The recent work of social historians provides an invaluable resource for the historicist recovery of the imbrication of Romantic literary culture and popular magic. During the past decade, interventions in the disciplines of social and cultural history have offered a portrait of the various incarnations of tradesmen (conjurors, cunning men, astrologers to name but a few) who continued to pursue their vocations throughout the Romantic period – figures who seem to have gone almost wholly unnoticed by critics of the era’s imaginative literature. With the 1790s as a chronological frame, this present study seeks a new conceptual purchase and historicist angle on the canonical and non-canonical literary productions of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Robert Southey and others in their orbit through the lens of the surviving material occult cultures of the period. Until recently these sub-cultures have been largely ignored even in accounts of British occult practice. My concern is with the valence of occult practice, in both rural and metropolitan spheres, as social event, material economy, cultural performance and political act. Further, I aim to show how imaginative literature negotiated these modalities of popular magic. The study seeks to nuance our understanding of the complex ways in which Romanticism was shaped by the practices of popular magic; a fresh historicisation of the literary productions of the 1790s with reference to the work of social historians such as Owen Davies and Richard Suggett, who have uncovered the thriving material manifestations of the period’s occult cultures. I seek to reveal the place of occult practice and culture – in the form of curses, spells, future-telling, charms and protective talismans – in everyday life, together with the complex ways in which such practice figures, and is refigured, in literary and political discourse at a time of revolutionary upheaval.
The decision as to which authors and texts to include in this study is governed largely by their proximity to magical practice, the extent of their appropriation of local folklore, customs and characters, their location in a culture of literary conversation and allusion and, of course, the chosen time-frame. What I hope emerges is a new perspective on literature’s material contexts in the 1790s – from the rhetorical, linguistic and visual jugglery of the revolution controversy and Thelwall’s occult turn during a period of autobiographical self-reinvention, to Wordsworth’s deployment of popular magic as a socially and politically emancipatory agent, Coleridge’s anxious engagement with superstition as a despotic system of ‘mental enslavement’, and Southey’s wrestling with an (increasingly alluring) conservatism that he associated with what he saw as Wordsworth’s reliance on ultimately incarcerating systems of superstition. As already noted, these varied but crucially interlinked literary inscriptions of material occult practice were formulated by writers under intense social and political pressure.
This study seeks to avoid monologic readings, teasing out instead the ambiguities and paradoxes of different modalities of the occult. Indeed, any critical engagement with occult culture is implicitly paradoxical and fraught with contradictions: Romantic popular magic is both communal and solitary; a networked economy and a sequence of arcane symbols and signs; a mode of power and a mark of disempowerment; a model for political identities both radical and reactionary; and a material phenomenon that in many ways disclaims its materiality. The challenge will be not only to recognise but also to embrace and account for these ambiguities.
Engaging the Romantic Occult
The 1970s represents the most sustained period of critical activity in this field, with Anya Taylor its most visible commentator. William Covino’s 1994 Magic, Rhetoric and Literacy1 cites Taylor’s 1979 monograph Magic and English Romanticism as the only book-length study of Romantic-period literary negotiations with the occult to date.2 Since then, no full-length works of note have been attempted. Taylor’s study attended to what she terms the ‘magical operations’ of the Romantic imagination (confined, problematically, to the ‘big five’).3 However – and this is a crucial point – her negotiation of magic is limited to its operation largely as metaphor, as she considers the supernatural in terms of language, poesis and poetic theory. The problem with critical scholarship of the 1970s is the tendency to consider the occult as largely a literary, textual experience for Romantic poets. Taylor suggests, for instance, that Coleridge’s interest in magic stemmed from his reading of other texts – in particular his interest in Shakespeare. Romantic Studies in the 1970s inherited – and, crucially, largely perpetuated – a critical tradition that limited the occult to metaphor, myth and the sensationalist modalities of the supernatural, thus relegating the operations of the Romantic occult to a narrow field of select writers. The survival of the occult as a living social phenomenon during the Romantic period remains insufficiently recognised. Seeking to contextualise the occult in the literature of the Romantic period, critical negotiations have often, problematically, resorted to ancient myth, pre-Enlightenment occult texts, and literary productions from other periods.
