THE LANGUAGE OF WHIGGISM: LIBERTY AND PATRIOTISM, 1802–1830
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THE LANGUAGE OF WHIGGISM: LIBERTY AND PATRIOTISM, 1802–1830
by Kathryn Chittick
london PICKERING & CHATTO 2010
Published by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH 2252 Ridge Road, Brookfield, Vermont 05036-9704, USA www.pickeringchatto.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the publisher. © Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Ltd 2010 © Kathryn Chittick 2010 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Chittick, Kathryn, 1953– The language of Whiggism: liberty and patriotism, 1802–1830. – (The Enlightenment world) 1. Whig Party (Great Britain) 2. English language – Political aspects. 3. Great Britain – Politics and government – 1800–1837. I. Title II. Series 306.4’4’0941’09034-dc22 ISBN-13: 9781851964246 e: 9781851964840
∞
This publication is printed on acid-free paper that conforms to the American National Standard for the Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Typeset by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Printed in the United Kingdom at MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction 1 1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism 2 1807–10 The Revival of Liberty 3 1816–20 The Liberty of the Press and the Literary Language of the People 4 1816–24 The New Criticism: Apostasy and Personality 5 1821–3 Historical Retrospective of the Edinburgh Review 6 1824–30 Whiggism and Liberalism
1 15 33 55 79 115 145
Notes Works Cited Index
175 217 235
For Edith and Madeleine
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a pleasure to thank those who have contributed to the experience of researching and writing this book. First and foremost, the staff at the National Library of Scotland through the years have been unfailingly helpful and cheery, and I have greatly enjoyed working there. I am also grateful to the National Archives of Scotland, the Manuscripts Collection at the British Library, and the National Archives at Kew for their efficient and knowledgeable assistance. The extensive holdings of Blackwood’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, and the Quarterly Review and other reviews at Trent University Bata Library provided me with regular access to the basic collection of primary material needed for this project. Iain Gordon Brown at the NLS was kind enough to advise me on the Walter Scott material, and David McClay helped me with the John Murray Archive. I am appreciative of the departmental support offered by my colleagues Suzanne Bailey, Elizabeth Popham, Paulette Nichols and by Sarah Stunden. I am pleased to acknowledge the financial support received from Trent University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Mark Pollard of Pickering & Chatto has been a patient editor, for whose guidance and encouragement I offer sincere thanks, and I am grateful to Julie Wilson and Paul Lee for their thoughtful assistance. Joan Eadie contributed the index. Joanne and Warren McDougall have been wonderfully generous with their hospitality and their research. Throughout the writing of this book, Janine Reid and Gavin Fraser have provided support both intellectual and practical. I owe thanks also to Jean and Peter Jones for their reading of the manuscript in its first form. At an early stage, Margaret Vaughan read over the manuscript and offered intellectual support and thoughtful criticism – our family owes many debts to her and her family. And I am happy to thank Merrill Distad once more for his advice and enthusiasm, which was crucial to me at a late stage in the work. As always, I am thankful for the faithful support of my family, Mary Chittick, Susan Anderson and Laurie Gehrling, to whom I owe more than I can fully say here. I would also like to acknowledge the quiet kindness and generosity of Ethel and Vernon Smith over the years. It is a pleasure to thank Philip, Edith, and Madeleine Brown for making our overseas expeditions so much fun and for
– ix –
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being so agreeable in accommodating their lives to library and archival research. Not surprisingly, my largest debt is owed to Stephen Brown, who has always offered me his enthusiasm, guidance, and keen critical intelligence. He has been an equal partner in these discoveries, and I am privileged to share in his own wide-ranging intellectual pursuits. As a scholar, he has been generous with his research and his books; as an editor, he has been incisive and at a crucial stage helped me to bring all this material together. I could not have completed it without him. All errors are strictly my own. Kathryn Chittick March 2010
INTRODUCTION
This book is a narrative of the debate about oppositional Whig language as it unfolded in British periodical literature from 1802 to 1830. The recurring figures in this argument over liberty and patriotism include Francis Jeffrey, William Cobbett and George Gordon Byron, but also prominent are Henry Brougham and George Canning, known at the time as the great ‘literary’ personalities of the Whig and Tory groups. In offering this account, the challenge has been to steer between two disciplines: literary criticism and political history. For literary scholars, I hope to show how such events as Walcheren or the retreat of the British army from Corunna affect our understanding of the prose of writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. For historians, I propose to demonstrate the importance of language in the growing political involvement of the middle and lower classes, something that culminates in the quarto publication and duodecimo piracies of Don Juan. Because of Napoleon and the protracted war on the Continent, it was an era of unprecedented commercial and ideological activity. In the late eighteenth century, government military supply contracts meant increased newspaper advertising, more business in the law courts and new baronets and lawyers in Parliament. The mass mobilization involved in the volunteer militia movement, especially after 1803, meant that ordinary people who normally regarded politics as a hobby for rich landowners became involved in the discussion of Britain’s fate. These things increased literacy and press activity, something of which Napoleon himself was well aware, for he too read the British newspapers. The persistent threat of invasion and the glamour of Napoleon’s military feats in themselves made a democracy of newly fledged readers in Britain. Complaints of nepotism, which had primarily interested only the opposition Whigs in the late 1780s, became a street commonplace after 1808 and military failures abroad. One cannot understand this expanded discourse without having some awareness of events on the Continent, the battles and treaties, and the parliamentary debates – this is the era when Hansard took shape out of Cobbett’s detailed note-taking.
–1–
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The Language of Whiggism
However, it remains difficult to speak precisely of the complicated distinctions of party at a time when the prime minister thought himself a Whig while his former colleagues called him a Tory, and there is no such entity as the Whig party. In attempting to understand these labels, I can only acknowledge my debt to such scholars as A. Mitchell, H. T. Dickinson, J. G. A. Pocock, J. C. D. Clark and J. E. Cookson. At the same time, Romantic literary criticism has produced a number of well-researched studies discussing the relationship between literature and politics, and serious contextual initiatives to recover the public discourse of the period. My work necessarily touches on the excitement of the period of radical writing and publishing from 1816 to 1821, but I consider that this area has already been expertly handled by such scholars as J. Ann Hone, James Chandler, Paul Keen, Iain McCalman, James Epstein and Kevin Gilmartin. This project began as an anthology of excerpts from the magazine and quarterly writers of the day giving these writers’ own words on a number of literary and political topics. ‘Whiggism’ only gradually emerged as a recurring preoccupation, as the work moved from a narrowly literary study into a more interdisciplinary realm. The urgent challenge faced by all commentators at the time was to find a safe language, when for reasons of national security the government war effort demanded repression. It can hardly be coincidental that the Edinburgh Review emerged from a provincial capital in the single year of peace afforded by the treaty at Amiens and that its first article was devoted to a selfconsciously apolitical understanding of the French Revolution. ‘Whiggism’, which has been used as a label for so many programmes since the 1680s, may thus stand during this period as the collective label for the effort to talk about liberty with safety. The Edinburgh Review can be seen as the key repository of intellectual Whiggism at this time. However, the quarterly itself was not initially affiliated with any parliamentary faction nor did it maintain organized contact with the All Talents government of 1806–7, which is commonly called Whig. Other languages of opposition emerge, Cobbett’s Political Register being the most obvious example. The great flood of oppositional language occurs after 1816, when ‘radical’ becomes a noun and ‘Tory’ is accepted as something other than a term of abuse. These are defined against the background of ‘Whiggism’, which since 1802 had been the only respectable language of opposition. After 1821, a new language of freedom emerges, neither eighteenth-century nor exclusively British, which is called ‘Liberalism’ and confounds all party distinctions. My perspective originated in literary studies, which is why, although this monograph depends heavily on historical references, my ultimate concern is to offer an exploration of language. From 1802 to 1816, Cobbett’s direct conversational idiom stands out above all others as the language of independent opposition. The language of the quarterlies, by contrast, is self-consciously edu-
Introduction
3
cated and exclusive. The politicians themselves read both Cobbett and Jeffrey. Between 1816 and 1830, besides the new logical terminology of Utilitarianism, and blue-book liberalism, there also emerges the charismatic Tory language of male badinage, seen most spectacularly in Blackwood’s Magazine and Don Juan. This literature, satirical and libertine, was ultimately submerged in the more socially correct humour of the 1830s, when the ‘cant’ of Liberalism superseded the vocabulary of Whiggism. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, oppositional Whiggism, unlike the Whiggism of Pitt’s government, was forced to explain its place in the British constitution, as Parliament grappled with the intellectual and practical questions posed by liberty in the context of ‘the People’. In the 1790s, Edmund Burke, who had distinguished himself by his advocacy of public opinion during the 1770s, rebuked fellow parliamentary Whigs for not speaking in the ideas or language of 1688. The 1790s rhetoric of the People was antithetical to the meaning of the Whig heritage, and the ‘Rights of Man’ was a popular misinterpretation of the events in France, said Burke, because the philosophical discussion of political rights did not apply to the People: in any eighteenth-century discussion of legal rights in Britain, the People constitutionally speaking did not exist. When Burke published these arguments in an anonymous pamphlet, An Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs in 1791, the price (three shillings) indicated that his audience was not populist. If the Whigs went on prating about the ‘Rights of the People’, they had broken with the original meaning of Whiggism – which was to preserve the Protestant constitution of balance between King, Church and Parliament. James II had sought to destroy this constitution, and it was the Whigs who had prevented him from doing so, notably without executing him. But their descendants, the ‘New’ Whigs, were now, with their talk of the People, encouraging the violation of this heritage of specifically parliamentary liberty. As the war progressed, the Whigs who went along with Burke and the government’s policy of repression came to be called ‘Tories’ – a term of factional abuse that historically had been associated with resistance to the Hanoverian constitution. It was this ‘Tory’ side of the party that directed the war and after 1793 called all others unpatriotic.1 J. C. D. Clark remarks that Fox did not consistently use the term ‘Tory’ as an ‘ideological’ description of his governmental opponents until the 1790s, and also argues that before the 1830s, ‘Tory’ was ‘an empty category’, Jacobitism having been constitutionally renounced. Technically all governments at this juncture were Whig or Hanoverian.2 The term ‘Whig’ was also being redefined in terms of party.3 In fact, Pitt’s government was a coalition that included the Portland Whigs, and after the 1760s, opposition was being defined ideologically rather than dynastically. For twenty-two years the Foxite Whigs toiled as oppositionists to the ‘King’s Friends’ and the government policy of war with France, but even on the government side there
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The Language of Whiggism
had been a ‘New Opposition’ that disagreed with the Peace of Amiens signed in 1802.4 The unity of the various and shifting groups that made up ‘government’ was pragmatically structured by administrative duties, as can be seen in the cordial relationship that evolved between Henry Dundas and Lord Spencer during the 1790s. When Pitt came back into government in 1804, he attempted to form a coalition with Fox, but this was not to be countenanced by George III. When Pitt died in January 1806, amid news of Austria’s defeat and prosecution by the Foxites of the former Home Secretary, Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, the King finally acceded to an administration under Fox. However, this government necessarily involved a number of ‘parties’ besides the Foxites, including among others the Windhamites, who advocated vigorous prosecution of the war: this bundling together of former oppositionists was familiarly called the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’. The private appeal of Walter Scott to the All Talents government in February 1806, as he moved from amateur verse-making to professional authorship, illuminates the relationships between Whig and Tory at the end of the epoch of Pitt and Fox. When the Lay of the Last Minstrel began to make a national poetic reputation for Scott in 1805, the thirty-four-year-old poet was looking for ways to retire from the daily practice of law, for ten years at the Scottish bar had not achieved the national distinction bestowed on him by the Lay in as many months.5 Political favour was crucial to Scott’s plan to become a Clerk of the Court of Session, and Pitt had indicated a willingness to offer Scott some kind of official advancement.6 Scott approached George Home, a Clerk of the Court of Session for thirty years, who formally agreed that Scott would take over all the active duties of the post, while the full salary would continue to go to Home, on condition that in the event of his retirement or death, the post would fall to Scott. However, there was one slight error made in the drafting of their contract, and just as this omission was discovered, Pitt died on 23 January 1806. Scott worried that a new government formed from opposition Whigs would refuse to ratify his appointment because of his known Dundasite and Pittite affiliations. He was fully cognizant of all the patronage demands that would press on a new administration and immediately made plans to travel to Westminster. His suit went forward, and by the second week of February 1806, Lord Spencer, the new Home Secretary, had given his approval.7 Inasmuch as Spencer (1758–1834) possessed what is usually described as the greatest private library in Europe at this time, it seems natural that he would have been responsive to the author of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. In his triumphant letter written from London on 11 February 1806 to Dalkeith, Scott apologized for including some political ‘effusions’, in particular, speculations about who would be given the management of Scotland in the
Introduction
5
new All Talents cabinet.8 There is little doubt that his visit to London in February 1806 made something of a politician out of Scott and led eventually to his involvement in the Quarterly Review. Scott’s bid for professional security was made at one of the most critical junctures of Westminster politics, because when he went to London it was not clear to him, or to anyone around Whitehall, exactly who was in charge of Scotland or indeed Britain. The account of Spencer’s approval in fact masks a substantial networking behind the scenes. Before he had ever set out for London, Scott contacted, among others, George Ellis (1753–1815), Lord Somerville (1765–1819), one of the few Scottish peers at Westminster and a Lord of the King’s Bedchamber since 1799, and the Earl of Minto (1751–1814). Somerville had talked about Scott to the Queen, and with her, read the Lay of the Last Minstrel aloud to George III. But in late January 1806, while he was listening to the Lay, George III was also urgently involved in negotiations to form a new government, after Pitt’s cabinet, his preferred leaders, had declared themselves unable to continue in office.9 Over the following fortnight a cabinet was cobbled together, mainly out of various parties of the old Opposition, including the Foxites. This could not be regarded as a government congenial to either George III or Scott. However, the offer of an introduction to Spencer had come not only from Somerville but also from the Earl of Minto, who had known Fox since the 1770s, and with the change of government had been offered the presidency of the Board of Control (India). Nor were other English connections besides Ellis wanting. Before he left Edinburgh, Scott also contacted William Stewart Rose (1775–1843), mainly known now as a minor poet and translator, who had been reading clerk to the House of Lords since 1800 and one of the conduits of Pitt’s praise for the Lay. Scott, in his first appearance in the Edinburgh Review in October 1803, had reviewed Rose’s rhymed translation of Amadis de Gaul. Rose was the son of George Rose (1744–1818), one of Pitt’s closest friends and a confidant of George III. William Stewart Rose, in turn, asked William Sturges Bourne to look for the paperwork concerning Scott’s appointment. Sturges Bourne (1769–1845), an MP since 1798, was, like George Ellis, a close friend of George Canning.10 After the disbandment of Pitt’s ministry, Bourne was at this time informally working as ‘a kind of press agent’ for the out-of-office ministers and acolytes known as ‘Pitt’s Friends’.11 At William Stewart Rose’s behest, Bourne before his resignation from the Treasury at the end of that month evidently went through all the files in the office, as he was entitled to do, for he had been patronage secretary to the Treasury since 1804. It was Rose who told Scott that Spencer was the minister to approach and who reassured Scott that his father thought he should go ahead.12 Rose’s letter was written while affairs in Westminster hung fire – during the first ten days there were daily urgent interviews of potential Cabinet nominees com-
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The Language of Whiggism
ing and going, for it was still not decisively clear that ‘Pitt’s Friends’ would not be forming a government.13 Meanwhile, in the Westminster lobbies, as Scott travelled down from Edinburgh, hourly bulletins concerning the disposition of Scotland’s affairs were emerging. Had Scott’s crisis arisen at any time during the previous two decades, he would have had no need to travel south, for the answer would have been comprised in the person of Henry Dundas, Lord Melville.14 However, the Lay of the Last Minstrel had been published in the very year Melville was being investigated for financial negligence by the Tenth Inquiry into the Navy, and by June 1805 impeachment proceedings had been set in motion. Melville’s fall was one of a number of political catastrophes of Pitt’s last few months, and it is important when considering the uncertainty in which Scott was making his professional way, to realize how much the conditions of Scottish patronage were in flux. In early February, Melville’s son Robert Dundas was also involved in the thick of negotiations at Westminster, particularly as they involved the disposition of Scotland – these were the subject of Scott’s ‘political effusions’ mentioned to Dalkeith. In Dundas’s letters to his father, it appears during the first week of February, that with the change of ministers Scotland had been given to a Whig, the Earl of Moira (1754–1826), an Irishman who had acted as commander-in-chief of Scotland since 1804. With Moira in place, things were essentially to remain as they were, with some offices to be given to the ‘Prince’s Friends’, since Moira’s greatest ally was the Prince of Wales.15 Dundas adds that this arrangement had been ratified by Lord Grenville (1759–1834), Spencer, and Fox, who were to be the Prime Minister, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary respectively.16 All this would have been reassuring to Scott, who had socialized with Moira in Edinburgh, but Melville himself anticipated complications.17 It became clear that the new administration would be heavily weighted towards conciliation of the Foxites, in a coalition of four different ‘Whig’ parties, all of whom had some expectation of office.18 The Dundases did not wish to risk any overtly public commitment to Moira, until it became clear how much power he would hold. His greatest rival within the opposition Whigs (to be differentiated from the Grenvillite Whigs), was Lord Lauderdale (1759–1839), a Foxite, the key point that Scott had mentioned in his letter to Dalkeith, because when he arrived in London, the dilemma facing him was whether to approach Moira or Lauderdale.19 Because of Lauderdale’s role in Melville’s impeachment, neither the Dundasites nor Scott could treat with Lauderdale, hence their urgency in attempting to determine Moira’s strength within the All Talents government. The frantic exchange of correspondence between Dundas and Melville during the first few days of February 1806 over the power struggle between Lauderdale and Moira was of direct relevance to Scott, since on his arrival in London he had to guess where the management of Scotland lay.
Introduction
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However in the end, Moira bowed out, the reason avowed to Dundas being that he did not wish ‘to be the Instrument of a System of dispossession’, a remark that hints at the Foxite eagerness to rejoice in their newfound riches of office. Moira’s remark particularly highlights Scott’s happy fortune in arriving in London during these few days while government arrangements remained unsettled.20 At the same time Dundas was able to comfort his father on 13 February with the news that ‘Grenville’s friends’ had made it clear that Lauderdale would not be given Scotland.21 Moira and the Dundasites had won that much – or perhaps it was the King, also a Lauderdalehater, who had triumphed. Meanwhile old George Home, a Dundasite, and Francis Horner, a Whig, had heard that Scott had been granted his favour by Moira.22 The management of Scotland was ultimately shared between Grenville and Spencer. In the correspondence of George III, the official date of Spencer’s appointment is 5 February 1806 , and it would appear that Scott had seen him by 6 February.23 Ultimately, in a letter of advice written to Scott too late to reach him before his journey, George Ellis said, like commentators on both sides at this time, he was doubtful of this government’s durability, and argued that with such a disparate cabinet, there are ‘consequently as many seeds of dissention, of which His Majesty, it is probable will not lose much time before he avails himself ’.24 And so it proved. What this Whig government meant for the Edinburgh Review, who might have enjoyed a direct conduit to official policy, remains mostly speculative, because within the year the members of the All Talents cabinet were abruptly to find themselves once again sitting opposite the Treasury bench.25 Fox died in September 1806, and after an election called by Grenville, a new parliament opened in December 1806, but it too dissolved only a few months later, in March 1807, when Grenville and Grey, the new leaders of the Whigs, pressed the king too hard on the question of Catholic emancipation, and he exercised his prerogative of changing the government. At the same time, a vote went against the Whigs, who were about to reveal the results of a committee investigation into the previous Tory government’s sinecures.26 It is with oppositional language that this study is concerned. Austin Mitchell has written that ‘All opposition writers were part-time soldiers in an army generalled and largely manned by whigs.’27 Whether or not one agrees, this makes explicit the central role of the statement of principles, and the formulating of an ideology that was not dynastic or aristocratic. Hence the shifting relationships formed with the press and the waxing and waning of clubs under the rubric of Pittite or Foxite, and the importance of popular speakers such as Samuel Whitbread and Henry Brougham in the Commons. Probably for the government itself the most problematic accommodations arose out of the relationships, often jealous, that had to be sustained between the few good administrators available, particularly in their conduct of the war – one thinks of Canning, Castlereagh
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The Language of Whiggism
and Perceval. For the opposition Whigs, who sometimes declined any attendance in the House at all, the most sensitive relationships came out-of-doors, in the partnerships made with the radicals and in rising lower-class literacy, which was bolstered by the new interest in national politics. In Whig history, the Glorious Revolution represented the triumph of the ‘Protestant’ monarchical constitution. In the 1770s the American Revolution had brought into play another innovation – the possibility of a constitution that was not monarchical. The French Revolution brought republicanism closer still, but the unpredictability of events in France made a coherent policy impossible to sustain. F. O’Gorman outlines the questions that were canvassed: What was to be declared policy of the [Whig] party towards the French Revolution and towards reform at home? Beneath this, there lay the most crucial question of all. What was the nature of the British constitution? In short was that constitution which it was the party’s purpose to defend ‘founded upon the wisdom of antiquity, and sanctioned by the experience of time’, or was it, as Fox said on 6 May [1791], founded upon the doctrine of the rights of man?28
Burke’s literary talent lent eloquence to the disapproval of popular agitation, and his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) caused the Foxites to cast about for their own formula in retaliation – this led to a ‘campaign which had for its aim the adoption of Paine’s principles as the creed of the party’.29 However, even though the main oligarchy of the party were to shun the Paineite ideology and turn to Pitt after 1794, in the House they continued to sit with Fox. Physically, the split was signalled by Fox’s codifying of ‘the buff and the blue’, originally the colours of George Washington’s regiment, which had been taken up by the Rockinghams.30 With Fox, Whiggism became the language of Opposition, yet still within the context of a constitution traditionally known overall as Whig, that is to say, loyal to the Hanoverians. The closest thing to a manifesto among the Foxites was his Letter to the Electors of Westminster (26 January 1793). Those Whigs who stressed loyalty to the Crown and were willing to accept repression after the declaration of war in February 1793 instead became part of the coalition under the Duke of Portland that supported Pitt as wartime leader. It was the Foxites who were to keep the name Whig, until it disappeared altogether, whereas the Pittites were increasingly labelled Tories, a name they could hardly at first recognize as applying to them, given the original meaning of Toryism inherited from 1688, which denoted loyalty to the Stuarts rather than the Hanoverians. In 1793, these Tories or Pittites were still Whigs, in the sense of seventeenth-century constitutionalists – but they were Whigs who happened to support the war against France: ‘Many a man means, by a Tory, him who supported Mr Pitt in his anti-Gallican wars. Those wars, it happened that the Tories supported, and the Whigs opposed. What then? The Tories did not
Introduction
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support them as Tories, nor the Whigs oppose them as Whigs’.31 The French war did not, by this argument, define Whiggism, nor initially were the Tories hostile to the overthrow of Bourbon despotism. Confusing these debates at the same time was the emergence of a body of popular opinion in print as the Foxites became alienated from the Pittite Whigs.32 Whiggism as an oppositional force and radicalism as an extra-constitutional popular protest therefore emerge together during the 1790s.33 Burke wished to distinguish between them, and it was in the name of Whig constitutionality that he wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France, and in the attempt to direct the Whigs away from Foxite enthusiasm for the Revolution, the Appeal.34 Much like the Puritans in the seventeenth century, British Jacobins were to be seen as enthusiasts, if secular ones, and the Whigs were the members who had restored order to a country threatened by civil war. However, opposition parties in the seventeenth century had generally lost their heads, a point that confusingly resembled what was going on in France, and so distorted the development of late eighteenth-century opposition. In this context, the Whigs remain, even as oppositionists, within the governmental arena. Since this is before any understanding or use of the term ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’, the Whigs of the 1790s could only conceive of opposition formulated as dependent on the Prince of Wales and his court.35 Fox himself, except inasmuch as he was the charismatic focus of these men and women, had little sense of party as an ideological concept and remained ‘uninterested in the refinements of speculative doctrine’.36 The oxymoronic notion of a ‘legitimate’ or governmental opposition developed only gradually during these years from the 1790s till the 1820s and not until well after the personal domination by the figures of Pitt and Fox was gone. In 1826, when the Whigs were still casting about for a strong direction, George Tierney, leader in the House (1817–21) and formerly one of the Whigs who had joined the Tories in the Portland government, urbanely remarked ‘though the gentlemen opposite are in office, we are in power. The measures are ours, but all the emoluments are theirs’.37 The term ‘emoluments’ indicates the continuation of the eighteenth-century concept of what it meant to hold office. It was the ‘radical’ Whig John Cam Hobhouse who first used the term ‘his majesty’s opposition’ in this debate, as a witty play on the conventional way of referring to the government, ‘his majesty’s ministers’, and Canning in replying had taken it up, to general laughter.38 The question of legal opposition remains one of language for both the Whigs in parliament and the public out-of-doors. True radical discourse remains undeveloped until the nineteenth century, in part because of the extreme repression of the 1790s, and also as Olivia Smith and Edgar Rickwood argue, because publishing had to catch up to developments in working-class literacy. For example,
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The Language of Whiggism
Rickwood remarks that because of the change in copyright laws in 1774, William Hone, born in 1780, had the canon of literature made available to him in a way that his parents’ generation, subsisting on a diet of chap-books, the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, did not.39 Hone was able to read English poetry in the cheap collected editions of Cooke: ‘His generation was the first to have the genre of refined poetry readily available’.40 At the same time, the allusions used in his trials in 1817 remain an example of the old Protestant dissenting culture: ‘Because few texts were written in a vernacular language after the Restoration, books by protestant Dissent occupied a dominant place in the literature of Hone’s class’.41 E. P. Thompson argues that, Pilgrim’s Progress is, with the Rights of Man, one of the two foundation texts of the English working-class movement: Bunyan and Paine, with Cobbett and Owen, contributed most to the stock of ideas which make up the raw material of the movement from 1790–1850.42
Early nineteenth-century Whig language was not of the Dissenting vernacular. J. G. A. Pocock discusses how both radical and Tory criticisms of Whiggism – such as, for example, Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation (1824), Coleridge’s Constitution of the Church and State (1830) and Southey’s Colloquies (1830) – commonly advert to the sixteenth-century dissolution of the monasteries and dispersal of the medieval clerisy as illustrating the ill effects of Whiggish modernism.43 In these accounts, Whiggism stands for the secularization of discourse and learning since the Reformation. But the Whigs could also point to the peaceful effects of modernism. The dissolution of the monasteries and the arbitrary bequeathal of all the Church’s wealth to Henry VIII’s friends, represented merely the last action of a recalcitrant feudal monarch rather than the emergence of a new oligarchy. Whig culture, Pocock argues, is the product of an urban commerce that shunned ideology: ‘The ideal of politeness had first appeared in the Restoration, where it formed part of the latitudinarian campaign to replace prophetic [Puritan] by sociable religiosity’.44 The town thus usurped the sociability of the Court: in Edinburgh we see ‘a series of evidently Addisonian societies, dedicated to the furtherance of sociability, conversation, and moral and economic improvement’.45 This preference for sociability over ideology marks ‘the ethic of limited strife’.46 The ousting of Robert Walpole from office in 1742, for example, had marked a historical innovation because it had not required to be accomplished by assassination, execution, exile or impeachment, and this shows ‘the extent to which loss of political office was coming to be regarded as both normal and tolerable, rather than as evidence of fundamental constitutional differences requiring resolution by force’.47 Periodic alternation of government and opposition parties, of course, remained some distance in the future, after the time of Tierney
Introduction
11
and his interpretation of ‘his majesty’s loyal opposition’, but conflict remained contained within the freedom of Parliament.48 In this parliamentary arena, the Whigs were the only party, and the term itself was used to denote the factions of Whiggism as they variously manoeuvred to catch the monarch’s eye. But it would appear that the language and ideology of party were only developed by those not presently enjoying government patronage, and the Edinburgh Review offered an important innovation in the development of this ideology because it attempted to explicate the outlook of a ‘rational patriot’.49 In the early nineteenth century, ‘Scientific Whiggism’ as a literary discipline showed the way forward for Whigs such as Palmerston, Russell and Lansdowne. Henry Brougham, one of the key Edinburgh Review contributors, also turned out to be a talented publicist for the Whig party, when he finally fluttered onto the Foxite branch held out by Grey, but had he received any encouragement from the Pittites in 1804, he could equally as well have joined them. Thus, where American and French radical discourse ended in republicanism and warfare, Pocock argues, British Whiggism, in its response to the two constitutional revolutions in those societies, turned instead on a much more complicated discussion of Liberty and Opposition: ‘… English and Scottish critics and conservatives – Hume, Smith, Paine, Bentham, Burke, Coleridge, Mill and Macaulay – engaged through sixty years of mingled repression and debate in a radical transformation of several of the sciences of society’.50 Whiggism as it struggled to understand all the changes of government on the Continent developed the idea of constitutional and principled opposition in the early nineteenth century using the intellectual resources of its own historical vocabulary of liberty. In that sense all of these writers are Whigs. The first chapter of this study sets out the place of the Edinburgh Review as it emerged during the Peace of Amiens (1802–3) and attempted under the guise of ‘Scientific Whiggism’ to offer an economic explanation of the French Revolution. Four years later, in 1806, when the Foxite Whigs were included in a government for the first time since 1783, Charles James Fox and Henry Brougham produced a pamphlet entitled Inquiry into the State of the Nation at the Commencement of the Present Administration. Dwelling almost entirely on foreign policy, its analysis of what was wrong with Britain was read by commentators as a manifesto of Whiggism and reinforces the perception that the key points of policy for the country at this juncture were comprehended in the war with France. The Whigs under Fox had always been synonymous with civil liberty, but there was little place for this stance in a society governed by Fox’s former colleagues, now denominated ‘Tories’, who saw all talk of freedom in time of war as a jacobin threat to national security. It was characteristic of Brougham that he energetically went on in the same month to review the pamphlet himself in the Edinburgh Review and print copious extracts. A year later, during the election of
12
The Language of Whiggism
1807, he would attempt to set up a press campaign for the Whigs. The chapter also considers a controversial article written by Jeffrey in 1807, where he singles out William Cobbett as the most influential journalist of the day: ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’ marks a milestone in the press’s effort to speak of opposition to the government’s wartime policy. The Political Register had its own rejoinder, published in October 1807, when Cobbett, having judged that the Whigs’ moment of power had passed, wrote an article on the ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’ and offered his own assessment of the Whig government’s mistakes. The second chapter looks at the re-emergence of the characteristic Whig terminology of liberty, when Napoleon’s relentlessly victorious army was unexpectedly routed by the Spanish peasantry. British public opinion was immediately electrified by this victory of the people, and there was widespread clamour for troops to be sent to the Peninsula. Coincident with the fervour over Spanish liberty, Fox’s history of the Glorious Revolution was posthumously published, and there was general talk about freedom and ‘Whig principles’. However, the Whigs themselves continued to hold out in parliament for a negotiated peace, and Jeffrey and Brougham in the Edinburgh Review argued against the British war effort in Spain, predicting certain defeat. Paradoxically, it was left to the Tory government under the Duke of Portland – who had headed the coalition ‘Portland Whigs’ during the 1790s – to advocate principles of Spanish liberty: one of the results of the Edinburgh Review’s anti-Peninsular stance was the establishment of the Quarterly Review as a government propaganda vehicle. Spain, however, was crucial in providing the British public with an up-to-date ideology of freedom that was neither French nor Whiggish – while the Whigs, accustomed to being hailed as the champions of 1688, found themselves wrongfooted in the popular media that they had dominated since 1802. This chapter discusses articles about Spain and liberty published in the Edinburgh Review during the years 1807–10 and considers the terminology of freedom as used in Coleridge’s Friend, Wordsworth’s Convention of Cintra and Cobbett’s Political Register. Works discussed in the third chapter include William Cobbett’s Grammar and William Hone’s Three Trials, as well as James Mill in the Edinburgh Review on the liberty of the press. Inasmuch as the definition of libel was central to the debate about liberty during these years of wartime domestic repression, many writers became expert in the terms of libel law. The chapter also contains discussion of The Times’s relationship with the government. The Examiner, which had established itself in 1808 as a respected nonpartisan commentator, began to look ineffectual as its Whiggism was left behind by radicalism in 1816. On the government side at this time, Robert Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review against the unrestrained freedom of the press, which he argued had directly caused the post-war distress. This unrest culminated in 1820, in the agitation against George IV and his plans to divorce Caroline, when the queen made a
Introduction
13
sensation with her ‘Letter to the King’ – ghostwritten by Cobbett. In response, the king bypassed both parliamentary parties and set out his own case in an open letter to the public. In this chapter, the Whigs are seen to be left behind in the popular discussion of liberty. There continued to be awkward attempts by the party to use the extraordinary agitation for Caroline out-of-doors in order to bring down the government, but in the end the Whigs’ enlightenment rhetoric of freedom found few points of intersection with the legal challenges presented by radical journalists to the government judiciary. The chapter concludes with a Blackwood’s Magazine article of 1821 that jeered at the ‘State and Prospects of the Whigs’. The apostasy of the Whigs is a theme of the discussion analysed in the fourth chapter, as the second generation of Romantic critics, exemplified by William Hazlitt, who had never known the darkest days of wartime repression and now accused the first generation of having betrayed their 1790s ideals of liberty. The Whig rhetoric of the Glorious Revolution was no longer adequate to the crises of 1816–21 and had been superseded by a new definition of liberty, seen in the growth of working-class publishing. Whereas radical writers directly took on the government in the courts and deism even reappeared, infighting among the literary classes (the ‘Cockney School’ squabble), as set against the background of significant political upheaval, seemed trivial. Amid all the radical clamour, the unexpected development was the rise of a new Tory voice. As Blackwood’s Magazine argued, the Whigs no longer had all the jokes, and ‘personality’ became the new saleable commodity in periodical writing. The works of Byron, a Whig during the heyday of Examiner radicalism during 1812–15, were now co-opted by both the radicals and the Tories, and Don Juan and the new Tory magazines shared in the emergence of a new literary idiom of banter that crossed class boundaries. The fourth chapter thus contrasts the ‘Cockney school’ controversy over Rimini and Keats’s polite Whiggism with Blackwood’s response to Don Juan and Life in London, which emerged as the bestsellers of the 1820s. The fifth chapter looks at the intellectual stocktaking that took place in a number of periodicals during the early 1820s. Articles such as John Gibson Lockhart’s ‘Periodical Criticism’ (1818) in Blackwood’s and William Hazlitt’s ‘The Periodical Press’ (1823) in the Edinburgh Review undertook lengthy surveys of the periodical literature that had been such an outstanding feature of British life since the French Revolution – they theorized about the age’s character as a critical one. Less politely, Blackwood’s published its ‘Historical Review’ of the Edinburgh Review, professing to trace the quarterly’s decline after 1821. The parliamentary Whigs remained out of office, and the question arose as to what the language of traditional Whiggism could usefully offer. In the post-Napoleonic world, this was complicated by the fact that continental Liberalism was emerging as the charismatic term of freedom in the rebellions of Greece and
14
The Language of Whiggism
Spain – and in Britain itself both the young Tories and Whigs were embracing this fashionable new ‘cant’ of safe revolution. The sixth chapter opens with a consideration of the relationship between the old oppositional Whiggism and the new Liberalism, the preface to Don Juan standing as the key example of both together, and ends with contemporary testimony to the achievement of the Edinburgh Review. At its launch in 1824, the new Westminster Review set out an overview of the growth of public opinion during the Napoleonic era, and both the Westminster Review and Blackwood’s Magazine offered retrospectives of what the Edinburgh Review had brought to literary and political criticism. In 1826, the Edinburgh Review published its own summary of the era and outlined a history of Whiggism in a review article on Thomas Moore’s biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Suddenly at the end of the decade, the parliamentary Whigs were called upon to form a government, and thus began the long delayed programme of electoral reform that Fox had projected in the 1780s. Nonetheless, all the developments of 1825–30 – the Whigs’ accession to power, Francis Jeffrey’s move to London to become Lord Advocate, the establishment of a chair of political economy at London (not Edinburgh), the wild success of the new Tory monthly Fraser’s Magazine, and the publication of Moore’s life of Byron – all these in fact marked the end of Whiggism’s domination of British periodical literature.
