British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic Nationalism

British State Romanticism

British State Romanticism authorship, agency, and bu r e au c r at i c n at i o n a l i s m

Anne Frey

stanford universit y press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Department of English and the AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frey, Anne, 1972– British state romanticism : authorship, agency, and bureaucratic nationalism / Anne Frey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6228-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature and state—Great Britain. 3. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain. 4. Romanticism—Great Britain. I. Title. PR457.F74 2010 820.9'35841—dc22 2009029787 Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/14 Adobe Garamond

Contents



Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Literature and the State in Post-Napoleonic Britain



1.

Fragment Poems and Fragment Nations: The Aesthetics of Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Late Work

21



2.

Wordsworth’s Establishment Poetics

54



3.

Speaking for the Law: State Agency in Scott’s Novels

88



4.

A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion

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5.

De Quincey’s Imperial Systems

140



Notes

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Index

199

1

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation at Johns Hopkins University, and my greatest debt is to Jerome Christensen, who helped me conceive the original dissertation and whose brilliant readings remain a model for me. I also owe tremendous thanks to Ronald Paulson both for his helpful comments on the dissertation and for the solid grounding his teaching provided me. ­Stephen Behrendt and my fellow participants in the 2003 NEH Seminar “Rethinking Romantic Fiction” greatly increased the breadth of my engagement with Romantic literary culture. And Karen Fang has my heartfelt gratitude both for her generous and astute attention over the years to this and many more of my texts, and for her friendship. I would also like to sincerely thank Peter Manning and the anonymous reader for Stanford University Press, both of whose careful and engaged critiques greatly improved the book. I only regret that I could not incorporate all of their wise suggestions. I am also immensely grateful to the editors and the production staff at Stanford University Press. I would like to especially thank Emily-Jane Cohen for her interest in and support for the project, Sarah Crane Newman and Mariana Raykov for seeing it through, and Jeff Wyneken for his careful copyediting. And I would like to express my appreciation to Karen Swann and my other undergraduate teachers for introducing me to the study of literature in an environment that was both encouraging and intellectually rigorous. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University New Orleans for supporting my research and to the Department of English and AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University (TCU) for supporting the publication of this book. Thanks also to my colleagues in the English department at Loyola for their unflagging support in my first academic position, and to my colleagues at TCU for creating such a welcoming environment. At TCU, Bonnie Blackwell, Karen Steele, and Marnin Young also helpfully commented on individual chapters.

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An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38 (2005): 214–34. I would like to thank Nancy Armstrong and the editorial board of Novel for their suggestions, and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint the article here. A shorter version of Chapter 5 appeared in Studies in Romanticism 44 (2005): 41–61 and is reprinted here courtesy of the Trustees of Boston University. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Robert and Eileen Frey, and my sister and brother, Linda and Alex, for their continued support of my academic work and of all my other endeavors. Daniel Gil has in so many ways enabled me to complete this book, as well as immeasurably improved it through his generous and intelligent readings, and Madeleine has kept me cheerful through it all. Such as it is, I dedicate this book to them.

British State Romanticism

i n t r o d u c t i o n

Literature and the State in Post-Napoleonic Britain

The nineteenth-century British state presents a historical enigma. On the one hand, after expanding in size during the Napoleonic Wars era, the state contracted, as a percentage of GDP, between 1815 and 1870.1 Beginning in the 1820s, a growing laissez-faire consensus critiqued government intervention into private lives. When the state did attempt to manage individual affairs, for example in the intrusive 1834 Poor Laws, it came under harsh criticism. Since government hesitated to interfere in citizens’ lives, its social and charitable functions spread across an array of civil and voluntary organizations, aiming to distribute charitable relief or educate the working classes. But while the state decreased in size, recent historians have argued that it nevertheless increased in the scope of functions it covered and in ideological prestige.2 Even when proclaiming laissez-faire ideology, the state increasingly entered into economic policy both at home and abroad.3 Britain’s central administration also continued to carry authority, even if its power was often hidden, functioning indirectly in a matter compatible with British models of freedom and individualism.4 The British state taxed its population heavily, even after it repealed the wartime income tax. And in

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the years following the Napoleonic Wars, the British government not only founded organizations to launch sociological and statistical studies of the newly expanded colonial territories and populations but also expanded such bureaucratic organizations at home, investigating the numbers of men available for armed service, rationalizing the army (containing largely Scottish, Irish, and Indian troops), and standardizing bank notes and customs.5 The army continued to exert a centralizing force, as it was deployed to combat riot and revolt at home (especially in Ireland).6 And the ideology of state power grew as the state claimed to be the space for ensuring citizens’ interests and well-being at home and as it ruled ever more peoples in the British Empire.7 C. A. Bayly suggests that even if the state decreased in size, “what was important, rather, was the charisma of the idea of the state” (Birth of the Modern World, 254). Local government, of course, continued to bear much responsibility for day-to-day administration, including running the penal system. This very diffusion of state authority into local and civic organizations, however, provided the occasion for debating who should manage government functions: local or national governments? A governing elite, or paid administrators? Only qualified ratepayers, an expanded middling class, or all men?8 For late Romantic authors, the diffusion of governing functions across civil agencies presented both an opportunity and a challenge. As they observed governing functions spreading into civil society, these authors asked whether literature could carry out any of the state’s tasks. To do so, they rethought literary agency in the context of state power. For some writers, this meant challenging their own high Romantic claims for the author’s singular imagination, and instead taking the state or state agencies as their subject. Many readers have dismissed these interests as reactionary politics; critics from their contemporaries on have complained that in their late careers Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in particular became tools of the establishment, churning out hack essays and insipid verse praising church and state.9 I will not deny that Wordsworth and Coleridge in their late careers were conservative in politics and accommodationist in policy. But like the other authors I study, they do not turn to the state in any simple manner. Works like Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State, Scott’s historical novels, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach in fact participate in a culturewide debate about the nature of state authority, asking how the state forms individuals into communities and nations, and who carries state power.

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In examining how late Romantic writers revise their accounts of agency and authorship as they envision their relationship to the state, I aim to study in its own terms a period that has often eluded literary critics.10 In part, critics have overlooked texts written immediately following the Napoleonic Wars because they do not fit into our conceptual paradigms; literature written after high Romantic poetry and before the Victorian novel has proven resistant to critics’ strategies for understanding and rendering significant both forms. Recently, several readers have begun to reevaluate the post-Napoleonic period and have discovered new genres like sentimental poetry operating in this supposed vacuum.11 This book finds another group of authors revising their aesthetic theory and literary styles in the years between high Romanticism and the Victorian era. I argue that this literature is unified by a shared concern with the relationship between authorship, the state, and individual agency. When we read Wordsworth and Coleridge in this context, their turn to the Anglican Church and British state appears not as imaginative failure but as an attempt to rethink poetic inspiration in the context of a new model of aesthetics in which perception is located within state frameworks. The late Romantics I study rethink both literature and authorship during a period of imperial expansion, rising nationalist sentiment, and increasing bureaucratization. And as these authors ask who acts for the state and how the state molds individuals, they explore the conditions of agency and subjectivity in an era of centralizing state power. I call this movement “State Romanticism,” and I argue that it reconceives both the state and the literary aesthetic in a manner we can understand only by studying the two together. For the late Romantics, the diffusion of state functions does not weaken the central state but rather allows the state to extend its authority over regions it had not previously superintended: both geographical regions, like the Scottish highlands, and conceptual regions, like the individual conscience and emotional life. Trusting the state to form individuals, these writers begin a trajectory that culminates in ­Matthew ­Arnold and that defines the state as the administrator of “culture” charged with cultivating and representing the populace.12 But more than later figures like Arnold, the late Romantics also investigate the conditions of individual agency within the state, asking both who carries state power and how individual identities are formed within a framework of state institutions. Engaging the grounds of agency also entails rethinking the nature of authorship. These authors question the Kantian claim that aesthetic experience points toward a shared human perceptual frame, realized through the

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author’s imagination. Instead, they suggest that state institutions structure our experiences and our perceptions, creating the very terms by which individuals perceive their identity in the first place. I have found Michel Foucault’s late work especially helpful in thinking about late Romantic authors’ engagement with government authority. ­Although Foucault writes largely in the European context about states that centralized earlier and more strongly than Britain, his work on governmentality is useful in describing both the explosion of government powers and procedures across civil society that we see in nineteenth-century Britain, and the way in which Britain combines a liberal insistence on individual freedom with government procedures focused on ensuring the health and well-being of individuals and the population as a whole.13 Foucault’s model suggests that the question of whether the central state strengthened in the nineteenth century is less important than the way in which administrative tactics served as a site for negotiating the boundaries between the state and civil society. His analysis suggests, then, the importance of examining precisely the areas of intersection between state and nonstate agencies, the grey areas where state authority shades into individual or local acts of power. Such an approach illuminates the strategy by which late Romantic authors engage with government authority. Although authors like Southey and Coleridge at times conceive their work (especially in the periodical press) as performing a service for the government, more generally the State ­Romantics ask not whether their work expresses opinions that serve existing authority but whether literature performs any of the state’s functions of cultivating individuals and shaping communities.14 To do so, these writers examine specific state agencies—in the examples I will present, the established Church, the courts, the navy, and the mail—and ask how these agencies form individuals into communities and nations, and whether nonprofessionals (including authors) may perform any of an agency’s work. As they place themselves and their own work within state agencies, the State Romantics share a second preoccupation of Foucault’s late work: both consider how individual agency is possible within a disciplinary structure that defines the field of possibilities open to each person. Critics who study the political functions of literature often take the early Foucault as their model for how literature operates as a discourse. Literature, they suggest, creates the ways of thinking that form power structures. Many of these arguments are indeed compelling. But the late Romantics do not see their power in this manner. Instead, they identify the state as the agency that determines

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how ­individuals think, feel, and perceive the world, and argue that literature operates as an accessory to state power. Focusing on the promise inherent in government administration, the State Romantics appeal to state organizations to restructure a society that seemed increasingly in flux. In postwar Britain, several influences challenged traditional social and economic structures. The end of the Napoleonic Wars dumped large numbers of demobilized men into the economy, and a postwar economic slump made it more difficult for these newly returned soldiers to find employment. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, these men lent power to the radical call for election reform and manhood suffrage.15 The issues of Catholic rights and of the status of Ireland within Britain further questioned who composed the body politic. And Britain’s increasing imperial expansion also focused British attention on how to understand the relationship between the various peoples joined by British government. In response, writers of various political persuasions considered what it would take to create a new social order. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge, for example, turn to the state as part of an increasing conservatism, both conservative and progressive writers found reason to locate themselves within developing national and imperial organizations. For conservatives such as Wordsworth, Scott, and De Quincey, the increasing demand for populist reform provoked a search for institutional forms that could forcibly mold the lower classes. These writers recognize that the kind of individual moral development they seek does not take place only in state agencies—Coleridge, for example, praises the Bible Association’s ministry to the working classes and Bell’s system for educating working class children using student monitors—but they rest ultimate responsibility for cohering society with the state. If conservatives seek order in state institutions, however, progressives find in the governing structures of these organizations a role for middle class people and middle class values. Although British government was far from a meritocracy, agencies promised to give positions to certain members of the middle class in a way that older aristocratic structures did not. For writers of all political persuasions the rise of radical reform and the growth of a mass reading audience raised fears about the status of the reading public.16 Imagining their work as part of a state, these writers hoped to find license and strategic power to shape their audience. For readers accustomed to Dickens’s Chancery Court and Office of Circumlocution and other critical portraits of administrative bureaucracy in the Victorian period, the late Romantic attitude to government can seem

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s­ urprising. Far from criticizing bureaucracy’s intrusiveness, hard-heartedness, or inefficiency, these authors entrust state bureaucracy to form individual morality, stir national identity, and improve the well-being of the British population. There is no single explanation for why the late Romantics find so promising the very administrative practices Victorians will later denigrate. In part, the Romantics simply have less experience with bureaucracy. The late Romantics write at the close of a period of wartime government expansion.17 But although the bureaucratic age is coming, national administrative agencies are not yet obtrusively structuring individuals’ private lives. The late Romantics therefore fantasize about administrative agencies’ power to build communities in a way that Victorians, hardened into a skeptically realistic portrait of bureaucratic paralysis, do not. In asking how individuals and authors participate in the state, these authors take part in Romantic-era Britain’s redefinition of the relationship between nation, state, and government. Before proceeding, I would like to discuss each of these terms. At its most narrow, “government” refers to the central political structure and its administrative apparatus, as well as to regional and local governing bodies; these agencies are, in popular parlance, “the government.” In his late work on “governmentality,” however, Foucault suggests a broader definition in which “government” signifies “not only the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, that were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people” (“Governmentality,” 341). Although the term is diffuse, he defines it most specifically as a set of goals and procedures: the tactics he refers to as “governmentality” seek to measure and improve the well-being of the population and adopt political economy and statistics as their primary investigative tools. These tactics spread beyond the confines or control of the state to individuals and institutions that perform governing functions. “Government” here includes the multiple disciplinary institutions that intend to influence others’ actions, such as the courts, the schools, the asylums, and the Church, as well as the individuals who take on such institutional functions (such as employers who dictate and enforce codes of behavior).18 But even if governmental tactics spread across the population, the state is inextricable from the process of governance. Foucault insists that we should not see the state as the origin of government. Instead, the state is continually shaped by the process of bringing government functions under local and central control: “governmentality” is “at once internal and external to

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the state—since it is the tactics of government that make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on” (“Governmentality,” 221). The state calls for greater central authority by locating perceived social needs and creating policies to address them, and the question of who should have responsibility for any particular problem incites debates over the boundaries of state authority. In Britain, the state and reformers used issues like poor relief, penal reform, education, and sanitation to negotiate the boundaries of central, local, and civil authority. The very process of debate justified central oversight, however; although Parliament reserved many governing responsibilities for the localities, it was Parliament that decided what the balance should be. As a result, David Eastwood suggests, “‘[g]eneral rules and directions’ were increasingly becoming the prerogative of the centre, and ‘details’ the substance and limit of local discretion” (164). The question of who constituted the government was also complicated by the development of an administrative class. After the 1818 and 1819 Sturges Bourne reforms allowed the creation of a “select vestry” to administer parish governments, both local government and civil organizations increasingly relied on paid administrative staff.19 The poor laws and subsequent reforms also created a central body of administrators, even as they assigned responsibility for the poor to local parishes.20 Throughout this period, then, reformers and counterrevolutionaries alike debated who should carry government authority, and the state extended authority into local and civil organizations even as it created the conditions of statewide central supervision. Foucault’s analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century government is also helpful in describing how two at times contradictory and at times complementary government rationalities, the pastoral and the liberal, provided the terms for this debate over who should carry government power. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the state no longer defines itself by its territory, or by the sovereignty of a monarch, but through its ability to administer a population. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, Foucault argues that this model of the state originates in, but secularizes, the Christian model of pastoral care. Just as the pastor attempts to see into each conscience in addition to and as a means toward shepherding the congregation as a whole, the pastoral state seeks “to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state” (“Omnes et Singulatim,” 322). Pastoral power grants the state, through its representatives, access to and supervision over an individual’s interiority,

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including personal relationships, emotional life, and moral development, aspects of the individual that would otherwise fall outside the state’s purview.21 In this way, governmentality expands the state’s power even as state functions spread to civil organizations. But if the pastoral idea shapes the role of both civil and state government, a second liberal rationality also beginning in the mid-eighteenth century arises concurrently with and as a correlate of the pastoral state. Whereas the pastoral state attempts to supervise and make visible the health of a national population, liberalism contends that the state cannot see into individual interests and cannot fully comprehend “the economic mechanism which totalizes every element” of society (Birth of Biopolitics, 280). In this view, to create the strongest society, government must allow free individuals to pursue their interests.22 Even a liberal government does not completely step aside, however. Foucault argues that from the eighteenth century on, the role of government is to create the conditions under which individuals can pursue their interests and supposedly “natural” phenomena (like free markets) can operate.23 And here, the liberal and pastoral rationalities converge to the extent that both measure the state’s success through its ability to increase the well-being of the population. In Foucault’s view, liberalism is not a matter of “letting” individuals exercise a freedom they already possess but rather of creating the possibility of freedom in the first place: “Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free” (Birth of Biopolitics, 63). Foucault notes that this new government rationality involves “mechanisms with the function of producing, breathing life into, and increasing freedom, of introducing additional freedom through additional control and intervention. That is to say, control is no longer just the necessary counterweight to freedom . . . it becomes its mainspring” (Birth of Biopolitics, 67). For this reason, Foucault analyzes liberalism not as a philosophy but rather as itself a governmental tactic, a way both of critiquing excessive or ineffective government and of arguing for and extending government power. Foucault suggests that this dual dynamic characterizes liberalism: “it is clear that at the heart of this liberal practice is an always different and mobile problematic relationship between the production of freedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it. . . . Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, ­etcetera” (Birth of Biopolitics, 64).

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This problematic—what Colin Gordon calls the “liberal problem-space”— is quite helpful in accounting for the State Romantics’ dual interest in proclaiming Britain’s tradition of liberty while simultaneously insisting that state institutions develop individual character and mold individual behavior.24 Foucault’s analysis is also helpful in depicting the way in which these authors structure the relationship between society and the state and between themselves as individuals and the state. Just as Foucault suggests that government operates both inside and outside of the state, and serves as a mechanism for defining the state’s authority, he similarly locates civil society at the boundary of the state. Liberal philosophy was incorrect, he suggests, to state that individuals and society exist outside of government.25 Civil society “is not an historical-natural given which functions in some way as both the foundation of and source of opposition to the state or political institutions. Civil society is not a primary and immediate reality.” Instead, Foucault describes it as a “transactional reality” which is “born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed”; he suggests that civil society is “absolutely correlative of the form of governmental technology we call liberalism” (Birth of Biopolitics, 297). This formulation is especially useful because late Romantic writers locate civil society and individual character both inside and outside the state. Late Romantic writers at times take a philosophically liberal stance, assuming that individuals lie outside of and prior to government and that the state and all other forms of government should therefore respect individuals’ rights to freely pursue their own interests. Simultaneously, however, many of these writers take conservative or communitarian positions, suggesting that institutions and in particular the state government construct society and individuals in the first place. They imagine, then, both that state institutions structure society and that they must nevertheless continue to reach out to develop individuals more fully and pull into the nation elements of society that are not yet fully incorporated. And the State Romantics find their own agency in this contradiction: the state needs agents because it defines some people, regions, and areas of life as outside its immediate purview or as closed off from its view. Agents work for the state precisely because they are not actual state officials. Foucault’s model of the pastoral state demonstrates what the late Romantic writers seek in the state: an agency that molds individuals and through them the nation as a whole. But if these authors see the nation as determined by the shared strength of its people, they also suggest that building a

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sense of national identity is part of the state’s strategy for forming each individual. Indeed, these authors suggest that a strong moral and ethical community arises only when a shared sense of nationality connects individuals to one another. The State Romantics reserve the task of nation-formation for the state, in part because they have watched state institutions literally incorporate the Celtic periphery into Britain. But they also grant the state a crucial role in forming the nation as an aesthetic category. As many critics have noted, it is no coincidence that the modern nation, so influentially described by Benedict Anderson as an “imagined community,” arose during the Romantic period at the heyday of the imagination as an aesthetic concept.26 Anderson calls the nation “imagined” to suggest that all nations are mental constructions: because no individuals know every person and every place in their nation, they must inevitably imagine the national community. For Anderson, there is no deeply “true” national identity, and therefore no imagination of nation can be truer than any other. While some late ­Romantic authors, like Walter Scott, foreground the very constructedness of nation in a manner that agrees with Anderson, others, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, believe that there is one true national identity that is in the process of formation. Nevertheless, these authors resemble Anderson in that they treat the nation at least in part as an aesthetic rather than ontological category: nationalism is based in how people perceive the whole to which they belong, and the nation-state actively teaches citizens to recognize their national identity. State institutions, like the education system, therefore make the collective sentiments of nationalism possible.27 The authors I call State Romantics rely not only on the education system but also on a multitude of state organizations to teach people to know and to feel their nationality. Some historians have suggested, like the late Romantics, that the central state played a predominant role in cohering national identities. Eric Hobsbawm and the school of historians associated with him argue that the state is more important than language, history, religion, or any other form of collective identity in building nations: “[n]ations do not make states and nationalisms, but the other way around” (10).28 Other historians, however, and most notably Linda Colley, suggest that national identity arose among the populace. In her highly influential history, Britons, Colley argues that the English, Scots, Welsh, and to a lesser extent, the Irish, began to identify as a single nation during the eighteenth century as Britain fought a series of wars against France.29 This nationalism was based in a sense of shared

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values in the face of French difference: as they gazed across the channel at France, the English, Scots, and Welsh found pride and unity in their religion, their wealth of trade, and their tradition of liberty. Colley argues that Britons from all of the nation’s regions freely and rationally chose their British identity, and that “it would be wrong, then, to interpret the growth of British national consciousness in this period in terms of a new cultural and political uniformity being resolutely imposed on the peripheries of the island by its center” (373). When the British monarchy finally, under George III, attempted to construct itself as a center of British identity, it imitated and sought a role within an already extant popular nationalism (195–236). Colley’s model has its critics.30 Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood question whether eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain developed a single identity at all, countering that “[o]ne should not confuse a patriot rhetoric of Britishness, forged or deployed in wartime, with a pervasive or persistent sense of Britishness as a primary or normative identity.” They also contest the idea that any “British” features arose from folk culture. Instead, they suggest, Parliament held the country’s peoples and regions together by providing “a political framework through which differences could be accommodated or contested.”31 Colley’s model of national identification as a moment of specular exchange also neglects the role that other state organizations play in determining the very categories with which people identify. For each of Colley’s sources of national pride, we could identify a corresponding national bureaucratic institution: for Protestantism, the English Church; for trade, the East India Company and other trading organizations; for liberty, the courts. In the lectures collected in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault provides an alternative account of nineteenth-century nationalism. Foucault suggests that whereas earlier discourse (indeed, as Colley argues) defined nations as peoples in conflict with other peoples, nineteenth-century nationalism instead defined a nation through the state’s administrative boundaries. At this moment the nation “is not essentially specified by its relations with other groups (such as other nations, hostile or enemy nations, or the nations with which it is juxtaposed). What does characterize the nation is, in contrast, a vertical relationship between a body of individuals who are capable of constituting a State, and the actual existence of the State itself ” (223).32 In contrast to the nationalism Colley describes, then, Foucault argues that nineteenth-century nationalism is less concerned with a nation’s culture or a shared past; what is at stake is not one nation’s ability to dominate another

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nation (like England’s rivalry with France) but the state’s “ability to administer itself, to manage, govern, and guarantee the constitution and workings of the figure of the State and of State power” (224). Benedict Anderson comes closer than Colley to this insight. Anderson grants the state two crucial roles in creating the earliest instances of nationalism. First, in both the colonies and European nations the language used for state administration becomes the national language. And second, colonial administrative structures provide the framework for the first assertions of national identity. For Anderson, the first people to envision themselves as nationals were Creole administrators who found their rise within their motherland’s administration limited to positions in the colony of their birth. As they discover that full “British” or “Spanish” identity is closed to them, they come to identify as Americans. However, when Anderson traces the later rise of nationalism within Europe, he, like Colley, attributes nationalism to the people rather than to administrative categories. Government administrations, he argues, embrace nationalism only after the people and so as not to appear out of step with them. These “official nationalisms,” he suggests, “developed after the popular European nationalisms of the 1820’s, and were responses by power groups—primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and aristocratic—threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in, popular imagined communities” (109–10, Anderson’s emphasis). As Marc Redfield has noted, even as Anderson argues for the role of the state, he continues to see nationalism in its European manifestations as a popular phenomenon, with which the state becomes involved only belatedly and artificially, in a manner that corrupts the previously more natural identity.33 Anderson neglects, therefore, the role of state institutions in creating a sense of nationalism in the populace. The State Romantics provide an account of how state administration structures national identity. In seeking a role for themselves within this official nationalism, they participate in and attempt to profit from both of the somewhat contradictory tendencies active within Britain, the drive toward central state supervision and the diffusion of governing authority. The State Romantics’ reliance on the state to construct national identity presents a sharp contrast to their earlier models of community and nation. Whereas high Romantic writers had implicitly defended a notion of community as an organic outgrowth of a population with a shared past, the State Romantics envision a national identity that is imposed through a mesh of interlocking administrative systems. In describing how the state acts on individual

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subjectivities, they adopt a model similar to Althusser’s description of interpellation.34 For the Romantics as for Althusser, state structures provide an identity that people do not choose but simply recognize as their own. This definition of nation opens the way for one defense of imperialism. If nation is no longer defined through history, or through qualities, traits, or values, then a nation can be extended as far as its administration extends. In redefining nationalism as a function of the state, the State Romantics make their models of nation and of authorship suit each other. Locating national and individual identity within state frameworks allows them to imagine that the state and the authors who work in its name actively shape their readership, a comforting thought in an era in which the mass readership was increasingly fragmented and politicized. Insisting that the state administers nationalism also allows them to define an important role for themselves as state agents. To do so, however, they must alter their model of aesthetics. Placing authority within the state means reducing these writers’ claims for literary agency. They no longer claim to originate unique visions but instead to transmit a message that begins in the state. Whereas high Romantic writers portrayed themselves as lone geniuses recording their solitary effusions in lyric poetry that aimed to give readers a glimpse of the transcendent truth the poets had experienced, the authors I study in this volume portray themselves as functionaries in an increasingly bureaucratized cultural economy. The State Romantics still seek a kind of authorial charisma, but they suggest that individuals take on what Weber calls a “routinized charisma”; they borrow the state’s power and glory rather than develop a power of their own.35 High Romantics like the young Wordsworth and young Coleridge claim that their poetry derives organically from the people. In his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth argues that poetry must reestablish its relationship to everyday people and language: in “low and rustic life,” he suggests, “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity,” and rustic language, “arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more important, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets.”36 By portraying the genuine passions of rustic people, he promises, his poetry will be “important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations” (158). 37 But Wordsworth grounds the ability of his poetry to improve its readers not only in the kind of story he tells and the kind of language he uses but also in his own character.38 The poet is a man “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human

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nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind” (138). In contrast, the State Romantics I study no longer hope that a single author “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility” can restore poetry and language to its common origins (126). Faced with an expanding radical press, these writers worry that they cannot constitute their own audiences and influence the taste of a reading community. They argue instead that the state shapes communities and that literature assists in this work as the state’s adjunct. The State Romantics draw sharp distinctions between the authority of writing and the authority of government. Whereas authors like Percy ­Shelley claim a direct political power for poets as “the legislators of the world,” Wordsworth, Scott, and Austen think that literature cannot directly assume social or political power. In fact, for these authors, thinking over literature’s role as an agent of state authority points toward the many ways in which literature lacks power. Unlike the courts, literature cannot punish offenders; unlike the Church, literature cannot come to know and individually supervise readers. For the State Romantics, attributing a person’s identity or a writer’s imagination to a national organization therefore entails revising high Romanticism’s definitions of the poet. We can see this reduction as a turning away from all types of revolutionary claims toward the more realistic practical and empirical goals that Virgil Nemoianu has argued characterize the “Biedermeier” period.39 These authors also wish to distance themselves from the agency of radical writers, which they suspect has tainted the public sphere.40 However, in reducing their claims for literature, the State Romantics have a positive as well as negative goal. They aim not only to dissociate from radical literature but also to develop a new literary authority grounded in a different model of social totality. Since the State Romantics no longer trust individual vision to achieve a whole, they instead turn to the state to achieve this process. They also, however, turn to the state to find a new role for themselves. Paradoxically, they imagine themselves giving up their own agency by working within the state but also being useful to the state in their private capacity precisely because they carry state authority into areas it could not otherwise reach. As they retreat from claims of individual authorial agency, these writers’ thematic concerns change as well. Instead of considering, like Wordsworth’s Prelude, the sources of the poet’s genius, or like Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the elusiveness of the imagination, the late Romantic writers I study thematize the question of who can carry national authority and how. Like the

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high Romantic authors, the State Romantics still search for a transcendent experience; they find it, however, not through the agency of their imaginations but in the nation and in the administrative apparatuses by which the nation addresses its people. As part of this change, some late Romantics experiment with prose genres. Whether writing in poetry or prose, however, these writers revise traditional romantic tropes to operate through the state. Where the early Wordsworth, for example, finds sublimity in nature, the late Wordsworth and Thomas De Quincey find sublimity in the rituals of the Anglican Church and the reaches of British power, respectively. Sympathy and imagination no longer are characteristics of an individual visionary but rather a function of the system into which he inserts himself. In asking who participates in government and how the increasingly pervasive role of government changes the conditions of individual and literary agency, the State Romantics explore a set of issues that faced all early nineteenth-century writers. Not all of their contemporaries defined the relationship between individual and state in the same way, however. Byron and Shelley share with the State Romantic authors I study an interest in state bureaucratic institutions. Neither, however, wishes to speak for or as part of existing state institutions. Byron wants poets to change institutions rather than take their projects from them. Shelley presents a complicated case, because although he too claims to be more interested in using the imagination to tear down repressive institutions than in using institutions to empower his authorship, his plays, and particularly The Cenci, resemble the State Romantics in that they do not so much explode these institutions as interrogate the terms by which law and government attain legitimacy.41 Both Byron and Shelley ultimately avoid the reach of government by leaving Britain altogether.42 Poets like Dorothea Hemans and Letitia Landon are equally suspicious of the bureaucratic state but respond in a different manner. Instead of locating their poetry within the state, they authorize their work through an appeal to domestic sentiment. Several of Hemans’s most famous lyrics, such as “Casabianca,” in fact suggest that state authority pales in the face of human bonds like the love of father and son. If I would not, therefore, argue that all authors writing between what we think of as high Romanticism and the Victorian period were State Romantics, I would nonetheless contend that the concerns the State Romantics most vividly portray were crucial in shaping British literary culture in this era.43 Indeed, I see authors’ increasing preoccupation with state agency as both cause and symptom of two developments literary historians have dated

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to the late Romantic era. First, the number of authors claiming affiliation with the state is one symptom of the closing of Habermas’s ideal public sphere. Instead of seeing the private sphere as authorizing one’s public participation, these authors rely on the state to regulate both the public and private spheres, including the formation of individual character and personal relationships. The late Romantics take the division between state and nonstate as a starting point but see this separation as an unfortunate condition that atomizes individuals and makes them unable to relate to one another as part of a moral and ethical community. These authors do not believe that private individuals will be able fully to form as individuals, much less able to cohere into anything that we would call a “public” or a social totality. Those “publics” that form outside of state auspices prove either degenerate or even (for the more conservative writers) dangerous to the social order. To remedy this gap, they suggest, the state should expand into ever more areas of social life, acting through recognized agencies and agents. Second, the need for authors to claim state affiliation also suggests an additional factor in the decline in the number of women authors publishing after 1815. Women were active in the public sphere, both as authors and in debating societies, in the early years of the nineteenth century.44 However, after 1815 male authorship increased and female authorship declined. Whereas male novelists might take female pen names, or sign “a lady,” in the early part of the century, only a few decades later female authors like the Brontës felt obliged to cloak their identities in male pseudonyms.45 There are many reasons for this change; certainly Victorian separate-spheres ideology suggested that women should stay away from the frays of public discourse, and the immense popularity of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels created a newly masculinized aesthetic.46 However, the need for authors to claim state affiliation, and the increasing interest in debating the boundaries of state power, suggest reasons why women might find it more difficult to write in a period when the State Romantics were redefining the Romantic aesthetic. Because women could not be employed by state agencies, they find it more challenging to claim state power through them. Jane Austen, I will suggest, proves the exception; she argues that women participate in the state through the professions of their husbands. Women writers like Hemans and Landon, in contrast, sidestep the state by appealing to domestic sentiment. The State Romantics rethink agency and aesthetics in the context of a state that increasingly penetrates individual lives. They inflect this shared preoccupation in different ways, however, and for this reason the chapters

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that follow constitute a series of case studies rather than the description of a single coherent school of thought. Each chapter examines how a late Romantic writer engages a specific state agency—the established Anglican Church, the courts, the navy, and the mails—to question who performs the work of the state, and how the writer revises a Romantic form or concept— the fragment in Coleridge; the distinction between imagination and fancy in Wordsworth; the historical novel genre in Scott; the sublime in Austen; and sympathy, vision, and organic form in De Quincey—to empower literature to assume state functions. I begin with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth because both examine how the most traditional state institution, the established Church, molds individuals. Both, however, update the function and governing strategies of the Church in the context of a modern, rationalizing state. Chapter 1, “Fragment Poems and Fragment Nations: The Aesthetics of Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Late Work,” examines how Coleridge’s late work, including On the Constitution of the Church and State, transposes his model of organic form from poetry to politics to consider the interrelationship of Britain’s component regions. In doing so, Coleridge casts colonies like Ireland as fragments, “parts” that cannot be wholes of their own but are not fully incorporated into the British nation. Reading Coleridge’s vitriolic essays on Ireland alongside his fragment poems, I argue that both his early and later use of fragments assume that social frames structure our perceptions and that the absence of these frames produces social disintegration and poetic failure. Coleridge’s late work relies on the bureaucracy of the Anglican Church to create an organic nation that reconciles individual freedom with collective totality, interpellating individuals into the state even while cultivating the character that establishes their capacity for free will, and their ability to recognize their national identity, in the first place. Because Irish Catholics refuse to participate in the administrative bureaucracy of the Anglican Church, he argues, they cannot be fully incorporated into Britain, and the Irish people will never learn to perceive their national identity correctly. For Coleridge, Ireland therefore remains a fragment that requires British rule, and its people, subjects who cannot aspire to full citizenship. Like Coleridge, Wordsworth in his late career trusts the Anglican Church administration to interpellate British citizens; unlike Coleridge, he drastically revises his earlier aesthetic in order to do so. In Chapter 2, “Words­ worth’s Establishment Poetics,” I argue that the late Wordsworth does not lose his youthful poetic genius but adjusts his high Romantic aesthetic to

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integrate poetry as part of the state. In his early Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth hopes to convert readers to a new form of poetic taste that would restore the moral ties between individuals. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, in contrast, Wordsworth suggests that only the state Church has the institutional structures to convert readers and place them in a national ethical community. In an interesting permutation on Foucault’s concept of pastoral state power, Wordsworth uses the Anglican pastor to model how the state works: the pastor takes his authority from the state Church, and by coming to know each parishioner interpellates them into the state. Wordsworth rethinks the role of the poet to assist in this task. He is in fact so committed to state religious administration that he fears excessive or imaginative language will emphasize the poet’s vision at the expense of the Church’s institutional functioning. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets find a partial solution in the restrictions of the sonnet form and in diction; Wordsworth deliberately chooses insipid language that aims not to force readers to convert but subtly to remind them of the truths they already know. Whereas Wordsworth and Coleridge use the Church as a model for how to incorporate individuals into the state, the other authors in this study model government power by examining state institutions—the courts, the navy, and the mail—that became increasingly important as Britain fought an international war and expanded both its internal and overseas empire. In Chapter 3, “Speaking for the Law: State Agency in Scott’s Novels,” I argue that Scott’s novels rethink how the law can best enfold Scotland into ­Britain. Scott suggests that both statutory and common law fail to administer justice in Scotland. Drawing again on Foucault’s model of pastoral state power, I argue that Scott develops the historical novel in part to suggest that nongovernmental individuals better mediate the passage of British order into regions, such as the highlands of Scotland, that it has not yet penetrated. For Scott, these agents succeed where the courts fail because they know local populations and bend British law and order to address the population’s needs and to ease the working of British legitimacy. Scott suggests that novelists demonstrate the kind of attention to individual and regional differences that he thinks the pastoral state provides, and that they themselves serve as pastoral agents, showing the context in which the government should understand the information it collects about individuals. Like Scott’s novels, Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion, engages with a state institution to endow a new class of individuals with state power; in doing so, however, Austen in fact reduces her earlier claims for the po-

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litical agency of novels. In Persuasion, Austen marries heroine Anne Elliot to a ­naval man in order to free her from her corrupted aristocratic family and provide an alternative middle class community founded upon the professional ties of the navy. Chapter 4, “A Nation Without Nationalism: The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion,” argues that this novel demonstrates one rather paradoxical way in which women can become members of state professional organizations: by joining the profession of their husbands. More crucially, professions such as the navy model for Austen a form of community and of national identity that does not rely on notions of landed property or of inheritance from one’s forbearers. In contrast to the strategies depicted in much current historical work on British nationalism, Austen sharply differentiates an “English” identity, defined through landed inheritance, from a “British” identity, which promises to replace it and to better position individuals in ethical relationships to one ­another. This Britishness, she suggests, must be administered to the populace through administrative agencies exemplified by the navy and is felt only in a moment that restructures the Romantic sublime, when individuals become aware of the sacrifice that the nation demands from the professionals who serve it. Even more blatantly than the other authors I study in this volume, Thomas De Quincey, in his essay “The English Mail-Coach,” locates himself and his writing at the center of English nation-formation. In doing so, he evacuates individual agency, placing the responsibility for his words and actions in the mail and in the nation. Chapter 5, “De Quincey’s Imperial Systems,” argues that De Quincey imagines the British mail system during the Napoleonic Wars as an organ spreading British identity from a single, central point across the countryside. And as De Quincey rides on the British mail coaches, he claims to be a part of the medium that conveys the news of victory to the masses. De Quincey combines an ethnic model that locates nationality in a people’s blood with a nonorganic model in which nationality is imposed from the outside by an imperial administration. In such a model, Romantic inspiration derives solely from organization: terms such as “sympathy” and “vision” no longer refer to personal attributes but rather to the author’s imbrication within vast communication networks overseen by the British state. In this way, De Quincey exemplifies the late Romantic recontextualization of Romantic aesthetics as part of the British state as he redefines the state as the privileged agent of national identity.

o n e

Fragment Poems and Fragment Nations The Aesthetics of Ireland in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Late Work

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is famous as a writer of fragments. “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” (which are or claim to be unfinished) are his most oftcited examples. But Coleridge also wrote or spoke in fragments in his in marginalia, in the prose Aids on Reflection, and in the scattered remarks recorded in his Table Talk. Even his completed essays frequently set aside points for further discussion in work he promises but never completes. ­Indeed, several critics have suggested we should consider the fragment the Coleridgean genre.1 Sympathetic critics generally cite the poetic fragments as a symptom of Coleridge’s lofty vision: his imagination is too powerful and too evanescent, his ambition for a perfect work too comprehensive, to be actually embodied in verse.2 The fragment, in this view, is simply the flip side of Coleridge’s philosophy of organic form. Because he cannot envision a whole that adequately unifies his disparate ideas, he is reduced to fragments. In this chapter, I argue that the same aesthetic philosophy that produces the fragment extends into Coleridge’s political writing. Like the other authors I call “State Romantics,” Coleridge in his late career believes that the state’s bureaucracy manages national identity by actively forming

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i­ndividuals into national citizens. And he envisions the established state Church as the framework that best shapes individual character, training individuals’ perceptions and reconciling each with the whole they together form. But as Coleridge uses organic form to consider the relationship between the individual citizen and the state, and the relationship between Britain and its component regions, the problem facing readers of his poems and marginalia—how do we know a fragment from a poem, an unfinished part from a whole of its own?—enters into his thinking on the relationship between Britain and Ireland. Like many of his contemporaries, Coleridge saw the status of Ireland within Britain as an insoluble problem. When he defines this problem, he uses his aesthetic vocabulary of parts and wholes: Ireland should be simply a part of Britain, but the Irish people experience “love of a part as of a whole.”3 He uses similar language in the “Aids to an Appreciation of the Catholic Bill” (at the conclusion of On the Constitution of the Church and State) when discussing the Catholic issue: “A great numerical majority of the inhabitants of one integral part of the realm profess a religion hostile to that professed by the majority of the whole realm: and a religion, too, which the latter regard, and have had good reason to regard, as equally hostile to liberty, and the sacred rights of conscience generally.”4 Indeed, in On the Constitution of the Church and State and in his bitter and vitriolic essays on the Irish question, Ireland resembles a fragment: it is a region that should be part of another nation but yet attempts to stand on its own. Examining Ireland as a fragment demonstrates how Coleridge conceives the British state through his aesthetic categories and, conversely, how he envisions the state structuring aesthetic perception. For Ireland as for Coleridge’s poetic fragments, the whole that would give structure and meaning to the individual part is incomplete. In the case of Ireland, however, the “whole” that Coleridge argues should assimilate the part is not a matter of imaginative vision but of state administration. Regions like Ireland are a problem for Coleridge because they stand outside of the state Church (which Coleridge views as a bureaucratic agency that forms individual identities) and outside of other agencies that interpellate citizens into the state. The status of the “political fragment” derives from the model of nation that Coleridge develops in his late career.5 Coleridge’s early poetry relies on visionaries (such as Joan of Arc in “Destiny of Nations”) to intuit their national identity and spread their message to the populace. In these poems,

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Coleridge insists that government gets in the way of freedom: “those feelings and that grand ideal of Freedom which the mind attains by its contemplation of its individual nature, and of the sublime surrounding objects . . . do not belong to men, as a society, nor can possibly be either gratified or realized, under any form of human government; but belong to the individual man, so far as he is pure, and inflamed with the love and adoration of God in Nature.”6 In his late career, however, Coleridge no longer trusts individual visionaries to interpellate their countrymen into a national identity. Instead, he imagines that the very state he earlier found incapable of providing individual freedom must now do exactly that. Coleridge suggests that the state’s administrative structures provide the frame through which individuals form personal and collective identities.7 Coleridge still in part claims the nation as his personal vision: he insists that he as a philosopher studies history and analyzes the direction in which the nation is tending, and therefore he knows Britain’s true shape in a way that the populace obviously does not. The fulfillment of this vision, however, depends not on his individual intellect or imagination but on whether the state’s administrative structures fully penetrate each region of the state and interpellate its peoples.8 Further, he redefines his model of symbol and symbolic representation to operate through state administration. Coleridge’s turn to Church and state is part of a conservative political philosophy, and his contemporaries and later detractors critiqued this conservatism, along with his impenetrably obtuse language and his profusion of journalistic writing.9 We miss the interest of Coleridge’s late project, however, if we view him as simply conservative. Coleridge models a form of state bureaucracy that is active and positive. In the case of Ireland, it is also illustrative in the way in which it fails. Even at its most convincing, Coleridge’s vision of the Anglican Church is as much prescriptive as descriptive; although he claims to study the history and structure of the Church, he is never sure that the current Church performs the functions he theorizes for it. Nevertheless, the Church’s inability to incorporate Ireland into the British state ultimately raises questions about Coleridge’s organic philosophy, in ways he acknowledges only at the end of his life. Even if his vision of an organic state unified through the institutions of the established Church is ultimately impossible, studying his vision for the Church and the state demonstrates how Coleridge revises his high Romantic literary theory to suggest that imagination, symbol, and organic form work through

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a ­bureaucratic state organization, and to participate in the project of authorizing Britain’s colonialist expansion. Before turning to the case of Ireland, I will begin by examining how Coleridge defines organic form and applies his model of form to the state.

Organic Form and the State Throughout his career, Coleridge uses organic form to conceive the relationship between individuals and the social totality. Coleridge follows the Kantian imperative that insists all individuals must be recognized as ends in themselves. And Coleridge believes that for an individual to be an end in itself requires self-determination. However, even as Coleridge insists that we consider each individual and each part freely self-determining, he also envisions each individual as a part contributing a designated function to the whole. Organic form is Coleridge’s solution to this conundrum: organic form is a totality in which each part’s internal tendencies follow the very form and function the whole demands. Although he applies organic structures to social forms, Coleridge first defines the term “organic” as an aesthetic category. In his Lectures on Shakespeare (1812), Coleridge (paraphrasing Schlegel) distinguishes organic from mechanic forms: “the form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the material . . . the organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.”10 The Shakespeare lectures discuss the example of poetry, but because they conceive poetry as a “living body,” they raise the question of form, and specifically the relationship of part and whole, more broadly. A “living body,” Coleridge suggests, “must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living Body is of necessity an organized one—& what is organization, but the connection of Parts to a whole, so that each Part is at once End & Means!” (495). That a part must be both end and means has important implications for Coleridge’s application of organic theory to political entities. If we focus simply on Coleridge’s distinction between mechanic and organic forms, we might take an “organic” state to follow Rousseau’s social contract, in which the people of a nation determine what government will rule them. Coleridge, however, defines the organic state more particularly: the organic state does not simply rise from the bottom up but instead balances the needs of the citizen with the needs of the whole and determines that individuals’ free choices are the

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same that the nation’s destiny demands. The British state forms individuals’ perceptions in a manner that makes them choose British citizenship. Defining the nation as “organic,” then, allows Coleridge to conceive the reconciliation of particular and general, individual freedom and social totality. 11 One essay from The Friend describes this balance: [T]he true Patriot . . . will reverence not only whatever tends to make the component individuals more happy, and more worthy of happiness: but likewise whatever tends to bind them more closely together as a people. . . . But much as he desires to see all become A WHOLE, he places limits even to this wish, and abhors that system of policy, which would blend men into a state by the dissolution of all those virtues which make them happy and estimable as individuals.12

An organic state unifies its populace but only as the people themselves choose to become a nation. Coleridge’s account of organic form is clearest when he treats poems and plants. In the third of his Lectures on European Drama (1812), he uses the relationship of a plant to its environment to illustrate the kind of balancing organic form entails: [E]very living object in nature exists as the reconciliation of contradictions, by the law of Balance—The vital principle of the Plant can make itself manifest only by embodying itself in the materials that surround it. . . . On the other hand, it takes [these materials] up into itself, forces them into parts of its own Life, modifies and transmutes every power by which it is itself modified: & the result is, a living whole, in which we may in thought & by artificial Abstraction distinguish the material from the indwelling Spirit, the contingent or accidental from the universal & essential, but in reality, in the thing itself, we cannot separate them. [Lect. on Lit., I, 447]

Plants must necessarily absorb materials from the environment in order to grow, and these materials of course exert a determining influence on the plant. The tree will only grow in an environment that is conducive to its growth (an acorn will not sprout in a desert). However, we do not say that the plant is any less a free and self-determining agent because environmental conditions affect its shape. The shape and identity the plant takes—for instance, the tendency of an acorn to grow into a tree—conforms to both its “indwelling spirit” and the contingencies of its environment. Indeed, Coleridge suggests that the conditions of its growth make each tree appear

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different, but it is still recognizable “as an ash or a poplar” (Lect. on Lit., I, 358). For Coleridge, the plant’s dependence on its environment does not limit the plant’s autonomy but in fact enables it. Where the plant grows expresses both free will (the plant’s drive to grow) and fate (that its seed lands where conditions are conducive). Extending his model to people, Coleridge reads even the need to conform to one’s environment as providing room for free will: “The Fate must conquer, as far as the event is concerned; but the free determination remains unconquered, & preserves itself either by voluntary chosen Submission, or by voluntary Death” (Lect. on Lit., I, 448). Both trees and humans can refuse to conform to their environments, but death may be the result. While such a formulation might seem unremarkable in the case of plants, when speaking of humans, calling the decision between conformity and death a free choice is more troubling. But for Coleridge, limited choice does not mean lack of freedom. In a marginal comment to Fichte he notes, “zwang or compulsion is not the same as Necessity, nor Choice (willkuhr) the same as Freedom—On the contrary, Necessity and absolute Freedom are one,” just as in “the assent of the mind to a mathematical demonstration.”13 Just as the plant’s conformity to environmental conditions does not impinge on but in fact enables its freedom to grow, humans also should recognize necessity as a source of freedom. And for the human, environmental conditions include social influences, such as nationality and class structures. Coleridge suggests that such restrictive identities actually enable human self-determination. His formulation slides between Burke’s argument that “freedom includes the freedom to be restrained” and Foucault’s description of power as productively forming individual identities. No individual can develop without constraints, and Coleridge views these constraints as actively forming rather than limiting individual identity. The state is one element of the “necessity” confronting humans. Coleridge insists that the state does not constrict individuals, because the state is responsible for creating the very identities each citizen will freely choose. Nevertheless, in the name of individual freedom he also emphasizes that states must act with restraint. To make the government more compatible with individual freedom, Coleridge argues that the government should not act directly on individuals but instead on the organizations—such as the clergy—that produce individual behavior. In the “Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher” (1814), Coleridge describes the state’s action through the metaphor of a supervised stream:

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As the Warden and Inspector of a navigable stream confines his attentions to its depths and shoals; to its banks, indentations, promontories and reaches; yet thus preserves most effectively the component waters from at once losing themselves, and ruining the adjacent lands by inundation: in like manner does a Legislature appropriate its regards to the permanencies of a State, to the supporting skeleton and the containing vessels, of the Body Politic, to its ranks, estates, conditions, customs, and offices; yet by these means provides eventually, though indirectly, for the perpetual flux of the persons, proportioned channels and a regulated impulse, a quick and vigorous, yet healthy and tranquil, circulation. [EOT, II, 386–87]

In describing the state through the duties of the “Warden and Inspector of a navigable stream,” Coleridge emphasizes the importance of indirect state guidance. The nation’s “circulation”—its commerce and public sphere— requires government regulation, but the government regulation must be compatible with individual freedom. Coleridge insists that the government must act indirectly to preserve individual freedom (EOT, II, 387). The best way to cultivate citizens is to focus on the organizations that mold them, creating a stable governing structure and educational and religious institutions that extend into every corner of the nation. Even as Coleridge advocates indirect regulation, his vision of the organic state nevertheless emphasizes that a single administrative apparatus oversees all. Coleridge’s insistence that the state serve as a mediating force makes him suspicious of any group that seeks to appropriate state functions, even those claiming charitable purposes. Without the state’s balancing influence, he believes, such groups create fringe interests that give way to radicalism and prove so demanding to members that they harden into tyranny. He in particular criticizes groups that demand an oath from members “without the authority or known acquiescence of the supreme power” (the state); these oaths create new social forms that threaten traditional social structures (EOT, II, 380–81). Coleridge especially condemns political reform societies (which he compares to Jacobins) and trade unions and guilds (which he says focus on “Lording it over their employers”) (EOT, II, 393). But he also complains that participants in voluntary societies more generally are motivated by vanity: he traces interest in societies and voluntary organizations to “the sweet lust of power and management, and to the delight of beholding in printed reports and circular letters their own names and busy doings, their orations and donations, motions and emotions”; and claims they find “moral titillation” in “their mummery, presidentships, chairmanships, and

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s­ ecretaryships” (EOT, II, 394). Coleridge thus argues for a strong central state that would prevent individuals from inflating their own power and from forming societies that exclude themselves from the nation as a whole. He insists that the government mediates the entire society’s competing interests. And the agency that operates both indirectly and under the auspices of the state to interpellate citizens is the state Church.

