What the Victorians Made of Romanticism

Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History

Tom Mole

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691202921, 9780691175362
• eBook ISBN: 9781400887897
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Literature

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media.

Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public's understanding of Romantic writers.

Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

PART I

The Web of Reception

1

Romantic Writers in the Victorian Media Ecology

FOR A WHILE, it seemed that the Romantics would not be remembered at all. Many early-Victorian commentators worried that the writing of the recent past no longer compelled readers’ interest, and that it would soon be forgotten. The predictions began polemically. Blackwood’s Magazine claimed in 1820 that John Keats had ruined his talent by imitating Leigh Hunt, that “he must be content to share his fate, and be like him forgotten,” and Coleridge wrote in 1825 that he “dare[d] predict, that in less than a century” Byron’s and Scott’s poems would “lie on the same Shelf of Oblivion.”¹ John Todd felt sure in 1835 that Byron would “quickly pass from notice.”² Predictions soon became warnings. The Quarterly Review asserted that Scott was “in danger of passing—we cannot conceive why—out of the knowledge of the rising generation,” and Thomas Carlyle cautioned in 1829 that “Byron [ . . . ] with all his wild siren charming, already begins to be disregarded and forgotten.”³ And the warnings became simple statements of fact. Orestes Brownson asserted in 1841 that Shelley was “seldom spoken of and much more seldom read.” The Graphic cattily remarked in 1873 that Hemans was “almost as much neglected now, as she was overrated formerly,” while another journalist in 1886 thought that she was “a writer too little read by our young people of the present day.” Stopford Brooke declared simply in 1893 that Byron was “not much read now.”⁴

If anyone read the Romantics, some claimed, it was only those people who scarcely counted, like adolescents or the uneducated. Selections of Wordsworth’s poetry “chiefly for the use of schools and young persons” appeared from as early as 1831, while in 1848 Readings for the Young, from the Works of Sir Walter Scott inaugurated a tradition of excerpting or retelling Scott’s works for children.⁵ Walter Bagehot wrote that “a stray schoolboy may still be detected in a wild admiration for The Giaour or The Corsair [ . . . ], but the real posterity—the quiet students of past literature—never read them or think of them.”⁶ T. S. Eliot followed this line when he recalled taking “the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, [and] Keats,” dismissed enthusiasm for Shelley as “an affair of adolescence,” and described some of Byron’s Don Juan as “not too good for the school magazine.”⁷

This chapter explains why so many Victorians thought that Romantic writing was starting to seem irrelevant and in danger of being forgotten. The underlying causes, I argue, lay in shifting concepts of history, new anxieties about cultural memory, and a rapidly changing media ecology. When these elements came together, sometime between roughly 1750 and 1850, they created the cultural conditions of modernity, which defined itself as distinctly and self-consciously different from what had gone before. When self-consciously modern people looked back from the nineteenth century to the poets and novelists of their parents’ generation, those writers seemed unfitted for addressing modern concerns. The Romantics began to look perilously outdated and uninteresting to new readers. They were liable to gather dust on the “Shelf of Oblivion” if no one took pains to make their works relevant once again. But if the modern nexus of history, memory, and media that I trace here made the Romantics seem old-fashioned, it also created the conditions in which they could be fashioned anew. Changing configurations of history, memory, and media produced the problem and the materials for solving it. Even as they made literature from the recent past seem obsolescent, they created new possibilities for renovating, memorializing, and remediating it. The web of reception would be woven on the conceptual frames that modern understandings of history, memory, and media constructed.