1 1802–7 THE INTELLECTUAL ASCENDANCY OF WHIGGISM
I remember going one day [August 1807] into a bookseller’s shop in Fleet-street to ask for the Review; and on my expressing my opinion to a young Scotchman, who stood behind the counter, that Mr. Cobbett might hit as hard in his reply, the North Briton said with some alarm – ‘But you don’t think, Sir, Mr. Cobbett will be able to injure the Scottish nation?’1
The era of Whiggism’s intellectual ascendency in the early nineteenth century might be said to span the years 1802–24, from the first Edinburgh Review to Don Juan. In the early 1820s, liberalism seemed to appear internationally all at once, cutting across national boundaries and party benches as British foreign policy acknowledged the right of self-government to the fledgling South American republics. Whiggism, by contrast, was seen to be a collection of great families in search of government office. The image of Whiggism that had dominated the media since 1802 was more coherent in retrospect than any group of parliamentarians who called themselves Whigs during that time. By 1823, the Whigs as a political party were more adrift than ever: some had crossed the floor to Liverpool’s and Canning’s liberal Tories, while the ‘popular’ Whigs lost whatever cachet their various episodes of condescension had gained them with the radical media since the 1790s. The Liberal foundered, Bryon went off to Greece, and Whiggish adventures in the underworld of European liberty ceased. The Tory monthly Blackwood’s Magazine, established in 1817 in part to challenge the Edinburgh Review’s predominance, wrote – … Cobbett haunts Whiggism, as the devil was said of old to haunt those who raised him; they must find work for the spirit of mischief, or he must carry off the necromancers. The Whigs feel this; and a public meeting is now a public, theatrical, bitter exposure of Whig pride, in contact with rabble meanness … The most insolent men in the land steeped to the lips in reluctant humility, and soliciting the protection of the lowest. This is the crime that has covered Whiggism with national disgust.2
– 15 –
16
Language of Whiggism
Whiggism was a term of vituperation in the vocabulary of both Blackwood’s Magazine and William Cobbett’s Political Register (established 1802). It has since become a term of mild abuse in historical scholarship, in the revision of the Whig history of liberty. The quintessential purveyor of intellectual Whiggism is usually taken to be the historian and Edinburgh Review contributor Thomas Babington Macaulay, who recast the years from 1688 to 1832 as a triumphant progress leading up to the Whig Reform Parliament of 1832. However, if Whiggism remains no more than an ironic presence in historical writing, as scholars shadow-box with Sir Lewis Namier, it has mostly fallen out of literary criticism altogether.3 To begin to understand what Whiggism meant in the era between the French Revolution and Reform – let alone the finer points of who might actually claim to be a Whig – is no more than a minor intellectual pastime. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in an essay written in 1827, enumerates these contradictions, one of them being that while Pitt may have called himself a Whig, his opponents and ‘hagiographers’ claimed him as a Tory: There are, indeed, two Pitts, – the real and the imaginary, – the Pitt of history, a Parliamentary reformer, an enemy of the Test and Corporation Acts, an advocate of Catholic Emancipation and of free trade, – and the canonized Pitt of the legend, – as unlike to his namesake as Virgil the magician to Virgil the poet, or St James the slayer of Moors to St James the fisherman.4
At a time when Whiggism’s predominance since the Glorious Revolution was being challenged David Hume succinctly defined a Tory as ‘a lover of monarchy, though without abandoning liberty; and a partizan of the family of Stuart’ and a Whig as ‘a lover of liberty though without renouncing monarchy; and a friend to the settlement in the Protestant line’.5 In the eighteenth century, these distinctions were endlessly canvassed and sifted, but during the early nineteenth century were eclipsed by the cults of Pitt and Fox, and so often they break down into debate about what Pitt, in particular, stood for. Jennifer Mori writes that ‘[t]he Foxite opposition, hoping to receive from Pitt some coherent account of his policies, sought to brand him on “Tory” as early as March 1793’, but Pitt himself denied them the ‘exclusive claim to the term “Whig”’.6 There is evidence that Pitt subscribed loosely to a Benthamite belief in the autonomy, especially commercial, of the individual and could even have been called a liberal in his attitude towards trade, but what he lacked was any intellectually self-conscious critique such as the Edinburgh Review was to offer.7 And whatever the greater coherence of the Edinburgh Review’s analysis, like Pitt it also struggled to accommodate party or Foxite Whiggism, and both may be said to have rejected the party politics that the Foxites thought so crucial to their bolstering of liberty in an age of patriotism.
1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
17
There is no room for a full discussion of Pittite Whiggism or Toryism in a literary analysis, but Whiggism is perhaps particularly relevant as a literary concept to the Napoleonic generation of Romantic writers, whose attempts to be politically engaged were uneven. The revolutionary generation of writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge were, like Pitt, alternately and indistinguishably Tories and Whigs, the difficulty retrospectively being to untangle these strands from one another. Their jacobinism was, like the jacobitism of Samuel Johnson or Walter Scott, a literary and sentimental luxury that no prime minister could have risked and of which they themselves spoke carefully. Wordsworth and Coleridge came of the generation that embraced 1789 and even after forswearing direct revolutionary action, lived palpably with the consequences of their youthful enthusiasms. Coleridge in his lifetime was as well known as a journalist as a poet. Our view of him is shaped by the publication of the Biographia Literaria, but in 1802 or 1809, the German metaphysician was submerged in the public eye by the political leader-writer taunted by William Cobbett, who to Coleridge’s chagrin, was his more successful journalistic rival.
Francis Jeffrey and Edinburgh Whiggism Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1803 to 1829, experienced the same disruption in his career: educated to become a lawyer, finally appointed a judge in 1829, Jeffrey’s life’s work is seen instead as that of an editor of a newfangled quarterly started when he was an idle barrister. In the late 1780s, fourteen-year-old Jeffrey had matriculated at the University of Glasgow, where he is thought to have been sent because his father feared the inflammatory Whiggism that prevailed closer to home at the University of Edinburgh. Adam Smith was installed as Rector at Glasgow the very term (October 1787) that Jeffrey began as a student, but the latter – or his father – apparently did not support his election and Jeffrey was also forbidden to attend the lectures of the University’s notorious professor of law and government John Millar (1735–1801).8 On his return from Glasgow and Oxford, Jeffrey went in 1792 to the University of Edinburgh to prepare for a career in the law. However, his father would not allow him – and this, Jeffrey’s biographer Henry Cockburn finds ‘almost inconceivable’ – to attend the lectures of Dugald Stewart, who held the chair in Mathematics and also Moral Philosophy (1785–1809) and incorporated The Wealth of Nations and the history of liberty into these disciplines.9 Edinburgh was then the most progressive university in Britain, and Stewart its most exciting professor, especially when he began lecturing on political economy as a separate subject for the first time in 1800. Cockburn wrote, ‘To me his lectures were like the opening of the heavens. I felt that I had a soul’. But the older generation, shocked by the French Revolution, saw subversion in the new discipline,
18
Language of Whiggism
‘The mere term “Political Economy” made most people start. They thought that it included questions touching the constitutions of governments’.10 Jeffrey did finally attend Stewart’s second set of lectures, in the winter of 1801 when recently married he was no longer living in his father’s household. He left five volumes of notes and joined the Speculative Society, which during the years 1797–1800 included a number of future MPs such as Henry Brougham, Francis Horner and Lord Henry Petty.11 Like Petty, the future Lord Palmerston was also sent to Edinburgh and boarded with Stewart at his house in St Andrew Square in 1800–3.12 Discussion of the political events of the age were essential. Cockburn stresses, ‘Everything rung, and was connected with the Revolution in France; which, for above 20 years, was, or was made, the all in all. Everything, not this or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event’. As it turned out, 1802–3 marked a coming-together of both young and old against the imperialistic Napoleon. If Revolution had been on everyone’s lips in the 1790s, after 1803, during the second phase of the war, ‘Invasion became the word’. Cockburn, like Henry Brougham and Francis Jeffrey, went into uniform and took up drilling, and even Francis Horner carried a musket in the street: ‘Edinburgh, like every other place, became a camp, and continued so till the peace in 1814. We were all soldiers’.13 And so the Edinburgh Review opened in 1802 with an article on whether or not the freethinking philosophes of France had been responsible for unleashing the bloodshed of the previous ten years. It was an essential question to answer, in an Edinburgh with young men full of Adam Smith, and where Stewart, known to have been in France during the events of 1788–9, was questioned by the local authorities when he lectured on the philosophes. Cockburn suggests that the founding of the Edinburgh Review was a result of the compulsion to keep discussion going among those younger idealists who were not quite prepared to renounce the intellectual excitement of the 1790s.14 ‘Mounier De L’Influence des Philosophes’, reiterated the preoccupation of the age with its major catastrophe and employed the precepts of Stewart’s new political economy to portray history as less a succession of kings than modes of production of wealth that made political liberty compatible with capitalism and a desirable basis for citizenship. Politics entered the question in the attempt to distinguish British notions of liberty from French or revolutionary liberty and to decide who ought to comprise the electorate. The Edinburgh Review’s exposition of the new social science identifies the underlying factors that had made the conditions of political incompetence and injustice, generally present since the seventeenth century, flare up into the revolution of 1789. According to Jeffrey, these fundamental rather than accidental causes or conspiracies consisted in: ‘the change that had taken place in the condition and sentiments of the people; from the progress of commercial opulence; from the diffusion of information, and the prevalence of political discussion’.15 The emphasis on economic change is characteristic of
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19
what the Edinburgh group brought to national discussion and would bring to British government, partly through the agency of Lord Henry Petty as Chancellor in the brief Whig government of 1806–7 and Francis Horner on the Bullion Committee in 1810. It was to be another twenty years before the idea of legislative innovation and economic planning emerged clearly as a function of government, but the notion of a programme takes shape in these Whig literary figures who explained the greatest event of their day according to a theory of economic progress.
Francis Jeffrey and Cobbett’s Political Register The year 1802, when the Edinburgh Review started, saw the Peace of Amiens with France, and for the first time in over a decade brought perhaps a renewed glimpse of the Enlightenment debate suppressed by the necessity of wartime censorship. However, Pitt’s government had already begun to make plans for their own publication, this one designed rather to keep lower-class thought in line with official repression, and they approached William Cobbett, a farmer-soldier who had made a name for himself in America as a defender of the British government. The Scottish Enlightenment politesse of Francis Jeffrey and the English working-class brawling of William Cobbett are usually kept in separate compartments of literary history, and the differences of nationality have to a certain extent meant that the thinking of Edinburgh’s intellectual elite and England’s rural poor are rarely considered together. The understanding of how politics affects literary language in the early nineteenth century usefully begins with what the most powerful reviewer and journalist had to say about one another. Born in 1763, Cobbett was a self-taught farmer’s son who ran away to join the army; he served in Canada during the 1780s and went to Philadelphia and New York in the 1790s, where he defended the British government against American sympathy with France. Observations on Priestley’s Emigration (1794) made him prominent as an anti-jacobin. He published the Porcupine’s Gazette from 1797 to 1799, and when he returned to England in 1800 – the same year that Dugald Stewart was thrilling Edinburgh’s privileged young men with political economy – the Secretary at War, William Windham, invited him to dinner with Pitt. The fact that Pitt and Windham, government Whigs, as much as Fox or Jeffrey, opposition Whigs, all took note of Cobbett, perhaps indicates more than anything else the fluid nature of Whiggism and the value set on ‘literary’ talent. Indeed, the roll-call of those who came to dinner with Cobbett suggests that writing up the war occupied the government’s great minds almost as much as the deploying of men and materiel.16 However, Cobbett decided to remain independent, with his own paper, the Porcupine (1800–1) despite being supportive of the government’s case, and in 1803 wrote a pamphlet justifying the
20
Language of Whiggism
war effort, Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom distributed by the government, with a copy sent to every parish minister.17 In that same year Cobbett also began keeping the record of parliamentary debates that later became Hansard – by 1804, he had begun to speak out against Pitt.18 In 1807, the Political Register received national intellectual acknowledgement, when the July issue of the Edinburgh Review took the surprising step of reviewing this English lower-class newspaper at length.19 It is not strictly accurate in 1807 to use the term radical as a noun describing Cobbett – in any case, he was sui generis. Jeffrey’s article, entitled ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, well illustrates the literary method of the Edinburgh Review. It examines only one work – the eleven volumes of the Political Register issued over its first five years (1802–7) – but the vocabulary of Cobbett’s scurrilous periodical is scrutinized as thoroughly as that of any poem. Close rhetorical analysis is a signal feature that distinguishes the Edinburgh Review from the magazines of the late eighteenth century. As to why the magisterial Edinburgh Review should pay nice attention to a ‘common journalist’, Jeffrey does not hesitate: because in the Britain of 1807 Cobbett ‘has more influence, we believe, than all the other journalists put together’.20 This would have come as no surprise to the egotistical Cobbett. He boasted of his own literary power to Windham when he set up the Political Register – ‘I am conscious that my plan, particularly that part of it which relates to circulation, is extremely valuable’ – announcing that he could ‘at any time produce an almost instantaneous impression in every part of the nation’.21 The Edinburgh Review itself was anti-populist. A privileged product of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, Jeffrey does not flatter ‘the people’, and from the beginning spoke against a sentimental view of literary populism. In the very first issue, Jeffrey had remarked the announced intention of Robert Southey and the Lake ‘sect’ – ‘to adapt to the use of poetry, the ordinary language of conversation among the middling and lower orders of the people’ – and declared his own scepticism of the Burnsian notion that a man’s a man: the different classes of society have each of them a distinct character, as well as a separate idiom … The love, or grief, or indignation of an enlightened and refined character, is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench … The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their situation: but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is characteristic of it.22
Jeffrey saw no reason to encourage Wordsworthian democratic plans for literature, which he thought dangerous. Politics, like Literature, was still the exclusive preserve of those who owned property, and Jeffrey wrote for an audience with
1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
21
no direct experience of democracy. Cobbett’s sympathies had been Pittite during the 1790s, and Jeffrey took pleasure in pointing out that Within the last six months, however, he has undergone a most extraordinary and portentous transformation. Instead of the champion of establishment, of loyalty, and eternal war with all revolutionary agency, he has become the patron of reform and reformers.23
By means of comparing Cobbett’s own phrases, first as a reactionary and then as a reformer, Jeffrey seeks to undercut the authority of this journalist who was read by more people than anyone else in the country, including Westminster. And it is by this close critical attention to the terms of Cobbett’s change of heart that we come to understand the significance of early-nineteenth-century political vocabulary. The vocabulary of the early Cobbett emphasizes loyalty – to the monarchy, to the Hanoverians and to the Establishment.24 All these define what we would call the Tory position, that is to say, the patriotism of those who continued to support the long war against Napoleon. This article appeared when the Pittite Tories had come back into government, upon the resignation of the All Talents cabinet in March 1807. Cobbett had turned against the Whigs, and it would appear that Jeffrey’s article was not entirely a disinterested analysis of Cobbett’s appeal. Like Cobbett, however, Jeffrey had been disappointed at the Whig reversion to the party patronage system, and in this article he reiterates his preference for the traditional influence of the great landowners over that of those new capitalists made by the long war with France, even as he continues the typical late-eighteenth-century factional complaints about the number of placemen. The places they aspired to were not the Crown’s sinecures or pensions that Pitt had begun to scrutinize twenty years earlier, which the ‘most rigorous and unsparing reformer probably would not state the sum-total at a million annually’.25 Rather, Jeffrey is talking more about the bureaucracy that had been deemed necessary to administer the country in time of war and the resultant increase in patronage appointments: the King and his ministers have now the disposal of offices to the value of Twelve millions yearly. The expense of collecting the taxes was calculated, ten years ago, at six millions … all our establishments are upon a scale infinitely more extensive than was ever exemplified before among such a number of people. We have a navy suitable to a population of fifty millions; and a debt, revenue, and a colonial establishment, greater than would belong elsewhere to an hundred millions. The result is, that almost every third man is in possession or expectancy of some public office; and that there is scarcely an individual, above the rank of a common labourer, who does not look forward to some such appointment, as a part of his means of subsistence, or of elevation in society.26
22
Language of Whiggism
The hope of a government place or contract among educated men led to political quiescence, and in a total population of 12.1 million (1811) fewer than 4 per cent were entitled to vote.27 The secret ballot was at this time regarded as an unfathomable horror by even the most liberal reformers, and one copy of the Edinburgh Review cost five shillings: Jeffrey is writing for an audience with no direct experience of democracy. The original Whig notion of constitutional freedom derived from the now arcane seventeenth-century attempts of the Stuarts to rule without Parliament. The eighteenth century, specifically 1745, had seen an end to that possibility. There was as yet no nineteenth-century vocabulary of liberty. Refusing to submit again to the blanket repression of the 1790s, Jeffrey points out the need for reform of the government establishment, and at the same time, the growing strength of public opinion shown by readership of William Cobbett’s Political Register. Traditional Whig complacency about the success of 1688 in putting the Stuart kings in their constitutional place went along, as Jeffrey notes, with anxiety about attracting Hanoverian place rewards. But to be a Whig after April 1807 was to be place-less. According to John Clive, citing Lord Holland, Henry Brougham was the one who urged Jeffrey to write the article on Cobbett, but Stanley Jones has shown that Brougham, consulting with Dugald Stewart, instead advised against entering into a topical controversy.28 It was this new emphasis on being ‘political’, Biancamaria Fontana argues, that separated the Edinburgh Reviewers from their mentor, Stewart: ‘In their eyes, Stewart was guilty of the 18th-century illusion that the philosopher and political economist could be above political parties and factional disputes – that his appropriate political function was to counsel an enlightened monarch’.29 The picture of an Edinburgh professor of moral philosophy finding it necessary to hold the skirts of his academic gown above the political fray is a thinly comic one. Nonetheless, when the Whigs got into power in 1806, his former students now seated at Westminster soon drew Stewart into public view. When Parliament revisited some of the Whigs’ handiwork after their brief stay in office, the Tory speakers remarked among other things that the Scots philosopher Dugald Stewart had been given the new chair of Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh. His sinecure also included the Writership of the Edinburgh Gazette, with a salary cobbled together from the money previously paid to three newspaper editors in Scotland, although the actual work was to be done by Alexander Lawrie. George Canning, the Tories’ best speaker and Brougham’s equal in literary press campaigning, made some cutting remarks on this and other Whig appointments. About this exchange Spencer Perceval later reported to George III that as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had been ‘obliged to mention some instances in which the late Ministers in the creation of new offices had been grasping at patronage with an eagerness inconsistent with
1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
23
that superior purity & disinterestedness which they were so desirous to affect’, and drew particular attention to Canning’s performance, saying it was ‘one of the most brilliant speeches which either he or any other man ever delivered’.30 In reply, Lord Henry Petty, the young Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer and former student of Stewart, observed that Stewart earned only £135 per annum at the University and pointedly asked – ‘Were editors of newspapers the only literary men the gentlemen opposite would protect?’31 This was a hit at the wellknown connections of Canning with the press, particularly the Courier, and earlier than that, his writing for the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8).32 Canning defended himself, saying He acknowledged the high literary merit of Mr. Dugald Stuart [sic], who had besides the merit, and he thought it no light one, of having educated the noble lord [Lord Henry Petty]. He acknowledged and lamented the general insufficiency of the rewards bestowed of literary merit in this country; but he highly condemned the mode of reward here adopted, by constituting a new sinecure, and bestowing it on Mr. Stuart and his assignees for 21 years. As to the comparison instituted by the noble lord between this grant and the rewards granted to the writers of the Anti-jacobin, he for one, felt no shame for the characters or principles of that work.33
All this paled beside the undeniable fact that the Whigs had found a sinecure for one of their own, including also the proprietor of the Morning Chronicle, a paper with traditional Whig connections.34 Thus, the Edinburgh Reviewers – whose intellectual mission following Stewart was to promote the informed discussion of political economy as a branch of moral philosophy by which to supersede the eighteenth-century political construction of human happiness – enter into the footnotes of partisan politics. The intellectual inheritance from Stewart, seen in the Whig emphasis upon social legislation, was an advanced idea in itself to an age that was used to thinking of government as merely executive. Edmund Burke may have shown in his Appeal from the Old Whigs to the New Whigs, that ‘The People’ cited by the Whigs did not constitutionally exist in French or British civil government, but if the major part of the Edinburgh Review’s cultural project was to apply Scottish theses of capitalism, it also became involved through Westminster politics in refurbishing the seventeenthcentury English Whig intellectual heritage. This involved agreeing with Burke on legal grounds that the Glorious Revolution had been constitutionally sound in deeming the sudden absence of the Stuart king from the throne in 1685 an ‘abdication’, but disagreeing with him when he pronounced the deposition of the Bourbon monarch in 1792 a legal solecism. In Burke’s argument, ‘the People’ had no legal existence, nor were their ‘rights’ identifiable with the touted ‘rights of man’.35 If the Edinburgh Review might go along with this legal argument, their education under Dugald Stewart in the years 1799–1801 had opened up a whole new arena of terms, wherein ‘the People’ existed, if not legally, then eco-
24
Language of Whiggism
nomically speaking at least. To secure acceptance of their own social scientific discipline as an explanation of history, the Edinburgh Whigs had to accede also to an invocation of ‘the People’. Hence Jeffrey’s conclusion in his Cobbett article that popular revolution was inevitable: ‘We can see, as well as Mr Cobbett, the seeds of a revolution in the present aspect and temper of the nation; and though we look forward to it, we trust, with other feelings and other dispositions, we are not the less sensible of the hazard in which we are placed’.36 In other words, Cobbett is being reviewed because the danger from ‘the People’ must be acknowledged, even though the largest part of the article is spent dismissing the authority of populist demands. The Edinburgh Review felt it necessary to counter the tendency of the Political Register, which was to communicate a very exaggerated and unfair impression of the evils, abuses and inconveniences, which arise from the present system of government, – and to hold out the absolute impossibility of correcting or amending these, without some great internal change, of the nature of a political revolution.37
Finally, Jeffrey’s article becomes a conservative apologia for the status quo: ‘it is very easy to imagine something a great deal worse than the present constitution of this country, with all its rotten boroughs, sinecure offices, and placemen and pensioners in parliament’.38 The article begins actually to praise such practices, saying ‘the influence of great families in the election of members is rather beneficial than pernicious’, and ‘[i]n a country where rank, wealth and office, constitute the chief sources of influence over individuals, it is proper that rank, wealth and office, should make the greatest numbers of its legislators’ – surely, an argument that would have ingratiated Henry Brougham with the parliamentary Whigs.39 This vocabulary is old-fashioned on both sides. The argument for great families, associated with the Whigs rather than the modern stock-jobbing Tories, reiterates eighteenth-century tussles between the Court and Country. Cobbett’s complaints about ‘placemen and pensioners’ had invoked Country complaints about the amount of money the Court held at its disposal to keep the independent members in Parliament on its side. Pitt had been in the midst of eliminating these useful sinecures in the 1780s when the French Revolution broke.40 Placemen and pensioners were not a ‘modern’ disease: what was urgent from Cobbett’s own perspective is that the work of reform should not again be pre-empted for twenty years by the bogeyman of jacobinism. Indeed, here, by contrast, the Edinburgh Review argues that the commercial classes are already quite well represented – an argument of the Whigs, who had been worried that Pitt’s encouragement of the stockbrokers and colonial speculators was encroaching upon the interests of the great landowners:
1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
25
The whole landed interest, including the peerage, is scarcely a match for the monied interest, either in Parliament or in society; and, as it is the basis of a more steady and permanent, as well as a more liberal and exalted dependency, we wish rather to see peers concerned in elections, than stockjobbers or nabobs.41
It is part of the intimacy of this world that we have not only the notice of Cobbett by Jeffrey but also Cobbett’s remarks in his own paper, as to why the Edinburgh Review had noticed him at all. Despite the quarterly’s philosophical analysis of the causes of the French Revolution and the economic progress of the working classes, Cobbett’s rather ad hominem theory is that he has drawn attention to himself by making a derogatory reference to one of the Edinburgh coterie. For, as he remarks, the Edinburgh Review does not generally descend to publications of his level (‘It is not their custom to review newspapers’), and says without further paraphrase, ‘The real cause was the following passage in the Register of the 21st of March last, Vol. XI. page 440’, where he had described the Whig Chancellor, Lord Henry Petty among his Commons followers on the eve of dissolution – ‘see my Lord Henry Petty, who, backed and cheered by a daily increasing band of “young friends”… has brought forth and propounded to the House such magnificent plans of finance, occupying a bulk of book larger than the Bible’.42 And indeed, we may contrast Cobbett’s sarcasm with the Edinburgh Review’s own laudatory notice in April 1807 by David Buchanan, a commentator on Adam Smith, of Petty’s speech to the Committee of Finance, ‘Lord Henry Petty’s Plan of Finance’.43 The Political Register’s less respectful view of Lord Henry, Cobbett says, the Whigs ‘knew to be pointed at them’.44 One of the ‘young friends’ would have been Francis Horner, a Edinburgh Reviewer who had been sponsored by Petty: well-regarded in the House for his seriousness, Horner was always ridiculed as much for his appearance as anything else by Cobbett, who did not like anything very Scottish. To be fair, Sydney Smith himself said that he had always had to compose his own face to propriety when he came within half a block of the earnest Horner, whose pious mother had intended him for the Presbyterian kirk.45 On the Edinburgh Review’s charge of apostasy, Cobbett cites specific instances from his own writings, beginning in 1804, showing how he himself had drawn attention to his change of opinion especially about Pitt.46 Nor does Cobbett let the Edinburgh Reviewers themselves off on the charge of inconsistency: They have praised, until the late change, every ministry that has been formed since their work began. They were delighted with Addington, enamoured of Pitt, and they adored (for good reason) poor Mr. Fox, upon whom they were fastened by Lord Henry Petty. They grossly satirized Lord Lauderdale, while out of place, and more grossly flattered him, when he came into place. They eulogized Pitt’s system of finance to the skies, and that of Lord Henry Petty’s (the very reverse of it) to the third heaven.47
26
Language of Whiggism
It might be said that this is more precisely a description of the flounderings of Henry Brougham rather than of the review as a whole, but it is still wonderfully cutting of the quarterly’s intellectual dignity. Even more so is Cobbett’s visual evocation of these Scotchmen arriving in London at the invitation of Petty and their subsequent discomfiture at the abrupt end of Whig government after little more than a year: their straight backs, high cheek-bones, and modest faces, were seen in all the passages and offices of Whitehall, whence their lucubrations were dispatched to Edinburgh. From such a state of possession, and especially of prospect, to be ousted, in the twinkling of an eye, without either writ or summons or intimation of any sort; to find themselves, like the drunken cobler in the play, returned, as if by enchantment, back to their onions and beer, was too much for even their patient natures to bear; and it was just at this time that my unhappy Register of the 21st of March [the government was dissolved 24 March] happened to salute them. Upon me, therefore, and upon the authors of their fall (the king and new ministry) they fell in their next Numbers.48
The Whigs’ disappointment at finding themselves out of office so precipitately, just when their new legislative programme was under way, was therefore taken out on Cobbett – thus everything comes round to the happy egotism of Cobbett himself, who, like Coleridge, has a knack of explaining British politics by reference to his own presence in awkward places.49 Cobbett had exposed the high-minded politically scientific Scotch commentators who, despite having done ‘excellent service in terrifying blockheads from the press’, turned out to be place-hunters after all. His own article had been ‘an act of self-defence’, I saw them, upon the exaltation of the Whigs [the Ministry of All-Talents], flock up to England, ‘like carrion crows to a poor dying horse;’ I saw some of them gorging, and others of them about to gorge, upon the fruit of our labour; and, when, all of a sudden, I saw them driven away [end of the Whig ministry of 1806–7], like the said crows; from their unfortunate prey, was I not to be allowed to express my satisfaction? … For what were we to be thus loaded? For no better reason, perhaps, than that Lord Henry Petty, no great while ago, belonged to a spouting-club with these men at Edinburgh! … True these reviewers could not live by the law. That they had tried in Scotland; and, therefore, they would hardly earn bread at it in England. But, they could write their review, as they call it.50
Thus, a hit at the paucity of briefs for Whig lawyers in Edinburgh and Francis Horner’s half-hearted attempts to practise law in England allows the whole intellectual mission of the Edinburgh Review to be exposed as political, not literary, and Edinburgh is found to be nearer Westminster than might be supposed among the rural reading public of England.51 In writing a critique of Cobbett, the Edinburgh Review was engaging with party politics, perhaps as part of an attempt to retrieve the unexpected humiliation of March 1807 and fashion an intellectual justification out of political
1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism
27
defeat.52 The presence of Francis Horner, and especially Henry Brougham, at Westminster, actively involved in fighting the next electoral campaign, showed the new importance, after the death of Fox, who had been the ultimate political insider, of the understanding of the media and its national presence. Horner had deplored the All Talents government’s inattention to the newspapers, and upon their stepping down from power, had helped put together a short pamphlet outlining their achievements.53 A year later, he wrote of the Tory government’s ‘indefatigable, systematic attention to the daily press’ and the Whigs’ own ‘few feeble efforts to oppose this torrent, by good writing and virtuous indignation’. Horner argued that the newspaper was ‘now a necessary of life … a man feels himself as awkward if he walks out without his political creed for the day, as if he wanted his breakfast’.54 Francis Horner was not the only member of the Edinburgh Review circle to attempt to advise the Whigs on a press strategy. In the 1807 election the relationship between the parliamentary Whigs and the Edinburgh Review altered with the party’s use of Henry Brougham as a publicist. Inasmuch as the All Talents government had broken up in the face of George III’s resistance to further measures of Catholic emancipation, there was a good deal of anti-popery talk in the countryside, and Ivon Asquith argues that ‘the chief purpose of the [Whig press] campaign was to mollify dissenters who might have been alienated from the whigs by their attempt to secure a measure of Catholic relief ’.55 Although three years earlier, when Pitt formed his last administration, Brougham had gone down to London as a youthful Pittite, in 1806 he had begun a personal campaign to be chosen by the Foxite and Grenvillite Whigs for a seat in Parliament. He demonstrated his Opposition Whiggish credentials by writing up an anonymous pamphlet, An Inquiry into the State of the Nation at the Commencement of the Present Administration and then reviewing it anonymously and favourably in the Edinburgh Review (April 1806).56 Brougham had learned much about rousing public support from working with William Wilberforce on the abolitionist campaign, and the Whigs’ best-known legislative achievement was the abolition of the slave trade.57 It was the restriction of Catholic freedoms that had proved to be the ideological stumbling block for the country. Brougham worked with Lord Holland, who wrote, We raised a subscription the very day of the dissolution for the management of the press… Even the Dissenters, upon whom, in a context with the Crown, the Whigs must always mainly rely, were alarmed at the report of our indulgences to the Roman Catholicks … Our appeals were chiefly directed to the Dissenters.58
Brougham’s instructions for the handling of this press campaign advised employing famous literati such as Monk Lewis and Thomas Campbell (also Richard Porson, Cambridge Greek scholar and brother-in-law to James Perry, owner of
28
Language of Whiggism
the Morning Chronicle) for quotations, and the gleaning of Shakespeare and Swift for passages about corruption to be placed in the papers.59 Among the London papers used were the Morning Chronicle and the British Press, and four evening ones, the Globe, the Traveller, the Pilot and the Statesman – all generally papers connected to individuals within the Whig spectrum. Both the Globe and the British Press were set up in 1803 by London booksellers in direct competition with the Morning Chronicle, which was known for its literary advertisements but had not always satisfied the Whigs, while the Traveller had Grenvillite connections, and the Pilot, established only that year, had East India money behind it.60 Also used was the Morning Star, which had been established in November 1805 with connections to William Windham, who had initially used William Cobbett as part of an effort to popularize the government’s conduct of the war. The Statesman, an evening paper with Whig connections, had been set up in February 1806 by John Hunt with Daniel Lovell as proprietor-editor backed by Lord Moira, a confidant of the Prince of Wales, precisely at the time when Moira was faced with exclusion from real power in the All Talents government. Started specifically as a paper that could go out to the provinces, it lasted no more than six months.61 Thus the Whigs at this time show some consciousness of the need to cultivate the press – a need that normally did not trouble the party in power, who bargained with newspapermen from a position of strength, inasmuch as they were able to offer secret service money, official intelligence, good advertising and jobs, as well as the sticks of ex-officio indictments and postal delivery delays.62 In fact, when the All Talents government took office, they placed advertisements in the Morning Chronicle ‘in unprecedented numbers, totalling over 600’. The government notion of the usefulness of newspapers had more to do with advertising than the editorial department.63 Out of office, the Whigs were divided about the efficacy of newspapers and thought of public opinion as something that was voiced by local grandees in county meetings. The sum of £550 given by some party leaders to aid Brougham’s press campaign, at a time when thousands were normally spent on elections, indicates its relatively low order of importance. It was only subscribed to by Grenville, Spencer, Holland, Howick, Petty, Lauderdale, Kinnaird and W. H. Fremantle, with Grenville and Howick stipulating that they would not themselves have any direct contact with newspapers. Nor was Fox a cultivator of ‘paragraphs’: he thought that foreign policy issues, his own greatest interest, required the fuller discussion offered by pamphlets rather than newspapers. The eighteenth-century view was that publication of parliamentary proceedings marked a more substantive blow for public opinion than the cultivation of a hack’s overnight editorials.64 The young Brougham was used therefore as a kind of tentative arm’s length instrument of Whig public opinion, and in the end, most of the writing had
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to be done by Brougham himself. Originally there were seventeen volunteers, including such important figures as Henry Petty, Thomas Erskine, Lauderdale and Francis Horner, but the number of contributors finally came down to seven, including Sydney Smith, but ultimately mostly Holland and John Allen.65 The disorganization of the All Talents – the fact that there were too many factions within the ministry itself – contributed to their downfall and also made it unlikely that they could ever organize their relations with the press. It could be argued that the press had widely been sympathetic to the Whigs during their period of ministry, and there was no need of a public relations campaign until the Catholic relief debacle of March 1807. Notably, Cobbett, who had been part of the general opposition to the Pittites before 1806, turned against the Whigs at this time. Inasmuch as he had been perhaps the strongest opposition voice until then, perhaps Jeffrey felt it necessary to take notice of him in the Edinburgh Review in order to counteract his influence. Although it had not conceived of itself as a political organ, the quarterly’s breadth of literary articles first drew in readers who were not politically minded, only to make them so: ‘the variety of [its] contents attracts those who never dream of opening a pamphlet’.66 As Marilyn Butler points out, the Edinburgh Review built on the enlargement of the reading public that took place in the 1790s, even though it was itself exclusionary and deprecated the indiscriminateness of the Dissenting magazines that contained anywhere from forty-four (Monthly Review) to sixty-seven (British Critic) articles in one issue.67 The Edinburgh Review began with twenty-nine articles in its first issue but later reduced the number to eighteen, and then to twelve a month. All this was actually irrelevant to the parliamentary Whigs, except that some of them set about applying this extra-parliamentary pressure on the government to their own problem of getting ‘in’. In his discussion of the Whig party’s approach to management of the press, Ellis Wasson argues that the quarterly came to enjoy ‘a symbiotic relationship with the party in the 1820s and 30s, and remained the chief repository of whig opinion until the later nineteenth century’.68 In the interlude of peace during 1802–3, the achievement of the Edinburgh Review had been to break through the intellectual stalemate of Britain since 1793 that required so much legal repression. As Cockburn noted, Many thoughtful men, indifferent to party, but anxious for the progress of the human mind, and alarmed lest war and political confusion should restore a new course of dark ages, were cheered by the unexpected appearance of what seemed likely to prove a great depository for the contributions of able men to the cause of philosophy.69
It was in fact the Edinburgh Review’s seeming solution to the political impasse created by the war that had made its appearance newsworthy. Dugald Stewart had discarded seventeenth-century political philosophy, with all its legal bag-
30
Language of Whiggism
gage, and instead offered political economy as a more scientific predictor of human behaviour in the uncertainty after the French Revolution. The legal battles of democratic politics were made irrelevant. Stewart’s system for establishing moral progress was not political – indeed, the French Revolution had erred in leading ‘both the French Revolutionists and some of their British friends astray by making participation in the political process a condition for both private and public happiness’.70 Later readers, removed from the personalities of the day, might contrast the magisterial appeal to literary permanence found in the pages of the Edinburgh Review with the scrappy name-calling of Cobbett – and wonder what common literary place can be found for these two rhetorics. We no longer share the early nineteenth-century’s assumption that the Edinburgh Review is literature, to be ranked above novel-writing.71 Cobbett has been compared to Paine as a plain speaker, but in fact until 1805, Cobbett had been closer to Fox in political terms than Paine.72 It is not until 1816 that Cobbett becomes unmistakably ‘radical’ in his stance, although arguably his style can never be identified with any particular position, nor was he a philosophical theorist like Paine.73 His radicalism consisted as much in his literary style as anything else and in his analysis of educated rhetoric. Cobbett’s only ‘system’ was to expose the government’s rhetoric: ‘The mass of mankind are worked upon by the power of words. They are very apt to take a thing to be, and to let it pass for what it is called’.74 In the year after Jeffrey’s analysis of the Political Register’s appeal, Samuel Taylor Coleridge also made plans to write his own political journal. Mention of Cobbett turns up suspiciously often in Coleridge’s correspondence at the time when the Friend is getting under way, and it is pretty clear that he saw Cobbett as his main competition. Coleridge later recollected the story of his encounter with an ordinary man who was a Cobbett reader: It has often struck me, as a peculiarity of this enlightened age, that in all classes we meet with critics and disputants; from the Parliament to the Common Council, from the Crown and Anchor to the Chequers in St. Giles’s, nothing but discussion! A fellow in rags, who had held my horse for the few moments that I had occasion to dismount, expressed his thanks for a shilling, in these words: – “Bless your honour! I have not had a pint of beer, or seen the Register, for a week past”. “The Register?” quoth I – “Aye,” replies he, with a grin, “Cobbett’s the man, Sir! he has Ideas – A man’s nothing without Ideas”.75
It would indeed be disconcerting for a scholar of German metaphysics to hear that it was not he but a blowhard farmer who was the one known for having ideas – in fact, what this humble enthusiasm shows is that the readers of Cobbett themselves now brandished political ideas. One could do a statistical survey of how many people in both the unenfranchised and franchised sections of society read and bought Cobbett’s newspapers, but what is indeed more striking at this
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time is the number of references to reading Cobbett that are to be found in the diaries and letters of prominent people. It would appear that even the most au fait insiders at Westminster looked to Cobbett for the earliest domestic political information. In 1803, for example, Lady Stafford, mother to Lord Granville Leveson Gower, a prominent Canningite, wrote to her son, who was in Whitehall at the time, asking if he had looked at the latest Political Register (familiarly referred to as ‘Cobbett’) and could confirm its account of the government’s dealings over the possession of Malta – she reported that she had said to his father, ‘I told him I supposed you had not heard of it till you read it in Cobbett’.76 In similar fashion, when rumours began to emerge in 1804–5 that Pitt had confidentially offered to give Hawkesbury a Cabinet post and brush aside Canning, one of his greatest devotees, the ‘Insinuations’ came out in Cobbett first. As Lady Bessborough the Whig hostess mischievously wrote to Leveson Gower, ‘Owing to Cobbett’s remarks [about Pitt’s willingness to give up Canning] all last year’s conversations have been renew’d’.77 When Leveson Gower was posted on a crucial diplomatic mission to Russia in 1805, he had the Political Register sent to St Petersburg with the regular newspapers. The Edinburgh Review article of 1807 is only one public acknowledgement of Cobbett’s power as he began to turn from Pittite and Whig to radical opposition. The remarkable fact remains that this self-educated farmer was recognized as a literary stylist among the educated classes before he became a rhetorical force among the precariously literate ones.