Administering Culture: The State Church Coleridge entrusts the national Church with providing the cultivation that will develop individuals’ humanity and form them into citizens. The Church has this capacity because of its position within the structure of national government. The Church stands apart from the state sufficiently to enable it to counterbalance individual and class interests, but it also operates under the aegis of the King to interpellate individuals into a specifically national identity. Coleridge suggests that the British Constitution sets the King as the fulcrum that balances the state’s “permanent” (landed) and “progressive” (monetary and middle class) interests on the one hand, and the state as a whole with the Church on the other. He uses the term “church” in two senses. First, he identifies a “Universal Church” that encompasses all state Churches and is not actually any denomination; it is merely a “lucky accident” that the Church in Britain happens to be Christian (CCS, 55). Coleridge views God as the only head of this universal Church and says consequently that it can by definition have no earthly head. (For this reason, he calls the Pope the Antichrist: the Pope claims to be the representative of God on Earth, when no human can have such authority.) However, within each realm the Church has an earthly leader to head its administrative bureaucracy; in England, the King is head of the Church. Coleridge imagines one transcendent truth, and one God, that is visible through all of the disparate earthly churches.14 But individuals become aware of this God through their national Church and its state bureaucracy. Each Church, he suggests, adopting the language of astronomical solar systems, has its own “focal orb,” but the power of these suns “suppose[s] and result[s] from an actual power, present in all and over all, throughout an indeterminable number of systems” (CCS, 118–19). In this way, even though it is separated from the state in its more narrow definition, the British Church nevertheless points individuals towards the King, and makes individuals aware of a

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supposedly (and vaguely described) higher order of truth beyond both King and nation. Coleridge suggests that the Church stands apart from the “state in its narrow sense” and from the affairs of the everyday world because of its religious practices and because it is responsible for the gathering and diffusion of knowledge. Beyond its atemporal concerns, the Church is freed from the state because it administers its own land. The Church holds a portion of the “nationalty,” the land owned in common by the people of the realm, and therefore acts as a counterbalance to the “proprietage,” the landed and personal interests in the state. Because the Church is independent of state interests, it is able to cultivate individual citizens in a way that the state cannot. The Church “completes and strengthens” the state, compensating for the defects inherent in all states as states (114). The primary such defect, for Coleridge, is a tendency to lose track of “cultivation”—“the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity”— in pursuit of “civilization” (42–43). The Church develops the humanity that the state would overlook but that is nevertheless necessary for the state to function. Coleridge insists that “we must be men to be citizens” and credits the clergy with the ability to make people men (43). Coleridge’s vision of the Church is as much prescriptive as descriptive. As Stephen Prickett notes, Coleridge was critical of the Church’s widespread corruption, and maintained some of his early anticlericalism even in his later years.15 Nevertheless, he still insists that the Church, because of its position within the state, carries the function of distributing culture to the population.16 In his insistence that the Church stands apart from the world, we see an early form of the strategy by which later Victorians like Matthew Arnold define “culture” as an oppositional category, arguing that culture is an entity that through its very separation from industrial society heals individuals and society at large.17 Like Arnold’s “culture,” Coleridge’s Church is an agent of the state even as it is opposed to it. Although Coleridge calls the Church in its first sense “a kingdom ‘not of this world’,” he actually defines the Church not through any set of religious beliefs but through its administrative structure. And its administrative structure makes it part of “the same System with the State, though as the opposite pole” (CCS, 103). The Church interpellates citizens because as a state agency it penetrates every region of the nation. Coleridge describes a two-prong approach. First, the Church establishes a small group—an intelligentsia, as it were—that will “remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the

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knowledge already possessed.” Second, a “far more numerous body,” the parish clergy, “were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part of division without a resident guide, guardian, and instructor”; these clergy diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent. Finally to secure for the nation, if not a superiority over the neighbouring states, yet an equality at least, in that character of general civilization, which equally with, or rather more than, fleets, armies, and revenue, forms the ground of its defensive and offensive power. [CCS, 43–44]

Forming cultivated individuals inevitably strengthens the state; Coleridge sees the two as one and the same process. In developing individual morals, the Church acts as much in the interests of the state as in the name of individual growth. The people need religion, not to teach certain beliefs about divinity but because “the morality which the state requires in its citizens for its own well-being and ideal immortality, and without reference to their spiritual interest as individuals, can only exist for the people in the form of religion” (CCS, 69). Coleridge’s formulation transfers concepts that usually describe the supposed benefit of religion for an individual—“well-being” and “immortality”—to the state, implying that the continuity of the state is the proper end of the Church. The individual “spiritual interest” is simply a vehicle for teaching people to accept the social order imposed by the state. He claims that the “final cause” or ultimate purpose of the clergy is “to form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the state, and prepared to die for its defence” (CCS, 43). The Anglican Church therefore serves as the central agency that interpellates individuals into the state through a process that Coleridge equates with moral development. Throughout On the Constitution of the Church and State, Coleridge equates the national Church with the clerisy, the class of learned individuals who serve as moral and cultural custodians for the nation. In theory, Coleridge defines this class broadly. Originally, he says, the clerisy and the national Church consisted of the learned of all branches of knowledge, including “all of the liberal arts and sciences, the possession of which con-

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stitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological” (CCS, 46). He believes that this educated class serves its custodial function because it is capable of rising above ideology and self-interest. Coleridge at times includes the press—because of its role in distributing knowledge—in the clerisy, but at other times he complains that the press has become too involved with partisan and mercantile interests. By his own day, he suggests that the learned professions had also become too aligned with economic interests, and so the clerisy had become limited largely to the clergy, parish teachers, and the universities.18 And even educational institutions cannot actually aspire to the Church’s educational function. Schools, universities, and lecture series, for example, “are empirical specifics for morbid symptoms that help to feed and continue the disease” of an uncultivated public (CCS, 69). Coleridge’s insistence on the Church’s role as the clerisy, however, at times means the Church cannot complete the mediating work he would assign it. As Nigel Leask and Michael John Kooy argue, even though Coleridge insists that the clerisy or national Church balances the permanent and progressive interest, he ultimately treats the Church as a member of the permanent interests and as a stabilizing force that enshrines knowledge and defends one class’s custodial rights over national culture rather than stirring new knowledge.19 In On the Constitution of the Church and State, the Anglican Church ultimately functions as a clerisy not only because it upholds national culture but also because it serves within the state bureaucracy. Crucially, for Coleridge the Church turns individuals to “patriots” both because it instills in individuals the values necessary for state citizenship and because it teaches parishioners to view the British King as their spiritual and temporal leader. And in depicting the relationship between citizens and King, Coleridge applies his aesthetic theory. Coleridge describes the state bureaucracy not exerting force or coercion to make individuals recognize the King, but rather unifying the state by working as a symbol. In a Table Talk entry from May 15, 1833, Coleridge uses James I to describe the monarch’s symbolic function: James I thought that, because all power in the State seemed to proceed from the Crown, therefore all Power remained in the Crown—as if, because the Tree sprang from the Seed, the stem, branches, leaves, and fruit were all contained in the Seed. The Constitutional doctrine as to the relation which the King bears to the other components of the State is in two words this—He is the Representative of the Whole of that, of which he is himself a Part.20

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Coleridge defines this relationship through a process of figural, rather than republican, representation. In On the Constitution of the Church and State, he suggests that the King “represents” the people, with “representation” defined “in its widest sense, in which the crown itself is included as representing the unity of the people, the true and primary sense of the word majesty” (CCS, 20). Coleridge carefully distinguishes this representative function from actual decision-making power. The King does not represent the people’s interests but rather shows the people their identity.21 Linda ­Colley has given us one idea of how this process of recognition might work. According to Colley, George III in his later reign transformed the monarch into a public persona; increasingly, the King’s figure personified the nation (or at least England and Wales) in print and in public discourse.22 In this way, it is also conventional to speak of flags or seals, for example, as symbols of a state. But Coleridge moves a step beyond simply declaring the King a representative of a whole, and instead views the King’s function in a much more active sense, as a symbol.23 In The Statesman’s Manual, Coleridge suggests that “a symbol . . . is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of or the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.”24 Coleridge’s definition is a series of binary oppositions in which the more universal term in one opposition becomes the narrower term in the next opposition: “special in the individual, the general in the especial, the universal in the general.” We can think of the symbol as a series of ever widening circles, ultimately pointing toward a single shared universal. In this way, Coleridge’s symbol is not simply a one-to-one relationship between part and whole but a strategy for turning wholes into parts themselves, which are then reconciled into ever larger entities. When he applies symbolic structure to the nation, the “general” is the nation, and the particular, the individual person; the logic of symbol allows the nation to shine through each individual and his or her particularities. When Coleridge suggests that the King “is the representative of the whole, of which he is a part,” his body and individual personhood are the particular through which the whole—the people and their combined interests—shines through as the general.25 Ultimately, however, the King serves as a symbol of the nation’s unity only because he heads an administrative network that actively forms the British people into one. Coleridge insists

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that all power does not actually reside in the Crown, because every individual must be able to act freely. Nevertheless, it is crucial that power indeed seems to “proceed from the Crown”; the King is the symbolic center of the government apparatus that reaches every person, even if ultimately the King’s agents, clerical and administrative, carry the everyday disciplinary power that shapes the nation’s inhabitants. And it is their common relationship to the King that unifies the people into a nation. Individuals may seem to choose their identity, but their choice is like Althusser’s model of interpellation: in recognizing and naming the King, they show they are already members of the British nation.26 Items like flags and medallions might stir national allegiance, but the state itself functions as a symbol, working through state administration to integrate part and whole and ensure that the correct vision of a national whole penetrates every region and individual. And the administrative structures of the Church are the agency Coleridge most entrusts to form the state into an organic totality. In one sense, as Mark Canuel has demonstrated, such a vision is actually tolerant rather than coercive.27 By the logic of the symbol it is not a problem for individuals or regions to have different beliefs; the same universal shines through multiple particulars. Coleridge insists, for example, that he does not care which religious ceremonies individuals use as long as they are compatible with the national Church (CCS, 127). Indeed, because he ultimately defines national identity through allegiance to the King rather than through history, culture, or shared beliefs, Coleridge’s Britain claims to be inclusive. For example, Coleridge accepts Jews within England as long as they grant allegiance to the King. He loosely translated and printed in pamphlet form two Jewish prayers read on the deaths of Princess Caroline and King George III. Both suggest that allegiance is more important than particular religious beliefs in incorporating people into the state. “The Tears of a Grateful People” (1820) praises the dead monarch: His Love was bounded by no Clime; Each diverse Race, each distant Clan He govern’d by this truth sublime, “God only knows the heart—not man.” [25–29]28

The song does not assign the Jewish people full British identity; the speaker addresses Britannia as a “sister” who mourns a “common parent” (61, 66). And neither poem mentions the fact that Jews were not granted full citizenship

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rights. But in Coleridge’s model, the ability to vote or hold office is not important in considering whether an individual is a citizen. In calling George “our King,” the Jewish speakers suggest that the symbolic relationship of people to King is not based in a process of democratic or republican citizenship but rather in a process of simple recognition: as British residents, the Jewish speakers recognize their King. By making loyalty and recognition the rights of and qualifications for citizenship, Coleridge overlooks the differences between the political rights open to individuals of different religions. Only God can know the “heart,” and so no ruler can demand the heart’s allegiance. In limiting the extent of the ruler’s power in this way, however, the songs insist that the British King can govern people with many and divergent cultural heritages without understanding their values and sentiments, as long as they recognize him as their ruler. On the one hand, then, the song’s insistence on the multiple races, clans, and climes that George governs points to a tolerant and inclusive definition of Britishness. On the other hand, Coleridge’s insistence that British rule is tolerant enables him to argue that Britain can indeed properly, humanely, and justly govern other regions. The very diversity of individuals included within the nation makes it impossible to define the nation through its content and therefore removes one check on the nation’s expansion. Whether ultimately defined by reference to its past or present governments, the nation extends as far as its administration extends. The pride in British inclusiveness here stretches into imperialism. If the state is “bounded by no Clime,” then does it have any boundaries at all? In an 1833 Table Talk entry, Coleridge advocates that the British expand into more areas—arguing that “the condition upon which a country circumstanced as ours is exists, is that it should become the Mother of Empires”—but that it grant these colonies independence when they are ready for it (TT, I, 574–75). He does not specify how one could recognize when a colony was ready for independence. But if the American example suggests that Britain should grant its colonies independence when they are ready, then should Britain also grant incorporated parts independence when they request it? How does one distinguish a large part from a whole of its own?

Defining the “more important part” Even if we recognize, then, that Coleridge’s model of a government that mediates part and whole through the operation of symbol is tolerant, we

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can nevertheless view his model skeptically. David Aram Kaiser argues that Coleridge’s symbol and organic form pretend a tolerance he does not actually allow: Coleridge is so afraid society will dissolve into particularities that his model does not permit individual differences and therefore cannot reconcile individual and general. Paul de Man, while not focusing on the symbol’s politics nevertheless also argues that Coleridge cannot find in symbols the coherent wholes he seeks.29 And David Simpson and Nigel Leask contend that Coleridge’s organic form provides a language for pretending that his own interests are universal. Even as Coleridge insists that an organic entity allows its parts to freely determine their identity, he also suggests that the whole determines which parts have precedence. In Biographia’s discussion of meter, Coleridge names this drive to organization a general aesthetic rule: “the high spiritual instinct of the human being impel[s] us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establish[es] the principle that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts.”30 Reading this passage, David Simpson notes that when Coleridge insists the “more important parts” take a predominant role in shaping the whole, he in fact allows one part of a society to govern the many.31 Coleridge assumes that the governing “part” will impose the version of nation he identifies as “truth.” In an era when the shape of the nation and the qualifications for voting and officeholding were so controversial, Coleridge’s assumption that the “more important part” determines the whole allows one interest, presumably Tory government rather than mass radicalism, to shape the whole. Coleridge’s promise to reconcile part and whole therefore obscures his conservative ideology. The idea that the “more important part” determines the whole provides the terms for Coleridge’s understanding of the relationship among Britain’s component parts. “Hibern-Anglus’s Discovery,” published in the Courier on September 4, 1811, defends England’s predominance within both the United Kingdom and the Empire at large. Responding to an article insisting that England was “but a part and not the most flourishing and united part of the British Empire,” Coleridge appeals to “population census, the comparative amount of taxes levied, the tables of exports and imports, the relative number of new buildings and public works carried on by private capital,” and to the fact that “the less flourishing and less united part took on itself five millions of Irish taxes . . . and equally so in Scotland to permit the English to make canals and roads for its northern counties at the public expence, a favour which was never bestowed on any English county, or indeed even

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requested by them” (EOT, II, 275, Coleridge’s emphasis). David Erdman’s footnote to this passage notes that the five million Coleridge claims as a donation was in fact a loan and that about a third of the English contribution for Scottish transportation was specifically designated to build military roads. Such roads aimed to subject Scotland ever more firmly to the British central government, demonstrating English imperialism as much as English generosity. Coleridge clearly spends so much time defending England’s status as the “more important part” because his theory of organicism ultimately allows the “important” part to play a predominant role in shaping the whole, and he believes that England should have this privilege. Coleridge’s resort to statistics here departs from his usual idealism. In general, Coleridge reads a state in which one part determines the whole as organic, in part because he envisions the state as an “idea” in the process of development, whose shape is apparent to philosophers but not yet completely fulfilled. Coleridge defines the idea antiempirically: an “idea” is “that conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form, or mode, in which the thing may happen to exist at this or at that time; nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes; but which is given by the knowledge of its ultimate aim” (CCS, 12, Coleridge’s emphasis). To describe an idea one cannot begin by empirically describing or categorizing its forms but must instead intuit its ultimate aim from the path of its progression. The definition of the nation as an “idea” makes more immediate sense in the German tradition in which Coleridge immersed himself. At the time Coleridge wrote, the German nation was indeed evolving to make its political boundaries more closely coincide with its cultural and linguistic boundaries.32 In the British context, however, the model of a nation evolving to match its linguistic boundaries does not fit. Instead, Coleridge suggests that the nation is moving toward greater administrative coherence. When Coleridge identifies the King as the head of the national Church or clerisy, for example, he adds the caveat, “I am neither describing what the National Church now is, nor determining what it ought to be. My statements respect the idea alone, as deduced from its original purpose and ultimate aim” (CCS, 83). Likewise, even though the Constitution is not yet fully embodied, its eventual shape can be intuited by studying the state’s evolution from its past into its present forms. Viewing the state as moving toward an identity that only he and other philosopherhistorians understand allows him to overlook any people or movements that view the nation differently, or that might suggest the state does not make

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each individual’s chosen identity coincide with the shape the social totality demands. Coleridge argues that an empirical method that deduces an idea from its current manifestations would produce inaccurate definitions, because it would take a necessarily imperfect realization as the idea itself. No actual state can be perfect: “as no bridge ever did or can possess the demonstrable perfections of the mathematical arch so can no existing state adequately correspond to the idea of a state. In nations and governments the most happily constituted, there will be deformities and obstructions, peccant humours and irregular actions, which affect indeed the perfection of a state, but not its essential forms” (CCS, 159). Here too, Coleridge’s idealist methodology serves his politics: he insists that all areas currently part of Britain should indeed be part of the nation, and he identifies any parts of present order that do not fit his idea as imperfections that will disappear as the state evolves. Identifying the nation as an “idea” also allows Coleridge to overlook any conflicts between groups, individuals, or regions that might belie this seamless organic evolution of parts into wholes. Coleridge insists that there can and should be contrary interests in the state; the Constitution balances the “permanent” and “progressive” interests, regulating the pace of social change. Even conflict and violent differences between its citizens do not make the nation less organic, because the state is not premised upon shared qualities, traits, or values. As long as all discord or altercations are internal and no ideas are externally imposed, any conflicts are simply part of the state’s organic evolution. The British state is peculiarly organic, then, because of all states it has been most free of foreign influence: [I]t is the chief of many blessings derived from the insular character and circumstances of our country, that our social institutions have formed themselves out of our proper needs and interests; that long and fierce as the birthstruggle and the growing pains have been, the antagonist powers have been of our own system, and have been allowed to work out their final balance with less disturbance from external forces, than was possible in the Continental states. [23]

The state is organic because all of the opinions influencing the state’s direction are themselves British. Defining what is internal and external, however, ultimately means reifying Britain’s current boundaries. For all that he claims to look toward Britain’s future, Coleridge tends to define Britain through its current administrative

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boundaries in a manner that seems to belie his insistence that the nation is an evolving “idea.” As John Colmer notes, “in the pages of Church and State is demonstrated one of Coleridge’s worst weaknesses as a political theorist and critic of contemporary politics, his tendency to persuade himself and his readers that he was returning to first principles when he was in fact drawing certain deductions from the working of contemporary British institutions in the light of their historical development.”33 Whether an influence is “internal,” of course, depends on the historical and ideological perspective from which one defines the state’s boundaries; the union of Britain and Ireland, for example, looks “internal” from the perspective of Britons but “external” and imperialist to Irish nationalists. The Irish test Coleridge’s confidence that the state Church’s administrative apparatus renders individually chosen identities compatible with their British national identity. Ireland stirs Coleridge’s vitriol because it demonstrates that individuals do not always see the state that rules them as “necessary” or find their national identity as self-evident as a mathematical proof. In facing the Irish question, Coleridge must consider whether a constitution can truly operate organically and whether he would even want it to do so. And as he attempts to analyze the Irish problem through the language of symbol, he ultimately questions whether the symbol indeed describes how nations, and Britain in particular, work.

National Parts and Wholes: The Irish Problem When Coleridge applies his definition of organic form to the British nation and the status of Ireland, the British state is the whole and Ireland a part that should be assimilated into the more important nation. Coleridge does not convincingly explain why he is sure Ireland has to be a part of Britain. His argument both reifies the United Kingdom’s current boundaries—since Ireland is presently part of Britain, it must continue to be so—and imagines the present union of Britain and Ireland as the culmination of a centurieslong historical relationship. In this way, he suggests, the “Idea” of Britain includes Ireland. Yet when he insists on Ireland’s subordinate status, he turns to the very empiricist methodology he usually disclaims: the “separation of Ireland from Great Britain” is “impracticable; and, were it not so, yet the success of the undertaking would be an event to be deprecated, as but another name for war, intestine discord, insignificance and slavery” (EOT, II, 411). Like many of his contemporaries, he argues that an independent

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state across the Irish Sea is dangerous for Britain. However, he also contends that it is not only in England’s interests to incorporate Ireland, it is also England’s duty: as the “more enlightened country,” intertwined with Ireland throughout history, Britain “has most incurred the obligation, to prevent or to remedy the grounds and occasion of so glaring and so lamentable a contrast” between the two countries’ prosperity (“Ireland VIII,” published in the Courier, September 13, 1811, in EOT, II, 281). Once he starts from the assumption that Ireland is indeed and should continue to be part of Britain, Coleridge (like many of his contemporaries) finds Irish Catholicism an insoluble problem. When Coleridge defines the Irish problem in the “Aids to an Appreciation of the Catholic Bill” (at the conclusion of On the Constitution of the Church and State), he uses his aesthetic vocabulary of parts and wholes: “A great numerical majority of the inhabitants of one integral part of the realm profess a religion hostile to that professed by the majority of the whole realm: and a religion, too, which the latter regard, and have had good reason to regard, as equally hostile to liberty, and the sacred rights of conscience generally” (150). Like many other Britons who worried about Ireland throughout the centuries, Coleridge finds Irish Catholicism problematic because it splits its followers’ loyalties between the British ruler and a foreign church establishment. Coleridge suggests that he does not criticize Catholicism for its religious beliefs; all he would withhold from Irish Catholics is the freedom to join with France or the Pope against their British counterparts. Catholics, he says, are excluded from some offices of State and from the Legislature, not on account of their religious tenets, but because they involve in their religion a numerous and most powerful magistracy, whose spiritual authority intermixes itself with almost every point that most nearly affects the temporal interests and conduct of their subjects, which magistracy will not suffer itself to be placed under either the control or superintendence of the Sovereign, while they swear allegiance to a foreign Sovereign. [EOT, II, 243, Coleridge’s emphasis]

Coleridge feels that Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope threatens not only national security but also the integrity of the British Constitution. In the “Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher,” he insists he supports individual religious freedom but opposes Catholicism “for the common safety, for the preservation of constitutional freedom, both religious and political, and the maintenance of a Government which withheld from the Romanists no other

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power, but that of enslaving themselves and persecuting their neighbours” (EOT, 409). But more than simply insisting that Catholics should not participate in a Church bureaucracy headed by a foreign sovereign, he also worries that they exclude themselves from the Anglican Church bureaucracy and the relationship it offers with the British King.34 Coleridge attributes Irish nationalism to a collective misreading: “love of a part as of a whole” is “first among the conducing causes and aidances of the conspiracy of the United Irishmen” (“Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher,” EOT, II, 413). He admits that the example of American independence might encourage the Irish to think they could separate and form a new whole. Nevertheless, he insists that Ireland is not a country of its own, and therefore any sentiment of “Irish Patriotism” is incorrect; Irish patriotism is “the delusive and pernicious sublimation of local predilection and clannish pride, into a sentiment and principle of nationality” (EOT, II, 412). Coleridge describes the feelings of Irish patriotism as good sentiments— love of one’s home—turned awry: I hold the “amor natalis soli” of priceless value, for its kindly influences on the virtues and amities of private life, and more especially as the preparatory school, and the almost indispensable condition of Patriotism; yet, when instead of being subordinate to patriotism it is passed off as its substitute, or (what in a state of things like the present, is still worse) when it is made to usurp its name and duties, I have not hesitated to pronounce it delusive and pernicious. [EOT, II, 411]

Coleridge compares Irish patriotism to idolatry because both elevate senses to the level of concepts: in religious worship, “the reverence of supernatural power transferred to objects of the senses” produces “the lewd and sanguinary abominations which have been found attendant on all the forms of idolatry” (EOT, II, 411). In this example, giving too much attention to one’s senses leads to a religion that focuses merely on the physical—for instance, on the bleeding hands and head of a Christ statue rather than on the spiritual ideas that the statue represents. In his religious writing, Coleridge emphasizes the danger of such practices in creating Catholic superstition.35 In a political context, the same basic problem occurs when local affections replace nationalism: people feel but do not understand what they are feeling for. The people do not see the figurative through the literal meaning, the general or universal through the particular significance.36

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The Irish are not alone in intuiting their national identity incorrectly; Coleridge trusts very few people’s intuitions. In the Biographia, Coleridge (mostly plagiarizing here from Schelling) emphasizes the limits of popular reasoning in physical and racialized terms: To an Esquimaux or New Zealander our most popular philosophy would be wholly unintelligible. The sense, the inward organ, for it is not yet born in him. So is there many a one among us, yes, and some who think themselves philosophers too, to whom the philosophic organ is entirely wanting. To such a man philosophy is a mere play of words and notions, like a theory of music to the deaf, or like the geometry of light to the blind. The connection of the parts and their logical dependencies may be seen and remembered; but the whole is groundless and hollow, unsustained by living contact, unaccompanied with any realizing intuition which exists by and in the act that affirms its existence, which is known, because it is, and is, because it is known. [I, 251]

Attributing intuition to an “organ” that only a few possess allows Coleridge to refuse the name “patriotism” to most people’s feelings of attachment to a place or nation, and more generally to discount their ability to serve any state or to be instruments of any cause. He claims that these people lack a physical “organ,” in other words, in order to prevent them from becoming political “organs.” Coleridge wants to reserve the ability to lead political movements for those who agree with his own perceptions. In the case of Ireland, Britain is the whole, and Ireland is the part, because the philosophers say it is so. The Irish people’s failure to intuit correctly, however, does not fully explain the Irish problem. The real problem for Coleridge is not that the majority of Irish people would deny their British identity but that the networks of the state Church do not reach into the Irish population to convince these people otherwise. Unlike lower class English or Scots, who also lack the ability to intuit, the Irish people reject the Established Church and therefore place themselves outside of the networks that should form their actions, thoughts, and identities in allegiance to the King. Even worse, they grant the authority they should reserve exclusively for their King to the Pope. For Coleridge, then, the problem is not that the Irish people currently seek independence; the problem is that because they are outside of the British state’s religious institutions, they will never be convinced otherwise.37 They therefore mistake a region that is merely part of Britain for a whole of its own.

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The question of how to distinguish a part from a whole is of course familiar to readers of Coleridge’s poetic fragments. And the rhetoric of failure from “Kubla Khan” haunts any account of the nation that uses Coleridge’s aesthetic vocabulary. For Coleridge, the region as fragment points to a similar problem as the poetic fragment: in both cases, the whole that would give structure and meaning to the individual part is incomplete. In its political context, however, the fragment does not point to a failure of imagination, or the failure to fully embody an imaginative vision, but rather to the state’s failure fully to extend its administrative networks. To be completed, Ireland must be incorporated into British government. Before we examine the consequence of political fragments for Coleridge’s aesthetic form, I will turn briefly to “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” to demonstrate that Coleridge’s most famous poetic fragments also explore the role of political and aesthetic frames in structuring individual vision.

Poetic and Social Fragments Readers continue to debate whether “Kubla Khan” is in fact a fragment (as Coleridge’s preface announces). Although the poem jumps between sections internally, seemingly missing passages that might connect Kubla’s work to the poet’s vision of the Abyssinian maid, some readers feel that it nevertheless presents a complete account of the poet’s failure to sustain a vision. Jack Stillinger suggests that the poem itself, before the addition of the preface, allows some hope that the poet’s vision will be revived.38 When Coleridge published the poem in 1816, he added a preface that removes this hope: he attributes his vision to an opium dream and claims that an interruption caused him to lose his dream vision. Coleridge’s supposed failure, of course, in one way simply testifies to the magnitude of his imagination and to his standards for aesthetic comprehensiveness: the true poet has such inspired visions that he can never fully record them on paper. When we read Coleridge’s preface in the context of his comments on organic states, however, we see that his 1816 account of the poem’s production reflects his developing model of political structures’ centrality to organic form. Because the preface and poetic text of “Kubla Khan” were written at different historical moments, the poem’s definition of the relationship of imagination and the state has proven difficult to untangle. In reading the original poem, without the preface, critics are divided as to whether Coleridge contrasts Kubla’s tyranny to the poet’s vision or whether he finds

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in Kubla a model of successful vision that organically fuses opposites such as the “sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice” (36).39 Although Kubla creates the dome by “decree” in the first stanza, the more organic processes at work within the chasm, the fountain, and the sacred river resist his complete control, and their “tumult” inspires Kubla’s visions of “ancestral voices prophesying war” (2, 30, 29).40 For Marjorie Levinson, the conservative 1816 Coleridge reevaluates the rule of Kubla Khan and now finds him “repressive” but “effectual and legitimate.”41 Certainly in 1816 more than in 1798, Coleridge worries about the rise of radicalism and feels that governments rather than individual visionaries must shape a people’s identity.42 Simon Bainbridge, however, contends that the Kubla character in part reflects Coleridge’s opinions on Napoleon. He notes that Coleridge first drafted “Kubla Khan” at a moment in which he still admired Napoleon as a genius with the potential to effect important change; by the end of 1802, he saw Napoleon as a tyrant.43 When we view the preface in the context of Coleridge’s writing on organic form, it is apparent that even if Coleridge in 1816 has all the more reason to portray a ruler as a person who sustains vision, he nevertheless wants governments to form organically rather than through a single leader’s assertion. In this context, Coleridge attributes the poem to an opium dream in part to deny that his description of Kubla carries any political significance: Coleridge insists that he invokes Kubla’s dome not because he admires despots but because he just happened to be reading a history of Kubla’s reign when he fell asleep. Levinson argues that Coleridge’s conservatism also causes him in 1816 to critique his own organic form. Her reading turns on the preface’s quotation from Coleridge’s poem “The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution.” In the extract, a “poor youth” watches a pebble destroy the “phantom-world” pictured on the surface of a stream and then sees the calm return as “once more / The pool becomes a mirror.” Levinson reads the youth as a reference to Narcissus and suggests that he sees a reflection of himself. The youth’s obsession with the stream’s mirror images is therefore narcissistic, illustrating “the dangers of a voyage inward and downward” (112–13). For Levinson, the preface uses the youth to critique the organicism that the poem advocates as radical and solipsistic, “a terrible tyranny”: “[f ]or in putting to work an ideology requiring the artist’s appropriation of the actual and extrinsic into psychic space, the poem denies itself the dialectic . . . —where mind and Nature, vision and fact, engage in productive, self-perpetuating, self-enlarging interaction” (114). In the larger poem from which the extract

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is derived, however, the youth in fact sees his beloved reflected in the water before she throws petals in the pond and disturbs the mirror image. When the surface becomes a mirror again, she has departed, and the youth simply sees the reflection of trees and petals. Coleridge suggests that the youth’s vision might indeed turn solipsistic: if he repeatedly returns to the stream, his “love-yearning” might “bewitch [his] eyes” until he sees his beloved reflected again, “the Naiad of the Mirror.” The youth displays at times a failure to organically integrate individual psyche and outer world, moving between such solipsistic visions and an opposite desire to lose himself completely in nature, to “cease to be.” In the quoted lines, however, the vision that returns is simply of the exterior world. And whether he sees in the mirror’s reflection the surrounding trees or his own face, the youth depends on the watermirror to support his vision. When the water’s surface is disrupted, he loses all vision. Coleridge in fact quotes the lines in part to contrast the return of the youth’s “mirror” with his own permanent loss of the opium dream; the difference between the two is that the youth keeps the frame for his vision, and Coleridge loses his. This contrast suggests that the political context of 1816 motivates Coleridge not to recant his organic model but rather to revise it: organic vision does not arise to individuals alone but rather through the frames that structure their perceptions. Coleridge’s 1816 preface to “Kubla Khan” implies this later model of how wholes develop, with opium providing the frame for the poet’s vision. Opium, of course, is a frame in a far different sense than state bureaucracy is a frame. But in both cases an external agency stirs individuals’ vision, whether this vision encompasses a poem or an understanding of one’s place within a nation. And in both cases, when this frame fails—when the opium trance wears off, or the state bureaucracy fails to penetrate the Irish people—it produces an aesthetic failure. The poet loses his vision; the Irish people (according to Coleridge) never develop theirs. With this reading, we can see Coleridge’s note describing the opium dream not only as an excuse for what he worries is poetic failure but as a different account, more in line with his later political works, of how vision arises. Like “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel” thematizes its failure to achieve closure, but “Christabel” envisions the whole it seeks and the causes of its failure differently. Whereas “Kubla Khan” considers the poet’s failure to sustain his vision, “Christabel” reflects on a failure to achieve familial and social unity. Unlike “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel” is clearly unfinished. Even the

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critics who agree that the poem, as fragment, should be read against the whole it projects (and Levinson provides the clearest account of this methodology) argue over what that whole would be; Coleridge himself gave several different and contradictory accounts of how “Christabel” would end.44 Beyond simply lacking an ending, the poem is also fragmented internally. The psychologically realistic and seemingly autobiographical conclusion to part II does not match the medieval setting and the supernatural character of the rest of the poem. The poem’s formal failures reflect its plot and thematic concerns. The poem also meditates on the problem that produces fragmentary political entities in Coleridge’s later writing: people cannot form themselves into social totalities. “Christabel” examines organic society in the context of two unions, the familial ties between Christabel and her father and the social ties between Christabel’s father and his former friend Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine. The two lords’ friendship also implies a political union: they rule territories in England and Scotland, respectively. The poem suggests that Geraldine will reunite the quarreling friends but at the cost of ejecting Christabel from her family’s good graces. The work of the poem in one sense is to show how Christabel, “whom her father loves so well” (24), becomes the object of her father’s disdain. At the moment in which the poem breaks off, it meditates on this failure to achieve both an organically structured society and a completed vision through considering mental “force”: “Perhaps tis pretty to force together / Thoughts so unlike each other” (666–67). “Force” marks the failure of organic form because the very need for force demonstrates that concepts cannot be reconciled as part of the same whole. In fact, we have seen that some sort of “force” underlies all applications of organic form to social and political contexts, the force that makes one part more important than another part. But Coleridge’s vision of organic form requires ignoring the fact that force is necessary for reconciling opposing ideas; he wants such reconciliation to occur naturally on the level of concepts. If the poem is a fragment because it lacks an ending, Coleridge cannot end the poem in part because he is questioning the very grounds and costs of totality. “Christabel” considers social unity as a function of familial ties and friendships, and uses a psychological and supernatural vocabulary to analyze the rupture between father and daughter. In the psychological reading, Coleridge blames social disintegration on improper communication and individual differences of feeling rather than on a lack of bureaucratic

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f­ rameworks. Nevertheless, “Christabel” anticipates Coleridge’s later idea that an organic social whole requires administrative systems that actively structure each individual. Placing Christabel “a furlong from the castle gate” at the opening of the poem forecasts this worry that individuals will fall outside of the frameworks that construct them. Christabel has already fallen away from her father, and this falling away (rather than any of her later actions or Geraldine’s spell) makes them unable to communicate with each other. In this sense, Christabel’s problem points to the same relationship of individual and society that underlies Coleridge’s fears about Ireland. In Ireland, and in Coleridge’s more modern administrative vocabulary, people who are outside the reach of state agencies can never be brought back inside, because the state will be unable to educate them to perceive correctly. In both the fragment poems and the political writing, Coleridge’s need for a sustained system to tie the elements of poem, society, or nation together means that inevitably the whole fails. In this sense, the same aesthetic problem underlies the early and late, poetic and political, works. In his later career, Coleridge writes in a political context, and suggests that the ability to form a whole out of disparate parts is not a matter of one person’s vision or of traditional social structures but of the system that balances the parts; state bureaucracy takes the place of the opium dream and the feudal family. And in Ireland, the British state Church’s failure to reach the populace produces a different kind of failure: the Irish people, according to Coleridge, fail to recognize their (British) national identity. They become a national fragment, neither maintaining an identity of their own nor fully integrating into Britain. Whereas the poetic fragment can be read as a symptom of and testament to the force of Coleridge’s vision and the standards of his organic form, the political fragment has no such reassuring reading. In fact, Coleridge’s assessment of Ireland apologizes for and further enables Britain’s colonialist policies. Coleridge is preoccupied by Ireland, however, not only because of prejudice but also because he fears that the Irish anomaly might point to a problem, not with the Irish people’s perceptions but with his own aesthetic models. Even as Coleridge continues to reiterate and expand his system for using the British Church to penetrate the British populace, he simultaneously worries that Ireland challenges his definition of organic statehood, based on the symbol as an agent of state formation. And Coleridge’s writing on Ireland becomes most vitriolic when he comes nearest to recognizing this failure.

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Proliferating Symbols and National Identity We see Coleridge’s frustration that the state’s administrative and symbolic structure does not interpellate Irish citizens in his writing on the Irish question, particularly in the bitterly vindictive “Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher,” published in the Courier between September and December 1814. The letters debate the history of the two paramilitary secret societies in Ireland, the loyalist and Protestant Orangemen and their opponents, the “ribbonmen,” a group within the United Irishmen that sought independence for Ireland. Coleridge’s addressee, Judge William Fletcher, was an English circuit court judge presiding at the Court of Sessions in Wexford. On August 5, 1814, he delivered an address to the grand jury, which was reprinted throughout ­Britain and Ireland as his “charge.” The address contended that many English Protestants exaggerated the degree of civil unrest in Ireland and used the bogey of radical uprising as an excuse to impose laws such as the Insurrection Acts that withdrew from the Irish the protections guaranteed by the British Constitution. Fletcher cautioned jurors of the dangers posed by the secret paramilitary societies on both sides, but he suggested that the loyalist Orangemen had infiltrated Irish courts and juries to sway legal proceedings.45 Coleridge’s “Letters” greatly misrepresent Fletcher’s rhetoric. Coleridge accuses Fletcher of ignoring the United Irishmen’s crimes and casting sole blame on the Orangemen. In response, Coleridge defends the Orangemen, inaccurately recounting their history to portray them as innocent defenders of their homeland against an unreasonable aggressor, and links the United Irishmen to French Jacobinism.46 In part, Coleridge is upset with Fletcher because Fletcher challenges Coleridge’s fears of Irish revolt and of lower class radical uprising. More crucially, however, Fletcher violates Coleridge’s trust that government structures interpellate citizens into the state. Coleridge argues that by downplaying the dangers of Irish revolt and criticizing the Insurrection Acts, Fletcher corrupts his government office. Coleridge admits at the opening of his letters that Fletcher’s motives were probably admirable, insofar as he aimed “to conciliate the gentlemen of Ireland in behalf of their tenants, not to inflame the Catholic peasantry against the Protestant landholders” (EOT, II, 376). Nevertheless, Coleridge says he is driven to publish his rebuttal for two reasons. First, the newspapers have reprinted Fletcher’s charge for an audience that includes radical Catholics as well as Protestant landholders, allowing his words to be “appropriated to the more detestable purpose of disturbing

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Ireland, and disuniting the Empire” (377). And second, Fletcher has failed in his duty to spread British law. As a judge, Fletcher has “an especial obligation to be an example to us of subordinating the blind impulses of local predilection to the duties of a comprehensive and enlightened patriotism,” and “must abhor all attempts to exasperate or embitter the popular mind on any occasion” (376, 377). He tells Fletcher, “Your Lordship’s habitual sense of your character and duties, as a JUDGE, [should] have precluded the possibility of your first designating, as useless, and then stigmatizing as a suspension of all constitution, law, and justice, the very measures and statutes which, as a Judge, it may become your solemn office to propound and actuate” (378, Coleridge’s emphasis). He taunts Fletcher with the possibility that a rebel in the judge’s courtroom might offer Fletcher’s own words to defend actions against Britain and against law and order more generally. Members of the British administration must spread law and promote obedience in the populace, and Fletcher, he thinks, instead incited revolt. Coleridge’s comments seem so bitter, however, not only because they exaggerate Fletcher’s positions and falsify history but because they sarcastically invoke Coleridge’s own philosophy of the symbol: But what has become of the United Irishmen? Have they vanished and left no successors? . . . Have they all, by a simultaneous shock of penitence, inwardly renounced their projects of separation, their schemes of resumption? And from the recent deluge of traitorous and blood-thirsty passions, does there indeed remain only a harmless partiality for green ribbons; mere symbols, belike of peace and promise, a coloured bow set up as the token of covenant between Rebellion and Loyalty? And who but must join with your Lordship in angry regret that the mischievous Orangemen should show as brutish and irrational antipathy to a slip-knot of Green, as turkies and wild bulls have to a rag of Red? [EOT, II, 403]

Coleridge ironically voices the position he imputes to Fletcher, suggesting that the United Irishmen have renounced violence and now aim to unify Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants but pose no threat to the union of Ireland and Britain. His rebuttal focuses on the Irishmen’s use of the green ribbon as symbol. He accuses the Irishmen of two different and opposite misapplications of symbol. On the one hand, he suggests that Fletcher and the United Irishmen understand symbolic structure: a symbol indeed reconciles opposites (like Rebellion and Loyalty) and demonstrates a “covenant” between individuals and the whole to which they belong. As we have seen,

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Coleridge defines the symbol not only as a trope in which a literal object or image (like the green ribbon) stands for a more abstract concept (like the Irish nation) but as a strategy for merging particulars into ever larger universals. As the symbol mediates part and whole, individual and nation, it indeed (Coleridge thinks) brings “peace and promise” to a people. In Fletcher’s descriptions, then, the United Irishmen share both Coleridge’s desire for a tolerant Britain that unites varied beliefs in one political structure and his strategy for achieving this goal through symbol; the Orangemen are at fault because they do not understand the symbol’s logic and violate the peace and unity the green ribbon promises. Coleridge, however, suggests that Fletcher reads the ribbon as a symbol only by ignoring the United Irishmen’s actual goals: even if they want to unite Catholics and Protestants, they seek an independent Ireland, freed from British rule. For all that they proclaim the green ribbon a symbol of a unified Ireland, Coleridge argues, the United Irishmen do not use symbol correctly, because their symbol advocates the division of Ireland from Britain. Second, however, Coleridge suggests a different reading. Maybe Fletcher does not understand symbol ­after all. If Fletcher believes the green ribbons are not political (not demanding division but only a brotherly unity), he shows that he defines symbol in its most restrictive (and not its Coleridgean) sense: “mere symbols” are any emblems in which a literal points to a figurative meaning; they do not carry a political or social force. Fletcher and the United Irishmen ignore the symbol’s power. Coleridge therefore accuses Fletcher not of misapplying the symbol’s promise of reconciliation but rather of denying that the symbol has any larger referent at all. Fletcher, he suggests, demonstrates an extreme literalism, reducing the ribbon to material fabric and decorative color, a “slip-knot of Green.” Blind to the political significance of the ribbon, Fletcher assumes that the Orangemen’s attacks—which Coleridge insists simply defend British law, order, and stability—are unmotivated. If the ribbon does not represent any idea or political vision, then the Orangemen’s anger is simply a visceral “antipathy” to the color green: like a bull or wild turkey seeing red, they charge. Coleridge’s irony suggests that such a reading is of course naïve: the ribbons obviously carry a political referent, a referent that (he implies) Fletcher ignores. The mistakes that Coleridge accuses Fletcher of making—first misreading the green ribbon as a symbol of peace and unity, and second denying that the ribbon as symbol has any larger referent at all—are contradictory, but in both cases Coleridge suggests

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that Fletcher does not understand the divisive political consequences of the United Irishmen’s vision. Coleridge’s irony surfaces because the proliferation of ribbons challenges his vision of organic form and symbolic structure. Unless he is one of the irrational bulls and turkeys he depicts, Coleridge must admit that the green ribbon is a symbol. In doing so, however, he either violates the integrity of the United Kingdom or admits that a symbol is not sufficient to enact union. The existence of two incompatible symbols threatens Coleridge’s model of political agency.47 Coleridge’s irony, then, ultimately expresses his own sense that the combined rhetorical and administrative structures he has trusted to form the British nation are failing.48 In the face of such a challenge, Coleridge backtracks from any suggestion that the ribbons are symbols. He calls the Orangemen’s ribbon a “remembrancer”: the Protestant group adopted the name Orangemen that whether collected in their lodges as brethren, or called to the field as loyal soldiers, they might hear in the very name, and bear about them in the common badge of their union, a perpetual remembrancer of that tolerant spirit, admitting no principles of persecution, but that of disarming persecutors on principle; and of that heroic devotion to liberty and equal laws, which have rendered the House of Nassau venerable to all Europe. [EOT, II, 409]

Unlike a symbol, which points to an idea that is in the process of manifestation and therefore places the moment of fulfillment in the future, a “remembrancer” places its referent in the actual world, in a specific incident in the historical past. A remembrancer therefore suggests that the nation is already fully established. As remembrancer, the orange ribbon defines the origin of the British nation in the Glorious Revolution that brought William of Orange to power and codified the Protestant succession and the right of Parliament to oversee the British monarchy. It also stands for the virtues Coleridge grants the nation since this founding moment, virtues that resemble the symbol’s “tolerant spirit,” including all individuals even if through a process of subordination. It is important, nevertheless, that Coleridge here does not call the orange ribbon a symbol and that he attributes the nation’s inclusiveness to ideology rather than to form. By renaming the orange ribbon a remembrancer, Coleridge suggests that ribbons are not symbols and therefore that the proliferation of incompatible ribbons is not a problem for his account of a symbolically mediated nation. That

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Coleridge must incorrectly recount the Orangemen’s history to provide this account of their name and emblem—especially when David Erdman shows that earlier essays stated this history correctly—suggests Coleridge’s urgent need to provide a nonsymbolic account for ribbons.49 If the orange ribbon is not a symbol, then neither is the green ribbon, for all that they may claim to emblematize union. The green ribbon, therefore, challenges neither his vision for the nation nor his idealist methodology. Coleridge’s essays are most bitter and vitriolic at moments when he fears that Ireland questions his models of state-mediated symbolic form. As long as he can isolate the threat to the other side of the Irish Sea, however, Coleridge does not actually rethink his political application of organic form. The United Irishmen’s separate and conflicting national vision troubles Coleridge, but in many ways it simply stimulates him to articulate his own model of the state more strongly. In the 1820s and 1830s, however, the fears of mass radicalism that Coleridge addresses in the “Letters to Mr. ­Justice Fletcher” expand into a fear of reform in England. And as he observes postwar unrest and political radicalism in England, Coleridge worries that not only the Irish but also the English masses might have a different vision of the nation. These doubts cause him to question his model of organic form in a way that he did not when discord was across the water. In an 1831 Table Talk entry, Coleridge argues that the ideal state is neither fully organic nor fully inorganic: in an inorganic body, like “a sheaf of corn—the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual phenomena,” but in an organic body, like “a man—the whole is the effect of, or result from, the parts—is in fact every thing and the parts nothing. A State is an Idea intermediate between the two—the Whole being a result from, and not a mere total of, the parts—and yet not so merging the constituent parts in the result, but that the individual exists integrally within it” (TT, I 258–59). In an organic whole, each part completely merges into the whole; because no part has a separate identity, it would be incorrect to refer to one part imposing a form onto another. Coleridge’s previous definitions of organic form had argued that an organic state simultaneously allowed individuals to be ends in themselves and imposed an end on them; in an organic whole, he suggested, the individuals freely choose the role the whole assigns to them. Here, however, he does not trust organic form to balance free individuals and the social whole. The state must allow individuals to retain their integrity as individuals, and so it cannot demand that they merge into a single organism.

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For all that Coleridge claims he now restricts his definition of organic form because of ethical concern for the individual, another Table Talk entry, from the same day, suggests that his politics might actually motivate his changed view. Instead of worrying about individual rights, he is actually concerned with what kind of whole self-determining individuals would create. As Coleridge fears that simple numbers of people rather than the weight of tradition or philosophical education now determine how much “importance” a part of society holds, he distances himself from his account of the state as organic balancing. Under an organic model, the lower classes demanding a voice in British government would inevitably bend that government’s shape. In theory, Coleridge accepts such change as the gradual process by which the nation and the Constitution evolve into their respective “ideas.” In practice, however, he insists that both Irish Catholics and the radicalized English working classes are tearing the state from its past forms and therefore destroying the “idea” of the state rather than further developing it. Coleridge casts the blame on Ireland, attributing the demands of the English masses to an infection of Irish radicalism. For this reason, Coleridge, now at the end of his life, declares the Union of England and Ireland a mistake: I am quite sure that no dangers are to be feared by England from the disannexing and independence of Ireland at all comparable with the evils which have been, and will yet be, caused to England by the Union. We have never received one particle of advantage from our association with Ireland— whilst we have in many most vital particulars violated the principles of the British Constitution solely for the purpose of conciliating the Irish Agitators, and endeavoring—a vain endeavor!—to find room for them under the same Government. Mr. Pitt has received great credit for effecting the Union; but I believe it will sooner or later be discovered that the manner in which, and the terms upon which, he effected it, made it the most fatal blow that ever was leveled against the peace and prosperity of England. From it came the Catholic Bill! From that has come this Reform Bill! And what next? [TT, I, 257]

When we have witnessed the vigor and vitriol with which Coleridge’s Courier essays defend the Union of Britain and Ireland, his position here is unexpected. But although he alters his opinion of the union, he maintains his insistence that one part in fact controls the nation’s supposedly organic evolution. Now, however, he thinks that in reality even England’s wealth and history are not enough to give the region and, more importantly, its

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upper classes control over the nation as a whole. Coleridge worries here about England, not Britain, and therefore demonstrates once again that he normally trusts that England shapes British interests. Organic form promised to weigh the “importance” of each part and allow it to shape the whole proportionally. But Coleridge now feels that he himself is the minority individual that will be dwarfed by the increasingly powerful masses. When he no longer trusts that the philosophers will shape the nation, he retreats from his model of the organic state.

