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If the factionalization of the 1780s allowed the coexistence in Bentley of both liberalism and libertarianism, the partisanship of the 1790s would force him into the political camp of one or the other. Unlike his liberal peers, Bentley would become a Democratic Republican, or, more loosely, a Jeffersonian. This shift began in 1785 with the arrival of William Hazlitt, an English Unitarian and member of the circle of English Rational Dissenters that moved around Joseph Priestley. Hazlitt convinced both Bentley and James Freeman, rector of Boston's King's Chapel, of Unitarianism (this was in fact the beginning of Bentley's Socinianism, a term used synonymously), and Bentley and Freeman began participating in a transatlantic network of disseminating Unitarian pamphlets into the public sphere. They met only casual resistance for the first few years, but then more rigorous resistance after the beginning of the French Revolution. After 1789, that is, Jacobinism and Unitarianism merged in the public mind, and supporters of one were linked with supporters of the other. In 1791 when a Church and King mob in Birmingham, England, destroyed Priestley's property, Bentley in Salem came to believe that the path to rational liberation was being blocked not so much by the ignorant masses themselves as by the liberal elites who were encouraging those masses.

It was a scandalous age, an age in which the Queen was, at the instigation of her husband, tried before the House of Lords for adultery. This chapter explores the disruption of the boundary separating the public from the private that produces scandal, focusing on Byron's separation crisis, Hazlitt's publication of Liber Amoris, and Edmund Kean's trial for crim. con. Such scandals are inevitable when the major cultural figures such as Kean and Byron generated such intense public interest by refusing clearly to distinguish between their private and their public selves, between the performer and the role.

This chapter explores Conrad's literary style in the early years of his career, detailing how Conrad balanced his Polish literary and philosophical heritage with his new British cultural environment. It investigates Conrad's early short stories and novels in the context of English neo-Hegelian philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the context of the work of F.H. Bradley. It also outlines Conrad's connection to Romantic and Victorian traditions of nineteenth century literature represented by William Hazlitt and Thomas Carlyle, examining Conrad's narrative and his representation of time and history up to and including Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. By focusing on Conrad's interest in various forms of historiography, from oral narratives to seminal Western historians such as Herodotus, the chapter places Conrad's early work in a variety of new historiographical contexts.

With its representation of grain shortages, conflicts between the populace and the patricians, and the dependence of political leaders on the approval of the people, Coriolanus was a most topical play for Romantic period audiences. This chapter compares productions by John Philip Kemble, who used the role to portray the rightness of patrician rule in a time of popular unrest, with that of Edmund Kean, who returned the scenery to the mud huts of early Rome and diminished the haughty dominance of the central character. It then evaluates Hazlitt's claim, made initially in a review of Coriolanus, that imagination is an “aristocratical faculty.” The performance history of Coriolanus, the chapter concludes, provides the crucial subtext for Hazlitt's Romantic theorization of the imagination and helps us to understand Romantic anxieties about Shakespearean performance generally.

This chapter explores the meaning of concepts such as subjectivity, imagination, and mimesis that from the late 1820s provided a counter-current to the classical ideal. Although Pushkin was inherently conservative as a lyricist, he understood how the classical could become the Romantic. His approach to innovation as a type of creative recycling met the Romantic revolutionary ideal halfway. But from 1826, the path to Romantic subjectivity through imagination also lay open to Pushkin. Issues once given little urgency in his poetry became more critical from 1826. It is shown that the transition to a greater Romantic lyric was tentative, and that Pushkin only intermittently transposed his reading about the imagination and subjectivity into poems that are statements about the creative mind.

This chapter takes as its focus William Gifford's 1816, nine-volume edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, offering a historicized account that seeks to understand how the conditions of its making influenced not only its methods but its later reception and influence. The chapter argues that Gifford's edition presented its readers with a social Jonson; and that Gifford, having conceived of the edition in terms that ally themselves closely with, and were earlier formed by, a Jonsonian understanding of friendship, was himself the beneficiary of a network of later literary friends, who provided him with help in the making of, and material vitally with which to make, the edition. The chapter then traces the sources of the manuscripts and books on which Gifford drew, as well as his own long correspondence with Octavius Gilchrist, drawing from this previously unpublished material a new picture of his working practices from which is derived an account of why the edition mattered then, and matters now today. Taking as test cases Gifford's treatment of Jonson's biography (including the Conversations with Drummond), and his handling of The Underwood, Jonson's final, posthumously-published collection of poetry, the chapter explores the way in which Jonsonian models of friendship can be read against and within the edition's editorial practice. The later part of the chapter then explores the hostile treatment that Gifford's edition attracted on publication, surveying its early reviews as a way of setting up a long engagement with the most important of Gifford's critics: William Hazlitt. In Hazlitt's account of Jonson, the chapter argues, we see not only an explicitly hostile political response to Gifford's alignment of Jonson with a particular mode of Regency Tory politics, but a vivid imaginative engagement with Jonson's writings, chief among them his Roman tragedy, Sejanus. This material begins to set up the interests of the book's second part: allusion and imitation.

