Cambridge.University.Press.The.Crisis.of.Literature.in.the.1790s.Print.Culture.and.the.Public.Sphere

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THE CRISIS OF LITERATURE

IN THE 1790s

This book offers an original study of the debates which arose

in the 1790s about the nature and social role of literature.

Paul Keen shows how these debates were situated at the

intersection of the French Revolution and a more gradual rev￾olution in information and literacy reflecting the aspirations

of the professional classes in eighteenth-century England. He

shows these movements converging in hostility to a new class

of readers, whom critics saw as dangerously subject to the

effects of seditious writings or the vagaries of literary fashion.

The first part of the book concentrates on the dominant argu￾ments about the role of literature and the status of the

author; the second shifts its focus to the debates about

working-class activists, radical women authors and the Orien￾talists and examines the growth of a Romantic ideology

within this context of political and cultural turmoil.

PAUL KEEN is Assistant Professor in the English Department

at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. His articles

and reviews have appeared in Mosaic, Irish University Review,

British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Wordsworth

Circle, English Studies in Canada and Critical Mass.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM 3 6

THE CRISIS OF LITERATURE IN THE 1790s

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General editors

Professor Marilyn Butler Professor James Chandler

University of Oxford University of Chicago

Editorial board

John Barrell, University of York

Paul Hamilton, University of London

Mary Jacobus, Cornell University

Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University

Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara

Jerome McGann, University of Virginia

David Simpson, University of California, Davis

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challeng￾ing fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the

early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to liter￾ary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously trans￾formed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing

created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what

they wrote were raised again by what Wordsworth called those ‘great

national events’ that were ‘almost daily taking place’: the French Revol￾ution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrializ￾ation, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform

movement at home. This was an enormous ambition, even when it pre￾tended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion

and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia

Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don

Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; peotic form, content and style

by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare stud￾ies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response

or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed

is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of ‘literature’ and

of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern

scholarship in English has been founded.

The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by

recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both

with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing

field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series

published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both

younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and

elsewhere.

For a complete list of titles published see end of book

THE CRISIS OF

LITERATURE IN THE 1790s

Print Culture and the Public Sphere

PAUL KEEN

         

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA

477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain

Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

http://www.cambridge.org

First published in printed format

ISBN 0-521-65325-8 hardback

ISBN 0-511-03317-6 eBook

Paul Keen 2004

1999

(Adobe Reader)

©

For my father and mother, and for my wife,

Cynthia, with love.

In my introduction to the Third Part, feeling the importance

of my subject in its various branches, I asserted that, ‘LITERA￾TURE, well or ill conducted, IS THE GREAT ENGINE by which, I am

fully persuaded, ALL CIVILIZED STATES must ultimately be supported

or overthrown.’ I am now more and more deeply impressed with

this truth, if we consider the nature, variety and extent of the

word, Literature.

T. J. Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature

I went out drinking with Thomas Paine,

He said all revolutions are not the same.

Billy Bragg, ‘North Sea Bubble’

Contents

Acknowledgements page x

List of abbreviations xii

Introduction Problems now and then 1

PART ONE ENLIGHTENMENT

1. The republic of letters 25

2. Men of letters 76

PART TWO MARGINALIA

Preamble Swinish multitudes 135

3. The poorer sort 142

4. Masculine women 171

5. Oriental literature 206

Conclusion Romantic revisions 236

Notes 255

Bibliography 279

Index 292

ix

Acknowledgements

The idea that all texts bear the traces of many overlapping com￾munities of readers and writers has become an article of faith in

the academy today, but it is also an accurate description of the

genesis of this book. I am extremely fortunate to have enjoyed the

encouragement and insights of many friends in the Eighteenth￾Century Studies Group at the University of York where I wrote

this, and in the Politics of Print Culture MA. in the Department

of English at Simon Fraser University where I revised it for publi￾cation. First thanks must go to John Barrell, whose influence has

been challenging and liberating in equal measures. He performed

the delicate task of encouraging me to confront my own unexam￾ined assumptions in such a way that my gratitude, and my enthusi￾asm for the project, grew throughout the three and a half years