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Wordsworth’s Establishment Poetics

In December 1819, during a visit of Wordsworth to London, the painter Benjamin Haydon hosted an “immortal dinner.”1 Haydon’s friend Keats wanted to be introduced to Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb and Thomas Monkhouse rounded out the company. According to Haydon’s vivid depiction, the discussion was both learned and witty, interspersing “a glorious set-to—on Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Virgil” with Lamb’s comic toasts. When the party withdrew for tea, they were joined by Mr. Kingston, Wordsworth’s superior in his position as stamp distributor, who wanted to meet Wordsworth in person and had called on Haydon that morning to beg for an invitation. The introduction did not go smoothly. Haydon forgot to mention Kingston’s title, and so Wordsworth at first denied they had conducted any correspondence. When Kingston attempted to begin a literary conversation, asking, “Don’t you think, sir, Milton was a great genius?” a drunken Charles Lamb recited nursery rhymes in derision and, grabbing a candle, demanded to study the phrenology of a man who could utter such “deep” remarks. Wordsworth eventually conciliated the comptroller, who was, Haydon suggests, “a goodnatured man.” Nevertheless, Haydon ­regretted Wordsworth’s association:

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He [Kingston] had a visible effect on Wordsworth. . . . Those who are dependent on others who have despotic control over them must and do feel affected by their presence. . . . I felt pain that such a poet as Wordsworth should be under the supervisorship of such a being. The people of England have a horror of office, and instinct against it. They are right. A man’s liberty is gone the moment he becomes official; he is the slave of his superiors, and makes others slaves to him.2

Keats was especially disturbed to learn that after meeting Kingston at Haydon’s party, Wordsworth had dined with him. In a letter to Haydon he bemoaned, “O that he had not fought with a warrener—that is, dined at Kingston’s!”3 Wordsworth took the position as Distributor of Stamps for the district of Westmoreland in 1813. His three children were growing, and he worried that his income was insufficient for educating them.4 Although the position did not require full-time employment, it was not a sinecure. Wordsworth corresponded with his subdistributors, made yearly trips through his district, and since he was paid in a percentage of income, worked to see that licenses, estates, and other transactions would pass through his hands rather than going directly to the London offices. Nevertheless, Wordsworth would probably not have agreed with Haydon’s assessment that his position as a subordinate rendered him a “slave”: the job granted Wordsworth financial independence while not involving him in the kind of politics that might compromise his poetry. While certainly compatible with Wordsworth’s idea of himself as a professional poet, however, the job necessarily took some time away from Wordsworth’s vocation. And Wordsworth’s contemporaries not only felt his position reduced him but questioned whether his stampoffice work had deleterious consequences for the quality as well as the quantity of his poetic production. One of Wordsworth’s most consistently critical reviewers, Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review, complains that “contact of the stamp office appears to have had nearly as bad an effect on Mr. Wordsworth” as laureateship had on Robert Southey: [S]ince he has openly taken to the office of a publican, and exchanged the company of leech-gatherers for that of tax gatherers, he has fallen into a way of writing which is equally distasteful for his old friends and his old monitors, a sort of prosy, solemn, obscure, feeble kind of mouthing—sadly garnished with shreds of phrases from Milton and the Bible—but without nature and without passion—and with a plentiful lack of meaning, compensated only by a large allowance of affectation and egotism.5

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Interestingly, both Jeffrey and Haydon deprecate the effects of the poet’s state office, but they differ on how they read Wordsworth’s own attitude towards his employment and employers: Haydon sympathizes with Words­ worth’s embarrassment before his stamp-office superior, whereas Jeffrey finds him an uncritical “publican,” freely engaging with his fellow “taxgatherers.” Wordsworth’s poetry from the years following the Napoleonic Wars suggests that despite his embarrassment at his superior’s attempts to engage in literary conversation, he does not feel the horror of office that Haydon insists is instinctual to all English people. From The Excursion (1814) on, and especially in the Ecclesiastical Sketches (published in 1821 and revised into the Ecclesiastical Sonnets), Wordsworth’s politics and verse increasingly embraced Church and state. I do not intend to argue that Wordsworth’s position as stamp distributor was responsible for this change in poetics and politics. However, Wordsworth’s state position was one of many impetuses for him to question the benefits and drawbacks of carrying official office and to ask to what degree the poet performed state work. Until the end of his life, when after Southey’s death he became poet laureate, Wordsworth did not write poetry in the direct employ of the state.6 Wordsworth considered it very appropriate for the state to honor a distinguished poet with a pension (and eventually accepted a pension himself ), and he certainly envisioned himself as a patriotic writer who celebrated Britain’s history and recent military victories in verse. In none of these cases, however, is the poet a state official. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, I will argue, Wordsworth distinguishes the poet’s authority from that of government officials even as he aims to depict and contribute to the state’s work. Recent critics have placed less emphasis than Wordsworth’s contemporaries did on his job as stamp distributor but have nevertheless agreed with Jeffrey that taking the state as his subject had profoundly deleterious consequences for Wordsworth’s poetry. By simply dismissing Wordsworth’s verse as bad and politics as reactionary, however, we miss the serious intellectual program his work contains. In taking the Anglican Church and the British state as his subject, Wordsworth models the changing strategies of early nineteenth-century state power and rethinks individual agency and poetic authority as part of the state. To imagine his own work as part of the institutions of the British state and Anglican Church requires Words­ worth to abandon his concern for his own genius and instead worry over the institutional conditions under which a community of like-minded readers arises.7 As he attempts to relay the message of the Church, he worries

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that the imagination and poetic language he had prized in his earlier verse might pull his poems, and his readers, away from the Church’s message. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, therefore, Wordsworth intentionally abandons the imaginative style of his early verse in favor of a content that draws upon a history and set of beliefs which readers already share, and a style that will neither fancifully exceed the boundaries of Protestant restraint nor distract readers from the Church’s message. If the resulting verse sounds like failure to some readers, we can recognize that even this failure is the result of Wordsworth’s conscious strategy.

Modeling Governmentality: Wordsworth’s Anglican Church The Ecclesiastical Sonnets take the institutionalization of the state Anglican Church as their subject. Wordsworth narrates the history of Christianity in Britain, culminating in the Glorious Revolution; depicts the sacraments, liturgy, and rites in present use; and concludes by praising church architecture as the physical embodiment of religious community. In Wordsworth’s narration of English history, the British state and the Anglican Church reach their fulfillment simultaneously, when the Glorious Revolution instantiates the Anglican succession. And Wordsworth implies that a similar fusion of national and religious identity marks the fulfillment of an individual’s ethical development: joining the Church means realizing one’s religious and national identities simultaneously. For Wordsworth, the Anglican Church serves the traditional function of churches, incorporating participants into a community of beliefs and practices continued across the ages.8 However, Wordsworth updates his vision of the Anglican Church for the modern governmental era by focusing on the quasi-bureaucratic institution of the Church as a kind of state agency. For Wordsworth, the Church is so important as an agent of both national and individual formation because its institutional structures reach into each individual to form his or her character and conscience in a manner that is compatible with the English tradition of liberty. Like Coleridge’s model of the Church, Wordsworth’s is prescriptive as well as descriptive. Wordsworth envisions the Church both as a state agency and as a model for how the government should shape the populace. The poet hopes to participate in this mission: in a motto adapted from Herbert, he suggests that “A verse may catch a wandering Soul, that flies / Profounder Tracts, and by a blest surprise / Convert delight into a Sacrifice.”9 The two types of sonnets in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, historical narration and description of ritual, show

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the two functions of the sequence. In narrating history, they create a specifically national vision; in depicting ritual, they demonstrate how the Church forms this national vision by reaching individual parishioners. In this way, Wordsworth’s Anglican Church demonstrates what Michel Foucault calls the simultaneously individuating and totalizing functions of the modern pastoral state. Foucault’s analysis helps us realize what is indeed modern in Words­ worth’s state Church. In several late essays, including “Governmentality,” “Omnes et Singulatim,” and “The Subject and Power,” and in the lectures published in English as Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault suggests that the late eighteenth century saw a change in the nature of state power.10 The state no longer defined itself through a king’s sovereignty over a territory but by the state’s ability to govern a population. It governed this population, however, not only as a group but also as a collection of individuals who must each be actively formed. The state studied individuals to analyze the population’s sanitary conditions, crime, debt, nutrition, or health, for example, and then formulated policies to address each issue through a combination of local and central interventions. Foucault traces the state’s individuating power to the tradition of pastoral care developed in the Christian Church. In the Christian tradition, the pastor supervises and morally forms each individual and his parish as a whole, encouraging his parishioners to renounce this world in hopes of salvation in the next. Indeed, the pastor must answer personally for the state of each parishioner’s soul. For this reason, Foucault writes, pastoral power “cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it” (“Subject and Power,” 333).11 According to Foucault, from the beginning of the eighteenth century the state adopted but secularized this pastoral model. The state understood the ultimate goal of pastoral care differently from the Church: “it was a question no longer of leading people to their salvation in the next world but, rather, ensuring it in this world” by developing “health, well-being (that is sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents” (“Subject and Power,” 334). The state linked the health of each individual to the nation as a whole, aiming to “develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state” (“Omnes et Singulatim,” 322). Nevertheless, for Foucault, these pastoral processes were not confined to the state. In fact,

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he suggests, beginning in the eighteenth century, governing functions proliferated and spread across the population. Foucault suggests that this pastoral state emerges alongside, and at the same time countering and enabling, a liberal government rationality. On the one hand, liberalism’s limitations on government contradict the tactics of a pastoral state: liberal economics suggests that the sovereign cannot in fact see citizens’ individual interests or understand the mechanisms by which in pursuing their interests they create a prosperous society. Government therefore must leave society alone to develop without interference. On the other hand, Foucault suggests, liberalism’s insistence on individual freedom in fact proves to be a governmental tactic: freedom develops “not only as the right of individuals legitimately opposed to the power, usurpations, and abuses of the sovereign or the government, but as an element that has become indispensable to governmentality itself.”12 Liberalism defines individuals’ ability to pursue their own interests as both necessary to good government and as the object of good government, and so government must create the conditions under which they have the capacity to be “free.” For this reason, he suggests, “freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security,” with security defined both as what we would now call “national” security (the conditions necessary for society to conduct economic transactions) and as “social” security, the conditions necessary for individuals to maintain themselves (48). In describing the disciplinary reach of government authority, Foucault draws on the model of bio-power he developed in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. But whereas his earlier work imagined that individuals had little free will in the face of the disciplinary tactics that constructed them, Foucault’s late work focuses on the way in which individuals claim subjectivity.13 He suggests that disciplinary structures rely on individual agency; power does not monolithically control another person but rather is a means of “acting on another’s actions” (“Subject and Power,” 340). Foucault excludes physical coercion or slavery, for example, from his definition of power. Instead, “power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free,” by which he means that they “are faced with a field of possibilities in which several kinds of conduct, several ways of reacting and modes of behavior are available” (“Subject and Power,” 342). Power relationships affect the choices individuals make but do not remove their ability to choose. Far from setting freedom and power at odds, then, Foucault finds a “complicated interplay” between the two and suggests that

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“freedom may well appear the condition for the exercise of power” (“Subject and Power,” 342). This model of power is evident in Foucault’s analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberalism’s insistence that the state governs best when it relies on individuals’ capacity for free choice. Foucault’s analysis of liberal governmentality is especially helpful in reading Wordsworth’s post-Napoleonic writing, for several reasons. First, Words­ worth’s representation of the Anglican Church is an important transitional moment in the state’s secularization of pastoral care. Wordsworth focuses on a traditional religious institution. But although he praises the Church’s conventional religious teaching, he finds its secular mission of forming individuals into an enduring community and nation even more crucial. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets describe the techniques—and especially the rites and rituals—through which the Church incorporates individuals into a religious community. In doing so, Wordsworth upholds the Church as a model for state government. Second, Wordsworth also demonstrates the at times contradictory governmental techniques that Foucault describes in the liberal state, the insistence on respecting individual freedom and liberty while asserting that the state must actively form individuals and the social conditions that enable these individuals to act freely. Third, Foucault’s analysis helps account for the ways in which Wordsworth moves between liberal and communitarian positions, locating individual development and social transactions both inside and outside government institutions. In contrast to traditionally liberal arguments that take individuals as their starting point, Wordsworth believes that Church and state institutions form both individuals and communities in the first place. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Words­ worth describes the way in which the Anglican Church has evolved over time, and like Burke therefore imagines government institutions as both evolving out of previous generations of society and providing an inheritance for current and future generations. However, Wordsworth takes a more classically liberal view than Burke because although he imagines individuals to be Anglican by birthright, and to gain their basic rights and identities from the institutions that surround them, he nevertheless also imagines that a segment of society threatens to elude these institutions’ reach. The state, therefore, must continually draw in members of the populace. And finally, in examining the way in which individuals and civil society arise alongside the state, as both part of and outside of it, Wordsworth suggests the need for a special class of quasi-institutional individuals who likewise operate both inside and outside of the state, carrying the state’s guidance to people it

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would not ordinarily reach. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets Wordsworth is especially interested in the ways in which the pastor works at the boundaries of the state religious institution that authorizes his teaching. And Wordsworth asks to what degree the poet may or may not serve a similar function.

Poetic Conversions In his early career, Wordsworth portrays the poet as a kind of pastoral agent who depicts rural life and everyday emotions with the aim of improving his readers. From his Preface to Lyrical Ballads on, Wordsworth hopes to convert readers to a new form of aesthetic and imagines his verse founding reading communities that would connect middle class homes across Britain through their shared taste.14 By using real language and natural emotions, Wordsworth promises, his poetry will be “important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations” (615). In Wordsworth’s early poetry, the poet’s narrative persona often attempts a kind of pastoral care. When he encounters individuals walking on the public roads, he gives them advice; for example, he asks the leech-gatherer why he cannot be more productive, and he suggests that the discharged soldier should “not linger in the public ways / But ask for timely furtherance and help / Such as his state required.”15 In one sense these passages suggest that Wordsworth is a bad pastoral agent. Through conversation, the poet eventually learns that he has misread his interlocutor and that his advice is presumptuous and misguided. In the cases of the leech-gatherer and the discharged soldier, he at first reads each man’s physical needs but not his strong and independent character. Both Lyrical Ballads and Poems on the Naming of Places in particular are full of the poet’s “rash judgments.”16 But if these lyrics demonstrate an initial failure of pastoral supervision, they do so to enact two different kinds of pastoral relationship. First, Wordsworth’s misreadings suggest that an individual’s inner character is surprisingly difficult to ascertain, and this very illegibility means that the state needs agents like the poet who take the time to come to understand their fellow citizens. Although these lyrics do not directly address the British state, they claim for the poet a special skill in the kind of monitoring and supervision of individuals that the pastoral state also undertakes. Second, the poet figure’s misunderstandings and eventual learning make him a model for the kind of ethical development he promises to promote in readers. In the end the poet figure learns from the individuals he intends to aid physically or improve morally. The discharged soldier, for

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example, teaches Wordsworth that what looks like excessive meekness is in fact an admirable trust in passersby and in God, a trust that emphasizes Wordsworth’s own need to trust his readers.17 In demonstrating his willingness to learn these lessons, Wordsworth implicitly argues that reading about his encounters will expand his readers’ sympathies as well. If the young Wordsworth aims to develop his readers’ taste and morals, however, he finds his goals frustrated. Wordsworth suggests that his goal of creating a new kind of taste means he starts with a small readership, and he worries that general readers will not notice, understand, or appreciate his innovations in the subject and style of poetry. When he addresses this problem in his first Preface, he merely cautions readers to judge his poetry for themselves and asks them to give his works the time they deserve. At other times, though, Wordsworth is much less optimistic about his verse’s power to convert readers. In “Home at Grasmere” he defiantly proclaims, echoing Milton, “fit audience let me find though few.”18 In search of this fit audience, however, he withdraws from society first into the vale of Grasmere and then, when he fears that the people of Grasmere do not share the majesty of their surroundings, into his own drawing room.19 Even if he retreats from his goals of conversion, Wordsworth still imagines he fulfills a pastoral role. For one, he tests potential readers’ character based on whether they buy and read his poetry in the first place. Furthermore, writing for a readership composed of family and friends encourages the fantasy that he can see into readers’ souls. Indeed, when Sara and Mary Hutchinson critique the “Leech-Gatherer,” both Wordsworth and Dorothy insist that the sisters’ inability to appreciate his poems is a sign of moral failing, and admonish them to look more carefully into their hearts to learn to appreciate Words­ worth’s work. In 1815, still frustrated with his sales, Wordsworth insists that his lack of popularity demonstrates his own genius and his continued need to convert readers: “[e]very author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed: so has it been, so will it continue to be.”20 The civil unrest in the years following the Napoleonic Wars amplifies his fear that the reading public will not sympathize with his verse even while emphasizing to him the need for the kind of moral education that his work had aimed to provide.21 The Ecclesiastical Sonnets maintain Wordsworth’s hope that verse will convert readers but transfer the functions of forming moral character and interpellating individuals into a community to the institutionalized state

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Church.22 Whereas his 1815 essay imagines that the poet will convert readers to an appreciation of his own poetic innovations, in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets the poet does not seek to build “taste” for a new kind of poetic style but rather to guide his readers to the institutional rituals of Anglican worship.23 The poet’s new role also alters the style of Wordsworth’s verse. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets contain none of the conversations in which the poet learns from or is admonished by his interlocutor. In the pastoral state depicted in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the poet is fully formed as a national citizen and Church member; the state underwrites through its supervisory agencies and tactics the self-sufficiency of each individual. The poet therefore is the agent of others’ conversion without modeling such a conversion or ethical development himself. In his epigraph to the poem, Wordsworth hopes that his sonnets will turn readers’ “delight” into “sacrifice.” His verse, he implies, will draw readers who are Anglican by birth (and therefore who do not in actuality need to be converted) to give up worldly sins and embrace religious practice. The term “sacrifice,” however, takes on a more ironic meaning in the context both of Wordsworth’s note to the poem and of the generally negative reaction to the Sonnets. In response to critics who bemoan Wordsworth’s decline, Alan Liu argues that Wordsworth does not simply lose his abilities but rather “sacrifices” them for a purpose: “he sacrifices part of his original self—his imagination—to redeem part of history.”24 In an 1822 letter, Words­worth himself agrees: The Ecclesiastical Sketches labour under one obvious disadvantage, that they can only present themselves as a whole to the reader who is pretty well acquainted with the history of this country; and, as separate pieces several of them suffer as poetry from the matter of fact, there being unavoidably in all history, except as it is mere suggestion, something that enslaves the Fancy.25

If Wordsworth’s self-assessment proved true—and the negative response of most readers to the Sonnets certainly would suggest it has—we might ask why he chose a narrative form and historical content so unsuited for the task of conversion which his motto announces.26 Not only might the poem’s lack of “fancy” prevent many poems from delighting; if the poem’s dense historical references limit its audience to those “pretty well acquainted with the history of the country,” Wordsworth misses many of the potential readers he most wants to convert. Even Wordsworth’s version of history is a

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singularly uncharismatic one, listing a multitude of minor incidents and personages rather than portraying influential characters or telling moments in detail. When writing poetry with the express task of converting, why does Wordsworth abandon his imaginative abilities? The answer, I will suggest, is twofold. First, Wordsworth now locates his poetry’s power in the state religious institution that it serves rather than in his own vision, and he fears his own imagination might get in the way in this message. And second, he is not so much converting readers as reminding them of an identity they already possess. Peter Manning, writing on Wordsworth’s 1833 “Stanzas Suggested in a Steamboat off St Bee’s,” suggests that Wordsworth turns to Church history to find a more reliable way of producing the inspiration he had previously located in nature and in autobiography. In doing so, he “forfeited the openness to accident that had been important to the young Wordsworth.”27 The Ecclesiastical Sonnets similarly relocate inspiration within the history, rites, and practices of the Anglican Church. And Manning’s comment points us toward another instructive disconnect between Wordsworth’s stated goals for the sequence and his poetic practices in it. Although Wordsworth in the Sonnets forfeits accident for the certainty of Church history and Church ritual, he still phrases his goals for the work in terms that reflect the centrality of accident and surprise to his earlier poetry: he intends to “surprise” the reader (“by a blest surprise / Convert delight into Sacrifice”). A narration of the major events of British Church history is by definition unsurprising, relying on standard (even if somewhat arcane) knowledge. In The Prelude, the kinds of accidents Manning refers to often surprise Wordsworth partially because he finds the incidents, and the images they call to mind, strangely unsurprising. When Wordsworth sees the drowned man rise up from the lake, for example, he realizes his “inner eye had seen / Such sights before, among the shining streams / Of Fairy Land, the Forests of Romance” (5.475– 77). In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, “surprise” works similarly: the Sonnets aim to make readers recognize what they already know, and suddenly realize that they have indeed already known it. And these surprises of realization and recognition occur not through the kinds of accidents or encounters that populate the Prelude but through a rediscovery of the institutions of the Church and state. Ultimately, then, the conversion Wordsworth attempts does not seem like conversion at all: Wordsworth simply reminds readers that they are already members of the institutionalized national Church.

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Wordsworth’s National Vision In his early poetry on the state and nation, Wordsworth does not give state institutions so prominent a role. In poems written during the Napoleonic Wars, Wordsworth suggests that the nation’s character and strength derive organically from the people themselves. As he states most clearly in an 1810 sonnet, “O’erweening Statesmen have full long relied / On fleets and armies, and external wealth: / But from within proceeds a Nation’s health.”28 When we read these sonnets through the lens of Foucault, Wordsworth’s insistence that the nation’s people constitute its wealth announces one of the basic tenets underlying both the pastoral and liberal visions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governmentality: the pastoral state defines the nation’s strength through the population’s health and character. Wordsworth’s 1802–3 poems derive his strong sense of British identity in part from a wartime opposition to France.29 When he imagines an actual French invasion, Words­ worth thinks England will move “in one breath,” rise “like one man,” or “have one soul,” because it is a “free-born Nation” that accommodates all political views; he calls to potential militia men, “Come ye—whate’er your creed.”30 Similarly, in the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty he assures the “Men of Kent” who would bear the brunt of the invasion that “Britain is one breath; / We all are with you now from Shore to Shore” (“To the Men of Kent,” 23.12–13). Even as the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty locate the nation’s strength in its people, they simultaneously argue like Burke that the upper classes, who embody English tradition, must lead the nation. Wordsworth at times attributes the nation’s strength to a few “great men” or “invincible knights of old,” who bequeathed both character and liberty to current Britons. He includes authors among these great men, crediting geniuses such as Milton and Shakespeare for Britain’s freedom: “We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold / Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung / Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold” (16.9–14). Wordsworth is at his most pessimistic when he feels that the upper classes not only do not have the moral stature to guide the people but do not in fact equal the people in character. He finds the ruling class especially corrupt in France. Reflecting on his visit to Calais, he suggests that individuals must distance themselves from their rulers: “Happy is he, who, caring not for Pope, / Consul, or King, can sound himself to know / The destiny of Man, and live in hope” (5.12–14). Even in Britain, though, he worries that the upper class’s focus on money and wealth is weakening

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British society; he cautions that “riches are akin / To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death” (20.13–14).31 He hopes the country’s rulers will be “Wise, upright, valiant” but fears that instead they might be “a venal Band, / Who are to judge of danger which they fear / And honour which they do not understand” (26.11, 12–14). With such a ruling class, Wordsworth questions whether England’s people are sufficiently strong to defeat Napoleon and laments that his imperfect nation is all that stands against France’s imperial expansion: “Oh grief! That Earth’s best hopes rest all with Thee!” (21.14). To be strong, a people and a nation need moral leaders. Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry still suggests that the people form their nation’s strength but transfers the responsibility for leading these people from the great men and ruling classes to the institutions of the British state.32 He no longer trusts “great men” to rise from the people or the upper classes to guide the nation, and even should such leaders arise he is not sure that the nation would accept their guidance. If he in theory views the people as the nation’s strength, he now worries that the people themselves do not understand the nation’s interests and that if stirred by rancorous leaders they would demand destructive change. At times, Wordsworth seems pessimistic about whether the nation will unify at all.33 Wordsworth’s Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818) depict his fear that the wrong people might sway mass opinion and cause the destruction of traditional social structures. The addresses defend the prerogative of Lord Lonsdale (head of the Lowther family) to appoint his sons as the district’s representatives to Parliament.34 Using logic similar to Burke’s, Words­ worth argues that the wealthiest families should represent their regions in both houses of Parliament and should lead public opinion. However, he also attempts to make these prerogatives seem compatible with the idea of free elections, claiming that the very fact that the district has never held a Parliamentary election shows that the county’s freeholders have always supported Lonsdale’s appointments. Britain’s social and political freedom, he suggests, make it all the more important that the upper classes mold the behavior and opinions of society at large, “with the liberty of speech and writing that prevails amongst us, if such rays of light and love did not generally emanate from superiority of station, possessions, and accomplishment, the frame of society, which we behold, could not subsist.”35 Lonsdale’s opponents, however, incite the working classes to riot in hopes of stirring rancor among the lower ranks of voting freeholders

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[i]nstead of aiming to influence the less wealthy and less instructed Freeholders through the medium of those whom they have been accustomed to confide in—instead of descending by legitimate gradations from high to lower, from the well-instructed and widely-experienced to those who have not had equal advantages—it commences at the bottom; far beneath the degree of the poorest Freeholders; and works upwards, with an inflammatory appeal to feelings that owe their birth to previous mis-statement of facts.

Far from locating Britain’s most positive character traits in the people, the riots demonstrate how readily the people stray from ruling class influence. And Words­worth’s later work suggests that the people now threaten to destroy society and state alike. The “Protest Against the Ballot” (1838) describes how “A Power misnamed the SPIRIT OF REFORM / . . . through the anguished Island swept in storm, / Threatening to lay all Orders at her feet” and insists that the state must stop this force (2–4). In response to these popular uprisings, Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo poetry emphasizes the need not only for social institutions (like class and property) but for active government institutions to form the populace. In the state Church in particular Wordsworth finds an institution that he hopes will provide the social order the upper classes are no longer able to impose.

“Between license and slavish order”: Liberty and Authority in the State Church In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth not only suggests that property alone does not provide social order but more specifically insists that institutions like the Church must develop each individual’s character. Although the sequence does not directly address the civil unrest of the postwar years, the poems nevertheless respond to current events.36 In the advertisement to the Ecclesiastical Sketches, Wordsworth attributes the sonnets’ origin to a visit with his friend Sir George Beaumont and specifically to “a walk through different parts of [Beaumont’s] estate, with a view to fix upon the site of a new Church which he intended to erect.” While walking, Words­worth says, they “were naturally led to look back upon past events with wonder and gratitude, and on the future with hope”; as he wrote the Sonnets, he recalls “[t]he Catholic Question, which was agitated in Parliament about that time, kept my thoughts in the same course” (Hayden, 997). ­Stephen Gill notes that Wordsworth had visited the site of the Peterloo Massacre during the same trip, and suggests that the massacre, and the spectre of

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mass radicalism it evoked, were also in Wordsworth’s mind as he wrote.37 Beaumont’s plan to erect a Church for his tenants demonstrates the kind of paternalistic concern and institutional structure Wordsworth hopes will solidify society against radicalism and reform. The Catholic question provides a lightning rod for Wordsworth’s worries. Like Coleridge and many other contemporaries, Wordsworth opposes granting citizenship to Catholics and worries that Catholics’ allegiance to the Pope threatens Britain’s security.38 Even more, however, he criticizes Catholicism for inhibiting individual conscience. In letters, he complains that “papacy is founded on the overthrow of private judgment” and worries that rituals like confession encourage individuals to misrepresent themselves: Catholicism “gives religious sanction” to “that disposition in all men to deem false pretence justifiable for favourite ends.”39 Wordsworth cites Britain’s very liberality and freedom to argue for the importance of Protestant state religion. In a country without a strong despotic or military power, he says, the natural force of Catholicism would spread throughout the people. He concludes that “the two religions cannot coexist, in a Country free as our’s upon equal terms.”40 Maintaining a nation requires maintaining a single state Church, and the only hope for the future of state Protestantism is to withhold from the Catholics any and all power. Wordsworth’s arguments here are especially interesting because of the way he uses “liberty” (both the fact of British liberty and the goal of maintaining liberty) to argue for maintaining restrictions on Catholics. Despite his criticism of Catholic excesses, Wordsworth is ultimately more concerned with the ubiquity of the state Church than with doctrine per se.41 The Ecclesiastical Sonnets praise Cromwell for defending the Scottish Covenanters, and Wordsworth’s contemporary Anglicans for welcoming the Catholics who fled the French Revolution. Wordsworth also insists that dissenting ministers should not be persecuted and that individuals must follow their own religious conscience. In his 1835 “postscript” to his series of prefaces, Wordsworth suggests that Anglicans worry too much about dissenters, when they should instead worry that “hundreds of our fellow-countrymen, though formally and nominally of the Church of England, never enter her places of worship, neither have they communication with her ministers!”42 In other poems, Wordsworth at times moves beyond doctrinal openness into outright suspicion of religion. Peter Manning notes that in the poem “Processions” from Wordsworth’s 1820 tour on the continent, Wordsworth suggests all religion is “invented by the mind” and views “tradition . . . as willed invention rather than living force.”43 Wordsworth’s questioning of ­religious

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verities emphasizes that it is not the religious beliefs themselves that interest him but rather the ways in which these beliefs contribute to social stability. Even in the 1840s, as Wordsworth’s beliefs become more orthodox, he still values religion for encouraging individual behaviors—such as meekness and gratitude—that he believes are conducive to forming communities.44 And if he places less weight on doctrinal specifics, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets nevertheless draw a firm boundary around the religious tolerance they advocate: the Anglican Church should work for freedom against tyrants, but it can best do so by maintaining its firm hold of the British government. In suggesting that the institutionalized state Church should ethically form the British population, Wordsworth argues for a certain degree of government penetration into individual lives. He reconciles this disciplinary reach and restrictiveness with his insistence on individual liberty in part by suggesting that the Anglican Church and British state simply cannot tyrannize citizens. First, Wordsworth argues that the Church was historically responsible for the development of civil rights in England. Basic rights, he says, “came from heaven,” and the Church stirred the “champions” of civil rights to action on earth (“Obligations of civil to religious liberty,” III.x. 13, 6). And second, even if he attributes their origin to heaven, Wordsworth suggests that individuals claim these rights and become fully human only through earthly government institutions.45 The way to preserve civil liberties, he argues, is through careful preservation of the nation’s religious institutions: “if spiritual things / Be lost, through apathy, or scorn, or fear,” he fears the “humbler franchises” of civil liberty will be lost as well (9–11). And to preserve “spiritual things,” the Church must remain part of the state so that Church institutions have the capacity to reach every citizen, developing their individual character and their ability to claim freedom in the first place. Once the state has formed individual character and conscience, Words­ worth suggests that the state must respect individuals’ rights and freedom. Even as Wordsworth imagines that individuals are by birth members of the state and the state Church, he also insists that they must freely choose to become active participants in the Church community. Wordsworth has several reasons for emphasizing free will. He conforms to a religious tradition of free will, and he insists that liberty distinguishes both the English political and Protestant religious traditions from other nations and faiths. Furthermore, Wordsworth seeks in the church a community of understanding readers and thinks that only those individuals who turn to the Church freely and with full understanding demonstrate the ethical development

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that he finds necessary for moral relationships. Since Wordsworth aims to participate in the process of converting readers, he also finds his own ability to influence readers predicated upon their ability to choose. Beyond his concern for ensuring that each member of the Church community meets his ethical standards, Wordsworth (like the theorists analyzed by Foucault) also views the state’s ability to guarantee individual freedom as part of the argument for, and effect of, its very extension.46 Conversely, because the state is continually using the goal of individual liberty to set its own limits, the people need not seek to limit the state. In Wordsworth’s vision, however, “liberty” looks similar to the contestfree Westmoreland elections, which he claims allowed free choice: individuals acclaim the ideas and the social order presented to them. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, when Wordsworth defines terms like rights, liberty, and freedom, they denote not individuals’ ability to participate in government but rather an abstract religious equality before God, an equality he associates with Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism. 47 Wordsworth claims that the vernacular Bible, for example, serves “to equalize and bless [all parishioners] / Under the weight of moral wretchedness!” (“Translation of the Bible,” II.xxix 10–11). In a sonnet deploring the condition of the serfs, “passing with the soil / To each new Master, like a steer or hound,” he asserts individuals’ right to liberty: “Man—whose soul / Christ died for—cannot forfeit his high claim / To live and move exempt from all controul / Which fellow-feeling doth not mitigate” (II.iv 3–4, 10–14). As a general statement about human freedom, however, his statement does not protest against state (or, in the historical context of the poem, aristocratic) “controul” as much as specify how the state should interfere. Because individuals have souls, their rulers should treat them with “fellow-feeling” even as they exert power over them. The difference between liberty and tyranny is not the degree to which rulers interfere in individual lives but rather the degree of “fellow-feeling” they possess. By defining appropriate government through the feeling of the rulers rather than the degree of citizens’ participation, Wordsworth uses the rhetoric of governmental restraint to argue for greater government penetration into individual lives. In the context of Wordsworth’s contemporary pastoral state, government policies that investigate and attempt to shape individuals’ lifestyles show the kind of concern Wordsworth equates with “fellow-feeling.” Ultimately, however, Wordsworth suggests that within the modern British state it no

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longer even matters what “feelings” rulers possess, for two reasons. First, the institutions of the Anglican Church and British state take the place of the feeling (or unfeeling) aristocrats, seeing into and governing individual citizens in a manner that claims to produce both individual and national well-being. Second, state institutions prevent any individual from attaining too great a power over others. Wordsworth dates this triumph of state and religion to the Glorious Revolution. When Parliament invited William and Mary to Britain to found a new Protestant dynasty, it not only demonstrated a balance between traditional order and democratic license but also left that balance as a legacy for future British citizens and rulers. Wordsworth, like Edmund Burke before him, reads the Glorious Revolution as an end point in the evolution of the British government, a moment that determined the rights and duties inherited by all subsequent English citizens. The sonnet describing the Glorious Revolution is therefore entitled “Congratulation” (III.xxxvii) and appears out of historical order at the culmination of the sequence. After narrating the history of the Church into the present and cataloging the Church rituals currently in use, Wordsworth thinks back to the moment of Protestant deliverance when members of Parliament invited William of Orange to England to become King:    we have felt As a loved substance, their futurity: Good, which they dared not hope for, we have seen; A State whose generous will through earth is dealt; A State—which, balancing herself between Licence and slavish order, dares be free. [2, 9–14]

Wordsworth’s clumsy diction allows two possible meanings for the last two lines. He might mean that the state is composed of free individuals who are left alone to pursue their own interests, but able to do so precisely because the state has already formed them correctly and ensured their security. He might also mean just what he says, that the state is free: the state need not worry about its conduct towards its citizens because its balanced institutions internalize their own restraint. The state’s balance creates a similar balance in the state Church. When the Church is part of a state that epitomizes the perfect compromise of democracy and authority, it allows the degree of liberty and coercion needed to create a community of free believers.48

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The Glorious Revolution makes the Anglican state Church permanent and therefore forms a state that takes over the task of religious conversion. This passage contains the only overt reference to British imperialism in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the sonnets never discuss English missionaries abroad.49 I would nevertheless argue that Wordsworth’s praise of the “state whose generous will through earth is dealt” is telling. Empire confirms that the British state has reached its final mature form as an institution, a form that will geographically extend but nevertheless remain constant into the future. Wordsworth suggests, using the passive voice “is dealt,” that the state with its institutionalized religion will extend naturally, as if of its own accord. Even more important than its ability to convert foreigners, however, the state’s “futurity” makes the British people’s Anglicanism look inevitable. In crediting Parliament with futurity, Wordsworth means that those who permanently established the state Church and the Protestant succession both envisioned and created the communities of the future. In dating “futurity” to the Glorious Revolution, Wordsworth finds a confidence that the Anglican community will extend in its current forms into the future, continuing to mold individuals and the nation as a whole. And he need not worry that these institutions will be coercive, because they form the very structures through which individuals recognize their identities and exercise their liberties in the first place.

The Work of Rituals As Wordsworth revises the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, he adds more sonnets considering the Church’s strategies for interpellating individuals and in particular the rituals it uses to mold individual belief and behavior. In part, he may hope these sonnets make the sequence more appealing for readers, since they lack the historical density that makes the first two books of the sequence unapproachable. Even more importantly, these sonnets demonstrate how the state Church creates communities, and they investigate the range of techniques by which the state, through its Church, claims to see into individual conscience while simultaneously merging individuals into a totality. Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo verse more generally does not trust people to feel either a national or a religious identity without institutional instruction. In his 1816 odes commemorating the Victory at Waterloo, Wordsworth wants the state to legislate, as it were, moments of collective nationalist feel-

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ings. He calls on England to build a temple on the Thames to house its “sacred wealth,” the “heroic dust” of the Waterloo dead, and create regular remembrances, “Commemoration holy that unites / The living generations with the dead”; by declaring a “Day of Thanksgiving” for victory, the government will unite the British people in a moment of unified prayer, producing a single religious and national community (“Ode: 1815,” 56, 66–67).50 Among the poems of his late career, the earnest “Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death” (1841) provide an extreme example of the way in which Church institutions form individual conscience. Wordsworth defends capital punishment on the grounds that for the criminals who have fallen outside of the Church and state, the last opportunity for religious development comes with the sentence of death. He insists that only by condemning a criminal to death can the state fully encourage that individual, in the face of doom, to secure a lasting penance through conversion to Christianity. Even if the criminal fails to convert, his punishment will “fortify the moral sense of all.”51 And if the state declines capital punishment, forgiving the murderer will “debase the general mind; / Tempt the vague will tried standards to disown” (iv 9–10). Recent critics have found the sonnets’ logic contradictory, and at times Wordsworth reifies state power as a good in and of itself without considering the goals of the state’s interventions.52 Nevertheless, he finds the state justified in acting both indirectly and through extreme means to form individual conscience and solidify social order. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth uses the Anglican Church’s rituals as both instances of and models for the ways in which the state forms individual and national character. Wordsworth finds Anglican sacraments and rituals so important because they simultaneously instruct individuals and demarcate the boundaries of a religious and national community.53 As Wordsworth represents them, Anglican rites negotiate the divide between religious teaching and individual free will: priests follow a specified text to guide rituals, but each individual participates for himself or herself. The ritual therefore actively forms individuals in a way that readings or sermons might not. Indeed, Wordsworth laments that Britain’s “scrupulous Sires” left such “scanty measure of those graceful rites” (“Regrets,” III.xxxiii 1, 2). However, Wordsworth worries that if performed improperly, Church rites allow individuals to participate without understanding and therefore foreclose the very religious development that he trusts them to provide. In the version of Ecclesiastical Sketches first published in 1821, Wordsworth spends

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as many lines worrying over the inappropriate use of ritual as he does extolling ritual’s transcendent powers. In one such sonnet, he cautions against Rites that console the Spirit, under grief Which ill can brook more rational relief Hence, prayers are shaped amiss, and dirges sung For Souls whose doom is fixed! [“Other influences,” I.xx 6–9]

Wordsworth criticizes in particular Catholic rites and sacraments for preventing the development of individual conscience. In Wordsworth’s logic, individuals do not become free and independent if they do not develop the capacity for considered choice. Rites like confession undermine their purpose of encouraging moral behavior by too easily “sooth[ing]” the “pang” of guilt. More generally, priests are wrong to provide too ready a consolation for parishioners’ sorrows. Wordsworth cautions, “Ye holy Men, so earnest in your care / Of your own mighty instruments beware!” (I.xx 11–12, 13–14). Catholic rites also, he warns, entrap parishioners into dubious ideology. The sonnet “Transubstantiation” (II.xi) condemns not only the philosophy of transubstantiation but also the use of “tapers,” “odorous incense,” and “greedy flame” to make the “pompous mass” feel an “awe and ­supernatural horror” as the priest raises the host and performs the Eucharist. These excessive trappings, Wordsworth suggests, overwhelm individuals into uncomprehending participation. The parishioners do not choose their religious practices but simply bend to the Church’s determining force; they “bow their heads, like reeds / To a soft breeze” (2, 3, 6, 7–8). But although he critiques Catholic rituals most forcefully, Wordsworth’s cautions apply to Protestant practices and clergy as well. Even those rites that do not distract observers from their religious lesson may allow individuals to participate without feeling any commitment. “Sponsors” (III.xxi, written 1827) cautions the godparents who speak for a child at baptism, “Shame if the consecrated Vow be found / An idle form, the Word an empty sound!” (13–14). Wordsworth insists that only individuals who understand their Church’s history and the duties Church membership imposes experience the ethical development he thinks is a prerequisite for both individual liberty and enduring community. The successful rituals that Wordsworth depicts at the close of part three develop individual conscience and induct the participants into the Church community. In both respects, they take over the functions Wordsworth had previously allocated to poetry. Equally importantly, Wordsworth claims

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that the effect of these rites is externally visible: any observer can immediately know whether the participants’ vows are “empty sounds.” Wordsworth grants the pastor responsibility for all of these functions, and many of the sonnets focus as much on the pastor who performs the ritual as on the participants. For example, the sonnet on “The Marriage ceremony” (written in 1842) begins, “The Vested Priest before the Altar Stands,” and offers the Church’s prayer that the couple “may live / Obedient, as here taught, to Thy commands” (III.xxvi 7–8). Only at the end does the sonnet show the ceremony’s effect on the participants, addressing the woman, “Weep not, meek Bride! uplift thy timid brow!” (14). Wordsworth’s series of three confirmation sonnets (added in 1827) demonstrates how he imagines the Church’s institutional rituals developing individual conscience. Wordsworth is especially interested in confirmation (granting the rite three sonnets instead of one) because it traditionally marks a child’s acceptance into the Church community. For Wordsworth, the rite demonstrates that interpellation into the Church requires both an institutional context and an individualizing reach, and it is the pastor who combines these two capacities. The Young-ones gathered in from hill and dale, With holiday delight on every brow: ‘Tis passed away; far other thoughts prevail; For they are taking the baptismal Vow Upon their conscious selves; their own lips speak The solemn promise. Strongest sinews fail, And many a blooming, many a lovely cheek Under the holy fear of God turns pale; While on each head his lawn-robed Servant lays An apostolic hand, and with prayer seals The Covenant. The Omnipotent will raise Their feeble souls; and bear with his regrets, Who, looking round the fair assemblage, feels That ere the Sun goes down their childhood sets. [“Confirmation,” III.xxiii]

Each child here speaks his or her own “solemn promise,” and the solemnity that replaces their “holiday delight” proves that they understand their vows. For all that the children take the vows upon themselves, the confirmation requires the pastor’s intercession in two senses.54 First, the pastor is the

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children’s teacher. “Confirmation” follows a sonnet in which Wordsworth remembers his pastor testing him in the catechism, and together the two sonnets show children’s understanding of their vows to be a result of their religious teaching. Second, the pastor represents the Church institution. Through the power of the apostolic succession, he “seals / The Covenant” with a laying on of hands; in the third sonnet he completes the rite— tying “the Soul” “by chain yet stronger” (“Sacrament,” III.xxv 1)—through administering the sacrament. Although Wordsworth certainly finds the pastor’s religious message important, he finds the pastor equally important as an agent who has been designated to create communities. This sonnet also emphasizes the way in which the ritual makes the children’s transformation externally visible to all. Whereas the traditional Christian pastor saw into individuals’ consciences himself, in the modern state each individual’s wellbeing—including, for Wordsworth, his or her moral state—is a matter of public concern. It is therefore important that all observers, and not just the pastor, see the moral development that the rite produces in each individual. In interpellating individuals into the national religious community and conducting rites that prove each participant’s conscience and understanding, the pastor models the state’s most effective practices. The series of sonnets on confirmation are also interesting because they use the moment in which children are officially inducted into the Church community to reflect on the degree to which society is independent of or prior to governing institutions. Even in poems in which Wordsworth seems to slip away from the Church’s precise grip, he actually demonstrates how emotions and relationships that seem to originate outside the Church actually arise within its purview. The sonnet “Catechizing” is one of the only instances in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets in which Wordsworth relates his own memories. Wordsworth remembers standing with other children, “each with a vernal posy at his breast . . . a trembling, earnest Company,” as they are examined by the pastor. His thoughts then turn to his mother: How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me, Belovèd Mother! Thou whose happy hand Had bound the flowers I wore, with faithful tie: Sweet flowers! At whose inaudible command Her countenance, phantom-like, doth reappear: O lost too early for the frequent tear, And ill requited by this heartfelt sigh! [III.xxii 8–14]

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It is certainly appropriate that Wordsworth turns to his own childhood memories to depict catechism, the moment in which children show their knowledge of Church history and doctrine and thereby prove their readiness to become members of the Church community. The entire sequence, after all, shows the ecclesiastical learning that Wordsworth first publicly demonstrated at this moment, and this particular sonnet traces the origins of this knowledge to his pastor’s teaching and the rites of the Anglican Church. This sonnet also, however, uses Wordsworth’s memories of his mother to question how much of our character preexists the state institutions that mold us. William Galperin suggests that this sonnet ultimately questions Church authority: “the authority of the Pastor (before whom the speaker remembers ‘trembling’ as a Child) is displaced by the memory of his ‘[b]eloved Mother’ whose ministry is more enduring.”55 Nancy Easterlin notes that Wordsworth’s memories of his mother show what eludes the institutional Church. Although the sonnet negotiates “a fragile balance between the continuity provided by the institutional occasion and a specific memory of loss related to it,” she concludes that “Wordsworth’s tentative expressions of personal feeling and experience throughout the Ecclesiastical Sonnets . . . all signify the insufficiency of conformity and institutional explanations, and are manifestations of the problematical nature of Wordsworth’s willed belief in the efficacy of institutional history.”56 I would emphasize, in contrast, that the sonnet does not so much question the Church’s authority as show how even those “natural” relationships that seemingly lie outside of the Church come to be experienced through it. Moreover, far from suggesting that the mother’s authority exceeds that of the Church, Wordsworth emphasizes that she was lost too early; if, as Wordsworth suggests in the Prelude, she was the “prop” of his earliest affections, after her death these affections still needed to be “augmented and sustained” through other means (1805.ii 274, 268). Here, he depicts the Church as both substituting for and providing a framework for the “faith” (both in her son and in the Church) that his mother showed. In one sense, the poem marks a movement from nature to culture, substituting a national community that will henceforth be defined through Church and state institutions for a mother-child bond, and so it is appropriate that Wordsworth connects the loss of his mother with the catechism that marks the beginnings of his membership in the Church. In another sense, however, such a contrast is false: Wordsworth’s mother, far from existing outside the Church, is in fact a Church member herself, and so even before his actual Church membership Wordsworth was never really outside

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the Church. Wordsworth’s image of the “posy” demonstrates the way in which nature itself appears within the Church’s institutions. The Church did not grow the flowers, but the fact that every child wears one suggests that it is the ceremony (rather than, say, Wordsworth’s mother’s particular taste for posies) that causes Wordsworth to be wearing the flower. And the fact that Wordsworth’s memories of his mother arise in the course of the sonnet on catechism evokes the impossibility of separating his personal feelings from the experiences that were dictated by the Church. Although they observe a transition from childhood to adulthood, the confirmation sonnets are very different from Wordsworth’s high Romantic poems on themes of growth and development. In the final lines of the first sonnet, Wordsworth credits the Church, through the pastor’s benevolent guidance, with mediating a transition between youth and maturity that in his early poems (like “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations Ode”) was inevitable, requiring no outside intercession at all. The second confirmation sonnet observes the ritual’s effects on a particular mother and child and so comes closer than any other sonnet in the sequence to the kind of individual encounter that filled Wordsworth’s early poetry. Here, however, Wordsworth is interested more in testifying to the power of ritual than in depicting the varieties of rural character he encounters. In sharp contrast with earlier p ­ oetry, such as Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth does not converse with his subjects and neither teaches them nor learns from them. He does not need to engage the subjects himself because he trusts the Church to develop their consciences and because the Church rites render the subject’s moral character visible in the same way that, in his earlier poetry, the poet’s questions had. Wordsworth hopes, of course, that observing characters who are undergoing church rites will stir similar emotions in the reader. But he does not trust poetry to produce full ethical development in readers, because poetry cannot take the rite’s place in inducting individuals into a community. The poems aim, then, to send the readers to Church. Words­worth ends the third confirmation sonnet by addressing both the children and the reader: “Ye, who have dully weighed the summons, pause / No longer” (III.xxv 9–10). Wordsworth finds a sure sense of his audience by joining his message with the state, in whose “futurity” he is confident. He knows the state and state Church will continue to form readers in whose taste he can feel assured. But joining his message to that of the institutionalized state Church requires a different kind of relationship with his audience, and a different

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kind of poetry. When Wordsworth’s poetry aims to convert individuals to religious practice, he hopes it will send individuals to Church, where they will be actively incorporated into the Anglican community and supervised by their pastor. The conclusion of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets makes this point literally: several of the final stanzas physically depict the churches to which the sonnets would like to lead readers. Wordsworth describes both humble new churches, which demonstrate the Anglican community’s growth and continuity, and historic chapels and cathedrals as appropriate destinations for the poems’ readers. In pushing his readers towards Church, Wordsworth acknowledges one limitation of poetry. Even when he joins his message to the (supposedly perfectly balanced) British state, however, Wordsworth worries about the way his verse exercises power over readers. And he rethinks poetry and poetic authority to address his new sense of purpose.

Pastors, Poets, and the Possibilities of State Agency Wordsworth’s worries about the kind of force poets use surface obliquely in the first sonnet, when he recalls his previous sonnet sequences (on the River Duddon and on Liberty) and announces his new topic. Writing on Church history, he suggests, associates him not with nature and liberty but with tyrants: I, who accompanied with faithful pace Cerulean Duddon from its cloud-fed spring, And loved with spirit ruled by his to sing Of mountain-quiet and boon nature’s grace; I, who essayed the nobler Stream to trace Of Liberty, and smote the plausive string Till the checked torrent, proudly triumphing, Won for herself a lasting resting-place; Now seek upon the heights of Time the source Of a HOLY RIVER, on whose banks are found Sweet pastoral flowers, and laurels that have crowned Full oft the unworthy brow of lawless force; And, for delight of him who tracks its course, Immortal amaranth and palms abound. [“Introduction,” I.i]

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Certainly in narrating Church history Wordsworth recounts the stories of tyrannical leaders. Here, however, he links poets and tyrants more closely by suggesting that both seek the same “laurels.” In juxtaposing the poet with the “lawless force” he depicts, the sonnet begins to question whether the poet inevitably uses such force in writing.57 As we have seen, Wordsworth believes individuals must embrace religion with full understanding of their own accord in order to develop their consciences. If a poet, for all that he finds his “force” in a religious “source,” applies the power of his individual genius to encourage readers to “sacrifice,” he might be as much at fault as the tyrants who used force to compel conversion. Wordsworth’s suspicion of excessive rites is a relevant analogy here. Just as Wordsworth fears that incense and tapers could lure individuals into the Church without ethically cultivating them, the poet too might carry more force than is appropriate. The pastor provides for Wordsworth a model of simultaneous authority and restraint. But the pastor is able to influence his parishioners without tyrannizing them in part because he gains his authority from an office that both derives from (in Wordsworth’s mind) divine authority and is empowered and limited by the state. A pastor’s work, however, carries him outside of his scripted role into the community, and so Wordsworth emphasizes that the pastor must have a certain reticent character.58 In “Pastoral character” (III.xviii), Wordsworth describes both the character required for the pastor’s office and the power of the office to transform the pastor: A genial hearth, a hospitable board, And a refined rusticity, belong To the neat mansion, where, his flock among, The learned Pastor dwells, their watchful Lord. Though meek and patient as a sheathed sword; Though pride’s least lurking thought appear a wrong To human kind; though peace be on his tongue, Gentleness in his heart—can earth afford Such genuine state, pre-eminence so free, As when, arrayed in Christ’s authority, He from the pulpit lifts his awful hand; Conjures, implores, and labours all he can For re-subjecting to divine command The stubborn spirit of rebellious man?

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Wordsworth grants pastors a kind of charisma but one that resembles ­Weber’s “routinized charisma”: it falls not to the individual but to the office he holds. The pastor owes his power to the state Church and the apostolic succession. Only in the pulpit does he speak with “awful” force, pushing his parishion­ ers to accept “divine command.”59 The almost perfect iambic pentameter of the final quatrain (in contrast to the enjambed lines of the octet) and the near rhymes between the opposed lines “hand/can/command/man” emphasize the pastor’s ability to turn opposition into agreement. Wordsworth worries, however, that charisma, when not limited by an institutional context, easily slides into tyranny or, like incense, draws individuals to participate in Church rituals without understanding them.60 The sonnet insists that outside the pulpit the pastor must be “meek” and “gentle” so that he will neither spiritually overwhelm his parishioners nor seek earthly power over them. Wordsworth’s requirement for pastoral character is in part political. The pastor’s house—simultaneously “refined” (educated rather than working class) and “rustic” (simple enough for the working class)—allows him to serve as an exemplar for his parishioners without attempting to elevate their social position or challenge class hierarchies. Through his meekness, he models the submissive behavior Wordsworth expects of the lower classes. Equally importantly, in distinguishing the pastor’s work and the pastor’s character in and out of the pulpit, this sonnet offers the pastor as a model for (and as a best instance of ) state government. The pastor demonstrates the self-limited liberal governmental rationality that knows where and when it should “labour” to “command” individuals, and where and when it should leave them alone. He dwells “among” “his flock” and “watch[es]” over them, precisely so that he can influence their lives in his work both in and out of the pulpit. Nevertheless, outside the pulpit, “pride’s least lurking thought appear[s] a wrong / To humankind” because the pastor must respect each individual’s decision making. Both the authority and the limits that the pastor’s office establishes are therefore crucial in enabling him to spread Church teaching. The sonnet on “pastoral character” contrasts the pastor’s ritualistic duties and his everyday conduct as a man who lives among his flock. Wordsworth’s note to this sonnet, however, refers readers to a sonnet that he composed in 1820 but did not include in the sequence. “A Parsonage in Oxfordshire” emphasizes not the division but the continuity between the pastor’s official and nonofficial duties.

