoever feeds him. Any master will do just as well. Similarly, both page and yeoman can be replaced. Moreover, so can the nation. Thus while the singer’s servants cling (naively) to home, he himself turns to the Continent: With thee, my bark, I’ll swiftly go Athwart the foaming brine; Nor care what land thou bear’st me to, So not again to mine. Welcome, welcome, ye dark-blue waves! And when you fail my sight, Welcome, ye deserts, and ye caves! My native Land–Good Night. (1: 15–16)




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As England disappears from view and the song ends, Harold shifts his outlook from stern to bow, from his native land to new lands. Thus his ‘Good Night’ inflects with irony the very thing it is designed to celebrate: love of hearth and home. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage foregrounds travel as border crossing. The hero begins his pilgrimage by breaking through the thickened border of a war-time England and crossing the waters separating the island from the Continent: ‘Without a sigh he left, to cross the brine,/ And traverse Paynim shores, and pass Earth’s central line’ (1: 11). But Byron’s point about borders is made more emphatically by the second border Harold crosses: that between Portugal and Spain, which is remarkable only because it is so unremarkable. Portugal and Spain are not separated by ‘barrier’, ‘river deep’, or ‘mountains dark and tall’, the poem notes, but only by a diminutive and scarce-named ‘silver streamlet’ (1: 33). The streamlet does not so much determine the border between Portugal and Spain as the Portuguese and the Spanish determine the streamlet as border (1: 33). In contrast to Harold, whose view is bound only by the horizon and extends from one nation to the other without interruption, the peasants standing on either bank see the streamlet as divisive. For them, it definitively separates one nation from the other, but the central impulse of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage itself is to throw into question the very notion of borders. When Harold moves from the Christian west into the Muslim east in Canto Two, for example, the crossing is figured as a descent into the underworld. But as soon as one tries to pin down the line between east and west, it becomes elusive. Thus Albania is a border-land where west blurs into east, and the Albanians a confusing ‘mixture’ of Christian and Muslim, detested by both. Moreover, Albania is not even particularly foreign. ‘The Arnaouts, or Albanese’, Byron relates in a note, ‘struck me forcibly by their resemblance to the Highlanders of Scotland, in dress, figure, and manner of living. Their very mountains seemed Caledonian with a kinder climate. The kilt, though white; the spare, active form; their dialect, Celtic in its sound; and their hardy habits, all carried me back to Morven’ (Childe Harold, 192–3). Byron arrives at the gateway to the Muslim east only to find there something like home. His comparatist, domesticating impulse may position him as an Enlightenment ethnographer, but the point is that his note does not so much efface national difference as confound it. Travel in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage challenges the Burkean understanding of the nation as something clearly-bordered and unified, and the narrative structure of the pilgrimage itself allows Byron to criss-cross the political geography of Europe,




dissolving lines even as he metaphorically unites European space within a text. Moreover, this unity (like the ever-expanding poem) is a shifting one that does not really allow for ‘home’ space. As Canto One makes clear, Byron’s traveller is diametrically opposed to the homebody, who stays inside the nation and regards the traveller with scorn: ‘sluggards deem it but a foolish chase,/ And marvel men should quit their easy chair,/ The toilsome way, and long, long league to trace’ (1: 30). The poet’s sentiments are clear: ‘Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain air,/ And life, that bloated Ease can never hope to share’ (1: 30). Immobile in his state of ‘bloated Ease’, the homebody does not trek any further than his ‘easy chair’. He denies himself not only the sensual pleasures of travel but also a widened and more complete understanding of the world. Quietude may have its attractions even for a Byronic hero, but Harold’s quest for enlightenment depends on his movement through the landscape. He must remain in motion both geographically and intellectually; similarly, Byron’s narrative has to keep moving as well. There is about both a kind of existential restlessness. Activating the long-standing equation between the cosmopolitan and the nationless Jew, Byron associates his aristocratic pilgrim with the mythical Wandering Jew. Like the ‘fabled Hebrew wanderer’ Cain, Harold is doomed to wander the earth until he dies: ‘What Exile from himself can flee?/ To Zone, though more and more remote,/ Still, still pursues, where-e’er I be,/ The blight of life – the demon, Thought’ (40). Harold’s journey, like Cain’s, has no definitive end. It is entirely appropriate, then, that Byron’s first two cantos have no definitive end either. Canto Two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ends with Harold’s arrival in Greece, an event he experiences as a sort of home-coming: He that is lonely hither let him roam, And gaze complacent on congenial earth Greece is no lightsome land of social mirth; But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide, And scarce regret the region of his birth When wandering slow by Delphi’s sacred side, Or gazing o’er the plains where Greek and Persian died. (2: 92) While some pilgrims long to return to their native land, Byron’s pilgrim returns ‘home’ to the root of western civilization, Greece. Home in this sense implies a feeling of ease rather than the domestic attachment that underpins Burke’s notion of national identity. It is in Greece (not




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England) that Harold is ‘at home’. But Byron himself returns to England. Significantly, however, the poet’s own home-coming is rendered tentative by the news of his friend John Edelston’s death: ‘Thou too art gone, thou lov’d and lovely one!/ … Nor staid to welcome here thy wanderer home,/ Who mourns o’er hours which we no more shall see – / Would they had never been, or were to come!/ Would he had ne’er return’d to find fresh cause to roam!’ (2: 95). With Edelston’s death, Byron has little incentive to settle down in England. For Byron, as for Harold, pilgrimage entails more than a singular journey to a particular destination and back to a home space. The repetition of the rhyme ‘home’/‘roam’ in the stanzas dealing with each of their returns underscores this point. It re-emphasizes Byron’s distinction between the traveller and the homebody and, at the same time, reconfigures the notion of home, presenting the pilgrim as one who is ‘at home’ travelling. ‘Where roll’d the ocean, thereon was his home’, Byron writes at the beginning of Canto Three: ‘He had the passion and the power to roam’ (3: 13). When the poet picks up Childe Harold again in 1816 after his own selfexile from Britain, Harold is still travelling. Although the pilgrim who makes his appearance in Canto Three is older and more disenchanted than the pilgrim of Cantos One and Two, he is still a ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (3: 3). Moreover, he is an outlaw from humanity: ‘But soon he knew himself the most unfit/ Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held/ Little in common’ (3: 12). He chooses to distance himself from humankind, but insists that this does not make him a misanthrope: ‘To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind’ (3: 69). But it does make him an outsider: ‘I have not loved the world, nor the world me; … I stood/ Among them, but not of them’ (3: 113). This sense of being ‘[a]mong … but not of’ is crucial to Byron’s survey of Italian culture and politics in Canto Four. In the preface to Canto Four, Byron declares that ‘[i]t is … a delicate, and no very grateful task, to dissert upon the literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar; and requires an attention and impartiality which would induce us, – though perhaps no inattentive observers, nor ignorant of the language or customs of the people amongst whom we have recently abode, – to distrust, or at least defer our judgment, and more narrowly examine our information’ (122–3).11 Byron feels he not only possesses the impartiality required to assess the state of Italy but adds to it the benefit of his extended residence in that country: ‘I’ve taught me other tongues – and in strange eyes/ Have made me not a stranger; to the mind/ Which is itself, no changes bring surprise;/ Nor is it harsh to make, nor hard to find/ A Country with – ay, or without mankind’ (4: 8). If Byron is ‘not a stranger’ to Italy, he is not a




native either. Rather, he is consciously a British expatriate living in Italy: ‘Yet was I born where men are proud to be,/ Not without cause’ (4: 8). Like Goldsmith’s Altangi, Byron remains attached to his homeland even as he dismisses the nationalism of homebodies.12 He sees himself, for example, as entitled to a place in English literature, and speculates that if he dies in Italy, his spirit will return to Britain. The Byronic stance highlights the liminal position of the expatriate. To be an expatriate is to be (voluntarily or involuntarily) outside the nation; at the same time, it is to define oneself according to the nation. It is thus to be both inside and outside national attachment. Unfettered by the interest of insiders, for example, Byron can view historical events and processes more critically. In particular, he can demystify the already mystified battle of Waterloo, viewing it as the exchange of one form of tyranny for another.13 ‘Gaul may champ the bit/ And foam in fetters; – but is Earth more free?’ Byron asks (3: 19): ‘Shall we, who struck the Lion down, shall we/ Pay the Wolf homage?’ (3: 19). England may have succeeded in ridding the world of Napoleon, but it has put another despot in his place. The only real change effected by the battle of Waterloo, the poet suggests, has been to fertilize the field itself with the blood of fallen soldiers (French and English). Although Byron narrates the events leading up to the battle from the British point of view, his commentary implicates both sides in the slaughter, and the canto invokes Gibbon and Voltaire. In this way, as Karen O’Brien points out, Byron’s history of Waterloo is a cosmopolitan rather than a national history. It draws on the historical methodologies of writers like Gibbon and Voltaire to create what O’Brien calls an ‘exilic cosmopolitanism’.14 While Gibbon and Voltaire recognize the existence of national histories, she explains, they believe that national histories are not intelligible in and of themselves, and so they detach themselves from national frames to view events in terms of a European historical framework. For Byron, O’Brien suggests, Gibbon and Voltaire were ‘Europe’s internal exiles … repatriating themselves in the bosom of European history’ (234). Their ‘imaginative homelessness’ offered him an alternative form of European identity, one that was at odds with more dominant forms. In particular, it was at odds with the ‘culturally grounded position of address’ adopted by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (234). Where Burke grounded his history of the French Revolution in his identity as Englishman, Byron knew himself as an exile when narrating his history of Waterloo.15 Not nationless so much as outside of the nation, he could view national events from an international perspective. Through such exilic cosmopolitanism, Byron reconciled his nationality and his internationalism.




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If, as Kristeva suggests, the cosmopolitan is the ‘alter ego’ of national man, Jerome McGann gets it right (although perhaps reversed) when he suggests that Robert Southey was Byron’s ‘dark double’.16 Southey’s ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ (1816) offers an important counter to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and highlights by contrast the radical nature of Byron’s romantic traveller. In contrast to Childe Harold’s peregrinations, the pilgrimage in Southey’s poem is a singular journey. The poet travels from his home in the Land of Lakes through England to Flanders, Brussels, and, finally, Waterloo. The tour is a prescribed one, with a set agenda, and Southey is never way-laid. Indeed, the tour is so prescribed that Southey’s ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ begins not with a departure but a return. In the opening proem, Southey, his wife, and their eldest daughter climb out of their carriage and are joyously received by the rest of the family (as a family man, Southey has brought his wife and eldest daughter along with him to the Continent). The other Southey children eagerly step forward to greet the returning travellers, and the travellers greet each in turn. Once the initial welcome is over, Southey hands out souvenirs of the voyage to the outstretched hands of his children and extended family. By positioning the return before the pilgrimage, Southey assures his readers that his pilgrimage (unlike Childe Harold’s) will finish where it began: in the heart of England. Travel here is not an unfolding of identity, as it is in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; rather, it confirms an already-established identity. In contrast to Byron’s romantic traveller, Southey’s pilgrim is unmistakably a national man. In fact, Southey undertakes the pilgrimage in his role as poet Laureate, a point he makes immediately clear: ‘Me most of all men it behoved to raise/ The strain of triumph for this foe subdued,/ To give a voice to joy, and in my lays/ Exalt a nation’s hymn of gratitude,/ And blazon forth in song that day’s renown, – / For I was graced with England’s laurel crown.’17 While Harold regards the triumph of Waterloo from a cosmopolitan perspective, Southey narrates the battle as ‘a struggle between good and evil principles’ in which Napoleon is Satan, and England Europe’s saviour (‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, 749).18 Southey may go outside the borders of the nation, but he remains a homebody nonetheless. The jingoistic ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ thus stands in stark contrast to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which, by 1816, had grown to three cantos. Southey’s pilgrim was everything that Byron’s romantic traveller was not: loyal, moral, religious, and thankful. Indeed, for Southey, the self-exiled Byron proved a very useful figure against which to position himself as national poet. His well-known Preface to A Vision of




Judgement (1821) attributes to Byron the ruin of English literature and immortalizes him as father of the Satanic school of poetry. Southey’s Preface begins with a nostalgic vision of Britain in the days when its literature was distinguished by ‘moral purity’ and fathers could pass on books to their children without worrying about the contents.19 This, Southey laments, is no longer the case. Morally lax authors, publishers and booksellers have failed to forestall ‘pernicious works’, and they are thus guilty of ‘one of the worst offenses that can be committed against the well-being of society’ (793). Indeed, ‘every person … who purchases such books, or admits them into his house … becomes an aider and abettor of the crime’ (793). Most at fault, of course, are the writers themselves, whom Southey describes as men ‘of diseased hearts and deprived imaginations’ whose object is to ‘make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul’ (793–4). Led by Byron, these writers struggle to ‘subvert the foundations of human virtue and of human happiness’ (794). Together, they constitute the ‘Satanic school’, for, as Southey explains, ‘though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent, they are more especially characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied’ (794). Because morality and politics are ‘inseparably connected’ for Southey, the Satanic school invites political as well as moral subversion, so that poets like Byron threaten the integrity of the English nation by introducing a ‘moral virus’ into the heart of English identity (794).

Byron’s Vagabond Looking back on his political career in late 1821 – early 1822, Byron confided to Thomas Medwin that he took ‘little interest … in the politics at home’.20 The petty intrigues of English party politics were beneath him, he explained, and the dry House of Lords not the proper realm in which to unleash his ‘Don Juan kind of speech’ (229). Instead of a national statesman, Byron saw himself as a citizen of the world. Medwin quotes Byron: Perhaps, if I had never travelled, – never left my own country young, – my views would have been more limited. They extend to the good of mankind in general – of the world at large. Perhaps the prostrate situation in Portugal and Spain – the tyranny of the Turks in Greece – the




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oppressions of the Austrian Government at Venice – the mental debasement of the Papal States, (not to mention Ireland,) – tended to inspire me with a love of liberty. I felt for Romagna as if she had been my own country, and would have risked my life and fortune for her, as I may yet for the Greeks. I am become a citizen of the world. (229) Not only do Byron’s views extend from the good of the nation to the ‘good of mankind in general – of the world at large’, but he is willing to fight for liberty in any nation (be it Portugal, Spain, Greece, Venice, Ireland, or Italy). This militant commitment to liberty underpins the poetical and political project of Don Juan (1818–24): ‘And I will war, at least in words (and – should/ My chance so happen – deeds) with all who war/ With thought.… To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation/ Of despotism in every nation.’21 Byron’s war against despotism ‘in every nation’ includes England; hence the dedication to Don Juan takes Castlereagh to task for helping to repress the 1798 rebellion in Ireland and facilitate the 1801 union and for withdrawing English support from the move to return independence to the free cities of Italy in 1814. In the poem itself, Byron argues that Wellington may have helped restore ‘legitimacy’ but failed to establish liberty, so that in this particular case (as in others) Britain proves to be a ‘false friend’ to Europe (10: 67). Having promised freedom, it has delivered tyranny. In Byron’s opinion, to have freedom and not to extend it to other nations is to be a ‘slavemaker’. But it is also to be the ‘first of slaves’. He thus writes of England: Would she be proud, or boast herself the free, Who is but first of slaves? The nations are In prison, – but the jailor, what is he? No less a victim to the bolt and bar. Is the poor privilege to turn the key Upon the captive, freedom? He’s as far From the enjoyment of the earth and air Who watches o’er the chain, as they who wear. (10: 68) Both captive and captor are bound to the bolt and bar which separates them, and the implications of Byron’s image recall the arguments earlier in the century by writers such as Brougham and Jeffrey: for true liberty to exist in one nation, it must exist in all. ‘Cosmopolitanism will be either libertarian or totalitarian –’, Julia Kristeva writes, and Byron’s well known defence of liberty places him




firmly within the libertarian camp. But libertarian cosmopolitanism, she adds, has two faces: ‘absolute cynicism based on individual pleasure, or the elitism of lucid, self-controlled beings’ (Strangers to Ourselves 61). By the time of Don Juan, Byron fulfils Southey’s fearful expectations by aligning the hero of liberty with the libertine. In this poem, Byron definitively cuts the romantic traveller loose from his nation, making him (irredeemably) a citizen of the world. In his mock-heroic account of the battle between Russia and Turkey in Canto Seven, for example, Byron presents the freedom fighter as a type of what Clifford has called ‘travelling culture’. He draws attention to the significant impact of non-Russian volunteers, ‘distinguished strangers in that fray’, such as Prince de Ligne, Langeron, and Damas who fought ‘[a]s gallantly as ever heroes fought’ (Don Juan, 7: 32, 34). Suggestively, Byron describes these soldiers as ‘dilettanti in war’s art’, and he is well aware that the motives of such soldiers are not always altruistic (7: 39). They fight not ‘for their country or its crown’ but for themselves: for money, for military rank, or, in some cases, for fun (7: 18). While Juan’s English travelling companion, Johnson, is a mercenary of the first sort, Juan is one of the latter: But Juan was quite ‘a broth of a boy,’ A thing of impulse and a child of song; Now swimming in the sentiment of joy, Or the sensation (if that phrase seem wrong) And afterwards, if he must needs destroy, In such good company as always throng To battles, sieges, and that kind of pleasure, No less delighted to employ his leisure. (8: 24) That Juan fights for pleasure rather than principle means, among other things, that he is able to turn against his Cossacque comrades-in-arms to save a Turkish girl from their swords. His protection of the ‘homeless, houseless, helpless’ Leila, despite her Turkish nationality, is a humanistic rather than nationalistic gesture and points to an international code of ethics (8: 141). The key point, however, is that Juan aligns himself with nations other than his own. Like Goldsmith’s Altangi, he can ‘scheme’ for any country. In this way, Don Juan is not all that different from Haidée’s poet laureate who ‘varied with some skill his adulations;/ To “do at Rome as Romans do”’ (3: 84). A world-traveller, the poet laureate ‘knew the self-loves of the different nations’ and adjusted his verses accordingly (3: 84). In Greece, for example, he would sing a patriotic hymn; in France, a chanson; in




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England, a six canto quarto tale; and in Spain or Portugal, a ballad or romance of the last war. So long as he was paid, this poetic mercenary could heap praise on any nation, whether deserving or not: ‘He gave the different nations something national;/ ‘Twas all the same to him’ (3: 85). For Byron, such poets are ‘liars’ who ‘take all colours – like the hands of dyers’ (3: 87). Nor is Byron himself exempt. Near the end of the First Canto, the poet highlights his own dependence on the purchasing public: ‘whether/ I shall proceed with [Juan’s] adventures’, he observes, ‘is/ Dependent on the public altogether’ (1: 199). He urges his readers to be patient with him: he will fulfil their need for a moral, but not until the twelfth canto. Moreover, in case they choose not to believe him, he has bribed the editor of his ‘grandmother’s review – the British’ to give the poem a favourable review (1: 209). Casting himself as a ‘humble servant’ to the public, Byron thus ends the canto by bidding adieu to his ‘gentle reader! and/ Still gentler purchaser!’ (1: 221). When it comes right down to it, Byron suggests (albeit satirically) that modern poetry like modern warfare is about individual gain. Don Juan’s mother may have sent him on a grand tour to ‘mend his former manners, or get new’ in accordance with the Enlightenment understanding of travel as ‘pleasurable instruction’, but in Don Juan, travel is more pleasure than instruction, a point underscored by the fate of Juan’s tutor, Pedrillo (1: 191).22 As soon as Juan’s ship leaves port at Cadiz, Pedrillo becomes sea-sick and is forced to take to his bed: travel has made him incapable of teaching. Things get even worse for Pedrillo when the ship sinks. On board the life-boat, he is bled to death, then eaten by his fellow passengers (Juan excepted). Tellingly, then, Juan’s grand tour begins with the incapacitation and then death of his tutor: like Goldsmith’s vagabond, Juan will be travelling for pleasure and not instruction. But Juan is a vagabond in a more unsavory sense as well. Just as he wanders from nation to nation, so too he wanders from woman to woman. Juan’s romantic attachment to the married Donna Julia dominates the first canto of Byron’s poem. This first illicit affair serves as the impetus for Juan’s travels, but it also initiates a pattern of sexual conquests. As Juan tearfully leaves Cadiz for his grand tour, he pledges eternal devotion to Donna Julia. Shortly after, however, when the ship-wrecked Juan opens his eyes to the lovely Haidée on an obscure Greek island, Donna Julia is all but forgotten. Indeed, Byron suggests that Juan’s inconstancy is inevitable: ‘no doubt, the moon/ Does these things for us, and whenever newly a/ Strong palpitation rises, ‘tis her boon,/ Else how the devil is it that fresh features/ Have such a charm for us poor creatures’ (2: 208).




Thus in Canto Five, Juan moves from Haidée to the Turkish Gulbeyaz and from Gulbeyaz to the seraglio. When he arrives in Queen Catherine’s Russian court in Canto Nine, he promptly fills a ‘high official situation’ in her government, becoming a sort of royal gigolo (9: 48). Although, as Juan tells Gulbeyaz, ‘[l]ove is for the free’, it can apparently also be simulated for a fee (5: 127). Not only Juan’s military services can be bought. Compared to his activities in the English cantos, however, Juan’s role in Catherine’s court seems tame. In England, he is befriended by the ‘high-born’, ‘beauteous’ and married Adeline Amundeville, enamoured of the ‘prim, silent, cold’ and virginal Aurora Raby, and seduced by the ‘[d]esirable, distinguish’d, celebrated’ and married Duchess of Fitz– Fulke (13: 2, 15: 49, 14: 42). He plays the political field just as successfully. A political trimmer, he stands ‘well both with Ins and Outs’ (13: 24). Indeed, he is the perfect diplomat: Serene, accomplish’d, cheerful but not loud; Insinuating without insinuation; Observant of the foibles of the crowd, Yet n’er betraying this in conversation; Proud with the proud, yet courteously proud So as to make them feel he knew his station And theirs: – without a struggle for priority, He neither brook’d nor claim’d superiority. (15: 15) In politics as in love, Juan is a free agent or, to use Byron’s phrase, ‘A bachelor – of arts,/ and parts, and hearts’ (11: 47). Thus Byron’s Don Juan is a vagabond in that he wanders from nation to nation led not by benevolence but by his own curiosity. In short, his political and sexual ambulations recall the OED’s definition of vagabond as a ‘disreputable, idle, or worthless person; a rascal, a rogue’. It is this darker denotation that generally surfaced in contemporary critical reception of both Byron’s romantic travellers and Byron himself. Addressing the early periodical criticism of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in an ‘Addition to the Preface’, Byron responded in particular to complaints concerning the most ‘unknightly’ character of his hero (Childe Harold, 5).23 That the ‘vagrant Childe’ did not conform to the chivalric ideals of love and honour is to be expected, Byron explained, for neither did the knights templar who, though ‘sans peur’, were in no way ‘sans reproche’ (5). For Byron, the cosmopolitan Childe Harold was a wandering philosophe who revealed the limitations of an uncritical and closed patriotism, but for his critics both pilgrim and poet were





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He arraigns wars, generally and indiscriminately, confounding the just with the unjust, the defensive with the offensive, the preservative with the destructive, not with the judgement of a sage, but the settled moroseness of a misanthrope; victories, though gained by courage exerted in the best of causes, excite only the sarcastic sneers of this querulous vagabond; and the profession of a soldier, deemed honourable by wise and good men, is the subject of his ridicule and contempt.24 Its charge that Byron’s poem was the ‘rant of democracy in its wildest form’ was only reinforced when Byron published ‘To a Lady Weeping’. Written in March 1812, the poem referred to an incident at Carlton House when the Regent turned on his old Whig friends with such vehemence that he caused the princess Charlotte to shed tears. Byron’s poem criticized the Regent for his growing conservatism, linking it to England’s decline, and the Antijacobin scorned the lines as a ‘scandalous reflection on an exalted personage; and a calumny on the nation’.25 Elaborating, the review claimed that ‘he seems to have some worm cankering in his own bosom, and to envy the tranquillity which reigns in others; he sees his native country, the pride of Britons, and the envy of the world; and he labours to degrade it in the eyes of all’ (‘Byron’s Bride’, 234). Its parting shot was the advice that Byron effect a slight transposition of his family motto: ‘instead of CREDE BYRON, we say, BYRON! – CREDE!’ (234, 237). Where the Antijacobin then opted to forget Byron, refusing to review his later works, the British Critic sought to banish him. With the public airing of Byron’s dirty domestic laundry in ‘Fare thee Well’ and ‘Sketch from Private Life’ in 1816, the British Critic took the side of ‘injured innocence’, supporting Lady Byron against the ‘oppressive brutality’ of her husband.26 Like many other conservative periodicals at the time, it used Byron’s adultery as a lead-in to a sweeping indictment of liberal ideology: ‘Our plain notions will doubtless appear bigotted and narrow to the refined and liberal feelings of his Lordship’s school; but they are, and we trust that they long will be, the notions of British nation’ (‘Byron’s Siege’, 436). If the British public disapproves of Byron’s adultery, the reviewer reasons, it must disapprove of liberalism as well. The journal



traitors to the nation, and both were unceremoniously pushed outside its borders. From the start the Antijacobin Review found Childe Harold ‘fractious, wayward, capricious, cheerless, morose, sullen, discontented, and unprincipled’, and it poured contempt on ‘this querulous vagabond’:

evokes the same ‘tender feeling of the British nation’ a few years later with the prediction that the ‘good sense, and the good feeling of the English nation must, and will banish [Don Juan] from their houses’.27 The mere possession of Byron’s poem draws suspicion, and the British Critic threatens that it ‘should have the worst opinion indeed of any man, upon whose family table this volume were to lie exposed’ (204). Indeed, for the British Critic Byron’s own self-banishment should be enforced, for ‘after the just and natural hatred which he has more than once expressed against his mother country … it would be a most distressing revulsion if he were again to be exposed to the necessity of coming among a people unfitted to his modes of thinking and acting; or of reviving any attachment which it is just possible he may once have felt for a soil which is too ungrateful to return it’.28 For both the British Critic and the Antijacobin Review there was no such thing as being both inside and outside national attachment. One either was a patriot or one was not. If the cosmopolitan was the alter ego of national man, it was an alter ego to be repressed at all costs.

