Romanticism's Debatable Lands

Romanticism’s Debatable Lands Edited by

Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington

Romanticism’s Debatable Lands

Frontispiece Map from c. 1590 showing the Debatable Land, taken from a late nineteenth-century facsimile by R. B. Armstrong of ‘A Platt of the Opposite Border of Scotland to ye West Marches of England’ (British Library, Royal MS 18.D.III, f. 76). The facsimile is in the National Library of Scotland, MS 6113, f. 267, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. The estuary shown is the Solway Firth (Soulua sands).

Romanticism’s Debatable Lands Edited by

Claire Lamont and

Michael Rossington

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington 2007 Individual chapters © contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230507852 hardback ISBN-10: 0230507859 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romanticism’s debatable lands / edited by Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 9780230507852 ISBN-10: 0230507859 1. Boundary disputes in literature. 2. English literature“19th century“History and criticism. 3. English literature“18th century“History and criticism. 4. Imperialism in literature. 5. Colonies in literature. 6. Geography in literature. 7. Boundaries in literature. 8. Romanticism“Great Britain. I. Lamont, Claire. II. Rossington, Michael. PR468.B68R66 2007 2006048052 820.9 32“dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Notes on Contributors

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1 Introduction Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington

Part I

1

Britain and Ireland

2 Writing on the Borders Fiona Stafford

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3 ‘Viewing Most Things Thro’ False Mediums’: Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826) and English Perceptions of Wales Mary-Ann Constantine

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4 ‘Looking back upon a Highland Prospect’: Scott, The Lady of the Lake, and the Lowland/Celtic Fringe Susan Oliver

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5 He’s Come Undone: Gender, Territory, and Hysteria in Rob Roy Fiona Wilson

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6 ‘The Shadow Line’: James Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ and British Romanticism Nigel Leask

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7 The Debatable Borders of English and Scottish Song and Ballad Collections Janet Sorensen

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8 Debatable Geographies of Romantic Nostalgia: The Redemptive Landscape in Wordsworth and Cobbett Alex Benchimol

92

9 John Clare and the Question of Place Timothy Morton v

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Contents

Part II

Europe and Beyond

10 Uneasy Settlement: Wordsworth and Emigration Karen O’Brien

121

11 Philosophy’s Debatable Land in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria Joel Faflak

136

12 Interrogating the ‘Valley of Wonders’: Some Romantic-Period Debates about Chamonix-Mont Blanc Cian Duffy

148

13 ‘Those Syren-Haunted Seas Beside’: Naples in the Work of Staël, Hemans, and the Shelleys Nanora Sweet

160

14 Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the Spanish Legacy of the British Empire Juan Sánchez

172

15 Borderline Engagements: The Crusades in Romantic-Period Drama Diego Saglia

186

16 Debating India: Southey and The Curse of Kehama Carol Bolton

198

17 Debating China: Romantic Fictions of the Qing Empire, 1760–1800 Peter J. Kitson

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18 ‘Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits’: The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century Deirdre Coleman

223

Select Bibliography

237

Index

239

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece: Map from c. 1590 showing the Debatable Land, taken from a late nineteenth-century facsimile by R. B. Armstrong of ‘A Platt of the Opposite Border of Scotland to ye West Marches of England’ (British Library, Royal MS 18.D.III, f. 76). The facsimile is in the National Library of Scotland, MS 6113, f. 267, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. The estuary shown is the Solway Firth (Soulua sands). 1

2

3

4

5

‘Hermitage Castle’, from the frontispiece to the first volume of Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2 vols (Kelso, 1802). The image is taken from the Bodleian Library copy (Douce S 145. Frontispiece) and is reproduced by kind permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford J. M. W. Turner, ‘Powis Castle, Montgomeryshire’ (c. 1834–35), © Manchester Art Gallery. Reproduced by kind permission of the Manchester Art Gallery ‘The Flying Ship’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 56 (April, 1786), p. 297. The image is taken from the copy in the State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library Council of New South Wales A ‘Machine [    ] for Flying in the Air’, Figure 2; and a ‘Ship [    ] sustained By the Air’, Figure 3, from Philosophical Collections, 1–7, ed. Robert Hooke for the Royal Society (London, 1679–82), No. 1. The image is taken from the copy in the National Library of Australia, RB MISC 3246, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library Three submarine machines, Figures 7–9, from Philosophical Collections, 1–7, ed. Robert Hooke for the Royal Society (London, 1679–82), No. 2. The image is taken from the copy in the National Library of Australia, RB MISC 3246, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library

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Acknowledgements The title of this book, Romanticism’s Debatable Lands, is that of the British Association for Romantic Studies Conference held in Newcastle upon Tyne in 2005, and all the chapters in it were originally given as either lectures or papers at that conference. We, the editors, are grateful not only to the contributors, but to all the participants at that conference who made the exploration of its title and theme something inviting a more permanent form. In the preparation of this book we are indebted to Xiao Yu for her accuracy and dedication in preparing the material for the publisher. We are grateful also to the Research Committee of Newcastle University School of English for enabling us to benefit from her skills, and to the support staff of the School of English for much invaluable help and advice. In particular we are grateful to Melanie Birch for assistance over the visual material in this book. We are indebted to Zeb Korycinska for so ably compiling the index. In arranging for the use of W. J. Blacklock’s painting ‘Gilnockie Tower’ (1843) on the cover, we are grateful to Melanie Gardner of the Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle, and in arranging for the use of the map of the Debatable Land in the frontispiece to Christopher Fleet of the National Library of Scotland.

viii

Notes on Contributors Alex Benchimol teaches in the Department of English Literature at Glasgow University. He has contributed to such journals as NineteenthCentury Contexts, Textual Practice, Romanticism, Radical Philosophy and The European Legacy, and co-edited a collection of essays, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (2006). Carol Bolton completed her PhD at Nottingham Trent University, was an MHRA-funded Research Associate on Southey: Poetical Works 1793– 1810 (2004), and is editor of an anthology, Romanticism and Politics 1789–1832, 5 vols (2006). At the time of writing, she is completing a monograph on Writing the Empire: Robert Southey and Romantic Colonialism. Deirdre Coleman holds the Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (2005) and editor of the Australia volume of Women Writing Home, 1700–1920: Female Correspondence across the British Empire, 6 vols (2006). Mary-Ann Constantine is Research Fellow and project leader at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. She has recently completed The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery, to be published by the University of Wales Press. Cian Duffy lectures in English Literature at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill. His publications include a monograph on Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime (2005). He is an editor of the third and final volume of the The Poems of Shelley (Longman) and is researching the cultural history of sublime landscape during the long eighteenth century. Joel Faflak is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario. He has co-edited Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (2004), has edited Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism (2005), and is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis and the Burden of the Mystery (2007). ix

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Notes on Contributors

Peter J. Kitson is Professor of English at the University of Dundee. Most recently he has published (with Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee) Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Period (2004) and his latest book is Romanticism, Race and Colonial Encounter, 1780–1830 (New York: Palgrave, 2007). Claire Lamont is Professor of English Romantic Literature at Newcastle University. She specializes in English and Scottish Literature, especially the Romantic poets, Austen and Scott, and the literary representation of architecture. Her edition of Scott’s Chronicles of the Canongate for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels appeared in 2000. Nigel Leask is Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. His books include The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (1988), British Romantic Writers and the East (1992), and Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770–1840: ‘from an Antique Land’ (2002). He is currently preparing a monograph on Robert Burns and British Romanticism. Timothy Morton is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (1994), The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (2000), and Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007). Karen O’Brien is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997) and Women, History and Enlightenment in Britain (2007), as well as essays on literature and the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Susan Oliver is Lecturer in English at Canterbury Christ Church University where she directs studies in Romanticism. She is a Senior Member of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a Visiting Fellow in Literature at the University of Essex. Her publications include Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (2005). Michael Rossington is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University. He has edited Mary Shelley’s Valperga (2000) and Percy Shelley’s The Cenci in The Poems of Shelley, Volume 2 (Longman, 2000). He is one of the editors of the third and final volume of The Poems of Shelley.

Notes on Contributors

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Diego Saglia is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Parma. His publications include Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000), I discorsi dell’esotico: l’oriente nel romanticismo britannico 1780–1830 (2002), and (co-edited with Laura Bandiera) British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting (2005). Juan Sánchez is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as managing editor for Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and as Teaching Fellow at Lancaster University. His dissertation considers the role of Spain in the development of British Romantic literature. Janet Sorensen teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2000, reissued 2005) and co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004). Fiona Stafford is Reader in English at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Somerville College. Her books include The Sublime Savage (1988), The Last of the Race (1994), Starting Lines in Scottish, Irish and English Poetry (2000), and editions of Jane Austen, Emma (1996), and Mary Shelley, Lodore (1996). Nanora Sweet is Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has co-edited Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (2001) and publishes widely on Hemans’ early work. Her current poetry chapbook is Rotogravure; her book Hemans and the Shaping of History is in progress. Fiona Wilson is Visiting Assistant Professor in English Literature at Fordham University. She has published articles on Scott, Byron, and twentieth-century Scottish writing. Her work has appeared most recently in the Keats–Shelley Journal and The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. Berthold Schoene (2007).

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1 Introduction Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington

As its title indicates, the concept linking the chapters in this book is that of the ‘debatable land’. The phrase is first recorded in the sixteenth century in the specific context of the Anglo-Scottish border. It remained the possession of lawyers, historians and map-makers until made more widely known by Walter Scott in the early nineteenth century. Thereafter the term ‘debatable’ came to be used to describe not only the Anglo-Scottish border but other disputed territories and, by metaphorical extension, disputes of other sorts, social, intellectual or artistic. It is, therefore, an appropriate concept to use to focus attention on certain aspects of writing in English in the Romantic period, roughly 1780–1830. In this collection of seventeen chapters, about half allude to the term ‘debatable lands’ in its geographical or literal sense; the others show the metaphorical extensions to which it now readily lends itself. The chapters are principally about the literature of Britain and Ireland. As that literature, however, incorporated the overseas experience gained in the course of travel, trade, war, and colonial expansion, the subjectmatter is not confined to these islands, and the collection is divided into two parts, headed ‘Britain and Ireland’ and ‘Europe and Beyond’. The border between England and Scotland was substantially agreed in 1237, but debates over some stretches continued at least until 1552.1 The term ‘debatable lands’ first appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in relation to these disputes. In particular, there was debate over the section in the west between the rivers Esk and Sark, north of Carlisle (illustrated in the frontispiece). It is this section, variously estimated as about ten miles long and four miles broad, which is referred to when the term ‘the Debatable Land’ is used in the singular.2 In the plural it could apply to any parts of the border held to be doubtful. Because of the turbulent reputation of the Debatable Land, in which border clans 1

2 Introduction

dominated by the Armstrongs on the Scottish side and the Grahams on the English pursued careers of petty warfare and intermittent outrage, in 1552 commissioners were appointed by the monarchs of both England and Scotland to agree the line of the Anglo-Scottish border at that point.3 They did so, marking it with a ditch which came to be known as the Scots Dyke. It is today a curiously forgotten site of Anglo-Scottish history. Its significance is perhaps more resonant for us on a map. The Anglo-Scottish border, as finally agreed in the thirteenth century, runs from the Tweed to the Solway. Parts in the east and middle are quite clearly defined by major geographical features: the course of the river Tweed and the watershed of the Cheviots. In the West there is no such commanding geographical feature, which is one reason why the border remained unresolved for so long. When one looks at the Anglo-Scottish border on a modern map one notices that most of it winds in conformity with natural features; but that the Scots Dyke is a straight line, clearly the work of a committee. To a map-reader aware of all the straight-line borders of the modern world, and the debates out of which they arise, it is curiously prophetic. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was little to draw the average Briton’s attention to the Anglo-Scottish border. Before the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 the inhabitants of the lands adjacent to the border had a reputation for lawlessness and were a nuisance to the central government of both countries. On ascending the English throne, James VI and I expressed his wish to minimize the concept of a border between the two countries, and bring the cattle-rustling and skirmishing borderers into a modern polity.4 His success is reflected in the first English edition of William Camden’s Britannia (1610) in which, after dividing the inhabitants of Scotland into Highlanders and Lowlanders, Camden continues, Out of this division I exclude the Borderers, because by reason of peace shining now upon them on every side, by a blessed and happy Vnion [of 1603] they are to bee ranged and reckoned in the very heart and midest of the British Empire, as who beginne to be weary of warres and to acquaint them selues with the delightfull benefits of peace.5 Against this policy of denial, the existence of the particular culture of the border and borderers was retained in the public mind largely by popular song. In James’s reign a printed broadsheet of ‘Chevy Chase’ (‘Chevy’ being a contraction of ‘Cheviot’) was sold in London,6 and the

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song’s long-standing popularity caused Addison to call it ‘the favourite Ballad of the common People of England’.7 A clearer pointer to the literature of the Romantic period is Thomas Percy’s pioneering collection of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry first published in 1765. In the third edition (1775), at the end of his ‘Essay on the Ancient Minstrels’, Percy writes, I cannot conclude this account of the ancient English Minstrels, without remarking that they are most of them represented to have been of the North of England. [    ] On the other hand the scene of the finest Scottish ballads is laid in the South of Scotland; which should seem to have been particularly the nursery of Scottish Minstrels. [    ] The martial spirit constantly kept up and exercised on the frontier of the two kingdoms, as it furnished continual subjects for their Songs, so it inspired the borderers of both nations with the powers of poetry.8 It was some years before anybody acted on that hint. The first collection of specifically border ballads is Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03). In his Introduction, Scott gives a history of the border, and when he comes to the mid-sixteenth century he writes, At this time, also, the Debateable Land, a tract of country, situated betwixt the Esk and Sarke, claimed by both kingdoms, was divided by royal commissioners, appointed by the two crowns. – By their award, this land of contention was separated by a line, drawn from east to west, betwixt the rivers. [    ] Yet the Debateable Land continued long after to be the residence of the thieves and banditti, to whom its dubious state had afforded a desirable refuge.9 Before the appearance of the Minstrelsy, Wordsworth had written, though not published, his The Borderers (1796–97). The work of these two major writers makes clear that the Anglo-Scottish border and its inhabitants were of significance to Romantic literature – both for themselves and for the ideas which their history could provoke. It was not difficult for anyone with either a knowledge of history or a fondness for Scott to extend the concept of ‘the debatable’ to other comparable territories. The Oxford English Dictionary cites as the earliest extension the terms ‘debateable ground’ and ‘debateable frontier’, both referring to Greece. The more interesting extension of the term, however, is into the world of ideas. In 1828, Macaulay described history

4 Introduction

as ‘a debateable land’ between ‘the Reason and the Imagination’.10 The remark seems to have arisen from his reflections on Scott’s success as a historical novelist and professional disappointment that historians did not have the same success in transmitting the past to a mass readership. He felt that Scott had stolen a march by the use of ‘imagination’, and wished to retrieve that faculty for the historian.11 After that the term ‘debatable land’ could be said to have come free of its physical and geographical origin; though it has never entirely shed its border and Scott-ish origin. ∗

∗

∗

The phrase ‘debatable lands’ can be put beside other geographical expressions which have proved fruitful in recent literary criticism. Examples of such criticism are Homi Bhabha’s wide-ranging collection Nation and Narration (1990), and, in the Romantic period, Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844, edited by Amanda Gilroy (2000), Placing and Displacing Romanticism, edited by Peter J. Kitson (2001), and Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, edited by Leith Davis, Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen (2004).12 A ‘debatable land’ is connected with the idea of a border. Benedict Anderson, in his Imagined Communities, points out that the emergence of the nation increased the importance of borders. In the social organization before the nation, which he designates ‘dynastic realms’, borders could be allowed to be ‘porous and indistinct’.13 ‘Debatable lands’ occur when a border in the modern world is, for whatever reason, ‘indistinct’ and probably also ‘porous’. Writers in the Romantic period had every reason to be acutely conscious of borders. The French Revolution at its outset might have seemed concerned with a vertical view of politics; but it was not long before revolutionary ideas came to dominate horizontal relationships as well. There were unexpected consequences, like the impetus the quarrel with France gave to the British union with Ireland in 1800.14 The early successes of Napoleon’s armies called in question national borders so insouciantly crossed. The real redrawing of borders, however, was the work of the Congress of Vienna (1815), venturing in several parts of Europe into territories with long-standing claims to debatable status.15 The Congress had consequences also for borders on a global scale, since it ‘marked the final defeat of Iberian, Dutch, and above all French pretensions to contain British imperialism and commerce with Asia, Africa, and the Americas’.16

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A border is a notional line, inviting discussion as to what it separates and what are the possibilities and consequences of crossing it. On some borders the two sides are mirror images of each other; on others one side is keenly trying to differentiate itself from the other. As many of the territorial disputes of the second half of the twentieth century concerned borders – fuelled by communism, religion, ethnicity, and economic resources – it is not surprising that much has been written about borders in the last couple of decades by geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, historians, and political theorists.17 Nor is it surprising that the issues raised should influence contemporary literature. Writing in English about borders has been dominated by the troubled areas within Britain, the many borders arising from colonialism and empire, and by recent American experience. In the United States the early settlers’ move west has been replaced as a border issue by the border with Mexico. That is the dominant model of a border in the contemporary world, a border crossing (mostly crossed one way) which represents for a poorer people a move into modernity, and which is both resisted and exploited by the destination country. When one turns to an earlier period and other parts of the world it is obvious that borders do not always work like that, and may be closer to the experiences of the American west or Britain and Ireland. It is clear, however, that whether a border separates two communities with an imbalance of power or two equal but opposing sides, whether the line of the border is to be negotiated or whether the negotiation regards the existence of the border itself, if the disputes continue over a period of time they create their own border culture.18 A debatable land is such a culture. Its point is that the notional line of the border, or its very existence, is not agreed. A debatable land, the area in which these disagreements matter, sets up a contrast between the sources of authority on either side and the unpoliced society which emerges in a territory where government is both disputed and probably distant and seldom effective. Debatable lands, like borders, go with the nation state. They represent an uncertainty of perpetual annoyance to the ruler, and exploitable by those on the ground. Historians point out that the ‘Debatable Land’ of the Anglo-Scottish border, acknowledging the laws of neither England nor Scotland, generated its own customary law. By the early sixteenth century, Border custom had settled down to an understanding that [the land] should be treated as common pasture from sunrise to sunset by

6 Introduction

the neighbouring inhabitants of both countries. Cattle or goods left overnight could be taken or destroyed and no recompense allowed. If a man built a house it could be burned with all in it and no penalty incurred; if there were persons within they could be taken prisoners [    ].19 This rigour underlined the fact that no claims to ownership or individual right were permitted. Such alternative and localized law is provocative. It can have, however, a romantic appeal. The debatable lands explored in this book are territories disputed between established power groups, yet struggling for definition, and, as they do so, generating their own codes. As Homi Bhabha remarks about both nations and cultures: It is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.20 Different terms are used for this sense of a territory surrounding a disputed border. The border area between England and Wales is known as ‘the Marches’, a term not usually used now in either Scotland or Ireland. Historians looking for a geographically neutral term sometimes refer to ‘borderlands’, or the more politically charged ‘frontier zone’. We have chosen ‘debatable lands’ not only because of the history of the phrase and its association with Romanticism, but also because the word ‘debatable’ so clearly enables the move from the geographical and political to the wide-ranging intellectual disputes investigated in this book. ∗ ∗ ∗ The first part of this book explores debatable lands in Britain and Ireland. Fiona Stafford starts from the historical ‘debatable land’ by comparing the Anglo-Scottish border in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border with twentieth-century writing from the Welsh marches and the border zone of the north of Ireland, revealing a shared concept of ‘border vision’. Mary-Ann Constantine’s chapter is on Iolo Morganwg and his negotiations to establish a Welsh identity against the pressures of English pre-conceptions of the country. Scotland has another border besides that with England, the less formal but perhaps more culturally decisive one between Lowland and Highland. Susan Oliver’s reading of Scott’s The Lady of the Lake shows how Scottish Enlightenment theories

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of the stages through which societies develop, and accompanying theories of language, inform Scott’s presentation of the Highlanders in that poem. Fiona Wilson draws on medical definitions of hysteria to interpret the journey of the hero of Rob Roy into first Northumberland and then the Scottish Highlands, where gender boundaries are opened up in a personal parallel with the opening up of the north to British trade. Nigel Leask’s chapter shows the Anglo-Scottish border being crossed in the other direction as he examines the influence of James Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ on the reputation of the poet and his country, and also on the theory of poetry formulated in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800). Janet Sorensen’s chapter compares English ballad editors’ insistence on the ancientness of their poems, with the Scots’ greater willingness to celebrate ballads and songs for being powerful in the present – an ironic conclusion in view of the English belief that it was in the north of Britain that vestiges of earlier cultural forms were to be found. The works discussed in the last two chapters in Part I are geographically set in England, but the debates arising from them are in the realms of politics and philosophy. Alex Benchimol compares the impact of harsh economic conditions on Wordsworth’s ‘mountaineers’ and the rural poor of the south of England described by Cobbett, pointing out that different terrain, as well as different politics, lies behind the remedies the writers suggest. John Clare is the focus of a theoretically innovatory chapter by the ecological critic, Timothy Morton. He reads two poems, ‘I Am’ and the sonnet on the mouse’s nest, reinterpreting the relation between subject and place in contexts where any comforting aspects of nature have been removed. The chapters in Part II extend the scope of the book outwards from Britain, while demonstrating the national preoccupations often underpinning British writers’ engagement with Europe and the wider world. In the first, Karen O’Brien shows how domestic debates about colonial emigration inform the treatment of geographical movement and settlement in Wordsworth’s writings. Like O’Brien’s, the next chapter, by Joel Faflak, engages explicitly with issues that relate to empire. The ‘cultural imaginary of philosophy’s nationhood’ in Biographia Literaria is part of a territorial anxiety that reflects the political outlook of ‘late’ Coleridge. Forced to admit his indebtedness to continental thought Coleridge yet finds a way of using Europe to bolster a metaphysics that is implicitly British, even imperial. The next two chapters focus respectively on specific European mountain- and seascapes – the sublime Alps and the bay of Naples. Cian Duffy analyzes narratives of exploration

8 Introduction

and aesthetic theory in relation to the former, Nanora Sweet the poetry and prose fiction generated by the latter. In each of these two chapters, it is a geographically remarkable location that prompts discursive and literary contestation. There follow two chapters which offer further reflections on empire and Europe. Juan Sánchez examines Helen Maria Williams’s long poem, Peru (1784), in the context of both contemporary Anglo-Spanish relations and the use of Spain as a focus for literary debate about the ideology and method of colonialism. Diego Saglia discusses ‘siege plays’ by Baillie, Hemans and Sheil, set in North Africa and Constantinople. Here the places are all scenes of debate, if not of conflict, between Christianity and Islam. Saglia finds in these dramatic portrayals of conflict between East and West the staging of ‘fears about the disappearance of Europe from the cultural and political map’. The following two chapters extend debate to the Orient. Carol Bolton revises recent interpretations of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810) as an ‘Anglicist’ text by emphasizing its indebtedness to the Orientalist researches of Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Peter J. Kitson’s chapter looks at a variety of literary representations of China from Goldsmith to De Quincey, tracing their sources in economic, racial and religious discourses of the Enlightenment. Finally, Deirdre Coleman extends the concept of ‘debatable lands’ beyond territorial geography, by using the unpublished papers of the eighteenth-century explorer and projector Henry Smeathman to investigate aerial and submarine natural history.

Notes 1. G. W. S. Barrow, The Kingdom of the Scots: Government, Church and Society from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 139–40, 145. 2. W. Mackay Mackenzie, ‘The Debateable Land’, The Scottish Historical Review, 30 (1951), 108–25 (p. 110). 3. Ibid., pp. 124–5. 4. Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), p. 16. 5. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of [    ] England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), [Part 2], ‘Scotland’, p. 5. This is the first English translation of William Camden’s Britannia, first published in Latin in 1586 and frequently revised in subsequent editions. 6. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554 –1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols (London, 1875–94), IV, 131.

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7. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 70 (21 May 1711); The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, 298. 8. Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London, 1775), I, xxxvii–xxxviii. This passage in the first and second editions of the Reliques (London, 1765, 1767) makes no mention of the border. 9. Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1803), I, xxxii. The phrase ‘the Debateable Land’ is used several times in Scott’s notes to the Minstrelsy, and the variant ‘the Bateable Land’ is in the text of the ballad of ‘Kinmont Willie’ (I, 148). For those whose knowledge of Scott was through his novels the phrase ‘the Debateable Land’ occurs with noticeable frequency in The Abbot (1820). 10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in a review essay in The Edinburgh Review, 47 (1828), 331. 11. Ibid., 365; Jane Millgate, Macaulay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 20, 122–3. 12. Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990); Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844, ed. Amanda Gilroy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed. Peter J. Kitson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); and Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991), p. 19. Anderson, writing from an American perspective, dates the emergence of the nation as ‘towards the end of the eighteenth century’ (p. 4). A writer from old Europe, Etienne Balibar, proposes instead ‘the middle of the sixteenth century’ (Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 88, 105, n. 2.) 14. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 322 (first published in 1992). 15. Robert Gildea, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800–1914, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 57–61. 16. Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998– 99), II, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall, pp. 53–77 (p. 53). 17. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 2–3. One political theorist, Etienne Balibar, has recently suggested that the term ‘border’ ‘is undergoing a profound change in meaning’ because ‘the borders of new socio-political entitites [    ] are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed [    ]’. (Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 1.) 18. This has been strikingly demonstrated for the US–Mexico border in José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 19. Mackenzie, ‘The Debateable Land’, pp. 115–16. 20. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.

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Part I Britain and Ireland

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2 Writing on the Borders Fiona Stafford

When Scott published his collection of popular ballads, he gave it a substantial title: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads Collected in the Southern Counties of Scotland; with a few of Modern Date, Founded upon Local Tradition. Published in Kelso in 1802, it appeared with a frontispiece depicting the most menacing of Border castles, the Hermitage. It is very much a local work, but carefully packaged to widen its appeal to those further afield. The engraving conforms to contemporary tastes for picturesque scenery, with a tree and solitary figure in the foreground, a ruined castle ringed by a river in the middle distance, and beyond, the fainter outlines of mountains. The figure may be a participant in the landscape – a shepherd or a fisherman, perhaps; but he is also a spectator, a reader within the scene, gazing on the ruin. Like the ballad-collector, he is at once part of the local area and yet capable of looking from a distance, of understanding what he sees and of recognizing its faults and fissures. A Borderer in the regional sense, he also suggests a kind of ‘border vision’ later identified by Raymond Williams as the special quality of writers who retain old ties, while still achieving a more detached view of their homes.1 When he defined Hardy’s ‘border country’, Williams had in mind the barriers of class and education, but his own work also demonstrates that the conflicting compulsions to depart and return are especially strong in those from Border regions. Williams’s background in the Black Mountains imbued him with a sense of identity defined by local difference, ‘we could speak of both English and Welsh as foreigners, as “not us” ’.2 At the same time, he recognized that the community to which he looked back in adulthood was itself riven, ‘a frontier zone which had been the location of fighting for centuries’. If a Border childhood set 13

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Illustration 1 ‘Hermitage Castle’, from the frontispiece to the first volume of Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2 vols (Kelso, 1802). The image is taken from the Bodleian Library copy (Douce S 145. Frontispiece) and is reproduced by kind permission of The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

him apart from surrounding areas, his developing ‘border vision’ placed his own remembered neighbourhood at a distance. Williams may seem a surprising figure to set next to Sir Walter Scott, but his insights offer helpful ways into a volume characterized primarily by its association with the Scottish Borders.3 ‘Border vision’ suggests duality – a combination of insider and outsider perspectives. But the matter becomes more complicated when the birthplace and surrounding areas are internally divided. A stable viewpoint is neither easily attained in such circumstances nor necessarily desirable. In the Minstrelsy frontispiece, the dark figure emphasizes the shadow cast by the shattered wall of the great fortress. This may be a view familiar to local residents and appealing to Romantic tourists, but it is also an image of destruction. The Hermitage is a symbol of ancient power, but a history of shifting ownership, allegiances and fortune is written into its fabric. Though easy to enjoy as a nostalgic image of a chivalric past, the engraving depicts a symbol of a region torn by warfare and political instability.4 Scott’s starting point reveals deep divisions and thus invites mixed responses. The castle provides a visual counterpart to the ballads that follow – old, rooted and recalcitrant. Shaped by centuries of communal action and reaction, these Border constructions

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remain oddly elusive and, despite their general appeal, firmly resistant to easy absorption into the modern world. In the introduction, Scott acts as a guide to dangerous territory, offering the ballads as a way into unfamiliar parts and pasts. His essay presents the Borders as a ‘stage, upon which were presented the most memorable conflicts of two gallant nations’.5 Though referring to the period before the successive Unions of the English and Scottish Crowns in 1603 and the Parliaments in 1707, Scott’s historical detail had a strong resonance for readers immediately after the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland. The theatrical metaphor may soften the reality of Border warfare, but it does not conceal the notion that the ballads represented the cultural legacy of a blood-soaked region. Whether such poetry would now provoke regret, resentment, alarm, or relief is as debatable as the lands where it had been collected. What is clear, however, is that at a moment of national Union, Scott was stirring up memories of bitter internal disunity. Though staunchly supportive of the Union, he remained fascinated by the Debatable Lands and their long history of unrest. His editorial commentary emphasized a modern, civilized perspective on a lawless past, but the ballads themselves were not so easily manageable.6 Scott’s sense of local obligation is evident in his formal dedication to the Duke of Buccleuch, whose family had listened to the ballads for centuries. As he reflected on his editorial labours, he also admitted a more personal note: By such efforts, feeble as they are, I may contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally. And, trivial as may appear such an offering, to the manes of a kingdom, once proud and independent, I hang it upon her altar with a mixture of feelings, which I shall not attempt to describe.7 Scott’s allegiance to his ‘native country’ is couched in terms that emphasize a classical education and attitudes gained through knowledge of other cultures. Though a Borderer by descent and romantic inclination, he had been raised and educated largely in Edinburgh, the centre of Scottish Enlightenment thought and progressiveness. Scott was a Borderer with ‘Border vision’, his conflicted awareness not always amenable to discursive prose. The feelings inspired by ‘a kingdom, once proud and independent’ were not only mixed, but indescribable – and with this acknowledgement, Scott’s essay comes to a halt. Facts may be

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recounted and battles enumerated, but the emotions evoked by Border history were less easy to convey. Ballads were the traditional media for local expression, but as Scott unleashed the old, unruly voices into the polite world of print, he also made way for a complicated, personal response to his ancestral region. Scott’s collection is an act of homage, which carries its own health warning. The feelings acknowledged in the essay are mixed, rather than purely nostalgic, and so it is helpful to trace elements in the poems that might provoke responses less obvious than native loyalty or escapism. ‘The Battle of Bothwell Bridge’, for example, which commemorates the relatively recent Covenanter battle of 1679, encapsulates the stirring, but troubling nature of so many of the ballads in its closing stanza: Alang the brae, beyond the brig, Mony brave man lies cauld and still; But lang we’ll mind, and sair we’ll rue, The bloody battle of Bothwell-hill.8 Although the poem finishes on the battlefield, its last lines address the survivors, who are left not just to mourn, but to ‘mind’ – in three senses of the word – take heed, object to, and remember. The ballad, with its inclusive first person plural, ends not with melancholic retrospect, but with a note of obligation and perpetuation. Compulsive recollection is beaten into the ballad form, with its regular rhymes and rhythms, formulaic motifs and refrains. Poems so easy to memorize are long-lived and resistant to closure. The task of the traditional Border poet was partly commemorative, but recreating heroic deeds and deaths also meant keeping communal wounds fresh, and reinscribing old differences in new audiences. The mixed feelings of the modern ballad collector, therefore, were not just a matter of wistfulness over the erosion of local culture. Scott’s Introduction describes a bloody sequence of revenge and lawlessness, while the editorial tone reflects a tension between excitement over the proud actions of his ancestors and a desire to dissociate from the superstition and violence of the past. While keen to claim personal kinship with the region, Scott was equally determined to demonstrate his membership and firm support of civilized society to which blood-feuds and outlaws were not admitted. At the same time, if the conditions of modernity meant the ‘melting’ of sister kingdoms into one, then the local obligation to remember was pressing. The Union with Ireland had emphasized the need for strong British alliance against the common enemy, France, but the associated

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debates had rekindled earlier discussions over the Anglo-Scottish Union, and the desire to preserve distinct cultural identities within Great Britain. Scott was faced with a dilemma: How to fulfil his local obligations, while upholding the power of the state? How to celebrate the heroic actions of his people, while endorsing the values and institutions of an enlightened age? Were memories of Border warfare compatible with celebration of the United Kingdom? Scott’s argument that the AngloScottish Union had made the Borders central to the new country was potentially double-edged, for it was easy to read the fierce local loyalties expressed in the ballads as disruptive rather than strengthening to the kingdom at large. Scott’s view of the role of poetry in the Borders was rather different from the ideals espoused by his influential contemporaries, Wordsworth and Coleridge. There is nothing in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, for example, to suggest that poets should compose poems ‘of a military nature’ celebrating the ‘valour and success of their predatory expeditions’.9 Scott’s emphasis on cumulative authorship and the intrinsic interest of stories themselves is also alien to later conceptions of Romantic poetry that derive from Wordsworthian principles (even though his own understanding of ‘Romantic’ made it a suitable designation for some of the ballads). This chapter, therefore, looks elsewhere for analogies that might shed light on this important collection and open routes between literary periods traditionally kept separate. When considering Scott’s fraught attraction to the Border ballads, it is illuminating to turn to the late twentieth century, when issues of unionism and devolution have once again dominated the political agenda, and to regions where clashing local identities have been experienced most acutely. Scott’s melancholy over the erasure of clear distinctions between the sister kingdoms, for example, has more in common with Gillian Clarke’s crumbling ‘Border’ and its forgotten names, broken farms and fading saints, than with Lyrical Ballads.10 By crossing temporal borders, and adopting a spatial and comparative approach, it is possible to reveal aspects of both Romantic and contemporary poetry that might otherwise remain hidden. Clarke’s lyric laments the disappearance of Welsh along a Border buried by English shops and garages, and reveals a contemporary sense of national distinction and responsibility to the past. The gradual erosion of regional differences makes their preservation especially urgent to those whose culture seems threatened. It is the kind of regret voiced by Scott – and just as much a statement of participation in a modern world where English is the dominant language. ‘Border’ raises the same

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questions as those inherent in Scott’s collection, where powerful feelings defy analysis: who is speaking and who might listen? Many of the ballads are anonymous, their origins still questionable. Poems written on Borders often avoid identifiable speakers and audiences, remaining poised at the in-between. After all, ‘Border’ means different things, depending on which side you stand. Even Scott’s title is ambiguous, for ‘Scottish Border’ might suggest that the Border belongs to Scotland, but it could also imply an English readership differentiating the northern border from the western route to Wales. Anxieties about regional culture crumbling or melting often alert writers to local peculiarity. For Scott, the Borderers were neither Scottish nor English, but ‘kind of outcasts’, at odds with both states.11 This is similar to Williams’s sense of ‘both English and Welsh as foreigners’, and finds further, uneasy parallels in writings from the north of Ireland. Williams’s sense of the Welsh Marches as a ‘frontier zone’ is not unlike Edna Longley’s view of Ulster as a ‘frontier region, a cultural corridor, a zone where Ireland and Britain permeate one another’, even though her perception is coloured by much more recent political confrontation.12 For Seamus Heaney, too, the fondly remembered ‘country of community’ at Mossbawn is also a ‘realm of division’: he admits to feeling always ‘a little displaced’ and has observed that ‘being in-between was a kind of condition, from the start’.13 Like Scott, Heaney’s profound sense of place is attended by a feeling that his creative centre is split at the core. In his writing, the pull towards timeless pastoral is halted by sharp memories of a specific place, caught between unreconciled political, sectarian and national forces. It is a tension felt even more acutely in the work of Heaney’s contemporary, Seamus Deane, whose own childhood in Derry forms the groundwork of Reading in the Dark, ‘Lying in the filtered green light of the high fern-stalks that shook slightly above our heads, we listened to the sharp birdsong of the hillside. This was border country.’14 In Deane’s remembered country, light is filtered, the plants shake and even the birdsong is sharp. The local stream is reddened by political division, while images of surveillance cast dark shadows over the children’s games. Writing in a ‘frontier zone’ is marked by the consciousness of military presence, whether in the form of swords and castles or guns and checkpoints. The in-between condition inspires contrasting imagery and looping sentences, where birds and bombs, green fields and blood belong uncomfortably together. The imaginative landscape is shaped by conflict, and Border areas, though often furthest from the centres of power, are those most aware of the state.15

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Violent dispute over the Irish border is so much more immediate than the medieval wars between English forces and the Welsh or Scots that the legitimacy of bringing together ‘Border writing’ from different areas for critical discussion may seem doubtful. Where acknowledgement of partition is regarded as a political statement and the Irish situation as unique, then literary criticism that takes a comparative approach to Border writing may seem unhelpfully distant from urgent contemporary issues. Scott’s life is hardly parallel to the experience of Irish poets living through the Troubles, even though the ballads he collected represent imaginative responses to bitter local conflict. The odd similarities between writings from Border areas nevertheless suggest that literary analysis can be mutually illuminating – as long as local specifics are not forgotten. Longley’s idea of Northern Ireland as a ‘shared region’ can be extended fruitfully through critical readings, which reveal surprising common ground between different areas and periods.16 By attending to similarities as well as to differences, greater understanding of literatures on both sides of generic, period or national borders may be reached. Scott’s attraction to local history, for example, is also characteristic of northern Irish writing. Modern Border writers frequently revisit old legends, anecdotes and conversations. Their poems often work through others’ voices, or dwell on figures dredged up to speak enigmatically to modern readers. Heaney’s interest in Buile Suibhne, the medieval tale of Sweeney’s flight from the Battle of Moira in the shape of a bird, is especially illuminating when set next to Scott’s collection of narrative poems, since he acknowledges the text’s personal appeal rather more explicitly. Sweeney’s kingdom was in Antrim and Down, neighbouring on Heaney’s own nesting ground, so he was fulfilling a local responsibility by retelling the region’s ancient narrative for a new generation. For Heaney, Sweeney is a true Borderer, poised between traditional, pagan society on one side, and the new, Christian Ireland on the other. At the same time, he represents the modern struggle of a ‘free creative imagination’, desperate to escape ‘religious, political and domestic obligation’.17 Even as he took on the traditional task of the Border poet, reshaping an old tale for new listeners, Heaney was demonstrating his border vision, in the contradictory desire to escape the duties of circumstance. In Heaney’s translation, Sweeney’s flight from the battlefield is exhilarating and terrifying – in the painful moment of transformation, he is freed and doomed. But as he broods over his experience, the old dilemma is played out: stay and fight with your people, or take flight and view things from a distance? Sweeney has the internal/external ‘Border

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vision’, but his tale demonstrates its cost, as he is compelled to fly, but moves, maddened, from place to place, isolated from, and pursued by those he loves. As a bird flying from physical combat, he might be a symbol of hope, but the poem depicts a bird king mentally trapped by his past.18 In North, Heaney explored the turmoil resulting from moving south across the Border during the Troubles: ‘For what? For the ear? For the people?’19 The conflict between artistic potential and communal obligation led again to identification with Sweeney: Escaped from the massacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark. By the time he revived Sweeney for Station Island, however, Heaney was presenting flight from conflict very differently: I was mired in attachment until they began to pronounce me a feeder off battlefields so I mastered new rungs of the air to survey out of reach their bonfires on hills.20 In his later meditation on poetic responsibilities, the poet who remains with his people is a vulture-like figure, feeding on blood – and hence, the desire for flight. Heaney’s wrestle with the poet’s task during the Troubles may initially seem far removed from Scott’s antiquarian enthusiasms, but his practice of reading contemporary concerns in local legends is surprisingly illuminating. For although Scott’s role in the Minstrelsy is that of editor rather than poet, his creative approach to the task of collection has long been recognized. Among the ballads often associated with Scott himself are those that prove most interesting when set beside Heaney’s work, such as the haunting poem, ‘The Twa Corbies’. Like the poet in ‘The First Flight’, ‘The Twa Corbies’ are scavengers, feasting on a fallen knight: ‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause bane, And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een. Wi’ ae lock o’ his gowden hair, We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare. ‘Mony a one for him makes mane,

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But nane sall ken whare he is gane: O’er his white banes, when they are bare, The wind sall blaw for evermair’.21 The mutual benefits of drawing comparisons between Border writings, rather than restricting poems to their contemporary contexts, are especially evident here. For unlike more celebrated Romantic birds, such as Shelley’s ‘Sky-lark’ or Keats’s ‘Nightingale’, the corbies are anonymous and predatory, picking over the carcase, building their nest from others’ pain. Like Heaney’s guilty self-image, they are ‘feeders off battlefields’, dependent for survival on death and conflict. Scott’s ballad helps to show that Heaney’s impulse to ‘master new rungs of the air’ is not just a question of artistic freedom, or aversion to bloodshed, or even cowardice. Instead it suggests a deep unease about the very nature of traditional Border culture and the poet’s role. For if the poet is neither benefactor, leader nor hero, but rather the deceitful scavenger, feeding on the aftermath of others’ actions, the value of his art must be doubtful. Despite its beauty and dark humour, ‘The Twa Corbies’ presents an uncomfortable metaphor for Border poetry. If the poem reflects caustically on traditional balladry, however, it also suggests a modern self-consciousness. Romantic ideals of poetry, though apparently remote from ‘The Twa Corbies’, are in fact crucial to understanding the anxieties displayed by later Border writers; for the self-punishing view of Border poetry indicates a modern creative artist at work on old materials, and opens the common ground between Heaney and Scott. In addition to the problems of local obligation and the perpetuation of old wrongs, both are afflicted in ways that their local predecessors were not, by notions of originality and belatedness. Even more painful is the sense, acknowledged variously by both poets, of the modern, deskbound writer’s difficulty in following men of action. The doubleness of ‘The Twa Corbies’ is a powerful expression of the internally conflicted border vision. Flight from conflict is not just troubling to the artist, however. Disappearances baffle those left behind, as when Sweeney’s followers fail to find their king alive or dead after the battle. Mysterious absences are all too common in warfare, where numerous men are labelled ‘missing, presumed dead’. It is not surprising then that areas which have long been fighting zones should be haunted by stories of sudden disappearance – ‘nane sall ken whare he is gane’. In Reading in the Dark, the cliffside ‘Field of the Disappeared’ with its vanishing birds haunts a

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narrative pitted with unexplained departures. The local name blends ancient beliefs with modern fears, as it is ‘here that the souls of all those from the area who had disappeared’ are said to return several times each year ‘to cry like birds and look down on the fields where they had been born’.22 Trapped between land and sea, life and death, past and present, these limbo-like birds are borderers, crossing between the known and the unknown, lost and yet compulsively drawn back to their birthplace. The disconcerting problem of disappearance has been perfectly captured by another contemporary, Northern Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, in the poem beginning, ‘Why Brownlee left, and where he went, / Is a mystery even now’.23 His well-made sonnet passes itself off as part of a conversation, its colloquial tone and down-to-earth imagery suggesting that Brownlee may very well, as Larkin put it, have chucked up everything and just cleared off. Since the poem was published at the height of the Troubles in 1980, however, darker possibilities lurk all around, without being fully articulated. In Border writing, there is often a sense of something withheld, of stories not quite fully told. Unattributed dialogue, hearsay and inconclusiveness leave readers to respond to words which tell much, but are never complete. In the Minstrelsy, Scott may have addressed his audience clearly through his annotation, but the ballads retain an elusive, often menacing quality, and work against the grain of the urbane commentary. Borders have no beginnings or endings; their tales are told by many before reaching print. Someone knows the story, but not the source. It is as if no one will take responsibility for things uttered by the place itself. For Muldoon, Irish writing is defined by evasiveness, disappearances and border crossings. To Ireland, I, his personal history of Irish literature, begins not with a single starting point, but rather a threshold or ‘unhewn dolmen arch’ in the poetry of Amergin.24 Muldoon passes mercurially from poem to poem, slipping through centuries and yet always alighting on the same fears and images. William Allingham’s famous poem, ‘The Fairies’, for example, is set beside the less familiar ‘Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland’, in which One old man, tears upon his wrinkled cheek, Stands trembling on a threshold, tries to speak, But, in defect of any word for this, Mutely upon the doorpost plants a kiss, Then passes out for ever.25

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The man who is neither here nor there, but who remains at the interface of strangely contiguous worlds, emerges from Muldoon’s critical history as an image central to the Irish psyche. Like Heaney and Deane, Muldoon has ‘Border vision’, being highly educated, able to fly across the Atlantic, and yet remaining preoccupied with Ireland. He is drawn to local poets such as Art MacCumhaigh, whose ‘Aisling’ is a classic example of the human encounter with the fairy world. Since the vision takes place at Howth Head, however, Muldoon reads it as a poem of ‘dislocation from his native realm, the Fews of South Armagh’.26 As in so much Border writing, the sense of separation from familiar territory – the first flight – is at once uneasy and marvellous. If meetings with sky-women are generally associated with eighteenthcentury Irish poetry, however, they also figure in Scottish tradition. Burns’s ‘A Vision’ plays on a similar idea, while James Hogg’s writings, though firmly set in the Scottish Borders, frequently include the motif of crossing into other worlds, whether fairyland or Hell. In the Minstrelsy, too, several of the ballads designated ‘Romantic’ recount stories of people being carried off by fairies. ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ (to which Scott contributed a large section) begins in a manner similar to an Irish aisling, as Thomas sees ‘a ladye bright / Come riding down by the Eildon Tree’.27 As he is carried away by the elfin Queen, the peculiar character of the Scottish fairyland becomes apparent, as they ride kneedeep in blood, ‘For a’ the blude, that’s shed on earth, / Rins through the springs o’ that countrie’.28 Sudden disappearances and prolonged sojourns in another world are common motifs in Scottish Border writing and it is fruitful to read the Scottish supernatural in the way that Muldoon interprets the parallel worlds of Irish literature – as ‘an escape clause’ or ‘psychological trapdoor’ for a people whose experience of fighting has left a profound sense of uncertainty about their place in the world.29 Furthermore, it provides a narrative device for expressing the difficulty of coming to terms with disappearance – with the unexplained absence, the unfinished story, the unburied body. The story of Thomas’s mysterious journey through rivers of blood, and his ritual return after 7 years, may be an imaginative, mythologizing defence against a situation otherwise too painful to accept. As a modern editor, Scott imposed strict divisions on his ballads: ‘historical’, ‘romantic’, ‘modern imitations’. When his collection is approached via twentieth-century Border writers, however, distinctions between the ballads – and their editor – seem less clear-cut. The ‘Romantic’ ballads may not have had such an obvious basis in historical fact, but poems such as

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‘The Twa Corbies’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ are just as much responses to memories of bloodshed. They are quintessential Border poems, with the capacity to cross the boundaries of history, geography and genre. The symbolic charge of their imagery eludes historical certainty, while their anonymity allowed Scott to blend his own voice secretly with the voices of his forbears. Their resistance to containment also allows the old Border ballads to serve as an unlikely threshold into the work of sophisticated contemporary poets normally seen in very different contexts. In 1802, political Union seemed secure at last, and so Scott could indulge in nostalgic participation as he assembled what he regarded as the vanishing remains of a once independent culture. Within his collection, however, were ancestral voices whose sense of place was rather less settled. Subsequent history would reveal that the process of Union in Britain and Ireland was not as finite as it seemed to Scott, and so his ballads still have things to tell the four nations.

Coda The imaginative power of Borders remains mysterious. Whether similarities between Border writings result from self-conscious engagement

Illustration 2 J. M. W. Turner, ‘Powis Castle, Montgomeryshire’ (c. 1834–35), © Manchester Art Gallery. Reproduced by kind permission of the Manchester Art Gallery.

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with evolving traditions or from direct experience of living in a Border region is debatable. When J. M. W. Turner visited the Welsh Marches, however, it is notable that his series of landscape sketches are full of Border images: bridges, castles, storms and indistinct figures. Most striking is the painting of Powis Castle, ancient stronghold of the Welsh princes in the Border county of Montgomery, which provides a misty backdrop for a scene of contemporary destruction. A heron at the waterside is about to be shot by the gunman crouching below the bridge. In the distance, solitary birds circle and disappear, while the dim silhouettes of trees and hills suggest otherworldly figures. Fortress, water, bridge and birds seem somehow part of an age-old conflict that is being reenacted in a new generation. Death and disappearance, flowing water and fleeing birds surround the sluice gate, which bears a strong resemblance to the guillotine.30 It is as if old hostilities have marked the land so deeply that those who come centuries later are still compelled, and repelled, by ancient conflicts.

Notes 1. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth, 1993), p. 197. 2. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters (London: NLB, 1979), p. 26. His novels, Border Country (1961) and People of the Black Mountains (1989), explore the experience of living on the Borders. See also Dennis L. Dworkin and Leslie G. Roman, Views beyond the Border Country (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). 3. Many of the ballads may derive from Aberdeenshire, but Scott’s emphasis is on the Border between England and Scotland. On the north-east as another ‘Border region’, see David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 28–34. 4. For Scott’s attraction to medieval chivalry and castles, see Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). 5. Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1803), I, i. All references are to this edition. 6. For evidence of Scott’s ‘conservative philosophy’ in the Minstrelsy, see Susan Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Politics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), and David Harker, Fakesong (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 48–9. 7. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, I, cxxxii–cxxxiii. 8. Ibid., III, 223. 9. Ibid., I, cxii. 10. Gillian Clarke, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 95. 11. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, I, lxiii. 12. Edna Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia: The Breakdown of Irelands’, in The Living Stream (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994), p. 195.

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13. Seamus Heaney, ‘Mossbawn’, in Finder’s Keepers (London: Faber, 2002), p. 6; Neil Corcoran, ‘On Seamus Heaney’s Life’, in The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (London: Faber, 2002), p. 236. 14. Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Cape, 1996), p. 49. 15. Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers, ed. Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 5–6. 16. Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia’, p. 195. 17. Seamus Heaney, ‘Introduction’, in Sweeney Astray (London: Faber, 1984). Heaney began work on the translation in the 1970s. 18. cf. Arthur, who, according to Cornish legend, turned into a Chough and will one day return to his people. Merlin, too, was renowned for shapechanging, and for fleeing the battle of Arfderydd; his legendary importance owes much to the Welsh Border writer, Geoffrey of Monmouth. 19. Seamus Heaney, ‘Exposure’, in North (London: Faber, 1975), p. 73. 20. Seamus Heaney, ‘The First Flight’, in Station Island (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 102–3. 21. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, III, 242. Scott also reprinted ‘The Three Ravens’ from Ritson’s Ancient Songs and Ballads (1790), challenging his readers to see which is the ‘more original’; see Oliver, pp. 61–2 and M. J. G. Hodgart, The Ballads (London: Hutchinson, 1950), pp. 41–5. 22. Deane, Reading in the Dark, p. 53. 23. Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber, 2001), p. 84. 24. Paul Muldoon, To Ireland, I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 4–5. 25. Ibid., p. 8. 26. Muldon To Ireland, I, pp. 79–80. For Muldoon’s ‘Aisling’ and ‘Sky-Woman’, see Poems 1968–1998, pp. 126, 122. 27. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 269. 28. Ibid., II, 272. 29. Muldon To Ireland, I, pp. 4–5. 30. On the death imagery, see Turner’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales, ed. Eric Shanes (London: Chatto & Windus, 1979), p. 44. Elizabeth Helsinger interprets the volume as part of the 1830s debate over the nature of England, in ‘Turner and the Representation of England’, in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd edn (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 103–26.

3 ‘Viewing Most Things Thro’ False Mediums’: Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826) and English Perceptions of Wales Mary-Ann Constantine

In an astute remark, the Welsh bard and stonecutter Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, noted how ‘false mediums’ distorted most English discussions of Wales: The great Error of English writers when they write anything about Wales arises from their viewing most things thro’ false mediums. Thus the Welsh language is viewed in a light similar to that wherein they would view the Cherokee Language. The Welsh MSS in the same light in which the MSS of Ossian are now justly view’d, the present state of society in Wales through the medium of antiquated authors, for instance Giraldus, who wrote what was most probably true in his own days. One author views things thro’ what a preceding author has said. A Welsh custom is viewed thro the medium of an English usage which is something similar or conceived to be so, and a great number of things are viewed thro the medium of long continued prejudices. Thro’ some false medium or another every thing is view’d.1 His comments, which neatly prefigure our own period’s fascination with the processes by which different cultures define and construct each other, pick up on some of the major themes of the Celticist/primitivist discourse that shaped perceptions of the marginal cultures of Britain during the Romantic period. And there is much truth in his complaints. But Iolo was himself a persuasive purveyor of false mediums: his (largely invented) vision of an Ancient British past, transmitted orally and in manuscript from druidic times, played a crucial part in the Welsh Romantic revival, and continues to shape notions of Welsh identity to 27

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the present day. Though he published little under his own name, Iolo had many contacts in literary and radical circles in Wales, Bristol and London, and his representation of his country’s culture, created at least partially in response to English stereotyping, became itself part of a new Romantic idea of Wales. That he too deployed exotic tribes, the Ossian debate, and medieval texts and customs to make his point compounds the irony nicely. In their introduction to the essays in English Romanticism and the Celtic World the editors suggest that such reconstructions and responses are part of a long historical process of each side perceiving the other: ‘even before Wales is reappropriated by English culture, we hear the voice of English culture in its own self-inventions. For England is one of the principal intended recipients of, and target audiences for, Wales’s selfrefashioning’.2 The complexity and historical depth of that process – the debatable lands in which national characteristics find their shape – form the background to the main subject of this essay, which is an examination of the voice of English culture in one particular aspect of Welsh self-invention during the 1790s and early 1800s. Iolo’s own themes – the ‘Cherokees’, Ossian and the medieval past – usefully focus those moments where he can be seen either specifically writing for an English audience or with an English audience in mind. It may be helpful to begin by recalling the extent to which the two cultures were present in his life from the beginning.3 Iolo was born in the Glamorgan parish of Lancarfan to a dual inheritance: the family spoke English at home, but Welsh was the language of the community. He had no formal schooling, either because of his ill health or because the family was too poor (his father was also a stonecutter, and his three brothers followed the same trade). But his mother, educated ‘above her station’, had taught him to read and introduced him to English literature. Iolo’s relationship with her seems to have been a special one, and his talents as a writer set him apart from his brothers, whose letters home remain resolutely semi-literate. Throughout his life Iolo read, as self-taught writers often do, voraciously, omnivorously, buying books he could ill-afford (at various times he owned hundreds) and copying extracts from journals and magazines like the Monthly or the Gentleman’s. His Welsh education came in adolescence, when he learned the complex craft of strict-metre poetry from local scholars, and helped the lexicographer John Walters in neighbouring Llandochau with his English–Welsh dictionary. He wrote poetry in both languages, and was conscious from early on of working in two distinct literary traditions. That duality is nicely evoked in his feelings for the two stars of the respective traditions, the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym

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and Shakespeare, both beneficiaries of an increasing interest in the notion of a national literary canon. Iolo encountered Dafydd’s work in the early 1770s, in manuscript copies made by the Morris brothers and held at the Welsh School in London. His enthusiasm initially took the usual form of imitation, but led to the successful forgery of some dozen poems, published unwittingly by his London acquaintances in their collection Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym in 1789. As with many of his other forgeries (and as with Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley creations a decade or so earlier), these pieces born of a passion for the language of the medieval past were anchored in the landscape of the present, in a Glamorgan alive with earlier echoes. A letter to his friend and mentor Owen Jones in 1780 evokes a visit to the ruined court of Ifor Hael, patron of Dafydd, at Gwern y Cleppa, just north of Cardiff: Yr wyf yn awr yn ysgrifennu attad o fann ag yr wyf yn ei ystyried yn fath o dir Cysegredig, hwnn yw’r tir a droediwyd lawer arno gan Ddafydd ab Gwilym, Morfydd, Ifor Hael a Nest wiwgoeth wenddoeth wynddaint, ar hyd lann afon Ebwy [    ]. Y mae ynof ryw bruddder meddwl a chynnwrf Calon wrth edrych ar y Lleoedd hynn, darfu am Ifor, am Ddafydd &c eithr byw y Gân a brydawdd y naill ar clod a haeddodd y llall, a byw byddant tra phery’r Iaith Gymraeg.4 I am writing to you now from what I consider a kind of Consecrated ground, the land trodden by Dafydd ap Gwilym, Morfydd, Ifor Hael and the fair, noble and wise Nest of the dazzling smile, along the banks of the river Ebwy [    ]. I am troubled in thought and roused in my heart when I look upon these places: Ifor is gone, and Dafydd &c yet the song made by one and the praise earned by the other live on, and they will live as long as the Welsh Language survives. A similar emotion would disturb him nearly 20 years later when, making his way back to Wales from London on foot, he passed over equally consecrated ground at Stratford. In the tattered notebook he took with him on that journey, a critical observation on breeds of cattle is interrupted by a burst of lyricism: Thou soft flowing Avon On whose silver stream Of things more than mortal Thy Shakespear would dream

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I go on singing for I am in view of Stratford upon Avon the birth place of that Bard of all bards – the Warwickshire Bard. The Avon is here a fine placid river bordered by fine meadows. The bridge over it narrow, has fourteen small pointed arches, of course ancient, and is probably the same that Shakespere walked over.5 His visit to the Bard’s monument combines the real thrill of literary homage with the chagrin of the tourist (the woman there charges him an extra half crown for copying out the inscription). And in spite of the ubiquitous fakery of the Shakespeare industry, the ‘busts, prints and paintings of him that are to be seen everywhere’ (‘for who’, he remarks acutely, ‘is without something deemed a likeness of Shakespeare?’), the poet’s historical presence affects him as did the ghost of Dafydd in the ruins of Ifor Hael’s court: ‘A succession of pleasing reveries has for several hours of this day passed over my mind. I feel something like magic in every thing that relates to Shakespeare’.6 Iolo makes no attempt to oust the English writer from his position of primacy as ‘bard of all bards’ (it is nothing less than ‘blasphemy’, indeed, to call the Welsh dramatist Twm o’r Nant ‘the Shakespeare of Wales’).7 Nevertheless, the happy balance of this double inheritance is complicated elsewhere by an undertow of opposition, a resentment of English attitudes to Wales. There are many moments in Iolo’s work when the two lines of descent find themselves twisted together, sometimes with decidedly ambiguous results. Iolo’s sarcastic equation of Welsh and Cherokee is shorthand for an established English tendency to see Welsh culture, and particularly the language, in terms of barbarity and strangeness. ‘I had no sooner passed the River Dee’, wrote one satirical traveller at the beginning of the eighteenth century, ‘but I began to grow sensible I was not in England; for the Country I was got into look’d no more like it, than if a man had been in America, or the most uninhabited parts of Arabia. There was a savage air in the face of every body I met’.8 The language he found ‘inarticulate and guttural [    ] more like the Gobling of Geese, or Turkeys, than the Speech of Rational Creatures’.9 Yet although Welsh was the most obvious marker of Wales’s distinctiveness from England (before 1801, nine out of ten people in Wales spoke the language, and seven out of ten were monoglot) there was, then as now, extraordinarily little representation of the Welsh language in English writings.10 Negative linguistic stereotyping from England tended rather to focus on Wenglish, written à la Shakespeare’s Fluellen, and to revolve around jokes about toasted cheese.11 Indeed, one of Iolo’s principal complaints was

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that the language itself was not so much the object of English scorn as of pure indifference: ‘Nothing appears to me so strangely unnacountable as that no English Literary Gentleman should have applied himself to the acquisition and study of the Welsh language during so long a period that the two nations have been so amicably united’. (‘It is’, he adds provocatively, ‘the primitive language of their own country’.)12 On the other hand, the potential for attracting interest in an ‘undiscovered’ ancient wisdom was something Iolo turned deftly to his own advantage. American Indians and the Welsh language are, however, most potently conflated in the ‘Madoc’ story – the legend of the preColumban discovery and settlement of America by a twelfth-century Welsh prince and his followers.13 The story had some currency in the Renaissance, and had been revived in the context of the fight for the colonies: by the early 1790s many of the London Welsh, Iolo prominent amongst them, were devoting their energies to piecing together material suggesting that a tribe of Welsh-speaking American Indians, the ‘Madogwys’ or ‘Padoucas’, descendants of the Welsh prince, were still to be found somewhere on the banks of the Missouri river. A Madogeian Society was formed, maps and charts were published, and stories circulated of captured Welsh travellers serendipitously released from tight corners after hearing the hostile natives speak their native tongue. Iolo himself intended to emigrate with his family, drawing up Pantisocratic plans for settlement, and preparing himself physically for an initial expedition by sleeping rough and restricting his already sober diet to nuts and berries. Calculating and speculating frenziedly from travellers’ accounts, he contributed ‘information’ on the subject to various journals, and Welsh Indians became an important topic in his dealings with the literary ladies of Bath and Bristol – women like Hannah More and Harriet Bowdler, who also took a keen interest in his poetry. Like other stories of colonization the Madoc myth focuses many of the ambiguities of allegiance and identity prevalent in this period; tensions evident, for example, in Southey’s much-revised epic poem on the subject (in which ‘old Iolo’, who advised Southey on certain aspects, makes a cameo appearance).14 As I have argued elsewhere, Iolo’s use of the supposed Welsh–American connection was extremely adaptable, and depended on his audience.15 In a letter to Hannah More, he presents his intended expedition as a benign mission to return the word of God to the long-separated brethren, their shared language a medium for renewing Christian truths ‘now quite forgot’.16 A poem in his 1794 Poems, Lyric Pastoral encourages readers to identify the contemporary Welsh emigrant from Pitt’s Britain with those who fled religious and