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Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends Is marked by no distinguishable line; The turf unites, the pathways intertwine; And, wheresoe’er the stealing footstep tends, Garden, and that Domain where kindred, friends, And neighbours rest together, here confound Their several feature, mingled like the sound Or many waters, or as evening blends With shady night. Soft airs, from shrub and flower, Waft fragrant greetings to each silent grave; And while those lofty poplars gently wave Their tops, between them comes and goes a sky Bright as the glimpses of eternity, To saints accorded in their mortal hour.

In this sonnet, Wordsworth admires the Church for its ability to carry the sacred into secular life, just like the “airs” that blow between the parsonage’s garden and the church’s graveyard. The sonnet’s last lines equate the union of parsonage and churchyard with a movement from earth to heaven, which Wordsworth believes the pastor both demonstrates and enables in others. In describing a fusion of sacred and secular spaces, this poem to some degree pulls against Wordsworth’s emphasis in “Pastoral character” on the way the pastor’s institutional role distinguishes the two; perhaps for this reason Wordsworth does not include this poem among the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Taken together, however, these sonnets locate the pastor’s strength in his ability to adjust his authority and tactics to the position in which he finds himself. The state and the Church need figures like the pastor precisely because he carries the Church’s message beyond the pulpit to people that the state would not otherwise reach; he must both work among the people and stand apart from them.61 He succeeds in fusing sacred and secular spaces because the limits his office and his character place on his conduct allow the development of free will, and also because the very power of his office allows him to shape a community that then chooses to follow the Church’s standards. As an agent of the state Church, responsible for converting the English to their national religion, the pastor has a task and a position similar to the one Wordsworth seeks in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. And the pastor, like the ideal poet Wordsworth described in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, is fit for his work because of his character. The aspect of pastors’ character that Words­ worth admires is its restraint, and not its capacity to originate a message;

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in the case of the pastor, the office provides the message. However, in asking whether “earth” can provide another example like the pastor’s combined power and meekness, Wordsworth implies that poets, among the other ranks of earthlings, cannot equal the pastor, because the poet, unlike the pastor, does not have a Church office. Until Wordsworth’s final years when, after the death of Robert Southey, he became poet laureate, he is not a direct employee of the state. Without a state position, he lacks the pastor’s routinized charisma. Ironically, Wordsworth sees the poet’s lack of official position as a problem both because he lacks the institution’s force or authority and because he lacks the limits upon his authority that state office imposes. Because the poet does not have a position that defines the boundaries of his personal authority, he must define his own limits or seek them elsewhere. In particular, the poet must avoid charisma altogether and be as “meek” and “gentle” as the pastor outside of his pulpit, even as he seeks to promote “sacrifice.” Another poem Wordsworth wrote at this time also associates the renunciation of pride with an artist’s ability to serve the state. Wordsworth composed the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820) concurrently with the Ecclesiastical Sketches—they appear in the same manuscript—and often switched individual sonnets without revision between the two sequences.62 The poem that concludes the Memorials, “Desultory Stanzas Upon Receiving the Preceding Sheets from the Press,” could easily reflect upon both works. The “Desultory Stanzas” describes the historical and biblical paintings inside Lucerne’s covered bridges. Wordsworth must have noted these paintings’ resemblance to the Ecclesiastical Sonnets: the bridge pictures contain sequential illustrations of civic history and biblical scenes, and Wordsworth suggests that in stirring spectators’ noblest emotions, these pictures carry out the work of Church and state. In praising these pictures’ work for the state, however, he suggests that they succeed because the medieval painters and the biblical characters they depict model a selflessness that contrasts with contemporary people’s (and authors’) pride. Our pride misleads, our timid likings kill. —Long may these homely Works devised of old, These simple efforts of Helvetian skill, Aid, with congenial influence, to uphold The State—the Country’s destiny to mould; Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold; Filling the soul with sentiments august— The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just! [73–81]

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For Wordsworth, the paintings elicit spectators’ feelings of beauty, bravery, and justice in part because their “homely” and “simple” style shows the medieval painters’ renunciation of worldly ambition. In the context of the poem as a whole, Wordsworth implicitly contrasts these painters’ selfless anonymity with his contemporary authors’ insistence that their sublime imagination underlies their art. The poem treats ambition in the context of Wordsworth’s professed concern over the reception of the Memorials. In the first lines of the “Desultory Stanzas,” Wordsworth worries that his book is “presumptuous” and asks, “How can I give thee license to depart?” (3, 4). He finds one answer by reminding himself of his poetic abilities: as he rereads the poems, his “spirit is the scene of such wild art / As on Parnassus rules,” he “dare[s] to sit” on alpine peaks “where Mortal never breathed,” and his “fancy” builds an “airy bridge” across these ravines (7–8, 19, 28). His recollection of the Lucerne bridge pictures simultaneously affirms his poems’ value and challenges his confidence that his own abilities determine their worth. Wordsworth’s juxtaposition of his poems to the pictures implicitly suggests that poetry, like the paintings, develops the kinds of sentiments that uphold the state.63 Interestingly, the bridge pictures also literally occupy the boundary between sacred and secular in which Wordsworth locates the Ecclesiastical Sonnets: the bridge with the biblical pictures conducts individuals to and from the cathedral. Like the Sonnets, they aim to stir august sentiments, but they also aim to carry individuals to church, and then to carry their religious messages from the cathedral into everyday life. When Wordsworth turns to discuss his own poetry at the conclusion of the “Desultory Stanzas,” however, he does not claim that the Memorials of a Tour on the Continent serve the state, even though several of them look back on Napoleon’s downfall or praise England’s tradition of liberty in implicit contrast with the Continent’s recent experiences of war and tyranny. Instead, he concludes the “Desultory Stanzas” and the Memorials as a whole with a wish simply to “please the gentle and the good” (88). These readers’ pleasure might indeed testify that the poems, like the bridge pictures, stir the kinds of sentiments that “uphold the state.” Wordsworth does not directly claim such a goal, though, perhaps in part to eschew the earthly “pride” he here critiques. In defining his goal as “pleasing,” and in praising paintings that evince a “homely” style and derive their topics from history and religion rather than the experiences of the artist, Wordsworth implicitly rebukes his earlier claims to sublime agency. Indeed, to stir “noble” emotions might require the author, like the medieval painters, to abandon his pride and ambition.

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In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the poet’s ability to serve the state and to narrate national and ecclesiastical history turns on a similar renunciation of pride. Wordsworth considers what kind of poetry would be as “humble” as the bridge pictures, as “meek” as the pastor outside of his pulpit. When Wordsworth compares the poet to the pastor, he imagines the poet’s individual vision and rhetorical charisma as a kind of excessive force that might sway his readers without adequately developing in them the religious understanding or individual conscience that institutionalized Church rituals impart, or without placing them into a community. In this context, we can understand Wordsworth’s turning away from his own imagination and toward historical narration as one defense against any charges of tyranny or excessive force. Wordsworth turns to history precisely because it is a content that is not derived from his own imagination. In his early career, when he took himself and his own visions as a subject, he suggested that his imagination was powerful because it could create ideas that had never before been represented, and use language to stir emotion. Now, however, he worries that his own vision might, like the Catholic Church’s incense, interfere with his message. For this reason, he distrusts both imagination and fancy. Coleridge defined fancy as the “drapery” of poetic genius and imagination as the “soul.”64 In one sense Wordsworth continues to follow this distinction even as he takes his message from Church and state: now the Church provides the “soul,” the transcendent truth Wordsworth earlier trusted imagination to provide. But as he substitutes for his own imagination the “soul” of religious doctrine, he becomes wary of personal imagination lest he confuse personal goals for the transcendent truth he believes religion provides. Whereas the problem with fancy for Coleridge is its weakness—fancy cannot create sublime visions—the problem for late Romanticism is, bizarrely, its strength: fancy threatens rhetorically to overwhelm readers and prevent them from achieving a true understanding of Church doctrine.65 In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, fancy and imagination seem interchangeable. Both are potentially dangerous distractions from the Church’s message, tropes that would in different ways impose the poet’s mind on his material. In general, readers have agreed, Wordsworth does not use his own imagination in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. He continues to apply the terms fancy and imagination in a few instances, but each usage suggests a new sense of embarrassment with these concepts. In a specifically religious context, Wordsworth often uses the word “fancy” to refer to individuals’ superstitions, which religious rites should correct; fancy here denotes willful

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a­ dherence to incorrect beliefs.66 When describing the speech of pastors or missionaries to their congregations, Wordsworth uses “fancy” in its second, rhetorical or poetic sense, to refer to associative language. Although Words­ worth admits that fancy is powerful and was therefore useful in converting pagans to Christianity, he insists that there is no room for such fancy in the modern state Church.67 These two usages emphasize the parallel he draws between false religious practices and the poet’s own potentially dangerous language. Wordsworth also is newly suspicious of imagination’s power. In his sonnet describing the Crusades, Wordsworth asks that we forgive the Crusaders the disorder and violence they caused: “Blame not those who, by the mightiest lever / Known to the moral world, Imagination, / Upheave, so seems it, from her natural station / All Christendom” (“Crusades,” I.xxxiv). Imagination here operates like a “lever” to “upheave,” and Wordsworth condemns all such social upheavals. In the case of the Crusades, Wordsworth forgives the disorder the Crusaders created, because they sought to restore Christian rule and because the original imaginative vision came from an institutionalized authority, the Pope. When Wordsworth claims to employ imagination himself in the sonnet entitled “Imaginative regrets” (II.xxvii), he uses the word “imaginative” in a manner that more resembles the high Romantic definition of “fancy.” Imagination denotes the poet’s projection of grief over the dissolution of the monasteries onto the “Demons and spirits” of world rivers, from “proud Tiber” and “far-off Ganges” to “the Arabian Prophet’s native Waste” (6, 11). Labeling the sonnet “imaginative” announces and apologizes for its non-Christian references to “spirits.” Furthermore, in labeling the sonnet “imaginative” and confining such references to a single sonnet, Wordsworth insulates his more serious purpose, recounting religious history and encouraging religious morality. From this perspective, Wordsworth’s unimaginative verse seems a practical strategy. The sonnet form provides a second solution for Wordsworth’s need to avoid personal vision and charisma. Wordsworth’s turn to forms such as the sonnet is one of the events that have caused some critics to label his later career a decline. In his early career, they argue, Wordsworth possessed the imagination and will to invent new forms; by the end, he is reduced simply to repeating established forms such as the ode and the sonnet. ­Geoffrey Hartman suggests that Wordsworth fails to utilize fully the forms he adopts.68 I would argue, however, that to read Wordsworth’s turn to the sonnet as a sign of decline is to miss the very point that such a turn makes. The sonnet form seems the closest Wordsworth comes to imagining poetry as an institu-

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tion with both traditions and regulations that restrict the poet. The sonnet’s strict formal rules limit the poet’s ability to assert himself, and Wordsworth now chooses a form with such limitations precisely to avoid the fanciful and imaginative self-assertion he associates with freer forms of lyric. In his oftquoted sonnet “Nun’s Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Rooms,” printed as a “prefatory sonnet” in the Poems in Two Volumes (1807), Wordsworth notes a similar reason for choosing a restrictive form like the sonnet.69 There, he asserts, “In truth the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves no prison is,” and suggests that cells and sonnets alike provide “solace” from “the weight of too much liberty” (8–9, 14, 13). In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets Wordsworth fears too much liberty, not because of any sense of personal stress or aimlessness but for fear that liberty might prove tyrannical. The sonnet’s demands on the poet, allowing freedom of content within the set stanza of fourteen lines, prove analogous to the way in which history and the historically evolved state balance freedom and traditional order. What Hartman con­ siders a failure to explore the possibilities inherent in the genre we could see as Words­worth’s deliberate attempt to place his narration within the boundaries of the institutionalized Church and Protestant propriety.70 Wordsworth believes that the state, operating through the established Church, forms individuals’ basic character and interpellates them into the national community. As Wordsworth locates his own address to readers within the state, he finds his individual vision not only irrelevant but a potential distraction from his national and religious message. The Ecclesiastical Sonnets describe the history of an institution, and the poet hopes that readers will recognize its purchase on them. If the state ensures the proper balance of free will and order, legislates the existing community into “futurity,” and maintains the Protestant establishment, the poet need simply record the past and the present to remind readers of their birthright. As we have seen, Wordsworth himself acknowledges two problems with this model: first, he produces bad poetry; and second, regardless of whether he succeeds in sending any readers to church, he fails to attract the audience he most wants to convert. Walter Scott, like Wordsworth, conceives his writing as participating in the state. Scott, however, succeeds in two of the areas in which the Ecclesiastical Sonnets fail. First, his novels prove immensely popular. And second, Scott defines a model of pastoral state agency that both allows individuals to use their own vision and local knowledge to bend the state’s message and argues that they are most successful (and of the greatest service to the state) precisely when they do so.

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Speaking for the Law State Agency in Scott’s Novels

While Wordsworth wrote patriotic poetry that aimed to send readers to church and Coleridge used philosophy to consider the idea of the state, Sir Walter Scott sought a more active role for himself as a state agent. In 1818, as he composed The Heart of Midlothian, he supervised a ceremonial recovery of the Scottish crown jewels, which he argued should be displayed as a sign of the British Union’s strength.1 In 1822, he arranged a procession of the highland clans, clothed in their designated tartans, for the King’s visit to Edinburgh.2 In both enterprises, Scott simultaneously plays the roles of Scottish antiquarian and British patriot: he employs local knowledge both to celebrate Scottish history and to serve the British government, and indeed argues that these two purposes are compatible. Scott’s novels likewise combine a loyalty to the British government with a detailed depiction of Scotland’s independent past. They also render Scott’s roles as antiquarian and patriot not only compatible but also marketable, as he sells to metropolitan readers with an interest in kilt-clad warriors, desperate Jacobites, and superstitious crones. More than their reliance on antiquarian knowledge, however, Scott’s attempts to serve the British state off the page demonstrate

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a second preoccupation that pervades his novels, namely, an interest in how individuals attain state agency. Individual citizens, he argues, play a crucial role in governing the British population. These citizen-agents use their local knowledge to bend British law in a manner that addresses local concerns. As a novelist, Scott aspires to become one such agent, providing the state an understanding of individual and regional peculiarity, which it needs to incorporate regions like Scotland into Britain. Since Georg Lukács, criticism of Scott’s novels has often discussed his model of agency through his heroes. In his famous analysis of the historical novel, Lukács suggests that Scott creates a new kind of passive hero, who is blown about by the events of his time rather than exerting decisive action.3 For Lukács, these heroes illuminate the process of modern historical change: in the modern era, change occurs in the populace, with “world historical individuals” appearing on the scene simply to confirm and provide a face to the prevailing spirit of the times. Lukács’s emphasis on the mass origins of social change, however, causes him to underemphasize the role of the state in Scott’s novels in shaping both individual agency and social change. Although Marxism sees the bourgeois revolution and the formation of the modern state as one intertwined process, Lukács does not focus upon the role of the state in defining the “spirit of the age.” For Scott, in contrast, the British state’s incorporation of Scotland was the force driving the social, political, and economic changes his novels depict. In this context, what is important is not so much whether we call Scott’s characters active or passive but how Scott portrays them acquiring agency by acting both within and for the British state. As Lukács notes, Scott’s characters are caught between societies and between worldviews—old and new, feudal and capitalist, ­Scottish and British. In The Heart of Midlothian, however, their in-between positions allow them to use their local knowledge to serve the state, carrying British order into the highlands and participating in the governance of local populations. Their actions simultaneously impose the central state’s authority and deinstitutionalize its agency.4 Scott’s novels present the need for such citizen-agents by rethinking how the state best governs its population. In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott’s vision of the state resembles Michel Foucault’s analysis of pastoral governmentality. As I noted in the Introduction and in Chapter 2, Foucault suggests that beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, European states adopted and secularized the Christian idea of pastoral care as a model for the way in which a state supervises and forms its citizens.5 The Christian pastor

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seeks to form each parishioner and the congregation as a whole to ensure their salvation in the next world; the modern state attempts in this world to develop the economic and physical well-being of each citizen and the state as a whole. For the modern state, individuals’ well-being determines the nation’s strength. Indeed, the pastoral state believes the nation can be strong and economically successful only if each individual contributes to the wealth of the whole. Nineteenth-century states therefore developed agencies and procedures to survey their populations’ physical health, education, and sanitary conditions, for example. Although the goal of such studies was to improve the health of the aggregate population, the methodology required attention to the individual. Even as it attempted to mold individuals, however, nineteenth-century government also worked through a second, liberal rationality that theorized individuals’ interests as both irreducible and unknowable and argued that society functions best when the state allows individuals to define and pursue their own interests. Nineteenth-century government has contradictory impulses: it must through both laissez-faire policies and pastoral supervision create the conditions by which individuals and society have the freedom and the capability to pursue their interests.6 Scott’s model of citizen-agents finds a compromise between these ­pastoral and liberal governing rationalities, and between the nineteenth-century state’s simultaneous tendencies toward centralization and diffusion. Scott participates in and indeed celebrates the British state’s continued expansion into a peripheral region, Scotland.7 He also argues for an ideological expansion of the kind of work the state performs. As many critics have noted, Scott’s novels naturalize the British state and its capitalist economic system even as he nostalgically remembers the independent Scotland of old.8 ­Jerome Christensen goes a step further, suggesting that Scott sees the novelist as an “official” of the state.9 Even as Scott advocates the union, however, he resists the imposition of an English legal system onto Scotland.10 And in The Heart of Midlothian he also critiques the British legal system for preferring its mission of imposing law to the pastoral care that Scott believes ultimately creates a more enduring order. In particular, Scott argues that the state, the law, and the courts can neither administer order nor pastorally supervise the Scottish populace if they do not adequately know the individuals and the regions that they administer. But although the central government does not understand individuals and regions sufficiently, Scott’s citizen-agents possess the local knowledge that the central government lacks. Furthermore, they ironically carry the state’s power further by

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bending its laws to better fit local populations. Local citizen-agents also help Scotland retain its regional distinctiveness within a strong English-Scottish union. When the state acts through Scottish agents rather than blindly imposing statutory change, it slows its destruction of traditional societies while it accommodates populations to British rule. As they smooth the working of British law, Scottish agents define the relationship between Scotland and England as union rather than colonization, voluntary submission rather than enforced subjection. In serving the state, these citizens also discover the possibility of individual agency. Scott suggests that state officials cannot act as individuals; they cannot allow personal feelings to influence their judgments. Scott’s citizenagents, in contrast, find personal action possible precisely because they understand and indeed locate themselves within two worldviews, ­Scottish and British, and negotiate between them. They act for the state but as individuals; more precisely, acting for the state enables them to act as individuals. And in turn, in pursuing their own interests, they solidify the British state. Scott sees himself as a pastoral agent because his novels place his knowledge of individuals and regions at the service of the state and present his vision of British order to the populace. Unlike the central state, which views individuals through a single English worldview, the novel explores multiple, conflicting worldviews, unfamiliar to metropolitan readers.11 In Scott’s Waver­ley, for example, many critics have noted that Scott admires clansman Evan Dhu’s loyalty to his chief, Fergus MacIvor. When Fergus is sentenced to death for leading his clan into the Jacobite rebellion, Evan offers that he and several other clansmen should be hanged in their chief ’s stead. Scott’s portrait of Evan nostalgically depicts the clansmen’s sense of honor for a society that has largely lost its aristocratic social relationships. Characters like Evan demonstrate one function that Scott claims for novels, the ability to represent a society through the actions of an individual. Conversely, the novel also understands the peculiar behavior of individuals in part because it understands the societies that produce them. In contrast, Scott believes, the British state cannot understand regions because it does not have the local knowledge or conceptual frameworks to recognize the differences among the individuals that constitute the nation’s population. The novel, he suggests, corrects this deficit. For Scott, citizen-agents best serve both the government and their locality precisely because they do not have an official government position; they are not lawyers, judges, or regional administrators and so can respond

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to ­individual and regional circumstances rather than holding to the letter of the law. Scott could certainly claim professional authority to interpret Scottish law: he was trained as a barrister and continued work as a clerk of sessions (a semi-sinecure) even after he gave up practicing law. The point, however, is that he does not. Instead, Scott contends that nonprofessionals successfully transmit the law precisely because they bend it in a way that lawyers, judges, and state administrators cannot. In insisting that citizenagents in fact impose law better than do professionals, Scott contrasts with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth, for example, uses the pastor to exemplify the best workings of the British state because the pastor has both official authority and the unofficial power that comes from membership in a community. Although authors too may relay the Anglican Church’s message, Wordsworth finds it problematic that they do not actually hold positions in the Church. Scott, in contrast, insists that actually holding a state position would prevent the citizen-agent from using his individual knowledge to carry state power into the regions he serves. Scott most clearly argues for the pastoral state in Redgauntlet, and I will turn to this novel later. My discussion begins and ends with The Heart of Midlothian, however, because there Scott both adopts the model of a pastoral state that ministers to its citizens and revises this same state’s governing operations: he critiques courts and lawyers and instead suggests that individual citizens serve as the state’s best agents. And he suggests that novels and novelists similarly serve the government by portraying individual and regional worldviews that elude the agencies of the central British state. Scott does not directly argue for the novel’s governmental role and certainly never shows the novel intervening in courts. Instead, he indicates the kind of work that he imagines novels perform by considering how other genres, and especially the ballad, interact with the courts and legal system, and by claiming for the novel and novelist a kind of local knowledge closed to other discourses. And at the outset of The Heart of Midlothian, Scott thematizes the way in which novels supplement the law in his portrayal of a meeting between a novelist and two lawyers, in which the lawyers are literally overturned.

The Lawyers and the Novel The plot of The Heart of Midlothian centers on a legal case: the heroine, Jeanie Deans, a Scottish Presbyterian peasant woman, travels to the London

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court to plead for the pardon of her sister Effie, who has been wrongfully convicted of child murder and sentenced to die. With the aid of the Scottish Duke of Argyle, Jeanie convinces the Queen to secure a pardon for ­Effie. The Duke, impressed with Jeanie’s honesty, settles her and her father in his highland estate, and appoints her lifelong love, Reuben Butler, minister of his church. Scott claims that he bases Jeanie’s story on an actual incident that he learned of from a correspondent.12 The putative manuscript author, Peter Pattieson, however, attributes the story directly to lawyers. In the novel’s first chapter, Pattieson describes encountering two Edinburgh lawyers when their coach overturns, tossing them into the river. When they emerge, too wet to be accepted into any public conveyance, they must sit and dry in a local inn. Their conversation turns to novels, and the lawyers recommend that Pattieson look to the annals of Scottish law for novel ideas. One of the lawyers complains that in fiction, bizarre events have become commonplace: The inventor of fictitious narratives has to rack his brains for means to diversify his tale, and after all can hardly hit upon characters or incidents which have not been used again and again, until they are familiar to the eye of the reader, so that the development, enlèvement, the desperate wound of which the hero never dies, the burning fever from which the heroine is sure to recover, become a matter of course.13

The records of the courts, however, provide more excitement than the novels: in the courts, he says, “every now and then you read new pages of the human heart, and turns of fortune far beyond what the boldest novelist ever attempted to produce from the coinage of his brain” (21–22). And Scottish criminals, he suggests, are more interesting than English criminals, because more irregular: Our sister kingdom is like a cultivated field,—the farmer expects that, in spite of all his care, a certain number of weeds will rise with the corn, and can tell you beforehand their names and appearance. But Scotland is like one of her own highland glens, and the moralist who reads the records of her criminal jurisprudence, will find as many curious anomalous facts in the history of mind, as the botanist will detect rare specimens among her dingles and cliffs. [23]

The lawyer concludes by suggesting that Pattieson look to the law annals for material for his next novel, and supposedly The Heart of Midlothian is the result.

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In this passage, the law annals provide a solution to an aesthetic problem: novels have become boring, characters and plots, predictable. By lending its interest and variety, Scottish law creates better fiction. The passage also, however, poses a potential problem for novels that rely on regional peculiarities in order to interest readers. For the lawyers, the peculiarities that make for good novels are in part a sign of the law’s uneven penetration into Scotland. With time, they imply, these peculiarities will be as rare in Scotland as they are in England. For Scotland’s regional character to endure, the British state must slow its destruction of Scottish ways. And here Scott suggests one blindness of the law: even as law supervises and records individuals and anomalies, it subjects them to a single standard. But in literally overturning the lawyers and transferring their knowledge to novelists, Scott suggests that novels observe individuals without subjecting them to a uniform standard. The irregular individuals and incidents point to the need for leaders (and writers) who can act in a way that the courts cannot and adjust British rule to Scotland’s individual people and regions. The opening of the novel suggests that both common and statutory law prove blind to individual needs and therefore fail in their pastoral super­ vision of individuals and the nation. Scott’s opening anecdote poses a potential solution: individuals with social position should assume the social responsibilities that the law declines. The lawyers find themselves in the company of a client, Dunrover, who despite his honesty and industry was ruined by signing bills for another man. As he returns from debtor’s prison, the coach accident tosses him into the river along with the lawyers. The lawyer Hardie sympathizes with his client’s misfortune but proclaims it “the worst of precedents, to provide for a ruined client” (25). However, after the putative author, Peter Pattieson, repeatedly calls the lawyers’ attention to the man, they invite him to share their meal at the inn and later find him a small position with which he can maintain his family. In referencing “precedent,” Scott associates Hardie’s initial refusal to aid Dunrover with a common law tradition that evaluates all cases according to the same conventions. Such law, he suggests, denies the state the ability to turn impoverished or unlucky men like Dunrover into productive citizens. Scott suggests that authorities should help individuals like Dunrover make a living, and that ensuring the prosperity and health of citizens is a more important part of the state’s work than punishing individual infractions (in this case, the crime of poverty). But the lawyers, because of their excessive concern with treating all individuals in the same manner according to precedent, do not recognize this need.

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Instead, it is the novelist who notices the man’s needs, and argues that the lawyers should address them. In doing so, Pattieson demonstrates the kind of concern for individual circumstances that the novel, for Scott, provides. And here, overturning their own precedents, the lawyers act personally to aid their former client. Just as Scott suggests that pastoral agents do well to diverge from common law precedent, he also critiques statutory law for its blindness to individuals and for preferring punishment to pastoral care.14 Statutory law, he suggests, incorrectly assesses guilt because it imposes a single set of rules and therefore cannot recognize differences among individuals and populations. Furthermore, by judging individuals on external evidence rather than on insights into the individual conscience, the law misses its opportunity to uncover truth and shape character. This is especially true in the case of the child murder law under which Effie is convicted. The law, imposed by the British state on Scotland, specifies that if a woman conceals her pregnancy and then cannot produce the child after its birth, she is presumed to have murdered it. The judge who convicts Effie admits that the law is an especially harsh one but insists that the law “is yet wisely so,” to demand that young mothers do not “conceal . . . their lapse from virtue” but instead prepare for their child’s birth (237). As Charlotte Sussman notes, “what the law really pinpoints, and seeks to root out, is female secrecy, the capacity of reproduction to outwit surveillance” (110).15 But Scott’s novel and characters, Sussman argues, suggest that the severe law is not an effective form of behavioral modification but rather a relic of a more primitive age; Scott and many of his contemporaries believe that women naturally want to nurture their children, not murder them.16 More crucially for my argument, Effie’s case shows that the law cannot in fact uncover individuals’ secrets or assess their virtue. The court convicts Effie even though it cannot arrive at the facts of her case—the babe’s fate remains a mystery—and it makes no assumption about Effie’s motive or intention. In the process, the court produces a child murder where none in fact existed. Mrs. Saddletree reads the situation correctly: she states that if the law creates murders, “the law should be hanged for them; or if they wad hang a lawyer instead the country wad find nae faut” (55). The law fails because it refuses to recognize the limits of its knowledge and because it prefers punishment to the kinds of supervision that might better solidify Scottish society. Effie’s case shows an additional problem with statutory law: beyond incorrectly deducing the facts of her case, the court cannot adjust to individual

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circumstances. To be fair to Effie requires bending the law that convicts her of a crime she did not commit. But judges and juries cannot do this. As the judge who presides at Effie’s trial informs her, “he and the jury were sworn to judge according to the laws as they stood, not to criticize, or to evade, or even to justify them,” even though “never had he found his duty more distressing than in discharging it that day” (234, 235). The judge has no freedom to consider Effie’s youth or individual circumstances but must follow the law exactly as written. To make Effie’s virtue legible requires not a legal proceeding but the kind of pastoral power that the novel’s final volume demonstrates. Jeanie’s audience with the Queen offers a similar vision of pastoral care. Jeanie convinces the Queen to procure a pardon for Effie not by arguing against the child-murder law but by persuading the Queen to see Effie as a young “unhappy girl” whose life she can save, rather than as one of many rebellious and disorderly Scottish subjects (369). Jeanie overcomes, then, the Queen’s English prejudices and her tendency to see all Scottish people as one. She suggests that the Queen’s duty is to aid subjects rather than judge them, and asks her to act not as a lawmaker but as a woman who, at the hour of her death, will find that “it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly” (370). When Jeanie finishes speaking, the Queen notes, “this is eloquence.” Interestingly, in describing Jeanie’s success in rhetorical terms, Scott aligns her speech with the work of authors. And in fact, Jeanie acts similarly to Peter Pattieson in asking a government agent to overlook legal reasoning and instead act on her human sympathies. In doing so, both argue, government strengthens the nation by improving the lives of its lower class citizens. Scott’s next novel, The Bride of Lammermoor (published following The Heart of Midlothian in 1819), demonstrates another problem with statutory law: law actually prevents pastoral relationships because it too fully stipulates contractual obligations. In a case decided before Parliament, the ancient Ravenswood family is forced to give their ancestral estate to the Ashton family as payment for debts. But if the Ashtons easily take possession of the Ravenswood house and land, they cannot so easily take over the Ravenswood patriarch’s role as the leader of the surrounding society. In part, the Ashtons lack the historical relationship with their tenants that would encourage them to act on their behalf. However, even when Ashton attempts to act the patriarch, he finds that the law has prevented his agency, replacing personal relationships with contractual stipulation. When Ashton offers to allow Blind Alice to live rent-free for the remainder of her

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life, she reminds him that the bill of sale for the Ravenswood estate already established such provisions. The statutory law that gave Ashton the estate renders both the traditional position of the patriarch and the newer position of pastoral leader impossible because it prevents him from acting on his knowledge of individual character. Neither common nor statutory law, then, adequately assesses or cares for individuals. In part, both forms of law are at fault because they distinguish between public and private capacities.17 To treat Dunrover and Effie correctly requires lawyers, judges, and rulers to act on personal feelings, even if these feelings carry them outside of official duties. In her meeting with Jeanie, the Queen models this fusion of public and private roles. She claims that she acts in her private capacity, telling Jeanie, “I cannot grant your sister a pardon—but you shall not want my warm intercession with his Majesty,” and the “housewife case” she gives Jeanie as a remembrance of her interview also consigns their discussion to a private realm (370). Her fusion of public and private roles leads to better justice for Effie. Effie’s situation demonstrates that the law’s failure to understand and respond to people as individuals also proves problematic on the level of regions. Just as the courts do not attend to individual circumstances, the British rulers do not understand Scottish regional differences.18 At the opening of The Heart of Midlothian, Scott uses the Porteous incident to demonstrate the English monarchy’s misunderstanding of its Scottish subjects. The English Queen does not predict that pardoning Porteous, a captain of the guards who shot into the crowd at the hanging of a popular smuggler, will enrage Edinburgh residents. The Scottish mob then takes the law into its own hands, breaking into the Edinburgh prison to lynch Porteous. Scott eventually minimizes the mob’s threat by suggesting that personal as much as political concerns motivated the mob’s leaders: George Robertson hoped to use the lynching as a cover for freeing Effie. But the novel nevertheless blames the Queen’s inattention to her Scottish subjects in part for the disorder. And after the lynching, Scott writes, “the anxiety of the government to obtain conviction of some of the offenders, had but served to increase the public feeling which connected the action . . . with the idea of national independence”; he adds that demanding that the clergy “promulgate from the pulpit the reward offered for the discovery of the perpetrators of this slaughter, had produced on the public mind the opposite consequences from what were intended” (341). Scott suggests then that when rulers do not understand the regions they govern, their dictates backfire.

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Scott portrays the law in disorder at the opening of the novel in order to revise the terms by which British law applies to Scotland. By the end of the novel, law will enter Scotland through ordinary citizens who submit to the law and gain the authority to bend it. These leaders better know the populations they serve, and adjust British law to fit them. In doing so, they become agents of a pastoral state that views nurturing individuals’ wellbeing as a means of strengthening the nation. Scott’s novel Redgauntlet provides his clearest argument for this model of state, and before examining the citizen-agents of The Heart of Midlothian, I will turn briefly to Redgauntlet’s discussion of pastoral state leadership.

Pastoral Leadership: Bending the Law in Redgauntlet In Redgauntlet, Scott imagines that twenty years after the Jacobite rebellion the Pretender’s supporters make a last attempt to rise up against the Hano­ verian government. While traveling in the lowlands of Scotland, Darsie Latimer, an orphan who knows nothing of his family history, is kidnapped by his uncle Hugh Redgauntlet, a desperate Jacobite who demands his assistance in stirring their house and the country to revolt. Raised as a Protestant in allegiance to the Hanover dynasty, Darsie will not take the role his uncle demands; he knows, however, that outright refusal would mean his death. His only course of action, therefore, is to wait, defer a decision, and hope that the rebellion fails of its own accord. In the Scotland that Redgauntlet depicts, the legal settlement of the 1745 rebellion did not succeed in destroying the Stuart cause and has not yet fully imposed a Hanoverian order. From the beginning of the novel, ­Darsie knows that England and Scotland have their own laws and legal bureaucracies. In an early letter, Darsie’s friend Alan Fairfax, a law student, warns Darsie that in the border regions “the distinctions of Whig and Tory, ­Papist and Protestant, still keep that country in a loose and comparatively lawless state,” and “warrants are not easily executed, owing to the jealousy entertained by either country of the legal interference of the other” (94). When he is kidnapped, Darsie finds that the law cannot help him, not only because there is no single authority but also because powerful personalities use the law when it furthers their interests and reject it when it does not. Redgauntlet cites the arcane minutiae of English custody law to justify kidnapping his nephew. When Darsie demands a hearing to plead for his release, Redgauntlet takes him before a magistrate under his influence. But

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when the magistrate learns of Redgauntlet’s Jacobite past and produces a warrant for his arrest, Redgauntlet throws the warrant into the fireplace and threatens the lawyers until they agree to leave him alone. Other characters also bend the law for their own purposes. The Quaker Geddes claims to be too pious to need laws and criticizes lawyers as “necessary evils in this probationary state of society,” but his derision serves his economic interests: he sets fishing nets at the base of the river, even though the fishing community upriver asserts, and Alan agrees, that such actions are illegal (97, 66–67). Peter Peebles uses law to drive an impoverished woman out of her rented rooms, thereby causing her death. He also produces a fake warrant for Alan’s arrest, a warrant that Redgauntlet then uses to justify Alan’s detention. All of these examples suggest, as Mark A. Weinstein notes, that “law may be just a function of power.”19 Scott, however, does not see bending the law as a problem in and of itself. The problem is when the wrong individuals bend the law, using their power to harm others or disrupt social order. Indeed, it seems that when no powerful individual arrives to bend the law, the courts circle incessantly without reaching any conclusion. In Redgauntlet as in The Heart of Midlothian, the law’s failure derives partially from an incomplete extension of British rule over local (here, Catholic and Jacobite) allegiances. But the larger problem, evident even in Edinburgh away from the complications of the border, is that courts and lawyers fail to resolve cases. Peter Peebles’s endlessly unresolved case demonstrates the legal system’s failure. Peebles claims his suit to be a “specimen of all cases,” and critics have therefore read the case as a commentary on Scott’s adjudication of cases and causes in the Waverley novels and on the law’s failure to adjudicate the Jacobite cause (153).20 Peebles’s case parallels the Jacobite rebellion: his suit began in the same “great year of forty-five; . . . the Grand Rebellion broke out, and my cause—the great cause—Peebles against Plainstanes, et per contra—was called in the beginning of the winter Session, and would have been heard, but that there was a surcease of justice, with your plaids, and your piping, and your nonsense” (220). In his deposition as Peebles’s lawyer, Alan asserts that the court turned Peebles into a madman by dragging out his case and disappointing every hope for resolution. And we can apply Alan’s analysis to the Jacobite “case” as well: the state’s response to the Jacobite rebellion—including the execution of clan leaders, the seizure of property, and the abolition of the kilt, among other acts and decisions—created Redgauntlet’s madness. In this way, the courts not only fail to solve problems but create new ones. When the courts fail so notably, Scott suggests, the only way to

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adjudicate claims is for a strong patriarch to act as mediator. Characters like Redgauntlet, however, raise the question of how to ensure that only those individuals who work on behalf of the legitimate order will be capable of bending the law. In Redgauntlet, Scott imagines that the Jacobite cause is finally settled only when a government leader bends the law rather than enforces it. Scott invents a rebellion for which there is no historical evidence, I would argue, precisely so he can model a response to revolt that diverges from Britain’s actual historically documented actions. The King and his representative Colin Campbell, the Duke of Argyle, refrain from using the law or armed force to punish Redgauntlet and his fellow Jacobites. Instead, Campbell arrives unarmed (albeit with an army at a safe distance away) to offer passage to Charles Stuart and his followers. As Bruce Beiderwell has argued, in the ending of Redgauntlet Scott portrays power as most effective in its moments of greatest leniency: Campbell’s amnesty solidifies Hanoverian rule more strongly than fighting a civil war would have done.21 Redgauntlet understands this; it is only when he learns that Campbell does not intend to punish the conspirators but rather is offering a universal amnesty that he realizes “the cause is lost forever” (413). Campbell’s actions demonstrate the kind of pastoral state that Scott advocates because he bends the law to protect the lives and wealth of even disloyal subjects. Campbell’s leniency would not be possible under a court system that dictates punishments for crimes such as treason; he needs the license to act as an individual in order to offer amnesty to the rebels. Charles Stuart, in contrast, loses the support of his followers because he does not think that a leader’s primary goal is to further the citizens’ and the nation’s well-being. In portraying the rebellion’s demise, Scott contrasts the pastoral state with both an earlier model of the divine right of kings and a later model of liberal consent. The Jacobite lords have pledged their support to Charles on condition that he renounce his mistress, who they worry is a spy for Robert Walpole. Charles first appeals to divine right and dynastic lineage to insist that he as sovereign should not need to negotiate for support: “I will never betray my rights as a sovereign and a man, by taking this step to secure the favour of any one, or to purchase that allegiance which, if you owe it to me at all, is due to me as my birthright” (394). Here, Charles misunderstands the function of government within the new pastoral state: the King’s role is not to solidify his own personal authority but rather to

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promote the well-being of the population and the kingdom. Redgauntlet is similarly retrograde in viewing a family’s honor as more important than its lives and livelihood: he insists that “[m]en of honour . . . set life, property, family, and all at stake when that honour commands it!” (377). In addition to appealing to honor, Charles also uses the language of liberal freedom to insist that he deserves to conduct his amorous affairs privately: “[i]n affairs of state and public policy, I will ever be guided as becomes a prince, by the advice of my wisest counselors; in those which regard my private affections and my domestic arrangements, I claim the same freedom of will which I allow to all my subjects, and without which a crown were less worth wearing than a beggar’s bonnet” (393). Here Charles is wrong both to demand individual privacy and to think that in doing so he demands only what ordinary people have. In a pastoral state, the government studies and regulates private spaces and relationships to build a healthy population. In disbanding their rebellion, the Jacobite lords do not exactly consent to Hanoverian rule; they simply decide that rebellion is imprudent. One suggests, “we owe caution to ourselves and our families, as well as to those whom we are empowered to represent on this occasion”; another insists that he “will not peril the whole fortunes of [his] house” to rise for the Stuarts (409, 413). In the end, each lord votes to revolt or to return home based not on his consent to the Hanoverian government but rather on whether he has wealth to lose: those Scots lords, like Redgauntlet, who have already lost their livelihood seek revenge, but those who still have wealth intact seek above all to maintain their families’ health and wellbeing. Darsie, of course, is unique among the assembled group in actually supporting the Hanoverian kings, but he similarly argues that the general health of the nation is more important than abstract legitimacy in authorizing a governing dynasty: An enterprise directed against a dynasty now established for three reigns requires strong arguments, both in point of justice and expediency, to recommend it to men of conscience and prudence. . . . I look around me, and I see a settled government—an established authority—a born Briton on the throne—the very Highland mountaineers, upon whom alone the trust of the exiled family reposed, assembled into regiments, which act under the orders of the existing dynasty. France has been utterly dismayed by the tremendous lessons of the last war, and will hardly provoke another. All without and within the kingdom is adverse to encountering a hopeless struggle. [374–75]

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When the Jacobite lords and Darsie acquiesce to Hanoverian rule, their acceptance resembles what Jerome Christensen has called a model of recognition. As Christensen notes, “no more than the Stuarts do the Hanoverians and their adherents wish to ground their claim to the allegiance of their subjects on the Lockean qualification of the consent of the governed. Something more than passive obedience and something less than active consent is called for.”22 What is important to Scott is the lords’ behavior, not their opinions. Because the Jacobite lords value their families’ wealth and livelihood above all, they take actions that support the regime they actually oppose. Although the lords’ conduct might suggest that they care more about their families than the nation, Scott agrees that abstract ideals of legitimacy are less important than the health of the lords’ families because the health of a nation’s families is the best judge of a sovereign’s legitimacy. A strong state governs pastorally, supporting individual prosperity. Furthermore, in validating the lords who safeguard their families’ wealth, Scott suggests that the best rulers allow individuals to follow their self-interest (provided they do not threaten social stability) in order to strengthen the nation as a whole.23 The difference between outlaws like Redgauntlet and government agents like Campbell is not only that Campbell supports the existing authority and Redgauntlet does not but also that Campbell aligns individual and national well-being, and therefore appeals to individuals’ self-interest rather than their sense of honor or duty. Campbell’s policies demonstrate one way in which pastoral and laissez-faire governing rationalities coincide: both insist that individual well-being is in the national interest. But once again Scott suggests that the state must know its citizens’ and regions’ interests in order to create the conditions for social stability, and that it therefore needs the assistance of agents like Campbell who know the individuals and localities they help to administer. The Heart of Midlothian does not portray any desperate outlaws who attempt to lead social uprisings. The mob aims only to lynch Captain Porteous; a few isolated rural hooligans present the only threat to individuals’ lives and livelihood. The years of the Jacobite rebellion pass by almost unremarked in the idyll of the novel’s final volume. In The Heart of Midlothian, therefore, Scott evades the question of how to ensure that only individuals who will support the government carry state authority. However, he nevertheless develops a more complex account of who may carry state authority, empowering not only nobles who act in the King’s name but citizens with-

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out a government position. And in doing so, he models the kind of pastoral role that he envisions novels and novelists playing.

Ministering the Law The Heart of Midlothian introduces the question of how citizens become legal agents, by depicting citizens, like the members of the Porteous mob, who seek to mediate Scottish law but go about it in the wrong way. Scott next raises the question of who can carry British law, by poking fun at one nonprofessional’s interest in the law. When Edinburgh is embroiled in legal turmoil, Bartoline Saddletree, saddle maker and legal dilettante, offers explanations to his neighbors and unsolicited advice to Effie’s family. Saddletree’s reputation rests on his ability to pepper any conversation with Latin legal terminology, which he inevitably fails to explain to his listeners. In one sense, Saddletree demonstrates the kind of action the novel advocates: he is an individual citizen who attempts to interpret the law for his neighbors. However, Saddletree differs in several crucial respects from the pastoral citizen-agents the novel’s final volume depicts. He is generally “fonder of talking authority than really exercising it”; instead of using his social position to bend the law, Saddletree abandons his social position—he leaves his saddle shop to the management of his wife—to attend court sessions and then adjourn for discussion to the local pub (46). More than simply abandoning his saddle shop, Saddletree pretends an authority he does not possess.24 When ­Reuben ­Butler, in his first appearance in the novel, questions the accuracy of Saddle­tree’s Latin, Saddletree claims a professional authority for his errors: “I speak Latin like a lawyer, Mr Butler, and not like a schoolmaster.” Butler refuses to grant Saddletree legal credentials, retorting, “[s]carce like a schoolboy, I think” (46). And simply by association, Butler, who by the end of the novel will be as much its hero as any male character, looks as preposterous as Saddletree. Although Butler actually is a schoolmaster, in a gathering of shopkeepers his distinctions between nominative and dative cases seem as unnecessarily erudite as Saddletree’s legal Latin. The humor of this unnecessary erudition lies not in Saddletree and Butler’s errors: from every indication in the novel, Saddletree does indeed understand the intricacies of Edinburgh law, and Butler’s grasp of Latin grammar is never in doubt. Butler and Saddletree appear so ludicrous because the minute knowledge they expound does not help their Scottish

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neighbors’ situations. Both emphasize the fine points of legal and grammatical knowledge rather than use their particular knowledge to help Effie. Saddletree explains verdicts but unlike Jeanie does nothing to appeal them. And Butler’s training as a Presbyterian minister is reduced to pointless jargon as he lectures on Latin declensions. Instead, each man’s knowledge and personal ambitions simply make him self-absorbed. When the neighborhood legal council dissolves, Butler and Saddletree walk “down the Lawnmarket . . . each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of Syntax, and neither listening to a word which his companion uttered” (48). For all his humor, Saddletree nevertheless proves important for the novel, in part because he models the possibility of a layperson engaging in legal and governmental affairs. After they move to the highlands, Jeanie and Reuben use their social status and Reuben’s authority as minister to interpellate individuals into the state in a manner that fits the local populations. The ­final volume of the novel demonstrates that Scotland will not need ministers (as in official government servants) as long as it can rely on ministers (moral leaders of the Church, and proponents of order and decency) who work in service of the state. The novel twice notes the confusion arising from these two uses of the word “minister.” When Jeanie announces her intention to travel to London to plead before the King, Butler explains that she has little chance of an actual audience: “the King of Britain does ­every thing by means of his ministers” (266). Jeanie, in confusion, suggests, “And if they be upright, God-fearing ministers . . . it’s sae muckle the better chance for Effie and me” before Butler explains that “minister” refers not to church pastors but to the King’s servants. Jeanie is not the only one who is confused. When Mr. Saddletree reads aloud the Duke’s speech about the Porteous mob from a copy he bought from a hawker, his neighbors misinterpret the Duke’s opening line, “I am not a minister, I never was a minister, and I never will be one.” One woman comments, “I didna ken his grace was ever designed for the ministry,” prompting Mr. Saddletree to explain that “he disna mean a minister of the gospel . . . but a minister of state” (241). Butler and Saddletree know their vocabulary of government. In distinguishing between gospel ministers and state ministers, however, they prove too insistent. Jeanie does manage to see the Queen through the aid of the Duke of Argyle, even though (the Duke insists) he is a minister of neither sort. The novel’s ending relies upon the ability of Church ministers to act as unofficial or unnamed court ministers, carrying British law into the highlands

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of Scotland. And Scott’s pastoral model of government gives individuals like the Duke of Argyle the ability both to advise the monarch, just as state ministers do, and to mold the lower class individuals under their jurisdiction, just like Church ministers. But these characters are successful precisely because they are embedded in the communities to which they minister. The Duke of Argyle, in his insistence on not being a minister, redefines service to the government as based in individual character and local knowledge rather than a professional position. He therefore provides a model for the kind of pastoral leader Scott envisions. For many of Scott’s readers, the kind of relationships I am calling pastoral have often looked like nostalgia for aristocracy. And Scott’s life seems to reinforce such a reading: after purchasing the Abbotsford estate, Scott transformed the house into a feudal castle and sought patronage relationships with his tenants.25 His novels, however, redefine the aristocratic relationship for an era of modern government, giving the pastoral leader responsibility for dispensing rewards based on character rather than traditional obligations. The Duke demonstrates this fusion of the older aristocratic and the newer pastoral roles. The Duke helps Jeanie seek a pardon for Effie in part because she carries a letter reminding Argyle of the debt his family owes to the Butler family. However, he installs Jeanie in Argyle parish as a reward for her character. His patronage of Jeanie is also self-interested: her presence consolidates his economic and political hold on his land. And aristocrats are not the only characters to attain pastoral power. Reuben Butler becomes a second example of pastoral government when he serves as an actual pastor on the Duke’s Argyle estate. As Butler incorporates his parishioners into the British nation, he merges the traditional religious and the modern secular versions of pastoral power. Butler’s role in bending British law is more important than any religious duties he performs. When Jeanie and Butler move to the highlands, they come to a place that British law has not yet fully reached. The highlanders wear kilts even after the British government outlaws them after the 1745 rebellion; as the Duke’s retainer says when Jeanie asks him about his kilt, “The law is put twa-three years auld yet, and is over young to have come our length” (499). More damningly, the highlanders still refer criminal cases to their hereditary magistrates rather than the British courts. Under the authority of the Duke, Jeanie and Butler gradually help reorder the traditional clan society. Butler’s position as a minister grants him authority to address the highlanders and demand that they listen to him, and gives him

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some control over legal and extra-legal affairs: he prevents his parishioners from testing a woman for witchcraft by accusing her of cheating and by reprimanding her in private instead of in front of the congregation. Scott, however, does not consider ministers to be state employees in the same way that Wordsworth and Coleridge do. In the highlands, Butler’s social status as the Duke’s appointee exceeds his authority as a minister, and he uses this status to encourage his neighbors to adhere to British laws. And his personal qualities, in particular his ability to work through compromise rather than uniformly imposing new laws, provide his means of inducing change. In the final pages of the novel, when Effie’s long-lost son, the babe she was convicted of murdering, resurfaces in the act of robbing and killing his ­father, Butler convinces the Scottish hereditary magistrate to save the trials of the boy’s accomplices for the assizes and to hang only the murderer. Jeanie inadvertently reinforces her husband’s governmental tactics: she accidentally lets the boy escape and thereby prevents the local hereditary magistrate from proclaiming his continued authority by conducting a public execution. But in convincing the hereditary magistrate to yield partially to the official courts, Butler begins the process of converting the highlands into a province of Britain. By knowing the individual characters to whom he administers the law, he adjusts the pace of its distribution. In this way, Scott argues, Scottish agents preserve the individuality of the highlands even as the region comes under the aegis of the British laws that, the lawyers in the opening of the novel claim, have rendered England so uniform and uninteresting. Although Jeanie has neither an aristocratic title nor a state or Church position, she employs pastoral agency to carry the work of the state into the home, and the homemaker’s attention to individuals’ well-being into the state.26 Jeanie contributes to British order in part through her domestic economy: she keeps a tidy home, runs a profitable (we gather) dairy, and makes excellent cheeses to send to the Duke. In the pastoral worldview, Jeanie’s work contributes to the nation’s strength. Furthermore, Jeanie performs the work of national unification on a domestic scale: she smoothes over the doctrinal arguments of her Cameronian father and her Presbyterian husband by appealing to each man’s sentiment. Through her intercessions, David Deans duly attends Butler’s church and Butler desists from doctrinal combat at home. Jeanie’s treatment of Effie’s son, the “Whistler,” also establishes her role as a pastoral agent. Jeanie visits the Whistler in order to minister to his conscience the night before he is to be hanged, showing concern for him as an individual and a desire to see into and develop his

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conscience in a manner that contributes to state citizenship. The Whistler proves his underdeveloped conscience by taking advantage of Jeanie’s leniency and fleeing the country. Nevertheless, by (if even unwittingly) ejecting the boy from Scotland, Jeanie provides a filter that distinguishes productive and virtuous individuals from unproductive individuals, and that identifies who constitutes excess population to be sent to the colonies and who should stay at home to build a new Scotland.27 Jeanie’s interactions with the state demonstrate the logic of pastoral governmentality that equates individual and national well-being. As in Redgauntlet, Scott recasts this logic in terms of interests: for Scott, a successful state makes self-interest and national interest coincide. In each of Jeanie’s movements, she serves her own interests and the state’s interests simultaneously. As I have noted, when Jeanie appeals Effie’s verdict, she succeeds in part because she and the Duke appeal to the Queen’s self-interest: Jeanie tells the Queen that on her deathbed she will remember her generous acts, and the Duke convinces the Queen that pardoning Effie would mend the King’s reputation among his Scottish subjects. Jeanie’s conduct in the highlands also allows her to serve the state by serving her own interests. From her domestic economy and from the money Effie gives her, Jeanie saves enough to allow her family to purchase land, solidifying their middle class position and their status within the community. And Jeanie’s industry in the highlands serves her own family, the Duke’s economic interests as proprietor, and the state as a whole. Interestingly, Jeanie’s conduct at times eludes supervision from both her husband and the state. Jeanie keeps the secret of George Staunton’s involvement in the Porteous riots and of her banished sister’s marriage and continued residence in England, and she accepts money from her sister without telling Butler how she acquired her wealth. Carolyn Austin’s fascinating reading of the novel suggests that Jeanie’s secrets are a form of resistance to patriarchal and state authority.28 But even as Jeanie’s secrets indeed protest against a centralized legal authority that thinks punishment best molds a population’s character, they also simultaneously further the state’s pastoral work. Jeanie brings Effie’s money and Effie’s son (although not Effie herself, since she has been permanently banished and eventually retreats to a French convent) within the British political-economic system.29 Jeanie is able to serve the state precisely because she maintains her personal ties with people who elude the state’s pastoral institutions. Her economic transactions also turn her secrets into national prosperity, “cleansing” Effie’s suspect money

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by storing it in her Bible and then giving it to her husband to buy land in Scotland and solidify her family’s middle class respectability. When Jeanie compares herself to “the enchanted princess in the bairns’ fairy tale, that ­kamed gold nobles out o’ the tae side of her haffit locks, and Dutch dollars out o’ the tother” (466), we could compare her “magic” to the “invisible hand” that transforms individual interests into a wealthy civil society.30 ­Simultaneously, it is safe to allow Jeanie to pursue her interests, because she derives her economic agency in the first place from the act of submitting herself to the state; it is her loyal appeal to the Queen through the Duke of Argyle that ultimately places her in a position where she has enough wealth to build more. In this sense, Jeanie’s secrets suggest Scott’s compromise between the necessity of a pastoral state that supervises individuals and a liberal state that allows individuals to pursue their own interests. Scott also recasts his argument for the inextricability of individual and national interests in terms of regional and national interests and identities. Through Jeanie and Reuben, Scott portrays Scotland’s regional peculiarities as a source of strength for Britain. Scott suggests that Jeanie’s Presbyterian Scottish peasant upbringing is in fact responsible for her unquestioning obedience to the state: she refuses to lie under oath, even to save her sister. In appealing Effie’s sentence to the Queen, Jeanie affirms both her Scottishness and Britishness. When Jeanie walks (barefoot and tartan-clad) from Edinburgh to London, she marks simultaneously her identity as a Scottish peasant (in her costume) and a British subject (in her movement from the Scottish provinces to the London metropolis). Her two identities, of course, do not always mesh well; she needs the patronage of the Scottish Duke of Argyle to help her communicate with the English Queen. Nevertheless, her success suggests that Jeanie’s individual interests and regional peculiarities prove a source of strength for the British nation. In fusing Jeanie’s personal welfare with her contributions to national welfare, Scott demonstrates the logic of governmentality: the well-being of the nation depends upon the well-being of each individual. Ian Duncan argues that “the Waverley novels represent the historical formation of the modern imperial nation-state in relation to the sentimental formation of the private individual: a homology, a synecdochic equivalence, is asserted between these processes.”31 I agree, but would specify this claim further. For Scott, the synecdochic relationship of part and whole is not simply a homology but is causal: the nation forms not like the individual but rather through the

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individual, through the agents who act on the state’s behalf, and through the individuals these agents mold into British citizens. As Duncan argues, Scott’s novels (especially The Heart of Midlothian) enact the fusion of individual and national well-being as romance; the novel’s incorporation of romance form enables it to cover over the contradictions between individual and nation, and between abutting worlds, placing the characters beyond the reach of the difficulties and contradictions that reality—and history—impose. Indeed, the only characters who fall prey to the conflict between English and Scottish worldviews are Madge (whose demise can be partially blamed on her madness) and her mother (who is a criminal and deserves her fate). In other novels, Scott more fully recognizes that the nation does not always care for its citizens’ welfare. Fergus’s execution for treason at the end of Waverley, for example, demonstrates the sacrifices involved in creating a national identity. The Heart of Midlothian, however, presents no such sacrifices. In one sense, Jeanie and Reuben come to the highlands as a colonizing force, imposing British order upon a region still clinging to traditional Scottish structures.32 The novel’s emphasis on Jeanie and Reuben’s successful agriculture, united Church, and spirit of gradual compromise, however, portrays their actions as modernization and regeneration rather than colonization. Scott’s explicit fairy tale references in the last volume suggest that he also sees the alignment of individual and national interests that he produces there as romance.33 This does not, however, make his vision less earnest. Critics, from Scott’s earliest readers to those of the present day, have complained that the fourth volume is unnecessary and excessively idyllic; the novel’s plot is completed with Effie’s pardon, they suggest, and we would not need an entire volume to watch Jeanie secure the rewards of her virtue.34 However, the last volume is indeed necessary if we see the novel’s work as depicting a new form of authority and agency that carries British law and British identity into the highlands of Scotland. Scott’s citizen-agents do not ignore contradictions among individual, region, and nation but rather actively reconcile them. Such agency is part of the novel’s romance, but Scott suggests that such romance might be the only possible account of successful modern agency. In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott does not directly discuss how he imagines novels and novelists operating as pastoral state agents. Obviously novels do not actually care for the fictional characters they depict. But by calling attention to representative characters and their needs, the novelist enables

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government and legal officials to address individuals they would otherwise overlook. Scott does not enter into policy himself and does not elaborate on the specific legal bending he might hope his novels provoke. To argue for the historical novel’s governmental role, he discredits his previous genre, the ballad.