Mad, bad, and dangerous to know: Byron-the-cosmopolitan In ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (1990), Mikhail Bakhtin defines the romantic character as a ‘homeless wanderer, a sojourner, a seeker.’29 This early essay posits character as a form of interrelationship between author and hero, and makes a provocative distinction between the romantic and classical character. For Bakhtin, the author uses his position outside the hero to produce the hero as an artistic unity or whole. How this is done differs according to the ‘axiological soil’ (or authorial world view) which shapes the hero. The unity of the classical character, for example, derives from the fulfilment of a specific destiny or ‘fate’. All that he does is pre-determined: ‘I can be no more than what I am already in essentials; I cannot reject my essential already-being, for it is not mine, but belongs to my mother, father, kin, people, mankind’ (178). Hence the axiological soil of the classical character is one that values kin and tradition. In contrast, the romantic character is an embodiment or unfolding of an idea: ‘all of the moments that constitute his quest for meaning and value (he wants, he loves, he considers something to be true, etc.) find their transgredient determination as the symbolic stages of a single artistic course, the course of actualizing a certain idea’ (180). That is, the romantic character ‘responsibly initiates the sequence of his life as determined by meaning and values’ (179). The axiological soil of the romantic character, then, is fundamentally different from that of the classical character. It is not kin and tradition that give value here but




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the idea. Since the romantic character’s individuality comes from within himself and is not given to him, his value ‘cease[s] to be authoritative and is only re-experienced, lyrically re-experienced’ (180). One of the implications of this change is the dissolution of authorial distance. In the case of the romantic character, Bakhtin explains, the author’s position outside the hero is compromised: ‘The weakening of this position leads to the disintegration of the character; the boundaries begin to be effaced, the center of value is transposed from the boundaries into the very life of the hero’ (180). We can see such a dissolution of authorial distance with Byron, which, in his case, meant the often-noted collapse of the difference between author and hero. Despite Byron’s half-hearted protests to the contrary, the public insisted on reading Childe Harold as Byron, and, equally provocatively, Byron as Childe Harold.30 In a review of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for example, Francis Jeffrey declared that ‘the mind of the noble author has been so far tinged by his strong conception of this Satanic personage, that the sentiments and reflections which he delivers in his own name, have all received a shade of the same gloomy and misanthropic colouring which invests those of his imaginary hero’.31 Noticeably tenuous as it was in the first two cantos, in the third canto the boundary between Byron and Childe Harold completely gave way. The British Critic declared with confidence that Byron ‘has now so unequivocally identified himself with his fictitious hero, that even in his most querulous moods, he cannot complain of an impertinence in tracing the resemblance’.32 And even the well-disposed Sir Walter Scott found it ‘impossible … to divide Lord Byron from his poetry, or to offer … criticism upon the continuation of Childe Harold, without reverting to the circumstances in which the commencement of that singular and original work first appeared’.33 Byron himself eventually surrendered. ‘The fact is’, he wrote in the Preface to Canto Four, ‘that I had become weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive … it was in vain that I asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the pilgrim; and the very anxiety to preserve this difference, and disappointment at finding it unavailing, so far crushed my efforts in the composition, that I determined to abandon it altogether – and have done so’ (Childe Harold, 122). One of the consequences of this conflation of Byron and Childe Harold was the creation of the cultural figure ‘Byron-the-cosmopolitan’, who figured in the battle over national identity outlined by Gerald Newman in The Rise of English Nationalism (1987). Newman argues that the shift from eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to nineteenth-century nationalism




in England was intimately connected with the rise of the middling class or bourgeoisie, whose own self-promotion involved ‘the repudiation of “Fashion,” the destruction of cosmopolitanism, and the elaboration of nationalist ideology.’34 Supporting this socio-cultural shift was the development of a ‘symbolic logic’ consisting of four interconnected premises: (1) the [fashionable] World [is] pervaded, even neutered or hermaphroditized, by foreign cultural influence; (2) this foreign cultural influence translates itself into ruinous moral influence; (3) … ordinary, innocent Englishmen unthinkingly admire and follow the World’s lead – they are seduced by the Quality; (4) hence alien cultural influence brings collective domestic moral ruin. (67) Combining anti-French feeling with myths about the moral degeneracy of the aristocracy, the emerging middle-class ideology was at once ‘anticosmopolitan, anti-aristocratic, and nativist’ (67).35 That the aristocratic Byron’s fall from English grace nicely fed into the struggle between aristocratic and bourgeois notions of the nation is illustrated in particular by the response of the British Review. Aiming at a middle-class audience, the British Review was both patriotic and moralistic, and from 1812 to 1819 its editor, William Roberts, used its reviews of Byron’s poetry as a convenient space in which to criticize aristocratic Regency excess.36 Roberts first connected Byron to the degenerate state of the British aristocracy in his generally positive review of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which accuses the peerage of self-neglect and deplores ‘the inverted ambition of noblemen who aspire to be less than gentlemen’.37 A member of the ‘peerage’, Byron is cautioned indirectly. But his review of the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage explicitly makes Byron the exemplar of a segment of aristocratic society exhibiting certain negative characteristics: A contempt for English manners and institutions; respect for the memory of Jacobin France and her revolutionary ex-generals; indignation at the conduct of our allies, and all measures of caution towards the innocent French people; a dread of the ferocious despotism of Louis, and a tender feeling for the fate of afflicted Buonaparte and the interesting Bey of Algiers; are the present characteristics of most young men of superior thinking who have travelled for the instruction of their countrymen, with a zeal that has made them abridge and abandon their own.38




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Travelled, young, and aristocratic, such men are steeped in the ‘cant of cosmopolitanism’, and they return from their grand tours with ‘contempt for English manners and institutions’ (‘Canto the Third’, 8). Lord Byron – hostile to the monarchy, critical of the Holy Alliance, and pointedly unthankful for Britain’s military victory at Waterloo – is a prominent member of this cosmopolitan class, and in his review ‘Beppo’ Roberts accuses the poet of subverting not only British politics but also British virtue. In particular, he takes exception to the content of Byron’s satire, declaring that the self-exiled poet has sent back to Britain ‘a tale of pollution, dipped in the deepest die of Italian debauchery’.39 In his opinion, the ‘cosmopolitan liberality’ that supports Byron’s satire does not involve ‘a Christian enlargement of sentiments’ but ‘a growing indifference to the distinction of moral worth’ (330). Resting in universal indifference rather than universal benevolence, this cosmopolitan liberality ‘disarms the vigilance of virtue’ so crucial to Britain’s national identity (329). To make his point, Roberts calls upon Mme de Staël’s claim in On Germany that nationality and morality are interdependent. For Staël, Germany’s republican government encourages vice by undermining the ‘great pillars of human repose’, such as love and religion. Similarly, when a society’s ‘stays and fastenings are loosened’, she explains, society itself ‘reels and totters’ (330). By introducing Italian morality into Britain, Roberts reasons, Byron is helping to make Britain Continental. His cosmopolitan liberality is part of a ‘denationalizing spirit’ that corrodes Britain’s honour, prosperity, and masculine decency, among other things (330). Of particular concern in Roberts’ review of the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is Byron’s ‘enlightened friendship’ with Hobhouse, which Roberts sees as based ‘on a covenanted contempt for mere decent men and women, mere English maxims, mere homely institutions in church and state, and ordinary life, combined with a strong infusion of French principles, and the dogma of the school of revolution and political regeneration’.40 Unlike ‘plain men’ such as Roberts and his readers, Byron and Hobhouse have an air of ‘complacent superiority’ (5). Possessing all the advantages of being English, they fail to appreciate those advantages; instilled with Continental values and philosophies, they judge England through the eyes of a foreigner and find it wanting. For Roberts, Byron and Hobhouse are men ‘bred out of the French revolution’, a type that subverts the foundations of nations. Roberts’ reviews of Byron in the British Review are part of an increasing hostility in the press towards an older cosmopolitan aristocracy.41 The same kind of hostility entered into fiction as well. Published the same




year as Byron’s self-exile, Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon (1816) makes Byron into a morally and politically suspect Irish exile named Glenarvon, who returns to Ireland from Italy to incite the 1798 rebellion. Admittedly, Lamb had a personal animus and was herself tied to the aristocracy, but the novel’s anti-Byronic charge has a wider resonance. Lamb’s roman à clef follows the marriage between a spirited Catholic Irishwoman, Calantha, and an honourable but overly lenient Protestant Englishman, Lord Avondale.42 Despite several impediments, Avondale and Calantha marry. Avondale educates her in the liberal tenets popular at the time, and then takes her to England, where he leaves her to her own devices in the morally dangerous world of London high society. Her inappropriate conduct there, coupled with her husband’s frequent absences, strains the marriage, and eventually the couple decides to return to Ireland. Back in Ireland, Calantha breaks her marriage vows by taking Glenarvon as her lover, and then oversteps society mores by making this affair public. Glenarvon, however, soon leaves her for another woman. Despite a last-minute reconciliation with her husband, Calantha pays for her transgression with her life. It is important to Lamb’s roman à clef that Byron play anti-hero to Lamb’s husband, William.43 But it is equally important to her national tale that he play the cosmopolitan to her national man. Lamb uses the English–Irish marriage of her domestic narrative to support her treatment of a larger political marriage between England and Ireland. Calantha is yet another early nineteenth-century embodiment of Ireland as woman, one in a series which includes Edgeworth’s maternal Ellinor in Ennui and Morgan’s alluring Glorvina in The Wild Irish Girl (1806).44 Avondale’s absences and careless neglect of his young wife offer an easy parallel to England’s neglect of Ireland, and Irish complaints about Ireland’s status within Britain are echoed in Calantha’s protest that Avondale treats her as a child rather than a friend or a companion. The fateful arrival of the Irish exile Glenarvon around 1798 acts as a catalyst, unleashing both Calantha’s and Ireland’s rebellions. Encouraged by Glenarvon, Calantha expresses herself in direct opposition to her English husband and to the English mores which tolerate adultery so long as it is kept private, while on the public front, Glenarvon publishes an incendiary pamphlet that proves crucial to the 1798 rebellion. Lamb’s dual narrative structure mirrors Glenarvon’s sexual and political infidelity. Aside from Calantha, Glenarvon ruins and abandons two other Irish women in the course of the novel. He seduces the first, Alice, on his first visit to Ireland, deserting her two years later in England and leaving her without warning or money. He takes with him their son.




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The second, Elinor, he lures out of the convent. She joins Glenarvon and becomes both his mistress and a leader of the United Irishmen. Glenarvon’s powers of seduction, however, are not limited to women. He has infatuated the whole nation with his ‘keen’ eye, ‘sweet and tunable’ voice, and ‘persuasive language, which never fails to gain upon its hearers’.45 Indeed, we are told, ‘[c]attle walk out of the paddocks of themselves: women, children, pigs, wander after Glenarvon’ (113). But Glenarvon’s fascination with Ireland and ‘with the romantic splendour of ideal liberty’ proves to be as superficial as his love for women (140). Bribed by the English with a ship (significantly, named ‘the Emerald’) and the reinstatement of his hereditary titles and estate, he forsakes the United Irish and joins the British troops, fighting against the revolutionaries he once led.46 Glenarvon is a traitor not only to women but also to a nation. Lamb’s novel exemplifies the nationalist logic of foreign invasion and corruption delineated by Gerald Newman almost too neatly. Her Irish exile Glenarvon returns from Italy; he invades British fashionable society, and proves to be a ruinous moral influence. He not only ruins several women but seduces the Irish people as well, turning them into a group of ‘licentious democrats’ and ‘rebellious libertines’ and he causes widespread upheaval throughout Ireland (111). Glenarvon’s horrific death at the end of the novel – mad, haunted by his past, and convinced he will be dragged down to hell for his crimes – symbolically expunges the Whig party of its cosmopolitan element, bringing it closer in line with Romantic nationalism.47 For the liberal Lamb, Byron becomes a metaphor for an aristocratic liberalism less and less politically germane to a post-Napoleonic Britain, and as both liberals and conservatives turned their attention to Britain’s own domestic situation, the demonization of the cosmopolitan escalated. By the time John William Polidori published The Vampyre in 1819, Byron had become the ultimate outsider. Reworking one of Byron’s own fragments and drawing on a strain of vampiric imagery present within Byron’s own poetry, Polidori rewrote the cosmopolitan Byronic hero as a supernatural villain.48 In Polidori’s tale, an unknown nobleman, Lord Strongmore, begins to frequent London society, inspiring much speculation as to the exact cause of his singularity: Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the glance of that dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, seemed not to penetrate, and at one look to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but to throw




upon the cheek a leaden ray that weighted upon the skin it could not pass. Some, however thought that it was caused by their fearing the observation of one, who by his colourless cheek, which never gained a warmer tint from the blush of conscious shame or from any powerful emotion, appeared to be above human feelings and sympathies, the fashionable names for frailties and sins.49 With his ‘dead grey eye’ and ‘colourless cheek’, Lord Strongmore seems other-worldly, ‘above human feelings and sympathies’. Very quickly this mysterious stranger becomes the talk of the town. Intrigued by Strongmore, the English hero (a romantic young orphan) leaves his sister and travels to the Continent with him. As the two proceed on their grand tour, the hero becomes more and more unsettled by Strongmore’s indiscriminate liberality, gambling, and womanizing. Prompted by a letter from his guardian, he leaves Strongmore in Italy and travels to Greece alone. In Greece, he falls in love with a young Greek girl, who tells him tales of vampyres who feed on beautiful young women in order to prolong their own lives. He himself then witnesses a vampyre sucking the life out of the Greek girl, and sinks into a long illness from which he is nursed back to heath by Strongmore. The two travel together again until Strongmore is shot by bandits. Dying, he makes the hero promise not to reveal his crimes to anyone, and by the next day his body has mysteriously disappeared. When the hero returns to England, he is horrified to find Strongmore alive and well and courting his sister. Bound by his promise, however, he can say nothing and soon falls into a stupor. He wakes when he hears of his sister’s marriage to Strongmore and, breaking his promise, relates the whole story to his guardian. But by the time his guardian reaches his sister, she is dead and the vampyre has disappeared. It is important that Strongmore attacks the figure linked most closely to home. Infiltrating the domestic realm, he literally sucks the life-blood out of the heart of the nation. But it is equally important that in rejecting all socially constructed borders, the cosmopolitan Byronic hero moves beyond the confines of society itself.50 In Polidori’s novel, the citizen of the world becomes other-worldly. The grand tour becomes a ghost story and the world-traveller, a vampyre.





In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Slavoj Žižek posits a fundamental antagonism at the core of social union: ‘All “culture”’, he writes, ‘is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize – to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.’1 Žižek’s ‘radical antagonism’ recalls Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘unsocial sociability’, and his discussion of social fantasies gives new resonance to Kant’s description of the state as a ‘pathologically enforced social union’ (‘Universal History’, 45). For the poststructuralist Žižek, social union does not itself exist but is a social fantasy constructed to mask an originary antagonism. There is always a gap between our fantasies of social union and the underlying antagonism that prompts their formation. What this means for the nation is that it (like all other fantasies of social union) is inherently unstable: ‘every process of identification conferring on us a fixed socio-symbolic identity’, Žižek insists, ‘is ultimately doomed to fail’ (127). Central to Žižek’s argument is the notion of the ‘social symptom’. For Žižek, society anticipates the gap between its fantasy of social union and its own antagonistic nature by giving the gap a positive form. It is this Žižek calls the social symptom. The social symptom represents the contradictions and disparities inherent in a society that prevent it from achieving its ‘full identity’ as a unified and homogenous whole. These internal antagonisms are displaced into an antagonism between a sound fantasy-society and a destabilizing outside force, an interloper. This interloping figure, portrayed as the cause of social disorder, is the sign of society’s immanent failure, its limit. In fascism, for instance, society’s failure to achieve its ‘full identity’ as a unified and homogeneous whole is attributed not to that society’s own antagonistic nature but to 119



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a particular figure, the ‘Jew’. ‘If we look at it through the frame of (corporatist) fantasy’, Žižek explains, ‘the “Jew” appears as an intruder who introduces from outside disorder, decomposition and corruption of the social edifice – it appears as an outward positive cause whose elimination would enable us to restore order, stability and identity’ (128). Seen simultaneously as a threat to social union and the cause of its failure, the social symptom both denies and embodies the ‘structural impossibility’ of our fantasies of social union, erupting ‘on to the social surface [at] the point at which it becomes obvious that society “doesn’t work” that the social mechanism “creaks”’ (126, 127–8). Žižek’s concept of the social symptom is suggestive in terms of the question of the cosmopolitan in early nineteenth-century Britain. At a time when the boundaries of national belonging were being redrawn (both inside Britain and on the Continent), unified models of the nation such as Burke’s came under increasing scrutiny. Positing the nation as a homogeneous and organic whole, these images of social union failed to address the sorts of political unrest increasingly evident in fragmented nations such as Greece, Italy, and Ireland. In early nineteenth-century fiction, the cosmopolitan appears as a social symptom that gestures towards the impossibility of social fantasies of union even as it preserves them. This concept of the social symptom underscores the way in which the cultural figure of Byron-the-cosmopolitan works to unify the emerging nationalist ideology in Britain. It also brings into useful view a dissonant and often overlooked figure in the early nineteenth-century national tale, that of the cosmopolitan heroine.

The cosmopolitan heroine and the national tale National tales have generally been read in relation to the more prominent and domestic figure of the national heroine, who consolidates and unifies national place.2 Miranda Burgess, for instance, sees the yoking together of gender and national culture in the early national tale as a ‘defensive response to imperial ideology.’3 The national heroine, she suggests, gives representational unity to a diverse and stratified Irish nation that has lost its political autonomy. At the same time, Robert Tracy and Mary Jean Corbett have drawn attention to the ways in which the family and marriage plots of Sydney Morgan’s and Maria Edgeworth’s early national tales work to naturalize British colonial hegemony. ‘Bourgeois marriage’, Corbett notes, ‘functions symbolically as a model for connecting separate and unlike “partners” even as it simultaneously occludes or minimizes their inequality.’4 As these readings suggest, much is invested




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in the conjunction between domestic femininity and the nation in the early national tale. A stabilizing force, the national heroine underwrites fantasies of national union. Morgan’s Wild Irish Girl (1806) is in this sense paradigmatic. In Wild Irish Girl, an English hero, Horatio, travels to Ireland where he overcomes his prejudices against the Irish. Crucial to Horatio’s development is Morgan’s national heroine, Glorvina, who instructs the hero in Irish politics, history, and culture. The daughter of a dispossessed Milesian Chief, Glorvina is an allegorical embodiment of the Irish nation, gathering together a multiplicity of national characteristics into one singular identity. When the hero falls in love with her, he falls in love with Ireland, and their marriage at the end of the novel reconciles English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic. If the national heroines of writers such as Morgan unify and combine, the cosmopolitan heroines of Germaine de Staël and Charles Maturin scramble and divide. Infiltrating the early national tale, they challenge romantic fantasies of national union, marking the point at which – in Žižek’s words – the social mechanism ‘creaks’. In Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807), the figure of the cosmopolitan heroine operates as a social symptom, gesturing towards the impossibility of fantasies of national union even as she preserves them. Corinne follows the travels of a young Scottish peer, Oswald, on his journey through late eighteenth-century Italy. Mourning the death of his father, the melancholic Oswald leaves Scotland for the continent with the hope that a change of scene may lift his spirits. Instead, travel merely adds to his feelings of isolation, and when he arrives in Rome he at first shuts himself into his lodgings and refuses to visit the city. He is tempted out into the streets of Rome by the coronation of one of the city’s foremost artists, a poet, writer, conversationalist and improvisatrice, known only by her first name, Corinne. Although the Italians confidently claim this great artist for their own, assured that ‘you had to be born in Rome to speak such pure Italian’, mystery surrounds her origins.5 When Oswald returns Corinne’s crown after she drops it at her coronation, for instance, she thanks him in perfect English, leading Oswald to wonder if she were not a native of England rather than Italy: ‘Was she English? Had she spent a few years of her life in England? He could not say, but study alone could not have taught her so well’ (33). Like the Italians’ speculations, Oswald’s conjectures about Corinne’s nationality rest on assumptions about the correlation between language and national identity. Just as to speak ‘pure’ Italian means for the Italians that one is Italian, so to speak English ‘with a pure native accent’ means for Oswald that one is English. Both the Italians and Oswald prove to be correct: Corinne is English and




Italian. The daughter of an English man and an Italian woman, she was born in Italy but spent six of her formative years in England, a personal heritage and history that tugs at the edges of the neat synonymy between Corinne and Italy that Staël asserts in her title. Indeed, Corinne’s greatness, as well as her attraction for Oswald, lies not in her ‘pure’ Englishness or her ‘pure’ Italianness but in her mixed background. ‘Thanks to the rare combination of circumstances that had given me a dual education and if you will, two nationalities’, Corinne explains, ‘I could think myself destined for special privileges’ (264–5). The improvisation Corinne gives on ‘The Glory and Bliss of Italy’ at her coronation demonstrates this duality. The first part of the improvisation is a patriotic musing on Italy’s historical eminence in the realm of the imagination, and celebrates Italian poets, philosophers, and artists. Corinne’s unrestrained celebration of Italian genius in her improvisation is greeted by the ‘[i]mpassioned applause’ of the Roman audience (30). The English Oswald, however, remains largely untouched by this first performance. Noticing an Englishman in the crowd, Corinne adjusts her speech to meet his needs, qualifying her previous remarks with thoughts of uncertainty and death. Unlike the first part of the improvisation, this second part speaks directly to Oswald’s taste, and ‘this time the raptures of the Italians themselves did not equal his’ (31). Where Corinne’s coronation improvisation captures the Italian and English imagination in separate parts, later improvisations entwine the two more organically. In her improvisation in the countryside of Naples, for example, she draws the two together by expressing the ‘melancholy feelings’ of the English ‘with the Italian imagination’ (246). Corinne’s ability to unite both northern and southern characteristics in her art is in keeping with the cosmopolitan notion of national literature Staël puts forward years earlier in Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions, advancing a literary economy that is not insular and self-enclosed but rather permeable and receptive to outside influence. But the key point here is that Staël’s cosmopolitan heroine confounds rather than confirms clear national demarcations. A heterogenous mixture of Englishness and Italianness, she frustrates social fantasies that posit national identity as something homogenous and unified. In Staël’s novel, Oswald must choose between Corinne and her English half-sister, Lucile. Brought up in the English countryside, Lucile is a model of gentle domesticity. A ‘shy, innocent heart unknown to itself’, she possesses that ‘diffident reserve’ of the Englishwoman who saves her ‘eloquence and genius’ for the enjoyment of her husband alone, unlike the worldly Corinne who parades it for all to see (52, 124). Certainly,




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as many critics have pointed out, Oswald’s choice is between the public heroine and the domestic heroine.6 But importantly it is also between the cosmopolitan heroine and the national heroine. Where the cosmopolitan Corinne, as Oswald puts it, ‘combines the charms of many different countries’, Lucile is Englishness unalloyed (96). Planning for his son’s future, Oswald’s father decides against Corinne in favour of Lucile, citing Corrine’s independent spirit, ‘impetuous imagination’, and ‘passionate character’ as impediments to her marriage with Oswald (329). Wedded to Corinne, he explains, his son would live in his wife’s shadow. But of more direct concern is that Corinne would lead Oswald away from England, for ‘such a woman can never be happy here, and Italy alone is right for her’ (329). Indeed, she would extinguish his very Englishness. To please her, Oswald’s father predicts, his son would introduce foreign ways into his household, and ‘[s]oon he would lose that sense of nationality, those prejudices, if you will, that bind us together and make of our nation one body, a free but indissoluble association that cannot perish until the last one of us is dead’ (329–30). The cosmopolitan heroine, he suggests, not only weakens national attachment, but breaks apart the nation as well: she dissolves the ‘indissoluble’. For Oswald’s father, it is not the cosmopolitan Corinne, but Lucile, the ‘truly English’ woman, who will guarantee Oswald’s happiness (330). Here, as in Burke’s formulation of the ‘little platoon’, a correlation is drawn between domestic femininity and national stability: it is love of hearth and home that distinguishes the ideal English wife. Lucile exemplifies such a love. Each night she prays in turn for her servants, her relatives, her king, and her country, asking God to let her ‘live and die with her soul unstained by a single thought, by a single feeling that does not conform to her duties’ (320). Lucile will not only ensure Oswald’s domestic happiness but will strengthen his ties to his nation as well, a belief that Corinne herself echoes when she relinquishes Oswald to Lucile so that he ‘might be at peace with his country, with his family, with himself’ (357). ‘[O]nly Englishwomen are right for England’, as Lucile’s uncle concludes early on in the novel, ‘as lovable as Corinne is, I think like Thomas Walpole, what do you do with that at home?’ (133). But the triumph of the national heroine over the cosmopolitan heroine in Corinne is not as complete as it might be. Oswald’s marriage to Lucile is jeopardized by their mutual reserve. Lucile’s shyness prevents her from telling Oswald how she feels about him, and she cannot even bring herself to let him know when she becomes pregnant with his first child. Oswald interprets this shyness as a want of feeling. When his regiment leaves for North America, he finds Lucile’s farewell cold, and




he spends his nights there thinking not of his wife but of Corinne. Nor do his thoughts change when he returns to England. Soon after he returns, he falls ill and in his delirium calls out for Corinne and for Italy: ‘This northland is so cold’, he complains, ‘that one can never get warm’ (389). Although Oswald marries the national heroine, then, the cosmopolitan heroine continues to intrigue him, and Staël as well, as the last passage of the novel demonstrates: What became of Oswald? He was so wild that at first they feared for his reason and for his life. He followed Corinne’s funeral procession to Rome. He shut himself up at Tivoli for a long time, refusing to have his wife and daughter with him. At last affection and duty brought him back to their side. Together they returned to England. The order and priority of Lord Nevil’s domestic life were exemplary. But did he forgive himself for his past behaviour? Was he consoled by society’s approval? Was he satisfied with an ordinary lot after what he had lost? I do not know, and on this score I wish neither to blame him nor to grant him absolution. (419) Staël’s refusal to come down on one side or the other with respect to Oswald’s decision in favour of the national heroine denies the reader the unproblematic closure found in national tales such as Morgan’s. Indeed, Staël’s cosmopolitan heroine remains an attractive alternative to the national heroine and the author’s sympathetic treatment of her throws into question the Burkean fantasy of national union broached in Oswald’s marriage to Lucile. Where Staël’s Corinne foregrounds the ambivalence of the social symptom, Maturin’s Milesian Chief (1812) exploits its strategy of displacement. In The Milesian Chief, Ireland’s failure to achieve its full identity as a unified and homogeneous whole is attributed not to that society’s own antagonistic nature, but to the cosmopolitan heroine.7 A rewrite of Staël’s Corinne, Maturin’s cosmopolitan heroine, Armida, is a heterogenous ‘mixture’ of Englishness and Italianness.8 The daughter of an Italian mother and English father, she was born in England but educated in Italy, a background that, as one of the minor characters explains, ‘accounts for the mixture of English pride and Italian indolence that her character exhibits’.9 Armida’s Anglo-Italian background allows her to affiliate herself with both Italy and England, and in Maturin’s novel she affiliates herself with each in turn. In Italy, for example, she identifies herself as an Italian. When she is approached by the English Wandesford, she dismisses his attentions immediately, instructing him to ‘[g]o to the




