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Te Meeting o the Waters

[Plenary I]

Tomas Moore’s ‘Te Meeting o the Waters’ was first published in 1808 in the first volumeo his Irish Melodies. Te song, in various arrangements, became one o the most popularperormed in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, sung at home, in schools, in or-chestral concerts and ‘ballad concerts’, in Britain as well as in Ireland, in Australia andelsewhere in the Empire. It came to be included in the standard list o a dozen or sixteen‘national songs’ representative o the our ‘home nations’. Tis paper however is less aboutthe song itsel than about the history o the phrase ‘the meeting o the waters’. It is first re-corded in 1804 as the title o a picture o the confluence o the two rivers in County Wick-low celebrated in the song; but by 1914 or so the song’s popularity made the phrase one othe commonest place names in the empire. Nowadays, however, though it has survived asthe name o an online dating site, and as the title o numerous books about the healing o

racial and religious divisions, whose authors show no sign o knowing o the connectionwith Moore, as a place name the phrase has all but disappeared, and with it the memorythat this or that place was ever known as ‘the meeting o the waters’.

Biography: John Barrell has taught at the Universities o Essex, Cambridge, Sussex and York, and is currently Proessor o English at Queen Mary University o London and is anhonorary Fellow o King’s College Cambridge. His work is multi-disciplinary, combiningliterary criticism, the history o art, and cultural and political history, almost always withreerence to Britain in the long eighteenth century. He has written at length o such sub-jects as landscape art and the sense o place, political theory and theories o art, and poli-tics, propaganda and the law in the age o the French revolution. He is an irregular contrib-utor to the London Review o Books. His most recent book is on the Welsh artist and writer

Edward Pugh o Ruthin, published by the University o Wales Press in 2013. [email protected]

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Te Romantic Impression

[Plenary II: Marilyn Butler Memorial Lecture]

We’re accustomed to thinking o Romanticism, especially in the signal case o Wordsworth,as involving what M. H. Abrams once described as an ‘expressive’ critical orientation. Buthow does this square with what Wordsworth himsel once described as the ‘impressive

discipline’ that shaped his poetry and his mind? How do we best understand Romanti-cism’s intervention in the history o the impression—a term oen used interchangeablywith ‘imprint’ or ‘stamp’—as that history unolds in the intellectual tradition that leadsrom Locke to Hume to Wordsworth and beyond? What kind o ‘imprint’ is the Romanticimpression? Tese are the questions that this talk will address.

Biography: James Chandler is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Pro-essor in the Department o English, Director o the Franke Institute or the Humanities,Founder and Director o the Center or Disciplinary Innovation, and Chair o the Depart-ment o Cinema and Media Studies at the University o Chicago. His research interests in-clude British and Irish literature since the early Enlightenment, American cinema, the pol-



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itics o interpretation and the relationship o literary criticism to film criticism. England in1819, his study o literary historicism and its limits, won the Laing Prize at the University oChicago Press in 2000. Recent publications include Te Cambridge History o English Ro-mantic Literature (2009) and An Archaeology o Sympathy: Te Sentimental Mode in Litera-

ture and Cinema (University o Chicago Press, 2013), which traces the ormal oundationso modern narrative cinema to the early sentimentalist moment o literature and moralphilosophy. He is currently at work on a book about practical criticism in literature andcinema. He is a Fellow o the American Academy.

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Sea Crossings, Scale and the Imprint o Colonial Inrastructure rom Swif to Edge- worth

[Plenary III]

Irish literary culture o the Romantic period was shaped by the colonial relationship withBritain, in particular the material presence o the powerul London publishing industry.Te early nineteenth century saw rapid improvements to the travel and communicationinrastructure that joined Ireland to Britain, creating ever closer links between the two is-lands. Tis lecture suggests that Ireland’s union with Britain can be analysed in terms o themultidirectional routes by which it was materially constituted, rather than simply in termso either native resistance or metropolitan perceptions o otherness. o do this requiresattention to ways in which Irish journeys through Wales and northwest England are in-scribed in cultural texts. Tis paper reads the imprint o the travel inrastructure in Irishculture, via an introductory discussion o Jonathan Swi’s Holyhead Journal and with aparticular ocus on the writings o Maria Edgeworth. In different ways, both Swi and

Edgeworth prise open a densely bound knot o contingent circumstances, in order to finda way o measuring their divided careers and scaling their own place in space and time.

Biography: Claire Connolly is Proessor o Modern English at University College Cork. Sheis the author o A Cultural History o the Irish Novel, 1790–1829, published in 2012 as part othe Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series and winner o the Donald J Murphy Prize orDistinguished First Book, presented by the American Conerence or Irish Studies. She iseditor o Teorising Ireland (Palgrave) and co-editor (with Joe Cleary) o the CambridgeCompanion to Modern Irish Culture (2005). She has produced scholarly editions o a num-ber o the key prose texts o Irish Romanticism, notably Pickering & Chatto’s ales and

Novels o Maria Edgeworth and (with Stephen Copley) a new critical edition o SydneyOwenson’s Wild Irish Girl (also or Pickering & Chatto). Claire has published a great many

essays and book chapters on Irish Romanticism, including a chapter in the 2-vol. Cam-bridge History o Irish Literature; recent chapters on the national tale in the Oxord Historyo the Irish Book, Vol. 4 and the Oxord History o the Novel in English, Vol. 2; and ‘A BookishHistory o Irish Romanticism’ in Porscha Fermanis and John O’Regan (eds), Rethinking

British Romantic History, 1770–1845 (2014)[email protected]



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Another Golden Age or the Novel?

[Plenary V: Stephen Copley Memorial Lecture]

Te lecture begins with a tribute to Stephen Copley whose input helped generate the Car-diff–Corvey project, with its aim o re-orientating fiction in the Romantic period. Previous-ly, the novel tended to be treated as a kind o add-on to the great Romantic poets, a situa-tion only erratically ameliorated by new fields o study such as the gothic and women’swriting in the 1980s. Te ten-year project which culminated in the printed bibliographyTe English Novel 1770–1829 (2000) provided a resh charting o fiction over sixty years,with some startling results, concerning output o new titles, gender mix o authors andpopularity o different subgenres. Adding flesh to this skeleton, the online Database o Brit-ish Fiction 1800–1829 (2004) attempted to provide materials or a uller social history, tak-en as ar as possible rom the vantage point o active participants, rather than as seen romhigh by more ‘official’ commentators. Te main part o the lecture offers a number o

‘broad-brush’ impressions gained rom a recent re-visitation o these materials, severalcountering existing presuppositions, such as the novel at that time representing a ‘low’genre with a large underbelly o ‘trash’ items. On the contrary, the orm is seen at one o itsmost ormative moments, occasionally buffeted, but increasingly playing a central part innational culture. Te final stages consider reasons why this sense o a ‘golden age’, as sharedby contemporary commentators, so radically disappeared rom view. One cause is ound inthe path taken by the fiction industry in the immediate aermath, as charted in the lastCardiff–Corvey project, surveying the years 1830–36. Te way in which fiction o the pre-ceding era was recycled is also seem a major actor, as illustrated by the varying aerliveso Scott, Austen and Hogg. Concluding remarks will address difficulties in nomenclature indealing with the phenomenon o fiction in the Romantic period.

Biography: Proessor Peter Garside was educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities,and taught English Literature at Cardiff University rom 1967 to 2004, where he was a Pro-essor o English Literature. From 1997 to 2004, he was Director o the Centre or Editorialand Intertextual Research (CEIR) at Cardiff University. He subsequently became Proessoro Bibliography and extual Studies at the University o Edinburgh, where he is now anHonorary Proessorial Fellow. He became an Executive Editor or the Edinburgh Edition othe Waverley Novels (EEWN) in 1986, and has been a General Editor since 1994. He servedas Advisory Editor to the Stirling/South Carolina Edition o the Collected Works o James

Hogg rom 1991, and in 1998 became Associate General Editor. He has edited three volumesapiece or these two scholarly collected editions. He was also a General Editor o theground-breaking bibliographical survey Te English Novel 1770–1829, 2 vols (Oxord Uni-

versity Press, 2000), and Director o the AHRC-unded online database, British Fiction,1800–1829 (2004). His most recent publication is English and British Fiction, 1750–1820,co-edited with Karen O’Brien, representing vol. 2 in the Oxord History o the Novel in En- glish.

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Jane Austen Matters

[Plenary IV]

How did Jane Austen become an icon? From illustrations to public and private stages, rompolitical perormance and speeches to scholars and schools, rom memorials and memen-tos to milestone celebrations, Austen’s reception history is a rich one, much o it still un-told. Since the late nineteenth century, she has attracted some o the most zealous literaryans and has galvanized her air share o detractors, but their reasons or loving or hatingher—their senses o who she was and is and how her fiction matters—have changed consid-erably over time. In this talk, Looser will look at the ways in which Jane Austen’s image andreputation ormed and shied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in orderto grasp the significance o her celebrity today.

