On Gothic Romanticism; or, Wordsworth's Poetry and the English Political Imagination
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A research presentation on the MLA prize-winning book 'Gothic Romanticism'
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On Gothic Romanticism; or, Wordsworth's Poetry and the English Political Imagination
- 2. Thomas J E Duggett 13 December 2011 Centre for Research in Language, Culture and Communication
- 3. •Centre for Research in Language, Culture, and Communication •introduction to my research and Gothic Romanticism (2010) •‘flavour’ of chapters 1, 2, (reading pack – excerpts) •‘reading’ from chapter 3 •further directions and new research •Q&A
- 4. Research Overview PhD (University of St Andrews, 2007) ‘Wordsworth’s Gothic Politics: a study of the poetry and prose, 1794-1814’; supervisors Prof. Nick Roe, Dr. Susan Manly historically-informed ‘new formalist’ approach to literary studies loosely affiliated to ‘new historicism’ (anecdote, fore/back-ground) how literary form is inflected by other cultural forms and registers historical change Romanticism (late C18th-early C19th), esp. William Wordsworth (WW) Periodicals Prints Education Manuals Pamphlets Spectacles http://gothicromanticism.weebly.com/
- 5. Palgrave Macmillan Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
- 6. Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars Citation: Tom Duggett’s Gothic Romanticism is a compellingly ambitious study of the pursuit of a purer and better gothic in late- eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England. Focusing on Wordsworth and the Lake Poets’ attempt to refine a coarser, more sensational gothic as set forth in the novels of Radcliffe and Scott and in antiquarian curiosities, Duggett weaves sustained analysis of their poetry with thoughtful commentary on medieval architectural imagery and history, the turn to conservative politics, and educational reform. This multileveled investigation demonstrates in engaging prose the centrality of a cultivated rhetoric of a gothic aesthetic in this period while provocatively suggesting its relevance to a post-9/11 era where architecture “has assumed an importance that seemed without precedent.” Gothic Romanticism goes far in detailing such a poetic, cultural, and historical precedent. Positive Reviews from major research journals and leading The Wordsworth Circle scholars ‘excellent … an education in the dynamic fusion of the poetic and the constitutional imagination’ Romanticism ‘thoroughly researched … a genuine contribution to the study of Wordsworth’s career’ Prof. Nick Groom, University of Exeter ‘refreshingly historicist and culturally ambitious … [developing] sophisticated new models of both
- 7. Gothic Romanticism Explores the role of first generation British Romantics in formation of medievalist ‘Gothic’ national identity (C19th Gothic Revival; analogy to post-9/11 world) Correlates ‘Gothic’ projects of Romantic poets with notable historical and political episodes (close historicist reading) A new account of Romanticism, showing the fusion of the poetic and the constitutional imagination New account of Wordsworth as ‘Gothic’ founder Recovers centrality of neglected texts (esp. Cintra) Key Themes: •Revolution and Tradition Winner of the 2011 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars •War and Nationalism Bestseller in Palgrave Macmillan ‘Nineteenth Century Major Lives and •Education and Class Letters’ series in UK (Jan-July 2011) Held by hundreds of research Key Texts: libraries worldwide Salisbury Plain (1794) – uncanny and politics The Prelude (1805) – childhood and identity Convention of Cintra (1809) – war and Romantic conservatism The Excursion (1814) – epic and education
- 8. the ‘cast’
- 9. kernel: analogy in Preface to The Excursion (1814) between The Prelude and ‘the Anti-chapel of a gothic Church’: [The Prelude ] is biographical, and conducts the history of the Author’s mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself [The Recluse ]; and the two Works have the same kind of relation to each other, if he may so express himself, as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a gothic Church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor Pieces, which have been long before the Public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive Reader to have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses ordinarily included in those Edifices…
- 10. what does the analogy mean? architectural models of a ‘gothic Church’? change from 1805 ‘portico … part of the same building’