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lovely women of your own country, they will be proud of their conquest: go and leave the weak enthusiastic Italian to her harp and her paintings, her morbid sensibility, her luxurious melancholy’ (1: 27). The proper mate for an Englishman, she insists, is an Englishwoman. But if Armida sees herself as an Italian heroine in Italy, she is an English one in France. Despite the pleasure she derives from the French admiration of her talents, her ‘English mind and character’ are revolted by French ‘frivolity’, and she yearns to visit England, ‘the country of her ancestors, the country of her birth’ (1: 36). In England, however, Armida is surprised to find herself a ‘beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious foreigner’ (1: 37). Fully engrossed in itself and its own doings, English society has little praise for the cosmopolitan heroine. In Maturin’s novel, her destiny lies in the politically fraught climate of post-Union Ireland. Relocated to Ireland, the interloping cosmopolitan heroine operates as a destabilizing outside force, the cause of Ireland’s social disorder. After reluctantly getting engaged to Wandesford in England, Armida travels with her family to their estate in Ireland, where the marriage is to take place. While waiting for Wandesford to arrive, she falls in love with Connal O’Morven, a dispossessed Irish prince. The rivalry that develops between the English Wandesford and the Irish O’Morven over Armida displaces the political conflict between England and Ireland into a romantic struggle between English and Irish suitors. Indeed, it is Armida’s first refusal to honour her engagement to Wandesford that triggers the Irish insurrection that is at the heart of the novel’s political plot. After learning that Wandesford has abandoned an Irish mistress and child in England, Armida revokes her promise to marry him. Wandesford (mistakenly) believes that it was O’Morven who told Armida of his indiscretion, and he vows to seek revenge. That night he follows O’Morven’s footprints from Armida’s estate to a nearby cave where a group of Irish rebels have gathered. Wandesford’s untimely arrival interrupts O’Morven’s speech imploring the rebels to disband, preempting the possibility of a nonviolent solution to Irish discontent. Moreover, when O’Morven releases him from the rebel cave, Wandesford goes directly to the magistrates to inform them of the coming insurrection, asking to lead the English troops in their battle against the Irish rebels. Certainly, the antagonism underlying English–Irish union pre-exists the cosmopolitan heroine’s arrival in Ireland. But in Maturin’s narrative, it is Armida who incites Irish rebellion. Coming between Wandesford and O’Morven, between England and Ireland, the cosmopolitan heroine is portrayed, literally and symbolically, as the cause of the Irish insurgence: as a dying Wandesford explains to O’Morven near the end of the novel,




‘I hated you for your virtues: I hated you for your country: I hated you for her whom we both loved’ (4: 180). If Armida displaces the antagonism underlying English–Irish Union, she displaces a more fundamental antagonism as well, that underlying Irish union. Shortly after the first battle between the English troops and Irish rebels, Armida leaves home to join O’Morven and the Irish forces. Her appearance in the rebel camp causes discontent within the Irish ranks and splinters the rebels into hostile factions. In particular, she comes between O’Morven and his second in command, Brennan. When O’Morven travels to Dublin in an attempt to seek peace with the English, Brennan attempts to seduce Armida and encourages the Irish rebels to mutiny against their leader. O’Morven’s timely return saves Armida from Brennan’s clutches, but it fails to reunify the Irish forces. Caught in the power struggle between O’Morven and Brennan over Armida, the Irish rebels turn against themselves and their own countrymen, becoming a ‘numerous and ferocious band, mutinous to their leader, hostile to government, and formidable to the country’ (4: 47). But Maturin’s cosmopolitan heroine contributes to the downfall of the Irish forces in another way as well. O’Morven makes tactical decisions based on her presence in the rebel camp, avoiding encounters with the English soldiers in order to protect her, changing routes to make travel easier for her, and, perhaps most seriously, deserting his troops mid-battle to check on her safety. Such decisions have dire political consequences not only for the Irish cause but for O’Morven as well, a conclusion he himself acknowledges near the end of the novel: ‘Had I never loved’, he muses, ‘had I never beheld the first of her species, my destiny would have been undivided, and the concentred [sic] forces of my mind would have produced something great even in error, and extorted reverence from mankind amid their censure’ (4: 76–7).10 In Maturin’s Milesian Chief, Armida comes between the English Wandesford and the Irish O’Morven, between the Irish O’Morven and the Irish Brennan, and between O’Morven and his national destiny. Threatening English-Irish Union and dissolving Irish unity, she marks the immanent failure of Ireland. Where the national heroine functions as a stabilizing figure, consolidating and unifying national place, the cosmopolitan heroine operates as a destabilizing force. What she does, as O’Morven suggests, is divide and scatter. An interloper in the early national tale, she appears as a social symptom, signalling the impossibility of romantic fantasies of national union. But if the cosmopolitan heroine represents the dissolution of nation in the early national tale, in post-Napoleonic ones she points to an alternative social order. In Maturin’s Women; or Pour et Contre




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(1818), for instance, the cosmopolitan heroine, Zaira, leads the novel’s Irish hero across the Irish border and into the borderless world of postwar Europe, where kings and their subjects move from nation to nation with a hitherto unknown fluidity. Herself a product of European culture, Zaira embodies this new Europe, holding court in her Parisian salon for an international crowd of sundry connoisseurs and intellectuals. Perhaps, as Oswald’s uncle concludes, the cosmopolitan heroine has no place in a wartime Europe bent on the consolidation and unification of nations. In the fluid and international climate of post-Napoleonic Europe, however, she would be right at home.

Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer: a cosmopolitan discourse Not only cosmopolitan figures but cosmopolitan literary forms threatened Burkean notions of nation and their related assumptions. Working well outside domestic genres, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) illustrates the way in which cosmopolitan narrative undermined certain romantic conceptions of genre sustaining Burkean formulations. ‘There is clearly a paradox in the fact that one of the most notable post-war Gothicists, C.R. Maturin, was felt by conservatives to be subversive’, Marilyn Butler writes in Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (1981).11 The kind of reception that Butler has in mind is represented by a figure like Samuel Coleridge whose well-known review of Maturin’s successful Gothic drama, Bertram (1816), deemed the play a ‘Jacobinical drama.’12 In his review, Coleridge objected to the play’s superfluous supernatural effects and narrative inconsistencies, but most objectionable in his mind was the adulterous affair between Bertram and the married Imogine introduced at the beginning of the fourth act: I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust, with which I witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants.13 What is at issue here is the intimate connection between just taste and pure morality that underpins Coleridge’s literary criticism. For him, dramas such as Bertram not only ‘disorganize’ moral principles but




‘poison’ the taste of the nation as well, fostering in the public mind a ‘craving … for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants’. That the British audience (with the exception of one ‘plain elderly man’ sitting beside him) could remain passive ‘under such an insult to common decency’ and, worse yet, that it could greet Bertram’s adulterous hero with ‘a thunder of applause’ indicates the extent to which the ‘spirit of jacobinism’ has pervaded British society (229). Coleridge’s negative response to Bertram was hardly disinterested (Drury-Lane chose to produce Bertram over one of Coleridge’s own plays), but his formulation of the ‘jacobinical drama’ is important in that it establishes a firm connection between national literature and national politics, making ‘jacobinical’ a generic as well as a political designation. Coleridge prefaces his criticism of Bertram with a discussion of British drama, in particular, of the internal politics of Drury-Lane Theatre. The main object of the theatre under the management of the late Mr. Whitbread, he explains, was to make money, and dramatic productions were selected according to their ability to fulfil that object. Under the new joint management of Thomas Dibden, Alexander Rae and the ‘Supreme Committee’, however, the theatre adopted a new mandate: Drury-Lane was to be restored to its former classical renown; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the expurgated muses of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be re-inaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter ‘Change, and Polito (late Pidcock’s) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. (Biographia, 208) Writing in 1816, Coleridge evokes the timely rhetoric of restoration to present Drury-Lane’s ambition to re-establish a national drama in Britain: British dramatists must be ‘re-inaugurated’, their ‘rightful dominion’ over the nation restored. In his view, the first step towards such a restoration is the elimination of all foreign drama, in particular those ‘speaking monsters’ that England has imported from the Continent. Coleridge’s desire to purify the English stage from all foreign imports recalls Burke’s desire to stop all alien (French) ‘manufactures’ at the English border, and for Coleridge (as for Burke) such a ‘restoration’ is not simple.14 First among the ‘speaking monsters’ to be eliminated for Coleridge is the German drama. A literary ‘Olla Podrida’ or Spanish stew, the genre mixes together the ‘bloated style and peculiar rhythm’ of Hervey’s




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Meditations, the ‘strained thoughts’, ‘figurative metaphysics’ and ‘solemn epigrams’ of Young’s Night Thoughts, the ‘loaded sensibility’, and ‘morbid consciousness’ of Richardson’s Clarissa, and the ‘horrific incidents’, ‘mysterious villains’, and ‘ruined castles’ of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (Biographia, 211). Such a stew, Coleridge suggests, does not sit well with many, and the best critics in Germany have denounced the genre as ‘mere cramps of weakness’ and ‘orgasms of a sickly imagination’ (211). Moreover, with its roots in England, ‘The so-called German Drama is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by re-adoption’ and is not really foreign at all (212). So Coleridge renames the genre the ‘modern jacobinical drama’, and argues that England should take responsibility for its own progeny. ‘We should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders’; he insists, ‘or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned from transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as young transported convicts usually come home with’ (212). Like other English travellers such as Byron and Hobhouse, Coleridge’s generic ‘brat’ has travelled from England to the Continent, only to return to England tainted with continental ‘manners’. For Coleridge, the jacobinical drama is complicit with political jacobinism in that it confuses and subverts ‘the natural order of things in their causes and effects’ (221). In particular, it represents ‘the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and classes where experience teaches us least to expect them’ (221). By disseminating such republican ideals, he suggests, jacobinical drama aspires to ‘reconcile us to vice and want of principle’ (221). Politically as well as morally subversive – and for Coleridge (as for Burke and Southey) the two are linked – the genre represents a threat to the nation and so should be removed from the national stage. Moreover, the jacobinical drama contradicts Coleridge’s own sense of what constitutes good art. For Coleridge, a work of art should grow organically from within itself. Its form should not be mechanical – imposed from the outside – but internal, innate. Such an organic form ‘shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form’.15 An artificial amalgamation of other genres, the jacobinical drama has no internal principle or order of its own. In short, it lacks what Coleridge posits as the primary criterion for all good art: organic unity. This is not to say that the jacobinical drama lacks form: it is a genre after all. But unlike other genres, it is non-unified (an amalgamation of genres). Its first reviewers saw Melmoth the Wanderer in just such a light, complaining that it transgressed established literary genres and lacked unity.




It operated outside norms of literary authority. The generally positive review of the novel in Blackwoods, for instance, deems Maturin ‘a sort of applauded rebel against all the constituted authorities of the literary judgement-seat’.16 In particular, the reviewer argues, Maturin’s works defy classical understandings of genre: ‘There is not one of them that a rigid disciple of the Aristotelian school of criticism would condescend to call by the name of any one given species of regular composition’ (161). Indeed, his works scorn the basic structure Aristotle claims fundamental to all genres, ‘for there is not one of them that has either beginning, or middle, or end’ (161). Melmoth the Wanderer is especially deviant in this regard: The truth is that it is mere curtesy to call MELMOTH ‘a romance’; the four volumes contain as many or more stories which, with the exception of the agency of one character common to them all, have no sort of connextion with each other, their personages being otherwise quite different, and their scenes laid at different periods, and in quite different parts of the world. (162) With its multiple plots, subplots and digressions, Melmoth the Wanderer has no singular story line to give the novel overall coherence. In short, it has no unity of action. Nor does it fulfil either of the other two classical unities, those of time and place. Spanning two centuries, the novel has no temporal centre, and containing tales set in Ireland, Spain, England, Germany, and India, it has no geographical centre. The key point, however, is that Melmoth the Wanderer breaches established literary categories: it does not belong to any ‘one given species of regular composition’. Blackwoods was not alone in considering Melmoth the Wanderer a sort of generic hybrid. Writing on the novel for the Quarterly Review in 1821, John Wilson Croker observed that along with nonsense, want of veracity, ignorance, blasphemy, brutality, and obscenity, Maturin’s ‘new ravings’ united the ‘worst particularities of the worst modern novels’.17 ‘Compared with it’, Croker writes, ‘Lady Morgan is almost intelligible – The Monk, decent – The Vampire, amiable – and Frankenstein, natural’ (303). Unintellible, indecent, unamiable, and unnatural, Melmoth the Wanderer is an assault ‘not merely on common sense and the English tongue … but on decency, and even religion’ (304). Most offputting for Croker, however, is the novel’s organizational structure: We shall not waste our time in endeavouring to unravel the tissue of stories which occupy these four volumes, they are contained one





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What is at issue is the heterogeneity: that Melmoth the Wanderer is a ‘tissue of stories’, ‘a nest of Chinese boxes’. But what really bothers Croker is less this heterogeneity (embedded narratives were not uncommon during this period) than the way in which Maturin’s narratives blur into one another. The novel is a ‘clumsy confusion’ in which distinction between tales is lost. Croker ascribes this formal confusion to ‘a mind either very loose in its principles, or very wild in its operations’ (304). For him, the radical instability of Maturin’s novel reflects the radical instability of Maturin’s mind. It was, however, in the pages of the liberal Edinburgh Review that the most rigorous criticism of the novel appeared. Like Croker, the reviewer for the Edinburgh Review found Melmoth the Wanderer appallingly over-determined, a ‘phantasmogorie exhibition’ that crammed in every fashionable trope imaginable regardless of its fit: the novel included ‘sybils and misers; parricides; maniacs in abundance; monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning; Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras’.18 Maturin himself represented a ‘certain class of writer’ who worked through formal and rhetorical excess (363). Like ‘offensive vagrants who used to thrust their mangled limbs and putrid sores into our faces to extort from our disgust what they could not wring from our compassion’, writers like Maturin ‘attempt, by a still more revolting exhibition, to terrify or nauseate us out of those sympathies which they might have the power to awaken by any legitimate appeal’ (362). In short, such writers manipulate sentiment rather than judgement to make their point, and the reviewer finds this jacobinical style particularly prevalent among Irish writers, for ‘[t]heir genius runs riot in the wantonness of its own uncontrolled exuberance; – their imagination, disdaining the restraint of judgement, imparts to their literature the characteristics of a nation in one of the earlier stages of civilization and refinement’ (355). Against this Irish ‘exuberance’, he advocates the plain language of preferred Irish writers such as Swift, whose ‘unstudied and familiar’ style of writing is better suited to public discourse (356). In order to impress upon the reader the sort of threat that Maturin’s novel poses, the reviewer broaches a cultural theory of genre.



within another like a nest of Chinese boxes; but instead of being the effect of nice workmanship, Mr. Maturin’s tales are involved and entangled in a clumsy confusion which disgraces the artist, and puzzles the observer. (304)

Underpinning this theory of genres in the Edinburgh Review is the idea of progress that defines genres not as static artifacts but dynamic entities. Nor are they independently evolving entities but forms enmeshed in national life. The reviewer proposes that national literatures – along with nations – reach a certain point of perfection and then begin to degenerate. Political change is one cause of such a degeneration; another is an ‘insatiable thirst for novelty’ (354). What happens in this second case is that a writer who is unable to secure ‘legitimate applause’ within the normative bounds of literature pushes outside those bounds, and he ‘arrests the attention of many who would fall asleep over monotonous excellence’ with ‘fantastic or monstrous innovation’. This writer is imitated by others, and ‘thus, by degrees, the whole literature of country becomes changed and deteriorated’ (355). One errant text can thus infect an entire national literature.19 The reviewer’s sentiments are clear: Melmoth the Wanderer and novels like it are ‘tumor[s] of words’ and it is ‘high time to step forward and abate a nuisance which threatens to become a besetting evil’ (354). Taken together, these early reviews of Melmoth the Wanderer delineate a certain class of text that stands in opposition to mainstream genres of the period. Heterogeneous and non-unified, novels such as Maturin’s cut across the borders of traditional generic categories, disrupting the literary status quo and threatening England’s national literature. Melmoth the Wanderer itself makes the point about generic migration and hybridity from the start. ‘The hint of this Romance (or Tale)’, Maturin asserts in the Preface, ‘was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons’.20 It is important that Maturin frames his novel with his own sermon, for it points to a fluidity not only between different kinds of discourse but also between his role as romance writer and his role as Anglican curate. Aside from his own theological writings, Maturin further informs the reader, his novel will draw on history: ‘The story of John Sandal and Elinor Mortimer is founded in fact’, and the ‘original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman’ (5). But Maturin positions his novel in terms of fictional genres in the preface as well, distinguishing his treatment of the Inquisition from that of the ‘Radcliffe-Romance’.21 Like his reviewers, the author too sees Melmoth the Wanderer as an amalgamation of genres, and the self-conscious literariness of the novel displays a cultural competence that includes not only British literary history but much of Western literary history as well. As Veronica Kennedy points out, Melmoth himself is an extraordinary compound of allusions: the character includes ‘touches of Zeus the Thunderer, Prometheus, the Satan of Paradise Lost and the Devil of folktale, of the German Faust of tradition




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as well as of the Faustus of Marlowe and the Faust of Goethe, of the Wandering Jew, of the Biblical and the Byronic Cain, of the other Byronic heroes – Lara, Manfred, and the Giaour – of Mephistopheles, of Vathek, of Ruthven, of the Bonhomme Misèr of French folklore, of Celtic wizards, druids and demons, of the amorous and evil Genii of the Arabian Nights, of Don Juan and the Demon Lovers of ballad tradition as well as the herovillains of such “Gothick” writers as Anne Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis’.22

Melmoth the Wanderer: a satanic pilgrim Melmoth the Wanderer follows a satanic pilgrim as he traverses the earth in search of some wretched or desperate soul willing to forfeit his salvation for earthly goods or glory. Proud, bored, and detached, Melmoth the Wanderer is the epitome of the Byronic traveller, and his stance recalls that of Childe Harold: ‘The world could show him no greater marvel than his own existence; and the facility with which he himself passed from region to region, mingling with, yet distinct from his species, like a wearied and uninterested spectator rambling through various seats of some vast theatre, where he knows none of the audience, would have prevented him from feeling astonished’ (Melmoth, 358). Maturin’s image of the world as theatre foregrounds spectatorial distance: the Wanderer watches history unfold with an ‘uninterested’ eye. Moreover, he is distanced from his fellow spectators. Like Childe Harold, he is an outsider, ‘mingling with, yet distinct from his species’. But where Byron keeps his traveller within the bounds of human sociability, distinguishing him from the misanthrope, Maturin pushes his outside all human attachment. Indeed, Maturin puts the Wanderer’s very humanity into question: a ‘disinherited child of nature’, he is ‘separated from life and humanity by a gulph [sic] impassable’ (319). He has neither empathy with nor sympathy for the human race, and he pursues those individuals least able to resist his temptation. ‘I never desert my friends in misfortune’, he warns Stanton sardonically: ‘When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be visited by me’ (45). Even the acquisition of wife and child fails to re-incorporate the Wanderer into the social body, and he leaves them both to die in the prisons of the Inquisition. The key point, however, is that Maturin’s traveller is free not only from national attachments but also from that most fundamental of attachments and the heart of the Burkean nation: love of hearth and home. Central to Maturin’s negative figure of the cosmopolitan is the irrelevance of borders. The frame narrative takes place in Ireland, but the




Wanderer’s diabolical mission leads him from nation to nation, and Maturin underlines the geographical sweep of his pilgrim’s travels by setting embedded narratives in Spain, England, Germany, and India. The Wanderer not only crosses national borders but does so with supernatural facility and rapidity: he has the ‘power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions with the swiftness of thought’ (537–8). One of the implications of this power is that he appears to be in two places at once, ‘active in his purposes of mischief in the remotest parts of Europe at the moment he was supposed to be expiating them in others’ (325). What is at issue here is not the kind of dual affiliation proposed by Edgeworth, for the Wanderer does not belong to any one nation, let alone two. Rather, he inhabits borderless space. The Wanderer defies not only abstract national borders but more concrete borders as well. He traverses the rock barrier that protects Immalee’s paradisal island, for example, with the same ease with which he crosses the walls of her father’s Spanish villa: ‘Be it known to you’, he informs her, ‘that I regard bolts, and bars, and walls, as much as I did the breakers and rocks of your Indian isle – that I can go where, and retire when I please’ (342–3). He also mysteriously penetrates Stanton’s cell in a London insane asylum, offering him instant liberty in exchange for his soul. Perhaps most impressive, however, is his infiltration of the deepest dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. He enters and exits the prison of the Inquisition ‘without help or hindrance … like one who had a master-key to its deepest recesses’ (227). Moreover, he moves within the Inquisition walls with astounding fluidity, negotiating its halls unseen by vigilant guards and slipping unheard into cells ‘impervious to human power’ (239). If no boundary can keep the Wanderer out, none can keep him in either, and he successfully escapes every prison in which he is enclosed. Buildings themselves refuse to harbour him: ‘Even this mansion of horror trembles to contain you;’ Stanton informs the Wanderer, ‘its walls sweat, and its floors quiver, while you tread them’ (58). If the Wanderer disdains spatial borders, he equally disdains temporal ones. As he points out to Stanton, he is ‘independent of time and place’ (44). When the novel opens in 1816, the Wanderer is over one hundred and fifty years old. His personal memory extends from the Restoration to the Napoleonic wars, and includes an intimate familiarity with such historical characters as the queen-mother Henriette of France, Louis Quatorze, and the Duchesse d’Orleans.23 This makes him a wonderful conversationalist: he is a master of language and his conversation is ‘rich, various, and intelligent’ (228). It also makes him an excellent historian, able to contextualize public events with a ‘minuteness and




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circumstantiality’ of detail beyond the reach of most historians. Moreover, the Wanderer’s memory is not limited to the past. He sees into the future, for instance, when he informs Stanton that their next meeting will be years hence in a madhouse. Unlike Byron’s traveller, then, Maturin’s Wanderer not only roams freely but is free from every given point in space and time. The novel introduces this figure through a portrait. Fetching a bottle of Madeira for his dying uncle, young Melmoth enters a locked closet and sees a portrait of one of his ancestors hanging on the wall. By candlelight he reads the words inscribed on the border of the painting: ‘Jno. Melmoth, anno 1646’. But where the portrait captures Melmoth the Wanderer as an image and its bordering inscription locates him firmly in time (the portrait was painted a hundred and fifty years ago), the subject himself defies such representational and temporal fixity. The portrait’s ‘original’, the uncle points out, ‘is still alive’, and young Melmoth catches his first glimpse of this mysterious ancestor hours later at his uncle’s death bed (18). But Maturin’s point about representation is made more forcefully when young Melmoth tries to destroy the portrait of his notorious ancestor: He seized it; – his hand shook at first, but the mouldering canvas appeared to assist him in the effort. He tore it from the frame with a cry half terrific, half triumphant; – it fell at his feet, and he shuddered as it fell. He expected to hear some fearful sounds, some unimaginable breathings of prophetic horror, follow this act of sacrilege, for such he felt it, to tear the portrait of his ancestor from his native walls. (60) It is important that young Melmoth’s symbolic act of destruction involves tearing the portrait from its frame and from the ‘native walls’ which support it. In effect, he rips the work of art from its proper site. But it is also important that the portrait itself seems to aid young Melmoth in its own de-siting: ‘the mouldering canvas’, Maturin writes, ‘appeared to assist him in the effort’. Indeed, the portrait begins to deconstruct itself by confounding the line between art and life: ‘As the wrinkled and torn canvas fell to the floor, its undulations gave the portrait the appearance of smiling’ (60). After young Melmoth destroys the portrait, he falls into a deep sleep. He dreams that the Wanderer is in his bedroom, but when he awakes, he finds himself alone. His right arm, however, ‘was black and blue, as from the recent gripe [sic] of a strong hand’ (60). Paradoxically, the destruction of the Wanderer’s representation (the portrait) is the impetus for his actual manifestation in the bedroom. In other words,




the sign of his absence (the portrait) brings about his presence (his arrival in the bedroom). Yet young Melmoth does not witness the Wanderer’s presence: he sees only another sign of his absence (the mark on his arm). In this way, the Wanderer confounds the line between presence and absence and, in so doing, he points to the instability of the sign itself. This instability has significant repercussions for Maturin’s own narrative. ‘If I could but trace that being’, Stanton asks himself after his first encounter with the Wanderer, ‘and what if I could?’ (39). The point of Maturin’s novel, however, is that the Wanderer cannot be traced. Stanton, for instance, trails him back and forth across Britain and the Continent and even encounters him twice, but he fails to enact the definitive meeting he so desires: I have sought him every where. – The desire of meeting him once more, is become as a burning fire within me, – it is the necessary condition of my existence. I have vainly sought him at last in Ireland, of which I find he is a native. – Perhaps our final meeting will be in (59) Stanton’s search for the Wanderer remains incomplete, and it is thus fitting that his manuscript breaks off not only in medias res but midsentence as well. What this does in terms of the novel as a whole is to defer closure. Indeed, narrative in Melmoth the Wanderer merely produces more narrative. When Monçada concludes the ‘Tale of the Indian’, for instance, he does so with the promise of more narrative. The ‘Tale of the Indian’, he reminds young Melmoth, pertains to only one of the skeletons preserved in Adonijah’s Madrid vault. He himself translated many more tales during his stay, and ‘[t]he circumstances relating to them were of a character still darker and more awful than those he had recited’ (534). Moreover, he has yet to complete his own story, and ‘the circumstances of his residence in the house of the Jew, his escape from it, and the reasons of his subsequent arrival in Ireland, were scarcely less extraordinary than anything hitherto related’ (534). Monçada is about to recount to young Melmoth the sequel to the ‘Tale of the Indian’ when the Wanderer himself enters the room, and announces: ‘Your ancestor has come home … his wanderings are over!’ (537). Significantly, Monçada’s narratives are left incomplete. The Wanderer’s diabolical mission has been unsuccessful – none of his victims has consented – and he now must prepare to bear the penalty for his ill-begotten gains himself. That night he locks himself in a room, instructing young Melmoth and Monçada not to open the door no matter what they hear. The two do as they are instructed, but the next




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morning they are amazed to find the room empty. They see traces of footsteps leading down a back staircase, and so follow them outside and across the estate to a summit overlooking the ocean. A few feet before the summit, the footsteps turn into a ‘down-trodden track’, and they surmise that the Wanderer must have been dragged to the edge of the cliff by supernatural forces and thrown to his death. All that remains of him, it appears, is his handkerchief, and young Melmoth climbs down the precipice to retrieve this ‘last trace of the Wanderer’ (542). The novel concludes with young Melmoth and Monçada exchanging ‘looks of silent and unutterable horror’ and then returning home. Appropriately enough, Maturin’s novel ends with two home comings, that of the Wanderer, and that of young Melmoth and Monçada. The end of the Wanderer’s narrative, however, is less certain. As Maturin’s repetition of the word ‘trace’ suggests (the word appears in various manifestations six times in the last two pages of the novel), young Melmoth and Monçada have drawn their conclusions about the Wanderer’s fate around a missing body. Suggestively, the Wanderer himself remains absent. Equally suggestive is the reader’s knowledge that the Wanderer has come back from the dead before. Earlier, in ‘The Lover’s Tale’, a clergyman is astonished to see the Wanderer alive because he had witnessed his death years before. Admittedly, Maturin may have had no intention of resurrecting the Wanderer, but he did write Melmoth the Wanderer with a sequel in mind. And, as Dale Kramer has observed, the premise of the novel allows for an infinite number of victims, its structure for an infinite number of narratives.24 What is important is that the possibility exists for Maturin to defer closure indefinitely. Just as the Wanderer cannot be contained within the limits of time or space, so his story cannot be contained within the limits of one narrative or even, perhaps, the limits of one novel.

