Abstract
My last chapter again explores the alienation under the surface of the London Magazine essay as written by a member of the Cockney school who was also a participant in the Lakes coterie. Thomas De Quincey was a disciple of Coleridge and Wordsworth who had lived in Wordsworth’s former cottage in Grasmere. Like Lamb, he produced a distinctive Romanticism by replaying Lake coterie motifs—ruralism, imagination, confession, prophecy—in the context of the Cockney essay, product of a commercial London by which the Lake poets were both fascinated and repelled. In the process, he asked whether Romantic poetry could lyricize the city, when the city destroyed the communal relationships, the coterie languages, on which Romantic poetry depended—when to write from the city was to write from an experience of commodification, isolation, and alienation. His answer to his question was to oppose country to city and poetry to prose, precipitating a lasting polarization, inscribed into the very discourse that he defined—“English literature.”
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Notes
See Robert Hole, Pulpits, Politics and Public England, 1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists; J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979).
See Jack Fruchtman, “The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestley,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , 73/4 (1983), 1–121.
Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (London, 1790), pp. 49–50.
Priestley was also attacked by Burke; the critique helped precipitate a number of alarmist attacks that presented prophecy as part of an international revolutionary conspiracy. See John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies, etc., Collected from Good Authorities (Edinburgh, 1797)
W. H. Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800).
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), p. 99.
See E. P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). The culture of the artisan classes in London, though not the urban experience of London as such, is considered in the account of millenarian radicalism given by
lain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1992).
Lines 4–7; from Lee’s Songs from the Rock (1795). Quoted in Jon Mee, “‘The Doom of Tyrants’: William Blake, Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, and the Millenarian Public Sphere,” in Blake, Politics and History, ed. Jackie DiSalvo, G. A. Rosso, and Christopher Z. Hobson (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 97–114.
On the prevalence of allusions that connected George III with Nebuchadnezzar, see Mee, “The Doom of Tyrants,” 110–11. On biblical prophecy bolstering radicals’ imagination so as to let them overcome the psychological hold that legitimacy has established, see John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
As revealed by David Worrall, “William Bryan, Another Anti-Swedenborg Visionary Engraver of 1789,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly , 34 (2000), 14–22.
Mudie, Babylon the Great: A Dissection and Demonstration of Men and Things in the British Capital , 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1825), II, 293 (labyrinth), I, 49 (insignificance).
Brothers, A Description of Jerusalem (London, 1801), p. 40.
Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 263.
Thomas Carlyle, A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 460.
On the involuntary nature of De Quincey’s dreams as a critical deconstruction of Coleridge’s idealism, see Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 223.
Excursion , II, 869–86. See the perceptive reading by Joshua Wilner, “The Stewed Muse of Prose: Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire,” in Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalisation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 68–77.
On Lowth’s and Michaelis’s redefinition of prophecy and inspiration see Stephen Prickett, Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Chapter 3.
On De Quincey’s new definition, dividing literature from other kinds of writing on the basis of its ability to communicate power, see Jonathan Bate, “The Literature of Power: Coleridge and De Quincey,” Coleridge’s Visionary Languages: Essays in Honour of J. B. Beer , ed. Tim Fulford and Morton D. Paley (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), pp. 137–50.
Baudelaire adapted the city seen in the clouds into his Petits poems en prose , having translated Confessions of an English Opium Eater . On this, see Wilner, “The Stewed Muse.” On De Quincey as the constructor of the Romanticism he knows in perverse form see Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 189; on his inauguration of modernity see
Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 160.
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© 2015 Tim Fulford
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Fulford, T. (2015). Allusions of Grandeur: Prophetic Authority and the Romantic City. In: Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518897_9
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