- 11. use analogy to reconstruct absent church ‘body’, The Recluse? related to Hurd, Percy, Mackintosh on ‘Gothic poetry’? Hurd (1762): the Gothic architecture has its own rules … as well as the Grecian… The same observation holds of the two types of poetry … Percy (1765): Shakespeare in ‘a lineal descent from the ancient historical songs of the Gothic Bards and Scalds’ Mackintosh (1813): We have successively cultivated a Gothic poetry from nature, a classical poetry from imitation, and a second Gothic from the study of our own ancient poets’
- 12. Research – cultural polysemy of Gothic links radical and conservative politics, native and exotic spans discourses of architecture, politics, literature e.g. Gentleman’s Magazine (1739): proposed rebuilding of Parliament House should be done “intirely in the antient Gothick Stile, after one of those excellent Plans left us by our Saxon Ancestors” equates “the bold Arches and the solid Pillars” of “old hospitable Gothick halls” with the solidity of the “old Gothick Constitution”: John Carter, in GM (1799): no better way to “aid the general cause” against French “innovation” than to “stimulate my countrymen to think well of their own national memorials” (GM 69 (1799), 190)
- 13. Maurice Levy: “Gothic” is “historically dated response of the English psyche to what was happening on the far side of the Channel” after 1789 historically-calibrated national-imaginary “regression” to the ethos of the period before Enlightenment e.g. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) French Revolution ends “age of chivalry”; “cold sluggishness” of English “national character” unchanged since C14th vs. over-enlightened French Key concept: Revolution + Tradition = Gothic Politics GR correlates various literary Gothic projects with notable episodes in development of Gothic culture: French Rev & Brit counter-rev, Peninsular War, national education, etc.
- 14. • situates Wordsworth in literary-historical and political discourses of Gothic • through close contextual reading of the Preface to The Excursion (1814) - oeuvre cf. a “gothic Church” • charts Wordsworth’s attitude & Gothic analogy against changing political and cultural circumstances from 1789 to 1850 • discusses cultural Gothicism in literary periodicals, poetry collections (Lyrical Ballads), political pamphlets, books on the picturesque, lecture courses, etc. • Reading (37, 39)
- 15. Focus on Salisbury Plain (1794) explores antiquarian orientation of reform movements in France and Britain in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and the radicalizing effects of the outbreak of war in 1793 Wordsworth develops “radical Gothic” poetry: a poetry that sought to show the corrupted foundations on which Britain’s “Gothic” constitution stood network of cultural signs (Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral & Magna Carta) made Salisbury Plain legible in 1793-4 as a “map” of British history ‘Gothic’ legacy – materialized on SP by Magna Carta at Salisbury Cathedral (Gothic cathedral = Gothic England) SP contains visions of ancient ‘Celtic’ human sacrifice – wicker man – keyed to Terror in France & counter-terror of Pitt ministry, treason trials etc. Salisbury cathedral is ‘lost in the blank sky’ – symbolic loss of ‘Gothic’ England SP thus interrogates conservative English Gothic narrative of “Celtic night” giving way to “present grandeur” concludes with reflections on the links between Salisbury Plain and better known work, “Tintern Abbey” Reading: 90-95
- 16. ‘By Gothic Virtue Won’ Romantic Poets Fighting the Peninsular War Chapter Three of Gothic Romanticism – a summary
- 17. Peninsular War (Nap. Wars in Spain & Portugal) the key episode in Lake Poets thinking about nation Spanish Revolution of 1808 Edinburgh Review scandalously implied old Jacobins could now speak freely again new revolution allows WW & Lake Poets to move from dissent to loyalism ‘progressive Gothic politics’ developed in key text The Convention of Cintra (also in Letters on Spaniards, Roderick, etc.) birth of a British and pan-European Romantic Conservatism, to triumph after 1815
- 18. Our Spain is a Gothic edifice, made up of morsels, with as many forces, privileges, legislations, and customs, as there are provinces. Public spirit does not exist in her at all. Marquis of Urquijo to General Cuesta, 13 April 1808 (qtd. in M. de Pradt, Mémoires Historiques sur la Révolution D’Espagne (Paris, 1816))
- 19. Tiddy-Doll, the great French-Gingerbread-Baker by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, 23 January 1806
- 20. The interests of my House and of my Empire demand that the Bourbons should cease to reign in Spain! Countries where monks rule are easy to conquer! Napoleon Bonaparte, 19 April 1808
- 21. olis hed re ab gh ts a constitution u da l ri a Ki ng and a free fe here are provinces eroys as t as many vic
- 22. • ‘A war of partisans’ • ‘The Cortes will be assembled’ • ‘Without any necessity that the vile French should come to instruct us’