‘Beads strung on the same string’: a narrative of alliance Melmoth the Wanderer as a whole foregrounds the construction of narrative. When Stanton is living in London, for example, his cousin asks him to accompany him to the countryside, purportedly to view a new estate that the cousin has purchased. Instead of a new estate, however, the cousin takes Stanton to an insane asylum where he leaves him in a room while he makes final arrangements for his incarceration. The unsuspecting Stanton picks up the book nearest to him and begins to read. Its author proposes that London be rebuilt with the stone fragments of Stonehenge in order to protect the city from fire.




He supplements this first proposal with ‘grotesque drawings of engines’ designed to remove the stones from Stonehenge, noting that these illustrations would have been more accurate if he had been allowed a knife to sharpen his pen (Melmoth, 46). Next the author proposes that the best way to spread Christianity to the east is to give Turkish ambassadors an ultimatum to choose between Christianity and immediate strangulation. He supplements this proposal with intricate paper cut-outs of the Turkish ambassadors, noting that the cut-outs would have been more complete if his scissors had not been taken from him. That very evening, however, he intends to catch a moon-beam, whet it on the iron knob of his door, and use it in place of the confiscated scissors. This ‘album of a mad-house’ nicely foreshadows Stanton’s own imminent incarceration. Mesmerized by the author’s descent into madness, Stanton is oblivious to his surroundings, and when he finally looks up from the book, he finds that he himself has been locked in a mad-house. But the ‘album of a mad-house’ is interesting in another sense as well. What is so unsettling about the album is not so much the irrational nature of the proposals it contains as the tacit violence involved in its creation. The ‘album of a mad-house’ is a book comprised of bits and pieces, and hewn out with sharpened pen and scissors. ‘There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made’, write Deleuze and Guattari.25 For Deleuze and Guattari, the book is an assemblage of content and expression where what is done is inseparable from what is said. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), they develop this idea in terms of two different types of book: the root-book and the rhizome-book. Taking its governing image from the tree, the ‘root-book’ is organized around a deep structure and possesses a ‘noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority’ (5). Deleuze and Guattari use the term to refer to the classical or traditional book, one that is hierarchical, linear, and totalizing. In contrast, the ‘rhizome-book’ is non-hierarchical, nonlinear, and heterogeneous. It takes its governing image from the rhizome or fascicular root, a root system consisting of an ‘indefinite multiplicity of secondary roots’ (5). Unlike the tree, the rhizome ‘has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermesso’ (25). Grass, for instance, is a rhizome. These two images – the tree and the rhizome – are at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the root-book and the rhizome-book and each implies a very different model of relation: ‘The tree is filiation’, they explain, ‘but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance’ (25). Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer may usefully be thought of as a kind of rhizome-book. The novel is not organized around one narrative but




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consists of a multiplicity of narratives, with no one narrative acting as a pivot. Although three of the six embedded narratives open off the frame narrative, three open off embedded narratives, creating four distinct planes of narration in the novel: the frame narrative, tales (‘Tale of the Spaniard’, and ‘The Wanderer’s Dream’), tales within tales (‘Tale of the Indians’), and tales within tales within tales (‘The Tale of Guzman’s Family’, and ‘The Lover’s Tale’). Layering the narratives in this way adds a certain asymmetry to the novel’s form. The ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, for instance, opens out into the ‘Tale of the Indians’, and the ‘Tale of the Indians’ into ‘Tale of Guzman’s Family’ and ‘The Lover’s Tale’. It also breaks up the supremacy of the frame: movement occurs not only between frame and tale but between tale and tale as well. This decentring impulse is central to Melmoth the Wanderer. In a suggestive moment, Monçada is recounting to young Melmoth the ‘Tale of the Indians’ when he mentions a hiatus that occurred during the Wanderer’s seduction of Immalee. He explains that the Wanderer neglected to visit Immalee on her paradisal island for some time, and when he returned, he had lost his desire to corrupt her. Monçada digresses from this main point, however, to note that the Wanderer spent his time away from Immalee in London tempting ‘the Englishman Stanton’ (298). Digression is nothing new in Maturin’s novel: it is an integral characteristic of his prose and is important both to his narrative structure and to the literary apparatus which frames the novel, most notably, the epigraphs and informational footnotes.26 It does not forestall narrative movement so much as re-direct it, moving the reader sideways instead of forward. Although digression transforms a straight highway into a series of scenic detours, in other words, the reader is travelling all the same. Monçada’s digression, however, referring as it does to Stanton’s manuscript, usefully highlights the non-linear structure of Maturin’s narrative in another way as well. Stanton’s narrative and the ‘Tale of the Indians’ are concurrent in time, yet they appear at different points in the novel. The formalist distinction between ‘story’ (the chronological order of events) and ‘plot’ (the order in which those events are presented to the reader) is useful here. Maturin requires his reader to refer back (in the plot) to something occurring simultaneously (in the story). On the whole, Maturin’s narratives do not appear in chronological order, and thus the reader is constantly moving back and forth through time. Indeed, Melmoth the Wanderer does not work teleologically by unfolding one line of meaning through time but cumulatively, adding narrative to narrative. Struck by the mention of Stanton’s name in Monçada’s




digression, young Melmoth – who (like Maturin’s reader) has already read Stanton’s manuscript – impatiently interrupts Monçada and asks him to repeat himself. Monçada’s response is key: ‘Have patience with me, Senhor … have patience, and you will find we are all beads strung on the same string. Why should we jar against each other? our union is indissoluble’ (298). In an important sense, Maturin’s narratives are like ‘beads strung on the same string’. Although each bead retains a certain autonomy (they can be different sizes, shapes, colours), together they form one necklace. Moreover, the beads can be rearranged, new beads added or old beads taken away, all without destroying the integrity of the necklace. The Wanderer himself threads his way through each narrative bead, but he does not pull the narratives together into a clear whole. The novel works less as filiation than as alliance, operates not as an organic unity but as a non-homogeneous union of narratives. Given young Melmoth’s struggle to create one coherent story out of detached bits and pieces, his impatience with Monçada is understandable. Such an incremental narrative structure can be disorienting, and Maturin takes time at this point in the novel to re-orient his own reader: ‘[Monçada] proceeded with the story of the unhappy Indian, as recorded in the parchments of Adonijah, which he had been compelled to copy, and of which he was anxious to impress every line and letter on his listener, to substantiate his own extraordinary story’ (299). Maturin’s expository review re-enforces the earlier point about the interdependence of narratives: the credibility of Monçada’s ‘extraordinary story’ rests on the other stories he tells. More important, it re-situates the reader within the novel’s labyrinthine structure. By rehearsing each level of narrative through which the reader has moved – from the frame to the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’ to the ‘Tale of the Indian’ – Maturin creates a sort of narrative map by which his reader can get his bearings. Nonetheless, Melmoth the Wanderer, fracturing as it does narrative unity, encourages a sort of scattered reading. Like the Wanderer himself, the reader wanders from place to place, from time to time, and from narrative to narrative. Maturin compounds this fracturing of narrative unity by introducing broken texts into his novel. Stanton’s manuscript, for instance, is ‘discoloured, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader’ (28). Through time, the elements have eaten away at the paper of the manuscript, leaving large sections of the narrative either missing or unintelligible. This has important consequences for the manuscript’s reader: young Melmoth, we are told, ‘could make out only a sentence here and there’ (28). Maturin replicates young Melmoth’s reading experience for his own reader, breaking




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up his presentation of the manuscript with blank spaces and setting those spaces off with series of asterisks. If the physical form of the book supports the idea of the text as an organic unity, the effacement of the physical text puts into question traditional assumptions about the unity of the work of art. Stanton’s manuscript is no longer a clearly bordered and self-contained object: the line between text and world has dissolved. Certainly, missing or unintelligible sections of narrative are a standard gothic procedure.27 At the same time, Maturin takes the procedure to an extreme, and, in the context of Melmoth the Wanderer, his fracturing of narrative encourages a distinct counter-reading to the centripetal ‘national’ reading offered by other novelists of the period like Scott. ‘Scott’s manner of composition … shows a very interesting parallel to Hegel’s philosophy of history’, Georg Lukàcs observes in his well-known chapter on Scott in The Historical Novel (1962).28 For Lukàcs, Scott’s historical novels anticipate Hegel’s philosophy of history in that they broach a dialectic of historical development in which progress develops out of conflict. In particular, his novels ‘concentrate’ and ‘intensify’ historical events into a tight teleology (41). Conflict reconciles itself in the emergence of something new: Thus out of the struggles of the Saxons and Normans there arose the English nation, neither Saxon nor Norman; in the same way the bloody Wars of the Roses gave rise to the illustrious reign of the House of Tudor, especially that of Queen Elizabeth; and those class struggles which manifested themselves in the Cromwellian Revolution were finally evened out in the England of today, after a long period of uncertainty and civil war, by the “Glorious Revolution” and its aftermath. (32) Lukàcs identifies this manner of composition as national: Scott is a ‘patriot’ who ‘sees and portrays the complex and intricate path which led to England’s national greatness and to the formation of the national character’ (53, 54). Maturin’s manner of composition, in contrast, is nonteleological and non-dialectical. Narrative in Melmoth produces no ‘logic’ whereby one part answers another, and both resolve into a third part. Subverting organic theories of art and genre, Maturin appears unpatriotic and unhistorical. In Lukàcs’s sense, he is un-national. Instead, what he encourages is a scattered cosmopolitan reading, so that it is not surprising reviewers like Coleridge should expel him as ‘jacobin’. In her genealogy of the new cosmopolitanism, Amanda Anderson observes a tension between universalist ethical assumptions and the




desire ‘to cultivate ethical practices that do not impose false universals’, and it is this tension, she argues, that is behind the ‘casual normativity’ of the new cosmopolitanism.29 Mediating between the universal and the particular, the new cosmopolitanism advocates an ethico-political stance that is at once detached and situated, and this stance has important implications for genre. ‘[T]he articulations of cosmopolitanism often occur not within a philosophic or high theoretical mode’, Anderson notes, ‘but rather within genres more classically literary or eclectic: the essay, the autobiography, travel writing, and works of literature generally’ (275). Uncomfortable with abstract universalism, the new cosmopolitans shy away from the traditional modes of philosophical justification favoured by neo-Kantian universalists such as Habermas, and adopt ‘a process of incremental, casual description’ (275). In particular, they invite ‘descriptions from the perspective of the participant as he or she negotiates a dense array of affiliations and commitments’ (275). The cosmopolitan fictions of Edgeworth, Byron, Staël, and Maturin suggest that Anderson’s observations about the casual normativity of the new cosmopolitanism have a much wider – and older – resonance. In the politically fraught climate of the early nineteenth century, these four writers turned to genres such as Enlightenment narrative, national tale, and gothic to take up the question of nation. Together their cosmopolitan fictions constitute not only a neglected counter-voice to dominant understandings of nationness in the Romantic period but also a neglected part of a larger genealogy of cosmopolitanism.




Throughout the course of this book, I have emphasized the continuity between Enlightenment philosophy and the idea of the nation, focusing in particular on how the cosmopolitan model of nation operated in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain as an alternative to the Burkean model, offering writers such as Jeffrey, Edgeworth, and Byron an understanding of nationness that was in sympathy with eighteenth-century religious, intellectual, and political universalisms. After the Napoleonic wars, however, the same cosmopolitan model was also evoked in counter-enlightenment terms, and it is with a brief look at two examples of this reactionary cosmopolitanism that I conclude: Robert Southey’s Colloquies (1829) and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). In post-Napoleonic Britain, both Robert Southey and Mary Shelley turned to cosmopolitanism in their efforts to theorize counterrevolutionary politics. Their contrasting readings of the Enlightenment idea of a universal history not only neatly signal the reassessment of cosmopolitanism that took place in Britain in the years following the Napoleonic wars, thus serving as a bookend to the late eighteenthcentury vilification of cosmopolitan thought with which I began the book; they also draw attention to the way in which early nineteenthcentury cosmopolitanism – like cosmopolitanism today – points in both progressive and reactionary directions. ‘I believe I should be better employed in thus studying one man, than in perusing the abridgement of Universal History in sixty volumes’, writes William Godwin in his well-known 1797 ‘Essay on History and Romance’.1 The kind of universal history Godwin has in mind is represented by the 30 volume Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present which, published between 1736 and 1765 and reissued several times during the later half of the eighteenth century, met a need 143



Epilogue: Reactionary Cosmopolitanism

in eighteenth-century Britain for a ‘general’ history. A monument to the Enlightenment drive for compilation, the Universal History was both expansive and inclusive, containing histories of all peoples- modern and ancient, strong and weak, big and small. Godwin’s negative response to such universal histories is part of his larger critique of Enlightenment historiography in ‘Essay on History and Romance’, and it nicely underlines a more general shift in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century from cosmopolitan histories to national ones. In the essay, Godwin divides history into two main branches: ‘the study of mankind in a mass’ and the ‘study of the individual’ (291). He turns to the first branch first, arguing that Enlightenment studies of ‘the progress, the fluctuations, the interests and the vices of society’ are a ‘dry and frigid science’ (291–2). Instead of such general studies, he encourages historians to look to the concrete ‘materials’ out of which history is composed (292–3): Laying aside the generalities of historical abstraction, we must mark the operation of human passions; must observe the empire of motives whether groveling [sic] or elevated; and must note the influence that one human being exercises over another, and the ascendancy of the daring and the wise over the vulgar multitude. It is thus, and thus only, that we shall be enabled to add, to the knowledge of the past, a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity. (293) Privileging the concrete over the abstract, the specific over the general, and the particular over the universal, Godwin’s critique of universal history points forward to his own histories, and to the national history writing of writers such as Walter Scott and Thomas Macaulay whose influential works set the dominant historical paradigm for much of the nineteenth century. Building out of the cosmopolitan political philosophy of Kant, however, the idea of a universal history gained new currency in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, giving shape to a competing thread running through nineteenth-century historiography.2 Understood in a Kantian sense, as I explain in Chapter 1, universal history is not an expansive and inclusive compilation (a history that includes all nations), nor is it a sacred history (a Christian teleology consummated in Apocalypse and Millennium) – although aspects of these do appear alongside nineteenthcentury inflections of the idea. Rather, subordinating the individual and the national to the universal, it regards humanity as a complete whole developing towards one destiny, and in post-Napoleonic Britain, the idea offered writers as diverse as Southey and Shelley an alternative to




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An unexpected alliance: Southey, Kant, and the question of international federation Begun shortly after Waterloo and published in 1829, Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society appropriates the cosmopolitan idea of a universal history for conservative political ends. An extended comparison between Southey’s own time and that of the Renaissance, the Colloquies consists of a series of conversations between Southey’s alter ego, Montesino, and the ghost of Sir Thomas More on a variety of topics, including religion, trade, and national and international politics. Stressing the Burkean ideals of local attachment, historical continuity, and slow change, Southey argues that contemporary Britain is in many ways inferior to More’s Renaissance England, and that the nation’s best path lies in the return to and preservation of traditional values. A response to the growing liberal push for reform in Britain and to the post-Napoleonic re-structuring of Europe, the Colloquies as a whole is anti-Enlightenment, anti-reform, and pro-restoration.3 It is somewhat surprising, then, that Southey turns the idea of a universal history, an idea with a clear Enlightenment heritage, to legitimate the post-revolutionary social order and to justify Britain’s role in an Allied politics. Southey introduces the idea of a universal history in Colloquy Two, ‘The Improvement of the World’, where More and Montesino discuss Montesino’s assertion that the world has improved, is improving, and will continue to improve. More agrees with Montesino that the world is improving, but he questions the exact nature and progress of this improvement, and the Colloquy proceeds by way of dialogue to refine and qualify Montesino’s initial assertion. ‘You hold […] that the human race will one day attain the utmost degree of general virtue, and thereby general happiness, of which humanity is capable’, More inquires: ‘Upon what do you found this belief?’4 Montesino carefully reworks More’s statement before answering it, admitting only to believing that ‘a happier condition of society is possible than that in which any nation is existing at this time, or has at any time existed’ (29). Together, he explains, ‘good laws, good institutions, and good governments’ help to diminish moral and physical evil (29). To achieve the ‘utmost degree of general virtue’ posited by More, however, would mean the complete elimination of evil, a feat possible only by ‘the special grace of God’ (29). Drawing attention



the more prominent national teleologies being exercised by writers like Godwin, Scott, and Macaulay.

to the limits of human agency, Montesino’s response foregrounds the difference between secular and sacred histories. At the same time, it reinforces the optimistic progressivism of Enlightenment universal histories: Montesino’s assertion ‘is supported by that general improvement (always going on if it be regarded upon the great scale) to which all history bears witness’ (30). The key point here, however, is that Southey cuts his notion of universal improvement loose from its familiar liberal moorings. Contrary to popular opinion, More warns, the ‘triumph’ of ‘liberal opinions’ such as free trade, freedom of the press, and the extension of franchise will usher in no Millennium (35). Indeed, ‘The fact is undeniable,’ he insists, ‘that the worst principles in religion, in morals, and in politics, are at this time more prevalent than they ever were known to be in any former age’ (32). For Southey, humanity as a whole is proceeding towards perfectibility, but its path is not the irreversible and continual advancement that Enlightenment universal histories suggest. Indeed, he argues, the consummation of human history rests on both divine Providence and human free will. Together the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about ‘something like that Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream … [something] like that millennium in which Saints as well as enthusiasts have trusted’ (27). Southey’s re-working of the Enlightenment idea of a universal history comes into explicit focus in the conclusion to the Colloquies with his discussion of Kant’s 1784 essay, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’. ‘Here, Sir Thomas,’ asserts Montesino, ‘is the opinion which I have attempted to maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched there according to the rules of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers’ (314). Fueled by English translations of Kant such as De Quincey’s 1824 translation of ‘Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-political Plan’, Southey’s positive assessment of Kant is not only part of a renewed critical interest in the philosopher and his political philosophy in the wake of Waterloo; it also figures in the more general post-Napoleonic re-opening of British thought to Continental literature.5 If for late eighteenth-century writers such as Burke and Taylor, Kant was a Jacobin revolutionary, for the post-Napoleonic Southey, he was a ‘political Achilles’ and ‘as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to be’ (314, 315).6 In Colloquies, Southey is particularly attracted to Kant’s idea of a universal history, the idea that (as Southey puts it) ‘individuals and nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory purposes, [follow] the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thus promot[e]




a process, which even if they perceived it, they would little regard’ (316). Following Kant, he argues that there is a singular purpose governing the actions of all individuals and nations: human history involves the ‘steady and continuous, though slow developement [sic] of certain great predispositions in human nature: and that … the great current of human actions flows in a regular stream towards this developement’ (316). To make sense of human history then, Southey asserts, it is necessary to extend one’s vision beyond the here and now. Although the ‘present aspects’ of Britain and Europe may lean more towards evil than towards good, for instance, humanity as a whole is still ‘proceeding toward the perfectibility for which [it is] designed’ (325). If Southey is attracted to Kant’s idea of a universal history, however, he is less enamored of his notion of ‘cosmopolitan purpose’. For Kant, as we saw in Chapter One, the cosmopolitan purpose underlying universal history is the development of human reason: enlightenment. For Southey, it is divine providence. Southey thus Christianizes Kant’s universal teleology of reason, replacing Kant’s ‘hidden plan of Nature’ with the ‘revealed will of God’ (319). For Southey, history ultimately unfolds according to God’s plan, not Nature’s. ‘Let man dutifully obey that will [of God], and the perfection of society and of human nature will be the result of such obedience;’ More asserts, ‘but upon obedience they depend’ (320). In practical terms, this means that subjects will not find their ‘perfect welfare’, states will not find their ‘full security’, and humanity will not realize its true destiny until ‘there be a system of Government, conducted in strict conformity to the precepts of the Gospel’ (319). Southey’s re-writing of Kant’s idea of universal history and its cosmopolitan purpose has important implications for his consideration of post-Napoleonic politics, and in particular, for the pressing question of international federation. For Kant, Southey explains, the realization of cosmopolitan purpose entails both internal (domestic) and external (international) components: ‘[t]he history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as the unraveling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations, (and as the condition of that … in its external relations also,) as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed’ (318). Southey activates a similar model, but directs that model towards reactionary rather than progressive ends. On the national level, Southey argues, Britain must struggle against moral weakness in all its forms, including Catholic emancipation and the recent political push for reform. ‘There can be no health, no soundness in the state,’ he asserts, ‘till Government shall regard the moral



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improvement of the people as its first great duty’ (331). Nor is it enough to improve things within British borders. In order to achieve internal stability, Britain must direct its attention to what is taking place outside its borders as well. In particular, it must re-consider its insular foreign policy and enter into federation with other nations. For post-Napoleonic Southey, the future security of both Britain and Europe lies not in war between nations but in the implementation and conservation of a balance of states, a model akin to the political internationalism put forth at the beginning of the Napoleonic wars by Edinburgh reviewers such as Jeffrey and Brougham, and one quite different from that which appears in Southey’s own war-time writings. Viewed with Kant’s goal of perpetual peace in mind, Southey finds Britain’s refusal to profit unduly from the Napoleonic wars laudable: ‘There is hope for the world as well as for ourselves, when a nation, which is second to no other in resources and in renown, sees clearly that it needs no aggrandizement, abstains from all aggression, and disclaims any ambition, that alone excepted of maintaining the station to which its own exertions, and the blessing of God, have raised it’ (229). If Britain’s restraint gives Southey hope, however, the recent squabbles between France, Germany, and Italy over national borders point to how far Europe has yet to go before Kant’s ideal is fulfilled. France, which ought to be satisfied with its own power and extent of territory, will not, till a better principle prevail there than has ever yet predominated in its councils. In Germany there are jealousies which only slumber; and there is a more dangerous struggle of opinions, between governments which grant too little, and enthusiasts who demand too much. The inferior states are ill-compacted, and their weakness holds out a temptation to their ambitious neighbours. Italy is in a worse condition; a condition disgraceful to itself and reproachful to all its rulers. It suffers under the double cure of foreign dominion and of its own fatal superstition; the pestilent influence of that Upas extends far and wide, … but Italy lies under the droppings of the poison-tree. (231) Indeed, perpetual peace will not come to Europe, Southey insists, ‘till good shall have triumphed over evil in the struggles which are brooding, or shall have obtained such a predominance as to allay the conflict of opinions before it breaks into open war’ (332). Significantly, Southey invokes the Holy Alliance as an important step towards just such a perpetual peace. United under the auspices of shared Christian values, and




dedicated to preserving peace throughout Europe, the Holy Alliance operates for Southey as a concrete expression of Kant’s federation of free states. ‘[I]mperfect and unstable as it is,’ Southey proclaims, the Holy Alliance ‘is in itself a recognition of [Kant’s] principle’ (332). Other conservative writers during the period understood the Holy Alliance very much in this way, reading it in terms of universal history and seeing it as the fulfilment of Kant’s cosmopolitan political philosophy. Writing in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1830, for instance, Thomas De Quincey concludes a review entitled ‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’ with the declaration: ‘I had much to say of Kant in the way of blame; but I am not sorry that my last words about him happen to be those of praiseand praise from a writer who had great prejudices to overcome, being, in an ultra-British sense, hostile to metaphysicians as a class.’7 De Quincey’s words of praise for Kant in this essay are reserved primarily for the notion of a federal union of states, a notion that he – like Southey – finds in keeping with the slow progress towards federation initiated by the Holy Alliance. ‘Certainly,’ De Quincey writes, ‘this was the first step taken by leading nations to realize the fact of a Federal Areopagnus for Europe, let the immediate purpose have been what it may’ (78). De Quincey concedes that given the still imperfect state of humanity’s moral development ‘the growth of a Federation, purified for Kant’s purpose, will be slow’ (78). At the same time, he suggests that ‘Perhaps [Kant] did not himself think otherwise’ (78). ‘Nay’, De Quincey concludes, ‘it is very possible that the satirical signboard of a Dutch innkeeper, which [Kant] pleasantly alludes to in his preface [to his essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’].… A churchyard, filled with graves, and bearing the sarcastic superscription of Perpetual Peacemay, in fact, express the amount of his own serious anticipations in this region of human hopes’ (78).