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political persecution under William Penn. In both cases, settlement in the New World is presented as innocent, even beneficial to the native inhabitants, their shared Welsh identity making the process of colonization nothing more sinister than the reuniting of sundered tribes: ‘British’ in this context refers primarily to the Welsh. Elsewhere, however, Iolo appears more opportunistic. In a paper written for the Royal and Antiquarian Society (probably intended to help raise funds for his expedition), he has no qualms about bringing up the subject of material gain, and no trouble with a broader and more aggressive use of Britishness: In a Political view, it would extend our Dominions at a cheap rate, by restoring to us a congenial nation [    ] and a hundred well-disposed Welshmen there (being of the same language as them) would do more towards acquiring a considerable accession of Territory to Great Britain, than a hundred thousand scoundrels in Botany Bay [    ]. It would enable us to establish very strong posts in the heart of that Continent [    ]. Many other advantages might be pointed out. National Honour is not to be despised. Great Britain would be entitled to the honour of prior discovery and the right derived from that which the Spaniards so much insist upon.17 The happy accident of a shared culture and language, in other words, would provide a useful foothold in contested territory: emigrants from Wales, elsewhere meek, benign and themselves fleeing persecution, are offered here as subjects uniquely qualified to further the Great British project, to serve military and economic interests abroad. The twist on the primitivist equation of Welsh and American ‘savage’ is all the more provocative when one remembers that the linguistic connection, taken seriously by many at the time, was at least partly soldered with the materials of Iolo’s own imagination. The second of Iolo’s ‘false mediums’ is the Ossian debate, a thorn in the side of Welsh scholarship from the first appearance of the famous Gaelic Fragments in 1760, and still a live issue in Iolo’s time.18 Comments on Macpherson, generally scathing, are scattered throughout his manuscripts, but the subject is most clearly focused in the preface to the collection of medieval texts known as the Myvyrian Archaiology, published between 1801 and 1807, the collaborative project of Owen Jones (whose bardic name, ‘Owain Myfyr’, gives the book its title), the lexicographer William Owen Pughe and Iolo himself. Iolo’s introductory ‘Short Review of Welsh MSS’, written early in 1801, can be read as an angry response to comments by outside critics like John Pinkerton, who championed

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a Gothic theory of British origins at the expense of all Celtic pretensions to antiquity, and had been stinging in his criticism of Welsh scholarship. Iolo’s refutation defends the Welsh manuscript tradition with vigour, stressing the abundance of manuscripts dating from many different periods through which the ‘originals’ could be traced. Ossian, absent from the published version but not from the earlier drafts, is a clear point of reference throughout, the ‘imposture’ against which the fidelity and reliability and historical depth of the Welsh tradition can be measured. What is particularly interesting in this context, however, is the extent to which Iolo’s attacks on Macpherson ventriloquize a classic ‘English’ response to the Ossian question, that of Samuel Johnson. The preface does not merely adopt the position and basic assumptions of Johnson’s notorious opinions of the Gaelic bard, but echoes his very phrasing. Having rubbished Macpherson’s claims for the longevity of oral tradition and mocking his inability to produce reliable manuscripts of the Ossian poems, Iolo tells his readers that the Myvyrian editors scrupulously inform them ‘where for ages those very numerous mss have been preserved, where they are at present, and where we presume they will remain open to the inspection of rational incredulity for ages yet to come’:19 ‘rational incredulity’ here closely rephrases the ‘reasonable incredulity’ of Johnson.20 Indeed, the Johnsonian idiom, thoroughly internalized, seems to have become one of Iolo’s chief weapons in the defence of his version of historical truth, and he is as happy to wield it against his fellow countrymen as he is against the Scots. Followers of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s theory that the Welsh were descended from the Trojan hero Brutus are thus castigated as ‘modern historians who, it seems, are such patriots as to love their own Country and nation better than Truth’, a phrase lifted bodily from Johnson’s famous comment: ‘A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.’21 Iolo’s lack of sympathy for (and indeed interest in) the Gaelic position is in many respects typical of mutual antipathies among the Celtic-speaking peoples of the British Isles before the unifying notion of a ‘Celtic’ culture took hold. Where later there would be a more romantic sense of brotherhood based on linguistic affiliations and a perception of shared injustice, there is only a kind of sibling rivalry, a jostling for English attention, a desire to be taken seriously. The third ‘false medium’ brings up the question of intertextual stereotyping and, more broadly, that lens of primitivism which is relentlessly focused on the past. In the negative satirical portrayals earlier in the eighteenth century, Wales is always medieval by virtue of its

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uncouthness, its dirt and the repulsive customs of its inhabitants: sharing sleeping quarters with beasts, paddling around in coracles, eating nasty food and living in huts (one fastidious writer notes the ‘Uncarpetness’ of the floor).22 The markers of non-civilization had, as Iolo realized, barely changed since the travels of Gerald of Wales in the twelfth century. In the course of the eighteenth century, however, a more Romantic version of primitivism proceeded to medievalize the country with greater enthusiasm. Its landscape and inhabitants became less uncouth, more picturesque: Thomas Gray’s 1757 ode The Bard was particularly responsible for a heightened appreciation of Welsh sublime, with its bearded bards clutching harps against a backdrop of snow-topped mountains. Gray’s poem is a perfect example of the impossibly enmeshed nature of the contributions to the Romantic vision of Wales: an English version of a Welsh legend which became so popular, and so embedded in the landscape, that tourists looked for the place above the ‘Conway’s banks’ where they thought the action of the poem had actually taken place.23 Prizes were offered at the midsummer Gorsedd in 1798 for the ‘Best Translation, into Welsh, of Gray’s Ode – The Bard’.24 Iolo’s claim to be another ‘last bard’, the only surviving inheritor of the secrets of Wales’s poetic past, could be seen in this context as the ultimate internalization of an English myth. If English romanticism wanted Celtic bards, then Iolo, bristling with pseudo-medieval triads, forged Dafydd ap Gwilym poems, and an elaborate invented ceremony of bardic initiation, the Gorsedd, would supply them (it is appropriate somehow that the Gorsedd, still an integral part of the Welsh National Eisteddfod, was first held not in Wales but in London, on Primrose Hill, in 1792). It would appear, in the words of Carruthers and Rawes, that ‘Wales’s eighteenth-century self-reinvention is a reconstruction of the Welsh past along ideological lines laid down by an English political tradition’.25 But that is to overstate things, and to reduce one of Wales’s most creative and intriguing literary phenomena to the level of mere reaction: it weakens, too, any sense of this debatable territory as an arena for debate. While Victorian Wales arguably did suffer a real identity crisis in the face of a better-defined and more imposing British conformity, the relationship during the Romantic period appears less one-sided. As we have seen, Iolo’s creations, like those of Thomas Chatterton, were intensely local, drawing on a literary tradition and on communities of thought and language very different from those of the centre; as Gwyneth Lewis has argued, both writers used their regionalism to express political dissent.26 That these creations are themselves

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born of the very blend of intertextuality and medievalism which Iolo himself attacks as a typical ‘false medium’ makes little difference: as Murray Pittock has warned, that useful phrase ‘the invention of tradition’ may all too quickly come to imply a kind of inorganic and factitious ‘construction’ which makes the notion of separate national identities within the British Isles all the easier to dismiss.27 After all, Iolo’s awareness of the manufactured nature of the Shakespeare experience in Stratford did not destroy the reality of his feelings in crossing the bridge over the Avon. Moreover, this chapter has deliberately focused on moments where Iolo is especially open to an English or Union perspective, whether writing to Hannah More in the context of publishing his English poems or desperately trying to disassociate Wales from the clouds of suspicion covering Scotland. For a more strident and specifically anti-English Welsh nationalism, one need only pick a different track through the archive, where there are truly visionary plans for a Welsh Corresponding Academy, a University and a National Library, and comments to the effect that ‘Wales will never become truly civilized but by the Literature of its own language. English learning may make us Coxcombs, knaves and fools, but so many temptations in its hands held out to seduce us, will never in any valuable degree truly civilize us’.28 Above all, Iolo believed that the Welsh language was far purer, more ancient and more expressive, that it was more perfectly adapted to the description of ‘British sceneries’ than English, a latecomer to Britain, could ever be (through its inherent grace, indeed, even the Welsh lower classes were inherently less ‘barbarous’ than their English counterparts).29 When he writes in Welsh, of course, the perspective is different again, since ‘Welshness’ can be taken for granted; yet it is intriguing to note just how much of Iolo’s thinking and arguing is done in English. This is partly a reflection of the audiences he wrote for and of the various literary outlets available (for much of his writing life Welsh-language journals were rare, increasing in number only during the nineteenth century). But it is also indicative of the available literary models, particularly for prose-writing – a symptom of how far English writing necessarily set the parameters for his thought from the beginning. The dynamic remains most interesting in those texts, like the preface to the Myvyrian Archaiology, which self-consciously present Welsh culture to a non-Welsh-speaking audience. Another such moment occurs in a letter written in 1811 to the editor of The Cambrian Magazine, a newly launched Welsh journal in English. Iolo applauds the idea, which,

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in judicious hands, may be rendered interesting, not only to the inhabitants of Wales, but also to English readers in general; but, to answer this purpose, it will be necessary that the writer or rather writers should be possessed of eyes that can see nature, that can discriminate truth from error; that they should give matter of fact, rather than of hobby-horsical imagination.30 The letter then takes a Shandean diversion into the world of Welsh Hobbyhorses, attacking fellow Welsh scholars for ‘heaping error upon error, blunder upon blunder’, in their depictions of Welsh antiquities and literature, with Iolo’s ideological opponent, the ‘smatter-dasher Edward Davies’, coming in for specific abuse. Their misrepresentations of Wales are subject to the gaze of two kinds of external critics, the diabolical ‘Pinkerton and his imps’, who ‘have justly enough flagellated those shallow fellows’, and the benign Sharon Turner, whom Iolo admired enormously for his balanced Vindication of the Genuineness of the Ancient British Poems of Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen and Merdhin (1803): ‘It is a theme to us all, Cambrian scribblers, that a mere English gentleman, who with a most wonderful rapidity acquired the knowledge of our language, Mr Sharon Turner, is the best writer that has ever appeared on our literary antiquities.’31 In both cases, one senses a familiar anxiety about being taken seriously by English scholarship and a concern for Wales’s image in the outside world. But while Iolo clearly understands the need to control the projection of national characteristics manufactured from within a culture, he does not forget his original criticism of that external gaze, and returns to the theme of ‘false mediums’. Here, the traveller’s vision sees only difference, and takes the exotic, the out-of-the-ordinary, for the norm: We have had a swarm of Welsh tourists of late years, ambling on their hobbies in old beaten tracks: these are also smatter-dashers; their purblind eyes discern nothing of nature: something that is unnatural they now and then see through a hugely magnifying medium; they see a few instances of singularity, oddity, and eccentricity, in a few individuals; these things they set down for national manners!!! – Poor devils!!!’32 Again, this is both perfectly just and perfectly ironic, since Iolo (whom Prys Morgan calls ‘the rogue elephant’ of Welsh literary tradition) himself revelled in being thought eccentric, and played up his own singularities of diet, habit, thought and belief for all they were worth.33

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Notes 1. National Library of Wales, MS 13121B, p. 486 (quotations from the Iolo Morganwg archive will hereafter be cited as NLW plus call number). 2. English Romanticism and the Celtic World, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 18. The question of identity is further explored in Cathryn Charnell-White, Bardic Circles: National, Regional and Personal Identity in the Bardic Vision of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). More generally, see also Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3. The most detailed account of Iolo’s early life is that of G. J. Williams, Iolo Morganwg: y Gyfrol Gyntaf (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1956); for a good short biography in English, see Prys Morgan, Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1975). A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005) offers a wide-ranging collection of essays on all aspects of his life. 4. British Library, Add. 15024, f. 199. 5. NLW 13174A, pp. 10–11. The lyric is by Thomas Arne (1710–78). 6. Ibid., p. 15. 7. Iolo Morganwg to Evan Williams, 31 March 1811, Cambrian Register, 3 (1818), 381–5. 8. E. B., A Trip to North-Wales: Being a Description of That Country and People (London, 1701), p. 7. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998), p. 2. 11. See Peter Lord, Words with Pictures: Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press, 1640–1860 (Aberystwyth: Planet, 1995), pp. 46–51. 12. NLW 13121B, p. 479. 13. See Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (London: EyreMethuen, 1979). 14. See Caroline Franklin, ‘The Welsh American Dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend’, in English Romanticism and the Celtic World, pp. 69–84; Lynda Pratt, ‘Revising the National Epic: Coleridge, Southey and Madoc’, Romanticism, 2 (1996), 149–63. 15. Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘ “A Subject of Conversation”: Iolo Morganwg, Hannah More and Ann Yearsley’, in Wales and the Romantic Imagination, ed. Damian Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 16. NLW 21286E, Letter no. 1023, Iolo Morganwg to Hannah More (draft). 17. NLW 13104B, pp. 89–91; quoted in Williams, Madoc, pp. 135–6. 18. See Mary-Ann Constantine, ‘Ossian in Wales and Brittany’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, ed. Howard Gaskill (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 67–90. Iolo’s reaction to Ossian is discussed at length in my The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007). 19. NLW 13104B, p. 128.

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20. ‘The editor, or author, never could shew the original; nor can it be shewn by any other; to revenge reasonable incredulity, by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence, with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt’: Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 98. 21. NLW MS 13106B, p. 133; Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands, p. 99. 22. Anon, The Briton Describ’d, or, a Journey thro’ Wales (London, 1738), p. 6 23. Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth Century Renaissance (Landybïe: Christopher Davies, 1981), pp. 120–1. For a discussion of reactions to Gray’s poem in Wales, see Sarah Prescott, ‘ “Gray’s Pale Spectre”: Evan Evans, Thomas Gray and the Rise of Welsh Bardic Nationalism’, Modern Philology, 104 (August 2006), pp. 72–95. 24. NLW 21282E, no. 325a. 25. Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, eds, English Romanticism and the Celtic World, p. 18. 26. Gwyneth Lewis, ‘Eighteenth-Century Literary Forgeries, with Special Reference to the Work of Iolo Morganwg’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1991). 27. Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 12. 28. NLW 13121B, p. 473. 29. Ibid., p. 475. 30. Iolo Morganwg to Evan Williams, 31 March 1811, Cambrian Register, 3 (1818), 381–5. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance, p. 111.

4 ‘Looking back upon a Highland Prospect’: Scott, The Lady of the Lake, and the Lowland/Celtic Fringe Susan Oliver

Towards the end of the third series of Tales of a Grandfather (1830), Walter Scott looks across one of Britain’s most debatable lands, the Scottish Lowland/Highland margins: The view which we cast upon the system of clanship [is] like looking back upon a Highland prospect, enlivened by the tints of a beautiful summer evening. On such an occasion, the distant hills, lakes, woods, and precipices are touched by the brilliancy of the atmosphere with a glow of beauty, which is not properly their own, and it requires an exertion to recall to our mind the desolate, barren, and wild character, which properly belong to the objects we look upon.1 In that typically romantic sketch, Scott acknowledges the power of imagination to transform our perceptions of social history. He continues with a rationalizing account of the military, judicial, economic, scientific and other means by which Highland clan culture changed during the eighteenth century. Figurative and actual forms of death interweave with a more positive vision of adaptation to modernity as he describes the executions that followed the Battle of Culloden, the assimilation into commercial society of many Highland chieftains and the moves to implement improvements in animal husbandry and land management. Contradictory notions of cultural fracture and continuity, loss and recovery, failure and success emerge as inextricable concepts alongside Scott’s wordplay concerning what might have constituted a ‘Highland prospect’ given the barren nature of what actually existed north of the Lowland/Celtic fringe. 39

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The immediately obvious literary analogue is Scott’s first novel, Waverley (1814), which culminates in the executions of Highlanders Fergus Mac-Ivor and Evan Dhu Maccombich, and the modernization of Baron Bradwardine’s Perthshire home. The collapse of transcultural continuity in Waverley becomes most poignant in the breakdown of communication during the trial of Mac-Ivor and Maccombich, when the latter – representative of the ordinary clansman – falls silent due to ‘the perplexity arising from thinking in a language different from that in which he was to express himself’.2 Before this scene Maccombich has not experienced any such difficulty, so in representing his predicament Scott draws attention to the implications of the suppression of Gaelic following the Battle of Culloden. Maccombich’s subsequent refusal to say the English words required in a petition for grace and his declaration in Scots of loyalty to his clan leader seals the enactment of his capital sentence.3 However, fatal consequences arising from the fragmentation of Highland, Lowland and English conversation are not unprecedented in Scott’s work. In his narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810), a clan chieftain from two centuries earlier sends his followers into the mountainside – and metaphorically into the grave of history – with a tacit sweep of his hand in the moments before his own death. Until that point, the poem is full of the sounds of a wild landscape; from then onwards, the hills fade into silence. This chapter is concerned with Scott’s engagement in The Lady of the Lake with contemporary views on social history, language and more generally with a science of man. Since Duncan Forbes’s essays in the 1950s, and onwards through Peter Garside’s influential work from 1975, interest has grown in the manner in which Scott combined Enlightenment philosophical enquiry with his distinct brand of romanticism to create a literature of social history.4 As Garside says, the intellectual climate in Edinburgh during the last decades of the eighteenth century was such that Scott was ‘soaked’ in the ideas of the Scottish universities’ approach to human history and the new social sciences.5 Within those schools, the nature of language was one of the most debatable issues: questions were asked about why it was peculiar to humans, and how it evolved along with society. Cultures from Asia, Africa and America were considered as case studies, based on their comparative location in the newly conceived four-stage theory of human development. At the extremities of that argument, Francis Burnett, Lord Monboddo, argued in his Of the Origin and Progress of Language that orang-utans are capable of developing speech and should be considered human, whilst Henry Home, Lord Kames, suggested it to be ‘highly improbable’ that Native Americans ‘are of the same species’ as

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Europeans.6 Kames conjectured that language, being a symptom of social development, must evolve into forms that are ever more complex or be lost in a changing world. Taking Gaelic as exemplary, he speculated that the Celtic tongue, once extensive, is at present confined to the highlands of Scotland to Wales, to Britany, and to a part of Ireland. In a few centuries, it will share the fate of many other original tongues: it will be totally forgotten.7 Scott’s poetry and prose subsequently figure forms of communication as indicators of levels of social development within a stadial framework, as defined by John Millar.8 I particularly want to look at the ways in which Scott invokes animal, bird and a range of other natural sounds and non-verbal means of communication, together with gesticulation and conventional speech, to characterize the people of the Highland fringes of North Perthshire in his poem The Lady of the Lake. Where he introduces Gaelic into the poem, Scott largely confines its use to proper nouns, and more particularly to the names of people, places and rituals: Roderigh Vich Alpine Dhu (a clan chieftain and the anti-hero), Beala-nam-bo (the name of a mountain), Beal’ an Duine (the name of a battlefield), Ben-shie (a banshee, or female fairy) and the Taghairm (an oracular ritual). Scott thus primitivizes Celtic society using structural means, perhaps recollecting Adam Smith’s note in ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’ that ‘the application of particular names [    ] and of nouns substantive, would probably be one of the first steps towards the formation of language’.9 Smith’s views, in turn, were representative of a consensus that held the imitation of natural sounds generally to be an early step in the development of language. James Dunbar, for example, asserted that ‘the first elements of a rising language’ are located in natural exclamations and cries.10 Almost all Scottish Enlightenment treatises on language conclude imitations of natural sounds to be an early expedience in the history of communication. A proto-anthropological theme consequently emerges in Scott’s work. The clan system as the dominant social formation north of the Highland line until the mid-eighteenth century is frequently represented by Scott through a series of cross-cultural comparisons. He likens Highland Chieftains to eastern warlords through behavioural and physiological analogies, whilst ordinary clan members display traits similar to those ascribed to warrior societies more variously (including North American tribes). In the first canto of the Lady of the Lake, the Grampian mountains

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to the north of the Trossachs and Loch Katrine are transformed into an orientalist capriccio as the narrator recalls how, in the evening light, ‘the native bulwarks of the pass’ brought to his mind the Tower of Babel, whilst those beyond Seem’d fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever deck’d, Or mosque of Eastern architect.11 The past tense and the sense of illusion is significant, because the Lady of the Lake is a poem that looks backwards to tell of the disappearance of a people that are represented as savage and thus unable to progress sufficiently to be accommodated within the modern world. The ascending peaks of the mountains suggest more, however, than an imaginary perspective that leads the viewer’s eye ever further eastwards: they prefigure the vertical layering of social development in Waverley, where the journey upwards from Tully Veolan into the Highland mountains is also one back into a culture at the point that it passes into history. The reaction of the narrator of the Lady of the Lake upon surveying the scene along and beyond Loch Katrine sounds like that of a tourist from Scott’s own period. His perspective also anticipates the view referred to in Tales of a Grandfather, far from his vantage point on a ‘steep promontory’, he has been drawn away from the familiarity of Stirling and South Perthshire towards an ‘enchanted land’ on which as a ‘stranger’ he ‘gazed / [    ] Raptured and amazed’ (1. xiv–xv). Significantly, the mountains at the Lowland southern end of the Trossachs are separated from this wild Highland landscape by a path that ends at a rock face: And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice, A far projecting precipice. (1. xiv) Metaphorically, Scott’s adventurer stands on the margins of civilization as he gazes at the inaccessible ‘fragments of an earlier world’, where granite escarpments emerge from the ‘forest feather’d o’er’ (1. xiv). In canto 4, a ‘wasted female form’ (4. xxi) appears on the same precipice. Her initially ‘strain’d and roughen’d’ voice leads into a lyrical song that rings across the hillside in ‘wildly sweet’ notes that suggest a harmony of Celtic and Lowland tones. Blanche of Devan’s death by

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a Highlander’s arrow transforms her song into a haunting lament for the victims of transcultural violence; abducted by clansmen on her wedding day, she tells how enforced cross-border experience, with no possibility of return to her own society, had ruined her life. Fitz-James’s guide, meanwhile, communicates with his fellow clansmen through a whoop ‘loud and high’, which he explains as an attempt to frighten scavenging ravens. Scott does not provide any notes to this part of the poem, but North American captivity narratives had been available since the late seventeenth century, whilst Monboddo’s accounts of primates abducting women were also well known.12 It is possible that Scott was drawing on the sensational appeal of such publications, but whether or not he intended any analogy, the primitivization of Highland society and the parallels with perceptions of Native Americans are noteworthy. In Rokeby (1813), set in northern England, he refers directly to ‘arts, in Indian warfare tried’ and to Native Americans’ skills in tracking and secret communication through the imitation of animal sounds, acknowledging James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1774) as a source.13 Meanwhile, Monboddo had suggested that ‘barbarous languages’ generally were ‘too vocal [    ] and excessive’, whilst noting that they nevertheless sometimes had a musical quality and rhythm that ‘is lost in all the European, but is preserved in some of the Barbarous languages spoken by certain tribes of Savages in North America’.14 Scott’s first mention of human habitation behind the Highland line in The Lady of the Lake figures a society founded upon rapine and devoid of traditions of hospitality: But hosts may in these wilds abound, Such as are better miss’d than found; To meet with Highland plunderers here Were worse than loss of steed or deer. (1. xvi) His note to the last two lines of this passage comments on ‘the clans who inhabited the romantic regions in the neighbourhood of Loch Katrine’ as ‘even until a late period, much addicted to predatory excursions upon their Lowland neighbours’.15 Thus, cross-cultural contact is frequent, but of a problematic kind. The analogy with addiction suggests eastern or American cultures, where opium, tobacco and alcohol were known to shape patterns of behaviour. However, Scott follows with a quotation from Patrick Graham’s Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire (1806) that suggests a more enclosed environment. Graham describes a marginal land that is ‘rendered almost inaccessible by strong barriers of rocks,

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and mountains and lakes’ to the extent that ‘it was a border country, and, though on the very verge of the low country, it was almost totally sequestered from the world, and, as it were, insulated with respect to society’.16 This marginal land set precariously between Lowland and Celtic Scotland is home in The Lady of the Lake to a third social group, namely fugitives from the Scottish/English Borders region. Also representative of a pre-civil society with traditions of predation, but ultimately more adapted to social change, these refugees are members of the Douglas and Graeme clans who were already familiar to Scott’s readers from the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The fragility of their tenure in an ‘enchanted’ and ‘fairy’ land of exile, however, becomes clear with the incursion into the poem of the Highland chieftain Roderick Vich Alpine Dhu. The imagery that introduces Roderick and his clansmen as they row into view like ‘darkening specks upon the tide’ (2. xvi) from the far end of Loch Katrine suggests that they come from the distance of another epoch or from a barbarous ‘other’ land. Scott combines descriptions of the clansmen’s physical appearances, manners and speech, with references to their ‘spears, pikes, and axes’, their ‘plaids and plumage’, their ‘shrill [    ] mingled cries’ and their ‘shrieks’ (2. xvii). As they approach the southern end of Loch Katrine, they pipe a pibroch and sing a jorram, or Gaelic boat-song (in English transcription). Scott notes that the sounds are confusing to anyone other than a Highlander, being a ‘thick’ series of ‘rapid notes’ with a ‘rhythm so irregular’ and ‘notes [    ] so mixed and huddled together’ that ‘a stranger finds it impossible to reconcile his ear to it’.17 The ‘mingled outcry’ eventually subsides into a ‘moan prolong’d and low’ (2. xvii), conveying the impression that Highland music, like the strange sounds of Gaelic to non-speakers, lacks the rational and measured cadences of polite society. Scott does not represent the Highlanders in The Lady of the Lake as immoral foils for their virtuous counterparts. Rather, he portrays societies in the process of change, coming into contact within a secluded, borderland location in such a way that they are poised either to progress or to disappear. Morality, such as it exists in this poem, lies in the inevitability of historical providence rather than the destruction of evil. Roderick Dhu has qualities that render his eventual defeat – prefiguring the demise of the Highland clan system – tragic. He is fiercely defensive of his own people, but fails to act according to the chivalric codes of behaviour associated with European societies when placed in a situation requiring cross-cultural communication. Ruling by terror, his resistance

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to sympathetic exchange with neighbouring societies seals his downfall according to the stadial model. However, he and his followers embody the martial vigour that Scott believed to command the highest levels of respect amongst tribal, pre-commercial people. Scott’s figuration of the Highlands in The Lady of the Lake assents to many of Adam Ferguson’s ideals, as expressed in his Essay on the History of Civil Society. Ferguson, who was himself a Gaelic speaker born and raised in the Perthshire Highland margins, argued for the retention of a martial spirit from earlier stages of society as an essential modern civic virtue, not least because it counterbalances the moral enervation and excessive self-interest he saw as arising from luxury within contemporary society. The essential qualification for Ferguson was that martial spirit had to be compatible with a laissez-faire economy.18 Therein lies the chasm between Scott’s Roderick Dhu and his opponents – the clansmen inhabit a system where military loyalty was unconditional in its allegiance to a chieftain who, in return, arbitrarily dispensed a living to his followers. Scott evaluates whether the Highlanders of Clan Alpine show the potential to eventually translate themselves, their culture and their language across historical borders and finds them lacking any prospect of doing so. Communication, the cultural embedding of language, and problems arising from failures of understanding are constant themes within Scott’s writings of borderlands. Again, this constitutes a response to debatable issues within Edinburgh intellectual circles. Susan Manning has noted that since the mid-eighteenth century in Scotland, theories arguing a connected genealogy of ‘use from the primitive to the “correct” ’ increasingly gave the relationship between speech and consciousness ‘a historical dimension’.19 Janet Sorensen’s studies of theories of ‘universal grammar’ and the suppression of Gaelic demonstrate how seminal language was as an instrument of political power.20 In The Lady of the Lake, Scott places particular emphasis on two aspects of the Highlanders’ means of communication, each of which points to a fatal simplicity when they are placed in a borderland context with another culture. First, their language is naturalized by being repeatedly likened to the cries of wild creatures or to uncontrollable environmental phenomena such as the roaring wind or rushing water. Secondly, as a form of expression, Scott shows the Highland language to be highly emotional. Thus, it lacks the order necessary for reason, which in turn is necessary for change. The discord of shrieks, whistles, wails and moans that marks the entrance of the clansmen echoes throughout the rest of the Lady of the Lake, with Scott extending it to the vocal utterances of the Highland

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women and children in canto 3. Again, the effect is one of confusion and strangeness. Inspired by a demonic, semi-naked hermit, whose ‘eye might brook / On human sacrifice to look’ (3. iv), the women’s song is likened to ‘the Ululloo of the Irish [    ] a wild lamentation’, whilst their participation in magic rites is suggestive of North African and Native American societies. As a goat is prepared for ritual slaughter in preparation for war, we read of The cry of females, shrill As goss-hawk’s whistle on the hill, Denouncing misery and ill, Mingled with childhood’s babbling trill Of curses stammer’d slow. (3. x) This combined primitivization and feminization of the Highland language is important, because Scott replaces Gaelic with a set of sounds and sentimental gestures. Those sounds and gestures are rendered translatable only in terms of emotional outbursts, and consequently they are inconsistent with any notion of a stable, universal grammar based on systematic reason.21 At best, they are assimilated into the nostalgic world of folk memory and dead languages. Scott follows the enactment of the sacrificial ceremony with an interpolated version (in English) of a coronach, which he notes to be ‘like many other Highland peculiarities, falling into disuse, unless in remote districts’.22 Scott’s depiction of the language of the Highlanders as the savage utterance of warriors living in a near state-of-nature culminates in canto 5, shortly before Roderick Dhu is mortally wounded by Fitz-James. The Highland chieftain calls to his men, who are hidden in the heather of an apparently empty mountainside, in lines that are notably Ossianic and which thus prefigure cultural confinement to a Gaelic past: He whistled shrill, And he was answer’d from the hill; Wild as the scream of the curlew, From crag to crag the signal flew. (5. ix) An army of 500 clansmen appears, as ‘every tuft of broom gives life / To plaided warrior arm’d for strife’ (5. ix). Scott then creates a sublime

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moment in which time, and the process of human development, momentarily stops, as Watching their leader’s beck and will, All silent there they stood, and still. Like the loose crags, whose threatening mass Lay tottering o’er the hollow pass     Upon the mountain-side they hung. (5. ix) After a pause, Roderick signals again – this time silently, with a single wave of his hand – and the Highland army disappears into the broom and bracken ‘as if their mother Earth / Had swallow’d up her warlike birth’ (5. x). In those lines, Scott offers his readers a glimpse of a world that had, indeed, vanished from view not so long before their own time. The silent sweep of Roderick’s hand symbolizes the containment of Gaelic north of the Highland line, and it is mirrored in the closing lines of the poem as the sound of the Harp of the North fades like a ‘wandering witch-note’ into the distance. Unlike The Lay of the Last Minstrel, where the Border minstrel’s song is immortalized in the perpetual rolling sound of the river Yarrow, The Lady of the Lake closes in silence. The most important note captured by Scott as the clansmen hang like loose crags on the edge of their precipice is the destructive historical power that might be involved in their ‘threatening mass’, should they descend into the ‘hollow pass’ below them. Earlier accounts throughout the poem of Roderick Dhu’s campaign of terror against the Lowlands, along with Scott’s emphasis on the vulnerability of Ellen, prefigure the devastation that such a fall would involve for society south of the Highland border, ushering in a history different from the one which Scott sees as eventually – and providentially – coming to pass. Finally, there is an interesting contrast to be made between the way these clansmen ‘hung’ from the mountainside and the lines that Wordsworth had written only a few years earlier, in the first book of The Prelude, where he re-imagines his boyhood self-sustained by forces of nature: ‘suspended by the blast which blew amain, / Shouldering the naked crag’, as ‘on the perilous ridge’ he ‘hung alone’.23 In Wordsworth’s lines the miracle is in the apprehension of being held up, for all the precariousness of the particular childhood experience, such that what remains in the later adult memory is a sense of the universe as an ultimately sustaining combination of vectors of benevolent force upon the boy. For Scott, by contrast, the clansmen have no such assurance of being held aloft or of tumbling

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into a subsequent phase of history. They cannot just exist in historical suspension or state of cultural stasis, but must either ‘fall’ to their own and others’ ruin, or disappear. In the event, they suffer the latter course. Fraught as Scott’s verse at this point is with a sense that these clansmen’s lifestyles have reached a limit, the implicit point being made is that they must ‘go down’ in consequence, disappear for ever into the realm of legend and historical memory, as a social system that must be superseded in order for another to come to pass. In the description of the boy Wordsworth, suspended from his crag, there is none of the sense of historical fatedness of Scott’s clansmen.24 As The Lady of the Lake approaches its dénouement, Scott steps back from the dizzying prospect of cultural cataclysm and moves into the convention of cathartic tragedy. The language becomes that of regular, anglicized speech as Roderick prepares to engage in single combat with Fitz-James (who is revealed to be the Scottish King). Indeed, Roderick’s silent sweep of his hand is the last primitive communicative gesture ‘the Gael’ makes. The narrator notes how ‘the Chief in silence strode’ (5. xii) away from the clans and ventured towards his fatal confrontation with the leader of another cultural system. Clan Alpine’s dominance of the Celtic / Lowland fringe is consigned to the past in a haze of ‘blood and mist’ as Roderick throws his ‘clotted locks’ backwards and thrusts his dagger impotently into the heather (5. xvi). As would be the case in Waverley, the moment of silence captures human tragedy at the point that it metamorphoses into romantic legend. The present essay has so far said nothing about Ellen Douglas, the heroine of The Lady of the Lake, although Scott allots a substantial amount of the dialogue to her and she sings several of the interjected songs. I shall therefore conclude with a brief consideration of how Ellen’s voice in the poem relates to the utterances of the Highlanders, for she ultimately holds the key to the prospect of this particular debatable land. In canto 1, Scott identifies Ellen with the Highlands by noting that ‘upon her speech there hung / The accents of a mountain tongue’(1. xviii). The description of her as she rows towards the concealed FitzJames further confers Celtic associations, as the narrator likens her ‘wild luxuriant ringlets’ (1. xix) to ‘the plumage of a raven’s wing’ (1. xix), and casts her ‘on this lake’s romantic strand’ as ‘a fay in fairy land’ (1. xxii). She is dressed in plaid, and wears a brooch and snood whilst her singing of Ave Maria in canto 4 emphasizes her Catholicism. Although the poem’s setting is pre-reformation, the stressed Catholicism shades the earlier moment into later, romantic Highlandism. Her eloquent

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articulation of soft vowels and consonants dissociates her from the shrill, barbarian cries of the women of the warrior clans. Singing to the accompaniment of her fellow borderer, the minstrel Allan-Bane, she represents a musical language that was accessible to Scott’s readers because it was much more familiar than that of Celtic Scotland. Roderick Dhu, whom we know to speak a Highland language shaped by predatory habits, war and a harsh physical environment, desires Ellen sexually but he symbolically has difficulty understanding her as, at a distance, he ‘fondly strains his anxious ear, / The accents of her voice to hear’ (3. xxviii). The fundamental lack of translatable feeling between Roderick and Ellen represents the absence of common ground between them. Consequently, the prospect of their union reflects the barrenness of the landscape from which he derives. Ellen also rejects the romantic advances of the King, insisting on marrying a fellow inhabitant of her adoptive Celtic/Lowland borders country, Malcolm Graeme. The conclusion Scott offers is that a Highland prospect could only be such if it sympathetically incorporated elements from elsewhere in Scottish society, embracing linguistic and cultural translation as a mutually developmental process. In terms of where Scott might be seen interacting with the Science of Man and the debatable land of the Celtic fringe, as Sorensen notes, there was a virtual industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries of constructing Highland society as ‘inequivalent’ to its AngloScottish counterparts.25 However, Gaelic Scotland may find some equivalent in the writings of the Enlightenment thinkers I have mentioned. Monboddo’s theory that orang-utans might be a primitive form of Homo sapiens that have yet to progress to the development of language seems bizarre to us today, but in theory it makes a point regarding civil society’s attitudes towards otherness. Kames, whilst dismissing Monboddo’s theory on the particular matter of primates, nevertheless draws upon aspects of the argument in his Sketches of the History of Man to condemn Spanish genocide of the Caribs, whom he points out were slaughtered because regarded as ‘but a species of the Ouran Outang; for no better reason than that they were of a copper colour [and] spoke an unknown language’.26 Walter Scott’s narratives of the retreat of a system of savagery behind the Highland line do not so much suggest an innate dehumanization north of the Highland border, as a recognition that human society exists in differing stages. Its progress is necessarily uneven, with transitions occurring smoothly in some regions, as in the Borders between England and Scotland, but through violent change and tragic fracture in others.

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Notes 1. Sir Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1867), III, 458. 2. Scott, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 320. 3. Ibid., pp. 320–1. 4. Duncan Forbes, ‘ “Scientific” Whiggism: Adam Smith and John Millar’, The Cambridge Journal, 7 (1954), 643–70. P. D. Garside, ‘Scott and the “Philosophical” Historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 497–512. 5. Garside, ‘Scott and the “Philosophical” Historians’, p. 504. 6. Francis Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (Edinburgh: J. Balfour and T. Cadell, 1774), I, 270–313. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, 3rd edn, 2 vols (Dublin: James Williams, 1779), I, 25–6. 7. Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, I, 46. 8. Stadial theory, which argued that human society evolves through recognizable phases from hunter gatherer to civil society, is described by Millar in The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), ed. John Price (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990). See pp. 2–4 for a synopsis and the entire work for the processes involved. The idea was formulated by several Scottish Enlightenment social philosophers, including also Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. 9. Adam Smith, ‘Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages’ (1761), in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 203. 10. James Dunbar, ‘On Language as an Universal Accomplishment’, in Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (London, 1781), pp. 70–1. 11. The Lady of the Lake, 1. xi. All quotations from Scott’s poetry are taken from The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1917), referred to henceforth as PWS. 12. Monboddo, I, 290. African pongos (from Congolese, mpongo, although recently attributed in OED to Angolan/Loango dialect) are the subject of an abduction story in James Hogg’s Altrive Tales (1832). I am grateful to Gillian Hughes for her discussion with me about Hogg’s story. See James Hogg, Altrive Tales: Collected from among the Peasantry of Scotland and from Foreign Adventurers by the Ettrick Shepherd, ed. Gillian Hughes, The Stirling/South Carolina Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003). 13. Scott, PWS, pp. 333, 391. Scott’s text and notes concerning accounts of Native Americans include references to their use of naturalistic sounds as signals and their habits of deceiving their enemies. 14. Monboddo, IV, 10–11. 15. Scott, PWS, p. 277. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., p. 284. Scott cites James Beattie’s Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition (Edinburgh: 1776). 18. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 141–6, 213–23.

Susan Oliver 51 19. Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 241–79. The point is made on p. 247. 20. Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–62. ‘Universal grammar’, a concept proposed by James Harris in Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751), is defined on pp. 11–13. 21. Ibid., p. 173 and Chapter 5 passim accounts for the embodiment, historicization and feminization of Scottish Gaelic. 22. Scott, PWS, p. 292. 23. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 1: 345–7 (1805)/334–6 (1850). 24. This comparison is treated within a more expansive exploration of Scott’s narrative poetry of the Borders and Highland margins in my book, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 87–8. 25. Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing pp. 38–9. 26. Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, II, 139.

5 He’s Come Undone: Gender, Territory, and Hysteria in Rob Roy Fiona Wilson

The case ‘How have I sinned that this affliction Should light so heavy on me?’∗ In March 1817, at an Edinburgh dinner party, Walter Scott collapsed in a spasm of agonizing pain. It was the first hint of the illness that was to plague him in the months to come, during which period he suffered appalling stomach cramps; ingested alarming quantities of opium; fell into a melancholy depression; suffered chronic writer’s block; and fantasized writing his own obituary. Recovery was slow and debilitating, not least because Scott’s doctors had great difficulty in diagnosing his ailment (gallstones). ‘I could neither stir for weakness and giddiness’, he reported to his friend John Morritt, ‘nor read for dazzling in my eyes nor listen for a whizzing sound in my ears nor even think for lack of the power of arranging my ideas’.1 Being Scott, however, he did manage to write a novel: Rob Roy. If productivity under such trying circumstances seems startling, the reasons for it were true to form. Additions to the Abbotsford estate had compounded a financial situation already so vulnerable that, as the self-styled ‘Laird’ confessed, ‘while my trees grow and my fountain fills, my purse, in an inverse ratio, sinks to zero’.2 In short, having pushed for an exceptionally large advance from his publisher, Scott had no choice but to try to write his way out of debt. Two years later, reflecting on what it had been like to write under these conditions, the novelist recalled, ‘I did not much write him [Rob 52

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Roy] con amore and I think he smells of the cramp [    ]. Above all I had too much flax on my distaff and as it did not consist with my patience or my plan to make a fourth volume I was obliged at last to draw a rough coarse and hasty thread’.3 The allusive density of this statement – metaphorically linking illness, femininity, and economic pressure – is interesting, but at first glance, little related to the actual content of Rob Roy; ‘[d]espite the circumstances of its composition’, John Sutherland asserts, ‘there is no feel of weariness or sickness about Rob Roy’.4 Nevertheless, in a curious way, significant elements of Scott’s characterization of his project as marked by ‘the cramp’ do appear in Rob Roy, a work I will be describing here in terms of illness as metaphor, as performative of a kind of figurative male hysteria. For, if we do not feel ‘weariness’ in this very busy tale, we do, as critics have long reported, feel a mood of profound dis/ease quite at odds with the surface confidence of the tale, a restlessness and ‘want of object’, as one contemporary critic put it, of ‘something [    ] which may give meaning and consequence to the preparations which are going on’.5 Modern critics, like Fiona Robertson and Ian Duncan, fascinated by this curious emotional texture, note the ‘nameless terror’ and ‘disjunctiveness’ of the text; Jane Millgate reports a ‘persistent sense of disturbance’.6 My approach here builds on such responses to examine how borderline concerns of gender identity and national difference are conveyed in Rob Roy through the language of that most debatable of illnesses: hysteria. In pursuing these thoughts, I read Rob Roy against eighteenthand early nineteenth-century discourses about hysteria, as well as Michel Foucault’s account of how, in that period, ideas about the hysterical female body as, at once, ‘continuous’ and porous gradually came to be applied to minds too – a shift that potentially left men as vulnerable to hysteria as women.7 Images of porous bodies and minds in this novel, I argue, express anxiety about the re-writing of borders through trade. This issue is especially focused in the struggle of the hero, Frank Osbaldistone, to maintain self-control in the contested territory of ‘North Britain’ shortly after the 1707 Act of Union and before the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Presented as a memoir written in Frank’s wealthy and successful old age, Rob Roy claims a healthy resolution to the crises of national history. Yet, as its persistent sense of disturbance suggests, the narrative does not so much cure itself of hysteria as reinscribe that condition in novel form. Frank’s problems – and our own, as readers – take new shape in the ritualized, normative hysteria of trade in an imperial economy.

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Symptoms ‘As if I were a man or you a woman’ It is appropriate perhaps that Frank Osbaldistone’s exposure to the risky appeal of continuous bodies begins in childhood, when his curiosity about the north is first whetted by the aging and garrulous nurse Mabel Rickets. Forbidden by Frank’s father from speaking on the subject of the family’s origins in the ‘heaths, glades, and dales of her beloved Northumberland’, Frank recalls, Mabel ‘poured herself forth to my infant ear in descriptions of the scenes of her youth and long narratives of the events which tradition declared to have passed amongst them’ (94). This image of the old nurse, pouring ‘herself forth’ into Frank’s ear – subverting the law of the father and seducing the male child through aural narrative – gestures towards the ancient fear of the wet-nurse who contaminates the infant she feeds.8 Key links are established here between transgressiveness, femininity, and the north; Mabel’s accounts of violent border raids fill Frank with divided feelings as well as a certain confusion about ‘home’ that later typifies his reaction to North Britain. On the one hand, he is ‘[w]armed’ by these border tales; on the other, he is instilled with ‘a sincere aversion to the northern inhabitants of Britain, as a people bloodthirsty in time of war, treacherous during truce’ (96). Provoked equally by female narrative and paternal censorship, Frank grows up to become a would-be poet who refuses to enter the family business. When his father banishes him to Northumberland, home of the estranged Catholic and Jacobite branch of the Osbaldistone family, he is primed to interpret the North as simultaneously attractive and frightening, a transgressive zone where southern certainties are undone and borders successively crossed. Fearful attraction, in fact, generally shapes Frank’s reaction to northern landscapes, as it does his response to the novel’s main female characters, both of whom are strongly identified with the territory in which they live. The ‘lonely valleys’ of Northumbria that, Frank thinks, ‘invite the traveller to explore their recesses’ offer a suitable backdrop for the novel’s heroine, the lonely and enticing Diana Vernon (100). Similarly, Frank’s sense of the Highlands as ‘lofty’ yet dangerous, a landscape of sublime primitivism riddled with ‘numerous passes, marshes, caverns, and other places of concealment or defence’ resonates later with his account of the sublimely hostile Helen MacGregor (414). This notion of the North as infinitely penetrable might seem to accord with the kinds of trope that liken the possession of land to the possession

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of female bodies. Yet the actual women Frank encounters in the North are, as readers often remark, not only resistant to possession (as Diana is), they are, on occasion, so downright aggressive (as Helen is) as to overwhelm any idea of containing, let alone possessing them. To travel north, apparently, is to enter territory where gender norms are confused. Both Diana and Helen exude an extraordinary transgressive force that alarms Frank and compromises his ability to individuate himself. Thus, Diana is consistently figured as man-womanly, as an ‘Amazon’, ‘Tom Vernon’, a would-be dueller, a wearer of ‘masculine dress’, and so on; her admirer is constantly being astonished by what he thinks of as her masculine virtues, by her physical and intellectual boldness and what he calls, without a whisper of irony, her ‘over-frankness’ (102, 113, 385, 106). Helen, too, is described as an Amazon, albeit a less sexy, more frightening one. Like Diana, she dresses mannishly, with a plaid ‘disposed around her body as the Highland soldiers wear theirs’, ‘a man’s bonnet’, ‘an unsheathed sword’, and a ‘pair of pistols at her girdle’. Both women are symbolically associated with death and violence: Diana’s nickname is ‘Die’; Helen’s aggression is ‘imprinted’ on her body and, within the story itself, she endangers Frank’s life and cruelly murders the government agent Morris (349). Finally and strikingly, both women are first introduced in situations in which they seem to emerge from the landscape, the cross-dressed avatars of liminal territory. Dressed in clothes ‘resembling those of a man’, Diana bursts on to Frank’s vision in the middle of a foxhunt in the Northumbrian hills (101); Helen is first seen looming above a Highland pass, a dramatic figure with ‘a countenance which must once have been of a masculine cast of beauty’ (349). In a land that breeds such Amazons, women, not surprisingly, are sometimes confused with men. ‘ “Can it be you, Miss Vernon, on such a spot – at such an hour – in such a lawless country” ’, a ‘thunderstruck’ Frank declares in one particularly delicious moment of confusion. ‘ “In such a masculine dress, you would say. – But what would you have?” ’ the dashing Miss Vernon responds (385). By the same token, however, men are also confused with women. In the dim light of the Glasgow prison, Frank feels ‘a mixture of disappointment oddly mixed with pleasure’ when his hopes of finding Diana are overthrown by the discovery instead of his father’s assistant Owen; later, Frank is arrested by English soldiers under the mistaken impression that he is the ‘young person’ (again Diana) that they seek. Yet the problems of continuous bodies are not simply physical; language too runs the risk of confusing difference. In Scott’s cartoonish rendering of English as spoken by native

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Gaelic-speakers, the word ‘he’ appears as ‘she’. This literary convention, as Graham Tulloch notes, produces a ‘pseudo-Highland Scots’ that tends to cast Gaelic speakers as figures of low comedy.9 The effect is seen, for example, in the prison passage, when the turnkey’s reference to Owen entirely misleads Frank: She’s sleeping. She! – who? – can it be Diana Vernon in this abode of misery? (259) The substitution of female for male in this passage is intended as comic. It is reprised, however, to darker effect, in the later scene in which redcoats hunting Rob Roy, on the verge of being ambushed by a band of women and boys led by Helen, are advised by the same speaker that if the ‘ “shentlemans were seeking Red Gregarach [    ] they couldna expect to find her without some wee danger” ’ (347). In each instant, blurred distinctions produce volatile emotions. Tears and laughter are jumbled together; gender figures as pratfall – or sudden death – with an intensity that echoes Laura Brown’s analysis of the Amazon as ‘the point where comic transvestism turns to tragic violence’.10 In either case, the result is a residue of unassimilated feeling, evidence, perhaps, of that textual ‘want of an object’. As these several examples suggest, the risky attractions of continuous bodies extend to the area of behaviour. Throughout Rob Roy, standard notions of gendered behaviour are reversed: women are silent, men emote. The novel is full of vivid performances of male feeling – from Owen’s distress at Frank’s disinheritance to Morris’s shrieks on the verge of death and to the tears on Rob Roy’s eyelashes when Frank offers to help his sons. In one striking moment, a clansman greets the MacGregor chieftain with a labile enthusiasm that disturbs Frank’s Whiggish sensibilities: ‘He grinned, he shivered, he laughed, he was near crying, if he did not actually cry’ (258). Yet it is to Frank himself that the most dramatic and extreme displays of emotion belong. The character who at the beginning of the story is, in his own eyes, so much ‘lord of [his] person’ that he feels it ‘unmanly to yield’ to his own father is within pages behaving in ways traditionally coded as feminine (86, 83). He is jealous, irrational, impulsive, given to ‘unmanly burst[s] of passion’, and perpetually on the verge of losing control (212). Provoked to anger, Frank is overwhelmed by ‘impetuous passions’ that whirl him ‘onward at their pleasure’ (174). When Diana reproves him, he feels lost in a ‘wild whirl and giddiness of mind’ conveyed spatially as a ‘chaos of thoughts [    ] passing hastily through my brain, intercepting and overshadowing

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each other, and resembling those fogs which in mountainous countries are wont to descend in obscure volumes, and disfigure or obliterate the usual marks by which the traveller steers his course through the wilds’ (212–13). Still, Frank cannot control his feelings. In truth, though he is surrounded by the suffering of others, it is his own mental state that occupies centre stage, to the extent even of staging the feelings of others. In one pointed exchange, merchant Nicol Jarvie accuses Frank of being one ‘ “o’ that playacting and play-ganging generation” ’ (277). Frank is surprised (‘ “how could you possibly connect me with the stage?” ’), but the accusation makes perfect intuitive sense; Frank does seem exceptionally vulnerable to catching – and performing – other people’s emotions (277). In the single moment we see Diana in tears, her tears are literally transferred to her lover’s cheek, as if her pain has become his. That episode immediately precedes the most extreme display of emotion in the novel, Frank’s breakdown at the prospect of permanent separation from Diana. Heaven knows, it was not apathy which loaded my frame and my tongue so much, that I could neither return Miss Vernon’s half embrace, nor even answer her farewell. The word, though it rose to my tongue, seemed to choke in my throat like the fatal guilty, which the delinquent who makes it his plea knows must be followed by the doom of death. The surprise – the sorrow, almost stupefied me [    ]. At length, tears rushed to my eyes, glazed as they were by the exertion of straining after what was no longer to be seen. I wiped them mechanically, and almost without being aware that they were flowing, but they came thicker and thicker. I felt the tightening of the throat and breast, the hysterica passio of poor Lear; and sitting down by the wayside, I shed a flood of the first and most bitter tears which had flowed from my eyes since childhood. (386)

Diagnosis Continuous bodies, continuous minds? Sorrow, choking, excess, tears: Frank’s retrospective diagnosis of his behaviour as hysterical has much to recommend it. Ian Duncan describes the hero’s theatrical breakdown as illustrating ‘nineteenth-century masculine subjectivity in full proto-Freudian flood’.11 One need not look forward, however, to Freud (or, at least, not yet) to explain the breakdown scene; a medical vocabulary descriptive of hysteria already

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existed. In fact, to fully grasp what is happening in this passage, it is helpful to place Frank’s self-diagnosis in relation to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century concepts of the condition. Descriptions of hysteria have, throughout history, shared many similarities: ‘sensations of suffocation, choking, breathing, and eating difficulties, mimetic imitations, deceitfulness, shock, fits, death states [and] wanting (craving, longing)’.12 Notoriously, Hippocratic medicine tied the condition to female sexuality, and maintained that sexual frustration in widows and unmarried women could cause the womb to become detached and wander around the body, putting pressure on other organs and causing the symptoms just described. This curious idea persisted over centuries, establishing the powerful symbolism of an illness imagined, as Foucault writes, as ‘a dynamic upheaval of corporeal space, a tide of the lower powers [   The] disease of a body indiscriminately penetrable to all the efforts of the spirits, so that the internal order of organs gave way to the incoherent space of masses passively subject to the chaotic movement of the spirits’.13 Medical accounts of hysteria envisioned female bodies as peculiarly vulnerable to the dissolving of boundaries, to the intimate, quasi-domestic, violation of the body by the womb. In Renaissance England, the condition was renamed by the physician Edward Jorden as ‘suffocation of the mother’, popularized in common parlance as ‘the Mother’ (the term used in the Lear passage Frank quotes from).14 By the 1700s, however, the period of the narrative action in Rob Roy, little credence was given to the idea that the womb could actually wander around the body (this is why, no doubt, Frank cites Shakespeare rather than directly invoking the term ‘suffocation of the mother’). Although medical writing continued to list the standard symptoms and to emphasize the special vulnerability of women, the decline of the uterine theory led to new theories about of the etiology of hysteria. ‘The cause’, Thomas Marryat opines mid-century, ‘is an unequal distribution of the electrical fire [    ] a great fulness or plethora of the system mechanically opens the vessels of the uterus’ leading to ‘either a suppression, or too great a discharge.’15 Similarly, the famous Edinburgh physician William Cullen cites such causes as obstruction of the menses or the viscera, disorders of the stomach, and ‘sanguine menorrhagia’ (heavy periods).16 Commentaries like these underline the image of the hysteric’s body as a system of volatile hydraulics, as liable to blockage as it is to sudden, violent release. Yet physical disturbance is no longer classed as the only possible cause of hysteria; the mind too may be implicated. Interestingly, Cullen cross-references his entry

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on hysteria with what he calls the ‘Affectio hysterica of Authors’. And, for John Aitken, the condition is most frequently caused by ‘[s]trong passion or violent emotion of the mind, such as results from disappointed love’.17 The implications of this subtle shift from physical disorder to nervous condition are carefully enumerated by George Wallis, in The Art of Preventing Diseases (1793). ‘[We] cannot suppose’, Wallis writes, ‘[hysteria] to be attributed solely to the morbid affections of the womb [    ] we therefore conclude, that the constitutions subject to this malady have, for the predisposing cause, great incitability of the nervous system’ and as the brain has general communication and connexion with every part of the body, however minute, by means of the spinal marrow and nerves; – and as it does act, and can be acted upon, so as to produce general affections either from itself or from other parts which are primarily affected [    ] and as it is also liable to have its powers exerted by mental affections, we conclude, that the hysteric disease may be occasioned by primary affections of the brain, and different causes existing in different part, and have a variety of symptoms dependent upon sympathy.18 What’s interesting about the conclusions of Wallis, Aitken, and Cullen is that even as they reinscribe old links between hysteria and female sexuality (all three still argue that women are particularly susceptible), they also open other possible models of pathology, notably the concept of the hysterical man. Detached from the uterine theory, feeling like a ‘woman’, suffering from the cramp – physical, emotional, or intellectual – can, presumably, be a non-sex-specific affliction: hysteria can afflict men; and those who are most at risk, the literature claims, are imaginative, ‘feminized’ types, or as one hospital manual puts it ‘the more delicate and irritable of the male sex and those who have led a studious and sedentary life’.19 For the male sufferer, then, emotion and imagination are the conduits to inner disorder and perpetual self-rebellion. Symbolically, the male patient’s body is feminized, ‘riddled’ as Foucault writes of the female hysteric ‘by obscure but strangely direct paths of sympathy; it is always in immediate complicity with itself, to the point of forming a kind of absolutely privileged site for the sympathies; from one extremity of its organic space to the other, it encloses a perpetual possibility of hysteria’.20

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Questions of cure ‘Be a man and a merchant at once’ What is at stake in the hysterical body of Frank Osbaldistone? In the final part of this chapter, I want to consider more closely the question of what male hysteria in this novel might actually mean. As we have seen, both hero and text in Rob Roy can be described as hysterical. The list of classic symptoms invites obvious comparisons: suffocation and choking echo the repeated theme of being unable to speak; tendencies to fits of longing and verbal incoherence unquestionably characterize the hero; ‘mimetic imitation’ parallels the motif of dramatic performance. Even Frank’s peripatetic wanderings in the north, the physical manifestation of narrative restlessness, recall the image of the wandering womb. Significantly, the southerner’s sense of spatial dislocation begins the moment he sets foot on the road to North Britain and finds himself ‘driving, without a compass, on the ocean of human life’ (85). Within pages, he is drawn ever closer to the seductions and risks of territory, in every sense, on the edge. One way of thinking about all this might be to say that Frank’s affliction is a direct result of his trip up north. On the peripheries of North Britain, what was fixed and knowable becomes fluid and continuous: businessmen blur with outlaws, men with women, and the politics of the Protestant Hanoverian succession with the emotive panache of Jacobitism. From this perspective, the risk of male hysteria (and political meltdown) is best averted by containing and dissolving the northern difference. Like Hippocrates’s female patients, Frank is cured of hysteria by marriage, just as the North is cured of Jacobitism by the Act of Union. The best medicine for the male hysteric, it would seem, is of the sort articulated by Owen when he pleads with Frank to obey his father and be ‘be a man and a merchant at once’, a cure that deliberately ‘anticipates’ Adam Smith’s core vision of free trade as the vital guarantor of national health and of nationalist protectionism as a kind of economic hysteria (82). For Smith, economies reliant on trade barriers resemble unhealthy bodies: reduced consumption ‘cramps’ industry and ‘clogs’ trade, resulting in spasms (‘convulsions, apoplexy’) of political violence (‘a mutiny or disorder alarming to government, and embarrassing even to the deliberations of the legislature’).21 Nations of this sort resemble those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more prop-

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erly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic.22 In narrative terms, Rob Roy clearly embraces such thinking; more, it reproduces Smith’s symbolic linkage of economic block with political violence and ‘unwholesome bodies’. In the novel’s retrospective view, the revolt of the Catholic, Jacobite, feminized North is essentially hysterical; the best cure for such internal disorder is the redrawing of borders and expansion of trade. As Frank himself admits to his father, trade ‘connects nation with nation, relieves the wants, and contributes to the wealth of all; and it is to the general commonwealth of the civilized world what the daily intercourse of ordinary life is to private society, or rather what air and food are to our bodies’ (75). And yet, and yet – as so much recent criticism has emphasized – Rob Roy also registers a significant discomfort with the very cure the novel itself would seem to wish to recommend.23 This is not to say that Scott’s work is covertly opposed to Union (it is not); it is simply to assert that no form of identity, national or personal, is achieved without cost. Violence does not disappear from the historical romance of Britishness any more than the problem of economic discomfort is solved by free trade; rather suffering is displaced to the edges of the narrative, to allusions, gestures, metaphors, and open secrets – from the text’s coded references to the rape of Helen MacGregor, to the ‘knowing shrug’ of Nicol Jarvie as he refers to his ‘snug plantation’ in Jamaica (282, 295). It is this undertow of unresolved and appropriated trauma, this trauma of others, that gives Rob Roy its particular haunted tone and brings a startling irony to Scott’s description of his tale as a ‘coarse and hasty thread’, a direct echo of Diana’s fear that she may end her life a political prisoner, ‘beating hemp, or drawing out flax into a marvellous coarse thread’ (150). No surprise then that as Frank takes full legal possession of his uncle’s Northumberland estate, he is oppressed by ‘melancholy sensations’: ‘My mind was not habituated to regard the scenes around as my property, and I felt myself an usurper, at least an intruding stranger, and could hardly divest myself of the idea, that some of the bulky forms of my deceased kinsmen were, like the gigantic spectres of a romance, to appear in the gateway, and dispute my entrance’ (433). The two sentences in which Frank disposes of his marriage to Diana and her subsequent death are, of course, notorious. ‘Memory in this novel’, Jane Millgate writes,

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‘far from being the redemptive power celebrated by the Romantic poets, manifests itself as a tormenting gift to the widowed and apparently childless old man’.24 For Millgate, Frank is a failure; the truer and crueller irony, however, is that Frank is cursed with success. To become a wealthy citizen in imperial Great Britain, the senior partner in the company of Osbaldistone and Tresham must ‘forget’ a great deal and deliberately engage in the patterns of disavowal and silence written all over the memoir Rob Roy purports to be. To become a success, Frank must deploy an entirely different discourse about hysteria. Hysterics are haunted by reminiscences, the late nineteenth-century Freudian narrative insisted, relocating hysteria as the habit of female minds. Yet, perhaps, as Juliet Mitchell has argued, certain types of male behaviour viewed as socially acceptable – for example, war-fever, extreme patriotism, stock market speculation – can be described as ‘ritualized forms of hysteria’.25 Looked at this way, hysteria in Rob Roy is no more in the North, than it is in the bodies of women; rather, it is a discourse through which cultures exercise power over what may and may not be said. The moneyman, it turns out, is not the opposite of the hysteric: he is the hysteric’s double. Frank’s business is not to cure his tendencies but to transform them, to learn to write hysteria in a way that sells – to write a novel, perhaps, like Rob Roy.

Notes ∗

All quotations from Rob Roy are taken from Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and page numbers are given in brackets after quotations in the text. The quotations beneath subheadings are from pp. 65, 221, and 82. 1. Walter Scott, Letter to John Morritt (20 March 1817), in The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson and others, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–37), IV, 413. 2. Scott, Letter to Daniel Terry (September 1812), Letters, III, 154. 3. Scott, Letter to John Morritt (14 January 1818), Letters, V, 50. 4. John Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 206. 5. E. J. Channing, ‘North American Review, 17 (1818)’, in Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 158. 6. Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 180. Ian Duncan, ‘Introduction’, in Rob Roy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xxviii. Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), p. 139. 7. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 150–1.

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

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‘Ce corps pénétrable doit pourtant être un corps continu’ (Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Union générale, 1964), p. 144.) See for example, Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), p. 189. Graham Tulloch, The Language of Sir Walter Scott: A Study of His Scottish and Period Language (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980), pp. 255–6. Laura Brown, ‘Amazons and Africans: Gender, Race, and Empire in Daniel Defoe’, in Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margot Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 121. Duncan, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 13. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 147. Edward Jorden, Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London, 1603). The Shakespearean allusion is to King Lear, II. 4. 55–7 (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 54. Thomas Marryat, The New Practice of Physick, Founded on Irrefragable Principles and Confirmed by Long and Painful Experience (Dublin, 1764), p. 120. William Cullen, A Methodical System of Nosology, trans. by Eldad Lewis (Stockbridge, CT, 1808), p. 138. John Aitken, Principles of Midwifery or Puerperal Medicine (Edinburgh, 1784), p. 61. George Wallis, The Art of Preventing Diseases and Restoring Health, Founded on Rational Principles, and Adapted to Persons of Every Capacity (London, 1793), p. 811. Guy’s Hospital, Elements of the Practice of Physick, for the Use of Those Students Who Attend the Lectures Read on the Subject at Guy’s Hospital (London, 1798), p. 111. Foucault, pp. 153–4. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV-V (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 188. Smith, p. 188. See, for example, Andrew Lincoln, ‘Scott and Empire: The Case of Rob Roy’, in Studies in the Novel, 34 (2002), 57. Also, Millgate, p. 149, and Robertson, p. 187. Millgate, p. 134. Mitchell, p. ix.