2 1807–10 THE REVIVAL OF LIBERTY
Nor unatoned, where Freedom’s foes prevail, Remain’d their savage waste. With blade and brand, By day the Invaders ravaged hill and dale, But, with the darkness, the Guerilla band Came like night’s tempest, and avenged the land.1
If the peace of Amiens in 1802–3 had represented the first possibility since 1798 of discussing the progress of public opinion and natural rights, then the commencement of war in the Peninsula in 1807–8 made possible the spectacular re-emergence of discourse about liberty – in both cases, it is important to note, political events on the Continent were the catalyst for revived philosophical discussion in Britain. In June 1807, as the All Talents government handed over power to the Tories, France decisively defeated Russia: for Britain this represented the lowest point of the Napoleonic era.2 The Whigs had seen foreign affairs as their great strength because of their sympathy for France since the 1790s, but the failure of their peace initiative and the chaotic administration of the war under Windham, who alienated popular support with his dismantling of the volunteer system, left the country with no clear way forward. The deaths of Nelson, Pitt and Fox deprived Britain of heroic leadership. When the government passed to Portland’s Tories, charge of the war – which dictated both foreign and domestic policy – went to Castlereagh and Canning, neither of them popular figures. Britain after fourteen years of war had no allies and no foothold on the Continent. It was left to these two ambitious rivals to fashion a new patriotic ideology and strategy. Unexpectedly, it was Spain that provided both. The Peace of Tilsit had meant that Napoleon was able to turn his attention to the Peninsula, demanding that Portugal declare war on Britain. When Portugal did not cooperate, Napoleon invaded Spain, up till now an ally, on the pretext of attacking Portugal. The government of both countries collapsed: the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil, and Napoleon, using the infighting of the Spanish royal family, engineered their removal and replaced them with his own brother Joseph.
– 33 –
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Language of Whiggism
None of this looked promising for Britain, until May, when riots broke out against the French army.3 By early June, envoys from various regions of Spain had travelled to Britain and received promises of aid.4 In mid-July troops set sail from Cork: by late August British troops under Sir Arthur Wellesley had won two battles in Portugal. In an instant, literature and politics converged in the imaginative excitement generated by Spanish popular resistance and decisive British action. In the same month as British forces departed for Portugal, Francis Jeffrey’s review of the long-awaited History of James II by Charles James Fox, which had been posthumously published, appeared in the Edinburgh Review. The talk of liberty became electric. Henry Brougham wrote to Grey – ‘… Fox’s book is flourishing. The cry is loud and universal in its favour. All classes – political, fashionable, and literary – talk of nothing else, and talk in the same strain … the cause of liberty and liberality of opinion is prodigiously refreshed by it’.5 Jeffrey’s review of the book in July 1808 speaks of the same revival of energy: ‘it contains the only appeal to the old principles of English constitutional freedom … which we recollect to have met with for very many years’.6 As he celebrated Fox’s book, however, Jeffrey also forensically dissected the long setback of the ideology of freedom in Britain caused by the French Revolution, which had derailed all talk of revolution: The revolution of 1688, it was agreed, could not be mentioned with praise, without giving some indirect encouragement to the revolution of 1789; and it was thought as well to say nothing in favour of Hampden, or Russel, or Sydney, for fear it might give spirits to Robespierre, Danton or Marat.7
Three years before, in his ‘Memoires de Bailly’, Jeffrey had argued, ‘Among the many evils which the French revolution has inflicted on mankind, the most deplorable … consists in the injury it has done to the course of rational freedom, and the discredit in which it has involved the principles of political philosophy’.8 A second reason for decline of the constitutional activism of the early 1790s had been ‘the great increase of luxury, and the tremendous patronage of the government’.9 The war had not only made talk of freedom treasonable but it had also made the government the most powerful distributor of commercial contracts. In a paragraph that very nearly reproduces the phrasing of his article on Cobbett a year earlier, Jeffrey reiterates the old Whig complaint of ‘influence’, when government has the disposal of nearly fifteen millions per annum, and the power of nominating to two or three hundred thousand posts or places of emolument … there is scarcely one man out of three who does not hold or hope for some appointment or promotion from Government.10
1807–10 The Revival of Liberty
35
Rising prospects had inevitably made ‘Tories’ out of middle-class suppliers to the navy and army bureaucracies. Fox’s account of James II reminded the Whigs that they had once been at the centre of government and history, although Fox’s own career had unfolded against a backdrop of decline. In his emphasis on an economic analysis of freedom – the hallmark of the ‘Scotch metaphysics’ – Jeffrey expresses no wish to foment rebellion: we shall do wisely to occupy ourselves with the many innocent and pleasing pursuits that are allowed under all governments, instead of spreading tumult and discontent, by endeavouring to realize some political conceit of our own imagination.11
Nonetheless political freedom remained a central term in Jeffrey’s intellectual economy. The French had merely imitated what the English had already achieved a century before with the Glorious Revolution. Now, while the French war still imposed national restrictions in the name of patriotism, Fox’s History of James II, with the author and his subject both safely dead, clearly ex hilarated, because it was necessarily a circumscribed discussion of the topic of liberty. Jeffrey presses the point, that fear of the call for liberty is now merely a historical emotion: It is now [ July 1808] at least ten years since Jacobinism was prostrated at Paris [by Napoleon]; and it is still longer since it ceased to be regarded with any thing but horror in this country … we hail, with pleasure, this work of Mr Fox’s, as likely to put an end to a system of timidity so apt to graduate into servility, and to familiarize his countrymen once more to speak and to think of Charles, of James, and of Strafford; – and of William, and Russell, and Sydney, as it becomes Englishmen to speak and think of such characters.12
If Jacobinism had no intellectual currency in Britain, what then was the modern idea of British freedom? Jeffrey speaks here, provocatively, of ‘the rights and services of the people’. This may sound jacobinical enough, but Jeffrey had already offered the reassurance that there was sufficient ballast of nobility and wealth in Parliament to steady the country: ‘The most certain and the most permanent influence, is that of rank and of riches’.13 This is the quintessential Whig position: the seventeenth-century heritage of religious freedom as expressed by men of property. However reactionary the time in which the Edinburgh Review flourished, it is noteworthy that Jeffrey does not give up his Enlightenment idealism and its religious scepticism. He simply states that, ‘the consciousness of independence is a great enjoyment in itself, and that without it, all the powers of the mind, and all the capacities of happiness, are gradually blunted and destroyed. It is like the privation of air and exercise’.14 There is little sense of religious persecution here: freedom is expressed as an economic and intellectual quantity. The great corrective to the political
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Language of Whiggism
enervation of anti-jacobinism has been the increase in wealth among the lower and middle class, which Jeffrey sees as ‘naturally leading them to aspire to greater independence, and improving their education and general intelligence’. From this, it follows that ‘public opinion, which is in all countries the great operating check upon authority, has become more extensive and more enlightened’.15 Despite these mild encomiums to freedom, however, at the height of the enthusiasm for Spain in 1808, both the Whigs and the Edinburgh Review found themselves out of step with public opinion. As parliamentary orators on both sides came together to offer support to the Spanish revolutionaries, Samuel Whitbread, the Whig with the greatest popular standing in the country, injured his reputation by arguing that negotiation, not war, was still the way forward.16 In an attempt to recover this blunder, Whitbread issued his Letter to Lord Holland, where he publicly explained his position to the Whig lord most known for his longstanding familiarity with Spanish affairs. Whitbread appears partly to blame their own Whig orator, Thomas Sheridan, for pressing the government to reveal information about their communications with the Spanish deputies at a time when there might have been some ‘danger’ in breaking confidence.17 Whitbread affirms his trust in the government ministers, remarking that the Spanish had risen up against France ‘without breaking forth into those furious excesses of sanguinary licentiousness which have … brought the name of Liberty into disrepute’.18 One senses the disagreement among the best Whig orators themselves about strategies for questioning the government side. This is confirmed by Henry Brougham’s article ‘Mr Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’ (appearing in the same issue as ‘Fox’s History of James II’) which attempted to rehabilitate Whitbread and the Foxite position but also brought Brougham’s own differences of opinion to bear. Brougham reiterates the importance of foreign affairs to domestic politics and emphasizes the Edinburgh Review’s role in focusing on European politics. In asserting the Whigs’ participation in ‘the universal good wishes’ towards Spain, Brougham also works to show that their position is ‘perfectly consistent’ with their criticism of the government’s earlier Continental alliances against France, arguing that the previous allies such as Austria and Prussia had consisted of corrupt courts and professional armies, whereas Spain is ‘a whole people’.19 Brougham, in organizing a comprehensive discussion in his best Edinburgh manner, as to why the Spanish people may have a chance at success, typically perhaps goes too far in then dilating on the reasons why Buonparte’s army has so far been undefeated: the enemy’s army is a meritocracy while those of Britain’s allies are corrupt, run by ‘contemners of merit and personal acquirements – scoffers at the divinity of talents – to whom, melancholy to reflect, the fate of Europe has been entrusted for the last twenty years’.20 Ultimately Brougham’s argument becomes a critique of the Tory government, that Britain would continue to be outwitted by Napoleon until their enemy’s army faced the
1807–10 The Revival of Liberty
37
same internal incompetence born of nepotism – a ‘kept-mistress giving away a command … squabblings between some silly prince and some booby dignitary’ – then Britain might have a chance.21 Notoriously, the writer went on to develop this strain of Whiggish pessimism in the next number of the Edinburgh Review, in the article that ended the quarterly’s reputation as a strictly philosophical journal, ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the Usurpation of Spain’.22 Even the victory of the Spanish people was no confirmation of any military success to be had, for Napoleon’s record led the realistic observer to predict ‘the subjugation of the most gallant people in the world’.23 This prediction was partly vindicated by the events of the next few years, but at the time both the Whigs’ pacificism and the government’s humiliating treaty at Cintra in August 1808 aroused popular outrage. More inflammatory even than the prophecy of doom, which was interpreted by the Tories as pro-Napoleonic propaganda, were the domestic reformist conclusions that the Edinburgh Review Whigs dared to draw from the unexpected Spanish repulse of the French. In the ‘Don Cevallos’ article, the writer cleverly argued that the British government had thereby tacitly lent assent to the populist overtones of the Spaniards. No one at court or in the government, he noted, had made any remonstrance over the fact that the victory against Napoleon had been achieved under the auspices of a revolution against the Spanish monarchical government and the flight of the Spanish king. The British government had recognized the revolutionary government and waged war against Charles IV, the hereditary monarch who had been conscripted by Napoleon and then deposed. As the article points out, George III had sent an official minister to the new government.24 From this monarchical endorsement of a revolutionary government therefore, the writer argues, ought to follow the possibility of constitutional reform in England itself – every Englishman who has, for the last six months, heartily wished that the Spaniards should succeed, has knowingly and wilfully wished for a radical reform of abuses in the regular monarchy of Spain, and for such a change of the government, as might permanently secure a better administration of its affairs … Now, who are the persons thus committed to these most wholesome and truly English principles of civil government? Are they a few speculative men – a few seditious writers or demagogues – or a popular meeting here and there – or are they even a political party in the state? No such thing. Men of all descriptions – of all ranks in society – of every party – have joined, almost unanimously, in the same generous and patriotic sentiments.25
The article argues that such sentiments had been unreasonably suppressed in Britain for eighteen years, and ‘the Spanish revolution comes most opportunely … to awaken in this country all those feelings of liberty and patriotism which many had supposed were extinguished since the French revolution’.26 By a sleight-ofhand, the writer thus cleverly yokes ‘liberty’ and ‘patriotism’, normally invoked
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as opposing terms by the Whig and Tory parties respectively. The Edinburgh Review does not here advocate revolution. It puts forward, as it was consistently to do, the Whig argument that constitutional reform was necessary precisely so that revolution would not occur. Nonetheless, there was something demagogic in the article’s variations on the phrase ‘the people’, only intermittently mitigated by the qualifying prepositional phrase ‘in Spain’ – those who had no stake in the community (to speak the technical language of the aristocracy), – the persons of no consideration in the state, … they who could no pledge their fortunes, having only lives and liberties to lose, – the bulk – the mass of the people, – nay, the very odious, many-headed beast, the multitude – the mob itself.27
Thus, the Edinburgh Review reopened all Burke’s distinctions about ‘the People’, because in this case the unenfranchised had played the heroic patriotic role against England’s enemy. Arthur Aspinall argues that the reception of this article, for all that it galvanized the Tory powers into setting up a rival quarterly, it in fact testifies to the easing of official government repression: ‘Had it [‘Don Cevallos’] appeared in a popular form in 1794 instead of in 1808, little short of a miracle would have saved the author from the hands of the hangman and his head from reposing on Temple Bar’.28 When in 1798 the Duke of Norfolk made a toast in the Crown and Anchor tavern to ‘our sovereign’s health: The majesty of the people!’ he lost both his militia regimental command and his office as Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire; when Charles James Fox repeated it, he was removed from the privy council.29 ‘Don Pedro Cevallos’ came to mark the end of one era in the intellectual history of the Edinburgh Review and in the aftermath of the failure of the Whigs at government rather than as opposition brought party politics into a disinterestedly intellectual journal.30 Most famously, the article upset Walter Scott, who had already partly broken with Jeffrey over his ungenerous review the same year of Scott’s patriotic war poem Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field. Marmion was published in February 1808 in an edition of 2,000 copies. Scott sent the first printed copies to Lady Abercorn, and told her that he had intended to dedicate it to Lord Melville, had the impeachment case gone against him.31 As well as the reference to Pitt and Fox together (1.166–95), the Introduction to Canto First includes the expected eulogies to Nelson and Pitt (1.66–125). If Marmion can be read as the epitaph of the era of Pitt and Fox, it also marks the turn in the British war effort against Napoleon: after the All Talents government fell, the Duke of Portland headed a government that appointed Castlereagh as Secretary for War and Canning as Foreign Secretary. The latter’s decision to open fire on the neutral Danish fleet in Copenhagen’s harbour on 2 September 1807 marked the spectacular announcement of his determination. In his review of Marmion, Jeffrey included the Whig objections and argued that Scott’s praise
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for the coup at Copenhagen was out of place in a story of the sixteenth century. But although Jeffrey complains that such ‘instances of bad taste’ are merely ‘allusions to objects of temporary interest’, his criticisms appear in a closing paragraph full of remonstrance about Scott’s treatment of the late Charles James Fox – We are unwilling to quarrel with a poet on the score of politics; but the manner in which he has chosen to praise the last of these great men [Nelson, Pitt, Fox], is, more likely, we conceive, to give offence to his admirers, than the most direct censure. The only deed for which he is praised, is for having broken off the negotiation for peace; and for this act of firmness, it is added, Heaven rewarded him with a share in the honoured grave of Pitt! … he died a Briton – a pretty plain insinuation, that, in the author’s opinion, he did not live one.32
The French revolution and wars had been extraordinary in their effect on the nationalization of Britain. The threat of invasion had been felt as far north as Scotland, and John Gibson Lockhart writes that with Marmion Scott had become the war’s greatest minstrel: Scott had sternly and indignantly rebuked and denounced the then too prevalent spirit of anti-national despondence; he had put the trumpet to his lips, and done his part, at least, to sustain the hope and resolution of his countrymen in that struggle from which it was the doctrine of the Edinburgh Review that no sane observer of the times could anticipate any thing but ruin and degradation. He must ever be considered as the ‘mighty minstrel’ of the Antigallican war; and it was Marmion that first announced him in that character.33
It was Jeffrey, the resolutely sceptical commentator, reared on the anti-metaphysical lectures of John Millar and Dugald Stewart, and devoid of any taste for Catholic medievalism, who was out-of-step with the prevailing taste for patriotism. The two articles of October 1808 and January 1809, ‘Don Pedro Cevallos’ and ‘Expedition against Copenhagen’, further demonstrated the Whigs’ unfitness to lead the country even as their controversy increased the circulation of the Edinburgh Review.34 When Scott travelled down to Westminster in the spring of 1806 to beg a favour during the week that the All Talents government was assembled out of the fragments of Foxites, Grenvillites and others, Pitt was dead and Whitbread was triumphantly pursuing Melville’s impeachment. One year later, in 1807, when he returned to London, Melville had been acquitted, Fox was dead, and the Whigs were out of office.
Convention of Cintra Spanish liberalism had caused voices beyond the Edinburgh Review to speak with hopefulness once more about liberty. For others, including William Wordsworth, it brought back the idealism of the 1790s. Wordsworth was thirty-eight
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years old in November 1808 when he began writing the longest prose piece of his career, The Convention of Cintra. Wellesley’s victory at Vimiero came on 21 August 1808, but he was immediately replaced by more senior commanders, Sir Harry Burrard and Sir Hew Dalrymple, who refused to allow Wellesley to pursue Junot’s army further. The French appealed for a treaty and the result was the Convention of Cintra (23–30 August), which was printed 16 September 1808 in British newspapers to general disgust. Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge met in October to plan a public meeting and discussion of the issue, but local government pressure was brought to bear, and Wordsworth gave up these plans to write a pamphlet instead.35 His Convention of Cintra was substantially completed during the months that Parliament continued to debate the events at Corunna and an inquiry was conducted. The first part appeared in two instalments in the Courier (27 December 1808; 13 January 1809); the whole was published as a pamphlet of 500 copies on 27 May 1809. The Courier had become a Tory paper around the time the king dismissed the Whigs over the question of Catholic Emancipation in 1807. One may wonder that an article criticizing the government’s treaty should appear there, but the paper was, until September 1809, informally called ‘Canning’s Courier’, and Canning, as Foreign Secretary, was upset by what he saw as the feeble conduct of the Spanish campaign by his Cabinet colleague Castlereagh as Secretary for War, and so took opportunities to embarrass him.36 In the Convention of Cintra Wordsworth notes that the government’s wars ‘against liberty’ [the American Revolutionary war and the French Revolution] and ‘for liberty’ [the Spanish wars] had in fact shown the same moral insensibility to the spirit of the common people, which he praises in a way that would have irritated Jeffrey, who always complained about Wordsworth’s fondness for pedlars. He insists that ‘Liberty’ is not to be dismissed as merely ‘long past and dwindled in the memory’.37 His Poems, in Two Volumes, published the year before, had included one section entitled ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’.38 In Cintra, he reviews the grounds of the war with French and the thoughtful acquiescence of the people at large in that policy, which he dates from the late 1790s. He insists that the British people were no less patriotic for having taken a number of years to acknowledge the necessity of war. Further, Wordsworth says, such people were the majority and were initially more sympathetic to France ‘notwithstanding all the delusions which had been practised upon them’ by their own government – a remarkable point for a Tory patriot to make. Wordsworth’s language here is only somewhat less dangerous than Henry Brougham’s.39 Wordsworth’s argument, like those of the Edinburgh Review, testifies to the importance of the Spanish resistance in reviving British wartime morale. This discussion of how hope and freedom shape the human state is even more detailed – ‘This sudden elevation was on no account more welcome – was by
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nothing more endeared, than by the returning sense, which accompanied it of inward liberty and choice’.40 Wordsworth thoughtfully allows the differences between the British constitution and the Spanish – where Catholicism and the absoluteness of the Spanish monarchy were traditions at odds with English habits of liberty – only to suggest in this case the safety of English sympathy with the Spanish cause: taught by the reverses of the French revolution, we looked upon these dispositions [the Spanish habits of religious and political submission] as more human – more social – and therefore as wiser, and of better omen, than if they had stood forth the zealots of abstract principles, drawn out of the laboratory of unfeeling philosophists.41
Like the Edinburgh Review, Wordsworth seeks both to excite the British and also to convince them that their own leaders have already accepted the fact of revolution as it had played out in Spain. The main point for both was to emphasize the civil safety of embracing the Spanish ‘revolution’. Whatever the rumours of ‘rashness’ attributed to the Spaniards against the Napoleonic military machine, Wordsworth makes them sound like would-be Victorians, with all ‘the virtues of perseverance, constancy, fortitude, and watchfulness’.42 Still, Wordsworth does not hesitate to make careful discrimination between varieties of moral strength. For example, he differentiates between the American Revolutionary war of 1776–83 and the Spanish cause of liberty in 1808: the Spaniards, given their historical, that is to say Catholic, disabilities, may lack the impulses that assisted the Americans. Nonetheless, whatever the Spanish defeats or their shortcomings measured mathematically against the Napoleonic army, they do not constitute a final judgement on the Spanish cause or its losses, for Wordsworth here rates ‘liberty’ above national ‘independence’.43 Equally, unlike the defeated Prussians and Austrians, whom Pitt had funded as mercenaries all through the 1790s rather than send British troops, they are ‘a PEOPLE, and not a mere army or set of armies’.44 And it is in this, their recognizable identity as a People, the phrase repeated by both the Edinburgh Review and Wordsworth, that the British imagination was excited and British hope revived. Wordsworth also records the outrage at home when the Convention was published on 16 September 1808, permitting the French army to retreat without penalty. The French troops were allowed to keep any plunder, and the British navy made to provide transportation for them.45 These were the stipulations that caused the greatest public outcry. Like most, Wordsworth was unaware of Wellesley’s strategic reasons for doing so and saw this as an insult to the Spanish people: by virtue of the Convention, the British people found themselves responsible, for colluding in the suppression of the spirit of liberty, a manifestation that had now honourably redeemed hopes dashed by the French Revolution:
42
Language of Whiggism It was not for the soil, or for the cities and forts, that Portugal was valued, but for the human feeling which was there … We combated for victory in the empire of reason, for strong-holds in the imagination. Lisbon and Portugal, as city and soil, were chiefly prized by us as a language.46
Wordsworth analyses the language of the document itself in some detail, dwelling on what must have been the Spanish shock to discover that a nation synonymous with Liberty (the ‘peculiar boast of Britain’) could thus give in to the moral poverty of the French, who had been corrupted by twenty years of conscription.47 But when the City of London petitioned for an inquiry into the Convention as an event that was ‘“humiliating and degrading to the country”’, they were reproved by the government.48 To describe the alienation of this newborn feeling of freedom, Wordsworth uses imagery as of a monster, ‘a kind of lusus naturae in the moral world – a solitary straggler out of the circumference of nature’s law’.49 Again, his language is strikingly moral, and like Brougham, he seeks to redeem the People – it was left to the ‘People of Britain – to voice the Spanish pain’, and to suggest that ‘when the people speaks loudly, it is from being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon … the voice within was of Holiness and Truth’.50 Aware that this rhetorical strain may be too elevated for the common run of governmental debate, Wordsworth insists that the Spanish ‘are instruments of benefit and glory for the human race; and the Deity therefore is with them’.51 The miracle was that the Spanish people have acted beyond their government and settled circumstances. It was the British who had in this instance acted below expectations of national character and human fellow-feeling. Wordsworth’s most pointed criticism is reserved for unthinking British officialdom that had not had the imagination to respond feelingly to this sublime moral event – this is not only an eighteenth-century call to the democracy of human feeling but a nineteenth-century critique of governmental bureaucracy. One proof of the governmental moral unfitness lay in the fact that Britain had in the previous thirty years fought two wars against liberty, in 1776 and in 1793. Wordsworth points out that the British government had sent hired Hessians across the Atlantic to bring the Americans ‘to reason’, a use of ‘gross’ force against intangible spirit, and that history has testified to the greater power of spirit.52 The British government had shown itself out of touch with the spiritual and therefore the political reality of the times. Liberty was the force to be reckoned with, and it was a power because it had animated so many – the many who had no reverence for the intricacies of power in the closet, cabinet or chamber. The Spanish peasants had defeated Napoleon where the hired armies of Germany and Britain could not. Perhaps the most revolutionary sentiment Wordsworth utters is that the Spanish people were to be seen as ‘Persons’ rather than the ‘Things’
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they had hitherto been reckoned.53 The Spanish uprising was to be distinguished from the French Revolution: because of its old-fashioned piety and lack of modern industrial overcrowding, ‘Spain has nothing to dread from Jacobinism’ – ‘the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau, and the flippancies of Voltaire, are plants which will not naturalize in the country of Calderon and Cervantes’.54 Napoleon’s power represents merely ‘a depravation’ of the French Liberty in which it began: ‘there is no independent spring at the heart of the machine’.55 Thus, the circumstances of Catholic Spain’s revolution in 1808 permitted Wordsworth to write this ecstatic reaffirmation of the moral idealism of the 1790s. In May 1809, Henry Crabb Robinson reviewed Wordsworth’s pamphlet on Cintra, which had been published by Longman in octavo at the price of five shillings. Robinson, a student in Germany during the years 1800–5, had reported on German affairs for the Monthly Register (1802–3). In July 1808, he was sent to be The Times’s Spanish correspondent, where he met Lord Holland, who was in Spain from November 1808 to July 1809, and on returning to Britain, Robinson took up acquaintance with Spanish agents there.56 Robinson, had been a self-confessed fashionable Jacobin in the early 1790s (‘It is well known that the French Revolution turned the brains of many of the noblest youths in England’, he noted in his diary in 1809), but remarked since then on the enormous changes in Europe – With the solitary and enviable exception of Great Britain, not one of the independent states, which in the year 1792 constituted the great European republic, now remains, which has not beheld, either its sovereign perish by a violent death, or its capital occupied by an hostile power.57
Only the monarchs of Great Britain and Denmark remained in place. In comparing the Spanish revolution to the French Revolution, he says ‘in both, we beheld that most interesting and fearful spectacle, a whole people called as it were into existence’. But he could find no other resemblance between the two. This was significant for reassuring British readers that the Spanish uprising could safely be supported, and such is exactly the point that Wordsworth, a Tory, also makes. Robinson finds Wordsworth’s pamphlet important above all as a discussion of principles, something he says that had not been seen since ‘Mr. Burke’s spiritstirring publication, provoked the discussion of first principles, both moral and psychological’.58 Principles as such had not been a feature of public discussion after the 1790s, and there is now no discussion of what Robinson calls ‘the moral character of public events’. Jacobinism has gone from being a party representing liberty and democracy to ‘a historic denomination’. But, says Robinson, Wordsworth combines patriotism with ‘a romantic attachment to the cause of liberty’.59 He draws attention to the full title that Wordsworth has used.60 He notes that the traditional ‘friends of liberty’ (the Whigs) now mostly ‘counsel our assenting
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at last to a tyranny we cannot successfully oppose’ and leaving the Spaniards to Napoleon – he criticizes the Edinburgh Review for showing a lack of integrity in its Don Cevallos article.61 He explains the Whigs’ lack of interest in the Spaniards by the fact that they have published ‘no declaration of the rights of man’.62 The Spanish are interested in ‘national freedom’ rather than ‘national liberty’ and therefore are more concerned to get rid of a foreign conqueror, however constitutionally progressive, than their own monarch. He remarks that they do not quite live up to Wordsworth’s idealized image of them: the Spanish ruling classes had merely propitiated Napoleon while the lower classes lacked education and direction, nor was the army well trained, a point raised by all the British generals in their frustration with the British public’s enthusiasm. But like Wordsworth and Southey, Robinson writes in order to urge Britain to support Spain. Robert Southey showed much partial feeling for Spain and had already been approached by Scott to write the ‘History of Europe’ for the new Edinburgh Annual Register, beginning with the year 1808 (published 1810). In that section, Southey wrote of the outrage at the treaty negotiated at Cintra – Nothing else could be talked of, nothing else could be thought of: men greeted each other in the streets with execrations upon those who had signed this detested convention … on no former occasion had they [the London papers] been so unanimous … The provincial papers proved that from one end of the island to the other, the resentment of this grievous wrong was the same.63
Southey’s account of the Spanish campaign is impassioned – the fullness of the detail alone reveals the strength of feeling behind it. Patriotism was thus at the core of journalistic literature at this time. Southey was already signed up as a contributor to a new publication, the Quarterly Review, ‘for the purpose of counteracting the base and cowardly politics of the “Edinburgh”’.64 William Gifford had contacted Southey through his friend Grovenor Bedford. In Southey’s account, it was set up by the government: ‘But they wish it not to wear a party appearance, – only to breathe at this time the right English at-him-Trojan spirit’. The object was patriotic rather than ministerial but the political details were to come from ‘an official quarter – presumably Canning himself ’.65 This was in contrast to what the Edinburgh Review received from Henry Brougham and Francis Horner, named by Southey as that review’s main conduits. Reading Scott’s own letters, one sees the same points reiterated: the death of Pitt and the subsequent lack of leadership in the Cabinet, excepting only Canning, and therefore the need for a public journal that supports the war effort, particularly on the Spanish front. The Edinburgh Review clearly carried weight in the public mind because its gloomy prophecies had been borne out by long years of defeat by Napoleon and especially the nadir reached in July 1807.
