Abstract
This chapter challenges the view that the 1820s and 1830s saw a slump in poetry production. Stewart presents publishing statistics and evidence from poets, periodicals, and publishers to develop a more nuanced picture of a market that was considerably more vibrant than previous studies have allowed. A new category, ‘the living poets’, allowed the age’s culture to consider the shape their period would take when it became part of poetical history in a future ‘canon’. The period also encouraged poets to think in strikingly modern ways about the idea of poetic ‘form’, a term that possessed both metrical and commercial aspects. The chapter concludes with Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), a poem that crystallises the doubts and possibilities the period’s poetry encapsulates.
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Notes
- 1.
Carlyle, ‘Characteristics’, Edinburgh Review 54 (December 1831), 366.
- 2.
- 3.
Sutherland’s ‘The British Book Trade and the Crash of 1826’ studies 1824–7 and offers a powerful case for considering the 1826 ‘crash’ as a blip from which the trade quickly recovered.
- 4.
See Jackson , Poetry of the Romantic Period and Annals of English Verse, 1770–1835, for the figures Erickson and others use, which indicate a similar trend. These keep broadly in line with general book sales figures. Jackson’s updated digital edition of Annals of Verse, hosted at http://jacksonbibliography.library.utoronto.ca, takes in a much larger range of books (though not including annuals). It records a similar pattern between 1770 and 1835: 1770 has 102 volumes of poetry, rising steadily to 203 in 1787, then 333 in 1805, reaching 449 by 1810, staying around the high 400s and low 500s in the 1810s, then rising to 553 in 1818, 579 in 1819, reaching a highly unusual peak of 957 in 1820, before returning to the 1810 levels of around 500 throughout the 1820s and early 1830s with peaks of 582 in 1825, 585 in 1830, and 569 in 1835. These figures are not a perfect account of poetry production: Jackson had not finished checking each volume at his death, he does not include annuals, and he includes some reprints. The website continues to be updated by scholars at the University of Toronto.
- 5.
See also James Raven, The Business of Books, 295.
- 6.
Briggs, A History of Longman’s, 205.
- 7.
On the apparent disappearance of verse satire, Gary Dyer considers the absorption of satire into the novel and the rise of ‘light verse’: British Satire and the Politics of Style, 13–14.
- 8.
The third canto of Byron’s Childe Harold sold 12,000 copies at 5 shillings and sixpence; Moore’s Lalla Rookh, in its first two editions, sold at 2 guineas, as did Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and Rokeby (St Clair, 587, 619, 634–5). Paula R. Feldman notes that annuals cost between 8 shillings and £4, with sales of successful individual volumes over 10,000 (‘Introduction’, 8, 16).
- 9.
Stephen Gill remarks of Wordsworth that it is unsurprising The Excursion at first found only a small audience, but was later recognised as his most important work. Poetry of religious devotion ‘was to become unremarkable in the 1840s. In 1815 it is strikingly discordant. Most reviewers up to the 1820s still came to scoff and they did not remain to pray’: Wordsworth and the Victorians, 17. On 1820s and 1830s religious poets, see Kirstie Blair , Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion.
- 10.
Quoted by Bate, John Clare, 370.
- 11.
Constable and Company to Reynolds, 15 January 1820, in Jones, The Life of John Hamilton Reynolds, 307.
- 12.
Richard B. Sher’s ‘Transatlantic Books and Literary Culture’ provides a useful overview of the publishing context in the long eighteenth century.
- 13.
Journal of Thomas Moore, 1: 359.
- 14.
Stauffer , ‘Hemans by the Book’. The Guiana volume is Midnight Musings: Being A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects (1832). I discuss this further in Chap. 5. See also Chorley, Memorials of Mrs Hemans, 1: 132.
- 15.
The volume was a follow-up to an earlier volume published in Frankfurt containing selections from the works of Byron, Scott, and Moore: The British Poets of the Nineteenth Century (1828).
