Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874

228 Pages·2005·1.692 MB·English

by  Stephanie Kuduk Weiner (auth.)

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA
Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London;
Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins,
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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph
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It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only
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All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings
of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.
Titles include:
Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors)
ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS
Editors, Authors, Readers
Dennis Denisoff
SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950
Laura E. Franey
VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE
Lawrence Frank
VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE
The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Ana Parejo Vadillo
WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM
Passengers of Modernity
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Republican Politics and
English Poetry, 1789–1874
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
© Stephanie Kuduk Weiner 2005
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-9335-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kuduk Weiner, Stephanie, 1972–
Republican politics and English poetry, 1789–1874/Stephanie Kuduk
Weiner.
p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-9335-1 (cloth)
1. English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Politics
and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Politics and
literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Republicanism—
Great Britain—History—19th century. 5. Republicanism—Great
Britain—History—18th century. 6. English poetry—18th century—
History and criticism. 7. Political poetry, English—History and
criticism. 8. Republicanism in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR585.H5K83 2005
821′.609358—dc22
2005041953
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
for Mark
Love and harmony combine,
And around our souls intwine,
While thy branches mix with mine,
And our roots together join.
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1 Republican Demystification in Politics for the People and
Blake’s Songs of Experience 17
2 Two Defence[s] of Poetry: Shelley and the Newgate Magazine 35
3 Cooper and Linton: Chartist Prophets and Craftsmen 66
4 Landor, Clough, and European Republicanism 97
5 Meredith, Thomson, and Swinburne, 1867–1874 133
Conclusion 177
Notes 181
Index 213
vii
Acknowledgements
Barbara Gelpi, Herbert Lindenberger, Joss Marsh, and Peter Stansky
oversaw the earliest version of this work, and I am deeply indebted to
their criticism and support. For their help in conceiving this project,
and their support throughout, I also wish to thank Florence Boos, Lisa
Cody, Regenia Gagnier, Robert Kaufman, Purnima Mankekar, Monica
Moore, and the Victorian Studies Group at Stanford University: Helen
Blythe, Kenneth Brewer, Jason Camlot, Lisa Jenkins, Diana Maltz, Richard
Menke, Paul St Amour, Ardel Thomas, and Kate Washington.
I am grateful to the many faculty members and students at Wesleyan
University, and friends in New Haven, who offered support and, in many
cases, read and commented upon portions of the manuscript. I wish to
extend a special thanks to Henry Abelove, Steve Angle, Yaron Aronowicz,
Sally Bachner, Sarah Bilston, Christina Crosby, Gertrude Hughes, Aaron
Kunin, Mary Livingston, Sean McCann, Carmen Moreno-Nuño, Jamie
Novogrod, Joel Pfister, Jill Rapaport, Joe Reed, Kit Reed, Shelley Rosenblum,
Julia Simon-Kerr, Ori Simchen, William Stowe, Khachig Tololyan, and
Katie Trumpener. Casey Quinn was an indefatigable research assistant.
I am grateful also to the reviewers and editors whose comments
contributed to the revision of this book. My thanks to Joseph Bristow
go back to his days at the Humanities Center at Stanford. I thank him
for all his critical engagement and encouragement.
I am happy to acknowledge the assistance I have received from the
librarians and staff at the British Library, the Bishopsgate Institute,
Stanford University, Yale University, and Wesleyan University, and I wish
in particular to thank the interlibrary loan and special collections librarians
in Wesleyan’s Olin Library. I also gratefully acknowledge permission to
reprint a revised version of two earlier articles, ‘“A Sword of a Song”:
Swinburne’s Republican Aesthetics,’ Victorian Studies 43.2 (Winter 2001):
253–79 and ‘Sedition, Chartism, and Epic Poetry in Thomas Cooper’s
Purgatory of Suicides,’ Victorian Poetry 39.2 (Summer 2001): 165–86, which
appear here in Chapters 3 and 5.
Finally, I thank my sister, Andrea, and my parents, Dave and Cathy
Kuduk, for years of enthusiasm and boundless generosity. With love and