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Scott also argued that the other basis for the Edinburgh Review’s predominance was that ‘independent of its politics, it gives the only valuable literary criticism which can be met with. Consider, of the numbers who read this work, how many are there likely to separate the literature from the politics – how many youths are there, upon whose minds the flashy and bold character of the work is likely to make an indelible impression’.66 Scott emphasized that the Quarterly Review must attract readers through its literary department first – then they would come round to its politics. Scott, who explained the proposal at length to William Gifford, its first editor, suggested that the first number might look at Fox’s History of James II, and ‘any book or pamphlet which could give occasion for a distinct and enlightened view of Spanish affairs’.67 Scott also suggests to Gifford, ‘some Scotch metaphysics which you know are fashionable however deservedly or otherwise’.68 This was the narrative of economic and social progress that had given the Edinburgh Review its oracular and scientific reputation. Scott was explicit that the Quarterly Review should not appear too much to be under government direction and that its literary criticism should be equally as strong as its political information, so that ‘the respect of the public may be maintained by the inpartiality [sic] of our criticism’.69 To John Murray, its publisher, he says that ‘… I stated as essential that the literary part of the work should be as sedulously attended to as the political, because it is by means of that alone that the work can acquire any firm and extended reputation’.70 In a letter to George Ellis, he again speaks of the Edinburgh Review’s dynamic literary criticism: The common Reviews, before the appearance of the Edinburgh, had become extremely mawkish; and … gave a dawdling, maudlin sort of applause to everything that reached even mediocrity. The Edinburgh folks squeezed into their sauce plenty of acid, and were popular from novelty as well as from merit.71
Politically speaking, he emphasizes to Murray that the Quarterly Review was to follow ‘constitutional principles’.72 And equally to Ellis at this time, he stresses the ‘impartial’ nature of the new review’s politics. But this meant a kind of Pittism, ‘stern in detecting and exposing all attempts to sap our constitutional fabric’, and loyalty to the government that was conducting the war in the Peninsula.73 And so it is not surprising that the first article in the Quarterly Review should be on Spain. In 1808, after the Convention of Cintra, even the victories there had seemed like defeats. In January 1809, the commander-in-chief, Sir John Moore, had died in retreat from the French, and the troops who had survived the desperate march back through the mountains to Corunna harassed by the French army in freezing snow, had been thrown up on Britain’s beaches in an emaciated and ragged condition that shocked the public. Talavera (27–8 July 1809) brought Wellesley
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his peerage but no substantive advantage in the field. Napoleon meanwhile had achieved enough success in defeating Austria that he now had leisure to plan a new campaign in Spain with an army more than twice the size of the Allied forces there. The British under Wellington did not engage in battle over the winter of August 1809 to February 1810. Castlereagh, his strongest supporter in the Cabinet, resigned after the duel of September 1809 with Canning, which had been partly brought on by Canning’s disgust at his ineffectual conduct of the war. As the Spanish continued to encounter defeat by the French, Wellington stayed in Lisbon and contented himself with a defensive strategy. With a force of 25,000, as against Massena’s army of 65,000, he could only appeal to Portuguese civilian resistance as the French approached a Lisbon swollen by fleeing refugees. In the battle of Fuentes d’Onoro (May 1811), Wellington considered himself lucky to escape. Such was the state of the war against Napoleon in the spring of 1811. For wider political purposes, the Whigs wished to transpose the English ideal of liberty on the Spaniards and Portuguese but were wrongfooted by the military generals’ threats to have nothing further to do with these unreliable natives who vaingloriously claimed all the victories and ran away from the routs. The death of the Whig general Sir John Moore (1761–1809), who had been known for his low opinion of the Spanish forces, was seen as almost a self-induced consequence of his defeatism. His refusal to follow John Hookham Frere’s instructions was a military man’s judgement on his political masters’ misguided desire for victory in the Commons. Moore was a Whig, while Frere was a Canningite Tory who hoped both to justify the Tories’ war policy and to show up Castlereagh’s deficiencies against the initiative of Canning. Frere (1769–1846), a friend of Canning from Eton schooldays and coauthor with him on the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8), had joined the Foreign Office in 1799 and served as a diplomat in Lisbon, Berlin, and Madrid. The discussion of Moore’s torturous retreat at Corunna, unlike those of Graeme’s at Barossa or Wellington’s at Talavera, display all these fissures. In responding to Liverpool’s motion for a vote of thanks for the victory of Corunna and the safe evacuation of all the troops, the Earl of Moira mocked the futility of this war: What! Did our troops go to Spain only to make their escape? … British blood and treasure, and the invaluable lives of British officers and soldiers, had been sacrificed to no purpose, and without in the least assisting the great cause which the country had been pledged to support.74
Lord Erskine, also a Whig, invoked in detail the misery of the 8,000–9,000 men who had died in the snow and sleet of the December march over the mountains with nothing to show for it – ‘What could, then, be a more disgusting and humiliating spectacle than to see the government of this great empire, in
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such a fearful season, in the hands of men who seemed not fit to be a vestry in the smallest parish’.75 This was a reference to the politicians. Erskine went on to speak with great warmth of Moore as a fellow Scot. Grenville also spoke, and like Whitbread, pressed for the release of Moore’s dispatches, which the Whigs knew would condemn the government’s strategy. In the Commons on the same day, Castlereagh gave an account of Moore’s death, and in moving to propose the erection of a monument to Moore’s memory, a detailed justification of the retreat.76 Supporting the motion, the Whig Lord Henry Petty went on to allude to the slander of Moore that was going on in the government press, even while the government ministers were expressing their high opinion of Moore. The first number of the Quarterly Review for February 1809 was going forward, with its first article, ‘Affairs d’Espagne’ written by George Ellis, with the assistance of George Canning.77 Samuel Whitbread continued to press for the publication of Moore’s dispatches, and in February, as Drury Lane theatre burnt to the ground and its flames illuminated the sky at Westminster, Canning gave an important speech on Corunna.78 Nearly two months later, mention in the Lords of a specific dispatch of July 1808, led to Earl Grey’s notice of motion that Frere’s letters to Moore be produced in the House. Liverpool refused, on the grounds of their private nature.79 The motion, with requests also for certain dispatches of Canning and Castlereagh, put forward on 24 March 1809 was negatived without even a vote being put, and again on 27 March.80 Then, on 11 April 1809, Canning, as Foreign Secretary, handed over to the Commons eight extracts of correspondence between Frere and Moore (27 November–14 December 1808). In these, the crux of the government’s problem was laid out: Moore detailed the resources and positions of his armies, and the two considered the chances of success in Spain. A good deal of attention was paid by both Frere and Moore in gauging the spirit of the civilian population in Madrid and the countryside – the evidence of any popular Spanish determination to resist the French remained equivocal. Only straightforward were Moore’s accounts of his troop numbers, positions and possible strategies. The sixth letter, from Frere, startled with its extreme personal rebuke of Moore for embarrassing Britain by not immediately pursuing the French on behalf of the Spanish in Madrid.81 In the meantime, Moore had sent a letter (10 December 1808) announcing that he would make an effort, despite the capitulation of Madrid to the French. Although these letters were presented by Canning to the Commons, Frere’s strong language was noted in the Lords (14 April 1808), where Lord Auckland commented that Frere’s tone was ‘somewhat out of the usual way’, especially in its challenge to Moore’s military opinion that Madrid was not safe.82 This was the more remarkable considering that at the same time, ‘… Mr. Frere and the Span-
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ish junta were themselves obliged to take to flight’ and so close at hand were the enemy that Frere had to entrust delivery of his message to a Frenchman.83 The questions raised in this exchange of mid-April did not allow an immediate reply, and on 21 April 1809, Earl Grey delivered a detailed criticism of the campaign in the Peninsula.84 He pointed out that Castlereagh’s original instructions as Secretary for War to Moore specified that Frere’s statements to Moore were not to be treated as government commands. Moreover, Grey had discovered the name of the French messenger bearing the instructions sent by Frere, who turned out to be a well-known fraudulent bankrupt emigré actually suspected to be a traitor to the Spanish cause, whose advice in this case would have led Moore into certain destruction of his army at Madrid. Liverpool responded to each of Grey’s points in detail. In his speeches, it is noticeable that apart from questions of military strategy, there was strong attention paid to the role of British public opinion in responding so fully to Spanish feeling: the pressure of popular enthusiasm for Spain lay behind the questions so fatefully vexed over by Frere and Moore. Other speakers in the debate responded according their loyalties, and here it was notable that Sidmouth, another Tory rival of Canning’s, spoke in opposition to the government’s case and in particular, against Canning’s friend, Frere, whom he accused of ‘ardour without judgment’. Grenville was the last speaker on the Whig side, accusing the ministers for avoiding the blame for Corunna and ‘transferring it upon sir John Moore, who could not now appear to speak in his own justification’.85 At 7:30 in the morning (Saturday), the debate adjourned, the motion having been defeated. In the Commons, it was Canning who met the Opposition’s questions about Frere, where he became openly indignant about the criticism of his friend.86 But a few days later, the issue of the messenger entrusted by Frere was dealt with in more detail. This time it was Castlereagh who spoke for the government, denying that this man named Charmilly had been acting on behalf of the government or that he knew anything of Charmilly’s presence in Spain at this time. Canning is not recorded as speaking on this point. But in response to a question put at a later date by Whitbread, William Huskisson, one of Canning’s disciples, acknowledged that Charmilly was receiving half-pay as a lieutenant-colonel in the British army.87 Canning himself presented further papers dating from November 1808, which showed that in fact Frere had tried to obtain information from the Spaniards for Moore, and that Moore’s decision to retreat was based on information sent to him by Frere.88 This was all gone over in fullest detail in the Commons on 9 May 1809, when Earl Temple, later Palmerston, proposed a motion critical of the ministers and paid tribute to Moore and to the strength of Britain’s desire to help Spain: ‘but one wish pervaded the country – to promote the generous cause’.89 However, Temple went on to show that the government had contrived to make the country regret its generous feeling by its
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inadequate provision of information and resources for the generals sent out even before the troops embarked. British troops had even initially been refused permission to land by the Junta of Galicia. Castlereagh’s own instructions to Moore had been vague – simply to place himself under the command of whatever Spanish general he could find locally – and Moore had then found himself shut out by the Spaniards, expected to fight a French army much closer and larger than he had been told – and finally told by Frere in Madrid to advance even as the diplomat himself was fleeing the city. Temple then dwelt somewhat satirically on the attempt of the government to withhold these letters from the public: ‘First they did not know of such a correspondence; then it was private … then they were said to be of no consequence’.90 George Tierney, a Whig speaker, called Frere’s instruction to advance ‘the rhapsody of Mr. Frere’ and the language of his remonstrance ‘most unbecoming and indecent’.91 The speech culminated in a four-point motion declaring that Moore and his troops had been ‘sacrificed’ by the incompetence of ‘his majesty’s ministers’. Castlereagh replied in stolid detail, declaring that it could not be shown that Moore had acted on Frere’s advice. George Ponsonby, the Whig leader, observed that Castlereagh had not explicitly defended Frere.92 Canning then showed his cleverness in the intricacy of his defence of Frere: after a long review of what information had indeed been available to the government, he argued that Moore had advanced on his own initiative and ‘had not transmitted his correspondence with Mr. Frere to government’. Declaring his own respect for Moore, Canning then quoted from one of Moore’s dispatches showing that he had come to his decision to advance on grounds besides those of Frere’s advice, nor did Canning believe that Moore, had he appeared in the Commons in person, would have mentioned Frere as being responsible for his decision.93 In response, Tierney noted that ‘though Mr. Frere had found a friend, the noble lord [Castlereagh] had lost one; for the right hon. gent. [Canning] had not in any part of his speech, undertaken to defend the general management of the campaign’. This time the House adjourned at 5 am, the Whigs’ censure of the government having been defeated. All the speeches had revolved around these two points: had the government mismanaged the war, and had Frere influenced Moore to his final disastrous attempt against the French? In every speech made in both Houses, Moore was extolled with enthusiasm and fondness: only Canning dared to cast aspersion. Thus, in early 1809 the parliamentary debates recurred to lack of information about Spanish resistance – did it exist? Was the Spanish army to be relied upon? Where was British information coming from? These questions were then recast most spectacularly as the debate between Frere and Moore, the political and the military judgements of what could be gained in the Spanish theatre of war. Was the retreat of Moore’s army to Corunna a successful diversion or a traumatic midwinter bare escape? Was Moore a bungler of a great opportunity or a hero whose
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army had been placed in treacherous circumstances by his political masters? In answering these questions, as Tierney noted, Castlereagh had not said that Frere was right, nor had Canning offered a solid defence of government strategy. The death of Moore marks a fault-line both political and literary in public discussion. Even Wordsworth’s attempt to speak in general philosophical terms about Spain in his Convention of Cintra was accompanied by an appendix, ‘Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters’, written by Thomas De Quincey, who acted as his London contact during its publication. De Quincey’s postscript argues that the publication of the correspondence between Moore and those giving him his orders, Frere and Castlereagh, had unfortunately worked ‘to alienate’ the British people from the Spanish and halt the public’s widely sympathetic enthusiasm. What follows is a closely written ten-page analysis of Moore’s language and ‘a full answer to all the charges alleged, by Sir John Moore in his letters, against the people of Spain’.94 De Quincey essentially writes here a justification of the government policy against the cavils of a professional military man. In this context, the establishment of the Quarterly Review in 1809 shows how Canning was goaded into action by the setbacks he had been forced to defend in the House. The first issue of the Quarterly Review (advertised for 23 January, in fact published 3 March), led with an article on Spain. The death of Moore does not appear as a debating point in it, and the article says only, Our readers have seen that the changes which have taken place in the political state of Spain will, in a great measure, account for all those alternations of success and defeat, of vigour and indecision, which have produced in the minds of the British public such extravagant hopes and such gloomy despondency.95
But the third number, published 29 August 1809, contains Canning’s written justification of his policy, ‘Spanish Affairs’. The article is a review of six accounts of the army in Spain, including A Narrative of the Campaign of the British in Spain, James Moore’s defence of his brother’s memory, on which Canning, with George Ellis, performs a forensic exegesis of Corunna as a military episode and as an occasion for public language. Jonathan Cutmore cites William Gifford’s description of this as ‘The best article that ever yet appeared in any review’.96 There Canning notes the gap between the British public’s enthusiasm for the symbolic importance of Spain and the British generals’ pessimism about the military possibilities, given the state of supplies, troops and Spanish topography. The article is also a piece of propaganda, insisting on the necessity for optimism and refusing to give in to the opposition’s lyrical interpretation of Corunna as an elegy for Moore and defeat: ‘It has been always represented by political writers as a symptom of decay in the real vigour of a state, when unimportant or doubtful military achievements have been hailed and magnified with disproportionate applause’.97
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Moore’s death at Corunna and the Spanish campaign were destined to spawn much more literary eloquence and analysis. Scott continued to write poetry about the war, most notably The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), which was by contrast a seizing of the moment of victory. The defeated spirit of Moore had been left behind, and there were a substantial number of battles to celebrate – it is above all, a panegyric to Wellington. After Marmion and what was generally seen as a critical blunder, Jeffrey had a delicate path to tread where Scott as the foremost poet of the era was concerned. In 1810, Jeffrey had spent a considerable part of his review of the Lady of the Lake on the question of Scott’s popularity, beginning with the statement that ‘Mr. Scott, though living in an age unusually prolific of original poetry, has manifestly outstripped all his competitors in the race of popularity; and stands already upon a height to which no other writer has attained in the memory of any one now alive’.98 A year later, the review of Don Roderick began by affecting once more to lament the difficulties of living up to one’s own popularity, particularly ‘if, in these later appearances, he should venture upon a theme with which all the vulgar echoes of the country are at that moment resounding’.99 The subject of the moment – ‘our depending campaigns in Spain and Portugal, – with the exploits of Lord Wellington and the spoliations of the French armies’ – might argue against the likelihood of Scott’s artistic success, while the ostensible eighth-century subject of the poem, Don Roderick, is, Jeffrey says, ‘machinery’. Thus, ‘[i]n point of fact, the poem begins and ends with Lord Wellington’. Jeffrey briefly summarizes the plot, and points out how unconnected the poem’s ‘Conclusion’, which relates the British battles in Spain of the previous few years, is to the poem proper.100 He calls it ‘a splendid versification of Lord Wellington’s official despatches’.101 With cheerful irony, Jeffrey slyly appends a footnote that remarks on the poem’s apparent corroboration of the Edinburgh Review’s own judgements against the Spanish nobility in its notorious Don Cevallos article of 1808: It is amusing to see how things come round. When we published our review of Don Pedro Cevallos, we were overwhelmed with reproaches for having vilipended the privileged orders of Spain, and said that it was only through the spirit of her commonalty that she could be saved; – and now her nobles are given up by the stoutest champion of nobility in Great Britain! If we will only wait patiently a little longer, we shall all be agreed.102
Similarly, but with less irony, Jeffrey acknowledges his personal pleasure with the poem’s treatment of Scottish generals in particular (he had criticized Marmion’s lack of Scottish patriotism), but he does not denigrate the appeal to national British pride – ‘Lord Wellington and his fellow-soldiers have well deserved the laurels they have won; – nor is there one British heart, we believe, that will not
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feel proud and grateful for all the honours with which British genius can invest their names’.103 The review is generally comfortable and full of bland praise. However, towards the end Jeffrey inserts a sharp rebuke for the praise that Scott ‘has withheld’ and remarks on the fact that in a poem written substantially for the purpose of commemorating the brave who have fought or fallen in Spain and Portugal, – and written by a Scotchman, – there should be no mention of the name of MOORE!104
The review then goes on to offer an eulogy of Moore’s character and to point out that he had been the only commander-in-chief to have died in the war. Scott had shown generosity in praising the living, but injustice in withholding what is due – ‘Who will deny that Sir John Moore was all that we have now said of him? – or who will doubt that his untimely death, in the hour of victory, would have been eagerly seized upon by an impartial poet, as a noble theme for generous lamentation and eloquent praise?’105 The key hit in this review is the answer to this question: ‘Mr Scott’s political friends’. Jeffrey says he feels both ‘shame and indignation’ that Scott has so far allowed ‘the spirit of party to stand in the way, not only of poetic justice, but of patriotic and generous feeling’.106 In this way a continuing disagreement between Edinburgh’s greatest critic and Edinburgh’s greatest poet led to the establishment of the Edinburgh Review’s greatest rival, which was conceived amid a national discussion in politics and literature, in order to support the government war policy in the Peninsula.107 Canning, who as Foreign Secretary was forced to defend that policy and the intervention of his ambassador, not only set the Quarterly Review in motion but also a chain of events that led to the duel between himself and Castlereagh, who defended his generals. Castlereagh, in his letter of self-justification to George III, touches on three areas of criticism raised by Canning, dwelling the longest on ‘the language held upon the conduct of the late campaign in Spain’ and remarks that although originally he had perhaps not entirely accepted Moore’s assessment of the Spaniards’ gaps in discipline and provisions, subsequently ‘the experience of the present campaign, and the uniform course of information received from Lord Wellington, has tended indisputably to establish the truth of Sir J. Moore’s opinions’. In admitting his mistake, Castlereagh contrasts the professionalism of the army officers with the ‘sanguine conceptions’ formed by the public at a distance.108 The language of Frere and Canning, particularly as it fed the British popular enthusiasm for Spain, had been in part responsible for the debacle at Corunna, and the public language of liberty was crucial to the artistic and professional assessments of ‘Spain’. Byron travelled in the Peninsula precisely as the British war effort there got underway, arriving in Lisbon little more than a fortnight before the battle of Talavera ( July 1809).109 The first canto of Childe Harold was composed during
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the last two months of 1809.110 Like the Vision of Don Roderick, it is written in Spenserian stanza but is a thoroughly Whig poem in its questioning of the British efforts in Spain. Portugal is the first place at which Harold lands, after the satiric farewell to Britain and hedonism. But even as he celebrates the beauties of Cintra and Lisbon, he does not spare the character of the inhabitants: A nation swoln with ignorance and pride, Who lick yet loath the hand that waves the sword To save them from the wrath of Gaul’s unsparing lord.111
This is a poem of its time, inasmuch as Byron too cannot resist adding his mite’s worth on the Convention of Cintra – ‘Britannia sickens, Cintra! At thy name’ – including these cancelled verses: But when Convention sent his handy work Pens, tongues, feet, hands, combined in wild uproar; Mayor, Aldermen, laid down the uplifted fork, The Bench of Bishops half forgot to snore; Stern Cobbett, who for one whole week forbore To question aught,
once more with transport leap’t, And bit his devlish quill agen, and swore 112
Byron’s original notes to the poem also reiterated this cynicism about Spanish and Portuguese valour: In the year 1809, it is a well-known fact, that the assassinations in the streets of Lisbon and its vicinity were not confined by the Portuguese to their countrymen; but Englishmen were daily butchered, and so far from the survivors obtaining redress, they were requested ‘not to interfere’ if they perceived any compatriot defending himself against his amiable allies. I was once stopped in the way to the theatre, at eight in the evening, when the streets were not more empty than they generally are, opposite to an open shop, and in a carriage with a friend, by three of our allies.113
There is more, but the note published is considerably shorter: the differences between the two highlight the greater satiric timeliness of Byron’s original writing of Childe Harold. Whatever the romantic implications of a Spenserian form, both Scott and Byron used it during these years of the Spanish campaigns for political purposes. The omitted stanzas contain many more contemporary references, to ‘Sirs Arthur, Harry, and the dizzard Hew’, the Courier, the Morning Chronicle and Morning Post.114 In the Preface, in the paragraph that disavows interest in Peninsular topics, there is an omitted wording that goes on –
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Language of Whiggism With the different poems published on Spanish subjects and perhaps with Mr. Scott’s [celebrated satire] ‘the Vision of Don Roderick’ there may be some casual coincidence in that part of the poem which treats of the Peninsula, but it can only be casual.115
Thus the first canto of Childe Harold, up to stanza 44, is very much a satire of British bungling in the Peninsula, all supposedly undertaken in the name of popular patriotism. To the Whigs, ‘Spain’ and the Spanish revolution had represented the possibility of discussing liberty once again, for the first time in a generation. To the Tories, however, it rather represented the justification of a war that had seemed futile. Moore’s death was a setback to them, but his identify as a Whig was used in part to explain his disappointing judgement of the Spaniards. The exposure of Frere, on the other hand, was crucial to the Whigs, in pointing out the weaknesses of the government war effort – Moore was therefore a martyr to Tory vainglory and nepotism. Scott in verse and Canning in prose rushed to the rescue of the government. Moore himself had no poetic monument until 1817, when Charles Wolfe wrote the eight-stanza ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, which in fact was based on the account of his death contained in the Edinburgh Annual Register, written by Southey. Not drum was heard, nor a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O’er the grave where our hero we buried.116
Byron recited it to Shelley and others, and it was his ‘generous enthusiasm’ for this poem that made it known.117 Thus, both the Whig and the Tory generals have their poetic monuments, written by Wolfe and Scott. Similarly, the politicians facing one another across the parliamentary benches attempted to analyse the meaning of Corunna, weighing up divergent rhetorical assessments of Spanish enthusiasm and its significance for Britain in a time of war. In the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, in the articles of Jeffrey and Canning, Spain dramatized the intersection of patriotism and liberty in unpredictable ways.
3 1816–20 THE LIBERTY OF THE PRESS AND LITERARY LANGUAGE FOR THE PEOPLE
Liberty, in our opinion, is but a modern invention (the growth of books and printing).1
During the 1790s, Pitt’s government, suspicious of the growth in literacy linked with the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man, had spoken of it as a growth in conspiracy.2 Pitt, on accepting the ‘First Report from the Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons respecting Seditious Practices’ (1794), remarked that ‘This whole system of insurrection would appear, from the papers found with them, to be laid in the modern doctrine of the rights of man’. The papers confiscated by the authorities included documents exchanged by the Corresponding Societies in various cities, where Rights of Man was pre-eminent for the number of references made to it, including the resolution taken to produce a cheap edition. Pitt remarked, with some justification, that ‘the proceedings of all those Jacobin societies would appear … to be only comments on that text’.3 Nonetheless, despite the intellectual ferment, it is debatable that Paine’s language had no literary heirs until 1815.4 The educated who did write were less likely either to be prosecuted or to achieve wide popularity because of the expensive formats in which their writings appeared. Philip Harling remarks that ‘in the early 1790s then attorney general Sir Archibald MacDonald did not bother to prosecute the relatively expensive first part of Rights of Man, but he set the full weight of the law against part two, at least in part because it was circulating in more easily accessible forms’.5 William St Clair expresses scepticism about the claim that Rights of Man was a popular bestseller: the original price was 3s. 6d., later reduced to 6d.: in the absence of surviving records, St Clair suggests that the sales can only be assumed to have been more than 20,000, although they may not have been, and he notes that Richard Carlile discovered hundreds of copies still unsold as late as 1817.6 The fad for flirtatious Godwinism among young men and women, E. P. Thompson argues, actually constituted a ‘retreat from immoderate political commitment’. If the years 1791–4 were the years of Paine and prosecution, then 1795–7 were the years for fashion and Godwin. God– 55 –
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winism became the safe haven of Paineite republicanism, which declined in the second half of the 1790s: falling just in between the Treason Trials and the Two Acts, ‘1795 was the annus mirabilis of advanced intellectual radicalism’. Godwin himself supported the Two Acts of 1795 that put an end to the excitement of 1793–4.7 After 1797, the reform ideology left over from the 1780s, was finally set aside and, Michael Roberts argues, by 1800 Paineite enthusiasm was dead.8 Seen in this light, the establishment in 1802 of the Edinburgh Review – with its advocacy of philosophical economics as the intellectual explanation for 1789 – appears well and truly to mark the end of radical political agitation. And yet the Peace of Amiens itself (preliminary treaty signed 1 October 1801, confirmed 27 March 1802) brought hope for reform. Even Walter Scott wrote to Lady Anne Hamilton, wife of the Duke of Hamilton, who was a Whig, that ‘There never was a period during the history of this country apparently more favourable to the improvement of its laws than that in which we are now placed’. He added, ‘[t]here is at present no establishd [sic] Minister for Scotland to throw cold water upon any measure which might be brought forward independent of his participation’.9 Henry Dundas, the manager of Scotland since 1775, had resigned with Pitt over George III’s refusal to consider Catholic Emancipation. Scott was a Pittite, but this letter is a flattering dissertation on the political skills of ‘men of Rank’ as opposed to merely middle-class lawyer managers of the Dundas ilk. Scott was hedging his bets: the intimation it offers – that Scott’s loyalties could be flexible in a time of transition – is significant for indicating that the Whigs seemed likely in 1802 to have a chance. Whatever the outbreak of democracy that occurred, after 1803 the country united to defeat Napoleon, and in 1804 Dundas (now Lord Melville) was brought back to take charge of the Admiralty, at a time when Britain’s only significant battlefield with Napoleon lay at sea. When the Whigs briefly did form a government in 1806, the failure of their sympathetic approaches to Napoleon, underlined the necessity of war as the only strategy left. There was no longer any literary argument for peace to be made. Spain, whatever ideological importance its cause carried, became the all-absorbing military focus for the British government regardless of party. By 1809, the estrangement between popular feeling and the Whig reformist ideologies of the 1780s was complete. After the revelations in 1809–10 of government incompetence and nepotism in conducting the war, enormous energy had to be used by the authorities to contain public opinion.10 Prosecutions and trials sold papers, which were thereby enabled to become financially independent of Treasury funds.11 The increase in newspaper readership over the period from 1789 to 1832 has been traced by a number of scholars, including Arthur Aspinall in his Politics and the Press (1949) and G. A. Cranfield in The Press and Society (1978). In 1784, realizing his unpopularity among newspaper writers, Pitt had made a conscious effort
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to bring the press over to the government, and by 1788, it controlled seven out of ten morning papers. Cranfield, following Aspinall, remarks on the difficulty of tracing the secret service funds by which the government controlled papers, while the French Revolution made it more urgent than ever to do so.12 Most of the respectable dailies sold only a few thousand copies everyday. In 1793, the most powerful, the Morning Herald, sold 4,000 to 5,000 daily. Daniel Stuart, the publisher who cultivated Coleridge’s talent for leader-writing, managed to increase the Morning Post’s circulation from 350 copies daily in 1797 to 4,500 in 1803; later he increased the Courier’s sales from 500 to 7,000. His papers relied more heavily on advertising than had previously been the practice. Over the thirty years from 1800 to 1830, the sales of newspaper stamps doubled despite the doubling in the cost of stamps themselves.
The Times The history of The Times is usually cited as the pre-eminent example of the ideological break made from government propaganda during the revolutionary years, but the paper’s own official history traces the process of independence from much earlier, ‘the expansion of English commerce after the final extinction of Stuart ambitions in the ’45’.13 In the 1760s, the leading article did not yet exist, and it was the establishment of a regular vehicle for advertising rather than news (apart from shipping information) that gave newspapers a presence. John Walter I, the founding publisher of The Times, preferred to keep in government favour and in 1789 negotiated an agreement of £300 a year for inserting paragraphs sent from the Treasury, which was the general administrator of press money. However, even this did not mean political safety: within a matter of weeks following Walter’s agreement some of the material sent to him for insertion by Treasury clerks was ruled a libel against the royal Princes, for which the bewildered Walter, having unwittingly stumbled into the china shop of tiffs that constituted the politics of George III and his sons, was sentenced to two years in Newgate. The severity of the punishment is a sign of the repressive atmosphere that prevailed during the 1790s, and John Walter I was not the only newspaper publisher who found himself held responsible for items inserted at the last minute in his paper by the government or someone on the shopfloor. Since there was comparatively little ‘writing’ in contemporary papers, publishers generally acted as their own editors or left supervision to hack sub-editors, and John Walter I was also busy with his commercial printing business. Eventually, after sending letters to a number of powerful people who appear to have been afraid to act, he received, through the agency of the Prince of Wales, a reduced fine and sentence of fifteen months, as compensation for time already spent in cells with felons and murderers.14 Subsequently, The Times also appears to have
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been compensated with some preference in receiving early intelligence of government policy.15 But in 1799, this subsidy was completely lost, this time apparently because of cross-currents within the Cabinet: Windham, the Secretary at War, and Grenville, the Foreign Secretary, separately took offence at what they saw as the paper’s lack of genuine support. By the end of the 1790s in any case, the government’s leaking of news to the papers was beginning to look ineffectual in the contemporary setting of pamphlet warfare. The owner of the Morning Post and later the Courier, Peter Stuart, had a brother, Charles Stuart, who dealt in government news under Henry Dundas as Home Secretary during the years 1791–4. Stuart complained to Dundas that while a minister might be pleased to offer an exclusive item of government intelligence now and then, ‘thousands of pamphlets are circulated on that day, primed with lasting materials that totally destroy that ephimera of the day. They [the government] do not consider that while they circulate News, the others circulate Sentiments’.16 Canning’s Anti-Jacobin (1797–8), to which the prime minister himself contributed, was one government attempt to fight this literary war of sentiments. When the Pitt government resigned in 1801, The Times became known for its support of the Addington ministry (1801–4), a government widely derided for its incompetence. In 1802, William Walter was given a position in the audit department of the government worth £600 per year.17 John Hiley Addington (the prime minister’s brother) was known to insert paragraphs in The Times.18 Even when this government yielded in April 1804 to a new Pitt ministry, The Times continued to support the Addington group of members, most notably in their pursuit of Lord Melville, for alleged misuse of public funds while Treasurer of the Navy in Pitt’s previous government (1784–1800), but at the height of these investigations, in April 1805, The Times was informed that their government printing contracts were at an end – perhaps one of the few small revenges Pitt was able to take in support of Melville, who had been one of his most faithful allies and longest serving ministers.19 When Pitt died and Lord Sidmouth (Henry Addington having received his peerage early in 1805) was appointed Lord Privy Seal in the Ministry of All Talents, John Walter II applied for restoration of his contract as a printer for the government. He received no reply, nor was his request ever granted.20 At the same time, he set about expanding the paper’s network of foreign correspondents, but neither his compliments nor his complaints to Addington himself prevented the officials at the Post Office, who maintained rigid bureaucratic control over foreign newspapers and their translation, from holding up the paper’s letters from abroad.21 At the same time, John Walter II was arguing with the established theatres about the paper’s decision to discontinue free advertising in exchange for free tickets. The History of The Times suggests that it was through The Times’s con-
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nection with the Leigh Hunt circle that a change in its traditional relationship with the theatres – ‘Puffing and plenty of tickets’ – came about.22 In May 1805, John Hunt had begun a new Sunday weekly, the News, and Leigh Hunt, while still working as a clerk in the war office, a position obtained for him through his father’s acquaintance with Henry Addington, wrote the theatrical notices from May 1805 to December 1807.23 He also wrote notices for The Times: in 1805, John Walter had taken on Barron Field, who was part of the Hunt circle, as his drama critic, and it appears that Hunt occasionally filled in for him, both being young men of only twenty years of age.24 In his Autobiography, Hunt stresses his utter lack of political acquaintance, even with the great Whig leaders whom he supported later in the Examiner, and the oddity of his refusing to accept free tickets from the theatre managers.25 The History of The Times argues that Walter gave this kind of journalistic independence a more prominent profile.26 At the Examiner Hunt paid for his own tickets and wrote independently, while The Times continued to accept free tickets but refused to insert the usual puffs in return and insisted that the managers submit to paying the full rates for advertising, arguing that the tickets were proffered as a gratuity by the theatres’ own choice. The notices therefore became criticism rather than a form of advertising. There were protests, with the theatre managers arguing that the bartering of free advertising for free tickets had originated ‘in a political as well as a theatrical agreement’.27 Their eventual capitulation suggests that advertising in The Times was finally seen as necessary to their public presence. Thus, it was the commercial circulation of the paper that gave it its independence, and it was this assertion of freedom from the theatres’ dictats that indicated the way for political independence. Sheridan was both the manager of Drury Lane and an MP, having been appointed as Treasurer of the Navy in the cabinet of All Talents (1806–7). If the dating of the exchange quoted here by the History of The Times is correct, then it was written after the Ministry of All Talents had fallen. At the same time, Sidmouth was finally shown the door by the newly formed Portland cabinet, and for the first time in the paper’s history John Walter II determined to seek governmental approval no longer. In this resolve, he may have been reinforced, not only by his drama critics but also by his foreign correspondent Henry Crabb Robinson. In October 1805, Walter had ceased to pay the Post Office its monopoly fee of sixty guineas for foreign papers and their translation, complaining that the deliveries promised by the service were sporadic or non-existent. The Post Office retaliated by confiscating any foreign packages addressed to The Times. After further negotiation, Walter agreed to an arrangement by which his foreign mail would be addressed to the UnderSecretary for foreign affairs, George Hammond (1763–1853), who would see that the items were not delayed; eventually, it was brought to the attention of
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the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, who instructed the Postmaster-General that there should be no holding back of Walter’s correspondence.28 When it seemed that the Pitt system of wartime repression might be on its way out and that the civil servant at the head of the Post Office of whom all complained, Francis Freeling (1764–1836), might be dismissed, Cobbett wrote to his old ally William Windham, calling Freeling ‘the most dangerous’ and ‘the most powerful’ of the Pitt administrators, because through his control of the distribution network, he had ‘the appointment of an active and powerful political partisan in every town in the kingdom’.29 But even under the All Talents, Freeling was retained. In the meantime, The Times itself used its own columns to seek redress. An article headed ‘The Post Office’ on 9 May 1807 complained that for its fees the paper had to be grateful for ‘the obsolete contents of Foreign Papers’ and had recently received ‘a parcel of paragraphs which had already, with the exception of a few lines of no consequence, appeared in another paper’. The paper’s campaign against the Post Office did not invoke questions of political rights or censorship: instead, its column began with the remark that ‘The mercantile world has long complained of the conduct of the Post Office’. And the second paragraph continued, ‘In a commercial country like our own, every possible facility should be given to its commercial correspondence’.30 Thus, The Times argued not about political rights but commercial urgency. However, the Post Office chose to see this as libel, and John Walter and John Walter II, were ordered to appear in court on 3 July. They put forward the names of ten other newspaper owners, including William Cobbett and Daniel Stuart, as having paid the fees for the delivery of foreign correspondence in a mandatory contract that was not being fulfilled. The Post Office acknowledged during the trial that The Times had used no individual or party invective, but its proprietors were nonetheless fined and ordered to pay costs and print an apology revoking its accusations.31 Thus the outlook of government was such that Walter’s status as a businessman, whether he organized his own contract for the delivery of foreign news or not, did not figure against the privilege of the government and its schedule of fees. In this respect, the Post Office and the Foreign Office shared Cobbett’s view, that foreign news was indeed a political commodity first. There was no acknowledgement of The Times’s view of itself as a commercial organ among other commercial organizations, whose product was up-to-date shipping news, even though the government’s own use of Orders-in-Council signalled a recognition of the importance of the mercantile estate. Eventually, John Walter II was ingenious enough to pay ship captains experienced in contraband smuggling to achieve his ends, which, he argued to the Admiralty, ‘is perfectly innocent with respect to its operation on the public revenue, namely the conveyance of French papers only to England’.32 The officials to whom he appealed for permission to
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smuggle something of no obvious commercial value appear not to have replied, and eventually Walter was receiving requests for his early information from the government.33 The commercial interests who advertised in The Times had themselves been enriched by years of fulfilling government war contracts in clothing and supplies, and it is perhaps in that sense that the government can be said to have subsidized the paper. Meanwhile, in his efforts to secure early intelligence, Walter had placed the young Henry Crabb Robinson at Altona in January 1807. By September, Robinson, who seems to have had a gift for being on the newsworthy spot, was fleeing for his life from the Copenhagen bombardment, but before that he had written to Walter urging him to make foreign news a literary feature of the paper. He argued that the writer of such a column abroad would give the reader ‘the tone and spirit of his time and place’ and thought such writing more authoritative than the mere transmission of facts.34 But as he himself dispassionately noted a few months later, the businessman was not persuaded of the value of fine writing and preferred to deploy Robinson in the office at home, while leaving any political commentary to another writer, the Reverend Peter Fraser, who was more experienced in government bureaucracy. Indeed Robinson frankly recognized that Walter disapproved of his tendency to literary ‘playfulness’.35 Thus, for the leading article, Robinson was given ‘the compiling of the little articles of information, which is always the beginning’, while Fraser did the actual writing-up of the argument, because he had ‘a certain wordy emphasis which readers like, & also more knowledge in general’.36 From this we can see that Walter had little taste for ‘literary’ writing or for a conception of the paper as essayistic in the Leigh Hunt mode. Commentary alongside the selection of news items was sporadic. Walter eventually dispensed with Robinson’s help at the end of 1809 and mostly edited the paper himself in 1810. Nor, in 1811, was he desperate enough to accept an offer made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to work in the office six hours daily and supply a number of articles that would establish the paper as a principled expostulator, showing ‘the due proportion of political power to property, joined with the removal of all obstacles to the free circulation and transfer of property and all artificial facilities for its natural tendency to accumulate in large and growing masses’.37 Nor did Walter accept Coleridge’s offer of some articles gratis in exchange for puffs of his upcoming lecture series entitled ‘The Principles of Poetry’. The leading principle of The Times rested on pre-eminence of business news, and Walter showed no desire to challenge the Morning Chronicle’s moral victories under James Perry (1756–1821), who was prosecuted by the government three times and went to prison in 1798.38 In October 1808, one of Wilberforce’s ‘Saints’, the young James Stephen, who had worked as a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, told Spencer Per-
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ceval, Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader in the Commons for the Portland government, You are losing … or have lost that paper [The Times], which has great influence on the public mind, especially on the mercantile world … In a national view this is to be regretted. I do not think that your colleagues and you attach as much importance to the press as Bonaparte and I do.39
Standing back from any view of the age as morally progressive, it would appear that Walter’s only principles were a secure commercial base and the defeat of Napoleon in order to free up trade. It is important to realize that the grounds on which The Times achieved preeminence were utterly distinct from those of Cobbett’s Political Register, which was essentially one long editorial and carried no commercial advertisements (apart from those for Cobbett’s own publications or those he approved). Walter and Cobbett thus made themselves ‘independent’ of government sponsorship but by entirely divergent tacks. Olivia Smith in The Politics of Language points out that newspapers put the newly literate on equal footing with parliamentarians by ‘putting them into relationship with both the state and other readers’.40 Cobbett’s Political Register made that relationship explicit, as demonstrated by its publication of instructions for the submission of petitions. The difference between Cobbett and other leader-writers such as Coleridge was that Cobbett talked directly to the rustics themselves. In his famous address on excessive taxation and the need for parliamentary reform, ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland’, Cobbett reminds his readers that all the wealth of the country sprang from its people – Elegant dresses, superb furniture, stately buildings, fine roads and canals, fleet horses and carriages, numerous and stout ships, warehouses teeming with goods; all these, and many other objects that fall under our view, are so many marks of national wealth and resources. But all these spring from labour.41
Having reminded his readers of their national value, he draws attention to the derogatory governmental rhetoric surrounding them in the aftermath of the war: ‘With this correct idea of your own worth in your minds, with what indignation must you hear yourselves called the Populace, the Rabble, the Mob, the Swinish Multitude’. He quotes Blackstone on liberty, and explains in detail what Habeas Corpus means. Cobbett’s innovation is to suggest to the working classes that they are rightful rather than revolutionary participants in the political nation.42 Earlier, while in America, Cobbett had written in a colloquial idiom but once back in Britain tended to resort to Burkean romanticism about the British Constitution and agrarian society. Cobbett’s nostalgias do not alter, but by 1816, he is no longer
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speaking of ‘we’ nor is he directing his remarks to the middle-class reader: it is the ‘you’ of the lower classes to whom he unembarrassedly addresses his thoughts. At this point the Observer was still selling its usual few thousand copies, as compared to an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 copies of the Political Register. When Parliament became more repressive, new legislation redefined newspapers in April 1817 to include Cobbett, he shut down (last issue: 32:13 ( 29 March 1817); price 1s.1d.), went to America (see ‘Mr. Cobbett’s Taking Leave of His Country Men’ published 28 March 1817; price 2d.), and altered his format to Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlet (32:15 (12 July 1817); price 2d.) The famous ‘Taking Leave’ dwelt on the social change that had divided England into classes. Cobbett remarks that this estrangement from the country gentry, who now spent less time in the country and more in London, was taking place at the same time as the lower classes were becoming more literate. After 1774, when perpetual copyright was ended, the lower classes suddenly gained access to literary, as opposed to popular, culture. Before 1780, there had been only the Bible, broadsheets, chap-books, almanacs and ballads. After the change in copyright law, from 1777 to 1783, John Bell printed his Poets of Great Britain in various formats including weekly sixpenny numbers and, during the 1790s, the Minerva Press put out novels for circulating libraries. New literature continued to be expensive right up to the 1830s, but Bell’s and Cooke’s series of reprints meant that the tradition of English literature was no longer confined to readers nurtured in the classics and college life.43 Cobbett was quick to scorn all the conventional 1790s wisdom of looking to Hannah More and the Sunday School movement – the upper classes had not really grasped the nature of this new literacy: they ‘imagine that the working classes of the people have their minds quite sufficiently occupied by the reading of what are called, “religious and moral tracts.” Simple insipid dialogues and stories, calculated for the minds of children seven or eight years old’.44 The problem for the ruling classes was that the new reading public ‘understand well what they read; they dive into all matters connected with politics’. Cobbett is derisive of the notion that the appetite for reading should exist in a moral vacuum, an artificial arena of innocence. On 29 November 1817, he remarked that the grammatical mistakes in an otherwise impressively intelligent petition made to Parliament had allowed the politicians to say that the writers were merely ‘a set of the “Lower Classes,” who ought never to raise their reading above that of childrens’ books, Christmas Carrols, and the like’.45 In November 1817, he announced a project ‘to communicate to all uneducated Reformers, a knowledge of Grammar: The people, you know, were accused of presenting petitions not grammatically correct. And those petitions were rejected, the petitioners being “ignorant”: though some of them were afterwards put into prison for being “better informed”.46 Cob-