Biography: Devoney Looser is Proessor o English at Arizona State University. She was

born in St Paul, MN, and received her BA in English rom Augsburg College in Minneapo-lis in 1989 and her PhD in English rom the State University o New York at Stony Brook in1993. She has held teaching positions at Indiana State University, the University o Wiscon-sin-Whitewater, Louisiana State University and the University o Missouri, beore joining

ASU in 2013. She is the author o Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850(2008) and British Women Writers and the Writing o History, 1670–1820 (2000, rptd 2005).She is currently working on two book projects: Sister Novelists: Jane and Anna Maria Por-ter and Te Making o Jane Austen. Outside o the classroom, Devoney plays roller derby asStone Cold Jane Austen. She recently wrote about her experiences in the first-evercollegiate roller derby bout in Slate.

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Wordsworth’s Notebooks, a Case Study: DC MS. 13

[Part o the themed panel ‘ “Mimicking the texture o thought”: What Can We Learn om

Manuscripts o an Author at the Wordsworth rust?’]

Tis paper will set out to explain why a reconstructed notebook in the Wordsworth archivehas recently been reconstructed or the second time, with its pages in a new order. It willocus on the material, visual, bibliographical, and textual clues that ed into this decision,and the implications that it has or our understanding o Wordsworth’s work between 1796and 1802. Now catalogued as DC MS. 13, the manuscript in question is a handmade note-book constructed out o large olded sheets o paper, which were later scattered; its con-tents, like those o many o Wordsworth’s notebooks, are intricately interlinked. Phrasesand preoccupations recur across page aer page o work on what we now think o as dis-crete poems, such as ‘Te Old Cumberland Beggar’ and ‘Te Ruined Cottage’, and run onrom this 1790s material into work that Wordsworth added to the notebook in 1802, onmodernizations o Chaucer. But this is only something that you can see when you workwith the notebook as a whole document, and keep matters like conjugate leaves, water-marks, and the orientation and spacing o writing in view. Such work clarifies bibliograph-ical matters: it is what revealed the original order and orientation o the notebook’s leaves,and led to its second reconstruction. But it also illuminates matters o interpretation. In itsnewly restored order, DC MS. 13 can be seen, not only as a notebook remarkable or thevariety o its writing practices and the oddity o its spacing, arrangement, order, and orien-tation, but also as a notebook that Wordsworth used to reflect upon such matters: as aninvestigation into the nature and implications o writing itsel. Situating this notebook inthe wider context o Wordsworth’s manuscript practices at the turn o the century, thepaper will sketch out what we gain rom thinking about and working with Wordsworth’s

notebooks as whole material [email protected]

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Wordsworth’s Notebooks, Another Case Study: DC MS. 16

[Part o the themed panel ‘Wordsworth’]

Most o Wordsworth’s blank verse was never published in his lietime. Indeed, most o Wordsworth’s blank verse was le in multiple versions in never finalized manuscriptswhose numerous layers o revision are extremely difficult to date and differentiate romeach other. Since Wordsworth’s death, several editors have produced ‘reading texts’ o thisunpublished material by selecting rom and simpliying the messy, complex mass o workthat he le. But the nature o the work itsel remains hard to see, even in the recently com-pleted scholarly editions o Wordsworth’s poetry published by Cornell University Press.For Wordsworth mostly worked in notebooks, not one or each project, but one at a time,or whatever he was working on at that time, until it was orgotten or ull. In these note-books, much overlaps that editions separate: there are ew clear boundaries between onepoem and another, between neat copies and messy dras, between one person’s writingand another’s, or between writing entered when the notebook was in active use and writ-ing entered at a later date. Tis is nowhere more evident than in the notebooks used be-tween 1797 and 1802 or work on the poem known during these years as ‘Te Ruined Cot-



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tage’, which at no point during this period was le or produced in a clear or finished state.It was le, instead, in notebooks, none o which offer a clean or sel-contained version othe verse, and all o which include writing excluded rom the available ‘reading texts’, in-cluding overlapping work on other projects, notes, quotations rom other writers, and

work by other writers, in close and conusing proximity. What can we learn i we read thisunpublished blank verse in these notebooks where Wordsworth le it, with the other ma-terial that he le it among? In this paper, I will offer some tentative answers to this question,by ocusing on a large notebook used by the Wordsworth amily around the turn o thecentury, now catalogued as DC MS. 16. Like most o Wordsworth’s notebooks, DC MS. 16 testifies to mixed compositionalpractices: the ront and back were used or commonplacing, while the middle was used orcomplex, overlapping revision work by William, Dorothy, and Mary Wordsworth on Lyri-cal Ballads, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, Te Prelude, ‘Te Ruined Cottage’ and longstretches o unpublished blank verse work, some o which was later incorporated in Te

Excursion. Changes made to both kinds o material during the course o writing indicatethat much o the verse in this notebook was entered as a transcription o an inordinatelyhesitant and sel-correcting dictation: what looks like a air copy o ‘Te Ruined Cottage’,or example, which has been used to create all ‘reading texts’ o the poem known as ‘MS. D’,is actually ull o corrections and changes that Dorothy Wordsworth evidently made as shewrote, in ways which indicate that discussion, interruption, and mishearing were integralparts o dictation in the Wordsworth household. Tis is interesting, because much o thework in the notebook as a whole is drawn to explicit discussion o such matters: conversa-tion, miscommunication, and the effects o oral delivery upon meaning are the explicitsubject o most o the commonplaced quotations at the ront and back o the manuscript,and phases and preoccupations rom these quotations resurace throughout the notebook’sverse. Tis is not only a notebook in which Wordsworth relied upon discussion as well asdictation as a compositional practice, then: it is also a notebook in which he reflected upon

the effects and difficulties o discussion and dictation in human interaction. My paper willexplore the significance o such sel-consciousness or our understanding o ‘Te RuinedCottage’ in particular, and Wordsworth’s compositional practices more generally, suggest-ing that working with Wordsworth’s notebooks allows us to see his work on ‘Te RuinedCottage’ as part o an multi-aceted investigation into the nature o blank verse.

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Contested Imprints: Te Letters o the ‘Black Dwar ’ to the ‘Yellow Bonze in Japan’

ogether with William Hone’s satires, the letters o the ‘Black Dwar’ to the ‘Yellow Bonze

in Japan’ constitute some o the most original examples o what Markus Wood perceptivelytermed ‘delight in unrespectability’. Tese letters were authored and published by Tomas

Jonathan Wooler in Te Black Dwar , the radical periodical he edited between 1817 and1824. In Te Black Dwar , satire was consciously used as a political weapon, but it was alsorefined literary discourse and a cultural act. Politically it underscored the recognized cour-age and spirit o defiance that characterized radical print culture in general. Literary andculturally, satire was the creative response to the cultural marginalization and the restric-tive press legislation against which the whole post-war radical print culture was played.Te current paper contextualizes Wooler’s literary and political intervention and analysesthe sophisticated wit o the fictional letters o the ‘Black Dwar’. It ocuses on two mo-



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ments o crisis in post-war Britain: the years o popular agitation that culminated in Peter-loo, and the so-called Queen Caroline affair. Part o a culture that valued the printed andspoken word, Wooler’s satirical journalism in the letters rom the ‘Black Dwar’ is viewedas a polemical mode—the art o baiting authority. Te letters o the ‘Black Dwar ’ thus go

beyond the confines o the agenda o parliamentary reorm to acquire a sense o timeless-ness. Hence, revisiting these voices rom the past can be a much-needed antidote to thecurrent oppressive atmosphere experienced all over the world, particularly in Europe.

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. H. Green and the Coleridgean Vocation

[Part o the themed panel ‘Coleridge’s Aerlives’]

In his amous essay on Coleridge in 1840, John Stuart Mill confidently declared that ‘exis-tence o Coleridge will show itsel by no slight or ambiguous traces in the coming historyo our country; or no one has contributed more to shape the opinions o those among its

younger men, who can be said to have opinions at all’. Coleridge’s influence was not an ac-cident: it was a product o his late, great project o education that occupied the last third ohis lie: it lay behind his role as the ‘Sage o Highgate’ and the amous Tursday eveningsessions that accompanied them, and every major late prose work (excluding the Biograph-ia Literaria) which were designed to teach young men how to cultivate ‘fixed principles’ in‘prudence, morality and religion’, and encourage them to think or themselves so that theycould, in turn, go on and teach others. Tis paper will examine the impact o Coleridge’sideas on one individual: Tomas Hill Green (1836–82). Green was an idealist philosopher,liberal political theorist, social reormer and the ounding figure o the British Idealistmovement. British Idealism is oen attributed exclusively to the influence o Hegel, and

whilst some scholars (most recently Douglas Hedley) have drawn aint parallels betweenColeridge and Green, a proper account o their intellectual relationship has not been pro-vided. Tis is probably because Green’s access to Coleridgean ideas was indirect and sec-ond-hand: he attended Tomas Arnold’s Rugby School (which Arnold reormed alongColeridgean lines) and his exposure to Coleridgean notions was bolstered by attendingBalliol College, Oxord and encountering Benjamin Jowett there. Tis paper will elaborateon his biographical interaction with Coleridgean ideas and examine the Coleridgeanthemes in Green’s work, concentrating on his thoughts on religion, politics and society. Itwill argue that Coleridge’s influence can be seen to characterize Green’s intellectual career.

