The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability

340 Pages·2016·5.42 MB·English

by  Emily B. Stanback (auth.)

PALGRAVE
STUDIES IN
LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND
MEDICINE
The Wordsworth-
Coleridge Circle and the
Aesthetics of Disability
EMILY B. STANBACK
Palgrave Studies in Literature,
Science and Medicine
Series editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
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Emily B. Stanback
The Wordsworth-
Coleridge Circle and
the Aesthetics of
Disability
Emily B. Stanback
English Department
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, MS, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-1-137-51139-3 ISBN 978-1-137-51140-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9
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Acknowledgements
I am fortunate to have remarkable friends, family members, c olleagues,
and mentors, a great many of whom have left their mark on this book. First
thanks are due to Alan Vardy. I cannot imagine a more generous mentor or
a better model of Romantic sociability, and I owe him a tremendous debt
of gratitude for his unflagging encouragement, friendship, and intellectual
support.
My PhD committee members, Nancy Yousef and Talia Schaffer, not only
helped me shape my dissertation, but also helped me envision how to revise
the project into what it has now become, providing wise counsel at several
points along the way. The expansive Joseph Straus guided me through my
early engagement with Disability Studies, and Joan Richardson and Josh
Wilner fundamentally shaped the ways that I think about aesthetics and
poetry. Earlier mentors, Maud Burnett McInerney at Haverford College
and Toni Giamatti at Hopkins School, could be credited with setting me
on this path in the first place.
This project would not have been possible without my year as
a Haas Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in
Philadelphia. CHF provided an inspiring setting for thinking through
some of the central questions of this book, and I am grateful to all of my
colleagues at CHF for their conviviality and for their valuable responses
to my work. My year in Philadelphia would not have been nearly as fruit-
ful without the friendship of Carin Berkowitz, Teasel Muir-Harmony,
and Michael Gamer. Since arriving at the University of Southern
Mississippi, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by fantastic people.
Thanks are due to all of my colleagues in the Department of English for
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
welcoming me so amiably to the South, and to all of my students, whom
it has been a real joy to teach and to learn from. Special thanks to Kay
Harris, Martina Sciolino, and Alexandra Valint for making USM—and
the South—feel much more like home.
Lucy Lead and the staff of the Wedgwood Museum and Archive were
incredibly kind and helpful during my three visits to Barlaston, the first
of which was made possible by a dissertation year fellowship from the
CUNY Graduate Center. The wonderful Mary Fairclough—a great and
wise friend, and a truly fantastic travel companion—helped check my
transcriptions of unpublished Wedgwood material. Without all of these
sources of support, Tom Wedgwood could have not emerged as a central
figure in the book.
I want to thank Ben Doyle and Tomas René at Palgrave Macmillan for
their kindness, professionalism, and patience, and Sharon Ruston and her
fellow series editors for supporting interdisciplinary work such as mine. I
am especially grateful to the manuscript’s anonymous reader, whose inci-
sive and insightful comments had a very significant impact on this book.
Thanks to Hannah Dow and Mary Stephens for their assistance in the final
preparation of the manuscript, and to USM’s University Foundation Fund,
established by Dale and Janet Shearer, for underwriting these efforts.
I presented early versions of several parts of this book at conferences
including the Coleridge Summer Conference, the Wordsworth Summer
Conference, NASSR, and ICR, all of which provided convivial and intel-
lectually rich environments under the leadership of conference directors
including Tim Fulford, Richard Gravil, and Nicholas Roe. Building on
these conference presentations, part of what is now Chapter 1 of this book
was published in Romantic Circles: Praxis Series; part of Chapter 5 was
published in The Wordsworth Circle, and another part of that chapter was