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bett then went on to give an explanation of the political importance of grammar, denying that it had any intrinsic value or any real intellectual difficulty: Grammar is to literary composition what a linch pin is to a waggon. It is a poor pitiful thing in itself; it bears no part of the weight; communicates nothing to the force; adds not in the least to the celerity; but, still the waggon cannot very well and safely go on without it.47
The political moral is clear, that grammar is a sign of caste: ‘if I were to fix upon the greatest cause of the people having been so long kept down, I should … rank the infinite pains that have been taken to amuse the people with little childish tracts, and, at the same time to keep up a monopoly of the study of Grammar’.48 Grammar was taught in eighteenth-century public schools through the study of the ancient languages. Cobbett had already spent much time in his earlier journalistic career discussing how the ‘learned languages’ operated as a means of exclusion, and he here recounts how his own efforts to make the people part of national politics had aroused the ire of the professional classes and satirizes the manners of those who have been to college, in order to make his lower-class readers view with moral contempt what they otherwise might have found socially intimidating: When you meet with one of them at a time, he wearies you half to death with his puns, his college jokes and scraps; but, if two, they are a perfect pest. A loud tone and pulpit-like gesticulations they have learnt to great perfection, and ill-manners are the natural produce of their insolence, conceit and fancied superiority.49
As for education of the poor, Cobbett again made great play of the complaint by Lord Sidmouth (Home Secretary 1812–21), that the people were now ‘better informed’ and read more: Well? And what then? What are all your Bell’s and Lancaster’s and God knows how many other sorts of Sunday and Week-day and Night Schools for? What are they for, man? Are they intended to prevent the people from reading? … and did not this Sidmouth himself, in his official capacity, give his sanction to the establishment at Norwich, of a society for distributing publications of this very sort? Cheap, indeed! Why, what has all this school-subscribing been for? What a complaint is here bolted out, at last, from the lips of one of the great patrons of the education of the poor!50
In attacking this dichotomy – between the patronage of the poor and the treatment of them as children, the profession of educational purposes alongside the suppression of ‘blasphemous’ writings – Cobbett makes explicit the exclusion that was promoted by conventional veneration for the ‘learned languages’. To meet them as equals on their own political ground, the lower classes evidently must demonstrate their own grammatical competence. Urging the necessity for an understanding of English grammar, Cobbett promises ‘an English Grammar,
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for the use of Apprentices, Plough-Boys, Soldiers, and Sailors’. He also promises to provide them with a history of the constitution, a history of the Church, and a report on the country’s financial management: these will help the ordinary working person answer the ruling classes’ arguments – and ‘the price of the whole four volumes shall not exceed much more than half the amount of the tax which the labourer in England now pays upon one single bushel of salt’.51 Quite apart from the intellectual challenge offered, this opens up the emotional confidence for change: ‘To convince you of the great use of this branch of knowledge, or learning, I have only to relate to you its effects with regard to myself ’.52 He then describes how grammatical competence improved his status in the British army during years of service in Canada from 1783 to 1791, when he was first clerk to the regiment and responsible for all the paperwork. To illustrate the pitfalls of being a lower-class literate person making his way amid hierarchical protocols, he then relates a specific incident: It is the custom in Regiments to give out Orders every day from the Officer Commanding. These are written by the Adjutant, to whom the Serjeant Major [Cobbett] is a sort of Deputy. The man, whom I had to do with was a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate. The Orders, which he wrote, most cruelly murdered our mother tongue. But, in his absence, or, during a severe drunken fit, it fell to my lot to write Orders. As we both wrote in the same book, he used to look at these. He saw commas, semicolons, colons, full points, and paragraphs. The questions he used to put to me, in an obscure sort of way in order to know why I made these divisions, and yet, at the same time, his attempts to disguise his object, have made me laugh a thousand times … he, at last, fell upon this device: he made me write, while he pretended to dictate! … But, here, a greater difficulty than any former arose. He that could not write good grammar, could not, of course, dictate good grammar. Out would come some gross error, such as I was ashamed to see in my hand writing. I would stop; suggest another arrangement … But, this course could not continue long; and he put an end to it in this way: he used to tell me his story, and leave me to put it upon paper.53
This buffoonishly incompetent adjutant then made an unfortunate offer to his superiors to write up the report of a government commission looking into the state of the Canadian colonies at the time, and taking the hint, the young Cobbett casually offered to write the report in exchange for a week’s pigeon-hunting leave – ‘Away he went, brought me the whole mass, and, tossing them down upon the table: “There,” said he, “do what you like with them; for, d—n the rubbish, I have no patience with it”’. The moral of the story for his readers becomes explicit when Cobbett asserts that every young man who shall read what I am now writing may be assured, that he can never arrive at fame; that he can never obtain and retain any great degree of influence over the minds of other men, unless he be possessed of this branch of knowledge.54
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In winding up his argument, Cobbett vowed that his working-class grammar would circumvent any potentially libellous material: ‘it would be hard indeed to flog a soldier or a sailor for studying Grammar!’55 Cobbett was right to say that the possession of the learned languages was the sign of power. In 1817, Coleridge’s refutation of the Wordsworthian notion of rustic language, in Biographia Literaria, was a conservative attempt amid civil unrest to set aside politics – the essence of literary and political romanticism – and did not stand up against Cobbett’s interpretation of language as power. Rather like Horne Tooke in his Enlightenment radicalism, Cobbett reasserted the place of the nominative and the political in his analysis of language. However, the discussion of language in 1819 was no longer a matter for educated radical dilettantism. Discussing the correct pronoun to be used for nouns of multitude, Cobbett in his Grammar chooses the House of Commons as his example of an antecedent – ‘they refused to hear evidence against Castlereagh, when Mr. Maddox accused him of having sold a seat; or, it refused to hear evidence’.56 For the contemporary reader, the names and events referred to would have recalled the nepotism crisis of 1809, when it looked as though Castlereagh and the government would be thrown out of office over charges of bribery and the popular call for reform began. Similarly slanted are Cobbett’s examples of simple and of compound sentences: ‘The people suffer great misery’ and ‘The people suffer great misery, and daily perish for want’.57 The most defiant part of the book consists in its appendix, ‘Six Lessons, intended to prevent Statesmen from using False Grammar and from Writing in an Awkward Manner’. There Cobbett includes examples taken from the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Prince Regent, and papers by Castlereagh, the Duke of Wellington and the Marquis Wellesley. Their solecisms of grammar and logic are closely criticized, and the whole exercise indeed ends with a sneer at the universities that produced officials who wrote so incorrectly. In 1817 the educated knew that it was urgent to refute Cobbett and others like him. Increasingly, his writing became relentless in its persistent attacks upon the respectable broadsheets, which ‘say, that you have no business at public meetings; that you are rabble, and that you pay no taxes’.58 Cobbett then printed in a vertical list the items of direct taxes that penalized the poor, On your shoes, Salt, Beer, Malt, Hops, Tea, Sugar, Candles,
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Soap, Paper, Coffee, Spirits, Glass of your windows, Bricks and tiles, Tobacco.59
Reiterating the fashionable Malthusian outcries over a growing population, he tells his readers not to be misled into applying such logic to themselves – So then, a young man, arm-in-arm with a rosy-cheeked girl, must be a spectacle of evil omen! What! and do they imagine, that you are thus to be extinguished, because some of you are now (without any fault of yours) unable to find work? As far as you were wanted to labour, to fight, or to pay taxes, you were welcome, and they boasted of your numbers; but, now that the country has been brought into a state of misery, these corrupt and insolent men are busied with schemes for getting rid of you. Just as if you had not as good a right to live and to love and to marry as they have! They do not propose, far from it, to check the breeding of Sinecure Placemen and Pensioners, who are supported in part by the taxes which you help to pay. They say not a word about the whole families, who are upon the pension list.60
The Tory Opposition Cobbett’s rhetorical power had never been greater.61 It is a testimony to his singular strength that the government at this juncture thought to capitalize on the increase in lower-class readership and imitated him by putting out a publication called the Anti-Cobbett, or Weekly Patriotic Register, consisting of sixteen pages, published from 15 February 1817 to 5 April 1817 and priced at 12d. (they put out another anti-radical publication, called the White Dwarf, from 29 November 1817 to April 1818). But increasingly, prosecution for libel looked more expeditious. In this atmosphere the radical lower-class writers and publishers of this time became proficient in points of libel law.62 In view of the rising tone of the Political Register, it is not surprising that government voices should have felt compelled to write on the danger presented. Robert Southey replied, in two of his most famous articles in the Quarterly Review, ‘Parliamentary Reform’ (October 1816; published February 1817) and ‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’ ( January 1817; published May 1817), arguing ‘That was an unhappy state of society in which every citizen was so closely interested in public affairs, that it was declared criminal by the laws for any one to be neutral in times of public commotion’.63 He blamed the press for aggrandizing the People, who formerly were as ‘nothing in the scale’.64 He then went on to trace the growth of opposition, beginning with the Catholics who
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opposed Elizabeth I. Where the Catholics had been responsible for the upheaval of the Tudor and Stuart eras, late Hanoverianism had to deal with the threat of Dissenting journals, particularly after the American revolution: ‘When these principles began to spread, it so happened that our literary journals were almost wholly in the hands of dissenters’. Thus Literature had become entangled with republicanism and Socinianism. Southey, who, like Coleridge, was still caught up in the ideological debates of the 1790s, cited the atheists as a class of ‘literary adventurers’: … Addison observes that, in his time, the great professions law, physic, and divinity were overstocked with practitioners. Hence there arose a class of literary adventurers … but men of letters were not known in England as a distinct class in society till the beginning of the last century, and during the present reign they have increased in number at least fifty fold.65
His theory was that the pursuit of literature had combined with the disruption of the peasant class to produce a widespread political discontent.66 Statistically, he shows the danger of Cobbett alone, in terms that might otherwise be flattering to a journalist – ‘Two years ago it was computed that above 500,000 newspapers were printed every week. Cobbett boasted that he had sold more than a million of his papers within the last six months, and that a single paper frequently served for an hundred auditors’.67 Indeed Southey’s articles testify unhappily to this literary enfranchisement of the populace, which had made those without votes interested in the political decisions of their masters. The People had now become caught up in this rarefied occupation of national politics, and Southey saw this as a change in ‘the very constitution of society’, which is to say, that all were now political commentators.68 Southey spoke for the Tory Quarterly Review, but the parliamentary and literary Whigs too reflected, in the Edinburgh Review, on the expansion of the political classes made by newspaper reading. A year later, another figure active in the 1790s, James Mackintosh (1765–1832), author of Vindicae Gallicae and a Whig MP, considered the question of universal suffrage in the Edinburgh Review and expressed the educated classes’ horror of democracy in acknowledging that politics were now part of public opinion: … Sixty years ago, the opinion of Parliamentary parties might be said to represent all the opinions of the nation … no man has canvassed a county in England, who has not felt, that political opinions have penetrated into places where they never before reached.69
The result was that people who had no ‘permanent’ stake in the commonwealth, that is to say, owned no property, nonetheless exercised power through the press, whereas the electorate system had in fact been set up to reflect the political needs
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of Property not Opinion. It was at this point that, famously, Southey himself was embarrassed by the republication of his own youthful bit of democratic incendiarism, Wat Tyler, written in November 1794 when he was twenty. It came out on 13 February 1817, from the radical publishers Sherwood, Neely and Jones (via the deistic Daniel Isaac Eaton and William Winterbothem). William Hone then reprinted Wat Tyler with ‘A Preface suitable to Recent Circumstances’, where he quoted from Southey’s article of October 1816 on parliamentary reform. Hone’s preface summarizes the uproar caused by its reprinting, two days after the publication of the Quarterly Review issue (October 1816) containing ‘Parliamentary Reform’ had appeared on 11 February 1817.70 The debate reached the Commons, where William Smith, a Dissenter and a Foxite Whig, read out extracts from Wat Tyler and disingenuously inquired as to why no action had been taken against a book so highly seditious, for it denounced the monarchy and advocated universal suffrage and equality.71 Coleridge’s defence seized upon the fact that Southey had been attacked in a forum, the chamber of the House of Commons, where his accuser, Smith, was protected from prosecution.72 Technically the accusation should have taken place without public record, since parliamentary reporters were only admitted by a customary waiving of the rule of secrecy – When his Majesty ascended the Throne, and for some years afterwards, the publication of the debates was strictly prohibited. Since the American Revolution their publication has not only been allowed, but, indulgences have been gradually conceded to the Gentlemen who report them; and since the French Revolution, the Journalists have freely commented, not always in respectful terms, on the sentiments of the speakers. All this arisen during an age of tyranny and oppression according to the mob orators of the day.73
Southey’s own defence, ‘A Letter to William Smith’, appeared on the same day in the same paper (Courier, 17 March 1817) and dwelt on the historical circumstances of the 1790s as a context for Wat Tyler’s publication, ‘republicanism was confined to a very small number of the educated classes’.74 He identified Tory anti-Jacobinism as the prevailing ethos of the lower classes in the 1790s, whereas in 1817, the reverse was true. Coleridge, though disgusted by this disavowal of Southey’s earlier principles, also privately noted, ‘the Thing contains nothing, that I can find, that would not have been praised and thought all very right forty years ago at all the Public Schools in England, had it been written by a Lad in the first form, as a Poem’.75 In this context, Wat Tyler was not seditious according to Coleridge. Remarkably, Coleridge saw 1817 as political but not the 1794 of his youth, despite the Treason Trials.76 Privately, to T. G. Street, he recommended a survey of the parliamentary debates from the 1790s in order to show that Wat Tyler was hardly original. Southey’s dangerous phrases had first been voiced in the sanctum of the House itself, and indeed ‘it seems nothing but a string of
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servile plagiarisms from the Speeches of the Opposition Party from 1792 to the Peace of Amiens’.77
William Hone This same aristocratic jacobinism of the 1790s was also invoked as a defence for the liberty of the press in December 1817 during the trial of the publisher William Hone for blasphemy. Hone was actually tried, on three separate counts, on three consecutive days (18–20 December). The trials were published immediately afterwards, and William Hazlitt later made a statement of his own radicalism when he gave his collected Political Essays to Hone to publish in 1819.78 Of interest here is the fact that Hone’s defence was mostly a literary one. Just as Cobbett argued that the working men of England should not be prosecuted for studying grammar, Hone sought to persuade the jury that he was only copying his literary betters. The crimes attributed to Hone consisted in having published parodies of the Catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, the Litany and the Athanasian Creed. All these libels were read out in court and included: Q. Rehearse the Articles of thy Belief. A. I believe in GEORGE, the Regent Almighty, Maker of New Streets, and Knights of the Bath, And in the present Ministry, his only choice, who were conceived of Toryism, brought forth of WILLIAM PITT, suffered loss of Place under CHARLES JAMES FOX, were execrated, dead, and buried.79 Among Hone’s version of the Ten Commandments were: I. Thou shalt have no other Patron but me. VI. Thou shalt not call starving to death murder. VII. Thou shalt not call Royal gallivanting adultery.80 And his ‘Lord’s Prayer’ reads, ‘Our Lord who are in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session’.81 Hone undertook to defend himself as no lawyer could have done, and put forward the point on which the jury’s verdict was to rest, and indeed, on which the government prosecution foundered: blasphemy was the wrong charge. Hone argued that his parody was intended to bring into disrepute the government, not Christianity: ‘if they [the jury] did not find that this political catechism was published with an impious and profane intention, they would give him a verdict of acquittal’.82 He then ran over the recent history of trials for libel, beginning with Burke’s unsuccessful attempts in 1771 to secure trial by jury. Burke had failed in his campaign for the role of public opinion
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in government, and it was not until twenty years later, in 1792, that Fox had succeeded in getting his Libel Bill passed mandating trial by jury. The government had retaliated with its notorious system of ‘special’ juries. Hone thus began his defence proper by protesting the special jury chosen in this case. When first arrested (3 May 1817), he had consulted with Cobbett, Francis Place, Richard Phillips and John Hunt, among others. In 1814 Phillips had put out a pamphlet on the abuses of special juries, and extracts from this were published under the title ‘Golden Rules for Jurymen’ in Hone’s Reformists’ Register (5 July 1817).83 Such was the strength of popular feeling over Hone’s trials that most of the men picked for the special jury took it upon themselves not to appear. Hone then turned to citing the historically familiar instances of parody, beginning with Martin Luther in 1518, going right up to ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’, which had appeared in the October 1817 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine only two months before – and had not been prosecuted.84 Perhaps the most telling citation was that of George Canning and the Anti-Jacobin: Hone argued that he was being prosecuted for ‘doing that which a Cabinet Minister had been suffered to do with impunity’.85 He read out an excerpt from Canning’s satire The New Morality (1798). The judge replied that it parodied passages from Milton and Pope, but Hone showed that some of the lines also parodied passages from the Book of Job and Psalm 148.86 Hone spoke for over six hours on this first day. After a deliberation of fewer than fifteen minutes, the jury returned an acquittal. Lord Ellenborough, the Attorney-General (who had presided over the trial of the editor of the Morning Chronicle, James Perry, in 1810 and also of the Hunts in 1812) then decided on the second day to take over the chair himself from Judge Abbott. The publication of these proceedings was important because it furnished an opportunity for those who had not seen the original publications to read them and to hear something of the history of literary parodies as well. Lord Ellenborough proposed to suppress these during the trial, but Hone faced him down by his persistence in asking what was meant by evidence.87 Much of the same material from the first day was produced again. Hone additionally brought forward Burke’s parody of the Burial Service in the Commons, and earlier parodies on the Book of Common Prayer.88 He also cited a parody of the Litany written by Ben Jonson and performed before Queen Elizabeth. In detail, he went through the passages of his own publication, showing how the statements about corruption and rational distress were based on fact – in effect, he delivered a day-long editorial upon the state of the country. Ellenborough directed the jury to find Hone guilty, but after a trial lasting over eight hours and deliberations of under two hours, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Because Hone had spoken for six and seven hours during his first and second trials, there was some expectation of delay, that he might recuperate, but the third trial went ahead the next day. Hone complained that he had been tried sep-
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arately on charges that might have been dealt with on one occasion, and having been acquitted twice, still had to face trial a third time. He raised the point that libel was such that its criminal boundaries were notoriously unclear, especially to those unacquainted with the niceties of law.89 In her account of post-war radicalism, For the Cause of Truth, J. Ann Hone remarks on the sophistication of the legal knowledge cultivated among the radical publishers at this time. In spite of his professions of legal ignorance, Hone himself was conversant enough with legal niceties to remind the jury that by the statutes of Fox’s Libel Bill the judge was not required to make his opinion known, only to give information.90 In Politics and the Press, Aspinall remarks that although there had been attempts with two acts in 1798 and 1799 to register printers and thereby control the press, in fact, ‘[t]he special privileges enjoyed by the Attorney-General when conducting Press prosecutions in libel cases, constituted a more serious threat to the liberty of the Press than this legislation’.91 The use of special juries, finally abolished in 1825, was one such way of manipulating the system; the use of ex officio information was another. In 1811, Lord Folkestone in the Commons and Holland in the Lords had put forward motions on the use of such informations.92 In particular, they were roused by statistics showing that there had been forty-two prosecutions during the years 1808–10 (by comparison, say, to seventy during the years 1760–91). Only sixteen of these had resulted in convictions. R. G. Thorne argues that this represented a situation of Damoclean anxiety for those threatened: ‘at one time more than half the newspapers were threatened with prosecution and not one of them was ever brought to trial’. Sir Vicary Gibbs (1751–1820) was Attorney-General for the period of March 1807 to May 1812. On being attacked for the number of prosecutions, he replied that there were altogether about two hundred publications in London, including fifty-two newspapers.93 Gibbs also maintained that the forty-two prosecutions were in fact much fewer, because most of them consisted of the same libel copied in a number of publications. Despite Lord Holland’s sincere efforts to have the practice of ex-officio information rescinded, the Whigs as a whole did not support the motion, which was defeated 199 to 36. Hone ended his third defence, having spoken more than eight hours, by stressing the liberty of the press and the new ‘liberality’, which, he said, meant that the people now went on with ‘the charities of social life, or the performance of moral duties’ – quite separately from considerations of politics or religion.94 He was acquitted a third time within twenty minutes, once more to loud applause and cheering, with a crowd of over 20,000 said to have gathered outside. Hone subsequently published the account of his trials, and numerous public meetings were held to celebrate the victory and take up a collection. It was a victory for ‘Trial by Jury’ and ‘Liberty of the Press’. The account of the three days of the William Hone trials give in some detail Lord Ellenborough’s instructions to the jury
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– in each case to find Hone guilty of ‘most impious and profane libel’ – which in each case were met with the two short words ‘Not Guilty’.95 The independence of ‘the People’ in 1817 had become a fact. In his article ‘Liberty of the Press’, James Mill had maintained in the Edinburgh Review that the French Revolution was a result of too much repression of the press rather than too little – ‘The abuses of the press which attended the excesses of the French revolution, we regard as the effect, not the cause of the public disorders … had a free press existed in France, the French revolution never would have taken place’.96 The danger to the country now lay in the government’s overuse of the bogeyman of the French Revolution to keep its critics quiet. The amorphous nature of the libel law was one of the government’s tools. Mill argues that the free press is an anti-revolutionary link between the government and the governed: ‘by the free circulation of opinions, the government is always fully apprised, which, by no other means it ever can be, of the sentiments of the people, and feels a decided interest in conforming to them … a free press compels them to bend to one another’.97 But the period after Hone’s trial was one of unmitigated convulsion. The government seemed unable to understand what the People were saying. Ellenborough, who had been Lord Chief Justice since 1802, retired and died a year later – most accounts say, as a consequence of Hone’s trial. The Hone case was a persuasive turning point. Hone defended himself on literary grounds, citing the literary works of respectable politicians and showing the impossibility of separating mere words from the reputation of their writers. Henry Crabb Robinson, who had given up journalism for law by this point, gives a forensic account of the trial, suggesting the neater grounds that a professional pleader might have used but admiring Hone’s success nonetheless. As a lawyer who had appeared before Lord Ellenborough, Robinson clearly enjoyed this rout of ‘a despot’, saying ‘this illiterate man has avenged all our injuries’.98 Coleridge, Keats and Shelley all hailed Hone’s victory. Coleridge wrote in a letter to James Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, ‘… I exult in Hone’s acquittal and Lord Ellenborough’s deserved humiliation’. Shelley subscribed five guineas after Robert Waithman and other ‘Friends of the Liberty of the Press & Trial by Jury’ met on 29 December 1817 and passed a motion thanking Hone for his defence of ‘constitutional freedom’.99 But Hone troubled those Whigs who recognized his work as a concomitant of the new literacy, and one feature of their discussions over the next year concerned the connection between liberty and education. Tellingly, all the examples of unfair prosecution offered by the Whigs in resistance to the government’s repressive legislation were taken from the 1790s. In 1819, they considered that the radical publishers’ challenges inspired by Hone bordered on criminality.
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In two debates in the House in December 1819, James Mackintosh spoke on the Whig tradition of ‘Liberty of the Press’. He and other speakers alluded to the ‘heroic age of Whiggism’ and the end of licensing in 1694 under Charles II.100 Hone’s acquittal was cited as the reason for the radical press’s new boldness.101 It was noted that in the year following his trial, ‘there was no information filed or prosecution commenced against blasphemous or seditious libels’. But in October 1819 the deist publisher Richard Carlile had been prosecuted and convicted. Condemning the deism of Carlile, these old Foxite Whigs could argue that the law needed no further penalties, for blasphemy was still being successfully convicted. Hone, as was widely recognized, had simply been prosecuted on the wrong grounds, religious ones, in the attempt to suppress his political remarks: ‘It was impossible that a jury could convict that individual, when they saw that statesmen, bishops, and lawyers had published similar productions; and that a parodist was actually a cabinet minister’.102 Just a few days after the ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties’ bill was passed in December 1819, Wordsworth, acknowledging the mistake made in Hone’s case, wrote The Ministers do not appear to me to have cleared themselves from the charge of not having made the best use of the previously existing laws for the punishment of Libel. The failure of the prosecution of Hone, furnished no sufficient reasons why other offenders of that description should not have been indicted.103
In the debate on ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties’, Henry Brougham cited the libel from the case that in 1813 had sent the Hunts to jail, a derogatory remark on the Prince Regent and his vanity.104 Brougham contrasted the mildness of such a statement with the open calls to assassination presently appearing in the radical press and as yet unprosecuted. Thus the parliamentary Whigs consoled themselves with the archaic notion of the liberty of the press that they had inherited from Fox and the 1790s. And indeed Leigh Hunt and traditional Whiggism had been left behind in libellous terms by the new lower-class publishers. Richard Cronin argues in The Politics of Romantic Poetry that after 1810, Leigh Hunt’s political vocabulary would get no further than those of Fox and Sir Francis Burdett at his most ‘radical’.105 In 1819, Hunt acknowledged Cobbett as ‘at once the most powerful as well as popular political writer now living’ – but Hunt himself increasingly turned to literature rather than politics. For, he too had served his time in jail and in 1819 read the signs of danger for all the press. The fear of the old Foxite Whigs was that respectable publishers would be caught up in the same net as the deist publishers Carlile or Sherwin. Brougham noted that in 1817 there had been two to three productions such as the Cap of Liberty, the Medusa and the Gorgon, but in 1819 there were ten to twelve of them, and he blamed the government’s ‘rigour’ of prosecution.106 This Whiggish defence of the liberty
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of the press finally did no more than modify a notoriously repressive piece of legislation. There was a clause included saying that a trial must be brought on within a year of an ex-officio information’s being filed.107 This proviso was a sop, considering that Habeas Corpus had been suspended, but it was a clause that James Mackintosh, perhaps in a nod to Holland and Folkestone’s failed motion of 1811, proclaimed ‘the greatest and most beneficial alteration of the criminal law of the country’ since Fox’s libel bill of 1794 [sic, should be 1792].108 One can see why the radicals would have been exasperated with Mackintosh and these Whig cohorts who were always ready to fall in with the government. Castlereagh was the one to move the second reading, and the debate contained an interesting discussion of the Hone and Wooler trials, suggesting that governmental wisdom lay in not prosecuting. For an old Whig like Mackintosh, the difficulty was ‘the possibility and expediency of distinguishing instigation to crime from political libel’ – and thus the conundrum of dealing with a concept of liberty of the press not founded on ‘Whig principles’.109 Public opinion had moved outside the parliamentary chamber where all this was debated. In his Edinburgh Review article a year later, ‘Parliamentary Reform’ (November 1820), Mackintosh commented on the phenomenon of public opinion and its supersession of parliamentary free speech: the prodigious increase of the power of public opinion, has procured, for every portion of the people, that degree of influence on Parliamentary proceedings, which, in former ages, they could have obtained only through the channel of direct representation.110
At the same time, Mackintosh took pains to say, however, that in making this judgement in 1820 he was not remarking on the uproar caused so memorably that same year by the George IV’s attempts to obtain a divorce from Queen Caroline before being crowned. On that occasion, the cabinet had been caught between the King’s wishes and its own reluctance to pursue an unpopular policy, so much so that the King nearly dismissed his Tory ministers and brought in Whig ones – the closest the Whigs ever came to forming a government in the fifteen years since 1806. All recognized that a Whig motion to include the Queen’s name in the Litany against the King’s wishes would in effect be a motion of nonconfidence and the signal for a change of government, and all classes speculated as to whether the Whigs would bring it off. In an article entitled ‘State and Prospects of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine wrote, It is long since the whigs have made so keen a struggle for power as that of which we have lately witnessed the ardour, and already seen, we believe, the termination. The motive to this unwonted alacrity is obvious. The casual excitement and delusion of those whom the Opposition find it convenient to denominate “the people,” was the sole and most questionable occasion of all this factious bustle – and, so soon as the
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And the next year, the Whigs split into factions, some of them going off to join the Tory government and the rest subsiding into absence or inactivity. Not only did the Queen’s case conclusively prove the King’s unwillingness, hard as he might be pushed, to bring in a Whig government, but it also showed that the Whigs could not rely on popular pressure, however strong, to bring them into power. In fact, so great was the pressure – and therefore so astounding the failure of the Whigs on this occasion – that it brought home to their leader, Grey, just how much the King disliked them. In the brief period when it looked as though the Whigs might bring down the government, they had actually busied themselves organizing public meetings. But the fact remained, that ‘Parliament was indifferent to public opinion’.112 Nonetheless, the prosecution of the Queen, besides nearly bringing the Whigs as a party into power, also led to the striking proof of the truth of James Mill’s observation in 1811 that the press was necessary to a stable government. The proof came, unexpectedly, from the King himself. Pushed to the brink of having to treaty with Whig ministers, he appealed over the heads of Parliament, to the country, in a pamphlet beginning with the totemic words ‘The Liberty of the Press’. It was called ‘Letter from the King to His People’ (dated 1 December 1820) and ran to fifty-three pages on the subject of the royal divorce. The King remarks at the beginning, ‘The liberty of the press does not permit to your King, the possibility of remaining ignorant of passing events, or unaffected by the public agitation’. In fact, not only the first, but also the second, paragraph begins with the catchphrase ‘the liberty of the press’. The freedom of the press meant that ‘With such a constant possibility of explanation, a Monarch may be misguided, but cannot be uninformed’.113 He sees himself as the victim of party politics and the Queen as ‘the tool of party’, by which the Whigs have made ‘[t]he conversion of my matrimonial differences into a political attack upon my authority’.114 He shows how the timing of the Queen’s appearance in the country moreover has become a matter of national danger, following as it does upon the discovery of the Cato-street conspiracy (February 1820), whereby the whole Cabinet were to be assassinated. He even goes as far back as the 1780s, to explain first why he had taken up with the Whigs, and then why at the inception of the Regency in 1812, he had repudiated them. It is a remarkable document and a notable use of the press by royalty though far from being the first.115 On the other side, Henry Brougham’s steering of the Queen as her counsel throughout 1820 was but one more instance of the use of the Princess of Wales in the public press for the purposes of party warfare.116 Cobbett, too, was secretly involved in the controversy, by his ‘Queen’s Letter to the King’ (sent 7 August 1820; printed in The Times,
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14 August 1820), which he had ghostwritten as Caroline’s own appeal to the public. The King’s letter was an acknowledgement of the power of such writing, for the Queen’s letter had sold 20,000 copies a day.117 Hone’s defence had been a literary one, and so was that of George IV. The Whigs ultimately succeeded in preventing George IV from getting what he wanted, partly because the Tories were themselves lukewarm in their support for the king. But subsequently when the Whigs still failed to get into government, it began to look as though this last press campaign had spent the literary strength of Whiggism.
4 1816–24 THE NEW CRITICISM: APOSTASY AND PERSONALITY
The people! – ah, that Freedom’s form should stay Where Freedom’s spirit long hath pass’d away! That a false smile should play around the dead. And flush the features where the soul hath fled!1
The gap between our notion of literature and that of the early nineteenth century is most apparent in the criticism that appeared during the six years of political volatility between 1816 and 1821, years that later generations have often taken for the culmination of the canon of ‘Romantic’ literature. The twenty-fourth volume of the Edinburgh Review (November 1814 & February 1815) opens with Jeffrey’s famous dismissal of Wordsworth’s Excursion – ‘This will never do’ – and closes with the sublime announcement, that ‘Napoleon Buonparte is once more at Paris’. This bookending of Napoleon and Wordsworth gives some sense of the literary-political juxtaposition that makes up British quarterly writing in the early years of the nineteenth century. It also marks the end of the era in which the Edinburgh Review’s judgements were taken as authoritative. During the years 1816–21, the Whiggism of both Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review and Leigh Hunt’s Examiner were shown to be as inadequate as the Toryism of Coleridge and Wordsworth. The idealism of the older generation who first embraced the French Revolution and then fought off Napoleon was exposed as hypocritical by William Hazlitt and then irrelevant by Byron. Post-war criticism, secure in the defeat of France, turned to the long postponed question of domestic reform, and this was the issue that interested the second generation of Romantic writers. William Hazlitt’s prose from 1816 provides an example of the new criticism of apostasy and personality. Here, the end of the struggle against Napoleon did not dissolve into second-generation ennui or disgust. For Hazlitt, the old idealistic scores of the 1790s were suddenly reinvigorated by the publication of Coleridge’s Christabel in 1816 and Southey’s Wat Tyler in 1817. These publications prompted no fewer than three reviews of Coleridge by Hazlitt in the Edinburgh Review alone: ‘Coleridge’s Christabel’ (September 1816); ‘Col– 79 –
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eridge’s Lay-Sermon’ (December 1816); and ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’ (August 1817).2 By August 1817, Hazlitt had written eight reviews of Coleridge within a year – three in the Edinburgh Review and five in the Examiner. In the Examiner, Hazlitt attacked Coleridge three times in four months from September 1816 to January 1817. The first of these, having actually no text in hand, resorted to satirizing Coleridge’s wafflings.3 The second notice, in the Examiner of 29 December 1816, after the book has been published, consisted mostly of excerpts, sandwiched with exclamations about Coleridge’s ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘nonsense’. The third, which was published as a letter to the editor on ‘Mr. Coleridge’s Lay-Sermon’, offered the reminiscence of Hazlitt’s first encounter with Coleridge that became the essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’.4 Coleridge’s Lay-Sermon had originally been advertised as ‘The day of Adversity, a Layman’s Sermon addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes of Society on the present Distresses of the Country’, and Robert Keith Lapp sees it as ‘one of Coleridge’s most determined bids for cultural authority’.5 But in the interim, Cobbett’s Political Register, Coleridge’s old periodical rival, had lowered its price and thus authoritatively staked its claim to intellectual and political predominance. Coleridge may have claimed ultimate victory in the literary canon, as the Victorians later forgot about the political circumstances surrounding his Anglican German transcendentalism, but for the moment Cobbett’s prose won the greater readership. In the same way, literature students have lost sight of Hazlitt’s writings on Coleridge because he mostly chose to reissue them as political essays, and as the significance of their political background has receded, Hazlitt’s invective now looks to be personal. Coleridge seemed inclined to recreate a Rousseauesque ideology while Hazlitt, like Cobbett, attacked in the language of the domestic journalistic vernacular. Although both Coleridge and Hazlitt were delivering lecture series on English literature at this time, only Hazlitt’s were repeated, at the politically evocative site of the Crown and Anchor.6 Hazlitt had begun this campaign against Coleridge earlier in the year, in a review for the Examiner, the only one not to be republished as a political essay.7 This notice was not without its praise of Christabel and also of Kubla Khan, but Hazlitt dwells mostly on Coleridge’s ditherings in handing over the poem to be published by John Murray, after its long shelf life as a legend. Hazlitt, like others, had long been familiar with Christabel, having heard it recited by the poet himself.8 Byron recalled that Hazlitt’s brother-in-law, John Stoddart, had recited it in September/October 1802 to Walter Scott, who was later accused of plagiarizing it in his Lay of the Last Minstrel.9 This suggests Christabel’s place in literary history as a poem of apocryphal existence that had inspired the age’s greatest poetic celebrity to produce one of its best-selling poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The reputation of Christabel is the greater by association because the Lay itself was famous for having sold 25,000 copies in six years.10 Christabel
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is a sort of Ossian-in-reverse, a work whose reputation as an oral masterpiece was stronger during the years 1795–1816 than its effect as a modern printed text.11 In his Edinburgh Review article of September 1816, Hazlitt finds fault with the judgement of Byron in urging Christabel on John Murray, and Hazlitt here lines up with Southey in taking advantage of Byron’s personal crises at this time. In attacking Byron’s failure of judgement, Hazlitt is quite as sarcastic about the incomprehensibility of Christabel as John Wilson Croker was later to be in the Quarterly Review about the poetry of Keats. There is no appreciation of the poem itself, and Hazlitt’s bald description of the its narrative renders it a mere extrusion of Coleridge’s neuroses.12 However disinterested Byron’s agency may have been, Hazlitt imputes the publishing of Coleridge’s ravings to Murray and Tory support: ‘And are such [Byron’s] panegyrics to be echoed by the mean tools of a political faction, because they relate to one whose daily prose is understood to be dedicated to the support of all that courtiers think should be supported?’13 By the time this review of the Biographia Literaria came out, in August 1817, Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review felt it necessary to deny that there was any ongoing vendetta in the quarterly against Coleridge in a long note appended to Hazlitt’s article on the Biographia Literaria, where he spoke of dropping in on Coleridge while touring in the Lake district: When I came to Keswick, I had not the least idea that Mr C. lived in Mr Southey’s house; and sent a note from the inn, saying, I should be glad to wait on him. He returned for answer, that he and Mr Southey, would be glad to see me. I thought it would be pitiful to decline this invitation; and went immediately. Mr Southey received me with cold civility – and, being engaged with other visiters [sic], I had very little conversation with him. With Mr C. I had a great deal; and was very much amused and interested. I believe coffee was offered me – and I came away in an hour or two.14
There are three more pages of the same length, forensically outlining the topics of the conversation that Jeffrey had with Coleridge on this occasion. Then, in Blackwood’s Magazine, in the same October 1817 issue that launched that magazine into notoriety with the ‘Chaldee Manuscript’, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria was reviewed by John Wilson. Not surprisingly, the Blackwood’s perspective on Coleridge followed a perverse line: Wilson countered Coleridge’s protests at being considered part of a ‘Lake School’, by saying that indeed Coleridge was not worthy to stand alongside Southey or Wordsworth, for he had not actually written enough: ‘[t]he truth is, that Mr Coleridge has lived, as much as any man of his time, in literary and political society, and that he has sought every opportunity of keeping himself in the eye of the public, as restlessly as any charlatan who ever exhibited on the stage’. For Wilson, whose loyalties were unstable, Coleridge’s sin during the 1790s had been to cast himself
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alongside Burke as a political force and to write for the Morning Post, at that time an opposition paper: ‘He [Coleridge] seems to think that he was the cause of the late War; and that, in consequence of his Essays in the Morning Post, he was, during his subsequent residence in Italy, the specified object of Bonaparte’s resentment’.15 The nature of the literary world Coleridge inhabits is illustrated by the personal rather than literary grounds of the complaint he makes against Francis Jeffrey, the foremost critic of the age, having accused him of a ‘breach of hospitality’.16 All the most offensive attacks on the writings of Wordsworth and Southey had been made by Mr Jeffrey before his visit to Keswick. Yet does Coleridge receive him with open arms, according to his own account – listen, well-pleased, to all his compliments – talk to him for hours on his Literary Projects – dine with him as his guest at an Inn – tell him that he knew Mr Wordsworth would be most happy to see him – and in all respects behave to him with a politeness bordering on servility.17
Subsequently, when the Edinburgh Review voiced criticism of his work, Coleridge then ‘accuses Mr Jeffrey of abusing hospitality which he never received, and forgets, that instead of being the Host, he himself was the smiling and obsequious Guest of the man he pretends to have despised’.18 Wilson also alludes to the defence of Coleridge that appeared in the Courier (published anonymously by Coleridge himself on 24 September 1817), which quotes from the Biographia, on the use of personal invective in the Edinburgh Review to sell copies: ‘He [Coleridge] says, “a Review, in order to be a saleable article, must be personal, sharp and pointed”’.19 The anonymous quotation of Coleridge by Coleridge makes Wilson’s point – that the poet had been his own best selfpromoter. Six months later in April 1818, in the third article of the series entitled ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler’, Francis Jeffrey and the ‘tea-drinking at Keswick’ episode were satirised, and Jeffrey’s footnote seen as a rather magazine-ish descent from the quarterly heights of literary discussion. There, Wilson’s Blackwood’s persona, ‘Timothy Tickler’, pretends to address a letter to Jeffrey himself on the Keswick episode – Who ever thought they would live to see the day, when the Editor of the Edinburgh Review would publish in that work a bulletin of his tea-drinking at Keswick? I forget – it was not tea, but coffee. What an image! The stern destroyer of systems, political, poetical, metaphysical, – having “coffee handed to him” by Robert Southey’s servantlass! He sips it – while the destined Laureate stands aloof “with cold civility,” and the “Ancient Mariner” “holds him with his glittering eye”.20
Wilson goes on in his vein of hilarity to propose that the inn where Jeffrey stayed on this historic visit should now be made into a shrine for literary pilgrims – ‘what was the meeting of Kings and Emperors on “that famous Raft”
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[the Peace of Tilsit], “to the celestial colloquy sublime,” of Reviewer and Bard, in the back-parlour of an Inn at Keswick?’21 Coleridge’s indignation against Jeffrey – ‘that you had eaten his beef and drunk his wine’ – is humorously reduced to the mock-heroic – ‘the truth is, you had only sipp’d his coffee, and perhaps munch’d his muffins’. Nor is Jeffrey’s self-absorption spared, inasmuch as he had felt it necessary to print a footnote of public denial: you [ Jeffrey] began to think that the fifteen million inhabitants of these kingdoms had their eyes all fixed upon you – and in the silence of night you heard voices call on you to vindicate yourself against the Feast of the Poets. The public, who you imagined were thinking only upon you, were then trifling away their time about the more general, though less interesting affairs of Europe.22
Wilson finally reserves a less light-hearted criticism for the fact that Jeffrey still allowed Coleridge to be reviewed by the ‘savage and truculent jacobin’ Hazlitt – who was ‘not ashamed to confess in his critique that he despised Mr Coleridge’s poetry, because he hated his politics’.23 Christabel had been written by a radical advocate of Unitarianism and pantisocracy, the idol worshipped by Hazlitt in 1798, but ultimately, the poem had been published in 1816 by a man who wrote for the Tory Courier. The visionary mind of Christabel had not survived the 1790s, and when the poem was published it became an obvious target for satire in the post-war struggle between radical and reactionary forces. Coleridge, like many others, had taunted Cobbett over his change from support of Pitt in the 1790s to defiance of the government after 1806 but was himself open to the charge of oscillation. In the decade of the 1790s, Coleridge had come to public attention with his lectures on politics and religion, and had then after his return from Germany in 1799, produced nearly fifty articles on foreign affairs and radical politics for the Morning Post from December 1799 to October 1800 (and sporadically until 1803). E. V. Lucas, Charles Lamb’s editor, comments on the draw of Coleridge’s newspaper work and particularly cites his ‘Devil’s Walk’, a satirical ballad published 6 September 1799, later imitated by Shelley and Byron in 1812 and 1813, and reprinted during the Reform Crisis of 1830–2, as ‘the most popular thing printed in Stuart’s time; his [Coleridge’s] political articles also helped enormously to give the paper prestige’.24 For the Courier, Daniel Stuart co-opted him from March 1811 to May 1812, to write over ninety leading articles. Coleridge was to write more than 140 articles altogether for this paper from February 1804 to March 1818. Hazlitt’s reviews fashion substantial criticisms out of the personal distaste of a lifelong Dissenter for a quondam Unitarian who has reverted to the Establishment. The loss of revolutionary faith in Coleridge’s generation and betrayal of their causes of the 1790s constituted the crucial topic for Hazlitt in 1816, and he
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began to mount in the Examiner a series of invectives on the topic of apostasy. These were particularly directed, against The Times and its editor, John Stoddart, his brother-in-law, who was writing at the time in support of the Congress of Vienna, which was in the process of restoring Europe’s monarchs to their preNapoleonic state. Hazlitt here paints a Gillray-esque cartoon of the restoration of Legitimacy – now that they have restored this monstrous fiction (after twenty years of baffled, malignant opposition to human nature, long glorious and triumphant, and still to be so) you see them with their swords and pens still propping up its lethargic, ricketty form, that sits squat like a toad or ugly nightmare on the murdered corse of human liberty.25
Set against this image of the blood-sucking rulers of Europe is the post-Waterloo Britain of ‘the discharged soldier’. The struggle started by revolutionary France in the name of Freedom had ended in the submission of the British people to renewed repression. Like Cobbett, Hazlitt complains that the editor of The Times calls on them to remember, that it was to effect his catastrophe of human liberty and pave the way for that of their own, that they have shed rivers of blood, wasted mines of wealth, incurred an insupportable national debt, loaded themselves with taxes which they cannot pay … [and] filled the workhouses with paupers, the streets and highways with beggars.26
This is the post-war image of Britain in 1816 familiar to us from histories of radicalism, and Hazlitt explicitly links its origins to the political apostasy of writers such as Coleridge and Stoddart. The struggle with France since 1793 had resulted in a generation of war and the suppression of Britain’s domestic liberties. The years after Waterloo posed a different generational battle: the assent to the Allies’ dispensation for Europe represented the end of Whiggism as an adequate ideology of freedom. Liberty could no longer be ceremonially touted as a ‘right’ by the meagre three per cent who participated as voters at election time or in camera at Westminster. Instead, it was seen in this generation in the poverty of thousands of demobbed soldiers and sailors: liberty now became a force of numbers and mass printing. The Times itself was a symbol of the growth of public opinion through commercial expansion, but Hazlitt here cites it as an example of the new ‘literary prostitution’ and ‘political apostacy’.27 Whereas previously, the connection between government sponsorship and papers had been straightforwardly venal, now the arguments behind an editorial stance had turned coyly ideological – it was not government finance but ‘the new cant’ that sold papers.