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- ( , )Tomas aylor and S. . Coleridge: Literary and Philosophical Interaction

Te purpose o my research is to probe into the role played by Tomas aylor’s translationsand publications in ormulating the Romantic thought. It discusses aylor’s seminal contri-bution to the so-called Hellenistic revival during an era o sheer empirical dominance. Tefirst phase o the research ocuses on the reasons that alienated the key figures o Plato andPlotinus rom the eighteenth-century philosophical oreground and the extents to whichaylor was successul in combating the ‘delusive phantom’ o the Lockean philosophythrough revitalizing the mind as an active organ. Moreover, my research aims at presenting



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aylor as a significant link between the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists and thenineteenth century’s more coherent emanation o Platonism. More importantly, reviewersbelieve that aylor exhibited little interest in artistic authorship yet his contribution to theevolvement o the Romantic thought is noteworthy. Tus, the significance o my research

resides in its attempt to address the effects o aylor’s philosophy and printed translationson Coleridge’s literary and philosophical development. aylor’s industrious efforts to re-vive the Greek heritage enormously influenced the young Coleridge as his imagination wasemerging rom a ‘creative Tought’ towards a more complex ‘shaping spirit o imagination’.On the other hand, the research attempts to investigate into aylor’s staunch adherence toPlato’s absolute archetypes and how it corresponded to Coleridge’s inquisitive dispositionwhich sought metaphysical interpretations o nature beyond the perceptual ones; an effectthat ranked aylor and his printed thoughts as Coleridge’s ‘darling studies’.

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‘We will call it “I Carbonari” ’: Te Liberal , Italy and Byron’s Emancipatory Poetics

[Part o the themed panel ‘Imprinting Anglo-Italian Relations in Te Liberal’]

Writing to Tomas Moore about his project o a new periodical, Byron hypothesizes possi-ble titles: ‘We will call it the “enda Rossa” […]. Or we will call it “Gli” or “I Carbonari” i itso please you—or any other name ull o “pastime and prodigality” which you may preer’.In his autobiography Leigh Hunt reers to the journal as an ‘endeavour’ to ‘secure new aidon our prospects and new riends in the cause o liberty’. Drawing on critical studies by,among others, Leslie P. Pickering, W. H. Marshall and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, this paperwill offer a reading o the Byron’s conception o and contributions to Te Liberal ocusingon the meaning o the editorial enterprise in relation to the poet’s involvement in Italian

politics. In particular, Byron’s literary contributions—especially epigrams on Lord Cas-tlereagh, ‘Letter to the Editor o “My grandmother’s Review” ’, ‘Southeogony’ and a ewminor pieces attributed to him—will be examined in the light o his initial enthusiasm andlater disenchantment with the venture as evinced in the letters and journals he wrote romItaly between 1821 and 1823. Ultimately, the paper will suggest that Byron’s gradual disa-ection with the journal cannot be dissociated rom his parallel estrangement rom the Ital-ian political situation.

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Leigh Hunt as Editor and Contributor to Te Liberal [Part o the themed panel ‘Imprinting Anglo-Italian Relations in Te Liberal’]

Tis paper will investigate the crucial role Leigh Hunt played in the establishment and pub-lication o Te Liberal , the ‘brilliant but ill-ated’ quarterly that lasted just our issues con-ceived in Italy and published in London by the Hunts rom 1822. Leigh Hunt was the editorand the more prolific writer o Te Liberal , since he produced hal o the articles, but PercyShelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Brown and Tomas Jefferson Hogg also con-tributed in a significant way. Since the journal is considered o ‘undamental significance inunderstanding those participating in it’, I will be ocusing in particular on Hunt’s involve-ment and responsibility in this editorial project, which shied rom great enthusiasm at the



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very first stage, when it was conceived by Percy Shelley, to impatience when, aer thedeath o his riend, Hunt had to deal with a reluctant and inconstant Lord Byron and arugal amily lie in Italy.

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Sanditon: Austen’s Waterloo Novel

Just days aer reading Southey’s ‘A Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’ in January 1817, Jane Austen began work on a new novel: Sanditon. Set in a seaside town which is on the cusp obecoming the next in a line o ashionable resorts on the South coast or invalids, the unfin-ished Sanditon makes brie mention o the battle o Waterloo. In comparison to Persuasion,the novel begun shortly aer Waterloo, the novel which turns a naval hero into a romanticone, Sanditon appears to be little stained by the bloody battle which ended the Napoleonic

Wars. But while the setting o Persuasion in the alse peace o 1814 ensures that the novel

written soon aer the battle actually sidesteps the great victory o 1815, the novel original-ly titled Te Brothers conronts that victory in its concentration on masculinity and thephysicality o the body. Waterloo was both a sublime victory and a grim statistical reality.Te British and Prussian army lost ewer soldiers than the French, but the battle claimed50,000 lives. Wellington earnestly lamented the high price o the victory. Even the Regentwas reduced to tears by the list o casualties. While the battle and its heroes were celebrat-ed, the bodies o the ordinary soldiers were burnt. Tis paper argues that to read Austen’simagining o a seaside town or the sickly is to read what John Wiltshire terms the culmina-tion o her work on the body as a novel which reuses to bury the bodies o Waterloo.

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( , )Beauty’s Imprint: Literary Annuals as Intergeneric Spaces

Literary annuals and gibooks represent sites where three major kinds o Romantic print-ed material coexist: poetry, prose and illustration are presented side-by-side, and worktogether to create a thoroughly immersive reading experience. With different kinds oprinted matter coexisting within their gilt-edged pages, literary annuals were tasked withbringing them into an aesthetic harmony. I will argue in this paper that literary annualswere able to achieve this project o reconciling different orms o printed matter because othe aesthetic values they espoused: namely, an emphasis on grace and beauty. Negotiatingthe propagation o these aesthetic values is part o the challenge o engaging critically withliterary annuals as unique printed arteacts: they have long been read as pursuing thesevalues at the expense o commitment to philosophical or intellectual projects. Tat is, solong as their content provided immediate pleasure on an aesthetic level, annuals did notnecessarily strive or artistic provocation or ingenuity. Coupled with their deeply commer-cial orientation, literary annuals risk interpretation as hollow or vapid. While recent criti-cal studies have responded by offering insightul ways o resituating literary annuals withinan understanding o Romantic print culture, there has oen been a reliance on a herme-neutic approach in which the apparent aesthetic commitments are unpacked to reveal an-nuals as sites o negotiation with power, politics and gender. I turn here instead to an inves-tigation o the aesthetic surace as a source o value, rather than a disguising unction. Tevery tendencies that make literary annuals suspect can also show how they were able to



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provide a unique intergeneric space in which different orms o print could be productivelyjuxtaposed.

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( , )Robin Hood: Constructing Hero in the Eighteenth Century Robin Hood scholars such as Stephen Knight and James Holt are medieval historians, con-cerned with investigating the text and context o fieenth-century ballads eaturing theoutlaw, while Stephanie Barczewski studied Robin Hood’s appearance rom Ivanhoe (1820)onwards. Consequently, as Holt has acknowledged, more research needs to be conductedinto eighteenth-century representations o Robin Hood. My paper addresses this issue byexamining the outlaw’s appearance in eighteenth-century broadside ballads, criminal biog-raphies, and plays. I will demonstrate that in this period Robin Hood had a variety o repu-tations. In A History o the Most Noted Highwaymen (1714) he was a cruel murderer. In

ballads such as Robin Hood and the Duke o Lancaster (1737) the outlaw was used to satirizeRobert Walpole. Te representations o Robin Hood in the eighteenth century thereorecorrespond to the typology o thieves identified by Lincoln B. Faller in 1987: brute, bu-oon and hero. I will argue that the eighteenth century was the period when the ‘modern’Robin Hood was constructed. Tis process began when Joseph Ritson collected numerousRobin Hood ballads and published Robin Hood: A Collection o All the Ancient Poems, Songs,and Ballads (1795), transorming him into the noble outlaw; a social bandit who stole romthe rich and gave to the poor. Tis image, constructed by Ritson in 1795 was urther popu-larized by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe, and remains with us today.

