30 Great Myths about the Romantics E-Book

Duncan Wu

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 607

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history.

• Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era

• Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister

• Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire

• Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes

A Note on Monetary Values

Notes

Myth 1: Romanticism began in 1798

Notes

Myth 2: English Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment

2.1 New Forms of Sociability

2.2 The Language of Passion

2.3 The Poet as Prophet

Notes

Myth 3: The Romantics hated the sciences

Notes

Myth 4: The Romantics repudiated the Augustans, especially Pope and Dryden

Notes

Myth 5: The Romantic poets were misunderstood, solitary geniuses

Notes

Myth 6: Romantic poems were produced by spontaneous inspiration

Notes

Myth 7: Blake was mad

Notes

Myth 8: Blake wrote ‘Jerusalem’ as an anthem to Englishness

Notes

Myth 9: Lyrical Ballads (1798) was designed to illustrate ‘the two cardinal points of poetry’, using poems about everyday life and the supernatural

Notes

Myth 10: Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads was a manifesto for the Romantic revolution

Notes

Myth 11: Wordsworth had an incestuous relationship with his sister

Notes

Myth 12: Tory Wordsworth

Notes

Myth 13: The person from Porlock

Notes

Myth 14: Jane Austen had an incestuous relationship with her sister

Notes

Myth 15: The Keswick rapist

Notes

Myth 16: Byron had an affair with his sister

Notes

Myth 17: Byron was a great lover of women

Notes

Myth 18: Byron was a champion of democracy

Notes

Myth 19: Byron was a ‘noble warrior’ who died fighting for Greek freedom

Notes

Myth 20: Shelley committed suicide by sailboat

Notes

Myth 21: Shelley's heart

Notes

Myth 22: Keats's ‘humble origins’

Notes

Myth 23: Keats was gay

Notes

Myth 24: Keats was killed by a review

Notes

Myth 25: Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein

Notes

Myth 26: Women writers were an exploited underclass – unknown, unloved, and unpaid

Notes

Myth 27: The Romantics were atheists

Notes

Myth 28: The Romantics were counter-cultural drug users

Notes

Myth 29: The Romantics practised free love on principle

Notes

Myth 30: The Romantics were the rock stars of their day

Notes

Coda

Notes

Further Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Guide

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 11

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An early nineteenth-century cut-and-paste job. In 1825, after Byron's death, Pierre Louis Bouvier hijacked Thomas Phillips's 1813 portrait of Byron and superimposed on it an image of the plumed cavalry helmet the poet had designed himself, perpetuating the image of the archetypal Romantic who died on the battlefield in the cause of freedom (see Myth 19).

Source: Paul F. Betz Collection.

30 GREAT MYTHS ABOUT THE ROMANTICS

Duncan Wu

This edition first published 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wu, Duncan.

30 great myths about the Romantics / Duncan Wu.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-84326-0 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-118-84319-2 (pbk.) 1. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. English literature–18th century–History and criticism. 3. Romanticism–Great Britain. 4. Literature and society–Great Britain–History. I. Title. II. Title: Thirty great myths about the Romantics.

PR457.W84 2015

820.9′145–dc23

2014046950

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Illustration of Lord Byron, Private Collection / © Look and Learn / The Bridgeman Art Library.

This book is dedicated to Catherine Payling and her companion,Poppy, the smooth fox terrier (1999–2013)

Acknowledgements

I pay tribute to those whose writings I consulted during work on this book, from those who played their part in the editing of scholarly texts to the many who have written short notes correcting errors of fact in such indispensable publications as Notes and Queries. I pay tribute also to those whose arguments and debates played their part in shaping my thoughts. I have not agreed with everyone – that would be impossible – but have striven to summarize them accurately and with respect for their views.

The reports of the seven anonymous readers who analyzed my initial proposal have been constantly to hand; I thank them for their comments. I have not hesitated to turn to friends and colleagues for points of information or opinions on parts of this book, usually in return for nothing other than a sincere thank you, or the cut and thrust of continuing debate: G. E. Bentley, Jr., John Gardner, Sarah Wootton, Glenn Skaggs, Richard Gravil, Peter Cochran, Mary O'Connell, Jane Stabler, Paul Miner, Robert Morrison, Cian Duffy, Seamus Perry, John B. Pierce, Shelley King, Michael O'Neill, Susan J. Wolfson, and Nicholas Roe. Harry Mattison deserves particular thanks for surveying this book from a reader's perspective, and providing a list of adjustments. Charles E. Robinson has been a friend to this volume from its inception; he read several drafts and offered numerous corrigenda. I am grateful to the three anonymous readers who examined the final typescript and proposed emendations of tone and emphasis. Ben Thatcher, Project Editor at Wiley, has been helpful on production matters, Janet Moth has been a scrupulous and eagle-eyed copy-editor, while Deirdre Ilkson and Emma Bennett have been wise and responsive editors; I am grateful for their guidance, and that of my agent, Charlie Viney.