This chapter explores how the theme of the ‘self’ as an autonomous and expressive agent — the ‘Romantic’ self — is produced in texts. A case study of sets of works by Elizabeth Gooch and William Henry Ireland demonstrates that autobiography invokes a self which resists or transcends the transactions in which it is enmeshed. In courtesan autobiographies and slave autobiographies, the rhetorical effects of expressive subjectivity are also set in opposition to the transactions that determine the self and its text. This idea is developed in readings of two of the master-texts of ‘Romantic’ subjectivity, De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and Hazlitt's Liber Amoris.

The chapter focuses on the unprecedented expansion in both the production and consumption of print that marked these years. Writers who knew themselves to be addressing an anonymous mass readership responded by developing in prose or in verse a manner that suggested intimate address. This chapter seeks to explain why a mass‐produced literature directed to an anonymous readership should prize so highly the local, and cultivate so assiduously the intimate.

The chapter identifies this as the period when literature finally established itself as a professional occupation rather than a gentlemanly vocation. Literary animosities were so violent in part because this was a pivotal moment in which it might still be felt that to write for money was to sacrifice any claim to gentlemanly status. This chapter investigates this as a period in which writers both investigated and exhibited class insecurities.

The chapter describes the determined and flamboyant campaign in the decade after Waterloo to reassert the masculine character of the republic of letters which, many male writers seemed to believe, had been compromised by the dominant role of women as consumers of literature and their increasingly important role as producers. Walter Scott and his followers masculinized the novel. Byron produced in Don Juan a poem that respectable women felt that they could not admit to reading, and even Keats declared that he wished to write only for men.

The book concludes by examining the relationship between the kind of writing that the work has explored, the kind that De Quincey calls ‘writing for the current press’, and that other kind of writing, best exemplified by Wordsworth's poems, which has been more commonly associated with the Romantic period. It is, like the relationship between duellists, an antagonistic but an ambiguously antagonistic relationship, for duellists come together in a murderous encounter through which each ratifies the social standing of the other. The book concludes that the two kinds of writing are similarly mutually supporting, and that the canonical status since accorded to those writers now identified as ‘Romantics’ owed more than has been allowed to the fury with which their work was attacked.

The lessening of Mencken's influence was accompanied by the further decline of The American Mercury. Against slumping financial returns, Mencken decided to resign from the magazine. For various reasons, resentment against Mencken began to fester in his assistant, Charles Angoff; this nearly exploded when Mencken and Knopf appointed Henry Hazlitt, instead of Angoff, to replace Mencken.

Focusing on the range of meanings assigned to republican Rome and on the process by which Rome is compared to contemporary Britain in contexts ranging from Parliamentary debates to the writings of John Thelwall, S. T. Coleridge, Percy Shelly, and William Hazlittt, this chapter demonstrates how the diffusion of historical sense in British Romantic writing reveals the previously neglected relationship between the culture of republican Rome and the development of Romanticism in Britain. Attention to how these diverse figures interpret the legacy of republican Rome suggests that ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ were competitive and complementary fascinations; Greece did not replace Rome in the Romantic imagination, but the rise of Hellenism did enable sophisticated distinctions between Greece and Rome. By considering these distinctions, the chapter establishes Rome's crucial role in helping us understand the interpellation of politics and aesthetics in the Romantic period.

This chapter deals with the dialogues and crossings which took place between creativity and criticism in the early 19th century. The chapter explores the implications for the power relations between rival discourses. Having considered ways in which creative-cynical dialectic operates in the most distinguished Romantic poet-critics of the first generation, the chapter concentrates here on its manifestations in the periodical culture on which second-generation Romanticism thrived, when criticism and poetry were apparently at war with each other, but when complex mergings between them were taking place. A number of key texts (among others) Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb — all of them characteristic of this more self-conscious phase in the rise of criticism — provide focus for discussion along with the ‘pathology’ of high Romanticism.