- 16.
Hughes, James Hogg, 277, 281–4.
- 17.
Reynolds, Selected Prose, 422. He is referring to Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker.
- 18.
John Wilson, ‘An Hour’s Talk About Poetry’, Blackwood’s 30 (September 1831), 475–90 (485).
- 19.
Craciun, ‘Romantic Poetry, Sexuality, Gender’, 161.
- 20.
Mason, Literary Advertising and the Shaping of British Romanticism, 118–42.
- 21.
McGann, ‘Rethinking Romanticism’, 247–8.
- 22.
Peacock, ‘The Épicier’, The Halliford Edition of the Works of Thomas Love Peacock, 9: 294–5.
- 23.
In The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3: 83.
- 24.
Printed in William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert Woof, 1022. Further references abbreviated to Woof. The term (‘poietes’) was written originally in Greek.
- 25.
For an excellent selection of these, see Woof, William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage.
- 26.
Dedication to Robert Southey, 41.
- 27.
Blackwood’s 7 (May 1820), 206. The same issue of Blackwood’s features a series of three bravura parodies of Wordsworth’s overbearing high-mindedness when confronting his readers.
- 28.
It is one of the principles of Gill’s Wordsworth: A Life (see vi), and he has furthered it in more recent publications; Bates, Wordsworth’s Poetic Collections; Fulford, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets; Bushell, Re-Reading The Excursion.
- 29.
Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity, 95.
- 30.
Gill, Wordsworth’s Revisitings, 148.
- 31.
Rounce, Fame and Failure 1720–1800, 26.
- 32.
Chandler, England in 1819, 484. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. See also Thomas Vogler , ‘Romanticism and Literary Periods: The Future of the Past’, and Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
- 33.
Boswell refers to Cuthbert Shaw’s The Race, by Mercurius Spur, Esq. (1765) ‘in which he whimsically made the living poets of England contend for pre-eminence of fame by running’ (Life of Johnson, 378). Shaw’s idea of having writers compete for laurels is one of a number of such satires; that they are running to reach a place in the temple of fame makes this a matter of moderns and ancients, and accordingly, as I will explain below, a different type of contest to the ‘living poets’. See Dryden’s ‘Prologue to the University of Oxford’, 1674.
- 34.
Monthly Review 30 (April 1764), 323.
- 35.
Quoted by W. A. Speck, Robert Southey, 75.
- 36.
The Monthly Visitor, and New Family Magazine 14 (December 1801), 404 and 15 (November 1801), 279. The list is Rogers, Sotheby, Hunt, Campbell, Pye, Southey, Cumberland, Cottle, Booker, Hayley, Bowles, Bloomfield, Wollcott, Darwin, Gisborne, Dyer, Hurdis, Bidlake, Roscoe, Maurice, and Case.
- 37.
The Poetical Register: And Repository of Fugitive Poetry (January 1802), 487–91.
- 38.
Alexander Molleson , Beauties of Select Living Poets. He focuses on Rogers, Campbell, and Scott.
- 39.
Gentleman’s Magazine (December 1815), 524; Blackwood’s 1 (August 1817), 508.
- 40.
The Musical World 11 (10 January 1839), 20.
- 41.
I have used data based on searches of ProQuest’s Periodicals Archive Online, the largest database of historical periodicals, and a Google Ngram, both of which show a low use of ‘living poets’ in the eighteenth century, rising to a peak in 1822, which is sustained into 1852 before slowly subsiding. Neither method offers definitive data, but they help indicate the trend. The Edinburgh Review’s 1802 ‘Advertisement’ claimed that it would only review those publications ‘that either have attained, or deserve, a certain portion of celebrity’, a crucial move, as many have argued, in the relation between the periodical reviews and the market they surveyed.
- 42.
Blackwood’s 4 (November 1818), 159–61 (160). The article is attributed by A. L. Strout to James Wilson.
- 43.