Giuseppe Albano, Curator of the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome, and his colleague Luca Caddia, gave me access to Trelawny's earliest manuscript account of Shelley's seaside cremation, and provided the coveted photograph of his jawbone, published here for the first time (by kind permission of David Leigh Hunt on behalf of the Leigh Hunt family). As a member of the English Department at Georgetown I have been fortunate in having among my colleagues Paul F. Betz and Carolyn Forché, both of whom have advised me at various points along the way. Professor Betz provided some illustrations for these myths from his personal collection. The Master and Fellows of Campion Hall gave this book a home in Oxford in the summer of 2013, while Chester L. Gillis and Robert M. Groves, the Dean and Provost of Georgetown University, granted me time in which to finish it in the spring and summer of 2014.

This book has sent me back to basics in a way that leads me to reflect on the privilege of having enjoyed, at various times during my early career, the supervision of Jonathan Wordsworth and D. F. McKenzie – both of whom, directly and indirectly, shaped my approach to these essays. In turn I have learned, and continue to learn, from my students at Georgetown University, without whose insights this book would be the poorer. All errors, flights of fancy, and missed tricks are attributable exclusively to me.

My greatest debt is to Catherine Payling, who has assisted my work in countless respects. The dedication of this book to her and her companion Poppy the smooth fox terrier, for many years occupants of Keats House in Rome, is a small acknowledgement of all their endeavours on my behalf.

Duncan WuGeorgetown UniversityJuly 2014

Introduction

Eternal Spirit! God of truth! to whom

All things seem as they are…

Robert Pollok, The Course of Time, Book I

This book aims to reassert the humanity of Romantic writers. That is to say, its objective is to replace misconception and speculation with truth – or, where it is unknown, the admonition to be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’.1 For some reason, the lethal combination of being both dead and ‘Romantic’ has abstracted writers of the late Georgian period to the point at which they have been divorced from the reality of their own lives and translated into the mini-mart of fantasy: Blake the presumptive inmate of Bedlam in a cell adjacent to that occupied by the artist John Martin, Wordsworth the ravisher of his own sister, Byron the poet slaughtered on the battlefield, Shelley keeping his sails raised in bad weather so as to precipitate his own demise, and Keats born, Christ-like, in a stable. They were (we are told) hostile to the Enlightenment, the Augustans, and the world of science while being atheists, drug users, wife-swappers and rock stars. It is as if the truth were judged harmful to the literature and displaced by a dog's breakfast of conjecture and surmise.

Even the label by which they are invoked inflicts upon them a species of violence: Romanticism is a flashy but brazenly opaque term.2 None of the writers in this book would have used it to describe either themselves or the times in which they lived. From the vantage-point of an adult alive in 1805, when Wordsworth completed The Thirteen-Book Prelude, there was little romance to be found in recent history. The uprising of the United Irishmen was brutally suppressed in 1798 and again in 1803.3 Since 1793, Britain had been suffering the privations of war – and I refer not to minor skirmishes but to arduous and drawn-out battles, fought on sea and land. For more than two decades much of the world became a potential battleground, the main protagonists (Britain and France) being international trading nations: the first few years of the French Revolutionary War were marked by clashes in Pondicherry, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, the Windward and Leeward Islands, and Trinidad.4 No one grew up or came to maturity without being affected by it.5

What we call Romantic might more accurately be called Regency Wartime Literature were we to backdate the Regency, as some historians do, to 1788.6 Just as the optimism associated with revolution shaped the sensibilities of those who witnessed it, so the impoverishment of war chilled the national psyche. The defeat of Napoleon brought temporary jubilation but pitched the country into internal conflict, deepened by the Corn Laws of 1815 (which kept food prices artificially high), economic recession, widespread unemployment, and indirect taxation (weighing disproportionately on the poor), to the point at which the country approached something not far from insurrection. None of this would have struck anyone as Romantic, and it might be argued such a hopeful word could be attached to these years only as a misnomer.

Small wonder that a blowzy concept imposed retrospectively on the past has been a vector for misconception. But then, given the flamboyance of those involved, that might have happened anyway. The Romantics must be among the most mythologized figures in the canon, their lives recounted in print and on stage, television, and celluloid. Perhaps the explanation has less to do with the immediacy of their writings than with the eventfulness of their lives. I wonder whether that has been their undoing. To take one example, who could be blamed for assuming Keats and Shelley were among the most widely read poets of their day? But if sales are anything to go by, there were few people awaiting their next book at the time: less than half the print-run (1,000 copies) of Keats's Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) had sold by the time he died in 1821, while Shelley's , of which 250 copies were published in 1821, had sold roughly 90 copies by 1823. The point is that the contemporary perspective was different from our own. Today Jane Austen is one of the most popular novelists of all time but in 1814 no one thought she would occupy that status, nor did they suspect an obscure engraver named Blake would 150 years later be hailed as a literary and artistic genius.