The end of universal history: Shelley’s The Last Man If for conservatives such as Southey and De Quincey the Allied victory at Waterloo and the ensuing Holy Alliance signaled the coming apotheosis of universal history, for liberals such as Mary Shelley it augured its end. For Shelley, the recent developments in Europe had proven earlier hopes for a ‘universal cosmopolitan existence’ to be at best premature and at worst utopian, and her 1826 novel The Last Man offers another rewriting of Kant’s idea of a universal history. In Shelley’s hands, the optimistic progressivism of Enlightenment universal histories mutates into a universal nightmare as individuals and nations alike are subordinated to the ‘steadily advancing but slow development’ of the world-leveling plague.8



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Shelley’s The Last Man presents itself as a kind of universal history from the start. The frame narrative opens with the author and her companion hunting for antiquities around Naples in the winter of 1818. They enter the Sibyl’s Cave and find fragments of ‘leaves, bark, and other substances … traced with written characters’ scattered on the cave floor.9 These Sibylline leaves are written in multiple languages (known and unknown) and are from multiple periods (ancient and modern), and Shelley’s first task is to collect them: she and her companion return to the cave numerous times, picking up more leaves to add ‘to [their] store’ (3). If Shelley’s role as collector of the Sibylline leaves suggests Godwin’s sense of universal history as an expansive and inclusive compilation, her role as ‘decipherer’ of the leaves points to more Kantian one. ‘Sometimes I have thought, that, obscure and chaotic as they are, they owe their present form to me, their decipherer’, Shelley writes: ‘As if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael’s Transfiguration in St. Peter’s; he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent’ (4). Foregrounding the similarity between historian and artist, Shelley’s analogy draws attention to the constructedness of history: ‘Doubtless,’ she concedes, the leaves ‘have suffered distortion and diminution of interest and excellence in my hands’ (4). But the mosaic suggests something else about history as well, for it is only when the ‘obscure and chaotic’ leaves are collected together that pattern emerges, that the individual leaves become intelligible. ‘Time and experience have placed me on an height from which I can comprehend the past as a whole;’ claims Shelley’s last man, Verney, ‘and in this way I must describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be harmony’ (192–3). It is only by extending one’s horizon of inquiry beyond the random actions of individuals and nations to the gradual progress of humanity as a whole through time that the historian is able to make sense of human history, that one is able to (as Verney puts it) ‘lay bare the secrets of destiny, and reveal the meaning of the enigma, whose explanation closed the history of the human race’ (311). If Shelley’s insistence that we must look beyond the finite machinations of individuals and nations to the species as a whole to find meaning supports Kant’s idea of a universal history, her narration of the plague’s gradual destruction of humanity re-works his notion of cosmopolitan purpose. ‘For seven years’, Verney recounts, the plague ‘had had full sway upon earth; she had trod every nook of our spacious globe; she had mingled with the atmosphere, which as a cloak enwraps all our fellow-creatures –




the inhabitants of native Europe-the luxurious Asiatic-the swarthy African and free American had been vanquished and destroyed by her’ (310). Like Maturin’s cosmopolitan Melmoth, Shelley’s plague defies all borders – social, political, geographical. Universal, unpredictable, and uncontainable, it destroys rich and poor, young and old, countrydweller and city-dweller, European and Asian, African and American alike. Shelley’s narrative treatment of the cosmopolitan plague has distinct political implications. In Shelley’s novel, no nation, no matter how remote or self-contained is exempt from the plague’s ‘universal visitation’ (176). ‘I spread the whole earth out as a map before me’, Verney explains: ‘On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety’ (188). As multiple critics have observed, Shelley links the plague’s imperialistic sweep to international commerce.10 International commerce facilitates the spread of the plague: the plague spreads first along established trade routes. Moreover, international commerce is also one of its first casualties. In Britain, for instance, economic devastation hits before the epidemic itself: Bankers, merchants, and manufacturers, whose trade depended on exports and interchange of wealth, became bankrupt. Such things, when they happen singly, affect only the immediate parties; but the prosperity of the nation was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses. Families bred in opulence and luxury, were reduced to beggary. The very state of peace in which we gloried was injurious; there were no means of employing the idle, or sending any over plus of population out of the country. (169–70) Rather than stabilizing the national economy, Britain’s commercial dependence on foreign trade puts the whole nation at risk. If for early nineteenth-century writers such as Jeffrey and Edgeworth international commerce supports a cosmopolitan agenda of universal enlightenment and perpetual peace, for the post-Napoleonic Shelley it facilitates universal misery and worldwide destruction. The key point here, however, is that for Shelley, borders permeable to the free migration of commodities and labour are also permeable to the plague. In its unfettered movement across borders, Shelley’s plague challenges Burkean understandings of the nation as insular and self-enclosed, and its imperial sweep anticipates mid-century descriptions of the ‘cosmopolitan’ nature of capital by writers such as J.S. Mill and Marx. This negative sense of the cosmopolitan is not limited to Shelley’s treatment of the cosmopolitan plague in the novel; it extends to



Epilogue 151

cosmopolitan figures as well. The Byronic Lord Raymond is a case in point. Raymond, we are told, is ‘emphatically a man of the world’ (31). He is passionate, urbane, and ‘worldly wise’ (33). He is also a political internationalist who believes for fighting for liberty in all nations: although he is an Englishman, Raymond becomes a hero in the Greek fight for independence. Such Byronic cosmopolitanism, Shelley warns, destroys domestic relations, that love of hearth and home that is the heart of the Burkean nation: Raymond, for instance, betrays the trust of his pure, domestically-minded English wife, Perdita, for the sake of the worldly and politically minded Greek princess, Evadne. Moreover, it slips easily into imperialism. Back home in England after his first military success in Greece, for instance, Raymond informs Verney that his first act as King of England will be to ‘unite with the Greeks, take Constantinople, and subdue all Asia’ (40). Indeed, Verney observes, Raymond ‘seemed to govern the whole earth in his grasping imagination’ (40). Set against the Byronic cosmopolitanism of Raymond in The Last Man is the philosophical cosmopolitanism of Adrian, Earl of Windsor. ‘Adrian felt that he made a part of a great whole’, Shelley writes: ‘He owned affinity not only with mankind, but all nature was akin to him; the mountains and sky were his friends; the winds of heaven and the offspring of earth his playmates; while he the focus only of this mighty mirror, felt his life mingle with the universe of existence’ (31). Where Raymond demonstrates a certain political realism, Adrian is a moral idealist. His philosophical cosmopolitanism is rooted in universal benevolence and a desire for world peace. If Shelley dismisses Raymond’s Byronic cosmopolitanism as dangerously imperialistic, however, she rejects Adrian’s philosophical cosmopolitanism as unrealistic and impractical. For a post-Napoleonic Shelley, political realism and moral idealism cannot be reconciled, and neither Raymond’s nor Adrian’s strain of cosmopolitanism goes without censure.11 The crucial point here is that Shelley’s universal history is not so much a testament to the success of Enlightenment cosmopolitan ideals as it is a sign of humanity’s failure to achieve them. In a suggestive moment near the end of Volume Three, Verney asks ‘Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature?’ (290). The answer comes not from without but from within: ‘Sudden an internal voice, articulate and clear, seemed to say: – Thus from eternity, it was decreed: the steeds that bear Time onwards had this hour and this fulfillment enchained to them, since the void brought forth its burthen. Would you read backwards the unchangeable laws of Necessity?’ (290). The Last Man reads the ‘laws of Necessity’ backwards.




In Shelley’s novel, the progress of human history is not so much a one-way march from savagery to more and more advanced stages of civilization as it is the reverse. As the plague spreads across the globe, social organizations become more and more rudimentary, degenerating from nation states, to nations, to tribes, to families, to individuals. Verney’s farewell to England captures this process nicely: We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. We saw depart all hope of retrieving our ancient state – all expectation, except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from the wreck of the past. To preserve these we had quitted England – England, no more; for without her children, what name could that barren island claim? With tenacious grasp we clung to such rule and order as could best save us; trusting that, if a little colony could be preserved, that would suffice at some remoter period to restore the lost community of mankind. (300) The same asocial tendencies that encourage national and international union and propel society towards a universal cosmopolitan existence for Kant, here propel humanity back to its most basic purpose: ‘life – life – the continuation of our animal mechanism – was the Alpha and Omega of the desires, the prayers, the prostrate ambition of the human race’ (212). Read as a universal history, Shelley’s novel is not a narrative of union and evolution but rather one of disunion and devolution. Fittingly, then, the novel concludes with Shelley’s last man, Verney, setting off for a tour of the globe: I would coast the beauteous shores and sunny promontories of the blue Mediterranean, pass Naples, along Calabria, and would dare the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis; then, with fearless aim, (for what had I to lose?) skim ocean’s surface towards Malta and the further Cyclades … I would coast Asia Minor, and Syria, and, passing the seven-mouthed Nile, steer northward again, till losing sight of forgotten Carthage and deserted Lybia I should reach the pillars of Hercules … and, still obeying the breezes of heaven, forever round another and another promontory, anchoring in another and another bay, still ploughing seedless ocean, leaving behind the verdant land



Epilogue 153


For Kant, as we saw in Chapter 1, because the globe is finite, it is a communal possession: it belongs to all. All individuals thus have the right to visit all regions of the earth. Pushing Kant’s cosmopolitan right to visit to the extreme, Shelley’s last man is not just a citizen of the world; he is the only citizen of the world as well. At the close of his essay on the ‘Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, Kant writes: ‘It is admittedly a strange and at first sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such premises’ (52). If Shelley’s Last Man is a dark reflection of the optimistic progressivism of Kant’s ‘Idea of Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, it bears much in common with the satirical formulation of perpetual peace as grave-filled churchyard that prefaces his ‘Essay on Perpetual Peace’ as well, for in Shelley’s universal history, the realization of Kant’s ‘cosmopolitan purpose’ is coterminous not with enlightenment, but with the end of the world.



of native Europe, adown the tawny shore of Africa, having weathered the fierce seas of the Cape, I may moor my worn skiff in a creek, shaded by spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean. (341–2)

Introduction 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991). 2. Romantic cosmopolitanism is a topic of increasing critical attention. Using the political and philosophical cosmopolitanisms of Kant and Habermas as his frame, Michael Scrivener has recently drawn attention to how feminism, slavery abolition, and Jewish emancipation operate as ‘areas of contestation between emergent cosmopolitan politics and an emergent nationalistic politics’ in early nineteenth-century Britain. See his The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1776–1832 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 3. Other critics have explored alternative understandings of Romantic cosmopolitanism. See for example, Jon Klancher’s essay ‘Discriminations, or Romantic Cosmopolitanisms’, in Kevin Gilmartin and James Chandler, eds, Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British culture, 178–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Adriana Craciun’s British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and the European Romantic Review’s special issue on the subject (Volume 16, Number 2, April 2005). There has also been a lot of recent critical attention in Romantic studies to imperialism and colonialism as international or transnational energies in the period. See, for example, Julia Wright, Ireland, India, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and the essays collected in two important volumes: Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, eds, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 3. Bruce Robbins, ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’, Social Text, 31–2 (1992), 173. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, Catherine Porter, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Martin Thom, Republics, Nations, Tribes (London and New York: Verso, 1995). 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘On the Law of Nations’, in The Friend vol. 2, Barbara E. Rooke, ed., vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 323. 6. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 133. 7. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’, Edinburgh Review, 19 (February 1812), 467. 155



Notes

8. Amanda Anderson, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, eds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 273. 9. Martha Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Joshua Cohen, ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 7.

1. A Cosmopolitan Nation?: Kant, Burke and the Question of Borders 1. Hannah Arendt was instrumental in initiating the current interest in Kant’s political philosophy. Her influential Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982) argued persuasively that Kant’s political philosophy formed a neglected fourth critique. Among the numerous recent studies of Kant’s political philosophy, see for example Kimberly Hutchings’ Kant, Critique and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), Hans Reiss’ ‘Introduction’ to Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Patrick Riley’s Kant’s Political Philosophy (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983). 2. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 9. 3. In the introduction to the fourth edition of Nationalism (1993) Kedourie describes nationalism as a form of ‘ideological politics’ in that it sees itself as cure-all to social ills and is ‘necessarily and inevitably caught up in a perpetual disastrous and self-destructive tension between ends and means.’ Thus the ‘enshrinement of national self-determination as the organizing principle of international order’ has been both the greatest triumph and greatest failure of nationalism. Nationalism, 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), xi, xvi. 4. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 5. In an earlier work, Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), Gellner stresses Kant’s mistake in supposing a universal human predicament rather than an historically specific one: ‘Kant did not suppose that we could take with us, when entering the cold cognisable world, all our luggage, whole lorry-loads of conceptual furniture. He took the absolute minimum to save our humanity, to make us more than mere things; the rest he spurned. He was like a refugee from a catastrophe who arrives nobly carrying but two or three beings dearest to him’ (188). The characterization of Kant here as refugee is an interesting one, considering Kant will later bear the related burden of cosmopolitanism for Gellner in Nations and Nationalism. 6. In the controversial Cosmopolitanism and the National State, rev. edn, Robert B. Kimber, trans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Friedrich Meinecke argues for a less abrupt transition from cosmopolitanism to nationalism in German political thought: ‘Cosmopolitanism did not merely sink to the ground, pale and exhausted; and the new national idea did not then spring up in its place, unimpeded and victorious. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism stood side by side in a close, living relationship for a long time. And even if the idea of the genuine national state could not come to full



156 Notes

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

157

bloom within such a relationship, the meeting of these two intellectual forces was by no means unfruitful for the national idea’ (94). Felix Gilbert’s useful 1970 introduction to Cosmopolitanism and the National State puts Meinecke’s glorification of nationalism and the nation state into the context of pre-World War one politics. Hurrell refers primarily to the following works in his argument: F. H. Hinsley’s Power and the Pursuit of Peace (1963); Ian Clark’s Reform and Resistance in the International Order (1980); Patrick Riley’s Kant’s Political Philosophy (1983); Howard Williams’ Kant’s Political Philosophy (1985); Hedley Bull’s ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight eds, Diplomatic Investigations (1966); Martin Wight’s ‘An Anatomy of International Thought’ in Review of International Studies, 3 (July 1987). Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 16 (July 1990), 204. In his study Political Theory and International Relations, Charles R. Beitz divides international morality in modern political thought into three distinct conceptions: international moral scepticism, morality of states, and cosmopolitanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). He recognizes, however, that Kant’s political writings can be included under both morality of states and cosmopolitanism. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, in Kant’s Political Writings, Hans Reiss, ed., trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41. All references to Kant are to this edition. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?’, in Kant’s Political Writings, 54. Reason also extends the limits of the individual in a more basic way. As Kant explains in ‘Idea of a Universal History’: ‘Reason, in a creature, is a faculty which enables that creature to extend far beyond the limits of natural instinct the rules and intentions it follows in using its various powers, and the range of its projects is unbounded’ (‘Universal History’, 42). Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), xii. Immanuel Kant, ‘This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice’, in Kant’s Political Writings, 73. Immanuel Kant, ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, in Kant’s Political Writings, 138. Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Kant’s Political Writings, 94. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 16. One of the earliest reviews of Kant’s philosophy in Britain was Thomas Beddoes’ ‘Kant’s Project to perpetual Peace’, Monthly Review, 20 (August 1796) 486–9. A physician with ties to the lunar society, Beddoes conversed with many of the radical thinkers of the age, including Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and his engagement with fundamental tenets of Kant’s political philosophy points to the circulation of Kant’s model of nation within late eighteenthcentury Britain. For a detailed history of Kant’s reception in Britain see



Notes

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

Giuseppe Micheli and René Wellek, Kant’s Thought in Britain: The Early Impact (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993). Edmund Burke, ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’, The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Paul Langford, ed., 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 401. All references to Burke’s essays are to this edition. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 56–7. Price’s sermon was bound together with ‘The Congratulary Address to the National Assembly of France’ in A discourse on the love of country. Burke writes of this combined effort that ‘The whole of that publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France with those of England, by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness’ (Reflections, 59). Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1992), 178. As the Kedourie–Gellner debate suggests, the oppositional relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism continues to linger in twentiethcentury thought. For an even more recent example, see the debate provoked by Martha C. Nussbaum’s ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ in the Boston Review (Oct/Nov 1994). The core of this debate is published in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, Joshua Cohen ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Price, for example, claims that the English constitution is a model for the new French constitution, but also claims that England should imitate the French constitution and correct the inequality of representation it preserves in its own constitution. Edmund Burke, ‘Thoughts on French Affairs’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 342. Séamus Deane observes that long after Burke’s conspiracy theory was discredited, the English government ‘was willing to nurture this notion because it kept anti-French feeling alive and because it was a useful weapon in its own battle against Jacobins in England, Scotland, and Ireland’. See Séamus Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789–1832 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 170. Deane shows that Burke was pivotal in the reception and the interpretation of the Enlightenment in England, creating a climate of hostility towards Enlightenment thinkers ‘by picturing them as a band of atheistic conspirators plotting revolution against throne and altar’ (The French Revolution and Enlightenment, 5). The philosophes may have answered back. Hans Reiss suggests that Edmund Burke may be the ‘worthy man’ whom Kant addresses in his defence of theories and systems in ‘Theory and Practise’. Burke’s Reflections were translated into German in 1793. See Kant’s ‘Theory and Practise’, 63, and Reiss’s note, 274. Edmund Burke, ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 313. Burke clearly points out that the first statue the National Assembly erected was of Rousseau.



158 Notes

159

30. David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 178. 31. Burke notes a similar non-correspondence between moral and geographical France in his ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’ (1793) where he declares that ‘France is out of itself’ (465). 32. Edmund Burke, ‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 265, 277 33. As in Reflections, Burke clearly differentiates between the old France and the new: the old is a unified nation with clear borders, while the new is a sprawling entity of ‘questionable shape’ with pockets dispersed throughout Europe (‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 277). As he noted elsewhere, ‘[w]e are at war with a principle, and an example, which there is no shutting out by Fortresses or excluding by Territorial Limits. No line of demarcation can bound the Jacobin Empire.’ ‘To the Compte de Mercy-Argenteau’ (circa 6 August 1793), in vol. 9 of The Correspondence of Edmund Burke (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 387. 34. Edmund Burke, ‘Heads for Considerations on the Present State of Affairs’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 402. 35. Edmund Burke, ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 404. Frank O’Gorman discusses the debate between Burke and Fox in the context of English politics in The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1967). 36. Edmund Burke, ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 105. Burke began to draft the ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’ in 1795 but left it to write the First and Second ‘Letters on a Regicide Peace’. 37. Edmund Burke, ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 199. In an earlier attempt to convey the relation between English and French Jacobinism, Burke writes to Lord Grenville (18 August 1792) that ‘Every encouragement direct or indirect, given to their Brethren in France, stirs and animates the [English] Embers.’ ‘Letter to Lord Grenville’, vol. 7 of Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 177. 38. Edmund Burke, ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 641. 39. Edmund Burke, ‘Letter to William Smith’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 661. 40. In The French Revolution and Enlightenment, Séamus Deane notes the close connection Burke established between the French Jacobins and the Protestant Ascendancy: ‘Thus much of what had happened in Ireland was a standing rebuke to all that was being attempted in France. National love and political affections were being broken or vulgarized by a despotic, enterprising sect which had a persecuting edge to its deeply embedded fanaticism. The French were universalizing sectarianism into a theory of global benevolence and revolution. Neither the sect nor the party, the Ascendancy nor the Jacobinism, was a true aristocracy’ (17). For Burke, he suggests, ‘France was a threat, Ireland a dire warning, England the middle term between the two’ (19). Luke Gibbons has recently argued that when Burke’s conservative ‘critical stances on the Enlightenment, colonialism and indigenous



Notes

41. 42.

43.

44.

cultures’ are viewed in terms of his aesthetics theories, they contain ‘unresolved counter-currents’. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, politics, and the colonial sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15. Edmund Burke, ‘Letter on Affairs of Ireland’, in The Writing and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 663. Abbé Barruel, Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, Hon. Robert Clifford, trans., 4 vols (London: T. Burton and Co., 1797), 1: ix. Barruel’s translator, Robert Clifford, works with the same basic premises in his Application of Barruel’s Memoirs of Jacobinism, to the Secret Societies of Ireland and Great Britain (London: E. Booker, 1798). Barruel’s indictment of Kant was echoed in British periodical press. Writing for the Monthly Review in 1799, for example, William Taylor draws direct line between Kant’s philosophy and French Jacobinism. Kant’s opinions, Taylor suggests, bear a marked affinity to French enlightenment thought and ‘must endear him to the patriotism of the philosophers of the Lyceum.’ [William Taylor], ‘Willich’s Elements of Kant’s Philosophy’, Monthly Review, 28 (January 1799), 65. James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae. A defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers, against the accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in The Miscellaneous Works of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1858), 426. Mackintosh compares Burke’s treatment of the French monied class in Reflections to Tory treatment of the Whigs during the Glorious Revolution.

2. ‘A Great Federacy’ of Nations: Internationalism and the Edinburgh Review 1. John Clive has documented the connection between the Edinburgh Review and the Enlightenment in detail in his foundational study Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). See also Donald Winch’s chapter on Dugald Stewart and his pupils in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow’s That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Biancamaria Fontana has noted the Edinburgh’s strong eighteenth-century roots, paying special attention to the source of its socio-economic methodology in the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment. See her Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review, 1802–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For recent essays on the Edinburgh’s place in British Romanticism, see Massimilian Demanta and Duncan Wu, eds., British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002). 2. [Sydney Smith], ‘Bowles on the Peace’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 96. 3. [Thomas Brown], ‘Villers, Philosophie de Kant’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (January 1803), 253. See also [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Mounier, De L’influence des Philosophes’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802) 1–18, and [Francis Horner], ‘M.Canard, Principes d’economie politique’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (January 1803), 431–50. 4. [Francis Jeffrey and James Loch], ‘Orders in Council’, Edinburgh Review, 20 (July 1812), 234.



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5. The same 1808 article also drew R. Wharton’s rancour in his Remarks on the Jacobinical Tendency of the Edinburgh Review, where he uses the article as a stepping stone to a more general criticism of the Edinburgh’s Jacobinical politics (London: J. Hatchard, 1809). 6. In their landmark essay ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, John A. Gallagher and Ronald E. Robinson argue that there is no qualitative difference between midand late-Victorian imperialism and that free trade is merely one of many techniques for British expansion used throughout the century. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 6 (1953), 1–7. The essay is reprinted, along with various responses, in W.M. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976). Earlier in the century (1902), J.A. Hobson had posited imperialism as a ‘perversion’ of international free trade that coincided with the advent of nationalism. See his Imperialism: A Study (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1965). 7. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, J. M. Robson, ed., vols 2 and 3 of Collected Works (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1965), 3: 588. 8. Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Penal Law, vol. 1 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring, ed. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 563. 9. Bentham’s own connection to cosmopolitanism is strong. In An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), for example, he lays out the parameters for an international system of law and coins the word ‘international’: ‘[International law] is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations: an appellation so uncharacteristic, that, were it not for the force of custom, it would seem rather to refer to internal jurisprudence.’ An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, vol. 1 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 149. His Principles of International Law (1786–89) demonstrates an ongoing intellectual investment in cosmopolitan ideals, with the concluding essay, ‘A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace’, arguing for European disarmament, the universal emancipation of colonies, and the establishment of a Common Court of Judicature to mediate conflict between nations. 10. Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, for instance, political economy was considered a subsection of moral philosophy in British universities. On the intersection of political economy and moral philosophy see chapters 5 and 6 of Mary Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 11. Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), 97. 12. Karen O’Brien traces Hume’s cosmopolitanism in Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon, arguing that Hume’s historical works present the history of the English nation in conjunction with European history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 13. David Hume, ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’, Writings on Economics, Eugene Rotwein, ed. (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 81–2. 14. In a letter to Smith written shortly after the publication of Wealth of Nations (1 April 1776), Hume gives the work a favourable review: ‘I am much pleas’d with your Performance; and the Perusal of it has taken me from a State of great Anxiety. It was a work of so much Expectation, by yourself, by your



Notes

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Friends, and by the Public, that I trembled for its Appearance; but am now much relieved’ (Writings on Economics, 216). He does, however, say that if Smith were at his fireside, he would dispute some of his principles. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 5th ed., Edwin Cannan, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1985), 156. Smith explains that the invasion of German and Scythian nations interrupted the commerce between town and country and led to an amalgamation of smaller land holdings into vast dominions. Land ceased to be passed from generation to generation according to the natural law of succession (which divided land holdings between different family members), and began to be passed on according to the law of primogeniture (which consolidated land holdings in the hands of the first born male). Coincident with these changes came a re-valuing of land as a means of power rather than as a means of subsistence, one of the results of which was that surplus capital went towards further land acquisition and not to the improvement of already-held lands. Such political changes, then, blocked the ‘natural progress of opulence’ in Europe by disrupting domestic commerce and by discouraging agricultural improvement. Accordingly, international commerce is the impetus for national improvement in Europe: ‘But what all the violence of the feudal institution could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about’ (Wealth of Nations, 188). Smith notes that, among other things, commerce has created domestic and foreign markets for agricultural produce, infused the countryside with wealthy merchants bent on agricultural improvement, and introduced into the countryside order and good government by helping to break up the vast dominions perpetrated by the feudal system. Its benefit has therefore been both economic (in that it encouraged agriculture) and political (in that it ensured the ‘liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country’ (Wealth of Nations, 185). Smith stresses that the benefit ‘was not even confined to the countries in which [the towns] were situated, but extended more or less to all those with which they had any dealings. To all of them they afforded a market for some part either of their rude or manufactured produce, and consequently gave some encouragement to the industry and improvement of all’ (Wealth of Nations, 184). Hume posits a similar connection between public good and individual commercial interest in his essay ‘Of Commerce’ when he states that ‘[t]he greatness of a state, and the happiness of its subjects, how independent soever they may be supposed in some respects, are commonly allowed to be inseparable with regard to commerce; and as private men receive greater security, in the possession of their trade and riches, from the power of the public, so the public becomes powerful in proportion to the opulence and extensive commerce of private men’ (Writings on Economics, 5). For Stewart on Smith see his Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith (read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 21 January and 18 March, 1793), vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, ed. (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1971). Dugald Stewart, ‘Of Patriotism’ in The Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers of Man, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, 180.