6 ‘The Shadow Line’: James Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ and British Romanticism Nigel Leask

Dr James Currie’s 1800 edition of the Works of Robert Burns, particularly the 335-page critical biography of the poet which makes up the first of its four volumes, was enormously influential in its time, going through five editions and about 10,000 copies by 1805, and reaching an 8th edition by 1820.1 By comparison, the combined sales of the three editions of Lyrical Ballads 1798–1802 amounted to little more than 2000 copies.2 Nevertheless, Currie’s Burns has long been vilified by Burns scholars and unjustly marginalized in Romantic studies. In this chapter I propose to revisit Currie’s biography of the poet, and particularly the preliminary ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’, in a bid to reclaim its importance as a discursive ‘debatable land’ between the Scottish Enlightenment and that programmatic manifesto of British Romanticism, the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. ‘Shadow line’ is employed here as an alternative designation for the ‘debatable land’ of the English–Scottish border, the focus of the chapters in this book. ‘Border thinking’ (to cite Walter Mignolo) has become an important concern in much current work on nationalism and post-colonialism, seeking to establish ‘a geohistorical location that is constructed as a crossing instead of a grounding (e.g. the nation).’3 Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel, The Shadow Lines offers a rich exploration of the human and political consequences of post-colonial borders, ironizing Ernest Renan’s claim that ‘a nation is a spiritual principle, the outcome of the profound complications of history; it is a spiritual family not a group determined by the shape of the earth’.4 Ghosh’s title alludes to Joseph Conrad’s late masterpiece The Shadow-Line (1916), a maritime bildungsroman set in the colonial Far East, but whose title alludes to crossing a line ‘from youth, care-free and fervent, to the more 64

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self-conscious and more poignant period of mature life’.5 Both uses of the term have some resonance for my present argument. The fact that Scotland in the aftermath of the 1707 Act of Union belonged, according to Tom Nairn, ‘to a unique, pre-nationalist stage of socio-economic expansion’, a ‘decapitated national state, as it were, rather than an ordinary assimilated nationality’, suggests exactly why the Scottish border was a ‘shadow line’.6 Currie himself referred to ‘the invisible line which divides the nations’7 but it was one which nevertheless cast a long shadow upon the development of a supposedly ‘homogenized’ British culture. Like Conrad’s shadow-line, the border also represented a temporal as well as a geographical threshold between Scottish cultural ‘youthfulness’ and English ‘maturity’ under the sign of uneven development, a notion which the staunchly Unionist Currie would employ to polemical effect. ‘Border thinking’ yields a better purchase on the question of AngloScottish literary relations than the ‘nation/narration’ model. The latter tends to yield only a relative void or emptiness, as in Nairn’s celebrated analysis of the twin absences of bourgeois nationalism and ‘a mature cultural romanticism’ from the Scottish nineteenth-century scene.8 According to the editors of the recent Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, Scotland has long been cast as ‘an intermittent, shadowy anachronism, a temporal as well as spatial border of [English] Romanticism’.9 It may well be that notions like ‘mature cultural romanticism’ as well as ‘grounded nationalism’ are themselves anachronistic in the discussion of much Scottish literature and culture, and that ‘border thinking’ will help us better recover a sense of that anachronism. It might at least facilitate a better understanding of Scotland as a ‘critical site for the production of Romanticism’, opening up questions of periodization and identity which structure current notions of the British literary canon.10 James Currie found himself well placed as an Anglo-Scot to work across the shadow line, as is clear from the first page of his edition: Though the dialect, in which many of the happiest effusions of Robert Burns are composed, be peculiar to Scotland, yet his reputation has extended itself beyond the limits of that country, and his poetry has been admired as the offspring of original genius, by persons of taste, in every part of the sister islands [    ]. It seems proper, therefore, to write the memoirs of his life, not with the view of their being read by Scotchmen only, but also by natives of England, and of other countries where the English language is spoken or understood.11

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In most respects, Currie conforms to Christopher Harvie’s Stendhalian notion of ‘red’ versus ‘black’ Scots; ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly enlightened, and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting bigger and more bountiful fields than their own country could provide’, as opposed to ‘their black brethren, demotic, parochial and reactionary, but keeping the ladder of social promotion open, resisting the encroachments of the English governing classes’.12 Born in 1756, a son of the manse from Annandale in Dumfriesshire, he had studied medicine at Edinburgh University after an ill-favoured sojourn as a tobacco merchant’s clerk in revolutionary Virginia. He subsequently practised as a physician in Liverpool and played a prominent role in that city’s rise to civic as well as commercial eminence in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.13 Although affiliated to the liberal, Midlands intelligentsia recently studied by Jenny Uglow in The Lunar Men, Currie’s Unionist sympathies never eclipsed a fierce loyalty to the Presbyterian and Enlightenment heritage of his Scottish filiation.14 Currie’s involvement with the Burns edition was initially philanthropic, an extension of his social activism as a concerned bourgeois liberal. He might almost have been invented by Michel Foucault if he had not actually existed; he was a physician in the Liverpool Dispensary for the poor, founder of the Liverpool Fever Hospital and Lunatic Asylum and member of the city’s Committee for Managing the Poor. He was also a prominent campaigner for the Abolition of Slavery and for the Repeal of the Test Acts, and campaigned against the mistreatment of French prisoners of war in the early 1800s. A man who justifiably claimed expertise in the management of the poor, the sick and disadvantaged brought a particular set of (often regulative) attitudes to bear on the case of Burns, many of them fairly unpalatable to the poet’s admirers early and late. Before turning to the ‘Life of Burns’ itself, I will briefly survey the rationale for the 1800 Burns edition in relation to the polemic surrounding the death of Burns in 1796. Despite its strongly Unionist inspiration, Currie’s biographical treatment of Burns was paradoxically motivated by what might be called ‘a Scottish difference’ overriding political ideology, a desire to exonerate his countrymen from blame in precipitating Burns’s premature death in poverty, sickness and debt. English commentators, especially those of a radical stamp, blamed Scotland’s detested ‘Dundas despotism’ for neglecting the genius in their midst. (Perhaps the most celebrated was Coleridge’s 1796 verse epistle ‘To a Friend who had declared his intention of writing no more poetry’, which imagined laying a garland of ‘rank hensbane’ and deadly

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nightshade upon the ‘illustrious Brow of Scotch Nobility’ (ll. 34–7).)15 Behind the dark vision of the half-starved exciseman/poet hovered the spectres of Thomas Muir and the ‘Scottish Martyrs’ exiled to Botany Bay in 1793 on charges of sedition. Currie described his resistance to this view in a letter of 8 February 1797, when the biography was already underway: To speak my mind [    ] fully, it appears to me that [Burns’s] misfortunes arose chiefly from his errors. This it is unnecessary and, indeed, improper to say; but his biographer must keep it in mind, to prevent him from running into those bitter invectives against Scotland, &c., which the extraordinary attractions and melancholy fate of the poet naturally provoke. (Memoir, I, 281) Burns’s friends John Syme and Alexander Cunningham had established a charitable subscription to raise money for Burns’s penniless widow Jean and their surviving children and were accordingly anxious to play down the poet’s radical views to that end. Currie’s name first appears in connection with Burns when Syme wrote asking him to publicize the subscription on Merseyside and the Midlands; he quickly raised £73.10s from his affluent circle in Liverpool.16 Currie’s correspondence with Syme reveals the extraordinary ideological delicacy required in managing Burns’s posthumous reputation (as well as his intellectual property, given the number of incriminating letters amongst Burns’s papers to and from leading members of the Scottish establishment) in the years following his death, against a background of political recrimination and witch-hunting. No wonder, given the problems involved, that Currie wrote despairingly, ‘There is no getting any Editor in Scotland, and in England no man can possibly edite them, for reasons I cannot go into’.17 Yet it soon transpired that there was such a man in England, and (despite his heavy professional workload) Currie was himself that man. Given the rumours and anecdotes about Burns circulating in and out of the press, it would be necessary to preface the poet’s poems and correspondence with an official ‘life’. Currie accepted the role of biographer with some reluctance, initially on the grounds that the poet’s radical Wollstonecraftian friend Maria Riddell had put her name forward, a dangerous hostage to fortune in the current climate. As is evident from the Currie archive held in Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, the reluctant biographer received extensive assistance from the more forthcoming Scottish literati, many of whom had known Burns

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personally, happy to collaborate from the wings, as long as they did not have to enter the limelight. The antiquarian Ramsay of Ochtertyre, legal theorists Baron David Hume (nephew of the philosopher) and Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee), the philosopher Dugald Stewart (earlier proposed as Burns’s biographer) and Henry Mackenzie, all contributed material. To this extent the ‘Life of Burns’ might be regarded as a composite production of the late Scottish Enlightenment rather than the work of a single author, providing a full cultural, biographical and literary context to make Burns’s poetry fully intelligible to non-Scottish readers. At the same time, modelled as it is on James Boswell’s recent Life of Dr Johnson (1791), it participates in the fragmentary condition of Scottish letters in the century after the Union.18 Currie’s understanding of Burns and the Lowland peasantry was influenced by the Scottish Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and his disciple Dugald Stewart, which he polemically opposed to the English necessitarian ethics of David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. The fact that Currie was a political liberal who loathed Burke and had attacked Pitt’s war with revolutionary France in a bestselling pamphlet of 1793 entitled A Letter to William Pitt, written under the pseudonym of ‘Jasper Wilson’, complicates a common tendency to associate Common Sense philosophy with antijacobin politics. ‘Wilson’ insisted that Britain’s aristocracy and gentry, ‘when compared to the modern manufacturer or the merchant, seem weak and useless things [    ] the poor peasant who cultivates his estate is of more importance than [the landed gentleman]’.19 Currie’s championship of a voluntaristic Common Sense philosophy represents another aspect of Scottish intellectual influence on the English romantic scene which has been overlooked or misunderstood by critics, too ready to accept Coleridgean or Peacockian caricatures of ‘Scotch feelosophers’ as grim harbingers of ‘the dismal science’ of political economy. The most important statement of Currie’s ideas on the subject before the Burns biography was his long review article on Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of Man published in the Analytical Review in 1788.20 Currie here writes as an active partisan of Common Sense philosophy, which, he was glad to report six years later, was ‘gaining ground in England, though till very lately it seems not to have been understood’ (Memoir, II, 319). To a necessitarian, an act of free will was an impossibility to the extent that it was an effect without a cause. Against this mechanistic doctrine Reid urged that motives (effectively habits, desires or subliminal determinants to action) were subordinate to acts

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of conscious will, and were therefore not causally determined; as Currie glossed the matter, ‘[    ] a free action is not an effect without a cause, since it is caused by a being who had power and will to produce it’.21 Currie arrived at a thoroughly orthodox ethical conclusion in refuting Hume and Priestley, albeit one supported by Reid’s formidable philosophical argument. He suggested that the English necessitarians had completely misunderstood Reid’s politics as well as his epistemology, confusing it with James Beattie’s conservative dogmatism. Joseph Priestley’s Examination of Dr Reid’s Philosophy (1774), for example, had pledged to ‘put a stop to this sudden torrent of nonsense and abuse, that is pouring down upon us from the North [    ] opposing the farther encroachments of this bold invader’. Priestley predictably played the Wilkesite card by associating Scottish philosophy with ‘exploded doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance’.22 Actually Reid would attend meetings of the ‘Friends of Liberty’ in 1791 and was forced, at the age of 83, into a humiliating public recantation of his political liberalism. Currie sought to rehabilitate Reid’s Common Sense philosophy – and with it the metaphysics of the North – in the eyes of the readers of the Analytical Review, presumably English Dissenters and liberal partisans of Priestleyan Necessity. This provides the vital context for Currie’s statement of Burns’s neuropathology in the 1800 ‘Life’: ‘The fatal defect in [Burns’s] character lay in the comparative weakness of his volition, that superior faculty of the mind, which governing the conduct according to the dictates of the understanding, alone entitles it to be denominated rational [    ]’ (Memoir, I, 236). Despite the medical terms in which his diagnosis of Burns is couched, Currie’s argument virtually glosses his earlier comments on Reid’s Active Powers of Man in the Analytical Review. As in the earlier essay, he seeks to exorcise a particularly Scottish pathology of mind which he associates with the determinism and mental ‘impotence’ of Hume’s metaphysics. Endowed with all the talents, intellect and passion of the Scottish peasantry, Burns had failed in the voluntaristic regulation of his overenergetic sensibility. By means of this Reidian critique of the national bard, Currie offers Burns as a scapegoat to purge the spectre of Hume and his paratactic, federated model of the mind, from the constitution of Scotland within the Union. Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ recasts Scottish genius in a new, voluntaristic form, sacrificing the poet to the body of his poetry and its power to stimulate the jaded taste of a polite but deracinated English public. As Leith Davis puts it in her suggestive essay on Currie and ‘the Politics of Hypochondriasis’, ‘if Burns is the

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undertaker of an independent Scotland, Currie is the doctor of a united Britain, offering a cure for the kind of “National Enmity” that continues to erupt’.23 I am suggesting here that Currie sacrificed the ‘genius of Burns’ on the altar of Scottish amour propre, ‘the Scottish difference’, to ensure a more successful integration ‘on her own terms’, into the British Union.

Observations on the Scottish Peasantry Henry Mackenzie’s influential 1787 Lounger review of Burns’s Kilmarnock volume located the Ayrshire Bard within the parameters of eighteenth-century peasant poetry by hailing him as a ‘heaven-taught Ploughman’.24 Currie’s ‘philosophical’ approach to Burns’s genius, contra Mackenzie, offered a rational, socialized explanation of Burns’s genius to dispel his reputation as a vulgar, nine days’ wonder. Burns was indeed ‘a Scottish peasant’, with the proviso that the Scottish peasantry ‘possess a degree of intelligence not generally found among the same class of men in the other countries of Europe’ (WRB, I, 3–4).25 Currie’s ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’ provides a detailed historical rationale for Scotland’s ‘popular enlightenment’ – the matrix of Burns’s genius – in the history of Scotland before and after the Union, particularly the excellence of Scottish parochial education and the absence of poor relief which has nurtured the domestic affections of the Lowland peasantry. Space prohibits any detailed account of the philosophical roots of Currie’s social thought, which conforms to the Scottish Enlightenment discourse described by John Robertson and J. G. A. Pocock as ‘civil jurisprudence’, commercial, as opposed to civic, humanism.26 Currie believed that government should be ‘chiefly negative or preventative, so to speak, extending to as small an abridgement of liberty as possible, but absolute on the points on which it interferes’ (Memoir, II, 177). He cited the main inspiration for his political principles as Dugald Stewart’s chapter on the ‘Use and Abuse of General Principles in Politics’ in his 1793 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, hailed as the most incisive attack on Burkean prescription to have emerged from the whole revolution controversy (Memoir, II, 150). Donald Winch has argued that Stewart departed from the scepticism of his teachers Hume and Smith in his perfectibilitarian optimism regarding the beneficial effects of commercial intercourse, and, a related effect, the diffusion of knowledge by the printing press.27 If Ferguson, Hume and Smith worried about the deleterious effects of modern

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society on public spirit, it was Stewart’s faith that the power of enlightened opinion would more than substitute for public virtue.28 Enlightened social intercourse ‘cannot fail to operate in undermining local and national prejudices, and in imparting to the whole species the intellectual acquirements of each particular community’.29 Echoing his teacher Thomas Reid, Stewart pinned his hopes on what would come to be called ‘the spirit of the age’ rather than the ‘efforts of original genius’ in improving society: ‘not merely the force of a single mind, but the intellectual power of the age in which he lives’.30 Stewart looked to a cosmopolitan futurity in conceiving the present (in the words of James Chandler) as ‘the age of the spirit of the age’.31 Stewart and Currie’s social thought was premised upon the broad diffusion of what George Davie has called Scottish ‘democratic intellect’, popular education and print culture, quite distinct from the regulative ideas of English social theorists like Bentham, Malthus or Paley. To this end, Currie extolled the effects of Scottish parochial education on a society blessed with few other benefits or endowments. This section of ‘Observations’ was clearly intended to explain the fact of Burns’s extensive education, as described in the poet’s letter of 2 August 1787 to Dr Moore with which Currie opens the ‘Life’. Currie attributes the intellectual ‘curiosity’ and ‘information’ of Scottish peasants to the legal provision made by the Scottish parliament in 1646 (i.e. before the Union with England) ‘for the establishment of a school in every parish throughout the kingdom, for the express purpose of educating the poor’ (WRB, I, 4). In the wake of 1707, ‘as the minds of the poor received instruction, the union opened new channels of industry, and new fields of action to the view’ (I, 352). One unintended effect of Scottish popular education was to engender a desire to emigrate across the ‘shadow line’. By a kind of Newtonian law, an educated peasantry in ‘a country comparatively poor, in the neighbourhood of other countries rich in natural and acquired advantages’, is bound to emigrate from the former to the latter (I, 7). Currie triumphantly challenged a commonplace metaphor of Wilkesite Scotophobia in his description of the émigré Scottish peasantry: ‘By the articles of the Union, the barrier was broken down which divided the two British nations, and knowledge and poverty poured the adventurous natives of the north over the fertile plains of England, and more especially over the colonies which she had settled in the East and North’ (ibid.). Having discussed the positive provision of Scotland’s parochial education system in the first part of his ‘Observations’, Currie next considered the effect of a ‘negative’ ordinance on the moral character of the

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Scottish peasantry, the other wing of ‘the Scottish difference’. He praised Scotland for the absence of a Poor Law like that of England, whereby the parish or local government offered support for the old, the infirm, the mendicant, or the unemployed. Like many liberal social thinkers of his day, including William Wordsworth, it was a provision to which he was implacably opposed. As a member of the Committee for Managing the Poor, Currie actively campaigned against increasing the Poor Rate in Liverpool; although somewhat to his credit he did not entirely abandon the poor to the ‘invisible hand’, sketching a plan to institute workers’ savings banks modelled on David Dale’s New Lanark scheme. Philip Connell notes that ‘Rational dissenting attitudes to charity placed a particular stress upon the importance of private philanthropy, partly because of their hostility to state interference in matters of conscience’.32 Much discussion of the issue of poor relief in romantic poetry has centred on Wordsworth’s ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’ with its claim that the ‘social visibility’ of the beggar’s suffering possesses moral utility by inculcating charitable affections. Currie argues that the English Poor Laws discourage thrift and moral self-governance among the poor, and that their absence explains the superior domestic affections of the Scottish peasantry (no wonder he did not include Burns’s ‘The Jolly Beggars’ in his 1800 edition). But what is remarkable about Currie’s polemic is that it was largely based on wishful thinking. Currie ignores the 1672 act of the Scottish Parliament which entrusted the implementation of the Poor Law jointly to the Kirk Session and local landowners, who had the legal power to raise assessments in support of the local poor.33 Tom Devine goes so far as to suggest that the low level of social unrest in Lowland Scotland accompanying the classic period of agrarian transformation (between 1760 and 1815) may be attributable to the flexibility of the Scottish Poor Law system in succouring the dispossessed.34 The whole question was, of course, extremely pertinent, as well as delicate, in the context of a ‘Life of Robert Burns’ which introduced a volume intended to raise charitable relief for the poet’s family, left virtually destitute by his alleged fecklessness and imprudence. Currie implied that although Burns’s genius was the fruit of the marvellous system of Scottish parochial education, neither he nor his family could depend on any support from parish relief when both patronage and moral self-government failed. Burns’s family must depend upon the charitable exertions of a subscription fund, and the selling power of the poetry itself, for their future sustenance. The 1800 Burns edition itself

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represented the triumph of private charity over public patronage, the absence of which Burns’s English supporters had decried in the Scottish establishment. Currie’s ‘Observations’ portrays a society which, since the Union of 1707, was only just crossing the Conradian shadow-line dividing political youth from maturity. For Currie it was a matter of hope rather than regret that the post-union Scots, ‘enjoying a great part of the blessings of Englishmen, and retaining several of their own happy institutions, might be considered, if confidence could be placed in human foresight, to be as yet only in an early stage of their progress’ (WRB, I, 24). This version of ‘the Scottish difference’ appeals to the discourse of ‘uneven development’ in the ideological service of Scotland within the Union. For Currie, the ‘anachronistic’ education and independence of her peasantry, symbolized by the vernacular vigour of Burns’s poetry, offer a developmental potential within the Union superior to that of ‘overdeveloped’ England. But post-Union Scots have to learn, not just ‘to see oursels as ithers see us!’, but as ‘Others’ see us (with a capital ‘O’). Or perhaps a capital ‘E’; for Currie continues: ‘Since the Union, the manners and language of the people of Scotland have no longer a standard among themselves, but are tried by the standard of the nation to which they are united’ (WRB, I, 26). Currie concludes his prefatory essay with a celebration of the ‘strength of the domestic affections of the Scottish peasantry [    ] which it is hoped will not be lost’ (WRB, I, 26). The gemeineschaft of Scottish rural society (as portrayed in Burns’s poetry) is here promoted as a regulative idea for Scotland within the Union, rather than as a discourse of nationalism, which, as Tom Nairn has argued, was the goal of similar mobilizations of ‘ethnic and historical differentiae’ in nearly all other small European countries.35 Currie had already promoted the moral community figured in poems like ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ as a form of naturalized civil society operating harmoniously with minimum state intervention. What is interesting though in this final section of the ‘Observations’ is the extent to which Currie draws upon the very different discourse of civic humanism in his praise for the patriotism and ‘national spirit’ of the Scottish peasantry. Currie argues that patriotic attachment flourishes in the stoic economic conditions of mountain communities, an argument deriving from the classical republicanism of Rousseau’s encomia on Swiss liberty, or Macpherson’s idealization of the sentimental savagery of the Ossianic past. The embodiment of martial achievements and the Scottish independence struggle in ‘national songs, and united to national music’

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(Burns’s stirring anthem ‘Scots wha hae’ is the obvious example) underpins the affective power of Scottish patriotism, as defined in the intellectual tradition of George Buchanan and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Whereas Burns’s poetry radicalised this antiquarian discourse, Currie now recasts it as an infantile memory in the modern era of Union and Empire: ‘The images of infancy strongly associated with the generous affections, resist the influence of time, and of new impressions; they often survive in countries far distant, and amidst far different scenes, to the latest periods of life, to soothe the heart with the pleasures of memory, when those of hope die away’ (WRB, I, 30). The patriotism evoked here is essentially that of Harvie’s expatriate ‘red Scot’, an ingrained Scottishness of the mind, but one physically removed from any actual Scottish life-world. The Scottish patriot tradition survives only in the form of nostalgia for the martial achievements of the past which had safeguarded national independence, a nostalgia well served by Burns’s poems and songs. Currie’s Scottish peasants reculent pour mieux sauter, looking back the better to march forward, in the service of a British and imperial futurity. Currie’s ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’ claims that the 1707 Act of Union had improved, rather than corrupted, the social and moral fabric of Burns’s peasant class: despite the exemplary nationalist appeal ‘to the people’ contained in Burns’s poetry, Currie’s anomalous concern is to exorcise the spectre of Scottish independence. It is a memory at once infantile and posthumous: Burns’s poetry ‘displays, and as it were embalms, the peculiar manners of his country; and it may be considered as a monument not to his name only, but to the expiring genius of an ancient and once independent nation’ (WRB, I, 31) [my italics].

Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ and the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads In this final section I offer some brief conjectures about Wordsworth and Coleridge’s reading of Currie’s Burns, inspired by Daniel Sanjiv Roberts’s recent argument that it played an important and hitherto neglected role in the genesis of the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads.36 Whereas the Advertisement to the 1798 edition declares the linguistic model for its poetic ‘experiments’ to be ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’,37 the 1800 Preface (composed after the poets had read Currie’s ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’) specifies ‘low and rustic life’ as the social locus of ‘the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’.38 Burns was, of course, very far from being the only ‘peasant poet’ enjoying huge popularity in

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1800; nonetheless, in this respect the Preface appears to respond quite specifically to Currie’s ‘common sense’ cathexis of genius from Burns as ‘heaven-taught Ploughman’ to the manners of the Scottish peasantry as a class. In contrast to Currie’s ‘sociological history’ of Burns’s life, society and poetry, the Preface’s bid to recover an authentic poetic language is stated in baldly theoretical terms. This abstract idiom makes more sense if we read Wordsworth’s ‘real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’ in relation to Currie’s ‘Observations’, as a de-territorialization designed to deal with the awkwardness of Burns’s cultural location on the wrong side of the border. Judging from verbal echoes alone, Wordsworth appears to have been particularly attracted to Currie’s account of the amor patriae of the Scottish peasantry, a transference from nature to man brought forward by ‘objects capable, or supposed capable, of feeling our sentiments, and of returning them [    ]’ (WRB, I, 27). This resonates with Wordsworth’s celebrated account of the superiority of rustic language due to ‘hourly communicat[ion] with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived’.39 But, as Leith Davis puts it, ‘Scotland and Burns symbolize a difference within Britain, which Wordsworth both acknowledges and attempts to deny by incorporating it into a universal scheme’.40 ‘Universal scheme’ may only be partly right, however; for if the Preface ‘universalizes’ Currie’s Burns by an act of theoretical de-territorialization, Wordsworth’s 1801 ‘Letter to Charles James Fox’ seeks on the contrary to ‘re-territorialize’ ideals associated with the Scottish poet on the English side of the border. I have argued elsewhere that in pursuing this critical goal, Wordsworth needed to devise an alternative language for poetry (impossibly) based on a rural lower-class vernacular that was not a regional dialect.41 In many respects, the ‘Letter to Fox’ is the missing link which reveals the interplay between the 1800 Preface and Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’. Wordsworth’s letter, accompanying a gift of the new edition of Lyrical Ballads, bewails the ‘rapid decay of the domestic affections among the lower orders of society’, largely blamed upon the rise of manufacturing, and the increasingly centralized management of English poor relief.42 Wordsworth echoes Currie’s linkage of domestic affections among the poor with the necessity of self-reliance, without, of course, making any mention of the supposedly superior arrangement in Scotland. Wordsworth’s jeremiad is intended, however, to usher in the more optimistic and patriotic claim that ‘the spirit of independence is, even yet, rooted in some parts of the country’, meaning, of course,

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northwestern England.43 This claim is supported by the new poems ‘Michael’ and ‘The Brothers’ included in the 1800 volume, which explicitly deny Currie’s exceptionalist claims for the exemplary virtues of the Scottish peasantry. Wordsworth’s rustics are ‘small independent proprietors of land here called statesmen, men of respectable education who daily labour on their own little properties’.44 In contrast to Currie, the ‘Letter to Fox’ makes no mention of popular education, focussing instead on the possession of ‘their little tracts of land’ which renders Lakeland ‘statesmen’ morally superior to mill workers and farm labourers. Currie had made no reference to small proprietors in his ‘Observations’ for the simple reason that, as Tom Devine points out, ‘unlike many parts of Europe [in Scotland] there was little peasant proprietorship, buttressed with customary privileges to resist the “enlightened” progress of Improvement’.45 To Currie, Wordsworth’s Harringtonian agrarian idealism would have doubtless appeared to be based on a static and unprogressive system of inalienable property, in contrast to the popular education and migratory spirit widely disseminated amongst an unpropertied Scottish peasantry. Moreover, as David Simpson has indicated, Wordsworth simply glossed over the fact that land tenure in late eighteenth-century Westmorland and Cumberland bore many resemblances to the Scottish system.46 Ironically, there was as little historical warrant for the predominance of a ‘perfect republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists’ in Wordsworth’s Lakeland, as for Currie’s idealized view of a ‘self-help Scotland’ in which poor relief would have been redundant. In conclusion, I suggest that Wordsworth’s agrarian idealism engages in both a positive and a negative sense with Currie’s liberal encomium on the Scottish peasantry. In his Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth explained the historical rationale for the high concentration of small landed proprietors in the English Lakes: ‘the frontier of the kingdom [    ] was in a state of constant attack and defence; more hands, therefore, were necessary to guard the coast, to repel an invasion from Scotland, or make reprisals on the ‘hostile neighbour’.47 Wordsworth’s statesmen were originally planted as a human barrier along the border to safeguard England from Scottish incursions. For all his investment in a universalizing scheme which transcended local differences, in 1800 Wordsworth’s Borderers were once again mobilized, like paper soldiers, to police the shadow line between Scotland and England. The impoverished, immature and expansionist Scots-within-the-Union needed to be reminded that England possessed its own customary

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agrarian community as a counterweight to modernity, rendering Scotland’s exceptionalist claims quite redundant. In response to Currie, Wordsworth relegated Scottish parti pris to the subordinate terms of incorporating Union.

Notes 1. Currie/Burns Letters, Mitchell Library Glasgow, MS 10/C–196 C. Envelope 2, letters from Cadell and Davis to Currie. The first edition evidently sold out by August 1800. 2. See William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 661. 3. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 69. 4. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black, 1988). Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. 5. Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 111. 6. Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: Verso, 1981), pp. 140, 129. 7. William Wallace Currie, Memoir of the Life, Writing and Correspondence of James Currie, MD, FRS, of Liverpool, 2 vols (London, 1831), II, 358. Henceforth Memoir in text. 8. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, p. 114. 9. Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, ed. Leith Davis, Ian Duncan, and Janet Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 3. 10. Ibid. 11. James Currie, The Works of Robert Burns; With an Account of His Life, and a Criticism of His Writings. To Which are Prefixed, Some Observations on the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry, 4 vols (Liverpool, 1800), I, 1–2. Henceforth WRB in text. 12. Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707–1977 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977), p. 17. 13. See R. D. Thornton, James Currie: The Entire Stranger and Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963). 14. Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). 15. Coleridge’s Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), I, 269–71. 16. Thornton, James Currie, p. 320. 17. Currie to Graham Moore, 2 February 1797, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, MS 10/C–196 C. Envelope 3. 18. See Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 32–64. 19. A Letter, Commercial and Political, Addressed to the Rt Hon William Pitt by Jasper Wilson, Esq (London, 1793), p. 33.

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20. Analytical Review, 1 (1788), 145–53, 521–9; II (1788), 265–70, 549–58. 21. Analytical Review, II (1788), 266, 269. 22. Joseph Priestley, An Examination of Dr Reid’s Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principle of Common Sense [    ] (London, 1774), pp. 200, 201. 23. Leith Davis, ‘James Currie’s “Works of Robert Burns”: The Politics of Hypochondriasis’, Studies in Romanticism, 36 (Spring 1997), 43–60 (pp. 57–58). 24. Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald A. Low (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 67. 25. Jeffrey reiterated Currie’s argument in his 1809 review of Cromek’s Reliques of Burns in The Edinburgh Review, 13 (January 1809), 249–76 (Low, p. 178). 26. John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’ and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosphers: A Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 27. Donald Winch, ‘The System of the North: Dugald Stewart and His Pupils’, in That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History, ed. Stefan Collini and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 40–3. 28. Winch, ‘The System of the North: Dugald Stewart and His Pupils’, p. 43. 29. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 6th edn, 2 vols (London, 1818), I, 265. 30. Ibid., p. 271. 31. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), pp. 105–13. 32. Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 23. 33. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 100. 34. Ibid., p. 102. 35. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, p. 145. 36. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, ‘Literature, Medical Science and Politics, 1795–1800: Lyrical Ballads and Currie’s Works of Robert Burns’, in C. C. Barfoot, ‘A Natural Delineation of the Human Passions’: The Historic Moment of the Lyrical Ballads (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 115–28. Roberts provides conclusive evidence that Wordsworth and Coleridge both read Currie’s Burns in the early Autumn of 1800, about the time of the composition of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. 37. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 7. 38. Ibid., pp. 245, 241. 39. Ibid., p. 245. 40. Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707– 1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 129. 41. See my essay ‘Burns, Wordsworth, and the Politics of Vernacular Poetry’, in Land, Nation, Culture, 1740–1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste, ed. Peter de Bolla and others (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 202–22.

Nigel Leask 79 42. ‘Letter to Charles James Fox’, in William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 162. 43. Ibid., p. 163. 44. Ibid., p. 164. 45. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000, p. 127. 46. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 84. 47. Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth: Selected Prose, p. 34.

7 The Debatable Borders of English and Scottish Song and Ballad Collections Janet Sorensen

Throughout the eighteenth century, writers, antiquaries, and collectors debated the borders – spatial, temporal, and social – of what we have come to call popular culture.1 These debates often took place in the prefaces to print collections of British ballads and songs, their editors often associating those ballads and songs with the ‘common people’, in works such as the anonymously edited Collection of Old Ballads (1723– 25) and the collections of Thomas Percy, Joseph Ritson, David Herd, and James Johnson and Robert Burns.2 These collections represent very different sorts of works. They cater to different readerships – polite or less so, English or Scots, or both, antiquarian or decidedly not. And they pursue different agendas – from advancing historical knowledge to providing ‘mere’ entertainment. They contain different material – English or Scots songs, or both, older works or a combination of new and old compositions. Yet they all share an interest in songs and ballads as national productions, articulating that interest with an increasingly valourized national past and sometimes in reference to the tastes of the ‘common people’ – even as they differ in where to locate the songs and ballads they assemble in relation to such terms. In England especially compilers and editors argued various claims about the relative ancientness of those English and Scottish ballads and songs, often expressing their respective value – and the value of recording them – in terms of their connection to a national past. The premium was on the archaic, on projected proximity to national origins, and in ballad and song collections writers made competing claims about what space – central England, the North of England, Scotland – could boast the most ancient and, consequently, most superior of songs. Significantly, debate also took place over the class origins and consumption of these materials, with an increasing sense throughout the century 80

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that works originating from or consumed by the ‘common people’, as opposed to those from more noble origins, such as the court, had a purer connection to the history and culture of the British isles. Works of humble origins were also imagined to avoid the novelization and potential degradation of commerce associated with the middle class.3 In this chapter, I want to consider the terms upon which these collections value songs and ballads, how they understand their connection to the ‘common people’ and the nation, and in particular how and why the English collections, in situating the common people within the nation via their songs and ballads, also often characterize the people as residual and unchanging. I also, however, want to think about how characterizations of the ballads and songs of the ‘common people’ as embodying a continuous tradition differ in English and Scots works, and about how that difference might be the legacy of specific relations of print production and distribution. The revaluation of the songs and ballads of the common people as a folk culture, particularly those furthest removed from the ‘corrupting’ urban spaces of central southern England and London, and the association of these songs and ballads with a British past, is not a new observation; Raymond Williams’s discussion of the term ‘folk’ in his Keywords traces this development.4 Most important for the purposes of this chapter, considerations of print distribution and access help interrogate the notion that vulgar and rural reading cultures of the eighteenth century reflect an organically continuous song and ballad tradition. William St Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, for instance, reveals that, to the extent that the vulgar reading cultures could be considered archaic, it is because they are limited to an ‘obsolescent’ literature, as he calls it, foisted on those too poor or too remote to gain access to expensive recently written books.5 In his work, St Clair foregrounds questions of intellectual property and how different arrangements regarding intellectual property make for more and less divided national readerships. St Clair argues that despite the Copyright Act of 1710, which limited copyright to 14 years, a powerful London print cartel, backed by English courts clinging to English customary law, maintained instead perpetual copyright. The high cost of copyright – and the justified fear of other book printers infringing that copyright by reproducing copyrighted materials – made the price of most works besides the occasional Bible and astrological almanacs too high for consumption by poor and rural readers. He also argues that printers endlessly reproduced inexpensive ballads as broadsheets and chapbooks, frequently drawing from a static collection that

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had been initially copyrighted in the seventeenth century, for sale to those who could not afford pricey, recently copyrighted new books. St Clair might overemphasize intellectual property at the expense of other pertinent issues influencing what print materials were available to different strata of the British public. The cost of paper, the extralegal associations of London booksellers, and the illegal, often Scots and Irish, publications of cheaper editions of substantial books, as well as the illegal production of song and ballad broadsheets within England, all influenced access to printed material. Looking at the illegal reprinting of books and the compacts booksellers entered to control book production, Richard Sher has persuasively undermined St Clair’s main point, that the 1774 ruling of the House of Lords in the case of Donaldson v. Becket was a watershed in British print culture, creating a more united ‘romantic reading nation’.6 Sher’s argument that after 1774 much continued as before is especially helpful for my identification of a persistent logic operating across eighteenth-century and romantic ballad and song collections. Yet St Clair’s broad conclusions about deep divisions in British readerships in eighteenth-century Britain due to limited access to expensive recent print works has important implications for understanding the terms upon which collectors and readers revalued songs and ballads throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic era. In particular, his illumination of the anachronizing force of those disparities has a bearing on the articulations of class, region, and national past taking place within eighteenth-century ballad and song collections. Separated from the ‘reading nation’, that is, ‘the men, women, and children [    ] who regularly read English language printed books’, a merely ‘literate nation’, constricted to shorter, cheaper documents, inhabited what St Clair calls a ‘frozen culture’.7 The language of the ‘obsolescent’, of a ‘frozen culture’, especially in connection with English vulgar readerships, the widest and lowest-income level of readers, casts the notion of ‘the people’s’ connection to the past in a different, and darker, light than narratives of the folk as the source of organic connection to the past. Put another way, St Clair’s emphasis on the stark division between ‘reading’ and ‘literate’ nation and on the restriction of materials available to most readers to older texts suggests that what has often been understood as something like a continuous popular cultural tradition of ballad production and consumption, and the connection to the past often attributed to ‘the people’ because of that continuity, has been read the wrong way round. If vulgar literacy cultures were separate from high-end literacy cultures, and entrenched in the past,

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this was in part a function of a well-oiled modern London machine of book publishing and distribution and not simply of some intrinsic embeddedness of the vulgar and rural in ages-old ballad traditions, as writers of the period frequently claimed. The questions of print copyright and book accessibility, of course, rarely made their way into the period’s debates about the origins and provenance of popular songs and ballads. I would like to turn to some of those specific characterizations, both to outline their arguments and to consider the implications of uneven print access for rethinking those characterizations. While studies connecting old ballads to ‘the people’ were more characteristic of the late eighteenth century, even early eighteenth-century writers like Joseph Addison had connected the ballad to ‘the common people’. In The Spectator, Addison writes of his delight in hearing the songs of the ‘common People’ – the ‘Rabble of a Nation’, as he calls them a few lines later, to put a finer point on his sense of the class origins of these songs.8 Addison famously argued that the ‘Ballad that is the Delight of the common People, cannot fail to please’ all readers. Linking ballad and song to labourers, particularly rural shepherds and milkmaids, was one of the hallmarks of eighteenth-century notions of the pastoral, a genre whose protocols and practice critics hotly debated at the beginning of the century. Yet Addison’s emphasis on reception already takes the discussion in a different direction. His estimation of ballads as ‘the Delight of the common People’ and therefore universally pleasing turns to questions of consumption and taste, and in a sense validates the proclivities of ‘common people’ in discerning value. Such inclusive gestures towards ‘the people’ and the popular became particularly important in the second part of the century with its rise in cultural nationalist discourse in both England and Scotland. Seven decades later, the preface to James Johnson’s second volume of The Scots Musical Museum (1788) similarly insists, ‘Ignorance and Prejudice may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favorites of Nature’s Judges – the Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit’.9 Yet already coinciding with Addison’s revaluation of the products and tastes of the people is a simultaneous ‘anachronizing’ of popular culture, as I call it. Thus, while Addison’s epigram to his discussion of ‘Chevy Chase’ is Horace’s line: ‘Interdum vulgus rectum videt’ or ‘sometimes the vulgar judge aright’, he modifies this idea in the course of the essay by connecting that judgement and its value to the pastness of the beloved ballad.10 Significantly, Addison does not choose a recent or new

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ballad for discussion. Linking the songs of ‘the Rabble’ to the past, he describes the ‘old Song of Chevy Chase’ as an ‘antiquated Song’, which yet remains ‘the favourite Ballad of the common People of England’.11 Popular culture, in the form of ballads and songs, has value to the extent that it provides a connection to the past still extant in the present. Addison cites Sir Philip Sidney’s reflections on the ‘old Song of Chevy Chase’, who ‘in his Discourse of Poetry speaks of it in the following Words’: I never heard the old Song of Piercy [sic] and Douglas, that I found not my Heart more moved than with a Trumpet; and yet it is sung by some blind Crowder with no rougher Voice than rude Stile; which being so evil apparelled in the Dust and Cobweb of that uncivil Age, what would it work trimmed in the gorgeous Eloquence of Pindar?12 While Sidney imagines the old ballad uncoupled from the ‘rude’ and the ‘rough’, from the ‘evil apparel’ of its ‘uncivil Age’, and thus improved, however, for Addison, and many writers on the ballad who followed him, the value of the ballad, its ancientness, rudeness, and lower-class origins are all of a piece. The ballad’s worth is in its relation to an inextricably linked crudeness, pastness, and ongoing appeal to the ‘common People’ – underwriting, of course, a quite limited vision of ‘the common people’, relegating them to a changeless past temporality, consumers of a ‘frozen’ and ‘obsolescent’ culture, to use St Clair’s apt language. By mid-century the terms of age and rudeness dominate the scholarly discussions of ballads and songs, which were increasingly antiquarian in nature. In 1765, Thomas Percy, in his ground-breaking and trendsetting Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, formalizes the extent to which ballads have value precisely because of their ancientness, even though, and maybe in connection to the fact that, they were ‘rude’ and ‘meerly written for the people’.13 Percy, of course, ‘polished’ these rude works, but was not especially forthcoming about just how much he had intervened in their presentation, preserving and corroborating, instead, a sense of their ancientness. While Joseph Ritson disagreed vehemently with most aspects of Percy’s scholarship, he shared with him, at various points at least, the sense of songs and ballads as at once rude and venerable. In his 1791 Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry – the title already doing the work of entwining the popular and the past – Ritson aims to ‘rescue from oblivion and obscurity’ the bards who ‘have been the favorites of the people for ages’.14 Similarly, John Aiken writes in 1772 that ‘[t]he ballad may be considered as the native species of poetry in this country.

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It very exactly answers the idea [    ] of original poetry, being the rude uncultivated verse [    ] which was ever the delight of the vulgar’.15 Such phrases as ‘ever the delight of the vulgar’ and ‘the favorites of the people for ages’ suggest that while members of social classes above the ‘rabble’ consume a wider range of texts, the ‘common people’ continue to favour the old ballads and songs – and their supposed unchanging habits align them with the past. It is important to note here that these perceptions of the people’s abiding, if unselfconscious, delight in old songs, perceptions common in discussions of song and ballad, elide the significant consumption – and production – of always newly appearing illegal and underground ballads and songs, of the type Paula McDowell has documented, that were also going on at this time.16 The trans-historical characterization of the static ballads supposedly captivating the people across time removes songs and ballads from the immediate political scenes on which illegally circulating ballads often, in fact, commented. Such commentary would suggest not a unified common people but a deeply divided public. As well, in describing old ballads and songs as ‘meerly written for the people’, the ‘delight’ and ‘favorites of the people’, these writers, like Addison, also foreground the habits and preferences of cultural consumption, and not production, of the ‘common people’. If a subterranean economy of illegal ballads travelling across classes highlighted the dangers of print, especially in a rapidly changing commercial economy, however, the connection of old ballads and songs to an allegedly simpler, oral culture of the ‘common people’, not producing but merely consuming, was perhaps reassuring. Further, St Clair’s research suggests that if the ‘common people’ did consume old ballads and songs more exclusively and consistently than those of higher social standing, this was due more to what was available to them than to any inherent connection of the ‘common people’ to the national past and its imagined oral origins. Songs and ballads, reproduced over and over again because of the low expense both of publishing materials copyrighted long ago and of distributing short, small works, as St Clair puts it, ‘looked primitive and provincial, features which have fostered the fallacy that they are emanations of “the folk” [    ] they were actually produced by rich owners who were [    ] part of the central management of the London book industry’. Many songs and ballads had been ‘private intellectual properties from the earliest days of print’. In a particularly compelling passage, St Clair compares the early modern London book industry to enclosing land owners, in that they ‘took into private ownership much of the

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traditional common culture of England, and then charged a rent for using it’. Not only profitable, such an enterprise presents a sense of songs and ballads as stable and enduring, however much that image was belied by an often politicized street culture, and by transformative movement between oral performance, manuscript, and print. St Clair’s research, when amended with Sher’s argument about the extra-legal dealings of book publishers and McDowell’s research into illegal ballad and song production, thus reveals how renderings of ‘the people’ and their ballad consumption as anachronistic had less to do with organic conditions of song and ballad cultures and more to do with what St Clair calls ‘techno-economic structures of [print] production’.17 The literacy cultures of the vulgar and rural – at least those superficially observable – might have been anachronistic, but this was a condition imposed on them rather than a function of their own active preservation of organic tradition. ∗∗∗∗∗∗ I began this essay by noting how debates over the relative value of respective national ballads and songs centered on claims regarding whose traditions might be the most ancient. But I want to revise that observation slightly to note that the investment in the recovery of the original, ‘genuine’ work and the connection of the ‘people’ to the archaic was less emphatic in Scotland. The different valuation of the pastness and authenticity of songs and ballads in Scotland is possibly related to Scotland’s contrasting interpretations of intellectual property and resulting differences in book and print access, for the enforcement of the intellectual property laws and the resulting print cultures of England and Scotland were quite different. Scotland, of course, operated under a different legal system, and for the most part Scottish Courts, unlike English ones, upheld the provisions of the copyright act of 1710. St Clair describes these differences: The English judges, operating a system of law which relied heavily on property, precedent, and custom, gave great weight to the fact that the English book industry had operated perpetual intellectual property since the earliest days of printing. Their approach [    ] was essentially backward looking. The Scottish judges, by contrast, operating a legal system derived from Roman law, [    ] judge[d] cases in accordance with general legal and moral principles [and] took a forward-looking approach.18

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The legal rulings in England meant, as noted above, that the aboveboard readings of the poor and rural tended to be restricted to very old, inexpensive chapbooks and ballads, separating these readers from those with the means to acquire recent books. Alternatively, the Scots legal rulings that returned intellectual property ‘to the commons’ after 14 years meant that more readers in Scotland had access to recently published titles and that the ballads and chapbooks they read were, especially by mid-century, ‘new titles by modern writers’, such as those of Dougal Graham.19 This meant that the nature of popular literary production and consumption was markedly different in Scotland, with new materials, including ballads, more often widely available legally. As well, the North of England became something of a battleground between these competing legal systems and consequent print cultures. Of course, there are many ways to account for the important differences in songs and ballads of different geographical spaces. But underwriting some of those differences were structural relationships regarding the status of intellectual property and the different levels of access to print available to distinct literate communities. It stands to reason that the conceptualizations of ‘the people’ and popular culture in England, Scotland, and the north of England would also be quite distinct. And so, like the purported connection of vulgar and rural popular reading cultures to the past, the claims of important distinctions between the ballad and song cultures of England, Scotland, and the North of England were also true, although, again, not entirely for the reasons we might have thought. For the English ballad and song collectors, ancientness and static continuity were usually the key terms of value. Even Percy, whose notorious latitude with the ‘ancient popular poems’20 he consulted led to his significant, often unmarked revisions of them, remained rhetorically committed to the idea of the ‘ages-old’ quality of these works and his role in preserving them. He describes the ‘rude songs’ as ‘shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages: of ages that had been almost lost to memory’ and claims that ‘the editor has endeavoured to be as faithful, as the imperfect state of his materials would admit’.21 Ritson too promises ‘fidelity and correctness’ with his originals and, as we know, was much more rigorous in his adherence to those terms. Aiming to ‘rescue from oblivion and obscurity’ the works of the bards ‘who have been the favourites of the people for ages’, Ritson both associates the remote past with ‘the people’ and, once more, separates modern readers of higher status from ‘the

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people’, for whom these works, presumably, do not need rescuing.22 In a bout of nationalist pride predicated on the comparative ancientness of English works, Ritson, who had also compiled a collection of Scottish songs, notes in a letter that he could find no Scottish songs in print or manuscript prior to the Restoration, and asks, ‘Upon what foundation then do we talk of the Antiquity of Scotish [sic] music?’, and in his letters he repeatedly impugns the claims to ancientness of Scottish ballads and songs.23 The Scot David Herd, likely in response to such private and public slights, had, in turn, belittled England and its claims to ancientness, writing, in the second 1776 edition of his collection, that ‘Every nation, at least every ancient and unmixed nation’ – a slur alluding to the sense of England as itself an upstart mixed nation – ‘hath its peculiar style of musical expression’.24 Yet Herd’s terms of value for national song culture have less to do with notions of fidelity and correctness or ancientness itself. Less committed to the recovery of original, authentic ballad language than his English counterparts, Herd eschews the possibility of ‘fidelity and correctness’. He admits, ‘of many of the songs in these volumes the chief merit will be found to consist in the musical air, while the poetry may appear much below mediocrity. For this the editor has no other apology to offer, than that these were the only words existing to the tunes in question, the original words which gave rise to these tunes being irrecoverably lost.’25 Herd acknowledges the recentness of many of the songs’ language in his collection and includes songs of relatively recent composition, including his own. Not Percy’s polished, modernized versions of ancient ballads, many of these works are undeniably of the present; and yet, in making them part of a collection entitled ‘ancient and modern Scots songs’, Herd incorporates them into an ongoing, yet consciously evolving, tradition. Likewise paying a tribute to the value of age, James Johnson dedicates Volume VI (1803) of The Scots Musical Museum, and all volumes reissued thereafter, ‘To the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’.26 Yet also like Herd’s collection, The Scots Musical Museum turns away from age as sole, primary, or even entirely credible criterion of value. While it might be desirable ‘to ascertain the origins of [Scots] style of national music’, Johnson maintains, ‘it must be confessed that the subject remains as obscure and uncertain as ever. What is it, at best, but idle conjecture?’27 Johnson rejects the link of ‘our popular airs’ to ‘nameless shepherds and shepherdesses, inhabiting at some undefined period (called a pastoral age)’ and the implicit faith in a pure, if vulgar, oral moment of origin such a link implies. Most important, The Scots Musical

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Museum contained, famously, original compositions of Robert Burns, again, like Herd’s collection, openly including new, recent works within its ‘museum’. With an eye towards performance and not antiquarian presentation, Johnson writes that while other collections of Scots songs have appeared, ‘they could by no means answer the purpose of being pocket-companions; which is no small incumbrance, especially to the admirers of social Music’.28 It might make sense to think about Herd’s and Johnson’s foregoing an attempt to recover exact original words, of their inclusion of forthrightly contemporary works, and of their scepticism regarding narratives of ancient origins in relation to the distinct print cultures of London and Scotland. Without divisions quite as deep between the merely ‘literate’ nation and the reading nation, the Scottish sense of popular culture, particularly its temporality, might be entirely different. The Scots context might not make for the consignment to the past, the anachronistic character, of the English construction of popular culture. The possibility that Scots collectors and editors envisioned Scotland’s ballad and song culture as more consciously innovative, less chained to the past, than that of London, however, certainly works against the grain of eighteenth-century conceptualizations of the North. Locations to the north, away from London’s corrupting polish, so the argument went, were more likely to have preserved the language and cultural practices of the past, in part because of their closer connection to an originary oral culture. Works collecting and representing the dialects and customs of Manchester and Newcastle, for instance, claimed to reveal national cultural origins in spaces and bodies north. For Scotland, a space still further north, some writers made claims regarding its language and songs and ballads as the most ancient, the most close to British origins. Such characterizations of Scots songs and ballads as either the most anachronistic or, as in the case of Ritson, fraudulent works striving for such ancient status, might have been attempts to defuse what was in fact their understanding of popular culture as current, as innovative. A Scots print culture which circulated print materials to a wider class spectrum would make for a less-divided literate space. Lowland Scotland, at least, had the power to disrupt British national narratives of a distinct song and ballad culture of the ‘common people’ as a culture which was somehow inherently anachronistic. Yet when Scots songs, even those of quite recent composition and revision, made their way south, they were folded back into the anachronizing narrative regarding Scots songs and ballads dominant in London. I want to close by tracking one instance of that transformation of Scots

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song culture into anachronism in London. In 1724, Allan Ramsay had published his collection of songs, The Tea-Table Miscellany, many of which Ramsay authored or significantly revised.29 In 1733 London William Thomson reprinted and copyrighted those songs in a larger collection entitled Orpheus Caledonius – a collection Thomson dedicates to the queen, and boasts a subscriber list of élite, high ranking individuals. Like Ramsay’s, this collection makes no claims regarding the ancientness of its songs.30 Five years later, in 1738, however, a London printer bought the rights to and included these as ‘old Scots ballads’ in a reprint of the Collection of Old Ballads.31 Thus, even when Scots made significant changes to traditional material, southern printers and readers regarded the material as ‘old’. These songs, however innovative, in turn, provide the lyrics that appear in static form throughout the rest of the century in a series of song and ballad collections that increasingly privilege ancientness. Endlessly debatable, the spatial, temporal, and class origins of British songs and ballads were fluid and untrackable. Yet the editors and collectors of those songs and ballads established, in different print cultural contexts, distinct borders that would shape Romantic notions of their national significance.

Notes 1. The term ‘popular culture’ is notoriously vexed. What I have in mind here are works associated with ‘the common people’ or ‘the vulgar’, to use the language of the day. These terms appear throughout this chapter, and when I use them I take my cue from Samuel Johnson, who defines ‘the people’ (interestingly) as both ‘the nation’ and ‘the vulgar’. In turn, he defines ‘vulgar’ as ‘the common people’, ‘mean and low’, and ‘plebian’, which he defines as ‘lower people’ and ‘lower ranks’. Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755). 2. Anonymous, Collection of Old Ballads (London, 1723–25), this work is sometimes attributed to Ambrose Phillips; Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London, 1765); David Herd, The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (Edinburgh, 1769; rev. edn, 2 vols, 1776); Joseph Ritson, Select Collection of English Songs, 3 vols (London, 1783), Scotish [sic] Songs, 2 vols (London, 1794); The Scots Musical Museum, ed. James Johnson, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1787–1803). 3. See Steve Newman, The Call of the Popular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 3. 4. ‘Folksong’, Williams writes, ‘came to be influentially specialized to the preindustrial, pre-urban, pre-literate world’. Keywords, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 137.

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5. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6. Richard Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 7. St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 13, 138, 139. 8. The Spectator, no. 70, 21 May 1711; The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, 297. 9. Johnson, The Scots Musical Museum, II, Preface. 10. The Spectator, ed. Bond, I, 298. 11. Adam Fox provides a wonderfully detailed description of the oral, manuscript, and print circulation of this ballad from as early as the fifteenth century, conclusively rejecting understandings of that and other ballads as uncorrupted oral productions of the British people in Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–6. 12. The passage comes from Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (1595); Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 231. 13. Percy, Reliques, I, ix. 14. Joseph Ritson, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry (London, 1791), p. vi. As I argue elsewhere, Ritson’s is a distinct case, especially in his deep suspicion, at other points, of claims regarding a continuous, traceable song culture of the ‘common people’. 15. John Aiken, Essays on Song-Writing (London, 1772), pp. 26–7. This passage was reproduced in anonymous, Old Ballads Historical and Narrative, 2 vols (London, 1777), Vol. I (not paginated). 16. Paula McDowell, Women of Grub Street (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 17. St Clair, The Reading Nation, pp. 342, 50, 39. 18. Ibid., p. 105. 19. Ibid., p. 347. 20. Percy, Reliques, I, xi. 21. Ibid., I, vi, xii. 22. Ritson, Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, p. vi. 23. Joseph Haslewood, The Letters of Joseph Ritson, Esq., 2 vols (London, 1824), I, 190. 24. Herd, The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs (1776), I, 5. 25. Ibid., p. ix. 26. Johnson, The Scots Musical Museum, VI, engraved title-page. 27. Ibid., I, Introduction. 28. Ibid. 29. Allan Ramsay, The Tea-Table Miscellany, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1724–40). 30. William Thomson, Orpheus Caledonius, A Collection of Scots Songs set to Music, 2nd edn (London, 1733), p. 1. 31. Collection of Old Ballads, 2nd edn (London, 1738).