published in the collection Disabling Romanticism.
I am deeply indebted to the friends I’ve made through conferences
and CUNY’s network of Romanticists. Anne McCarthy and Leila Walker
have provided steadfast friendship in the years since we first met at the
Graduate Center. After a fateful walk in the Quantocks, Allison Dushane
became the best (mostly remote) companion I could imagine, and has
given me sage advice and a more sympathetic ear than I could have hoped
for; I could not have completed this book without her support. Over the
past several years I have also counted on the light and constancy of Polly
Atkin’s friendship. She and Will Smith have welcomed me in Grasmere
with unparalleled hospitality, and I’ve been sustained by the evenings I’ve
spent at their hearth—replete with poetry, laughter, and custard.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
My heartfelt thanks to Fred Burwick, Heidi Thomson, and Judith
Thompson for the warmth with which they welcomed me into the
Romanticism community. For their friendship, care, and companionship,
and in many cases for the specific feedback they have provided on portions
of this book, heartfelt thanks are likewise due to friends and colleagues includ-
ing Julian Knox, Kurtis Hessel, Brittany Pladek, Jared Richman, Ian Newman,
Brian Rejack, Kate Singer, Mike Theune, Giffen Maupin, Bruce Graver, Jeff
Strabone, Sarah Weiger, Noel Jackson, Mandy Burton, Heather Stone, Sara
Nyffenegger, Thora Brylowe, Richard Landsdown, Amanda Springs, Jill
Belli, Courtney Luckhardt, Chris Washington, Sharmaine Brown, Shruti Raju,
Ashley Foster, Kyle Volk, David Alm, Annie Ballocating, Meredith Lewis, Jen
Gelband, Vanessa Healy, Mike Bennett, Thad Fowler, and Virginia Sciolino.
The list could go on and on, and in the interest of Romantic sociability (à la
Charles Lamb—or Alan Vardy) I’m tempted to let it.
My deepest appreciation is for my family. I come from a line of female
academics, and I am grateful to my grandmothers, Elaine Bresnahan and
Margaret Stanback, for making it seem like a foregone conclusion that
I would earn a PhD just as they had. Other members of my extended
family, especially my grandfather Tom Stanback, the Stanback-Whites, the
Wilson-Sullivans, the Maartens-Klaubers, and Kris Coontz and Panpim
Thongsripong, have supported me in ways too numerous and important
to even try to articulate here. My beloved dog, Frederick, has been a
stalwart companion through many a long night of researching and editing.
This book is dedicated to my brother, Charles B. Stanback, who taught
me to love words, to love sound, and to love poetry; my mother, Michaeline
Bresnahan, who has supported my career in every way possible; and my
father, Tom Stanback, who lovingly saw me through my PhD, and who
would have been the happiest of all to have seen this book in print.
Contents
1 I ntroduction 1
Disability Studies 5
Non-Normative Embodiment 10
Romantic Medicine and Disability 39
Aesthetics and Romantic Disability 43
Disability and the Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle 46
Part I Medical Bodies 51
2 C itizen Thelwall and Thomas Beddoes M.D.:
Romantic Medicines, Disability, and “Health” 53
Beddoes and Romantic Medicines 57
Thelwall, Alternative Therapy, and the Citizen Patient 69
Thelwall and the Sociocultural Dimensions of “Disability” 71
Thelwall, Gough, and “Physical” and “Moral” Idiocy 75
Beddoes and “Madness” 82
Beddoes, Romantic “Health,” and the Aesthetics of Disease 87
Medico-Aesthetic Prospects 92
ix
x CONTENTS
3 Pneumatic Self-Experimentation and the Aesthetics
of Deviant Embodiment 97
Beddoes’s Panacea 100
Researches and Deviant Embodiment 114
Aesthetic Prospects 134
Part II Bodies in Pain 141
4 “An almost painful exquisiteness of Taste”:
Wedgwood’s Pleasure and His Body in Pain 143
Biographical contexts 148
Wedgwood, “pleasure,” and “pain” 154
The world within us 162
The mutability of feeling and taste 171
Wedgwood’s embodied example 177
5 Between the Author “Disabled” and the Coleridgean
Imagination: STC’s Epistolary Pathographies 185
Injured to Epiphany 189
The Young STC’s Body in Pain 195
STC and Self-Diagnosis 202
Coleridge and Tom Wedgwood 214
STC in/and Pain 222
Part III Embodied Encounters 225
6 Wordsworthian Encounters: Sympathy, Admonishment,
and the Aesthetics of Human Difference 227
The Discharged Soldier 231
The Blind Beggar 239
Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman 248
Mad Martha Ray 253
Johnny Foy, the Idiot Boy 258
Readerly Admonitions 268