Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the Making of English Literature, 1760-1830

317 Pages·2019·2.098 MB·English

by  John Owen Havard

DISAFFECTED PARTIES

Disaffected Parties
Political Estrangement and the Making
of English Literature, 1760–1830
JOHN OWEN HAVARD
1
1
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Preface
After the US presidential election in November 2016, I held a discussion for
students to share their feelings about the stunning upset that saw Hillary Rodham
Clinton, the Democrat widely favoured to win, lose to the Republican candidate.
The accompanying reading, from that week’s lecture, was from William
Wordsworth’s Prelude. One student was visibly shocked when I pointed out her
similarity in age to the poet when his own political hopes were destroyed. For those
who believed, as those who experienced the French Revolution as a blissful dawn
had believed, that recent progress had not only been inevitable but was assured to
continue, the abrupt collapse of expectations had been shattering. The surprise
vote for ‘Brexit’ that summer occasioned its own shock and disbelief. These events
were experienced not only as surprise reversals (or belated revelations) of public
opinion but as the stripping away of existing certainties: a violent rending aside of
political life’s decent drapery and pleasing illusions. Among those shocked by
the outcome of the American election, an emphasis emerged on taking solace
in  intimate bonds and small circles, a particularly Wordsworthian quantum of
solace.1 (Clinton herself did a lot of walking in the woods.) Yet initial shock also
quickly gave way—in contrast with the pervasive resignation and palpable malaise
following the British vote to leave the European Union—to renewed commit-
ment: the kind of perpetual resistance that we particularly associate with the sec-
ond-generation Romantics. In his blistering sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, Percy Shelley
accused the poet not only of having reneged on his earlier attachment to the revo-
lutionary cause but of a more fundamental betrayal: turning his back on a blind
and battling multitude to stand above the fray, encased in solitude. Lord Byron
developed a more idiosyncratic critique, voicing disdain for Wordsworth’s lowly
origins and appeals to ‘natural’ language. Byron’s own poetic concerns with irrep-
arable loss and the sublimation of self nonetheless resonated deeply with those of
the older poet. Yet rather than retreating into political quietism, Byron occupied a
more volatile remove. The prototypical Byronic hero, Lord Macaulay noted, was
‘proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a
scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’.2
In his own person, Byron adopted a complex political stance and public role that
combined jadedness and misanthropy with a version of the mental fight and spir-
ited resistance witnessed in his Romantic contemporaries and precursors, continuing
1 The circulation of the following quote by Anna Freud after the election exemplifies this response:
‘I agree with you wholeheartedly that things are not as we would like them to be. However, my feeling
is that there is only one way to deal with it, namely to try and be all right oneself, and to create around
one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.’ Quoted in Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 18.
2 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Moore’s Life of Byron’, in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, ed.
G. M. Young (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 543.
Figure 1. ‘The Royal Chace’ (1770). As the king’s representatives pursue radical printers
from horseback, the anonymous satirist ‘Junius’ lurks in an oak tree, watching on as frac-
tures develop in the ground below.
(Source: British Museum, AN364953001. © Trustees of the British Museum.)
Preface vii
to claim the mantle of stringent ‘opposition’ (not least to the onset of a newly
emboldened ‘Toryism’ taking hold at home and abroad) alongside his distinctive
brand of cynicism.