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( , ) ‘[H]aving gained a ooting in your inclosure’: Te Culture o Community in Te

Lady’s Magazine

[Part o the themed panel ‘Periodicals III: Situating Te Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818) in Romantic Print Culture’]

Tis paper examines the position o Te Lady’s Magazine: Or Entertaining Companion orthe Fair Sex (1770–1832) in Romantic-era print culture and the scholarship that surroundsit. Aside rom its extraordinary popularity and longevity, a number o ambitious claimshave been made or the magazine’s historical and literary importance. Chie amongst theseis Edward Copeland’s 1995 claim that the Lady’s defined women’s engagement with the

world in the Romantic period. Te argument is as seductive as it is unsubstantiated. eigh-teenth-century periodicalists commonly overlook the title, which emerges aer the oenlamented i somewhat exaggerated demise o the essay-periodical epitomized by Te atler and Te Spectator . Romanticists, meanwhile, have tended to privilege the sel-proessedly‘literary’ magazines o the turn o the century, in which writers such as Coleridge, Hazlitt,Hunt, Lamb and Southey, well known or their work in other more canonical genres, wereinvolved (see e.g. Klancher; Wheatley). Tis paper, like the Leverhulme-unded researchon which it is based seeks to address this oversight by explicating how the magazinesel-consciously and strategically positioned itsel in relationship to the wider and highlycompetitive literary marketplace in which it thrived somewhat against the odds. In partic-



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ular, I want to ocus on one important aspect o the magazine’s identity: the sense o printcommunity the magazine established through its heavy reliance on amateur or unpaidreader contributors and which situated itsel as both arbiter on and alternative to the pro-essional literary marketplace beyond its pages.

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Library as Status Symbol: Romantic Readerships, Prestige and Plymouth PublicLibrary

Te late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a rapid increase in the number osubscription libraries in Britain. Tis paper ocuses on the role these libraries played inshaping regional identities, using Plymouth public library as a case study to identiy nation-al trends as well as regional differences. Plymouth with its naval base had benefitted greatlyrom the ongoing Napoleonic wars. Tis new wealth enabled the ounding o the library in

1810, which allowed regional Romantic readerships to access, consume, and circulate texts.Te most important actor that motivated the city’s wealthy men to spend their money onthe new library was the prestige connected to a library o this kind. Te ounders’ aim wasto put Plymouth more firmly on the nation’s cultural map. But status signified in two otherways, too: as was the case elsewhere, belonging to a subscription library raised proprietors’individual status, all the more so at Plymouth because the share price o the new institutionwas set at the immensely high sum o thirty guineas. However, an important eature in thisnew library’s constitution was also the admission o lower-middle-class readers who couldnot pay the admittance price. Te library’s proprietors saw themselves as benevolent do-nors who enabled the region’s (serious) reading. Tis ocus on status through reading isalso visible in the library’s holdings: in line with subscription libraries elsewhere, Plym-outh, too, emphasises its distance rom circulating libraries by including very ew novelsand other texts that were seen as ephemeral in its early catalogues.

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John Murray’s Strategic Networks

[Part o the themed panel ‘Romantic ravel Networks’]

Troughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the London firm o JohnMurray was to become the most prolific publisher o travel writing in the English language.Te name o the firm was associated with the leading travellers and explorers o the age, not

least as the publishers o Charles Darwin, Austen Henry Layard, Isabella Bird, John Frank-lin, David Livingstone and many others. From the early nineteenth century the Murrayscultivated a vast network o influential collaborators: booksellers, printers, publisher’sreaders, agents, illustrators and authors. What’s more, Murrays cultivated a powerul net-work o associations beyond the book trade: o key importance were its intimate relation-ships with the Admiralty (a connection that oen gave them first reusal on the most im-portant new exploratory works), with scholarly societies (in particular the RoyalGeographical Society), and in the higher echelons o London cultural lie. Such an inra-structure not only had a considerable influence on Murray’s travel list, but was requentlyreflected in the structure o the works themselves. Aer setting a context or a discussion



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o Murray’s social and proessional networks, this paper will go on to explore some o theways in which these were maniest in the contents o the list itsel and its paratextual pre-sentation, rom preaces, dedications, and epigraphs, to ootnotes and citations (what La-tour, in Science in Action [1987], reers to as a complex game o riends and enemies). O key

importance was Murray’s use o the title page as a means o advertising the various presti-gious connections enjoyed by the firm, at the middle o which he positioned his most influ-ential works. Even the authorial name, so oen overlooked by scholars, bore within it trac-es o the symbolic sociability through which the firm’s relations with its authors and literaryadvisors were situated.

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‘Let Scotland flourish by the printing o the word’: Print, Civic Enlightenment andNational Improvement in Te Glasgow Advertiser

[Part o the themed panel ‘Scottish Romanticism in Print and Manuscript’]

Tis paper will explore the interlocking civic, regional, national and international impera-tives animating Te Glasgow Advertiser , ounded in 1783, examining in particular how thenewspaper attempted to re-imagine—through its editorial mission and print identity—Glasgow’s status as a centre o cultural production in late eighteenth-century Scotland, anda key intelligence hub or the expansion o Scottish trade internationally. Te paper seeksto map how the Advertiser ’s first editor/publisher, the transplanted Edinburgh printer JohnMennons, ramed the newspaper’s sel-declared print mission o ‘inorming and instruct-ing his ellow citizens’ as a local and regional challenge to the Scottish capital’s dominanceo the nation’s publishing industry and press. Trough this mission, the paper will argue,Mennons sought to recalibrate Scotland’s national print identity via Glasgow’s emerging

status as a trading and manuacturing metropolis, projecting the city’s thriving commercialculture in the Advertiser as an alternative expression o national enlightenment against Ed-inburgh’s elite institutional model, rooted in civic initiative, expanding networks o com-merce, and pragmatic aims or material, cultural, and intellectual improvement. Te ten-sions and perceived asymmetries maniest in this late eighteenth-century print rivalry oGlasgow and Edinburgh, the paper argues, echo those between the Scottish and Englishpress in the first hal o the eighteenth century, and the Advertiser ’s mission will be used asa case study or Glasgow’s explicitly aspirational and commercially-minded print culture,mirroring Scotland’s periodical pragmatism rom earlier in the century, devoted above allto ‘the ’, as declared by Te Scots Magazine in 1739.

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Gothic Horror at the Doorstep: Or, the Strange Case o Isabella Kelly’s Britishness

Scottish gothic novelist Isabella Kelly enjoys a unique place among the many gothic writerso the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or her departure rom established patterns.

While myriads o writers ocused on Italy and Spain as southern European countries andtheir Catholic aith with its wicked and lecherous monks, bigoted and sexually depravedabbesses persecuting and torturing the innocent, Isabella Kelly ollowed a different pathand aithully and exclusively chose British settings thus disclosing that British citizens



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could be just as vicious and immoral as their Mediterranean counterparts. In all her ninenovels (rom Madeline or Te Castle o Montgomery [1794] to Te Secret [1805]), she skilul-ly transplants all the gothic paraphernalia into the British Isles and diverse locations suchas the remote and windswept Hebrides and wild Scottish Highlands with Macbethian hags

and a superstitious peasantry, the orlorn abbeys o North Wales and the sordid streets oLondon and the snares o the metropolis. In addition, Kelly expanded her subject matterar beyond that o the customary gothic novel and in her sharp denunciation o a hypocrit-ical society she weaves unvarnished tales that include brothels and prostitutes, rape andadultery, stifled babies and sex in a convent. Her transgression o boundaries and violationo the code o propriety with outspoken descriptions o scenes which were deemed im-proper in the early nineteenth century reveal an oen idiosyncratic approach. In this light,Scottish gothic novelist Isabella Kelly must be seen as an unusual author with a perectblend o British settings and a dimension to the gothic which we do not find in most otheremale novelists or in the even more amiliar works o her canonical contemporaries.

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‘Far beyond Language!’ Colonial Botany, Indigenous Knowledge and Romantic PrintCulture

Tat Romantic botanists tended to view the systematizing, disenchanting aspects o En-lightenment epistemology in a critical light is well known. What has been less thoroughlyexplored, however, is the relationship between Romanticism and indigenous knowledge.One reason or this omission, I suggest, is that historians o botany have ormed a more orless totalizing impression o the discipline’s imperial significance rom the predominanceo Linnaean binomial species names in published botanical writings. My analysis, on theother hand, contrasts the marginality o indigenous plant names in published texts withtheir ar greater prominence in unpublished materials. Given this discrepancy, I argue or afigurative interpretation o indigenous plant names in early to mid-nineteenth-century Ro-mantic botanical writings, as implicit gestures toward knowledge-making floral and cultur-al domains beyond the printed text. By extension, the limited—albeit suggestive and stra-tegic—placement o indigenous plant names underscores the colonial botanist’s position asan expert, almost occult intermediary between European cultural words and indigenousnatural worlds. I examine this tendency in two mid-nineteenth-century Romantic bota-nists: William Colenso in New Zealand, and Berthold Seemann, who collected plants inFiji, Hawai’i, Panama and elsewhere. My intention is threeold: to contrast the botanists’print personas with their assumed private domains o mystery and expertise; to augment a

growing scholarly awareness o indigenous knowledge-making contributions to imperialbotany; and finally, to reflect on Romantic natural history’s sel-reflective, critical stancetoward its own writerly containment.

