Abstract
To map the “progress” of poetry “from the age of Chaucer to that of Cowley” and beyond, Headley, Anderson, Chalmers, and Hazlitt call on historiographical conventions to explain literary developments.1 Attention to patterns of cultural evolution helps them to meet readerly expectations of clarity and comprehensiveness, while also offsetting what each represents as the idiosyncrasies and even tyrannies of commentators like Johnson, Hurd, and Knox. Similar motives shape accounts of the lives of individual subjects — biographical and autobiographical — another fertile source of literary historical thinking in the period, although one focused more often on specialized detail than on the wide-angled view encouraged by the extended chronology of the Johnsonian sequence. Charles Mahoney has suggested that “much ostensibly political writing from these years is distinctly literary while much writing advertised as literary is decidedly political.”2 Individual biographies support this insight more overtly than the collective ones considered in the previous chapter, in part because of their distinctive orientation toward present circumstances. While the larger-scale sequential biographies establish their distance from criticism by highlighting their proximity to historiography, the writers of individual lives tend to refer to immediate political contexts in vindicating (or censuring) their subjects.
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Notes
Charles Mahoney, Romantics and Renegades: the Poetics of Political Reaction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 15. Mahoney minimizes the significance of Romantic apostasy as an historical phenomenon, focusing instead on its functions as an ironic trope for “an abiding crisis in literary signification” (12). Kevin Gilmartin discusses the modern historical debate about the credibility and force of conservative thinking in the period and, citing H. T. Dickinson, Ian R. Christie, Frank O’Gorman, Mark Philip, Gregory Claeys, David Eastwood, James J. Sack, Don Herzog, and Robert R. Dozier, suggests that their work makes it possible to “demonstrate the enterprising and productive (rather than merely negative or reactive) presence of counterrevolutionary voices in the culture of the romantic period.” Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9.
Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: the Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1.
Samuel Egerton Brydges, Arthur Fitz-Albini (London: J. White, 1798), I.271. The Monthly Review 27 (1798) notes that the “chief object of this well-written novel seems to be to plead the cause of birth against fortune. It represents loftiness of sentiment, and disinterestedness of character, as exclusively allotted to the high-born; and as sources of perpetual mortification and disappointment to the possessor” (318).
Robert Bisset, The Life of Burke (London: George Cawthorn, 1800), I.3–4.
In The Ruminator; Containing a Series of Moral and Sentimental Essays reprinted in Censura Literaria, Brydges contrasts Pitt, who “imagined that the temper of the public mind might be, not only best, but exclusively, influenced through the channel of parliamentary oratory” with Fox, who carefully cultivated writers and “now enjoys the effect of it in the adulation paid to his memory” (Censura VIII.102–3). Fox’s recognition that the management of public opinion entails attention to posterity has allowed a carefully crafted personal reputation to modulate into a positive historical judgment. An encomiastic account of the “Character of Dr. Samuel Johnson” appeared in Bisset’s Historical, Biographical, Literary, and Scientific, Magazine (London: 1799), 191–2.
See Oxford Dictionary of Literary Biography. For Beloe’s involvement with the conservative press, and especially his co-editorship with Robert Nares of the British Critic in 1793, see Gilmartin, Writing against Revolution. James L. Sack cites Beloe as an instance of the patronage system as it applied to editors and journalists before the Liverpool administration. See, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain c.1760–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
On the discovered manuscript trope, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 56–7. Beloe was dismissed from his post at the British Museum in 1806, on the charge of negligence, after numbers of engravings were stolen by James Deighton, whom he had allowed into the library.
William Beloe, The Sexagenarian; Or The Recollections of a Literary Life (London: J. and C. Rivington, 1817), I.6.
See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 157–69, for an account of Gerrald’s trial and subsequent transportation to Australia. Southey’s “To Joseph Gerald” is discussed by Lynda Pratt, in “Robert Southey, Writing and Romanticism” in Romanticism on the Net, Issues 32–33, November 2003–February 2004, http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n32_33/009255ar.html
Beloe includes “Dr. Priestley, Mr. Henley, Dr. Price, Horne Tooke, Dr. Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld, Bishop Percy, the venerable Bishop Douglas, Dr. Gregory and Mrs. Wolstoncraft” among the participants in the pre-revolutionary salons. Jon Mee, in tracing Barbauld’s early attraction to and subsequent rejection of the bluestocking circle’s version of politeness, affirms the continuity of Dissenting models of conversational exchange with 1790s radicalism in “‘Severe contentions of friendship’: Barbauld, Conversation, and Dispute,” in Repossessing the Romantic Past, ed. Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21–39.
H. T. Dickinson identifies the special status accorded 1789 with the attempts of historians of early British radicalism to argue that only the intervention of the French Revolution prevented parliamentary reform, Kevin Gilmartin with the ways in which “the Burke problem” or the “Burke-Paine debate” for many years framed British Romantic studies. See, Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1977), 270–2 and Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution, 8–9. Jon Klancher considers the extended literary history of Romanticism through critical readings of 1789 in “Romantic Criticism and the Meanings of the French Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 463–91.
Jack Lynch notes that radical commentators from Toland to Shelley acknowledged and celebrated Milton’s politics, but for large numbers of eighteenth-century commentators, particularly early in the period, Milton was defined as an apologist for regicide. See, The Age of Elizabeth, 148–9, and Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 19–62.
As William St. Clair notes, “In the year of Waterloo to praise an author as a ‘patriot of the world’ was to flaunt lack of commitment to a narrow nationalism.” For St. Clair, the work more generally comments on “antiJacobin England as much as on the nation’s last great political reaction.” See St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: a Biography of a Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 391.
William Godwin, “Of History and Romance”, Appendix IV, Things As They Are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1988), 362–3.
William Godwin, The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature in a Series of Essays (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), x.
Tilottama Rajan, “Uncertain Futures: History and Genealogy in William Godwin’s The Lives of Edward and John Philips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton,” Milton Quarterly 32 (1998), 81.
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© 2010 April London
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London, A. (2010). Rewriting Lives: Revolution, Reaction, and Apostasy. In: Literary History Writing, 1770–1820. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283336_3
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