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Hazlitt is cynical about the new ‘liberal’ explanations of the leader-writers for changing sides: No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships, no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to inveigle, have had any weight with them [writers who changed sides], or can be supposed to have had any.28
This is personal criticism, because Hazlitt could equally have said the same about the Morning Chronicle, where he had been a reporter on political affairs since 1813. James Perry satisfied not even his traditional allies, the Whigs, with his loyalties. In 1816, Whig leaders grumbled about the Morning Chronicle’s lack of usefulness as a party organ and looked for other venues. Government advertising had declined everywhere since 1814, but meanwhile profits from commercial advertising had risen since 1800, even as circulation figures remained static.29 In Hazlitt’s next attack on The Times’s turncoat ideologizing, ‘On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, which appeared at a time of year when there was little actual news in the Examiner, he says ‘Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause of the people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to desert it have been lawyers or poets’.30 The pairing of lawyers and poets is provocative: after some further fulminations against Stoddart as a lawyer, the second part of Hazlitt’s article develops an argument about poets (Coleridge) as effeminate seekers of sympathy who allow themselves to be used by politicians and ‘would pass off the gewgaws of corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the gifts of the Muse’.31 Hazlitt’s article rises to a pitch as it then shifts its cynosure from Coleridge’s conservatism to the jacobinism of his friend Wordsworth: The secret of the Jacobin poetry and the anti-jacobin politics of this writer [William Wordsworth] is the same. His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility.32
As a literary explanation of Wordsworth’s shift from democrat of the 1790s to a royalist of 1816, Hazlitt’s writing down of the Lake school into a combination of apostasy and jacobinism constitutes a rhetorical flourish. Wordsworth, like most Britons after 1803, had reluctantly concluded that Napoleon’s imperialist ambitions were a threat to British safety. However painful the renunciation of youthful revolutionary idealism may have been, it was seen as a necessity by both Whigs and Tories against the threat of invasion.33 In fact, the home front war against Napoleon had been a genuinely popular movement: when the government called for a levée en masse in 1803, the public response was so enthusiastic that the number of volunteers accepted had to be closed down after a few months.34 This movement of mass patriotism must be distinguished from
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the government-led propaganda of loyalism during the 1790s. In loyalist terms, Wordsworth was an outcast in 1798, whereas in 1803 he was a patriot. Subsequently, Wordsworth himself used this historical moment of popular public cohesion as a metaphor, to argue that those who clamoured for change ‘choose to regard themselves as shackled Conscripts: – we know that we are self-equipped Volunteers’.35 Many early commentators had looked with favour on the events of 1789 and the Napoleonic reshaping of France as a meritocracy, but after 1803 they put on the uniform of the home militia. Even Leigh Hunt had done so for the St James’s corps, and there were 400,000 volunteers assembled in 2,000 corps across the country: all the familiar oppositional literary figures of the first generation (Wordsworth, Southey, Jeffrey, Francis Horner) took up muskets and marched in drills.36 In the meantime, the most flagrant example of this generation’s loss of faith had emerged, with the publication of Southey’s Wat Tyler in February 1817. In ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”’, Hazlitt dwells on the fallacy of Coleridge’s defence in the Courier (17, 18 March) that Southey had long since renounced his youthful opinions, by pointing out that Southey was still writing revolutionary sentiments as recently as 1803, a good ten years after Wat Tyler: His Joan of Arc, his Sonnets and Inscriptions, his Letters from Spain and Portugal, his Annual Anthology, in which was published Mr. Coleridge’s “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” are a series of invectives against Kings, Priests, and Nobles, in favour of the French Revolution, and against war and taxes, up to the year 1803.37
Hazlitt here states the case at its most ridiculous, suggesting that it would take a whole new court to provide enough injunctions for Southey’s early work. But, as he implies, given the body of poetic work amassed by Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth in that ten years, their authority as writers must indeed rest on what had been done in their jacobin period – if what these persons have done in poetry, in indulging the ‘pleasing fervour of a lively imagination,’ gives no weight to their political opinions at the time they did it, what they have done since in science or philosophy to establish their authority, is more than we know. All the authority that they have as poets and men of genius must be thrown into the scale of Revolution and Reform.38
So far from distinguishing their youthful poetry from their mature political careers, Hazlitt insists that their latter-day eminence is dependent on the achievement of their early imaginative works. Even the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, considered as a political document, would have been more easily set aside had not the poetry already made its own claim. Wordsworth’s own egotism in the Preface instead brought up a wholly separate controversy and suggested other ambitions, later confirmed by his repeated forays into political commentary.
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Given the historical circumstances of the youth of Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, it is doubtful that the passion of their poetry could ever be separated out from the energy of revolution and a new age of print. Hazlitt boldly argues that this poetry was the better for it: ‘Their Jacobin principles indeed gave rise to their Jacobin poetry … Their genius, their style, their versification, every thing down to their spelling, was revolutionary. Their poetical innovations unhappily did not answer any more than the French Revolution’. Whatever the strength of this idealism, they betrayed it, and as a truly international idealism receded before narrow patriotism, these writers sank to prose: ‘it was necessary for these restless persons to do something to get into notice; as they could not change their style, they changed their principles; and instead of writing popular poetry, fell to scribbling venal prose’. Hazlitt maintains that these were writers who above all craved notice, who wanted to be published, and hence necessarily fell into line with the prevailing force of government: their jacobinism fell back before mere ‘vulgar ambition’.39 That their jacobinism was real in Hazlitt’s eyes is suggested by his criticism of the grounds used by Coleridge in defending Wat Tyler, where he said that the young Southey had not really meant to criticise the government by depicting ‘“the evils of war and the hardship of the poor”’ and had intended only, as it were, a ‘philosophical view of reform’.40 Coleridge’s argument, that the evils depicted were little more than a sample of Southey’s art, Hazlitt does not accept: ‘Would these gentlemen persuade us that there is nothing evil in the universe but what exists in their imagination?’41 That Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were not sincere in their early poetry is logically intolerable, and thus their poetry had to be seen as intentionally political. Hazlitt says in ‘Southey’s Letter to William Smith’ (4 May 1817): ‘When this poem [Wat Tyler] was written, there was a rage of speculation which might be dangerous: the danger at present arises from the rage of hunger’.42 There is a gap between the 1790s crime of spreading abroad ‘notions of perfect equality and general licentiousness’ and the post-Waterloo crime of ‘defending every abuse of excessive inequality, and every stretch of arbitrary power, the end of which must be to sink “the people” in an abyss of slavery, and to plunge “the populace” in the depths of famine, despair, and misery’. It is in reaction against the latter that Hazlitt cites ‘anarchy, violence, and bloodshed’ but which as he says, ‘Mr Southey hypocritically affects to deprecate as the consequences of seditious and inflammatory publications’.43 If this unrest had genuine causes in hunger and not the press, Hazlitt’s own solution to the threatened bloodshed is equally literary: ‘the only possible preventive of one or other of these impending evils … is the liberty of the press, which Mr Southey calls sedition, and the firm, manly, and independent expression of public opinion, which he calls rebellion’.44
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This is still a war of words. The examples of Legitimacy cited by Hazlitt constitute an international roll call of Liberty: ‘the names of Poland, Norway, Finland, Saxony, Italy, Spain and Portugal, the Pope, the Inquisition, and the Cortes’.45 These names are shorthand for the suffering that the restoration of Legitimacy has caused. However such suffering may have arisen – whether because of the French Revolution or Napoleon – the subsequent meritocracy, the moving around of Europe’s borders, and the mobilisation of large numbers of young men – these have all meant that the war of ideologies has had material consequences. Famine was most recently associated with the overrunning of Europe by Napoleon’s foraging armies, who had renounced supply trains in order to move more quickly, and so produced here an ideological anger. These Examiner articles appeared early in 1817, before Hazlitt’s review of Coleridge appeared there. In the Edinburgh Review three months later, Hazlitt was equally harsh on Coleridge’s defence of Wordsworth: The object of this long-winding metaphysical march, which resembles a patriarchal journey, is to point out and settle the true grounds of Mr Wordsworth’s claim to originality as a poet; which, if we rightly understand the deduction, turns out to be, that there is nothing peculiar about him; and that his poetry, in so far as it is good for anything at all, is just like any other good poetry.46
Hazlitt’s treatment of the apostasy of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey is actually good-humoured by comparison to what comes next – the hijacking of the review by his feelings about Edmund Burke. Hazlitt had begun ‘Southey’s Letter to William Smith’ by reminding his audience that Burke, though a better writer, was a fit model for Southey in his apostasy.47 As Tom Paulin says, pointing out that eight of the collected Political Essays were written on Southey, Hazlitt’s relationship with Southey is ‘a comic sub-plot to the main drama of his engagement with Burke’.48 Hazlitt’s remarks about Burke are highly serious – apostasy, a theme of slapstick in the affair of Wat Tyler, becomes the grand drama in the life of Burke, whose subtlety, Hazlitt sees as ‘a dangerous engine in the hands of power’.49 Ten years earlier, in The Eloquence of the British Senate, Burke was not yet synonymous with villainy for Hazlitt. Speaking in that essay, about Burke’s Reflections upon the Revolution in France, Hazlitt had gone some way to support Burke’s argument in favour of prejudice, speaking calmly of how the veneration for difference in rank acted indeed to enlarge the human imagination of the moral world. There was even a panegyric to Burke’s ‘natural’ reverence for nobility, whereby the necessity for differences in rank was seen as analogous to the aesthetic need for ‘chiarascuro’ against luminosity. In this argument, the quality of Burke’s imagination was allowed by Hazlitt to subsume everything, even facts –
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they were the playthings of his mind. He saw them as he pleased, not as they were; with the eye of the philosopher or the poet, regarding them only in their general principle, or as they might serve to decorate his subject. This is the natural consequence of much imagination: things that are probable are elevated into the rank of realities.50
Hazlitt’s analysis here is as sympathetic to Burke’s imagination as that of any Tory and is based on admiration of Burke’s ability to render imaginative vision into ‘realities’: ‘His words are the most like things; his style is the most strictly suited to the subject’.51 However, ten years on, Hazlitt was less of an apologist for the imagination. Since 1813, he had been a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle, and by this time the use of facts as ‘playthings’ runs into a more calamitous track of logic and signals a personality without principle, a Marie Antoinette of poetic feeling: They [facts] were the playthings of his style, the sport of his fancy. They were the straws of which his imagination made a blaze and were consumed, like straws, in the blaze they had served to kindle. The fine things he said about Liberty and Humanity, in the speech on the Begum’s affairs, told equally well, whether Warren Hastings was a tyrant or not: Nor did he care one jot who caused the famine he described, so that he described it in a way to attract admiration.52
In this revised judgement, Burke’s play with the facts seems less the sign of a voluptuous imagination than a diseased morality. Hazlitt’s judgement of the great rhetorician makes him akin to ‘modern lawyers and poets’, in other words, the post-war apostates of 1817. It is notable that Hazlitt should spend so much of a review about the lifework of Coleridge on the tergiversations of Edmund Burke. The Edinburgh Review was a less fleet-footed vehicle for political commentary than the Examiner, but in the quarterly Hazlitt had more room to expound in detail on points of style: he makes a genuine effort to understand how Burke had achieved his political weight. Whatever Burke’s political sins, one cannot help but feel that in analysing Burke’s style, Hazlitt is speaking of an ideal for his own writing, whereby the writer’s ‘only object is therefore to strike hard, and in the right place; if he misses his mark, he repeats his blow; and does not care how ungraceful the action, or how clumsy the instrument, provided it brings down his antagonist’.53 This is Hazlitt’s description of a ‘literature of power’. The insistence on words as blows recalls another famous notice, published in 1819, of a popular sporting figure, John Cavanagh, where Hazlitt develops an analogy between the blows made by the celebrated rackets player and the use of words by a mixture of literary and political figures: His [Cavanagh’s] blows were not undecided and ineffectual – lumbering like Mr. Wordsworth’s epic poetry, nor wavering like Mr. Coleridge’s lyric prose, nor short
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In the article on Cavanagh, Hazlitt makes no distinction between poets and politicians. This style of writing applied to late eighteenth-century politics had brought political disquisition forward into modern discourse. By 1817 Hazlitt’s own style is more colloquial, less ornate, and also less classically balanced – read alongside these essays, the ‘Character’ of 1807 seems positively Johnsonian.
After Apostasy: Defining Radicalism after the Examiner The battle taken up by Hazlitt against the lapsed revolutionaries of the 1790s, Burke, Stoddart, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, constitutes the last chapter in the wartime opposition of Whigs versus Pittites. In 1815, after the Hunts’ stint in Newgate, the Examiner’s radicalism still looked admirable, as with the backing of such glamorous Whig literary figures as Brougham, Moore and Byron, it faced down the government’s repression. Since 1808, the Peninsular campaign had in fact overtaken the eighteenth-century Foxite narrative of the Glorious Revolution against Stuart despotism or the Jacobin revolution against the Bourbons, and a new campaign for parliamentary reform had begun in 1809, after Britain’s military failures prompted investigation into governmental nepotism. This, combined with Cobbett’s accounts of the British populace’s struggle against government repression, began to supersede the Whiggish history of freedom in the British imagination. Castlereagh, whose reputation had been weakened by the nepotism charges of 1809, was implicated both in the restoration of Legitimacy in Europe and the distress and repression at home. His role in putting down unrest in his native Ireland in 1798 was at this time bitterly recalled, and the government’s use of spies was well known. In June 1817 Hazlitt wrote an article in the Morning Chronicle, ‘On the Spy-System’, about Castlereagh’s defence in Parliament of the use of undercover agents (‘Castles’ and ‘Oliver’) by the Government to betray provincial insurrectionary leaders at this time of unrest: ‘The Noble Lord in the blue ribbon took the characters of Castles and Oliver under the protection of his blushing honours and elegant casuistry, and lamented that by the idle clamour raised against such characters, Gentlemen were deterred from entering into the honourable, useful, and profitable profession of Government Spies’.55 In the Parliamentary Debates for 16 June 1817, it is recorded that Sir Francis Burdett read out an item from the Leeds Mercury that ‘Oliver’ had been used as an agent provocateur.56 The Examiner’s reporting of Sir Francis Burdett’s challenge to the government on this occasion perhaps represents – along with the Whig grandees’ attendance later that year at William Hone’s trial – the last time that
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the paper’s Whiggism can be confounded with the new radicalism. Castlereagh replied, ‘He had never heard any imputation against Mr. Reynolds’s personal character’, and Henry Brougham denounced the government’s defence of such characters, ‘This, he believed, was the first time that any man had ventured in that House to pass a panegyric on spies and informers’. Later in the debates for 23 June 1817, Castlereagh defended the use of informers ‘as a preventive’ and ‘blamed the attempt to throw odium on such persons, as calculated to prevent individuals from coming forward’. The Examiner reprinted Burdett’s question to Castlereagh in ‘Sir F. Burdett – The Spy Oliver’ and wrote a leading article ‘To the English People’ in the same issue, where the writer makes a joke about the improbability of it all by having a character say, ‘“You might as well say that Lord Castlereagh’s the author of Waverley” – along with other jibes at Castlereagh’s notorious inarticulateness.57 But the Examiner and its celebrity Whiggism were confronted with the challenges posed by a new language of radical reformism, and its own revolutionary credentials, as much as those of Coleridge or Southey, were in doubt. That language was more than a manipulating of rhetorical playthings is made clear by the government’s actions. It was no longer possible to entertain a disinterested literary assessment of what Burke or Southey may have meant in the 1790s. In 1816–17, Southey’s work in the Quarterly Review ‘had attracted the especial notice of the Ministry of that day, and a communication was privately made to him through various channels’ that the prime minister wished to speak with him. This was certainly as high a compliment as could be paid to Southey’s powers as a political writer.58 It becomes clear from his own correspondence that the government was proposing to set up a new journal, an updated Anti-Jacobin ‘conducted upon better principles’.59 At the same time Southey was also invited by John Walter II to become chief leader-writer for The Times (for £2,000 p.a.).60 That same year Southey sent a private memo to the prime minister urging the arrest and transportation of Cobbett, William Hone, and the Examiner circle.61 By 1817, the government had suppressed the reading of Cobbett’s Political Register in public coffee-houses and taverns. On this occasion, Cobbett’s judgement of the seriousness of the situation apparently tallied with Southey’s, since he fled the country in March 1817. Clearly neither the government, Southey nor Cobbett regarded facts in this instance as rhetorical ‘straws’. The curious thing is that Southey had written about Cobbett as a public danger, in his Quarterly Review article of October 1816 on political pamphlets, but it is clear from Southey’s ‘History of Europe’ in Ballantyne’s Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808, that Southey himself had relied on the Political Register for an authentic account of domestic public opinion – he quotes Cobbett in footnotes, in at least six places, including an extended note on the Spanish question, an area of Southey’s own expertise – more often than any other source.62
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In March 1817, the Examiner announced the rumour that Cobbett had left the country before he could be arrested under the Habeas Corpus Act [suspended 4 March 1817]. It then included part of a letter privately received, saying that in fact Cobbett and his family were presently on board at Liverpool awaiting a favourable breeze to America.63 The next week, the Examiner reprinted the ‘Farewell Address’ of 26 March 1817 from Cobbett’s own paper.64 In doing so, the Examiner demonstrated its own mixed feelings about Cobbett, for in the same issue, it detailed all the money that Cobbett owed, in particular, a debt of £3,000 to Sir Francis Burdett, the wealthy radical-minded Whig.65 The following week, there was a long editorial, ‘Mr. Cobbett’s Departure for America’, helpfully pointing out the fallacies in the Courier accusations against Cobbett, that he had an overdue debt of £18,000 stamp duties owed to the government.66 The Examiner defended Cobbett against this rumour, but also argued that Cobbett should have stayed, alluding to the historical example of Milton, who in 1639 had voluntarily returned from his private studies in Italy upon hearing that civil war had broken out in England.67 The Examiner’s series of editorials named ‘To the English People’, begun on 2 March 1817 (though not labelled and numbered until 9 March), appears to be a direct imitation of Cobbett’s own customary mode of labelling his leading articles in 1816.68 The first of these editorials discussed the proposed suspension of Habeas Corpus, undoubtedly the heroic topic of the moment. The Examiner continued to argue for the next few months that Cobbett should have braved the same dangers of prosecution as everyone else and also that Cobbett had been ungrateful to Burdett, who had behaved with the dignity of his class, in advancing the money and then enduring Cobbett’s insults.69 In this last remark, the Examiner takes a line no different from the Tory Blackwood’s criticisms. Indeed, it is at this point that we see the Examiner’s retreat from the radicalism of 1816 to the polite Whiggism of 1810– 12, when the term ‘radical’ was not yet current as a noun and the government paid the aristocratic Burdett the compliment of treating him as a serious threat and imprisoning him in the Tower of London. In May 1817, the government arrested William Hone, Thomas Wooler, and Arthur Thistlewood and his co-conspirators. These arrests would also appear to prove that there were solid grounds for Cobbett’s flight to America. During the following month, the Examiner reported the trials of Arthur Thistlewood, James Watson the Elder, Thomas Preston, and John Hooper in gripping detail. The prosecution of these figures was presided over by both the Attorney-General, Sir Samuel Shepherd, and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Ellenborough, who in his day had prosecuted Lord George Gordon (1787), Thomas Hardy (1794), and John Horne Tooke (1794), who had presided over both the trials of James Perry and the two trials of the Hunts, and who was to take on William Hone
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six months later. Ellenborough consistently opposed the criminal code reforms proposed by the respected Whig MP and legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly. One sign of the importance of this trial was the entrance into the court at five that afternoon, of the leaders of the Opposition Whigs from both Houses – Holland, Grey, Lauderdale, and Tierney.70 On the second day, eminent spectators included Holland, Grey, and Lambton (the future Lord Durham): these were Whigs from the radical Foxite side of the party. The third and fourth days of the trial were taken up with full evidence for the Crown, given mainly by the government informer John Castle [sometimes Castles], who represented himself as having been an independent witness. The spectators on that day included, among others, such prominent political figures as Grey, Stanhope, Burdett, Wilson, Peel, Tierney, and Lambton. After four days of the government case, the defence of the accused finally began on the fifth day, lasting all of one afternoon, but in the end the defendants were acquitted, largely because Castles’ testimony was so embarrassingly flagrant in its dishonesty.71 In the issue where the trial’s conclusion appeared, the Examiner reported a debate in the Lords the previous week (16–19 June 1817), which included Burdett’s remarks about ‘Oliver’ in the Commons, and how the trial had made infamous the government’s use of spies.72 Two weeks later, in the same issue that also includes a running review of ‘Mr. Keats’s Poems’, the Examiner reported that ‘The Spy Oliver’ had tried and failed to create mischief of a similar nature in Yorkshire.73 Even the presiding magistrate there publicly expressed disgust that the government had used such tactics to incite provincial rebellion. Indeed, the Examiner continued over these weeks to print detailed physical descriptions of ‘Oliver’ so that ordinary people could be enabled to recognize him, and in November the execution of rioters at Derby was blamed on the manipulations of this ‘Oliver’. Hazlitt’s article ‘On the Spy-System’ (30 June 1817) was only one demonstration of the popular mistrust of the government. A few weeks earlier, the government had been successful in prosecuting the publisher of a radical newspaper, the Black Dwarf, Thomas Jonathan Wooler, and so had every reason to expect that it would prevail in the effort to contain radical feeling through judicial as well as legislative means. The Wooler trial was carried at length in the Examiner, and the reporting of these trials became a form of popular narrative literature in itself, appearing in newspapers and pamphlets everywhere. Cobbett lost face by not staying in England, and it can be said that his reputation never recovered from absenting himself during this time of high publicity for the radical cause. Realistically, he could not have anticipated the unprecedented public successes of the radicals against a grimly repressive government. He continued to defend himself in columns written from America, answering every one of the allegations his enemies raised, but the Examiner finally came down openly on the Whig side and taunted Cobbett, by recalling his old polemic pseudonym
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of the Pittite days, in its article ‘Porcupine Renewing His Old Quills’.74 In this and in another article the following week, the Examiner chipped away at his pre-eminence. The Examiner was careful always to reiterate Cobbett’s strengths but came down on the side of Sir Francis Burdett and the Whigs – a position that proved the paper’s own remoteness from the radicalism of 1816. The presence of the Whig lords along with the crowd at the trial of the Thistlewood conspirators suggest a bedrock of sympathy for the radicals at this time. These judicial dramas, reported in detail, were the more important, because it confirmed the recognition that legislatively the thousands of signatures being presented to Parliament and championed by the parliamentary Whigs were having no effect.
Hunt, Byron and the Whig Romance The publication of Rimini upon Leigh Hunt’s release from Newgate in 1815 exploded the reputation as a political commentator that had accrued with Hunt’s editorials in the Examiner.75 Hunt’s aspirations to be part of the political class were revealed as social climbing – ‘One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding-school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house’.76 Thus Leigh Hunt’s political capital of the pre-radical era appears to have been squandered in the publication of a poem about adultery. Appearing in the same issue (October 1817) as John Wilson’s ‘Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’ and ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’, John Gibson Lockhart’s ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’ is the first of the famous series of invectives against jumped-up suburban classicism.77 Reading through the papers of this time, it would appear that literary controversy came to prominence only when the pressure of feeling over hard political questions had abated. Francis Jeffrey’s Lakers ‘sect’ of ‘washtub’ poets affecting democratic verse referred to in the first issue of the Edinburgh Review, ‘Southey’s Thalaba’ (October 1802), is not the same group as Hazlitt’s Lake ‘school’ (August 1817) fifteen years later. The appearance of these remarks in 1817 happened to coincide with Hazlitt’s reviews in the Examiner and the Edinburgh Review, as well as with the publication of patriotic verse by Wordsworth and Southey reflecting upon the end of the war. Wordsworth’s ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ and Southey’s ‘Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, both appearing in January 1816, branded them as an ideological group once again: ‘for the younger writers the Lake Poets came to be reconstituted as a group not because of their early poetic revolution but because of their current reactionary politics’. Coleridge registered
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his unhappiness at being termed part of an ideological group in the Biographia Literaria.78 One may contrast the reviews given to Childe Harold by Tory writers with the indignant notice by John Wilson Croker of Leigh Hunt for Rimini in the Quarterly Review ( January 1816, published 18 May 1816). While Rimini was severely criticized for its sexual licence, the unlawful emotions of Childe Harold were given enthusiastic reviews by both Walter Scott in the Quarterly Review (October 1816 [actually issued February 1817]) and Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review (December 1816). If Rimini and its dedication to Byron in effect ended Leigh Hunt’s career as a polite radical polemicist since the inception of the Examiner in 1808, Childe Harold saw off Walter Scott’s popularity since Marmion as a writer of patriotic verse romances. The year 1816 had shown the strength of the connections between the generation of Scott and Southey and the Tory Government. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake, not to mention Waverley, were still selling in edition after edition though Scott had bowed to the timeliness of Childe Harold.79 Once Scott had conceded the palm, Byron and Thomas Moore, both Whigs, were the most lauded poets of the day. Scott had written inspiringly of Britain’s glory, but after the era of war had passed and he had produced as a sort of coda The Field of Waterloo (1815) and Paul’s Letters to His Kinfolks (1816), he confessed himself blank.80 Waverley and its sequels put national battles safely in the folklorish past, to the extent that in 1822 Scott stage-managed the first visit ever of an Hanoverian monarch to Scotland, a tourist rather than a military occasion commemorated by a statue of George IV at the significantly named juncture in Edinburgh where Hanover Street meets Dundas (formerly Pitt) Street. Just at the point when the young soldiers who had put an end to the Napoleonic era returned home and post-war radicalism recognized itself as news, the older generation laid away its revolutionary youth in volumes of history. The new generation, having never known the Terror or the threat of invasion, were more curious about the exiled Napoleon as a figure of melancholy than fear. Byron’s historical ennui created a sensation among both Tories and Whigs. Southey’s condemnation of the Whigs’ call for parliamentary reform appears in the same issue as Scott’s praise for a Whig rake, and it is striking how sympathetic to a psychological notion of geist the reviews are, to the point of making the poetry seem irrelevant alongside the cult of Byronic personality. Privately, Scott had been anxious to hit the appropriate note in this review, given the controversy surrounding Byron’s personal life at this time, and Byron wrote to John Murray with his gratitude for Scott’s ‘tact’.81 Murray replied happily that there had been general agreement with its judgements and that moreover it had ‘produced a sensation’.82 There was some mild frisson in arranging to have the
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acknowledged national laureate comment on the junior poetic sensation who had eclipsed him. Scott’s second review of Childe Harold appeared in the Quarterly Review for April 1818 (actually issued September 1818). Scott’s young Tory colleague, John Wilson, was able in 1818 to publish glowing articles on Byron in both Blackwood’s Magazine (May) and the Edinburgh Review ( June). Meanwhile, in the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey had long since made amends for Brougham’s blundering review of Hours of Idleness (1807). The sentiments expressed in Wilson’s two reviews are equally rapturous, but the one written for the Edinburgh Review is longer and fuller, while the excerpts in the Blackwood’s article take up a greater part of that article. Both disavow formal criticism of Byron and instead speak of him as a personality – ‘It is impossible to speak of his poetry without also speaking of himself, morally, as a man’.83 The closest Wilson comes to writing formal criticism here is to remark that ‘it cannot be said that Byron has ever created a great Poem … Byron’s creations are not so much poems, as they are glorious manifestations of a poet’s mind, all irresistibly tending towards poetry’. Both Wilson’s reviews are not so much analyses as adoration tending to poetic criticism – ‘It would be worse than idle to endeavour to shadow out the lineaments of that Mind, which, exhibiting itself in dark and perturbed grandeur, has established a stronger and wider sway over the passions of men, than any other poetical Intellect of modern times’.84 In his memoir of John Wilson some years later, Thomas Carlyle wrote caustically of this review, that it was ‘eloquently descanting with abundance of sympathy, and in a great poetic style, on the abysses of Human Life, on Rousseau’s Confessions and the Byronic character’.85 The high sublimity of John Wilson’s Romantic voice bursts in on the reader especially oddly in the Edinburgh Review, where the shift from the brisk easterly breezes of Jeffrey’s criticism marks a curiosity. To a certain extent, this European Romantic tone explains how Wilson can write for both a Whig and a Tory publication within a month of each other: there are only a few political touches, though Wilson speaks of Byron’s democratic initiatives as psychologically unconvincing, given the ‘tyrant’ voice of Childe Harold. More than that, one notes that in the Edinburgh Review, he compares Byron to Rousseau as representing the spirit of the age: ‘There are two writers, in modern literature, whose extraordinary power over the minds of men, it may be truly said, has existed less in their works than in themselves … When we speak or think of Rousseau or Byron, we are not conscious of speaking or thinking of an author’.86 Although there had been more than seven decades between the births of Rousseau and Byron, Wilson speaks of them ahistorically, as inhabiting a single era of popular political aspiration. Recounting Childe Harold’s travels over post-Waterloo Europe, Wilson says of Byron’s poetic persona, ‘It is his to speak of all those great political events which have been objects of such passionate sympathy to the nation … The whole sub-
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stance and basis of his poem is, therefore, popular’.87 Citing a confrontation with scepticism as the characteristic dilemma of modern poets, Wilson lauds Byron for having the courage, unlike Goethe or Schiller, to expose the torments of his own soul in the battle with Nature’s nihilism. Byronism fit in with the contemporary sense of Europe, nor was Byron the only one who saw the resemblance between his own restlessness and that of the now safely marooned Napoleon. Everything Wilson attributes to Byron is a description of how the Romantic sense of history combined with a psychological rather than a religious view of the soul – though it has to be said that Wilson’s sublime German breathlessness is unexpected coming from a man who was to succeed the unmetaphysical Dugald Stewart in chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh.88 The passage from Stewart to Wilson is one of the markers of the transition from the old Romanticism to the new. Both Wilson and Scott are self-conscious when talking of Byron on personal terms, but Wilson does not so much excuse Byron’s actions on the grounds of private suffering, as Scott takes care to do, but rather seeks to generalize the poet’s personality into an epochal phenomenon. Scott’s Gothic 1790s Romanticism yields gracefully to young liberalism in a moment that can be pinpointed as falling in the year between The Field of Waterloo, published October-November 1815 and the third canto of Childe Harold, published in November 1816: this year perhaps marks the line between the older generation’s struggle with revolutionary uproar and the second generation’s nostalgia for 1789, a year that carried no terror for them. In reviewing Childe Harold in 1812, Francis Jeffrey had marvelled at Byron’s boldness in risking unpopularity by speaking ‘with the most unbounded contempt of the Portuguese – with despondence of Spain – and in a very slighting and sarcastic manner of wars, and victories, and military wars in general’.89 In so doing Byron was certainly not in tune with the popular feeling after 1808, as indeed the Edinburgh Whigs were not. If the review shows Jeffrey’s selfconscious awareness that the Edinburgh Review needed to make up to Byron in a public way, in 1812 his compliments are not formulaic. Particularly, Jeffrey singles out Byron’s language for ‘a freedom, copiousness and vigour, which we are not sure that we could match in any cotemporary poet’. He compares its strengths to Scott’s, but gives the palm to Byron’s ‘manly freshness which reminds us of Dryden’.90 These remarks appear in the same issue where Jeffrey also reviewed John Wilson’s poetry, praising Wilson as a ‘Lake’ poet, who, unlike Wordsworth, ‘does not break out into any ecstacies about spades or sparrows’ eggs – or men gathering leeches – or women in duffle cloaks – or plates or porringers – or washing tubs’.91 The ‘Lake’ poets had promulgated common things as part of a poetic agenda that could not be overtly political. Leigh Hunt had announced in his preface to Rimini that his versification was meant to show ‘a free and idiomatic cast of lan-
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guage’ in an attempt to ‘describe natural things in a language becoming them’.92 This he had chosen to do in heroic couplets, which might have pleased Jeffrey, if one recalls his strictures on the Lakers’ blank verse: about Southey’s Madoc (1805), Jeffrey had written, ‘we really fear that the great easiness of that loose and colloquial blank verse, in which Mr Southey has chosen to compose, will one day be the ruin of him … As he has always plenty of good words, he never pauses to look for exquisite ones’. (In Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore satirized Jeffrey’s remarks on irregular versification: ‘“What critic that can count,” said Fadladeen, “and has his full complement of fingers to count withal, would tolerate for an instant such syllabic superfluities?” He here looked round and discovered that most of his audience were asleep’).93 Southey, in his preface to Thalaba, had argued that, although his newest poem was not written in blank verse, he nonetheless considered it ‘the noblest measure’ in English. But in apologizing as it were for his choice of metre in this case, he also suggested that the English reader was perhaps not generally responsive to ‘Verse’ or ‘the regular Jews-harp twingtwang, of what has been foolishly called heroic measure’.94 William St Clair points out that Southey’s subtitle for the poem, ‘A Rhythmical Romance’, was an advertisement for the rough irregularity associated with medieval poetry.95 And in a review of Wordsworth’s Poems two years later, Jeffrey had called Wordsworth and his friends ‘mannerists’ who had deliberate cultivated ‘peculiarities of diction … upon principle and system’.96 In a similar way, John Wilson Croker criticized Leigh Hunt’s language in Rimini for being constructed on ‘certain pretended principles’ that had resulted in ‘an inaccurate, negligent, and harsh style of versification’.97 And Byron, in the midst of generous encouragement, had offered Hunt one private criticism, that the language seemed to consist of ‘a kind of harsh & yet colloquial compounding of epithets – as if to avoid saying common things in the common way – “difficile est proprié communia dicere” seems at times to have met with in you a literal translator’.98 To Thomas Moore, Byron later wrote, ‘When I saw “Rimini” in MSS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system … He believes his trash vulgar phrases tortured into compound barbarisms to be old English’.99 It is in such a context that Rimini’s claim to ‘natural’ language must be seen. The circumstances of Rimini showed, politically speaking, a mixture of loyalties. Hunt’s first contract, with Gale, Curtis & Fenner, was conditional on the poem’s being ‘as long as one [of ] Walter Scott’s poems’.100 Scott was at this point still more of a commercial success than any of the Whig poets such as Campbell, Moore or even Byron.101 Whether or not Hunt’s publishers came to think better of the subject material is a matter for speculation. Scott certainly steered clear of adultery in his poetry, and in a review of Southey’s translation of Amadis De Gaul had praised Southey for avoiding ‘the impure descriptions’ given by
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earlier translators of the adulterous relationships in this example of early medieval poetry – precisely the aspect that Hunt had picked up on.102 In any case Hunt was not able to write a poem of Walter-Scott-like dimensions, and the contract fell through. Hunt then offered the book to the Whig publisher Constable, saying that he did not want much money and lived apart from the world – although inexplicably, he then goes on to say that ‘[I] usually spend five days out of the seven in politics of some sort’ and ‘do not mean to leave politics’.103 But though Constable and Hunt were in frequent correspondence during the years 1816–18, Constable declined the bargain. It went to Murray in London, Blackwood in Edinburgh (and Cumming in Dublin) and was printed for them by a printer used by John Murray, Thomas Davison (whose name was later to be the one to appear on the first title-page of Don Juan). Byron had put in a good word to Murray, but Hunt felt betrayed by the review of Rimini that appeared in Murray’s political organ, the Quarterly Review: What helped me to publish was an assurance he [Murray] gave another friend of mine in the mean time, that he had become indifferent as to the politics of those who came to his house… I certainly did not expect that Mr. Murray, on a comparison of all the parts of his conduct to me, would have laid himself open to the suspicion of having done his best to sacrifice me to his official friends.104
Byron had left England by this point, Murray declined to retain the copyright, and so the second edition was published by Charles Ollier (together with Robert Triphook, Taylor & Hessey) in June 1817. It was also at this point, when Leigh Hunt’s ordeal in jail was being eclipsed by working-class radical persecution, that the Examiner revealingly confessed its ignorance of Thomas Wooler. In the same year, another Whig romance, Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, which had been contracted for at the height of Whig radical excitement in 1812, finally came out, after years of protracted work. What had made Rimini a Whig romance rather than a Tory epic in the Scott mode was its portrayal of sexual feeling in an exotic setting.105 It is worth remarking that Moore’s career illustrates the uncertain reception of sensual literature, for it had taken years for him to recover from his debut in 1801 as the licentious ‘Thomas Little’. It was about the poetry of ‘Little’ that the term ‘Satanic’ had first been used, and Francis Jeffrey had severely criticized Moore for his poetry’s misleading effect on young women.106 Moore’s Lalla Rookh thus put a cap to the period of Oriental romance and Whiggish radicalism of the years 1812–15, and Keats’s Endymion, when it finally appeared in 1818 as another one of these Whig romances, was out-ofdate in its language and politics (‘Are then regalities all gilded masks?’, Bk 3), its ‘radicalism’ reminiscent of the criticism of the Prince Regent that sent the Hunts to jail in 1812.
