Romanticism

An Anthology

Duncan Wu, Duncan Wu

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118256572
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

ROMANTICISM

Praise for the third edition:

"An outstanding anthology, an excellent choice for advanced undergraduate courses on the Romantic era. This edition's improvements include illustrations, a detailed chronology, and expanded selections from women poets. I look forward to using this edition of Romanticism for years to come." Kim Wheatley, College of William and Mary

"This anthology, even more magnificent and indispensable in its Third Edition, is not simply the most useful or the most learned anthology of English Romantic poetry and thought; it is the most exciting." Leslie Brisman, Yale University

Duncan Wu's Romanticism: An Anthology has been appreciated by thousands of literature students and their teachers across the globe since its first appearance in 1994, and is the most widely used teaching text in the field in the UK. Now in its fourth edition, it stands as the essential work on Romanticism. It remains the only such book to contain complete poems and essays edited especially for this volume from manuscript and early printed sources by Wu, along with his explanatory annotations and author headnotes. This new edition carries all texts from the previous edition, adding Keats's Isabella and Shelley's Epipsychidion, as well as a new selection from the poems of Sir Walter Scott. All editorial materials, including annotations, author headnotes, and prefatory materials, are revised for this new edition.

Romanticism: An Anthology remains the only textbook of its kind to include complete and uncut texts of:

• Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, The Pedlar, The Two-Part Prelude, Michael, The Brothers and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
• Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (3rd edn, 1786), The Emigrants, Beachy Head
• Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Records of Woman sequence (all 19 poems)
• Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III and Don Juan Dedication and Cantos I and II
• Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Urizen
• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion, The Mask of Anarchy and Adonais
• Keats, Odes, the two Hyperions, Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes
• Hannah More, Sensibility and Slavery: A Poem
• Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven
• Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade
• Helen Maria Williams, A Farewell, for two years, to England

As well as generous selections from the works of Mary Robinson, John Thelwall, Dorothy Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, John Clare, Letitia Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Visit www.romanticismanthology.com for resources to accompany the anthology, including a dynamic timeline which illustrates key historical and literary events during the Romantic period and features links to useful materials and visual media.

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (I788–I824)

George Gordon, Lord Byron, that most seductively attractive of poets (and one of the biggest-selling of his day), was born 22 January 1788, to Catherine Gordon and Captain John ‘Mad Jack’ Byron, in poor lodgings in London. He had a deformed right foot from birth and, despite several failed operations, was lame for the rest of his life. Abandoned by her husband (who, having spent his wife’s inheritance, died in mysterious circumstances in France in 1791), his mother took her son to Aberdeen in her native Scotland, where she brought him up as best she could, but in considerable poverty. Here he came to love the Scottish countryside – and, at the age of 7, his cousin, Mary Duff, the first of many females who would fascinate him.

He was only 10 years old when, on the death of his great-uncle in 1798, he succeeded to the barony, becoming sixth Lord Byron. At that point he and his mother moved to Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and he began to receive private tuition in preparation for entrance to a public school. At this period, his nurse May Gray beat and sexually abused him. This went on for about two years before it was discovered and she was dismissed.

At home, he fell in love with another cousin, Margaret Parker, who inspired Byron’s ‘first dash into poetry’. He entered Harrow School in 1801. Among his contemporaries were a future marquess, two actual and five future earls and viscounts, four other lords, four baronets, two future Prime Ministers (Lord Palmerston and Robert Peel), and the Duke of Dorset, who became Byron’s ‘fag’ (or servant). At the age of 15 he fell in love with yet another cousin, Mary Chaworth, refusing to go back to Harrow on account of his feelings for her. This gave way to an intense friendship with the 23-year-old Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who had taken a lease on Newstead Abbey until Byron’s coming of age five years hence. Their association came to an abrupt halt in January 1804 when Grey seduced Byron, who returned to Harrow soon after.

He fell in love with other boys in his remaining year and a half there; Lady Caroline Lamb later claimed that he slept with three of them. In spite of his obvious brilliance, he was never a diligent student but read voraciously, noting at the age of 19 that he had digested ‘about four thousand novels, including the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais and Rousseau’. In 1805 he led a rebellion against the new headmaster, the Reverend Dr George Butler, whom he found affected, ingratiating, overbearing, boastful, pedantic and (worst of all) socially inadequate. He organized the dragging of Butler’s desk into the middle of the School House where it was set on fire, and composed scurrilous verses about him. Other triumphs included his performance of King Lear’s address to the storm at the 1805 Speech Day, followed by the scoring of eighteen runs in the Eton–Harrow cricket match – no mean feat for someone with a club foot.

He left having incurred numerous debts, and took every opportunity, after going up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1805, to increase them, living high on the highest of hogs. By January 1808 his debts amounted to over £5,000 – £210,000/US$378,400 today. Cambridge brought out his lordliness: the keeping of dogs being prohibited, he kept a tame bear in a turret at the top of a staircase. He struck up a passionate friendship with the choirboy John Edleston, ‘the only being I esteem’, who provided the inspiration for the ‘Thyrza’ poems (see pp. 872–4). In 1806 he gathered his juvenile poetry as Fugitive Pieces but suppressed the book at the last moment; in January 1807 he privately printed his juvenilia as Poems on Various Occasions; and in the summer of 1807 published a third volume, Hours of Idleness. It drew damning criticism from Henry Brougham (anonymously) in the Edinburgh Review for January 1808, whose opening remarks set the tone for what was to come: ‘His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water.’ Byron was mortified. He downed three bottles of claret after dinner and contemplated suicide.

The following day he decided to take revenge with a vigorous satire on literary life, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), the chief butt of which was Francis Jeffrey (see pp. 734–5), editor of the Edinburgh, whom he held responsible for the review. He laboured over it for more than a year before it was published anonymously, by which time it had grown to the point at which it lambasted virtually every notable in the literary world – the ‘dunces’, as he put it, which included his guardian, the Earl of Carlisle, who nurtured the ambition of being a verse-dramatist: ‘No muse will cheer, with renovating smile, / The paralytic puking of Carlisle.’

The only writers of whom he had anything good to say were Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Samuel Rogers and William Gifford. He saw them as faithful to the ‘correct’ Augustan tradition of Pope, Dryden and Swift, which had been rejected by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey in exchange for misguided poetic and philosophical systems. That was why he sniffed at Wordsworth’s Poems in Two Volumes when he reviewed it in 1807, dismissing its author’s ‘namby-...