Novels, Ballads, and Legal Authority When Scott wrote and published The Heart of Midlothian in 1818, he had finally retired from poetry and switched completely to prose. In the 1830 Magnum Opus edition of his works, Scott offers two explanations for his turn to prose: first, as he aged, his powers of imagination were increasingly failing; second, and perhaps more to the point, his own prodigious sales were being eclipsed by Byron (Scott’s 1817 verse romance Harold the Dauntless sold poorly and confused readers, who compared Scott’s hero to the more famous and popular Childe Harolde), and he did not wish to compete.35 The Heart of Midlothian, however, provides a different reason for Scott’s switch from poetry to prose: unlike the novel, the ballads and metrical romances cannot model modern forms of government agency. Scott believes that in premodern times ballads played a version of the public role he seeks for novels. He follows the theory of ballad composition that attributes individual ballads to a single hand rather than to a collective process of creation and gradual revision. According to this theory, a bard or minstrel, often in service of a king, wrote each ballad, and the peasants merely transmitted them.36 Scott’s metrical romances depict bards and minstrels as figures of immense authority, advising kings and applying their knowledge of history and their sometimes magical ability to see into the future to predict the successes and failures of the dynasties they serve. Scott at times claims that his own role as poet likewise makes him an advisor to those in power; in Marmion, for example, the introductory letters to each canto counsel state leaders in the current Parliamentary era. In postunion Britain, however, poets are not counselors to the same degree. The closest position to the ancient bard would be the poet laureate—a position Scott declined in 1813—but the laureate’s job is merely to celebrate the monarch and publicize British victories, not to advise. And if the metrical romances therefore do not grant Scott an advisory position, they also do not provide the opportunity to develop his account of the author as a pastoral state agent. The ballads and metrical romances do not depict agents who inter-

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pret across cultures. First, they portray a static era of cross-border conflict in which the fighting English and Scottish clans share a common border culture.37 Second, they trust aristocrats and clan leaders to find the best policies for their people. Scott’s historical novels, in contrast, integrate a conflict between the present and past and between English and Scottish worldviews into the plot, and argue that citizen-agents best bridge these divides. The Heart of Midlothian depicts the decline of the ballad. In part the bards have disappeared because the clans they served have been dismantled. Even more damningly, however, Scott portrays ballads as incompatible with the modern legal and social order. Ballads and bards have lost their authority, and to the extent that they have any power at all work in opposition to the state. The last remaining ballad singer is a madwoman, Madge Wildfire, who travels with her mother’s criminal band and dies pathetically, still singing ballad lines, after an attack by the mob. Madge’s gender and madness emphasize that her ballads are not an active social force. And if Madge is not a bard, neither is she a member of the virtuous peasantry that Scott imagined transmitting ballads and who were sources for Scott’s ballad collections. Instead, Madge is a member of the criminal underclass that conducts raids on both sides of the border. Scott’s Madge contrasts with his predecessor Thomas Gray’s last Welsh bard, who leaps off the cliffs to his death, cursing the invading army and predicting that poetry will triumph despite it. With Madge as the last ballad singer, the novel portrays the ballad’s final era not as a heroic last stand but as the extended life of a pathetically corrupted form. In The Heart of Midlothian, the ballad is the discourse of the lower class and the criminal underclass, of those who do not fit into the British state and the modern capitalist economy because they are poor, mad, or rebellious. The fact that the authorities do not know ballads allows the Scottish underclass to communicate secretly, under the eyes and ears of the police. In her first appearance in the novel, Madge evades police questioning by singing ballads. Her wiser ally, the criminal-turned-bailiff Ratcliffe, uses Madge to warn his outlaw friend George that the police are approaching. By quietly humming the beginning of a ballad, Ratcliffe gets Madge to sing at greater volume the second verse: “O sleep ye sound, Sir James, she said / When you should rise and ride / There’s twenty men, wi’ bow and blade / Are seeking where ye hide” (157). The ruse works; George immediately understands his precarious situation and runs. And because the police know that Madge is mad, they do not credit her song with any message or intention. In fact,

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even when she is not prompted by characters like Ratcliffe, Madge’s ballads often comment directly on the situations in which she finds herself. The legal officials, however, do not see the relevance of her songs, in part because they no longer belong to the world the ballads depict. Madge’s difficulty in communicating has potentially tragic consequences: Madge knows the fate of Effie’s baby, and were she to testify, she could exonerate Effie. Madge and her ballads therefore represent in the extreme one problem of Scots under British rule: Britain does not (and does not seek to) understand the different worldviews of Scottish citizens. A similar problem threatens the success of Jeanie’s trip to England. Jeanie’s foreign and impoverished appearance—her bare feet and her tartan—at times makes her seem mad, especially when she appears with Madge. Jeanie fears that the English will incorrectly deduce that she is insane and either refuse to assist her or end her trip by placing her in an asylum. The characters who are most able to work the system, individuals like Ratcliffe, do so in part because they understand the discourses of multiple social classes and governing systems. Scott suggests that the ballad’s difficulty in communicating across social strata applies to the genre of poetry more generally, even when it is not sung by a madwoman. In the eyes of the law, not just lower class ballads but any form of poetry is irrational. When the magistrates receive an anonymous letter quoting two lines from Othello (which Scott describes as a “poetical quotation”), the quotation alone tempts a magistrate to consider the letter “the production of a madman” (183). Poetry, of course, is not the usual form of discourse for legal proceedings, and the magistrate is unable to see how poetry might be relevant in a legal context. The legal officials remain blind to the function of ballads, in part because their own discourse replaces one function of ballads: the law is the new repository of Scottish history and culture. The English and Scottish common law traditions imagined law as a codification of customs that have accrued over time; law narrates history, according to this model, because it describes the customs that have developed through a people’s history. Even statutory law remembers the historical people and events that incited new law. For example, the story behind one particular hill, Muschat’s Cairn, has been recorded twice, in ballad and in law. This spot “had been the haunt of robbers and assassins, the memory of whose crimes are preserved in the various edicts which the council of the city, and even the parliament of Scotland, had passed for dispersing their bands, and ensuring safety to the lieges, so near the precincts of the city” (147). This official record of the spot is doubled in a form of popular

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knowledge: “the names of these criminals and of their atrocities, were still remembered in traditions of the scattered cottages and the neighbouring suburb” (147). Madge Wildfire sings the ballad describing how Muschat cut his wife’s throat. But although the two discourses both remember the murder, they interact with that memory differently. Madge attempts to participate in the story rather than simply recounting a history: she says that when she sees the wife’s ghost, slit throat still visibly bleeding, she tells her to let bygones be bygones. In advising the ghost, Madge attempts the kind of pastoral relationship that Scott argues supersedes the courts. Madge’s advice takes an attitude toward past crimes that the law cannot take: once a case is brought before court, the law must exact punishment and cannot simply counsel forgiveness. But unlike Jeanie, Reuben, and even Peter Pattieson, Madge fails as a pastoral agent. She is mad, and only counsels ghosts. While amusing, Madge’s advice to the ghost demonstrates Scott’s attitude to history: it is important to remember the past, and even to conjure its ghosts, but equally important to recognize its pastness, to let bygones be bygones. For Scott, a different discourse—the novel—now assumes the multiple functions that the ballad and ballad singer no longer provide; the novel serves as a repository of history, counseling leaders and encouraging everyday citizens to put their grievances to rest and respect the new social order. And while historical novels talk about the dead, they talk to the living, reconciling a love for the “ghosts” of the past with a recognition that the modern era has inevitably arrived. The historical novel’s ability simultaneously to revive the past and place it to rest supports the social order. But Scott imagines a more direct way in which the novel becomes an agent of a pastoral British state. The novel provides information that would otherwise elude the government authorities and also supplies the context by which to understand this information. In The Heart of Midlothian, Scott makes a tongue-in-cheek argument for literature’s ability to produce information when he shows how Jeanie learns the fate of Effie’s baby. Years after the court convicts Effie of infanticide, Jeanie learns from a broadsheet, containing Meg Murdockson’s confession, that her sister’s child lives. In one way, Scott here makes a claim for literature: the sensational tale, originally sold by a peddler, trumps the supposedly more trustworthy court, teaching Jeanie what the law and the lawyers cannot. The convoluted story of how Jeanie acquires the text is also telling. Jeanie witnesses Murdockson’s hanging while traveling from London to

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­ rgyle. At the time, the Duke’s assistant, Mr. Archibald, sees that the hangA ing has affected Jeanie and worries that reading Murdockson’s confession would remind Jeanie too much of her sister’s narrowly avoided sentence. He therefore buys the complete stock of the texts from a peddler to keep them from Jeanie. He expects Jeanie to read the tale as any reader of fiction would and see its resemblance to her situation. In fact, Murdockson is not a stand-in for Effie; her confession provides information Jeanie actively seeks, explaining what happened to Effie’s baby. In depicting one text that should be read not as homology but as information, Scott notes the kind of function he seeks for novels: novels actually provide information about Scottish culture to British authorities. In Jeanie’s case, the information she acquires from the confession enables her to serve the state: Jeanie and Reuben find the boy, and Jeanie (if even unwittingly) tests the boy’s conscience and effectively ejects him from Scotland. Obviously, we do not learn the fate of long-lost relatives from reading novels. Nonetheless, Scott suggests that the novel provides a contextual understanding that both the law and other literary genres lack. In narrating how Jeanie acquires the confession, Scott reduces the confessional genre to pure materiality: although Mr. Archibald intends to burn the confessions, Dolly Dutton takes the stock, insisting that “it was a pity to waste so much paper, which might crepe hair, pin up bonnets, and serve many other useful purposes” (399). Years later, the confession comes to Jeanie as simply a piece of paper: Dolly sends it as a wrap around a homemade cheese. The text’s proximity to cheese implies a joke on Scott’s part about the status of his own texts as locally produced and domestically consumable objects. Like the cheesecloth, his text is a vehicle for a kind of local artisan knowledge. But in reducing the text to the paper it is printed on, Scott also distinguishes the novel from the lower class, sensationalist, and (at least ostensibly) purely factual confession. The story of the confession and the cheese wrapper shows that a text signifies differently for different individuals: for Jeanie the text possesses crucial information; for Dolly it is only paper. The difference between these two readings is the presence of a context that makes the confession’s information relevant. Scott suggests that this context is precisely what the historical novel genre provides, and the source of its pastoral state agency. The nineteenth-century pastoral state seeks to know individuals in order to supervise its population and strengthen the nation as a whole, but Scott argues that the state fails in these tasks when it attempts to know Scottish

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individuals only through legal frameworks. The novel models the attention to individual circumstances and regional differences that the state, for all its interest in supervising individuals, lacks. As part of this project, Scott advocates a new form of state agency, in which citizens who know Scotland carry British law and order into the highlands and bend the laws to make them acceptable to local populations. But Scott suggests that more than modeling a better form of government, the novel actually provides the context and history that will enable the state to better understand Scotland and its people in the future. In his novels and in his actions off the page, Scott portrays himself as a citizen-agent, employing his local Scottish knowledge to serve the British state. Regardless of whether his novels actually conveyed new knowledge to the British King, Scott’s campaigns for himself and his genre succeeded: his novels, he was told, pleased the prince regent, and in 1820 he earned a baronetcy for his service to the Crown.

f o u r

A Nation Without Nationalism The Reorganization of Feeling in Austen’s Persuasion

In a January 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra, between references to family illness and yards of muslin purchased, Jane Austen reports that she is reading Captain Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, which she “protested against at first” but now finds “delightfully written and highly entertaining,” and she proclaims, “I am as much in love with the author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan.”1 These latter references reveal a further range of politically current reading: Clarkson is the author of Abolition of the Slave Trade, and Buchanan of Christian Researches in Asia. In a subsequent letter, Austen again refers to Pasley’s book, disparaging ladies who read “enormous thick quarto volumes,” announcing, “I detest a quarto . . . Captain Pasley’s book is too good for their society. They will not understand a man who condenses his thoughts into an Octavo” (206). Recent scholarship has been interested in these references because they suggest a different Austen from that of the Leavisite great tradition and of popular recent films, who described the task of her domestic novels as narrowly working a “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory” (Letters, 289). Despite the provincial domestic focus of her novels and her letters

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as a whole, we now realize, Austen was aware of political controversies and world events.2 I am interested, however, not only in Austen’s approbation of a military officer but also in how she phrases her approval: even if she is speaking hyperbolically (or in fact winking at Pasley’s dense subject matter), Austen treats an officer of the British state as an object of romance.3 Austen’s proclamation of “love” for an author identified with the imperial military police anticipates the situation of her final novel, Persuasion, in which her heroine falls in love with an imperial institution—the British navy—as much as with a man. Pasley’s essay resonates with Persuasion in another sense. ­Pasley argues for maintaining a strong military to govern the British Empire. Persuasion, I will suggest, argues for a different but equally intrusive kind of military governance: the state, through institutions like the British navy, superintends both individual and communal relationships, arranging romance and providing the foundation for the moral duties that create solid communities. As such, Persuasion is part of the movement I call State Romanticism. For many critics, Persuasion demonstrates both Austen’s and the novel genre’s role in the rise of British nationalism. In Anne Mellor’s account, Persuasion makes Austen a “mother of the nation”; Miranda Burgess calls Persuasion a “national romance.”4 That Austen meditates on British nationhood in Persuasion seems no longer in doubt. Nevertheless, readings of the novel in the context of the nation face one difficulty: why does Austen refer to the nation only twice, and why does Anne Elliot, widely considered Austen’s most deeply feeling and deeply felt character, express no sentiments about the nation itself?5 Part of the reason that Persuasion appears to many critics to reflect on nation and nationalism is that it portrays the British navy so admirably at a time when the navy’s victories against Napoleon were a source of nationalist pride. In praising the naval officers’ manliness, courage, and willingness to sacrifice, Austen certainly participates in this postNapoleonic fervor.6 But the novel contributes to the contemporary hero worship of the navy without reflecting the nationalist sentiments the navy inspired. Persuasion refers to the British nation largely to establish the navy’s national importance. In Anne’s first statement in the novel, introduced with fanfare as “Here Anne spoke,” Anne insists, “the navy, I think, who have done so much for us, have at least an equal claim with any other set of men, for all the comforts and all the privileges which any home can give. Sailors work hard for their comforts, we must all allow.”7 Here, Anne places herself among the “us” who should appreciate the efforts of the navy; such an “us”

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probably includes every member of the British nation on whose behalf the navy fought, but the exact nature of the group remains ambiguous. The fact that Anne refers to herself as a member of a national group—an “us” and an “all”—in no way suggests anything about the identity of the nation of which she acknowledges herself a part. In fact, although Anne acknowledges her membership in a nation, it would be difficult to say that she imagines the nation at all. She does not appeal to the glory of the nation, and being a member of a nation seems here to produce not pride but rather simply a sense of obligation: she, and all who think honestly and sincerely, must be grateful for the navy’s hard work. Even as Anne includes herself in the “us” of the British nation, she divides the nation into “sets of men” distinguished from other sets by their occupation. Anne’s statement suggests that nationality might not be enough to make the conflicting needs or identities of these groups coincide. The nation is important to the novel here because the navy’s service to the nation demonstrates that naval officers deserve domestic comforts and marriage with the likes of Anne Elliot. Austen refers directly to the nation again only in the novel’s final sentence. Here too, Austen simply acknowledges the navy’s “national importance” and does not call up any vision of the nation as a whole. That the navy has a national importance speaks as much to Austen’s emphasis on usefulness in evaluating people’s contributions as it does to her patriotism. Thinking about the role of the navy in Persuasion leads to a surprising vision of nation that foregrounds government bureaucracies and agencies. In Persuasion, Austen raises the question of nation as an epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical problem: How do we know we are part of a nation? How do we feel our nationality? And what purchase do the citizens of a nation have on one another? Austen suggests that it is in fact impossible for any person to imagine the nation. Instead, administrative agencies such as the British navy define individuals’ obligations to the nation as a whole and the people within it. Such a model is surprising because it removes content from the nation: nationality does not designate a shared history or culture, and does not arise from among the people, but is imposed on them through government agencies. And Austen’s vision of nation is just one instance of what she sees as a more general problem: for Austen, people do not naturally form relationships of moral obligation with one another. In Persuasion, state agencies like the navy build communities that define individuals’ obligations to one another. And by acting through personal relationships, the navy also makes individuals aware of the nation to which they belong.

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Austen’s version of nation distinguishes Britishness from popular or traditional nationalisms, and in doing so she offers an account of nation that is very different from the models recent historians and theorists have described. As I noted in the Introduction, influential work by historian Linda Colley and political theorist Benedict Anderson suggests that nationalism arose within the people, with the government catching on later.8 Katie Trumpener specifies which people: in Trumpener’s account, the concept of nationalism developed first in Wales and Scotland as a resistance to the imperial incursion of British rule; this “bardic nationalism” created a consciousness of a deeply rooted past shared by the people and in opposition to the political centers of London and England.9 Trumpener argues that the English did not develop such a culture, because for the English—at the metropolitan center of Britain and as the culture and government that would impose its language and political system on Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and a growing worldwide empire—Englishness and Britishness seemed equivalent.10 In Persuasion, in contrast, Austen suggests that the English do indeed have a regional identity of their own, just as the Scots or Welsh do. Austen adopts a Burkean vision of England as a nation defined by landed inheritance. She envisions “Englishness,” however, in the process of rejecting it and offers instead a new form of nation that operates through state agencies like the navy. Such a national identity has no content, but we could call it “British” because it relies on the agencies of the central government and defines individuals’ obligations to all of the peoples Britain rules. In Persuasion, then, Austen reverses the poles of Trumpener’s framework: the British nation interpellates individuals through the same administrative apparatuses that the Scots and Welsh resist as agents of an imperial Britain.11 But whereas the Scots and Welsh turn to a “bardic” past to resist the incursion of the British Empire, Austen offers an unfelt but nevertheless acknowledged Britishness to resist the Englishness she associates with aristocracy.12 Austen’s readers have long recognized that Persuasion criticizes the effeminate and profligate upper classes and offers the navy as an alternative class that will supplant the aristocracy as the backbone of British society. In rejecting the aristocracy as a class, however, Austen also rejects the model of nation the aristocracy embodies, refusing any definition of England or ­Britain based on organic connection to one’s country, a shared past, or shared qualities, traits, or values.13 For Austen, aristocratic and organic models of nation have failed in two senses, ethically and epistemologically. Ethically, communities based in landed inheritance no longer morally ­connect individuals, and

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without such connections these societies fall apart. Epistemologically, by the early nineteenth century, events made the logical contradictions in the concept of organic form increasingly evident.14 As Ina Ferris has noted, the 1800 Union of Britain and Ireland demonstrated that the “body politic” was internally fractured and would not completely cohere; the specter of Irish independence, the Catholic question, and a history of mutual suspicion emphasized that proclaiming a union was not sufficient to consolidate several nations into one.15 The social unrest at the end of the Napoleonic Wars introduced another fracture plane: when working classes became politically active, even England could not be presumed a single nation. And the expansion of the British Empire produced additional sets of people who would not fit into an organically defined nation. In Persuasion, these epistemological questions further compromise the ethical foundations of nation: how do people feel obligations toward one another when they cannot conceive of the community that joins them? The difficulty of knowing the nation also poses a challenge for the novel form. The romance plot uses the heroine’s marriage to place her within the social order, and at the end of the Napoleonic Wars this social order included membership in a nation. In Persuasion, however, Austen suggests that no individual and no single author can imagine the nation in which he or she lives. Austen rejects the synecdochic logic whereby one character stands in for an entire nation, because the synecdoche would ignore the vast parts of the nation that this character does not represent. And an inability to represent the nation therefore presents a problem for the novel’s resolution: if no author can conceive or no character embody the nation as a whole, how can a novel represent national citizenship and the hero or heroine’s place in the social order? Ultimately, I will argue that Austen finds a solution in rewriting the Romantic sublime into a new professional context. Austen poses the problem of the nation in terms that resemble the mathematical sublime: the nation is a vast incomprehensible entity because no one can know every place, every person, or even every type of person it contains. In that sense, Austen’s engagement with the sublime continues the high Romantic concern with the status of perception and imagination. How do parts fit into wholes? How do objects fit the mental images we make of them? How can one, as Words­ worth puts it in the Prelude, “combine / In one appearance, all the elements / And parts of the same object, else detached / And loathe to coalesce?”16

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Austen’s answer, however, challenges the high Romantic models of organic community and visionary imagination. Austen suggests that no individual, and no novel, can either know or represent the nation as a whole. But administrative agencies like the navy compensate for an individual’s failure of vision, enfolding people into the nation by prescribing duties to them. Austen revises the sublime to operate through such real-world agencies. And it is for this reason that she finds the professional organizations of Britain so important: the professions that serve in the British administration interpellate individuals into a duty that includes serving the nation whether or not the nation has a single identity, and regardless of the individual’s sympathy or imagination. Austen argues that these administrative structures extend into both men’s and women’s private lives, providing a foundational core for communal and national life.

A Novel Navy Throughout her novels, Austen considers the problem of national cohesion on a small scale, asking how we form communities—including how individuals decide whom to marry—and what ethical purchase others should have on us. Her early novels link community to blood or to location: a community consists of the social and economic interactions of the people who live in the same area and therefore regularly encounter one another. For the aristocracy, community entails fulfilling a responsibility to tenants and giving charity to the poor. In marrying her heroine into the navy, Austen figures in Persuasion a larger social change.17 The aristocracy is effeminate, profligate, and corrupt; Kellynch Hall (the Elliot estate) no longer functions as a community partially because among her family only Anne tends to the poor. The failure of these aristocratic communities is evident from the first scenes of the novel, when the Elliots’ excessive spending forces them to place their estate for rent. The naval communities, in contrast, promise to reform the gentry. Admiral Croft literally moves into the Elliot estate, and the changes he makes to the house improve it. The shipboard skills of the naval officers—sewing nets, repairing holds, weathering for winter—prove eminently transferable to their new homes. Even more, the navy assumes the duty of patrician care for social inferiors that the profligate aristocracy has abandoned. Captain Wentworth, for example, helps Mrs. Smith recover her inheritance where Mr. Elliot refused.

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In transferring power from the gentry to the navy, Austen critiques the Burkean model of nation as a community defined through landed ­inheritance. Persuasion no longer imagines that communities rise organically from the English people and landscape. Austen acknowledges that locality does and should provide a set of common interests but makes fun of those who confine their interests to a single household. With an almost anthropological awareness, Anne observes that even the shortest geographical distances produce different ways of thinking. On visiting Uppercross, she notes that “a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea,” and “she acknowledged it to be very fitting, that every little social commonwealth should dictate its own matters of discourse; and hoped, ere long, to become a not unworthy member of the one she was now transplanted into.—With the prospect of spending at least two months at Uppercross, it was highly incumbent on her to clothe her imagination, her memory, and all her ideas in as much of Uppercross as possible” (44–45). Anne accepts that a geographical change entails a change of scene and ideas and that one “little social commonwealth” will rarely share the concerns of another. Austen’s narration, however, undercuts Anne’s organic language of “transplantation,” first by pointing toward Anne’s exaggerated notion of a “total change of conversation” and second by poking fun at the frivolity of the Musgroves’ interests. Anne recognizes that “the Mr. Musgroves had their own game to guard, and to destroy; their own horses, dogs, and newspapers to engage them; and the females were fully occupied in all the other common subjects of house-keeping, neighbours, dress, dancing, and music” (44). The concerns of the Musgrove families, then, are in reality the same “common subjects” of all gentry families but yet remain completely self-absorbed: the Musgroves worry over “their own” hunting, neighbors, and housekeeping. The Musgroves’ inability to share the concerns even of people so like themselves as Anne Elliot suggests the impossibility of imagining an aggregate whole; if the Musgroves cannot interest themselves in other people’s hunting and housekeeping, how could they understand people with completely different concerns? Austen implies that the Musgroves’ failure derives in part from a failure of sympathy: Anne’s visit to Upper­ cross teaches her to be thankful for “the extraordinary blessing of having one such truly sympathising friend as Lady Russell” (44). But that Anne finds true friends only among those who, like Lady Russell, consider the community surrounding Kellynch their home suggests a deeper structural

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problem. Communities founded on location prove insular and unable to connect even to proximate outsiders, much less to feel the concerns of a social whole. The ending of Persuasion irrevocably splits community and property when Anne places her affections for people over affections for place, choosing marriage with Wentworth over returning as “Mrs. Elliot” to her native Kellynch. When tied together, land and affection become devalued, as when upstarts like Mrs. Clay pretend affection to seek a title and money. William Elliot’s inheritance from Sir Walter proves mere “clay”—Mrs. Clay (who relinquishes her designs on the senior Elliot to run off with his heir) and the “clay” of Kellynch Hall itself.18 Separating land from affection, of course, does not mean that Anne does not wish that she could be mistress of ­Kellynch Hall like her mother was before her, or that she does not regret the necessity of moving from Kellynch to Bath. In Persuasion, however, stable familial land ownership threatens individual happiness. Lady Russell’s desire to see Anne installed in her mother’s position at Kellynch causes her to overlook Mr. Elliot’s prior rudeness toward his uncle and cousins and to hope for his marriage to Anne. Anne admits that Lady Russell might eventually have persuaded her to accept Mr. Elliot. When she learns of Mr. Elliot’s history and manipulative, self-serving character from her friend Mrs. Smith, she realizes that her desire to return to her beloved Kellynch might have led her to marry a man whom she could not respect. For Persuasion, a return to Kellynch and Mr. Elliot’s wish that Anne’s “name might never change” seem more dangerous than the uncertainties of social change (177). Although the novel critiques aristocratic communities, it nevertheless praises traditional aristocratic values; it simply transfers aristocratic responsibilities to the navy. Indeed, Marilyn Butler argues that Persuasion locates the same values Austen has always promoted—good manners and a concern for the lower classes—in a new occupational group.19 However, even if Austen’s vision of a moral community does not change in Persuasion, assigning these morals to a new occupational group significantly alters community formation. As with many arguments for a rising social class, Austen’s adopts the moral standards of the previous social order.20 But the fact that Austen praises traditional aristocratic virtues should not hide what is new in Persuasion: her emphasis on organizational structure. Austen argues that the navy better fulfills the duties and obligations that the aristocracy neglects because the naval organization places individuals into relationships that define their duties toward one another and toward the community as a whole,

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rather than relying on tradition to dictate moral responsibilities. The novel insists that sailors’ relationships continue when the navy returns home and that communities accrue through and around the friendships of the naval officers.21 That an organization such as the navy could be said to offer a different model of community formation is by no means a given; that such a domestic community derives from professional positions, however, is part of Austen’s vision for the British navy. In Persuasion she portrays a navy that is at least partially bureaucratized and that allows individuals without aristocratic connections to rise in its ranks.22 Regardless of the navy’s actual class status and employment practices, in insisting that Harville, Benwick, and Wentworth rose without patronage, Austen portrays a navy open to middle class men. In perhaps overemphasizing the British navy’s bureaucratic structures, Austen performs specific ideological work.23 Her navy’s open hiring and promotional practices emphasize that organization is now more important than social class in structuring communities, and that how societies are formed in part determines the values they hold. As part of this argument, Austen suggests that the navy actually produces merit in its sailors, teaching them to be useful and even dutiful, as when Wentworth makes the young Dick Musgrove write the only two letters to his parents in which he does not request money. More crucially, the navy’s administrative structures not only develop individual sailors’ merit but also ensure that the navy provides a foundation for social interaction. The resolution of the novel’s marriage plot provides the most concrete instance of the navy’s importance as a social agent. For Austen, individual people are too absorbed in their own sentiments and their own insular locations to come together of their own accord. Just as individuals from different locations cannot sympathize with one another’s concerns, Anne and Wentworth cannot read each other’s feelings and come to an understanding. When rumor announces that Anne will marry her cousin William ­Elliot, she wonders how she can convince Wentworth otherwise: “How was such jealousy to be quieted? How was the truth to reach him? How, in all the peculiar disadvantages of their respective situations, would he ever learn her real sentiments?” (180). Previously, aristocracy and family would provide the connections that led to marriage, but in Persuasion Austen finds these social groups suspect. Anne’s aristocratic family and friends prove either uninterested in or unhelpful to her relationship with

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­ entworth: Lady Russell persuaded Anne to give up the engagement in W the first place and now wants Anne to marry her cousin (the family heir) so that she can be Lady Elliot, as her mother was before her. Instead, Anne and Wentworth’s relationship must be mediated through the professional relationships that began in the navy. Wentworth’s naval friends unknowingly intercede to help Anne and Wentworth discover each other’s feelings. Wentworth and Harville come to Bath on an errand for Benwick and visit the Musgroves. When Wentworth overhears Anne, in conversation with Harville, insist on women’s constancy, he secretly writes her a letter professing his own continued love. Only ­after Anne reads the letter and assures him of her affection in a single look do the two come to a mutual understanding. Crucially, it is not only the friendship between the naval officers but the duty and obligations that they feel toward each other that bring Harville and Wentworth into the room to write a letter for Benwick. The two are actually performing a task that Harville finds particularly disagreeable: Benwick had been engaged to Harville’s sister Fanny, and when she dies, he soon becomes engaged to Louisa Musgrove; Harville believes that this transfer of affection has happened too quickly. Nevertheless, Harville and Wentworth take on the task of having Benwick’s miniature portrait reframed for his new bride. I emphasize this point—that Harville performs for Benwick a task he does not approve of—because it demonstrates the importance of the professional obligations the naval officers feel toward one another, and that these obligations transfer from shipboard to domestic life. The navy’s role in Anne and Wentworth’s romance emphasizes that even private relationships arise in the context of public identities. Austen makes this point spatially as well: Anne and Wentworth’s rapprochement occurs not in the drawing room of an estate home but in the Musgroves’ rented hotel rooms, and their private conversation begins on the open streets of Bath as they move outward into the world at large. But Austen has a very specific model of what this “public” context entails: only organizational structures place individuals into relationships that create entire societies. For all the personal merits of the naval officers, Austen admires the navy’s qualities as a community even more than the officers’ morality as individuals, because the navy’s administrative networks create affective ties that spill outward to encompass officers’ families and friends, creating new communities tied together through a sense of duty and obligation.

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Gender, Professions, and Social Structure Austen’s suggestion that a professional agency like the navy creates the most solid communities is doubly surprising because as women neither Austen nor her main character Anne Elliot could aspire to actual naval positions. For a woman, joining the navy means affiliating through one’s brother or husband. Persuasion portrays the wives of the naval officers as members of the organization.24 Mrs. Croft prefers to accompany her husband to sea rather than stay at home and, in an oft-quoted passage, proves herself of crucial importance in directing her husband’s affairs by steering their carriage away from a pole: “by coolly giving the reins a better direction herself, they happily passed the danger”; Anne imagines this scene “no bad representation of the general guidance of their affairs” (90). By the end of the novel, Austen suggests that in becoming a “sailor’s wife” Anne “belong[s]” to her husband’s “profession”: “she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance” (237). To be sure, Anne will never become a naval officer herself, but it does not actually matter whether she follows Mrs. Croft to sea or plays an active role in her husband’s professional life. Women’s ability to become “members” of the navy is an essential aspect of the navy’s ability to intervene in and reorganize even supposedly “private” and nonprofessional life. Austen contrasts this vision of women’s professional life to professions actually open to women, such as nursing. The novel offers one example of a woman who finds her own professional work: Nurse Rooke moves between the homes of her wealthy clients. Austen calls this work a “profession” but recognizes that such professions are open only to lower class women; in considering the benefits of Nurse Rooke’s professional labors, Anne suggests that “women of that class have great opportunities” (147). Even if Austen calls nursing a “profession,” Nurse Rooke’s work nevertheless points to the differences between the male and female professions. Nurse Rooke resembles the naval officers in two respects: she serves others, and she constitutes a community around herself through her professional relationships, albeit a community defined through the boundaries of gossip and economic exchange.25 Nurse Rooke convinces her wealthy client Mrs. Wallace to buy trinkets made by Anne’s impoverished school friend Mrs. Smith, and thus enables Mrs. Smith to contribute to charity. And information passes in the reverse direction, as Mrs. Wallace tells Nurse Rooke the rumor that Mr.

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­ lliot and Anne are engaged and explains his motives for reconciliation with E the Elliots; Nurse Rooke repeats this information to Mrs. Smith, who informs Anne. But Nurse Rooke’s circle is different from the naval society in two crucial respects. First, the people she connects have no obligation to act on one another’s behalf. Second, although Mrs. Smith and her female caregivers might claim Anne for an evening and offer her respite from Lady Dalrymple’s drawing room, they cannot offer her a complete alternative society but only a temporary escape. This female community cannot help Mrs. Smith regain her rightful wealth and cannot bring Anne and Wentworth together. Only an organization like the navy places unrelated individuals in a network of duty and responsibility and thereby offers a new mechanism to structure societies. In reflecting on the possibilities and the limits of the society accruing around Nurse Rooke, Austen also considers the social agency of novels. Charles Rzepka and Monica Cohen have suggested that Austen uses the character of Nurse Rooke as a stand-in for the novelist herself: just as Austen traveled between the homes of relatives before settling in the house at Chawton, where she completed most of her novels, Nurse Rooke moves between people’s homes in search of new work; Austen punningly implies this analogy when she writes that access to other people’s homes gives Nurse Rooke stories “worth . . . volumes” (148).26 Austen’s praise of Nurse Rooke’s beneficial conversation also echoes the terms of her famous praise of novels in Northanger Abbey: both are entertaining, knowledgeable about human nature, and well worth reading or listening to. In making this analogy, however, Austen restricts novels even as she praises them. Like Nurse Rooke’s gossip, literature is limited in its social power: novels entertain and instruct, but they cannot form a group of strangers into a society with duties and obligations to one another. This might seem an odd claim for a writer to make, and indeed many critics have suggested that Austen argues the opposite, that novels can restructure society, or as Miranda Burgess puts it, “that legitimate social order can be produced by romance-reading in a chain of homes across Great Britain” (185). Austen’s critical account of the role of novels in cohering communities of readers in fact revises a standard component of Romantic ideology. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads and other early works, for example, Words­ worth imagines that his poetry will create two forms of aesthetic community. First, his verse will create a community of readers with shared taste, whose sensibilities he has cultivated and changed as his poetry “create[s] the

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taste by which . . . to be enjoyed.”27 Second, in poems such as “Michael,” he promises to create a poetic community that extends into the future as his poetry sires poetic heirs. In “Michael,” Wordsworth suggests that familial communities are failing; rural poverty and misfortune prevent Michael’s son from inheriting his father’s sheephold. But Wordsworth promises that his poetry will substitute for these failing filial communities and start a new cycle of literary father-son relationships as he tells his tale “for the sake / Of those youthful poets who among these hills / will be my second self when I am gone” (37–39). In the first case, the individual poet and his imaginative powers instantiate new communal forms. In the second, Wordsworth, like Austen, assigns to a new class the responsibility for replacing failing traditional social structures. For Wordsworth, writers may take on this task. Austen, in contrast, suggests that no individual—and no writer—can create a new society. In doing so, she takes a stance that resembles the late Words­ worth’s reassessment of literary agency, which I discussed in Chapter 2, although she writes several years before the Ecclesiastical Sketches. In arguing for a limited role for authors, Austen does not suggest that literature does not affect readers: she knows that girls solidify their friendship by reading novels together, that literature dictates morals to its readers, and that the book as a commodity links authors, publishers, and middle class readers in a common economy. However, for all that novels may dictate morals and provide a common culture of taste (two of their functions at least from Richardson on), Austen suggests that shared reading is not enough to form people into a large-scale community: writing can depict networks of obligation and responsibility but not actually create them.28 For Austen, a writer’s inability to generate a community around him- or herself derives in part from the writer’s inability to represent a whole. In Persuasion she suggests that a work of literature cannot represent the whole society because individuals cannot see beyond their biases and social positions. Austen uses gender as one example of such a narrowing bias: literature, she notes, has been written predominantly by men and has therefore taken men’s assessments of women’s conduct for truth. As Anne Elliot and Harville debate women’s constancy, she tells him she will not consider literature’s opinions on the subject: “If you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands” (221). Anne suggests here that women’s experiences have not found their way into print; more crucially for my argument, however, in

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suggesting that men and women tell stories differently, she implies that one person’s perspective does not provide access to a universal truth and that no book can illustrate the whole of human experience. When Anne concludes, “I will not allow books to prove any thing,” her suspicion extends beyond the immediate context of her argument with Harville (221). If no book surpasses its author’s biases, then Austen’s novels cannot reflect the social whole any more than men’s writing does. (We might note, for instance, that Persuasion offers only limited access to the worlds of the lower classes.) Austen’s novels too will represent only one part of society. Austen acknowledges these limits from the opening of the novel. Persuasion presents two books that might claim to represent the nation: the Baronetage, a history and current listing of the British peers, shows the traditional aristocratic order; the naval list, a description of the nation’s fleet, reflects a militarized definition of national glory. On the novel’s first page, Austen introduces Sir Walter Elliot as he peruses the Baronetage, locating himself and his estate among the histories of England’s premier families; later, Captain Wentworth finds a similar pleasure in looking through the Musgrove sisters’ copy of the naval list and searching for the boats he has commanded. By opposing these two books, Austen suggests once again that power is passing from the aristocracy to a new professional order. But the juxtaposition also suggests that neither book can present a nation in its entirety: both books, as visions of the nation, are incomplete.29 The two books demonstrate that the trope of synecdoche does not apply to representations of nation: no part of the nation, or set of people within it, can adequately represent the national whole. And in the absence of a true national portrait, the book’s readers search only for a flattering portrait of themselves. Recognizing the limits of novels and authors produces stylistic changes that distinguish Persuasion from Austen’s earlier novels. In particular, I read Austen’s changing use of free indirect discourse as one register of her shifting claims for the novel genre’s ability to create social cohesion. Studies of Austen have described her free indirect discourse as a way of eluding the particularity of a single speaking voice and of approximating the knowledge of a community. More particularly, several critics have suggested that free indirect discourse takes the character of gossip, rising organically from the people as a whole but from no individual in particular.30 In contrast to the narrators of other Austen novels, however, Persuasion’s narrator moves more closely into the heroine’s consciousness and takes on more of a character, as if she were a sometimes disgruntled spinster herself. D. A. Miller, in fact,

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calls Persuasion a stylistic failure because in it Austen abandons her strictly impersonal narrative voice: for Miller, “Persuasion amounts to the retraction of her great world-historical achievement, which is to have established, within the boundlessly oppressive imperiums of gender, conjugality, and the Person, something like extraterritoriality.”31 While Miller sees Austen’s turning away from omniscient anonymity as a failure, I would argue that Austen abandons her impersonal voice in Persuasion at least in part because she abandons the organic model that allows one voice to embody “truths universally acknowledged.”32 She now doubts whether any author can speak for the social whole. Austen still uses free indirect discourse, but she no longer suggests that her discourse registers the opinions of the entire community. There is no single answer for why Austen, in Persuasion, diminishes her claims for the powers of authors. Possibly, as Clifford Siskin has suggested, she limits the agency she claims for novels to deflect fears that writing exerts dangerous changes on readers and on society.33 Alternatively, we could read in this argument a feminist resistance to giving any one person power over the social order. Finally, in reserving for professional agencies the authority to join together a nation, Austen grants the middle classes the power to dictate the form of the nation, at the expense of withholding this power from authors. In the conclusion to Persuasion, however, Austen works within the limits of individual vision to register, even if she can neither conceive nor individually mold, a national whole. As she revises the literary sublime, ­Austen depicts the nation and the social order through a structure that expresses the unknowable and therefore inexpressible.

Romancing a Naval Nation In suggesting that individuals cannot see from their confined positions to a universal truth, Austen departs from much of eighteenth-century ­aesthetics. For Kant, individuals see all objects through shared human perceptual frames. As Frances Ferguson suggests, Kant “formulates the aesthetic as a kind of experience in which one moves from a perception of a particular thing directly to a claim about the typical human response.”34 For many commentators on Romantic aesthetics and the sublime in particular, this experience of simultaneous autonomy and humanity makes aesthetics a moral category.35 Austen wants to retain the moral and communal function of aesthetics even while negating its premise of universal truth and common human perceptual frames, and acknowledging that no author and no narrative voice can

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conceive a social totality. She seeks this larger moral community in the British nation but in a version of Britain that no longer relies on the inherited culture she finds morally bankrupt or on the hero worship she disdains. Austen depicts the British navy as an agency that forms such a moral and aesthetic community. The navy’s administrative apparatus interpellates individuals into the sublimely inconceivable British nation and defines their moral participation in the social whole through the very individual emotions that otherwise limit their perspective. Austen’s critique of Romantic aesthetics is most evident in Admiral Croft’s response to a painted seascape. The scene begins when Anne, walking on the streets of Bath, finds Admiral Croft standing before a printshop window, completely absorbed in contemplation of a picture. She not only might have passed him unseen, but was obliged to touch as well as address him before she could catch his notice. When he did perceive and acknowledge her, however, it was done with all his usual frankness and good humour. “Ha! Is it you? Thank you, thank you. This is treating me like a friend. Here I am, you see, staring at a picture. I can never get by this shop without stopping. But what a thing here is, by way of a boat. Do look at it. Did you ever see the like? What queer fellows your fine painters must be, to think that any body would venture their lives in such a shapeless old cockleshell as that. And yet here are two gentlemen stuck up in it mightily at their ease, and looking about them at the rocks and mountains, as if they were not to be upset the next moment, which they certainly must be. I wonder where that boat was built!” (laughing heartily) “I would not venture over a horsepond in it.” [160]

From the Admiral’s brief description, the picture depicts a standard picturesque scene: the sailors “looking about them at the rocks and mountains” do not seem to be in any real danger; the mountains, cliffs, and decrepit boat are elements of picturesque “roughness and variety.”36 When the ­Admiral views the picture with his professional knowledge of boats and sailing, however, he sees not an idyllic scene but impending catastrophe: he insists the boat is so poorly built it must capsize at any moment. Part of the joke, of course, is that the Admiral does not understand aesthetic conventions; he does not recognize the picture for the picturesque scene it is, insisting that the painter depicts or intends to depict a real boat (he wonders where it was built). If a responder schooled in aesthetics would praise the framing and proportions of the scene, the Admiral sees not a brilliantly executed painting but a poorly executed boat. The Admiral’s laughter suggests that he

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might get his own joke and understand that the painting does not depict an actual boat; nevertheless, he willfully applies realist standards to the picture he views. As she laughs at (or with) the Admiral, Austen uses his example to question whether aesthetic response indeed demonstrates a universal human understanding that inducts the viewer into a moral community. The Admiral’s response shows that conventions like the picturesque are available only to appropriately schooled and complicit spectators. And given that no mode of viewing is the “natural” one, even aesthetic response must be mediated through personal experience. For the Admiral, these experiences include his profession and his consequent knowledge of boats and sailing. The Admiral’s interpretation of the painting therefore reiterates the problem Austen has noted throughout Persuasion: people are too involved in their own perspectives and inevitably use those perspectives to read the world. His response to the picture, however, shows one case in which individual interpretive frameworks provide a corrective to standard aesthetics: if the artist knows nothing of boats and has painted a scene of danger without knowing it, might the Admiral not be correct to read the picture as impending catastrophe? Indeed, Admiral Croft is in one sense a better reader and viewer because of his very refusal to leave behind his professional knowledge when viewing a work of art. Austen uses the Admiral to introduce a realist aesthetic based in personal and professional experience. But even if the Admiral’s response is tied more to the real world than the picturesque, viewing the picture does not integrate him into a larger moral community. The picture reaffirms the ­Admiral’s professional identity as a sailor—he insists he “would not venture over a horsepond” in the decrepit boat—but does not extend his professional obligations. The Admiral’s profession has taught him to be useful, but he obviously cannot help the fictional sailors. Furthermore, viewing art temporarily removes the Admiral from engagement with the real world. To be useful to anyone he must pull himself away from the picture. The Admiral is so absorbed in the picture that Anne rouses him only with difficulty; once she attracts his attention, however, the Admiral immediately turns away from the shop window. He begins by thanking her for stopping him—in distracting him, she has proven her friendship—and asks her, “Now, where are you bound? Can I go any where for you, or with you? Can I be of any use?” The Admiral’s turning away from the picture demonstrates a firm grounding in reality and a desire for self-sacrificing service to others.37 Indeed, that he thanks Anne for distracting him suggests that he views art as a diversion

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from his responsibilities. Though the Admiral opens the way toward a realist aesthetic by unknowingly demonstrating the absurdity of the picturesque, even his realism is not compatible with the real-world service Austen so values in the navy. The final sentences of Persuasion imagine an aesthetic that like the ­Admiral’s realism is based in professional experiences, but that unlike the printshop scene integrates the individual into a larger community. These lines revise the key Romantic aesthetic experience of the sublime. Austen finds the Roman­tic sublime useful to the novel’s conclusion because it allows her to portray Anne’s position within a nation that cannot be fully envisioned or represented. First, the sublime provides a structure in which individuals respond aesthetically to an entity that is overwhelming or inconceivable. As Kant describes and Wordsworth enacts the sublime, the viewer initially feels he cannot comprehend what he sees (either danger or immensity) but then realizes that reason and imagination work where the senses cannot.38 For Austen, the nation is literally inconceivable; structuring the experience of the nation through the sublime allows Anne to respond aesthetically to the nation even if she cannot envision or comprehend it. Second, the sublime provides Austen a strategy for deriving the meaning of an experience from interpretive frames rather than content. The Kantian sublime begins in the mind of the viewer, and in particular in the perceptual frames humans share, rather than in the object that seemingly stirs the sublime response.39 This aspect of the sublime is important for Austen’s definition of nation, because for Austen the nation has no finite, representable content. Any experience of the nation therefore must derive from an external frame that structures individual perceptions and feelings. As we have seen, however, Austen suggests that no perceptual frames are truly universal. Instead, she argues that agencies like the navy provide the structure through which individuals perceive their identity and experiences, including membership in a nation. In this manner, what I will call Austen’s “professional sublime” differs sharply from Kant: whereas Kant suggests that the sublime shows humans their shared structures of perception, and thus cannot begin in particularized experiences such as one’s profession, Austen ­argues that humans do not share the same aesthetic consciousness, and therefore our aesthetic experiences must be highly particularized. Austen particularizes both the frames through which individuals experience the sublime and the whole the sublime illuminates: Anne Elliot’s sublime begins in her husband’s professional duties and demonstrates her implication in the British nation.