This stark divide, between Wordsworth’s retreat from political activity into
smaller circles and the renewed commitment, voiced by Shelley if not also by
Byron, to political transformation even in the face of its apparent impossibility,
cuts to the heart of an abiding predicament.3 Fuller reckoning with these so-called
generations of Romantic writing, building upon fuller attention to their reckoning
with each other, reveals the complicated interplay between quietistic retreat and
revolutionary horizons, the bonds between men (usually men) in small numbers
and the commitment to mankind as a whole. The pervasive sense, exemplified in
late Romantic texts including Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and the final cantos of
Byron’s Don Juan, that political hopes, the human species, and even the planet
itself have been exhausted, casts these respective responses to political disillusion-
ment further into relief. In the face of dismantled certainties and impending crises,
retreat and rebellion emerge less as opposites embraced by mortal enemies than
alternatives embraced by men united in clinging to whatever hopes they can, on a
darkling plain and shrinking shoreline. These various movements, between salving
quietism and renewed idealism, between the depressed belief that possibilities have
been exhausted and the radical hope that spring cannot be far behind, provide
paradigms—particularly when considered in their dynamic interplay with each
other—for thinking about our own moment of eroding political certainties and
deepening planetary despair. ‘There is nothing in disenchantment inimical to art’,
E. P. Thompson has maintained, drawing a distinction between the layered disen-
chanted state and the apostasy he characterizes as ‘self-mutilation and the immod-
erate reverse of attachments’.4 The ‘withdrawal from the vortex of an unbearable
political conflict’ may cause one to clutch at sources of limited optimism, but ‘[t]here
must be some objective referent for social hope, and it is one trick of the mind to
latch onto an unworthy object in order to sustain such hope’—as much the case,
Thompson reminds us, for Mary Wollstonecraft as for Wordsworth.5
These complementary responses to political disappointment are not the subject
of this book. Although my discussions of political disenchantment, renewed com-
mitment, and more elusive kinds of disengagement, cynicism, opposition, and
3 The student mentioned above, incidentally, inclined squarely to the latter course: ‘I can appreci-
ate the calmness in Wordsworth’s poetry, I can understand wanting to go into nature, needing to take
some time to put yourself back together, to get back on track. I definitely had to do that for a day. But
it’s not enough. We can’t retreat like he did, we can’t give up. We just can’t.’
4 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, in The Romantics: England in a Revolutionary Age
(New York: Norton, 1997), 37. For Thompson, apostasy involves relapsing into ‘received patterns of
thoughts and feelings’ and a psychology that includes that ‘peculiar and vengeful kind of bitterness
which a certain kind of man finds for an idealized mistress who has disappointed him’ (62, 68, 63). ‘It
is easy enough to make fun of Wordsworth’s apostasy, which was in some senses abject, in his last forty
years’, Thompson concedes; ‘less easy is to conceive how he upheld, through all the preceding fifteen
years, so great a confidence that “fair seasons yet will come, and hopes as fair.”’ Compare his suspicion
about apostasy as a ‘stimulant to the critical faculties’ (including for jaded leftist intellectuals writing
in the Partisan Review closer to his own moment) (64).
5 ‘Disenchantment or Default? A Lay Sermon’, 59, 68.
viii Preface
recalcitrance take inspiration from studies of writers animated by the French
Revolution or estranged by its failure, this study does not address Wordsworth and
his generation of Romantic poets directly, whether critically or sympathetically
(except for Robert Southey, the former radical turned Poet Laureate, whom Byron
scathingly derided for having turned out ‘Tory at last’). With the crucial exception
of Byron, ever an exceptional figure, I do not address Romantic writers animated
by the ‘spirit’ of revolution, whether radical politicians like John Thelwall, radical
nationalists like Sydney Owenson, or radical outsiders like William Blake. The
French Revolution was unprecedented: electrifying and inspiring, galvanizing
and terrifying. The subsequent decades transformed the relationships—real and
imagined—between political organization, religious practice, public feeling, and
literary expression.6 Rather than foregrounding the French Revolution and its frac-
tal refashioning across subsequent decades, this book instead adopts a diagonal
course through the long Romantic period that locates these developments within
broader contexts and against deeper histories of unrest.7 In the first instance, this
means approaching the post-1789 period in relation to the global ‘age of revolu-
tions’ that began several decades earlier; this book pays particular attention to the
neglected discontent and unrest within Britain during the decades surrounding
6 These developments and the enduring transformations to which they helped to give rise have
attracted extensive attention. See, inter alia, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Vintage, 1966); John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Georgina Green, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty
and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kevin Gilmartin, Print
Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Andrew Franta, Romanticism and the Rise of the Mass Public (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the
Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Daniel E. White,
Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Mark
Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Harriet Guest, Unbounded Attachment: Sentiment and Politics in the Age of the French
Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
7 Although beyond the scope of this book, the Haitian Revolution presents one—though by no
means the only—example of political disaffection in this period that promised to trouble Euro-
Atlantic society and its constitutive exploitation of unfree racialized labour. Emphasizing the global
scope of upheaval in the 1790s, Ashley L. Cohen reminds us that ‘[i]n Ireland, England, India, and
Jamaica, the Jacobin crisis was fueled by extreme levels of worker disaffection and resistance to Britain’s
imperial-capitalist world order’ and contends that this ‘global Jacobin crisis threw into relief the ease
with which processes of exploitation, dispossession, and political and economic oppression subverted
boundaries between the domestic and the imperial, free and unfree labor, the East and West Indies.’
