Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780–1860

The Legacy of Charlotte Smith

Claire Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754669753
• eBook ISBN: 9781317057246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Arguing that the end of the eighteenth-century witnessed the emergence of an important female poetic tradition, Claire Knowles analyzes the poetry of several key women writing between 1780 and 1860. Knowles provides important context by demonstrating the influence of the Della Cruscans in exposing the constructed and performative nature of the trope of sensibility, a revelation that was met with critical hostility by a literary culture that valorised sincerity. This sets the stage for Charlotte Smith, who pioneers an autobiographical approach to poetic production that places increased emphasis on the connection between the poet's physical body and her body of work. Knowles shows the poets Susan Evance, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning advancing Smith's poetic strategy as they seek to elicit a powerful sympathetic response from readers by highlighting a connection between their actual suffering and the production of poetry. From this environment, a specific tradition in female poetry arises that is identifiable in the work of twentieth-century writers like Sylvia Plath and continues to pertain today. Alongside this new understanding of poetic tradition, Knowles provides an innovative account of the central role of women writers to an emergent late eighteenth-century mass literary culture and traces a crucial discursive shift that takes place in poetic production during this period. She argues that the movement away from the passionate discourse of sensibility in the late eighteenth century to the more contained rhetoric of sentimentality in the early nineteenth had an enormous effect, not only on female poets but also on British literary culture as a whole.

1 Understanding Sensibility as Performance: The Della Cruscans

DOI: 10.4324/9781315608365-1

The fever turned into a frenzy: Laura Maria, Carlos, Orlando, Adelaide, and a thousand other nameless names caught the infection; and from one end of the kingdom to the other, all was nonsense and Della Crusca.

William Gifford, The Baviad and Mæviad.

Hester Lynch Thrale’s second marriage, to the Italian singer Gabriele Piozzi, took place in July 1784. The next year, as part of their much-anticipated honeymoon trip to the continent, the couple spent a relaxing summer in Florence. It was a pleasant break from life back home in England, which had become increasingly difficult for the writer after her infatuation with her daughter’s music master became public knowledge. Many of Piozzi’s friends had been horrified at her decision to remarry for love at the advanced age of forty-three. In fact to some, including prominent bluestocking Hester Chapone, the decision verged on madness. “There must really be some degree of Insanity in that case,” she noted in a letter to William Pepys, “for such mighty overbearing Passions are not natural in a ‘Matron’s bones.’” ¹

¹Hester Chapone to William Weller Pepys, August 24, 1784 in James Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 231.

Italy, however, seems to have agreed with the new Mrs. Piozzi, and it did not take long before the couple had gathered a close circle of “verse mad” friends around them. These friends included William Parsons, Bertie Greatheed and his wife, and the Cambridge-educated writer, Robert Merry. The group, who would come to be known as the Della Cruscans, eventually grew to include several Italians, all distinguished poets in their own right: Doctor Lorenzo Pignotti, Abate Parini, Count Angelo d’Elci and Marquis Ippolito Pindemonte. ² Piozzi was clearly enjoying herself when she wrote to a friend:

²For more information see Hester Lynch Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776–1809, ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), vol. 2, note to p. 643.

I have been playing the Baby, and writing Nonsense to divert our English friends here, who do the same thing themselves; and swear they will print the Collection, and call it an Arno Miscellany; Mr. Parsons, and Mr. Merry are exceedingly clever, so is Mr. Greatheed, and we have no critics to maul us, so we laugh in Peace. ³

³Hester Lynch Piozzi, The Piozzi Letters, ed. Edward Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), vol. 1, p. 160.

She could not have foreseen that this “Nonsense” would go on to have a long and, at times fraught, cultural life.

As anticipated, a collection of Florence-inspired poems, called the Florence Miscellany (1785), was published for friends and family back in England, although the print run and intended audience for the privately published volume was small. This is reflected in the dedication to the book, which announces that “OURSELVES and our FRIENDS we for Patrons will chuse, / No others will read us, and these will excuse.” ⁴ Judging from her comments in her letter, Piozzi clearly envisaged only a small and partial readership for the Miscellany. Nonetheless, once poetry from the volume arrived on the English literary scene it went on to inspire a host of poets. Following Piozzi and her friends’ example, a second wave of Della Cruscan poets (now nurtured by publisher John Bell, with their works published primarily in the pages of his popular newspaper The World) took to composing poems in the same summery vein as The Florence Miscellany. In so doing, they ensured the longevity of a poetical form intended initially to do little more than while away the long hot hours of a Florentine summer.

⁴The Florence Miscellany (Florence: G. Cam, 1785), p. 3.

The Poetics of the Bower

The first poem in The Florence Miscellany, Greatheed’s “A Dream,” sets the scene for the collection in a world of “fairy visions,” in which “many a wood-Nymph, many a Faun / Trips sportive o’er th’enamell’d lawn.” In his dream, Greatheed wakes the sleeping Tuscan Muse who laments that she only has one living follower; Lorenzo Pignotti. “Alarm’d” at this state of affairs, she searches all Italy for more worthy devotees:

O’er the cold Appenines she flew.

And scarce bestow’d a transient view;

But having reach’d the Pisan shore,

On even wing she seem’d to soar;

Nor linger’d long, but heav’d a sigh

And pass’d Sienna, Prato, by:

When, even in Florence, she finds none but “Cavaliers; / Who tell the daily tale of love / To many a fair in many a grove,” the muse turns to “Immortal Milton’s shade” who promises to find her a “genuine Bard” on “Albion’s chalky shore.”

