Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print General Editors: Professor Anne K. Mellor and Professor Clifford Siskin Editorial Board: Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck; John Bender, Stanford; Alan Bewell, Toronto; Peter de Bolla, Cambridge; Robert Miles, Stirling; Claudia L. Johnson, Princeton; Saree Makdisi, UCLA; Felicity Nussbaum, UCLA; Mary Poovey, NYU; Janet Todd, Glasgow Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print will feature work that does not fit comfortably within established boundaries whether between periods or between disciplines. Uniquely, it will combine efforts to engage the power and materiality of print with explorations of gender, race, and class. By attending as well to intersections of literature with the visual arts, medicine, law, and science, the series will enable a large-scale rethinking of the origins of modernity. Titles include: Scott Black OF ESSAYS AND READING IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN Claire Brock THE FEMINIZATION OF FAME, 1750 1830 Brycchan Carey BRITISH ABOLITIONISM AND THE RHETORIC OF SENSIBILITY Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760 1807 E.J. Clery THE FEMINIZATION DEBATE IN 18 TH -CENTURY ENGLAND Literature, Commerce and Luxury Adriana Craciun BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Citizens of the World Peter de Bolla, Nigel Leask and David Simpson (editors) LAND, NATION AND CULTURE, 1740 1840 Thinking the Republic of Taste Ian Haywood BLOODY ROMANTICISM Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776 1832 Anthony S. Jarrells BRITAIN S BLOODLESS REVOLUTIONS 1688 and the Romantic Reform of Literature Michelle Levy FAMILY AUTHORSHIP AND ROMANTIC PRINT CULTURE Tom Mole BYRON S ROMANTIC CELEBRITY Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy
Mary Waters BRITISH WOMEN WRITERS AND THE PROFESSION OF LITERARY CRITICISM, 1789 1832 David Worrall THE POLITICS OF ROMANTIC THEATRICALITY, 1787 1832 The Road to the Stage Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print Series Standing Order ISBN 1 4039 3408 8 hardback 1 4039 3409 6 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Family Authorship and Romantic Print Culture Michelle Levy
Michelle Levy 2008 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-54512-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-36066-6 ISBN 978-0-230-59008-3 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230590083 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
To Helen Zelma Levy 1921 2003
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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Commonly Used Abbreviations viii x xii Introduction 1 1 Family, Nation, and the Radical Education of Anna Barbauld and John Aikin 20 2 Coleridge, Manuscript Culture, and the Family Romance 45 3 Working Families and the Children s Book Trade 70 4 The Shelleys, the Wordsworths, and the Family Tour 108 5 Literary Remains, Family Editors, and Romantic Genius 143 Epilogue 165 Notes 172 Works Cited 196 Index 209 vii
List of Illustrations I.1 Adam Buck, The Edgeworth Family (1787) (Private Collection; photograph National Portrait Gallery, London) 1 2.1 William Shuter, Portrait of S. T. Coleridge (1798) (Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 49 3.1 Entrance of the Juvenile Library, Eliza Fenwick, Visits to the Juvenile Library (1805) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 79 3.2 Interior of the Juvenile Library, Eliza Fenwick, Visits to the Juvenile Library (1805) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 79 3.3 3.6 Baldwin [Godwin], Venus, Pantheon (1806 and 1810) and Mars, Pantheon (1806 and 1810) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 84 3.7 Frontispiece [William Godwin], The Looking-Glass (1808) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 85 3.8 Frontispiece [Wyss; ed. and trans. William and M.J. Godwin], Family Robinson Crusoe (1814) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 86 3.9 Dust, ho!, etc. [Ann, Jane, Isaac Jr. Taylor], New Cries of London (Darton and Harvey, 1823) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 96 3.10 Charity School [Ann, Jane, and Isaac Jr. Taylor], City Scenes (Darton and Harvey, 1818) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 98 3.11 Charity School [Ann, Jane, and Isaac Jr. Taylor], City Scenes (Darton and Harvey, 1828) (Osborne Collection of Early Children s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada) 98 viii
List of Illustrations ix 3.12 Holy Thursday, William Blake, Songs on Innocence (1789) (Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, 2007) 99 3.13 Little Ann and Her Mother, Frontispiece [Ann and Jane Taylor, Adelaide O Keeffe, and others], Original Poems for Infant Minds, v.1 (1804) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 101 3.14 Servants Turned Masters [Ann, Jane, Isaac, Jr., and Isaac, Sr. Taylor], Signore Topsy Turvy s Wonderful Magic Lantern (1810) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 103 3.15 The Hogs Council [Ann, Jane, Isaac, Jr., and Isaac, Sr. Taylor], Signore Topsy Turvy s Wonderful Magic Lantern (1810) (Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 104 3.16 Jane Taylor, Betsey Bond, A Person of Consequence, Monthly Magazine (1819), v.4 NS, p.112 (Osborne Collection of Early Children s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada) 106 3.17 Isaac Taylor, Sr., The Taylor Family (c.1792) ( National Portrait Gallery, London) 107 4.1 Mary Wordsworth, Diary kept during a Tour on the Continent. 1820 ( Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust) 126 4.2 Dora Wordsworth, Illustration to Composed in One of the Catholic Cantons (undated) (Harry Ransom Humanities Center, The University of Texas at Austin) 131 4.3 William Westall, Room at Rydal Mount (1840) ( Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust) 141 4.4 Margaret Gillies, William and Mary Wordsworth (1839) ( Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust) 141