Moral and Sacred Poetry, eds. Rev. T. Willcocks and Rev. T. Horton (1829).
- 44.
‘A Dialogue for the Year 2130: Extracted from the Album of a Modern Sibyl’, Keepsake (1830), 256.
- 45.
D’Israeli, The Literary Character Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, 6.
- 46.
Preface to The Battle of Marathon (1820), The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2. Barrett was 14 and, although the poem was printed privately, it is telling that she felt the need to make such a public statement about the state of her art.
- 47.
Cunningham, Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Last Fifty Years. The book drew together articles he had published in the Athenaeum.
- 48.
William St Clair claims, rather too confidently for me, that ‘The reputation of the eight “living poets” of the romantic period which had been established around 1812, remained firm right through the century’ (414). Patmore has neglected Samuel Rogers, who almost always features in these lists.
- 49.
See also the anthology Specimens of British Poetesses; Selected and Chronologically Arranged by Rev. Alexander Dyce (1827).
- 50.
Cottle, An Expostulatory Epistle to Lord Byron (1820).
- 51.
The Edinburgh Literary Journal 65 (6 February 1830), 81–3.
- 52.
Blackwood’s Magazine 14 (November 1823), 555.
- 53.
As discussed by, for example, Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, and Trevor Ross , The Making of the English Literary Canon.
- 54.
For example, Robert Anderson , ed. A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. The tale it tells of the emergence of ‘English’ from a combination of Norman French and vernacular poetry is typical, and sees Chaucer as ‘the Reformer of the English language, and the father of English poetry’ (1: vi). The Whiggish historicism of this is captured by Thomas Campbell’s account of the ‘rise of English’: ‘amidst the early growth of her commerce, literature, and civilization, England acquired the new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprung’: Specimens of the British Poets, 1: 19.
- 55.
Bloom, The Western Canon, 15.
- 56.
Cox, ‘The Living Pantheon of Poets in 1820: Pantheon or Canon?’, 14.
- 57.
The appropriate method may be that made popular by Franco Moretti , the use of ‘big data’ to explore from a distance the patterns of reading via statistical analysis, though I want to pursue something else here. See, for a useful overview, Moretti’s Distant Reading.
- 58.
Although the volume of the Edinburgh Annual Register is dated 1808, it was not published until 1810.
- 59.
The Spy, 10 (3 November 1810). All references are to The Spy: A Periodical Paper of Literary Amusement and Instruction, ed. Gillian Hughes. There is an interesting follow-up to this: when Byron and Hogg made friends, Byron challenged Hogg to a ‘trial of skill’ in which they would both write 17 odes in any style to be judged by Scott, Campbell, Baillie, and nine other ‘living poets’: 24 March 1814, BLJ: 4: 86. Meiko O’Halloran discusses insightfully The Queen’s Wake (1813) and The Poetic Mirror (1816) as examples of Hogg’s deployment of such contests in his work: James Hogg and British Romanticism: A Kaleidoscopic Art.
- 60.
The Spy, 2 (8 September 1810), 17.
- 61.
The Spy, 52 (24 August 1811), 518.
- 62.
April London , Literary History Writing, 1770–1820, claims that John Wilson at Blackwood’s and Hazlitt share a sense of ‘a native pantheon of transcendent greatness’ (151) that marks the movement away from literary history writing towards the establishment of literary criticism (6).
- 63.
Blackwood’s 3 (July 1818), 369.
- 64.
Wordsworth, dedication to Peter Bell, 41.
- 65.
Blackwood’s 3 (July 1818), 381.
- 66.
Blackwood’s 7 (August 1820), 520. The review of Advice to Julia (1820) is attributed to John Gibson Lockhart by Strout.
- 67.
D. M. Moir, ‘Letter from Mr Odoherty, Enclosing the Third Part of Christabel’, Blackwood’s Magazine 5 (June 1819), 286–91.
- 68.
Review of Wordsworth’s River Duddon (1820), Blackwood’s 7 (May 1820), 206.