Concerns about who would be remembered and by whom especially clustered around those writers who had been celebrities in their lifetimes. As I have argued elsewhere, a distinctly modern culture of celebrity took shape at the end of the eighteenth century.⁸ It emerged in response to the industrialization of print culture and the growth of an audience that was large, anonymous, socially diverse and geographically distributed, and it was bound up with shifting conceptions of subjectivity. In these conditions, celebrity emerged as a cultural apparatus with both material and discursive aspects. Celebrity was often understood, then as now, to be an inferior kind of recognition, opposed to true, worthwhile, and lasting fame. Celebrity was thought of as something ascribed rather than earned, here today and gone tomorrow, a meteor that burned itself out too soon. True fame, in contrast, was slow to arrive and usually posthumous, but it lasted forever because it was deserved. Celebrity and true fame each operated in its own timeframe, and they seldom overlapped. Once celebrity and true fame had come to be understood as mutually exclusive, it became easy to assume that those like Byron and Scott who had been celebrities in their lifetimes would soon be forgotten after their deaths. For some individuals, that proved to be the case. Mary Robinson’s celebrity was already deserting her by the end of her life (only two people came to her funeral), and after her memoirs and an edition of her works were published posthumously she disappeared from view almost entirely for the rest of the century.⁹ When celebrated authors were not in fact forgotten, we can usually discern a variety of efforts that helped to move them across the bar from lifetime celebrity to posthumous fame. This book, then, is partly a sequel to my earlier work; in it, I pursue the story of celebrity beyond the grave to discover what happens to celebrity authors after their deaths. But celebrity is not the whole story here: the web of reception weaves in some other threads as well.

Predictions that Romantic authors would be forgotten were part of a wider set of complaints about the ignorance and presentism of the “rising generation.” As early as 1827, William Hazlitt argued that as the reading public grew in size, it began to ignore the literature of the past. “When a whole generation read,” he claimed, “they will read none but contemporary productions. The taste for literature becomes superficial, as it becomes universal and is spread over a larger space.” “Many people would as soon think of putting on old armour, as of taking up a book not published within the last month, or year at the utmost,” Hazlitt asserted.¹⁰ Facing the challenge of raising funds for a statue of Byron (a project I describe in chapter 12), Benjamin Disraeli complained in an 1876 letter that “unfortunately, we have to appeal to a generation, which never read Byron, or, perhaps, anything else.”¹¹ The Quarterly Review grumbled in 1868 that “the instances are rare, we suspect, in which, even among educated persons, young men or young women under five-and-twenty know anything at all either of what Scott wrote or of what he did.”¹² Thomas Carlyle began “Signs of the Times” by affirming that his age preferred to “deal much in vaticination” and look to the future at the expense of the past.¹³ The writing of the recent past seemed in danger of dropping out of the stock of common knowledge, as the concerns of the present became ever more urgent. Even people who had read the Romantics seemed unlikely to return to their works. In 1860, Francis Turner Palgrave claimed that what distinguished contemporary readers from those of a century before was that now, “everything is to be read, and everything only once” (a tendency Palgrave tried to correct when he published The Golden Treasury the following year).¹⁴ These commentators anticipated Walter Benjamin’s fear that “every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”¹⁵ They shared a sense that Romantic writers were beginning to slip into history and anticipated the desuetude of their works. If no one found new ways to reconnect them to the present, they would soon be forgotten altogether.

These anxieties reflect an underlying concept of history that was still fairly new. It emerged, as several historians argue, around 1800. Before then, the passing of time could be understood in a variety of ways, each of which has its own complex historical backstory. Time might be thought of and experienced in terms of seasonal cycles, or in terms of durable continuities that reasserted themselves despite occasional disruptions, or in mythical terms as having a beginning, middle, and end, or in terms of slow but steady teleological progress.¹⁶ Beginning with Thucydides in the fifth century BCE, as Bernard Williams has argued, a conception of historical time emerged that made it possible to ask questions about the truth or falsity of historical accounts.¹⁷ With the rise of Christianity in the first five centuries CE, as François Hartog and others have described, a new conception of salvation history gestates, coming to fruition in Augustine.¹⁸ This understanding orients historical time, first, in relation to the interval between the saving action of Christ’s passion and its fulfillment in his Second Coming, when history itself will be gathered into God’s Kingdom, and, second, in relation to the Divine “fullness of time” that exists beyond human temporality. As modernity begins to take shape, as Charles Taylor has explained, a new kind of “secular time” begins to appear that can operate “horizontally” in purely human terms without reference to any concept of “higher time.”¹⁹ This way of understanding and experiencing historicity makes it possible to conceive of progressively perfecting society and promoting human flourishing over time, first in terms of Providential Deism and later in terms of exclusive humanism. In secular time, as in Thucydides’s historical time, the present is essentially continuous with the past. Time flows smoothly from past to present, making the present just the latest moment in what Reinhart Koselleck calls “a purely additive chronology.”²⁰