At the heart of 1970s critical engagements with the occult is a fundamental (and frustrating) instability. For the purposes of this study, spiritual and philosophical notions of the occult need to be teased apart from the material, social applications practised by cunning folk so that the myriad contemporary operations of a material occult can be identified against a diffuse and sensationalised Gothic. History is missing from 1970s critical encounters with the Romantic occult. Deconstructions of Romantic texts have since been accomplished by feminist theory, New Historicism and ‘four nations’ or devolutionary Romanticism, and yet, to date, the challenge of historicising popular magic has not been robustly taken up. While the occult appears to present an exciting and, in many ways, ideal subject for Romantic New Historicism to tackle (the initial apparent paradox of a ‘material occult’ notwithstanding), it is a field (an economy, a practice, a discourse) that has been unaccountably neglected.
Negotiations of the occult in the years since the rise of New Historicism as a critical orthodoxy have tended to practice demystificatory moves. ‘Secularised’ readings of Romanticism have sought to ‘explain away’ the magical. For example, Lucy Newlyn has suggested that the careful layering of unreliable narration deployed in ‘The Thorn’ is designed to educate readers out of their (literary) fascination with outmoded superstition in order to become more reflective and responsible both as reading subjects and as social subjects. While Newlyn valuably alerts us to the significant role of sensationalist gossip as a barrier to social reform, her reading does not take full account, I suggest, of the social and cultural contexts from which works such as Lyrical Ballads emerged in an era that still relied on, and maintained belief in, the local cunning man’s powers. A complete evacuation of the occult in Lyrical Ballads problematically strips subjugated individuals (Martha Ray, Goody Blake) of all power. As I will show, a critical reading alive to the possibilities that contemporary popular magic offered the lower classes reveals Wordsworth’s hopes for social reform through the empowerment of disenfranchised individuals.
It is now axiomatic that New Historicism attends to text-as-history and to history-as-text. By its very nature, magic is also accessible only through textual and material evidence – through records such as diaries, letters, sales figures of almanacs, legal documents, written charms and, of course, works of imaginative literature. Since the 1980s, New Historicism has succeeded in recalibrating our sense of the complexities and ironies of a Romantic utterance. Romantic poetry is no longer an escape into nature, or into the self. The kind of deconstructionist historicism applied to Romantic texts has revealed the ways in which the Romantic lyric (in particular) performed itself as an elaborate, always already politicised, allegory of absence. The turn to nature (or the self, or the transcendent) becomes a mark of the socio-political pressures conditioning the contours of the text. Recent years have seen historicist methodologies of different kinds reveal the contiguities between the imaginative literature of the period and scientific discovery. Studies such as Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder (2009)4 and Sharon Ruston’s Shelley and Vitality (2005)5 have prompted a critical reassessment of the Romantics as technophobes – too absorbed with the (egotistical) sublime and a euphemised view of the natural order to countenance the nuances and consequences of scientific and technological development. New Historicism has begun to achieve for Romantic science what it achieved for politics during the 1980s, dramatically changing the landscape of Romantic Studies.
However, while scholars have considered themselves to be on safe ground when co-opting the disciplines of politics or science, the occult presents a qualitatively different area of enquiry, one whose interface with ‘science’, historically conceived, deserves scrutiny. It is difficult to draw a definitive line between what can be identified as ‘science’ and what as ‘magic’; often the two are inescapably linked, and in many cases, a scientific discovery remains ‘occult’ or ‘other’ until it can be thoroughly explained and naturalised. This is why it is important to evaluate the cultural location of the occult within this entangled relationship. In her introduction to The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (1989), in which the occult is presented as a living and integral part of Victorian spiritual and intellectual life and society, Alex Owen highlights the difficulties confronting the literary scholar who also hopes to play...