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Anne was tenderness itself, and she had the full worth of it in Captain Went­ worth’s affection. His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance. [237]

In these lines, the navy interpellates Anne into the nation through her fear for her husband’s life. Anne knows her husband might again be called upon to risk his life at war, and the terror this knowledge stirs shows her the power of the nation.40 Her membership in the navy causes her to feel her nationality as a feeling of alarm; although this alarm is directed toward her husband, she pays it to the nation as if a tax. Anne’s “alarm” at the thought of a future war is structurally similar to Kant’s dynamic sublime because it begins in a moment of fear, leads her to transcend the boundaries of the personal, and produces awareness of an entity (for Austen, the nation) that she initially cannot comprehend. Unlike Kant’s and Wordsworth’s sublimes, Austen’s professional sublime does not affirm Anne’s self or the powers of her mind but instead demonstrates her particular group membership: Anne realizes that she belongs to a nation that may make demands on her, even if she cannot conceive of the nation as a whole.41 Anne’s “alarm” inducts her into a nation that is indeed sublime, incomprehensibly large but engrossing in its power. And unlike Kant’s dynamic sublime, Anne experiences the sublime in a moment of real danger. Austen locates a sublime experience in real-world dangers because she suggests that only moments in which individuals feel the cost that group membership imposes make them aware of their implication within entities as large as the British nation. Because Austen does not believe that all individuals share the same perceptual frames, she cannot argue that shared perceptual frames illuminate the duties that membership in a universal humanity demands. Instead, in order to define the relationship between individual and collective identity, she reverses the sublime’s epistemological and ethical moments: for Austen, characters begin by accepting ethical duties owed to a local group or organization like the navy, and the acceptance of these duties leads to a sublime-like experience in which they become aware of their implication in an unimaginably large nation. Anne’s experience of professionally induced moral obligation solves both the epistemological and aesthetic questions the nation posed: Anne knows she is a member of a nation and feels the consequences of this membership

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through and because of her professional responsibilities. And the professional sublime works through the personal sentiments and local obligations that Austen at times worried were too narrow to allow sympathy for others, too circumscribed to admit an individual into a larger community: Anne’s domestic and professional relationships provide the only context in which she feels (for) the nation, when her fear stands in the place of nationalism as an emotion stirred by the nation even if directed toward her husband. The novel’s conclusion suggests that women experience nationality in a familial context. However, far from dividing the world into male and female, or public and private spheres, Austen suggests that Anne feels her membership in the nation only because the national and the domestic are inextricably fused. Austen’s description of Anne’s “alarm” as a “tax” is significant in this context. In March 1816, while Austen worked on Persuasion, Parliament actively debated and then repealed the wartime income tax. The tax was highly unpopular, and opponents criticized its intrusiveness into citizens’ private lives. In 1802, a member of the navy called the income tax “a vile, Jacobin, jumped up Jack-in-office piece of impertinence” and asked, “is a true Briton to have no privacy? Are the fruits of his labour and toil to be picked over, farthing by farthing, by the pimply minions of Bureaucracy?”42 In 1816, petitioners called the tax “hostile to every sense of freedom, revolting to the feelings of Englishmen and repugnant to the principles of the British constitution” and complained about the “inquisitorial mode of its collection.”43 A letter to the London Times assailed “the despotic spirit of this inquisitorial impost, its horde of petty tyrants!” and warned, “a government exercising inquisitorial powers may easily extend them.”44 Austen’s extant letters nowhere comment on the 1816 income tax controversy; however, her use of the tax metaphor counters the opponents’ rhetoric by valorizing the public regulation of private life. Austen’s “tax of quick alarm” resembles the “bureaucratic” and “inquisitorial” income tax: the navy intrudes into Anne’s private relationships to demand a payment of the most intimate sort. Austen, however, argues that such intrusion is necessary for any individual to experience moral integration into a community and the nation as a whole. Both the navy and the “inquisitorial” tax system incorporate individuals into the nation by specifying their responsibility to it, and they do so only by reaching into individuals’ domestic lives. The tax’s bureaucracy, of course, interpellates more people than does the navy: the income tax reaches every middle and upper class individual in Britain regardless of gender or occupation and assigns each of these individuals a

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role in the nation.45 In one sense, however, the naval bureaucracy extends further than the income tax: the navy allows the state influence over Anne’s emotions, and places even these emotions at the service of the nation. When experienced in the context of professional service, Anne’s love for her husband and fear for his safety register both her individual tenderness and her duty to the nation. But these feelings of alarm for and tenderness towards her husband are the only feelings of any sort that the nation stirs in Anne Elliot. Anne’s sublime experience does not allow her to depict the nation but to feel its pull. Such a model of nationality of course empties the nation of any content at all: Anne knows of her membership in the nation only through the duties and the emotional “tax” it extracts. This vision of nation is very different from the Englishness that Austen depicts in the Baronetage, the list of aristocrats that Sir Walter Elliot peruses at the opening of the novel. To say that Austen’s administered Britishness opposes an aristocratic definition of nation, however, is not to imply that it is freely chosen: national interpellation operates through the sublime’s dangerous force. Austen partially naturalizes this administratively imposed national identity in two ways. First, by avoiding scenes that would show the navy’s military activity, Austen deemphasizes the state’s power to exert force on its citizens and subjects whether in battles abroad, through press-gangs at home, or in harsh discipline at sea. Instead, she focuses on the positive disciplinary power the navy exerts on individuals and communities. Second, Anne’s professional sublime domesticates her interpellation into the nation through her feelings for her husband. Anne’s “tenderness” toward her husband stands in place of her feelings for the nation and transfers to Anne’s British nationality a sense of free choice that does not in fact belong to nationality. Anne did not choose her nation, but she did choose her husband. In rewriting the Romantic sublime, Austen replaces the vision that the Romantics usually accord to imagination with tenderness. Austen’s praise of Anne’s tenderness retains some of the exclusivity of the imagination that Wordsworth and his fellow high Romantics claim for poets; tenderness like imagination falls to humans unevenly, and privileges certain people. And if small in scale and scope, tenderness nevertheless is the register through which one integrates into the nation as a whole. Unlike imagination, however, tenderness allows a relationship with another person but not with an abstract identity. Even if Anne’s heightened tenderness allows her to feel the nation (albeit only through her husband) in a way that others might not, and to participate morally in this nation (through her gratitude and obliga-

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tion) in a way that her relatives most certainly do not, her tenderness cannot imagine the nation in which she finds herself. For all her tenderness, then, Anne in fact requires a bureaucratic organization in order to feel the nation. Unlike Wordsworth, Austen does not suggest that bureaucratic agencies like the navy see individual sentiments. The naval officers at times act like pastoral leaders, training sailors’ moral character. But Austen ultimately suggests that the function which the navy provides for Anne Elliot does not require the agency to look into her feelings but simply to elicit them, first when Harville elicits Anne’s praise of women’s constancy and second when her husband’s position makes Anne aware of her position in the nation. The irony is that the seemingly unfeeling character of the bureaucracy that places her husband’s life in danger ultimately stirs the kinds of feelings in Anne that make her aware of her participation in and service to the nation. Austen’s vision of nation also has interesting implications for recent discussions of her opinions on the British Empire.46 Austen’s administratively cohered nation allows for a national identity that incorporates even those individuals who have neither inherited nor chosen British identity; to the degree that the British Empire bestows national identity and citizenship upon the peoples it governs, it will do so not by drawing on a shared identity but by incorporating individuals into government administration. Austen argues for such a vision on ethical grounds: an empire that unites individuals who share little nevertheless places individuals in service to one another through the administrative agencies that tie them together. Her model could allow imperial subjects the status of citizens, but it also could defend extending these agencies’—and the Empire’s—geographical reach.47 Furthermore, the British identity that national organizations offer remains a coercive one: it originates only at the Empire’s administrative center.

Austen’s State, Austen’s Romanticism If Austen in her final novel portrays a state that structures individual feelings and relationships, it is interesting that she does so in the course of the novel widely considered her most “Romantic” (in both the common and the literary-historical usage). Critics have noted many ways in which Romantic poetry may have influenced Persuasion and often attribute the depth of the heroine’s consciousness and the renewed emphasis on feeling to Romanticism.48 Clifford Siskin and Clara Tuite further argue that ­Romanticism’s

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influence allows Austen to emphasize sentiment even as she dissociates the novel from the literature of sensibility; she thereby legitimizes the novel genre, creating the form that rises to canonical prominence in the Victorian period.49 What is especially interesting about Persuasion, however, is not just that Austen, under the influence of Romanticism, changes her mind about the importance of deep feelings and early attachments, but how she does so: through a state organization. Persuasion therefore suggests that we further specify Siskin’s and Tuite’s models in two ways. First, even as Austen is influenced by Romanticism, she revises Romantic structures in a manner that critiques high Romantic aesthetics. And second, in Persuasion the navy’s crucial role in mediating feeling means that the very aspects of ­Austen’s writing that Siskin and Tuite credit with canonizing the novel form are predicated upon Austen’s use of the British state. Austen’s turn toward the state enables the novel’s reassessment of feeling and emphasis on individual consciousness. The naval officers’ usefulness and status as war heroes frees their sensibility from charges of solipsism and any association with the French Revolution, and turns sensibility into an affective quality that builds social bonds rather than threatening to destroy them.50 In Persuasion, characters have deep and overwhelming feelings without these feelings leading to solipsism or threatening social bonds, because now these feelings and desires come to fruition only through national organizations such as the navy. State Romanticism, then, provides the terms by which Austen brings Romanticism, both through a general reevaluation of feeling and through specific tropes like the sublime, more deeply into the novel form. When Austen in Persuasion simultaneously turns toward and critiques Romanticism, she does so at a moment in which the high Romantics revised their own aesthetic projects. Her critique of both sensibility and individualism produces a Romanticism similar to the late Wordsworth’s: both value individual depth of feeling but suggest that even if authors stir feelings, ultimately only government agencies provide the structures that turn feeling into social bonds. Austen envisions such a state and such a model of subjectivity several years before Wordsworth publishes his 1821 Ecclesiastical Sketches. Needless to say, while Austen finds the navy a positive regulatory agent and praises its capacity to develop morals in its sailors, to bring Anne and Wentworth together, and to induct individuals into the community at large, many other later authors will not share her glowing praise of national agencies. In one sense, Austen’s very prescience allows her to idealize the British navy and its organizational structure. Austen writes at a moment in

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which national administrative agencies are expanding their reach but are not yet overtly impacting individuals’ private lives. She therefore fantasizes about these agencies’ power to develop ethical relations among individuals and to build communities and the nation, ideas that later Victorian novelists will treat much more skeptically. Indeed, Austen celebrates and even advances the reconstruction of both national and domestic life through professional organizations that increasingly penetrate and organize it. Her vision of Britain challenges us to consider what it really means to imagine a nation, and what role state institutions play in making us feel we are part of one.

f i v e

De Quincey’s Imperial Systems

Thomas De Quincey was one of the last living Romantics. When De Quincey died in 1859, Dickens had already published many of his major novels. The Chartist movement had incited riots but had failed to make suffrage universal. The factory acts had called attention to and begun to regulate industrial working conditions. But even if he lived through the events that inform the pages of Victorian novels, De Quincey continued to classify himself among the Romantic writers, publishing on Wordsworth and Coleridge as late as 1845. One of his last essays, “The English Mail-Coach” (1849), nostalgically recalls the era of the Napoleonic Wars as the glory days of the British nation. However, even as De Quincey associates himself with the high Romantic era, he defines his own project and himself as author in a manner that resembles the State Romanticism that Wordsworth and Coleridge exemplified in their post-Napoleonic careers. Much of the best criticism of Thomas De Quincey focuses on the relationship between De Quincey and Wordsworth. Charles Rzepka and Alina Clej, for instance, read De Quincey’s friendship and subsequent hostility to Wordsworth as an anxiety of influence, an attempt to upstage the more

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illustrious writer.1 Margaret Russett, in contrast, argues that De Quincey does not attempt to avoid Wordsworth’s influence but parasitically to profit from it: De Quincey befriends the poet, inhabits his former house, and claims to interpret his genius for the popular magazine audience. 2 I find Russett’s account especially compelling because it explains De Quincey’s continual tendency to stake his own literary authority on other people and agencies, whether Wordsworth, Ricardo, opium, or as this chapter will argue, the English mail.3 While the attention to the Wordsworth–De Quincey relationship provides illuminating readings of De Quincey’s early career, focusing on the relationship between the writers has prevented critics from noticing that De Quincey’s later works shift from dependence on a person such as Wordsworth to dependence on vast, impersonal state organizations. One example from De Quincey’s revised Confessions of an English Opium Eater can quickly illustrate this shift from an interpersonal to a national context. In the 1821 Confessions, when De Quincey explains his strong attraction to the Lake District, he credits Wordsworth: Wordsworth’s poetry has so amazed and intrigued him that he wants not only to meet the poet but to wander the very hills depicted in his poetry. When De Quincey revises and expands the Confessions in 1856, however, he diminishes the role of Wordsworth and of poetry more generally in drawing him to the lakes. In 1856 Wordsworth appears (along with Ann Radcliffe and the landscape painters) as merely one of many influences provoking his curiosity. De Quincey ultimately attributes his interest in the lakes to English administrative divisions: due to the “mere legal fiction” that the southern section of the lakes was part of De Quincey’s Lancashire home, the lakes held “a secret fascination, subtle, sweet, fantastic, and even from [his] seventh or eighth year spiritually strong.”4 He cannot claim acquaintance with the lake region, and he cannot claim that any similarity between landscapes or peoples connects this portion of the lakes to Lancashire. Still, writing retrospectively, De Quincey allows the legal identity of the lakes to assign them a “spiritual” meaning even before he reads Wordsworth’s poetry. Even more than literature, local culture, or any author’s personal charisma, “the eccentric geography of English law” identifies De Quincey as a native of the lakes. In moving from Wordsworth to “English law,” De Quincey refuses the organic relationship to the lakes that Wordsworth claimed for his boyhood in The Prelude. Equally crucially for my argument here, De Quincey shifts his interest in the lakes out of the psychological register. The passage of time cannot account for this change. The Wordsworth–De Quincey friendship

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had already turned acrimonious by the time De Quincey published the earlier passage in 1821, and since Wordsworth was arguably more popular in 1856, after his death, than at the time of the first version of the Confessions, De Quincey stood to gain just as much cultural prestige from his claim to be the first to recognize Wordsworth’s genius in 1856 as he did in 1821.5 Instead, I will argue, De Quincey identifies with national bureaucracy because by 1856 he locates authorship within a national system of information rather than in individual genius. This redefinition of authorship culminates in De Quincey’s 1849 essay, “The English Mail-Coach.” De Quincey’s turn to the mail follows a growth in the importance of such organizations in Britain following the Napoleonic Wars.6 Far from simply responding to a historical and social growth in the number and importance of state organizations, however, De Quincey turns to the mail to find an alternative means to achieve literary authority. In locating himself in the English mail, De Quincey moves from disseminating the ideas of an illustrious predecessor to disseminating English nationality. To do so requires redefining what constitutes nationalism and how individuals identify with nations. In “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey insists that an ethnic understanding of nationality must be combined with an imperially defined nationality, which imposes Englishness upon its own people. Only those with English blood can truly share in the joy of English victory, but even those of English blood must have that blood stirred by the conquering force of the English mails. Even if De Quincey proves far from a disinterested historical observer, I find his version of national identification interesting because of the challenge it offers to our current models of nationalism. First, De Quincey’s appeal to a specifically English national identity and his insistence on the primacy of English blood contradict Linda Colley’s argument that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the development of a British national identity.7 Second, De Quincey’s model of a top-down transmission of national identity reverses Colley’s assertion that national identity began among the people. For Colley, British national identity first arose during Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth-century wars with France, as ­England, Scotland, Wales, and (to a lesser extent) Ireland united to oppose a common enemy. Colley narrates a historically situated specular exchange: as they gaze across the channel at France, the English, Scots, and Welsh find pride and unity in their Protestant religion, their wealth of trade, and their tradition of liberty. In “The English Mail-Coach,” in contrast, ­nationalism

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descends onto the English people rather than arising from them. Colley’s model of national identification as a moment of specular exchange neglects the role that organizations play in determining the very categories with which people identify. Indeed, for each of Colley’s sources of national pride, we could specify a corresponding national bureaucratic institution: for Protestantism, the English Church; for trade, the East India Company and other trading organizations; for liberty, the courts. We can read De Quincey’s insistence on the need for state intervention to incite even popular feelings of nationalism as part of the “official nationalism” identified by Benedict Anderson. Although Anderson locates the origins of nationalism in the middle class, specifically in bourgeois print capitalism, he suggests that “official nationalism” begins in the second half of the nineteenth century as “responses by power groups—primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and aristocratic—threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in, popular imagined communities” and consists of “conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them.”8 De ­Quincey’s model of nationality, however, goes further in marking the government as the origin of all popular feelings. In doing so, he makes the nation look increasingly like the empire it governs. Anderson’s model of “official nationalism” and Hannah Arendt’s study of imperialism both point to a core contradiction in the definition of the imperial nation, but they site this contradiction in the contrast between the nation’s projects at home and abroad: a nation rules over like individuals, whereas empire places one people in conquest over an ethnically different people.9 Nation, on this account, is created by a figurative plebiscite: people are a nation when they imagine themselves to be one. Empire, on the other hand, offers subjects no choice over affiliation: empires take populations by force or coercion; the resident population does not identify with its conquerors and never assimilates into the conquering country. A nation such as nineteenth-century Britain that defines itself as imperial must therefore combine two contradictory understandings of its purpose. De Quincey undoes this contradiction by insisting that even national identity is imperial because nationality imposes upon a citizen’s other identities. The nation must imperially conquer its own people in the name of the King, if only through a battle of information. De Quincey finds the imperial model of national identity so compelling because it serves his literary ambitions. Only when national identity is imposed in a central system of information can De Quincey claim to

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be the author of Englishness. Locating his authority in a government organization therefore challenges high Romantic models of authorial genius. When riding the English mail, De Quincey finds literary authority in the position in which he sits and in the message he distributes rather than in his own capabilities; terms such as “sympathy” and “imagination” refer not to the author but to the vast system whose center he occupies. Transmitting national identity through a government organization also supports De Quincey’s Tory politics. No radical reforming voices will offer rival claims to speak for the nation. If De Quincey’s top-down model of nationality offers the possibility of nullifying potential discord, however, he also fears that joining a nation requires the sacrifice of persons as well as personal allegiances. In “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey finds a position of personal and authorial safety, imagining that the official authority of the mail protects all those who ride it. Nevertheless, like Austen, De Quincey remains acutely aware that the nation’s wars kill many of its citizens; even when he does not worry over his personal safety, he feels guilt over others’ sacrifice, guilt that is all the more acute because he so firmly identifies himself with the message of victory he carries. Turning in conclusion to his final, revised Confessions, I argue that the terrors, rather than the benefits, of national membership might predominate if the authority granted him by his position on the mails cannot protect him from the sacrifice that national identification potentially demands. Over thirty years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, De Quincey nostalgically remembers riding on the mail coaches as they carried across the countryside the first news of English victory over France. De Quincey describes riding on the outside seat of the mail coach as a theatrical experience. Sitting on the outside, he watches the passersby at the very moment when they see the laurelled coach and learn of victory. Moreover, he knows that these passersby also see him on the coach, part of the spectacle conveying the news. He not only shares in the observers’ exultation but also feels that he has played a role in arousing it. On the outside of the coach, he becomes not merely a passenger but part of the medium that conveys information to the people along the coach’s route. De Quincey turns back to the era of the Napoleonic Wars to remember a time of national unity. He attributes this national unity, however, not only to the message of victory that the mails carried but also to the system of its

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dissemination. De Quincey argues that the mail coaches presented information in a manner that unified rather than dispersed the English people. He prefers the old mails to the modern rails because “the gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres as there are separate carriages in the train.”10 The crowd surrounding the mail coach demonstrates in miniature the nation’s unity at a moment of victory, as citizens forget their individual concerns before their shared glory. Even more, De Quincey requires an audience with a single center because it is only when he rides at the center of the crowd’s attention that he himself feels a part of the news he carries. Only when every eye looks at him and the mail can De Quincey feel connected to the entire nation. On the mail, the laurels celebrating victory recall the laurels that bedecked classical poets, and like these poets the mail stirs the sentiments of a nation. And when riding the mail, De Quincey earns these laurels simply by virtue of his position. When he finds himself at the center of the news’s distribution and a part of the message he carries, De Quincey claims a status equivalent to “laurelled” poets such as Wordsworth or Milton. De Quincey prefers the mails to the rails not only because the mails place him in a position from which he can join in disseminating the news of victory but because he feels connected to its source. De Quincey argues that only the mail allows passengers to experience their “imperial natures.” First, only on the mails, and not on the rails, could passengers feel the speed at which they traveled. On the mails, every passenger witnesses the speed in the exertion of the horse and knows that this speed began as an order from the driver. Riding the mail, speed “was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of an animal, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and echoing hoofs” (193). In contrast, on the rails, De Quincey insists, it is impossible to ascertain how fast the coach is traveling without a watch; even if the rails move more quickly than the mail, the passenger experiences this velocity “not . . . as a consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon alien evidence” (193). And this produces a sense of disconnection from the car’s movement: “iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has power to raise an extra bubble in a steam-kettle. The galvanic cycle is broken up for ever; man’s imperial nature no longer sends itself forward through the electric sensibility of the horse” (193–94). The horse is more “imperial” than the rails because

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the horse better promulgates the thrill of victory. Unlike the mechanical rails, the horse responds to its driver’s excitement with increased speed and exertion and therefore carries this excitement to both passengers and observers, who note the horse’s effort. Once again, man’s nature proves “imperial,” not only because of its grand reach, to Nile and Trafalgar, but because he experiences his own power in directing and observing the exertion of another. Not only does the horse give more visible signs of its exertion; it also allows the passenger to sympathize with this effort in a way one cannot sympathize with the rails’ “blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give” (194). In De Quincey’s imperialist discourse, sympathy for the horse does not imply concern for its degree of effort but simply an awareness that its motion is created by muscles and that those muscles are controlled by man. Sympathy does not oppose imperialism (as it might in anti-imperial discourse, where an individual’s suffering would be used to suggest a system’s immorality) but fuels the Empire’s mechanism: the connection of horse to man allows the individual to experience his connection to empire as a feeling of exhilaration. Although De Quincey insists that passengers feel their “imperial nature” only through animal nerves rather than mechanical technologies, he still relies on technological structures to authorize his position. In other words, if De Quincey prefers that the mail’s messages travel through human and animal nerves, he still requires the centralized bureaucracy of the mail system to direct the flow of information across these nerves to the waiting ­English people. De Quincey needs the mail to place him at the center of every crowd in order to enable him to transmit national identity. And in transmitting information from a single center, the mail imposes an analogously central political system: power flows from the King to the provinces, because the King and his agents control the movement of information. Indeed, the mail proves a “medium” in Friedrich Kittler’s sense of the word, because the way in which it organizes and transmits information transforms the social and political structure of its society by dictating who will hold information and how they will gather and transmit it.11 The very power of technology to determine social structures and authorial possibilities, however, ironically propels De Quincey’s attempt to return to a past era. Only in the “discourse network” of the Napoleonic Wars can he find the technological and political conditions that support his authorial position. De Quincey’s 1834 essay “Travelling in England in the Old Days” also considers the role of transportation networks in developing patterns of

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communication that ultimately underwrite political systems. The 1834 essay, however, imagines a more democratically structured civic order. If technology improved to the point of allowing instantaneous communication, De Quincey suggests, a new political system might arise: Action and reaction from every point of the compass being thus perfect and instantaneous, we should then first begin to understand, in a practical sense, what is meant by the unity of a political body, and we should approach to a more adequate appreciation of the powers which are latent in organization. . . . Then every part of the empire will react upon the whole with the power, life, and effect of immediate conference amongst parties brought face to face. Then first will be seen a political system truly organic—i.e., in which each acts upon all, and all react upon each: and a new earth will arise from the indirect agency of this merely physical revolution. [M, 1:218–19]

De Quincey imagines a technological revolution that would create a cultural revolution: a change in the movement of information (specifically its velocity) would indelibly join vast expanses of territory and create a “new earth.” He describes this transformation, however, with a word we have come to associate with a much less technological Romanticism: the technological and organizational advances will create “a political system truly organic.” In crediting an organic society to a revolution in technology, De Quincey revises Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s strict opposition between organic and mechanic forms. In his Lectures on Shakespeare, Coleridge quotes Schlegel to distinguish the two: “the form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the material . . . the organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.”12 In his late career, as we saw in Chapter 1, Coleridge imagines an institutional structure—the British Constitution—forming the nation as an organic whole. De Quincey, however, imagines technology performing this function. And although for Coleridge and for Schlegel organic and mechanic forms are opposites, for De Quincey the “indirect agency” of a mechanism reveals society’s “latent” organic form. The British nation he imagines is organic because its organization arises from within; however, this organization arises only through mechanical assistance. One specific technology, instantaneous communication, harnesses the “powers latent in organization” to allow their “life” to spring forth. The organic system that De Quincey envisions in “Travelling in England in the Old Days” is democratic. There is no single center, no single place

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or person controlling the Empire or originating all information. Instead, when communication moves instantaneously, “each acts upon all, and all react upon each.” For this reason, the new technology allows a democratically formed national identity to emerge. The 1834 essay comments that “the national will has never been able to express itself upon one in a thousand of the public acts, simply because the national voice was lost in the distance, and could not collect itself through the time and the space rapidly enough to connect itself immediately with the evanescent measure of the moment” (218). With instantaneous communication, the movement of the whole follows the sum of the actions and reactions of all of its parts, with each part voting in a representative assembly, as it were, of parts. But if this technology succeeds in creating a truly organic national identity, it also diffuses agency. It is difficult to suggest where an action or movement might begin, and what part any one individual plays in its propagation. Even as De Quincey credits the new communication technologies with producing a “new earth,” he indicates some dissatisfaction with this “merely physical revolution.” De Quincey introduces his expectation of technological revolution with the assertion that he has “always maintained, that under a representative government, where the great cities of the empire must naturally have the power, each in its proportion, of reacting upon the capital and the councils of the nation in so conspicuous a way, there is a result waiting on the final improvements of the arts of travelling, and of transmitting intelligence with velocity” (217–18). He suggests that looking back on these lines (written twenty years previously), he found that “already, in this paragraph . . . a prefiguring instinct spoke within me of some great secret yet to come in the art of distant communication. At present I am content to regard the electric telegraph as the oracular response to that prefiguration. But I still look for some higher and transcendent response” (219). Although the telegraph connects the Empire and forms the nation into an organic whole, it is not sufficiently “transcendent.” Like the telegraph, De Quincey’s mail coaches mechanically impose an organic identity upon the English people. The mail system, however, proves more “transcendent” in two ways. First, as I have discussed, De Quincey states that the mail operates on animal and human nerves rather than on electric wires and thus allows passengers to feel their own power over the horse, and to imagine that human agency controls the news’s dissemination. More importantly, however, whereas the telegraph system that De Quincey imagines weighs each voice proportionally, the mail encourages individuals to abandon, and

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therefore to “transcend,” their individual identity as they celebrate national victory. And for De Quincey, the mail coach unifies the nation because its message propagates from a single center, so that every English person owes the news of victory to the same original source. The telegraph system also differs from the mail because, lacking a center, it does not allow De Quincey to place himself at the center of national discourse. Riding the mails, however, De Quincey derives both his national identity and his personal authority from the system of which he is a part. Sitting in London at the central mail terminal and watching the coaches depart, De Quincey envisions himself connected to every British citizen who will hear the news of victory. He positions himself at the center of the Empire not because he performed any wartime action or extended Britain’s foreign possessions but because all those who learn of British victory owe their information to the English mail. The half-slumbering consciousness that all night long, and all the next day— perhaps for even a longer period—many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the victory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, without intermission westwards for three hundred miles—northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies which in so vast a succession we are going to awake. [204–5]

De Quincey determines his personal importance from the “infinite” number of people who will hear the news he carries: here imagination verges on mathematical calculus, in which each instantaneous moment of a line is taken to infinity.13 De Quincey need not see every person who hears the news in order to imagine that he is responsible for conveying it; instead, he simply imagines the reach of the mails. When he terms this imagination “visionary sympathy,” sympathy becomes not a matter of knowing and feeling for individuals but of envisioning the system of which one is a small part; envisioning the system links one with each individual in it. De Quincey redefines “vision,” “sympathy,” and “imagination,” then, as aspects of one’s placement within a system of information and communication rather than as poetic qualities requiring a special sort of mind.14 When De Quincey rides the mails, his imaginative reach extends beyond his physical

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­ ovement, for he identifies himself with the outward movement of the m news he carries. In describing the English people as gunpowder, De Quincey implicitly resorts to an ethnic model of national identity, suggesting that some Englishness is necessary in order to take pride in English victory: those not made of gunpowder cannot be lit aflame. In De Quincey’s model of nationality, English ethnicity is necessary to share authentically in the glory of victory even if the battles were fought by a united Britain. At the moment of victory, “one heart, one pride, one glory connects every man by the transcendent bond of his English blood” (203). De Quincey uses the term “English” rather than “British” deliberately. “The English Mail-Coach” never considers imperial subjects, and most of the essay imagines only English people receiving the news of victory, and therefore imagines only a population that should rise together in glorious sympathy with the spread of empire. The only episode that features a non-English Briton treats skeptically the ability of the Welsh (and by analogy the Scots and Irish) truly to sympathize with English victory. De Quincey and a Welshman are fellow mail passengers on an occasion in which a Birmingham coach dares to race the mails. After the mail coach accelerates and speeds past the upstart coach, the Welshman asks if De Quincey “had not felt [his] heart burn . . . during the continuance of the race.” In reply De Quincey insists that he had remained calm because there was no possibility of a local coach beating the mail: “‘Race us, perhaps,’ I replied, ‘though even that has an air of sedition, but not beat us’” (192). De Quincey’s whimsical insistence on the priority of the mail places the mail’s authority not only in the strength of the horses but in something more ineffable: “on our side, besides the physical superiority, was a tower of strength, namely the king’s name” (192). The Welshman persists in denying the mail’s absolute supremacy and refuses De Quincey’s suggestion that to pass a mail would be treason, a capital offense. Although the Welshman takes pride in the victory, he cannot properly understand the priority of the King’s name and the King’s agent, the mail. He exults in the mail’s victory and, by extrapolation, in British victories abroad, only because he identifies with the coach he happens to be riding. If he were riding the Birmingham coach, he would probably wish just as strongly for its victory. English identity enduringly ties one to the King and the nation in a way that Welsh identity does not. If English blood is necessary truly to conceive the nation’s glory, blood alone is not sufficient. The racing mail coach needs the authority of the

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King, rather than simply English passengers or an English driver, in order to beat the local coach. And likewise, the English people unite in a shared glory only when the news of victory travels under the King’s aegis, through the aid of appropriate technology. Even if Englishness lies latent as an ethnic category, stirring it to the surface proves coercive. Although the news of British victories brings joy, this joy takes each individual violently. After the battle is over, the dissemination of news figuratively continues the fighting. Information appears as “fiery arrows” and moves like “fire racing along a train of gunpowder . . . kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy.” People are merely the “gunpowder” and require a spark to flare. Setting individual emotions aflame, the mail’s “fiery arrows” seem almost as powerful as actual munitions, but it is the English people (rather than the French or the colonies) that they conquer.15 To understand why De Quincey insists that national identity imposes itself upon the English people and cannot simply rise up within them, we need to consider De Quincey’s political as well as authorial concerns. In restructuring the national communication system around a single center, De Quincey insists upon an imperial center-periphery political structure rather than the more “democratic” organization seen in the telegraph system. As I have argued, De Quincey finds in such a centralized structure a surer authorial position: he can only be certain that every man, woman, and child in England listens to his message when he joins his message to the King’s mail. An 1836 political essay, however, demonstrates a second reason for seeking a centralized structure and an imperial context for national identity. “Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism” considers the question of who can speak for the nation and worries that the reform movement claims to rise above partisan politics to speak with a national voice. The reformers once spoke with such great numbers, De Quincey acknowledges, that they reasonably approximated a nation: “whether for achieving the victory, or for commemorating it . . . [the reformers] were able to put forth a power greater than that of kings—most despotic. And thus far they were entitled to style themselves ‘national,’ or even, in a popular sense, ‘the nation’” (M, 9:347). De Quincey admits that the reformers do indeed achieve the numbers to win a democratic contest for the national voice. Within this democratic system, however, De Quincey imagines the power of the people as “despotic” because their sheer numbers co-opt those like himself who disagree with the goals of reform. De Quincey and his fellow Tories cannot defeat the reformers in any fairly contested election or contest of voices. Instead, he counters the ­reformers

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first by suggesting that there is no room for a third party in the British government: in a division of labor, the Whigs “take[] charge of the popular influence” and the Tories “take[] charge of the antagonist or non-popular influence,” leaving no position for reform (M, 9:337). Second, he turns outward from a contest for the national voice to the battle for empire, attributing the essay to “a letter to a friend in Bengal.” By admitting that the English government of Bengal needs reform, even if such reform is currently too “perilous” to attempt, he claims the position of a moderate: he desires some reforms (in Bengal) but not others (in Britain). Furthermore, when speaking to the colonies, he becomes a member of the center in a way he does not while participating in English partisan debates. In a version of what John Barrell has termed “this, that, and the other,” he incorporates the near other, the British working classes, by opposing both the upper and working classes to a more distant other, Bengal.16 “The English Mail-Coach” raises the same question as “Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism”: Who speaks for the nation? The mail coach, however, need not worry over rhetorical positioning but decisively overruns all opposition. In turning to the mail, De Quincey’s memory serves his politics. He looks to the Napoleonic War era rather than to some other moment of mass union (such as the rallies for the Reform Bill) to represent the national imagination at a moment when the nation thinks like a Tory. Only at such a moment can De Quincey be supremely sure that no individual citizen will break the chain of “burning joy” (205). De Quincey figures this unified vision, however, as a consequence not only of the historical moment but also of the action of the mail. The mail stirs a consensual national identity among all English people. At that moment, there was no question of argument or error: the mail irresistibly presented truth and elicited the same patriotic feelings in every English person. Even more than locating a historical moment of union in the Tory cause, however, the essay’s insistence that national identity derives from the King and descends through the motions of the mail onto the people removes the possibility of democratically counting the voices. Only the messages sanctioned by the mail reach the masses. “The English Mail-Coach” most decisively combats the figure of reform by figuring any opposition to the essay’s message of patriotism as personal, not political. The individuals who cannot share in national joy do not seek an alternative national voice. Instead, they have “suffered some deep personal affliction,” perhaps losing sons or brothers or husbands in the war, that prevents them from celebrating national glory. The news of victory

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merely reminds them of their loss or causes them to sympathize with other families now experiencing similar tragedy. Passing one lady in mourning, De Quincey worries that she, “having formerly suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be distressing herself with anticipations of another similar suffering” (207). De Quincey does not seem to care that some English citizens will not be able to share in English patriotic joy. As long as grief remains personal and not political, it will not spread among the population. Patriotic joy, in contrast, moves so quickly that a few nonparticipants cannot halt its inevitable spread. The point is not that every single citizen will sympathize in exactly the same way but that most will, and so the few who equate battle victory with grief will be drowned out by the majority’s resounding imperial pride. De Quincey portrays the moment of national pride as a forgetting of one’s self. In “The English Mail-Coach,” English identity lies dormant until awakened by news of victory. Only at the moment of victory do people give up their individual identities to identify themselves as members of a nation. De Quincey argues that the mail’s conquering force is generous; it elevates even the basest spectators to greatness by demonstrating the glory of their English blood: “The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets his lameness—real or assumed. . . . The victory has healed him, and says—Be thou whole!” (205). The poor charwomen “for this one night . . . feel themselves by birthright to be daughters of England, and answer to no humbler title” (206). Identifying with the nation makes the beggar and charwomen whole because it allows them to forget their poverty and social position. Indeed, it does not matter whether the beggar’s lameness is true or feigned; in either case, he gives up his individual claim before a greater imperial spectacle. By taking on the identities of the imperial nation, these figures forget their personal identities. In the cases of the beggar and the charwomen, the requisite forgetting seems benign: each forgets pain. When we set “The English Mail-Coach” alongside De Quincey’s more explicitly political writings, however, we can see that the advent of national identity is not always so innocent. Indeed, in De Quincey’s Tory logic the generous glory of the mail almost removes the need for reform by elevating the poor, in spirit if not in social class. And in every citizen it reaches, patriotic joy appears violently because it comes at the cost of an individual’s other identifications. De Quincey does not imagine that it would be possible to identify oneself in more than one way at a time, and so even those with English blood can only experience national

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pride as a conquering of national over individual feeling. National identification can never be neutral. Most, like one woman whom De Quincey meets, the mother of a soldier in a regiment that has just won a bloody victory, forget the uncertain fates of friends and relatives in the moment of joy. Not considering that the crucial role played by her son’s regiment likely meant his death, she “blindly allowed herself to express an exultation so unmeasured in the news, and its details” (207). In one respect, the woman’s exultation is far from “blind”: she responds to the visual spectacle of the mail coach, which only announces victory and does not foretell its costs. The mail itself is sublimely “unmeasured,” not only in the scale of the victory it announces but in the numbers of people it reaches: to count bodies, whether dead soldiers or living and celebrating English, would end the sublimity that De Quincey finds in the mail. Furthermore, “measuring” exultation would calculate nationalism democratically as a sum of individual voices rather than as a single spirit that proves “transcendent” in its ability to impose itself on the whole. Measurement will arrive the next day with the newspapers, when the numbers and names of casualties are listed. A few individuals cannot but help measure the personal costs of victory; for them, the sacrifice of a husband or son or brother will be too severe a price for them to share in the nation’s glory. For most, however, the message of the mail will stir nationalistic pride, upholding De Quincey’s confidence that he speaks to and for the English nation. De Quincey figures this conquering of all feeling as the mail’s utter indifference to any unofficial persons. The motion of the coach itself threatens to destroy whoever might step into its path, and De Quincey initially argues that such unresponsiveness cannot be helped: “Tied to post-office time, with an allowance in some cases of fifty minutes for eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to undertake the offices of sympathy and condolence? Could it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of the road? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, it did so, I contended, in discharge of its own more peremptory duties” (191). The mail cannot worry about individuals and feelings while it completes its national duties. It displaces the mind of the rider toward a national purpose, removing any capacity for sympathy not dictated by the force with which he rides. Just as sympathy with the horse implies not a concern for its well-being but rather an awareness of how its exertion carries the movements of empire, so empire cannot show any concern for the people it might harm but only allow sympathy with its expansion. De Quincey’s “visionary sympathy” when watching the

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­ eparture of the mails imagines the vast extent of the mail’s reach but cannot d concern itself with individuals. De Quincey accepts the constraints of the coach and indeed suggests that the nation is correct to attempt to penetrate and police private lives through mechanisms like the mail. He even thanks the mail for “regulating” his love affair with a girl at one stop, limiting his acquaintance with her to the short time necessary to change the horses.17 Although he recounts the potential danger of the mails, De Quincey claims to find power and safety for himself because of the mail’s rhetorical functions. Indeed, he jokingly suggests that the mail’s power as an agent of information protects him from the physical dangers of riding on a speeding coach. There was an impression upon the public mind, natural enough from the continually augmenting velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of danger. On the contrary, I maintained that, if a man had become nervous from some gipsy prediction in his childhood, allocating to a particular moon now approaching some unknown danger, and he should inquire earnestly, “Whither can I fly for shelter? Is a prison the safest retreat? Or a lunatic hospital? Or the British Museum?” I should have replied, “Oh, no; I’ll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the next forty days on the box of his majesty’s mail. Nobody can touch you there.” [188]

For fleeing pursuit, ever increasing velocity might be safer than stasis: the coach’s motion makes it hard to track down to any one position, and its velocity enables it to outrun all other coaches. The mail offers supreme protection, however, not simply because of its speed but because of the national authority that underwrites its movement. The mail’s regal authority matches the gypsies’ mysticism and proves more powerful, because the mail is English rather than foreign. And the mail outdoes gypsy spells because its command over news lends it a form of rhetorical power, the power to seem to determine fates in the act of revealing them. De Quincey suggests when he meets the mother of the soldier that for the mother, her son is alive until the mails announce him dead. With such a power, the hazy predictions of gypsies cannot compete. And the mail’s ability to determine fates makes it a safe place for those who ride it: the authority of the English government, in De Quincey’s terms the greatest power in the world, is behind each passenger. As long as De Quincey rides the mail, he announces others’ fates; when his position on the mail grants him authority, it also gives him protection. Nevertheless, he remains haunted by the individual sacrifices that the mail, both in its own terms and as a figure for the motion of England’s imperial

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expansion, demands. And he feels a sense of personal guilt for his own role in coalescing a nation that kills so many of its citizens. The horrific danger of the mail’s speed and the profundity of the sacrifice that national identification potentially demands climax in “The Vision of Sudden Death.” As the mail travels at increasing speeds through the dark, its driver asleep and De Quincey the only passenger, it veers into the wrong lane and heads straight for a young couple in a small cart. Absorbed in each other, the couple is unaware of the impending danger, and they take no action to remove their coach from the mail’s path. De Quincey tries to sound the horn, but his reach is blocked by a large stack of foreign mail. Luckily, he says, he remembers a passage from the Iliad and thinks to shout a warning to the couple. The man looks up, sees the approaching mail, and is able to pull the cart just out of reach. When De Quincey looks back, he sees the young woman raising her arms to heaven, in fear and in acknowledgment. This passage combines several of De Quincey’s common themes: first, even at this moment of danger, De Quincey suggests that he is incapable of agency. De Quincey can only propagate, and not originate, a message and so needs another author or text—here, the Iliad—to give him voice. Even more importantly for my argument here, the passage portrays communication as a specifically national system. The stack of “foreign mail” blocks De Quincey’s access to the coach’s horn, interfering with his attempt to warn the young couple of their danger.18 Just as the French nation threatens to block England’s imperial spread, the very existence of foreign letters threatens to stop De Quincey from communicating with fellow English citizens. The Iliad, a resource of a scholarly English education, written in a dead language rather than the language of an opposing nation, does not block communication but enables it. In the passage that De Quincey recalls, the shout of Achilles ends his battle with Agamemnon and begins their joint attack on Hector. This specific moment also offers a truce to the young couple, the fellow English, if they remove themselves from the path of the mail and ­allow its continued progress. In portraying the near-victims of the mail as a young couple in love, De Quincey once again figures any English resistance to national progress as personal—or more exactly in this passage, sexual—rather than political. The young couple in the cart are so absorbed in their private conversation that they do not notice the approach of the bolting mail: “Ah, young sir! What are you about? If it is necessary that you should whisper your communications to this young lady—though really I see nobody at this hour, and on

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this solitary road, likely to overhear your conversation—is it, therefore, necessary that you should carry your lips forward to hers?” (221). The couple’s private conversation appears not only foolish but also dangerous when it prevents them from seeing or hearing the mail coach. The coach literally insists upon the nation’s right-of-way over and through personal spaces and relationships. Just as the mail coach regulated (and thereby prevented) De Quincey’s relationship with the girl at a station, the mail demands control over all private relationships. Neither the mail coach nor the national identity that it represents of course threatens De Quincey himself. As in the Malay incident in the Confessions, danger threatens only the innocent person at the end of the communication chain. When national identity demands a sacrifice, or when communication fails, it sacrifices those on the outskirts— the colonial subject, the young woman. But more than simply demanding recognition of the mail, portraying the personal relationship threatened by the mail as specifically sexual removes the political valence of De Quincey’s model of nationalism. By reading private relationships as sexual rather than political, he can suggest the power of the mail over all individual concerns without evoking either the threat of reform or his own Toryism. A “whisper” in the dark signals romance, not sedition. Once again, “The English Mail-Coach” imagines only isolated and nonideological resistance to the encroaching force of a centrally distributed nationalism. The incident nevertheless haunts De Quincey, I would suggest, because it illustrates the threat that national identity poses and the guilt that it elicits in citizens. If the nation demands sacrifice, no other temporal authority can intervene. But although he insists that the coach (as representative of the King) has the right to ride on the wrong side of the street and that everyone else must make way, De Quincey also finds himself personally responsible for the near accident because he cannot warn the young man in time. Many readers have noted the passage’s sexual charge, with the mail coach enacting a form of phallic penetration. As Arden Reed notes, the passage places De Quincey in the position of rival lover, who by shouting to the young man pulls the lovers apart.19 And as Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe suggests, De Quincey’s continual replay of the girl in his dream vision shows that De Quincey finds an erotic thrill even in his shame, as he proves unable to act to stop the nation’s violence.20 In replaying the incident in his “Dream Fugue,” De Quincey responds to his sense of guilt and to his worries about whether his message successfully overruns all opposition. In the dream fugue, De Quincey imagines himself within a “saintly cathedral for the warrior dead that rested from their feuds

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on earth” (229). The young woman reappears as a baby, who quickly grows into a woman who must be sacrificed as “the ransom for Waterloo” (230). But her guardian angel succeeds in pleading for her life, the woman is saved, the war ends, and the people wait to celebrate the “secret words,” “Waterloo and Recovered Christendom.” The end of the war indeed ends “sudden death” in the sense of ending one threat to British lives. But the dream assuages De Quincey’s guilt over the nation’s power, suggesting that Britain sacrifices no innocents, and that even those “warrior dead” who gave their lives for their nation experience Christian resurrection. He triumphantly equates nationalism and religion, then, to suggest that English victory is divinely ordained and to insist that the nation is correct to enforce its power over individuals. The “Dream Fugue” also responds to De Quincey’s worry that his writing cannot form the same kind of unified and receptive audience that the mail coach did. In his current day, De Quincey worries, not just individuals but entire (radical) publics stand in the way of his message of British union. As we have seen, De Quincey recalls the mail coaches so nostalgically because he trusted the medium of the coach and the message of victory to produce a unified national audience. Even if his essay revives the memory of the coach and its nationalist message, he cannot revive the medium. In the world of early Victorian journalism, too many publications address disparate audiences. Each publication serves as a center for a different public, defined through class and political agendas in ways that pit them against one another (and often against the Tory interests De Quincey holds dear). From his residence in Edinburgh, De Quincey is aware that he is not at the largest or most important of the nation’s centers. Furthermore, as seen, De Quincey worries that when the public does claim to speak as one, the voice that emerges is a radical one that excludes him and threatens his interests. Whether addressing a fragmented magazine readership or a radical, unified public, De Quincey can no longer claim to be an author of national identity. And nationalism itself, at a time when the vision of the British nation is so contested, no longer can be the unifying force it once was. De Quincey’s dream fugue imagines the moment of apocalypse to conceive the British public as once again a single entity. In jingoistically equating Waterloo and “recovered Christendom,” De Quincey joins two moments in which he imagines entire communities speaking with a unified voice—the moment of British victory and the promised resurrection. This moment of apocalypse transforms a potentially dangerous and radicalized public into a unified and peaceful community of the dead. In describing his vision of

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the girl, De Quincey repeats the same participial phrase he used to describe her near death in the coach accident: she is “sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting.” Here, however, his new ending for the phrase shows the ideological work the dream fugue performs: the girl is “suddenly reconciled, adoring” (233). De Quincey suggests, of course, that she is reconciled to her fate. But he also imagines both the girl and the crowd that clearly sympathizes with her as “reconciled” by religion and therefore as politically quiescent. The young couple in the cart represented for De Quincey a resistance, albeit an unmotivated and futile resistance, to the force of national power. When he relocates his model of national glory to the moment of resurrection, he nullifies this sense of resistance. And he transfers the “adoration” of each other that denoted the couple’s desire to pull themselves apart from the nation to a religious adoration that he imagines is shared by the crowd as a whole, and that he channels into a sense of English nationalism. De Quincey hopes that shared religious identity will transcend political ideology, just as in the Napoleonic era national identity transcended personal interests. And he imagines himself speaking to and for this reconciled populace. In his dream, at the moment when the girl is saved, De Quincey envisions himself once again at the center of a public united in exaltation, as the cathedral erupts in music that incorporates all peoples, the “[c]hoir and antichoir . . . filling fast with unknown voices” (231). De Quincey’s confidence in this public allows him to suggest that his earlier fears of radical publics were hysterical. As the mail coach exits the cathedral, ready to spread the “secret words” to all people, De Quincey initially worries about the masses surrounding him: “We, that spread flight before us, heard the tumult, as of flight, mustering behind us. In fear we looked round for the unknown steps that, in flight or in pursuit, were gathering upon our own. Who were these that followed?” He then realizes, however, that these “faces, which no man could count” are the resurrected dead, who “from the crimson altar and the fiery font were visited with secret life” at the moment when the angel succeeded in pleading for the girl (231–32). De Quincey upbraids himself for fearing the masses that turned out to be Christian souls, asking, could it be ye that had wrapped me in the reflux of panic? What ailed me that I should fear when the triumphs of earth were advancing? Ah! Pariah heart within me, that couldst never hear the sound of joy without sullen whispers of treachery in ambush; that from six years old, didst never hear the promise of perfect love, without seeing aloft amongst the stars fingers as of a man’s hand writing the secret legend—“ashes to ashes, dust to dust! ” [232]

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Although he acknowledges that he worries about the mass’s “treachery,” he blames this worry not on the mass’s political stance but on his own fear of death. Once again, he uses a personal explanation to avoid using politics as an explanation for his actions. But whether he acknowledges a political motivation or not, De Quincey consoles his Tory self by rereading the crowd, not as a radicalized mass but as enthusiasts who share his task of publishing national and religious glory. The essay’s conclusion imagines the crowds, moving with “one step,” overtaking the mail coach on which he rides: “and, as with a garment, they wrapped us round with thunders that overpowered our own. As brothers we moved together; to the skies we rose—to the dawn that advanced—to the stars that fled: rendering thanks to God in the highest—that, having hid has face through one generation behind thick clouds of War, once again was ascending—was ascending from Waterloo—in the visions of Peace” (232). Here, it is no longer a problem that the masses are “overpower[ing]” him and his Tory interests; De Quincey is one with the crowd and so confident in its unity that he suggests the mass has no geographical boundaries. By joining nationalism with religious promise, De Quincey attempts to find a message that will unify his magazine audience, recreating the single mass public that coalesced around the mails. De Quincey imagines his essay carrying on the work of the mail in the dream fugue, “publishing” the “secret words,” “Waterloo and recovered Christendom.” In imagining that his essay conveys a united religious and nationalist “glory,” De Quincey finds a message that he hopes outlives the Napoleonic era and resonates for his 1849 audience, regardless of politics or denomination. If so, perhaps he could impel his readers to abandon their individual concerns and be as “reconciled” and “adoring” as the girl and the masses of his dream. For De Quincey, the autobiographical essay operates as a type (and a typology) of resurrection, as it brings the characters and incidents of the past back to life. He emphasizes this effect by describing his vision of the girl as one of “the dreadful resurrections that are in dreams,” and by repeating the participial phrase—“sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting”—that describes her near death (232). The reader also experiences these “resurrections” when incidents, characters, and phrases from earlier episodes return and repeat in later visions, especially in the dream fugues that conclude both Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and “The English MailCoach.” In juxtaposing the “resurrections” of the soul, the “resurrections” he experiences in dreams, and the repetitions of his text, De Quincey makes himself as author into an agent of apocalypse. By facing his readers with a

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moment of near death, he hopes for the apocalyptic power to force individuals to transcend for a moment their individual interests. In this way, he imagines for the medium of memoir one version of the kind of power he admired in the mail coach. But if the dream’s resurrections feed the essayist’s power, they simultaneously signal his agony. On the one hand, depicting his vision of the girl as a recurring dream—and in the essay’s final sentence calling this dream a vision from God—allows De Quincey to claim a kind of involuntary authorship like that he found while riding the mail. He imagines that he does not have to be responsible for the message but nevertheless joins in its transmission. On the other hand, the dream reminds De Quincey of his guilt, the guilt that accrues to any citizen of the nation. De Quincey feels this guilt especially deeply because he claims to author national identity while riding the mails, and because he sees the cost of the nation’s violence personalized in the young woman’s near death. His difficulty in acting to warn the young couple increases his sense that he shares responsibility for their fate. De Quincey’s vision of the young woman’s reprieve and of the warriors’ resurrection partially assuages his guilt, since it promises one form of endless life to those innocents the nation sacrifices. Nevertheless, his continual dreams of the young woman’s despair show that in “The English Mail-Coach,” guilt is the dark side of the nation’s triumph, of the subject’s powerful identification with the nation, and of the autobiographical author’s confidence that he gathers agency from his position in spreading the nation’s news. For the most part, while riding the mails, De Quincey finds himself safe from the death that the nation threatens to require of others. But if the mails offer De Quincey a position of relative safety, his essay about the mail does not. His safety relies on motion, and writing requires stasis. His memoir fixes his words and position before an audience, forcing him to abandon the protection of the ever-moving coach. In the 1856 Confessions of an ­English Opium-Eater, De Quincey figures these concerns in recurring references to the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul’s Cathedral. De Quincey introduces the Whispering Gallery as a symbol of his fears that he will later regret his words and actions. Recalling a visit to the Whispering Gallery during his youth, he remembers his horror at the thought that a “solemn whisper” at one end of the gallery could turn into a “volleying thunder” at the other. The very idea that his words or actions could have consequences beyond what he intended is enough to make De Quincey “nervous[ly] recoil from any word or deed that could not be recalled” (M, 3:296). In “The

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English Mail-Coach,” the mail offers protection from these worries: as long as De Quincey rides the mail, the King’s authority will sanction his words and actions and protect his person. Such protection, however, lasts only as long as he maintains his position on the moving coach. De Quincey remembers the Whispering Gallery with the retrospective knowledge that the very chamber in which he had seen “pompously floating to and fro in the upward space of a great aisle running westward from ourselves, many flags captured from France, Spain, and Holland, . . . solemn trophies of chance and change among mighty nations” would five years later witness the burial of Lord Nelson (296). In his first visit to the Whispering Gallery, De Quincey identifies his own position in the cathedral with that of his nation; the flags “run[] westward from ourselves” as if he and his friend were the point of origin of their movement, the center of England’s imperial power. That five years later Lord Nelson’s casket stood in “pretty nearly the very spot” in which they had stood to watch the flags suggests that a triumphant position at the origin of national power cannot in fact protect the individual. The juxtaposition of De Quincey’s national identification and Lord Nelson’s burial demonstrates the precariousness of any attempt to derive authority from either a physical position, like De Quincey’s position on the mail coach, or a national position, like the mail passenger’s perceived (and temporary) assumption of the King’s authority. Nelson’s burial emphasizes the “chance and change among mighty nations,” not because it questions Britain’s glory—the Empire long outlives Lord Nelson—but because it separates individual fate from national fate even in a person who possesses tremendous national authority. The near death of the young woman in the coach horrifies De Quincey but does not threaten him personally, because he believes that while riding the mail the authority of the King protects him. The death of Lord Nelson, however, demonstrates that even those whom the British government endows with authority are not protected by the grandeur of their position. As naval commander, Lord Nelson won for his country the battles of Nile and Trafalgar (two victories which figure significantly in “The English Mail-Coach”), but at Trafalgar he was killed by enemy fire. If Lord Nelson can die in the midst of the nation’s greatest victory, then it seems that any action could signify differently on the private and the public levels. An aristocratic title and leadership in the navy were not enough to save Lord Nelson; can Thomas De Quincey suppose that riding the mail protects him? Or that he will not be called upon to sacrifice as well?

