Abstract
I have two related aims in The Dialect of the Tribe: first, to explore the formative role played in the production of Romanticism by coteries that comprised not only writers but also editors, patrons, booksellers, and critics; second, to understand the significance of the trope that was the hallmark of coterie style—allusion. The coteries I examine overlapped temporally and spatially; they even shared some of their members. Together they forged and reforged a literary language built on new, as well as traditional, uses of allusion.
A sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years
—Francis Jeffrey, review of Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer in The Edinburgh Review, 1 (1803), 63
Few, amid the rural-tribe, have time
To number syllables or play with rhyme
—George Crabbe, The Village (1783), lines 25–26
That perverse singularity of judgement which haunts the tribe of poets
—Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 10 (August–December 1821), 184, on Southey
The real objects of his admiration are the Coterie of Hampstead
—J. G. Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (October 1817), 38–40, on Leigh Hunt
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Notes
See, among others, Elizabeth Fay, Becoming Wordsworthian (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995)
Elizabeth Fay, Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain,1770–1840, ed. Clara Tuite and Gillian Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Michelle Levy, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
Scott Krawczyk, Romantic Literary Families (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Nicola Healey, Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Cf. Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship, ed. Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Greg Kucich, “‘The Wit in the Dungeon’: Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries,” European Romantic Review , 10 (1999), 242–53.
Greg Kucich, “Cockney Chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the Aesthetics of Excess,” in Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics, ed. Nicholas Roe (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 118–34
Gregory Dart, Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810–1840: Cockney Adventures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Clare was so called by Charles Elton in “The Idler’s Epistle to John Clare,” The London Magazine (August 1824), 143–45. On Clare’s participation in a Cockney coterie centered on J. H. Reynolds, see Simon Kövesi, “John Hamilton Reynolds, John Clare and the London Magazine ,” The Wordsworth Circle , 42.3 (2011), 226–35.
See David Stewart, Romantic Magazines and Metropolitan Literary Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
William Christie, The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009)
Mark Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Richard Cronin, Paper Pellets: British Literary Culture after Waterloo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
Lee Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
On this aspect of Byron’s writing see Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
See Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Paul Keen, The Crisis of Literature in the 1790s: Print Culture and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Lucy Newlyn, “Dorothy Wordsworth’s Experimental Style,” Essays in Criticism , 57.4 (2007), 325–49.
Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
Ashley Cross, “Robert Southey and Mary Robinson in Dialogue,” The Wordsworth Circle , 42.1 (2011), 10–17.
Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009).
On the Wordsworth/Coleridge poetic relationship see Lucy Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Language of Allusion , 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Stephen Prickett, Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)
Gene W. Ruoff, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Making of the Major Lyrics 1802–1804 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)
Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Allusion: “An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference: mid 16th century (denoting a pun, metaphor, or parable).” Allude: “late 15th century (in the sense ‘hint at, suggest’): from Latin allus-, alludere, from ad- ‘towards’ + ludere ‘to play’” (OED). For a clear discussion of recent theorizations, including allusion’s difference from intertextuality, see Gregory Machacek, “Allusion,” PMLA, 122 (2007), 522–36 (pp. 523–24); and Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For a theorization of echo see John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), for whom echo is distinguished from allusions that expect recognition by the reader: it is unconscious. Hollander’s rehabilitation of echo is helpful; in order to establish it as a separate object of enquiry; however, he creates multiple distinct categories of allusion and borrowing that attempt to tie down allusion’s playfulness. As Bate shows, in practice the categories bleed into each other: Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination , pp. 32–33.
A few examples among many studies of satirical allusions in postrevolutionary politics are David V. Erdman, Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954)
Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)
John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
The prevalence of allusion as a Romantic compositional method has been demonstrated, with regard to Shakespeare, by Bate, in Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination , with regard to Milton, by Lucy Newlyn, in Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), and with regard to eighteenth-century poets, by Ricks, in Allusion to the Poets . Also
Edwin Stein, Wordsworth’s Art of Allusion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988).
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London and New York: Penguin, 1978)
Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings. James Mill’s the 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).
Stuart Curran, “Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994), pp. 17–35
Marilyn Butler, Literature as a Heritage, or, Reading Other Ways (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Lynda Pratt, “Introduction,” Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793–1810, gen. ed. Lynda Pratt, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004), V.
On the social nature of allusion, see Susan Stewart, “The Pickpocket: A Study in Tradition and Allusion,” Modern Language Notes , 95 (1980), 1127–54
Eleanor Cook, Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Felicity James, Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth: Reading Friendship in the 1790s (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 3. See also Levy, Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture , pp. 45–69.
David Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 212–13.
See the work on patronage and professionalization of Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Scott Hess, Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship and the Print Market (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
On this for Clare see Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London: Picador, 2003), pp. 198–203.
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© 2015 Tim Fulford
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Fulford, T. (2015). Introduction. In: Romantic Poetry and Literary Coteries. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518897_1
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