8 Debatable Geographies of Romantic Nostalgia: The Redemptive Landscape in Wordsworth and Cobbett Alex Benchimol

The impressive accumulation of historicist and materialist interpretations of romantic culture since the publication of Marilyn Butler’s seminal Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries in 1981 has helped to answer her central question asked in the introduction: ‘in quite what sense is English literature at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries a product and a part of social experience?’.1 In her overview of the field, Butler also cautioned against the ‘isolationism of so many of the commonest approaches of the literary scholar’, but a different kind of isolationism has kept some of the most radical revisionist scholarship of the past twenty-five years from making the necessary transition from a practice of historical recovery to a re-engagement with the work of major figures in the romantic canon.2 In this chapter, I would like to make a small gesture in that direction by comparing the construction of a politics of social geography in William Cobbett’s most significant single work of extended cultural criticism, Rural Rides, with the effort by William Wordsworth to develop a lasting structure of moral and social values from the thinly inhabited mountain landscapes depicted in his longest and most philosophically ambitious poem, The Excursion.3 Further, I hope to demonstrate that these rival geographies provide a compelling illustration of the way symbolic interpretations of landscape in the period were used to engage with urgent social and political issues, giving another meaning to romanticism’s ‘debatable lands’. The opposite ideological trajectories of Cobbett and Wordsworth during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries clearly illustrate how the social and political events of the period transformed the intellectual orientations of its most prominent writers. Cobbett 92

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developed from an anti-revolutionary High Tory pamphleteer in the late eighteenth century to one of the most persuasive Radical polemicists of the early nineteenth, while Wordsworth underwent an equally fundamental ideological transformation during the same period, moving from a moderate Jacobinism in the early years of the French Revolution towards political and social conservatism, a re-orientation that was in part based on an ecologically centred, and at the end his life, increasingly orthodox Anglican spirituality. Despite these opposite trajectories both writers shared an instinctive, patriotic, and deeply nostalgic attachment to English landscape which formed the centrepiece of their respective cultural agendas. Both were also regionalists of a kind, with Cobbett championing the moral virtues of the yeomanry and independent farmers of England’s agrarian heartland in the south and Wordsworth shaping a distinct moral and social philosophy from the rugged solitude of cottage life in the mountainous north-west. These differences in political ideology and regional affiliation were paralleled by strikingly differentiated projections of landscape and social geography in The Excursion and Rural Rides. Marilyn Butler has cited Wordsworth’s poem as the dominant literary expression of what she calls ‘the era of the peace’ in Britain from 1814 to mid-1816.4 Unlike its more famous companion The Prelude, The Excursion is, as she puts it ‘designedly topical’, ‘pointedly polemical and controversial’.5 Published in August 1814, the lavish appearance of the quarto volume as well as its substantial Preface and accompanying essay indicate that its author was intending it to be a kind of memorial to the ideal of literary contemplation. The Excursion’s dedicatory sonnet to ‘The Right Honourable William, Earl of Lonsdale, K. G.’ provides an illustration of the social vision animating this epic work of national reconciliation. The dedication was not only an important public acknowledgement by the poet of some much needed recent support from his regional aristocratic patron, it was also a demonstration of Wordsworth’s belief in the importance of local institutional relationships and the need for reconciliation between the key components of England’s traditional social structure. It opens, after all, with the poet relating the freedoms of his youthful wandering to the aristocrat’s rightful dominion over the land which provides the poem’s moral inspiration. The harmony between noble and commoner anticipates the moral unities embedded in the poem’s social landscape, linking all of its characters, from humble cottager to high-born pastor, in an idealized conception of virtuous community. According to Butler, the

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poem reminded contemporary readers how the ‘English state had rested during its hour of trial and would continue to rest upon its churches and its cohesive village communities’.6 Wordsworth’s Poet in The Excursion, upon leaving the Solitary’s secluded valley spot at the beginning of Book V, calls it ‘the fixed centre of a troubled World’ (V. 16).7 This also characterizes Wordsworth’s larger conception of social landscape in the poem, in particular his notion that in the midst of profound cultural and economic upheaval the nation must be guided by the values surviving in these hidden mountain recesses. Earlier in Book II, Wordsworth depicts the Solitary’s retreat in the mountains as an embodiment of rural necessity and self-sufficiency, ‘the home of poverty and toil / Though not of want: the little fields, made green / By husbandry of many thrifty years’ (II. 340–2, p. 67) and ‘furnished in itself / With the few needful things which life requires’ (II. 356–7, p. 68). The spot is also described as a place of peace ‘tenderly protected’ (II. 359, p. 68) by its mountain surroundings, a refuge both literal and symbolic where ‘days unruffled by the gale / Of public news or private; years that pass / Forgetfully; uncalled upon to pay / The common penalties of mortal life, / Sickness, or accident, or grief, or pain’ (II. 365–9, pp. 68–9). For contemporary readers debilitated by the accumulation of dramatic political events, the long years of military conflict, and the accelerated pace of social change in the cities and countryside, this landscape would be viewed as a welcome symbolic refuge where the country might have the opportunity to reflect on the importance of traditional English moral values – values which would be called upon to inform Britain’s post-war role of global political and economic leadership. A key element in Wordsworth’s vision of social landscape – one that would take on a new urgency after the conflict with Napoleonic France – is the emphasis placed on harmonious relations between the classes in general and the value of moral leadership from traditional institutions like the Church more specifically. This is manifested most clearly in the Poet’s physical description of the mountain village community at the opening of Book V where the sight of ‘a grey Church-tower, / Whose battlements were screened by tufted trees’ (V. 80–1, p. 205) leads to the image of a ‘copious Stream’ (V. 84, p. 205) linking an idyllic social geography: ‘Fair Dwellings, single or in social knots; / Some scattered o’er the level, others perched / On the hill sides, a cheerful quiet scene, / Now in its morning purity arrayed’ (V. 88–91, p. 205). This scene is carefully constructed to highlight the peaceful relationship existing between the village church – a local representative of a central pillar of the British

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state – and the wider village community, mediated here by the flowing current of a stream. The subtle but clear social hierarchy that emerges in this topography is also significant, with the church placed upon what the Poet calls ‘rising ground’ (V. 80, p. 205) and the scattered village landscape developing organically downstream from its commanding and watchful tower. For readers still vulnerable to the very real threat of social levelling and political despotism from an alien empire, the Poet’s observation that ‘A popular equality doth seem / Here to prevail’ (V. 96, p. 205) would be received as a consoling confirmation of the freedoms rooted in a traditional social order; a sentiment which is expanded upon more formally in the Poet’s patriotic address that begins Book VI. Wordsworth’s account of the Pastor who presides over this community is an extension of his paternalistic social vision. The Wanderer’s description of the vicar is both symbolically resonant and ideologically revealing: ‘there abides, / In his allotted Home, a genuine Priest, / The Shepherd of his Flock; or, as a King / Is stiled, when most affectionately praised, / The Father of his People. Such is he, / And rich and poor, and young and old, rejoice / Under his spiritual sway’ (V. 99–106, p. 206). According to the Wanderer, ‘though born / Of knightly race, nor wanting powerful friends’ (V. 112–13, p. 206), the Pastor’s identity is closely bound up with the community’s ‘ancient rural character, composed / Of simple manners, feelings unsuppressed / And undisguised, and strong and serious thought’ (V. 117–20, pp. 206–7). From these observations the reader is presented with a picture of the model community leader in a traditional society, providing his people with a morally enriching form of spiritual and social guidance. The didactic function of the poem’s main characters in the broader moral narrative that Wordsworth is constructing can be seen most clearly in the Wanderer’s championing of traditional virtues like piety and reverence as antidotes to the emergent industrial society. The social implications of the Wanderer’s moral advice begin to take shape in Book IV during his correction of the Solitary’s despondency. The restorative justice and harmonious hierarchy of the natural world are hailed in his consideration of what he calls ‘The loss of confidence in social Man, / By the unexpected transports of our Age’ (IV. 261–2, p. 153). He implores his friend to see wisdom in the pace of natural development and, by implication, to mistrust any form of social or political aspiration that

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defies its laws. This leads to the Wanderer’s explanation of the law of organic relations: where begins The union, the partition where, that makes Kind and degree, among all visible Beings; The constitutions, powers, and faculties, Which they inherit, – cannot step beyond, – And cannot fall beneath; that do assign To every Class its station and its office, Through all the mighty Commonwealth of things; Up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man. (IV. 335–43, p. 156) The Wanderer’s mapping of these relations – and much of his ethical argument in the book more generally – illustrates the essential Wordsworthian belief, as Jonathan Bate has put it in Romantic Ecology, that ‘Everything is linked to everything else, and, most importantly, the human mind must be linked to the natural environment’.8 This philosophy also has a wider basis for social application, made explicit in the Wanderer’s ambitious agenda for social reform outlined in the poem’s final book. Indeed, though book IX is perhaps most remembered for the Wanderer’s discourse on the active principle at work in the Universe, it is the reform agenda developed from that principle which best displays Wordsworth’s social ethic in action. At its essence the Wanderer’s active principle attempts to demonstrate the inter-connected nature of all things with one another, through the ‘Spirit that knows no insulated spot, / No chasm, no solitude; from link to link / It circulates, the Soul of all the Worlds’ (IX. 13–15, p. 388). The moral philosophy informed by such a principle abhors the instrumental and atomistic treatment of man increasingly apparent in the new industrial order, as the Wanderer relates, ‘Our Life is turned / Out of her course, wherever Man is made / An offering, or a sacrifice, a tool / Or implement, a passive Thing employed / As a brute mean, without acknowledgment / Of common right or interest in the end; / Used or abused, as selfishness may prompt’ (IX. 113–19, p. 392). He declares that ‘Not for these sad issues / Was Man created; but to obey the law / Of life, and hope, and action’ (IX. 126–8, p. 393), and affirms a common humanity based on an equal access to the wonders of the natural world. In the speech which follows, the Wanderer makes a ‘universal plea’ (IX. 322, p. 401) to the ‘State’s parental ear’ (IX. 327, p. 402) for a national system of education to

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inculcate the ‘discipline of virtue’ (IX. 353, p. 403). Wordsworth’s developing Tory humanist views are particularly evident here, manifested in his faith in the power of education to restore harmonious social relations and spread the virtues of duty and piety. The Wanderer concludes his speech with an imperial enlargement of this paternalistic vision, directly appealing to ‘British Lawgivers’ (IX. 399, p. 405) to look beyond their current military aims and ‘Shew to the wretched Nations for what end / The Powers of civil Polity were given!’ (IX. 414–15, p. 406).9 This articulation of the Wanderer’s idealistic post-war vision is immediately followed by a call from the Pastor’s wife to make an evening visit to the lake. Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of the old sage’s grand social plan with this modest outing establishes for the reader an implicit moral connection between the natural world and the social philosophy it inspires. Kenneth R. Johnston, in his landmark work of reconstructive scholarship, Wordsworth and The Recluse (1984), has argued that this abrupt break in the book’s structure, along with a similar break initiated by the Pastor in Book VIII interrupting a passionate conversation about historical destiny, ‘indicate Wordsworth’s shifts from topics he wants to address but doesn’t know how to – history and politics (Human Life) – to topics he loves and knows very well – the interpenetrative play of mind with nature – as surrogates or sublimates of the former’.10 This section of the book also helps to remind us how much the Wordsworthian social ethic is rooted in a moral engagement with landscape, one that culminates, fittingly, in the optimistic vision of human progress articulated in the Pastor’s prayer near the book’s – and the poem’s – conclusion. The linking of the group vision of sunset with this prayer, perhaps more than any other episode in the poem, illustrates Wordsworth’s conception of a redemptive landscape. The Poet describes a moment where the group unites, ‘admiring quietly / The frame and general aspect of the scene; / And each not seldom eager to make known / His own discoveries; or to favourite points / Directing notice, merely from a wish / To impart a joy, imperfect while unshared’ (IX. 582–7, p. 413). It is at this key moment of benevolent and mutual appreciation of the natural world that the Pastor delivers his prayer. The portion of the prayer where he highlights the importance of an imaginative and optimistic faith – ‘The Worshippers how innocent and blest! / So wide the difference, a willing mind, / At this affecting hour, might almost think / That Paradise, the lost abode of man, / Was raised again; and to a happy Few, / In its original beauty, here restored’ (IX. 714–19, p. 419) – completes Wordsworth’s redemptive vision in The Excursion. Johnston

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writes movingly of this vision in his study: ‘This “little band” (729) and “thoughtful few” (658) comprise a picnic party of intellectuals who see a vision of modern redemption as they look at a beautiful landscape, on an excursion that will often be repeated in the next one hundred and fifty years, with hopes as high and as tenuously connected to the world they live in.’11 Johnston’s observation here, with its awareness of Wordsworthian influence on modern moral interpretations of natural landscape, captures the ardent desire – in both the poem’s characters and its readers – to find a more virtuous form of community based on man’s active and imaginative engagement with the natural world. For Wordsworth in 1814, amongst the twin national crises of war and industrial unrest, this was expressed in the need to return to a more traditional social order through the power of individual moral transformation – one student, one reader, and one soul at a time. The social dislocation caused by what William Cobbett called the ‘Thing’ – his term for the rapidly colonizing commercial system of the early nineteenth century – could not be addressed by this form of moral education. For Cobbett the economic logic that produced this system needed to be directly confronted and its effects personally observed; something he single-handedly attempted in an unprecedented campaign of popular economic education, political agitation, and social observation. Moving from Wordsworth to Cobbett entails more than a transition from a paternalistic Tory to a Radical political agenda. In the move from The Excursion to Rural Rides, we can see also a dramatic change in the use of English landscape, from being a metaphor for national reconciliation and individual moral renewal in Wordsworth’s text to an embodiment of national suffering and social injustice in Cobbett’s. The origins and aims of Rural Rides highlight these differences. After returning from his second political exile in America at the end of 1819, Cobbett wanted to see first-hand how much the agrarian culture of his beloved ‘Olde England’ had changed during the postwar years under the cumulative weight of deflation, excessive taxation, mass unemployment, rural depopulation, and the transition to a paper money economy. Cobbett’s subsequent survey of rural English landscape, published in instalments in his journal the Political Register from 1821–26 and partially collected in 1830, stands as a unique example of romantic-period human geography in which the writer attempts to map the dying pre-industrial agrarian economy’s role in sustaining a virtuous model of social relations. The overriding aim of Cobbett’s article series was political. As Kevin Gilmartin has put it, ‘Cobbett set out to describe and account for a corrupt system that already existed, in order

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to elicit its contradictions and encourage the popular resentment that would hasten its downfall’.12 So, far from being an exercise in politically quietest pastoralism, Rural Rides was for Cobbett an opportunity to educate his audience; not only about the vanishing pre-industrial economy at work in the countryside and the corresponding life-world it sustained, but also the political reasons for its eclipse by parasitic new forces of wealth accumulation emanating from London. The dominant pattern of geographical description in Rural Rides reflects Cobbett’s dual role as both a careful observer of, and passionate polemicist about, rural England’s tortured transition to economic modernity. The Rides also feature Cobbett’s nostalgic descriptions of a working rural landscape where the physical and cultural imprint left by the older agrarian economy is still clearly evident. An illustration of this can be found in an early instalment from October 1822 where Cobbett recalls the journey to a dinner meeting with one of his most important and longstanding cultural constituents, the farmers of Salisbury. During the ride from Andover, after passing Salisbury Plain, Cobbett’s thoughts are turned to the corrupt borough-mongering system when he approaches a bucolic valley scene: ‘Before you get to Salisbury, you cross the valley that brings down a little river from Amesbury. It is a very beautiful valley. There is a chain of farm houses and little churches all the way up it. The farms consist of the land on the flats on each side of the river, running out to a greater or less extent, at different places, towards the hills and downs’.13 This image of a small farming community reflects Cobbett’s deeply ingrained Arcadian sensibilities. However, his intensely political view of the world quickly undermines any sustained indulgence in rural picturesque. The journey culminates in a large meeting at Salisbury with some five hundred farmers where Cobbett speaks ‘against squeezing the labourers’, as he puts it (52∗ ). Cobbett also relates the recent occurrence of a fire at a local farm-yard – a desperate act of resistance by a rural working class in extreme crisis – as a clear reminder to the reader that the pastoral scene described earlier may conceal desperate material conditions for its inhabitants. These are the issues which Cobbett feels are his ‘very first duty’ to speak about, and, as he puts it at the end of the entry for that day, ‘I was resolved, be the consequence what it might, not to neglect that duty’ (52∗ ). During another journey from Berkshire to London a little over a week later, Cobbett approaches some new enclosures in Windsor Forest and immediately thinks of the corrupt economic system they both represent and are a product of, as well as the material hardships they symbolize for England’s older agrarian economy:

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These new enclosures and houses arise out of the beggaring of the parts of the country distant from the vortex of the funds. The farmhouses have long been growing fewer and fewer; the labourers’ houses fewer and fewer; and it is manifest to every man who has eyes to see with, that the villages are regularly wasting away [    ]. The farm-houses are not so many as they were forty years ago by threefourths. That is to say, the infernal system of Pitt and his followers has annihilated three parts out of four of the farm houses. The labourers’ houses disappear also. And all the useful people become less numerous. (59–60∗ ) For Cobbett, the development of this new exurban landscape outside London is directly linked to the widespread loss of England’s working agricultural economy. The new enclosures and the homes under construction on them ‘are a waste; they are means misapplied; they are a proof of national decline and not of prosperity’ (60∗ ). The economic and political interests making up what Cobbett calls the ‘Pitt system’ have enforced a morally corrupt form of modernization on England’s countryside, and led to the material destruction of a more virtuous agrarian way of life. From his transparently partisan perspective as a Radical intellectual with deep roots in the farming traditions of the south of England, the rural deprivation and depopulation witnessed in the Rides represent nothing less than the appalling consequences of an extended economic and political war by one section of the country upon another. As he writes in a later entry at the conclusion of this ride, ‘It is the destructive, the murderous paper-system, that has transferred the fruit of the labour, and the people along with it, from the different parts of the country to the neighbourhood of the all-devouring Wen’ (83∗ ). The symbolic interpretation of landscape reveals another aspect of the politics of social geography Cobbett was developing in Rural Rides. In an instalment from November 1822, while revisiting the valley surrounding Chilworth near Guildford in Surrey, he is reminded of the striking moral contrast between the natural beauty of the valley and the manufacture of the two principal products of the ‘Pitt system’ which come out of it – gunpowder and banknotes: This valley, which seems to have been created by a bountiful providence, as one of the choicest retreats of man [    ] has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the

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minds of man under the influence of the devil! namely the making of gunpowder and of bank-notes! (108–9∗ ) Undermining his readers’ desire for a pastoral escape from the realities of the present crisis, Cobbett instead forces them to make direct material connections between this Arcadian landscape and the system of wartime debt finance that he feels is most responsible for its imminent destruction as a living social geography. This is how Cobbett projects his political critique on to the natural landscape of England in the Rides; a tranquil valley in Surrey comes to represent the evil heart of a political and economic system he must identify in the most unlikely places in order to oppose. If Wordsworth’s linking of the group vision of sunset with the Pastor’s prayer helped to project a redemptive landscape in The Excursion, then in Rural Rides – which, as we have seen, attempts to construct a compelling narrative of political resistance out of England’s embattled rural social geography – a similarly defining moment comes during a ride in August 1826 through the Avon river valley in Wiltshire, ‘my land of promise’ as Cobbett calls it (353). It is a journey both physical and intellectual for Cobbett, where, like Wordsworth in the final book of The Excursion, a promising landscape inspires an illuminating moment of moral enlightenment for the writer. During the ride from the agricultural village of Milton down to Salisbury, he makes a visual survey of the valley, noting the pleasing signs of its productive rural economy: ‘The stack-yards down this Valley are beautiful to behold. They contain from five to fifteen banging wheat-ricks, besides barley-ricks, and hayricks, and also besides the contents of the barns, many of which exceed a hundred, some two hundred [    ]’ (362–3). When he considers the human dimension to this landscape, however, Cobbett’s mood turns to rage: A very fine site this was, and it could not meet the eye without making one look round (and in vain) to see the people who were to eat all this food; and without making one reflect on the horrible, the unnatural, the base and infamous state, in which we must be, when projects are on foot, and are openly avowed, for transporting those who raise this food, because they want to eat enough of it to keep them alive; and when no project is on foot for transporting the idlers who live in luxury upon this same food; when no project is on foot for transporting pensioners, parsons, or dead-weight people! (363)

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By calculating the provisions for a farm labourer’s family in the overall context of food and clothing production in Milton, Cobbett illustrates for his readers the corrupt moral logic of an economic system that promotes simultaneous surplus in the cities and deprivation in the countryside. Inviting them to share in his outrage, he writes, ‘What injustice, what a hellish system it must be, to make those who raise it skin and bone and nakedness, while the food and drink and wool are almost all carried away to be heaped on the fund-holders, pensioners, soldiers, dead-weight, and other swarms of tax-eaters! If such an operation do not need putting an end to, then the devil himself is a saint’ (372). This critique of the distortions imposed upon local agricultural economies by the developing complexity of the commercial market leads Cobbett to advocate a rudimentary form of socialist co-operation between the various sections of the labouring classes in England: ‘If the over-produce of this Valley of Avon were given, by the farmers, to the weavers in Lancashire, to the iron and steel chaps of Warwickshire, and to other makers or sellers of useful things, there would come an abundance of all these useful things into this valley from Lancashire and other parts [    ]’ (382). Unlike Wordsworth’s vision of redemption at the conclusion of The Excursion, Cobbett’s could only be completed through a fundamental transformation of economic relations, a transformation to be initiated by co-operation amongst the key sections of the country’s labouring classes – rural and urban, agrarian and industrial. James Mulvihill has noted how Cobbett’s text records the effects ‘of a mass commodities economy on a rural landscape’. He writes that ‘from having been an end in itself – as the landscape of the Lakes still was for William Wordsworth’, in Rural Rides, ‘it has become a means, a medium’.14 This observation nicely captures the distinctive way each writer uses landscape to represent very different visions for the nation. In The Excursion, the mountainous landscapes constitute a spatial metaphor that promises both reassurance and security from the European conflict just ending, as well as the opportunity to reflect upon the traditional moral values that will be needed to guide the nation through the years of social instability which lay ahead. For his readers, to quote the Poet in The Excursion, the Wordsworthian landscape presents itself as ‘the fixed centre of a troubled World’. In contrast, Cobbett treats the landscape in Rural Rides as a living witness to the material suffering of the post-war years caused by a corrupt polity and a parasitic economic system. For him, the open wound of England’s ravaged rural heartland represents both a cause for individual moral outrage and an invitation to lead the nation in a movement of radical reform. What both writers demonstrate

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is how the nostalgic appeal of England’s landscape could be used as a means to shape and incite national debate during a period of dramatic cultural change.

Notes 1. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 10. 2. Ibid. 3. There has been a recent revival of scholarly activity on The Excursion, including the publication of important studies by Sally Bushell and Alison Hickey, and a much needed critical scholarly edition is to be published as part of the Cornell Wordsworth series in 2007. See Alison Hickey, Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth’s Excursion (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997); Sally Bushell, Re-reading the Excursion: Narrative, Response, and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); The Excursion by William Wordsworth, ed. Sally Bushell and others (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). 4. See Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, p. 138. 5. Ibid., p. 140. 6. Ibid. 7. William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poem (London, 1814), p. 202. All the quotations are taken from the first 1814 edition of The Excursion. However, as that edition did not include any line numbers, I have listed corresponding line references in brackets in the main text of the essay taken from the revised 1850 edition as presented in William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), II. I have also listed the first-edition page references after the 1850 line references in brackets after each quotation. 8. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 66. 9. For an illuminating discussion of the complexities and contradictions of Wordsworth’s imperial vision in The Excursion, see Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and The Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 173–80. 10. Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The Recluse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 324. 11. Ibid., p. 327. 12. Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 159. 13. William Cobbett, Rural Rides in the Counties of Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Somersetshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire: With Economical and Political Observations Relative to Matters Applicable to, and Illustrated by, the State of Those Counties Respectively (London, 1830), p. ∗ 50. The remainder of the citations from Rural Rides will be given in the text of the essay. There was an anomaly with the pagination of this first edition caused by the late

104 Britain and Ireland inclusion of a ride before printing. The pages added were numbered from 45∗ to 124∗ , and followed by another sequence of pages from 45 to 124, with normal sequential pagination thereafter. 14. James Mulvihill, ‘The Medium of Landscape in Rural Rides’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 33 (1993), 825–40 (p. 833).

9 John Clare and the Question of Place Timothy Morton

‘Place’, and in particular the local, has become a key term in Romantic ecocriticism’s rage against the machine. Rhetorical affect is directly proportional to marginalization, maintaining an ironic barrier to genuine interrelationships between beings.1 I call it ‘beautiful soul syndrome’ after Hegel’s characterization of Romantic subjectivity that perceives a chasm between consciousness and the world, which cannot be fully bridged without compromising the soul’s beauty.2 Instead of wondering how to bridge an unbridgeable gap, ecological thinking might pose another question. To pose a question is to reveal how place and terms such as question are interconnected. Place is caught in a certain question, or questioning attitude. Phenomenology has come closest to understanding place as a provisional yet real ‘thing’ (in its original sense, thing implies place as meeting place). Martin Heidegger described place as open and opaque, but infamously solidified this very openness, turning history into destiny and making it vulnerable to extreme right-wing politics. The rhetoric of localism, which appears opposed to globalization and resistant to modern and postmodern decentrings, must not fall into the hands of reactionaries. Scholarship must examine the fixations upon which localism bases its claims. A left ecology must ‘get’ even further ‘into’ place than bioregionalism and other Romantic localisms.3 It is with the idea of thing that Heidegger’s meditation on the work of art as a special place begins. Heidegger tries to de-reify the thing. The work of art is an opening, a ‘place’ where phenomena become available to us, conveying the ‘thingliness’ of things ignored in the notion of the thing as formed matter (a derivation, claims Heidegger, from the status of equipment), or the thing as a perceptual manifold of substance and accidence. Heidegger’s reading of Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes 105

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poetically renders how things gather together the entire environment, social and natural place. He opens the shoes to the ‘earth’ (things that are not worked on), and to the ‘world’ (the historical–cultural dimension in which the shoes are used and gain significance): There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong – only an undefined space. There are not even clods of soil from the field or the field-path sticking to them, which would at least hint at their use. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet – From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.4 Similarly, the Greek temple, a product of the ‘world’ of Greek cultural/historical projects, opens the space that it inhabits such that we perceive the ‘earth’, the stoniness of the stone, the ‘skyey’ quality of the sky (to employ a Shelleyan adjective).5 In another essay, a bridge makes possible the riverbank as a specific place. Poetry is place.6 In some deep sense, it saves the earth – sets it ‘free into its own presencing’.7 It must be so that any place other than the peasant farm would enable experiences of space and place, revealing the ‘earth’ that resists instrumentalization. Otherwise Heidegger’s earth/world distinction would not be generalizable. Yet there is nothing that compels us to seek the earth outside the instrumental world. Art simultaneously opens up the earth and carves out a world. Heidegger is secretly on the side of technology rather than Being. Taken to an extreme, his view could be parodied by stating the obvious: that the environment has become more present to us precisely because humans have been carving it up so effectively. What remains is a ghostly resonance in the artwork. Perhaps all environmental art, both high and kitsch (from experimental noise music to Debussy for relaxation), is a symptom of the loss of the actually

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existing environment as non-cultural, non-historical earth. As Avital Ronell demonstrated, Heidegger imagines the call of conscience, which reminds us of our earthbound mission, as a telephone call.8 Despite Heidegger’s efforts to disguise it, the environmentality of the shoes is a function of modern capitalist society. The ideological flavour is a form of Romanticism, countering the displacements of modernity with the politics and poetics of place. The gesture is aware of its futility. It is like declaring that if we just thought hard enough, the hard rain of modern life would stop falling. Heidegger goes as far as stating that we could not have space without place: the sureness of place is what enables us to glimpse the openness of space.9 Ironically, his idea of place is one of the more open and seemingly non-reified ones. So rich, so downright earthy, it is compelling for certain forms of ecological thinking. For Heidegger, place is the opposite of closing or closure. Place is the aperture of Being, and yet it risks becoming a component of ideology, the sort suggested by the term Lebensraum, a locality meant for a certain race or class.10 Heidegger could have used a photograph of a dam, but the peasant shoes are the ideological fantasy objects of an atavistic nationalism. Since a poem happens to the body, it happens to the environment – the voice resonates in air, the eyes fall across the page. The marks and sounds have a certain timbre, a way of vibrating or squiggling – a Stimmung or ‘attunement’ (the term is significant across a range of philosophical views from Humboldt to Kant). Any poem is a construct in which the reader is embedded. Whether they are explicitly ‘about’ an environment or not, poems positively evoke an environment – ‘this’ one, right here. All poems, then, are preoccupied with issues of place and space. They put us in our place. But before we think that this is an authoritarian statement, we should ask, where is that, exactly? Honesty is the best policy. Urban modernity and postmodernity are included even in idyllic evocations of place, both inside and outside the artwork. Just as we took an extreme example of place in ecological philosophy, let us take an extreme poetic example. Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’, which allows us to reflect upon the ambient sounds of the English countryside, is enabled by a train journey: Yes, I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there

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Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.11 When the ‘express-train’ stops ‘unwontedly’ at the eponymous station, when, in other words, the ‘world’ of the train (in Heidegger’s language) is interrupted, the passengers are able to sense the earth (3–4, 9–12). The train necessarily traverses the space between cities. The earth interrupts the world – Heidegger’s term is ‘jut’.12 The more world we have, the more earth juts through, indicating the ambiguous role of technology. Even in this short Edwardian poem about an overlooked place, cities are present in the negative. Moreover, Thomas’s poem is as an answer to a question, implied in the opening ‘Yes’ (1) – not necessarily a direct question, more an invitation to meditate on the place, Adlestrop. Hanging over the poem, and over the place, is the question. The poem delves into Adlestrop as the question hangs in the air of thought, its eyes getting wider, just as the sense of hearing in the poem expands outward. Place is potentially endless, even if it is intimate. The objective correlative for this is the list. We cannot help wanting to expand the list, even as the poem restricts our ability to do so and captures us in a feeling of boundary, evoking not just nature but also nation, a sense of home even though the passengers are ‘away’. The poem conjures a metaphysics of place that establishes differences between inside and outside, here and there, even as it seems to erase such boundaries in its evocation of expanding ambient sound. The poem knows this even as it disavows it. Indeed it cannot present place as solid without relying on other places (the wider county, other counties, the sense of ‘over there’ whence the train has come and where it is going). Even according to this ecological miniature, place is radically indeterminate – it is in question, is a question. The question of place.

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‘Here’ includes ‘there’: here is precisely not there. Even if we do not inhabit a point-based universe, this idea of ‘there’ is intrinsic to ‘here’: it is here, in some way, so that here is shot through with there. ‘Here’ is not solid. I mean this more strongly than Heidegger when he claims that ‘The human being is the creature of distance!’13 Here becomes an object we gaze at through a shop window of aestheticization. Instead, we are so involved in here that it constantly dissolves. It fails to be where we look for it. The environment is what cannot be indicated directly. In terms of Gestalt psychology it is not-in-the-foreground. Yet as soon as we concentrate on it, background turns into foreground. It loses its environmental quality, which is what ecological writing wants to convey. We must perforce rely on a list tending towards infinity. The environment is sublime. It is the ‘what-is-it?’ – the objectified version of our question. As soon as it becomes an exclamation it has been erased. The list itself will necessarily exclude something (cities, pylons, certain races and classes, certain gender identities). Simply adding to the list that ends in an ellipsis and the word ‘nature’ is wrong from the start. Environment, then, is theory – not as answers to questions, or as instruction manuals (what is the theory behind that dishwasher?) but as in question, questioning-ness. The best environmental art retains its fullest existence as questioning – internally fractured by a doubt stronger than English sceptical empiricism (we know the uses of that) or Germanic peasant wondering (we know the uses of that). When we consider what ecocriticism excludes, the very concept of environment and its concomitant rhetorical gestures must give way to something more theoretical. Arne Naess’s idea of deep ecology is based on an encounter of a (small ‘s’) self with a (big ‘S’) Self: Organisms and milieux are not two things – if a mouse were lifted into absolute vacuum, it would no longer be a mouse. Organisms presuppose milieux. Similarly, a person is a part of nature to the extent that he or she is a relational junction within the total field. The process of identification is a process in which the relations which define the junction expand to comprise more and more. The ‘self’ grows towards the ‘Self’.14 With its talk of organisms and fields it sounds like secular science. But Naess’s idea is a version of Hinduism. In reality, the mouse would remain a mouse. It would just be a dead mouse. There is a slippage: to reformulate the self as a ‘relational junction’ is to push the issue of identity

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back a stage further, not to transcend it. A ‘relational junction’ does not solve the dualism that Naess sees as the problem. Something must still relate to something else. The ‘total field’ continues the idea of environment as different from relational junctions, the background to their foreground, however much ideas of field and totality strive to submerge difference. Naess’s figuration also relies on highly non-organic language, more reminiscent of electromagnetism and cybernetics, if not cyberpunk, than trees and roots. The way in which Naess reduces the self to a (zerodimensional) point in a field resembles nothing so much as the Cartesian reduction itself, the limitation of identity to a dot of doubt. Like Pascal’s before him, Naess’s prose ironically renders what it feels like to inhabit a Cartesian universe. How about basing ecological poetics and politics on no-self (and thus on no-nature)? Wherever I look for my self I encounter a potentially infinite series of alterities: my body, my arm, my ideas, place of birth, parents, history, society    . The same goes for nature. Wherever we look, we encounter a metonymic string of chipmunks, trees, stars, space, toothbrushes, skyscrapers    . Of course, where the list ends is telling. But basing a politics on a view of self, however sublimated and radically ‘alternative’ to a ‘Cartesian’ view, involves us in an aporia. These ‘new improved’ versions of identity never remove the paradoxes of the idea of self from which they deviate. Yet the ultimate paradox is that wherever we look for the self, we will not find it. This is the message of Buddhism and deconstruction, and also of Lacan’s sustained reading of the Cartesian cogito, which he develops into the splendidly convoluted ‘I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought. I think of what I am where I do not think to think.’15 This convolution is eloquent: it addresses the irreducible displacement that exists at the kernel of the self. Place as question has become internal to the question of self, of that which is located in place. This is supremely important, since place is the consequence of Naess’s view of self. Thus we return to Descartes’ act of situating himself at the start of the Meditations in a way that ironically anticipates any phenomenologist worth his or her ecological salt: ‘I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a dressing gown, holding this page in my hand.’16 I venture the provocative, probably heretical and certainly, to many ecological ears, blasphemous idea that Descartes, the whipping boy of ecological discourse, may have something to say about place. Wasn’t it Descartes who helped to get us into this mess, with his idea of the skin-encapsulated ego, as many ecologically minded writers have observed?17

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Descartes’ movement towards the cogito, transitioning through radical doubt, commences in this innocent-seeming scene, where the warm ambience of the fire and the bodily satisfaction it bestows enable the thinking process to take place. The self depends upon its environment. ‘I think’ depends upon the ‘I am’ of ‘I am here, sitting by the fire’. Moreover, the philosophy of the self depends upon this environment, as Descartes starts to subject his innocent situatedness to a series of doubts that hollow out that comfortable place. We are on a Moebius strip whose either side twists about the other such that it is impossible to designate one (either ‘self’ or ‘place’) as ontologically prior. The Cartesian situation contains a double-take, which Descartes registers by wondering why he shouldn’t be dreaming that he is beside a fire – surely a question which any satisfied, comfortable person may ask, relatively unaware of their bodily determinacy, but also a question which traumatized people ask – is this really happening? Am I really here? Place is a function of suffering. ‘This land is my land’ is a symptom of injustice. The politics of place is a struggle to achieve a state in which the question of place, the question that is place, can emerge as a question. Utopia, from this point of view, would look more like critique and debate than affirmation. To use Descartes’ situatedness rhetoric is not to assert that one must have achieved a certain level of comfort in order to theorize. John Clare’s profound poems of depression come to mind as superb examples of just such a theorization, born of pain. Clare is usually framed as a proto-ecological poet of minute particulars, a genuine and genuinely disturbing working-class presence in the revised Romantic canon. Far from being tangential to the nature poetry, the depression poems are essential. They stage the idea of being here in its most profound, formal way. Beyond any specific ecological content, often in spite of it, the narrator remains. Of all the Galenic humours, melancholy was closest to the earth. In his study of German tragic drama, Walter Benjamin explores the heavy materialism of the baroque, whose emotional analogue is the relentless melancholy of the drama’s protagonists.18 For Freud, melancholy refuses to digest the object. It is now old fashioned to think that melancholia is an irreducible component of subjectivity, rather than one emotion among many. But it seems undeniable. Melancholia is precisely the point at which the self is separated from, and forever connected to, the mother and the body of the earth. Isn’t this lingering with something painful, disgusting and grief-striking, exactly what we need right now, ecologically speaking?

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Take the poem ‘I Am’. The poem is a meditation on the cogito, as dark as Pascal’s (‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’).19 I

AM:

yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost; And yet I am, and live with shadows tost Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, Into the living sea of waking dreams, Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; And e’en the dearest—that I loved the best— Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest. I long for scenes where man has never trod, A place where woman never smiled or wept; There to abide with my Creator, God, And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, The grass below—above the vaulted sky.20 We would be right to think that this was Cartesian subjectivity at its darkest hour – the subject as pure empty self-reference. At first glance, the closest we get to ecology is the last couplet, where the narrator wishes for an impossible relief. Even here there is an ambiguity: Is the narrator lying with the sky above him, or lying ‘above the [    ] sky’ in heaven? But the very form of this yearning and impossibility is precisely the most ecological element. The narrator’s identity has shrunk to sheer blank consciousness, filled with ambient noises and disturbing otherness. There is an extraordinary enactment of this between the first and second stanzas, where the reader’s eyes have to ‘toss’ themselves into the nothingness of a gap to reach the end of the phrase (6–7). The narrator is so ‘untogether’, as they say in California, compared with Heidegger’s peasant woman, whose shoes connect her to feudal rhythms. Here they are, right here, on the earth, intensely depressed. Why did we think the deepest ecological experience would be full of love and light? I am, therefore I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am, therefore I doubt – I wish life were simple.

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The doubt is so corrosive that before we get to the grass and sky, we have a ghostly, ambient version of an environment formed from the narrator’s scooped-out insides (7–12). The narrator is painfully aware that the surrounding otherness does not truly exist; it is a ‘nothingness of scorn and noise’ (7). Does this ‘I am’, like an Old English riddle in which the poem declares itself to be something (‘I am [    ] an onion’), not indicate the status of the poem itself, a spectral quasi-object suspended in nothingness, an inconsistent bunch of squiggles that can never know itself as such?21 This depressive Romantic poem comes curiously close to Mallarmé’s experiments with crossed-out words. The sheer opacity of the poem becomes its subject, involving us in a paradox: it is precisely the ‘lack of content’ that gives the poem its opacity. Within the mist we glimpse a dull inertia, symbolized by the dash, that quintessential gesture of sensibility, and hence the illusion of deep subjectivity. In the printed text, the dash becomes the inert breath between signs, making us aware of the throat in which that breath is sticking. Wherever you go, here, even here, you are. The poem’s inertia does not permit the doubting part to escape into some abstract realm beyond grass and sky, but astonishingly connects grass and sky to depression and doubt. We are far from traditional, organicist readings of Clare, and from the therapeutic poetics of John Stuart Mill’s reading of Wordsworth celebrated in Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology. Clare wants us to stay in the mud rather than struggle out of it. If we read the last line of ‘I Am’ literally, this is exactly where we are.22 We may now reinterpret Clare’s ecological-poetic career in reverse from this startling event. It might appear that ‘I Am’ stands for a drastic, even tragic departure from an original ecological sensibility. Clare seems to embody the latest form of his poetic selfhood as an empty nothingness that can only yearn for an earth minimalistically conceived as grass and sky, like a character in a Beckett play looking out of a window, or one of Francis Bacon’s brutalist landscapes. ‘I Am’, however, helps us to see how, even from the point of view of the supposedly selfcontained, organic, feudal village, Clare was writing poetry for another. Bate’s biography makes this very point, perhaps inadvertently and ironically, in ostensibly trying to establish a certain ecology at the heart of Clare’s poetics – one marked by close, local observation of vestiges of feudal community and custom threatened by capitalist processes such as enclosure. Writing itself, publication, editors in London, and circulation of texts, stand in for these processes. But even when he was writing without a view to publication, Clare’s work was displaced from

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the inside by awareness of the other. He read his poems anonymously to his relatives out of an embarrassed fear that they would despise his work if they knew it was by him.23 It had to sound as if it came from somewhere else to receive validation. Rusticity was itself a poetic trope of which Clare was well aware. His poetic love of nature was a displacement from normative village life.24 As a self-taught poet living in misery, Clare deeply understood the complexities of his situation. He did not need a formal knowledge of Descartes to voice a sense of radical doubt. It comes down to the question of writing, which, confirming Derrida’s view, carries the burden of all that seems wrong about language: it’s never really yours, it is always dispersed, differential.    Recent criticism has sought an original, authentic Clare behind or before the corruption of London, capitalism, and so on, metonymies (or metaphors?) for the spacing and displacing actions of grammar. Ecological criticism has appropriated this task, discovering a natural Clare beneath the artificiality.25 But Bate himself observes that the image of an authentic ungrammatical Clare corrupted by revision is part of a fantasy of ownership in which Clare the primitive becomes an object of consumerism.26 A painful awareness of grammar always bisected Clare’s poetics, even (especially) when he was angry about grammar. The space of the village, even if it was feudal, was always already crisscrossed with otherness. There was no there there that was not already aware of another there. ‘I Am’ is the stunning moment at which this otherness is perceived as intrinsic to the self, at a terrible cost. Clare does not know who he is, as a horribly vivid letter from the asylum indicates.27 But this not knowing is also a hard won moment of actual subjectivity. If we take Clare as an ecopoet seriously, we have lost nature, but gained ecology. Clare evokes environment as open mind. Consider the weird ending of ‘Mouse’s Nest’, which unfolds the landscape: I FOUND a ball of grass among the hay And progged it as I passed and went away; And when I looked I fancied something stirred, And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird— When out an old mouse bolted in the wheats With all her young ones hanging at her teats; She looked so odd and so grotesque to me, I ran and wondered what the thing could be,

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And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood; Then the mouse hurried from the craking brood. The young ones squeaked, and as I went away She found her nest again among the hay. The water o’er the pebbles scarce could run And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun.28 Clare helps us to feel the existential quality of doubt. This is by no means ecoscepticism – quite the opposite. The poetic language falls into the earth’s emotional gravitational field. Doubt – the effect of things ceasing to be what you expect – mingles with heavy sadness, a lingering, even dreadful, quality, especially in the final couplet, which situates the narrator in an oppressive summer sunlight. Faith is no longer a question of belief (cleaving to ideas in your head), but of an existential remaining in place. The existential ‘thisness’ of the glittering cesspools is an environmental analogue for the anti-aesthetic grotesqueness of the close-up of the mouse and her young, surprising the narrator and defeating trite ecological sentimentality.29 This is life, as Giorgio Agamben would put it, reduced to bareness, just as the mother mouse and her children are metonymically reduced to a trickle of water and a stagnant pool.30 It is good news for ecocriticism that even here, even at the limits of subjectivity, we find closeness to the earth. Paradoxically, environment as theory does not achieve escape velocity from the earth. It sinks down into it further than any wishful thinking, any naïve concept of interconnectedness could push us. This is the place reached in Shelley’s extraordinary essay ‘On Love’, where feelings of loneliness and separation, rather than narcissistic fantasies of connection, put us in touch with a surrounding environment.31 This is dark ecology (Frost: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep’), in the spirit of Gothic culture, from Frankenstein to The Cure.32 Far from establishing a liturgy for escaping our guilty minds, for sticking our heads in nature, Clare helps us to stay right here, in the poisoned mud. Which is just where we need to be, right now.

Notes 1. For a comprehensive survey, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 2. Timothy Morton, ‘Environmentalism’, in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Nicholas Roe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

pp. 696–707. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 383–409. I use the language of the title of Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 15–87 (pp. 33–4). Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, pp. 41–2. Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 143–61 (pp. 152–3). Ibid., p. 150. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 26–83 (p. 28). Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, p. 154. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, pp. 54–5. Edward Thomas, The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, ed. R. George Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, 1981), pp. 24–5. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, pp. 49, 46–47. Martin Heidegger, ‘Supplement’, in Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 221. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 56. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977 (French 1966)), pp. 146–78 (p. 166). René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998, 2000), p. 19. See David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 167–8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 153, 230. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheime (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, 1995), p. 201. The Poems of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble, 2 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1935), II, 523–4. Anglo-Saxon Poetry, trans. and ed. S. A. J. Bradley (London: Dent, 1982), p. 372. I am grateful to Tim Fulford for discussing this with me. Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 91. Ibid., p. 206. James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St Martin’s, 2000), pp. 77–94 (pp. 89, 91). Bate, John Clare, pp. 563–75. Ibid., p. 506. The Poems of John Clare, II, 370.

Timothy Morton 117 29. John Goodridge has indicated to me that ‘cesspools’ is a textual crux. Some scholars, including Goodridge and Robert Heyes, prefer ‘sexpools’ (small pools formed in the hole left by turf cutting). I do not believe this affects my reading. 30. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 71–4. 31. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Love’, in Shelley’s Prose: The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), pp. 169–71 (p. 170). 32. Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’, 13, in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (New York: Henry Holt, 1923).

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Part II Europe and Beyond

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10 Uneasy Settlement: Wordsworth and Emigration Karen O’Brien

This chapter is concerned with the place of emigration in the British metropolitan imagination, and, in particular, with the part played by the first generation of Romantic poets in the national imaginative investment in white settler colonies overseas. It focuses upon the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, when the subject of emigration started to feature prominently in public and parliamentary debates, and when significant numbers of English people first start to join the flow of Irish and Scottish emigrants to Canada, New South Wales and the Cape Colony.1 It places the Romantics’ prescient, sometimes intense, imaginative engagement with colonial emigration in the context of their preoccupation with poverty, population growth and social dislocation, and it treats this as continuous with their depictions of internal migration and vagrancy within the British isles. Colonial emigration was regarded by Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge as one potential outlet for the country’s dispossessed poor, and one means by which they might regain a settled relationship to their own land. The chapter posits a connection between the Romantic association of freehold land ownership with psychic wholeness and civic autonomy, and the commitment, by public proponents of emigration, to an agrarian model of colonial society. It also considers how far this (at the time, emphatically Tory) idea of the colonies as places of rural recuperation can be seen as a turning away from industrial modernity, or how far it offered a vision of a modernity of a new, frontier kind. In Wordsworth’s Guide through the District of the Lakes he describes with affection and a degree of nostalgia the landed peasant proprietors of the Cumbrian dales, as they were up until 60 years before the time of writing: 121

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Towards the head of these Dales was found a perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists. [    ] The chapel was the only edifice that presided over the dwellings, the supreme head of this pure Commonwealth; the members of which existed in the midst of a powerful empire, like an ideal society, or an organized community, whose constitution had been imposed and regulated by the mountains which protected it [    ] venerable was the transition, when a curious traveller, descending from the heart of the mountains, had come to some ancient manorial residence in the more open parts of the Vales, which, through the rights attached to its proprietor, connected the almost visionary mountain republic he had been contemplating with the substantial frame of society as existing in the laws and constitution of a mighty empire.2 This settlement, as Wordsworth indicates earlier, originated in a series of migrations by the ‘aboriginal colonists’ of the Celtic tribes, followed by settlers of Danish or Norse origin who ‘crept on towards the more secluded parts of the valleys’. They were, as he puts it, ‘like Robinson Crusoe’, ‘creeping into possession of their homesteads, their little crofts, their mountain enclosures’.3 They acquire property in their land through cultivation, and so forge an agrarian republic of neighbourly smallholders oblivious of the larger national and imperial political structures which grow up around them. For Wordsworth, the Dalesmen present an ideal and fully realized model of colonization, one in which the voluntary and enterprising nature of the original migration is retained in the civic spirit and natural freedom of the settler society. Like others of his time, Wordsworth recognized how much of human society owed its character to an incremental process of migration and settlement, some of it (like that of the ancestors of the Dalesmen) freely chosen, some of it forced, much of it the product of economic desperation and displacement, and most of it bearing an oblique relationship to official schemes and structures of empire. In a world where, under the old poor law, to move outside one’s parish boundary was to lose one’s formal rights of settlement, Wordsworth was certainly correct to see all migrations, both large and small, as, to some degree, expatriations. Migrations to Britain’s colonies in the Americas, South Africa and the South Seas took place on a continuum with those everyday crossings of parish, county or country borders within the British isles, and re-enacted the ancient peopling of Britain by Celtic, Gothic and Norse settlers. Wordsworth’s writing career spanned an era that brought a considerable expansion of opportunities for British colonial emigration, as well as

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a significant increase in social displacement, poverty and internal migration. After the loss of most of the American colonies, a large proportion of colonial emigration was involuntary, including the tens of thousands of British and Irish convicts transported, from 1788 onwards, to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Other colonies just started to realize their future potential as offering new beginnings, refuges and desperate last resorts for the twenty-two and a half million or so people who ultimately left Britain and Ireland between 1815 and 1914. After the constitutional reorganization, in 1791, of the remaining North American colonies, migrants began to trickle into Upper and Lower Canada, among them, after 1803, a number of Highlanders displaced by the clearances, and also small numbers of settlers made their way to the Cape Colony, acquired by Britain during the Napoleonic Wars. With new acquisitions in the Caribbean and, from 1818, the consolidation of East India Company supremacy in India, it was soon apparent how far Britain had recovered as an imperial power from the disaster of the American Revolution. Despite this – and with the very notable exception of the abolition of the slave trade – the British government remained reluctant to undertake any measures of imperial reform, including that of the institution of slavery itself. Moreover, there were many prominent critics of empire, especially philosophical radicals and political economists, following in the wake of Adam Smith’s famous attack on colonial monopoly in The Wealth of Nations and of Bentham’s call to the government, in his widely circulated manuscript pamphlet of 1792, to ‘Emancipate your Colonies’.4 By the 1830s, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the prime mover of the National Colonization Society, started to persuade fellow political economists that the colonies represented a massive national investment opportunity. Prior to this, political economists took their lead from Malthus’s discussion ‘Of Emigration’ in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), which he dismissed as, in his words, ‘a very weak palliative’ for the problems of over-population.5 Against the grain of this public scepticism, Wordsworth was occasionally sanguine, even effusive about the national opportunities presented by white colonial emigration. In the final and culminating book of The Excursion (1814), he placed in the mouth of the poem’s major character, the Wanderer, a ringing endorsement of the expansion of Britain’s colonies: – For, as the element of air affords An easy passage to the industrious bees [    ] So the wide waters, open to the power,

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The will, the instincts, and the appointed needs Of Britain, do invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favours hope Or bold adventure; promising to skill And perseverance their deserved reward.6 Wordsworth was not alone in supporting colonization in his later years. Coleridge, who in his youth always expressed a kind of Swiftian distrust of all kinds of colonial activity as inherently productive of enslavement, violence and injustice, made the following pronouncement, in 1833, on Britain’s providential mission to enlarge its colonies: Colonization is not only a manifest expedient – but an imperative duty on Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of Hope, and not such as we alone encouraged and affected for the last fifty years, a colonization of Despair.7 Likewise, though more seriously and substantially, Southey promoted the idea of overseas colonization, often, like Wordsworth, with metaphorical recourse to hives and swarms. In a Quarterly Review piece on Malthus, published two years before The Excursion, Southey advocated state support for emigration as a means of both siphoning off surplus population and of exporting British culture: It is time that Britain should become the hive of nations, and cast her swarms; and here are lands to receive them. What is required of government is to encourage emigration by founding settlements, and facilitating the means of transport. [    ] Imagine these wide regions in the yet uncultivated parts of the earth flourishing like our own, and possessed by people enjoying our institutions and speaking our language. Whether they should be held in colonial dependence, or become separate states, or when they may have ceased to depend upon the parent country [    ] is of little import upon this wide view of things.8 Southey undoubtedly considered Malthus’ and other political economists’ hostility to the colonies as being merely of a piece with their

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non-interventionist and inhumane attitude to poverty. He was, both before and after his involvement with the parliamentary inquiry into emigration in the late 1820s, an active and influential proponent of what Anna Gambles has called the ‘alternative imperial political economy’ of the Tories, one that fused ideas of Britain’s overseas imperial mission with a commitment to trade protectionism and social welfare.9 He shared the Tory vision for the settler colonies as agrarian establishments of small freeholders dispersed across the Canadian and Australian landscape.10 Over and above Tory policy, Southey endeavoured to forge an alternative vision of the empire as a capacious, potentially enfranchising home for the poor – a vision which was, on occasions, pursued into religious and racial sectarianism of the worst kind, but which, David Eastwood has argued, did offer a seriously considered reply to the political economists.11 Southey, Wordsworth and Coleridge were all ahead of their time in anticipating the scale and social impact of British and Irish emigration to the colonies, and, to the extent that they advocated state sponsorship of emigration, one might go so far as to view them as precursors of the Colonial Reform movement of the 1830s. The wider set of nationalistic and racial views within which the later Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth’s support for emigration was embedded – their ‘colonialism’ or ‘imperialism’, in other words – has been comprehensively studied, most recently by Tim Fulford, Peter J. Kitson, Alan Bewell and others.12 It is not my purpose to revisit their findings, but it is in this context that we may understand their imaginative evacuation of the lands overseas of their native inhabitants, or, as I will argue later, their depiction of natives as having a rootless relationship to their own land. By contrast, these poets viewed European emigration as a search for roots, and as an activity that continually transforms domestic and global space into a locality, and in which British nationality features as an embodied and portable attribute of individuals. As Wordsworth and Southey well knew, most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century colonial emigrants were the casualties, rather than the standard-bearers of the imperial process – such as labourers, indentured servants, semi-skilled artisans and a few proscribed political radicals in search of opportunities and freedoms denied to them at home. For the Romantics, the question of colonization was always inseparable from that of the poverty begotten by industrialization and war, and their consideration of such matters formed part of their sustained, bitter engagement with the Malthusian idea of human surplus.13 To imagine oneself as a colonist, as Southey and Coleridge did when planning their pantisocracy settlement, was to

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feel marginal and vulnerable, yet also enterprising and brave. Southey liked to picture himself at the mercy of Native Americans: ‘Should the resolution of others fail’, he wrote in 1794, ‘Coleridge and I will go together and either find repose in an Indian wig-wam or from an Indian tomahawk.’14 Moreover, as Wordsworth and Southey would have been aware, most colonial emigrants in this period issued from Britain’s Scottish, Irish, Scots-Irish and Welsh peripheries, themselves the victims of an ongoing, internal imperial process of disinheritance, political oppression and clearance. Internal and overseas migration were inextricably linked. In Southey’s Madoc (1805) a group of medieval Welshmen, politically dispossessed by the forces of Anglicization at home, set out to found a new colony in America. In The Excursion, the Solitary, a Perthshire-born former chaplain to a Highland regiment, emigrates briefly and unhappily to America before settling in the English Lake District. The idea of portable, emigrant Britishness was not, then, straightforwardly part of an aspiration for global dominance. Indeed, Southey recognized and welcomed the fact that all colonial settlements, like those of Wordsworth’s Dalesmen, had a separatist and republican tendency of their own, as can been seen in his essay on Malthus cited above. Throughout his life, Southey remained unconcerned about Britain’s loss of its American colonies, and anticipated a similar, though less violent, process of separation for Canada (where he encouraged his brother to go and live), Australia and the Cape Colony.15 It mattered more to him that people of British origin possessed of British energy and values, should have a large, freehold stake in the world. Indeed, he felt that migration and a degree of separation might be the very conditions for the renewal of the British culture of liberty, eroded in recent times by the industrial economy with its ever more thinly sliced divisions of labour. He and Coleridge certainly envisaged their pantisocratic colony as a means of escape from such a division, one in which, as poet-farmers, they might gain wholeness and autonomy through the dual process of migration and settlement. Thomas Cooper, the author of the promotional book which had inspired their scheme, recommended America as a place where writers were not subject to the division of labour, not cut off from common life by economic specialization as intellectuals: With respect to literary men, it is to be observed that in America there is not as yet what may be called a class of society, to whom that denomination [professional literati] will apply; such, for instance, as is to be found in Great Britain, and indeed in most of the old

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countries of Europe. A class, whose profession is literature; and among whom the branches of knowledge are divided and subdivided with great minuteness, each individual taking and pursuing his separate department as regularly as the respective fabricators of a watch or a pin. Literature in America is an amusement only. In Europe it is a trade    16 After their American scheme was abandoned, Southey and Coleridge seem to have continued to pursue the idea of a migratory search for intellectual self-possession and wholeness. In a richly suggestive essay of 1993, Nigel Leask conjectured that Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey’s move to the Lake District at the turn of the century might be understood as an internal migration, one which, for the latter pair, ‘might have originated in [the pantisocracy scheme for] a colonial emigration to the periphery’.17 Wordsworth, too, often conceived of the poet or philosopher as a settler figure engaged in a migratory search for home, sometimes achieving permanent residence at home in Grasmere, sometimes remaining, like his Scottish Solitary, no more than a ‘Tenant’ of the ‘lonely vale’ in which he lives (IV, 1). Wordsworth was far less exercised by questions of empire than Southey or Coleridge, but he shared with them a view of colonization as a partial remedy for the economic and spiritual impoverishment brought about by industrial modernity, as well as a means of overcoming the Malthusian calculus of population and resources. In this context, Book IX of The Excursion (in which the Wanderer makes his speech about the imperial expansion of British culture and the need for a national system of education) appears to be less an aberration, and more a logical extension of Wordsworth’s lifelong reflections on settlement, displacement and migration. This Book opens with a wonderful passage – written back in the late 1790s – on the ‘active Principle’ within the animate and inanimate world, which breathes life into all things (as Wordsworth says simply, ‘we live by hope / And by desire’), gives a sense of freedom to the young, and endows the old with ‘Fresh power to commune with the invisible world’ (IX, ll. 23–4). The active principle is never utterly destroyed, but it can be deadened by poverty, by a gradgrinding education, and especially by the use of child labour that renders the young person a ‘senseless member of a vast machine’ (IX, l. 159). The remarks about child labour reprise a long discussion in Book VIII between the Wanderer and the Solitary about the loss of ‘liberty of mind’ among the manufacturing and agricultural poor, and among children in particular (VIII, l. 321). For the sake of the active principle, the Wanderer

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calls in ‘impassioned majesty’ for a time when ‘this imperial Realm’ will acknowledge an obligation to provide state education for all, so that none be left to droop By timely culture unsustained; or run Into a wild disorder; or be forced To drudge through a weary life without the help Of intellectual implements and tools; A savage horde among the civilised, A servile band among the lordly free! (IX, ll. 292, 295, 304–9) The Wanderer’s call for education as a remedy for the mental evils of the division of labour has something in common with Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as it provides a means of seeing beyond one’s narrow station to the big picture of society as a whole. The system of education Wordsworth had specifically in mind was one based upon pupil-to-pupil mentoring which had been pioneered in Madras by his acquaintance Andrew Bell.18 The originally colonial context of Bell’s ideas for educational reform may have reinforced Wordsworth’s sense of the plausibility of the Wanderer’s argumentative leap from advocating a system of education designed to emancipate the mind and quieten social unrest, to a plea for the expansion of Britain’s colonies. The Wanderer moves to this part of the argument by dismissing the Malthusian prediction of population explosion – what he calls the ‘fear / Of numbers crowded on their native soil, / To the prevention of all healthful growth / Through mutual injury!’ – and he then proceeds to the passage about Britain casting off her swarms quoted earlier (IX, ll. 363–6). He sees the empire as providing not only an outlet for surplus population and an unending opportunity for new agrarian colonies, but also a global canvas upon which to write large the active principle of the human mind: – Vast the circumference of hope – and ye Are at its centre, British Lawgivers; Ah! sleep not there in shame!     Transfer not to futurity a work Of urgent need. – Your Country must complete Her glorious destiny. (IX, ll. 398–400, 406–8)

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This is overblown, and very much of its own war time, but it does enable us to see how the colonial periphery informed Wordsworth’s peculiar sense of the meanings of domestic settlement and displacement, and their relationship to what he called mental ‘renovation’. A little later in Book IX, towards the very end of the poem, the friends take a boat trip to an island that, the Pastor tells them, had once been the site of human sacrifice by pre-historic peoples. The discussion of these ‘savage nations’ recalls the Wanderer’s earlier remark about the uneducated poor living as ‘a savage horde among the civilised’, and thus places both within a taxonomy (anthropological, but also, implicitly, historical) of savage, rustic and civilized states of society. In The Excursion, as in later works, Wordsworth’s taxonomy is keyed to different modes of subsistence, ranging from hunter-gatherer, to tenancy, smallholding, and to propertied independence, along with a progressive measure of Christian civility. This loose taxonomy is not so much a moral scale as an index of a people’s mental capacity to put down roots, and, then, when a greater level of education and economic independence is attained, to travel away from those roots for the sake of internal self-enhancement. The Wanderer is the latter kind of traveller: he leaves behind his rustic upbringing ‘on a small hereditary farm’ in Perthshire, educates himself, works as a pedlar, and eventually accumulates enough financial and emotional capital to live independently, to the point where he can, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘afford to suffer / With those whom he saw suffer’ (I, ll. 109, 370–1). At the other end of the scale, the wanderings of savages are prompted by basic need, abandonment or desperation. Native Americans are undoubtedly savages in Wordsworth’s nomenclature, but he does not use the word solely as an ethnic ascription, as it also denotes a quality of economic and mental rootlessness which can belong to or be transferred to Europeans.19 In a postscript to Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, published in 1835, Wordsworth denounced the new Poor Law Amendment Act, comparing the ‘famished Northern Indian’ and the ‘savage Islander who [    ] watches for food which the waves may cast up’ to the English poor, cast below the level of savagery by being denied even a basic right to scavenge.20 Wordsworth echoes his Wanderer’s fear that economic and educational deprivation have created ‘savage hordes’ within the British domestic polity – a mental underclass that cannot simply be shipped off to the colonies, since, as savages, they have not the will or mental capacity to settle. A number of Wordsworth’s poems deal with unsuccessful attempts at emigration, failures to settle that are often associated metaphorically

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with the unsettled life and mind of the American savage. In the Lyrical Ballad ‘Ruth’ (1800), he describes the young woman of the title as living in a state of ‘thoughtless freedom’ and domestic displacement brought about by the death of her mother and advent of a step-mother.21 She meets a ‘Youth from Georgia’s shore’ who opens out to her imagination an American world of magnolias, green savannahs and endless lakes, and she is attracted to the qualities of thoughtless freedom that he appears to share with her. He is so wild that ‘From Indian blood you [would] deem him sprung’, although he is in fact a white American Revolutionary soldier recently discharged from the army (l. 19). He marries her on the promise of a new life in America where she will be ‘a sylvan huntress at my side’, but he turns out to have been made unreliable by his former native existence, and he abandons her before they can emigrate (l. 89). A proximate savage, he lacks the mental capacity to settle, and he neither offers nor delivers a settled life in America, only a rootless, hunting and scavenging existence. In a comparable vein, the Solitary recounts, in Book III of The Excursion, how he crossed the Atlantic and attempted to settle in America having lost his family, and having reached a point when his Jacobin radicalism made England a dangerous place for him. His emigration fails partly because of his own mental despondency. He was, as he says, like ‘a damaged seed / Whose fibres cannot, if they would, take root’ (III, ll. 889–90). Dissatisfied with life on the eastern seaboard of America, he travels westward beyond the borders of the new republic, and tries to become like the Native American who ‘when, having gained the top / Of some commanding eminence, which yet / Intruder ne’er beheld, he thence surveys / Regions of wood and wide savannah, vast/Expanse of unappropriated earth’ (III, ll. 935–9). He meets only with disappointment, especially in the Native American whom he finds merely ‘A creature, squalid, vengeful, and impure; / Remorseless and submissive to no law’ (III, ll. 953–4). In his depression, the Solitary did not, and still does not see the self-revealing irony of his idealization and then callous dismissal of Native Americans – both of them symptomatic of a mind incapable of entering into a productive relationship with the land, or of turning ‘unappropriated’ earth into a settlement. In the context of Wordsworth’s larger project for The Recluse, the Solitary’s remark about ‘unappropriated earth’ would have given significant echo to the lines in the projected first part known to us as Manuscript B of Home at Grasmere. This echo occurs at the point where

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Wordsworth takes poetical possession of the valley he had first wished to inhabit as a boy: The unappropriated bliss hath found An owner, and that owner I am he. The Lord of this enjoyment is on Earth And in my breast.22 The merging of the self into Edenic surroundings, achieved (however precariously) by William and Dorothy at home in Grasmere, necessitates a degree of literal and figurative investment that the Solitary cannot make. He only nonchalantly ‘sympathised at leisure’ with, and ‘failed not to greet’ the birds and sounds of the North American landscape (III, ll. 950, 946). Appropriation and ownership are never, for Wordsworth, mere matters of financial transaction, but of psychological commitment, labour input and the slow transformation of property into an inheritance. Such commitments are quite beyond the deracinated and despondent Solitary. When the poet and the Wanderer first go looking for the Solitary, they come across his copy of Candide, significantly, a tale of shiftless, godless wandering that hints at the end at the possibility of fruitful cultivation. The Solitary is a ‘tenant’ in a so-called ‘savage region’ of the Cumbrian mountains (IV, l. 1). Other settlers in the region have embraced it more completely, and been transformed in the process. The Pastor, observing that ‘the Genius of our hills [    ] doth sometimes lure [    ] the unhappy alien’ tells the story of a Highland Chieftain ‘within whose spotless breast / The fire of ancient Caledonia burned’, and who, exiled from Scotland after the ’45, found sanctuary in the area and forged an unlikely friendship with another outsider, a disappointed English Whig politician (VI, ll. 391, 396, 398, 414–15). The two men ultimately choose to be buried together in the local mountain churchyard, and leave behind a joint monument as visible and lasting evidence of the possibility of restorative internal migration within the invisible community of the Anglo-Scottish Union and the Anglican / Presbyterian established church. External emigration within the British Empire undoubtedly holds out, for Wordsworth, the chance for a similar restoration for the exiled, the displaced and the disappointed, but only if their mental culture has raised them above the level of savages. In the seventh Book of The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth describes his first experience of the epicentre of empire, London. As he says, he had encountered it before, vicariously, when a school-fellow, a crippled boy,

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travelled down south to that ‘new region’, as he calls it, and returned disappointingly unchanged by his expedition.23 Wordsworth’s journey to London is, similarly, a foray into an unintelligible and, ultimately, unassimilable new region. He presents it in the persona of a jaded impresario offering, merely for entertainment, a panoptic simulacrum of the world with all its varied human types (‘from remote / America, the hunter Indian    ’, ‘Negro ladies in white muslin gowns’) (VII, ll. 240–1, 243). Social, geographical and racial hierarchies are here flattened out or erased, and, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘swarms’ of London’s ‘inhabitants’ are ‘melted and reduced / To one identity by differences / That have no law’(VII, ll. 703–5). Saree Makdisi, in his study Romantic Imperialism, has written of Wordsworth’s seeming inability to frame London visually, and his ‘terror of excess’ in its swarming streets as symptomatic of his recoil from capitalism, empire and their joint transfiguration by the forces of modernization.24 The city of London, for so many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets, had been the luminous and legible hub of Britain’s global empire – porous and open to the seas and territories beyond through the Thames and its tributary rivers. Yet, as Makdisi argues, the city epitomizes, for Wordsworth, ‘the unrepresentable vastness of the world-system’ on which he turns his back, in search, instead, for ‘enclaves of the anti-modern’, spaces (like Wordsworth’s nature or Walter Scott’s Scottish Highlands) that resist absorption into imperial modernity.25 The white settler colony could be seen as another such enclave. Indeed, for a number of Wordsworth-inspired nineteenth-century writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, the colonies came to represent a refuge from the horrors of urban and industrial life.26 But Wordsworth’s positive recommendation of colonization might also entail the possibility of something more than a refusal of global modernization and, in relation to the attendant displacement or coercion of native peoples, something less attractive. For him, as for Southey, British colonial emigration offers a postponement of modernity – indefinite so long as there are lands enough available in the world. Emigration is also, like the Jeffersonian agrarian liberal politics of early-nineteenth-century America, constitutive of a modernity of the dynamic, frontier variety in which abundant land creates multiple opportunities for propertyholding self-reliance and dignity. Wordsworth’s ambivalence about this model of modernity is clear from his use, in The Excursion passage, of ‘swarms’, a word which, in The Recluse, would have cross-echoed with the London swarms of The Prelude. Wordsworth certainly fears that like London (the destination of so many domestic and overseas emigrations that do not cohere

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into a multinational imperial community), the peripheral colonies may never become a meaningful part of the British polity, and that people may become rootless and dispersed, just as, in ‘Michael’, Michael’s son Luke drifted off, into unknown parts of the city and ‘was driven at last / To seek a hiding place beyond the seas’.27 Yet Wordsworth also hopes that, alternatively, British emigrants who are given the scope and the education to develop their natural powers may take with them the civil values and culture of liberty to lonely and dangerous places beyond. In all this, America represents a failed rehearsal for meaningful settlement, but not necessarily one that precluded migratory renewal elsewhere in the empire.28 When, in the 1830s, Edward Gibbon Wakefield persuaded political economists and Whigs to take seriously the Tory aspiration for planned settlement of Britain’s overseas colonies, the negative example of America was very much to the fore. Wakefield himself characterized white American citizens as a people who are ‘rotten before they are ripe’.29 He also advanced a more urban and socially stratified model of colonial settlement, albeit one that incorporated the Romantic ideal of independent, small-hold land ownership. In an early nineteenth-century Britain, increasingly preoccupied with the future of its colonies, Wordsworth’s poetry must certainly have exemplified a brave aesthetic openness to sublime and unfamiliar landscapes, and a profound engagement with the experience and contingencies of settlement. As De Quincey once remarked, there was something about his poetry that made it resonate with the experience of the overseas migrant and the colonial settler: ‘Wordsworth is peculiarly the poet for the solitary and meditative; and, throughout the countless myriads of future America and future Australia, no less than Polynesia and southern Africa, there will be situations without end fitted by their loneliness to favour his influence for centuries to come’.30

Notes My thanks to Josephine McDonagh for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. On emigration in this period, see H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830: ‘Shovelling out Paupers’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Helen I. Cowan, British Emigration to British North America: The First Hundred Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961) and Marjory Harper, ‘British Migration’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 75– 87. On idealistic colonization schemes of this period, see Deirdre Coleman’s

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

fascinating study, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes (1835), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Henry Froude, 1905), p. 67. This passage is cited by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), 2 vols (London, 1848), II, 6, para. 1 as part of his case for ‘peasant proprietorship’. Wordsworth, A Guide through    the Lakes, pp. 52, 58. See Donald Winch, Classical Political Economy and the Colonies (London: Bell and Sons, 1965) and John Cunningham Wood, British Economists and the Empire (London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 7–15. T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Donald Winch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 81. The original 1798 edition characterized emigration as a last-resort for the desperate, but conceded that ‘a certain degree of emigration is known to be favourable to the population of the modern country’, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1798), pp. 109, 209. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Helen Darbishire and Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952–59), V, The Excursion, The Recluse, IX, ll. 369–70, 375–82. This poem is hereafter cited in my chapter by book and line number. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and others, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), XIV: Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols (1990), I, pp. 369–70 (4 May 1833). Robert Southey, ‘On the State of the Poor, the principle of Mr Malthus’s Essay on Population, and the Manufacturing System’ (1812), in Essays, Moral and Political, 2 vols (London, 1832), I, 154–5. See also Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols (London, 1829), II, 276, 283. Anna Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815– 1852 (Woodbridge Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society and Boydell Press, 1999), p. 149; see Southey, Sir Thomas More, pp. 172–3. On Southey’s advice to the Select Committee chaired by Robert WilmotHorton, see Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1830, pp. 66–7, and Southey’s review of the reports, ‘Of Emigration’ (1828), in Essays, Moral and Political, II, 261–78. David Eastwood, ‘Ruinous Prosperity: Robert Southey’s Critique of the Commercial System’, Wordsworth Circle, 25 (1993), 72–6. On Southey’s sporadic support for forced emigration, see Geoffrey Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age: The Development of a Conservative Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 299, 326–7. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Tim Fulford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Kitson, Fulford and Debbie Lee, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Fulford, ‘Heroic Voyages and Superstitious Natives: Southey’s Imperialist Ideology’, Studies in Travel Writing, 2 (1998), 46–64; Fulford, ‘Catholicism and Polytheism: Britain’s Colonies and Coleridge’s Politics’, Romanticism, 5 (1999), 232–53.