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21. Stewart’s early Elements of the Philosophy of Human Mind (1792), for instance, was declared Jacobinical, in particular because it expressed a sympathy for Condorcet that Stewart himself soon regretted. He tells Lord Craig on 20 February 1794, for example, that he ‘dishonoured some of [his] pages by mentioning with respect the name of Condorcet’ and reminds Craig that although he defended the Economists, he opposed the French philosophers in general. Quoted in John Veitch’s Memoir of Dugald Stewart, vol. 10 of The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, lxxiv. 22. Quoted in John Veitch, Memoir of Dugald Stewart, li. These lectures were delivered in various forms during Stewart’s time as Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh from 1785 until his retirement in 1810. His first course on political economy alone, however, was conducted in the winter of 1800. Veitch outlines Stewart’s professional career in his Memoir of Dugald Stewart. 23. Also listed among Stewart’s students are Sydney Smith and Macvey Napier both of whom also wrote for the Edinburgh Review. James Mill also noted the important role of political economy in the early Edinburgh Review in his detailed review of early nineteenth-century periodical literature in the first number of The Westminster Review. See his ‘Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review’, Westminster Review, 1 (January 1824) 206–49. The standard modern account of the Edinburgh Review draws a direct line of influence from Thomas Reid and Adam Smith through Dugald Stewart to the Edinburgh Review. See John Clive, Scotch Reviewers. 24. [Henry Brougham], ‘Politique de tous les Cabinets de L’Europe’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (January 1803), 346. 25. One such advocate was James Anderson, who insists in A Calm Investigation of the Circumstances that have led to the Present Scarcity of Grain in Great Britain (London: J. Cumming, 1801) that history has proven the success of corn bounties. Anderson argues that when the bounties were fully operative between 1689 and 1773, British agriculture flourished, prices fell, and Britain was a net exporter of grain. However, when the bounties were lifted in 1773 (partly because of Adam Smith) agriculture suffered, prices rose, and Britain became a net importer of grain. 26. [Francis Horner], ‘Observations on the Bounty upon Exported Corn’, Edinburgh Review, 5 (October 1804), 194. 27. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘The Frauds of the Neutral Flags’, Edinburgh Review, 8 (April 1806), 13. 28. [Henry Brougham], ‘Examination of the late Orders in Council’, Edinburgh Review, 11 (January 1808), 490–1. 29. ‘Baring and others on the Orders in Council’, Edinburgh Review, 12 (April 1808), 226. 30. See, for example, Francis Jeffrey and James Loch’s ‘Orders in Council’. 31. [John Barrow and William Gifford], ‘America – Orders in Council’, Quarterly Review, 7 (March 1812), 32. 32. [Robert Southey and John Wilson Croker], ‘Capt. Pasley on the Military Policy of Great Britain’, Quarterly Review, 5 (May 1811), 410. 33. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘State and Prospects of Europe’, Edinburgh Review, 23 (April 1814), 39.



Notes

34. [Henry Brougham], ‘Appeal of the Poles’, Edinburgh Review, 22 (January 1814), 331. 35. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Letter on the French Government’, Edinburgh Review, 16 (April 1810), 29. 36. [James Mackintosh], ‘France’, Edinburgh Review, 24 (February 1815), 506. 37. The Edinburgh Review continued to criticize the Congress long after the meetings in Vienna were over. ‘The sovereigns have, in fact, erected themselves into a sort of council for arranging the interests of Europe; under the sanction of which, they consider themselves authorized to extend or contract the territories of other independent kingdoms and states, without the smallest respect for the personal interests of the subjects which compose those States’, writes a reviewer in his 1819 assessment of the ongoing influence of the Congress on post-Napoleonic Europe: ‘We cannot agree with those who think, that by the creation of powerful and extensive kingdoms of the first order, and the annihilation of the smaller states, the peace or security of the rest is better ensured; for, besides the total want of justice or principle in such a system, it seems to us still more objectionable on the score of expediency’ (401). [D. Constable?], ‘Congress of Vienna’, Edinburgh Review, 32 (October 1819). The Congress of Vienna has attracted recent critical interest. See David King’s Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harmony Books, 2008) and Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). 38. [David Buchanan], ‘Corn Laws’, Edinburgh Review, 24 (February 1815), 492. 39. The vision, however, was periodically taken up elsewhere before mid-century, most notably, by the Manchester School in the 1830s and 40s. William Cobden’s England, Ireland, and America (1835), for example, evoked international commerce as the ‘grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world.’ Political Writings of Richard Cobden, (London: William Ridgeway, 1878), 20. Ronald Hyam implicates Cobden’s internationalism in the imperial project in Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London: B.T. Batsford, 1976). 40. E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945), 8. 41. [James Mill?], ‘Liberty of the Continental Press’, Edinburgh Review, 25 (June 1815), 112. 42. Of course the Edinburgh Review did not overlook the censorship taking place on home-ground during the post-Napoleonic period. In ‘Liberty of the Press and its Abuses’, for example, Brougham argues that the new libel laws will curtail the freedom of the press and put English liberty at risk. Edinburgh Review, 27 (September 1816) 245–63.

3. ‘An Alternative Formulation: The Idea of National Literature in Staël and the Edinburgh Review 1. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Correspondence Littéraire et Philosophique de Grimm’, Edinburgh Review, 21 (July 1813), 263; [Francis Jeffrey], ‘De Lille, Malheur et Pitié: Poëme’, Edinburgh Review, 3 (October 1803), 26–42. Written in French,



164 Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

165

addressed to a German audience, and attributed to Diderot as well as Grimm, Grimm’s Correspondance Literaire, Philosophique et Critique: Adressée à un Souverain d’Allemagne straddles national demarcations as well. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, ‘Introduction’ to The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 6. See also, Gregory Maertz’s collection of essays, Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998). Haun Saussy, ‘Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares’, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 6. Germaine de Staël, Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions, in Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, Morroe Berger, ed. trans. (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1964), 145. Staël’s close ties to the Scottish enlightenment nicely exemplify the kind of international literary exchange that Schlereth identifies with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. See Chapter 1 of The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought. Of course ‘literature’ itself was an unstable category during this period. Stael uses ‘literature’ here to refer broadly to ‘works of philosophical writings and works of the imagination – in short, everything that involves the exercise of thought in writing, the physical sciences excepted’ (Literature, 141–2). For Staël’s treatment of classical republicanism and its relationship to Romantic nationalism, see Martin Thom’s Republics, Nations, and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995). Staël repeats this division in On Germany, where she divides the nations of Europe into three ‘distinct strains’ – Latin, Germanic, and Slavic – each with its own ‘natural’ genius. On Germany, in Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, 274. There have been several recent explorations of how Staël destabilizes national borders, including Deidre Lynch’s, ‘The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Staël, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters’, in Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever, eds, The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel, and Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmulo, eds, Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Staël, Germaine de, Delphine, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 5. On Germany, 276. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Mad. de Staël – Sur la Literature’, Edinburgh Review, 21 (February 1813), 2–3. Jeffrey selected his review of Literature to be reprinted for posterity in his Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1844). Its inclusion in Contributions was noticed by Lord Cockburn in his biography of Jeffrey, where it exemplifies Jeffrey’s literary criticism. Staël returned the compliment. Writing on ‘Learning, Religion, and Morality among the English’ in Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution françoise (1816), Staël praises the Edinburgh Review: ‘Literary criticism is carried to the highest point in the reviews, especially that of the Edinburgh, where writers who may be famous in their own right – Jeffrey, Playfair, Mackintosch [sic] – do not disdain to



Notes

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

enlighten authors by the judgements they make upon them’. See ‘England’, in Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, and National Character, 350–1. For a general history of Staël’s reception in England, see Roberta J. Forsberg, Madame de Staël and the English (New York: Astra Books, 1967). [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Southey’s Thabala’, Edinburgh Review, 1 (October 1802), 63. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Lord Holland’s Account of Lope de Vega’, Edinburgh Review, 9 (October 1806), 241. The early Edinburgh Review’s general treatment of foreign literature is explored by J.H. Alexander in ‘Learning from Europe: Continental Literature in the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine 1802–1825’, The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 21 (Summer 1990) 118–23. For the treatment of French literature in the early Edinburgh Review, see Seamus Deane’s ‘The Reputation of the French “Philosophes” in the Whig Reviews between 1802 and 1824’, Modern Language Review, 70 (April 1975) 271–90. Mackintosh was on intimate terms with Staël during her 1813 stay in England. He had close connections to her circle as well: his sister-in-law was married to Simonde de Sismondi, and Benjamin Constant had been a friend and classmate at the University of Edinburgh. See J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to An Age: a Life of Madame de Staël (New York: Harmony Books, 1958), 140, 440–1. [James Mackintosh], ‘De l’Allemagne, par Mad. de Staël’, Edinburgh Review, 22 (October 1813), 198, 204. [James Mackintosh], ‘Rogers’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review, 22 (October 1813), 32. Rogers’ ‘Voyage of Columbus’ was published in 1810. Staël’s Corinne was published in 1807. Campbell’s ‘Ye Mariners of England’ was first published in 1801. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 347. [Francis Palgrave], ‘Goethe’s Life of Himself (Part I)’, Edinburgh Review, 26 (June 1816), 305. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury came out in 1861. This tension is reflected in nineteenth-century criticism of the early Edinburgh Review. In his 1824 assessment of early nineteenth-century periodical literature for the Westminster Review, for example, J.S. Mill characterizes the Edinburgh Review as self-servingly and uncritically nationalistic: ‘English and excellent it employs as synonymous terms;’ he writes, ‘that a foreigner admires England, is a sure passport to its praise; that he does not, is of itself sufficient to draw down upon him its censure’ (‘Periodical Literature’, 521). By contrast, Goethe finds the periodical richly cosmopolitan, the exemplar of a new literary ideal: ‘These journals,’ he writes of the Edinburgh Review and the Foreign Review in an 1828 note, ‘as they win an ever wider public, will contribute in the most effective way towards that universal world-literature for which we are hoping’ (Goethe, 92). See [J.S. Mill], ‘Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review’, The Westminster Review, 1 (April 1824) 505–41; Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Literary Essays: A Selection in English, J.E. Spingarn, ed. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1964). [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Lessing’s Nathan the Wise’, Edinburgh Review, 8 (April 1806), 149. [Francis Jeffrey], ‘German Genius and taste: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’, Edinburgh Review, 42 (August 1825), 409.



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4. Porous Borders: Maria Edgeworth and the Question of National Identity 1. Maria and Robert Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Carr’s Stranger in Ireland’, Edinburgh Review, 10 (April 1807), 59. 2. Séamus Deane, ‘Virtue, travel and the Enlightenment’, in Nations and Nationalisms: France, Britain, Ireland and the Eighteenth-century Context, Michael O’Dea and Kevin Whelan, eds (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1995), 291. 3. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, for instance, argues that Maria Edgeworth appropriates peasant life, while Mary Jean Corbett focuses on how she ensures colonial stability. See Kowaleski-Wallace’s Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Corbett’s ‘Another Tale to Tell: Postcolonial Theory and the Case of Castle Rackrent’, Criticism, 36 (1994) 383–400, and ‘Public Affections and Familial Politics: Burke, Edgeworth, and the “Common Naturalization” of Great Britain’, English Literary History, 61 (1994) 877–97. 4. On Maria Edgeworth’s life, see the standard biography by Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 5. Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the category of Anglo-Irish. See, for example, Mary Jean Corbett’s Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), and Julian Moynahan’s Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, Paul Longford, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 82. 7. The intersection of the political and the domestic in Burke has received ongoing critical attention. See, for example, Deirdre Lynch, ‘Nationalizing Women and Domesticating Fiction: Edmund Burke and the Genres of Englishness’, Wordsworth Circle, 25 (Winter 1994) 45–9; W.J. McCormack, Ascendency and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); and Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 8. Marilyn Butler notes Edgeworth’s rejection of Burke’s historical model of nation in her ‘Introduction’ to Castle Rackrent and Ennui (London: Penguin, 1992). On the other hand, Mary Jean Corbett has argued for an unproblematic adaption of Burke’s ‘familial plot’ in The Absentee that supports English hegemony over Ireland. See her ‘Public Affections and Familial Politics’ noted above. 9. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, Marilyn Butler, ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 84.



26. [Thomas Carlyle], ‘State of German Literature’, Edinburgh Review, 46 (October 1827), 312. 27. Simon During, ‘Literature – Nationalism’s other? The Case for Revision’, in Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 138.

10. Edgeworth’s representation of Jews in the Irish tales has received much critical attention. 11. In The Absentee a similar point is made when O’Halloran points to the advantages of an exchange between Irish and English militia: ‘The two countries have the same interest; and, from the inhabitants discovering more of each other’s good qualities and interchanging little good offices in common life, their esteem and affection for each other would increase, and rest upon the firm basis of mutual utility.’ Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, W.J. McCormack and Kim Walker, eds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 117. In both Castle Rackrent and The Absentee the direction of national influence is not from England to Ireland, centre to periphery, as one would be led to expect from descriptions of Edgeworth as colonial writer. 12. Edgeworth’s connection to eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism was pointed out by contemporaries such as Francis Jeffrey in ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life’, Edinburgh Review, 14 (July 1809) 375–88, and it has been noted as well by modern critics like Marilyn Butler (‘Introduction’ to Castle Rackrent and Ennui; Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography) and W.J. McCormack (‘Introduction’ to The Absentee). 13. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 2 vols (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969), 1: 247–8. Maria lifts the quotation from her father’s speech on education delivered 25 February 1799. 14. On this point, Edgeworth quotes Sir John Davies who goes so far as to suggest that ‘fostering hath always been a stronger alliance than blood; and the foster-children do love and are beloved of their foster-fathers and their sept (or clan) more than of their natural parents and kindred’ (Ennui, 159). For a complex reading of the nurse in the imperial context, see Chapter Five of Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 15. Richard Lovell Edgeworth was in the same tenuous situation during the Irish rebellion of 1798. Trying to mediate between Irish and Anglo-Irish factions, he found himself suspected by both. See Chapter Ten of Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Katy Brundan addresses Ennui as a text of competing cosmopolitanisms in ‘Cosmopolitan Complexities in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui’, Studies in the Novel, 37 (Summer 2005) 123–40. 16. Maria Edgeworth, Ennui in Castle Rackrent and Ennui, Marilyn Butler, ed. (London: Penguin, 1992), 263. 17. It is not until her last Irish tale, Ormond (1817) that Edgeworth grants unqualified narrative recognition to the potential inherent in the socio-cultural attribution of kinship. In Ormond, belonging as inheritance and belonging as socio-cultural relationship are conflated: the orphaned Anglo-Irish Ormond ‘inherits’ the Black Islands from one of his foster-fathers, the Irish King Corny. 18. In ‘Privileged Assimilation: Maria Edgeworth’s Hope for the Ascendancy’, Meredith Cary suggests that this is ‘a postulation which would have aroused protests from both contemporary cultures if its implications had not been obscured by Edgeworth’s naturalistic detail.’ Eire-Ireland, 26 (Winter 1991), 31. 19. My thanks to Marilyn Butler who noted informally that the Nugents had cousins in County Leitrim named Nugent Reynolds, some of whom had



168 Notes

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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been in the public eye as recently as 1799. On names in The Absentee, see also McCormack’s Introduction and Appendix II. For the ambiguities of Irish or English in relation to Grace Nugent, see Robert Tracy’s influential essay, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40 (June 1985) 1–22. The Edgeworths warn against that ‘yawning demon of Ennui’ in their earlier treatise on practical education: ‘Young men who are most ready to yield their companions, are not therefore to be considered as of really compliant dispositions; the idle or indolent, who have no resources in their own minds, and no independent occupations, are victims to the yawning demon of Ennui the moment they are left in solitude.’ Practical Education, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1801), 1: 291. In contrast, Glenthorn’s first energetic foray into Irish affairs on the eve of Irish rebellion lacks the grounding necessary to ensure an ongoing and critical commitment to Irish improvement: ‘I had been driven to exertion by a mixture of pride and generosity; my understanding being uncultivated, I had acted from the virtuous impulse of the moment, but never from rational motive, which alone can be permanent in its operation’ (Ennui, 249). When the direct threat of rebellion disappears, Glenthorn sinks back into his ennui. Mitzi Myers examines the public and private significance of Glenthorn’s ennui in ‘“Completing the Union:” Critical Ennui, the Politics of Narrative, and the Reformation of Irish Cultural Identity’, Prose Studies, 18 (December 1995) 41–77. Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, W.J. McCormack and Kim Walker, eds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6. Unlike the Clonbronys, the Irish Sir Terence O’Fay exploits English stereotypes of the Irish, exaggerating his ‘native brogue, and his natural propensity to blunder’ to meet English expectations (Absentee, 22). As with Nugent Reynolds, Brooke is an English-sounding Irish name of some importance. See McCormack’s note on the Brooke family of Rantavan in County Cavan (Absentee, 297). For an account of R.L. Edgeworth’s connection to Enlightenment thought, see Desmond Clarke’s The Ingenious Mr. Edgeworth (London: Oldbourne, 1965). For two foundational readings of Richard Lovell’s influence on Maria see Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace’s Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (Columbia: Colombia University Press, 1991), 148. Joep Leerssen, ‘Anglo-Irish Patriotism and its European Context: Notes Towards a Reassessment’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 3 (1988), 15. Bruce Robbins, ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’, Social Text, 31–2 (1992), 173. Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’, in vol. 4 of Tales and Novels (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), 90. [Sydney Smith]. ‘Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls’, Edinburgh Review, 2 (July 1803), 399 In ‘Goring John Bull: Maria Edgeworth’s Hibernian High Jinks versus the Imperialist Imaginary’, Mitzi Myers reads the ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’ as a parody



Notes

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

that destabilizes gender, genre, and national identity. In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, James E. Gill, ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995). On the centrality of the notion of merit to the Edgeworths, see Gary Kelly, ‘Class, Gender, Nation, and Empire: Money and Merit in the Writing of the Edgeworths’, The Wordsworth Circle, 25 (Spring 1994) 89–93. Edward Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983) 1–30. The idea of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ has received quite a bit of critical attention. See, for example, Mitchell Cohen, ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism’, Dissent, 39 (Autumn 1992) 478–83, Bruce Ackerman, ‘Rooted Cosmopolitanism’, Ethics, 104 (April 1994) 516–35, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). William Howard argues that in Ormond Edgeworth attempts to ‘convey a relatively consistent regional outlook, which would supersede not only the level of individual characters but also her own cosmopolitan bias’. ‘Regional Perspective in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Case of Ormond’, The Wordsworth Circle, 10 (Autumn 1979), 332. Maria Edgeworth, Ormond: A Tale (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1992), 169. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 5. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 307. Sheila Spector, ‘The Other’s Other: The Function of the Jew in Maria Edgworth’s Fiction’, European Romantic Review, 10 (Summer 1999), 308. See also Judith Page, ‘Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington: from Shylock to Shadowy Pedlars’, The Wordsworth Circle, 32 (Winter 2001) 9–13. For Maria Edgeworth’s treatment of Jews in her fiction, see Edgar Rosenberg’s From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960). In The Absentee, for example, the Jewish character Mordicai functions as – in Spector’s terms – the ‘other’s other’, assuaging Anglo-Irish absentee guilt and facilitating English–Irish unity. ‘Thus, in the end,’ McCormack explains in his Introduction to The Absentee, ‘Grace Nugent can be both agent and beneficiary of a redemptive/conclusive reading of history, and for this to be possible the fictional Mordicai remains under a sentence, a scapegoat for the evils of absentee extravagance’ (‘Introduction’, xxix). The notion of tolerance is of course also central to Edgeworth’s political idea of a non-nationalistic patriotism. ‘Why should children be told that the Italians are naturally revengeful; the French naturally vain and perfidious, “excessively credulous and litigious”; that the Spaniards are naturally jealous and haughty?’, the Edgeworths write years earlier in Practical Education: ‘The patriotism of an enlarged and generous mind cannot, surely, depend upon the early contempt inspired for foreign nations’ (137). Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, Susan Manly, ed. (Peterbourgh: Broadview Press, 2004), 228. For her part, Berenice later vows ‘never to marry any man whose want of the spirit of toleration, whose prejudices against the Jews, might interfere with the filial affection she feels for her father – though he be a Jew’ (Harrington, 291).



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44. Edgeworth’s Jewish-American correspondent and ideal reader for Harrington, Rachel Mordecai, for instance, praises Edgeworth’s ‘benevolent intentions’ in ‘asserting the cause of toleration’, but also expresses her disappointment that ‘Berenice was not a Jewess’ (Education of the Heart, 14). More recently, Michael Ragussis has argued that despite Edgeworth’s ‘self-conscious initiation of a revisionist tradition’ in Harrington, she ultimately submits to the ruling ideology. ‘[W]hen we are told at the end of Harrington that Berenice is no Jew, but a Christian, we come upon a covert form – at once literary and cultural – by which Jewish identity is once again exiled,’ Ragussis concludes: ‘Berenice’s suddenly disclosed Christianity is a way of converting her’ (Figures of Conversion, 77). See Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, Edgar E. MacDonald, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1977); Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995). 45. Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, 74. 46. Interestingly, these lines were removed from the second and subsequent editions, as Susan Manly notes in her Introduction to Harrington (47).

5. Pilgrim, Exile, Vagabond: Byron and the Citizen of the World 1. Kirsten Daly examines Byron’s use of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in Don Juan in ‘Worlds Beyond England: Don Juan and the Legacy of Enlightenment Cosmopolitanism’, Romanticism, 4 (1998) 189–201. 2. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez, trans. (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133. 3. Lord George Gordon Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, Leslie A. Marchand, ed., 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973), 2: 34. 4. Andrew D. McKillop, ‘Local Attachment and Cosmopolitanism – The Eighteenth-Century Pattern’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, Frederick H. Hilles and Harold Bloom, eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 202. Maria Edgeworth’s cosmopolitanism, as the previous chapter suggested, is also characteristic of the second phase of cosmopolitanism. 5. Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Arthur Friedman, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 21. Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World; or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to his Friends in the East was originally published as a series of ‘Chinese Letters’ in The Public Ledger during 1760 and 1761. Donna Isaacs Dalnekoff takes up Goldsmith’s point, arguing that ‘the figure of the traveller, the outsider or stranger in a foreign land, is the natural paradigm of the philosophical critic’. ‘A Familiar Stranger: The Outsider of Eighteenth Century Satire’, Neophilologus, 57 (April 1973), 125. 6. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘A Comparative View of Races and Nations’, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 3: 68.



Notes

7. Séamus Deane, ‘Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World’, in The Art of Oliver Goldsmith, Andrew Swarbrick, ed. (London: Vision Press, 1984). 8. Lord George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, vol. 2 of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, Jerome J. McGann, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 3. All references to Byron’s poetry are to this edition. 9. Denis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 126–7. 10. James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds, Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108. 11. Byron distinguishes his methodology from Mr. Eustace’s in his Classical Tour of Italy which Byron describes as ‘a mere compilation of former notices, strung together upon a very slender thread of personal observation, and swelled out by those decorations which are so easily supplied by a systematic adoption of all the common places of praise, applied to every thing, and therefore signifying nothing’ (Childe Harold, 262). 12. Interestingly, Goldsmith’s citizen of the world seems to have been on Byron’s mind while writing the fourth canto, which Byron prefaces by declaring himself ‘weary of drawing a line which every one seemed determined not to perceive: like the Chinese in Goldsmith’s ‘Citizen of the World’, whom nobody would believe to be a Chinese’ (Childe Harold, 122). 13. Simon Bainbridge argues that writers such as Southey and Wordsworth used their poems on Waterloo to consummate their conservative plotting of the war, whereas Byron refused to recognize the battle’s importance. See his Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 234. 15. According to Thomas Moore’s The Life of Lord Byron, Byron attributed his own exile to general opinion: ‘The man who is exiled by a faction has the consolation of thinking that he is a martyr; he is upheld by hope and the dignity of his cause, real or imaginary: he who withdraws from the pressure of debt may indulge in the thought that time and prudence will retrieve his circumstances: he who is condemned by the law, has a term to his banishment, or a dream of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or the belief of some injustice of the law, or of its administration in his own particular; but he who is outlawed by general opinion without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal judgement, or embarrassed circumstances, whether he be innocent or guilty, must undergo all the bitterness of exile, without hope, without pride, without alleviation. This case was mine.’ The Life of Lord Byron; with his Letters and Journals, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846), 2: 666–7. 16. Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 277. 17. Robert Southey, ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey (New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1851), 749. Subsequent references to ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ and A Vision of Judgement are to this edition. 18. Part two of the poem picks up on this allegorical subtext and pits the poet Laureate against the ‘evil prophet’. Their conversation serves to reassert Tory values in the face of French materialism. The poem ends with Southey’s confirmation that the ‘hopes of man’ rest on the continued prosperity of



172 Notes

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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the British empire, a point brought home by a ‘magic picture’ that provides glimpses of all of England’s colonies. Robert Southey, A Vision of Judgement in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 793. Thomas Medwin, Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 228. Medwin met Byron in late 1821 and saw him for the last time in August 1822. Lord George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, vol. 2 of Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 9: 24. I draw the term ‘pleasurable instruction’ from Charles L. Batten, Jr, Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). According to McGann, the ‘Addition to the Preface’ was added to the fourth edition of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published in September 1812. ‘Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, Antijacobin Review, 42 (August 1812), 345. ‘Lord Byron’s Bride of Abydos and the Corsair’, Antijacobin Review, 46 (March 1814), 234. ‘Lord Byron’s Siege of Corinth and Parisina’, British Critic, 5 (April 1816), 430. ‘Don Juan’, British Critic, 12 (August 1819), 204. ‘Lord Byron’, British Critic, 15 (May 1821), 466. M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, eds, Vadim Liapunov, trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 180. Bakhtin points to the heroes of Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goethe as examples of the romantic character. The habit carried on well into the twentieth century. Peter Quennell, for example, refers to Byron as ‘Childe Harold’ throughout his study Byron: the Years of Fame (London: St. James, 1950). [Francis Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’, Edinburgh Review, 19 (February 1812), 467. ‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, and Prisoner of Chillon’, British Critic, 6 (December 1816), 609. [Walter Scott], ‘Childe Harold 3 and the Prisoner of Chillon’, Quarterly Review, 16 (October 1816), 174. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 47. Certainly, in yoking anti-cosmopolitan and anti-aristocratic sentiment, Newman’s argument leaves more ‘bourgeois’ cosmopolitanisms such as Edgeworth’s or Felicia Hemans’ unaccounted for. The key point here, however, is that Newman’s argument brings into useful view the class politics underpinning the critical reception of Byron’s aristocratic cosmopolitanism. For Hemans’ relationship to cosmopolitanism see Nanora Sweet, ‘“Lorenzo’s” Liverpool and “Corinne’s” Coppet: The Italianate Salon and Romantic Education’, in Lessons of Romanticism, Thomas Pfau, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), and William D. Brewer, ‘Felicia Hemans, Byronic cosmopolitanism and the ancient Welsh bards’, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge



Notes

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

University Press, 2003). For British women writers’ engagement with eighteenth-century cosmopolitan ideals during the French Revolution, see Adriana Craciun’s British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). The implications of Byron’s aristocratic status have been variously understood. Andrew Rutherford finds in his satire style the synthesis of poet and aristocrat, casting him as a Regency figure (Byron: A Critical Study), whereas Michael Robertson foregrounds the more democratic impulses of Byron as Whig aristocrat (‘The Byron of Don Juan as Whig Aristocrat’). See also Robertson’s more recent ‘Aristocratic Individualism in Byron’s Don Juan’. Jerome Christensen’s important study, by contrast, argues that ‘Byronism’ helped consolidate Britain’s commercial society by exploiting the affective charge of aristocracy in order to reproduce it in commodities that could be vended to a reading public avid for glamour (Lord Byron’s Strength, xvi). See Andrew Rutherford, Byron: A Critical Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967); Michael Robertson, ‘The Byron of Don Juan as Whig Aristocrat’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 17 (Winter 1976) 709–24; Michael Robertson, ‘Aristocratic Individualism in Byron’s Don Juan’, Studies in English Literature, 17 (Autumn 1994) 639–55; Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). [William Roberts], ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, British Review, 3 (June 1812), 276. [William Roberts], ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto the Third’, British Review, 9 (February 1817), 8. [William Roberts], ‘Beppo’, British Review, 11 (May 1818), 329. [William Roberts], ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Canto 4’, British Review, 12 (August 1818), 5. Even Hazlitt makes the most of Byron’s connection to the cosmopolitan class in his comparison of Byron and Sir Walter Scott: ‘Lord Byron, who is in his politics a liberal, in his genius is haughty and aristocratic: Walter Scott, who is an aristocrat in principle, is popular in his writings’. The Spirit of the Age in Lectures on English Poets and The Spirit of the Age (London: J.M. Dent, 1922), 236–7. Calantha’s Catholicism is only suggested in the first edition, but it is openly declared in the second edition. See John Clubbe, ‘Glenarvon – Revised and Revisited’, The Wordsworth Circle, 10 (1979) 205–17. On Glenarvon as a novel of passion, see Gary Kelly’s English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longmans, 1989). See also his ‘Amelia Opie, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Maria Edgeworth: Official and Unofficial Ideology’, Ariel, 12 (October 1981) 3–24. Robert Tracy discusses Edgeworth’s and Morgan’s national tales in light of the old trope of Ireland as woman in ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 40 (June 1985) 1–22. Lady Caroline Lamb, Glenarvon (London: Everyman, 1995), 109. Peter Graham notes that Lamb settles the contradiction between Byronthe-aristocrat and Byron-the-revolutionary in favour of the aristocrat. ‘Fictive Biography in 1816: The Case of Glenarvon’, Byron Journal, 19 (1991) 53–68.



