Romantic Literary Families (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

243 Pages·2009·1.78 MB·English

by  Scott Krawczyk

Rom a n t ic L i t er a ry Fa mil ies
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Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influ-
ential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who
captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their
achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inher-
ited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and
journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms
such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels,
reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters
incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters
presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major
figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the charac-
ter of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy,
Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and
J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats
to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll,
Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull,
PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple
University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the
Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of
experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture.
She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English
Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in
numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folk-
lore, and narrative theory.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE:
Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid
Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson
Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau
Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson
The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider
British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield
Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders
British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter
Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk
FORTHCOMING TITLES:
Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore
Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Periodicals, by Alberto Gabriele
From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood
Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett
Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian
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Rom a n t ic L i t er a ry Fa mil ies
Scott Krawczyk
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ROMANTIC LITERARY FAMILIES
Copyright © Scott Krawczyk, 2009.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–60475–9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krawczyk, Scott.
Romantic literary families / Scott Krawczyk.
p. cm.—(Nineteenth-century major lives & letters)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–230–60475–9 (alk. paper)
1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. English
literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Authorship—
Collaboration—History—18th century. 4. Authorship—Collaboration—
History—19th century. 5. Authors, English—18th century—Family
relationships. 6. Authors, English—19th century—Family relationships.
7. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) 8. Romanticism—Great Britain—
History—18th century. 9. Romanticism—Great Britain—History—
18th century. I. Title.
PR448.C63K73 2009
820.9⬘9205—dc22 2008051917
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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To
Evan and Audrey
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Con t en ts
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Commonly used Abbreviations xvii
1 C ollaborative Dissent: Barbauld and Aikin’s
Sibling Pamphlets 1
2 “The Aikin School”: Adopting an Aesthetic 29
3 W alking “Backwards And Forwards”:
The Wordsworths in 1802/1807 53
4 Incorporating the Literary Family 95
5 G enerations: Conflict, Continuity, and
the Genius Familiae 135
Epilogue 159
Appendix: “To Mrs. Barbauld, at Geneva” 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 205
Index 217
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P r eface
Just as ages exhibit generic affinities, they likewise reveal collabora-
tive affinities—forms of association in the joint labor of textual cre-
ation.1 In the third century BCE, seventy-two Jewish translators of
the Pentateuch established a type of collective authorship that would
remain prominent through the Middle Ages, when textual collabo-
ration was the province of a religious brotherhood striving to pre-
serve a classical tradition for the nascent world of secular scholarship.
Nearly a century before the great humanist Petrarch was to shine
forth in a blinding display of literary talent and scholarly industry, the
dominant model of literary collaboration began its transformation
from one involving networks of religious orders to one constituted
by networks of friends. Indeed, the humble “beginnings of human-
ism,” according to L.G. Reynolds and N.G Wilson, “are clearly
detectable in a small literary coterie” led by Lovato Lovati and his
“circle of friends” in mid-thirteenth-century Padua (110).2 During
the height of the Renaissance, theater companies and their derivative
friendship coteries shared in the creative, logistical, and performative
labor needed to write plays and stage productions in the “notoriously
collaborative”3 business of theater. Friendship coteries such as that
which produced Justa Edouardo King (1638), the poetic tribute to
Edward King that closed with Milton’s “Lycidas,” or that which grew
up around Aphra Behn, flourished throughout the seventeenth and
much of the eighteenth century. In a typology of collaboration what
differentiates one model from another is the nature of its mediating
network.4 On its face, the Septuagint—that first Greek edition of the
Bible so named for the number of Jewish scholars commissioned to
produce it—reads not entirely unlike a page from Wikipedia. Each
masquerades as the result of one authorial voice. The difference is that
with the Septuagint we cannot follow a hyperlink that would unveil
with certainty whether seventy-two or only seventy contributors
made up the collaborative author function. Thus the traces of differ-
ent translating hands are essentially invisible. Those translating hands
themselves, however, were together in close company, touching, shar-
ing, and perhaps even exchanging material texts. Today wiki technol-
ogy mediates the electronic reach of authorial hands that may never
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