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As late as 1819, amid the uproar after Peterloo, Keats wrote that the earlynineteenth-century fear of revolution ‘gave our Court hopes of turning back to the despotism of the 16 [sic] century. They have made a handle of this event in every way to undermine our freedom’.107 In mouthing this, Keats follows a sentiment familiar to readers of the Edinburgh Review. As an example of a lowermiddle-class person pronouncing on the political scene, Keats merely illustrates Jeffrey’s observation that an especially nineteenth-century mark of progress can be seen in the growth of interest in national politics among ordinary people. These people, who had formerly constituted neither the government nor the opposition but were indeed ‘nothing’ in all political calculations, ‘begin to feel their relation to the government under which they live…they begin to form, or to borrow, opinions’.108 Or, as Geoffrey Carnall, Southey’s biographer, says, ‘As a result [of Cobbett], even the most poor and ignorant could talk about the sinking fund, standing armies, sinecures, and pensioners’.109 However, the terms of this criticism of the Establishment as described by Carnall and used by Keats are the traditional eighteenth-century complaints used by the Whigs against the Court, lacking any programme of social improvement.110 ‘Radical’ or borrowed as Keats’s opinions might be, they were not of the kind to be taken seriously by writers trained in the history of the Rockinghamite Whigs. Inasmuch as Keats took Leigh Hunt’s lead, he was not a ‘radical’ but a thirdhand Whig, though he never pursued social Whig connections the way Hunt did with Brougham and Byron. In 1820 Byron himself distinguished between the traditional Whig platform of Reform and the new radicalism.111 Shelley, we know, turned to Cobbett’s Political Register as a source of political thought while in Italy, but Cobbett is not a presence in Keats’s personal writing. However, the Whiggism of the early Childe Harold years that focused on the infighting surrounding the Prince Regent abruptly became irrelevant after the return of demobbed soldiers.112 ‘Lisp[ing] sedition’ was one sure way to attain reputation in 1817, but these parts of Endymion are mild when set beside the diatribes risked by Hone or Cobbett. Scorned for their old-fashioned politics by the new radicals, the Examiner circle were at the same time attacked by the Tories for their literary Whiggism, as typified by Rimini and Endymion. The ‘Cockney School’ is one sign of Tory literary glee at the rout of the discredited Whigs. In the 1790s, there had been urgency in the accounts of revolution – meetings, resolutions passed, trials, executions – and there is a similar urgency in 1817 when reading about the trials of Thistlewood and Hone. State trials constituted popular literature, as Cobbett knew when he began to publish them, and thirty years later, when Dickens was still reading them. They were the most powerful literature of the day, and the minuteness of detail found in these and Cobbett’s weekly editorials is part of their attraction to both contemporaries
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and historians. Hone well knew the vital necessity of getting his literary allusions right, and the Examiner raised the contrast of Cobbett’s flight to America in 1817 to Milton’s return from Italy in 1639 without self-consciousness. More tellingly, Endymion was ‘Literature’, not a pamphlet, and – priced in shillings not pence – too expensive to have a popular sale. It would seem that these years produced such an exhilarating climate of radicalism that even genteel political amateurs could be induced to think of political heroism. From as far away as Italy, Shelley hoped to influence public opinion with his Masque of Anarchy, while Keats, waiting for the Examiner to arrive by country post in Hampshire, piously observed, ‘I hope sincerely I shall be able to put a Mite of help to the Liberal side of the Question before I die’.113 The literary crime that only five years before sent Leigh Hunt and his brother John to prison for two years and imposed a fine of five hundred pounds had been to exclaim, in an Examiner article, against the pandering of the royalist Morning Post to the Prince Regent.114 This controversy of 1812 was all about the aristocratic Whigs’ disappointment at not getting into office under the Prince Regent after years of alliance with him as the Prince of Wales. The disillusionment of Byron was typical: on 7 March 1812, in the Morning Chronicle, he published (anonymously) ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’, and in 1813, he wrote (but did not publish) ‘Windsor Poetics’, depicting the Prince Regent as a tyrant who displayed the wilfulness of both Charles I and Henry VIII. In 1814, ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’ appeared with The Corsair and caused a sensation even then. At the height of the Whig feeling against the Prince Regent Byron wrote to Thomas Moore, whose livelihood had been decisively smashed when the Prince Regent abandoned Moore’s sponsor, the Earl of Moira: ‘You can have no conception of the uproar the eight lines on the little Royalty’s weeping in 1812 (now republished) have occasioned … The Morning Post, Sun, Herald, Courier, have all been in hysterics ever since. M[urray] is in a fright, and wanted to shuffle … I am an atheist – a rebel – and, at last, the Devil’. In a subsequent letter to Moore, a month after the ‘Weepers’ uproar, Byron declined to offer ‘Windsor Poetics’ (he called it ‘the Vault’) for publication, saying that the poem ‘is downright actionable, and to print it would be peril to the publisher’.115 This is all couched in personal terms: Byron as a fellow dandy and Whig aristocrat could get away with poems on the Prince Regent, though his middle-class publisher, Murray, felt nervous enough to restrain him. Keats was not a Whig, nor of the right class and without even the meanest connections of his most prominent friend, Leigh Hunt. In October, John Hamilton Reynolds, undertaking Keats’s defence against the similarly hostile review in the Tory Quarterly Review (April 1818; published 26 September 1818) personally attacked its writer (widely thought to have been William Gifford, but in fact John Wilson Croker). When Reynolds called it a product ‘of Government sycophants and Government writers’, and Gifford himself ‘a Lottery
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Commissioner and a Government Pensioner’, he was, strictly speaking, saying nothing of note, for this was exactly the case inasmuch as Gifford was directed by Canning, and his was the kind of government situation sought after by most literary men.116 Gifford’s main conduit to the government, John Wilson Croker (1780–1857) had been an MP since 1807 and was chosen by Arthur Wellesley to run his office of the Chief Secretary of Ireland when Wellesley was ordered to Spain, and the Quarterly Review was known as a government organ. The most remarkable thing about Keats’s attack on the Prince Regent is that it attracted no government notice. Keats’s poetry, published in a conventional run of 500 copies, at more than three shillings per volume, was reviewed in quarterlies that sold at five to six shillings per issue. This was at a time when the average price per octavo volume was ten shillings and rising – Keats was thus attempting to break into the ‘upper 10 percent’.117 As Lockhart correctly said, Keats was merely part of an aspiration to literary celebrity among the lower classes: ‘The just celebrity of Robert Burns and Miss Baillie has had the melancholy effect of turning the heads of we know not how many farm-servants and unmarried ladies; our very footmen compose tragedies, and there is scarcely a superannuated governess in the island that does not leave a roll of lyrics behind her in her band-box’.118 Given the explosion in publishing that occurred after the war, Lockhart is stating no more than the facts. Keats’s poems were published in volumes, not newspapers, and as in the 1790s, the price of middle-class literature set it apart from insurrection. In this respect, Keats was merely playing at genteel defiance. There is perhaps no connection between Whig reform and working-class radicalism. Against this background of radical excitement, especially after the three trials of William Hone, the earlier government prosecutions of Sir Francis Burdett in 1810 and the Hunts in 1812 begin to look like Whig playacting at radicalism. In fact, it is arguable that the government may have made a hero of Leigh Hunt, much as they did Burdett, simply by their unreasonable policy of prosecution during these years. Byron later said of Hunt that his stay in jail had ‘conceited him into a martyr’.119 When Hunt was tried in 1812, the prosecuting Attorney-General had been Sir Vicary Gibbs, who filed so many ex-officio informations (forty-two) during the years 1808–11 that a special debate in Parliament was held over it.120 Between 1790 and 1832, there were seven years when informations and indictments came to double figures, two of them during Gibbs’s tenure as Attorney-General (March 1807 – May 1812): 1792 (10), 1793 (18), 1808 (14), and 1810 (16), 1817 (23), 1820 (43), and 1821 (32). Actual prosecutions were over 200, compared to 120 during 1702–56 and 70 during 1760–89. The sentencing rate for 1808–12 was 20 per cent, while in 1817–22, it was 38 per cent.121 Although the number of informations filed in 1817 was twenty-six, the number of prosecutions was two; Philip Harling ascribes this low 38 per cent sentencing rate to the defeat of the Crown attorneys by Wooler and Hone,
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but this rate increased to over 50 per cent during 1819–20.122 Harling argues that Spencer Perceval, a lawyer coming in as prime minister (1809–12) after the weak Duke of Portland (1807–09) was particularly insistent on prosecuting disturbances, of which there were in fact comparatively few, and thus the number of prosecutions during 1808–11 is high in proportion – at another time Burdett would probably not have been persecuted into popularity as he was in 1810. The problem was that charges might be laid against a proprietor (sometimes for an item inserted without his knowledge) which were then never brought to trial, even while these charges remained hanging over his business. Known for his judicial harshness, Gibbs finally resigned after criticism of his handling of the trial of John Bellingham, the assassin of Perceval in 1812. By 1818, when Lord Ellenborough retired in ill-health, after presiding over the trials of William Hone in December 1817, the government had realized that prosecutions for libel were turning into victories of public opinion for the radicals.123 The Attorney-General in 1818 was Sir Samuel Shepherd, who held that position from May 1817 to June 1819. The trial of Hone was the first one under his jurisdiction and his inexperience was used partly as an excuse for the government’s failure, though he was later to resign on the score of deafness. With the establishment of the Quarterly Review in 1809, Blackwood’s in 1817, and John Bull in 1820, the Tory press began to fight back against Whig domination, and Leigh Hunt made a relatively easy target. Considering what writers such as William Cobbett, William Hone, Richard Carlile, or John Wade were facing, the infighting between Tory and Whig looks feeble. While the government had more serious matters of subversion on its hands than Keats’s poetry, the literary journals – who, like Leigh Hunt, were to become more literary than political as the years went on – took up the cudgels of class. In fact, Hunt’s politics of moderate Whiggism had been superseded. In 1816, Cobbett jeered ‘… I venture to say, that my friend Mr. [Henry] Hunt produced more political EFFECT at the last Westminster Meeting than Mr. Leigh Hunt will have produced at the end of his life’.124 A week later, criticizing some earlier remarks made by Leigh Hunt about Henry (‘Orator’) Hunt that appeared to toady to the Attorney-General and the government prosecution machinery, Cobbett again exposed the fallacies of the Examiner’s moderate Whiggism: The Examiner seems to suppose, that there is a middle course to steer; that there are two parties amongst the debaters; that one is better than the other; that, a change of ministry would do us good. Well, let him think so; but, let him not utter real calumnies against such men as Mr. Hunt [Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt], who thinks, as I do, that to hold forth the notion of redress to be obtained by a change of ministry is to delude and cheat and abuse the nation.125
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As Cobbett well knew, the Examiner had been overtaken in radicalism and readership by the Political Register itself. Among the parliamentary Whigs, preparations were building for the Westminster election of June-July 1818, after the suicide of its MP, Samuel Romilly, the progressive Whig legal reformer. There was literary infighting about whether to support the radical reformers Henry Hunt and Major Cartwright or the radical parliamentary Whigs Sir Francis Burdett, John Cam Hobhouse and Douglas Kinnaird, with Cobbett marshalling public opinion for the ‘radicals’, Hobhouse and Kinnaird. The Westminster constituency (which had been Fox’s) was continually in the forefront of the press because of its longstanding bellweather history. These were the years when the phrase ‘radical reformers’ yielded to the blunt noun ‘Radicals’.126 Richard Cronin suggests that the Westminster election, in pitting Cobbett, Cartwright, and Henry Hunt against Burdett, Kinnaird, and Hobhouse initiated ‘a conflict between classes’, rather than parties.127 Leigh Hunt was still caught up with the Whig rhetoric of 1809–10, while Keats’s hand-me-down Whiggism can only be seen as sentimental. However much Keats, in his dedication of 1815, may have wanted to show his political involvement, the terms he used were as outdated as Wordsworth’s ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’ (1807).128 After Cobbett’s ‘Letter to the Journeymen and Labourers’ in November 1816, the debate had left the parliamentary Whigs behind. In his Autobiography, Cobbett typically relates how at this time a neighbour of his repeatedly told him that he was the only one who could quieten down the popular dissent ‘by writing an Essay upon the subject’.129 Whether or not this was the case, Cobbett’s reluctance to do so indicates his estimate of the strength of governmental repression: when he did go ahead, his fearfulness grew to such an extent that he attempted to cancel publication at the last moment. However, he seems also to have been aware that even at one shilling his paper was going to be too expensive to have any effect on the mob: ‘… I was aware that the high price of ‘The Register’, though it had not prevented it from being more read than any other publication, still, it prevented it from being so generally read upon this important subject’.130 Still, he reduced his price from one shilling to twopence per issue and told his audience that the parliamentary Whigs were not on their side: his appeal was an unprecedented success, but the result was, he says, the London press began a violent attack on him, after five years of relative silence.131 At the top end of the Whig press, if the Edinburgh Reviewers were not guilty of holding government sinecures, they were at least eligible for them. By the standards of Byron and Lockhart, Keats was not of the class to be noticed by quarterlies such as the Edinburgh Review. When Jeffrey belatedly reviewed Keats’s work, Byron took offence: ‘all the men they have ever praised are degraded by that insane article’.132 Byron was later to regret his personal deprecations of Keats, although he did not change his opinion of the poetry and said truthfully
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of the Quarterly Review attack on Endymion: ‘It was severe, – but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others’.133 Byron lived in a world of political personalities, of Court and Parliament. Leigh Hunt says in his Autobiography that he did not consort with any of the great Whigs in person and refused an invitation to Holland House.134 Nonetheless, he was the only Whig personality Keats happened to know, and he became Keats’s passport to infamy: ‘[i]t is fit that he who holds Rimini to be the first poem, should believe the Examiner to be the first politician of the day’. When Lockhart accused the Examiner and Keats of ‘sedition’, he was using the political shorthand of his time.
Personality Considering Lockhart’s terms and the defence of Keats published in the Examiner, it is impossible to separate out the literary from the political vocabulary, but an inflammatory new term – personality – aroused both sides at this time.135 The emergence of Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 marked a new era in literary writing. Richard Woodhouse had attempted to comfort Keats by suggesting that Lockhart’s article was in all likelihood left over from the earlier article on Leigh Hunt and merely inserted to fill a space in the magazine.136 But Benjamin Bailey’s retaliatory article attacked ‘the principle of ye [Blackwood’s] Magazine, inasmuch as it’s [sic] Criticism were personal, instead of being confined to the works’.137 ‘Personality’ was Blackwood’s outstanding quality, and in keeping with its characteristic irony, John Wilson, pretended to undertake a cool discussion of this early nineteenth-century journalistic phenomenon by saying that the Edinburgh Review ‘was the first, to set an example of that insolent and reckless personality which has since become a leading feature of almost all periodical works but our own’.138 Indeed, in 1809 Coleridge had used the term Personality in his periodical The Friend, when he discussed Horace’s motto ‘Genus irritabile vatum’ (the irritability of poets).139 In the second chapter of Biographia Literaria, he reproduced this passage and complained about contemporary striving after literary fame and the reputation of Genius: ‘“this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of literary and political GOSSIPING”’.140 The poetic irritability he considered a mark, not of unique gifts, but rather, of the anxiety of talent aspiring to genius. He cited the name-dropping in Epics of the Ton (1807) as an example.141 Coleridge, like Burke, felt little self-consciousness in alluding to the demarcations of rank in both literature and politics. And the protest against the term ‘Cockney School’ was carried on most strongly, not by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner, but by an early schoolmate of Byron, John Scott, a journalist from Aberdeen. His connections were good, and in 1816, Walter Scott had written to him, commending his independence of partisan politics.142 At the behest of publisher Robert Baldwin, John Scott took
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on the editorship of the London Magazine, which had been set up to compete with Blackwood’s. Mark Parker argues that John Scott did not dispute the place of politics in literature: ‘“If it were said that Literary work has nothing to do with Politics, – the answer would be, that a Magazine has much to do with Politics – that English Literature is closely connected with Politics – as are English trade, English amusements, Manners, thought, and happiness”’.143 Scott’s articles in fact suggest that Scott, like Moir, saw the role of political criteria in literary judgement as entirely rational: what he disliked were the attacks on the physical person of the author, the type of attacks which were used to discredit the radical political stance of ‘Cockneys’ such as Hazlitt and Haydon. The alternation of abuse and apology that Blackwood’s used was itself systematic, argues John Scott. The praising of Coleridge in ‘Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’ in October 1817, he says, was used to engage him as a contributor on poetry and ‘excite curiosity by the contrast’. Similarly, they ‘afterwards got up their “Peter’s Letters” in which Coleridge is praised by the very individual who had abused him in Blackwood’.144 Wilson had made fun of Coleridge, while Lockhart had praised him not so long after, in Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolks (1819), and around the same time Coleridge himself became a contributor. It was thus part of their method to arouse interest and snare contributors: It is a common trick with the pickpockets in the streets, to profess great interest in the misfortune of the person they have just knocked down and plundered: – the very rascals who have struck him from behind, and filched his watch from his fob, will come round in his face, to pity and to pat him … Blackwood’s Men cannot be complimented with the invention of his manoeuvre. Peter Morris [ John Gibson Lockhart], the hypocrite in front, and Christopher North [ John Wilson], the ruffian behind, are but varieties of the same personage … [and] honest Reekie [the publisher Blackwood] comes in as the smooth receiver – who is very sorry for the gentleman’s loss; vows to heaven that he desires no dealings but such as are in the way of fair trade – and is ready with all his heart to give up the article, or pay its value, if the aggrieved individual should demand it roughly, or talk about consequences!145
Scott then goes on to speak personally of those in Edinburgh society who countenance this mischief. John Murray had refused to act any longer as their London distributor, but it was unclear as to who was encouraging Lockhart and Wilson: ‘we understood that Sir Walter Scott, during his last visit to London, had spoken freely of the improprieties of the Magazine in question’.146 Whether or not Walter Scott condoned the Blackwood’s attacks on the ‘Cockney School’, he did write to Lockhart at this time urging him to give up personal satire.147 During 1820, Scott was campaigning for John Wilson’s appointment to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and arguing rather dubiously that Wilson had not indeed behaved irresponsibly as a writer for Blackwood’s.148
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In the next issue, December 1820, John Scott continued this complaint against the ‘personality’ of Blackwood’s.149 The writers for Blackwood’s are likened to hooligans who deal in physical violence – ‘A printing-press is a more deadly weapon than a pistol or a small-sword’.150 Further on, in praising the Noctes Ambrosianae, John Scott uses the term Mohock to describe Edinburgh manners and speaks of ‘the vulgar, but hearty, fun, and the unprincipled relaxations of Scotch wags, – who are a century behind your English roués in good manners. The Mohock has been put down for more than a century past in London’.151 Apart from these rougher manners, John Scott attributed the dealing in personal names to a commercial desire for greater sales – ‘The appearance of a real name in print sets scandalous curiosity agog, and produces an interest of a coarse and vulgar, but very general nature; an interest altogether independent of literary ability’.152 In another article, a month later, ‘Cockney Writers’, the London Magazine writer analyses Blackwood’s use of the term Cockney as a word of abuse against authors such as Hazlitt, Hunt and Keats, and finds its usage merely unthinking: We shall here say a word on what the epithet Cockney, applied to a writer either of prose or poetry, really signifies … We suspect they [‘the Edinburgh Mohocks’ or Blackwood’s] never knew very well what they were about in using it;–but it has served them for a word when they have been without an idea … they have written Cockney against a writer, when they have been unable to write any thing else.153
The only circumstance worth remarking in John Scott’s account is the discrepancy between Edinburgh and London manners, where one sees in the scorn typically lavished by Blackwood’s Magazine on the predominance of London. This rivalry is depicted by John Wilson as a favourite boxing match, in the second Noctes Ambrosianae, where ‘North’ remarks, the London people will say it is local. And why not? London itself is the most provincial spot alive. Let our Magazine be read in the interior of Africa, along with either, or both of the two Monthlies, and which will seem most of a cosmopolite to the impartial black population? Ebony. The London people, with their theatres, operas, Cocknies, &c. &c. are wholly unintelligible out of their own small town. The truth must be told them – London is a very small insignificant place. Our ambition is, that our wits shall be local all over the world.154
Eyre Evans Crowe, in reviewing Hazlitt’s collected Table-Talk (1821–2), some essays of which ran in the London Magazine and others in Colburn’s silver-fork New Monthly Magazine, distinguished between Cockneys and fashionable London. Crowe denied that the term Cockney in literature has anything to do with London society.155 And in Blackwood’s for March 1820, Lockhart writes, ‘The truth is, that the Cockney School has nothing to do with London … Their [the Cockney school’s]
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sphere lies entirely among a set of half-educated, would-be elegant clerks, and apprentices, and superfine shopkeepers’.156 His aspiring Cockneys were a lowermiddle-class phenomenon, and in fact the really popular level of readership was not penetrated by the sentimental Whiggism of Hunt and Keats. It turned out to be the aristocratic Byron whose works crossed the class boundaries of literature. The uncertainties surrounding the status of Don Juan and Vision of Judgment as potentially libellous meant that Byron became more financially involved with John Hunt as his publisher even as his literary relationship with Leigh Hunt deteriorated. George III died in 1820, but even so, the abuse of him contained in Byron’s Vision of Judgment, published anonymously in the Liberal two years later, contained enough grounds for John Hunt to be prosecuted. Byron had intended Vision to depict the Georges from ‘a Whig point of view’.157 His satire was directed towards Southey’s sycophantic praise of George III, but by this time, Whig satire could only be considered a quaintly historical genre belonging to the era of Fox, and from the distance of Italy, Byron was well aware that his poem was hardly going to help the Whigs get into office if the Queen Caroline affair had not already done it. By comparison, Cobbett’s secretly penned A Letter to the King (1820) written on Caroline’s behalf had been a best-seller. Byron, as he had promised, paid Hunt’s legal fees, and after Byron’s death the estate paid the sentence of one hundred pounds damages and security against future seditious acts for five years. However, Byron’s offer to stand trial in place of John Hunt demonstrates a melodramatic eagerness for the halo of political beatification that a few years of attending Parliament between 1812 and 1815 had not given the future saviour of Greece and Liberty. The Liberal, although it aroused great curiosity in literary circles, remained relatively obscure, for it was dated as an expression of Whig radicalism. Instead, it was Don Juan, breaking the mould of Whig romance, that was taken up by the radicals themselves. Moyra Haslett has studied the fad for plays derived from the Don Juan legend, which was at its height from 1817 to 1825, when there were at least eleven productions mounted, mostly burlesques and pantomimes, more than in the next six decades, till the 1880s. Mozart’s Don Giovanni had been staged for the first time in London on 2 August 1817 – the final sestet was left out in this production, thereby giving a Faustian rather than a Christian ending to the opera. The best known version of the story in English till then had been Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675), which was issued as a sixpenny chapbook in 1815.158 Hazlitt reviewed The Libertine for the Examiner (20 April 1817), and Keats did so for The Champion (4 January 1818).159 In 1819, the year he published Hazlitt’s Political Essays, the radical publisher William Hone published ‘Don John’ or ‘Don Juan’ Unmasked as a pamphlet with extracts, while J. Onwhyn brought out ‘An Exact Copy from the Quarto Edition’
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for four shillings. This was only four days after Murray had published Cantos 1–2 on 15 July in a quarto edition at £1.11s.6d. The resort by Murray to publishing in quarto had been a self-conscious one, designed to avoid government prosecution. Even Walter Scott had given up issuing his poetry in quarto by the time of The Field of Waterloo (October 1815), which appeared in demy octavo at five shillings. In January of the same year, The Lord of the Isles had come out in demy quarto. The smaller format, Lockhart argues, made for the great success of Field of Waterloo, but it was hardly an innovation at that juncture. Murray had already seen the way forward when he published Byron’s Oriental romantics in this format: ‘The poem was the first upon a subject likely to be sufficiently hackneyed; and, having the advantage of coming out in a small cheap form – (prudently imitated from Murray’s innovation with the tales of Byron, which was the deathblow of the system of verse in quarto) – it attained rapidly a measure of circulation above what had been reached either by Rokeby or the Lord of the Isles’.160 Indeed, Dorothy Wordsworth complained when The Excursion was published in quarto in 1814.161 In this context, the decision to print Don Juan in quarto was undertaken as a deliberate measure of safety by Murray, especially in the volatile atmosphere of 1819.162 When, in 1821, Wordsworth’s publishers issued The Excursion in octavo, the London Magazine wrote verses of rejoicing: AYE! This, as Cobbett says, is right!– … Twelve shillings, for a book like this, E’en for poor bards, is not amiss–Two guineas is–the d—l!163
Haslett writes at length about the anomalies of the aristocratic Byron’s place among working-class readers created by the popularity of the play versions of Don Juan.164 If the popularity of the these adaptations forms one aspect of the phenomenon, the other consists in the fact that Murray’s prudence in reverting to quarto was undone by his decision to publish the poem without the name of the author or publisher.165 William St Clair offers the fullest discussion of how Murray’s reluctance to acknowledge his proprietorship of Don Juan allowed the work to fall quickly and lastingly into the hands of pirate publishers.166 The result was that by 1824 over 100,000 copies had been printed: ‘Don Juan, even in its official form, was by far the biggest seller of any contemporary literary work during the romantic period … Don Juan was read by more people in its first twenty years than any previous work of English literature’.167 Probably the country’s most imitated publication in 1821 had been Pierce Egan’s Life in London, published as a flash account of London amusements for the swells and bearing a dedication to George IV. When the adventures of Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn appeared, John Wilson had already devoted no fewer than eight articles in Blackwood’s Magazine to Egan’s history of boxing
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( July 1819 to October 1820). In respectable literature, if Don Juan is retrospectively accepted as such, the same taste for thieving slang as Egan had exploited can be seen in Canto Eleven (1823), where Don Juan is held up on his entrance into London and Byron adds rhyme to the Regency underworld vernacular. It is worth noting that when the playwright W. T. Moncrieff [W. T. Thomas] adapted Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) for the stage, he ended it with a Venetian carnival scene, where Corinthian Tom was dressed up as Don Giovanni. Moncrieff had already staged Giovanni in London, Giovanni in Paris, and Giovanni the Vampire, among other pieces, showing the rage for the Don Giovanni legend in London after 1817. As it happened, Byron’s Don Juan fell in with the explosion of working-class publishing during these years and the taste for apocalyptic tales of the underworld history of Europe since 1789.168 Because of Don Juan, Byron’s colloquial upper-class Whig language, hailed as ‘natural’ by Jeffrey and Lockhart, Whig and Tory, became more familiar among the lower classes than Wordsworth’s methodistic pieties. Don Juan can usefully be set alongside Life in London, whose dedication to George IV is the more remarkable in the context of the politically charged atmosphere of 1820 and the Queen Caroline furore. Egan’s satiric series began with a first instalment in September 1820 and ran until July 1821, when it came out in book form. The latter sold for a guinea, but the adventures of Tom and Jerry were dramatised before the serial run finished, and by 1822, there were five stage adaptations playing at the same time. John Marriott, editor of Unknown London (2000), in which both Egan’s Life in London and Moncrieff ’s adaptation, Tom and Jerry, are reprinted, argues that the latter ‘dominated the English stage of the 1820s’ and thereby gave a popular currency to the more expensive book.169 On the basis of this success, Egan began a weekly newspaper in 1824 with his name on it, ‘Pierce Egan’s Life in London and Sporting Guide’, selling at 82d. (later merged in Bell’s Life in London). Egan had earlier written a Dictionary of Slang (1809) and put out in serial form also his history of pugilism, Boxiana, beginning in 1812. John Wilson’s reviews of Egan’s work appeared as a running feature in eight instalments ( July 1819–October 1820) at the same time as repeated notices of Don Juan appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine.170 By contrast, neither the Quarterly Review nor the Edinburgh Review discussed Don Juan for posterity. Francis Jeffrey had indeed hailed Beppo in February 1818, the year before Don Juan, for the liveliness of its language. The critic who had rebuked Wordsworth in 1814 for the improbable philosophizing of a Scotch pedlar in The Excursion praised the conversational ‘naturalness’ of the story-teller: ‘It is, in itself, absolutely a thing of nothing … [but there is] something still more striking and admirable in the matchless facility with which he has cast into regular, and even difficult versification, the unmingled, unconstrained, and unselected language of the most
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light, familiar, and ordinary conversation’.171 Beppo had been issued anonymously, but Jeffrey hints strongly that he thought it was Byron who had furnished us with an example, unique we rather think in our language, of about one hundred stanzas of good verse, entirely composed of common words, in their common places … running on in an unexhaustible series of good easy colloquial phrases, and finding them fall into verse by some unaccountable and happy fatality.172
Jeffrey praised the gentlemanly quality of the writing even with its potential for vulgarity, but despite his high opinion of Beppo and the similarity of subject-matter between it and Don Juan, the latter was not to receive the same attention.173 Jeffrey did make a passing comment on it in a review of ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’ (February 1822), where he digressed to remonstrate against the ironic tone of Don Juan and to rebuke Byron for his libertine morality, in portraying a married woman’s affair and a priest’s irreverence (Cantos 1 & 2), but the poem remained unreviewed.174 Murray, as we know, certainly felt the force of such objections (it should be remembered that he was the publisher of the Quarterly Review), even though John Wilson Croker privately reassured him that Don Juan was a ‘more innocent production than “Childe Harold”’ and said, ‘at present I had rather a son of mine were Don Juan than, I think, any other of Byron’s heroes’.175 The difficulty partly lay not in the fictional incidents but in the notoriety of Byron’s own affairs. Although the connections between John Hookham Frere’s Whistlecraft (1817) and Beppo and Don Juan are well recognized, Andrew Nicholson argues that neither of the latter two would have been written had Byron not taken up Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.176 Nicholson suggests that Byron paid particular attention to Coleridge’s remarks in Chapter 2, on the periodical press, and Chapter 20, on the disputed naturalness of Wordsworth’s language and the question of a lingua communis. One might note Byron’s concern in 1818 about the fourth canto of Childe Harold, before the reviews came out, that he would be criticized for its ‘stanzas running into each other’, which he excused by saying ‘The fact is, that the terza rima of the Italians, which always runs on and in, may have led me into experiments, and carelessness into conceit’. Here again the poem’s reception shows the distinction made between the criticism offered him and that which was given to Leigh Hunt, only excepting that of Hazlitt, who thought the fourth canto a falling-off (‘This will never do’) and complained, the versification was ‘perverse and capricious’: ‘One stanza perpetually runs on into the next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in itself ’.177 The motto of Don Juan was ‘“domestica facta”’.178 John Cam Hobhouse had advised against having a motto, but in fact when the first two cantos were published on 15 July 1819, they bore one from Horace’s Art of Poetry: ‘Difficile est propria
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communia dicere’.179 The question was, whether the language could redeem the subject-matter. This was the task Byron had set himself, and his undertaking of it was enthusiastically received at a time when the colloquial voice was never more ‘popular’, whether experienced in Pierce Egan’s Life in London or Hazlitt’s TableTalk. Even Blackwood’s Magazine began its review of Don Juan by alluding to the problem surrounding Byron’s work – ‘Had the wickedness been less inextricably mingled with the beauty and the grace, and the strength of a most inimitable and incomprehensible muse, our task would have been easy’.180 The writer very quickly comes to a strong affirmation of the poem’s importance and calls it ‘by far the most admirable specimen of the mixture of ease, strength, gayety, and seriousness extant in the whole body of English poetry’.181 Most of the review consists of excerpts from the poem, quoted in the consciousness that ‘the comparative rarity of such passages will, in all probability, operate to the complete exclusion of the work itself, from the libraries of the greater part of our readers’.182 In the case of Don Juan, it was a Tory magazine that hailed the genius of a Whig. This suggests that literature could cross political boundaries. Byron satirized his own party and was friendly with both Walter Scott and Jeffrey. But it was mostly the younger generation who showed themselves unafraid to praise him without reserve. Part of Don Juan’s appeal lay in its magazine-like timeliness – it entered seamlessly into contemporary gossip. ‘Extracts from Mr Wastle’s Diary. No. II’ ( June 1820), which we have reason to believe was written by Lockhart (authorship of No. I is ascribed to him), comments on the rumour that Blackwood’s had been targeted in the latest instalment of Don Juan, and looks forward to reading about itself. Indeed the very reason this article rates Don Juan above one of its models, Frere’s Whistlecraftt, is because of its topical dangerousness – ‘Frere had all the merit of inventing or reinventing that style, but his pure fun and pure wit would not do when Lord Byron brought personal, political, and critical satire into the field’.183 Don Juan is an example of a work that crossed class boundaries, in part because of the use of the material by contemporary dramatists for their own purposes, a phenomenon that can also be seen later with the serialisation of Oliver Twist and subsequent works by Dickens. Whatever the provenance of the Don Juan story, its use by Byron and Moncrieff invoked the age and its sublimities. But its use during these years implicitly relies on a confidence that the war with France was over, and the revolutionary era, now merely historical.