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Associating Nelson’s death with the whispering gallery, which raises whispers into “volleying thunder,” also suggests to De Quincey the dangers of fame. Nelson’s position as admiral of the navy—at the origin, as it were, of the national glory De Quincey and the mail coach celebrate—ties his name and his person too firmly to a single national role. De Quincey’s position while riding the mail differs from Nelson’s situation in several important respects: De Quincey’s authority is temporary, impersonal, and nonfunctional; he performs no task for the mail or for the British nation—the news would travel just as well without him on board the coach—and the vision he imagines descending upon him would fall to any English person sitting in his position. Furthermore, the mail grants De Quincey rhetorical protection: the speed of the coach ensures that he travels ahead of any personally specific news, and the evanescence and impersonality of his position on the mail protect him from any significance in the public eye. However, publishing his autobiography—whether under a pseudonym or, in 1856, his own name—poses a danger similar to Lord Nelson’s public identity. In constituting a reading public around a name and his memories, he fixes his identity. Only by refusing to locate his self and his literary persona can De Quincey claim to publish English identity and also protect his person from dissolution. After “The English Mail-Coach,” De Quincey continues revising his auto­ biographical Confessions. In the context of De Quincey’s meditations in the Whispering Gallery, these revisions serve two contrary purposes. On the one hand, his work records the personal identity the nation could annihilate. On the other hand, his continued expansions to his autobiographical corpus keep that very subject in constant motion, eliding any fixed identification of his authorial persona. De Quincey remains flexibly available to place himself within whatever information system may authorize his discourse and provide a speaking position. But the mail provides the most certain authority that De Quincey will find, because it underwrites an impersonal and ever-moving position before a national audience it forcefully, if briefly, constitutes.

Notes

Introduction 1.  During the Napoleonic Wars states across Europe grew and centralized, expanding their armed forces, increasing taxation, and creating new bureaucracies that investigated and supervised citizens’ health and education. After Napoleon’s defeat, however, the continental states continued to grow, but the British state diminished in size. See Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780– 1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) esp. 265. Tom Nairn suggests that Britain’s history partially explains the exceptionally diffuse state. As the first state to have a revolution, Britain retained a feudal emphasis on rule by an elite; this group, he suggests, “imparted to the body of civil society a consistency that rendered the state-skeleton less significant under English conditions” [The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 3rd expanded ed. (Altona, VIC, Australia: Common Ground Press, 2003) 17]. 2.  David Eastwood notes that Britain from 1750 to 1850 became a “more intensely governed country” [Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 124]. John E. Cookson similarly suggests that the nineteenth century moved in “advances and retreats” towards a central government [The British Armed Nation 1793–1815 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1997) 6]. 3.  Bayly argues that although historians have suggested that the doctrine of “laissez-faire” so popular among the Victorians limited state intervention into private lives, “laissez-faire” as an economic policy ironically required government imposition and intervention to preserve Britain’s free-trade privileges. See Birth of the Modern World. Anna Gambles contends that many historians overstate the degree of consensus surrounding laissez-faire political and especially economic theory in the first half of the nineteenth century. She notes that a steady and concerted opposition argued for protectionist economic policy and greater government regulation, often in the name of preserving the British Constitution, property rights, and a stable and balanced social order. Although her focus is on the economic debate between free markets and protectionism, she also suggests that the protectionist model created a greater regulatory role for the state [Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse 1815–1852 (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1989)].



notes to pages 1–3

4.  Pat Thane notes, for example, that taxes were often collected by unpaid local administrators [“Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, ed. F.M.L. Thompson, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 1–61, esp. 4–5]. 5.  See Bayly, Imperial Meridians (New York: Longman, 1989) and Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6.  See Cookson, British Armed Nation, esp. 246–50; as well as Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 257. Although the army decreased in size, Cookson notes that twice as many troops were stationed within the British Isles in the years following the Napoleonic Wars as in 1815, and that they traveled more easily between Britain and Ireland. 7.  David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have also suggested that the state gained a new role in the nineteenth century by promising to represent the body of citizens as a whole (even if not yet granting voting rights to large groups of citizens), and have demonstrated that literature played a crucial role in defining this new role. See Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998). Marc Redfield views this process of representation formally: the state is the “empirical representative” of “the formal identity—the transcendental body, as it were—of humanity” [The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) 12]. 8.  Eastwood helpfully depicts each of these debates; see Government and Community in the English Provinces. 9.  Hazlitt and Shelley were among the first to make these accusations. Among modern critics, Geoffrey Hartman terms Wordsworth’s late politics “illiberal, apostate even; a failure of nerve like his [late] poetry” [Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964) 334]. Harold Bloom calls Words­ worth’s late years “the longest dying of a major poetic genius in history” [The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 250; cited in Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 6]. For one notable exception to this trend, see Peter Manning’s work on the late Wordsworth, including “Wordsworth at St. Bees.” On the myth of Wordsworth’s decline, see John L. Mahoney, William Wordsworth: A Poetic Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997) 201–14. 10.  Two significant studies provide the exception to this tendency. Virgil Nemoianu’s 1984 comparative study characterizes the “Biedermeier” period as a revision to high Romanticism, in which “the sudden romantic synthesis is ‘explained’ and thus brought down to earth” and authors, turning to practicality, compromise, and accommodation, seek “to preserve the hope for a regenerative change in history while taking into account defeat and limitation” [The Taming of Romanticism: European Culture in the Age of Biedermeier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) 28, 40]. Richard Cronin’s impressive and comprehensive Romantic Victorians, in contrast, eschews a single characterization and instead identifies a multitude of relations between the late Romantics and their predecessors. Unlike Nemoianu’s,

notes to pages 3–5

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my study aims to examine the relationships between changing political and aesthetic models; unlike Cronin, I focus on a single strain within late Romanticism and on a group of authors he grants less attention, the high Romantics in their own later periods. 11.  See especially Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1996). 12.  On this tradition, see especially Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State; David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Redfield, Politics of Aesthetics. 13.  Foucault defines the concept of governmentality in several late essays, lectures, and interviews. See in particular the essays entitled “Governmentality,” “‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” and “The Subject and Power” [collected in The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, tran. Robert Hurley et al., series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994) 201–22, 58–85, 326–48]. I regret that the English translations of Foucault’s lectures delivered at the Collège de France in 1977–78 and 1978–79 appeared too late for me to fully incorporate them into these chapters, but I have tried to indicate how they apply to my perspective on early nineteenth-century Britain; see Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, both ed. Michel Senellart, tran. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 2008, respectively). Although her focus is the Victorian period, Lauren M.E. Goodlad also argues for the applicability of late rather than early Foucault to nineteenth-century Britain. See Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). On Foucault’s governmentality, see especially The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 14.  See Kevin Gilmartin’s excellent account of Southey and Coleridge’s work for the state. Gilmartin notes that both Coleridge and Southey claim to preserve intellectual independence. Southey declined to start a new journal for the ministry (preferring to write for the older government organ, the Quarterly Review) in part because he feared the new position would compromise public respect for his judgment. And Coleridge insisted he could accept a pension only from the Crown, and not from individual members of the government or the ministry, because only the Crown represented the nation as a whole rather than any set of narrow interests [Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) esp. 221–32]. 15.  On the link between demobilization and radicalization see especially Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) 321–24. 16.  On the growth of a radical public, see especially Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).



notes to pages 6–8

17.  On the strength of the eighteenth-century British state, see especially John Brewer, Sinews of Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Pat Thane notes that the British state always worked less obtrusively than the continental states; see “Government and Society in England and Wales.” 18.  For such micropolitical analysis, see Foucault’s earlier work, including Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Clinic. For a brief discussion of employers’ governmental tactics in nineteenth-century Britain and France, see Colin Gordon’s introduction to Burchell et al., Foucault Effect, 26–27. 19.  Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 45, 131. Bayly describes a growth in administrative personnel after 1815 (Birth of the Modern World, 282). Eastwood notes that the Sturges Bourne reforms allowed local governments to concentrate power in the hands of the principal ratepayers but that later reforms subdivided the parishes and created new administrative units in part to remove power from the traditional gentry (44–46). 20.  Historians have argued over whether this growth should be attributed to Benthamite ideology or to an ad hoc attempt to solve social problems, and over the eventual impact of these reforms. On the one hand, Pat Thane argues that by the 1840s the growth in state bureaucracy produced a backlash. Disillusioned by the attempts of reformers like Edwin Chadwick to enact central government control, many Victorians criticized the bureaucratic reforms of the 1830s, and subsequent civil service reforms aimed to prevent such individuals from interfering in everyday lives. On the other hand, these very reforms gradually transferred power to a new administrative class. Oliver Macdonagh and his followers contend that bureaucracy expanded continually, often on its own momentum, throughout the nineteenth century. Macdonagh also argues that this growth was pragmatic, based on the need to reform perceived social ills rather than propelled by ideology, whether Benthamite or otherwise. See Thane, “Government and Society in England and Wales”; Macdonagh, “The NineteenthCentury Revolution in Government,” Historical Journal 1 (1958): 52–67. On the influence of Bentham, see especially S. E. Finer, “The Transmission of Benthamite Ideas,” in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Government, ed. Gillian Sutherland (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972) 11–32. See also Goodlad’s helpful summary of this debate (Victorian Literature, 2–8) and Mary Poovey, “Thomas Chalmers, ­Edwin Chadwick, and the Sublime Revolution in British Government,” Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 98–114. 21.  In his work on the contemporary state, Foucault suggests that the state is less important in defining power than often thought, that “maybe, after all, the state is no more than a composite reality and a mythicized abstraction,” and that what is important “is not so much the statization of society, as the ‘governmentalization’ of the state” (“Governmentality,” 220). But as part of this process (and increasingly in contemporary society, he suggests), the state’s function “is the taking of everything under its wing, to be the global overseer, the principle of regulation and, to a certain extent also, the distributor of all power relations in a given social ensemble” (“Subject and Power,” 344).

notes to pages 8–10

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22.  Foucault emphasizes the centrality of “invisibility” in Smith’s model of the invisible hand. However, he notes that even if liberal economics conceives individual interests as invisible to the state, it also suggests that the interests and wellbeing of the population as a whole can be statistically studied, and that the effects of certain situations or policies on individuals therefore become predictable; from the eighteenth century, he suggests, “homo oeconomicus” was “a certain type of subject who precisely enabled an art of government to be determined according to the principle of economy” (Birth of Biopolitics, 271). 23.  In particular, Foucault suggests, liberalism requires the government to create “security,” both the security and the freedom from criminal action necessary for markets to function, and the social security, or the basic health and livelihood necessary to pursue one’s interests. See Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. 24.  Gordon, introduction to Burchell et al., Foucault Effect, 16. 25.  As some of Foucault’s most astute commentators put it, “the supposed separation of state and civil society is a consequence of a particular problematization of government, not of a withdrawal of government as such” [introduction to Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and the Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996) 1–18, quoted 9]. 26.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 27.  Marc Redfield also makes this point, suggesting that the nation “is at once irreducible to the state and endlessly tangled up in state institutions, for despite its putative spontaneity, the national imagination always needs training and must be produced through aesthetic pedagogy and the various apparatuses of acculturation.” Even though the distinction between state and nation is blurred, the two are not always equivalent, and Redfield argues that a more popular nationalism can at times destabilize state power (Politics of Aesthetics, 175, 54–59). 28.  Hobsbawm argues, using Rousseau’s terminology, that the state required nationalism as a new form of “civic religion” to replace the declining aristocratic social structures and “inculcate new forms of civil loyalty.” But even if he ultimately attributes nationalism to the state, he cautions against overstating this generalization: nations “are . . . dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist” [E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1990]) quoted 85, 10]. John Breuilly also argues that the modern state, and not a type of popular imagination or consciousness, provides context for development of nationalism, but he considers nationalism as an opposition movement to existing states, and government nationalism only when it grows out of such an oppositional movement [Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 [1982])].

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notes to pages 10–14

29.  Britons: Forging a Nation. 30.  Robin Eagles suggests that Colley’s argument overlooks the great admiration for France in eighteenth–century Britain, especially among the elite [“Beguiled by France? The English Aristocracy, 1748–1848,” in A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–1850, ed. Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997) 60–77]. Cookson notes that the militias Colley cites for creating British identity were often local in outlook, and that the patriotism of the poor who volunteered was “opportunistic, interested and conditional” (British Armed Nation, 9). Although his work precedes Colley’s, Tom Nairn’s account of English nationalism disagrees with Colley’s model in several respects. Nairn distinguishes the British sense of national superiority from nationalism, because the sense of British superiority depends on class, not on populism or a sense of volk. Nairn describes in Britain “not a belief that the People can do anything, in the last resort, but the conviction that popular aspirations will always, in the end, be attended to up there” (Break-up of Britain, 284). 31.  Conclusion to A Union of Multiple Identities, 193, 195. 32.  Society Must Be Defended, tran. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). 33.  Politics of Aesthetics, esp. 51–54. 34.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tran. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 127–86. 35.  From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, tran. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) esp. 263. In general, the Romantics view nascent bureaucratic forms much more positively than Weber views fully developed bureaucracy. Where Weber suggests that social rationalization dehumanizes the individual, many of the state Romantics see state organizations as forming both the writer’s authority and the very possibility of individual humanity. The Romantics, however, are able to maintain these positive views in part because they find a fluidity and negotiation within bureaucratic structures that is impossible in Weber’s strict definition of bureaucratic rationality. 36.  Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1974) I, 125. 37.  Wordsworth in his early work hopes, as Thomas Pfau has suggested, to create a middle class that defines itself through its capacity to read and interpret [Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)]. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Wordsworth is less confident in his ability to form his readership. 38.  See especially Mark Schoenfield’s interesting reading of Wordsworth’s claim in The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet’s Contract (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 39.  See Taming of Romanticism. 40.  Clifford Siskin suggests that authors after 1815 reduce their claims for literature in part to reject the dangers of “writing” in a period in which texts’ ability to sway audiences is associated with the French Revolution’s radical excess. Siskin suggests that naturalization of the novel form subdued these dangers at the period I am

notes to pages 15–22

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discussing [The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)]. In his recent study of the counterrevolutionary press, including authors such as Coleridge, Kevin Gilmartin notes the tension in conservative writing between critiquing the radical public sphere for its claims to destroy traditions and wanting to assume such power in writing themselves; see Writing Against Revolution. 41.  My reading here is influenced by Michael Kohler’s illuminating account “Shelley in Chancery: The Reimagination of the Paternalist State in The Cenci,” Studies in Romanticism 37:4 (Winter 1998): 545–89. 42.  As Richard Cronin has noted, even fleeing Britain cannot fully insulate Byron and Shelley from social change at home, especially from the growth of a mass reading audience. Although both are politically radical, they are also Whigs who believe politics is the job of an elite, and they therefore see the politicized masses as a threat. Cronin suggests that Byron turns himself into a celebrity to shape the masses, but Shelley is more vexed over this question, uncertain whether the lone poet or the masses have a greater claim to truth [“Asleep in Italy: Byron and Shelley in 1819,” in The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of Pure Commonwealth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 156–80]. 43.  In Romantic Victorians, Richard Cronin notes several of this period’s other preoccupations, including the search for origins and an awareness of the ways literature operates as a commodity. 44.  See Anne Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 45.  See especially Gary Kelly’s discussion of this phenomenon in English Novels of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (New York: Longman, 1989). 46.  On Scott’s influence, see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Chapter One 1.  Lee Rust Brown argues that the prose fragments function not as a part of a whole but “as a rehearsal or preparation for it” [“Coleridge and the Prospect of the Whole,” Studies in Romanticism 30 (1991): 235–53, 243]. Jerome Christensen finds Coleridge’s “marginal method” central to all of his prose works [Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981)]. Charles Armstrong, in contrast, argues that Coleridge’s focus on organic wholes denies the possibility of true fragments even as his texts become fragments themselves [Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)]. 2.  See, for example, Elinor Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 3.  “Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher,” The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 3, Essays on His Times, ed. David Erdman, general ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978) II, 413. Further references will be indicated as EOT.

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notes to pages 22–24

4.  Collected Works, Vol. 10, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. John Colmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) 150. Further references will be indicated as CCS. 5.  It is hard to know exactly how to divide Coleridge’s early from late career. These periods are not defined by genre; although Coleridge’s canonized poetry is from his early years and his canonized prose such as Biographia Literaria from his later years, he nevertheless wrote in both poetry and prose throughout his career. Critics often divide Coleridge’s career into “early” and “late” periods to mark either the shift in his philosophical allegiance from Hartley to Kant or the shift in his politics from radical to Tory, but there are important continuities. Pamela Edwards suggests that throughout his career Coleridge seeks “first principles,” the underlying rules that explain the way a system operates, and is neither Tory nor Whig but rather promotes a second strain of liberalism based in virtue rather than rights [The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004)]. As Phillip Connell notes, even in Coleridge’s “Tory” period, his religious principles distinguished him from other conservatives, and his religious legacy remained up for grabs throughout the nineteenth century [Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of “Culture” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)]. On Coleridge’s apostasy, see Jerome Christensen, “‘Like a Guilty Thing Surprised’: Deconstruction, Coleridge, and the Apostasy of Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986): 769–87, and “Once an Apostate Always an Apostate,” Studies in Romanticism 21 (1982): 461–74. 6.  Argument to “France: An Ode” (1802). All quotes of Coleridge’s poetry are from Collected Works, Vol. 16, Poetical Works: Poems, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7.  For a brilliant and compelling version of this argument, see Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8.  Nigel Leask suggests that partially in Biographia Literaria and fully later, Coler­ idge transfers the power he had associated with imagination to religion, and in the process the “politics of imagination became authoritarian, static and class-defined inasmuch as they were construed in resistance to democracy and even mass education” [The Politics of Imagination in Coleridge’s Political Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press) 142]. 9.  Hazlitt, for example, notes, “Mr Coleridge, by dissipating his [powerful intellect] and dallying with every subject by turns, has done little or nothing to justify to the world or to posterity the high opinion which all who have ever heard him converse, or known him intimately, with one accord entertain of him,” and moans, “‘Frailty, thy name is Genius!’ What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity: It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion and in writing paragraphs in the Courier. Such, and so little, is the mind of man!” (“Mr Coleridge,” in The Spirit of the Age, 1825). 10.  Collected Works, Vol. 5, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) II, 495. Further references will be abbreviated Lect. on Lit.

notes to pages 25–31

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11.  Stephen Knapp notes Coleridge’s “oddly abstract desire to establish a medium between identity and difference” [Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985) 43]. Seamus Perry suggests that Coleridge’s Platonic drive to unify all particulars in a single transcendental truth exists in tension with an allegiance to particulars, evident in his acute sensory descriptions. See Coleridge and the Uses of Division (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12.  Collected Works, Vol. 4, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969) I, 298–99. 13.  Quoted in David Haney, The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern Philosophy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) 258–59. See also Haney’s commentary on this passage. 14.  Elinor Shaffer notes that Coleridge believed that religions would eventually unify and that all symbols therefore should point to a common mythology; see “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem. 15.  Prickett, “Coleridge and the Idea of the Clerisy,” 270–71. 16.  John Mee suggests another reason Coleridge turns to an institutionalized clerisy to mediate knowledge: Coleridge, he suggests, is suspicious of the radical connotations of religious enthusiasm. He wants to reserve personal revelation for the trained members of the clerisy and ensure that popular enthusiasm is appropriately regulated [Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) esp. 164–72]. 17.  On the tradition from Coleridge to Arnold, see Raymond Williams, Lloyd and Thomas, and Kaiser. 18.  In perhaps his first (1818) use of the term “clerisy,” Coleridge suggests that “[a]fter the Revolution . . . a learned body, or clerisy, as such, gradually disappeared” (Lect. on Lit., II, 183). In On the Constitution of the Church and State, he clarifies that the learned professions withdrew from the clerisy at this time: “[A]s a natural consequence of the full development and expansion of the mercantile and commercial order,” the professions “gradually detached themselves from the nationalty and the national clergy” and instead “formed an intermediate link between the established clergy and the burgesses” (CCS, 50). On Coleridge’s definition of the clerisy, see especially Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion (New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1976) and “Coleridge and the Idea of the Clerisy,” in Reading Coleridge: Approaches and Applications, ed. Walter B. Crawford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979) 252–73; and Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978) esp. 37–71. On Coleridge’s insistence that the clerisy rises above class interests and ideology, see especially Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 164–70. 19.  Leask, Politics of the Imagination, 217–19. In part, Kooy suggests, Coleridge grants the clerisy an ideological function by restricting education to the elite, thereby ensuring the clerical class’s perpetuation [Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)].

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notes to pages 31–35

20.  Collected Works, Vol. 14, ed. Carl Woodring (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) I, 380. Further references will be abbreviated TT. 21.  See also John Colmer’s discussion of this passage [Coleridge: Critic of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) 162–63]. 22.  Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) 196–207. 23.  Yoon Sun Lee argues that in depicting relationships between part and whole, Coleridge employs not symbol but synecdoche [Nationalism and Irony (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) 153]. For Paul de Man, the fact that the symbol aligns with synecdoche in and of itself does not make it less of a symbol, but does show Coleridge’s deluded attempt to pretend his tropes operate organically [“The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 187–228]. Coleridge, however, views the relationship of King to Realm as a symbol because the symbol and not synecdoche (which he does not discuss) is an organic form, mediating particulars and uniting part in whole but also refusing to allow one to fully stand in for the other. The synecdoche allows slippage in a way that symbol, by keeping binary categories intact and arguing merely for the “translucence” of the larger entity through the smaller, does not. Furthermore, the symbol represents a process of interactive balancing, whereas the synecdoche points toward a static, already fully defined relationship. The symbol also differs from irony because it enacts a process of mediation rather than simply registering the presence of opposite interpretations. 24.  Collected Works, Vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972) 3–114, 30. 25.  David Aram Kaiser calls this vision of the state (with the King as its head) operating through the discourse of the symbol to reconcile individual particularity and social whole “aesthetic statism” [Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)]. 26.  On interpellation, see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tran. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 127–86. Jerome Christensen describes a similar logic of recognition in Walter Scott’s Waverley. See Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) 153–75. 27.  Canuel suggests that in Coleridge’s version of Church the government structures that incorporate all individuals provide a framework through which individuals can express their disparate beliefs. Far from coercing individuals into sameness, the government makes individual differences visible in the first place. See Religion, Toleration, and British Writing. 28.  A more direct translation of the original Hebrew praises the King for seeking his diverse people’s “well-being,” but suggests, “He said, God tests the heart—not man” (“A Cry of Lamentation,” in Poetical Works: Poems, 980–84, stanza 7). 29.  De Man argues that Coleridge misreads allegory as symbol and that in the process he denies not his politics but his relationship to temporality.

notes to pages 35–41

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30.  Collected Works, Vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bates (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) II, 72. 31.  For Simpson, Coleridge has “a theory of the imagination that is itself embedded within a social-political doctrine about the proper organization of mind and world. That organization is hierarchical even as it devises various ingenious qualifications through which it can present itself as essentially for the good of all. The major metaphor functioning to bridge this contradiction is that of organic form” [“Coleridge on Wordsworth and the Form of Poetry,” in Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination Today, ed. Christine Gallant (New York: AMS, 1989) 211–25, quoted 223]. 32.  For a discussion of this model of nation, see Kaiser. 33.  Colmer, Coleridge: Critic of Society, 156. 34.  As it became clear that Britain would indeed need to allow legal rights for Irish Catholics, Coleridge changed his mind on the Catholic question and advocated admitting Catholics to all public offices short of the monarchy, provided that adequate securities could be arranged to ensure that they would not owe allegiance to the Pope or any other foreign leader (EOT, 555–57). Even as he came to support Emancipation, however, he still worried that legal rights would simply increase the Irish people’s desire for political independence. 35.  “[T]he mistaking of symbols and analogies for metaphors has been a main occasion of support of the worst errors in Protestantism; so the understanding of the same symbols in a literal i.e. phenomenal sense, notwithstanding the most earnest warnings against it, the most express declarations of the folly and danger of interpreting sensually what was delivered of objects super–sensual—this was the rank wilding, on which ‘the prince of this world,’ the lust of power and worldly aggrandizement, was enabled to graft, one by one, the whole branch of papal superstition and imposture” (CCS, 120). 36.  Coleridge’s comments here follow the same logic as his critique of Hartley’s Associationism. The senses cannot directly apprehend reality; to think so forgets that we perceive and interpret the data from our senses through mental structures. Instead, Coleridge follows Kant to argue that humans do not directly perceive but intuit the world around them. To call love of home patriotism is to sense without intuiting, to be unable to use reason to perceive the larger ideas beyond immediate understanding. Coleridge takes his idealism one step beyond even Kant, however, and argues that reason must intuit beyond our senses and even beyond the categories—Kant’s imperatives—through which we structure our senses. Ultimately he will argue that the state Church should structure individuals’ intuitions, showing individuals the wholes that exist beyond sense perception. 37.  One solution Coleridge’s contemporaries had proposed was to place the Irish Catholic Church (like the Scottish Presbyterian Church) within the British establishment, so that even Irish Catholics would technically be under the spiritual guidance of the King. Coleridge, however, argues that the Catholic Church cannot fit within the establishment because the Constitution requires the British monarch to uphold the Anglican Church.

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notes to pages 42–50

38.  Coleridge and Textual Instability: The Multiple Versions of the Major Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 79. 39.  On the fusion of opposites in “Kubla Khan,” see especially Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division, 200–208. 40.  John Beer argues that the poem’s description of Kubla Khan’s pleasure garden contrasts two models of genius, the “commanding genius” who imposes his will and the “absolute genius” who develops his organic vision in dialog with the outside world [Coleridge the Visionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959) 226–29, and “Fragmentations and Ironies,” in Questioning Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) 234–64, esp. 241–42]. Simon Bainbridge, however, suggests that in 1798 Coleridge had not yet separated “commanding” from “absolute” geniuses and that the poem itself combines these two categories in a single “genius” [Napoleon and English Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 26]. 41.  Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 97–114, 113. 42.  Marilyn Butler suggests that Coleridge removes any radical political valences from “Kubla Khan” in part by rewriting Southey’s poem “Thalaba the Destroyer” and emptying Kubla’s garden; in doing so, he “rewrite[s] a narrative formerly in the public sphere so that it becomes a private fable, political no longer” [“Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism,” in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 133–57, 152]. 43.  Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, 20–27. 44.  Many critics read “Christabel” as an incomplete Gothic tale; Levinson, in contrast, suggests that the poem presents the first two acts of a classical tragedy (Romantic Fragment Poem, 77–96). 45.  My account of Fletcher’s speech relies on David Erdman’s summary in the head note to Coleridge’s essay (EOT, II, 373–74). 46.  Coleridge claims the Orangemen evolved out of the “Defenders.” In fact, the Orangemen formed out of the “Peep-Day-boys,” a society that invaded homes at the break of day to search for weapons, and the “Defenders” rose to protect themselves against these attacks. David Erdman notes that Coleridge had correctly recounted the history of the Orangemen in 1796 (see Erdman’s note, EOT, II, 408). 47.  If, as J. Robert Barth has argued, Coleridge grounds the symbol and the intuition and imagination that produce it in a model of religious faith, the idea that two symbols could oppose one another amounts to a kind of sacrilege, a violation of the actual covenant between God and man [J. Robert Barth, S.J., The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001)]. However, Nicholas Halmi for one questions the religious provenance of symbol; he suggests that “when Coleridge . . . appropriated theological language to define the symbol, what he achieved, however unwittingly, was not a secularization but a contradiction of Trinitarian theology” [“How Christian Is the Coleridgean Symbol?” The Wordsworth Circle 26:1 (Winter 1995): 30; see also

notes to pages 50–56

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Halmi’s extension of this argument in The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)]. 48.  Deborah Elise White suggests that Coleridge’s irony therefore resembles Schlegel’s: irony “posits the projection of multiple identities in the absence of any one fixed identity” [introduction to Irony and Clerisy, Romantic Circles Praxis Series (College Park: University of Maryland, August 1999) 2]. Coleridge’s irony works differently from the nationalist irony of the authors in Yoon Sun Lee’s study of conservative nationalism. For the authors Lee cites (Burke, Scott, and Carlyle), irony allows room for multiple conflicting versions of nations and demonstrates that unity is artificially constructed. Coleridge’s organic form, in contrast, seeks a definition of unity in which the parts are integrally related; his irony is a sign of failure to achieve this whole. See Nationalism and Irony. 49.  Habitually, Coleridge turns to history only in moments of desperation. As David Perkins notes, “Coleridge resorted to historical explanation to explain away. When a passage did not conflict with his scientific, ethical, or religious beliefs, but seemed simply true, he had no reason to place it in a historical context; but when he felt such a conflict, he historicized” [“The ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Its Interpreters: Some Versions of Coleridge,” Modern Language Quarterly 57:3 (September 1996): 425–48, 447].

Chapter Two 1.  The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Malcolm ­Elwin (New York: Coward-McCann, 1950) 316–19, quoted 316. My account of the dinner also derives from The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Willard Bissell Pope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) II, 173–76. 2.  Haydon, Diary, 175. 3.  Quoted in Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography, The Later Years, 1803–1850 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1965) 255. 4.  On Wordsworth’s position in the stamp office, see especially Moorman, Wordsworth, 240–55. 5.  Edinburgh Review 38 (November 1822), in The Romantics Reviewed, ed. Donald Reiman (New York: Garland, 1972) A497. Further references will be indicated as “Reiman.” 6.  Even then, Wordsworth accepts the position of poet laureate only with the understanding that he will have no official duties. See Moorman, Wordsworth, 559. 7.  When Regina Hewitt argues that Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics institutionalize the study of social relationships, she defines institutions as structures of knowledge, specifically as what she names the “Konfederation,” the early nineteenth-century institution of critics, scientists, and readers, and enabled by the magazine and its reviews. I argue that Wordsworth in his late career turns to a specific set of institutions—state bureaucratic apparatuses—in order to control the social practice that he finds insufficiently (or incorrectly) institutionalized. See The Possibilities of Society: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Sociological Viewpoint of English Romanticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

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notes to pages 57–62

8.  Anne L. Rylestone reads this “transcendence on one level of the limits of the individual, the community, the nation, the history of humanity even, to an allencompassing, shared spiritual existence, past, present, and future” as the main goal of the sonnets, and the task which unifies the work with Wordsworth’s earlier poetry [Prophetic Memory in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991) 12]. 9.  All citations to the Ecclesiastical Sonnets are from William Wordsworth: The ­Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981) II, 447–504. 10.  The essays are collected in The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, tran. Robert Hurley et al., series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994). See also Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, tran. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and, especially on liberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, tran. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 11.  See also Lauren Goodlad’s account of the centrality of Foucault’s “pastorship” to models of governmentality in the Victorian period [Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)]. 12.  Quotes in this paragraph are from Security, Territory, Population, here 354. 13.  On the differences between Foucault’s early and late work, see Colin Gordon’s introduction to The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and in the same volume, Graham Burchell, “Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing ‘The System of Natural Liberty’” (119–50). 14.  Thomas Pfau argues that Wordsworth and Romanticism more generally enable the self-identification of the middle class as cultural participants who create value in the act of writing, reading, and interpreting texts [Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)]. Mark Schoenfield suggests that even as Words­ worth places his texts into the marketplace, he insists that the works will not be alienated commodities, because the poet himself will guarantee his verse’s value [The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet’s Contract (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996)]. 15.  The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) 1805.iv. 490–92. 16.  I quote the fourth Poem on the Naming of Places, “A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags.” 17.  For more extensive readings of this passage, see Stephen Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985) 406–7; Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 193–212; Willard Spiegelman, Wordsworth’s Heroes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 130–37; Don H. Bialostosky, Making Tales: The Poetics of Wordsworth’s Narrative Experiments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 162–69; John

notes to pages 62–63

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Beer, Wordsworth in Time (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979) 125; and Alan Bewell, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 18.  I quote from manuscript B in the Cornell Wordsworth edition, ed. Beth Darlington (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) line 972. 19.  John Rieder suggests that Wordsworth worries most about his vocation in moments like the one I identify in “Home at Grasmere,” in which community and virtue are reciprocally defined. See Wordsworth’s Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790’s (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 20.  “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” of the 1815 Poems in Two Volumes, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W.J.B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1974) III, 80. Lee Erickson is certainly correct to read this claim as “a sign of Wordsworth’s frustration with the small size of his audience and the implication that it was a very wealthy one”; Erickson notes that Wordsworth’s publishers often limited the printings of his works and priced them out of the range of lower class readers [The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 52]. 21.  Jon Klancher suggests that Wordsworth countered his fear of an increasingly fragmented mass readership by claiming to appeal to his readers’ humanity; in particular, he suggests that Wordsworth attempts to distinguish his own poetry’s “reception” from the “consumption” of mass genres [The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)]. On the rise of mass readership, see also John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patton, eds., Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22.  Wordsworth here follows the model of ethical development that David Lloyd and Paul Thomas have described in their brilliant study Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998). According to Lloyd and Thomas, many middle class politicians in the Victorian period reacted to demands for universal manhood suffrage by suggesting that education must precede citizenship and that moral and ethical development were requisite for the vote. The state promised both to be the space for the development of such character and to represent individual interests. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Romantic poetry more generally envision a state that has the capacity to represent all individuals by representing a universal humanity. 23.  Nancy Easterlin notes that the Ecclesiastical Sonnets differ from most religious conversion narratives in that they neither focus on beliefs nor “dramatize the psychological dynamic” of conversion: “the process is not one of doubt into faith, but of nothingness into nearly absolute identification with Anglican history” [Wordsworth and the Question of Romantic Religion (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996) 130]. 24.  Wordsworth: A Sense of History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985) 456. 25.  From an April 16, 1822, letter to Richard Sharpe, quoted in Hayden, William Wordsworth: The Poems, 997–98 n.

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notes to pages 63–66

26.  The contemporary reviews of the Ecclesiastical Sketches suggest that the sonnets indeed appealed only to those readers who were already converted. Two high– Anglican Tory periodicals praise the sonnets; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for example, commends Wordsworth for demonstrating that “genius can conceive no image so august, no emotion so affecting, as those that rise up at the feet of the altar” (August 1822, Reiman, A132). Even High Church reviewers, however, criticize the poet’s language and politics. The British Critic, for one, complains that “every third” of the poems cannot really be called a sonnet, even though it praises Wordsworth’s Memorials of a Tour on the Continent for embodying “the ancient and righteous feelings of a free-born Englishman” (November 1822, Reiman, A196, A198). And more liberal publications, while admitting occasional “beauties” in the verse, criticize the overall project. Most memorably, the Literary Chronicle laments Wordsworth’s change from “dweller in the clouds” to “champion of Monastic institutions” (December 14, 1822, Reiman, A588). 27.  “Wordsworth at St. Bees: Scandals, Sisterhoods, and Wordsworth’s Later Poetry,” in Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 295. 28.  In William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) 71. 29.  Simon Bainbridge notes that much verse of this day was designed to unite the British nation and suggests that Wordsworth’s sonnets also attempt to “remasculinize” poetry. See British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: ­Visions of Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 99–119, 102. 30.  All 1802–3 poems, including the Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, are cited to Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983) here “Lines on the Expected Invasion,” lines 17, 15. The passages that I cite from “Lines on the Expected Invasion” and “To the Men of Kent” show Wordsworth slipping between “England” and “Britain” in naming his country, suggesting his belief that although Britain is united, England and English traditions form the nation’s core. 31.  Alan Liu calls this praise and criticism for Britain dialectical: “To take one’s stand was at last to exploit the antithetical to-and-fro of flux itself ” (Wordsworth: A Sense of History, 432). See also Carl Woodring, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) 117–22, and “On Liberty in the Poetry of Wordsworth,” PMLA 70:5 (December 1955): 1033–48; and Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) 39–49. 32.  In one sense, Wordsworth’s poetry or politics do not change following Waterloo. James Chandler suggests that Wordsworth’s “conservative turn” occurs between 1795 and 1797, when Wordsworth decides that Burke was correct to credit English traditions with forming the culture’s strength. For Chandler, Wordsworth’s politics are simply more apparent in the openly partisan postwar era [“‘Words­ worth’ After Waterloo,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick,

notes to pages 66–68

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NJ: ­Rutgers University Press, 1987) 84–111; see also Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)]. I would add that Wordsworth in the postwar period loses confidence that the upper class alone possesses the power to uphold tradition and shape mass opinion. 33.  Phillip Shaw proposes another reason for this change: after the end of the wars with France, Britain no longer has an “other” not only to unify its disparate people but also to check its power [Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 140–64]. 34.  Wordsworth was indebted to Lonsdale both for financial help in purchasing property in 1805 and for his position as a stamp distributor. For a full account of both episodes, see Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography, The Later Years, 60–62, 240–57; on the Westmoreland election, see 342–53. 35.  Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland, in Prose Works, III, 151–93, quoted in this paragraph from 186. 36.  In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Wordsworth often uses historically distant events to discuss his philosophy of government. In depicting the English Revolution and Restoration, for example, he expresses sympathy for the entrenched social order, noting fears that “England soon must sink / Into a gulf which all distinction levels” (“Charles the Second,” III.iii 10–11). 37.  Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989) 343. 38.  As Stephen Gill notes, Wordsworth never spoke publicly on the issue but expressed his opinions emphatically in private correspondence (William Wordsworth: A Life, 362). Wordsworth also worries that Catholics would not be content with the right to hold office but would attempt to claim the land that had been taken from them three hundred years earlier. On Wordsworth and the Catholic Question, see also Clare A. Simmons, “‘Prejudged by Foes’: The Late Romantic Recanonization of Archbishop Laud,” Wordsworth Circle 25:3 (Summer 1994): 150–54. 39.  Letters to Sir Robert Inglis (June 11, 1825) and Lord Lowther (February 12, 1825). The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1978–88) II, 209, 178. 40.  Letter to Sir R. Islip, 209 (op. cit.). 41.  Robert Ryan suggests that the younger Wordsworth’s return to the Anglican Church in 1802 “was closer to a pledge of allegiance than to a confession of faith” and that even “The Excursion” (1814) shows him uncertain about his exact beliefs. Ryan argues that “The Excursion” portrays the Anglican Church as a home to peoples of a variety of beliefs rather than insisting on one doctrinal interpretation [The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 80–118, 98]. Stephen Gill notes that even Wordsworth’s friends did not know his exact beliefs and that “[a]mongst the seven volumes of his letters there are no statement of belief that would have satisfied even a Low Church vicar on all points.” However, Gill reports that during the 1840s Wordsworth began to revise his poems, including “The Excursion,” to make them more exactly fit Anglican doctrine (Wordsworth, 398, 399, 418–19).

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notes to pages 68–73

42.  Prose Works, III, 256. 43.  “Cleansing the Images: Wordsworth, Rome, and the Rise of Historicism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33:2 (Summer 1991): 315. 44.  Stephen Gill suggests Wordsworth’s readers in the Oxford movement encouraged him to become more orthodox during this period in part by reading an unsubstantiated orthodoxy into his earlier works. See “England’s Samuel: Words­ worth in the ‘Hungry-Forties’,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 33:4 (Autumn 1993): 841–58. 45.  Like the Victorian authors Lauren Goodlad analyzes in Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, Wordsworth combines negative and positive visions of liberty, “liberating individuals from illegitimate authority while simultaneously ensuring their moral and spiritual growth” (viii). Patrick Joyce similarly argues that Victorians saw liberty not simply as freedom from government interference but as predicated upon a strong government; for this reason, he calls Victorian liberalism “the rule of freedom” [The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003)]. 46.  Importantly, Wordsworth differs from Foucault in imagining some states and nations as more “free” than others. See Birth of Biopolitics, 62–63. 47.  In part, once again, Wordsworth constructs Protestantism as the religion of freedom and liberty by contrasting Protestants with a Catholic bogeyman. Even though Henry VIII, for example, founded state Protestantism, he still had the “habit” of tyranny from his earlier Catholicism (“Reflections,” II.xxviii 10). 48.  For an original and convincing account of Wordsworth’s insistence that government defines the terms of individual liberty, see Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 49.  Wordsworth discusses missionaries more overtly in “The Excursion,” where Philip Connell notes his “imaginative identification of Britain’s imperial and domestic civilizing missions” [Romanticism, Economics, and the Question of ‘Culture’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 176]. In this passage as well, it is noticeable that his concern for the peoples abroad is ultimately a concern for religious education at home. 50.  For a more complete reading of these poems, see Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination. 51.  Hayden, William Wordsworth: The Poems, 822–28, quoted IX, 14. 52.  See Sharon Setzer, “Precedent and Perversity in Wordsworth’s Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50:4 (March 1996): 427– 47; and Mark Canuel, The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) 72–80. 53.  Wordsworth’s emphasis on Church rites is one of the aspects of Wordsworth’s Anglicanism that seems so High Church as to be practically Catholic. Many of Wordsworth’s friends increasingly suspected that he had Catholic sympathies and in the early 1840s worried he was too influenced by his friend and neighbor Frederick William Faber, a High Church Anglican who later converted to Catholicism. Wordsworth broke off the friendship after Faber’s conversion. Wordsworth main-

notes to pages 75–81

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tained his Anglicanism, and for all their admiration of ritual the Ecclesiastical Sonnets display a strong anti-Catholic prejudice, a suspicion of Catholic excess, and a preference for the vernacular Bible. See Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 417. 54.  Barbara T. Gates suggests the Confirmation sonnets aim to “reveal the importance of the church to single human beings who were not necessarily the great individuals of the past,” and argues that “in the end, however, for Protestant Words­ worth both the sacraments and ‘Faith’ become a personal matter, ministered to but not completed by the Church.” I would reverse Gates’s emphasis. Wordsworth wants to stir individual faith but insists this faith requires institutional mediation. Furthermore, Wordsworth does not simply content himself with “the individual soul,” because the transcendence of the individual soul requires a community to transcend into. “Wordsworth’s Mirror of Morality: Distortions of Church History,” The Wordsworth Circle 12:2 (Spring 1981): 131. 55.  Galperin, Revision and Authority in Wordsworth: The Interpretation of a Career (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) 231. 56.  Easterlin, Wordsworth and the Question of Romantic Religion, 146, 150. 57.  Clifford Siskin finds a similar fear of writing’s force throughout Romanticera texts; see The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Phillip Shaw connects Words­ worth’s awareness of the nation’s violence to his suspicion of both the poet’s and the nation’s authority. My account also follows William Galperin’s argument that Wordsworth throughout his career worried about the grounds of his own authority and in his late work sought to “save poetry from the authority of the self ” (Revision and Authority, 8). I do not, however, go as far as Galperin to suggest that in Words­ worth’s late work, “the authority formerly ascribed to the ‘Poet’ is relinquished so completely that it cannot be reconstituted elsewhere” (10). 58.  Lauren Goodlad suggests that the Victorians imagine “character” as the entity that allows the pastor to morally intercede, and as one object of his teaching. For Goodlad, the pastor becomes an important figure for Victorians in part because as a single individual he relieved their worries that the state was interfering too much in individual lives (Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, 8–31). Words­ worth’s pastor, then, is in part an early instance of both of these phenomena. 59.  For a different account of the relationship between charisma and bureaucracy in the Anglican Church, see Mary Poovey, “Thomas Chalmers, Edwin Chadwick, and the Sublime Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Government,” in Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 98–114. 60.  The Ecclesiastical Sonnets recognize the need for charisma when converting England as a whole to Christianity. In describing Paul’s conversion of England, Wordsworth depicts a charismatic figure, “a Man whose aspect doth at one appall / And strike with reverence” (“Paulinus,” I.xv 8–9). He actually attributes the conversion, however, not to Paul’s charisma but to the capacity of the King, a “pensive Sage,” to comprehend his message (14). Wordsworth emphasizes the internal operations of the King’s conscience: “The Monarch leans / Toward the pure truth

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notes to pages 82–87

this Delegate propounds, / Repeatedly his own deep mind he sounds / With careful hesitation” before calling his council (9–12). Once the Church is established, Words­worth hesitates to approve of any form of personal charisma. 61.  Indeed, Wordsworth believes it is possible for pastors to be too completely embedded in their communities. In an 1835 letter, he insists that young pastors should not be stationed in communities in which they were raised or have relatives, because a young man’s deep membership within a community prevents the degree of distance necessary for his effectiveness as a religious leader [Letter to ­Francis Wrangham, February 2, 1835. In de Selincourt, Letters of William and Dorothy Words­ worth, II, 727]. 62.  Lee M. Johnson, Wordsworth and the Sonnet, in Anglistica, Vol. 19 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1973) 151, 161n. 63.  In the Prelude to Poems Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842), Wordsworth specifies the kinds of sentiments he imagines his poetry stirring. He takes as his model the thrush that amidst a storm sings with “the promise of a calm, / Which the unsheltered traveller might receive / With thankful spirit” (8–10). Wordsworth hopes that his own verse will counteract the “venal words” that attempt to “overturn the Judgment” and instead “console and reconcile” by encouraging “gratitude” (45, 46–47). 64.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) II, 18. 65.  Jeffrey C. Robinson argues that the attributes Romantic writers assigned to fancy allowed it “to defamiliarize perception” and “to challenge convention”; Wordsworth’s need to avoid fancy then appears part of a more general fear that fancy demonstrated “the mind, the body, and social order getting out of control” [Unfettering Poetry: The Fancy in British Romanticism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 275, 28]. 66.  To cite two examples of this usage, when the Church is interdicted in England, “Fancies thickly come / Into the pensive heart ill fortified / And comfortless despairs the soul benumb” (“An interdict,” I.xxxvi). Likewise, Wordsworth credits monasteries with preserving religion while “the rugged Age on pliant knee / Vows to rapt Fancy humble Fealty” (“Cisterian Monastery,” II.iii 10–11). In both cases, fancy refers to individual superstition, at times encouraged by false religious rites. 67.  The title of the sonnet, “Apology” (I.xviii), however, makes sense only if we consider that Wordsworth apologizes for allowing fancy under any circumstances. 68.  Geoffrey Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 14–15. 69.  For an impressive reading of the relationship of repression and autonomy in this sonnet, see Jonathan M. Hess, “The Poetics of Liberty,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (1994): 3–29. 70.  Although he focuses in most detail on Wordsworth’s earlier sonnets, Jerome Mazzaro argues that Wordsworth adopts Milton’s three-part form because he admires its “intense unity,” but rounds this form by making the end return to the beginning. Mazzaro also suggests that Wordsworth admires in Milton’s use of the

notes to pages 88–90

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sonnet a “triumph of individual voice,” a focus that I argue Wordsworth deliberately resists in the Ecclesiastical Sonnets [“Tapping God’s Other Book: Wordsworth at Sonnets,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (Fall 1994): 337–54, quoted 338, 353].