- 69.
Blackwood’s 3 (April 1818), 75.
- 70.
Unless indicated, references to Hazlitt are to P. P. Howe’s The Complete Works of William Hazlitt.
- 71.
I enjoy but am not convinced by Jeffrey Robinson’s mischievous suggestion that it was the subject of a government attack: see Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism.
- 72.
Hazlitt, Select British Poets or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time, iii.
- 73.
In most of the anthologies of living poets I have consulted, some of which I have referred to above, Byron and Moore are the best represented, and though Wordsworth appears in most of them, Hazlitt’s decision to let him dominate is relatively unusual. He was not quite alone: The Living Poets of England: Specimens of the Living British Poets (Paris, 1827), for example, offers a wider range than Hazlitt, but Wordsworth is the best represented.
- 74.
Hazlitt, Select British Poets, iii–iv.
- 75.
It is intriguing that this phrase occurs only in the revised version of the review (printed in The Round Table in 1817) and not the original three-part review in The Examiner (1814), especially given that the original review is, generally, more generous. See Duncan Wu’s discussion in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, 2: 321–4.
- 76.
I discuss Hazlitt’s thinking on this issue, and particularly in Spirit of the Age, in ‘Hazlitt, the Living Poets, and Ephemerality’.
- 77.
Carey, Beauties of the Modern Poets, v–xxv.
- 78.
References are to John Strachan’s edition, volumes 5 and 6 of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt.
- 79.
It is interesting, as Nicholas Roe notes, that Hunt planned something a little similar in 1810 called ‘The Planet of the Poets’ in which he discourses with the great dead poets of ‘the present state of things on earth’: Fiery Heart, 120. Hunt had another list in the Literary Pocket-Book (1819).
- 80.
See, for example, ‘Mr Wordsworth’s Poetry’ in The Champion in 1815: reprinted in Selected Prose of John Hamilton Reynolds. Further references are included in the text. Reynolds famously parodied Wordsworth, but he was not the only ardent Wordsworthian to parody his hero.
- 81.
This piece was published in the Edinburgh Magazine (the renamed Scots Magazine) in October 1819. It is tempting to place this change at the point of Reynolds’s falling away from Wordsworth’s influence following Wordsworth’s not wholly enthusiastic comments on Reynolds’s Naiad (1816), which led up to the parody of Peter Bell. Reynolds was, as his later prose essays and poems in The Garden of Florence (1821) indicate, consistently appreciative of Wordsworth’s poetry and his critical views. I discuss Reynolds further in Chap. 6.
- 82.
The article was a review of the Thanksgiving Ode in The Champion, 20 October 1816.
- 83.
I give the quotation as it appears in Jones’s edition of Reynolds’s Prose, 74. Robert Woof (624) shows convincingly that Scott is the author. It is interesting that one reason Jones gives for attributing the article to Reynolds is the similarity of the attitude to Wordsworth that Reynolds exhibited elsewhere in the paper: it is an aspect of the ardent Wordsworthianism I discuss elsewhere in this chapter.
- 84.
Examiner 706 (15 July 1821), 444.
- 85.
Examiner 720 (21 October 1821), 666.
- 86.
Reynolds had attacked all the living poets except Keats in his review of Endymion (first published in The Alfred): ‘there is not one poet of the present day, who enjoys any popularity that will live; each writes for the booksellers and the ladies of fashion, and not for the voice of centuries’. Hunt reprinted the review in The Examiner (without reading it through, he said), and later qualified Reynolds’s attack in an article on ‘THE LIVING POETS’ by claiming the likely permanence of Wordsworth, Moore, and Byron. See Examiner 563 (11 October 1818), 648 and 565 (25 October 1818), 678.
- 87.
Hunt, Descent of Liberty (1815) in Selected Works vol. 5: scene 3, l. 145.
- 88.
‘Living Authors, A Dream’, Scots Magazine (August 1820): Reynolds, Prose, 253.