that I worked with him on it. Marilyn Butler, Stephen Copley,

Greg Dart, Leith Davis, Tom Furniss, Mary Ann Gillies, Ludmilla

Jordanova, Jon Klancher, Emma Major, Margaret Linley, Betty

Schellenburg, John Whatley and Jerry Zaslove all offered import￾ant suggestions along the way. Four close friends have influenced

this book in less direct but more fundamental ways: Steve Boyd,

Janice Fiamengo, Scott McFarlane and Tarik Kafala have all

insisted on the larger contexts within which this sort of work is

rooted. I hope that it has been faithful to their influence. The

input and support of all of these people were matched by my

mother’s enthusiasm and insights, which made this project not

only better but more rewarding than it would otherwise have been.

I would like to thank Josie Dixon and my two readers from Cam￾bridge University Press, who ensured that the process of seeing

this book through to publication remained a learning process.

Needless to say, all of the errors in this book are my own, but

there would have been several more of them if not for the diligent

x

Acknowledgements xi

attention and collegiality of Rachel Coldicutt during the copy￾editing stage. I was fortunate to be able to rely on the support of

the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. A President’s

Research Grant and a Publications Grant from Simon Fraser Uni￾versity helped enormously with the latter stages. Part of chapter

5 will appear in an article included in English Literature and the Other

Languages, edited by Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning (Rodopi,

1999), and is reprinted here with their kind permission. Marx and

Engels watched over every page, and were it not for their fervour

for batting crumpled-up versions of it down the stairs, this project

might not have gone through as many stages as it did.

Heartfelt thanks are due to the friends from outside the univer￾sity who grew tired of hearing about the eighteenth century and

who dragged me to Leeds matches (they never won!) and who

helped to make my years in York as entertaining and, frequently,

as distracting as they were: Terry and Olivia, Pete, Guy, Terry￾Ball, James, Andy, Mick, Opera-John, Mark and Sabine, and Tim

and Melinda. Tarik, Ben and Guy provided an unfailing supply of

beds, couches, floors and backgammon within easy range of the

British Library. Maggie let me pull pints for a year in the Golden

Ball. Cycle Heaven kept me on two wheels. Jim and Eric proved

to be ideal neighbours in the York Beer Shop. Finally, I am more

grateful than I can say to have been blessed with the company of

the ringleader of this crew, Cynth, who ensured that a project

which might at times have felt like a burden always remained an

adventure, and who during these years showed great wisdom in

agreeing to become my permanent literary critic and partner.

Abbreviations

AR Analytical Review

AAR Asiatic Annual Register

BC British Critic

ER Edinburgh Review

GM Gentleman’s Magazine

MM Monthly Magazine

MR Monthly Review

RR Retrospective Review

xii

INTRODUCTION

Problems now and then

Raymond Williams begins his foreword to Languages of Nature with

William Hazlitt’s report, in 1825, of a conversation about the dead.

‘I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see’, writes

Hazlitt, ‘would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir

Isaac Newton and Mr Locke.’ Williams’s point is that if ‘the use of

‘‘literature’’ there is now surprising, where ‘‘science’’ or ‘‘natural

philosophy’’ might be expected, the problem is as much ours as

theirs’.1 This book is rooted squarely within that problem. Its focus

lies along the disputed border between ‘the literary’ and the merely

‘textual’, and in the gap between definitions of literature in our own

age and in what is now known as the Romantic period, a time of

social and technological transformation during which literature

became a site of ideological contestation, generating a series of

questions with far-reaching implications: what constituted ‘litera￾ture’? What sort of truth claims or authority did it possess? What

kind of community should it address?

If an important part of the recent rise of interdisciplinary

approaches has been the exploration of the historical evolution of

the academic disciplines themselves, then it may be of some help

to our own debates to understand more about the theoretical ten￾sions of this earlier age, not least because those struggles found

their partial resolution in the development of the academic disci￾pline of English Literature, which is today the subject of various

theoretical challenges that aim at redrawing the boundaries

between the disciplines.2 The ‘enlightened philosophers’ of the

late eighteenth century were chastised by critics such as Edmund

Burke for arguments about the relationship between literature

and political reformation that are both wholly different from, and

strangely similar to, the claims advanced by the advocates of ‘the

new cultural politics of difference’ who are dismissed just as sum￾1