Karen O’Brien 135 13. On the subject of Romanticism and political economy generally, see Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) and, most authoritatively, Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 11. 14. New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 3 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), I, 70. 15. On Tom Southey’s plans for emigration, see Mark Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 299. On Southey’s Annual Review pieces on the Cape, see Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age, p. 79. 16. Thomas Cooper, Some Information Respecting America, Collected by Thomas Cooper (London, 1794), p. 64. 17. Nigel Leask, ‘Pantisocracy and the Politics of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads’, in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 44. 18. Andrew Bell, An Experiment in Education, Made at the Male Asylum of Madras (London, 1797). Wordsworth tried to put Bell’s ideas into practice in 1811 and Southey defended Bell in the Quarterly Review. See Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 290 and Carnall, Robert Southey and His Age, pp. 134–5. 19. For an in-depth account of Wordsworth and Native Americans, see Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 11–12, 24–5 and passim. 20. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III, 243. 21. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), l. 6 (original, 1800 text). 22. Home at Grasmere, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), MS B, p. 42, ll. 85–8. 23. The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1805 text, VII, l. 99. 24. Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 23–36. 25. Ibid., p. 32. 26. See Diana C. Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), pp. 29–32. 27. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, ll. 455–6. 28. For an illuminating discussion of early nineteenth-century emigration to America and the ‘influence of America on the [English] mind’, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Chapter 8. For the wider context of the British engagement with America, see Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). 29. Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney (1829), The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ed. M. J. Lloyd Prichard (Glasgow: Collins, 1968), p. 151. 30. Quoted by Leask in ‘Pantisocracy and the Politics of the “Preface” ’, p. 45.

11 Philosophy’s Debatable Land in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria Joel Faflak

From the hindsight of On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each (1829) we know that Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) acts as a guidebook for how the philosopher’s work is a necessary prelude to the building of the nation. But Coleridge complains of having suffered the ‘mental disease’ of his speculative nature, of getting lost in the ‘unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths’.1 Such symptoms ask us also to read the guidebook as a case history with a diagnosis but no cure. Biographia Literaria maps the work of philosophy as a psychic space which makes one wonder how the nation might at the very least cohere as an idealist or ‘imagined community’, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term, not to mention as a political reality.2 Moreover, the community of this nationalist fantasy coheres through a power of imagination that is at once unifying and excessive. Coleridge argues that certain ‘disturbing forces’ are necessary to the State’s ‘realization of every great idea or principle’ within its constitution in that they call upon its power to overcome these forces.3 One such disturbance is Mesmerism, whose ‘crisis’, as rapport or clairvoyance, evokes the mind’s ability to internalize ideas, like Church and State, at a profound psychic level. Yet Mesmerism also thwarts this intuition’s political efficiency. If one is compelled to read the later Coleridge as an eminent proto-Victorian whose theory of imagination would seem to prepare the Romantic psyche for its later usefulness within the Victorian public sphere, Mesmerism indicates this psyche’s resistance to domestication, the symptom of a radicalism that Coleridge cannot, perhaps does not want to, leave behind. Space forbids a fuller analysis of the various philosophical strands Coleridge interweaves in Chapters 5 to 9 of Biographia Literaria, pointing towards his account of imagination in Chapter 13. For the present 136

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chapter, I want to speculate upon the cultural imaginary of philosophy’s nationhood that emerges in these chapters and shapes Coleridge’s ideas about the political uses of imagination. If this speculation disengages from historical materialities, that is to make its point about Coleridge’s own speculative nature. Coleridge’s philosophy desires an idealism lacking in the largely empiricist British tradition, except in the writings of Richard Saumarez, ‘the first instaurator of the dynamic philosophy’ of the ‘life and progressive power’ of the mind and its cognates that Coleridge found most immediately in Fichte, Kant, and especially Schelling (BL, I, 163n.). To account for his swerve away from Hartleyan associationism, he plays Descartes against Hobbes in order to champion the disembodied mind as an autonomous agent free of materialist restraint. This move obviates associationism’s deterministic and necessitarian remainders. Traced to Condillac (among others) on the French side and Locke, Hume, and Mackintosh (among others) on the British, empiricism’s materialist bias evoked the ‘mere lawlessness’ of a subject without agency, the ‘delirium’ of the mind as a merely associative, or worse, free-associative, mechanism firing away at will without any inward or higher conscious control governing its dynamism (BL, I, 111). Turning towards the Germans, Coleridge misreads Fichte’s reading of Spinoza as a simple materialist in order to end with Kant and especially Schelling, whom he ventriloquizes at length. At the end of this narrative Coleridge finds ‘the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which [    ] in its highest power is nothing else but self-conscious will or intelligence’ (BL, I, 285) – a mind self-present to itself. He transforms the empiricism of the cogito into the psychic work of imagination always sublating itself as the idealism of the SUM, wherein the formation of principles works by a kind of invisible, nearly alchemical labour. Yet the work of philosophy in the text resists this telos. When Coleridge calls Biographia an ‘immethodical miscellany’ (BL, I, 88), he implicitly points to an unstable hegemony of nationalist differences that need to be colonized in order to make his own philosophical territory cohere. He reads between these differences in order to reveal their ‘instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words [and ideas] originally of the same meaning’ (BL, I, 82–3). To ‘desynonymize’ suggests the defamiliarization Shelley ascribes to Poetry, wherein the ‘literature of England’, out of the ‘great and free development of the national will, has arisen as it were from a new birth’.4 Julia Wright would call this purging of the past ‘inaugural nationalism’, which evokes ‘revolutionary or apocalyptic transformation’, as distinct from ‘antiquarian nationalism’, which

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is based on ‘derivation or evolution’.5 The nationalism of Coleridge’s philosophy seems antiquarian in letter, but is rather more inaugural in spirit, in that it builds an idealist and apparently international consensus about the mind’s empiricism. Chapter Ten’s apologia for Coleridge’s political past, however, renders his British/French/German philosophical alliance an equally fraught axis of knowledge. Coleridge rewrites radical sympathies as a critique of radicalism’s lack of first principles to ensure the State’s longevity. Since the 1790s, ‘the hand of providence has disciplined all Europe into sobriety, as men tame wild elephants, by alternate blows and caresses’. Now all ‘youthful enthusiasts, [    ] disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, [have] been taught to prize and honour the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national independence’. Most importantly, ‘Englishmen of all classes are restored to their old English notions and feelings’ (BL, I, 189–90). One recalls that the Congress of Vienna, having just secured England’s post-Revolutionary European status, gives a special valence to this return to sober national character and for calm, collective contemplation in the final stages of Britain’s imperial advent. Accordingly, Coleridge begins to refashion himself as a Man of Letters who, like the later Wordsworth or Scott collecting their life’s work, anticipates the future Victorian Sage. This consolidation of British philosophicalness, starting with Biographia Literaria and The Statesman’s Manual (1816), is further refined in Aids to Reflection (1825), what Anthony John Harding calls a guide for the ‘thinking but initiated believer’.6 This process culminates in On the Constitution of the Church and State, in which the ‘idea of each’, as that ‘which is given by the knowledge of [the] ultimate aim’ of either, is the work of ‘PHILOSOPHY’ as ‘the doctrine and discipline of ideas’, the ‘ground-knowledge’, or ‘prima scientia’ (CCS, 12, 47). Governing this process is imagination or ‘vision nascent’ (BL, I, 286), the dynamic force driving Coleridge’s national theology, the ‘nisus formativus of the body politic, the shaping and informing spirit, which educing, i.e. eliciting, the latent man in all the natives of the soil, trains them up to citizens of the country, free subjects of the realm’. In German this spirit is the State’s Bildungstrieb, translated as ‘ “formative urge, impulse, or force” ’(CCS, 48, 48n), which Coleridge draws from Blumenbach’s epigenesis of life and Schelling’s trieb of the Weltseele (world spirit) or ‘tendency toward infinite development’.7 That imagination is a ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ (BL, I, 304), however, anticipates its culturally and politically conservative role in Coleridge’s later writing, explored by Nigel Leask.8 Transcendentalized out of sight in

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Coleridge’s aesthetics, imagination seems out of mind – pure of ideology – in his political thought. David Calleo argues that Church and State are firstly psychological concepts.9 National coherence, stability, and progress depend on how good citizens learn to internalize the ideas of Church and State in order to preserve the nation’s ‘permanent’ cultural knowledge, disseminated through a broader ‘national education’ (BL, 185; CCS, 48). Whereas a conception ‘consists in a conscious act of the understanding’, ideas ‘powerfully influence a man’s thoughts and actions, without his being distinctly conscious of the same, much more without his being competent to express it in definite words’. Moreover, ‘it is the privilege of the few to possess an idea: of the generality of men, it might be more truly affirmed, that they are possessed by it’ (CCS, 12–13). The appeal to silence invokes the Gagging Acts and various suspensions of Habeas Corpus. But equally unsettling are the spectres of unconsciousness and possession, especially given the necessity of a ‘sober’ and disciplined sense of ‘PROPRIETY’ (CCS, 35). For there seems a fine line between the repression of radicalism’s dangerously unprincipled nature and its return in sublimated form as a zealous faith in the nation’s idealist State, however carefully calibrated its ‘progress’, especially given that this faith is meant to function unconsciously, at least in the ‘generality of men’.10 Less conscious, of course, is the ‘permanent class or order’ who analyze and guide the uses of enthusiasm in the nation’s vital interest, a ‘National CLERISY’ who oversee the nation’s ‘continuing and progressive civilization’ and who ‘remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed’ (CCS, 42, 43, 46). This national trust acts as a type of revealed religion. Harding explores a gnostic strain in Coleridge’s religious speculations that, as Tim Fulford argues, preserved ‘an “inner sense”, a spiritual meaning in scripture, understood by select interpreters’.11 Looking back to the emergence of English nationality in Elizabeth’s reign, Coleridge argues that civilization’s greatest ‘inventions [    ] had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen, or in the practical insight of men of business, but in the closets of uninterested theorists, in the visions of recluse genius’. But to ‘the immense majority of men, even in civilized countries, speculative philosophy has ever been and must ever remain, a terra incognita’.12 This esotericism’s confidential exchange of knowledge, however, also sets a dangerous political precedent of coercion and manipulation. Coleridge’s desire to protect the unseen project of thought in philosophy’s higher education of the State from its debasement as superstition in the public sphere is not so different from a

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desire to sequester philosophy’s ‘speculative’ project from civic accountability, from its materialization as temporal and political cognates that might contest philosophy’s role. Negotiating between stability and progress, between conservative (‘shaping and informing’) and excessive (‘impulsive’) forces and practices, is not an easy political task. But something of a colonizing mentality informs Coleridge’s thought, traceable to his secondary imagination, which works with the ‘conscious will’ to ‘[dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate] in order to re-create’, or when this ‘is rendered impossible, [    ] to idealize and to unify’ (BL, I, 304). This secondary repetition of a first repetition of the work of the SUM, an imposition of the ‘conscious will’ on its both noumenal and unconscious genesis, evokes the repetition-compulsion of a disciplinary reconnaissance. Instrumentalized politically, the imagination of a national clerisy ‘dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates’ differences to transform what it (re)creates into an organic, coherent, progressive State productively compelled by its own forces, which stem from its citizenry’s implicit and deeply felt understanding of the principles of Church and State. Yet the Coleridgean State also evokes a disturbingly imperial space, like the Crystal Palace: seemingly transparent and inclusive, but deliberately structured and firmly disciplined, wherein the imagination marshals the body politic’s energies within a fundamentally homeostatic and hermetic constitution. This elision of the individual and the collective evokes a kind of magnetism between subjects that in Coleridge’s thought bears the influence of eighteenth-century conceptions of civil society as held together by Smithean sympathy. There is an ‘electric force of the feelings’ that sustains ‘wise Government’ (BL, I, 199) and that binds Church and State as ‘two poles of the same magnet’ (CCS, 23). Such sympathy appears freely chosen, but is also an autonomous power within community that citizens will freely choose given their right education about its culturally productive nature. Society, that is, coheres via the galvanism of its citizens’ own trained desire to cohere. So even more than nationhood and nationality are at stake in Coleridge’s deployment of a British/French/German axis of knowledge to build a better British philosopher for the Victorian age. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri mark the passage from the ‘modern sovereignty’ of imperialism to Empire as a global organization, ‘composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’. Empire ‘establishes no [    ] fixed boundaries or barriers’ and instead ‘manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command’.13 Historically speaking, Coleridge’s later texts are the work of an imperialist imagination constructing

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English nationhood as a metonymy for the Empire’s civilizing mission. But the logic of Empire is at work in the SUM of Coleridge’s imagination. Both everywhere and nowhere, autonomous and organically selfgoverning through the palpable yet invisible effects of its own power, this imagination is a leap of imagination, like a tertium aliquid: an ‘interpenetration of the counteracting powers’ which ‘intermix’ in order to ‘partak[e] of both’ (BL, I, 300) – the melting pot as an idealist state of mind. This State is not without inner disturbances. Biographia’s move from Lockean matter to German spirit encrypts the remains of British philosophy as an ordering of the mind’s empiricism to embody the enlightened individual. This subject’s feelings, rationally managed by his thoughts, produce self-possession and sympathy for others, the basis of civil society and a potent prototype for a Victorian emphasis on moral hygiene. As Laura Quinney argues, however, empiricism also produces ‘the discomfiture of interiority’, the spectre of a ‘porous, fragmented, haunted and half-blind’ subject whose mind is unsettled by what Locke in his Essay associates with the ‘violence’ of imagination and what Kant associates with the rupture of the sublime.14 The ‘discomfiture’ of empiricism to which I want to turn for the remainder of this chapter, however, is Mesmerism. Mesmerism materialized within the post-Enlightenment cogito and body politic a Bildungstrieb whose ‘disturbing forces’ were as symptomatic as they were productive. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) hypothesized that an invisible fluid or magnetic influence compelled the universal motion of bodies, like gravity, galvanism, or electricity. An equilibrium of the fluid in and between bodies ensured health; its imbalance produced disease. In practice, the mesmeric agent cured disease by reconducting the fluid to produce beneficial ‘crises’ in both individuals and groups. Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), a disciple of Mesmer who emphasized the psychic over the physiological, focused on the rapport between the agent and patient(s) and the resultant clairvoyance: subjects could literally see into themselves, and thus into the life of things, the metaphysical possibilities of which most certainly fascinated Coleridge. But as much as it signified psychic and cultural transformation, Mesmerism, also known as animal magnetism, threatened the body politic. A 1784 report commissioned by Louis XVI concluded that it used suggestibility to exploit its clients’ imaginations. As Tim Fulford argues, ‘revolution [    ] was a creature of the imagination – spread not by rational argument but through the mesmerist’s hypnotic touch. It was a matter of excessive and fanatical mass belief.’15 On one hand, the fact that it might ‘taint further generations of Frenchmen’ raised

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the spectre of radicalism.16 On the other, in post-Revolutionary Europe, Mesmerism also threatened individual liberty. Poised between revolution and reaction, Mesmerism haunted Britain’s political unconscious into the next century. Coleridge’s own interest in Mesmerism likely stems from his reading of C. A. F. Kluge’s 1815 Versuch einer Darstellung des Animalischen Magnetismus, and can be traced through his unpublished writings as late as 1822, the ‘darker, more arcane aspects’ of which, Harding argues, Coleridge ‘did not want to risk bringing before an unprepared public’. But his closeted speculativeness reveals a less-than-ideal imagination whose Heideggerian ‘originary apprehension of pure Being’, returning thought to pre-Socratic origins, was heterodox to religious doctrine, especially to an Anglicanism haunted by the spectre of Roman Catholic ‘superstition’.17 Aside from his mistrust of Mesmerism’s exploitation of the powerless, for instance, Coleridge saw its powerful alignment with imagination: ‘if the zöomagnetic influx be only the influence of the Imagination, the active Imagination may be a form of the Zöomagnetic Influence’ (CN, IV, 4806). Mesmerism suggested both the synthetic power of secondary imagination and its unconscious primary form, an ‘intermediate faculty, [    ] at once both active and passive’ (BL, I, 124). Mesmerism also evokes ‘the will or [    ] vis vitae of Man [which] is not confined in its operations to the organic Body’, the basis of a Naturphilosophie in Coleridge’s thought.18 Yet Mesmerism equally challenged metaphysics by suggesting an interpenetration of minds and bodies that transgresses subject boundaries. Destablizing rather than unifying, and denoting an unsettling lack of agency, this free-associationist psychosomatic fluidity, read against the grain of Coleridge’s idealism, figures the tertium aliquid of imagination as disturbingly transpositional and transferential rather than transformational. This psychology of imagination perpetuates rather than resolves differences. In political terms it threatens the careful ties between individual wills and the will of the collective; and perhaps most problematically for Coleridge’s moral philosophy, it evoked a type of primordial and occult autonomy that undermined man’s willing suspension of disbelief in the authority of a higher agency. Fulford argues that for Coleridge Mesmerism ‘offered an interpretive key to the politics of the age’. Because it ‘worked not by the transmission of an imponderable material but through psycho-social relationships’, Mesmerism signified ‘the failure of radicalism to win widespread support [    ] due to the continued susceptibility of the popular imagination to superstitious belief. The people were too sensual – believing only in what they could see and touch and unprepared to keep faith in

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abstract ideals such as liberty and justice.’19 Mesmerism was, then, both cautionary tale and diagnosis. Its superstitious past reminded Coleridge of his own earlier Jacobinism; but its arcane hermeticism, revisited in later science and philosophy, made it epistemologically and culturally useful. Marshall Brown has explored how early nineteenth-century German thought absorbed Mesmerism’s more subtle philosophical implications.20 Apart from Kluge, Coleridge read Karl Christian Woolfart’s translation of Mesmer’s theories, Mesmerismus, and his subsequent Erläuterungen (commentary) on that text wherein, Coleridge argues, Woolfart uses Schelling to distill from Mesmer’s otherwise ‘crass materialism’ ‘a manifestation of an original unity in the absolute’, again, the basis of Coleridge’s theory of State.21 Elsewhere, however, Coleridge is rather more pointed about his sympathies. To D. G. Kieser’s article in Archiv für den thierischen Magnetismus (1817–24), which reported that animal magnetism produced more clairvoyants in France than in Germany, Coleridge responds, An English Physiologist with the same facts before him [    ] would exclaim – What a nation of LIARS the French are! Only where immediate Detection is foreseen (as in Mathematics & Chemistry) can you rely on a word, they say! – Not so honest Kieser’s ‘most believing mind’. [    ] If there were any ground for Kieser’s speculation on the dependence of the sorts and comparative excitability of magnetic State on national character, so that France being = 10, Germany is but = 1, I fear that old England will be – 1 = +0 : i.e. not mere absence of sufficing evidence with its consequent Unbelief, but positive Disbelief. – As to my own creed, I am more and more inclined to revert to my first notion, that the French Report under Dr Franklin was a glimpse of the truth, but such as might be expected from French Eyes filmed and gummy with French Sensualism. (CN, IV, 4512) Bound to his theory of English citizens educated to see into the life of things, Coleridge cannot believe that the French are more clairvoyant than Germans, upon whose transcendental philosophy he is so dependent. However, that the French might be more susceptible points to a ‘Sensualism’ that blinds them to a higher purpose. This much is apparent to the ‘English Physiologist’ who can properly diagnose and thus mediate between the French and the German, and who implicitly uses English common sense to temper French materialism and German idealism. His clairvoyance is clear-sighted rather than

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supernatural – and carefully sidesteps the problem of English superstitiousness and susceptibility.22 Proposing himself as a metaphysical physiologist of the State’s constitution, Coleridge reveals within the cosmopolitan state of his idealist body politic a rather more intractable and impassive Britishness. Such a national character might appear to have its head abstractly in the clouds in order to intuit the ‘vision nascent’ of its higher purpose. Yet its domestic eyes are nonetheless ideologically trained on any ground that might appear alien to its gaze or touch. For some time we have come to see in the ideology of English Romanticism’s frequent love of all things German a kind of philosophical treachery, especially given that much of the time Coleridge appears to merely ventriloquize German idealism (it is telling that he has to get one Englishman, Richard Saumarez, into a footnote even while championing Schelling). But the debatable land of Coleridge’s philosophical body politic suggests another rapport with the Scottish Enlightenment and its Common Sense ethos, which exerted a profound influence on the British empiricist tradition. For Thomas Reid, for instance, sensations are the natural language or syntax by which the mind accepts the world on faith. Common sense is ‘that degree of judgement which is common to men with whom we can converse and transact business’.23 The mind is not merely passively self-involved or transcendentally un-involved but, like Adam Smith’s man of moral sentiment, actively self-commanding and managerial, and thus built to take the reins of Empire. This common sense, oddly parallel with the Kantian notion of a sensus communis that coheres through the seamless interaction of its well-disciplined subjects, and oddly redolent within Coleridge’s late political writings, implicitly returns the philosopher-as-cleric to his properly British, post-Lockean empiricist home. Except that the Scottish influence is itself problematic. Coleridge’s repeated references to religious enthusiasm in both his official and unofficial writings evoke the spectre of the kind of hysterical empiricism of religious enthusiasm that James Hogg parodies, not without a little sinister dread, in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), an enthusiasm that for Coleridge threatened radicalism’s return. Hogg’s novel moves back to the future of a French threat of revolution internalized as a disease within the domestic space of a United Kingdom that in 1707 subsumed Scottish nationalist and religious identity within the scope of England’s increasingly imperial ambition. Which is to say that the domestic space of Coleridge’s philosophy is itself not so ‘common’, even or especially because it coerces a sense of community that subjects

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have no choice but to adopt as common. The unpublished enthusiasm for Mesmerism in his notebooks or marginalia, unrestrained and unrestrainable, affronts the sense of the imagined community of Coleridge’s philosophy. It produces a transference between sovereign philosophical bodies to create a melting pot whose globalizing power of imagination, threatened by differences that sustain its hybrid identity, must elide these differences. Yet within this closed system, Mesmerism compulsively returns as the unconscious of an uncollected and uncollectable body politic. Mesmerism confronts Coleridge’s metaphysics with a psychology that cannot be systematized, an occult strain or symptomatic psychopoesis within philosophy’s inter-nationalist body politic. Coleridge’s prose writings inflect the aftermaths of Mesmerism’s earlier political and psychological contexts through a later Romanticism about to give way to the Victorian age, when ‘making sense’ increasingly bore the anxious utilitarian imperative of managing bodies as productively as possible for the Empire. Mesmerism becomes the symptom of this Empire’s possible undoing through a worklessness whose labour cannot be economized. Tilottama Rajan locates Coleridge within the ‘unavowable community’ of idealism, aligned with Nancy’s idea of an ‘ “inoperative” community [    ] no longer constituted by completion and work, but by the unworking of its work in the differences between its members and its irresolvable difference from itself’, as against the idea of society set out in Coleridge’s late work as ‘ “communion [and] fusion into a body” whose identity “would no longer be exposed” ’.24 Incompleteness and indolence were not what the Empire needed, but they are powerful symptoms of the unworkable hybridity constituting Coleridge’s body of work, an ‘obscurity and [    ] love of paradox’ that floats thought against ‘the stream of intellectual usefulness’ (BL, I, 220). The intellectual productivity of Mesmerism, I would argue, allows Coleridge to think this usefulness otherwise. Recall that Biographia ends with a return to Coleridge’s Christabel. He describes the effect of reading the poem to his audience as a ‘species of Animal Magnetism, in which the enkindling Reciter [    ] lends his own will and apprehensive faculty to his Auditors’ to create a ‘sympathy of feeling’. But this transference mesmerizes the other within the ‘dilated sphere of [the Reciter’s] intellectual Being’ (BL, II, 239). Leask argues convincingly for the gendered space proscribed by the passage, wherein the masculinist will of the reciter/magnetizer ultimately masters the feminine space of a powerless sensibility. However, the scene of instruction, (dis)locating identity in the transference between author and

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audience, suggests confusion as much as communication. This ‘species’ of Mesmerism makes the empirical/imperial body susceptible to political and ideological manipulation, just as Christabel stands, ‘With forced unconscious sympathy / Full before her father’s view’, unwilling to accept Geraldine’s unholy alliance with her father, unable to resist the mesmerizing effects of its symbolic constitution.25 But perhaps this is a cautionary moment to make a further point: Mesmerism also threatens the kinds of Victorian cultural profitability his late works anticipate. It signifies a less-than-ideal ‘disturbing force’ that agitates as much as it binds the state, offering the more subversive progress of radicalism’s remainders.

Notes 1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), I, 17. Further references to this edition are given after the quotations in the text, abbreviated as BL, followed by volume and page number. 2. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and others, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), X: On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (1976), p. 37. Further references to this edition are given after the quotations in the text, abbreviated as CCS, followed by page number. 4. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 533, 535. 5. Julia Wright, ‘ “The Nation Begins to Form”: Competing Nationalists in Morgan’s The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys’, English Literary History, 66 (1999), 941. 6. Anthony John Harding, ‘Imagination, Patriarchy, and Evil in Coleridge and Heidegger’, Studies in Romanticism, 35 (1996), 8. 7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen, 4 vols (New York: Bollingen Series, 1957–90), IV, 4639n. Further references to this edition are given after the quotations in the text, abbreviated as CN, followed by volume and entry number. 8. See Nigel Leask, The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Critical Thought (London: Macmillan, 1988). 9. See David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (London: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 76–91. 10. On the politics of enthusiasm in Coleridge’s writings, see Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 131–72. In The Statesman’s Manual Coleridge argues that ‘nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and

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11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than self, or in an idea more vivid?’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible as the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight (Burlington, 1822), p. 30. Tim Fulford, ‘Apocalyptic and Reactionary?: Coleridge as Hermeneuticist’, Modern Language Review, 87 (1992), 28. Cited in Harding, p. 7. Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, pp. 19–20. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. xii–xiii. Laura Quinney, ‘Wordsworth’s Ghosts and the Model of the Mind’, European Romantic Review, 9 (1998), 294; John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), II, 161. Tim Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid: The Politics and Poetics of Mesmerism in the 1790s’, Studies in Romanticism, 43 (2004), 58. Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 22. Harding, ‘Imagination, Patriarchy, and Evil in Coleridge and Heidegger’ pp. 6, 19. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Inquiring Spirit: A New Presentation of Coleridge from His Published and Unpublished Prose Writings, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951), p. 47. Fulford, ‘Conducting the Vital Fluid,’ pp. 72–3. Marshall Brown, ‘From the Transcendental to the Supernatural: Kant and the Doctors’, Self-Conscious Art: A Tribute to John W. Kronik, ed. Susan L. Fischer (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1995), p. 151. Coleridge, Collected Works, XII: Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley, 6 vols (1980–2001), III, 867n. Here I set aside Coleridge’s discussion of the supernatural and the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that constitutes poetic faith’ (BL, II, 6). Frederick Burwick notes how ‘troublesome to [Coleridge’s] acceptance of magnetism’ was a ‘lapsus or captus mente, an involuntary susceptibility to trance’ prevalent in much of Coleridge’s verse, especially The Rime and Christabel. Frederick Burwick, ‘Coleridge, Schlegel, and Animal Magnetism’, English and German Romanticism: Cross-Currents and Controversies (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1985), p. 280. See also Nigel Leask, ‘Shelley’s “Magnetic Ladies”: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body’, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. John Whale and Stephen Copley (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 60–5. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (London: Macmillan, 1941), p. 421. Tilottama Rajan, ‘The Unavowable Community of Idealism: Coleridge and the Life Sciences’, European Romantic Review, 14 (2003), 395. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel, in Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 597–8.

12 Interrogating the ‘Valley of Wonders’: Some Romantic-Period Debates about Chamonix-Mont Blanc Cian Duffy

By the time that Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Chamonix as a ‘valley of wonders’, in the 11 September 1802 number of the Morning Post, the region was already well established as a key focal point in the European debate about the scientific, aesthetic, political and religious significance of sublime landscape.1 However, Chamonix’s prominence on the cultural map of Europe was also relatively recently acquired. ‘Incredible as it may seem’, Ebel’s popular Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland commented in 1820, ‘this valley so singularly interesting, in which is seen the highest mountain of the old world, was entirely unknown until the year 1741.’2 Ebel’s date for the discovery of Chamonix-Mont Blanc is that of the first British expedition to the region, by William Windham and Richard Pococke, the latter recently returned from his well publicized travels in the Middle East. By identifying Windham and Pococke as the discoverers of Chamonix, however, Ebel’s Guide does not simply point to their role as geographical explorers, but also – indeed moreover – to their role as the inaugurators of the debate about the region’s cultural topography. This essay charts the contours of that European debate about Chamonix-Mont Blanc, tracing in the published records of the most prominent eighteenth-century expeditions to the region, the emergence of tropes which would come to define English romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime, and which arguably continue to influence contemporary perceptions of the Alps. Foremost amongst these tropes, I will argue, is the trope of ascent, a trope which correlates the physical ascent of the mountains with a variety of ostensibly unrelated forms of elevation (moral, scientific, aesthetic and political), providing the basis for the consistent collocation, in romantic-period 148

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writing, of elevated landscape with elevated consciousness. The wider implication of this essay, then, is that romantic-period writing about the Alpine sublime owed less to philosophical aesthetics, domestic or foreign, than to the multi-disciplinary European debate about the Alps, and about Chamonix-Mont Blanc in particular. ‘For whom is Switzerland a remarkable country?’ This is the opening question, the first sentence of the English edition of Ebel’s influential Traveller’s Guide. As Ebel’s answer, the Guide’s lengthy opening recommendation of ‘the Alps of Helvetia’ makes clear, the European discovery of the region was multivalent. ‘Every individual’, Ebel affirms, who knows how to derive some enjoyment from the contemplation of nature, or who is desirous of acquiring a rich store of the most lively images, or of the most innocent gratifications; he likewise, whose breast labours under affliction, or whose cares require consolation, who is in need of being roused and fortified, may remain assured that he will find [    ] whatever he may wish for.3 Throughout the eighteenth century, in other words, the ‘singularly interesting’ Alps, and Chamonix-Mont Blanc in particular, came to be identified as a site of immense scientific importance, as a ‘rich store’ of ‘lively images’ for the artist, as a locus of ‘fortification’ and ‘consolation’ for the physically and emotionally ‘afflicted’, and as an ideal destination for those simply seeking ‘some enjoyment from the contemplation of nature’. And from the outset of the European debate about ChamonixMont Blanc, each of these Alpine ‘gratifications’ was inextricably bound up with the practice, the idea and the image of ascent. Ebel dates the European ‘discovery’ of Chamonix-Mont Blanc to 1741, the year of the first recorded British expedition to the region. On 19 June, Windham and Pococke led this expedition out of Geneva, reaching Chamonix 3 days later. Windham’s description of the landscape they encountered – in his Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy (1744) – effectively originates tropes that will have become conventional in romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime: the tension between the desire to provide credible narrative and the difficulty of describing incredible landscape in conventional terms; the tension between the evidently primitive locals and the perception, or the wish to perceive, that their society is idyllic, and so on.4 Hence, for example, while Windham registers his desire to provide reliable scientific witness of Chamonix – ‘in the plainest Manner, without endeavouring to embellish it by any florid Description’ – he also acknowledges the

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inherent difficulty of describing the glacial landscape, admitting that he is ‘extremely at a Loss how to give a right idea of it’.5 Likewise, while the Account notes that the local Savoyards – ‘as in all Countries of Ignorance’ – are ‘extremely superstitious’, it also affirms that they ‘are a very good sort of People, living together in great Harmony, they are robust, live to a great Age, and have very few beggars among them’.6 Alongside these clear discursive similarities, however, there are also, of course, some striking differences between Windham’s Account of the Glacieres and the major Alpine-travel narratives of the romantic period. For one thing, it is apparent from the outset of the Account just how much Windham and Pococke were consciously venturing into the unknown, into an ‘unfrequented Part of the World’: in addition to their scientific apparatus, the expedition went heavily armed, a precaution Windham advises his readers to repeat if they plan to visit the valley themselves.7 Beyond this sense of potential danger, however, what is most striking in Windham’s Account is the extent to which, notwithstanding the prevalent local traditions that Windham describes, early eighteenth-century Chamonix was a landscape almost entirely unknown to mainstream European culture, that is to say, a landscape largely devoid of familiar historical or literary points of reference. By the end of the century, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson rightly points out, travellers and tourists visiting the Alps ‘self-consciously anticipated the “sublime” experience’.8 Witness Helen Maria Williams’s account of her first sight of ‘that solemn, that majestic vision, the Alps!’ in her Tour in Switzerland: How often had the idea of those stupendous mountains filled my heart with enthusiastic awe! – so long, so eagerly, had I desired to contemplate that scene of wonders, that I was unable to trace when first the wish was awakened in my bosom.9 In his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826), William Hazlitt – in a markedly anti-Wordsworthian formulation – likewise noted of his first view of the Grand Chartreuse that ‘it was a scene dazzling, enchanting, and that stamped the long cherished dreams of the imagination upon the senses’.10 What Williams and Hazlitt and numerous similar accounts make clear, however, is not simply that romantic-period travellers to the Alps anticipated the sublime experience (as Nicolson puts it), but rather – indeed moreover – that they went equipped with a plethora of cultural references through which

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that ‘stupendous’ scene could be mediated and interpreted. In other words, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Alps had become ‘classic ground’, as the Shelleys described it in the Preface to their coauthored History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817): a landscape richly imbued with historical, cultural and scientific associations.11 The exponential growth of this referential range is best exemplified in the development of the Alpine guidebook. Thomas Martyn’s 1788 Sketch of a Tour through Switzerland, for example, outlines an itinerary, provides useful information about accommodations, currency, taxes, local culture and so on, and appends a ‘short account’ of the recent ‘expedition to the summit of Mont Blanc by M. de Saussure’.12 By 1816, however, Henry Coxe’s encyclopaedic Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland not only provides local information and up-to-the-minute scientific data, but also glosses virtually every spot on its suggested itinerary with literary references (to Rousseau, Gibbon, Henry MacKenzie, et al.), effectively telling its readers not only where to go, but also what to think and feel when they got there.13 Martyn, by contrast, makes absolutely no mention of Rousseau, despite extended discussion of prominent locations – Clarens, Meillerie, Vevai – from his notorious Alpine romance, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). By identifying Windham and Pococke as the ‘discoverers’ of Chamonix, then, Ebel’s Traveller’s Guide does not simply point to their role as geographical explorers but also to their role as the discoverers or inaugurators of the region’s various cultural connotations for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. Again, my claim here is that many of these connotations were intimately connected with the idea of ascent. The original basis of this connection is readily apparent from the two letters that make up the Account of the Glacieres: Windham closes the first noting that ‘a Man of Genius might do many things which we have not’; Peter Martel, the author of the second letter, climbs a nearby peak in order to do just that, by getting a better view of things.14 ‘I got to the top’, Martel affirms at the end of his letter, to observe the Angle of Position of the Glacieres, with respect to Geneva which I found to be 158 Degrees precisely. I looked down on all the Objects about us with great Pleasure; the Prospect put me in mind of that fine Plan which you have seen in our Publick Library [at Geneva], for the Plain below, seen from this high Mountain, at first sight gives on the same idea.’Tis wonderful to see [    ]. In a word, all the Pains I took to clamber up this Mountain were sufficiently recompensed by a Prospect so beautiful and so uncommon.15

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Martel’s contribution and the Account itself closes, then, with a clear indication that detailed scientific knowledge of the Alps can only be acquired by ascending their summits; indeed, that a gain in altitude equates not only to a gain in knowledge, but also to a gain in aesthetic appreciation of the landscape. This correlation of altitude and discovery – scientific and scenic – set the trend for travel and exploration in Chamonix for decades to come, effectively inaugurating an altitude race, a quest for ever-higher ground that would culminate with the first successful ascent of Mont Blanc. With their ‘hopes that pointed to the clouds’, in Book VI of The Prelude, Wordsworth and his fellow ‘mountaineer’, Robert Jones, had clearly bought into this trend.16 As C. M. de la Condamine noted in his 1763 Journal of a Tour of Italy, Windham’s Account of the Glacieres was ‘calculated rather to excite than satisfy curiosity’.17 For all that, the next major expedition to Chamonix took place over twenty years later, led by a man who would later reach the summit of Mont Blanc: the famous Swiss naturalist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, whose work is discussed below. Five years after Saussure’s first expedition, however, another Swiss – the artist and explorer Marc Théodore Bourrit – conducted a lengthy survey of the region, publishing his Description des Glacières [    ] de Savoye in 1773, with an influential English translation appearing two years later, boasting an impressive list of subscribers, including William Beckford, Edmund Burke, Catharine Macaulay, Joshua Reynolds and Lord Walpole.18 Bourrit opens, and to some extent seeks to justify the publication of his Description, by noting that despite the efforts of earlier travellers, the area remained ‘almost wholly unknown to strangers’.19 However, there is also the clear sense that the Savoyard Alps are fast becoming ‘classic ground’, to use that familiar phrase again. After all, Bourrit does not simply refer to the earlier expeditions by Windham and Saussure. Rather, he consciously treads in their footsteps, offering ‘a sparkling libation to the honour’ of Saussure at the ‘very spot’ on the Mer de Glace where his expedition rested, and recalling, on discovering a rock bearing Saussure’s name (inscribed during his earlier expedition), how he had constantly felt ‘the ideal presence of the writer’ in the landscape.20 Bourrit himself contributes significantly to the inscription of Chamonix-Mont Blanc on the cultural map of Europe: his Description is the first text to describe in detail the key sites – the Bossons glacier, the source of the Arve, the Mer de Glace – that will become the key sights, thereby delineating an itinerary that tourists still largely follow today. Crucially, however, Bourrit also takes up and significantly develops

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the correlation of altitude and insight first formulated by Windham and Martel. Following Martel and Saussure’s leads, Bourrit’s Description records that having taken a ‘general survey of the Glaciers’, his expedition decided to ‘spend the rest of our time in examining the construction of each of them particularly’ and ‘for this purpose we ascended Montanvert [Montenvers]’.21 Once again, then, we have the perception that a gain in altitude is equivalent to a gain in scientific understanding, that physical ascent correlates to epistemological insight: ‘a single glance over all these Glaciers together’, Bourrit recalls of his view from the top of Montenvers, ‘seemed to throw a light upon their correspondence and extent’.22 Bourrit, like Martel before him, also affirms that the ‘fatigues’ and ‘difficulties’ of ascent are not ‘rewarded’ with scientific discovery alone, but also with the ‘beauties displayed around us’.23 In fact, Bourrit’s Description opens with a general account of these ‘beauties’ – that is, of the Alpine sublime – noting the ‘singular emotion which the sight of this country excites in the mind, from the prodigious height of the mountains’, the ‘elevated, awful feelings of the soul’ that it ‘produces’.24 This kind of language will of course become conventional in the romantic period. What is particularly striking about Bourrit’s Description, however, is not simply the perception that ‘elevated’ landscape ‘produces’ an ‘elevated’ state of ‘mind’, although the terminology of that perception is itself instructive. Rather, it is Bourrit’s insistence that the intensity of these ‘elevated’ ‘feelings’ is directly related to the physical altitude of the perceiver: in short, the higher you go, the more sublime it gets. Hence, Bourrit recalls of the view from the summit of Montenvers that while the sight of the higher, neighbouring peaks ‘from their foot, was a most ravishing sight’, he was still ‘strongly agitated’ by a ‘longing attention’ and ‘restless inclination’ to ‘attempt at least, to set a foot upon their heads’.25 Proceeding with ‘determined resolution’ higher up the glacier itself the expedition gets its reward, which Bourrit, with the eye of an artist, details at some length: What a picture was before us! We were surprised to a degree of transport, and incapable of expressing our admiration, but by frequent acclamations. We beheld a spacious icy plain, entirely level; upon this there rose a mountain all of ice, with steps ascending to the top, which seemed the throne of some divinity. It took the form moreover of a grand cascade, whose figure was beyond conception beautiful, and the sun which shone upon it, gave a sparkling brilliance to the whole: it was as a glass, which sent his rays to a prodigious distance.26

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Some two pages later, Bourrit reaches a kind of pause, affirming that ‘new beauties still continued to delight us, astonished as we were’.27 However, even this ‘astonished’ halt is only momentary: continuous new discoveries – scientific and scenic – seem possible. Eventually, for Bourrit, the pursuit of the Alpine sublime becomes itself sublime, an irresistible scramble up the mountainside. ‘The valley on our right was ornamented with prodigious Glaciers’, the passage continues, as even the syntax grows erratic: that shooting up to an immeasurable height between the mountains, blend their colours with the skies which they appear to reach. The gradual rise of one of them, induced us to conceive it practicable to ascend it; and such is the engrossing nature of these objects, that they seem to efface every other idea. We are no longer our own masters; and it is next to impossible to stop the impulse of our inclinations. – It would open still new scenes of more extensive grandeur – That, as we certainly should gain a view behind the Needles [Aiguilles], such a point of elevation, (beyond which no mortal whatever had yet gone) would not only present Mount Blanc to us under a new form, and with new beauties, but that in short, looking towards the south, we should have a picture of all Italy before us as in a Camera Obscura. It was thus the wildness of the imagination prompted us to think the project possible, and we were in full enjoyment of our reverie, when a horrid noise from the very same Glaciers put an end to this delightful dream, and shattered all the scenery at once.28 With the return of ‘Reason’, then, with Bourrit’s realization that any further ascent ‘would require our stay all night upon this frozen valley, which was absolutely impossible, from the want of fuel only’, the ‘fancied picture’ dissipates.29 However, Bourrit’s image of ascent, enabling scientific discovery (a ‘new’ perspective on Mont Blanc, ‘all Italy [    ] in a Camera Obscura’) and gratifying the ‘wildness of the imagination’, would shape the course of European thinking about the Alps. Bourrit’s Description was also largely responsible for situating that ‘astonishing mountain’, the ‘immense’ Mont Blanc itself on Europe’s cultural map of the Alps, and at the heart of romantic-period writing about the Alpine sublime.30 In his account of the Alpine sublime in the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ of the Description, Bourrit affirmed that ‘Mount Blanc especially [    ] produces a sensation which it is very difficult to explain [and which] no tongue whatever is capable of describing

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and conveying justly to others’, combining the indescribability trope with a valorization of first-hand experience.31 After his first visit to Chamonix in 1767, Saussure had offered a substantial reward to anyone who could discover a viable route to the summit of Mont Blanc. In his ‘Preliminary Discourse’, Bourrit cautioned that ‘it is certainly a very great mistake [    ] in any person, to suppose it possible for him to ascend Mount Blanc’, though he himself would subsequently try and fail on a number of occasions, spurred on by that same ‘restless inclination’.32 Notwithstanding the Description’s ostensible insistence on the ‘absolute impossibility of ascending to its summit’, however, it is nevertheless Bourrit who first holds out to the European reading public the tantalizing prospect of the view from the top of Mont Blanc.33 Describing the ‘magnificent prospect of a chain of mountains’ that Chamonix presents, Bourrit wonders aloud to his readers, in a footnote: ‘what would it be then if we could ascend the summit of Mount Blanc?’34 The first recorded attempt to do exactly that had taken place in 1762, when a party of local hunters failed to find approaches via both Montenvers and the Bossons glacier.35 Interest in the climb intensified considerably in the mid-1770s, however, spurred on less by Saussure’s reward than by Mont Blanc’s increasing grip on the European imagination. At least eighteen unsuccessful attempts took place between 1775 and 1784, three of which involved Bourrit, accompanied on one occasion by Saussure himself. Finally, on 8 August 1786, Michel-Gabriel Paccard (a local doctor) and Jacques Balmat (a local crystal hunter), became the first men to see the view imagined by Bourrit, reaching the summit of Mont Blanc by the now seldom-used route known as the ‘ancien passage’. As with the first ascent of Everest, there was an immediate controversy about who got to the top first. On 20 September 1786, Bourrit published his Lettre sur le Premier Voyage fait au Sommet du Mont Blanc – deliberately scooping Paccard’s advertised but ultimately never published Premier Voyage á la Cime de la plus Haute Montagne d’Ancien Continent, Le Mont Blanc – in which he gave the honour to Balmat, in terms far from flattering to Paccard. The bourgeois doctor, Bourrit insisted, in a narrative clearly calculated to appeal to nascent revolutionary and romantic sensibilities, had been terrified and exhausted by the climb, and reached the summit only because of the energy and persistence of the intrepid peasant, Balmat. As the first available account of the 1786 ascent, Bourrit’s narrative was quickly disseminated and gained widespread acceptance. Hence Paccard’s star would drop increasingly below the Alpine horizon, so much so indeed, that John Ruskin’s 1853 poem, ‘Evening at Chamouni’,

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conflated an earlier failed expedition in which Balmat had been forced to spend the night alone on the Dôme du Goûter with the actual ascent itself, affirming that having ‘braved’ the ‘stormy’ night ‘on Goûter’s height’, the ‘heroic Balmat’ awoke to find ‘the untrodden summit stood / Accessibly beside him’ (1–3, 22–3), perhaps a distorted echo of Percy Shelley’s anachronistic description of the ‘inaccessible’ summit in his 1816 poem ‘Mont Blanc’. On 21 August 1786, Paccard had tried and failed to repeat his earlier ascent; the following day, an expedition led by Saussure was also forced to turn back. On 5 July 1787, however, Balmat – commissioned by Saussure to consolidate the ‘ancien passage’ route – made it to the top for the second time. Less than one month later, led by Balmat, Saussure himself followed this route, reaching the summit on 3 August 1787, where he remained for four-and-a-half hours, conducting numerous scientific experiments. Saussure’s account of this expedition – in his Relation Abrégée d’un Voyage à la Cime du Mont Blanc en Août 1787 – was published in Geneva almost immediately after his descent, and was subsequently included, along with narratives of his five earlier attempts and extensive other Alpine journeys, in the 1796 edition of his Voyages dans les Alpes. English translations were quickly disseminated through periodicals and guidebooks, including Martyn’s aforementioned Sketch of a Tour. Saussure’s Relation is one of the first texts to emphasize the physical hardships of ascent: like many other climbers since, Saussure initially suffered ‘great uneasiness’ on attaining the summit he had so long desired to reach.36 Indeed, the Relation draws an explicit parallel between learning to cope with this ‘uneasiness’ and learning to deal with ethical dilemmas, suggesting a kind of moral mountaineering, ‘this rule of conduct [    ] appears to me applicable in moral as well as natural causes’, Saussure affirms, ‘if you cannot bear the sight of the precipice and accustom yourself to it, give up the enterprise, for [    ] this sight if taken unawares [    ] may prove your destruction’.37 Most importantly for the purposes of this essay, however, is the extent to which Saussure’s Relation makes clear and effectively summarizes for the romantic period the correlation between physical ascent, scientific discovery, and aesthetic gratification that I have been tracing in eighteenth-century accounts of Chamonix-Mont Blanc. Recovering from the ‘painful ascension’, Saussure says he began to ‘enjoy without regret the grand spectacle’.38 ‘A light vapour suspended in the lower regions of the air, concealed from my sight the lowest and most distant objects’, he recalls, ‘but I did not much regret this loss’:

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What I had just seen and what I saw in the clearest manner, is the whole of all the high summits of which I had so long desired to know the organization. I could hardly believe my eyes, it appeared to me like a dream, when I saw placed under my eyes those majestic summits. [    ] I seized their relation to each other, their connection, their structure, and a single glance cleared up doubts that years of labour had not been able to dissolve.39 From the highest point in Western Europe, then, Saussure vindicated for the reading and travelling public the distinction between the mountaineer and the tourist, between those who merely contemplate the mountains from the valley and those who actually ascend them, gaining aesthetic, moral and scientific insight denied to even the most industrious of those who remain below. It is precisely this valorization of altitude, I would suggest, so prominent in eighteenth-century writing about the Alps, that informs the consistent collocation, in British romantic-period writing, of elevated consciousness and elevated landscape. That same valorization informs some of the key romantic-period debates about Chamonix-Mont Blanc, not least Shelley’s aforementioned response to Coleridge’s ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’, in which Shelley counters Coleridge’s pious valley view of Mont Blanc – ‘I raise my head, awhile bowed low / In adoration, upward from thy base / Slow travelling with dim eyes suffused with tears’ (‘Hymn before Sunrise’, 75–7) – with the confident assertion ‘I look on high’ (‘Mont Blanc’, 52), extolling a kind of epistemological Alpinism which rejects the mind’s defeat by the natural sublime in favour of a confident, though always respectful, poetics of ascent.40 We might conclude, then, adapting Samuel Holt Monk’s influential, teleological reading of the development of the aesthetics of the sublime, that British romantic-period engagements with the Alpine sublime owed far less to eighteenth-century theorists ‘groping’ their way towards Kant’s ‘philosophical system’ than to eighteenth-century travellers and scientists scaling the mountains and glaciers above Chamonix.41

Notes 1. Quoted from The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 362. Glossing his ‘Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni’, a much-expanded translation of Friederike Brun’s ‘Chamouni beym Sonnenaufgange’ (1795), Coleridge asked ‘Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders’ – prompting Percy Bysshe Shelley, amongst others,

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

to reply in his 1816 poem ‘Mont Blanc’. For a detailed account of Coleridge’s debt to Brun, see Elinor Shaffer, ‘Coleridge’s Swiss Voice: Friederike Brun and the Vale of Chamouni’, in Essays in Memory of Michael Parkinson, Norwich Papers IV, ed. Christopher Smith (Norwich: UEA, 1996), pp. 67–76. I return to Shelley’s debate with Coleridge below. M. J. G. Ebel, Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland, ed. and trans. Daniel Wall (London, 1818), p. 376. For an indication of the extent to which Ebel was voicing a conventional refrain, compare Samuel Glover’s 1819 Description of the Valley of Chamouni, in Savoy: ‘Among the events which mark the annals of the last century, one of the most interesting is the discovery of the lovely, the fertile, the highly romantic Valley of Chamouni’ (p. 7). Ebel, Traveller’s Guide through Switzerland, p. 10. William Windham, An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy, In Two Letters, One from an English Gentleman to his Friend at Geneva; The Other from Peter Martel, Engineer, to the Said English Gentleman (London, 1744). Martel visited Chamonix in 1742, after having read Windham’s original letter to his ‘friend at Geneva’, the painter Arlaud. Martel sent Windham a description of this journey on his return, which he subsequently included in the Account. Ibid., pp. 1, 8. For an indication of the extent to which this tension has become conventional by the early nineteenth century, compare Percy Shelley’s 22 July 1816 letter from Chamonix to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, ‘how shall I describe to you the scenes by which I am now surrounded. – To exhaust epithets which express the astonishment & the admiration [    ]. Is this to impress upon your mind the images which fill mine now, even until it overflows? I too had read before now the raptures of travellers. I will be warned by their example. I will simply detail to you, all that I can relate, or all that if related I could enable you to conceive of what we have done or seen’. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), I, 495. Ibid., pp. 10, 25. Ibid., pp. 1, 11. M. H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), p. 372. H. M. Williams, Tour in Switzerland; or, A View of the Present State of the Governments and Manners of Those Cantons: With Comparative Sketches of the Present State of Paris, 2 vols (London, 1798), I, 57. William Hazlitt, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930–34), X, 189. [Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley], A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland (London, 1817), p. v. The Tour’s Preface was written by Percy Shelley. The phrase ‘classic ground’ was apparently coined by Joseph Addison in his Letter from Italy (1701; pub. 1703) line 12; it had become something of a commonplace by Shelley’s day. Thomas Martyn, Sketch of a Tour through Switzerland: With an Accurate Map. A New Edition, to Which is Added a Short Account of an Expedition to the Summit of Mont Blanc, by M. De Saussure, of Geneva (London, 1788).

Cian Duffy 159 13. Henry Coxe (pseudonym of Peter Millard), The Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland; Being a Complete Picture of That Interesting Country; Describing Every Object of Curiosity, and Containing Sketches of the Manners, Society, and Customs of its Respective Cantons; With a Detailed Account of the Cities of Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, and Zurich, and their Environs; The Alpine Passes of the Simplon, St. Gothard, and St. Bernard; The Glaciers of Chamouny and Grindelwald; And a Narrative of the Various Attempts to Ascend Mont Blanc (London, 1816). 14. Windham, An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy, p. 12. 15. Ibid., p. 26; original emphasis. 16. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 text), vi, 587, 323; quoted from Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.), The Prelude: The Four Texts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 17. J. M. de la Condamine, Journal of a Tour to Italy, trans. anon. (Dublin, 1763), p. 166. 18. Marc Théodore Bourrit, A Relation of a Journey to the Glaciers in the Dutchy of Savoy, trans. by C. and F. Davy (Norwich, 1775). All quotations are from this text. 19. Bourrit, A Relation of a Journey, p. ii. 20. Ibid., pp. 116–17, 243–4. 21. Ibid., p. 116. 22. Ibid., p. 117. 23. Ibid., p. 65. 24. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 25. Ibid., p. 92. 26. Ibid., p. 112. 27. Ibid., p. 114. 28. Ibid., pp. 114–15; my emphasis. 29. Ibid., p. 116. 30. Ibid., pp. 211, 141. 31. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 32. Ibid., p. xviii. 33. Ibid., p. 141. 34. Ibid., p. 68n. 35. For factual data concerning the ascent of Mont Blanc, I am indebted to Thomas Brown and Gavin de Beer’s entertaining history The First Ascent of Mont Blanc (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). 36. H. B. Saussure, Relation Abrégée d’un Voyage à la Cime du Mont Blanc is quoted from the translation given in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in all Parts of the World, 17 vols (London, 1809–14), iv, 677–711 (p. 700). 37. Ibid., p. 700. 38. Ibid., p. 691. 39. Ibid., p. 691. 40. Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ is quoted from the text printed in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, pp. 175–83. 41. S. H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 213, 4.