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47. Malcolm Kelsall reads Lamb’s novel as a critical examination of Whig politics, arguing that Byron serves as a scapegoat for the Whig failure to find a solution for the Irish problem. See ‘The Byronic Hero and Revolution in Ireland: The Politics of Glenarvon’, Byron Journal, 9 (1981) 4–19. 48. ‘The Vampyre: A Tale by Lord Byron’ was published in the New Monthly Magazine on 1 April 1819. Before revisions, Polidori’s villain shared his name with Lamb’s and was called ‘Ruthven’. 49. John William Polidori, The Vampyre in The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Oedipus: Collected Fiction of John William Polidori, D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, eds (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1994), 33. 50. When the first two cantos of Don Juan were reviewed a few months later in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Polidori’s The Vampyre was still fresh in the minds of the reviewers, and they exploited Polidori’s vampyric rhetoric in their characterization of Byron: ‘It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification – having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, were resolved to shew us that he is no longer a human being, even in his frailties; – but a cool unconcerned fiend, laughing with a detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed – treating well nigh with equal derision the most pure of virtues, and the most odious of vices – dead alike to the beauty of the one, and the deformity of the other – a mere heartless despiser of that frail but noble humanity, whose type was never exhibited in a shape of more deplorable degradation than in his own contemptuously distinct delineation of himself.’ No longer even a ‘human being’, the poet is indifferent to virtue and vice alike, and his Don Juan just adds new sins to an already damnable canon of crimes. ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s, 5 (August 1819), 513. This review is attributed to John Gibson Lockhart and John Wilson.

6. Cosmopolitan Figures and Cosmopolitan Literary Forms 1. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 5. 2. On the national tale, see Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ina Ferris’s The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1991), and The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Nicola Watson’s Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Gary Kelly’s Women, Writing, and Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993); Joep Leerssen’s Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the NineteenthCentury (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997); and Ian Dennis’ Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1997). 3. Miranda Burgess, ‘Violent Translations: Allegory, Gender, and Cultural Nationalism in Ireland, 1796–806’, Modern Language Quarterly, 59 (March 1998), 50. 4. Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790– 1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80.



Notes

5. Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, Avriel H. Golgberger, ed., trans. (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 20. 6. See, for example, Madelyn Gutwirth’s influential Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), and Ellen Moers’ ‘Performing Heroinism: The Myth of Corinne’, in Literary Women, The Great Writers (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975). For a more recent discussion about Corinne see Karyna Szmurlo, ed., The Novel’s Seductions: Staël’s Corinne in Critical Inquiry (London: Bucknell University Press, 1999). 7. The Milesian Chief has not received much critical attention, but Ina Ferris, Katie Trumpener, Ian Dennis, and Fiona Robertson have offered some suggestive commentary. 8. Even the name of Maturin’s heroine recalls Staël’s Corinne. ‘Was there some magic in her charm or was it poetic inspiration?’ Oswald asks of Corinne: ‘Was she Armida or Sappho?’ (39). 9. Charles Maturin, The Milesian Chief, 4 vols (New York: Garland, 1979), 1: 9–10. 10. Maturin’s Armida in this sense bears a striking similarity to another reallife cosmopolitan heroine: Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s wife, Pamela. Rumoured alternatively to be an Englishwoman of respectable lineage and the French daughter of Mme Genlis and the Duke of Orléans, Pamela was accused of leading her husband astray during the events leading up to the 1798 rebellion and thus contributing to the Irish defeat. 11. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 160. 12. Chapter 23 of Biographia Literaria is a reprint of five letters on Bertram that Coleridge published in the Courier from 29 August to 11 September 1816. Byron’s positive recommendation helped to get Bertram produced at Drury Lane. 13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge vol. 7, James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, eds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 229 14. As I suggested in Chapter 3, Jeffrey and Mackintosh experience the same problem in their attempts to formulate a national literature. The Edgeworths also experienced this problem in their etymology of Irish Bulls. 15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Shakespeare’s Judgement Equal to His Genius’, in Shakespearean Criticism vol. 2, T.M. Tayson, ed., 2nd ed. (London: Dent, 1930), 198. 16. ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, Blackwood’s, 8 (November 1820), 161. 17. [John Wilson Croker], ‘Maturin – Melmoth the Wanderer’, Quarterly Review, 24 (January 1821), 303 18. ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’, Edinburgh Review, 35 (July 1821), 354. P.L. Carver has argued convincingly that William Hazlitt was the author of this review in ‘Hazlitt’s Contributions to the Edinburgh Review’, Review of English Studies, 4 (October 1928) 385–93. 19. The same logic plays itself out on a grander level as well: literature from a nation in ‘one of the earlier stages of civilization and refinement’ (such as Ireland) can infect the literature of a more advanced nation (such as England).



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20. Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer, Douglas Grant, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 5. 21. Other sources, however, go unacknowledged. A large section of the ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, for instance, was drawn from Diderot’s La Religieuse (1796). This plagiarism gives a different stress to the question of organic unity than Maturin’s own self-plagiarism does. What happens to a work of art’s unity, for example, when it is not the product of a single author? For a discussion on Melmoth the Wanderer and La Religieuse, see Amy Elizabeth Smith’s ‘Experimentation and “Horrid Curiosity” in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’, English Studies, 6 (December 1993) 524–35. 22. Veronica M.S. Kennedy, ‘Myth and the Gothic Dream: C.R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’, Pacific Coast Philology, 4 (April 1969), 41. 23. As Gary Kelly points out, the Wanderer’s mission is co-terminus with the establishment of Protestant hegemony in Ireland, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (London: Longmans, 1989). For the significance of Melmoth the Wanderer within an Irish context, see also Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995), and Julian Moynahan’s Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 24. Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (Twayne: New York, 1973), 101. In his discussion of Melmoth the Wanderer, Kramer notes that either Constable or Henry Colburn of London offered Maturin five hundred pounds for a second set of tales. 25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4. 26. Leigh A. Ehlers points out that Maturin’s informational footnotes sometimes contradict the text and so subvert narrative authority. ‘The “Incommunicable Condition’ of Melmoth’, Research Studies, 49 (September 1981) 171–82. 27. See Eve Sedgewick’s The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 28. Georg Lukàcs, The Historical Novel, Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell, trans. (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 39. 29. Amanda Anderson, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 275.

Epilogue: Reactionary Cosmopolitanism 1. William Godwin, ‘Essay on History and Romance’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 5, Pamela Clemit, ed. (London: William Pickering, 1993), 294–5. 2. This thread was picked up at different points during the century by various writers, including Michelet, Ranke, Hegel, and Marx. 3. For a more detailed reading of Southey’s Colloquies as a response to the larger cultural debate over the question of reform in Britain see my ‘Southey, Macaulay and the Idea of a Picturesque History’, Romanticism On the Net, 323 (November 2003–February 2004) 1–21.



Notes

4. Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1831), 29. 5. De Quincey’s translation of Kant’s ‘Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan’ first appeared in the October 1824 issue of the London Magazine. 6. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the reception of Kant’s philosophy in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain provides a useful parallel to the way in which cosmopolitanism was viewed during the Romantic period. ‘My ignorance of German would have prevented me from saying anything of the philosophy of Kant’, writes Dugald Stewart in his 1821 history of modern philosophy, ‘if the extraordinary pretensions with which it was at first brought forward in this island, contrasted with the total oblivion into which it soon after very suddenly fell, had not seemed to demand some attention to so wonderful a phenomenon in the literary history of the eighteenth century’. Dugald Stewart, Dissertation: exhibiting the progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy since the revival of Letters in Europe, Sir William Hamilton, ed., 2 vols (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854), 1: 389. Stewart’s observations about the curious rise and decline of Kant’s popularity in late eighteenth–early nineteenth-century Britain belong to the second rise of Kant’s reputation in post-Napoleonic Britain, the same rise that carried Southey’s Colloquies. 7. [Thomas De Quincey], ‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’, Blackwood’s Magazine 28 (August 1830), 268. De Quincey’s attitude towards Kant shifts through the 1820s and 1830s. See Daniel Sanjiv Roberts’ Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000). 8. Immanuel Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 41. 9. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, Hugh J. Luke, Jr, ed. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 3. 10. For critical discussion of The Last Man as a critique of British imperialism, see Julia Wright, ‘Little England: Anxieties of Space in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’, in Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, Michael Eberle-Sinatra ed. (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan Press; St. Martin’s Press, 2000), Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Apocalypse of Empire: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man’, in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Birth, Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, Gregory O’Dea, eds (Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1997). 11. In her Introduction to The Last Man, Anne Mellor notes that Shelley ‘reveals the failure of all dominant political ideologies of her day – both radical (republican and democratic) and conservative (monarchical and theocratic)’. ‘Introduction,’ The Last Man, xix. Lee Sterrenburg makes a similar point about the anti-political stance of The Last Man. See his ‘The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1978) 324–47.



178 Notes

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aristocracy: cosmopolitanism and, 115–17; liberal, 96, 117; middle-class ideology and, 114 Aristotle, 130 asymmetry: in international trade, 36; of Kant’s model of nation, 17; of Melmoth the Wanderer, 139; of nations, 3; in Smith’s political economy, 36 ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (Bakhtin), 112–13 authorial distance, 113

The Absentee (Edgeworth), 7, 77, 78–81, 86, 168n11, 170n41 Account of Lope de Vega (Holland), 62 Act of Navigation, 39 Act of Union (1801), 71, 84, 90, 107, 126 Act to Regulate the Importation and Exportation of Corn, 45 affiliation(s): alternative, 67; dual, 76, 124, 134; filiation and, 85; flexibility of, 54; multiple, and national identity, 90; between national literatures, 58–9; new cosmopolitanism and, 142; trade and, 80 Alien Act of 1793, 30 altruistic cosmopolitanism, 96, 98 America: Revolution, 24; trade with Britain, 48 ‘America – Orders in Council’ (Barrow, Gifford), 48 Anderson, Amanda, 141–2; ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 55; Imagined Communities, 1 Anderson, James. A Calm Investigation of the Circumstances that have led to the Present Scarcity of Grain, 163n25 Anglo-Irishness, 72, 76, 78, 81, 167n5; Jewishness and, 90 ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”’ (Kant), 13, 14 antagonism, 17, 18, 19; inter-state, 19–20; of Ireland, 124, 126; social union and, 119 Antijacobin Review, 111, 112 Appeal of the Poles (Brougham), 49 Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 156n1

Bainbridge, Simon, 172n13 Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, 112–13 balance of power/states, 42–4, 148 ‘Baring and others on the Orders in Council’, 47–8 Barrow, John. ‘America – Orders in Council’, 48 Barruel, Abbé, 32 Beddoes, Thomas. ‘Kant’s Project to perpetual Peace’, 157n18 Beitz, Charles R. Political Theory and International Relations, 157n9 belonging: affiliative vs. filiative, 85; and national affinity, 82; national vs. universal, 93. See also national belonging Bentham, Jeremy: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 161n9; Principles of International Law, 161n9; Principles of Penal Law, 35 Berlin Decree, 46 Bertram (Maturin), 127–8 Bhabha, Homi, 55 Blackwood’s Magazine, 149; on Melmoth the Wanderer, 130 borders: Anglo-Irishness and, 72, 74–5; Britain and, 71; in Castle Rackrent, 74–5; co-existence and, 190



Index

78; crossing of, 21; of genres, 132; Ireland and, 71; literature and, 55; local attachment and, 72; Melmoth the Wanderer and, 8, 133–5; and national literatures, 59, 64; plague and, 151; spatial, 134; temporal, 134–5; trade and, 35, 38; travel as crossing, 101; universal tropes and, 84 Boston Review. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, 9 Britain: absence of enlightenment in, 28; Act of Union (1801) and, 71; and borders, 71; censorship in, 164n42; corn trade, 44–5, 50–1; dependence on foreign nations, 42, 45; Enlightenment in, 158n27; heterogeneity of, 90, 91; as historical continuity, 25–6; homogeneity of, 4, 90, 120; Jacobinism and, 30–1; and Jewish finance during Napoleonic wars, 93; literature of, 106, 132 (see also English literature); as non-unified and heterogenous, 90; 1807 Orders in Council, 46–9; as organic whole, 26; poetry of, 64–5; post-Napoleonic, 143, 144; post-war depression in, 50; and Roman Catholicism, 147; 1756 rule of war, 46; as self-enclosed, 72; self-sufficiency of, 42, 45, 49; Southey on, 147–8; succession in, 25; trade war with France, 46–9; trade with America, 48; war with France, 22, 44, 49, 89–90; women in, 58 British Critic, 111–12, 113 British Review, 114 Britons: Forging the Nation (Colley), 89–90 Brougham, Henry, 6, 35, 41–2; Appeal of the Poles, 49; ‘Examination of the late Orders in Council’, 47–8; ‘Liberty of the Press and its Abuses’, 164n42; ‘Politique de tous les Cabinets de l’Europe’, 42–4 Buchanan, David, 35, 41–2, 50, 51 Bull, Hedley, 12

191

Burgess, Miranda, 120 Burke, Edmund, 3; and circles of attachment, 35; on congress of European powers, 22; on cosmopolitanism, 26–7, 72, 88; Edgeworth compared to, 72; Edinburgh Review and, 34; on England as historical continuity, 25–6; on English Revolution, 25; on familial relations, 72; ‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 31; ‘Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 30; on France as ‘faction’, 29–30; on French philosophes, 26–7, 72–3; and French Revolution, 5, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 73, 104; ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’, 22; on Ireland, 31–2; on Jacobinism, 30–3; Kant’s ideas compared to, 18; ‘Letter on Affairs of Ireland’, 32; ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’, 27, 30; ‘Letter to Richard Burke’, 31; ‘Letter to William Smith’, 31–2; on ‘little platoon’, 5, 26, 29; and London Revolutionary Society’s ‘Congratulary Address’, 22–3; Mackintosh on, 33; ’Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’, 30; and patriotism, 5, 7; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 5, 18, 22–3, 24–33, 32, 66, 72–3; ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’, 159n31; on Rousseau, 27–8; ‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’, 29–30; ’Thoughts on French Affairs’, 29; on universalism, 27–8 Burkean model of nation: Childe Harold and, 100, 101; cosmopolitan heroine and, 124; cosmopolitan vs., 143; Edgeworth and, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82; plague and, 151; post-Napoleonic boundary redrawing and, 120; Romantic nationalism of, 55, 61–2. See also local attachment Butler, Judith, 9 Butler, Marilyn, 81, 86, 167n8; Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 127



Index

Byron, Anne Isabella, Lady, 111 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 89, 90; adultery of, 111–12; Antijacobin Review on, 111, 112; British Critic on, 111–12, 113; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 4, 7, 8, 89, 98–9, 100–6, 110–11, 113–15, 133; as citizen of the world, 106–7; cosmopolitan liberality of, 115; and cosmopolitans, 95; Don Juan, 4, 7, 107–12; on Eustace’s Classical Tour of Italy, 172n11; as exemplar of aristocracy, 114–15; ‘Fare Thee Well’, 111; as Glenarvon, 116; poetry of, 117; Roberts on, 114–15; satire of, 115; Scott compared to, 174n41; ‘Sketch from Private Life’, 111; Southey and, 105–6, 108; ‘To a Lady Weeping’, 111; on travels, 95–6; The Vampyre and, 117–18 Byron: the Years of Fame (Quennell), 173n30 A Calm Investigation of the Circumstances that have led to the Present Scarcity of Grain (Anderson), 163n25 Campbell, Thomas. ‘Ye Mariners of England’, 65 Candide (Voltaire), 7, 95 ‘Capt. Pasley on the Military Policy of Great Britain’ (Croker, Southey), 48–9 Carlyle, Thomas, 6, 61; ‘State of German Literature’, 69–70 Carr, E.H.: Nationalism and After, 51–2; Stranger in Ireland, 71 Cary, Meredith. ‘Privileged Assimilation’, 168n18 Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 129 Castle Rackrent (Edgeworth), 7, 73–5 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 107 categorical imperative, 4 Catholicism: Britain and, 89–90, 91, 147; and British-French war, 89–90; Edinburgh Review and, 71; in Glenarvon, 116; Gordon Riots and, 91; in Ireland, 31–2; and

Jacobinism, 32; Southey and, 147; in Wild Irish Girl, 121 Childe Harold (Byron), 4, 7, 8, 89, 133 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 98–9, 100–6, 110–11, 113–15, 133 Christensen, Jerome, 174n36 Christianity: and east, 138; and Holy Alliance, 148–9; and Islam, 101; Jewishness and, 171n44; and national literature, 58; and northern-southern amalgamation, 57; and perfectibility, 146; and reason, 147; and universal history, 144. See also Catholicism; Protestantism Citizen of the World (Goldsmith), 7, 95, 96–9 citizens of the world: Byron and, 106–7, 108; cosmopolitan education and, 9; Goldsmith and, 7, 95, 96–9; in The Last Man, 154; Price and, 24 Clarissa (Richardson), 129 Clark, Ian, 12 classical character, 112–13 Classical Tour of Italy (Eustace), 172n11 classical unities, 130 Clifford, James, 99–100, 108 Cobden, William. England, Ireland, and America, 164n39 Cockburn, Lord, 41, 165n12 Cohen, Margaret, 55 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2–3, 8, 127–9, 141 Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 89–90 Collini, Stefan, 66 The Colloquies (Southey), 8, 143 commerce. See trade ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’ (Robbins), 8 comparative literature, 55 ‘Congratulary Address to the National Assembly of France’ (London Revolutionary Society), 22, 23, 26 Congress of Vienna, 50 ‘Contest of the Faculties’ (Kant), 15



192 Index

Corbett, Mary Jean, 120, 167n3, 167n8 Corinne; or Italy (Staël), 7–8, 59, 65, 121–4 corn, 44–5, 50–1 cosmopolitan heroines, 7, 8, 120–7 The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Schlereth), 14–15, 92–3 ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’ (Anderson), 8 Cosmopolitanism and the National State (Meinecke), 156–7n6 cosmopolitanism(s): altruistic, 96, 98; aristocracy and, 115–17; Burke on, 26–7, 72, 88; of capital, 35; Coleridge on, 2–3, 8; commercially-based internationalism and, 42, 52; critical literature on, 8–9, 155n2; discrepant, 100; Edgeworth and, 75, 89, 90, 171n4; Edinburgh Review and, 34; Enlightenment, 2, 10, 12, 14–15; exilic, 104; and French nationality, 72–3; internationalism and, 15; Jacobinism and, 5–6, 26–7, 32; Jews and, 90, 102; Kant and, 11–12, 13–14, 15, 19; Kristeva on, 21; libertarian, 108; literature and, 6, 8, 58–9, 122; local attachment and, 7, 88, 96; Mackintosh on, 33; meanings of, 1–2, 35; model of nation vs. Burkean model, 143; and moral philosophy–political economy intersection, 36–7; Napoleonic wars and, 42; and national interest, 70; nationalism and, 2–3, 6, 10, 15, 18, 25, 113–14, 155n2, 156–7n6; and national taste, 67–8, 69–70; new, 141–2; patriotism and, 2–3, 9, 24, 40–1; and peace, 152; plague and, 151; political economy and, 41; positive, 82, 85–6, 89, 90; reactionary, 8, 143–54; religion and, 92–3; rooted, 86; Smith’s political economy and, 35; as social symptom, 120; trade and, 6, 36, 151; and universal

193

benevolence, 152; and universal subject, 75, 91 cosmopolitan liberality, 115 cosmopolitan purpose, 13–14, 15, 19; Southey and, 147 cosmopolitans, 7–8, 14; as alter ego of national man, 95, 105; and destruction of domestic relations, 152 Le Cosmopolite (Fougeret de Monbron), 98–9 cosmopolites, Fougeret de Monbron’s definition of, 99 country, love of, 5, 23–4, 35, 55. See also local attachment critical consciousness, 85 Croker, John Wilson, 130–1; ‘Capt. Pasley on the Military Policy of Great Britain’, 48–9 Dallas, Robert Charles, 96 Dalnekoff, Donna Isaacs, 171n5 Deane, Séamus, 73, 98, 158n26–7; The French Revolution and Enlightenment, 159n40; Nations and Nationalisms, 71–2 Declaration of Right (England), 25 Declaration of the Rights and Freedoms of Man and Citizen, 82 Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus, 138 De Lille, Jacques. Malheur et Pitié, 54 Delphine (Staël), 59 De Quincy, Thomas, 146; ‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’, 149 Dever, Carolyn, 55 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron, 93 Diderot, Denis, 93; La Religieuse, 177n21 Discourse on the love of our country (Price), 4, 23–4, 25, 26 displacement: foreignness as, 77; pilgrimage and, 99 division of labour, 37, 40 domestic attachment. See home and hearth, attachment to Don Juan (Byron), 4, 7, 107–12



Index

drama: British, 127–8; German, 128–9 Drury Lane Theatre, 128 During, Simon. ‘Literature – Nationalism’s other?’, 70 Edelston, John, 103 Edgeworth, Maria, 6–7, 120; The Absentee, 7, 77, 78–81, 86, 168n11, 170n41; and Anglo-Irishness, 72, 85–6; and Burkean model of nation, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82; Burke compared with, 72; on Carr’s Stranger in Ireland, 71; Castle Rackrent, 7, 73–5; and cosmopolitanism, 75, 89, 90, 171n4; and critical consciousness, 85; and dual affiliation, 134; education of, 81; Ennui, 7, 75–8, 86; ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’, 82–5; on French, 88; Harrington, 7, 90–4; Irish tales, 4, 7, 72; and Jewishness, 90, 91–2; Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, 75; Ormond, 7, 86–9, 93, 168n17 Edgeworth, Robert Lovell, 81, 168n15; ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’, 82–5; review of Carr’s Stranger in Ireland, 71 Edinburgh Review, 4, 5–6; and Burke, 34; and commercially-based internationalism, 35, 42, 52; and cosmopolitanism, 34; and cosmopolitanism in literature, 54; on international trade, 41–2; on Irish-English relations, 71; literary patriotism of, 6, 60–6; mandate of, 62; on Melmoth the Wanderer, 131–2; J.S. Mill on, 166n23; on Orders in Council, 47–8; and patriotism, 34; and political economy, 34–5, 41; on post-Napoleonic restructuring of Europe, 50; retreat from liberal political economy, 50–2; Romantic literary criticism in, 56. See also names of individual reviewers education: cosmopolitan, 9; and national development, 75; and national difference, 75; and national identity, 76; and national prejudice, 91

Ehlers, Leigh A., 177n26 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Stewart), 163n21 England. See Britain England, Ireland, and America (Cobden), 164n39 English literature, 66; foreign influences on, 64–5; as homogeneous, 66; national character and, 58; Staël on, 58 English Revolution, 24, 25 Enlightenment: cosmopolitanism, 2, 10, 12, 14–15; and cosmopolitan purpose, 14; in England, 158n27; and French Revolution, 27, 28; and idea of nation, 143; narrative, 71, 73; reason and, 14; Scottish, 6, 56, 68; and universal history, 14, 144; and universal standards, 69 enlightenment: absence of, in England, 28; cosmopolitan purpose and, 147; of Europe, 44; international trade and, 151 ennui, 77 Ennui (Edgeworth), 7, 75–8, 86 ‘Essay on History and Romance’ (Godwin), 143–4 ‘Essay on Irish Bulls’ (M. Edgeworth; R.L. Edgeworth), 82–5 ethnography as pilgrimage, 99 Europe: free press and, 52–3; international union and, 49; literature in, 70; national taste in, 70; post-Napoleonic restructuring of, 50, 145; as united whole, 43 Eustace, John Chetwode. Classical Tour of Italy, 172n11 ‘Examination of the late Orders in Council’ (Brougham), 47–8 expatriates, 104 ‘Fare Thee Well’ (Byron), 111 fascism, 119–20 federations of states, 18–20 Fenelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-, 35 Fielding, Henry, 58 filiation, affiliation and, 85



194 Index

‘First Letter on a Regicide Peace’ (Burke), 31 Fitzgerald, Lord and Lady Edward, 176n10 foreign commerce. See trade foreignness, as socio-cultural relationship, 77, 78 For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston Review), 9 fosterage, 75 Fougeret de Monbron, Louis Charles. Le Cosmopolite, 98–9 Fox, Charles, 5, 30 France: alliance of European powers against, 22; colonies, 46; cosmopolitanism and, 72–3; and destabilization of other nations, 29, 30; Edgeworth and, 88; as ‘faction’, 29–30; geographical re-territorialization of, 29; National Assembly, 27, 28, 73; philosophes, 73; Southey on, 148; trade war with Britain, 46–9; ungroundedness of, 28–9; war with Britain, 22, 44, 49, 89–90 Franklin, Benjamin, 93 ‘The Frauds of the National Flag’ (Jeffrey), 46 freedom: fighters, 108; individual, 4, 15–16; and individual development, 17, 18; of nations, 4, 18–19, 20, 52–3; of press, 52–3; and reason, 14; reform and, 14; restricted, 17, 18. See also liberty French language, 99 French literature, 59, 65 French Revolution, 2, 26, 27; Burke and, 5, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33, 34, 73, 104; Enlightenment and, 27, 28; Mackintosh on, 33; and patriotism, 23; Price on, 24 The French Revolution and Enlightenment (Deane), 159n40 Gallagher, Catherine, 90 Gallagher, John A. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, 161n6 Galland, M. ‘The Remarkable Sayings of the Eastern Nations’, 83