deepest gratitude of all, for all his gifts, not least the inspiration he has
provided me and his faith in me as a scholar and writer, I dedicate this
book to my husband, Mark S. Weiner.
viii
Introduction
This book examines the poetic life of republican political ideas in late
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Analyzing the work of poets
who espoused republican ideals, from William Blake to W. J. Linton to
Algernon Charles Swinburne, this study shows how republican poems
reflected and refracted the theories of political change that animated the
expressive cultures of republican radicalism. Beginning with songs of
demystification written in the wake of the French Revolution, I trace the
history of nineteenth-century republican poetry through poets’ contri-
butions to the rebuilding of republican politics during the 1820s, the
proliferation and diversification of republican poetry during the 1840s
and 1850s, and its dispersal into aestheticism, advanced liberalism, and
secularism during the 1870s. Through this historical approach, I tell the
story of the intertwined fate of republican politics and republican poetry,
connecting the philosophical debates, organizational practices, cultural
institutions, and political events of republican politics to the formal
strategies of republican verse.
The argument advanced here has two principal parts. First, this book
asserts the importance of republicanism to the literary history of Romantic
and Victorian England. To some extent, that importance has been axio-
matic within the study of Romantic poetry, whose relation to the French
Revolution has long been a subject of literary-historical analysis. Yet the
central place of republican thought and political commitment within
nineteenth-century English culture has been obscured by the pride of
place afforded within studies of literary radicalism to the proto-socialist
and socialist political tradition and by period divisions between Romantic
and Victorian literature. Attending to republican poetry—Romantic and
Victorian, popular and elite—reconfigures the literary history of the
century to reveal a new series of ties across class and period, highlighting
1
2 Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874
both continuities and changes in England’s cultural engagement with
the idea of representative government, by any account one of the central
issues of English political history and the broader history of Western
modernity. The structure of this book follows from this part of my
argument, attending both to change over time and to poets’ intersecting
contributions to each historical moment.
Second, this book argues that the political work of poetry inheres
not so much in its hortatory messages as in its intellectual efforts. On
one level, this argument follows the claims made by republican poets
themselves that poetic forms were essential to the political role of poetry.
They tended to ally formal innovation with political progress, and they
also typically defined poetry’s agency in emotional and epistemological
terms: poetry, they believed, cultivated readers’ ethical sympathies and
opened their minds to a clear vision of the world as it is and could be.
On another level, this argument bypasses poets’ intention. Poetic forms,
I argue, made possible a unique richness and complexity of political ideas
by offering poets a unique set of tools for making meaning. As a discursive
medium characterized by explicit formalism, compression, and multiva-
lence, poetry organized knowledge and experience in ways that shaped,
as well as conveyed, republican ideas. Consequently, the contribution in
intellectual and imaginative energy that poets made to republican political
movements took place within, as well as through, poetic dynamics. The
methodological approach of this study, as I will discuss in greater detail
below, reflects this emphasis. My focus on poetic events and their
relation to political matters requires an interdisciplinary methodology
that combines formalist criticism with historical analysis.
The story of republican poetry follows that of republican politics.
Nineteenth-century English republicanism not only drew upon, but also
differed from, the civic humanist and commonwealth traditions with
which it shares the name ‘republican,’ as it did from the American, Irish,
and European democratic and nationalist movements that also went
under that banner. Emerging from the political upheaval and realign-
ments of the 1790s, this was a republicanism at whose center stood the
ideal of representative government: a polity organized according to the
principles of popular sovereignty and an expanded, ultimately universal
suffrage. It was anti-monarchical, at least in theory and emphatically in
spirit, and democratic, justifying the political participation of a wide
section of the citizenry as a good in its own right.
This configuration of political ideas represented a startling recombin-
ation of languages and positions that had long been opposed to one
another. Most unexpectedly, it fused elements of both the civic humanist