By contrast, the French Revolution fostered a radically new historical understanding, in which history itself ruptured and restarted with the revolutionary “Year One.” The Revolution should be understood not only as an event in history, but as the starting gun for what Hartog calls a modern “regime of historicity,” which he dates schematically from 1789 to 1989. Peter Fritzsche argues that the Revolution offered a model for conceiving other kinds of historical change as drastic and discontinuous, which was shared by both Revolutionary sympathizers and conservatives. The “Industrial Revolution,” for example, was understood as a technological revolution by analogy with the political revolution that preceded it.²¹ In these conditions, what Koselleck calls the “concept of history” emerged.²² It became possible, even necessary, to think and speak of modernity as radically distinct from the past. The German word Neuzeit (modernity) was coined in the nineteenth century, and the English word “modernity” took on a new usage. (As we shall see in chapter 3, Henry James was still putting the word in inverted commas in 1884.)²³ Modernity defines itself by its self-aware historicity and its sense of being fundamentally different to what has gone before.

The new sense of a sharp disjunction between present and past produced a number of effects. It was tied to a new understanding of temporality. An experience of time grounded in nature was gradually replaced by one measured by the clock. A temporality that was natural, cyclical, locally variable, and imprecise gave way to one that was mechanical, linear, uniform, and measurable.²⁴ It encouraged contemporaries to think of themselves as contemporaries, “differently situated subjects who nonetheless shared the same time and place,” and introduced a new sense of historicity into individual lives, making people feel that their experiences were different local manifestations of large historical forces that were producing a general, rapid, and unpredictable transformation.²⁵ As a result, people increasingly thought of themselves as inhabiting a distinct historical period, unlike any that had gone before. They looked for the key characteristics of this period, its spirit, producing what James Chandler calls “the age of the spirit of the age.”²⁶ And when moderns looked back to the past, they increasingly saw it, too, in terms of distinctive, self-contained epochs, which replaced each other with accelerating rapidity. Historians divided history into periods that got shorter the closer they were to the present.²⁷

The period covered by this book, then, was arguably the first in which most people expected their lives to be shaped by forces and circumstances that had been unknown a generation or two before. As a result, Victorians felt alienated from even the immediate past, perhaps more acutely than ever before. While the future seemed to be open and uncertain, both promising and worrying, the past started to seem strange, disconnected from the present and removed from its new concerns. In 1886, one journalist could look back and claim that the world of “just sixty-two years ago was almost as unlike the world of to-day as the reign of George I.”²⁸ But even as they mourned their historical alienation from the past, Victorians were also impelled to reconstruct and reinterpret it from the historical standpoint of the present. (The concept of a “historical standpoint” is itself a modern one.) In Fritzsche’s phrase, “new time did not always flow steadily into a progressive sea, but pooled and puddled around the wreckage of the past.”²⁹ Perhaps this is why so much intellectual history has been written about the Victorians’ engagement with earlier periods.³⁰ When the present felt unprecedented and the future unforeseeable, the past demanded to be recovered and remade for present purposes. In thinking about the Victorian reception of Romanticism, then, I’m concerned not just with how the Victorians remodeled Romanticism to suit their own concerns but also with the historical conditions that made this renovation project necessary.

The modern sense that time was accelerating, opening a crevasse between present and past, produced a crisis of memory. When people faced “[a]n increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that [was] gone for good,” they made new efforts to remember the past precisely because it was in danger of being lost.³¹ The “natur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction :Don Juan in the Pub
• PART I. THE WEB OF RECEPTION
• PART II. ILLUSTRATIONS
• PART III. SERMONS
• PART IV. STATUES
• PART V. ANTHOLOGIES
• Coda: Ozymandias at the Olympics; or, She Walks in Brixton
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index