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Blake’s Struggle ‘drawing’ Young’s ‘dire steel’: From Watercolour to Print

[Part o the themed panel ‘Romantic Illustration I: Landscapes and Legacies’]

Tis paper examines one o William Blake’s illustrations to Edward Young’s Night Toughts (c. 1795–7): N121 / 34E which depicts Christ as the Man o Sorrows, illustrating line 173o Night IV: ‘Draw the dire steel? Ah no! the dreadul blessing.’ In Night IV, Young presentsa reflection upon and celebration o the cross, a theme which sat ill with Blake’s rejectiono the doctrine o the Atonement. Blake’s illustrations to Night IV negotiate this problem ina variety o ways: some avoid Young’s crucifixion imagery altogether; others relocateChrist’s saving action to other aspects o his ministry; still others illustrate the literal senseo metaphors without pointing to their application in the text. However, in N121 / 34E,Blake picks up on and illustrates Young’s line about the nails o the crucifixion. Tis paperexamines the meaning and evolution o that design, which underwent significant revisionsbetween the watercolour drawing and the published engraving—evidenced by the proo

engravings which survive in the Four Zoas manuscript. I will argue that the development othe design reflects Blake’s theological struggle with Young’s celebration o the crucifixion,and that this moment can be placed within a broader attempt by Blake to grapple with themeaning o this central event or Christianity. My argument draws on key details in theiconography o the design, including how Blake exploits the unusual ormat o these illus-trations (in wide margins surrounding the text) to imprint his own theology upon the de-sign.

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‘Tou imagest my lie’: Alastor and Print SourcesTis paper explores Percy Bysshe Shelley’s collection o poems written in the wake o Wa-terloo in late 1815, Alastor; or, the Spirit o Solitude: And Other Poems. It takes up the themeo imprints by asking what Shelley’s choice o printer or this, his first public collection opoetry, tells us about his poetic and political practice. Poems such as Alastor itsel, ‘Feel-ings o a Republican on the Fall o Bonaparte’ (one o Shelley’s most accomplished politicalsonnets) and ‘A Summer-Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’ will be dis-cussed in relation to the collection’s printing history. Samuel Hamilton, based in Wey-bridge, printed this collection and Leigh Hunt’s 1815 edition o Te Feast o the Poets, withother pieces in verse. Alastor and the other poems can be read in two ways. First, SamuelHamilton’s links to a liberal network with its roots in the politics o the 1790s are explored,

and then Alastor and other poems are re-read in terms o what this liberal network mighttell us about Shelley’s well-documented preoccupation in Alastor with the politics and po-etry o the 1790s, as represented in the works o William Wordsworth and Samuel aylorColeridge. Samuel Hamilton’s location upriver in Weybridge is also relevant to a discussiono the poems. In Alastor , the river represents both a physical and symbolic journey, where-as the churchyard poem is located at the source o the Tames.

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Romantic Literature and Childhood Reading Practices at the Royal High School oEdinburgh

owards the end o the eighteenth and beginning o the nineteenth centuries, educationalpractice at one o Edinburgh’s largest schools was shiing rom a curriculum based aroundthe Classics to one which would better prepare pupils or a modern career in a post-En-lightenment Scotland. At the same time, the library catalogue o the Royal High School oEdinburgh demonstrates a noticeable shi in the number and type o books available orthese same boys. Tis paper argues that the material culture o the school, in the orm olibrary books purchased or pupil use, is reflective o, not only a changing curriculum, butalso a specific literary movement. By examining archival evidence related to the school li-brary it can be seen that there is a distinct movement towards the purchasing o novels byScottish and English Romantic writers, at the beginning o the nineteenth century. Tispaper argues that the analysis o the available reading materials at the Royal High School

provides insight into the educational, and wider societal, anxieties o the Romantic period.Te source material includes minutes rom governors’ meetings, library catalogues andborrowers’ records. Tis paper will examine this evidence in order to shed light on theparticular reading experiences o a set o pupils in Edinburgh during the Romantic period.By examining the reading practice o these children, it is possible to ascertain the extent towhich the literary movement we now call Romanticism impacted on the everyday experi-ences o Scottish children.

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Alternate History and Romantic Historiography

Since the publication o Hawthorne’s ‘P.’s Correspondence’ in 1845, the lives o the BritishRomantic poets have provided a consistent source o speculation or authors o alternatehistory. Hawthorne’s tale—the first sustained alternate history in English—imagines aworld in which Keats and Byron did not die prematurely but instead lived to become ahaunted recluse and a political turncoat respectively. Among the many subsequent workswhich have recontextualized the romantics in timelines other than our own are those oG. M. revelyan (1907), Elinor Wylie (1926), Harold Nicolson (1931), William Gibson andBruce Sterling (1990), Orson Scott Card (1987– ) and Susanna Clark (2004). o date, alter-nate history has tended to be read as an offshoot o postmodernist fiction. But the popular-ity o the romantics or writers working in this genre suggests that its roots go back urther.In this paper, which ocuses on ‘P.’s Correspondence,’ Card’s Seventh Son (1987) and An-

drew Motion’s Te Invention o Dr Cake (2003), I propose that the Byrons and Blakes o al-ternate history are avatars o a hybrid orm o historical imagination: one that is simultane-ously (but not unproblematically) Romantic and postmodern. In the respect that theseworks draw attention to the constructedness o received narratives surrounding the lives othe romantics, they presuppose a postmodern understanding o biography and history. Yetin their sensitivity to the rich symbolic subtexts o biographical and historical narratives(actual and counteractual), the works ollow the lead o Coleridge and Keats. For thisreason, they constitute intriguing and valuable examples o the complex ways in which ro-mantic historiography continues to inorm genre fiction.

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‘Native Fire’ and ‘Wild Graces’: Responses to Robert Burns in the Scottish PeriodicalPress, 1786–96

[Part o the themed panel ‘Robert Burns in the wenty-First Century: exts’]

Tis paper will explore responses to the lie, character and work o Robert Burns in theScottish periodical press, rom the beginnings o his ame in 1786–7 with the Kilmarnockand Edinburgh editions through to responses to his death in 1796. It will examine poetictributes and epistles to Burns, written beore and aer his death; anecdotes and writtenaccounts o his character by riends and strangers; reviews o his work and advertisementso his publications to ascertain contemporary popular opinions o the ‘Scotland’s bard’.

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Charles Lamb’s Elizabethanizing: Forgery or Ventriloquistic Impersonation?

My paper aims at a re-evaluation o Charles Lamb’s ‘Curious Fragments’, which have re-ceived little i no attention in the field o Romantic Studies. Yet these specimens provide asignificant example o a particular attitude on the part o the author, which E. V. Lucas haslabelled as ‘Elizabethanizing’. In ‘Curious Fragments’, as well as in the tragedy John Wood-vil and the Falstaff Letters, Lamb enacted a ‘literary’ approximation with some o the au-thors he cherished most, namely Robert Burton and Tomas Browne. Unlike the notori-ous ‘orger poets’, though, Lamb did not seek to actually present these extracts as authentic.Te literary process he enacted is rather that o Impersonation, which Carl Klaus has point-ed to as the main and most interesting eature o the personal essay. My argument’s ulti-mate goal is that o underlining the essayistic eatures o the ‘Curious Fragments’, in order

to discuss the intimate, almost delicate, interrelation between Lamb and the Literature othe Early Modern Period. On one level, my analysis will ocus on stylistic eatures, such asarchaisms in spelling, morphological and lexical peculiarities. Yet rom a historical per-spective the prominence o these stylistic eatures will be re-evaluated, since, I argue, themain aim o the author is not o convincing, or deceiving the reader, but to create a distinc-tive voice, a sort o ventriloquizing that allows Lamb to demonstrate his debt to the prosemasters o the Early Modern Period.

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Te Romantic Imprint o the Napoleonic Wars on the Early Writings o Charlotte andBranwell Brontë

Growing up in a post-war age, Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s juvenilia offer a child’s per-spective on a nation recovering rom large-scale conflict. Te siblings’ absorption o vari-ous Romantic, war-based periodicals and canonical texts meant that their younger liveswere permeated with reminiscences o the Napoleonic wars, their legacy permeating thechronicles o their imaginary kingdoms, Glass own and Angria. Te rise o the Romanticmilitary memoir, o which tales such as Te Subaltern (1825) and Malcolm’s ales o Fieldand Flood (1829) were read by Charlotte and Branwell, transmogrified war’s landscape andbattle into exciting, masculine travel narratives, whilst writers such as Walter Scott ur-



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nished the young siblings with imagery o sweeping battle scenes. Tis paper will examinethe Romantic imprint o the Napoleonic Wars on the Brontës’ early creativity. Teir antasykingdoms, based around the rival figureheads, the Duke o Wellington and NapoleonBonaparte, reanimate the ‘picturesque’ elements o war in an era where the golden days o

the army were thought to be over. I aim to establish Charlotte and Branwell’s juvenilia asimportant, Romantic reflections o war, the siblings participating in an identifiable andimportant cultural movement that sought to evaluate and reimagine the historical legacy owar through the literary—in this case childhood—imagination.