Chapter Three 1.  Scott had advocated searching for the jewels for several years. He initially planned to publish a series of stories involving the past history of the Scottish regalia along with The Heart of Midlothian. See John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Press, 1995) 208–10. 2.  See especially Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 15–41. 3.  The Historical Novel, tran. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (New York: Penguin, 1962 [1937]). 4.  Ina Ferris emphasizes the second part of this point; for Ferris, “the incorporation by these novels of a whole complex realm of non-institutional action and effect into history was central to their innovative power” [The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991) 199]. 5.  Foucault defines the pastoral state in “‘Omnes et Singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, tran. Robert Hurley et al., series ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994) 58–85. See also Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Senellart, tran. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 6.  See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart, tran. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 7.  Historians have argued that Scots’ employment in the British Empire provided a source of upward mobility and integrated Scotland more completely into Britain. See especially Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) esp. 127–32; and Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 67–114. Christopher Harvie notes that as Scott wrote The Heart of Midlothian, many Scots hoped for British assistance in putting down the radical revolts that culminated in an 1820 march on the Glasgow ironworks. Harvie argues that the problem for Scott and his contemporaries “was not one of combating the incursion of English government, but of preventing Scots distinctiveness from choking off the avenues to patronage and promotion in the south” [“Scott and the Image of Scotland,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel (New York: Routledge, 1989) II, quoted 177]. 8.  On Scott’s position within the modern capitalistic and imperialist world system, see especially Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and

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notes to pages 90–95

the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Wolfram Schmidgen also notes Scott’s tendency to embrace a British capitalist order even as he argues against it [Eighteenth Century Fiction and the Law of Property (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 186–213]. 9.  Christensen describes Scott as “a conscientious official whose self-authorizing task under the post-Napoleonic dispensation was to teach the British people new things as if those things were common knowledge” [Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 153]. 10.  Under the terms of the 1707 Union, the Scottish Parliament moved to London, but Scotland kept its own legal code and an independent judiciary. Gradually, however, more and more Scottish laws were superseded by acts of the British Parliament, and Scott actively opposed each encroachment. David Daiches suggests that at this time “[l]awyers and antiquaries were the new kind of Scottish patriots” [“Scott’s Redgauntlet,” in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996) 130–43, quoted 133]. See also Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) esp. 81–89. 11.  My argument here shares interests with James Chandler’s influential account of Scott’s casuistry. Chandler finds Scott’s historical novels “deeply structured by an interest in casuistical balancing acts of all sorts, including the balancing of trials of persons against trials of laws and the balancing of laws or normative systems against each other.” I would argue that Scott takes up such casuistical debates in part because he believes that state institutions, including the law, have not created adequate frameworks for resolving the conflicts Chandler discusses—conflicts between the duties we owe to individuals and the laws of society, or between coexisting moral frames [England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) quoted 212]. Judith Wilt analyzes a linguistic form of Scott’s conflicting worldviews, the “clash and absorption of different models of discourse, different languages” [Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 7]. 12.  The actual case involved a woman, Helen Walker, who like Jeanie walked to London to seek a pardon for her sister. Jeanie’s story differs from Helen’s in several respects: Helen’s sister actually killed her baby, and Helen receives a pardon for her solely through the intercession of the Duke of Argyle, without an interview with the Queen. Helen died single, and Sutherland reports that Scott initially intended for Jeanie to remain unmarried as well. See Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, 208. 13.  All citations of The Heart of Midlothian are to the Oxford edition, ed. Claire Lamont (1982), quoted here 21. 14.  For a compelling but different reading of statutory law in Waverley, see ­Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth Century Fiction and the Law of Property, 186–213. 15.  “The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15:1 (October 2002): 103–26. 16.  Sussman suggests that Scott aims to place women’s reproduction in the service of the state. See also Josephine McDonagh’s account of changing cultural at-

notes to pages 97–102

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titudes toward infanticide [“Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science and Literature, 1630–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999) 215–38; and Deborah Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997)]. 17.  Judith Wilt notes that many of the crimes in the novel, including both Robertson’s smuggling and the Porteous incident, turn on different perceptions of the public/private distinction. 18.  Scott makes a more extreme version of this point towards the end of his career, in the first two short stories in his collection Chronicles of the Canongate. There, English law’s misunderstanding of Scottish individuals leads characters to commit murder and results in their conviction and execution. 19.  I would not agree with Weinstein, however, that Alan therefore gives up all principles; he simply realizes that a battle of law and principles will not work as long as Darsie’s uncle retains him [“Law, History, and the Nightmare of Romance in Redgauntlet,” in Scott and His Influence, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1982) 140–48, quoted 144]. Alan, as James Chandler notes, finds his principles conflicting and must adjudicate between them. See England in 1819, 216–25. 20.  Judith Wilt makes this point; see Secret Leaves, 150–51. Certainly the “huge mass” of papers generated by the case can easily refer to the mass of novels Walter Scott produces from the “case” of the Jacobite rebellions. And Peebles takes his identity from his case just as Scott takes his identity—“the author of Waverley”— from his first “case.” See Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963); and Walter Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Most recently, James Chandler uses the Peebles case to illustrate the principles of casuistry, in England in 1819. 21.  In Redgauntlet, Beiderwell suggests, governments can be lenient only when they hold power so securely that “mistakes in judgment or education are possible, but true opposition on the part of honorable men against the established power is officially unthinkable.” Such a power, he argues, relies on maintaining people’s positive opinions of their government through coercion rather than through a process of democratic consultation. Campbell’s leniency to Charles and Redgauntlet proves a public relations coup because it prevents the near-rebellion from coming to public notice and stirring doubts about the legitimacy of Hanover rule [“Scott’s Redgauntlet as a Romance of Power,” Studies in Romanticism 28 (1989): 273–89, 286; see also Beiderwell’s extension of this argument in Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992)]. 22.  In Christensen’s reading, Waverley avoids committing treason even as he becomes a follower of Stuart, because he “acquiesces and submits, but he withholds his consent throughout” [Romanticism at the End of History, quoted 172–73]. 23.  Scott’s model adopts a logic like that of Adam Smith’s economics, in which rational individuals pursuing their self-interest build an economy, but uses this

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notes to pages 103–109

logic to define the relationship between individual self-interest and political stability. Scott was exposed to Smith’s ideas as a student in Edinburgh. For a reading of Smith’s effect on Scott’s view of authorship as work, see Kathryn Sutherland, “Fictional Economies: Adam Smith, Walter Scott, and the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” ELH 54:1 (1987): 97–127. 24.  It is especially clear that Saddletree does not have legal credentials because in Scotland the law became professionalized at an earlier period than in England. After 1610, advocates were required to undergo a private examination, defend a thesis on an assigned topic, and give a speech before the Lords; in 1749 the Faculty of Advocates added an exam in Scottish municipal law as well as in civil law. The University of Edinburgh offered courses in Scots law beginning in 1702; the University of Glasgow established a chair of Law in 1712; and the universities had established thorough courses in multiple branches of the law by the 1730s. The effect of the university education and the entrance procedures was to develop a professional body of advocates, distinguished from other classes of legal officers (such as the Writers Signet). See especially David M. Walker, A Legal History of Scotland (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998) V, 374–85. 25.  Scott titles himself “monarch of this little state [of Abbotsford]” and in a series of letters in 1817 suggests that poor relief on the English model should be ended, offering as a countermodel his own attempt to provide labor for the poor on his estate [The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H.J.C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1933) 6.174, 5.414, 446–48. 26.  I here echo Carolyn F. Austin’s suggestion that home and family in The Heart of Midlothian are not a private refuge from the nation but provide a space for actively considering the terms of national identity [“Home and Nation in The Heart of Midlothian,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 40:4 (2000): 621–34]. 27.  As Charlotte Sussman notes, Jeanie’s actions in the final volume also place her at the center of a colonial economy, when she puts Staunton’s Caribbean money (given to her by Effie) to use at home and sends excess population (the “Whistler”) out into the colonies (“Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian,” 123–24). 28.  Austin emphasizes that Jeanie’s home emerges as a permeable space, home to many conflicting ideologies. See “Home and Nation in The Heart of Midlothian.” 29.  The Whistler of course only temporarily returns to the supervision of British law but more permanently enters the colonial economic structures of nineteenthcentury Britain and America. 30.  I refer to Adam Smith’s formulation; see also Foucault’s reading of Adam Ferguson and civil society in Birth of Biopolitics, esp. 298–307. 31.  Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 15. 32.  Reuben and Jeanie’s actions demonstrate a version of Empire not only in imposing British law but in placing lowland Scots in charge of a highland region. On the relationships between lowland and highland Scots, see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism; and Trevor-Roper, “Highland Tradition of Scotland,” esp. 25–32.

notes to pages 109–117

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33.  Scott’s fairy tale references most often discuss Jeanie’s elevation into bourgeois prosperity. In narration, Scott refers to the duke as a “benevolent enchanter” whose “power” and “rod” bring Jeanie’s father and Reuben Butler to Argyle (412), and Jeanie compares herself both to the “enchanted princess” and to a fairy godmother. 34.  Critics such as Ian Duncan, while not labeling the final volume unnecessary, nevertheless read it as a departure from the remainder of the novel: in the highland book, Duncan argues, we withdraw from the forces of history into a pastoral romance. See Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, esp. 156–57. 35.  Critics have offered other possibilities. Scott’s biographer John Sutherland suggests that Scott turned to prose because his experiments in poetic meter and diction failed (Life of Walter Scott, 179). Richard Cronin notes that Scott’s metrical romances were war poems and argues that for this reason they no longer interested readers in the post-Napoleonic era. Cronin nevertheless finds important continuities in Scott’s treatment of history in the poetry and novels [The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) 92–109]. 36.  See Sutherland, Life of Walter Scott, 80–81. 37.  As Peter Murphy notes, the border in Scott’s poems is an early and primitive form of Britain itself, a region uniting England and Scotland; the ballad is the culture that this region shares. See Poetry as an Art and Occupation in Britain, 1760–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) esp. 168. On the culture of the border region in Scott’s poetry, see also Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation 1707–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998) esp. 151–55.

Chapter Four 1.  Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 198. Austen substitutes the word “police” for “policy” in Pasley’s title. 2.  Katie Trumpener, for instance, uses this evidence for Austen’s opposition to the slave trade to argue that Mansfield Park is not, as Edward Said suggests, a story of imperial consolidation but a protest against the tyrannical and necessarily absentee patriarchal power. See Bardic Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) 175–80. Lee Erickson uses the letter to comment on the contents of provincial lending libraries in The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) 136–37. 3.  William Galperin suggests Austen’s admiration is “dubiously hyperbolic” since she would have been troubled by Pasley’s “monolithic view of domesticity,” but any hyperbole does not undermine the letter’s prescience for readers of Persuasion [The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) 165]. In her fascinating reading of this letter’s references, Vivien Jones suggests that Austen approves of Pasley’s “strongly meritocratic principles,” his “admiration for the navy,” and his vigorous prose; Austen, she argues, sees a direct and concise style as an expression of a soldier’s duty [“Reading for England: Austen, Taste, and Female Patriotism,” European Romantic Review 16:2 (April 2005): 221–30, quoted 224].

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notes to pages 117–119

4.  Anne Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Miranda Burgess, British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 154. 5.  On Anne’s deep feelings, see especially Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Nina Auerbach, “O Brave New World: Evolution and Revolution in Persuasion,” in Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 38–54. On Anne as a deeply felt character, see D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) esp. 68–76. 6.  On the similarity of Austen’s portrayal of the navy to those of contemporaries including Coleridge and Southey, see Tim Fulford, “Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marryat,” Modern Language Quarterly 60:2 (1999): 161–96. 7.  Citations to Persuasion are to the Oxford World’s Classics edition, ed. John Davie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), here 24. 8.  Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 9.  Bardic Nationalism, passim. 10.  Franco Moretti for one describes such an “opaque overlap” of English and British identities. He argues that Austen’s novels equate Britain with (in words quoted from Northanger Abbey) the “central part of England” [Atlas of the European Novel (New York: Verso, 1998) 15 and note]. 11.  I take the term “interpellation” from Louis Althusser’s influential essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Like Althusser, I argue that individuals become conscious of themselves as subjects through ideological apparatuses. In Persuasion Austen portrays the navy as such an apparatus, suggesting that the navy’s ideological function is more important than the repression it exerts as an agent of state-sponsored violence. However, whereas for Althusser interpellation produces the illusion of freely chosen subjectivity, for Austen interpellation produces consciousness of membership in a nation that exerts claims upon the individual [“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, tran. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) 127–86]. 12.  My argument demonstrates another way in which Austen critiques the appeal to a “felt but never systematized national identity,” which Paul Hamilton demonstrates was identified with conservatism in the regency years [Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) 159]. 13.  Gerald Newman suggests that the very middle class values that Austen admires in the navy, what she terms “openness,” “feeling,” and “usefulness” and he summarizes as “sincerity,” come in the Romantic period to define English and British (he makes no distinction between the two) nationality [The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987)].

notes to pages 120–124

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Austen, however, identifies these qualities and behaviors not with Englishness but with a specific group of people, the navy. 14.  I discuss the contradictions within organic form in Chapter 1. 15.  The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 6–9. 16.  The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) 1805.2.247–50. 17.  Many other critics have made this and the following observations; I have been especially influenced by Nina Auerbach; Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 18.  I owe this point to Jerome Christensen. 19.  For Butler, the novel proves conservative because it critiques the gentry from the position of Evangelical Protestantism, combining middle class morality with an ultimate acceptance of social hierarchy. See Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1982) 94–109, and Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1975) 289. 20.  On middle class status, see W. J. Reading, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966); Margali Safarti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); and Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (New York: Routledge, 1989). 21.  The army does not work as well as the navy for Austen’s project because the army remains too much of a hierarchy. Although the naval captain takes directions from an admiral, the self-contained nature of the ship gives him a degree of independence that the army officer lacks and better represents in microcosm a functioning community and a stable domicile. 22.  Historians have debated whether the early nineteenth-century navy was in any sense a rationalized bureaucracy. Part of this discussion centers on the navy’s hiring and promotional procedures. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the navy was indeed open to nonaristocrats. The navy, unlike the army, did not require new recruits to purchase their commission and paid a wage that would support the recruit at a minimal level without supplement from his family (Reading, Professional Men, 7–10). Nevertheless, the “interest,” or social influence, required to secure appointments in the navy often ensured that only members of the upper classes could qualify. However, Peter Padfield suggests that during the Napoleonic Wars “service interest”—friendships developed in the navy—was as important as aristocratic interest and that the large number of naval openings during the Napoleonic Wars enabled men to rise by virtue of ability [Rule Britannia: The Victorian and Edwardian Navy (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 62]. Austen was very aware of a naval recruit’s need for patronage—two of her brothers gained naval appointments through an admiral who was a family friend—and she portrays this situation in Mansfield Park when she describes the efforts of Henry Crawford to engage his admiral friend to hire and then promote Fanny’s brother William. On

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notes to pages 124–128

the class status of the navy, see Christopher Dandeker, Surveillance, Power, Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1990); Colley, Britons; and David Cannadine, “The Making of the British Upper Classes,” in Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). On rationalization, see John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989). 23.  Brian Southam thoroughly depicts both Jane Austen’s relationship to the British navy, including the naval careers of Francis and Charles Austen, and conditions in the Napoleonic-era navy more generally. Southam describes the navy in Persuasion as “a distinct social group,” but he suggests we “read Persuasion biographically . . . as an expression of Jane Austen’s enthusiasm for the navy” in an era when the army is more popular, and possibly as an attempt “to repair the career of her brother Francis” [Jane Austen and the Navy (New York: Hambledon and London, 2000) 299, 297]. Although Austen’s brothers certainly influenced her portrait of the navy, I argue that in Persuasion Austen is concerned less with portraying the actual navy than with using the navy to consider how the state incorporates disparate individuals and communities into a single nation. 24.  Many readers have made this observation, but see especially Monica F. Cohen, who suggests that Austen seeks professional involvement for women, not only by allowing them to accompany their husbands but by professionalizing the domestic activities that had been the traditional responsibility of women [Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work, and Home (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 12–43]. 25.  Several critics have argued that gossip marks the boundaries of community in Austen. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985); Jan Gordon, “A-filiative Families and Subversive Reproduction: Gossip in Jane Austen,” Genre 21 (1988): 5–46; and Casey Finch and Peter Bowen, “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and Free-Indirect Style in Emma,” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 1–18. 26.  Charles Rzepka, “Making It in a Brave New World: Marriage, Profession, and Anti-Romantic Ekphrasis in Austen’s Persuasion,” Studies in the Novel 26:2 (Summer 1994): 99–120; Cohen, Professional Domesticity, esp. 35–38. 27.  “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” from the 1815 Poems in Two Volumes. All Wordsworth prose and poetry except for The Prelude is cited to William Words­ worth, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) here 657–58. For studies of Wordsworth and communities of taste, see especially Mark Schoenfield, The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet’s Contract (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Thomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 28.  My reading of Austen’s reluctance to claim national agency for novels agrees with Clifford Siskin’s suggestion that the Romantic novel understood writing as a “primarily reflective, rather than inherently productive, tool—a tool that in ­Austen’s hand, for example, was understood increasingly to depict, not construct or change,

notes to pages 129–132

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the details of British life” [The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) 187]. 29.  For other ways in which the Elliot entry in the baronetage shows the aristocracy’s failure and books’ incomplete vision, see William Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion. 30.  See Finch and Bowen, “‘Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’”; and Frances Ferguson, “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61:1 (March 2000): 157–80. 31.  Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, 75. For Miller, Austen achieves such anonymity because her identity as a spinster separates her from a society built around the conjugal imperative. At the cost of being “no one,” Austen speaks in an absolute impersonal voice. 32.  I refer here to the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice. I use a different definition of organicism from Clara Tuite and therefore arrive at different conclusions about the way in which Persuasion engages with Romantic organicism. Tuite defines organicism as “growth and decay,” and Austen certainly thematizes this version of organicism in the novel. However, my reading of Coleridge in Chapter 1 suggests that organicism argues for a mutual interrelationship between part and whole. Austen therefore resists Romantic organicism because she can no longer be confident that individuals naturally grow as part of whole communities. See Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 11–13. 33.  See Siskin, Work of Writing, esp. 203–6. 34.  Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992) 31. 35.  See Terry L. Givens and Anthony P. Russell, “Romantic Agonies: Human Suffering and the Ethical Sublime,” in Romanticism Across the Disciplines, ed. Larry Peer (New York: University Press of America, 1988) 231–53, esp. 238–40; and Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). I am not addressing the philosophical tradition critiquing this position, but see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard, “The Interest of the Sublime,” in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, ed. Jean-François Courtine et al., tran. ­Jeffrey S. Librett (New York: SUNY Press, 1993) 109–32. 36.  I here adopt David Punter’s definition of the picturesque [“The Picturesque and the Sublime: Two Worldscapes,” in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 223]. 37.  Lorrie Clark reads the boat painting very differently from me, but I agree with her claim that Austen suggests the romantic sublime “conventionalizes, fictionalizes, or aestheticises reality” and that Persuasion points in contrast to “the very real consequences of taking risks” [“Transfiguring the Romantic Sublime in Persuasion,” in Jane Austen’s Business, ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) 31, Clark’s emphasis].

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notes to pages 133–137

38.  The movement from fear or incomprehension to confident self-assertion that Austen revises here is common to all versions of the sublime. The problem of the nation resembles most closely the first moment of the mathematical sublime: there are so many various individuals within the nation that it is impossible to envision them all. For this very reason, however, the mathematical sublime cannot provide a solution to the problem of nation formation. Instead, Austen’s solution resembles but revises the dynamic sublime, as a potential danger makes Anne realize her implication within national networks. 39.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tran. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). Unlike Kant, Burke locates the sublime in the size or power of the object rather than in the frames through which the viewer comprehends it. For this reason, I have confined my discussion of the sublime to Kant and Wordsworth. 40.  As Tony Tanner has noted, Austen’s timing of the novel ensures that the British nation will indeed face another war, even if the navy will not play a large role in Napoleon’s final capture. 41.  Austen’s portrait of Anne Elliot’s fear aligns her with the women writers that Anne Mellor has described as “offering an alternative definition of the sublime as an experience that produces an intensified emotional and moral participation in a human community” [Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 105]. However, Austen’s final sentences of Persuasion stray even farther from the sublime than the writers Mellor discusses because Austen removes this movement from fear to humanity from any connection with nature. Adela Pinch finds another form of the sublime in Persuasion: she argues that just as sublime encounters teach Romantic poets their powers of comprehension, Anne’s own “sublime turn” teaches her to realize her strength and resist the “persuasions” of others (Strange Fits of Passion, 153–55). I greatly admire Pinch’s reading but would add that Anne learns we make decisions as part of a community. 42.  Quoted in B.E.V. Sabine, A History of the Income Tax (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966) 31. 43.  Quoted in Sabine, op. cit., 43. 44.  Quoted in M. J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 52. 45.  Both historians and contemporaries recognized the important role the tax played in defeating Napoleon. M. J. Daunton notes that in Napoleonic-era Britain “effective action by armies and fleets rested on the availability of revenue to maintain naval dockyards and barracks, pay wages, and supply food and munitions. . . . A striking feature of the state in eighteenth-century Britain was its ability to appropriate a larger proportion of national income than the French state, with fewer political difficulties” (op. cit., 32). 46.  Edward Said argues that Austen favored imperial expansion [Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994)]. For a critique of his position, see especially Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism; and Susan Fraiman, “Jane Austen and ­Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995): 805– 21. On Austen and Empire, see also Maaja A. Stewart, Domestic Realities and Im­

notes to pages 137–141

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perial Fictions: Jane Austen’s Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993); and You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Ragan, The Postcolonial Jane Austen (New York: Routledge, 2000). 47.  By this logic, Austen’s much-discussed treatment of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park protests slavery and absenteeism but not Empire; the problem with the Bertrams is not that Britain controls Jamaica but that one man runs estates in both places and runs neither properly. 48.  For a complete survey of criticism noting Austen’s debts to Romanticism, see Deresiewicz, Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, 3–4, 163–67. Deresiewicz argues that Austen’s engagement with Romanticism accounts for the differences between her early and her mature novels. Clifford Siskin suggests that Austen relies upon the same understanding of individual psychological development as Romantic poetry [The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)]. I have been especially influenced by Keith Thomas, who argues that Anne and Wentworth come to know each other through the “‘out-in-out process’ of cognitive alternation between self and other” exemplified in the Romantic Conversation poem [“Jane Austen and the Romantic Lyric: Persuasion and Coleridge’s Conversation Poems,” ELH 54 (1987): 893–924]. 49.  See Siskin, Historicity of Romantic Discourse and Work of Writing. Clara Tuite convincingly argues that Austen employs free indirect discourse as a “counter romance” to rewrite sensibility: “[s]ensibility as a mechanism is naturalized and domesticated as discretion, ‘tenderness’” (Romantic Austen, 71). As I have argued, Austen uses free indirect discourse less in Persuasion because she distrusts the organic social model she associates with it. Instead, she uses the navy to rehabilitate sensibility. 50.  On the association between sensibility and the French Revolution, see especially Tuite, Romantic Austen; Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); and Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that Austen sees sensibility as solipsistic sexuality in “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 817–37.

Chapter Five 1.  Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modern Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Charles Rzepka, Sacramental Commodities: The Gift and the Text in Thomas De Quincey (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Clej considers the Wordsworth–De Quincey relationship as part of her study of De Quincey’s modernity; Rzepka places De Quincey’s anxiety over Wordsworth within a general anxiety of the marketplace. Daniel Sanjiv Roberts maintains the focus on De Quincey’s relationship with predecessors but argues for Samuel Taylor Coleridge as his primary influence [Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge, and the High Romantic Argument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000)]. 2.  Margaret Russett, De Quincey’s Romanticism: Canonical Minority and the Forms of Transmission (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Russett also



notes to pages 141–149

helpfully locates De Quincey’s authorial strategies within the contemporary magazine industry. 3.  Josephine McDonaugh argues that De Quincey uses Ricardo to redefine debt (including literary debt) as central to all social interaction [De Quincey’s Disciplines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 42–65]. De Quincey’s opium addiction figures both the power and danger of literary dependency; on opium, see Clej, Genealogy of the Modern Self; and Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 4.  The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (London, 1897) III, 282. Further references to the Masson edition will be cited parenthetically as M. 5.  As Russett notes, the 1856 Confessions actually strengthens De Quincey’s claim to be the first to recognize Wordsworth. On Wordsworth’s popularity with Victorian audiences, see Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 6.  I discuss this growth in the Introduction, but see especially C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridians (New York: Longman, 1989) and Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7.  Britons: Forging a Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 8.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991) 109–10, Anderson’s emphasis. 9.  Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973) 123–34. In Anderson, op. cit., see esp. 92–94. 10.  Quotations of “The English Mail-Coach” are from the Oxford edition, ed. Grevel Lindop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), cited here 194. References will be cited parenthetically in the text. 11.  See Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, tran. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 12.  Collected Works, Vol. 5: Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987) 495. 13.  John Plotz terms this stage-by-stage reach of the mails “fractalization” and argues that for De Quincey the gradual accretion of the “national crowd” presents an important contrast to the newspapers, which distribute news simultaneously: “the coach’s ride created a sense of organic connection among those who experience it as parallel publication of newspapers does not” [The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 107, 119]. 14.  Redefining authorship as placement within a system therefore also frees De Quincey from comparing himself to Wordsworth. In a note to the Confessions, De Quincey compares English and American rivers to argue for judging an entity’s importance by systemic function rather than size of output. Whereas Americans would measure a river’s importance by its size, De Quincey notes that the small

notes to pages 151–157



Tiber River “has contrived to make itself heard of in this world for twenty-five centuries” and that “the glory of the Thames is measured by the destiny of the population to which it ministers, by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the empire in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer of Columbian standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued” (204 note). By analogy, while Wordsworth is an acknowledged literary giant, with an imagination as wide as the Mississippi, De Quincey is the great disseminator, spreading his knowledge of the poets among the population at large. 15.  Charles Rzepka makes a similar point when he suggests that “driving His Majesty’s coach-horses along the mail-routes of England is symbolically equivalent to riding His Majesty’s horses into the thick of battle,” but “[i]n place of achieving victory, however, De Quincey seeks to achieve, or to identify himself with the successful achievement of, the display of victory” [“Bang Up! Theatricality and the ‘Diphrelatic Art’ in De Quincey’s English Mail Coach,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 26:2 (Fall 2001): 92]. 16.  John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991) esp. 8–15. 17.  See also Eva-Lynn Alicia Jagoe’s discussion of De Quincey’s regulated love affair in “Degrading Forms of Pantomime: Englishness and Shame in De Quincey,” Studies in Romanticism 44:1 (Spring 2005): 23–40; Mary Favret similarly notes De Quincey’s “suspicion of human contact outside the official lines of communication” [Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 212]. 18.  In a similar instance, a note to the 1856 Confessions complains that a fire destroyed many of De Quincey’s manuscript additions; the “Daughters of Levana,” however, survived because De Quincey threw a Spanish cloak over the fire, preventing it from “communicating with the slight woodwork and draperies of the bed” (M, 2:221). In both cases, foreign items prove a bar to communication (whether of humans or fires). 19.  “Booked for Utter Perplexity on De Quincey’s Mail Coach,” in Thomas De Quincey: Bicentenary Studies, ed. Robert Lance Snyder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985) 279–307, esp. 296–98. 20.  Jagoe, “Degrading Forms of Pantomime,” esp. 38–40. Jagoe also finds a similar form of erotic submission in De Quincey’s dream of lying prostrate before a tiger.

Index

agency, individual, 3–5, 8–9, 14–16, 19, 56, 84, 89–91, 96, 108–9, 148, 156, 161; Foucault on, 4, 59–60. See also authorship; novels; pastoral agents; poet Althusser, Louis, 13, 33, 170n34, 174n26, 190n11 Anderson, Benedict, 10, 12, 119, 143 Anglican Church, 183n59; in Coleridge, 3, 17, 22–23, 28–31, 40–41, 135n37; in Wordsworth, 3, 15, 17–18, 56–61, 63–64, 67–82, 85, 87, 92, 179n23, 181n41, 182n53 Arendt, Hannah, 143 Armstrong, Charles, 171n1 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 29 Associationism, Coleridge’s critique of, 175n36 Auerbach, Nina, 190n5, 191n17 Austen, Jane, 14, 16, 17, 18–19, 116–39, 144. Works: Mansfield Park, 189 n.2, 191n22, 195n47; Northanger Abbey, 127, 190n10; Persuasion, 2, 18–19, 116–39; Pride and Prejudice, 193n32 Austin, Carolyn, 107, 188nn26,28 authorship, claims for, 3–5, 13–15, 143–46, 151, 158–63. See also novels; poet; women writers Bainbridge, Simon, 43, 176n40, 180n29 ballad form, in Scott, 92, 110–13 Barrell, John, 152 Barth, J. Robert, 176n47 Bayly, C. A., 2, 165nn1,3, 166nn5,6, 168n19, 196n6 Beaumont, Sir George, 67 Beer, John, 176n40, 178–79n17 Beiderwell, Bruce, 100, 187n21 Bell, Andrew, 5 Bentham, Jeremy, 168n20

Bewell, Alan, 179n17 Bialostosky, Don H., 178n17 Bloom, Harold, 166n9 Bowen, Peter, 192n25, 193n30 Breuilly, John, 169n28 Brewer, John, 168n17, 192n22 Brockliss, Laurence, 11, 170n31 Brown, Lee Rust, 171n1 Buchanan, Claudius, 116 Burchell, Graham, 178n13 bureaucracy, 2, 5–7, 13, 17; in Austen, 124–25, 135–39; in Coleridge, 23–24, 28, 31, 40, 44, 46; in De Quincey, 142, 146; in nineteenthcentury British government, 2, 168n20, 191n22 Burgess, Miranda, 117, 127 Burke, Edmund, 26, 65, 66, 71, 119, 122, 180n32, 194n39 Butler, Marilyn, 122, 176n42, 191n19 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 15, 110, 171n42 Cannadine, David, 192n22 Canuel, Mark, 33, 172n7, 174n27, 182nn48,52 Catholicism: Coleridge’s opinions on, 39, 175n34, 175n35, 175n37; Wordsworth’s opinions on, 67–70, 73–74, 181n38, 182n47, 182–83n53 “Catholic question,” 5, 67–68, 120; Coleridge on, 22, 175n34 Chadwick, Edwin, 168n20 Chandler, James, 180n32, 186n11, 187nn19,20 Chartism, 140 Christensen, Jerome, 90, 102, 171n1, 172n5, 174n26, 186n9, 187n22, 191n18 civil society, 2, 4, 9, 60, 108, 169n45 Clark, Lorrie, 193n37 Clarkson, Thomas, 116 Clej, Alina, 140, 196n3



index

clerisy, 30–31, 36, 173nn16,18,19 Cohen, Monica, 127, 192n24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 3,5, 10, 13, 17, 21–53, 88, 92, 106, 140, 147, 171n40, 179n22, 193n32, 195n1. Works: Aids on Reflection, 21; Biographia Literaria, 35, 41, 85, 172nn5,8; “Christabel,” 21, 42, 44–46; “Destiny of Nations,” 22; “France: An Ode,” 23; The Friend, 25; “Hibern-Anglus’s Discovery,” 35; “Ireland,” 39; “Kubla Khan,” 14, 21, 42–45, 176n39; Lectures on European Drama, 25–26; Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, 24, 25–26, 147; “Letters to Mr. Justice Fletcher,” 22, 26–28, 38–41, 47–51; Marginalia, 21; On the Constitution of Church and State, 2, 22, 28–33, 36–39; “The Picture, or the Lover’s Resolution,” 43–44; The Statesman’s Manual, 32; Table Talk, 21, 31–34, 51–52; “The Tears of a Grateful People,” 33–34 Colley, Linda, 10–11, 12, 32, 119, 142–43, 167n15, 170nn29,30, 185n7, 192n22 Colmer, John, 38, 174n21 Connell, Phillip, 172n5, 182n49 Cookson, John E., 165n2, 166n6, 170n30 Cromwell, Oliver, Wordworth’s opinions on, 68 Cronin, Richard, 166–67n10, 171nn42,43, 189n35 Crowther, Paul, 193n35 Curran, Stuart, 180n31

Eastwood, David, 7, 11, 165n2, 166n8, 168n19, 170n31 Edwards, Pamela, 172n5 Empire, British, 2, 5, 13, 117, 119, 120; Austen on, 137, 195n47; Coleridge on, 34–36; De Quincey on, 148, 150, 152; in Scott, 188n32; Wordsworth on, 72, 181n36. See also nation, vs. empire Englishness, vs. Britishness: in Austen, 19, 119; in De Quincey, 142–43, 150–51 Erdman, David, 36, 51, 176nn45,46 Erickson, Lee, 179n20, 189n2 essay form, in De Quincey, 160–61, 163 Established Church, Irish rejection of, 22, 41, 46, 135n37. See also Anglican Church

Daiches, David, 186n10 Dandeker, Christopher, 192n22 Daunton, M. J., 194nn44,45 Davis, Leith, 189n37 De Man, Paul, 35, 174nn23,29 De Quincey, Thomas, 15, 19, 140–63; relationship with Wordsworth, 140–42, 145, 195n1, 197n14. Works: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 141–42, 144, 157, 160, 161–63, 196n14, 197n18; The English MailCoach, 2, 17, 140–63; “Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism,” 151–52; “Travelling in England in the Old Days,” 146–49 Deresiewicz, William, 193n29, 195n48 Dickens, Charles, 5, 140 dissent, religious, 68 Duncan, Ian, 108–9, 189n34

Faber, William, 182n53 factory acts, 140 fancy, 63, 184n65; Coleridge’s definition of, 85; Wordsworth’s redefinition of, 85–86, 184nn66,67 Favret, Mary, 197n17 Ferguson, Frances, 130, 193n30 Ferris, Ina, 120, 171n46, 185n4 Finch, Casey, 192n25, 193n30 Finer, S. E., 168n20 Fletcher, William, 47–50 Foucault, Michel, 4, 6–9, 11–12, 18, 26, 58–60, 70, 89–90, 167n13, 168nn18,21, 169n22, 169n23, 169n25, 178nn11,13, 182n46; early vs. late work of, 59–60. See also agency, individual; governmentality; liberalism; pastoral state. Works: The Birth of Biopolitics, 8–9, 58, 169n22, 182n46, 188n30; The Birth of the Clinic, 168n18; Discipline and Punish, 59, 168n18; “Governmentality,” 6–7, 58, 167n13; The History of Sexuality, 59; “Omnes et Singulatim,” 6, 58, 167n13; Security, Territory, Population, 58–59, 169n23; Society Must Be Defended, 170n32; “The Subject and Power,” 58–60, 167n13, 168n21 fragment form, in Coleridge, 17, 21–22, 42–46, 171n1 Fraiman, Susan, 194n46 free indirect discourse, in Austen, 129–30, 195n49 French Revolution, 170n40 Fulford, Tim, 190n6

Eagles, Robin, 170n30 Easterlin, Nancy, 77, 179n23

Galperin, William, 77, 183n57, 189n3 Gambles, Anna, 165n3

index Gates, Barbara, 183n54 Gill, Stephen, 67, 181nn38,41, 182n44, 183n53, 196n5 Gilmartin, Kevin, 167nn14,16, 171n40 Givens, Terry L., 193n35 Glorious Revolution, 50, 57, 71–72 Goodland, Lauren M. E., 167n13, 168n20, 178n11, 182n45, 183n58 Gordon, Colin, 9, 168n18, 169n24, 178n13 Gordon, Jan, 192n25 government, central vs. local and voluntary, 1–2, 7; definition of, 6–7. See also governmentality; Michel Foucault governmentality: Michel Foucault on, 4, 6–9, 58–59, 89–90, 167n13, 168n21; Scott’s model of, 90–92, 105–8; Wordsworth’s model of, 57–58, 60, 65, 81–82. See also liberalism; pastoral state Guilt, see nation-formation, and guilt Gray, Thomas, 111 Habermas, Jürgen, 16 Halmi, Nicholas, 176–77n47 Hamilton, Paul, 190n12 Haney, David, 173n13 Hartley, David, 172n5, 175n36 Hartman, Geoffrey, 86–87, 166n9 Harvie, Christopher, 185n7 Haydon, Benjamin, 54–56 Hazlitt, William, 166n9, 172n9 Hemans, Felicia, 15, 16. Works: “Casabianca,” 15 Hess, Jonathan M., 184n69 Hewitt, Regina, 177n7 Hobsbawm, Eric, 10, 169n28 Hutchinson, Mary, 62 Hutchinson, Sara, 62 Imagination, 133; Austen on, 120–21, 133, 136–37; in Coleridge, 21, 23, 42, 57, 175n31, 172n8, 175n31, 176n47; in De Quincey, 144, 149, 196–7n14; and nation, 10, 169nn27,28; reduction of high Romantic claims for, 2–4, 14–15, 57; Wordsworth’s revision of, 17, 57, 63–64, 84–87 Insurrection Acts, 47 Ireland, relationship with Britain, 2, 5, 10, 119–20, 142, 166n6; Coleridge on, 17, 22–24, 38–42, 46, 47–53, 175n34 irony, Coleridge’s use of, 48–50, 174n23, 177n48 Jacobite rebellion, Scott’s portrayal of, 98–100, 187n20



Jagoe, Eva-Lynn Alicia, 157, 197nn17,20 Jeffrey, Francis, 55–56 Johnson, Claudia, 191n17 Johnson, Lee M., 184n62 Jones, Vivien, 189n3 Jordan, John O., 179n21 Joyce, Patrick, 182n45 Kaiser, David Aram, 35, 167n12, 173n17, 174n25, 175n32 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 24, 130, 133–34, 172n5, 175n36 Keats, John, 54–55 Kelly, Gary, 171n45 Kerr, Walter, 187n20 Kingston, John, 54–55 Kittler, Friedrich, 146 Klancher, Jon, 167n16, 173n18, 179n21 Knapp, Stephen, 173n11, 178n17 Knights, Ben, 173n18 Kohler, Michael, 171n41 Kooy, John Michael, 31, 173n19 laissez-fare, 1, 90, 102, 165n3 Lamb, Charles, 54 Landon, Letitia, 15, 16 Langan, Celeste, 178n17 Larson, Margali Safarti, 191n20 law: English vs. Scottish, 90, 93–94, 186n10; common law, Scott’s critique of, 18, 94–95, 97, 112–13; statutory law, Scott’s critique of, 18, 91, 94, 95–97, 112–13, 186n14 Leask, Nigel, 31, 35, 172n8, 173n19 Lee, Yoon Sun, 174n23, 177n48 Levinson, Marjorie, 43, 45, 176n44 liberalism, 4, 182n45; Coleridge and, 172n5; vs. communitarianism, 60; Foucault on, 7–9, 58–60, 169nn22, 23; in Scott, 100–101, 108; in Wordsworth, 60, 65, 81 liberty, British tradition of, 9, 11, 142; Wordsworth’s definition of, 57, 60, 65–74, 87, 182n45 Liu, Alan, 63, 180n31 Lloyd, David, 166n7, 167n12, 173n17, 179n22 Lonsdale (Sir James Lowther), Lord, 66, 181n34 Lukács, Georg, 89 Lyotard, Jean-François, 193n35 Macdonagh, Oliver, 168n20 Mahoney, John L., 166n9 Makdisi, Saree, 185n8, 188n32



index

Manning, Peter, 64, 68, 166n9 Mazzaro, Jerome, 184n70 McDonagh, Josephine, 186–87n16, 196n3 McGann, Jerome, 167n11 McMaster, Graham, 186n10 Mee, John, 173n16 Mellor, Anne, 117, 171n44, 194n41 Miller, D. A., 129–30, 190n5, 193n31 Monkhouse, Thomas, 54 Moorman, Mary, 177n3, 177n4, 177n6, 181n34 Moretti, Franco, 190n10 Murphy, Peter, 189n37 Nairn, Tom, 165n1, 170n30 Napoleonic Wars, 1–3, 165n1, 166n6, 194n45; aftermath of, 5, 62, 67–68, 120, 142, 170n37; Austen on, 117, 136, 194n40; British navy during, 191–92n22, 192n23; De Quincey on, 19, 140, 144–46, 152, 154, 158, 160; Wordsworth’s poems on, 65–66, 170n37 nation: vs. empire, 13, 143; as imperial, in De Quincey, 142–43, 145–46, 150–51 nation-formation, 9–12, 17–19; Austen on, 118, 119–21, 130, 131, 133–37; Coleridge on, 22–34, 37, 46; De Quincey on, 142–44,; and guilt, in De Quincey, 144, 157, 161; role of the state in, 4, 6, 9–13; Scott on, 90–91, 105–9, 114–15; Wordsworth on, 60, 63, 65–69, 72–73, 87 national identity, 6, 9–10, 12, 17, 19, 148; in Austen, 117–21, 133–34, 136–37, 139, 190n12; in Coleridge, 21–23, 28, 32–33, 38, 41, 43, 46, 50–51; in De Quincey, 142–59, 161; vs. personal identity, in De Quincey, 152–57, 159, 163; in Scott, 88, 108, 109, 188n26; in Wordsworth, 57, 64, 65–66, 72–73, 76. See also Ireland; Scotland nationalism: theories of, 10–12, 142–43, 169nn27,28, 170n30, 177n4; Austen on, 117, 119, 122, 135; De Quincey on, 142–43, 157–60; Irish nationalism, Coleridge on, 40–41 navy: Austen on, 19, 117–19, 121–26, 129, 135–36, 138, 189n3, 190n11, 190–91n13, 191n21, 191–92n22, 192n23, 195n49; during Napoleonic Wars, 191–92n22, 192n23 Nelson, Horatio, Lord, 162–63 Nemoianu, Virgil, 14, 166–67n10, 170n39 Newman, Gerald, 190n13 novels, agency of: in Austen, 120–21, 127–30, 192–93n28; in Scott, 89, 92, 109–10, 113–15

Orangemen, 176n46; Coleridge on, 47–51 organic form: Austen’s critique of, 119–22, 129–30, 191n14, 193n32, 195n49; Coleridge on, 17, 21–28, 32–39, 42–46, 50–53, 147, 174n23, 175n31, 177n48; De Quincey on, 141, 147–49, 196n13 Oxford movement, 182n44 Padfield, Peter, 191n22 Park, You-me, 195n46 Pasley, Charles William, 116–17, 189n3 pastoral agents: in Austen, 137; novelist as, in Scott, 90–91, 103, 110–15; pastor as model of state power, in Wordsworth, 80–83; poet as, in Wordsworth, 60–64; in Scott, 88–115 pastoral state: Michel Foucault on, 7–9, 58–60, 89–90, 178n11; Scott and, 18, 87, 90–92, 96, 100–102, 105–9; Wordsworth and, 18, 58, 60, 63, 70–71, 81–82, 87 Patton, Robert L., 179n21 Perkin, Harold, 191n20 Perkins, David, 177n49 Perry, Seamus, 173n11, 176n39 Peterloo Massacre, potential influence on Wordsworth, 67 Pfau, Thomas, 170n37, 178n14, 192n27 picturesque, Austen’s revision to, 131–32 Pinch, Adela, 190n5, 193n29, 194n41 Plotz, John, 196n13 poet, role of: in Scott, 110–11; in Wordsworth, 13–14, 61–64, 78–87, 128. See also ballad form Poor Laws (1834), 1 Poovey, Mary, 168n20, 183n59 Prickett, Stephen, 29, 173nn15,18 professions, 31, 188n24; in Austen, 16, 19, 120– 21, 124–39, 192n24; vs. non-professionals, in Scott, 91–92, 103–5 public vs. private identity, 7, 97, 101, 125, 135, 162, 187n17. See also civil society; national identity, vs. personal identity ublic sphere, 14, 16, 135, 170–71n40. See also reading public Punter, David, 193n36 Radcliffe, Ann, 141 Ragan, Rajeswari Sunder, 195n46 reading public, 5, 13, 62, 97, 158–60, 170n37, 179n21 Reading, W. J., 191nn20,22 Redfield, Marc, 12, 166n7, 167n12, 169n27, 170n33

index Reed, Arden, 157 reform movements, 5 Ricardo, David, De Quincey’s use of, 141, 196n3 Richards, Eric, 185n7 Richardson, Samuel, 128 Rieder, John, 179n19 Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv, 195n1 Robinson, Jeffrey C., 184n65 romance: in Austen, 117, 120; in Scott, 109–10 Romanticism: Austen and, 137–39, 195n48; De Quincey and, 140; late Romanticism vs. high Romanticism, 2, 3–4, 12, 14–15, 78, 166–67n10; late Romanticism vs. Victorian period, 3, 5–6. See also State Romanticism Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 169n28 Russell, Anthony P., 193n35 Russett, Margaret, 141, 195n2, 196n5 Ryan, Robert, 181n41 Rylestone, Anne L., 178n8 Rzepka, Charles, 127, 140, 197n15 Sabine, B. E. V., 194nn42,43 Said, Edward, 189n2, 194n46 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 24, 147, 177n48 Schmidgen, Wolfram, 186nn8,14 Schoenfield, Mark, 170n38, 178n14, 192n27 Scotland, position within Britain, 35–36, 45, 119, 142, 185n7; and British law, in Scott, 18, 92–95, 98, 186n10; in Scott, 88–91, 104–5, 108–9, 115, 189n37 Scott, Walter, 2, 5, 10, 14, 17, 18, 87, 88–115, 171n46, 174n26. Works: The Bride of Lammermoor, 96–97; Chronicles of the Canongate, 187n18; Harold the Dauntless, 110; The Heart of Midlothian, 88–98, 102– 15; Marmion, 110; Redgauntlet, 92, 98–102; Waverley, 91, 109 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 195n50 sensibility, Austen’s rehabilitation of, 137–38, 195n49 Setzer, Sharon, 182n52 Shaffer, Elinor, 171n2, 173n14 Shaw, Phillip, 181n33, 182n50, 183n57 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14, 15, 166n9, 171n42. Works: The Cenci, 15 Simmons, Claire A., 181n38 Simpson, David, 35, 175n31 Siskin, Clifford, 130, 137–38, 170–71n40, 183n57, 192n28, 195n48 Smith, Adam, 169n22, 187n23, 188n30; “invisible hand,” 108



sonnet form, in Wordsworth, 86–87, 184– 85n70 Southam, Brian, 192n23 Southey, Robert, 2, 4, 55, 83, 167n14. Works: “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 176n42 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 192n25 Spiegelman, Willard, 178n17 State Romanticism, 3, 9, 12–16, 117, 137–39, 140. See also Romanticism Stuart, Maaja A., 194n46 Sturges Bourne reforms, 7, 168n19 sublime: in the Anglican Church, 15; Austen’s revision of, 19, 120–21, 130–38, 193n37, 194nn38,41; in De Quincey, 15, 154; in Kant, 130, 133–34; nation as, 194n38; in Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 84; Wordsworth’s natural, 15, 133–34 Sussman, Charlotte, 95, 186n16, 188n27 Sutherland, John, 185n1, 186n12, 189nn35,36 Sutherland, Kathryn, 188n23 symbol, 23, 31–35, 38, 46–51, 174n23, 174nn25,29, 175n35, 176n47 Symonds, Deborah, 187n16 sympathy, in De Quincey, 19, 144, 146, 149, 154–55 synecdoche, and representation of nation, 120, 129, 174n23 Tanner, Tony, 191n17, 194n40 taxation, 1, 135–36, 194n45 Thane, Pat, 166n4, 168n17, 168nn19,20 Thomas, Keith, 195n48 Thomas, Paul, 166n7, 167n12, 173n17, 179n22 Todd, Janet, 195n50 Trever-Roper, Hugh, 185n2, 188n32 Trumpener, Katie, 119, 189n2, 194n46 Tuite, Clara, 137–38, 193n32, 195n49 Union of Great Britain and Ireland, act of, 38–39, 120 United Irishmen, Coleridge on, 47–51 Walker, David M., 188n24 Walker, Helen, 186n12 Watson, Nicola, 195n50 Weber, Max, 13, 81, 170n35 Weinstein, Mark, 99, 187n19 Welsh, Alexander, 187n20 White, Deborah Elise, 177n48 Williams, Raymond, 167n12, 173n17 Wilt, Judith, 186n11, 187n17 and 20 women’s social roles, in Austen, 126–28, 135



index

women writers, and growth of state, 16 Woodring, Carl, 180n31 Wordsworth, William, 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 17–18, 54–87, 88, 92, 106, 120, 127–28, 133–38, 140–42, 145, 166n9, 170nn37,38, 182n44, 195n1, 197n14. See also De Quincey, relationship with Wordsworth. Works: The “discharged soldier,” 61–62; Ecclesiastical Sketches and Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 2, 56–58, 60–64, 67–87, 128, 138; “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” in 1815 Poems in Two Volumes, 62–63, 192n27; The Excursion, 56, 181n41, 182n49; “Home at Grasmere,” 62; “Intimations Ode,” 78; “Lines on the Expected Invasion,” 65,

180n30; Lyrical Ballads, 61, 78; Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 83–84, 180n26; “Michael,” 128; “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Rooms,” 87; “Ode: 1815,” 73; “A Parsonage in Oxfordshire,” 81–82; Poems on the Naming of Places, 61; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 13, 61–62, 78, 127–28; The Prelude, 61–62, 64, 77, 120, 141; “Protest Against the Ballot,” 67; “Postscript” (1835), 68; Resolution and Independence, 61–62; The River Duddon, 79; Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, 65–66, 79, 180n30; “Sonnets upon the Punishment of Death,” 73; “Tintern Abbey,” 78; Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland, 66–67