ROMANTIC METROPOLIS This collection of new essays challenges the traditional conception that British Romanticism was rooted in nature and rural life, by showing that much of what was new about Romanticism was born in the city. The essays examine the works and events of the Romantic period from the point of view of the urban world, where rapid developments in population, industry, communication, trade, and technology set the stage and the tone for many of the great achievements in literature and culture. The great metropolis appears as both fact and figure: London is its paradigm, but the metropolitan perspective is also borrowed and projected elsewhere. In this volume, some of the most exciting critics of Romanticism explore diverse cultural productions from poems and paintings, to exhibition sites, panoramas, and political organizations to do long-overdue justice to the place of the city both as topic and as location in British Romanticism. james chandler is Richard J. and Barbara E. Franke Professor in the Department of English, University of Chicago. kevin gilmartin is Associate Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology.
ROMANTIC METROPOLIS The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780 1840 edited by JAMES CHANDLER AND KEVIN GILMARTIN
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521839013 Cambridge University Press 2005 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-83901-3 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-83901-7 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgments page vii ix xiii Introduction: engaging the eidometropolis 1 James Chandler and Kevin Gilmartin part 1 metropolis, nation, and empire 1 Edinburgh, capital of the nineteenth century 45 Ian Duncan 2 Discriminations, or Romantic cosmopolitanisms in London 65 Jon Klancher part 2 urban radicalism and reform 3 London and the London Corresponding Society 85 John Barrell 4 Blake s metropolitan radicalism 113 Saree Makdisi 5 Envy rising 132 Frances Ferguson part 3 metropolitan spectacle 6 Urbanity and the spectacle of art 151 Ann Bermingham 7 Mystagogues of revolution: Cagliostro, Loutherbourg and Romantic London 177 Iain McCalman 8 The temple lives : the Lyceum and Romantic show business 204 v
vi Simon During Contents part 4 the new poetics of urban publicity 9 Manufacturing the Romantic image: Hazlitt and Coleridge lecturing 227 Peter J. Manning 10 The artifactual sublime: making London poetry 246 Anne Janowitz 11 Venice 261 Celeste Langan Index 286
Illustrations 3.1 Meeting-places of the divisions and general committee of the LCS, 1792 95 3.2 Meeting-places of LCS divisions outside London, page 87 1792 95 6.1 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, 88 Ackermann s Repository of the Arts, 101 Strand. Private collection 6.2 Anon. trade card. S. & I. Fuller s Temple of Fancy, 1823. 152 Private collection 6.3 I. R. and G. Cruikshank, Frontispiece from Life in 154 London (1821). Private collection 6.4 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, Exhibition 163 of the Royal Academy at Somerset House. Private collection 172 vii
Contributors john barrell is Professor of English at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, University of York. He is the author of various books on the literature, art, and history of the long eighteenth century, most recently Imagining the King s Death (2000). His next book, on propaganda and politicization in the 1790s in Britain, will be published in 2005. ann bermingham is a Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1760 1860 (1986), and Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (2000). With John Brewer she edited The Consumption of Culture Image, Object Text, 1600 1800 (1995). ian duncan is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent and forthcoming books include an edition of James Hogg s Winter Evening Tales (2002), a co-edited collection of essays, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (2004), a co-edited anthology, British Travel Writing 1700 1830 (2004), and a monograph, Scott s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (2005). simon during is Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author, most recently, of Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2002) and has published in cultural studies and postcolonial theory as well as British and Australasian literary history. frances ferguson is George W. Pullman Professor of English and the College at the University of Chicago. In addition to various articles on the eighteenth century, Romanticism, and literary theory, she has written Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (1992); ix
x Contributors and Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did To Action (2004). She is currently working on a project called What Children Taught Political Philosophers. kevin gilmartin is Associate Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (1996), and is currently completing a book on counterrevolutionary literature and culture in the Romantic period. anne janowitz teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of England s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (1990), Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (1998), and Women Romantic Poets: Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson (2004). jon klancher teaches in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at Carnegie Mellon University and is author of The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790 1832 (1987), as well as many essays on Romanticism, the public sphere, British prose genres, and the history of criticism. He is editor of a collection of essays on emerging knowledges in the Romantic period for Blackwell s Concise Companions series (forthcoming), and is completing a sociological study of new cultural institutions in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, Romanticism and the Unfinished Projects of Modernity. celeste langan is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses on media theory and disability studies as well as Romanticism. She is the author of Romantic Vagrancy (1995) as well as essays on the effects of print culture on the poetry of Scott, Burns, and Moore. Her essay, Venice, derives from her current book project, Post-Napoleonism, a study of how writers reimagine sovereignty after 18th Brumaire. iain mccalman is a joint Federation Fellow in history at the Humanities Research Centre and the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. He is also President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is general editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776 1832 and of the forthcoming collection from Routledge, The Enlightment World. His latest book is The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (2003) and he is currently working on a study of spectacle and special effects in late eighteenth-century Europe.
Contributors saree makdisi is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (1998) and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (2003). In addition to his work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, he also works on a wide range of topics related to modernity and imperialism. peter j. manning is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Byron and His Fictions and of Reading Romantics, and the editor, with Susan Wolfson, of the Penguin Lord Byron: Selected Poems and Selected Poems of Hood, Praed, and Beddoes, as well as of the Romantics volume of the Longman Anthology of British Literature. Essays of his appear in the Cambridge University Press collections Literature in the Marketplace, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, and Romantic Revisions. xi
Acknowledgments This volume originated in a conference held at The Huntington Library in January 1999, co-sponsored by The Huntington and the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. We are grateful to both those institutions for their encouragement and generous support. In particular, Robert C. Ritchie, Director of Research at the Huntington, was a supportive colleague and warm host, and Carolyn Powell and Nancy Burrows were unfailingly capable organizers. John Ledyard, then Chair of the Division of Humanities and Social Science at Caltech, and Susan Davis, Division Administrator, proved to be indispensable supporters in the challenging matter of institutional collaboration. A number of colleagues in Southern California generously and ably served as panel moderators, and we are grateful to Anne Mellor, Margaret Russett, Julie Carlson, and Alan Liu. We would also like to acknowledge the work-study funded aid of John Maki, Venus Bivar, and Mollie Godfrey, graduate students at the University of Chicago. The concept for the conference and the volume was conceived in partnership with Josie Dixon, at the time the commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press. The volume reflects just a small portion of the positive impact she has had on the development of Romantic studies. Since the conference, responsibility for the volume passed into the capable hands of Linda Bree, who has carefully seen it through the Press, and we are grateful for her continued encouragement. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors, not only for their fine essays, but also for their patience and responsiveness at every stage of this somewhat protracted process. xiii