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Te Disordered Book: Night Toughts Proos in Blake’s Vala Manuscript

[Part o the themed panel ‘Blake’s Books’]

Tis paper explores proos as a surace o manuscript inscription. Freed rom the teleolo-gies o print, rom the book’s paratext, and the sequential order o the text, proos open upalternative orders o composition. William Blake’s engagement with Edward Young’s NightToughts involved three kinds o material text. First, the publisher Richard Edwards provid-ed an extra-illustrated book assembled by mounting pages disbound rom the original edi-tions in separate Nights on olio sheets, which Blake illustrated with 537 watercolours in themargins. From this preparatory book, orty-three designs were engraved and published byEdwards in an edition o the first our Nights (1797); finally Blake recycled proos o theseengravings in the Vala Manuscript . Each book ormat stages conflicts between letterpress,print and manuscript, as well as between text and illustration. Unlike the illuminatedbooks and their promise o a uniorm aesthetic through ‘a method that combines the paint-er and the poet’, Blake’s engagements with Night Toughts exhibit a ‘composite art’ that

dwells on the separation o media and the subversive possibilities o the book as a materialsupport. Following the alternative sequences in which Blake repositions the 1797 engrav-ings in the manuscript, this paper explores the economy o manuscript aer print. Fromasterisks to marginalia to epic scale rewritings, I will track the spaces o composition Blakeobtained by dislocating and reinscribing pages rom the 1797 edition, and the shiing oralternative visual and verbal anchorings o engravings in the changing book ormats Blakeenvisioned in the palimpsest that incorporated Night Toughts into Vala.

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angible Print: Reading Romantic Maps, Nature and NationTis paper examines poetic configurations o tactility as a mode o knowledge in the con-text o Romantic-era embossed printing systems (ancestors o Braille). I ocus in particularon the tactile map as a means o incorporating previously excluded classes o readers intothe national and international sphere o print. ‘angible literature’ is an ‘antidote’, accord-ing to James Gall, to the ‘Nature’ that is a ‘perect bland’ to people born dea, dumb andblind. According to blind poet Tomas Blacklock, embossed maps played a vital role in theprocess o allowing blind children to imagine themselves as national and European citizens.ranslating French educator Valentin Haüy, he writes,



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We trace the rivers to their source,O stars we calculate the course;From Europe to th’Atlantic shore,Successive journeys we pursue,

Tanks to the hand, whose prudence due,Guides us in Geographic lore. I will compare Blacklock and Haüy’s configuration o tactile maps to the configurationo mapping and tactility in Coleridge and Wordsworth. In Te Excursion, I argue, the figureo the map, o blind philosopher John Gough, and o ‘reading’ nature by touch are relatedconfigurations o what Wordsworth announces as the poet’s task:

No floweret bloomsTroughout the loy range o these rough hillsOr in the woods, that could rom him concealIts birth-place; none whose figure did not liveUpon his touch […] (VII.515–19)

Te ‘Poet’ communicates the patterns, pulsations, and rhythms o the national landscapeso as to incorporate readers within it.

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Dangerous Imprinting: Orientalism in Te Missionary In ‘Feminizing the Feminine’, Balachandra Rajan details the importance o Sydney Owen-son’s indebtedness to John Milton. ‘Few writers remember Milton as vividly and thought-ully as Owenson’, Rajan writes, ‘Her response to Paradise Lost is consistently both an in-vocation and a critique’. Like Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, Charlotte Dacre andCharlotte Brontë, Owenson reveals an unsettled relationship to the epic poet. She appro-priates crucial themes rom Paradise Lost —the submission and disobedience to establishedhierarchies, the management and invasion o Edenic space, the consequences o deviationrom ideological norms, and the catastrophic competition o contending imperialisms.Nevertheless, Owenson also critically examines these issues through a parallel appropria-tion o Orientalist discourse, particularly in her dramatic representation o Hilarion andLuxima, the Catholic missionary and the Hindu priestess, whose intense relationship ormsthe heart o Owenson’s work. Tis dual appropriation ‘is a prolixity instead o order, way-ward passion and wild extravagance instead o purposive reason, and serpentine Orientaldeceitulness instead o straightorward Western candour’. Owenson thus intertwines Mil-tonic and Orientalist discourses, deliberately matching up the ‘purposive’ and command-ing Europe o Hilarion with the hyper-eminized India o Luxima. As Mary Louise Pratt

rightly argues, however, ‘ “cultural harmony through romance” always breaks down’. Pre-dictably, Owenson’s looming union o Hilarion and Luxima exacerbates competing politi-cal and religious interests, suggesting that the case o Hilarion and Luxima points to thenecessity o dangerous union i cultural exchange is not always to signiy colonizing superi-ority and competitive advantage.

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‘Not useless do I deem / Tese quiet sympathies with things’: Politics and Nature inDrafing around ‘Te Ruined Cottage’

[Part o the themed panel ‘Wordsworth’]

In draing ollowing an early version o ‘Te Ruined Cottage’ in DC MS. 16, Wordsworthwrites that ‘Not useless do I deem / Tese quiet sympathies with things that hold / An in-articulate language’. Tese lines (and similar ones in DC MS. 17 and the Aloxden Note-book) eventually orm part o the Wanderer’s correction to despondency in Book IV o Te

Excursion and sit alongside lines with related preoccupations that contribute to Te Pre-lude. Tis paper will ocus on the importance o seeking ‘objects o a kindred love / In el-low-natures’ through a series o compositional stages o Wordsworth’s writing. In the pro-cess, it will pay careul attention to Wordsworth’s lexical and rhetorical choices: orexample, the double negatives and language o utilitarianism and political economy de-ployed in ‘not useless do I deem’ and a corresponding phrase ‘I deem not profitless’ in as-

sociated draing. My paper will attempt to extend conventional critical understandings othe centrality o nonhuman nature to Wordsworth’s conception o politics by juxtaposinghis verse with more recent philosophical approaches to nonhuman objects (including Bru-no Latour, imothy Morton and Levi Bryant). Simultaneously, it will demonstrate the di-erence between Wordsworth’s poetic thinking and their largely flat ontologies, while alsoshowing the indebtedness o such contemporary work to thinking ound in Romantic po-etry.

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Felicia Browne Hemans: Writing rom Wales in Manuscript and or Print Felicia Browne Hemans (1793–1835) was one o the most widely-read poets o the nine-teenth century. Her work has recently been recovered by literary critics but her manu-scripts remain under researched. Te poems and letters sent between members o theBrowne amily and their patron Matthew Nicholson, have drawn critical attention, cen-tring on the processes by which Hemans and her mother got the young poet’s work intoprint at the beginning o her career. In examining Hemans’ experiences o early nine-teenth-century manuscript cultures, I draw on the Nicholson collection but also on otherpoetry written by and to Hemans, which, to my knowledge, did not appear in print. Tesepoems deal with the same themes ound throughout Hemans’ body o work: domesticity,emale authorship and publication, and her use o her military relatives and ostensibly se-

cluded lie in north Wales to enable her comments on political and patriotic topics. Mycentral ocus is an unpublished poem ‘Te Charms o Llewesog’, a celebration o emaleauthority and creativity. I read it in the contexts o the production o Hemans’ collectionTe Domestic Affections (1812), poetic responses written by her readers, and work by Kath-erine Philips whose experiences o writing rom Wales in manuscript and or print can beseen to anticipate Hemans’. Hemans’ work blurs the boundaries which orm our under-standings o private and public, Romantic manuscript and print cultures and Wales, En-gland and Britain. Focusing on her experiences o manuscript circulation adds an import-ant dimension to our understanding o her lie, her work and her reception.

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Re-Visioning the Sacred ext: Femininity, Authority and Authorship in HannahMore’s Sacred Dramas

Te ambiguous status and public sel-presentation o Hannah More as a late eighteenth-cen-tury woman o letters exemplifies the conflicted position o women within early Romanticeconomies o textual production and consumption. More’s work across a range o genresdisplays an overt support o patriarchy, and o woman’s place within it, that underminesthe logic o her own position as a emale intellectual and political commentator. It is alsopossible to discern in the work o this writer, however, evidence o what Adrienne Richterms textual ‘Re-vision—the act o looking back, o seeing with resh eyes, o entering anold text rom a new critical direction’. Hannah More’s Sacred Dramas (1782) have not re-ceived a great deal o scholarly attention, yet I argue that they do provide an instance o‘re-visioning’; they constitute a series o critical interventions into old texts—the texts oscripture—that offer a radical re-conceptualization o eminine authority and authorship.

Whilst the intention here is not to attempt to reclaim Hannah More or eminism, the Sa-cred Dramas nevertheless complicate representations o More as a dutiul daughter whorepudiates the emale voice in avour o the social, spiritual and literary authority o patri-archy.

