Abstract
This chapter argues that Percy Shelley derived his poetics from engagement with his age’s discourse surrounding alcohol habit. Tracing Shelley’s ideas on habit from his early writings on diet through his later tragedy, The Cenci, and his Defence of Poetry, Colman shows how Shelley framed salutary habits (including engagement with poetry) as those that might counteract toxic habits, which Shelley had earlier come to understand in light of the work on alcohol habit by Thomas Trotter, among others. Shelley had, in his early work, contended that alcohol habit could shape a terrible social world, and in The Cenci, the habitually drinking villain Count Cenci does shape such a terrible world. This chapter argues that The Cenci’s tragic heroine Beatrice represents radical habits and patterns that could defeat toxic, predatory habit.
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- 1.
Curran quotes De Quincey’s review of Gilfillan’s Literary Portraits in the 1846 Tait’s Edinburgh Review, where De Quincey also observes that Beatrice’s opposition to Count Cenci provides the “true motive of the selection of such a story” (qtd. Curran 20).
- 2.
References to essays and poetry by Shelley are, unless otherwise noted, from Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).
- 3.
All quotes from “The Vindication of Natural Diet” are from The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, ed. E.B. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993): 77–91.
- 4.
Angela Leighton addresses the coexistence of Shelley’s empirical, materialist thinking with his comparatively abstract and idealist sense of sublimity in Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Shelley, she writes, “moves progressively from reliance on empirical arguments, which support his radicalism and atheism, to an interest in the sublime,” but Leighton adds that “the two perspectives remain in conflict throughout his life” (vii).
- 5.
For an example of Thomas Trotter describing someone with an alcohol habit as “addicted,” see Trotter’s Essay on Drunkenness (36).
- 6.
The years preceding Shelley’s writing on diet and perilous habits saw a number of texts that influenced addiction discourse. See, for instance, George Young’s Treatise on Opium and Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia, which discusses both the power of habit over the body in general (I.35) and the dangers specifically of excessive use of “spirituous liquor” (see I.234).
- 7.
See Gavin Budge’s Romanticism, Medicine, and the Natural Supernatural for more on Trotter’s relationship to the Brunonian ideas of stimulants, ideas that would influence a generation of Romantic poets (12).
- 8.
The notion that consumption and broader social engagement could be considered together would have been supported by the example of John Brown, known for his “unconventional political allegiances” (Christopher Lawrence 5) and his influence upon radical chemists such as Beddoes.
- 9.
In the Defence of Poetry, too, Shelley routinely uses language of grand scales and wide scope as opposed to specific, reduced, localized senses of place to convey the realm of the poetic imagination. Poetry “enlarges the mind itself,” he writes, and “enlarges the circumference of the imagination”; poetry at its best offers “widest dominion” (517).
- 10.
Shelley was not alone in recognizing that relationship between patriarchy and toxic habit; the male who seeks knowledge and power was one of the more common figures of nineteenth-century literature’s engagement with opium. See, for instance, Barry Milligan’s brief discussion of Middlemarch’s addict and doctor in Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (10).
- 11.
Shelley had himself studied science from an early age, at times deeply committing himself to that work. James Hogg noted Shelley’s Oxford room’s hectically scientific arrangement, full of “philosophical instruments,” including an air-pump, “as if the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos” (qtd. in Grabo 9).
- 12.
For a brief overview of their disagreement, see Simon Jarvis’s “Criticism, Taste, Aesthetics” (31–32).
- 13.
This quote is from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Speculations on Morals,” Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, vol. 1. ed. Mary Shelley (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840): 197–210.
- 14.
Such patterns and recurrences did more for Shelley than shape social places, too—they shaped Shelleyan experience of the world by creating the formal continuity by which the world might be personally experienced. In his “Essay on the Literature, the Arts, and the Manners of the Athenians,” Shelley describes how repeated resemblance configures our experienced reality. He notes that the mind “moulds and completes the shapes in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances of whatever form, animal, building, &c., happens to be present to it” (17).
- 15.
Peter Bailey in Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 describes how Victorian temperance movements sought—as, I would add, Shelley did—to produce aesthetic enjoyment that might prove habitual, but less toxic than intemperance, “providing an alternative world of recreation” (59).
- 16.
For a summary of Shelley’s personal encounters with laudanum, see Katherine Singer’s “Stoned Shelley: Revolutionary Tactics and Women Under the Influence.”
- 17.
Scholars have noted how sympathy discourse maintained an intense individualism along with an intense commitment to others; Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, Adela Pinch in Strange Fits of Passion writes, “contends that feelings are transsubjective entities that pass between persons; that our feelings are always really someone else’s” (19). This was a complex dynamic. In The Surprising Effects of Sympathy, David Marshall reflects on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, writing about “sympathy as an epistemological and aesthetic problem” (5).
- 18.
The science of the age bolstered such a sense of a convergence between physiology and psychology. Alan Richardson in The Neural Sublime describes several correspondences between Romantic idealism’s aesthetics and the age’s science, including “a materialist or ‘corporealist’ approach to mind” (11).
- 19.
Forster is recorded describing an acquaintanceship with Shelley as well as the poet’s vegetarian views; see William E. A. Axon, “Dr. Thomas Forster and Shelley,” Notes and Queries s7–VI: 140 (September 1, 1888): 161–162.
- 20.
See the footnote on page 176 of Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, which briefly covers the malarial associations with the Campagna.
- 21.
Such a huge but entrapping place recalls the places imagined in other nineteenth-century literature of addiction, such as De Quincey’s scene based on the labyrinthine image of Piranesi’s staircase, in which stairs seem to repeat infinitely (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Milligan 78).
- 22.
By motivating tyrannical poetic patterns that structure the world, intemperate habit also suggests what Cian Duffy identifies as “the Shelleyan sublime,” which emphasizes “the historical and political implications of the landscape” (9).
- 23.
Susan Zieger has described the dominance of De Quincey over later nineteenth-century addiction writing. “Distinguishing oneself from De Quincey was a problem for every nineteenth-century drug autobiographer,” Zieger notes (39).
- 24.
A related radical strain has been noted elsewhere in the Gothic. See E.J. Clery’s “Horace Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother and the Impossibility of Female Desire,” in which Clery observes Walpole’s initiation of the Gothic as a major phase in English drama, and finds in Walpole’s play a foregrounding of rebellious female desire. Clery notes “hints that female desire has its own, autonomous and selfish volition, that it might be impervious to the social desiderata of reproduction and the patriarchal family” (36).
- 25.
See Laura Wells Betz, “‘At once mild and animating’: Prometheus Unbound and Shelley’s Spell of Style.” She describes a tendency to view the repetitions in Shelley’s poetry as spells, a similarly repetitive language that establishes some control.
- 26.
Such connections between poetic recurrence and reflexive place-making, including the place-making of psychological self-imprisonment and abstracted escape, are noted by William Keach in Shelley’s Style, where he describes the reflexivity of Shelley’s poetry with regard to Satan’s belief in Paradise Lost that “The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (I.254–5) (qtd. Keach 90). Keach writes that for Shelley, the mind escapes a mental, solipsistic imprisonment “by reenacting the mind’s necessarily reflexive condition in a verbal artifact. The mind ‘defeats’ its ‘curse’ by repeating and articulating it at a higher level of self-consciousness” (91).
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Colman, A. (2019). Shelley, Alcohol, and the “world we make”: Habit’s Patterns in The Cenci. In: Drugs and the Addiction Aesthetic in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01590-9_2
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