- 23. [Europe] is virtually one great state … The whole of the polity and economy of every country in Europe has been derived from … the old Germanic or Gothic custumary … Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (London, 1796)
- 24. La Gratitud al Inventor Ingles del Toro Español by Anon., c. 1808
- 25. Spanish-patriots attacking the French-Banditti – loyal Britons lending a lift by James Gillray, published by Hannah Humphrey, 15 August 1808
- 26. The Noble Spaniards, or Britannia assisting the Cause of Freedom all over the world, whither Friend or Foe, by George Cruikshank, published by S. W. Fores, 20 July 1808
- 27. … something like the days of old as we poets and romancers represent them, – something like the best part of chivalry – and the career of that cursed monkey nation is stopped!
- 29. [C]ould we bring within the field of imagination, the devastation effected in the moral world, by [Napoleon’s] violent removal of old customs, by … the soul- sickening sense of unsteadiness in the whole edifice of civil society; the horrors of …the whole war … would present but a tame tragedy in comparison. S. T. Coleridge, Letters on the Spaniards in The Courier (1809)
- 30. Not uninvited this malignity. Full long relinquishing a precious dower By Gothic Virtue won, secured by oath Of king and people pledged in mutual troth, The Spaniard hath approached on servile knee The native Ruler; all too willingly Full many an age in that degenerate Land The rightful Master hath betrayed his trust. Wordsworth, Pelayo, June 1808
- 31. The Convention of Cintra (1809) e ris ing of th nt of the h e mome ean peninsula, [F]rom t he Pyren re of t e ; we we people h ty chang s] mind … ars as a mig nimated oleon’ ye there w a [Nap u ndred ich neously hree h e in wh instanta lags t g behin d the a it acts
- 32. [R]e-constructing, out of the materials of their ancient institutions, customs, and laws, a better frame of government, the same in the great outlines of its architecture, but exhibiting the knowledge, and genius, and the needs of the present race, harmoniously blended with those of their forefathers. William Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra (1809) Let us build our Compositions with the Spirit, and in the Taste, of the Antients; but not with their Materials: Thus will they resemble the structures of Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of Antiquity as soon as they were built. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)
- 34. [T]he … Works have the same kind of relation to each other … as the Anti-chapel has to the body of a Gothic church. [The] minor Pieces … when … properly arranged, [may] be likened to the little Cells, Oratories, and sepulchral Recesses ordinarily included in those Edifices… [T]he Reader will have no difficulty in extracting the system for himself. Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion (1814) [A] composition made out of fragments of … [d]eclarations from various parts of the Peninsula, which, disposed as it were in a tesselated pavement, shall set forth a story which may be easily understood Wordsworth, The Convention of Cintra (1809)
- 35. … a Gothic edifice, made up of morsels … Public spirit does not exist in her at all. Marquis of Urquijo to General Cuesta (13 April 1808)
- 37. Current Research: The Staring Nation •development into new project, ‘The Staring Nation’ • interdisciplinary study of poetry, pictures, and cultural nationalism in the Romantic period •theorize a general orientation in Romantic writing toward a visually-oriented posterity •explore a wide range of Romantic-era technologies, practices, and institutions of viewing •reception and dissemination within literary culture in magazines, periodicals and other print media
- 39. Questions? To buy a copy go to http://us.macmillan.com/gothicromanticism/TomDuggett Promotional code CONF2011 20% discount on all books in the series
Editor's Notes
- Wyatt – profile – built Fonthill Abbey Next him - Repton Women: Trimmer (top), Hemans (middle), Barbauld (bottom)
- 1798 Cologne
- Note the shift across 100 yrs - 1739 to 1834 - from Gothic arch. as material private place visited and straightforward simile between arch. and const. - to place visited in public imagination and complex mutual metonymy of nation and arch. whereby nation is composed out of individuals with both private and 'national existence', the latter composed out of an inward imaginative structure of links between such national touchstones as Gothic arch. in general and Westminster in particular This shift is implicit or latent in Gents Mag in 1739, but it is in Ww and others in Romantic period that it is elaborated and developed fully: gothic church of E is a key moment, since here the reader has to plan out an intricate Gothic structure.