‘Wage Slavery, Oriental Despotism, and Global Labor Management in Maria Edgeworth’s Popular
Tales’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55 (2014), 195. The West Indian slave plant-
ations obliquely alluded to in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee present
an outer limit for this book’s more delimited concerns with disaffected political energies, amplifying
the forces that promise to disrupt politics ‘at home’—a designation already fractured by the appendage
of Ireland and parallel exclusion of the English working classes from political recognition—with
reminders of the wider world in which the domestic polity was inescapably implicated. Given the
limited control of Sir Thomas Bertram over Mansfield Park, David Bartine and Eileen Maguire, draw-
ing upon Edward Said’s seminal discussion of the inseparable binds between ‘home’ and overseas
imperial activity in Austen’s novel, intriguingly ask whether we must not ‘entertain the possibility of
some sort of parallel creeping disintegration and potential rebellion’ at his Antigua slave plantation.
‘Contrapuntal Critical Readings of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: Resolving Edward Said’s Paradox’,
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 11 (2010), 47.
Preface ix
the American Revolution. This book similarly locates the 1760–1830 period
within histories of partisan contestation that span the long eighteenth century as a
whole. In addition to looking ahead to transformed governing practices that
accompanied the onset of nineteenth-century liberalism, this book looks back-
wards: to the tangled legacies bound up with Whig and Tory party labels and
increasingly rickety post-1688 political structures.8 The disenchantment, reimag-
ined horizons, and radical contestation (including the rise of a mass public and
incipient democratic reforms) following the French Revolution remain crucial to
thinking about political estrangement in this period. Yet in giving those develop-
ments too much centrality, this book contends, we risk eclipsing the variously
distanced, conflicted, antagonistic, and simply confused relationships to politics
that I emphasize here—from familiar and mundane kinds of grumbling about
‘politics’, to more subtle challenges to the status quo, to the heterogeneous con-
stituencies that hovered at the margins of political activity and the alternative per-
spectives these disaffected parties helped make available. Bringing an untidier
understanding of the histories shaping political activity together with attention to
an expanded period of upheaval, this book accordingly returns a wider array of
relationships with politics and understandings of ‘political’ writing to view, argu-
ing in particular for an expanded understanding of the ‘parties’ animating political
activity. Disaffected Parties thus examines the often uncertain relationships between
disaffected responses to politics of various stripes and the changing terrain of pol-
itical activity, during a moment in which partisan dynamics were at times fluid
(in contrast with the ‘Rage of Parties’ in the early eighteenth century and subsequent
instances of partisan deadlock) and when politics more widely was not yet domin-
ated by the regulatory, governmental norms and liberal ideals that took hold in the
nineteenth century—and that continue to shape, if not distort, our understanding
of politics in the present.
Byron’s own disaffection encompassed his radical detachment from the country
of his birth and the trappings of his earlier life; it extended at its furthest, Swiftian
extreme to his repudiation of human society as such. This radical estrangement
nonetheless coincided with an abiding attachment to his Whig party identity. At a
remove both from the remnants of his party and the changing guises of o ppositional
political activity (he was no fan of the ‘rabble’), his writings show how continuing
attachment to partisan identities—even amidst political estrangement and the
opening of altogether more radical possibilities—might reveal alternative political
horizons, even and perhaps especially as those commitments confronted their own
frustration, incoherence, or obsolescence. These competing tendencies are on dis-
play in a journal for January 1814, in which Byron noted the ‘sad enmity with the
Whigs’ created by a friend’s criticisms of Charles James Fox, the earlier Whig hero,
in an article for the Quarterly Review. ‘As for me,’ Byron continued, in a now familiar
8 The terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ carried wayward legacies. Established as political identities in the
later seventeenth century, they were first employed as insults, derived from names for Scottish religious
rebels and Irish Catholic highwaymen. See Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion,
and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–8.