We are introduced to the three other English Della Cruscans in the final section of the poem and, in a conceit that would carry over into second-wave Della Cruscanism, each of them is assigned a particular poetic role to play (presumably in the volume to follow). Robert Merry, in an acknowledgement of the overtly political imperatives behind much of his verse, takes on the role of Milton’s “genuine Bard,” attracting flocks of shepherds with his “Lyre’s majestic sound.” Piozzi is re-imagined as a rather unlikely “roving Nymph” who strikes her “British Lyre, / With Grecian force, and Sapho’s fire,” while William Parsons becomes a reclining “Youth” whose “wild harp warbled to the wind.” Entranced by the vision before him, Greatheed attempts to join the poets but is prevented from doing so by “adverse powers.” In the very final lines of the poem, a curtain of sorts is drawn across the pastoral scene. The poet’s vision dims and he becomes aware that other, more malignant “phantoms” have also witnessed the performance:

Confus’d at length my vision grew;

Fantastic phantoms rose to view;

Envy I saw, in yellow vest,

Malignant tear her shrivel’d breast;

And there the sullen race appear

Who scorn the glowing verse to hear:

Amaz’d I found the tumult rise,

And sleep, on hasty pinion, flies.

In this poem, Greatheed attempts to establish the significance of the Della Cruscan coterie by aligning the poets explicitly with a canonical English poetic tradition exemplified in the figure of Milton. His friends become the only “genuine” poets in a country filled with “cavaliers.” But (and somewhat presciently, as we will see) these final lines also tacitly acknowledge that the fairy bower is hardly a space associated with the production of works of high art: there will always be those who “scorn” such “glowing verse.” Even in this magical realm of shepherds, maids and naiads there is no respite from critics.

Della Cruscanism came increasingly to be associated in the public’s mind with the fairy landscape of “The Dream.” However, it is sometimes forgotten that a significant portion of the poetry contained in the Florence Miscellany was overtly political, motivated by a desire to express sympathy for the work of the former Academia Della Crusca in their resistance against Austrian oppression under Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany. M. Ray Adams, for example, suggests that Robert Merry “became deeply involved in plots for the independence of Florence, joining the literary and political malcontents who secretly hated Leopold,” ⁵ while Brian Moloney argues that The Florence Miscellany is an interesting work in part because “the English poets took a particular interest in local politics.” ⁶ While a detailed discussion of the political elements of the Florence Miscellany is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that Piozzi may well have been “unaware of the group’s intention of dealing with political themes. She contributed little to the Miscellany, ten pieces in all, and claimed that what she did write was done reluctantly on the insistence of the others.” ⁷ What is clear is that by the late 1780s, any political aspects of Della Cruscan verse had been overshadowed significantly by the fact that it had become a literary “fad” of sorts – even luminaries such as Mary Robinson and Hannah Cowley had taken to writing pseudonymous epistles in the pages of The World.

⁵M_. R_ay Adams, “Robert Merry, Political Romanticist,” Studies in Romanticism 2 (Aug. 1962): p. 25. With regard to the origins of the term “Della Cruscan,” William McCarthy writes, “in the Miscellany they [the male poets] were displaying sympathy with the Accademica della Crusca, the society for the cultivation of Italian letters that had just (1783) been suppressed by the Austrian grand duke of Tuscany.” Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 94. ⁶Brian Moloney, “The Della Cruscan Poets, the Florence Miscellany and the Leopoldine Reforms,” Modern Language Review 60 (1965): p. 48. ⁷Ibid., p. 52.

Della Cruscan poetry, in all of its guises, eschewed those aspects of literary accomplishment typically demanded of other more established forms of poetic production. There can be little doubt that to many eighteenth-century critics of the movement, the Della Cruscan phenomenon exemplified a broader threat posed to traditional forms of literary authority by those writers whom we have since come to regard as “Romantic.” ⁸ The distinctive generic style of Della Cruscan poetry (a style echoed in the work of poets such as Coleridge, Keats and, as we will see in Chapter 5, Letitia Landon) privileged the evocation of imaginative and attractive settings and the expression of feeling and sentiment over an education in the ancient languages or an extensive understanding of traditional poetic form and convention. Critics like Jerome McGann, Jacqueline Labbe and Judith Pascoe have since noted that this rendered the production of such verse especially appealing to women, who were largely excluded from an eighteenth-century high-literary education. ⁹ This appeal is reflected in Piozzi’s much-quoted observation that:

⁸For an extended discussion of this element of Della Cruscanism see Michael Gamer, “‘Bell’s Poetics’: The Baviad, The Della Cruscans, and the Book of The World” in Stephen E. Jones (ed.), The Satiric Eye: Forms of Satire in the Romantic Period (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2003). ⁹Judith Pascoe, for example, makes a similar claim in Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 77.

This fashion makes well for us Women however, as Learning no longer forms any part of the Entertainment expected from Poetry – Ladies have therefore as good a Chance as People regularly bred to Science in Times when fire-eyed Fancy is said to be the only requisite of a Popular Poet. ¹⁰

¹⁰Hester Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana, vol. 2, p. 730.

And popular it was. By the time that arch Tory William Gifford saw fit to satirize the movement in his ponderous Baviad (1791), less than a decade after the Piozzis’ memorable holiday in Florence, the writing of Della Cruscan verse had become so fashionable that he could say (only slightly hyp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Sensibility as Performance: The Della Cruscans
• 2 Performing Sincere Sensibility:Charlotte Smith
• 3 The Evolution of Sensibility:Susan Evance
• 4 Fame and the Limits of Sensibility:Letitia Landon
• 5 Rejecting the Script of Sensibility:Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Conclusion: Reading Female Poetic Tradition after Barrett Browning
• Bibliography
• Index