13 ‘Those Syren-Haunted Seas Beside’: Naples in the Work of Staël, Hemans, and the Shelleys Nanora Sweet

In Britain’s political and literary culture after 1798, Naples served as a ‘debatable land’ for figures from Horatio Nelson to Mary Shelley. A city of 400,000 and a kingdom of two million, Naples was key to Britain’s strategic interests in the Mediterranean. Bourbon and Hapsburg in its royalty, Naples posed a diplomatic challenge for Britain, the British ambassador’s courtesan wife adding a spice of scandal. Naples’s revolutions of 1798–99 and 1820–21 were among the most destabilizing episodes of the era for Britain: Naples was barely within her influence and split between populist and élite politics. To voice the lulls and revolutions in Naples’s ‘debatable lands’, British writers turned to its legendary female voices, the siren Parthenope and the Cumean sibyl.1 Naples held dangers for Nelson and the British interests he served – as his biographer Robert Southey acknowledged.2 Once Rome’s naval base, Naples boasted the Mediterranean’s principal fleet in 1798. Naples supplied Nelson in 1793 and welcomed him in 1798 after the Battle of the Nile; but its harbour came with a populous city and kingdom that Nelson could not control and a court that, through Emma Hamilton’s sexual favours, could control him. The results were ill-fated military expeditions to Malta and Rome, the court’s flight with Nelson to Sicily and orders for the burning of Naples’s fleet, a French-sponsored (then deserted) republic in 1799, and Nelson’s revocation of amnesty for the city’s republican élite. Prophetically, the decimation of this élite did not prevent another revolution in 1820. A legendary shore for Odysseus and Aeneas, colony of Magna Graecia, Roman then Byzantine terminus, Naples assumed its modern form in the twelfth century as a kingdom yoked to Sicily by Norman state-building. Marriage into the Swabian line made Naples a Holy Roman imperial capital, before the execution of prince Conradin by Charles of Anjou 160

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1268, followed by the Sicilian Vespers uprising of 1282. Spain’s later viceroyalty yielded Masaniello’s revolt in 1647.3 For British writers after Waterloo, these events anticipated the Parthenopean Republic of 1799 and unrest in the restored Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, leading to revolutions in 1820–21. Hemans closed her 1819 Tales, and Historic Scenes with ‘The Death of Conradin’; its dramatic sequel, The Vespers of Palermo, went into production in 1823. In 1819 Percy Shelley called on the ‘West Wind’ to stir ‘Baiae’s bay’ to ‘prophecy’; in 1820 his ‘Ode to Naples’ welcomed the Constitutional Government as a bloodless revolution.4 A decade later, hearing siren and sibyl in the city’s continued doldrums, Hemans quoted Shelley in her 1834 ‘Naples: A Song of the Syren’. British writing on Naples’s debatable lands involved a range of writers, variously expatriated, cosmopolitan and female: British Catholic travellers Henry Swinburne and John Chetwode Eustace; internationalists Germaine de Staël and J.-C.-L. Sismondi and their sources like Goethe and disciples like Hemans; publicists Ugo Foscolo, Helen Maria Williams, Eleanora Pimentel; the Shelley circle. These writers traded in disseminative genres, travel writing, publicist history, and legendary tales. Still, it is poetry, and novels echoing that poetry – Staël’s Corinne (1807) and Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826) – that hold the prized promontories of Naples’s debatable lands. Naples’s legendary and historical topography gave these writings their doublings and echoings, their siren songs and sibylline prophecies. First named after the siren Parthenope who perished at its shore for love of Odysseus, Naples once observed civic rites at her tomb on Pizzafalcone hill.5 There, too, the city was fortified by Castel dell’Ovo, legendary repository of Virgil’s magic, city-preserving egg. Considered a Christian prophet for his fourth Eclogue, Virgil was popularly credited with saving Naples from flies and Vesuvius.6 To the west of the city, travellers sought his tomb on Posilipo hill, near the bay and cape of Aeneas’s companions, Misenus and Baius, and the cavern of his Cumean Sibyl.7 To the east of Castel dell’Ovo lay the Mercato, where Masaniello plotted and was killed, where the blood of Conradin and his Neapolitan supporters was shed after a judicial travesty staged by Charles of Anjou. In Sismondi’s account, ‘one sole judge [    ] subject to Charles’ condemned Conradin. Similarly, in 1799 the Bourbon tribunal backed by Nelson used one hand-picked judge to condemn a hundred writers and professionals to hanging in the Mercato.8 Sismondi recounts that a crowd received Conradin’s ‘gage’ of revenge there; in 1799 poetjournalist Eleanor de Fonseca Pimentel went to her death there, quoting Virgil.9 She was followed in execution by Luisa Sanfelice, bed-partner

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of royalists, siren-turned-sibyl in revealing a Bourbon plot. Killed at the Mercato but prophetically remembered, Naples’s republican élite left a record in Pimentel’s newspaper Monitore napoletano. A society poet typecast as a siren, Pimentel became a ‘political sibyl’ and idealist predecessor of Naples’s own Benedetto Croce.10 ‘Unforgot’, ‘Forget’, ‘free’, ‘not free’: Hemans will ring these changes on Neapolitan historiography in her siren-sibyl songs; repression and preconception have plagued that historiography. Garibaldi’s capture of Naples secured the Risorgimento but subordinated Italy’s south to its north. In 1925 Croce tried to confine these losses, taking Naples as an always-already ‘amputated’ state. For Robert Casillo, the results are a less agile ‘empire of stereotype’, oversimplified as sunshine, soothing melody, and femininity. For Nelson Moe, a ‘unitary conceptual framework’ traps Naples regionally in ‘the Southern question’; for Roberto Dainotto, regionalism is chained to nationalism.11 In Romantic-era writing, however, Neapolitan locale remains debatable. It is an epic seascape reaching straits once dubbed Scylla and Charybdis, a freebooting colony still infested with brigands, a maritime polis of capes and bays and isles, a would-be republic cast among competing empires and its own state origins as a kingdom. To its north are Virgil’s supposed Elysium and Erebus, rewritten in Percy Shelley’s sexually visionary Prometheus Unbound;12 to its south are the city’s geothermally entombed others, Pompeii and Herculaneum. Like Shelley, Hemans devoted a range of work to greater Naples: ‘Alaric in Italy’, ‘The Maremma’, ‘An Image in Lava’, ‘The Release of Tasso’, ‘Tasso and His Sister’, ‘And I Too in Arcadia’. Against an empire of misogynist stereotypes, Romantic Naples is a place of strong female supplement in virtue, vice and truth-telling. In her ‘Chant’ at Naples, Staël’s siren-sibyl ‘Corinne’ catalogues its compendious bay of capes and isles, privileging the ‘political sibyl’. Her prospect from the Bay’s northwest promontory at Misenum grants a view northward to Gaeta where Rome’s great republican Cicero met assassination; closer by are volcanic fields, Virgil’s Erebus edged by his Elysian shore; then the sibyl at Cumae, Aeneas’s guide to Erebus; offshore, the exilic isles Procida and Ischia, where Rome’s civic widows languished and the 1799 republicans were tried; then Baiae, with Misenum Rome’s naval base, and with Capri its imperial resort; finally Vesuvius to the southeast, and Sorrento farther south, site of Tasso’s mournful homecoming in Goethe, Staël and Hemans. Only Naples the city is occluded from this prospect, its human epicentre repressed if unforgot. The Shelley circle drafted its own Neapolitan circuit. Reading Corinne at Naples in December 1818, Percy appears from a letter to Peacock

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to draw his Neapolitan sites instead from the more conservative John Chetwode Eustace’s frequently published Classical Tour of Italy (1813). When Eustace describes Posilipo’s promontory broken into ‘bays, islands and caverns, and these again hollowed by art into grottos, baths, and recesses’ and Sorrento’s shore of ‘the Syrens’ with ‘murmurs of the waves echoing amid the crags and the caverns’, Shelley syncretizes Eustace as ‘lofty rocks & craggy islets, with arches & portals of precipice standing in the sea, & enormous caverns which echoed faintly with the murmur of the languid tide’: both call these hollows the ‘Scuola di Virgilio’.13 In her 1844 Rambles through Germany and Italy, Mary complements Corinne with a prospect from the Bay’s southern arm at Sorrento, associated with the sirens and Tasso, the love-crazed laureate manqué.14 She gave Virgil’s sibylline caverns to her female protagonists in 1823 and 1826: in Valperga Euthanasia is lost in ‘the ocean-cave wherein she lay’; in The Last Man, narration begins in the grotto near Cumae taken as the sibyl’s.15 Each of these women’s novels inhabits a convoluted time, prophetic, amnesiac, mythic, topical. The Last Man pieces together a future from sibylline leaves, a pastiche seamless as déjà vu, a futurist world of anachronism and topicality à clef.16 Corinne is sibylline in its allusions to Virgil and Dante and its swerves from them, as Marie-Claire Vallois and Linda Lewis indicate.17 But Corinne is as much a ‘political sibyl’ as a literary one, the novel’s topical time suggests. Written in 1806, set in 1794–98, Corinne alludes throughout – largely by implication – to Napoleon’s incursions into Italy after 1796, discussing artwork actually in the Louvre, predicting Nelvil’s posting to the wars. Corinne might allude, too, to the failed Parthenopean Republic of 1798–99 and Nelson’s role there, and the situation in 1805 of his siren Emma Hamilton, awaiting her disposition by the England that rejected ‘Corinne’.18 We know that, visiting Naples in 1805, Staël talked with its Queen about the kingdom’s political troubles.19 Like Nelson, Staël’s ‘Nelvil’ appears as a British officer new to the ways of Italy, deaf to its sibyl, subject to its siren. As Naples’s court had in 1798, Staël sought British support against Napoleon; in Paris after Waterloo, she made Wellington a good friend in this interest.20 When Corinne appeared in 1807, readers would recall Nelson’s recent death at Trafalgar, certainly in the English naval scene. ‘Nel’vil’ has not been read as a Nelson figure in Corinne; yet both men are maimed, siren-ridden heroes seeking release in battle.21 In their topical convolutions, the novels of Staël and Shelley pit anachronism against amnesia, sibyl against siren – as Hemans will in her lyric ‘Naples’.

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In supplementing siren with sibyl, these novels’ historiographic structures move past one-dimensional tales of sirenic love and loss. Yet it is poetry, as Corinne will illustrate, that presses forward the Neapolitan debate. A repressed term in Staël’s book, ‘Parthenope’ appears only in quotation from Virgil’s Georgics, its coda, which Corinne offers as an epitaph for the poet’s supposed tomb on Posilipo hill: ‘In those days sweet Parthenope nourished me’.22 Reading Staël’s Virgil as a ‘ “naïf” ’ (topographical) poet, Jean-Marie Roulin enlists the Latin poet in the ‘continuité’ and ‘syncrétisme’ of her poetics.23 Like Virgil, Goethe is a tutelary figure for Staël’s poetics of Rome and Naples. As Harold Mah demonstrates, Goethe contributes to Staël’s grappling with the vexed and changing role of the ‘élite woman’, the siren-sibyl so ambiguous for Jacobin and Napoleonic France.24 As Balayé’s work with the Carnets demonstrates, Corinne originated with Staël’s visit to Weimar in 1803. The germ was Parthenopean, a theatrical portrayal of a water nymph loved by a man who abandons her for a mortal woman, which Staël supplemented with translations of Goethe’s poem ‘Der Fischer’.25 Goethe enriched Corinne with further poetry, offering his love of Roman elegy with motifs of his Italian travels.26 Like Corinne’s Chants, his Mignon’s song, ‘Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn,’ is a poem within a novel, Wilhelm Meister: its aromatic lemon becomes her motif for the Neapolitan South; Goethe adds myrtle and laurel, Venus and Apollo.27 Working from the Carnets, Balayé concludes that Staël privileged not prose or improvisation, but poetry in Corinne: German, Latin and Italian. Balayé’s Corinne is closely companionate with the poetry of Propertius, Tibellus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Metastasio, Pindemonte, Alfieri, Thomson – and Goethe.28 Goethe is Parthenopean like Virgil; for Mah he crosses boundaries of culture and gender, as the siren does those of species (bird or fish, woman). Like Corinne, he is part North and part South, more Italianate than the Italians. His magic is Neapolitan – it is poetry. On entering the Kingdom’s northern province, Staël felt ‘the Italian miracle’ finally happening in the aromatic ‘accents of Goethe’, of Mignon’s song: ‘It is in Campania, it is at Naples, that the revelation takes place’.29 Goethe had written, ‘The Neapolitan believes himself in possession of Paradise’; Mary Shelley wrote, ‘Now, for the first time, the charm of the country was revealed to me’, ‘This is Paradise’, ‘the secret of Italian poetry’.30 The fruit of this ‘revelation’ for Staël was indeed poetry, ‘Épitre sur Naples’: as Balayé supposes, a first effort toward the ‘Chants’ of Corinne. It opens, Goethe-like, ‘Connois-tu cette terre où les

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myrtes fleurissent [    ] ?’ The Chant at the Capitol will echo Goethe’s ‘Mignon’ (‘Do you know this land where orange trees bloom [    ] ?’, p. 29). ‘Épitre’ catalogues Neapolitan topography;31 but in her Chant at Naples Staël transforms the closed couplets of ‘Épitre sur Naples’ and its all-male, all-classical system into Parthenopean-Cumean terms.32 Corinne has pointed out ‘the temple of the Cumaean Sibyl’ and Virgil’s tomb, quoted Virgil on Parthenope, heard a peasant dance ‘echoing, echoing’ from rocks to sea. Now she ascends the utmost reach of the Bay’s north arm, Cape Misenum (pp. 238–40). Desperately unhappy at her impending abandonment by Nelvil, she is a Parthenope and a Sappho: placing and displacing history and poetry at Naples’s shores she becomes a sibyl. Early in her catalogue Corinne turns north to Aeneas’s sites, to Misenum itself, recording the fall of his trumpeter ‘into these waves’, saying ‘these hollow, echoing rocks are as Virgil described them’. Balayé protests that the Aeneid speaks of Misenus’s death ‘on the Strand’.33 Pace Balayé, Staël’s very purpose is her cobbling together, from neighbouring passages in the Aeneid, the ‘hollow, echoing rocks’ suitable for sibylline prophecy: the ‘spacious Cave’ that Daedalus ‘fashion’d’ for the Cumean Sibyl, with its ‘hundred doors’, ‘Thro’ the Hills hollow sides’ where ‘the Sibyl’s Words as many times rebound’. There is a ‘rushing Whirlwind’ that ‘roars’ in the cave, restoring ‘Sibyl’s Voice’ and, when the Sibyl spoke, ‘The cave rebellow’d’.34 The Sibyl is a voice, a female voice – a wind become words. In the Chant, Staël condenses the male republican catalogue of ‘Épitre’ to three strophes (12–14) and adds the imperial resorts familiar from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (‘old palaces and towers’, l. 34).35 Then she turns her catalogue to women, civic widows abandoned (as Corinne herself will be), sometimes assassinated on these volcanic banks and isles (suggesting Pimentel and Sanfelice) (15–17, 19–20). Their cries may be sirenic, but the Chant accents the sibylline. In the interlude after strophe 18, Corinne is saluted with ‘branches of myrtle and laurel’ (p. 243). Shortly after resuming her Chant, she turns her gaze to Sorrento, home of Tasso. As Balayé notes, this laureate manqué ‘fascinated’ Staël – not least through his portrayal by Goethe in Torquato Tasso. Corinne knows from her own crowning that the poet is ‘elected or proscribed’, ‘shaken’ like Apollo’s oracle ‘by a cruel power’ (23).36 Crossing gender lines, Tasso is an oracle too, shaken by the gods; as Misenus was, on this height; as Corinne will be, giddy and pale. Percy Shelley crosses these boundaries in ‘Ode to Naples’, seized by prophecy after flirting with Naples’s deadly

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siren song in his ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection – December 1818, Near Naples’. New scholarship on ‘Ode to Naples’ unearths its Neapolitan past and present and rhetorical present in the British readers Shelley hoped for. In Shelley’s ‘Ode’, written in late summer 1820 as the constitutional movement backed Ferdinand I into a corner, Michael Erkelenz discerns Magna Graecia and the Pindaric ode: triadic, monitory, mythic-civic.37 After the Congress of Vienna, Britain deferred to Austria throughout Italy; but here Shelley seeks an audience of enfranchized Britons for his rewriting of Pindar’s rich array of convolutions and displacements. Shelley’s stunning poem has found perhaps its best reader in Erkelenz, who also glosses for current scholarship the myth of Parthenope (pp. 400, 413). This slippery founding deity represents for Shelley a Naples who ‘ever pantest / Naked beneath the lidless eye of Heaven!’ (ll. 52–3). A venereal figure in Erkelenz’s Shelley, Parthenope is ‘humanity’s love for Apollo’, wordless adorer of Olympian rule. In this poem of urgent yet doubtful prophecy, Shelley’s last strophe finesses uncertain revolution with an apostrophe to this ‘Love’ filling the city’s sons with ‘harmonizing ardours’. The poem ends in a word Hemans will ring changes on, ‘let be, / This City of thy worship, ever free!’ Also enlisted in the poem is the sibyl herself, the poet invoking the ‘oracular’ (ll. 6, 49), projecting freedom for Italy, himself assuming the Apollonian high ground and leaving the feminine to the siren’s wordless song. Commentary by Michael Rossington broadens this Ode’s textual field further in gender and culture. His confirmation in ‘Claire Clairmont’s Fair Copy’ that Claire made the copy text for its two periodical appearances suggests that the final stage of poem’s composition possibly coincided with Shelley’s four-day stay with her in Livorno (August– September 1820). A Naples enthusiast, Claire had been reading Vincenzo Cuoco’s Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletena del 1799. In further work, Rossington adds Mary Shelley’s acute words on constitutionalism in Naples and points to readings by the Shelley circle on Naples in Giannone and Sismondi.38 In 1819 Felicia Hemans published her Tales, and Historic Scenes, a sequence that cites Sismondi’s Histoire often and emulates its historiography, where scaffold scenes defer republican outcome but prophesy new revolts.39 The book’s final piece, the 180-line ‘The Death of Conradin’, looks towards Hemans’s The Vespers of Palermo, drafted by spring 1821.40 Hemans fields an inclusive compendium of Neapolitan debate in ‘Conradin’, her dialogic terms enforcing siren

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and sibyl through contrasts of light/dark, water/blood, bloom/blade, lull/eruption. Not a laureate ode like Corinne’s or Shelley’s, Hemans’s poem of scene and narrative in thirteen verse paragraphs uses relatively open couplets whose caesuras at dashes can have a whiplash effect (e.g., ‘Now mutely suffering – never to forgive!’).41 Always aware of literary currency, Hemans might have realized the political topicality of her work on Naples as well, for her brother T. H. Browne was active in Italy, 1818–21, as private secretary to Britain’s ambassador to Vienna and investigator of Naples’s new British siren, Princess Caroline.42 Her headnote excerpted from Sismondi offers republican sentiment, moves to details of Anjou’s judicial outrage reminiscent of 1799, and features the scaffold dramaturgy she will skew to the feminine, with Conradin’s body buried at the shoreline of the Mercato’s.43 Like Staël, who supplemented male republicans like Cicero with Roman matrons disposed about its Bay, Hemans supplements Sismondi’s Italian republican plot with female suffering and speech in ‘Conradin’. In three notes she reflects three sources on the Roman matrons, underscoring her theme: Corinne, Universal History, and one unattributed but possibly from Henry Swinburne.44 As the poem closes, Hemans supplements Sismondi with Swinburne on Conradin, making the prince’s mother dramatically present at the Mercato’s shore. Describing Conradin’s ‘lifeless trunk’, Swinburne is particularly baroque.45 Cast ashore near Pizzafalcone hill, this widow bereft of her son combines in one the roles of siren ‘in speechless grief’ and sibyl in her cry ‘My Conradin! my child’: these become the dolorosa (l. 180) – which, in the ‘Stabat Mater’ of native son Pergolesi, Naples admits and Hemans loves.46 Hemans’s sources for Neapolitan debate join those of Staël and the Shelleys in coming to light. Still, the Virgilian matter that pervades ‘Conradin’ – with Virgil’s vespertinal manner (e.g., ‘the purple radiance of Elysium’) – receives no annotation beyond the poet’s own second, unattributed note: ‘The urn, supposed to have contained the ashes of Virgil, has long since been lost’. Readers of Eustace will recognize his ‘classical tour’ here (and spelling, syren). Unlike Staël or the Shelleys, Hemans registers Eustace on Naples as ‘the principal station of the Roman fleet’, noting ‘Roman streamers’ are no more at ‘Misenum’s cape’. On Virgil’s urn ‘at Posilippo’s height’, which Eustace speculates was removed for safekeeping and lost (or was never there), Hemans responds, ‘What though his dust be scattered [    ] ?’ Her ‘wanderer’ seeks Virgil’s guidance, ‘those syren-haunted seas beside’: ‘The soul, the

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genius of Parthenope,’ ‘his lays [    ] murmur’d’ on breeze and waves and ‘orange groves’. Hemans’s Virgil swerves toward the Goethean here, the Parthenopean, leaving Conradin’s mother to face ‘yet another crime’ on ‘th’Elysian shore’ and enact the sibyl’s role. There she ‘hath found his grave’, ‘Unhonour’d, unadorn’d – but unforgot ’.47 This pointed word extends to Hemans’s lyric ‘Naples: A Song of the Syren’ and its changes on ‘free’ and ‘forgot’. ‘Naples’ appears in the 1834 National Lyrics, and Songs for Music, a volume neglected by the poet’s critics and editors but yielding verbal pleasure in poems like ‘Nightblowing Flowers’ and ‘I dream of all things free’ – also collecting her Goethean ‘Mignon’s Song’ and Shelleyan ‘The Swan and the Skylark’ and more poems companionate with our topic.48 Her ‘Naples’ lends the concision of lyric to the siren-sibyl terms governing Neapolitan debate. It is well timed for the early 1830s, a moment of promise under Ferdinand II that would yield more repression, stagnation and revolution in 1848.49 As her epigraph, Hemans uses the first lines of Shelley’s Epode II. in ‘Ode to Naples’, evidently from Posthumous Poems, slightly misquoting its fourth line: ‘Then gentle winds arose, / With many a mingled close / Of wild Aeolian sound and mountain-odour keen, / Where the clear Baian ocean / Welters with air-like motion / Within, above, around its bowers of starry green’.50 The lyric is a framed ‘Song’ with an evolving refrain, in which Naples’s siren and sibyl move through balanced yet dynamic form. After an introductory stanza, the Syren ‘sings’ four stanzas with refrains: ‘Forget, forget, that thou art not free!’; twice more repeated shorn of one ‘forget’; then the final stanza taking a strong turn. Hemans dismisses the Syren for a response (‘sternly, mournfully’) ‘from Sibyl grots / And Roman tombs’: let ‘the echoes of thy shore / Take up the cadence of her strain alone, / Murmuring – Thou art not free!’ In Hemans’s musical double entendre, cadence means the rhythmic phrasing of a refrain but also a truncated dying fall with a quite different burden. The full refrain is the siren’s seduction to ‘Forget, forget, that thou art not free’ – a line already unsettled by its own insistence. The cadence yields instead the admonition, even call-to-arms, ‘Thou art not free!’ From epigraph to refrain, Hemans reopens Shelley’s ‘Ode’, Staël’s ‘Chant’, and her own Scene for a new moment. In the unchaining of her refrains, a one-dimensional siren song is unleashed for prophecy when answered by the sibyl’s cave.

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Notes 1. Virgil’s Aeneid 6 portrays the Sibyl. On her supposed grotto, see Luca Cerchiai, Lorena Janelli, and Fausto Longo, The Greek Cities of Magna Graecia and Sicily (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), pp. 41–8. Originally bird-women, on sirens see J. R. T. Pollard in ‘Muses and Sirens’, Classical Review, n.s. 2 (1952), 60–3, also Strabo and Lycophron below. 2. Robert Southey, The Life of Nelson (1813) (London: Dent, 1962), pp. 15–55; see Ugo Foscolo, ‘An Account of the Revolution in Naples during the Years 1798, 1799’, New Monthly Magazine, 1 (January 1821), 33–64; and Constance H. D. Giglioli, Naples in 1799: An Account of the Revolution of 1799 and of the Rise and Fall of the Parthenopean Republic (London: John Murray, 1903). 3. Note James Kenney’s Masaniello (1829 libretto for Auber opera) and The Sicilian Vespers (1840), beyond this essay’s scope. 4. I quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) – here ‘Ode to the West Wind’, pp. 413–14, ll. 32 and 69 – except for ‘Ode to Naples’, where I use Michael Rossington’s transcription in ‘Claire Clairmont’s Fair Copy of Shelley’s “Ode to Naples”: A Rediscovered Manuscript’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 56 (2005), 59–89; see l. 84. 5. Lycophron, Alexandra (ll. 732–7), in Callimachus, Lycophron, Aratus, trans. A. W. Mair (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 380–1; Strabo, 5.4, Geography, trans. Horace Leonard Jones, 8 vols (London: Heinemann, 1923), II, 449. 6. On Parthenope and Virgil, see Alexander Polovtsoff, The Call of the Siren (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1939), pp. 19–39 and passim. 7. John Chetwode Eustace, A Classical Tour Through Italy. An. MDCCII, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1814), I, 505–19. 8. J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, 16 vols (Paris, 1826), III, 387; trans. Susan J. Wolfson in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 168; Giglioli, Naples in 1799, 211–17. 9. Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, III, 393; Jordan Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Cultural History of Naples (London: Tauris, 2005), p. 178; Foscolo, 59. 10. I quote Linda M. Lewis’s term, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 14. See Lancaster, In the Shadow of Vesuvius, pp. 174–5; Benedetto Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, ed. H. Stuart Hughes, trans. Frances Frenaye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), passim. 11. Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, p. 43; Robert Casillo, The Empire of Stereotypes: Germaine de Staël and the Idea of Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 40; Roberto M. Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 12. See Alan M. Weinberg, Shelley’s Italian Experience (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 108–10; Benjamin Colbert, Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 200.

170 Europe and Beyond 13. Eustace, I, 519, II, 13. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 57–68 (p. 61). Notwithstanding Shelley’s dismissal of Eustace for Peacock’s ears (I, 54), Colbert points to his surprising prominence in the poet’s work (116–84). 14. In Mary Shelley, Travel Writing, ed. Jeanne Moskal, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook and Pamela Clemit, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), VIII, 368–86 (pp. 368–70). 15. Mary Shelley, Valperga, ed. Michael Rossington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 377. 16. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Morton D. Paley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 6, 363. 17. Marie-Claire Vallois, Fictions Féminines: Mme de Staël et les Voix de la Sibylle (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1987), p. 144; Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist, pp. 31, 36. 18. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. and ed. Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 192–276. 19. Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, p. 208. 20. J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Germaine de Staël (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 149–50, 456. 21. See de Staël, Corinne, p. 384; Southey, pp. 254–5. 22. See Goldberger, pp. 238 and 430 on Staël’s slight mistranslation of this line. 23. ‘Jean-Marie Roulin, ‘Bonstetten et Madame de Stael’, in Risonanze classiche nell’Europa romantica, ed. Annarosa Poli and Emanuele Kanceff, 2 vols (Moncalieri: Centro interuniversitario di ricerche sul viaggio in Italia, 1998), I, 175–87 (pp. 177, 184). 24. Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France, 1750–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 116–56. 25. Les Carnets de Voyage de Madame de Staël, ed. Simone Balayé (Geneva: Droz, 1971), pp. 98–9; Simone Balayé, Madame de Staël: Lumières et Liberté (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), pp. 106–7. 26. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, ed. Thomas P. Saine, trans. Robert R Heitner (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989). Goethe did not publish his Italienishe Reise until 1816–17, but his recollections circulated among friends: see Saine, Introduction, pp. 1–7 (pp. 5–6). 27. Space does not permit discussion of Goethe’s poetry in Staël’s De l’Allemagne. 28. Goldberger’s notes to Corinne re. Propertius, Petrarch, Tasso, etc., should be supplemented with those in Corinne, ou, L’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 29. Carnets, p. 116; my translation. 30. Mary Shelley, Travel Writing, p. 368; Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 152. 31. Oeuvres complètes de Mme la Barone de Staël, 17 vols (Paris, 1821), XVII, 415–19. 32. On Staël’s strophe writing, see Simone Balayé, ‘L’Improvisation de Corinne au Capitole: Les Strophes sur les poètes italiens: Manuscrits inédits de Madame de Staël’, in Resonant Themes: Literature, History, and the Arts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stirling Haig (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 17–32. 33. I quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, ed. Frederick M. Keener, trans. John Dryden (London: Penguin, 1997), IV, 255. Balayé, Corinne, ou, L’Italie, p. 622, n. 349c. 34. Virgil’s Aeneid, VI, 62–9, 127–8, 147–9.

Nanora Sweet 171 35. Strophe numbers are given in parentheses in the text; Goldberger, Corinne, pp. 241–5. 36. Carnets, p. 155. 37. Michael Erkelenz, ‘Unacknowledged Legislation: The Genre and Function of Shelley’s “Ode to Naples” ’, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 63–72; also ‘Shelley’s First Pythian’, Modern Philology, 97 (2000), 393–416. 38. Michael Rossington, ‘ “Metropolis of a Ruined Paradise”: Percy Shelley and the Neapolitan Revolution of 1820’, unpublished conference paper, 2003, and his edition of ‘Ode to Naples’ in The Poems of Shelley, Vol. 3, ed. Jack Donovan, et al. (London: Longman, 2008). 39. See Sismondi on Conradin, III, 386–90, 393. 40. Henry F. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, 2 vols (London, 1836), I, 65. See Diego Saglia, ‘ “Freedom’s Charter’d Air”: The Voices of Liberalism in Felicia Hemans’s The Vespers of Palermo’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 58 (2003), 326–67, and Marjean D. Purinton, ‘Shakespeare’s Ghost and Felicia Hemans’s The Vespers of Palermo’, Intertexts, 8 (2004), 135–54. Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, III, 393. 41. ‘The Death of Conradin’ in Felicia Hemans, ed. Wolfson, pp. 163–70, l. 162. 42. See my ‘ “The Inseparables”: Hemans, the Brownes, and the Milan Commission’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 39 (2003), 165–77. 43. ‘Conradin’, p. 163; Sismondi, Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge, III, 386–90. Hemans’s fifth note quotes Sismondi, III, 324. 44. ‘Conradin’, notes 5, 6, and 4; Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, 2 vols (Dublin, 1783), I, 43–8. Hemans’s original notes appear as Wolfson’s 1, 4–7, and 12. 45. ‘Conradin’, note 12; Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, II, 60. 46. Chorley, Memorials of Mrs. Hemans, II, 94, 99, 166. I thank Rebecca Jeyes for these citations. 47. Eustace, I, 540, 505–14. ‘Death of Conradin’, p. 168; ll. 44, 15–18, 32–42, 59–60, 174, 160. 48. Felicia Hemans, National Lyrics, and Songs for Music (Dublin, 1834). ‘Naples’ cited from Poems of Felicia Hemans, new edn (Edinburgh, 1854), p. 536. Julie Melnyk introduced me to this poem for our workshop ‘Neapolitan Readings’ at the 2004 meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. 49. Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, pp. 223–4; Harry Hearder, Italy in the Age of the Risorgimento, 1790–1870 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 141–8. Chorley, II, 207. 50. In that line Hemans adds ‘clear’ and omits ‘And’. She adopts the singular of ‘odour’ as does Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1824), p. 114. Cp. Rossington’s transcription of Shelley’s ‘Ode’, ll. 23–8.

14 Helen Maria Williams’s Peru and the Spanish Legacy of the British Empire Juan Sánchez

As the chapters in this book attest, romantic-era studies remain deeply invested in interrogating the various ‘global crossings’ of early nineteenth-century British literature. Current work on British romantic imperialism, transatlantic romanticisms, as well as increasing attention to travel writing, translation, and other transnational encounters have created new critical perspectives for reassessing early nineteenth-century British literature as explicitly international and global in its concerns rather than isolated and insular. Yet, despite this promising new turn towards more global scenarios, certain ‘romantic geographies’ still remain relatively neglected. Prominent among them have been those geographies of the Spanish-speaking world, particularly Latin America and, the focus of this chapter, Spain. Subsumed within a more generalized account of the Cult of the South or reconstructed negatively in terms of its Black Legend, Spain of the romantic period has traditionally been read either through its Gothic figurations as the unadulterated symbol of oppression or as merely part of a larger but inexact Mediterranean culture. In contrast, Diego Saglia has done more than any other critic to individuate this ‘debatable land’ by exploring the particular relevance of Spain to romantic-era writing, and has been the most important figure in laying the groundwork for further investigation into this still relatively unexplored topic.1 Yet, as Saglia himself would agree, much more work remains in further determining the complex ways in which Spain figured in British literary culture. Building on Saglia’s arguments on the important place of Iberia in early nineteenth-century British nationalist discourses, I want to shift focus to the international scene of the late eighteenth century and consider the role of literary representations of Spain in relation to what both historians and literary critics have identified as Britain’s ‘crisis of empire’. 172

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With an imperial history that had since its beginning been inextricably intertwined with Britain’s own global pursuits, Spain had become by the late eighteenth century a focal point around which a literary tradition engaged with questions of colonial ideology and practices developed. Helen Maria Williams’s Peru (1784) is an excellent example of such a text whose engagement with issues of empire is intimately linked to her literary figurations of Spain. Written in the wake of the American Revolution, Williams’s Peru has been typically read by such critics as Alan Richardson and Deborah Kennedy, among others, as an antiimperialist poem whose condemnation of Spanish rapacity functions as a more generalized indictment against European and, more specifically, British colonial violence.2 While these critics are right to situate this poem in the context of the widespread anti-colonialist discourses developing at the time, the suggestion that Spain simply operates as the incidental object of a displaced critique overlooks the important role literary engagements with Spain played in shaping rather than undermining Britain’s colonial ideology and the ambivalent attitude British writers often expressed towards Britain’s imperial rival. Situating the poem within the more specific historical context of late eighteenthcentury Anglo-Spanish rivalry in the Americas, I argue that Helen Maria Williams’s Peru engages with the larger ideological definition of the British Empire through its reworking of the Spanish material of the Black Legend. While the poem works to direct the British imperial project away from an ideology of conquest, as critics rightly argue, it does so only in an effort to reinforce an older colonialist paradigm that would not only come to serve as the basis of Britain’s so-called ‘Second Empire’ but was also derived, ironically, from Spain’s own justifications of empire. Though admitting its inability to entirely escape the rhetoric of colonialism, Alan Richardson makes a compelling case for Peru as an antiimperialist poem. Yet, before he can proceed, Richardson must deflect an equally defensible and even more immediately evident argument of the poem – that quite contrary to his own reading, Williams’s promotion of the Black Legend of Spain might in fact be read as endorsing rather than critiquing British global expansion. As he explains, ‘Williams’s choice of the conquest of Peru as her epic subject might be seen as minimizing the relevance to Britain of her critique of imperialist violence. The “Black Legend” of the Spanish conquest of the Americas’, he continues, ‘had, after all, long served the purposes of English nationalist and antiCatholic propaganda, and had historically been used to justify British

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expansion.’3 With Britain’s transatlantic empire in crisis, however, a poem condemning colonial violence ‘could hardly fail to suggest a home application’. While Richardson goes on to make a convincing case for his reading, his recognition that the poem’s topical concern with the Spanish conquest readily lends itself to being read in multiple and even contradictory ways reveals just how ambiguous a late eighteenth-century poem depicting Spain’s fifteenth-century ‘New World’ colonial enterprise could be in relation to issues of empire. This ambiguity becomes even more apparent in the context of late eighteenth-century Anglo-Spanish rivalry in the Americas.4 The collapse of Britain’s transatlantic empire and Spain’s central role in producing it had cultivated deep-seated anti-Spanish sentiments that had gathered momentum with such past Anglo-Spanish conflicts as the Spanish Match crisis, the War of Jenkins’s Ear, and the Seven Years’ War. Following the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty, Britain had emerged as the clear loser: in addition to Britain having lost its American colonies, Spain had gained both Floridas and Minorca in Europe, captured New Providence Island in the Bahamas, and repelled attacks on Louisiana and Nicaragua. While Britain retained the important fortress of Gibraltar, its substantial losses in North America were undeniable evidence that Britain was not the superpower it had imagined itself to be. Spain, by contrast, had done rather well for itself. In addition to consolidating its overseas empire, Spain under Charles III had instituted political and economic reform, developed more effective strategies for administering its transatlantic colonies, enlarged its army and navy, and fostered agricultural, industrial, and commercial growth. Thus, while 1783 has traditionally been seen as significantly marking the ‘demise of the Old Empire’ for Britain, it was conversely a time of great optimism for Spain, a nation which, to Britain’s great concern, was now clearly on the move.5 Yet, far from simply conceding the loss of its transatlantic empire, Britain was more than ready to continue its rivalry with Spain for an overseas empire. In spite of its recent losses and growing scepticism about the value of the ‘Old Colonial System’, Britain had no intention of giving up its imperial aspirations in America.6 In fact, as Wright suggests, it was possible to see Britain in a better position to challenge Spanish dominance in North America now that it no longer had to contend with US American rebels and could focus exclusively on acquiring and developing new colonies.7 Britain had, after all, supplanted France as the dominant colonial power in Canada and recovered its valuable West Indian possessions in the Paris Peace Treaty. It was not long before plans were formulated to regain possession of West Florida and transform it, in

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the words of Richard Oswald, into ‘a Centre of a great part of the Trade of America [    ] by which means [    ] England [    ] may still enjoy an exclusive Monopoly of a large share of North American Commerce’.8 Although such plans never came to fruition, Britain continued to keep a covetous eye on Spanish America long after the peace settlement. Spain’s North American possessions appeared a potential boon for an enterprising imperial rival determined to settle old scores. When discontented Creoles, mestizos, and Indians alongside exiled Jesuits began to revolt throughout Spanish America, the history to which Williams’s Peru explicitly alludes, many British strategists saw an opportunity to inflict substantial losses to the Spaniards while securing advantages for Britain. Proposals for a South Seas expedition against Spanish America, such as that proposed by John Dalrymple (1779), William Fullarton (1780), and later Thomas Townshend (1784), soon emerged, detailing the benefits that the loss of Spain’s American possessions would have for British commercialism. As Fullarton most succinctly presented, Some advantageous Ports should be fortified [in South America] and Terms of Independence offered to the Native Mexicans, Peruvians and Chilians. If these Settlements are effected it is evident that the Trade of South America would be opened to our East Indian Territories: if they were not effected still the Blow to Spain must be fatal because her richest possessions would be alarmed, their Commerce and remittances interrupted, their Ships destroyed, their Towns plundered and the Inhabitants incited to revolt.9 Although William Pitt welcomed at different times eager Spanish– American Revolutionaries like Luis Vidal, Juan Antonio de Prado, and Francisco de Miranda in London, rather than risk another open break with Spain, the young Prime Minister remained content to simply continue his unofficial endorsement of frontier intrigue, illegal contraband trade, and other surreptitious New World interventions. Open hostilities in the 1790s and most notably the 1805 success of Nelson over joint French and Spanish forces at the battle of Trafalgar served only to increase enmity between the two nations until Britain, aware of a declining Spanish empire, positioned itself to deliver a decisive blow. With a force of ten thousand men, the British prepared to set sail from Falmouth on a mission to settle once and for all the question of Spanish America. But Napoleon’s sudden invasion of Spain changed the nature of Anglo-Spanish relations. Fear of French imperialism trumped

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interest in Spanish America and, at a moment’s notice, British forces destined for the New World were redirected ironically in defence of their old rivals as Britain and Spain for the first time in three centuries unexpectedly found themselves allies in a radically transformed world. In this context of intense colonial rivalry between Britain and Spain, Williams’s 1784 poem, vividly portraying the ruinous effects of military conquest, could be seen, in support of Richardson’s thesis, as a timely warning against any British attempt that would, and certainly did, seek to recapture its colonial power in the West even as it pursued new ones in the East. Yet, its anti-Spanish sentiments at a time when hatred of Spain was intimately tied to Britain’s continued colonial pursuits could just as easily be seen as an anxious response to the demise of Britain’s American Empire, a propaganda piece fueling rather than impeding Britain’s imperial enterprise through its encouragement of ongoing contentions with Spain. Such tensions and ambiguities, which inevitably arose when British writers explicitly or, in Williams’s case, implicitly compared their empire to Spain’s, become even more complicated by the ideological disputes that soon emerged over competing justifications of empire. The legend of Spanish cruelty in the Americas in British writings, while largely motivated by religious antagonism, was more significantly at the heart of the long-standing ideological dilemma of discovering a way to pursue imperial expansion without conquest. For many British ideologues – from Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas to John Locke and William Robertson – Bartolomé de las Casas’s sixteenthcentury exposé10 on the Spanish mistreatment of Amerindians clearly revealed the cost of empire predicated on military conquest and served as a stern reminder of the potential pitfalls of Britain’s transglobal endeavours. Yet, Spain’s well-defined ideology of empire nonetheless remained for centuries the dominant colonialist paradigm, making Spain both model and rival for an aspiring imperial power. Since the early sixteenth century, Britain responded to the juridical and ideological claims of the Spanish Monarchy – that it had not only legal dominion and sovereignty over the New World on account of first discovery and conquest, but also moral and religious justification for its colonial pursuits by right of a 1493 papal decree charging Spain and Portugal with the task of evangelizing the natives – not by discounting the logic of those arguments, but by accusing Spain of having lost sight of its original Christianizing mission. Ironically, British writers took their cue from Spanish ecclesiastics themselves who, like las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria,

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were especially critical of Spanish colonial policy. Samuel Purchas, for example, had argued that since the ‘Christian Religion had [not] beene propounded in a meet sort to the Indians’, Spain had forfeited its entitlement to the ‘New World’.11 Proselytizing the natives, according to Purchas, was a European endeavour and because Spain had prioritized territorial gain over evangelism it had undermined its own claims to possession. While such an argument was intended to deny the legitimacy of the Spanish–American empire, it did so, however, by reinforcing the ideology that empire-building was first and foremost a European missionary enterprise. Although Spain had strayed from this religious undertaking, the original endeavour was still a compelling one and justification enough for Britain who saw an opportunity to rectify what Spain had done wrong. The evangelical revival in the late eighteenth century accompanied by a growing sense of Protestantism as a defining characteristic of the British Empire reinforced Spanish arguments about the nature of imperialism as originally a missionary endeavour. Foreign missionary societies, such as The Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the London Missionary Society (1795), and the Church Missionary Society (1799), were chiefly responsible for promoting a vision of the British Empire as morally obligated ‘to evangelize the heathen’ and served,12 according to William Barnhart, ‘among the most vocal proponents of empire in the late eighteenth century’.13 But, as many of the Christian periodicals promoting overseas missionary work made clear, Spanish treatment of indigenous populations presented a particular challenge for Protestant missionaries aware that in most cases ‘Spanish conquest ha[d] led the natives to rather detest Christianity than to comprehend its nature’.14 Certainly motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment, the impetus to re-Christianize the world from a Protestant missionary standpoint, what Bewell calls ‘global evangelical imperialism’, was seen merely as a corrective to Spain’s destructive colonial practices otherwise founded on laudable principles and sound ideology.15 But Spain’s missteps had revealed the practical difficulties of, as Richard Hakluyt put it, ‘plant[ing] Christianity without conquest’.16 If Spain’s Christianizing mission had been derailed by desire for gold and land, as the Black Legend vividly illustrated, it was still not clear how imperial expansion was possible without military seizure. Britain felt that the answer to this ideological quandary was a maritime commercial empire based on trading colonies through which Christianity could be disseminated without dominion. But by the late eighteenth century, when Britain’s activities in India and elsewhere indicated a shift back

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towards a more aggressive imperial policy involving territorial conquest, these older ideological problems began to resurface, making the lessons of the Spanish empire again an important subject of British political and public debate. It is not coincidental, then, that late eighteenth-century recountings of the Spanish conquest of America paid particular attention to the missionary element that ostensibly underwrote Spanish interest in the New World. As in Williams’s Peru, both Spanish ecclesiastics las Casas and Valverde play major roles in British imaginings of the Spanish conquest. In British adaptations of Kotzebue’s Pizarro, for example, las Casas and Valverde literally share the stage with the eponymous Spaniard and represent the alternatives of religion’s potential oppressive/redemptive roles in the colonizing mission. Whereas Valverde embodies the tyrannical nature of Catholic missions that many British Protestants depicted as motivated by ‘unprincipled ambition’ and territorial desires,17 las Casas serves as the voice of ‘justice and humanity’ (1. 1. 21), ‘an enthusiast’, in Valverde’s words, ‘in the opposite and worse extreme’ (1. 1. 37).18 But ‘enthusiasm’ was a key word for Christian missionaries in Britain who were beginning to distinguish between the humanitarian fervor of las Casas’s kind and the religious fanaticism of Valverde’s. As Southey would later transform the Jesuit Dobrizhoffer into a spokesperson for Protestant missionary colonialism in The Tale of Paraguay, las Casas began to emerge as something of an honorary Protestant and a model of how religion could still operate as a foundation for future British imperial endeavours. The resurgence of Spanish–American conquest tales at the moment of Britain’s emerging commercial dominance also lent these histories to economic analysis. For Robertson the Spaniard’s lust for gold was not simply a tired trope, but an explanation for the failure of the Spanish colonial system, wherein preference for accumulation over trade marked the enervation of the enterprising spirit, which Britain was now coming to embody. But unlike the anti-Spanish polemic on the continent, much of the literature also conveys a common ideological investment in portraying the benefits of British commerce over Spanish conquest. Like Richard Glover’s propaganda poem London: or, the Progress of Commerce (1738), in which Commerce personified denounces Spanish colonial practices for its ‘savage thirst of blood’ opposed to the ‘gentlest intercourse’ (300) of trade, many of these works transform their condemnation of the Spanish Empire into an opportunity to praise British commercial expansion.19 The imperial fantasy that conquest was possible ‘without blood’ fed into a more

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deeply held belief that Britain had successfully created an empire whereby ‘fair-ey’d commerce stretches her white sails’ to the ends of the world.20 Williams was among those writers who envisioned the post-1783 period as ripe for a new era of British commercial expansion. In her ‘Ode on the Peace’, published a year before Peru, Williams presents peace most importantly as the inauguration of a new age in British commercialism: Lo! commerce lifts her drooping head Triumphal, Thames! from thy deep bed; And bears to Albion, on her sail sublime, The riches Nature gives each happier clime. (48)21 Williams goes on to explicitly link the expansion of British trade to imperial pursuits in the East, gloating that commerce enables Britain to ‘open India’s glitt’ring mine’ to ‘waft the bright gems to Britain’s temp’rate vale’ (48). With Peru on her mind and her hopes that Albion soon ‘Shall spread upon the western main’ (49), Williams comes to envision Latin America as the next frontier. Peru, thus, unsurprisingly opens by presenting Latin America as a new horizon of colonial desire. Its lush descriptions of the animal and vegetable life, ‘totally unlike our own’, establishes a ‘romantic’ (54) desire for the exotic, presenting ‘the guava, and the soft ananas’, ‘the Pacos, and Vicunnas’, and endlessly exploitable ‘bark, reviving shrub!’ as ‘treasures’ to be possessed (I. 13, 23, 15, 6). As with other texts on Spanish America, the New World is presented as a new Eden that Williams hopes will revive and blossom once more, making ‘soft Peruvia’s fragrant breast’ and ‘beauty’ available to the world again (VI. 345, 346). This sexualized rhetoric of colonial desire is also expressed towards the Peruvians, whose ‘simplicity’ and ‘innocence’ ‘thrill with pleasure the responsive heart’ by ‘Diffus[ing] beauty, and inspir[ing] delight’ (I. 47, 49, 52, 60). Although such idealism depends on the demonization of the Spaniards, Williams’s version of the Black Legend is explicitly gendered. In contrast to the feminized ‘meek Peruvians’ (III. 3), who are ruled by love and affection, ‘Iberia’s ruthless sons’ are cruel, treacherous, and sexually deviant ( V. 53). In his lust for gold Pizarro leads ‘the fiends of slaughter’ to commit unspeakable atrocities (II. 33): the defenceless Peruvians are massacred, their Monarch imprisoned and strangled, their priests tortured and murdered. The excess of Spanish violence is

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highlighted through a series of vignettes focusing on Spain’s savage destruction of Peru’s domestic harmony. The emerging sentimental epic represents the Incas as an extended family torn apart by selfindulgent conquistadors. Ataliba, whose ‘gentle spirit, love’s soft power possest’ (I. 65), is symbolically murdered on his nuptial day; Zilia and Aciloe are both daughters who lose their fathers to the ‘sanguine rage’ of the Spaniards (II. 31); and Manco-Capac, Ataliba’s successor, is forced to part with his infant and ‘the tender Cora, partner of his breast’ (IV. 66). In all of these accounts, feminine sympathy and domestic affections form the basis of Williams’s sentimentalized critique of empire based on conquest. But if gender plays an important role in Williams’s condemnation of Spanish imperial aggression, it also, ironically, plays an important role in her support of revolutionary violence. The celebration of the contemporary Andean rebellion and the poet’s ‘hope that these injured nations may recover the liberty of which they have been so cruelly deprived’ clearly put Williams’s gendered account of Spanish cruelty in the service of justifying late eighteenth-century South American liberation movements (VI. 325). Praising the recent victories of the Creole rebel and Incan descendant Tupac Amaru II, the poem abruptly closes in a visionary poetic mode that anticipates the future liberation of Peru: The flag of freedom rears on Chili’s plain, And leads to glorious strife his gen’rous train: And see Iberia bleeds! While vict’ry twines Her fairest blossoms round Peruvia’s shrines. (VI. 325–8) Although many would have agreed with Williams’s endorsement of the rebellion, her unflinching support for a cause the British government refused to openly acknowledge was certainly unconventional. As the General Magazine made abundantly clear, Williams’s literary place was in ‘cultivating and discharging the tender and heart-felt duties of domestic life’, not in rousing support for a bloody uprising, especially at a time when British interest in Spanish America was a particularly sensitive issue.22 Williams may have advocated feminine sympathy, but she meant such sympathy to be directed towards more politically controversial and violent ends. Williams’s situation of the poem within the context of an ongoing rebellion suggests that the poem is much more than a warning against colonial violence: it is an active promotion of an independence

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movement and a vision of a post-Spanish-dominated world. The condemnation of Pizarro and Almagro may serve as an indictment against an ideology of conquest, but this is only half the text. If the Spaniards are the embodiment of cruelty and conquest, they are also in the figures of las Casas and the ‘mild Gasca’ (VI. 271), the embodiment of sensibility and affection. Described as a ‘pitying angel’ (III. 97), las Casas’s compassion for the Incas acts as a counterforce to Spanish brutality and splits the narrative representation of Spain into one of the poem’s many gendered binaries. Unlike the unfeeling Valverde, whose ‘bosom never felt another’s woes’ (III. 29), las Casas typifies female sympathy in his ability to comfort and share in the grief of the Peruvians. As Zamor declares, How dear to mis’ry’s soul, Las Casas’ name! Spirit benign where every grief can share, Whose pity stoops to make the wretch its care. (V. 256–8) The poem’s constant display of the weeping las Casas, melodramatically staged at the death of Zilia when he ‘bathes the pallid corse with tears’ (III. 182), also underscores the contrast between him and his callous countrymen. The arrival of Gasca, who comes ‘to bid oppression’s harpy talons spare’ (VI. 276), ensures that las Casas’s work will live on and illustrates Williams’s acknowledgement that the Spanish are not simply static symbols of oppression, but can also be the ultimate models of love and affection. Williams’s portrayal of las Casas, however, is part of a larger narrative that serves, like other eighteenth-century Spanish conquest poems, to reinforce the value of missionary work. If the need for ‘Sensibility’ towards a ‘region veil’d in partial night’ constitutes an important message of the poem, it is equally important that Sensibility is subservient to Religion (I. 176). The goal of las Casas’s sympathy is ultimately conversion. In his rescue of Zilia’s father comfort becomes conflated with evangelism when, He bids the bitter tears of anguish cease; Bids drooping hope uplift her languid eyes, And points a dearer bliss beyond the skies. (III. 138–40) Zilia’s father is the poem’s most visible convert who, after experiencing the mercy of ‘the Christian God’ (III. 133), cries out on his deathbed:

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The God, whom now my vows adore, My heart thro’ life obey’d, unknowing more; His mild forgiveness then my soul shall prove, His mercy share – Las Casa’s God, is Love! (III. 147–50) Zilia soon converts as las Casas tirelessly works to save the Peruvians, enacting the poem’s own desire for Peru’s redemption. As Sensibility makes clear, las Casas’s work serves a larger purpose: He pour’d by heav’n inspir’d its [mercy] accents meek; In truth’s clear mirror bade the mourner’s view Pierce the deep veil which darkling error drew And vanquish’d empire with a smile resign, While brighter worlds in fair perspective shine. (VI. 262–6) In placing mercy at the service of enlightenment and ultimately conversion, Peru reveals las Casas’s compassion as a subtle form of imperial desire. These conversion scenarios, which are often overlooked in readings of the poem, are at the heart of the narrative. Like other late eighteenthcentury Black Legend tales, Peru obsesses over the path not taken: had Pizarro not been tempted by the ‘sick’ning’ luxury of Peruvia’s treasured ore, and had the virtue of sensible religion triumphed, Spain could have been that elect European nation to have planted Christianity without conquest (I. 181). For, in Williams’s syncretic view of religion, the virtuous Peruvians had long served that ‘Power’ who is God, but merely lacked the revealed religion, their easy conversions show they would have readily accepted (III. 80). In fact, as Williams retells it, the story of las Casas’s compassion for the suffering Peruvians may be read as an allegory of Christ’s redemption. The Christ-like las Casas, represented as having descended from heaven, comforts the downtrodden, forgives his guilty countrymen, ‘br[eaks] the fetters, bursts the cruel bands’ of bondage (III. 120), dies, and is resurrected in the figure of Gasca, ‘the messenger of peace’ (VI. 271). This salvation narrative translates in the context of the poem’s condemnation of Spain’s colonial cruelty as a missed opportunity, which is best illustrated in the poem’s account of Pizarro and Ataliba’s first encounter. Displaying before the ‘monarch’s wond’ring thought’ all the impressive inventions of European civilization (II. 17), Pizarro presents the Incan leader with a Bible:

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And now he [Pizarro] bids the purer spirit rise Above the circle of surrounding skies; Presents the page that shed religion’s light O’er the dark mist of intellectual night; While thrill’d with awe the monarch trembling stands, He dropp’d the hallow’d volume from his hands. (II. 19–24) In one of the poem’s most dramatic scenes, Ataliba, at the moment of his enlightenment, is brought to the verge of conversion when Pizarro gives the ‘bloody signal’ for attack (II. 27). This ‘sudden’ and pernicious sabotage of a real opportunity to convert the willing Peruvians to Christianity (II. 25), which Williams emphasizes with a long footnote from Robertson’s History of America, constitutes the poem’s greatest regret as it recounts the very moment of Spain’s downfall: in choosing conquest over evangelism, Spain seals its fate and paves the way for British recuperation of the original imperial enterprise. With the unprecedented growth of British commerce, the revival of interest in overseas missions, and the end of Britain’s First Empire, the late eighteenth century was a ripe moment for the reformulation of British imperial ideology. Not coincidentally the period also witnessed an intensification of Anglo-Spanish rivalry and a renewed interest in Spain as both model and rival colonial power. The resurgence of the Black Legend in Britain at a time when anti-Spanish sentiment was linked to British imperial desires in political, religious, and economic discourses illustrates the immense importance of Spain in Britain’s resolution to distinguish itself as the leading world power. Williams’s emphasis on the missed opportunities of Spanish imperial ventures would become a staple of British romantic imaginings of Spain. Echoing the sentiments of Peru, Victor Frankenstein laments that if only the Spanish had been inspired to treat the natives benevolently, ‘America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed’.23 Southey capitalized on this motif in The Tale of Paraguay by promoting, according to Fulford, his vision of ‘missionary colonialism’, wherein paternalistic Britain would redeem previous mistakes by teaching Protestant civilization.24 It is not surprising that Southey, like Williams, looked outside Britain for his model of British imperialism. For, as the recuperation of the history of Spain’s involvement in the creation of British imperial ideology reveals, the British Empire was not an insularly British construction, but rather part of a European and most importantly, a Spanish colonial legacy.

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Notes 1. See Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 40–1. 2. See Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 32 and Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), p. 35. 3. Alan Richardson, ‘Epic Ambivalence: Imperial Politics and Romantic Deflection in Williams’s Peru and Landor’s Gebir’, in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 265–82 (p. 267). 4. See J. Leitch Wright, Jr, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971). 5. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America, p. 135. 6. See Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763–93, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1952), I, 98–222. 7. Wright, Anglo-Spanish Rivalry in North America, p. 136. 8. ‘Oswald to Townshend’, 2 October 1782, as cited in Harlow, I, 305. 9. William Fullarton, ‘Extract of a Proposal by Mr Fullarton for an Expedition to Spanish America’ (Public Record Office, WO 1/178), pp. 93–5. 10. Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevisima Relación de la Destruición de las Indias ([n.p.], 1552). 11. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1613), p. 750. 12. ‘Address to the Serious and Zealous Professors of the Gospel [    ]’ (London, 1795). 13. William Barnhart, ‘A Protestant Empire: Evangelicals and the Foreign Missionary Revival in Britain, 1790–1820’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1998), p. 11. 14. Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean [    ] (London, 1799), p. lxxxviii. 15. Alan Bewell, ‘A “True Story    of Evils Overcome”: Sacred Biography, Prophecy, and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, NineteenthCentury Contexts, 26 (2004), 97–124 (p. 115). 16. Richard Hakluyt, ‘Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended Towards Virginia’, in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1935), II, 332. 17. Valverde, Christian Observer, 8 (1809), 220–1 (p. 220). 18. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘Pizarro; A Tragedy in Five Acts’. in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. Cecil Price, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), II, 651–704. 19. Richard Glover, London: or, the Progress of Commerce (London, 1739). 20. H. H. Brackenridge, ‘A Poem, On the Rising Glory of America; Being an Exercise’ (London, 1772), p. 218. 21. All citations for Williams are from Poems, 1786, 2 vols in 1, Facsimile edition with introduction by Jonathan Wordsworth (London, 1786; repr. New York: Woodstock Books, 1994). 22. Williams, General Magazine, 4 (1790), 162–3 (p. 162).

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23. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook, 8 vols (London: William Pickering, 1996), I, 38. 24. Tim Fulford, ‘Blessed Bane: Christianity and Colonial Disease in Southey’s Tale of Paraguay’, Romanticism on the Net, 24 (2001) http:// www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2001/v/n24/005998ar.html [3 July 2006] (para. 4 of 40).