195

Gellner, Ernest: Legitimation of Belief, 156n5; Nations and Nationalism, 10, 11–12 genres: of English literature, 58; literature cutting across, 132; and national literatures, 132 Germany: literature, 62–4, 67, 69; Southey on, 148. See also On Germany (Staël) Gibbon, Edward, 57, 104 Gifford, William. ‘America – Orders in Council’, 48 Gilbert, Felix, 157n6 Glenarvon (Lamb), 7, 116–17 Godwin, William, 150; ‘Essay on History and Romance’, 143–4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Life of Himself, 66; Wilhelm Meister, 67–9 Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 66 Goldsmith, Oliver, 63, 92, 104, 108; Citizen of the World, 7, 95, 96–9 Gordon Riots, 91, 93 Great Britain: as Burkean nation, 4; and Europe, 43; Scotland’s role in, 4. See also Britain; Scotland Greece: Byron and, 102–3, 106; as fragmented nation, 120; in The Last Man, 152; liberty in society of, 56; literature, 56, 64, 83; in The Vampyre, 118 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron, 54 The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importations of Foreign Corn (Malthus), 50–1 Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus, 138 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 95 Habermas, Jurgen, 142, 155n2 Harrington (Edgeworth), 7, 90–4 Hazlitt, William, 174n41 ‘Heads for Consideration on the Present State of Affairs’ (Burke), 22 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 60, 141 Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 5, 26, 28, 73 Hemans, Felicia, 173n35 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 60 Hervey, James. Meditations, 128–9



Index

heterogeneity: of Britain, 90, 91; of German literature, 64; of Kant’s model of nation, 17, 18, 19, 20; of Lake poetry, 61, 66; of Melmoth the Wanderer, 131, 132; of nation, 6; in national literatures, 62, 66 Hinsley, E. H., 12 The Historical Novel (Lukàcs), 141 Hobhouse, John Cam, 115 Hobson, J.A., 161n6 Holland, Lord. Account of Lope de Vega, 62 Holy Alliance, 148–9 home, pilgrimage and, 102–3 home and hearth, attachment to: and borders, 72; Childe Harold and, 100; as heart of nation, 27; and national identity, 72; nationness as, 67; patriotism as, 5 homebodies, travellers vs., 102, 103, 105 homogeneity: of Britain, 4, 90, 120; and English literature, 66; fascism and, 119–20; and Ireland, 124 Horner, Francis, 6, 35, 41–2, 50; ‘Observations on the Bounty upon Exported Corn’, 44–5 Howard, William, 170n36 Hume, David, 41, 58, 60, 93; ‘Of Commerce’, 161n18; ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’, 36–7 Hurrell, Andrew. ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, 12–13

‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (Kant), 4, 12–19, 154; Southey and, 146–9 identity: as differential, 95; travel and, 105. See also national identity Imagined Communities (Anderson), 1 imperialism, 35, 155n2 ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ (Gallagher; Robinson), 161n6 individual development: education and, 75; restricted freedom and, 17, 18

interdependence: and Kant’s nation state, 17; of national literatures, 70; of nation-states, 42 interloper, the, 119–20 international federation, 4–5, 147–8 internationalism: commercially-based, 6, 35, 42, 52; and cosmopolitanism, 15; Schlereth on, 15 international relations: balance of power in, 42–4; Brougham on, 42–4; Mackintosh on, 33; as relations between sovereigns, 51; three periods of, 51–2; universal cosmopolitanism and, 6, 18; unsocial sociability and, 19–20 international trade. See trade international union: for Brougham, 44; cosmopolitan purpose and, 19; future of Europe and, 49; Kant’s nation and, 18; national union and, 20; and peace, 22 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham), 161n9 Ireland: Act of Union (1801) and, 71, 84, 90, 107, 126; and borders, 71; bulls, 82–5; Burke on, 31–2; Catholic emancipation in, 31–2; cosmopolitan heroine and, 124–6; dual status of, 74; as fragmented nation, 120; homogeneity and, 124; Jacobinism and, 31–2; patriotism in, 31; Protestantism in, 31–2, 177n23; 1798 rebellion, 76, 107, 116; as woman, 116. See also Anglo-Irishness; Edgeworth, Maria Irish-English relations: Act of Union and, 84; Edinburgh Review on, 71 Irish Rebellion, 6–7 Italy: Byron and, 103–4, 107; as fragmented nation, 120; in The Milesian Chief, 124; Southey on, 148. See also Corinne; or Italy (Staël) Jacobinism: Burke on, 30–3; Coleridge on, 127–9; cosmopolitanism and, 5–6, 26–7, 32; English, 30–1; in Ireland, 31–2; and Lake poets, 62;



196 Index

and literature reviews, 62; and nations, 30–1; and patriotism, 31; Protestantism and, 159n40; reviews of foreign literature and, 6; Roman Catholicism and, 32 Jefferson, Thomas, 48 Jeffrey, Francis, 5, 6, 35, 41–2, 54; on Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 113; ‘The Frauds of the National Flag’, 46; on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, 67–9; on Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, 67; ‘Southey’s Thabala’, 61–2, 67; State and Prospects for Europe, 49 Jewish Naturalization Act, 91, 94 Jews and Jewishness: Anglo-Irishness and, 90; and cosmopolitanism, 90, 93, 102; in Harrington, 90–2; Jew as intruder, 120; national identity, 93; Wandering Jew, 90, 102 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 4–5; Anglo-Irish relations and philosophy of, 78; ’An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment?”’, 13, 14; Arendt and, 156n1; Barruel on, 32; on boundary crossing, 21; Burke’s ideas compared, 18; and civil state, 15–17; ‘Contest of the Faculties’, 15; and cosmopolitanism, 11–12; ‘cosmopolitan purpose’, 13–14, 15, 19; De Quincey on, 149; ‘double logic’ of, 12–13; and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, 12; and federation of states, 18–19; Gellner on, 10, 11–12, 156n5; Hurrell on, 12–13; ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, 4, 12–19, 146–9, 154; on international union and national security, 22; Kedourie on, 10–11, 12; ‘Metaphysics of Morals’, 16–17, 19, 20, 21; and nationalism, 5, 11–12; on national unions, 17, 18; and non-unified state, 18, 19, 29; ‘On Perpetual Peace’, 4, 12, 18, 19–20, 21, 148–9, 154; ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice”’,

197

15–16; and Romantic nationalism, 11; on state as pathologically enforced social union, 119; statism and cosmopolitanism of, 12–13; tree image, 17–18; union of states, 20, 71; and universal history, 13–14; ’unsocial sociability’, 15–17, 19–20, 119 ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’ (Hurrell), 12–13 ‘Kant in his Miscellaneous Essays’ (De Quincy), 149 ‘Kant’s Project to perpetual Peace’ (Beddoes), 157n18 Kedourie, Elie, 12; Nationalism, 10–11 Kelly, Gary, 177n23 Kelsall, Malcolm, 174–5n47 Kennedy, Veronica, 132–3 kinship, 72 Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth, 167n3 Kramer, Dale, 137 Kristeva, Julia, 2, 7, 82, 105, 107–8; Nations without Nationalism, 21; Strangers to Ourselves, 8, 20–1, 95 laissez-faire economics, 51, 52 Lake poets, 61, 62, 66 Lamb, Caroline. Glenarvon, 7, 116–17 Lamb, William, 116 The Last Man (Shelley), 8, 143, 149–54 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt), 156n1 Lectures on Political Economy (Stewart), 41 Leerssen, Joep, 82 Legitimation of Belief (Gellner), 156n5 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Nathan the Wise, 67 ‘Letter on Affairs of Ireland’ (Burke), 32 ‘Letter to a Member of the National Assembly’ (Burke), 27, 30 ‘Letter to Richard Burke’ (Burke), 31 ‘Letter to William Smith’ (Burke), 31–2 Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu), 7, 95 Lewis, M.G., 133 liberalism: aristocratic, 96, 117; Byron’s adultery and, 111–12;



Index

198 Index National Assembly of France’, 22, 23, 26 Lukàcs, Georg. The Historical Novel, 141 Macaulay, Thomas, 144 Mackintosh, James, 6, 50, 61; on English literary history, 64–5, 66; relationship with Staël, 166n16; on Staël’s On Germany, 62–4; Vindiciae Gallicae, 33 Magna Charta, 25 Malheur et Pitié (De Lille), 54 Malthus, Thomas: The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importations of Foreign Corn, 50–1; Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, 50–1 Mandeville, Bernard, 17 marriage, 120–1 Marx, Karl, 151 Maturin, Charles, 90; Bertram, 127–8; heroines of, 121; Melmoth the Wanderer, 4, 8, 129–42, 151; Milesian Chief, 4, 7–8, 124–6; Women; or Pour et Contre, 126–7 McGann, Jerome, 105 McKillop, Allan D., 96, 98 Meditations (Hervey), 128–9 Medwin, Thomas, 106 Meinecke, Friedrich. Cosmopolitanism and the National State, 156–7n6 Mellor, Anne, 178n11 Melmoth the Wanderer (Maturin), 4, 8, 133–42, 151; Edinburgh Review on, 131–2; as generic hybrid, 130–1; narrative construction in, 137–42; reviews of, 129–33; as rhizome-book, 138–9 Memoirs of Richard Lovell Edgeworth (Edgeworth), 75 mercantilism, 6, 36–7, 38–9, 39–40, 47, 51, 52 ‘Metaphysics of Morals’ (Kant), 16–17, 19, 20, 21 middle class, 114 Milan Decree, 47 Milesian Chief (Maturin), 4, 7–8, 124–6



cosmopolitanisms and, 86; Holy Alliance and, 149; and universal improvement, 146 libertarian cosmopolitanism, 108 liberty: Byron and, 107–8; in Greece, 56; libertinage and, 108; literature and, 56–7; revolutions and, 24. See also freedom ‘Liberty of the Continental Press’, 52–3 ‘Liberty of the Press and its Abuses’ (Brougham), 164n42 Life of Himself (Goethe), 66 The Life of Lord Byron (Moore), 172n15 Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions (Staël), 55–60, 61, 122 ‘Literature – Nationalism’s other?’ (During), 70 literature(s): as category, 165n6; cosmopolitan forms of, 8; and cosmopolitanism, 6; cosmopolitan vs. national, 60; international, 55; Jacobinism and, 6, 62; and liberty, 56–7; and morality, 60; and national borders, 55; national character and, 58; national identity and, 54, 66; perfectibility and, 57, 68; in post-Napoleonic Europe, 70; progress and, 57; Roman, 56–7; root- and rhizome books, 138–9; socio-political approach to, 55–60, 70; southern vs. northern origins of, 58–9; Southey on, 106; transnational, 55; tyranny and, 57; universal standards in, 69. See also national literature(s) local attachment: and absenteeism, 79; and borders, 72; cosmopolitanism and, 88, 96; and international trade, 79–80; and national identity, 72; and partisanship, 80–1; re-territorialization of France and, 29. See also country, love of; home and hearth, attachment to London Revolutionary Society. ‘Congratulary Address to the

Mill, J. S.: on Edinburgh Review, 166n23; Principles of Political Economy, 35 Mill, James, 35, 41–2, 163n23 Mill, J.S., 151 Miller, Joe. Natural History, 83 Monbron, Louis Charles Fougeret de. See Fougeret de Monbron, Louis Charles Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron, 58; Lettres Persanes, 7, 95 Moore, Thomas. The Life of Lord Byron, 172n15 morality: international, 157n9; literature and, 60; nationality and, 115; national taste and, 60, 127–8 moral philosophy, 36–7 Mordecai, Rachel, 171n44 More, Sir Thomas, 145–9 Morgan, Sydney, 120, 124; Wild Irish Girl, 121 Napier, Macvey, 163n23 Napoleon I, Emperor, 46–7 Napoleonic wars: Britain’s dependence on Jewish finance during, 93; cosmopolitanism and, 42; Edinburgh Review and, 5, 6, 34; Jacobinism and, 6 Narratives of Enlightenment (O’Brien), 161n12 Nathan the Wise (Lessing), 67 national belonging: inheritance vs. education and, 76; ‘little platoon’ and, 29; local attachment and, 29; redrawing of boundaries of, 120; as socio-cultural, 77; to two nations, 76–7 national character: Irish bulls and, 84; and literature, 58; as national identity, 75; nationalism and, 71 national development: conflict and, 141; education and, 75; international trade and, 37–8 national heroines, 120–1, 123, 124, 126 national histories, 104, 144 national identity: British, 89–90; education and, 76; federation of

199

states and, 20; as inheritance, 72, 75, 76; Jewish, 93; and literature, 54, 66; local attachment and, 72; middle-class vs. aristocratic, 113–14; multiple affiliations in, 90; national character as, 75; national literature and, 67; national origin and, 76–7; socio-cultural foundation, 75, 78, 85 national interest: balance of power and, 43; cosmopolitanism and, 70; free trade and, 39–40 nationalism: cosmopolitanism and, 2–3, 6, 10, 15, 18, 25, 113–14, 155n2, 156–7n6; Gellner on, 11; invasion and, 117; Irish Rebellion and, 6–7; Kant and, 5, 11–12; Kedourie on, 10; and national character, 71; religion vs., 2; Romantic, 2, 10, 11, 12, 18; self-determination and, 10–11; universalism and, 2. See also Romantic nationalism Nationalism and After (Carr), 51–2 Nationalism (Kedourie), 10–11 national literature(s): affiliations between, 58–9; borders and, 64; cosmopolitan heroine and, national literature(s) – continued 120–7; cosmopolitanism and, 58–9, 122; cross-border movement and, 59; English, 58, 64–5, 66; Enlightenment narrative and, 73; French, 59, 65; genres and, 132; German, 62–4, 67, 69; Greek, 56, 64; heterogeneity in, 62; interdependence of, 70; international literary exchange and, 59–60; and national identity, 67; progress of, 132; Romantic nationalisms and, 55, 61–2; socio-political approach and, 57–8, 61, 64; stages of progress, 68; variables shaping, 58 national taste(s): cosmopolitanism and, 67–8, 69–70; and cultural relativism, 69; foreign literature and, 62, 67; international trade and, 68; local attachment and, 67; and



Index

morality, 60, 115, 127–8; in post-Napoleonic Europe, 70 national unions, 18; antagonism and, 17, 18; and international unions, 20 national wealth: free trade and, 39–40; international trade and, 48–9 Nations and Nationalism (Gellner), 10, 11–12 Nations and Nationalisms (Deane), 71–2 nation(s) and nationness: asymmetry of, 3; Burkean model of (see Burkean model of nation); cosmopolitan heroine and, 126; cosmopolitanism as rooted in soil of, 3; cosmopolitan vs. Burkean model of, 143; Enlightenment and idea of, 143; fragmentation of, 120; freedom of, 4, 18–19, 20, 52–3; heterogeneity of, 3; and international federation, 4–5; in international structure, 3; Jacobinism and, 30–1; Kantian idea of, 18–19; kinship and, 72; ‘little platoon’ and, 5; as love of hearth and home, 27, 67; as non-unified, 3–4, 5, 8, 10, 18, 19, 29, 62; as organic wholes, 55, 120; and sovereign, 51; stages in progress of, 68; unified models of, 120; and universalisms, 143; unsocial sociability and, 4; visitations to vs. settlement in, 21. See also state(s) Nations without Nationalism (Kristeva), 21 Natural History (Miller), 83 Newman, Gerald, 117; The Rise of English Nationalism, 113–14 Night Thoughts (Young), 129 Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, 9 O’Brien, Karen, 104; Narratives of Enlightenment, 161n12 ‘Observations on the Bounty upon Exported Corn’ (Horner), 44–5 ‘Observations on the Conduct of the Minority’ (Burke), 30 Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws (Malthus), 50–1

‘Of Commerce’ (Hume), 161n18 ‘Of Patriotism’ (Stewart), 40–1 ‘Of the Jealousy of Trade’ (Hume), 36–7 On Germany (Staël), 56, 58, 60, 62–4, 115 ‘On Perpetual Peace’ (Kant), 4 ‘On the Common Saying: “This May be True in Theory but it does not Apply in Practice”’ (Kant), 15–16 Ormond (Edgeworth), 7, 86–9, 93, 168n17 Owenson, Sydney. See Morgan, Sydney Palgrave, Francis, 67; on Goethe’s Life of Himself, 66; Golden Treasury, 66 patrilineal descent, 73–4 patriotism: Burke and, 5; Childe Harold and, 110–11; and citizens of the world, 97; cosmopolitanism and, 2–3, 9, 24, 40–1; Edinburgh Review and, 34; French Revolution and, 23; in Ireland, 31; Irish, 78; Jacobinism and, 31; literary, 6, 60–6; ‘little platoon’ and, 26; non-nationalistic, 82; Price and, 5, 23; rational vs. instinctive, 40–1; Staël on, 55–6 ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ (Nussbaum), 9 peace: cosmopolitanism and, 152; international trade and, 151; international union and, 20, 21, 22; Kant on (see ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant)); Southey on, 148–9 perfectibility: literature and, 57, 68; Southey and, 146 ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant), 12, 18, 19–20, 21, 148–9, 154 Persian Letters (Montesquieu). See Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu) philosophes, 92–3; Burke on, 26–7, 72–3, 88; Childe Harold as, 110–11; Edgeworth and, 88 Philosophie de Kant (Villers), 5, 34 pilgrimage, 99–100 ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ (Southey), 105–6 Pinsky, Robert, 9



200 Index

plague, universal, 149–54 ‘Pleasures of Memory’ (Rogers), 65 Poems (Rogers), 64–5 poetry: of Byron, 117; English, 64–5; Greek, 65; Lake, 61, 62, 66 Poland, 49 Polidori, John William. The Vampyre, 117–18 political economy, 41, 52; and cosmopolitanism, 41; Edinburgh Review and, 34–5; moral philosophy and, 36–7; of Smith, 37–41 Political Theory and International Relations (Beitz), 157n9 ‘Politique de tous les Cabinets de l’Europe’ (Brougham), 42–4 Porter, Denis, 99 Price, Richard, 5, 93; A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, 4, 23–4, 25, 26 Principles of International Law (Bentham), 161n9 Principles of Penal Law (Bentham), 35 Principles of Political Economy (Mill), 35 ‘Privileged Assimilation’ (Cary), 168n18 protectionism, 6, 38, 42, 44 Protestantism: and British-French war, 89–90; in Glenarvon, 116; and Gordon Riots, 91; in Ireland, 31–2, 177n23; and Jacobinism, 159n40; in Wild Irish Girl, 121 Quarterly Review, 34, 50, 130; on Orders in Council, 48–9 Quennell, Peter. Byron: the Years of Fame, 173n30 Radcliffe, Anne, 133 Ragussis, Michael, 171n44 reactionary cosmopolitanism, 8, 143–54 reason: cosmopolitan purpose and, 14; and Enlightenment, 14, 147; Southey and, 147 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 5, 18, 22–3, 24–33, 32, 66, 72–3 Reiss, Hans, 158n28 La Religieuse (Diderot), 177n21

201

religion: and cosmopolitanism, 92–3; cosmopolitan nationness and, 143; and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, 92–3; and Kantian model of nation, 21; nationalism vs., 2; and national literature, 57–8. See also Christianity; Jews ‘The Remarkable Sayings of the Eastern Nations’ (Galland), 83 Remarks on the Jacobinical Tendency of the Edinburgh Review (Wharton), 161n5 ‘Remarks on the Policy of the Allies’ (Burke), 159n31 revolutions, 24 Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa, 129 Riley, Patrick, 12 The Rise of English Nationalism (Newman), 113–14 Robbins, Bruce, 1, 55, 82; ‘Comparative Cosmopolitanism’, 8 Roberts, William, 114–15 Robertson, Michael, 174n36 Robinson, Ronald E. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, 161n6 Rogers, Samuel: ‘Pleasures of Memory’, 65; Poems, 64–5; ‘Voyage of Columbus’, 65 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism romantic character, 112–13 Romantic nationalism: comparative literature and, 55; cosmopolitanism and, 2, 10, 12; Kant and, 11, 18; and national literature, 55, 61–2; and Romantic literature, 70. See also nationalism Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Butler), 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 15, 19, 26, 27–8, 61, 73, 88 Rutherford, Andrew, 174n36 Said, Edward. ‘Secular Criticism’, 85 Saussy, Haun, 55 Schlereth, Thomas, 36; The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, 14–15, 92–3



Index

Scotland: Albania compared to, 101; Enlightenment, 6, 56, 68; Jacobinism in, 31; role in Great Britain, 4. See also Edinburgh Review Scott, Sir Walter, 8, 34, 113, 141, 144, 174n41 Scrivener, Michael, 155n2 ‘Second Letter on a Regicide Peace’ (Burke), 29–30 ‘Secular Criticism’ (Said), 85 self-determination, 10–11 self-interest, 6, 39 Shakespeare, William, 58 Shelley, Mary, 8; The Last Man, 8, 143, 149–54 Simpson, David, 28 Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society (Southey), 145–9 ‘Sketch from Private Life’ (Byron), 111 Smith, Adam, 5–6, 35, 56; Bentham on, 35–6; on corn, 44–5; Horner on, 44–5; Stewart and, 40; Wealth of Nations, 4, 5–6, 6, 37–41 Smith, Sydney, 84, 163n23 social contract, 15, 18 social symptoms, 119–20, 121, 126 Southey, Robert, 8, 95, 172n13; Byron and, 105–6, 108; ‘Capt. Pasley on the Military Policy of Great Britain’, 48–9; The Colloquies, 8, 143; on contemporary literature, 106; ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, 105–6; Preface to A Vision of Judgement, 105–6; Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the progress and prospects of society, 145–9; Thabala, 61–2, 67 ‘Southey’s Thabala’ (Jeffreys), 61–2, 67 Spector, Sheila, 90 Staël, Germaine de, 6, 55; Corinne; or Italy, 7–8, 59, 65, 121–4; Delphine, 59; On Germany, 56, 58, 60, 62–4, 115; heroines of, 121; Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions, 55–60, 61, 122; Mackintosh and, 166n16 ‘State and Prospects of Europe’ (Jeffrey), 49

‘State of German Literature’ (Carlyle), 69–70 state(s): civil, 15–17; difference among, 20–1; national groups and, 17; as pathologically enforced social union, 119; as tree, 18; unions of, 18–20. See also nation(s) and nationness Sterne, Laurence, 58 Stewart, Dugald, 56, 178n6; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 163n21; Lectures on Political Economy, 41; ‘Of Patriotism’, 40–1 St Pierre, Abbé, 19 Stranger in Ireland (Carr), 71 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 8, 20–1, 95 The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek), 119–20 Swift, Jonathan, 58, 131; Gulliver’s Travels, 95 Taylor, William, 160n43 Thabala (Southey), 61–2, 67 Thom, Martin, 2 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, Guattari), 138 ‘To a Lady Weeping’ (Byron), 111 Todorov, Tzvetan, 2 Tracy, Robert, 120 trade: asymmetry in, 36; and borders, 35; between Britain and America, 48; Britain’s war with France, 46–9; Burke on, 25; corn, 44–5, 50–1; and cosmopolitanism, 6, 36; division of labour in, 37, 39–40; and domestic economy, 48–9; domestic vs. international, 36–8; free, 6, 35; Kant on, 19; local attachment and, 79–80; mercantilism vs., 39–40; mutual advantages of, 35–6, 39–40; and national development, 37–8; and national interest, 39–40; and national tastes, 68; and national wealth, 48–9; plague and, 151; reciprocal view of, 36–7; Smith on, 37–8; and universal enlightenment, 151



202 Index

203

travel: as border crossing, 101; Byron on, 95–6; ennui vs., 77; and identity, 105; as pleasure, 109; in Southey’s ‘Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, 105 travellers: homebodies vs., 102, 103, 105; philosophical, 97–8, 98; as romantic rebels, 99 Treaty of Paris, 50

A Vision of Judgement, 105–6 Voltaire: Burke and, 5, 26, 28, 73; Candide, 7, 95; Edgeworth’s Montanero compared to, 92; and Jews, 93; and national histories, 104; and national vs. cosmopolitan literature, 60 ‘Voyage of Columbus’ (Rogers), 65

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 84. See also Great Britain; Ireland universal, local vs., 9 universal benevolence, 35–6, 96, 152 universal history, 13–14, 143–7, 150, 152–3, 154 Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, 143–4 universal hospitality, 21 universalism(s): abstract, 142; Burke on, 27–8; cosmopolitanism and, 75; of literary standards, 69; and nationalism, 2; nationness and, 143; new cosmopolitanism and, 141–2; new Kantian, 142 universal law of right, 4–5, 11 unsocial sociability, 4, 15–17, 19–20, 119

Walpole, Horace. Castle of Otranto, 129 Wandering Jew, 90, 102 wars, Kant on, 19, 20 Waterloo, battle of, 104, 105 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 4, 6, 37–41 Weishaupt, Johann Adam, 32 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 107 Wharton, R. Remarks on the Jacobinical Tendency of the Edinburgh Review, 161n5 Wight, Martin, 12 Wild Irish Girl (Morgan), 121 Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), 67–9 Women; or Pour et Contre (Maturin), 126–7 Wordsworth, William, 95, 172n13

vagabonds, 98, 109–10, 111 The Vampyre (Polidori), 117–18 Villers, Charles de. Philosophie de Kant, 5, 34 Vindiciae Gallicae (Mackintosh), 33

‘Ye Mariners of England’ (Campbell), 65 Young, Edward. Night Thoughts, 129 Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology, 119–20



Index

Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Misfits (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery,1760-1807 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Literature, Commerceand Luxury (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romantic Representations of British India (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Cultures of print: essays in the history of the book

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

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

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Comparative Cultural Studies)

Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Romantic Misfits (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Age of Hypochondria: Interpreting Romantic Health and Illness (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary History Writing, 1770-1820 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Byron's Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Romance of Gambling in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

The Feminization of Fame 1750-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700-1900 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Britain's Bloodless Revolutions: 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery,1760-1807 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789-1832 (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Literature, Commerceand Luxury (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print)

Literary Minstrelsy, 1770-1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in British, Irish, and American Literature (Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Romantic Periodicals and Print Culture

Romantic Representations of British India (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Byron and Romanticism (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

Cultures of print: essays in the history of the book

Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

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

Cosmopolitanism in the Americas (Comparative Cultural Studies)

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