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‘Tis eccentric step’: Mary Hays’s Resolution and Independence

In her correspondence with William Godwin (1756–1836) dated 13 October 1795, MaryHays (1759–1843) reflected on her widely opposed decision on moving into lodgings at

Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, and termed this significant milestone on the road to her inde-pendence ‘this eccentric step.’ Among the many benefits which she meditated would de-rive rom her living on her own, Hays specified that she could acquire ‘satisaction in theidea o being ree’ and gratiy her desire o strengthening her mind by standing alone. Withan annuity o £70 le to her by her ather, Hays still had to take up literary employmentsand in two instances, to run a school, or to work as a school mistress, to augment her in-come in order to secure her hard-won independence. Living alone, but not quite alone,rom time to time, Hays was called upon to attend to the needs o her riends and amily. AsEleanor y observes, the question o emale economic independence stands as one o MaryHays’s lie-long concerns. Pecuniary issues are, indeed, constantly raised throughout herwritings—personal, fictional, educational, as well as political—wherein Hays provides lietestimony to and illustrates the unpropitious circumstances women conront when seeking

their independence, as well as remarks on customarily unjust distribution o ortune be-tween men and women. Tis paper will first explore the actors that stimulated MaryHays’s resolution to come out rom parental shelter and ace lie’s contingencies on herown. Drawing on the accounts on independence and monetary matters extracted rom herwritings, it will urther examine how Hays supported the significant ew and bore the gen-eral elicity o the emale sex at heart as she moved along the stages o her career. It willargue that buttressed by the income rom her literary exertions, Hays’s independence wasboth beneficial and beneficent, or while it advanced the circumstances o her own sel, aswell as o her needy amily members and riends, it also helped inculcate in women notionso gender equality and aimed at ultimately promoting the welare o the emale sex. In the



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end, this paper will conclude that Hays’s persistence in exercising her talents or the causeo women rewarded her with ‘the dignity o independence’, which renders bearable all thetribulations accompanying it.

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Falkland’s Victorian Legacy: Caroline Clive’s Revision o the Godwinian Gentleman-Murderer in Paul Ferroll (1855)

William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) provides a critique o the English social orderthrough the adventure tale o Caleb, a secretary who discovers the secret crimes o hisgenteel employer, Ferdinando Falkland. At once political and psychological, the novel in-dicts the injustice and oppression o contemporary social institutions. Caleb Williams isoen identified as the first novel o detection, though the novel demonstrates that detec-tive work and the ethos o ‘policing’ undermine the values o sincerity and openness that

lead to social progress. Still, Godwin’s novel is a Romantic orerunner o nineteenth-centu-ry crime and detective fiction and a direct influence on later purveyors o these genres suchas Edward Bulwer Lytton and Edgar Allan Poe. Caroline Clive’s Paul Ferroll (1855), a lit-tle-known Victorian crime novel, also owes a debt to Godwin. In the eponymous Paul Fer-roll, Clive draws on—but also reworks—Godwin’s gentleman murderer. Like Falkland,Ferroll is a respected member o the landed gentry, but his reputation or benevolence andintegrity masks his true identity as a cold-blooded killer. Clive and Godwin both experi-ment with styles o narration that create suspense and allow or chilling psychological por-traits o the villain–hero. However, with no ‘detective’ character, and only a canny narratorwho colludes with her criminal protagonist, Clive shis the responsibility or detectiononto the reader. Moreover, although both novels indict the operative class hierarchy,Clive’s (anti)hero eventually goes ree. Her reashioning o Falkland thus continues God-win’s political critique whilst also destabilizing many o his ideals, social and literary. Tispaper explores the uncharted link between Caleb Williams and Paul Ferroll , arguing or thevitality o Godwin’s legacy in the Victorian period.

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‘So particularly involved’: A Prosopographical Sketch o a Controversy in Te Lady’s Magazine

[Part o the themed panel ‘Periodicals III: Situating Te Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818) in Romantic Print Culture’]

As mentioned above, one o the ways in which Te Lady’s Magazine stands out among oth-er periodicals o its kind is the extent to which it relied on unsolicited copy submitted by itsreaders. Troughout its long run, the magazine eatured a great number o loyal unpaidcontributors who delivered material in various textual genres, ranging rom both belles-lettres contributions to opinion pieces on topical issues, as well as several kinds o chal-lenging riddles to which other readers’ solutions would later be printed. Tese contribu-tions are usually pseudonymous, and the non-proessional background o their authorsmakes them particularly hard to attribute with any degree o certainty. However, becauseo the hints to the authors’ habitus that they do contain, and the patterns o interaction



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which are established between individual authors, a meticulous contextual reading maystill reveal a lot o useul inormation on the magazine’s wide readership. An excellent casestudy or such a so-called ‘prosopographical’ approach is a 1789 controversy between anumber o reader–contributors on the assessment o a contentious couplet by Pope, being

the well-known ‘Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take / but ev’ry Woman is atheart a Rake’, which incidentally would soon also be discussed by Mary Wollstonecra inher Vindication o the Rights o Women. Suggested as a topic o discussion by a sel-declared‘young correspondent’ in the belie that is would prove beneficial ‘to allow the readers at-taining a proper way o uttering [their] sentiments […] a requent opportunity o publiclydisclosing them’, the ensuing heated exchange o opinions reveals a lot about the diversityo the magazine’s readership, and offers insights on the different views on gender as well ason Augustan poetry that were current in late eighteenth-century Britain. Tis paper willelaborate social and ideological profiles or the different participants in this small-scalecontroversy, along the way suggesting research methodologies that may be o interest toscholars working on other periodicals o this period.

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Was It Necessar y to Deeat Napoleon? Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Friends o Peace

Tis paper is a tribute to Samuel Whitbread MP, who courageously maintained the anti-warargument in the House o Commons aer the death o Charles James Fox in 1807, and com-mitted suicide in July 1815. Whitbread led ‘the Mountain’, the radical minority in the Whigparty, and delivered numerous speeches presenting the case or a negotiated peace; therecord o one impassioned speech rom 1808, in which he declared ‘I deny the insane prop-osition that peace is more dangerous than war’, takes up fiy columns in Hansard. Hisarch-enemy George Canning reerred to these orations as his ‘annual exhibition’. In 1812

Whitbread united with the brilliant ideologue o the Edinburgh Review Henry Brougham,newly elected to Parliament, to bring about the greatest coup o the Friends o Peace, therepeal o Britain’s system o trade blockades, a mode o warare through economic damage.Brougham brought to the campaign innovative techniques or mobilizing public opinionthrough the press alongside petitioning, in order to put pressure rom ‘out o doors’ onparliamentary decision-making. I suggest that Anna Letitia Barbauld’s controversial poem

Eighteen Hundred and Eleven was part o the co-ordinated peace effort. Tis was a momentin which negotiated peace became a genuinely popular cause, and was seen as an achiev-able aim. A survey o speeches and writings by Whitbread, Brougham, Barbauld and Wil-liam Roscoe, among others over these years reveals a string o lost opportunities any owhich could have changed the course o events, and le Wellington a ootnote in the histo-

ry books. o mark the battle o Waterloo in this anniversary year as i it were an historicalinevitability is simply obtuse. We should be re-examining the ailure o Britain, and France,to achieve lasting peace between 1793 and 1815, and acknowledging those who struggledagainst the ‘War Demon’. It was a struggle with political and cultural dimensions, and thispaper seeks to establish the Romantic-era peace movement as an important instance o theradical efficacy o print beyond the 1790s, through a period that has been neglected bymost scholars o the revolution debate and its legacy.

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Intertextual and Paratextual Positioning in Popular Fiction: Charlotte Dacre’sConessions o the Nun o St Omer (1805)

Charlotte Dacre’s first novel, Conessions o the Nun o St Omer , displays its multiple lines oinheritance with little subtlety. Te work was first published in 1805 under the pen-name‘Rosa Matilda’, an allusion both to the sensual Della Cruscan school o poetry and to thedemonic seductress o Matthew Lewis’ notorious 1796 novel Te Monk . o underscore theconnection, Dacre dedicated her work to Lewis in an effusive preace. Yet, while the novelwas clearly designed to appeal to a broad readership hungry or scandal and titillation, thework also shows a surprising depth o engagement with the philosophical ideals that hadinspired reormists and radicals in the 1790s. Moreover, it bears a clear debt to Rousseau’sconessional mode and Diderot’s Te Nun. In terms o its genre, Conessions is perhaps bestdescribed as a gothic novel, although it eschews the supernatural and has many eatures oa novel o sensibility. However, in spite o its conservative narrative agenda the work re-

jects the socially acceptable example set by novelists like Ann Radcliffe in avour o an ex-ploration o the struggle between virtue and desire in a manner similar to Mary Wollstone-cra’s Maria; or, the Wrongs o Women (1798). Te novel tells the story o Cazire, the wiluland spoiled daughter o a dissolute nobleman. Naturally blessed with beauty and intelli-gence, Cazire indulges in her taste or ‘romance’ novels that warp her understanding o theworld and inculcate in her a predilection or antasy over reality. Tus, Dacre invokes theamiliar eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theme o the harmul effects o novelsand romances on impressionable young people, responding to Wollstonecra even as sherejects her politics. Tis paper will explore how Dacre’s use o paratextual and intertextualreerences in Conessions invokes and blends together the populist, sensationalist and polit-ically inflected literature o the last decades o the eighteenth century. Indeed, Conessions demonstrates how the popular fiction o the early nineteenth century absorbed, commer-

cialized and repackaged the cultural upheaval that had roiled Britain in the 1790s. [email protected]