- British Romanticism and the Napoleonic Wars in Spain and Portugal (known as the Peninsular War of 1808-1814) This topic arises from my research on the Lake Poets and the Gothic Revival, and it is the focus of the third chapter of my forthcoming book, Gothic Romanticism: Architecture, Politics, and Literary Form . In this presentation, I will give a digest of my research on the cultural products of the Peninsular War, including texts by the Lake Poets – Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge – prints by visual artists like James Gillray and George Cruikshank, and a range of other materials including newspaper clippings, letters, and diary entries. I will argue that the Lake Poets seized on the Peninsular War as a chance to reassess the period since the French Revolution, and to redeem Britain’s ‘Gothic constitution’. I will close with reflections on the formation of British nationalism. [SLIDE]
- On 13 April 1808, the Marquis of Urquijo wrote to General Cuesta to tell him of his despair of their Spanish motherland developing into a modern nation without French help. Spain was, he wrote, ‘a Gothic edifice, made up of morsels, with as many forces, privileges, legislations, and customs, as there are provinces’. ‘ Public spirit’, he continued, ‘does not exist in her at all’.
- Napoleon had already indulged his notorious penchant for king-making by having King Charles IV abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand. And even as Urquijo wrote to Cuesta, Napoleon was luring King Ferdinand across the French border into captivity at Bayonne. On 19 April, the eve of Ferdinand’s arrival at Bayonne, Napoleon’s view of Spain as a contemptible ‘Gothic edifice’ snapped sharply into focus. [SLIDE]
- Napoleon’s ideological campaign against Spain’s ‘Gothic edifice’ continued throughout 1808. On 25 May, as revolts broke out across the occupied nation, Napoleon pronounced that a ‘bad administration’ and an old monarchy had led once-glorious Spain to its present ‘perishing’ state, but that he would be its ‘regenerator’. His speech of 9 December to the Corregidor of Madrid proclaimed that [ SLIDE] ‘ feudal rights’ were ‘abolished’, and ‘henceforth everyone may … give free scope to his industry’. In the place of the Gothic state, Napoleon pledged [SLIDE] “ a king and a free constitution.” Or, if the citizens of Madrid continued their resistance, he threatened to [SLIDE] “ govern Spain, by establishing as many viceroys in it as there are provinces.” He would govern, that is, in contempt of the Gothic establishment of “privileges, legislations, and customs”: either by implementing liberal reforms, or by abolishing the state and its Gothic ‘morsels’ altogether. But Napoleon’s vacillation between promise and threat reflects the growing insecurity of his conquest. For the summer of 1808 had seen the growth of precisely the ‘public spirit’ that Spain was supposed to lack. In late June, the Captain General of Aragón, José de Palafox, published a manifesto that urged national unity and asserted the ‘elective right’ of the nation to choose its own king. [SLIDE]
- Simultaneously, the Supreme Junta of Seville issued a set of ‘Precautions’ that called [SLIDE] for a guerrilla war of resistance [SLIDE] for the convention of a full national assembly, or Cortes, [SLIDE] and poured scorn upon the new-fangled constitutionalism of the ‘vile’ French. Days after ‘Precautions’ was published in Britain, The Times proclaimed ‘Glorious News’ that appeared to confirm Spain’s national rebirth. The occupying French armies and the squadron at Cádiz had been defeated and ‘routed’, and the patriot armies under Palafox had given ‘no quarter’, treating the French as ‘guilty of high treason’. [SLIDE]
- Adopting something like Edmund Burke’s view of Europe as a ‘Commonwealth’ of nations with a common ‘Gothic’ culture, that was ‘virtually one great state’, the announced aim of the Spanish patriots was to re-establish the old ‘equilibrium among the sovereignties of Europe’. When in June 1808 the Spanish patriot army treated the French as ‘guilty of high treason’, then, it acted as the loyal army of the ancient Gothic constitution in Spain and in the ‘one great state’ of Europe beyond. [SLIDE]