Acknowledgments It is in turning to the acknowledgments for this book that I realize most fully the strength of the claim for the inevitably social nature of authorship. I am indebted to the research assistance provided by several institutions. In particular, I would like to thank the Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections, UCLA, and especially Jeff Rankin and Octavio Olvera, whose patience and kindness allowed me to explore their superb Children s Book Collection. I am also grateful to the research staff of Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust, and extend sincere thanks to Jeff Cowton and Rebecca Turner for making my time at the library so very productive and pleasant. I am greatly appreciative of the permissions granted by Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust and the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin to quote from several manuscripts held by them. This book is enhanced by the inclusion of many illustrations, and I am thankful to the following institutions for granting permission to reproduce these images: Dove Cottage, the Wordsworth Trust, Cumbria, England; Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress; National Portrait Gallery, London, England; Osborne Collection of Early Children s Books, Toronto Public Library, Canada; and Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. The enthusiasm Anne Mellor has displayed for this project from the outset has been incredibly important to its fulfillment, and I am deeply indebted to her for providing me with such a fine model of scholarly and pedagogical achievement. As series editors, Anne Mellor and Clifford Siskin have provided invaluable feedback and support. Betty Schellenberg has also been a generous and incisive reader for this project, particularly in all questions touching upon the earlier eighteenth century. And I am grateful to Andrea Keesey for her superb contribution as an editorial assistant in preparing the index for this book. A version of Chapter 1 appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19:1 2 (Fall Winter 2006 7): 123 50, which has been reprinted with the kind permission of the editors. Material support has been provided by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; a Beverly Berg Dissertation Fellowship from the x
Acknowledgments xi Department of English, UCLA; and a President s Research Grant, an Endowed Research Fellowship and a University Publications Fund Grant, all from Simon Fraser University. This project required considerable archival research, which has been generously supported by a Thayer Graduate Fellowship and a Mitzi Meyers Memorial Fellowship from the Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA; a Lenart Travel Award from the School of Graduate Studies, UCLA; and a Huntington Library Fellowship from the Huntington Library, San Marino. The support of my family made this book possible. The faith in me expressed by my parents has been constant, perhaps best evidenced by their willingness to support what must have seemed a bizarre decision when, in 1998, I abandoned a flourishing legal career to pursue graduate studies in English. I have dedicated this book to my beloved grandmother, whom I vividly recall escaping into her study to complete work on her own book; her memory is a continual source of encouragement and inspiration. As for my son Ethan, this project has quite literally shadowed his entire existence; he was born just a few short weeks after it was filed in its original form as a dissertation, and has had to endure, on more occasions that I care to recount, being told that Mama was working on her book. But above all, there is my husband Michael, whose commitment to this project has been unwavering, and whose generosity as a reader has been staggering. He is truly the best embodiment of a family author that I could have hoped for, and his influence is to be felt on every page that follows. Indeed, it would not be going too far to reverse Mary Shelley s remarks about Percy s involvement in the composition of Frankenstein, to say: I certainly owe the suggestion of more than one incident, and more than one train of feeling, to my husband. The author and publishers have made every attempt to contact copyright holders. If any have inadvertently been overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
Commonly Used Abbreviations AMG Autobiography and Memorials of Ann Taylor Gilbert BHR Book History Reader BL Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1847) BN British Novelists, ed. Barbauld CCH Coleridge Critical Heritage CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge CS Barbauld, Civic Sermons to the People EH Aikin and Barbauld, Evenings at Home ELTF Percy Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments F Coleridge, The Friend FF Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes GE Trimmer, Guardian of Education HCRBW Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers IP Wordsworth, Sonnet Series and Itinerary Poems, 1820 1845 JDW Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth L1795 Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion LB Lyrical Ballads LMS Letters of Mary Shelley LW Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. De Selincourt, 7 vols. MLSC Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge MPP Aikin and Barbauld, Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose OP Original Poems, ed. Lucas ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography PPALB Selected Poetry and Prose of Anna Laetitia Barbauld PPPBS The Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824) PSTC Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1852) PWPS Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839) P1815 Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) PW Coleridge, Poetical Works PWW Wordsworth, Prose Works of William Wordsworth RN William St. Clair, Reading Nation WALB The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1825) WJT Writings of Jane Taylor WMS The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley xii