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British Women’s ravel Writing, 1780–1840: Communities o Authorship

[Part o the themed panel ‘Romantic ravel Networks’]

In 1821, a young Swiss, Louise Demont, chie witness or the King’s counsel in the divorcetrial o Queen Caroline, was named on the title page as the author o a travel book by itscompiler and translator, Edgar Garston, himsel the Queen’s official translator during the

same trial. Te translation, Journal o the Visit o Her Majesty the Queen, to unis, Greece,and Palestine, was ollowed in a matter o days by its French original, Garston this timeappearing as its editor, and was incorporated without acknowledgment soon aer into an-other servant’s-eye view o the Queen’s travels attributed to John Adolphus, Voyages andravels o Her Majesty, Caroline Queen o Great Britain [...] By One o Her Majesty’s Suite (1821). Te publications were part o a campaign to rehabilitate the Queen’s reputationextending beyond her successul deence, giving substance to the voyages that were treatedsymbolically by a wider field o satirists and pamphleteers in 1820, not least Hone andCruikshank (e.g. ‘Te Embarkation’ in Te Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder ). But what avenuesrun rom Garston’s translations o Demont’s testimonies to his representation o her as a



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travel writer, and how ar do the bibliographical circles expanding around Demont’s textextend? Was Demont a conscious part o this post-trial community o authorship, or apawn? How do these rare examples o servant-class travel writings unction in the widerpolitical debate surrounding the divorce crisis and its aermath? Te case o Demont/Gar-

ston not only raises these important questions, but is also one o the many collaborativerelationships—in the broadest sense o the phrase—that come into ocus thanks to the Da-tabase o Women’s ravel Writing, 1780–1840, launched in July 2014. In at least fiy-two othe 195 books listed in the database (or 27 per cent o the total), women appear in the roleso co-authors, contributors, illustrators, letterpress writers, editors, abridgers, or arethemselves the (sometimes posthumous) subjects o editors, translators and plagiarists.Tis paper will investigate both the larger patterns o and reasons or such collaboration,while, using the example o Demont and other case studies as time allows, considering theextent to which women’s travel writings position themselves or are positioned within do-mestic, political, scientific and aesthetic networks o reading and reception.

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‘Somewhat o a mercenary showman’: Tomas Johnes and the Spectacle o Haod

[Part o the themed panel ‘From Footprints to Imprints: Curious ravellers in Wales and Scot-land’]

When J. . Barber visited the grounds and mansion o Haod in the Ystwyth Valley in 1803he complained, on being expected to tip the gardener and housekeeper or a guided tour,that there was ‘something very unworthy in great men allowing their ser vants to exact thesums that they do rom the spectators o their grandeur’. Tis paper explores the notion o‘showmanship’ and perormance in relation to the picturesque and to early tourism. It o-

cuses on Tomas Johnes’s remarkable creation, over decades, o the walks and gardens atHaod, which, with nearby Devil’s Bridge, became one o the principal attractions o mid-

Wales—an area ar less popular with visitors than Snowdonia in the north or the Wye Valleyin the south. By the 1790s, ew travellers approached Haod without being in some sense‘primed’ or the experience through texts and printed views: this paper considers the high-ly mediated and managed nature o their encounters with a place amed or preserving its‘original wildness’.

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‘Mimicking the texture o thought’: What Can We Learn rom Manuscripts o an Author at the Wordsworth rust?

[Part o the themed panel ‘ “Mimicking the texture o thought”: What Can We Learn om Manuscripts o an Author at the Wordsworth rust?’]

Te Wordsworth rust takes Wordsworth’s own words rom his 1807 letter to Lady Beau-mont as a starting point or its interpretation and learning activities. We seek to enable andencourage people o all ages, interests and backgrounds to benefit rom the works o theRomantic writers and artists through activities in Grasmere and elsewhere. Learning about

Wordsworth in Grasmere can be a very special experience—a combination o words writ-ten in this very place and about this place; the poet’s home and garden; the surrounding



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Lake District landscape, and original two-hundred-year-old manuscripts. In working withstudent groups, we seek to combine all elements into an immersive experience that can, orsome, be lie changing. Tis paper will briefly introduce the rust and its collections toprovide context or the other three papers; it will then look at ways in which we use manu-

scripts and books to encourage students to experience such arteacts as things that werecreated, owned and cherished by real people doing ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary,things.

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‘Literary men are an irritable race’: Madden’s Infirmities o Genius in Context

In 1833, the Irish doctor Richard Madden published Te Infirmities o Genius: a book whichattempted to explain why great artists—and especially great poets—tended to be such pe-culiar people. With his eye firmly on the recent controversies over the scandalous lives and

early deaths o Byron and Shelley, Madden laid out a medical theory which purported toaccount or the strange behaviour o such ‘wayward sons o genius’ in purely physiologicalterms: the writing o poetry, he explained, wore out both the nerves and the brain, predis-posing poets to all manner o mental and physical ailments and leading them to resort toalcohol and laudanum as orms o sel-medication, with the sad result that great poets (byhis calculation) died on average a ull eighteen years younger than great natural philoso-phers. As a result, he insisted that the people who were best equipped to understand poetswere not writers, critics or moralists, but doctors; and he strongly implied that i only By-ron or Cowper had employed a suitably competent physician, such as himsel, they mighthave had much longer lives and much more productive literary careers. In this paper, I aimto place Madden’s book within the context o contemporary medical thought, discussinghow the notoriety o the Romantics had, by the 1830s, allowed poets to be consideredalongside criminals and drunkards as people whose unusual behaviour was best under-stood in medical terms, and whose treatment was best le in the hands o the medicalproession.

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Posthumous Poems o Percy Bysshe Shelley Edited by Mary W. Shelley (1824): FromManuscript into Print Discussion o Posthumous Poems has traditionally turned on these twin axes: how arshould Mary Shelley’s inaccuracies and sometimes licentious treatment o Shelley’s manu-scripts be censured, excused or deended? And how ar was her success in making theworld ‘eel what it had lost’ by publishing Shelley’s Posthumous Poems in record time aerhis drowning achieved at the expense o promoting an apolitical lyric angel and nature-lov-er? Tis paper comes rom the somewhat different perspective o a textual editor. It looksat the making o the handsome and expensive volume, probing its conormity to and devi-ations rom generic norms. What can we deduce rom Mary Shelley’s air-copy notebooksabout the orm o the volume that emerged, her reasons or inclusions, exclusions and ar-rangement? As a material object Posthumous Poems has its peculiarities, though seemingconventional. Why ‘Posthumous Poems’? Many o its contents had already been published.

Why no section title or the first group o longer poems? Why is Alastor lineated? Can we



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say which errors and oddities come rom Mary Shelley, and which rom the printer, Reynell,who had printed Shelley’s volumes during his lietime, but o whose inaccuracy Shelley hadcomplained? And—above all—why so many past participial elisions in the ‘Julian andMaddalo’ Posthumous Poems? More hangs on minutiae than meets the eye!

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William Blake’s Final Imprint: Te Genesis Manuscript

[Part o the themed panel ‘Blake’s Books’]

Aer years o developing innovative graphic and printing technologies, and on at least twooccasions attempting to introduce them into commercial projects, Blake returned to thetraditional technique o pure line engraving in his final two graphic projects, the Job andDante illustrations. Similarly, aer developing his unique orm o the printed illuminatedbook, in his final work—an illuminated manuscript o Genesis—Blake returns to the an-cient genre o the illuminated manuscript. In both instances, Blake re-envisions the tradi-tional orms rom which his earlier innovations had evolved and in the case o the Genesis

Manuscript , he returns to origins in genre, medium, and narrative content. Te basic or-mat o the Genesis Manuscript is similar to the illuminated books, with Blake uniying thestandard unctions o a rontispiece (pictorial) and title page (textual). We also find an evi-dent rhythm in his use o pictorial headpiece/tailpiece pairs or each chapter, mimickingthe bibliographic standard o late eighteenth-century book illustration evident in letter-press volumes like Ritson’s Select Collection o English Songs (1783) or which Blake execut-ed some o the engravings. Blake’s experimentation with ormat in the Genesis Manuscriptevinces a complex synthesis o contemporary book illustration practices and medievalmanuscripts and, coupled with Blake’s own interpolated chapter headings and departures

rom the King James edition, signifies a startling revision o the Biblical creation myth. Tispaper examines Blake’s verbal and visual retelling o the creation narrative in his final worko composite art, arguing that the syncretic medium destabilizes the syncretic revisions.

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‘A journal o my eelings, mind and bod

abstracts text

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