- This oppositional attitude took graphic form in this Spanish print of late 1808, where Spain as Hercules and Britain as Mars slay the Napoleonic Hydra, against a background of Gothic architecture. The opposition was also staked out on the country’s battlefields. When, in December 1808 Napoleon demanded the surrender of Madrid, its citizens declared that they, like Samson, were ‘ready to bury themselves under the ruins of their town rather than surrender’. At Zaragoza, the French order to capitulate had been met with Palafox’s chilling invitation to ‘War to the knife.’ And the citizens’ long and heroic defence meant that, as Walter Scott put it in his Vision of Don Roderick (1811), the French gained less a city than a ‘bloody tomb’. [SLIDE]
- To many British Romantic writers, as to visual artists like James Gillray and George Cruikshank, Spain’s valiant uprising seemed nothing less than the resurrection of the culture of chivalry that Burke had seen dying in the streets of Paris in 1789. ‘ Gazettes dated from Oviedo, and gorges fortified in the Sierra Morena’, Scott wrote in June 1808, ‘sounds like history in the land of romance’. [SLIDE] Fill in the Don Pedro Cevallos controversy over Edinburgh Review article despairing of British success in Spain – which leads to Scott resigning his subscription and to founding of Quarterly Review – which, as Schoenfield has shown, operated on a metanarrative of history rather than (Scottish Englightenment) political economy, and which was leading organ of conservatism
- Spain had long been seen by literary Britons as the place where the terms Gothic, Chivalry, and Romance became interchangeable. Thomas Warton’s monumental History of English Poetry saw Romance spreading from Moorish Spain into a Europe already ‘seasoned’ by ‘the poetry of the Gothic Scalds’. So Felicia Hemans’s England and Spain (1808) figured the romantic uprising as the restoration of chivalry’s ‘Gothic reign’. [SLIDE]
- And so Robert Southey wrote to his brother in August 1808, describing the Spanish rising as [SLIDE] ‘ something like the days of old as we poets and romancers represent them, – something like the best part of chivalry – and the career of that cursed monkey nation is stopped’. [SLIDE]
- Coleridge’s Letters on the Spaniards in The Courier from late 1809 developed a similar Gothic imagination of the conflict. Coleridge rebukes those ‘Anti-iberians’ who ask despondingly what the Spaniards are fighting for. The question, he says, ‘unfairly attribute[s] to the Spaniards a want of [national] feelings’, or presumes that ‘a nation’s sufferings’ are limited ‘to visible and bodily evils’. But, Coleridge continues, [SLIDE]
- Wordsworth too sought to develop the Gothic language issuing from revolutionary Spain. [SLIDE] He composed a fragment poem in June 1808 that pictured the Napoleonic invasion as the result of the disuse in Spain of the ‘precious dower / By Gothic Virtue won’. [SLIDE]
- And he continued the development of a Gothic constitutionalism in his prose pamphlet, The Convention of Cintra , of May 1809. [SLIDE] The title of the tract refers to the armistice agreed between the French and British armies in August 1808 at Cintra, Portugal. For Wordsworth, this armistice had shown a moral cowardice in the British government quite at odds with the spirit of the British people. This contradiction had not been seen so clearly since 1793, when, according to Wordsworth, the ‘immense majority’ had opposed the government’s assault on liberty in France. Since the French ‘subjugation of Switzerland’ in 1798, Wordsworth claims, the roles of Britain and France have been reversed. Nevertheless, Britain was now fighting France with ‘desponding fortitude’ and ‘stern melancholy’ rather than with libertarian fervour. To complete the transfer of the cause of liberty to Britain