15 Borderline Engagements: The Crusades in Romantic-Period Drama Diego Saglia

In the preface to the Chronicle of the Cid (1808), Robert Southey reconstructs the eighth-century Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula and, in the process, projects the apocalyptic vision of a European continent overrun by Muslim armies led by the commander who had wrested Spain from the Visigoths: ‘Once already had Musa crost the Pyrenees and advanced as far as Carcassonne: he now proposed to overrun France, proceed through Germany and Hungary to Constantinople, and by this line of conquests, connect Spain with the Saracen empire’.1 If these imagined campaigns call to mind Napoleon’s sweeping conquests across Europe (the Chronicle appeared in the year when France occupied Spain), their peculiarly disturbing quality also lies in the fact that Southey envisages the disappearance of Europe from the political map even before it came into existence as a cultural and political concept. More specifically, the apocalyptic import of this passage depends on its elimination of Europe’s boundaries with Islam and the East. And Southey intriguingly imagines this catastrophe from the point of view of the present, as, by recurring to geographical denominations irrelevant to early medieval Europe (such as France and Spain), he produces a contemporary map of the continent imbued with his anxious evocation of the past. In describing this crucial event in European history, moreover, Southey unveils some of the basic coordinates of the Romantic-period discourse of the crusades. Whether fought in the Holy Land or over the entire Mediterranean area, the crusades loom large over Romantic literature as pre-text (as in Wordsworth’s The Borderers), scattered references and episodes (for instance, in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage I) or the main theme as in Eleanor Ann Porden’s Coeur de Lion, or the Third Crusade (1822) and Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825). This literary archive 186

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identifies a map deployed along what, in recent times, the geo-political expert Samuel Huntington has polemically called the ‘bloody borders’ of Islam, lines of demarcation that are sites of continuous attrition and open warfare.2 In this context, Southey evokes a space delimited by boundaries and divides that are under threat and need to be reaffirmed, so that his remarks are indicative of a Romantic construction of the medieval (and the recurrent) crusades as foundational of British, European and Western identities. On the basis of this complex background, this essay focuses on boundaries as central concepts, themes and tropes in the Romantic rhetoric of the crusades. Plotted around the creation, defence or demolition of frontiers and divides, the Romantic crusades are a geographical and temporal phenomenon extending from the earliest manifestations of Islamic expansionism to the present. Thus, Henry Hallam describes the ‘Reconquest’ of the Iberian Peninsula, officially concluded in 1492, as ‘an event glorious not only to Spain, but to Christendom; and which, in the political combat of the two religions, seemed almost to counterbalance the loss of Constantinople’.3 The wars with the Ottoman empire, of which the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and the sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683) are important highlights, affected Europe until the late eighteenth century and beyond; while the 1492 Christian conquest of Granada, the last Islamic foothold on European soil, gave new impulse to the piratical activities of the North African Barbary states, now strengthened by Granadan exiles and under tighter Ottoman control. Romantic literary engagements with these contested borderlines concentrate on three particularly crucial areas of contact between East and West – Constantinople, North Africa and Spain.4 These geographies may be examined in as many significant dramatic treatments: Joanna Baillie’s Constantine Paleologus, Richard Lalor Sheil’s Bellamira and Felicia Hemans’s The Siege of Valencia. Published and staged in a relatively circumscribed period (between 1804 and 1823), all three plays offer relevant instances of the permanent crusade against Islam. In addition, since they represent these interconnected borders between East and West through the situation of a siege, they offer compressed and heightened, and thus especially revealing, figurations of the tensions besetting the Mediterranean frontiers between Islam and Christendom.5 Of the three border geographies, the most dramatically symbolic for Europe is that of Constantinople – the descendant of classical civilization and the last relic of the Roman empire, either already or about to be lost to the Ottomans. Marking the divide between Asia and Europe, the city is traditionally figured as contested ground, especially because its fall

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to the Turks in 1453 was fundamental to the definition of the map of Europe in opposition to Islam. Hallam captures the significance of the fall of the city when he observes that: ‘A sentiment of consternation, perhaps of self-reproach, thrilled to the heart of Christendom. There seemed no longer any thing to divert the Ottoman armies from Hungary; and if Hungary should be subdued, it was evident that both Italy and the German empire were exposed to invasion.’6 Here, as in Southey’s Chronicle, the disappearance of a vital boundary threatens Europe with annihilation. Joanna Baillie reworked this fraught borderland in Constantine Paleologus; or, The Last of the Caesars, published in 1804 and first staged on 7 November 1808 at the Theatre Royal, Liverpool, with the subtitle ‘A Band of Patriots’.7 Drawing on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, this tragedy focuses on the figure of the last emperor as a virtuous, sentimental and humane hero in line with the feminized reconstructions of the past typical of Romantic-period women playwrights.8 As befits a character with a high ‘closet value’, Constantine’s ‘manly faculties’ are ‘beset with gifts / Of gentler grace, and soft domestic habits, / And kindliest feelings’ – he is a leader of armies who weeps on stage.9 If this hero in distress is the individual focus of the play, its collective centre is the fall of the city and the fear that the East will overrun the West. Since Constantinople is ‘the floating remnant of a wreck, / With the sea bellowing round it’, and ‘all that now / Remain[s] of the eastern empire’ (I. 2, (448)), Baillie’s tragedy explicitly deals with a geopolitical frontier and cultural bulwark that is about to vanish. As a result, much of the imaginative work of the play is concerned with the re-establishment and re-marking of boundaries. Most visibly, it clearly stakes out the two opposite military and cultural camps and their contrasting values. The Ottoman ruler Mahomet is a ruthless tyrant who considers his soldiers as ‘garbage’, ‘good enough for filling ditches up’ (III. 1, (459)), and his instrumental use of human beings becomes patent in the remark: ‘In mortal man / I have no trust; they are all hollow slaves, / Who tremble and detest, and would betray’ (III. 1, (460)). Constantine, instead, is a loving husband, a father-like ruler and a brother to his comrades. After appeasing the crowd that begs him to surrender the city, he replies in a Christ-like tone: ‘If, thus assembled, with repentant zeal / Ye would return, behold these open’d arms!’ (II. 1, (453)). Although Constantinople eventually falls, as history says it should, Baillie’s play works to contain this event and its consequences by reerecting the East–West divide and transforming it into a moral and

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cultural fracture. Throughout the play, Constantine’s band of brothers is placed in contrast with Mahomet’s motley army. In Act III, the ‘rude but generous adventurer’ Othoric, who out of love for Constantine tries to murder Mahomet, inspires the latter to exclaim repeatedly ‘And Constantine is served by men like these!’ (III. 2, (463)). Similarly, in Act IV, the Greek Marthon abandons his treacherous schemes and returns under the benevolent leadership of the emperor (IV. 4, (468)). And in Act IV, Scene 2, Baillie reworks the intensely emotional tableau, also present in Gibbon, in which Constantine and his followers meet in St Sophia for prayers before the final battle. The old chamberlain Heugho tellingly describes them as ‘In gen’rous love and brotherhood united’ (IV. 2, (465)), and the idea of brotherhood, unknown to Mahomet and his armies, is repeated over and over in the scene and culminates in Constantine’s emphatic repetition: ‘In mem’ry of the dearest brothership / That ever honour’d man, I lead you on, / My noble brothers’ (IV. 2, (467)). These culture-specific values and feelings are also in full view in the female protagonist, the empress Valeria, who first refuses to contemplate that she may soon become one of Mahomet’s concubines (II. 3, (456)) and eventually, after her husband’s death, takes over his public role and rhetoric in the build-up to the final battle. She invokes the remaining soldiers as ‘my living friends’, and renews the language of brotherhood while ‘Holding out a hand to each of them’: ‘You know, brave brothers, how it is with me; / For such you were to him, and such to me / My heart now truly owns you’ (V. 3, (477)). On a geopolitical level, the play dismantles the divide between East and West when, in Act V, Scene 1, ‘Turks are seen rushing through the breach’ in the city walls. And yet this divide is repeatedly reinstated by being shifted on to the dimensions of sentiment, ethics and cultural identity. Thus, even though Mahomet and his army are ultimately victorious, the Turkish leader feels defeated as he realizes that ‘The willing service of a brave man’s heart, / That precious pearl, upon the earth exists, / But I have found it not’ (V. 3, (478)). Bound to retell the historic victory of Islam, the tragedy simultaneously resists this apocalyptic abolition of a crucial boundary. In this respect, it is particularly significant that Baillie should include a reference to the future fall of Turkish Constantinople and its return to the Western fold. As the poet-turned-soldier Othus prophetically tells Mahomet: ‘A secret spirit whispers to my heart, / That in these walls your weaken’d wretched race, / [    ] / Shall shed each other’s blood, and make these towers / A place of groans and anguish, not of bliss’ (V. 3, (478)). Similar apocalyptic visions, grounded in the belief of an imminent fall of the

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Ottoman Empire, are frequent in Romantic-period literature and appear, for instance, in the works of Hallam, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. Although historically incorrect, they signal the continued relevance of Constantinople to definitions of a map of Europe and Westernness. Romantic fictional reinventions of the crusades identify another essential border area between the West and the Orient in the geographically and politically frayed regions of North Africa. This area emerges as an outstanding ‘bloody border’ between Europe and Islam in the Renaissance when, after the Christian conquest of Granada and the successful intervention of Turkish armies, the Barbary States became a major threat to European control over the Mediterranean. On the Romantic-period stage, this early modern space of the crusades is addressed in the tragedy Bellamira; or, The Fall of Tunis (first staged at Covent Garden on 22 April 1818) by the Irish playwright Richard Lalor Sheil. The play is centred on the fall of Tunis after the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V attacked and defeated the local ruler, the Barbary pirate Haradin ‘Barbarossa’, in 1535. Made ‘capitan pasha’ (i.e. admiral in chief ) of the Turkish fleet by the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman I in 1534, in the same year Haradin had conquered Tunis and transformed it into a major centre of piratical activities in the Mediterranean.10 In order to put a stop to his attacks, in true crusade style Charles V gathered an armada of European forces that duly received the seal of a papal blessing. The emperor personally led the campaign and succeeded in defeating Haradin and placing the rightful ruler Muley Hassan back on the throne. Yet, Charles V was prevented ‘by act of God’ (for which read ‘adverse weather conditions’) from conquering Algiers in 1541, a campaign once more inaugurated by the Pope’s blessing.11 If Baillie’s play concentrates on defusing or displacing the destruction of the Western border with Islam, Sheil’s Bellamira stages the downfall of a wicked Eastern tyrant and the disbanding of his diabolical power system. In the context of this new crusade, the play focuses on the tragic plight of a group of Christian prisoners destined to be sold as slaves. References to this practice, still common in early nineteenthcentury North Africa, determine the topical import of Sheil’s work for his audiences. Indeed, as G. A. Jackson, a contemporary commentator, states in a survey of 1817, the Barbary States were ‘a subject [    ] peculiarly interesting at the present moment’.12 Since most of Sheil’s characters are prisoners, exile and displacement are particularly pervasive themes in his tragedy. Tunis is presented as an alien space, a city beyond the pale, where European values are

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suspended because, there, ‘The Moslem faith, with Moslem fierceness joined, / Crushed the free soul, and chained the aspiring mind’.13 As characters constantly remark – with horror, dismay or sadistic pleasure – that they are ‘in Tunis’, the text exudes a strong sense of geo-cultural dislocation within an outlandish border-space dividing East and West, civilization and barbarism, or freedom and slavery. Thus, when the repentant renegade Montalto addresses the heroine, the persecuted Bellamira, he describes the Islamic city as a place of physical and sexual oppression and violence: Know you, you are in Tunis, – in the place Of horrid perpetration, where no law Of earth, or heaven, can shield the helpless wretch From sensuality’s ferocious arms. (III. 1, 38) Sheil’s characters repeatedly voice their dismay at being prisoners in a place that is both close to, and removed from, the map of Europe. From the outset, Tunis is described as a border area inhabited by renegades and apostates, characters that obviously fascinated the author for their dramatic and inter-cultural potential, as in his Spanish tragedy The Apostate (1817). Stranded in this hostile place, the dramatis personae rehearse over and over the idea of having crossed a crucial boundary and being beyond rescue. In Act II, the heroic Count Manfredi, the leader of the prisoners and slaves, vents his anger at the inhuman pirates: ‘Ye merciless villains! / Ye ruthless riflers of the human heart!’ (II. 1, 22). His anguished outburst, however, soon mutates into an attack against those European powers that, both in the Renaissance and in Sheil’s times, do nothing to stop the traffic in Christian slaves: [    ] Shame upon you, You purple-pall’d inheritors of empire, And your cold-blooded men of policy, Who, in their heartless conclaves coldly sat, And at these cruelties, with marble smiles Shrugg’d their state-loaded shoulders. (II. 1, 22) Through this piece of inflamed oratory, the play comments on current politics, the post-Napoleonic reorganization of Europe and, albeit more covertly, the subjugated condition of Ireland. The 1815 Congress of Vienna had determined that European powers had to terminate the

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trade in human beings conducted by the Barbary States, and charged Britain with carrying out this task of international policing. In 1816, Lord Exmouth was sent to obtain peace treaties in Algiers and Tunis, but, in spite of his diplomatic success, the pirates again captured British ships and enslaved British subjects. This time, Exmouth returned and bombarded Algiers, terrifying neighbouring Tunis into the bargain. Although new promises of co-operation were made and 3000 European soldiers released, the problem was far from solved, and in 1818 the British navy returned to bomb Algiers, which would not be completely tamed until the French conquest in 1830. Staged after the first, seemingly successful, British attack on the Barbary States, Sheil’s play echoes the triumphant patriotism of the preface to G. A. Jackson’s account of Algiers: The signal chastisement that has been inflicted on the Algerine Pirates, by the irresistible thunder of the BRITISH NAVY, must be truly grateful to the feelings of Englishmen. Especially, when we recollect that CHARLES V in the plenitude of his power, failed in an expedition against the city of Algiers [    ] and that no other state ever extorted from them a Covenant for the perpetual abolition of CHRISTIAN SLAVERY. This is the peculiar trophy of ENGLAND, and will be long remembered to her honour.14 The play interweaves public events and private stories in the context of these topical references, and the eventual fall of Tunis brings about the reconstruction of family ties and the return of the characters to their native Italy, with the only exception of the villain, the apostate Amurath. After Haradin’s evil Islamic power has been defeated and, with it, the inhuman system based on the harem for women and slavery for men, the characters are no longer in the same Tunis so obsessively evoked in the previous acts. As the Spanish-led crusade has wrested this Barbary (and barbaric) city from the control of an evil Muslim power, the border with Islam has been successfully re-drawn and shored up, while the city’s geo-cultural location is now closer to the safe, Western, side of the pale. These ‘crusading’ plays confirm that the Mediterranean geography of Western–Islamic borders is a jigsaw of closely interrelated areas. The fall of Constantinople paved the way for Turkish control over the Mediterranean and helped extend the Ottoman dominion over the piratical North African states. At the same time, North Africa had been traditionally connected with Islamic Spain, as the armies that conquered Iberia in 711 CE were largely composed of Berber troops; whereas, after the fall of

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Granada in 1492, many Iberian Muslims found refuge in Morocco and the Barbary States. In Southey’s apocalyptic picture from the Chronicle of the Cid, the Islamic conquest of Spain might have led to the transformation of Europe into a province of the Baghdad caliphate. In fact, it established one of Europe’s longest contested borders with Islam and started an eight-century-long conflict of Christian Reconquest animated by a strong need to ‘close Spain’ (the traditional war-cry was Santiago y cierra España) and thus secure the boundary with Islam and the East. Felicia Hemans’s The Siege of Valencia, published in 1823, dramatizes a fictional episode in the long history of wars fought in this contested borderland, and is thus another relevant testimony of the Romantic reinvention of the crusades and its fictional tightening up of the East– West border. The play is steeped in Spanish siege lore, from the siege of Numancia in 133 BCE (mentioned in the epigraph from Miguel de Cervantes’s play El cerco de Numancia) to that of Tarifa in 1294 CE, as Hemans’s protagonist Gonzalez, like the heroic governor of Tarifa Guzmán el Bueno, allows his sons to be killed rather than surrendering the city to the Muslims. Finally, the play hints at the siege of Valencia by Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar, el Cid Campeador, an event that gave the city the name of ‘Valencia del Cid’ and inspired Hemans with the idea of making Gonzalez a descendant of the Cid and giving the play the subtitle (later removed) ‘or the Race of the Cid’.15 If, on the one hand, The Siege of Valencia draws on a series of hostile frontier traditions, on the other, as with Baillie’s and Sheil’s texts, it conjures up and problematizes the border in a crusading environment by bringing Western values and codes of behaviour into conflict with those of the Islamic East to the apparent advantage and ultimate glorification of the former. Nonetheless, Hemans’s play also draws on an ideologically compromised legendary background, centred as it is on a notoriously ‘wavering’ hero such as the Cid. As the historical preface to Southey’s Chronicle makes abundantly clear, Rodrigo Díaz was more a figure of intercultural admixture than a single-minded patriot. His Arabized appellation indicates his wavering allegiance between the different peninsular powers and the fact that he was equally at ease with either Christian or Muslim troops and rulers. This complex antecedent as well as the distinctive ambivalences in Hemans’s text posit her representation of a crusade to secure the Western boundary with Islam as deeply enmeshed in the demarcation of the differences between Christians and Moors as well as in their neutralization.16 This ambivalence is in full sight when the heroic mother Elmina, Gonzalez’s wife, crosses the border of the siege (the city walls) to implore

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the Muslim leader to spare her sons in the name of shared human feelings: [    ] In your own land Doth no fond mother, from the tents, beneath Your native palms, look o’er the deserts out, To greet your homeward step? (sc. 4, 133) Yet, Elmina’s appeal falls on deaf ears, and the Moorish chieftain twists her language of the affections to suggest that she betray the city: ‘Look to yon towers and walls! / Think you no hearts within their limits pine, / Weary of hopeless warfare [    ] [?]’ (sc. 4, 135). This initial manipulation of humanitarian intentions then gives way to the suggestion of an actual, armed infraction of the divide: [    ] there are those, to whom The Prophet’s armies not as foes would pass Yon gates, but as deliverers. Might they not In some still hour, when weariness takes rest, Be won to welcome us? (sc. 4, 137) With all due qualifications – Elmina infringes the divide in order to save her children’s lives – she is another of those transitive figures seen in Baillie’s and Sheil’s tragedies (apostates, traitors and renegades) personifying the instability and weakness of the boundary. In fact, Elmina’s treachery ultimately results in a strengthening of the divide when she reveals her treason to her husband and thus precipitates the sacrifice of her children. In Scene 7, Gonzalez, Elmina and the Valencians witness their execution from the city walls, a location that physically and symbolically signifies the reinstatement of the gap between East and West that the woman had sought to bridge. Through such ideological and spatial oscillations, the play distances itself from either side in the siege. Muslims and Christians share the same bellicose ethos and, although physically divided by the walls of Valencia, both camps mirror each other. Drawing on the vacillations proper to the figure of the Cid, Hemans devises a split masculine dimension of a military and heroic kind which, seemingly separated by a boundary, in fact presents several points of connection. Elmina tries to manipulate these transversal links for the sake of her children and the polis under siege. The defeat of her plan reveals that the actual conflict (and

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boundary) in the play is not against the military and cultural enemy, but against the affections and herself as their strenuous defender. Once again the ‘clash of civilizations’ emerges in the play’s catastrophe, where the arrival of the Castilian army signals the re-definition of the East–West boundary and of the Christians’ crusading supremacy over Islam. At the same time, as the last survivor of her clan, Elmina rehearses the triumphant language of warlike heroism: ‘swell forth, Castile! / Thy trumpet-music, till the seas and heavens, / And the deep hills, give every stormy note / Echoes to ring through Spain!’ (sc. 9, 239). She celebrates her husband’s heroism, urging the Castilians to raise martial sounds in honour of their dead commander: ‘Awake, I say, / Tambour and trumpet, wake!’ (sc. 9, 239). It is one of the play’s central ironies, and one frequently examined by critics, that Elmina’s celebratory tones coincide with the destruction of her family, the ‘race of the Cid’. By the end of the tragedy, the physical border has been secured and so, ostensibly, has the divide between the affections and the ethos of honour and war. In actual fact, the crusading boundary has been hemmed in and the border with Islam ‘closed’, yet the other contested gap, that between masculine and feminine values, is far from pacified and remains a site of unresolved tensions. If we read Hemans’s notion of the affections in the light of the geopolitical imaginary of the crusades, the play posits the East–West boundary both as porous and as ultimately impassable. Collectively these tragedies design a map of the historical depth and geographic extension of the crusades in Romantic-period literature, as well as confirming its protracted investment in the crusades as essential components of European and Western identity. Moreover, these works make plain that, although set in temporally displaced (medieval or early Renaissance) geographies, the concept of the ‘bloody borders’ of Islam is intimately bound up with a range of pressing, topical concerns. Indeed, the crusade is a historical phenomenon that illuminates other, much more immediate, conflicts. From this perspective, Romantic literature is far from merely responsible for medievalizing and escapist versions of the crusades, as opposed to the serious debates among historians about the nature and significance of these events – from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century to Charles Mills in the 1820s and Henry Stebbings in the 1830s.17 Baillie’s, Sheil’s and Hemans’s plays indicate how fiction reworks the crusades so as to effect an ideological positioning of European or Western civilization on the present geopolitical map of the Mediterranean. In addition, they

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disclose the ambivalences and instabilities within this act of geographic and cultural positioning. Moreover, because of their insistence on the re-erection of boundaries and divides, these tragedies rework the strong tradition of anti-Muslim prejudice that is alive and active up to the Enlightenment and beyond, and thus indicate that Romantic-period culture brings about only a partial reversal of hostile clichés (the backbone of Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’) in favour of a tolerant, curious and fascinated attitude towards the Islamic East.18 Even as it develops empathetic strategies for addressing the Eastern and Muslim ‘other’, Romantic-period literature prolongs this hostile tradition by re-elaborating the image of the boundary and its conflicting associations. In this light, instances of hybridism and intercultural admixture – seen in these plays in the figure of the traitor and apostate, or the ambiguous allegiances of the Cid – become a further spur to the recreation of impermeable divides. An obsession with shoring up one’s boundaries, the trauma of their disappearance and the need to define cultural identity through conflict are some of the basic ideological concerns underlying contemporary dramatic representations of the crusades. For the plays examined here respond to the fear expressed by Southey in the preface to the Chronicle of the Cid about the vanishing of Europe from cultural and political maps. They envisage moments of intercultural contact and exchange which, however, ultimately confirm the separate and superior identity of the Western dimension. Taken together, these dramatic works importantly testify to the recurrent and self-renewing need for ‘closing’ the West, re-marking its lines of separation and pushing back the ‘bloody borders of Islam’, a phrase that, defining both a chronic problem and a late twentieth-century question, gives us the full measure of the contemporaneity of Romantic-period visions of crusading enterprises aimed at policing the Mediterranean borders of East and West.19

Notes 1. Robert Southey, Chronicle of the Cid, from the Spanish (London, 1808), p. xxiii. 2. Samuel Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’ Foreign Affairs, 72.3 (Summer 1993), 22–49. 3. Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, 2 vols (London, 1818), I. 453. 4. For the phrase ‘borderline engagements’, see the introduction to Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2. 5. On the motif of the siege in British Romantic literature, see Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 190–224.

Diego Saglia 197 6. Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, I, 528. 7. See Margaret Carhart, The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923; reprint Archon Books, 1970), p. 155. 8. See Greg Kucich, ‘Staging History: Teaching Romantic Intersections of Drama, History, and Gender’, in Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1999), pp. 89–96. 9. Joanna Baillie, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, Complete in One Volume (London, 1851), I. 2, (449); II. 4, (457). Further references to Acts and scenes (with parenthetical page references), in brackets after the text, are from this edition. 10. See G. A. Jackson, Algiers: Being a Complete Picture of the Barbary States [    ] Including a Faithful Detail of the Late Glorious Victory of Lord Exmouth (London, 1817), pp. 239–40, and Michael Russell, History and Present Condition of the Barbary States (New York, 1844), p. 197. 11. See Jackson, Algiers, pp. 269–70, and Russell, pp. 200–3, 239–42 12. Jackson, Algiers, p. iv. On white slavery in the Barbary states and the postWaterloo debate on this problem, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), pp. 43–72. 13. Bellamira; or, The Fall of Tunis. A Tragedy, in Five Acts; As Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden. By Richard Sheil, Esq., Author of The Apostate (London, 1818), p. xi. Further references, in brackets after the text, are from this edition. 14. Jackson, Algiers, p. iii. 15. On Valencia and the Cid, see the preface to Southey’s Chronicle, pp. 39–41. On the subtitle, see Felicia Hemans, The Siege of Valencia: A Parallel Text Edition, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Elizabeth A. Fay (Peterborough ON: Broadview, 2002), p. 38. Further references, in brackets after the text, are from this edition. 16. On the ideological ambivalences in Hemans’s verse, see Susan J. Wolfson, ‘ “Domestic Affections” and “The Spear of Minerva”: Felicia Hemans and the Dilemma of Gender’, in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 128–66. 17. On the historiographic debate about the crusades, see Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) and, for a general overview of the crusades in early nineteenth-century literature, Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 131–49. 18. On orientalist stereotypes, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1978]), pp. 72, 58. 19. See James M. Murphy, ‘Safety First’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 November 2004, pp. 4–6. Here, Murphy remarks that ‘Under attack one secures the perimeter. During the Cold War, it could be drawn on a map, from icebound radar arrays to monitoring posts in the Mediterranean. In the case of terrorism, one juggles a virtual perimeter running through al-Qaeda caves in Afghanistan, internet addresses in Canada and thousands of airline boarding gates around the world’ (5).

16 Debating India: Southey and The Curse of Kehama Carol Bolton

In March 1801, Robert Southey wrote to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, telling him, ‘I have planned a Hindoo romance of original extravagance’.1 At various times during the writing of his long narrative poem, The Curse of Kehama, eventually published in 1810, Southey also added the epithets ‘wild’ and ‘monstrous’ to it, so deliberately emphasizing the ‘extravagance’ of his fiction, based on the exotic source material of Hindu scriptures.2 But Southey also discussed his project thoroughly with another friend, William Taylor, whose initial reasons for advising Southey to proceed with his Indian fiction were more political: ‘Take the Hindoo superstition for your machinery, and your country here and your readers there have both an interest in its celebrity, which must grow with the national power and extend with the national empire’.3 Over the nine years it took Southey to finish his poem, he came to share Taylor’s ambitions for ‘national empire’, as his growing commitment to British colonial expansion was motivated by a desire to extend the benefits of Christianity and civilization to other countries. This he perceived as benefiting Britain and her colonies, in that ‘being English by language and by religion, their convenience and their interest would always attach them to England’.4 Both Southey’s poetical engagement with his Oriental source material – that he feared would be seen as intemperate at best and immoral at worst – and his political commitment to the dissemination of a British civilizing code of morality and religion throughout the Indian territories were important influences that shaped Kehama, which I will trace in this chapter. However, Southey’s attempt to blend both elements in his fiction created problems in Kehama that I will discuss in terms of the wider contemporary political debate about the future of British India during the Romantic period. 198

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At the time Southey was writing about India, the East India Company, under the aegis of the British government, was employing an expansionist policy in order to maintain stability in the regions surrounding the British territories (Bengal, and the hinterlands around the ports of Madras and Bombay). By 1815, the Company had added greatly to its landholdings and according to P. J. Marshall, ‘A contemporary estimate was that 40 million Indian people were by then living under the Company’s rule.’5 The question of how the native population of these territories should be governed became of increasing concern to Britons, and in the 1780s particularly many had feared that the East India Company’s growing power over its native employees was becoming cruel and despotic. For instance, Edmund Burke’s famous impeachment of the Governor-General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, in 1788, on charges of corruption and extortion combined with humanitarian concerns to present India ‘as an ancient civilization that must be protected from the barbarism of the East India Company’.6 By the time Kehama was written, the East India Company’s commercial monopoly had been curtailed (and would end completely with the East India Company Charter Act of 1813). Nevertheless the increasing awareness of Britain’s responsibility towards its Indian subjects was manifested by a growing evangelical movement to convert them to Christianity, as well as by controversy over the best form of government for them. Such concerns became a significant theme of Kehama, where Southey sought to combine Oriental ‘extravagance’ with imperial politics in his fictional commentary on government and power. The examples that Southey saw of native Indian politics (for instance, in Tipu Sultan’s rule of Mysore), as well as the machinations of the East India Company, combine in an enduring stereotype of Oriental despotism. The poem portrays the ambitious actions of a fictitious Indian ruler, Kehama, in his attempt to gain dominion over not only the world, but heaven and hell too. The effects of his actions are traced on the lives of two ordinary people (Ladurlad and his daughter, Kailyal) who resist his tyranny with the assistance of the gods of the Hindu religion (drawn from the Hindu scriptures that Southey had read). The oppressive nature of Kehama’s reign is enacted in the arrogant attempt of his son, Arvalan, to rape Kailyal, so that her father is forced to kill him, thereby setting in motion the narrative chain of events. The Hindu gods eventually bring about the downfall of the Oriental despot, and the central characters who have been persecuted by him are rewarded for their virtuous resistance in the afterlife. It can be seen from this brief plot résumé that Southey (despite no longer actively embracing radical politics) was repeating a familiar

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theme that forms the organizing structure of all his long narrative poems, from Joan of Arc (1796) onwards, of virtuous, decent individuals (often from the peasant or labouring classes) opposing royal or imperial oppression. In this particular version of the motif, Southey chose India and the Hindu religion as a setting for his idealized dénouement of the downfall of tyranny, relocating the theme of his Western radical politics in the East. This is because as Southey became increasingly conservative, he ‘exported’ his previously radical concerns about personal liberty to India. This was a method by which he could remain true to his formative politics, but yet highlight foreign tyranny, so portraying the British government in contrast as a responsible, benevolent polity. So there are several reasons why Southey focused on India and the Hindu religion in his poem. One of these obviously was that the subject-matter appealed to him as an attractive setting for his story, but his motives also related directly to political debate over the future of British India. Javed Majeed and Saree Makdisi have shown that during the opening decades of the nineteenth century, attitudes to India were becoming increasingly riven by a political ‘fault-line’, dividing the conservative and ‘romantic’ view of India – that valued Indian culture and its traditions, disseminated by Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings – and the utilitarian and evangelical view, that India should be governed by English law and administrative systems.7 While both attitudes posited India’s future as an imperial outpost, the former (and earlier) view advocated that ‘the languages and laws of Muslim and Hindu India should not be ignored or supplanted, but utilized and preserved, as foundations of the traditional social order’ and so implemented as instruments for governing the empire.8 But this attitude was gradually eroded by the changing demands of Britain’s relationship with India, indicated in the Hastings trial, which despite the latter’s acquittal led to diminishing support for ‘Orientalists’ against the centralized, metropolitan demands of the ‘Anglicists’. Makdisi puts Southey strictly in the latter camp, and in his articles on India for the Annual Review and the Quarterly Review as well as his prefaces to Kehama, Southey does seem to be firmly aligning himself with the ambitions for India of James Mill, as Majeed has shown.9 But we have to take into account the significant role that the research of Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in Calcutta, played in the construction of Kehama. Because Southey incorporated both the Orientalist and the Anglicist viewpoints in his poem, it is similarly divided by this political fault-line. One of the most obvious ways in which this dichotomy in the poem manifests itself is in the conflict between Southey’s Hindu material

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and the later prefaces that he wrote to explain his motives for writing Kehama. A letter of 1808 shows that Southey’s plan had been to include those aspects that he considered constituted an Oriental poem: There must be quicker, wilder movements; there must be a gorgeousness of ornament also, – eastern gem-work, and sometimes rhyme must be rattled upon rhyme, till the reader is half dizzy with the thundering echo    .10 Southey’s much later preface to Kehama, for the 1837 edition, had a condemnatory, but also a defensive tone: The spirit of the poem was Indian, but there was nothing Oriental in the style. I had learnt the language of poetry from our own great masters and the great poets of antiquity.11 The Indian content has been relegated to its ‘spirit’, because at this much later date Southey wanted to claim it as more conventional than it was perceived, and so fitting into the tradition of ‘our own great masters’. The largest source of imaginative material for Kehama came from Hindu scriptures, translated by Orientalist scholars, but Southey also wanted to present a poem that conformed to British, Christian standards of morality for his readers, condemning practices such as suttee and infanticide that he attributed to the ‘Brahminical system [which] produces the utmost excesses of false humanity and of hideous cruelty’.12 The moral message that Southey intended to promote was from the start, at odds with his ‘monstrous’ material, as he referred to it.13 When he realized there was such a discrepancy between his intentions and his text, the prefaces were written in order to curb the material, as well as to mould his readers’ expectations. As Balachandra Rajan points out, ‘the stubborn enmity between Kehama and its prefaces’ is due to the fact that Southey was trying to contain the positions of both ‘the Indian other and the English self’ in his poem, as well as fulfilling the contradictory ideologies of fictional writer and imperial advocate.14 The reluctance Southey felt to write the ‘monstrous’ elements of Kehama became a physical repugnance for the project, which he said was ‘so abominable a sin against what I know to be right, that my stomach turns at it. It is to the utmost of my power vitiating, or rather continuing the corruption of public taste.’15 Nevertheless, despite Southey’s fears, Kehama was more successful than he ever thought it would be (going through four editions in eight years). Perhaps this success was due to the

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subject material, that fed, what Madame de Staël identified, and Byron reported, as the ‘orientalizing’ trend of readers, during this period.16 However, the most revealing comment that Southey made about the poem was after a preview of Walter Scott’s review of it for the Quarterly, when he asked his friend Grosvenor Charles Bedford to insert some paragraphs that would ‘point out the moral grandeur of the fable’ and ‘rescue me from the imputation of having written a poem of 5000 lines for the purpose of teaching Hindoo mythology’.17 Southey wanted to have it both ways, aiming at a moral sublimity that would instruct, while also providing the excitement and novelty of Hindu ‘mythology’ for his readers – two incompatible elements that fail to cohabit comfortably in his poem. Southey’s debt to Orientalist scholars for his material creates the interesting division between his moral condemnation of Brahman ‘oppression’ and his positive depiction of the deities (who assist the oppressed heroes against their own sacerdotal intermediaries) on which the Hindu religion is based. Among the sources of Indian ‘mythology’ that Southey used for his poem were Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s Gentoo Code (1776); Charles Wilkins’s translation of the Mahabharata, containing the Bhagavad-Gita (1785); Sir William Jones’s translations of Sacontala (1789) and the translation by the Baptist missionary, William Carey, of The Ramayuna of Valmeeki (1806–10). Southey quotes extensively from this latter text, saying ‘the reader will be less disposed to condemn the fictions of Kehama as extravagant, when he compares them with this genuine specimen of Hindoo fable’.18 Southey again anticipates the reaction of his reader – as he did throughout Kehama’s pre-publication period – to be one that would consider his text immoderate, even though he himself revelled in the text’s ‘extravagance’ in his letters. However, Southey indicates that his reader should be comforted by knowing that he has filtered out some of the excessive material of the ‘genuine specimen’ in his own version. The implication is that the ‘Hindoo fable’ needs to be mediated by a Western writer and in fact Southey relied on such mediated texts himself in writing Kehama. He used Western translations of the Hindu epics (being unable to read Persian or Sanskrit) and depended even more heavily on the commentary of those scholars who had translated them, as well as the accounts of European travellers and residents in India. The role that William Jones and other members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal played in the construction of Kehama was very important, both for supplying much of the material that Southey drew on and also in terms of the value they placed on Indian literature. Southey’s

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poetic descriptions of the Hindu gods and their habitat are generally accompanied by notes containing extracts from essays published by the Asiatic Society in their Asiatick Researches.19 Southey was very familiar with these essays, regularly reviewing newly published volumes for the Annual Review (until 1809), and calling them the ‘treasures of the East’, which will ‘outlive the ill constructed and baseless empire in which they have originated’.20 Southey’s poetic representation of the Hindu god, Indra, and his heavenly domain, Swerga, is underpinned by an excerpt from an essay, written by Jones, entitled ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’.21 This essay was, according to Michael Franklin, ‘[p]ioneering in its attempt to discover universal connections between Oriental and Occidental religions and cultures’ and was ‘immediately and widely influential in its day’.22 In the extract on Indra from Jones’s essay, he compares the attributes of this Indian god to aspects of classical mythology. For instance, Jones says, ‘He has the character of the Roman Genius, or chief of the Good Spirits’ and ‘his Olympus is Meru’.23 Several of the other notes to Kehama are from this essay and make comparisons between the Indian gods and those of other ‘pagan mythologies’.24 Southey valued Jones’s comparative study of religious origins because such connections between the Hindu religion and the classical mythology justified his use of material that might otherwise have been considered abstruse and self-indulgent, by the European reader he posited. This preoccupation with finding a common link between religions and cultures only reflected the greater programme of the Asiatic Society generally. Jones and his fellow essayists had a polemical as well as a pedagogical agenda that attempted to make Indian culture and religion both accessible and acceptable to their European contemporaries. Even more ambitiously, as John Drew points out, ‘From the outset of his career Jones had hoped that a study of Oriental cultures might help reinvigorate European culture.’25 In order to investigate a culture so vastly different from their own, the Asiatic Society members applied scholarly methods to their field of study, to make it more comprehensible to Western readers. Asia had historically been perceived by Westerners as an ancient, marvellous and immeasurable continent; a perspective that Jones’s account of his arrival displays: It gave me inexpressible pleasure to find myself in the midst of so noble an amphitheatre, almost encircled by the vast regions of Asia, which has ever been esteemed the nurse of Sciences, the inventress of delightful and useful arts, the scene of glorious actions, fertile in the

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productions of human genius, abounding in natural wonders, and infinitely diversified in the forms of religion and government, in the law, manners, customs, and languages, as well as in the features and complexions, of men.26 As Jones surveys Asia, he is overwhelmed by its vastness and its infinite attributes. The excitement and passion he feels – revealed by his declaration that he had ‘ardently desired’ to visit this unknown continent – have been inculcated by a textual knowledge of their ‘eventful histories’ and ‘agreeable fictions’.27 Edward Said identifies this literary preconception of Asia as one of the attributes that shaped European Orientalists.28 Positioning himself in the middle of this ancient ‘amphitheatre’, Jones is surrounded and swamped by Asia – but to his delight, rather than the fear that De Quincey revealed in his own ‘survey’ of the ‘vast empires’ of Asia, that constituted his opium dreams.29 Whereas others may feel intimidated by the vast repository of knowledge that Asia contains, Jones is inspired by the revelations it can provide, positing the Orient as a feminine and therefore yielding, ‘fertile’ resource for investigation by the energetic male scholar. Jones’s fellow researchers in the Asiatic Society were expected to take just such an active, even a corrective, role in their studies. This was because, according to Jones, they were endowed with ‘the superiority of European talents’. He observes that ‘reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds, while the Asiaticks have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination’.30 Jones thereby creates a distinction between the rational and scholarly essayists of the Asiatic Society and the imaginative writings of the ‘Asiaticks’. This division was a result of Jones’s Enlightenment background which caused him to respect knowledge based on a philosophical, scientific and rational spirit of inquiry, while acknowledging the attraction of the inspirational poetry and ‘mythology’ of the Orient. It also pointed to the problems that Jones and his essayists would report, in using their academic methods to analyse Indian sacred texts. The Asiatick Researches often construct an India, and indeed an Asia, that is ahistorical, lacking any approved scientific method of chronology. The version of Europeans in India that Jones and his circle presented to the public (no doubt unconsciously) is very illuminating, particularly for the tone of scholarly bemusement it employs in trying to construct a logical system of knowledge from what were considered to be very interesting, but exasperatingly vague, Oriental apocryphal fables. Jones gave several reasons for a structured investigation of Asian

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history. One of these was that it would facilitate British rule in India and so it was necessary to know ‘all former modes of ruling these inestimable provinces, on the prosperity of which so much of our national welfare and individual benefit, seems to depend’.31 Another reason was because Jones believed that the Hindus at a much earlier time had been ‘splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge’, despite the ‘degenerate and abased’ state of the present Indian people.32 So Jones tried to discover more about India’s glorious past that contrasted so tellingly with the modern Hindus he saw. However, he was frustrated by finding this period enveloped ‘in a cloud of fables’.33 Similarly his colleague, Francis Wilford, also expressed bewilderment in the face of the Hindu’s ‘monstrous system’ of chronology, saying that he ‘rejected [it] as absolutely repugnant to the course of nature, and human reason’.34 However, according to S. N. Mukherjee, Jones’s attempts to rationalize the Hindu chronology by his ‘scholarly’ methods caused him to draw erroneous conclusions because ‘he believed in Genesis blindly’ and ‘ignored the Vedas completely’.35 What Southey took from the Asiatick Researches, as much as anything else, was this bafflement in the face of a ‘cloud of fables’, where ‘fiction and history are so blended “as to be scarce distinguishable” ’.36 In Kehama, Southey constructed a loose, free-floating version of India, which is timeless, unanchored in any secure historical fact, and as obscure and recondite as the beliefs he recounts. Even the annotation that Southey’s ‘mythology’ is embedded in is chronologically unreliable itself, ranging as it does from ancient Indian epics through to François Bernier’s The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol (1671–72), and to the more recent accounts of explorers such as Pierre Sonnerat’s A Voyage to the East Indies and China (1788). Despite using Western scholars to filter out the ‘extravagant’ element of ‘Hindoo fable’, Southey ended in constructing one of his own from his sources. Though the researchers of the Asiatic Society applied scientific methods to their field of study, at one and the same time they reported the limitations of applying such measures to the Asiatic ‘sphere of imagination’. The mixture of Indian ‘mythology’ and European method created mystery while trying to solve it, and the effects of the essayists’ comments, as well as Southey’s poem, adds to the romantic misconception of Asia as a mysterious, timeless, unmappable continent – an idea that has percolated into the modern period contemporaneously with the image of Africa’s ‘heart of darkness’. While Jones, as Michael Franklin

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has shown, did make his reading public more aware of the Hindu religion as a system of belief, I would still argue that by valuing Indian literature as part of a golden age of culture he added to ‘the identification of the Orient as static and fixed in a timeless past’.37 Jones’s respect for India originated in an idea of its past, rather than for its ‘degenerate’ present. His fabulous, romantic version of India is what appealed to Southey and this was what he replicated in Kehama, claiming Asia as a region where poetic inventiveness is uncircumscribed; a place where even the ‘hostile essences’ of fire and water can create a palace in which ‘spires and pinnacles of fire / Round watery cupolas aspire’.38 As Said states, the Orient is created in such texts as an unrestricted, imaginative ‘other’ for rational Europe.39 Nevertheless Southey’s alter ego, the historian, demanded that his Oriental fantasy be underpinned by verifiable accounts of the Indian religion and culture, and he sought to provide such evidence in his footnotes. This led to an even more insurmountable problem in writing Kehama, which explains further the ambiguous relationship Southey had with his Hindu source material. In 1807, Southey reviewed an essay by Francis Wilford in the newly published eighth volume of Asiatick Researches for the Annual. In this essay, Wilford revealed that previous assertions he had made (in the third volume of Asiatick Researches) connecting elements from the Hindu sacred texts to a geographical construction of Egypt were less reliable than he had first thought. Wilford relates a tale concerning an Indian ‘pandit’, employed to explain the links between ‘mythology’ and geography and so assist him in his researches. On checking through the materials he had collated, Wilford found that his (unnamed) assistant had carried out forgeries on the original documents that sometimes appeared as altered words, but also as larger amendments, to cover the tracks of his inventions. After discovering these forgeries, Wilford found that the assistant had also embezzled the research funds set aside to pay other Indian scholars for their labours. As might be expected, Southey’s review takes the form of outraged condemnation for the actions of the ‘pandit’, and he quotes the whole episode verbatim from Wilford’s essay, adding: This sort of deception is nothing new, but there is something shocking in the conduct of the Pandit when he was discovered. He flew into the most violent paroxysms of rage [    ] and he brought ten Bramins to swear by what is most sacred in their religion to the genuineness of these extracts.40

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Oriental literature is not just harmlessly fantastical any more for Southey, but is founded on a totally unreliable and even deceitful base. The fact that ‘ten Bramins’ will perjure themselves (and their religion) illustrates for him how reprehensible the Hindus, in thrall to their priesthood, are. In contrast, Southey describes Wilford’s conduct in confessing the erroneous conclusions he has made based on his research assistant’s unreliable evidence, as manifesting ‘perfect candour and sincerity’, demanding ‘high respect for his industry and erudition, his love of antiquity, and his love of truth’.41 Southey deliberately makes a striking comparison between the scholarly, sincere, British Wilford and the deceitful ‘pandit’, the product of a culture dominated by Brahman ‘oppression’. Southey’s response to this episode exemplifies a further reason for embracing, as he did, the Anglicist views of James Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay. He felt that the unreliability and ‘error’ of Hinduism needed to be replaced by a solid bedrock of corrective English education and government. In a Quarterly article of 1812, Southey developed these ambitions for Britain’s empire further. Whatever level of future control Britain was to have over its imperial possessions, including India, the role of the ‘parent country’ was to inculcate British ‘institutions’ and ‘language’ in the population, thereby creating feelings of ‘reverential attachment’ for Britain.42 In stating these views, Southey anticipated some of the ideas of the next generation of politicians, such as Lord Macaulay (President of the Council on Education in India) in his ‘Minute’ of 1835: We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.43 As well as dominating India with English ‘taste’ and ‘morals’, Macaulay suggests an educational system that encourages Indians to employ ‘Western nomenclature’. This can be seen as the culmination of Jones’s attempts to apply Western scholarly method to India. But unlike Jones’s approach, that sought to engage with the Indian language (as well as Hindu texts), Macaulay’s cultural imperialism attempts to control

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‘dialects’ and ‘render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge’, a further step in domesticating India. The Asiatic Society’s investigations (and Southey’s earlier romantic views of Asia) are in fact likely to have contributed to the Anglicist case for imposing British systems of education and government on the Indian territories. Certainly Jones and his researchers may have contributed to their own demise, because the practical question that their research begs is how can Britain govern a country that is portrayed as sublimely unknowable and unassimilable? Such a picture of India resists any form of external control. For those faced with governing India there was only one answer and ‘James Mill’s The History of British India (1817) was an attempt to define an idiom for the British empire as a whole which would replace the dominant conservative one’, as Majeed states.44 So Southey’s text contributes to the Anglicist argument in two ways; first, intentionally, by denigrating his Indian material, and secondly (and perhaps unconsciously) in presenting India as ungovernable, a view that many British readers would find disconcerting. The downfall of Southey’s Oriental, tyrannical ‘Rajah’, although brought about by Hindu divinities, is in fact the contrivance of a Western writer desiring to impose his rational Christian morality on the Indian world of Kehama. Southey’s fiction is therefore imbued with the controlling ideals of the Anglicist lobby, which also sought to impose a template of British morality, education and religion on the Indian territories.

Notes 1. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols (London, 1850), II, 136. (Hereinafter referred to as Life and Correspondence.) 2. In a letter to his close friend Charles Wynn in July 1800, Southey spoke of ‘manufacturing a Hindoo romance, wild as Thalaba’. Life and Correspondence, II, 97. The term ‘monstrous’ comes from Southey’s prefaces to The Curse of Kehama, in Robert Southey, The Poetical Works of Robert Southey Collected by Himself, 10 vols (London, 1837–38), VIII, xvi, xxiii. (Hereafter referred to as Poetical Works.) 3. A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, ed. J. W. Robberds, 2 vols (London, 1843), I, 375. 4. Robert Southey, ‘Reports of the African Institution’, Annual Review, 7, chap. 5, No. 9 (1809), 149–52 (p. 152). 5. P. J. Marshall in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–99), II: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall, p. 4. 6. P. J. Marshall, ‘Britain Without America – A Second Empire?’, in The Eighteenth Century, pp. 576–95 (p. 582).

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7. Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings: James Mill’s ‘History of British India’ and Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8. A. L. Macfie, Orientalism (London: Longman, 2002), p. 3. 9. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, pp. 47–86. 10. Letter to Walter Savage Landor, 20 May 1808, in Life and Correspondence, III, 145. 11. Southey, Poetical Works, VIII, xvii. 12. Robert Southey, ‘A review of James Forbes’ Oriental Memoirs’, Quarterly Review, 12, No. 23 (October 1814), 180–227 (p. 220). 13. See Note 2. 14. Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 143. 15. Letter to Charles Danvers, 6 May 1801, in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, 155–6. 16. Philip Martin, Byron: A Poet before His Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 43. 17. Walter Scott, ‘Southey’s Curse of Kehama’, Quarterly Review, 5, No. 9 (February 1811), 40–61; New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965), II, 1. 18. Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (London, 1810), p. 316. 19. Asiatick Researches; or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia, 20 vols (London, 1788–1839). (Hereafter referred to as Asiatick Researches.) 20. Robert Southey, ‘Asiatic Researches’, Annual Review, 6, chap. 10, No. 18 (1808), 643–54 (p. 643). 21. William Jones, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, in Asiatick Researches, I (1788), 221–75. 22. Michael Franklin in Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), p. 348. 23. Jones, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, p. 241. 24. Ibid., p. 267. 25. John Drew, India and the Romantic Imagination (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 49. 26. William Jones, ‘A Discourse on the Institution of a Society, for Inquiring into the History, Civil and National, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia’, Asiatick Researches, I (1788), ix–xvi (pp. ix–x). 27. Ibid. 28. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 92–6. 29. Thomas De Quincey, ‘Confessions of an English Opium-eater’ (1821), in Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Grevel Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 72–4. 30. William Jones, ‘The Second Anniversary Discourse’, in Asiatick Researches, I (1788), 405–14 (p. 407). 31. Ibid. 32. William Jones, ‘On the Hindus’, in Asiatick Researches, I (1788), 414–32 (p. 421). 33. Ibid.

210 Europe and Beyond 34. Francis Wilford, ‘On the chronology of the Hindus’, in Asiatick Researches, V (1798), 241–95 (p. 241). 35. S. N. Mukherjee, Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (London: Sangam, 1987), p. 96. 36. Ibid., p. 98. 37. Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001–02), VI: India, ed. Indira Ghose, p. xi. 38. Southey, The Curse of Kehama, pp. 65–6. 39. Said, Orientalism, pp. 94, 167. 40. Southey, ‘Asiatic Researches’, pp. 650–1. 41. Ibid., p. 651. 42. Robert Southey, ‘Inquiry into the Poor Laws, &c.’, Quarterly Review, 8, No. 16 (December 1812), pp. 319–56 (p. 355). 43. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft and others (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 430. 44. Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 8.

17 Debating China: Romantic Fictions of the Qing Empire, 1760–1800 Peter J. Kitson

I

Chinese, Tartars, Mongols and Manchu

This chapter is focused on the European fascination with a different other from those which are at the present time more commonly discussed in Romantic scholarship, the Celestial Empire of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). The Qing Empire was certainly a debatable and much debated land in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The Qing was debated in different ways as scholars, diplomats, travellers and missionaries attempted to assess the nature of its structure and the validity or otherwise of its customs and religions and the status of its unique and complex languages. This is the period in which the status of China shifts from a generalized idealization and admiration to one of degradation and often contempt.1 Earlier admiration by the philosophes of the empire as an enlightened despotism with a rational system of bureaucracy and a superior civilization gave way to disappointment with an allegedly stationary and stagnant tyranny, countenancing superstition, infanticide and female foot-binding. David Porter has influentially argued that what underlay Western responses to China in the eighteenth century was ‘an implicit model of legitimacy’ in religion and language which China appeared to validate in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries before a neo-classicist backlash rendered its culture increasingly unintelligible and illegitimate.2 Ros Ballaster has recently argued that Chinese culture was feminized in the eighteenth century and that fictional representations of China serve as the ‘location of a destabilizing illegitimate cultural and political agency’, identified with a feminine excess, a process that becomes increasingly apparent in the travel writing of the period.3 211

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This chapter attempts to contribute to this debate about China. It discusses one facet of what may be called the orientalizing imagination of the West: the recurrent stereotyping of the Chinese and the Tartar, a pattern that is apparent from the early modern period, if not before, to the end of the Qing Empire in 1912: though as the nineteenth century proceeds and physical anthropology begins to dominate ideas about difference in the distinction between Chinese, Tartar and Manchu collapses altogether into a fully negative stereotype.4 Like the constructions of the peaceful and friendly Arawak and the savage, cannibalistic Carib Indians of Columbus’s New World, as discussed by Peter Hulme, this distinction is slippery and loose, and partakes of the imaginary: it is a projection of European concerns.5 Generally, the word ‘Tartar’ is used by British writers to describe a northern, warlike, nomadic, fierce and superstitious people, in opposition to the Chinese who are southern, civilized, feminized and literate. Conventionally, the term refers to the north-eastern and north-western peoples of Central Eurasia who were defined as not Chinese, rather than to a specific ethnic or linguistic grouping. According to Pamela Kyle Crossley, ‘Tartar’ was originally a linguistic not an ethnic category; the name of a Turkic-speaking medieval people of Central Eurasia. This people became a significant element in early Mongol federations of the twelfth century, and the name became commonly applied to the Mongol peoples as a whole. Because the Turkic peoples, who settled in the Crimea and near parts of the Caucasus, were called ‘Tatars’, the corruption of this term as Tartar remained familiar in Europe. This modern usage of the word appears to have first been made by the English Monk, Matthew Paris, in his Chronica Majora (1686) which repeated the French King Louis IX’s pun establishing the popular identification of Tartary and its denizens with the classical underworld, Tartarus.6 The word was later applied to Temur or Tamerlaine and his followers, and, by the time of the seventeenth century, it was also bestowed on the newly powerful Manchu of Manchuria. The practice of calling both Manchu and Mongol Tartar persisted until the end of the Qing Empire in 1912. As Crossley puts it, ‘ “Tartar” then was evidently a European and American commonplace for a free-spirited, horseriding Eurasian peoples who harassed and in select instances conquered sedentary cultures of sober repute.’7 Thus for Europeans, the Tartars became associated with the Mongol peoples as a whole during a time of serious invasion fears. The Manchu, who famously conquered the Ming Empire in 1644 and established a polity that would persist until 1912, were a very distinct people from both the original Tatars/Tartars and the Mongols,

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although their histories were often conflated. Prior to the early 1600s, these peoples were known as the ‘Jurchen’, adopting the ethnic name of Manchu in 1635 in a deliberate attempt to construct a coherent and separate identity that would supersede the tribal identities of the Jurchen and other north-eastern tribes associated with them.8 The Manchu were also viewed as not having a coherent ethnic identity of their own once they settled and conquered China, being regarded as another example of the phenomena of China’s ability to conquer or absorb its conquerors. In fact, there was no clearly established Manchu cultural identity as this was created with the Qing Empire itself post 1635.

II Eighteenth-century Sinopolitans and Cosmopolitans: Goldsmith, Bell and Staunton So how did the rather complex ethnic and geopolitical divisions of Central Eurasia and China manifest themselves in the writing about the Qing Empire and its Mongol neighbours? Here I will concentrate on three less well-known texts by eighteenth-century writers, one a literary figure, the other two travellers and diplomats, and conclude by asking what difference it may make to our reading of one of the most celebrated canonical works about China and Tartary, S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. All these texts were composed before the end of the century when views of China and its culture began to change dramatically. ‘Kubla Khan’ provides a suitable terminus ad quem for this essay, as in some ways, it represents the last gasp of a kind of sinophilia that became less possible, perhaps impossible, for Coleridge himself and most of his contemporaries in the early years of the nineteenth century when the wholesale degradation of Qing culture by radicals and conservatives alike began. Working with the tools of racial discourse, economic liberalism, the reciprocal laws of diplomatic conduct and a fearsome Protestant missionary proselytization, the European powers demolished an extraordinary multi-ethnic formation that governed about as well as any of the period.9 In 1759, Oliver Goldsmith began work on the 119 Chinese letters which he published weekly in the Public Ledger, and later collected in novel form as The Citizen of the World (1762). The Citizen of the World satirizes European attitudes from the perspective of Lien Chi Altangi, a Chinese visitor to England. Lien Chi is, of course, a voice for Goldsmith to act out the role of the enlightened cosmopolitan, as well as to satirize the notion of the Man of Reason as Swift had in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. As Seamus Deane puts it, ‘Lien Chi Altangi has many qualities

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which recommend him to our attention, but being credibly Chinese is not one of them.’10 For Goldsmith, human differences are created by the stages of society and both China and Europe are civilized peoples: ‘The truth is, the Chinese and we are pretty much alike. Different degrees of refinement, and not of distance, mark the distinctions among mankind. Savages of the most opposite climates have all one character of improvidence and rapacity; and tutored nations, however separate, make use of the very same methods to procure refined enjoyment.’11 Both Britain and China are ‘polite nations’ and Lien Chi praises the English specifically for their ‘politeness’. Differences in manners are entirely relative as are notions of beauty: ‘the Europeans have a quite different idea of beauty from us; when I reflect on the small footed perfections of an Eastern beauty, how is it possible I should have eyes for a woman whose feet are ten inches long [    ] there is no universal standard for beauty’ (24–5). The marker for the Chinese Altangi of savagery and barbarism are the Tartar peoples. Altangi reports of those countries ‘where the brown Tartar wanders for a precarious subsistence, with an heart that never felt pity, himself more hideous than the wilderness he makes’ (47). Both states of barbarism and civilization have their attractions: ‘Do you sigh for the severe frugality of the wandering Tartar, or regret being born amidst the luxury and dissimulation of the polite? Rather tell me, has not every kind of life vices peculiarly its own? Is it not a truth, that refined countries have more vices, but those not so terrible, barbarous nations few, and they of the most hideous complexion?’ (50–1). The Manchu conquest of China in 1644 is discussed by Altangi’s correspondent from Peking, Fum Hoam in letter 42 of the series. Fum Hoam recounts the well-known story of the last Ming Emperor’s defeat, the killing of his daughter and suicide leaving behind the words written in his own blood, ‘Forsaken by my subjects, abandoned by my friends, use my body as you will, but spare, O spare, my people’. Fum Hoam repeats the standard wisdom of the Tartar conqueror conquered by Chinese (Ming) civilization, and notably fails to discriminate between the wandering nomadic Mongols and the Manchu: An empire which has thus continued invariably the same for such a long succession of ages, which though at last conquered by the Tartars, still preserves its ancient laws and learning; and may more properly be said to annex the dominions of Tartary to its Empire, than to admit a foreign conqueror; an empire as large as Europe governed by one law, acknowledging subjection to one prince, and experiencing but one revolution of any continuance in the space of

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four thousand years: that is something so peculiarly great, that I am naturally led to despise all other nations on the comparison. (178–9) Goldsmith’s novel evinces what may be called an Enlightened Universalist and cosmopolitan ethic, one where societies progress from stages of savagery and barbarism to politeness and refinement, from that of the ‘unlettered Tartar’ to the ‘polite Chinese’ (his novel also contains a moving response to Voltaire’s death). Ultimately differences between China and Europe are fewer than imagined as their nations have achieved a state of civilization. The other for Altangi and his European audience remains the barbaric Tartar who may be civilized by contact with the polite empire. Altangi considers himself, much like Goldsmith, as ‘Cosmopolite’, a citizen of the world, who ‘finds as much satisfaction in scheming for the countries in which I happen to reside, as for that in which I was born’ (462). Goldsmith never voyaged to China or Tartary except in the world of texts. There were, of course, actual encounters between Europeans and the Chinese empire. A few people did make the journey.12 Jesuit missionaries and diplomats wrote most of the accounts that came from China. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries several embassies journeyed to Beijing, mainly Russian, Portuguese and Dutch. Accounts of these embassies were translated and published in Britain or in various collections of voyages. One of the most influential of these accounts was written by the Scottish doctor, John Bell, who served with the Russian Court and was a member of the Izmailov Embassy sent by Peter the Great to the elderly Qing Emperor Kangxi in 1719–20. Bell’s account was written nearly forty years after this and published in 1763. His narrative is written in the mode of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. There is here less stress on the religious beliefs of the Chinese which had obsessed the Jesuit missionaries in Beijing and more interest in the manners and customs of the empire. The tone of Bell’s account is empirical, objective, humane and sceptical. The Embassy journeys overland from St Petersburg to Peking (Beijing) traveling over Siberia and what was then known as Independent Tartary inhabited by the ‘Kalmucks’ (Kalmyk or Torghuts). Bell again uses this term in a loose way to describe the Central Eurasian peoples of differing cultures and religions. His Tartars are nomadic, living in tents removing from place to place, ‘as conveniency requires’(89), which he describes as ‘the most ancient and pleasant manner of life’.13 He groups a whole range of different peoples under the term. He comments that the ‘Kalmucks are not such savage people as they are generally represented’ and that it is

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perfectly safe to travel among them. The Tzulimms ‘are poor, miserable and ignorant heathens’ (62), the Tongusans are ‘tall, able-bodied, brave and very honest’, they are ‘unacquainted with literature, and worship the sun and the moon’ (65). They are expert horsemen and hunters. The Yakutzy are hunters and fishers with ‘flattish faces, little black eyes, and long black hair, plaited and hanging down their backs’ (73). They are ‘humane and tractable’ apart from their custom of abandoning their terminally sick people to die. The ‘Mongall [    ] pursue the most ancient and simple manner of life’ and do not plough or dig (89). In his general remarks on the Chinese, Bell praises the arts of this ‘civilized and hospitable people; complaisant to strangers, and to one another; very regular in their manners and behavior, and respectful to their superiors; but, above all, their regard for their parents, and decent treatment of their women of all ranks, ought to be imitated, and deserve great praise’ (182). Within Peking, Bell frequently comments on the divisions between Manchu Tartar and Han Chinese, in one instance commenting about their disputes: ‘When a Chinese and Tartar are angry at one another, the Tartar in reproach, calls the Chinese louse-eater; and the latter, in return, calls the other fish-skin coat; because the Mantzur Tartars who live near the river Amoor subsist by fishing, and, in summer, wear coats made of the skins of fishes’ (156). Bell recounts how, when the Emperor was young, he insisted on his sons accompanying him on a hunting trip to the ‘woods of Tartary’ to prevent their falling into ‘idleness and effeminacy among the Chinese’ (169). Bell also tells the story of the Mantzur Tartar conquest of China in 1644. The Manchu, he tells us, are ‘so small a nation’, despised by the Chinese and who ‘bear no greater proportion to the Chinese than the inhabitants of Wales to the rest of Great Britain’. Despite some rebellions, the Emperor by ‘good fortune, and prudent conduct’ has maintained ‘publick tranquility’ and prosperity in his realm (177). Bell regards the Qing Empire of Kangxi as a formidable and powerful dominion which no country in the region would be capable of conquering. It is also a flexible and dynamic empire capable of forming alliances and treaties. Bell clearly shares in the sinophilia of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. He is a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, far more travelled than most and his account one where cosmopolitanism as a way of life finds little that is uncomfortable in either China, Russia or the interstices of Central Eurasia: ‘For never, perhaps, were those countries in a more flourishing condition than under the famous emperors, Kamhi and Peter the first’ (189). Thirty or so years after the publication of Bell’s account of the Qing Empire, there appeared several narratives of the first British Embassy to

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China, that of Lord Macartney in 1792. Its formal aim was to arrange the setting up of embassies in both nations’ capitals as well as to facilitate trade between Britain and China by a variety of measures privileging British merchants over their European competitors. A large volume of writing was published on the Embassy; but here I will focus on the Embassy’s official account penned by George Staunton who had full access to all the notes of the Embassy.14 Like Bell’s Account, Staunton’s official narrative attempts to avoid the direct expression of opinion preferring to observe and describe Chinese customs. China emerges as a civilized but despotic nation in which ‘the common Chinese’ are restrained by ‘the heavy hand of power’ but otherwise of ‘a cheerful and confident disposition’.15 Staunton is, of course, aware of the distinction between Chinese and Tartars. For him the word encompasses again the ‘the Tartar hordes’ of ‘Gengis-Kan’s power’ as well as the Manchu from whom the present Emperor, ‘Chien’ lung (Qianlong), is descended. They have ‘ever since maintained the empire in a tranquil and flourishing state’ (II. 183). Staunton notes the Emperor’s predilection for Tartars and the ‘secret but strong antipathy still subsisting between those two nations’ (II. 65). Here again we have the conflation between Mongols and Manchu as well as the construction of Manchu and Chinese as two different ‘nations’, which is hard to equate with the reality of the Qing state. Staunton writes how: A military life is much more the bent of a Tartar than of a Chinese. The hardy education, the rough manner, the active spirit, the wandering disposition, the loose principles, the irregular conduct of the former, fit him better for the profession, practice, and pursuits of war than the calm, regulated, domestic, philosophical, and moral habits of the latter. Warriors seem more often the offspring of Tartary, as literati are of China. The latter are more chiefly conversant in the sciences of morals, and of the policy of government, which are often united in the contemplation, and in the works, of their lawgivers and philosophers. (II. 582) Staunton notes how the Qing court retains a sense of its origins and manners. When discussing the education of the ‘Tartar princes’, he recounts how this is directed towards masculine military pursuits: They hold the Emperor in the greatest veneration, as considering him descended from Kublai Khan, the conqueror of China in the thirteenth century. His descendents being in the fourteenth century

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expelled from the throne of that empire, fled into the country of the Man-choos in Eastern Tartary; and from their intermarriages with the natives, sprung the Bog-doi Khans, who, in the last age, entered China, and formed the present dynasty: a dynasty hitherto most fortunate. (II. 267) Staunton reports the investment of the Qing court in the cult of Kublai Khan, a policy of identification with the cult of the Mongol Yuan emperor that the Manchu Qianlong emperor clearly encouraged. Staunton, however, is unable to disentangle Qing ideology from the ethnic situation of the previous 400 years of Chinese history. His account, like those of Goldsmith and Bell, perpetuates a discourse of northern masculine and warlike Tartars opposed to civilized southern Chinese, and one in which the Tartars have been civilized, or conquered, by the peoples they invaded. Staunton’s account is less idealistic about China than those of his predecessors. After all, the Embassy ended in a formal failure for the British in that Qianlong famously rejected the overtures of King George’s ambassador. Increasingly, as Porter points out, the Chinese were seen as a polity resistant to the avowedly universal languages of trade and diplomacy, as well as insulting to British conceptions of masculinity as enshrined in the Ambassador’s royal status when demanding the Ambassador’s ritual prostration before the Emperor in the ‘kowtow’ or kou tou, which Macartney famously refused to perform in its entirety. Nevertheless, Staunton (as did the authors of the journals he used) maintained an enlightenment universalist attitude to China, but one where Tartar barbarity blended in an uneasy solution with Chinese civilization. Later accounts would increasingly stress the barbarity of the Tartars as a sign for all of China’s peoples.

III

Romantic Tartary

We have seen how the opposition between Chinese and Tartar has informed much of the way that Europeans viewed the Far East over a substantial period of history. Not only is it seen in histories, travel accounts, drama, fiction and so on but it informs much other imaginative writing about China prior to the twentieth century. When writing about China the savage other is often created against which the Qing Empire is then defined for western eyes. I would like to conclude this chapter by discussing Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, composed sometime between 1797 and 1799 and published in 1816. The poem has been discussed as a poem of pure imagination, a poem about genius, an

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Orientalist poem, a poem about Napoleon Bonaparte. If one wishes to situate the poem in the discourse of China in general, and the Macartney Embassy in particular, then the way that we interpret the poem may be significantly different. This approach was adopted in a pioneering essay by Nigel Leask in which he sought to situate the poem in the context of debates surrounding the politics of landscape, with Kublai’s garden symbolising the kind of despotic absolutism to which George III could only aspire.16 Following Leask, I would like to draw attention to the Macartney Embassy as an informing context for the poem, though I diverge from his account by placing it in the discourse of Tartary and China, a discourse which locates it within a declining tradition of eighteenth-century sinophilia. Coleridge surprisingly writes very little specifically about China in his substantial oeuvre, and he writes almost nothing about his most enigmatic poem, other than the celebrated ‘Preface’. Kublai Khan, as Marco Polo and Samuel Purchas, and many others have made very clear, was a Tartar Emperor, the descendent of Genghis Khan. He was an outsider, an alien ruler. When Marco Polo visited Xanadu (Shang-tu or Chengde) and witnessed the Imperial Palace and gardens, Kublai was 85 years old and near the end of his reign and life, troubled by ‘voices prophesying war’. John Livingston Lowes, back in 1927, discussed at length Coleridge’s indebtedness to Samuel Purchas’s historical survey, Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), that contains a synthesis of all the accounts of China and the area called Tartary then known.17 Coleridge’s knowledge of China and his impression of it in the 1790s must surely also have been influenced by reports and accounts of the Macartney Embassy as well as earlier writings about Kublai and share in their tendencies. The Qianlong emperor who had ruled China for 60 years and who abdicated some 3 or 4 years previous to the composition of Coleridge’s poem is conflated with Kublai in the same way that previous writers were reminded of the Mongul conquest of the Song dynasty by the Manchu conquest of the Ming. Kublai hears ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’, because the final years of the philosopher Emperor, Qianlong’s reign, were taken up with the suppression of a growing number of anti-Manchu rebellions. As most commentators have accepted, the poem constructs an antithesis between nature and culture, savagery and civilization, chaos and art. In many ways the poem enacts the discourse of China that I have outlined. We have a Tartar Emperor whose lineage descends from the ruthless and savage Genghis Khan but who has now being at least partially assimilated into a civilized order as indicated by Purchas and others: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’ (ll. 1–2). The

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symbol of civilization here is the landscape garden, the ‘twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round’ (ll. 5–6), ‘bright with sinuous rills, / Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree’ (ll. 7–8).18 Qianlong, like Kublai, was known for his Summer Palace at Yuanming Yuan (or ‘Garden of Perfect Brightness’) near Beijing and also for the Imperial Palace at Jehol both of which were described in detail in the Macartney accounts. Macartney commented that Yuanming Yuan was said to be ‘eighteen miles round’ and ‘laid out in all the taste, variety, and magnificence which distinguish the rural scenery of Chinese gardening’. He stressed the ‘close arbours’, ‘stupendous rocks’, ‘fairyland galleries’ of the garden.19 The ‘deep romantic chasm’, described as ‘a savage place’ both holy and enchanted with its ‘woman wailing for her demon-lover’ and its destructive fountain, however, relates more to the necessary antithesis of savage Tartary which defines and confirms the civilization of China represented by the Pleasure Dome (ll. 12–30). Polo, Purchas, Bell and many others had detailed at length the Tartar reliance on Astrologers, magicians, necromancers and shamans. For instance, Purchas describes Kublai at the behest of his Astrologers ‘pour[ing] forthe with his owne hands the milke of the royal Mares in the ayre, and on the earth, to give drinke to the Spirits and Idols which they worship’. He describes how the necromancers or Bachsi are ‘exceedingly expert in their devilish art’ raising storms, threatening ‘plagues or other misfortunes from their Idols’.20 Certainly, savage Tartary, like Coleridge’s ‘Romantic chasm’, is a place of idols, demons and magicians, antithetical to the rational, Confucian civilization of China which has now assimilated both Tartar emperors – the Yuan Mongul and the Manchu Qing. In the same way that the civilized but effeminate Chinese culture civilized its Mongul and Tartar conquerors, Kublai and the Visionary speaker of the poem are also civilized by contact with a feminine presence. In the poem’s concluding lines the civilizing and inspirational figure is female: A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played Singing of Mount Abora. (ll. 37–44) The damsel’s agency is one that the Visionary wishes for, to enable him to build ‘that dome in air’ (l. 46) which Kublai has built on land, yet the process of civilizing in the poem is imaged as feminine, and

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that the Mongol trajectory from savage conqueror to settled ruler is accomplished by the influence of the feminine is one congruent with the received discourse of a feminizing and civilizing Chinese culture. Nevertheless the civilizing presence in the poem is not actually Chinese, neither Yuan conquered Song nor the Manchu conquered Ming, but Abyssinian. It may also be that for Coleridge the civilizing agency, though feminine and exotic, must in some way be Christian. As Leask has argued, Abyssinia, in contrast to savage and superstitious Tartary, connoted an ancient Christian culture compatible with Coleridge’s then Unitarian beliefs which Confucian China could not.21 Such customs and beliefs had been recently evoked by James Bruce in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (1790) as well as in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas which was widely read.22 In any case, I would argue that the paradigm of the discourse of China in the eighteenth century underlying the series of histories, accounts and fictions provides the informing structure, if not the exact programme, for a poem that is deeply imbricated in the ways of viewing China and its Tartar others which derive from at least the times of Samuel Purchas and persist at least to the Macartney Embassy.