- 89.
Longman made the deal in the midst of the poetry ‘boom’ in 1815, but he is interestingly tentative: ‘the times are most inauspicious for “poetry and thousands”; but we believe that your poetry would do more than that of any other living poet at the present moment’ (quoted by Jeffrey W. Vail, The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore, 113). The firm paid Scott the same sum for Rokeby; the 3000 guineas they had initially offered Moore would have trumped even that.
- 90.
St Clair (619) believes that another 750 copies were published and sold on the same impression. Two guineas is the same price as Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814), also published by Longman’s.
- 91.
Moore’s poem, indeed, seemed to resist any collapse in the market. We have seen that Constable thought he could make a bestseller with Moore when he was telling Reynolds that poetry was a drug on the market; Asa Briggs shows just how fully Constable’s rival, Longman’s , exploited their prize jewel. An expensive illustrated edition came out in 1839 in an edition of 3000, then ‘three years later in the “bad year”, 1842, another 1500 copies of it were printed, with a further 1500 to follow in 1845’: Briggs, Longman’s, 195.
- 92.
Journal 2: 444. The trial of April 1821 was brought by John Waterhouse against Colonel Berkeley at Gloucester Assizes.
- 93.
Vail, The Literary Relationship, 7.
- 94.
Vail, ‘Thomas Moore in Ireland and America: The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, 41.
- 95.
Vail, The Literary Relationship, 21.
- 96.
Rossetti, ‘Prefatory Notice’, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, xxiv.
- 97.
Hazlitt’s Select British Poets does the same thing, as do many other anthologies.
- 98.
The conflation of Fadladeen with Jeffrey is very common, but I am not wholly convinced by it. Authoritarian government-sponsored criticism was more the Quarterly’s territory than the Edinburgh’s. Even if Moore’s friend and editor was willing to take the joke, the way Fadladeen so abruptly turns his coat when realising that the poet is a Prince suggests Robert Southey, a common target for Moore, Hunt, Hazlitt, and other reformers in 1817.
- 99.
References are to the second (quarto) edition, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817). Here 128, 161.
- 100.
British Review 10 (August 1817), 40.
- 101.
Vail , The Literary Relationship, especially 135–7. Vail also offers an insightful defence of Moore’s couplets, 122. See BLJ 5: 265.
- 102.
Edinburgh Review 29 (November 1817), 9.
- 103.
Kelly, Bard of Erin, 283.
- 104.
David Macbeth Moir commented on the ‘luxurious laxity, a rich slovenliness’ (201) of his versification. See Charles Mahoney , ‘The Temptations of Tercets’, for an insightful discussion of triplets in the Romantic period.
- 105.
Letter to Thomas Kelsall, 19 July 1830, Letters of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 182.
- 106.
On the East India Ship, see Letters of Thomas Moore, 2: 585. Florence Parbury, The Emerald Set with Pearls.
- 107.
See Parbury, 14.
- 108.
Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 622. Dickens’s sentimental and silly Julia Mills ‘quoted verses respecting self and young Gazelle. Ineffectually’ in an effort to cheer up a pining Dora in David Copperfield, 624–5. Rossetti’s parody (‘I never reared a young Wombat’) is rather tender, and was written for his pet wombat in 1869. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning, 80.
- 109.
Keepsake (1828), 140.
- 110.
Edinburgh Review 29 (November 1817), 3; Hazlitt, 9: 170.
- 111.
Quoted by Kelly, Bard of Erin, 297.
- 112.
Beddoes , Letters, 182. He calls Moore’s style ‘best false one I know and glitters like broken glass—or he calls us and will show us a beautiful prospect in heaven and earth, gives us a tube to look thro’ which looks like a telescope, and is a kaleidoscope’.
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Stewart, D. (2018). ‘The Genius of the Times’: Sales, Forms, and Periods. In: The Form of Poetry in the 1820s and 1830s. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70512-5_2
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