would therefore require either a revolution, or a complete revaluation of the unreformed ‘Gothic’ constitution. But this is precisely the prospect that the Spanish uprising seemed to offer. [SLIDE] ‘ [F]rom the moment of the rising of the people of the Pyrenean peninsula’, Wordsworth says, ‘there was a mighty change; we were instantaneously animated’. Relieved of ‘the incumbrance of superannuated institutions’, the condition of Spain recalls the blissful dawn of 1789. [SLIDE] Meanwhile, France, ruled by a man whose mind ‘lags three hundred years behind the age in which it acts’, is now more decrepitly Gothic even than Spain before 1808. Like Burke’s English, with their ‘powerful prepossession towards antiquity’, Wordsworth’s Spaniards have a ‘predilection for all established institutions’. France had gone wrong, in Burke’s analysis, at the precise moment when it had elected to abolish rather than to restore the medieval Estates-General. And the Spaniards calling for the Cortes of their Visigothic ancestors had learned this Gothic lesson: [SLIDE]
- [T]hey … express a rational hope of reforming domestic abuses, and of re-constructing, out of the materials of their ancient institutions, customs, and laws, a better frame of government, the same in the great outlines of its architecture, but exhibiting the knowledge, and genius, and the needs of the present race, harmoniously blended with those of their forefathers. [ SLIDE ] Like Edward Young’s Plutarch who commended the ‘structures of Pericles at Athens ’, Wordsworth approves above all the Spanish Revolution’s instant ‘air of Antiquity’. It is the formulation of a progressive Gothic politics. The Spanish patriots took a similar position, and the Constitution promulgated at Cádiz in March 1812, claimed to have synthesized into one ‘fundamental law’ the ‘political laws’, the ‘venerable uses and customs’ and the ancestral religion of the nation. It was under this ‘Gothic’ banner that Spain would fight, until the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814. [SLIDE]
- What can we take from this study in political imagery? Besides the parallels with modern-day guerilla conflicts, the ‘Gothic’ imagery of the Spanish revolution is of central importance to a view of Wordsworth’s poetic career. The contest over the ‘Gothic’ constitution clearly informs the Preface to The Excursion of 1814. [SLIDE]
- Here Wordsworth describes his oeuvre as a poetic ‘Gothic Church’, requiring reconstruction by the imaginative reader from its ‘cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses’. To Coleridge, the link between the Spanish struggle and Wordsworth’s poetic career was clear. Wordsworth’s pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra was, Coleridge said, ‘almost a self-robbery from some great philosophical poem’. And indeed the pamphlet contains a clear prototype for the 1814 jigsaw puzzle image. The pamphlet, Wordsworth says, is [SLIDE] a composition made out of fragments of … [d]eclarations from various parts of the Peninsula, which, disposed as it were in a tesselated pavement, shall set forth a story which may be easily understood … In clear anticipation of the poetic jigsaw-puzzle offered in The Excursion , Wordsworth imagines the situation in Spain as a puzzle to be pieced together. To recall this paper’s opening quotation from the Marquis of Urquijo, [ SLIDE ]
- Cintra and The Excursion are ‘Gothic edifices made up of morsels’. But they are in fact the very opposite of Urquijo’s edifice of public absence. The act of collaborative imagination required to complete the ‘tesselated pavement’ or the ‘Gothic church’ also helps to construct the public realm. [SLIDE]
- A Gothic edifice has here become an embodiment of public spirit in a way that will be vital after 1834 for the decision to rebuild the Houses of Parliament in the Gothic style. The Gothic Revival, a phenomenon so central to the British national imaginary, is thus rooted in Spain – and British Romanticism’s – war of words against Napoleon. [SLIDE]