Notes 1. See William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), pp. 140–73; Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 1998), pp. 81–144. 2. David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 3–12. 3. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 206, 204, 223, 218, 196. 4. See Peter J. Kitson, Romanticism, Race and Colonial Encounter 1770–1830 (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 5. Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounter: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992). 6. See J. J. Saunders, ‘Matthew Paris and the Mongols’, in Essays in Medieval History presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 116–33 (p. 124). 7. Pamela Kyle Crossley, The Manchus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 1; David Morgan, The Mongols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 56. 8. R. Guy Kent, ‘Who were the Manchus: A Review Essay’, Journal of Asian Studies, 61.1 (2002), 151–64; F. W. Mote, Imperial China 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 784–90. 9. See Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China. 2nd edn (New York: W.W Norton, 1999), pp. 26–138. 10. Seamus Deane, ‘Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World’, in The Art of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Andrew Swarbrick (London: Vision Press, 1984), pp. 33–50;

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

Porter, Ideographia, pp. 138–42; 72–80; Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, pp. 202–8, 242–53. The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), II: The Citizen of the World, pp. 13–14. Further references to this work will be cited by page number in the text. See Nigel Cameron, Barbarians and Mandarins: Thirteen Centuries of Western Travellers in China (New York: Walker and Weatherhill, 1970). A Journey from St Petersburg to Pekin 1719–22 by John Bell of Antermony, ed. J. L. Stevenson (London: Barnes & Noble/Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 89. Further references to this edition are given by page number in the text. For the Macartney Embassy, see Alain LePeyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilisations: The British Expedition to China 1792–94 (London: HarperCollins, 1993); James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Porter, Ideographia, pp. 193–240. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China 2 vols (London: W. Bulmer, 1797), II, p. 14. Further references to this edition are given in the text and identified by volume and page number. Nigel Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited’, in Romanticism, 4.1 (1998), 1–21. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu; A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poems, ed. John Beer (London: J.M. Dent, 1993), p. 205 (pp. 205–7). Further references to the poem are from this edition and indicated by line numbers. An Embassy to China Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney during His Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793–1794, ed. J. L. Cranmer-Byng (London: Longmans, 1962). Macartney’s Journal was not published in its entirety until 1962. John Barrow drew heavily on it for his Travels in China (London, 1806). Samuel Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrimage or Relation of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places (London, 1626), pp. 418–19. See Note 16. Ibid.

18 ‘Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits’: The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century Deirdre Coleman

The eye-catching conjunction of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’ occurs in William Cowper’s ‘The Winter Evening’, where the poet describes the arrival in his secluded village of newspapers from the great Babel of London – that ‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’. Amidst advertisements for ‘Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald’, Cowper lists, Aetherial journies, submarine exploits, And Katterfelto with his hair on end At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.1 Katterfelto was a Prussian maestro of spectacle, the toast of London town in the early 1780s. A conjurer and travelling showman, he was a freemason who used insects (amongst other props) to bolster his claims to secret knowledge of the occult. Blitzing the London public with advertisements for an array of ‘New Grand Medley Entertainments’, all of which promised ‘Wonderful Wonders, Wonders and Wonders’, Katterfelto’s most popular act involved a ‘Solar Microscope’ which projected on to a screen an assortment of insects, magnified to fantastical size.2 Another stunt involved demonstrating ‘in a drop of clear water (the size of a pin’s head) upwards of 10,000 live Insects’.3 An illustration of 1783 in The European Magazine depicts him in the process of conducting his magic lantern insect show. With one hand stroking his feline familiar – his necromantic black cat – Katterfelto points the other to a set of magnified insects projected behind him, several of which look dangerously lively, even demonic.4 Cashing in on a flu epidemic 223

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which swept through London in 1782, Katterfelto explained the satanic appearance of his specimens by boasting that they were the very insects which had caused the outbreak. Another insect performer of the early 1780s was the Yorkshireman Henry Smeathman, flycatcher, colonial projector, inventor, aeronaut and deep-sea diver, a tried and proved aficionado of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’. In 1781, Smeathman published a remarkable paper on the aggressive West African termite which works as an allegory for his conception of the ‘free plantation’ colony, a debatable labour scheme which combined abolitionist sentiment with a distinctly imperialist theme.5 This essay extends our understanding of Smeathman’s thinking about the natural world and its lessons for human organization and life by examining two of his unpublished papers in the Linnean Society Library in London. These papers, worked up from journals of the 1770s and read to the Society for the Promotion of Natural History in 1786, record marine observations during Smeathman’s 8 years in West Africa and in the West Indies. During this time he was collecting for patrons such as Sir Joseph Banks, Dru Drury, the Duchess of Portland and other notables (the Duchess of Portland was a great collector of shells, rare corals and other marine curiosities). The first of the essays is untitled but contains ‘observations and remarks on certain marine Animalcules and Polypes’. These observations were made by Smeathman from the safety of the ship taking him to West Africa in 1771. The other paper, entitled ‘Of Submarine bodies on the Coral Banks at Antigua and other West India Islands’, records extensive diving, sometimes to a depth of 20 feet.6 If history is ‘a debatable land’ between reason and imagination, then natural history, as seen in these two essays, shifts between system and speculation – between the collector’s instinct for classification and the poet’s imaginative musings about the flux and formlessness of evolutionary nature.7 As we shall see in the case of the polyp, the marine invertebrate presented a particularly acute instance of disputed territory, its boundaries permeable, fluctuating and indistinct, forever pointing the passage from one species to another. Erasmus Darwin’s well-known lines in The Temple of Nature (1803), where life is imagined as originating in the ancient seas, captures well the permeability of vegetable–animal boundaries in marine zoology: Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

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First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.8 In her essay ‘Images of Ambiguity’, Barbara Maria Stafford has written wonderfully well of the ‘new realm of equivocal biota’ opened up in the eighteenth century by the magnification of microscopic organisms. For Stafford, magnification drives to the centre of ‘a major aesthetic problem posed by all natural history description. What does one do with beings that are neither one thing nor the other?’ Katterfelto’s fantastical insects,9 projected by his ‘lantern of fear’, were a ‘neither/nor’ dilemma invented for popular consumption, but scholarly natural history, as can be seen in Darwin’s ‘First forms minute’, had its ‘neither/nor’ dilemmas as well. The most famous of these was the polyp, that perplexing little aquatic being which captured Smeathman’s attention en route to West Africa in 1771. For some natural historians, while polyps appeared ‘inanimate as stones’ it was clear nevertheless that they were living organisms.10 To others the polyp appeared to be both animal and plant, an ambiguity which decentred both realms, rendering the terrain of definition highly debatable. Captivated by the polyp in 1740, the Genevan natural historian, Abraham Trembley, pondered whether it should be called a plant or an animal, for it possessed quite marked characteristics of both: Thinking that the Polyps were plants, I could hardly imagine that the movement of these slender threads, located at one end of their bodies, was their own. Yet they appeared to move by themselves and not at all as a response to the agitation of the water [    ] Subsequently, the more I studied the movement of the arms, the more it appeared that it had to come from an internal cause, and not from an impetus external to the Polyps.11 Although the polyp looked exactly like a plant, it was ‘sensitive and ambulant’, possessing powers of locomotion, contraction and extension. Most amazing of all was the polyp’s ability ‘to grow from cuttings like several plants’.12 This latter observation – that a polyp cut up into, say, seven pieces would regenerate into seven complete individuals – overturned what had always appeared to be an incontestable natural

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law – that for living things to reproduce, mating was necessary. This up-ending of long-held beliefs triggered the polyp controversy of the 1740s. In what is a classic instance of zoology’s propensity for crossing over into metaphysical and philosophical debate, the regeneration of the polyp gave strength to the Cartesian view of the animal body as a purely material mechanism, thus undermining the arguments of those who believed, contra Descartes, in an animal soul. The polyp’s ability to organize itself also foregrounded the role of chance in the natural economy, at the expense of the Creator’s own powers. While many leading natural historians distanced themselves as much as possible from these metaphysical debates, and especially from the public’s fixation on the marvellousness of the polyp’s regeneration, the non-scientific world resorted to hyperbole, with one report arguing, ‘The story of the Phoenix who is reborn from its ashes, fabulous as it is, offers nothing more marvellous than the discovery of which we are going to speak.’ The writer then goes on to assert that the wonder of the polyp surpasses even the chimerical ideas of the Alchemists, who dreamed of regenerating plants and animals by reuniting their essential parts.13 Despite distancing themselves, leading scholars could not disguise their astonishment at what they were seeing. René Antoine Réaumur, the renowned French entomologist, confessed in his Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Insectes: ‘when I saw for the first time two polyps form gradually from one that I had cut in two, I found it hard to believe my eyes; and this is a fact that I cannot accustom myself to seeing, after having seen and re-seen it hundreds of times’.14 Réaumur’s frank account of simultaneously seeing and not seeing gives the lie to the argument that since scientific investigation is primarily a visual experience, then improved microscopes and more minute observation would rid the world of the equivocal. While Trembley, in the end, assigned the polyp definitively to the animal world, others (including his cousin Charles Bonnet) held strongly to a belief in the intense flux of the organic world – the propensity for living beings to be fluid and unfocused. Devising a ladder of natural beings in his Treatise on Insectology, Bonnet viewed the polyp as expressive of a continuum in which plant and animal could not be rigorously separated. The polyp represented a middle place, a point of passage or a link uniting the vegetable kingdom to the animal.15 The idea that all species existed in a perpetual flux, continually circulating through each other, was a common theme in eighteenth-century writing, evident, for instance, in D’Alembert’s dream world, where the philosopher argues that ‘Every animal is more or less a human being,

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every mineral is more or less a plant, and every plant is more or less an animal.’16 In English Romantic-period writing, it was Erasmus Darwin’s work on sensation and vegetable fibres which popularized such ideas. From his studies of the mimosa, or sensitive plant, Darwin concluded that ‘the individuals of the vegetable world may be considered as inferior or less perfect animals’, a statement which in itself dissolves all hardedged boundaries.17 John Ellis, in his charming letters published in the 1750s in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, takes several good-natured swipes at ingenious botanist friends, reluctant to surrender entities such as coral, corallines and polyps to the animal kingdom. In the case of corallines, it is only when he coaxes his disbelieving friends to look through the microscope that they see, to their amazement, that corallines are not ‘vegetables, and only the receptacles of animals’ but ‘the proper cases, skins, or coverings of their bodies’.18 What appeared to be lodgings, built by the polyps, were in fact part of their living bodies. Also notable was the interdependence of the mother and its young, sharing a common body trunk and connected to each other by a continuous bladder-like membrane, which gave the animal its ‘power to raise and fall itself in the water at pleasure’.19 We now know that the corallines can be plants as well as animals, a reminder of the difficulty of distinguishing between the two kingdoms. Curiously, despite Ellis’s confident classification of the corallines as animals, he is unable to leave behind the metaphors of the vegetable world, referring to their roots, branches, stems and slender twigs. Smeathman’s writings resemble those of Ellis in employing botanical analogies. Diving for coral and other marine curiosities in Antigua, he refers to the polyps as ‘animal flowers’ and to Portuguese men-of-war as ‘sea-nettles’. ‘In diving among the Coral banks’, Smeathman wrote, ‘we seem to be passing over a submarine Garden full of most elegant flowers, for besides the Sea Fans of a most beautiful yellow, [there are] other plants of fine purple, the Sponges before mentioned, the Shells and the Corals and innumerable small sea plants’ (‘Of Submarine Bodies’, 7). Unlike Ellis, however, Smeathman overtly places God at the centre of the operations of the natural world. One essay opens with lines from his favourite poem, James Thomson’s deist ‘Hymn on the Seasons’: SHOULD fate command me to the farthest verge Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes,

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Rivers unknown to song     ’tis nought to me: Since GOD is ever present, ever felt, In the void waste as in the city full; And where HE vital breathes, there must be joy.20 Rather than travelling to a ‘void waste’, Smeathman experienced his ship journey to West Africa as an approach to ‘the borders of a new world of wonders’, surrounded as his ship was by ‘submarine regions richly peopled with a great variety of Animal and vegetable beings’ (‘Observations and Remarks’, 3). A belief in God’s immanence and an ever-present sense of nature’s deep, organic unity led him to note with equanimity the evanescence of all living things in his hands, the marine creatures slipping away in death from the ever-changing norm which had, until that moment, defined their existence. Of the dolphin caught and dragged on board: I think it was the finest creature I ever saw. Before it was got on board, it’s belly was a Silver white gradually falling into a rich gold on it’s sides, on the back it seemed a transparent blue laid upon Gold, and its skin all along the back of an elegant golden green. When it was laid upon the Deck in the Sun, I never saw any gilding nor tissue, nor even the Clouds at the setting of the Sun so rich; it even dazzled the Eye. The colours faded away as it died, leaving a reddish yellow upon the sides. (‘Observations and Remarks’, 16) The fading of colour in death was also true of the valuable crimson, black, blue, green and yellow corals and sponges which Smeathman went wading and diving for in Antigua. The impossibility of preserving their colours led him to a system of macerating, squeezing, washing and drying in order to achieve the best results, followed by bleaching into whiteness. The end result was, however, unsatisfactory, with the colour described as ‘that uniform dull white we see in Cabinets’. Living whiteness, on the other hand, had a ‘richness and mellowness’ about it, ‘relieved by agreeable tints and shades of yellow and brown, which add to the lustre’ (‘Of Submarine Bodies’, 7). Given the poetic associations of red, white and black coral with complexions, and Smeathman’s colonizing mission to abolish the West African slave trade, it is tempting to read his ruminations in the context of skin colour. For while those who justified the trade regarded black skin as the dividing line between

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species – between humans and animals – abolitionists dreamt about the possibility of ‘washing the Black-a-moor white’.21 Corals were also regarded as precious stones, with magical properties (‘Coral will look pale when you be sick’).22 The transformations wrought in corals by plucking them from the ocean are seen by Smeathman as continuous with the transformations of all living creatures, individual organic entities expanding past their own boundaries into a multitude of other possible forms – the vegetable turning to animal, the animal turning to mineral. Smeathman’s journal entries, as he watches the once-living coral turn to stone in his hands, are reminiscent of the philosophical natural history of earlier writers, such as Robert Plot. In his Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677), Plot ruminates on the petrified arteries of ancient cadavers, where the soft tissue had turned, over time, into bone. These are the transformations (he writes) of ‘extream old age’, the sure ‘fore-runners of death and the grave’.23 Plot’s ruminations reappear in spectral form in Wordsworth’s figure of the Leech-gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’. Resembling at once ‘a huge Stone’ and ‘a Sea-beast’, this man seems to the poet ‘not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep; in his extreme old age’.24 From the realm of fin, sea-beasts and ‘meadows submarine’,25 it is a surprisingly small move to the realm of wing, the ‘Aetherial journies’ of the Montgolfiers’ balloon ascents. That the two realms of fin and wing were linked in Smeathman’s thinking becomes clear in his ballooning exploits in Paris in 1783, a time when he was trying to drum up money for a return visit to the coast of West Africa. The desire to conquer the new frontier of the sky, and in the process annihilate space with time, appealed deeply to the frustrated traveller and colonizer, but there were a number of technical hitches to overcome, such as the steering and guiding of these ‘aerostatic Machines’. Along with other ingenious men, Smeathman joined the race to solve this riddle, believing that, once solved, it would ‘be very easy to breakfast at Paris and dine in London on the same day, and to reach America in three or four days’, as long as ‘there should be found no danger in turning the brain in consequence of the rapidity of the flight’. A bit of self-mockery was in order when we consider Smeathman’s design for his ‘aeronautical machine’, based on the shape of ‘a fish, a bird and a bat’, a contrivance which would fly by means of gravity, and by being opposed to the elasticity of the air.26 Perhaps he envisaged something like the marvellous ‘Flying Ship’ of 1709, reputed to be able to travel 200 miles in twenty-four hours, an image of which was reproduced by The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 (Illustration 3). This curious

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Illustration 3 ‘The Flying Ship’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 56 (April, 1786), p. 297. The image is taken from the copy in the State Reference Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library Council of New South Wales.

space-craft has sails to divide the air, pullies and ropes to hoist or furl them, a scallop-shaped body containing a pair of bellows for windless days, two wings to keep the vessel upright, feather-like oars, and an assortment of celestial globes, sea maps and compasses. Finally, and just in case, there were numerous large amber beads and loadstones whose occult operations were designed to help keep the ship aloft. Having witnessed the Mongolfiers’ wayward balloon ascents in Paris, Smeathman proposed to Banks a radical change in balloon design. An inventor of some genius, he recommended shifting from a globular shape to an elongated horizontal form with wings. In Smeathman’s words, what he had invented was ‘a dirigible aerostatic machine’, capable of alighting on both land and water if constructed with sufficiently light materials.27

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Smeathman’s fascination with the mechanics of flight was linked to the natural historian’s more general fascination with the mystery of locomotion. En route to Africa in 1771, he marvelled at the Portuguese men-ofwar alongside his ship, describing them as ‘animated’ sailing vessels, with flat bottoms for floating, sails of transparent membrane and the fibres of these resembling the ribbing of a fan: I found they had a transparent membrane like a Sail, standing perpendicularly and extended upon flat body, of a shape between an oval & a lozenge [    ]. The base of this Membrane describes a serpentine or waving line, obliquely through the longest diameter of the body, from one extreme angle to the other. The Membrane is elevated in the middle to a point, and making a delicate bend towards each end, is rounded before it joins the bottom part. It seems to be composed of fibres, which take their rise from the bottom of the membrane directly under the apex or point, and widen all the way like the ribs of a fan, until they reach the extreme edge of the membrane, which is scolloped all round [    ] and there are fibres again running across those corresponding with the Scollops. [    ] The lightest breath of wind imaginable falling on the membrane, makes the Animal turn round in every quarter in half a minute. (‘Of Submarine Bodies’, 4–5) Smeathman’s detailed dissections and attempts to understand the jellyfish’s movement through the water seem to have shaped his understanding of the mechanics of flight. Shell fish such as the Nautilus also prompted him to imaginative speculation. The Nautilus has (he noted) the power of rising to the surface of the Sea, and floating with the wind or current. This they effect by protruding a great part of their bodies, out of the shell, which gives their air Vessels room for expansion, they become specifically lighter than the water. They then extend their membranes, which have the effect of sails, while others occasionly perform the office of oars. By these means they are capable of making a progress through the water, within a certain circle, & are by the winds and currents, no doubt, frequently transported to and from distant regions. When the surface however becomes dangerous or disagreeable, they have for the most part a power of sinking, which is done by retracting their bodies into the shell, which making them specifically heavier than the water they of course descend faster or slower, as far as inclination prompts them. (‘Of Submarine Bodies’, 12–13)

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The iconographic conjunction of sailing and flying can be seen in a set of seventeenth-century artificial wings based on a boat-like design propelled with wheels and sails (Illustration 4). The inadequacy of the human limbs to keep the machine’s wings in motion led to the design of artificial muscles based on inflated bladders capable of lifting large weights. Such bladders were also used in underwater diving machines, as shown here in another engraving from Robert Hooke’s Philosophical Collections,

Illustration 4 A ‘Machine      for Flying in the Air’, Figure 2; and a ‘Ship      sustained By the Air’, Figure 3, from Philosophical Collections, 1–7, ed. Robert Hooke for the Royal Society (London, 1679–82), No. 1. The image is taken from the copy in the National Library of Australia, RB MISC 3246, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library.

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Illustration 5 Three submarine machines, Figures 7–9, from Philosophical Collections, 1–7, ed. Robert Hooke for the Royal Society (London, 1679–82), No. 2. The image is taken from the copy in the National Library of Australia, RB MISC 3246, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Library.

which discusses underwater movement in the same breath as aerial flight (Illustration 5). Mrs Barbauld’s poem, ‘Washing-Day’, ends with her recalling how:      Sometimes thro’ hollow bole Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles, little dreaming then To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant thro’ the clouds – so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean, hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them – this most of all.28 Perhaps Barbauld was thinking of Isaac Newton’s treatise on optics when she joined together the serious and the seemingly trivial – ‘The sports of children and the toils of men’ – for the scientist famously acknowledged

234 Europe and Beyond

that it was his observations of soap bubbles which had helped him develop his theory of colours.29 Imagination and science, speculation and system, the playful and the serious, these form the debatable worlds of natural history in the period leading up to Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Notes 1 William Cowper, The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 143–4 (ll. 78–9, 81, 85–7). 2 For the solar microscope as a ‘lantern of fear’, see Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 43–71. 3 See the advertisement for Katterfelto: ‘At No. 24, Piccadilly, This present Day, and every Day this Week, from 9 in the Morning till 6 in the Afternoon, there is now to be seen a great Variety of New Occult Secrets     ; or if the Sun appears Dr KATTERFELTO [    ] will by the Help of his New Solar Microscope, Exhibit many Wonderful Wonders, Wonders, and Wonders [&c], [London], [1785?]’. 4 The European Magazine and London Review, 3 ( June 1783), 406–8; see Patricia Fara’s entry, ‘Katterfelto, Gustavus (d. 1799)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and my ‘Entertaining Entomology: Insect Performers in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 30 (2006), 111–38. 5 For more about Smeathman, see my Romantic Colonization and British AntiSlavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 28–62. 6 See Henry Smeathman, ‘Observations and Remarks on Certain Marine Animalcules and Polypes, [etc.]’, 21 pp. (p. 2); and ‘Of Submarine Bodies on the Coral Banks at Antigua and Other West India Islands’ (read 1786), 11 pp., The Linnean Society, London, Archives of the Society for the Promotion of Natural History, MSS of Papers Read. 7 See ‘Introduction’, p.4 above. 8 Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem with Philosophical Notes (London, 1803), pp. 26–7 (I, V, ll. 295–302). 9 Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Images of Ambiguity: Eighteenth-Century Microscopy and the Neither/nor’, in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 230–57 (p. 230). 10 See Sharon Ruston, Shelley and Vitality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 7–8. For the role of the marine invertebrate in later evolutionary thinking, see Rebecca Stott’s ‘Darwin’s Barnacles: Mid-Century Victorian Natural History and the Marine Grotesque’, in Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 151–81.

Deirdre Coleman

235

11 Quoted in Virginia P. Dawson, Nature’s Enigma: The Problem of the Polyp in the Letters of Bonnet, Trembley and Réaumur, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 174 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1987), p. 97. 12 Ibid., p. 138. 13 Ibid., p. 7. 14 Quoted by Aram Vartanian, ‘Trembley’s Polyp, La Mettrie, and EighteenthCentury French Materialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 11 (1950), 259–86 (pp. 266–7). 15 ‘Les admirables propriétés qui leur sont communes avec les Plantes, je veux dire, la multiplication de bouture & celle par rejettons, indiquent suffisament qu’ils sont le lien qui unit le regne végétal à l’animal’ (Charles Bonnet, Traité d’insectologie; ou observations sur les Pucerons, 2 vols (Paris, 1745), I, xxviii). 16 ‘Tout animal est plus ou moins homme; tout minéral est plus ou moins plante; toute plante est plus ou moins animal. Il n’y a rien de précis en nature’: see Denis Diderot, Rêve de D’Alembert, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols (Paris, 1875–77), II, 122–81 (pp. 138–9). 17 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols (London, 1794–96), I, 102 (Section XIII, I, 2). For uncertain boundaries, see James Krasner, ‘A Chaos of Delight: Perception and Illusion in Darwin’s Scientific Writing’, Representations, 31 (1990), 118–41. 18 ‘A Letter from Mr John Ellis, F. R. S. to Mr Peter Collinson, F. R. S. concerning the Animal Life of those Coral-Lines, That Look Like Minute Trees, and Grow upon Oysters and Fucus’s All Round the Sea-Coast of This Kingdom’, read 13 June 1754, Philosophical Transactions, 48 (1753–54), 627–33 (p. 629). 19 Ibid., concerning a Cluster-Polype, Found in the Sea near the Coast of Greenland’, 8 November 1753, Philosophical Transactions, 48 (1753–54), 305–8 (p. 306). 20 See James Thomson, The Seasons (London, 1766), p. 209 (ll. 100–7). 21 For the racialization of complexions in the West Indies, see my ‘Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36.3 (2003), 169–93. 22 See OED entry for ‘coral’, sb.1 , sense 1a, quotation of 1584. 23 Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-Shire, Being an Essay toward the Natural History of England ([Oxford], [1677]), p. 212 (Chapter 5, para. 54). 24 William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 262 (ll. 64, 69, 71–72). 25 For ‘meadows submarine’, see Cowper’s ‘To the Immortal Memory of the Halybutt, on which I Dined this Day, Monday, April 26, 1784’, in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), II, 34–5 (34, ll. 1–14). 26 Letters of Henry Smeathman to George Cumberland, dated Paris, 26 January 1784 and 5 February 1784, British Library, Cumberland Papers, Vol. IV, Add 36494, fols 250, 256 v–257. 27 After I had disinterred Smeathman’s faint sketches of a dirigible airship contained in a letter from George Cumberland to Sir Joseph Banks in the Library of the Royal Society, the Society’s Library Newsletter featured

236 Europe and Beyond one of them: see ‘Discovery of dirigible airship letter’ (March 2006), http  //wwwroyalsocacuk/pageasp?id = 4195 [accessed 16 August 2006]. For Cumberland’s letter to Banks (‘On a flying vessel’), dated Church Court, Clements Lane, Lombard Street, 4 March 1784, see The Royal Society, London, Archived Papers, AP/5/12. 28 Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 146–7. 29 See in particular Book 2, Part I of Newton’s Opticks, and the remarks on it in Francesco Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies; in Six Dialogues on Light and Colours, from the Italian of Sig. Algarotti, 2 vols (London, 1739), II, 99, 108: A little Froth will furnish Sir Isaac Newton with a whole Magazine of Observations and Discoveries. Half the World that preceded him had the same Bubbles and Froth before their Eyes, without so much as seeing them.      That Froth we lately mentioned is an Instance of this, for as little philosophical as it may seem to vulgar Eyes, it was the principal Thing by which Sir Isaac Newton found out the Cause of those various and almost innumerable Colours which we see in Bodies.

Select Bibliography Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London and New York: Verso, 1991). Balibar, Etienne, ‘The Borders of Europe’, trans. J. Swenson, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 216–29. Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991). —, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Bewell, Alan, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Bhabha, Homi K., ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). —, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Carruthers, Gerard and Alan Rawes, eds, English Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Chandler, James, ‘Edgeworth and Scott: The Literature of Reterritorialization’, in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 119–39. Coleman, Deirdre, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005); first published in 1992. Dainotto, Roberto M., Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). Davis, Leith, Ian Duncan and Janet Sorensen, eds, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). de Bolla, Peter, Nigel Leask and David Simpson, eds, Land, Nation, Culture, 1740– 1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Donnan, Hastings and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford: Berg, 1999). Fulford, Tim, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Fulford, Tim and Peter J. Kitson, eds, Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). —, Travels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, 8 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001–02). Gildea, Robert, Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800–1914, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Gilroy, Amanda, Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Kitson, Peter J., ed., Placing and Displacing Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 237

238 Select Bibliography Kitson, Peter J., Tim Fulford and Debbie Lee, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Langan, Celeste, ‘Coup de Tête: Napoleon’s supposed epilepsy’, European Romantic Review, 16 (2005), 243–52. Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). ——, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘from an Antique Land’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Manning, Susan, Fragments of Union: Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Mee, Jon, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Mignolo, Walter D., Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Moe, Nelson, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Oliver, Susan, Scott, Byron and the Politics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). Richardson, Alan and Sonia Hofkosh, eds, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Saglia, Diego, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). Sorensen, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Trumpener, Katie, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Wilson, Thomas M. and Hastings Donnan, eds, Border Identities: Nation and State in International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Index

Note: page numbers in italics denote illustrations Addison, Joseph, 3, 83–4 Africa, 205 North, 187, 190 West, 224 Agamben, Giorgio, 115 Aiken, John, 84–5 Aitken, John, 59 Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 226–7 Algiers, 190, 192 Allingham, William ‘The Fairies’, 22 ‘Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland’, 22 Almagro, Diego de, 181 Alps cultural references, 150–1 sublime, 149, 150, 153–5, 157 see also Chamonix-Mont Blanc region Amazons, 55, 56 American Revolution, 123, 173 Americas, 174, 175, 176 see also Latin America Amerindians, 176–7 Andean rebellion, 180 Anderson, Benedict, 136 Imagined Communities, 4, 9 n13 Anglicism, 200, 208 Anglo-Scottish border, ii, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 44–5 Anglo-Spanish relations, 8 Annual Review, 200, 203 anti-Catholicism, 177 Arawak peoples, 212 Armstrong clan, 2 ascent trope, 148–9 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 8, 200, 202–3, 208 Asiatick Researches, 203, 204–5, 206 associationism, 137

Baillie, Joanna, 8, 195–6 Constantine Paleologus, 187, 188–90 Balayé, Simone, 164 Balibar, Etienne, 9 n13, 9 n17 ballads ancientness, 80–1, 86, 87–8 border warfare, 15 common people, 80–1, 84 locality, 16 national culture, 88 publications, 2–3, 81–2 rhymes and rhythm, 16 Romanticism, 17, 21 Scottish/English differences, 7, 80–1, 86, 89 underground, 85 Ballaster, Ros, 211 balloon ascents, 229, 230 Balmat, Jacques, 155, 156 Baptist Missionary Society, 177 Barbarossa, 190 Barbary States, 190, 191–2 Barbauld, Anna Letitia ‘Washing-Day’, 233–4 Barnhart, William, 177 Bate, Jonathan, 96 Romantic Ecology, 113 Beattie, James, 69 beauty, 214 Bedford, Grosvenor Charles, 202 behaviour gender, 56–7, 194–5 social acceptability, 62 Bell, Andrew, 128 Bell, John, 215–16, 217 Benchimol, Alex, 7 Benjamin, Walter, 111 Bentham, Jeremy ‘Emancipate your Colonies’, 123 Bernier, François, 205 239

240 Index Bewell, Alan, 125 Bhabha, Homi, 6 Nation and Narration, 4 Black Legend gendered, 179–80 Spain, 172, 173–4, 177–8 Blumenbach, J. F., 138–9 body continuous, 55–8 female, 53–4, 55–6 and soul, 226 Bolton, Carol, 8 Bonnet, Charles, 226 book production, 82, 85–6 booksellers, in London, 82 border thinking, 64–5 border vision, 6, 13–16, 19–20, 23 Border writing, 19, 23, 24–5 Borders Anglo-Scottish, ii, 1–2, 5–6, 7, 44–5 Anglo-Welsh, 6, 18, 25 Balibar, 9 n17 ballads, 15 colonialism, 5 conflict, 15, 18–19 crossing of, 4, 5 disappearances, 21–2 gender, 55–6 Ireland, 19–20, 23 Islam, 187, 195 poetry, 17, 18, 24 popular culture, 80 raids, 53 temporal, 17 Boswell, James Life of Dr Johnson, 68 Bourrit, Marc Théodore Description des Glacieres, ` 152–5 Bowdler, Harriet, 31 Brahmanism, 202 Britain Americas, 174, 176 colonialism, 176 Crowns, Union of, 2, 15 empiricism, 141, 174 imperialism, 4, 172–3 missionaries, 177 Parliament, Union of, 15, 53, 60, 73

union with Ireland, 4, 15, 16–17 see also England; Ireland; Scotland; Wales Britishness, 126 Brown, Laura, 56 Brown, Marshall, 143 Browne, T. H., 167 Bruce, James Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, 221 Buccleuch, Duke of, 15 Buchanan, George, 74 Buddhism, 110 Burke, Edmund, 199 Burnett, Francis, see Monboddo, Lord Burns, Robert, 69, 72–3, 75, 80, 88–9 ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ 73 ‘Scots wha hae’, 74 ‘A Vision’, 23 Butler, Marilyn Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, 92 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 190, 202 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 186 Calleo, David, 139 Cambrian Magazine, 35–7 Camden, William Britannia, 2 Canada, 174 Cape Colony, 123 captivity narratives, 43 Carey, William, 202 Caribbean, 123, 212 Carruthers, Gerard, 34 English Romanticism and the Celtic World, 28 Casillo, Robert, 162 Catholicism, 48–9, 53 Celticism/primitivism, 27, 33–4 Cervantes, Miguel de El cerco de Numancia, 193 Chamonix-Mont Blanc region, 148–57 charity, public/private, 72–3 Charles III of Spain, 174 Charles of Anjou, 160–1 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 190 Chatterton, Thomas, 29, 34 ‘Chevy Chase’, 2–3, 83–4, 91 n11

Index 241 China debatable lands, 211 feminization of culture, 211, 220–1 literary representations, 8 missionaries, 215 Western views, 211–12 Chinese peoples, 212–13, 216, 217–18 chivalry, 44–5 Christianity, 8, 177–8, 187 see also Catholicism; missionaries; Protestantism Church Missionary Society, 177 Cicero, 162 civic humanism, 73 civil society, 49, 140 civilization, 44–5, 195, 215 clan system, 1–2, 39, 41–2 Clare, John, 111, 113–14, 116 ‘I Am’, 7, 112–13 ‘Mouse’s Nest’, 7, 114–15 Clarke, Gillian, 17–18 class, 80–1, 82–3, 94, 96, 207 Cobbett, William, 7, 99, 102–3 Political Register, 98–9 Rural Rides, 92–3, 98–103 Coleman, Deirdre, 8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Aids to Reflection, 138 Biographia Literaria, 7, 136–46 Chamonix, 148 Christabel, 145–6 colonialism, 124 emigration, 121 French, 143–4 gnosticism, 139 ‘Hymn Before Sunrise’, 157 imagination, 136–7, 138–9, 140–1, 142 imperialism, 140–1 ‘Kubla Khan’, 213, 218–21 letter from Southey, 198 Lyrical Ballads, 7, 17, 64, 74–7 Mesmerism, 136, 142–6 nationalism, 137–8 On the Constitution of the Church and State, 136, 138 pantisocracy settlement, 125–6 philosophy, 136–7, 139–40 supernatural, 147 n22

The Statesman’s Manual, 138 Unitarianism, 221 verse epistle, 66–7 Collection of Old Ballads, 80 Colonial Reform movement, 125 colonialism borders, 5 Britain, 176 Coleridge, 124 emigration, 122–3 Madoc myth, 31 modernity, 132 nationalism, 121 Romantics, 125–6 Southey, 124–5 Spain, 8, 176 violence, 179–81 Wordsworth, 123–4, 127–8 colonies, peripheral, 129, 133 colour theory, 234 common people, 80–1, 83, 84, 85 Common Sense philosophy, 68, 69, 144 community Heaney, 18 imagined, 4, 9 n13 inoperative, 145 unavowable, 145 Condamine, C. M. de la, 152 Confucianism, 221 Connell, Philip, 72 conquest, 178–9, 183 Conrad, Joseph The Shadow-Line, 64–5 Conradin, Prince, 160–1 conscience, 107 Constantine, Mary-Ann, 6 Constantinople, 187–8, 189–90, 192–3 convict emigration, 123 Cooper, Thomas, 126–7 Copyright Act (1710), 81, 86 copyright legislation, 81–2, 83, 86 cosmopolitanism, 215 Covenanters, 16 Cowper, William ‘The Winter Evening’, 223 Coxe, Henry Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland, 151 Croce, Benedetto, 162

242 Index Crossley, Pamela Kyle, 212 Crowns, Union of, 2, 15 crusades, 186–7, 190, 195–6 Cullen, William, 58–9 Culloden, Battle of, 39, 40 cultural imperialism, 207–8 culture feminized, 211, 220–1 frozen/obsolescent, 82, 84 oral, 85 topography, 148–9 see also popular culture Cunningham, Alexander, 67 Cuoco, VIncenzo, 166 Currie, James, 65–8, 70 ‘Life of Burns’, 7, 69–70, 74–7 ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’, 64, 70–4 Works of Robert Burns, 64, 66 customary law, 5–6, 81 Dafydd ap Gwilym, 28–30, 34 Dainotto, Roberto, 162 Dale, David, 72 Dalrymple, John, 175 Darwin, Charles, 234 Darwin, Erasmus, 227 The Temple of Nature, 224–5 Davies, Edward, 36 Davis, Leith, 69–70, 74–5 Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, 4, 65 De Quincey, Thomas, 8, 133, 204 Deane, Seamus, 18–19, 213–14 Reading in the Dark, 21–2 death imagery, 26 n30 debatable land, ii, 1–4 China, 211 cultural, 5 Naples, 160–8 see also Borders deconstruction, 110 deep ecology, 109–10 defamiliarization, 137 dehumanization, 49 Derrida, Jacques, 114 Descartes, René, 110–12, 137, 226 despotism, 199 de-territorialization, 75

Devine, Tom, 72, 76 Díaz, Rodrigo (El Cid), 193 see also Southey, Robert difference Burns, 75 civilization, 215 language, 55–6 nationalism, 137 Qing Empire, 212 Scotland/England, 73, 75 society, 214 disappearances, 21–2 disinheritance, 126 displacement, 113–14, 123, 129, 190 Donaldson v. Becket, 82 doubt, 110, 112–13, 115 Douglas clan, 44 Drew, John, 203 Duffy, Cian, 7–8 Dunbar, James, 41 Duncan, Ian, 53, 57–8 Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, 4, 65 earth/world distinction (Heidegger), 106, 108 East India Company, 123, 199 Eastwood, David, 125 Ebel, M. J. G. Traveller’s Guide in Switzerland, 148, 149, 151 ecocriticism, 105, 115–16 economics/society, 45 education, 71, 96–7, 128, 207–8 Ellis, John, 227 emigration Coleridge, 121 colonialism, 122–3 convicts, 123 imagination, 121 modernity, 132 self-enhancement, 129 state supported, 124 Wordsworth, 121, 129–30, 133 emotions/landscape, 153 empiricism, 137, 141, 174 enclosures, 85–6, 99–100

Index 243

Faflak, Joel, 7 faith, 115 feminization, 46, 59 Ferdinand I, 166 Ferguson, Adam, 45, 70–1, 195 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 137 Fletcher, Andrew, 74 flight, 229–33 Florida, 174 Forbes, Duncan, 40 Foscolo, Ugo, 161 Foucault, Michel, 53, 59 France, 16–17, 94, 143–4, 174, 175–6 Frankenstein, Victor, 183 Franklin, Michael, 203, 205–6 French Revolution, 4 Freud, Sigmund, 111 frontier zones, 18–19 Fulford, Tim, 125, 139, 141–3, 183 Fullarton, William, 175

gender behaviour, 56–7, 194–5 Black Legend, 179–80 borders, 55–6 hysteria, 62 space, 145–6 General Magazine, 180 Genghis Khan, 219 Gentleman’s Magazine, 229–30 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 33 geography, 4–6, 8, 148, 172, 187 geo-politics, 195–6 George III, 218, 219 German Romantics, 144 Gestalt psychology, 109 Ghosh, Amitav, 64 Giannone, Pietro, 166 Gibbon, Edward, 188, 189, 195 Gibraltar, 174 Gilmartin, Kevin, 98–9 Gilroy, Amanda Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 4 Giraldus, 27 Glover, Richard London: or, the Progress of Commerce, 178 Goethe, J. W. von, 162 Wilhelm Meister, 164 Goldsmith, Oliver, 8 The Citizen of the World, 213–14 Public Ledger, 213 Gorsedd ceremony, 34 Graeme/Graham clan, 2, 44 Graham, Dougal, 87 Graham, Patrick Sketches of Scenery in Perthshire, 43–4 Granada, 187, 190, 193 Greece, 3, 106

Gaelic language, 40, 41, 45, 46, 56 Gagging Acts, 139 Galenic humours theory, 111 Gambles, Anna, 125 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 162 Garside, Peter, 40 Gasca, Pedro de la, 181 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 132

Habeas Corpus, suspended, 139 Hael, Ifor, 29, 30 Hakluyt, Richard, 176, 177 Halhed, Nathaniel Brassey, 202 Hallam, Henry, 187, 188, 190 Hamilton, Emma, 160, 163 Harding, Anthony John, 138, 139, 142 Hardt, Michael, 140 Hardy, Thomas, 13

England, 72, 75–6, 87, 89 union, 2, 15, 53, 60, 73 see also Anglo-Scottish border English language, 17 Enlightenment, 8, 215 environmental art, 106–7 Erkelenz, Michael, 166 European Magazine, 223–4 Eustace, John Chetwode, 161, 163, 167 evangelism, 183 see also missionaries Exmouth, Lord, 192 exoticism, 36 see also difference; Orientalism exploration narratives, 7–8, 148 explorations, 224

244 Index Hartley, David, 68 Harvie, Christopher, 66, 74 Hastings, Warren, 199, 200 Hazlitt, William Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, 150 Heaney, Seamus, 18, 21 Buile Suibhne, 19–20 North, 20 Station Island, 20 Hegel, G. W. F., 105 Heidegger, Martin conscience, 107 distance, 109 earth/world distinction, 106, 108 place, 105–6 pure Being, 142 Hemans, Felicia, 8, 162, 166, 168, 194–6 ‘Conradin’, 166–8 ‘I dream of all things free’, 168 ‘Mignon’s Song’, 168 ‘Naples: A Song of the Syren’, 163, 168 National Lyrics, and Songs for Music, 168 ‘Nightblowing Flowers’, 168 The Siege of Valencia, 187, 193–5 ‘The Swan and the Skylark’, 168 Tales, and Historic Scenes, 161, 166–8 The Vespers of Palermo, 161, 166 Herd, David, 80, 88 Hermitage castle, 13, 14–15 hierarchy, 42, 95–6 Highlands, 49, 123 Hinduism, 109–10, 199, 200, 202, 205–6 Hobbes, Thomas, 137 Hogg, James, 23 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 144 Home, Henry, see Kames, Lord Hooke, Robert Philosophical Collections, 232–3 Hulme, Peter, 212 humanism, 97 civic, 73 Hume, Baron David, 68

Hume, David, 69, 70–1, 195 Huntington, Samuel, 187 hysteria, 7, 53, 58–9, 62 Iberian Peninsula, 187, 192–3 identity, 110 imagination, 121, 136–7, 138–9, 140–2 imperialism Britain, 4, 172–3 Christianity, 177–8 Coleridge, 140–1 disinheritance, 126 Europe, 8 France, 175–6 Spain, 173 Tory politics, 125 see also colonialism Incas, 181–2 India class, 207 East India Company, 123, 199 education, 207–8 English taste/morals, 207 gods, 203 Hinduism, 200 history, 204–5 religion, 200 Romanticism, 198 translations from texts, 202–4 intellectual property rights, 81–2, 86, 87 intertextuality, 33, 35 Ireland border vision, 19–20, 23 frontier region, 6, 18–19, 22 union, 4, 15, 16–17 Islam, 8, 187, 195, 196, 200 isolationism of scholarship, 92 Izmailov Embassy, 215 Jackson, G. A., 190, 192 Jacobinism, 130, 143 Jacobite rebellion, 53, 60 James VI and I, 2 Jenkins’s Ear, War of, 174 Johnson, James, 80 The Scots Musical Museum, 83, 88–9

Index 245 Johnson, Samuel, 33, 38 n20, 90 n1 Rasselas, 221 Johnston, Kenneth R., 97–8 Jones, Owen, 29, 32 Jones, Robert, 152 Jones, Sir William, 8, 200, 202–4, 203–4, 204–6 Jorden, Edward, 58 Kalmucks, 215–16 Kames, Lord, 40–1, 49 Kangxi, Emperor, 215, 216 Kant, Immanuel, 137, 141, 144, 157 Katterfelto, 223–4, 234 n3 Kennedy, Deborah, 173 Kieser, D. G., 143 Kitson, Peter J., 8, 125 Placing and Displacing Romanticism, 4 Kluge, C. A. F., 142, 143 Kotzebue, A. F. F. von Pizarro, 178 kowtow, 218 Kublai Khan, 217–18, 219 Lacan, Jacques, 110 land ownership, 53–4, 76, 121–2, 131 landscape Cobbett, 102–3 elevated, 149, 153 emotions, 153 Europe, 7 imaginative, 18 picturesque, 13, 34 redemptive, 101 Romanticism, 92–3 social geography, 92–3 social relationships, 93–4 language civilized/barbarous, 43 difference, 55–6 feminization, 46 Kames, 41 non-verbal, 41 politics, 45 Scotland, 41, 42–3 writing, 114 see also specific languages Larkin, Philip, 22

Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 176, 178, 181–2 Latin America, 172, 175 Leask, Nigel, 7, 127, 138, 145–6, 219, 221 Lepanto, Battle of, 187 Lewis, Gwyneth, 34 Lewis, Linda, 163 Linnean Society Library, 224 literacy cultures, 82–3 literary criticism, 4–6, 8 locality, 16 see also place Locke, John, 141, 176 London book industry, 82, 85–6 booksellers, 82, 83 provinces, 223 Wordsworth, 131–2 London Missionary Society, 177 Longley, Edna, 18, 19 Louis IX, 212 Louis XVI, 141 Louisiana, 174 Lowes, John Livingston, 219 Macartney, Lord, 217, 218, 219, 220 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 3–4, 207 MacCumhaigh, Art ‘Aisling’, 23 McDowell, Paula, 85, 86 Mackenzie, Henry, 68, 70 Macpherson, James, 32, 33, 73 see also Ossian debate Madoc story, 31 Madogeian Society, 31 Mah, Harold, 164 Majeed, Javed, 200, 208 Makdisi, Saree, 132, 200 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 113 Malthus, Thomas, 123, 124–5, 127, 128 Manchu, 212–13, 214, 218 Manning, Susan, 45 Mantzur Tartar conquest, 216 marine zoology, 224–5 Marryat, Thomas, 58 Marshall, P. J., 199

246 Index Martel, Peter, 151–2 Martyn, Thomas Sketch of a Tour through Switzerland, 151, 156 Masaniello’s revolt, 161 medievalism, 35 melancholy, 111 memory, 61–2 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 141 Mesmerism, 136, 141–6 Mexico, 5, 9 n18 Mignolo, Walter, 64 migration, intellectual, 127 Mill, James, 200, 207 The History of British India, 208 Mill, John Stuart, 113 Millar, John, 41 Millgate, Jane, 53, 61–2 Mills, Charles, 195 mimesis, 60 mind, 58–9 Ming Empire, 212–13 Minorca, 174 Miranda, Francisco de, 175 missionaries, 176–7, 181–2, 215 Mitchell, Juliet, 62 modernity, 107, 132 Moe, Nelson, 162 Moira, Battle of, 19 Monboddo, Lord, 40–1, 43, 49 Mongol peoples, 212, 214–15, 217, 218 Monk, Samuel Holt, 157 Mont Blanc, see Chamonix-Mont Blanc region Montgolfier brothers, 229, 230 moral leadership, 94 moral narrative, 95–6 moral sentiment, 144 More, Hannah, 31, 35 Morgan, Prys, 36 Morganwg, Iolo, 6, 28–9, 37 n3 Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym, 29 The Cambrian Magazine, 35–7 false mediums, 27, 32–4, 36 Myvyrian Archaiology, 32 Poems, Lyric Pastoral, 31–2

on Shakespeare and Dafydd ap Gwilym, 29–30 ‘Short Review of Welsh MSS’, 32 Welsh language, 30–1, 35 Welsh Romanticism, 27–8, 34 Morning Post, 148 Morton, Timothy, 7 Muir, Thomas, 67 Mukherjee, S. N., 205 Muldoon, Paul, 22–3 To Ireland, I, 22 Mulvihill, James, 102–3 Naess, Arne, 109–10 Nairn, Tom, 65, 73 Naples constitution, 166 as debatable land, 160–8 Holy Roman Empire, 160–1 Shelley circle, 162–3 topography, 161–2 Napoleon Bonaparte, 4, 175 Napoleonic Wars, 4, 123 nation, 9 n13, 60–1, 88, 136 National Colonization Society, 123 nationalism, 64, 65, 121, 137–8, 162 Native Americans, 40–3, 126, 129, 130 natural history, 224 necessitarianism, 68–9, 137 Negri, Antonio, 140 Nelson, Horatio, 160, 163 New Lanark scheme, 72 New Providence Island, 174 newspapers, 223 Newton, Isaac, 233–4, 236 n29 Nicaragua, 174 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 150 Numancia, siege of, 193 O’Brien, Karen, 7 Oliver, Susan, 6–7 oral culture, 85 Orientalism, 8, 206–7 Byron, 202 India, 200, 206 Said, 196, 204 Scott, 42 Ossian debate, 27, 28, 32–3, 46–7, 73 Oswald, Richard, 175

Index 247 Otherness, 49, 113 Ottoman empire, 187 Paccard, Michel-Gabriel, 155, 156 pantisocracy settlement, 125–6, 127 Paris Peace Treaty, 174 Paris, Matthew, 212 Parliaments, Union of, 15, 73 Parthenope, 161, 164 Parthenopean Republic, 161, 163 patriotism, 73, 74 Peacock, Thomas Love, 158 n5, 162–3 peasantry, 74–5, 76 Penn, William, 32 Percy, Thomas, 80, 87 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3, 84 Peter the Great, 215 phenomenology, 105 philosophes, 211 picturesque, 13, 34 Pimentel, Eleanora, 161 Pinkerton, John, 32–3, 36 Pitt, William, 100–1, 175 Pittock, Murray, 35 Pizarro, Francisco, 179–80, 181 place ecocriticism, 105 faith and doubt, 115 Heidegger, 105–6 poetry, 106, 107–9 self, 110 sense of, 18 Plot, Robert Natural History of Oxford-shire, 229 Pocock, J. G. A., 70 Pococke, Richard, 148, 149, 151 politics, 7, 45, 137 Polo, Marco, 219 Poor Law, 72 Poor Law Amendment Act, 129 popular culture, 80, 83, 90 n1 population studies, 123, 125, 128 Porden, Eleanor Ann Coeur de Lion, 186 Porter, David, 211, 218 Portugal, 176–7 Portuguese man-of-war, 231

possession, land/female body, 53–4 post-colonialism, 64 Powis Castle, 24, 25 Prado, Juan Antonio de, 175 Priestley, Joseph, 68, 69 primitivization, 43, 46 print culture, 82, 86, 89 printers, 81–2 Protestantism, 177 provinces/London, 223 Public Ledger, 213 Pughe, William Owen, 32 Purchas, Samuel, 176, 177, 219, 221 Puységur, Marquis de, 141 Qianlong emperor, 218, 219–20 Qing Empire, 211, 212, 216–18 Quarterly Review, 124, 200, 202, 207 Quinney, Laura, 141 radicalism, 130, 139, 142 Rajan, Balachandra, 201 Rajan, Tilottama, 145 Ramsay, Allan The Tea-Table Miscellany, 90 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, John, 68 Rawes, Alan, 34 English Romanticism and the Celtic World, 28 reading culture, 82 Réaumur, René Antoine, 226 regionalism, 162 Reid, Thomas, 68–9, 71, 144 Renan, Ernest, 64 reproduction, natural, 225–6 re-territorialization, 75–6 revolution, 141–2 Richardson, Alan, 173, 174, 176 Riddell, Maria, 67 Ritson, Joseph, 80, 87–8, 89 Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, 84 Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv, 74 Robertson, Fiona, 53 Robertson, John, 70 Robertson, William, 176, 178 History of America, 183

248 Index Romanticism ballads, 17, 21 colonialism, 125–6 crusades, 186–7, 190, 195–6 geographies, 172, 187 Germany, 144 India, 198 land ownership, 121–2 landscape, 92–3 modernity, 107 nationalism, 65 subjectivity, 105 Tartars, 218–21 Wales, 27–8, 34 Ronell, Avital, 107 rootlessness, 125, 129 Rossington, Michael ‘Claire Clairmont’s Fair Copy’, 166 Roulin, Jean-Marie, 164 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 73, 151 Royal and Antiquarian Society, 32 Royal Society, 227 Ruskin, John ‘Evening at Chamouni’, 155–6 Saglia, Diego, 8, 172 Said, Edward, 196, 204, 206 St Clair, William, 85–6 The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 81–2 Sánchez, Juan, 8 Sanfelice, Luisa, 161–2 Saumarez, Richard, 137, 144 Saussure, Horace Bénédict de, 151, 152, 155, 156–7 Relation Abrégée d’un Voyage, 156–7 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 137, 138–9, 143 Scotland copyright, 86 difference, 75 education, 71 independence struggle, 73–4 Lowlands/Highlands, 6–7, 39, 47, 49, 123 patriotism, 74 Poor Law, 72 post-Union, 65, 73

social unrest, 72 supernatural, 23 union, 2, 15, 53, 60, 73 see also Anglo-Scottish border; Crowns, Union of; Gaelic language; Parliaments, Union of Scots Dyke, 2 Scott, Walter, 1, 52 border vision, 15–16 The Lady of the Lake, 6–7, 40, 41–7, 48 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 44, 47 Macaulay on, 4 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3, 6, 9 n9, 13–16, 22, 44 ‘The Battle of Bothwell Bridge’, 16 ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, 23, 24 ‘The Twa Corbies’, 20–1, 24 non-verbal language, 41 Rob Roy, 7, 52–62 Rokeby, 43 Scottish Enlightenment, 6–7, 15, 40 and Southey, 202 supernatural, 23 Tales of a Grandfather, 39, 42 The Talisman, 186 Waverley, 40, 42, 48 Scottish Enlightenment Burns, 68 Coleridge, 144 Currie, 70 Gaelic Scotland, 49 language, 41 Scott, 6–7, 15, 40 stadial theory, 50 n8 Scottish Martyrs, 67 self, 109–10, 111, 113 settlement, 122, 129 Seven Years’ War, 174 shadow line, 64–6, 71, 76–7 Shakespeare, William, 29, 30 Sheil, Richard Lalor, 8, 187, 195–6 The Apostate, 191 Bellamira, 190–3 Shelley circle, 162–3, 166

Index 249 Shelley, Mary, 160, 164, 166, 190 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 151 The Last Man, 161, 163 Rambles through Germany and Italy, 163 Valperga, 161 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 137, 190 History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, 151 letter to Peacock, 158 n5, 162–3 ‘Mont Blanc’, 156, 157 ‘Ode to Naples’, 161, 165–6 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 165 ‘On Love’, 115–16 Prometheus Unbound, 162 Sher, Richard, 82, 86 Sicilian Vespers uprising, 161 Sidney, Sir Philip, 84 siege plays, 8 silence, 48, 56–7, 139 Simpson, David, 76 Sismondi, J.-C.-L., 161, 166 skin colour, 228–9 slavery, abolition, 123, 228–9 Smeathman, Henry, 8, 224, 225–6, 227–31 ‘Observations and Remarks’, 228 ‘Of Submarine Bodies’, 228–9, 231 Smith, Adam, 41, 60–1, 70–1, 144 The Wealth of Nations, 123, 128 social geography, 92–3 society difference, 214 economics, 45 hierarchy, 42, 95–6 primitivization, 43 stadial theory, 7, 41, 45, 49, 50 n8, 214 unrest, 72 writers, 126–7 Society for the Promotion of Natural History, 224 Sonnerat, Pierre, 205 Sorensen, Janet, 7, 45, 49 Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, 4, 65 South Seas expedition, 175

Southey, Robert biography of Nelson, 160 Chronicle of the Cid, 186–7, 188, 193, 196 colonialism, 124–5 The Curse of Kehama, 8, 198–208 emigration, 121 Indian history, 206 Joan of Arc, 200 letter to Coleridge, 198 Madoc, 31, 126 moral message, 201 pantisocracy settlement, 125–6 The Tale of Paraguay, 178, 183 space, gendered, 145–6 Spain Amerindians, 176–7 Black Legend, 172, 173–4, 177–8 colonialism, 8, 176 contested land, 187 gold lust, 178 imperialism, 173 literary representation, 172–3 Masaniello’s revolt, 161 Napoleon Bonaparte, 175 violence, 179–80 Spanish-American conquest narratives, 178 Spanish language, 172 Spanish Match crisis, 174 Spectator, 83 stadial theory, society, 7, 41, 45, 49, 50 n8, 214 Staël, Germaine de, 202 ‘Chant’, 162, 165 Corinne, 161, 163, 164, 165 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 225 Stafford, Fiona, 6 state/civil society, 140 Staunton, George, 217–18 Stebbings, Henry, 195 Stewart, Dugald, 68, 70–1 Stimmung, 107 subjectivity Cartesian, 110, 112 Romantic, 105 sublime, 149, 150, 153–5, 157

250 Index submarine machines, 232–3 Suleyman, Sultan, 190 supernatural, 23, 147 n22 Sutherland, John, 53 Sweet, Nanora, 8 Swift, Jonathan Gulliver’s Travels, 213 Swinburne, Henry, 161, 167 Syme, John, 67 Tamerlaine, 212 Tartars, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217–21 Taylor, WIlliam, 198 termites, 224 Thomas, Edward ‘Adlestrop’, 107–9 Thomson, James ‘Hymn on the Seasons’, 227–8 Thomson, William Orpheus Caledonius, 90 Tongusans, 216 topography, 95, 148–9 Tory politics, 121, 125 Townshend, Thomas, 175 trade, 53, 60–1, 178–9 translations, Indian texts, 202–4 Trembley, Abraham, 225 Tulloch, Graham, 56 Tunis, 190–1, 192 Tupac Amaru II, 180 Turkic peoples, 212 Turner, J. M. W. death imagery, 26 n30 ‘Powis Castle, Montgomeryshire’, 24, 25 Turner, Sharon, 36 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 68 Tzulimms, 216 Uglow, Jenny The Lunar Men, 66 Union, Act of, see England; Ireland; Scotland United States of America, 5, 9 n18 Vallois, Marie-Claire, 163 Valverde, Vincente de, 178 Van Gogh, Vincent, 105–6, 107

Vidal, Luis, 175 Vienna, Congress of, 4, 138, 166, 191–2 Vienna, sieges of, 187 Virgil, 164, 167, 168, 169 n1 Eclogue, 161–2 Vitoria, Francisco, 176–7 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 123, 133 Wales, 27–8, 30, 32, 34–5 Marches, 6, 18, 25 Wallis, George, 59 Walters, John, 28 Welsh language, 17, 27, 30–1, 35 Welsh National Eisteddfod, 34 West Indies, 174, 224 Wilford, Francis, 205, 206, 207 Wilkins, Charles, 202 Williams, Edward, see Morganwg, Iolo Williams, Helen Maria, 161 ‘Ode on the Peace’, 179 Peru, 8, 173–83 Tour in Switzerland, 150 Williams, Raymond, 13–15, 18, 25 Keywords, 81 Wilson, Fiona, 7 Wilson, Jasper, see Currie, James Winch, Donald, 70–1 Windham, William, 148, 149 Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy, 149–50, 151, 152 Woolfart, Karl Christian, 143 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 131 Wordsworth, William active principle, 96, 127–8 The Borderers, 3, 186 ‘The Brothers’, 76 colonialism, 123–4, 127–8 Dalesmen, 122 education, 128 emigration, 121, 129–30, 133 The Excursion, 92–8, 101, 102, 103 n3, 123–4, 126, 127–9, 132–3 Guide through the District of the Lakes, 76, 121–2 Home at Grasmere, 130–1 ‘Letter to Charles James Fox’, 75–6

Index 251 on London, 131–2 Lyrical Ballads, 7, 17, 64, 74–7, 130 ‘Michael’, 76, 133 moral narrative, 95–6 Native Americans, 129, 130 ‘Old Cumberland Beggar’, 72 politics of, 92–3 Poor Law, 72 ‘Ruth’, 130 The Prelude, 47, 93, 131–3, 152 The Recluse, 130–1, 132–3

Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems, 129 Wright, J. Leitch Jr., 174 Wright, Julia, 137–8 writers, 126–7 writing, 19, 114 Xanadu, 219 Yakutzy people, 216 Yuan emperor, 218 Yuanming Yuan, 220