The Whigs and Democracy This was a confidence felt only by the second generation. Older Tories and Whigs, such as Walter Scott and Francis Jeffrey, whose lives had actually been disrupted by Napoleonic sublimity, continued to be alarmed by the extremes of
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rebellion and suffering that they observed in the society of Peterloo. Jeffrey, as a metaphysical Whig, analysed these things in print and tried to offer a plan for the future. In October 1819, he responded to some pamphlets on the estrangement between classes that seemed greater than ever. Jeffrey did not blame the French Revolution for this – ‘the only great and permanent change was the wider diffusion of political information, and the more general habit of attending to political matters’.184 He traced the rise of the radicals instead to upper-class politicians who were discontented with both parliamentary parties and sought a panacea – ‘The people of England, we may be well assured, are not now clamouring for universal suffrage and annual parliaments, from any abstract speculative affection for those institutions – but because they have been taught – we think very falsely taught, to regard them as the means of their deliverance from great and real evils’.185 As in 1802, Jeffrey’s analysis of the great distress traced its sources to economic injustices: that a Parliament that voted to protect wealthy landowners and to maintain a system of upper-class sinecures was now attracting the outraged attention of lower-class readers. This was where the Edinburgh Review really did diverge from the analyses being offered by writers such as Southey in the Quarterly Review (‘those unhappy alarmists who see a civil war in every provincial tumult’). Instead Jeffrey advises restraint – To proceed on the supposition that all the suffering and ignorant persons … are advised and determined revolutionists, and to set about repressing them accordingly, by mere force intimidation, and reproach, would be very plainly, we think, the height of injustice, and guilt, and folly.186
However, six months later, when the prognostications of revolution seemed about to be realized, James Mackintosh, the famous defence lawyer of the Treason Trials and author of Vindicae Gallicae (1791), wrote ‘What a frightful progress the general discontent has made, in the short time between 1817 and 1820!’187 He argued that the repression of this discontent by means of force had been tried long enough and that the way forward was constitutional parliamentary reform, a longtime Whig argument. The Whigs could hardly be forgiven for thinking that the mob was about to overwhelm the government of the day. In late 1819, Walter Scott had written, I would say we were on the verge of civil war. In Glasgow the Volunteers drill by day and the Radicals by night … the Volunteer regiment here are desired to hold themselves in readiness to garrison the Castle … The highland Chiefs have offerd their clans.188
At the same time, Scott was writing Ivanhoe and pushing forward plans for a new Tory paper, the Beacon (6 January–22 September). In the spring of 1820, in London to be knighted by George IV, he complained of the din made by ‘the whole
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mob of the Middlesex blackguards’ who marched twice a day through Piccadilly right by his windows.189 There is nonetheless something like youthful enjoyment in Scott’s letters, and he responded by reliving the glory days of 1793–4, even raising a local militia to confront the disaffected. Keats had remarked in 1819 that ‘This is no contest betwen [sic] whig and tory, but between right and wrong. There is scarcely a grain of party spirit now’.190 But reading over Scott’s letters of the time, the very reverse appears to have been true among the political classes themselves. The trial of the Queen brought out all the old antagonisms of Whig and Tory, and the Whigs clearly thought they were close to bringing down the government. By January 1821, Sir Walter Scott was writing to the second Lord Melville in London, ‘We are fighting hard here & parties running higher than they have been this twenty years’.191 The great sensation in Edinburgh was the planning of the first public dinner to be held there by the Whigs in many years, attended by Grey, the future Lord Durham, and other parliamentary Whigs, in commemoration of Fox’s birthday (24 January). It was moved forward by two weeks, and 500 Whigs turned up – but remarkably there were even more ‘Pittites’.192 Scott thought that the controversy of the Queen had roused such feelings as were ‘unmatched since the days of Sacheverel’.193 However, in London, even Scott had to acknowledge that the democratic spectre raised by the Queen’s trial evaporated into thin air surprisingly quickly. The coronation of George IV in July 1821 was a brilliant occasion bringing out an estimated crowd of 500,000. The attempts of Caroline to pound down the doors of Westminster Abbey were lost amid the magnificence: ‘That matter is a fire of straw which has now burnt to the very embers’.194 The young Lockhart, as we have seen, thought the forecast of doom-and-gloom overblown and the importance of Jeffrey’s prognostications on the decline – ‘I have a great respect for Mr Jeffrey’s talents … but … he has been more over-rated in his character of an English writer, than any man of our time’.195 Whether this was the cheerfulness of confident youth or the promptings of party Toryism, it began to appear that with the long delayed accession of Fox’s former confidant, George IV, the age of Whig literature had ended.
5 1821–3 HISTORICAL RETROSPECTIVE OF THE EDINBURGH REVIEW
O’er politics and poesy preside, Boast of thy country, and Britannia’s guide!1
Whiggism and radicalism appear to be confluent phenomena at the end of the long eighteenth century: Earl Grey, a leader of Friends of the People in 1792, also led the Whig government that in 1832 undertook the longstanding Foxite project to reform the franchise. However, arguably these two events have nothing to do with one another. By the time of the Reform Bill the idealism of the 1790s had long since evaporated, and the Whigs had stopped seeking out-ofdoors support for their parliamentary manoeuvrings. In 1818, their uncertain place with the people was typified by the remarks of the Yellow Dwarf: ‘Let any man compare the debate of 1794 with the debates of 1817, it will be impossible for him to believe that he is reading the speeches of the same persons’.2 If radicalism rests on a deistic critique of society, whereby church and state are separated in order to make way for a rational construction of government outside divine right, then Whiggism, however much it may have consorted with the radical Populus, remained relegated to the detritus of Legitimacy.3 In 1821, Queen Caroline died in Italy, Napoleon on St Helena, and an era of self-consciously historical feeling set in: Blackwood’s Magazine printed two articles on the history of Whiggism as a controlling force of public opinion during the era of Napoleon: ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’ and ‘Historical View of the Rise, Progress, Decline, and Fall of the Edinburgh Review’. The first of these speaks especially to the literary controversies after 1817 and the establishment of Blackwood’s itself. In particular, the Chaldee MS, published in October 1817 (suppressed in subsequent editions) had made the magazine’s name, with its satire of identifiable Edinburgh personalities. The Edinburgh Review claimed never to have gone in for ad hominem writing, vaunting instead its ‘Scientific Whiggism’. However ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’ argues that the Whigs had indeed dealt in ‘personalities’ in their writing, whatever their pretensions of – 115 –
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intellectual objectivity. Blackwood’s Magazine itself described this ‘severity’ by another name and compared the Edinburgh Review to a rattling and raging chariot, [where] the whole genius of the Whigs, like a manyheaded Hindoo idol, careered for a time as triumphantly … The infidel votaries of philosophy and taste, and ‘science falsely so called,’ rushed like fanatics and sacrificed themselves beneath the wheels.4
The success of Blackwood’s meant that the solemn chastisements of the Whigs were now being met with Tory ‘hilarity and banter’: this also marked a difference between 1802 and 1822.5 Instead of Thalaba and arguments about versification, literary criticism was marked by its attitude towards Don Juan. ‘Banter’ constituted the genius of Don Juan – which was hailed by Blackwood’s despite Byron’s Whiggism. While Jeffrey found himself unable to praise in Don Juan what he had acclaimed as ‘naturalness’ in Beppo, the Tory writer John Gibson Lockhart singled out the language of Don Juan as much more natural than anything else written at the time: There is nobody but yourself [Byron] who has any chance of conveying to posterity a true idea of the spirit of England in the days of his Majesty George IV … you know what neither Mr. Wordsworth nor any Cumberland stamp-master ever can know. You know the society of England, – you know what English gentlemen are made of.6
Lockhart’s Letter to Lord Byron did not appear in Blackwood’s Magazine, where it easily belongs, but in the form of an anonymous pamphlet, undoubtedly because Lockhart at this time preferred that his father-in-law, Walter Scott, not know he was still writing in a personal vein, despite the terrible warning posted by John Scott’s death only two months before. The pamphlet is a masterpiece of badinage, an attempt to meet Byron on his own rhetorical ground. The definition of a ‘natural’ language in 1821 breaks down along the lines of class, whereby Lockhart and Byron are closer to one another than either could ever be to Wordsworth’s Scotch pedlar or the dissenter Hazlitt. Nonetheless, a later audience finds this spirit of banter in Hazlitt’s prose, too – even if Blackwood’s saw him as a Cockney not a Whig. Just as Milton’s style had changed over the years of civil strife, from Elizabethan elaborateness on arcane questions of ecclesiastical doctrine to earnest directness on popular topics of government, so political urgency after 1815 pushed plain-speaking into the literary arena. It was Burke who had set the standard for eloquence in the late eighteenth century, and for a long time Cobbett, as much as Wordsworth, had attempted this Burkean style.7 Hazlitt made his own transition from Burkean eloquence to modern directness. In an essay on Cobbett in his collection Table-Talk (1821), Hazlitt had already held Wordsworth to account for inconsistencies in his language about
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democracy: ‘with one stroke of his prose-pen, he disfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmoreland and Cumberland from voting at elections, and says there is not a man among them that is not a knave in grain. In return, he lets them still retain the privilege of expressing their sentiments in select and natural language in the Lyrical Ballads’. The preface to Lyrical Ballads had been written just at the time when the forceful style of Cobbett was establishing him as a crucial political commentator, a position that Wordsworth’s prose style never gained for him.8 Where Hazlitt remained bitter about Wordsworth’s apostasies, he delighted in the self-contradictions of Cobbett: I doubt whether this outrageous inconsistency, this headstrong fickleness, this understood want of all rule and method, does not enable him to go on with the spirit, vigour, and variety that he does. He is not pledged to repeat himself. Every new Register is a kind of new Prospectus. He blesses himself from all ties and shackles on his understanding; he has no mortgages on his brain; his notions are free and unincumbered.9
Political consistency comes second to style in Hazlitt’s weighing-up here, even though, as he admits, ‘There is not a single bon-mot, a single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again’. Hazlitt contrasts this with the more quotable Paine, the writer most often compared to Cobbett: ‘Paine’s writings are a sort of introduction to political arithmetic on a new plan: Cobbett keeps a day-book and makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and troublesome questions that start up throughout the year’.10 Hazlitt here displays his own stylistic virtuosity as a ‘Slang-Whanger’, taking the Quarterly Review’s title for him as a compliment.11 Tom Paulin has written of the centrality of ‘free play’ to Hazlitt’s aesthetic, which Paulin sees as based on the Dissenting tradition of rational enquiry.12 Politically speaking, this is the ‘republican’ virtue described in Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus.13 Paulin’s book is designed to show how ‘writers like Cobbett and Hazlitt give liberty an aesthetic dimension’, although the wealth of Hazlitt’s metaphorical exuberance seems, in the Coriolanus essay, to be heaped in the scales of poetry’s aristocratic power: ‘It [Poetry] shews its head turretted, crowned, and crested’.14 Behind Hazlitt’s famous comparison between the royalist imagination and the republican understanding, lies a distinction that Paulin traces to William Shenstone’s Letters to Particular Friends, which is quoted by Hazlitt in his essay ‘On Paradox and Common-Place’, poets are Tories by nature …On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment of persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally Whigs.15
This is another form of the distinction between Burke’s Marie-Antoinette style and Paine’s plain-speaking. But the Whigs of the 1790s were not, as Burke had
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pointed out, the historical Whigs of 1688. The University of Glasgow faculty who taught Hazlitt’s father also influenced the generation of the Edinburgh Reviewers, and they make a genuine claim to a contemporary Whig aesthetic. In the sense Paulin outlines, of ‘English’ plain-speaking, Burke, too, would qualify as a Whig.16 But the conflation of Whiggism and plain-speaking holds true only in the part Whiggism has played historically: the ‘Real Whigs’ are part of the fallout from the Commonwealth, where the Whiggism of the early nineteenth century has little to do with Unitarianism or Presbyterianism.17 Hazlitt invokes England of 1688 ‘when under a constitutional monarchy and a Whig king’, the name of England itself was synonymous with Liberty. As Mark Goldie describes it, ‘[t]he crux is the transformation of the Puritan into the Whig’ – in the 1680s, the Whigs had completed the transformation of opposition to sovereignty begun in the 1640s.18 In the process, they had made monarchy constitutional in a secular sense and thus followed out the Hobbesian reasoning that liberty was not synonymous with republicanism.19 By contrast, the modern English politicians, in restoring the kings Napoleon deposed speak ‘the cant of legitimacy’ and ‘the doctrine of divine right’.20 Hazlitt’s critique of contemporary politicians very much rests on an opposition between Liberty as a consecrated English thing and the betrayal of it by modern linguistic obfuscation. Nor can modern Whiggism discuss liberty as an abstraction: because of 1688, an ‘English subject cannot call this principle in question without renouncing his country; an English prince cannot call it in question without disclaiming his title to the crown’.21 Thus, for Hazlitt, as for Burke, modern politics is a linguistic battleground over the meaning of Whiggism. On the different attitudes towards liberty in the Whig and Tory ideologies, Blackwood’s wrote in 1823, What is a Tory? Consult history; – examine their tenets – scrutinize their doctrines. Do they agree with you in any one point except in an opposition to the Whigs … [T]he character of the Whigs of the nineteenth century, is no more that of the patriots who effected the glorious Revolution of 1688, than Lords Somers, Godolphin, and their compeers, were copies of the sour covenanters of the North .. As a retort courteous, the Liberals of those days … bestowed on their opponents the nick-name of Tory, which belonged to a savage horde of Irish banditti.
This review of the Whig and Tory seventeenth-century pedigree continues, showing the conventional identification of the Tories with passive obedience and the Whigs with a love of liberty, ‘Liberty was the great object of their [the Whigs’] care; but they had the good sense to see that the prerogative of the crown was necessary to establish it … they set King William on the throne, and took effectual means to secure the Protestant ascendancy.’22 The point made here is that the Whigs, whatever their stance towards liberty, were not republicans but
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monarchists. Their innovation was to confirm Britain’s Protestant constitution without the regicides of earlier eras – opposition without assassination. In this context, the term opposed to Liberty in 1789 is Legitimacy. The different shadings that might be found in the word Liberty can be seen in an account given by Coleridge in The Friend (19 October 1809), when the Spanish popular opposition to Napoleon was making liberty an acceptable topic again: Though the Restoration of good sense commenced during the Interval of the Peace of Amiens, yet it was not till the Spanish Insurrection [1808] that Englishmen of all Parties recurred in toto to the old English Principles, and spoke of their Hampdens, Sidney, and Miltons, with the old enthusiasm. During the last War, an Acquaintance of mine (least of all Men a political Zealot) had christened a Vessel which he had just built – THE LIBERTY; and was seriously admonished by his aristocratic Friends to change it for some other name. What? replied the Owner very innocently – and should I call it THE FREEDOM? That (it was replied) would be far better, as people might then think only of Freedom of Trade; whereas LIBERTY has a jacobinical sound with it!23
In 1810 when the Whigs put forward a plan of reform (defeated by a vote of 234 to 115), the first to be voted on since Grey’s motion in 1797, Tierney spoke in support because it would make the House ‘a constitutional check upon the power of the Crown, and a sparing dispenser of the money of the people’.24 This reliance on the formula of Crown-Commons opposition and the 1780s notion of retrenchment of court expenses shows that the Whigs were hopelessly mired in the eighteenth, if not the seventeenth, century.25 Still, they had dimly begun to see that the battle for nineteenth-century liberty was in fact being fought not in Parliament but in the printing house. By 1821, Blackwood’s is scornful of its own polite Tories who shunned the ‘personality’ of the Whigs: ‘You [the Tories] are contending for an ascendancy over public opinion. The Whig writers have for a time pretended that they possessed it … Your object is to destroy their dominion’.26 In 1821, the London Magazine observed that even Castlereagh, noted for his part in the Holy Alliance reconstruction of Europe that put monarchy back in government, showed a ‘liberal’ sense of the importance of freedom of speech and spoke of the spirit of the times: – Lord Castlereagh, when he introduced the bills of last year against the Press, professed a regard for its freedom infinitely more liberal than any thing that ever dropped from Bacon or Sir Matthew Hale; yet it would be gross flattery in us to say, that we believe his lordship possesses a more liberal mind than fell to the lot of either of the two persons just mentioned. May not the difference be, that Lord Castlereagh yields his feeling to a necessity, which the dispositions and intellects of the others have helped to introduce in the lapse of time?27
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And in this vein, E. P. Thompson quotes the radical Richard Carlile, that ‘“The Printing-press may be strictly denominated a Multiplication Table as applicable to the mind of man. The art of Printing is a multiplication of mind”’.28 Thompson himself says that Carlile ‘rightly saw the repression of 1819 made the rights of the press the fulcrum of the Radical movement’. Even in merely surmounting the physical limitations imposed by the government on the distribution of Cobbett’s Political Register, the working class had fashioned itself into a collective consciousness: ‘From 1816 (indeed, from 1792) until 1836 the contest involved, not only the editors, booksellers, and printers, but also many hundreds of newsvendors, hawkers, and voluntary agents’.29 In this sense, the literary structure preceded the political, and Hazlitt and Carlile argue that liberty is a modern invention, of which the printing press is the material symbol. Whiggism had comprised the seventeenth-century notion of liberty and brought the term into play, at a time when the legal discourse of constitutionalism was seen as the most progressive language by which to resolve internal dissension. By the early nineteenth century, the limits of this Whiggish constitutionalism had been reached in the Foxite Whigs’ inability to form a government for more than a generation.30 However, in 1821, Earl Grey, who had withdrawn from active politics to his country estate after the futile excitement of 1809–10 and the refusal of the Prince Regent in 1812 to bring in a Whig government, began to consider that with the passage of twelve years and the popular agitation surrounding Caroline, the Whigs might have a genuine chance to form a government. The Tory Blackwood’s Magazine laughed at these efforts: ‘Many an anxious glance have they cast upon the rude workmen of revolution, – and under pretence of seducing them into the speculative moderation of whiggery, they have lent them much indirect and not ineffective aid in their projects’.31 The radical meetings out-of-doors were defended in camera by the party Whigs whom Blackwood’s called ‘men who affect to be the guardians of the British constitution’.32 However, public support of Caroline did not finally translate into any fundamental shift within the Commons. A moderate motion for Reform put forward by Lord John Russell in 1822 garnered 164 votes, ‘the largest ever recorded except on Pitt’s motion of 1785’, but this was not enough to change anything.33 It became clear that in the absence of royal support and without the reform of parliamentary representation itself, the Whigs could never form a government. Grey’s uncertainty came to an end in 1820, when George IV confirmed the Tories in power. And so for the Whigs, ‘The policy of the last seven years, direct onslaught on a despised administration, had thus reached stalemate at a time when its prospect of success had seemed brightest’.34 Nearly thirty years’ literary campaigning and the growth of public opinion had made no parliamentary impact. Blackwood’s gloated over the humiliation of the Edinburgh Review, even when the Whig spokesmen bent themselves to make advances:
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Mr Jeffrey is reported to have said at a public meeting here, that so far from disclaiming, he rejoiced in the connection formed betwixt the whigs and radicals, – that he looked to this union as the instrument of passing the latter from the grossness of their present being, so far, at least, as the middle and purgatorial state of whiggism, – and that a chance was even afforded of their being ultimately translated even to the paradise of the tories.35
But there was to be no Whig paradise of office in 1821, and this episode in ‘purgatorial whiggism’ passed, with no discernable reward for all the efforts of the Whig leaders to sit on the democrats’ platforms and grasp the greasy paw of radicalism. In February 1822, Blackwood’s crowed at the failure of the Whigs to use the Caroline uproar to any discernible advantage, The last Session of Parliament began with the loud anticipations of party [Whig] triumph … The processions which had covered the road to Brandenburgh-House [residence of the estranged late Queen Caroline] with insolent Radical festivity, were to be marshalled for the sterner purpose of besieging the doors of the Senate … It was in vain that Lord Grey had laid his mantle under the feet of the rabble; and Lord Holland bowed the unlaurelled baldness of his brow before the congregated purity of Westminster [a radical constituency, formerly Fox’s] and St Giles’s. The Saturnalia were at an end.36
In 1822, no one put faith in the traditional Whigs’ professions of democracy: ‘The secret of all the Whig impulses, and that which unveils the cause of their hopeless ruin, is their abject rapacity for place’.37 The Whigs and radicals parted company after the triumphant coronation of George IV and the funeral of Caroline: ‘Who can believe that the Whig Lords did not loath, from their inmost souls, the contact of the Hones and Hunts, and Cobbetts, and the whole putrid mire of public disturbance?’38 The question still to be addressed was how change could be conducted within the confines of an eighteenth-century ‘Whig’ constitution. British liberalism of the 1820s, in its international outlook and support for the securing of constitutions in Spain, South America and elsewhere, appeared to represent a recapitulation of 1789. But, as the Continent erupted, British radicalism collapsed. Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822, and Robert Peel, successor to the old-style Pittite Home Secretary, Sidmouth, introduced a much less repressive criminal code. Meanwhile, the parliamentary Whigs turned from lower-class mob scenes to the more exotic revolutionary setting of Naples – Blackwood’s Magazine taunted them with inconsistency: ‘The Neapolitan Insurrection was from the first lauded and magnified by the Whigs; no language of promise was too lofty for the prophetic spirit of English liberalism’.39 However, the Whigs had not taken up the similar cause of Greece, and the Tory press speculated that this was because it was not jacobin enough – ‘It did not march before them in the true revolutionary costume. It had no parade of tricoloured banners and
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emblems of mountebank rebellion, – no fantastic codes of Rights of Man, – no promises of religious overthrow, – no mad rapture of ribald Equality’. This Tory argument takes up the old slur on the Whigs, that they were atheists. The French Revolution, which had been a ‘frenzy’ of sacrifice to ‘the great Revolutionary Moloch’, had attracted the homage of Fox as late as 1803. But the uprising of the Greeks did not appeal to this ideology – the Greek Manifesto contained nothing of the massacre of the priesthood, or the divine right of the mob to drag kings and nobles to the guillotine; it had unwittingly left out the necessary pledge to the abolition of all religious belief, and, with an unwise ignorance of men, had confined itself to a demand of national freedom.40
The new British liberalism faced the same problem as Whiggism had in 1793: whether political intervention in another country’s affairs constituted an act of war or the affirmation of a beneficent international ideology. It was precisely on this point that the Pittite Whigs had found themselves transformed into ‘Tories’. Ironically, it was a Pittite, George Canning, the Tory of the Anti-Jacobin, who as the liberal Foreign Secretary in 1823 refused to send British troops to restore the Bourbons in Spain and the Americas. By the early 1820s, the Whigs appeared to have been passed over after the death of Caroline – whose crisis represents the last remnant of eighteenth-century-style opposition to a Hanoverian king, conducted in this case through the female consort instead of through the heir to the throne. Whiggism may have been the progressive agency of sixteenth-century secularization or seventeenth-century constitutionalism, but it was not going to be the future of early nineteenth-century liberalism.
‘Historical View of the Rise, Progress, Decline and Fall of the Edinburgh Review’ In fact, the sanctum sanctorum of Whiggism had been breached first by the Pittites’ defeat of Napoleon. In 1816, Southey wrote a private satire of the Edinburgh Review, ‘The Book of the Prophet Jehephary’, dwelling on the disappointment of its longstanding prophecies: 1. In those days, the men of the Party were sorely troubled, for behold, none of those things were fulfilled which had been written of by Jehephary the Prophet [ Jeffrey], and Peherri the Chronicler [ James Perry, editor of the Morning Chronicle], and Kawbit [Cobbett] of the Black Guards.41
In this Biblical parody, Jehephary sends for ‘Brum the Scribe’ [Henry Brougham], saying ‘Behold, we are become a jest unto the people, and the laughing-stock of our adversaries!’ (ch. 1, verse 10). Other characters were featured, such as ‘Lee the Huntsman’, ‘Lord Harold the Giaour’, ‘Giphardos’ [William Gifford], and
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‘Krokairos’ [ John Wilson Croker], and even Southey himself, ‘Sahouthy the Chief Poet’. The parochialism of its Edinburgh origins is exposed: … by the law it was made felony, without benefit of clergy, to contradict anything that was said in the Reekie Review, or to say anything which might tend to bring the party into disrepute. 8. Also there was a law made for the better encouragement of literature; and by that law it was decreed that a knowledge of Greek was not necessary for the learned professions: 9. And that the Latin prosody should be reformed according to the use of the High School at Edinburgh.42
All this foreshadows something of the Chaldee MS. satire produced by John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart for Blackwood’s Magazine in October 1817. A few months later, Lockhart’s more academic article, ‘On the Periodical Criticism of England’ (March 1818), provided a reasoned analysis of the state of the press in 1818. Just as Wilson could move from extrovert gossipiness on the ‘Lake School’ to solemn raptures over Childe Harold’s Lakeish sublimnity, so the ‘Scorpion’ Lockhart was equally capable of writing a balanced ‘scientific’ overview of the English literary world. Here his playfulness is exercised only in the indulgence of a Germanic pseudonym, ‘Baron von Lauerwinkel’, and the sobriety of the German reviewer-professor is contrasted with the flippancy of the English hack – An English Reviewer is a smart, clever man of the world, or else a violent political zealot. He takes up a new book either to make a jest of it, and amuse his readers and himself at the expense of its author, or he makes use of the name of it merely as an excuse for writing, what he thinks the author might have been better employed in doing, a dissertation, in favour of the minister if the Review be the property of a Pittite against him and all his measures if it be the property of a Foxite, bookseller …The English Reviewers are of the opinion of Pericles, that politics are, or should be, in some way or other, the subject of every man’s writings.43
Lockhart’s account suggests that literature is merely a sub-department of politics in English culture. For the English reviewer, his first question is not, ‘is this book good or bad?’ but it is, ‘is this writer a ministerialist or an oppositionist?’… His genius is tried, not by the rules of Aristotle, but by those of St Stephen’s chapel. A man may be a dunce, – that is a trifle. If he can influence a single vote in the House of Commons, he may reckon upon being trumpetted up as a great man by either one set of critics or another.44
Proof of literature’s secondary importance to politics in English periodicals is also suggested by Lockhart’s literary hierarchy, whereby the critic’s satiric entertainment supersedes that offered by the writer himself.
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Lockhart likens Francis Jeffrey and William Gifford to the heads of two great states: ‘The former resembles the gay despot of Rome [Nero], the latter the bloody and cruel one of Capreae [Tiberius]’.45 Lockhart is critical of Gifford’s English prejudice against the Scots and actually gives more personal praise to Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review: ‘The journal, conducted by this gentleman in a provincial town of Britain, has, notwithstanding it is opposed by the whole weight of ministerial influence, a circulation far beyond any periodical work in England, and such as, even among the more numerous readers of Germany, is altogether unrivalled’.46 Jeffrey’s personal failure, in Lockhart’s eyes, was that he had not lived up to his considerable philosophical gifts.47 In his abuse of Wordsworth and his niggardly praise for Scott, he had shown only an ephemeral grasp of greatness. The errors of literary judgement Lockhart ascribes to Jeffrey are part of the larger error for which the Edinburgh Review was indeed widely criticized after 1815: that its writers had spent the wartime struggle working to ‘deride’ those who carried on the effort against Napoleon.48 Lockhart refers in particular to the Edinburgh Review’s dissension from the popular support for Spain.49 Two years later, in June 1820, in ‘Extracts from Wastle’s Diary’, Lockhart alluded again to the Edinburgh Review’s failures of judgement, both political and critical: ‘[t]he degradation of his [ Jeffrey’s] favourite Napoleon on the one hand, and the exaltation of the fame of Mr Wordsworth on the other, may be regarded as the two “ill-favoured” images, that draw his curtain at dead of night’.50 Lockhart’s criticisms were mild by comparison to John Galt’s in September 1821, when he talked of the quarterly’s reputation for prophetic social science as mere intellectual idolatry: At last the brazen doors were burst open, the profane vulgar rushed in, and beheld, with open-mouthed astonishment, that the divinity to which they had offered up the sacrifice of their understandings, and implored the acceptance of their hearts and heads, was in reality but a senseless image set up for sinister purposes, adorned and augmented for a political end, by many who were perfectly well aware of the mean and insignificant materials of which it had been constructed.51
These reports of the Edinburgh Review’s demise by Blackwood’s were merely speculative.52 In ‘Historical View of the Rise, Progress, Decline and Fall of the Edinburgh Review’, however, Blackwood’s pretended to write a dispassionate analysis of the quarterly’s power: ‘The Edinburgh Review will undoubtedly occupy a distinguished place in the History of Scottish Literature. For the greater part of twenty years no journal was ever more generally read in this country’.53 In this history the Edinburgh Review was not a party journal, but instead ‘a work conducted professedly on rational and established principles’.54 Blackwood’s does not hesitate to declare that ‘at the time when the Edinburgh Review made its appearance, there existed, among all ranks and orders in this country, a general
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intellectualization … The great political events that were so loudly resounding on all sides, had awakened a universal curiosity’.55 It was politics that had restored a critical urgency to literature and created a new readership where the benign puffing of novels and sermons had not. The remarkable, unlooked-for thing was the sheer scale of this new review’s readership and intellectual authority: ‘The circulation of the Review rapidly exceeded the most sanguine hopes of the projectors … They were allowed a pontifical authority in taste, a prophetical, in politics’.56 This history locates the beginning of Jeffrey’s failure in the year 1807–8, with the review of Byron’s Hours of Idleness and ‘Don Cevallos’ – The triumphs of the Peninsular war overwhelmed and finished its pretensions to political sagacity. Never in the history of literature was any thing so complete and perfect as the demonstration of the political insagacity of the Edinburgh Review. Its inferiority and inability with respect to the estimates of genius also, about the same time, received an equal exposure. From the publication of Childe Harold, the author of which it had so merrily ridiculed for being no poet, all confidence was lost for ever in its dicta in taste; and Jeffrey will hereafter be chiefly recollected as the Zoilus of Byron.57
Coincidentally, this was also the year when the All Talents ministry, having been given their chance to show what contemporary Whiggism could do for the country, foundered on their own internal dissensions. Nonetheless, as Joanne Shattock has shown, the Edinburgh Review maintained its predominance for at least twenty-five years beyond these obituaries.58 Both Hazlitt in 1823 (‘The Periodical Press’) and Carlyle in 1831 (‘Characteristics’) were to reaffirm the continuing fad for the criticism of the quarterlies and argued that it was a sign of literature’s strength. The establishment of the Westminster Review was further testimony, that the pattern set by the Edinburgh Reviewers was a powerful one for an aspiring political association – and this can be seen by the attack in the very first Westminster number (‘Periodical Literature’, January 1824). Whether the Edinburgh Review or the Quarterly Review had led to reviewing as it was conducted in a magazine such as Blackwood’s is another question. John Gross remarks that organizing a quarterly was like ‘bringing an encyclopaedia up to date’, while managing a magazine was ‘more like running a theatrical troupe’.59 The question raised by Lockhart’s ‘history’, is whether Blackwood’s should attack the Edinburgh Review on political or literary grounds. The explanation given of the latter’s origins and style was political – ‘the genius of the age, as it predominated in politics, pervaded the republic of letters’. ‘Literature’ itself apart from politics and the discussion of the French Revolution had been dull and out-of-touch. The Edinburgh Review had brought together the excitement of progressive ideas and the rationality of learned discourse. There was a new interdisciplinarity of reading because of the ‘great political events that were so loudly.
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In short, politics had made readers of people who were not literary – as polite literature itself had not managed to do – and for the moment the gap between literary culture and the world of affairs had closed. Especially it was in the quarterlies that the appetites for current news and for encyclopaedic learning mingled without self-consciousness. Given the volatility of events in France, the desire to know what was happening abroad took on a greater urgency, and the Edinburgh Reviewers’ grounding in the philosophical equations of political economy passed for the magic art. In 1831, Thomas Love Peacock satirized the Scotch philosopher in Crochet Castle, who says, ‘“Morals and metaphysics, politics and political economy, the way to make the most of all the modifications of smoke; steam, gas and paper currency; you have all these to learn from us; in short, all the arts and sciences’”.60 Metaphysics or proofs of absolute existence no longer preoccupied philosphers, but a science that explained the mysterious providential ways of paper money and specie did. There was no holy text, only The Wealth of Nations and the accretion of Edinburgh Review articles. Henry Crabb Robinson tells the story of meeting an English labourer, whose talk ‘was enlightened by those principles of political economy which indeed are become common; but I did not think they had alighted on the hod and trowel. He did not talk of the books of Adam Smith, but seemed imbued with their spirit’.61 Within the space of a generation, the doctrines of Adam Smith had become a common cultural reference, and students of Dugald Stewart peered into the Promised Land of nineteenth-century economics. Biancamaria Fontana reminds us that Henry Cockburn, Jeffrey’s biographer, called this ‘philosophic Whiggism’, defined by ideology rather than party.62 However, Jeffrey had breached this philosophic position by arguing the legitimacy of party Whiggism.63 He corresponded with Francis Horner, but the relationship of the Whig writers in Edinburgh with the Whig party in London was not an explicit one, except insofar as the master self-publicist Henry Brougham attempted to broadcast in the Edinburgh Review what he was saying in the courts or the House. Fontana remarks that The idea that the Whig party should be a political force in the country and in public opinion rather than a parliamentary faction, remained central to the reviewers’ analysis throughout the 1810s and 1820s. The crucial question, in the years between 1815 and 1830, became accordingly: which elements of the political nation, which social forces and groups should be identified with the Whigs?64
The question was to what extent this Scotch philosophy could join up with the Whig party in London, and to what extent the lack of representation for the commercial classes coincided with the Whigs’ being out of power. Nor was there any necessary correlation between the new working-class radicals and the old Whigs, whose jacobinism belonged to the intellectual fads of the 1790s.
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As the events of the nineteenth century challenged the eighteenth-century body of political economic thought and new commentators entered the debate, the Edinburgh Review’s authority could only fragment further. Blackwood’s Magazine dates the breakdown of Whig authority from 1809, with the populist call for Reform, the establishment of the Quarterly Review, and the acceleration of British military successes in the Peninsular campaign.
Whig Literature and ‘Parsonality’: Jeffrey, Byron, and Moore The other challenge to the authority of the Edinburgh Review mentioned by John Gibson Lockhart lay in its first estimate of Byron, the review of Hours of Idleness ( January 1808), which satirized Byron’s mawkish preface and provoked English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.65 Despite its praise for Childe Harold, the Edinburgh Review, like the Quarterly Review, had refrained from commenting on Don Juan. Blackwood’s rejoiced in the poem, but its article ‘Remarks on Don Juan’ (August 1819), while praising Byron’s genius, deplored his immorality.66 In addition to the breathlessly Romantic review of Childe Harold by John Wilson in May 1818, John Gibson Lockhart’s anonymous pamphlet John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron showed a rowdy appreciation of the worldliness (‘filth’) of Don Juan – ‘it is the only sincere thing you have ever written; and it will live many years after all your humbug Harolds’.67 In February 1822, Blackwood’s did, however, print a rather Francis-Jeffreyish piece, which attempted to give a more rationally argued weighing-up of Byron’s faults and gifts. The dispute between Byron and Southey during 1821–2 was public enough that Jeffrey himself felt compelled to weigh in on it in February 1822 in his review ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’.68 There he excerpts Byron’s Preface – mainly to praise the political insights. This can be seen of course as one Whig’s bolstering of another, in order to reiterate the argument of the previous thirty years, that the French Revolution posed no danger to the Establishment and that the people’s unrest derived from justifiable grievances with their own government. Nonetheless, even this review sorrowfully regrets the immorality of his writing and deprecates ‘the outrageous, and till he set the example, the unprecedented personalities in which this noble author indulges’.69 Thus it is Byron whom Jeffrey holds up as the model for the slander of the age: since 1812 according to Jeffrey, Byron had made the controversies of English literature personal. However, as Lockhart rejoined in the third Noctes Ambrosianae (April 1822), Jeffrey himself did not easily endure personal attacks: ‘I [Odoherty] believe that any man may with impunity, (so far as a certain concern goes,) touch the King, – abuse the Lords, – blackguard the Commons, – and ruffianize the prime writers of the age and country; but that vengeance will fall on his head if he dares but to lay his little finger on the smallest of Critics’.70 To this, ‘Sir Andrew Wylie’
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replies, with a hit at Jeffrey’s height – ‘What? ay at the Sma’ Known?71 Will you never be done with your personalities about that gentleman?’ The Noctes dialogue goes on to review the ‘cuts’ of the previous fifteen years: NORTH … Mr Pendarves Owen, what do you understand by the word Personality? PEN OWEN.I don’t know – I can’t well say. I suppose Jeffrey means, when he accuses Lord Byron of it, to allude to his cuts at Coleridge, and Southey, and Sothby, and Wordsworth, and Bowles, and Sam Rogers, and the King, and so forth.
They then go on to discuss English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) – NORTH. Ay, there’s the rub! … The Edinburgh Reviewers ( Jeffrey himself, ‘tis generally supposed,) began the row with a violent attack on Lord Byron’s juvenile poems, in a review, in the conclusion of which there is certainly not a little personality. This is done in utter ignorance of Lord Byron’s talents, in utter contempt of him, and all that pertains to him. Very well, Lord Byron writes and publishes the poetical satire of which we have been speaking [English Bards and Scotch Reviewers], and the Edinburgh Reviewers are laughed at for several weeks all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, to say nothing of Yankieland and Botany-Bay. – So far so well. – But in a few years, out comes CHILDE HAROLD, and Lord Byron is at once placed nem. con. by the side of the first poets of our age. What a moment of mortification must that have been , when Mr Francis Jeffrey first discovered whom he had to do with!72
Beppo had been hailed by Jeffrey, but the fact that the Edinburgh Review had remained virtually silent on Don Juan was always brought up by Lockhart. ‘North’ goes on to remark how Byron seemed to get away with insulting Wellington and the government in Childe Harold, Beppo and Don Juan. The only consequence had been that Don Juan did not receive a review from either of the greater quarterlies – at which both exclaim, ‘The Parsonality! the Parsonality!’ and ‘North’ quotes Jeffrey’s judgement, that personality was a thing unknown until Lord Byron set the example’.73 Still, Blackwood’s writes down both Jeffrey and Byron as irretrievable Whigs and ‘personality’ as a feature of Whig literature since the Restoration.74 This too is the larger point of the ‘Preface’ in Blackwood’s Magazine of January–June 1822, attributed to Lockhart or William Maginn, which hails the supposed decline of the Edinburgh Review. Byron and Jeffrey might complain of personal attacks, but according to Blackwood’s Magazine, it was the Whigs themselves who had brought ‘personality’ into reviewing and the preface alludes to Byron’s letter to Blackwood’s in Pierce Eganish terms. Lord Byron, too, has written something about us – but whether a satire or an eulogy seems doubtful. The Noble Lord – great wits having short memories, and sometimes not very long judgments – has told the public and Mr Murray that he has forgotten
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whether his letter is on or to the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine. From this we fear his Lordship was in a state of civilation when he penned it; and if ever he publishes it, as we scorn to take advantage of any man, we now give his Lordship and the public a solemn pledge, to drink one glass of Sherry, three of Champagne, two of Hock, ditto of Madeira, six of Old Port, and four-and-twenty of Claret, before we put pen to paper in reply.75
In another article in the same issue, ‘Moore’s Irish Melodies’, the magazine also compares Byron to his fellow Whig poet Thomas Moore on the same score of personality.76 A year later, Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review for February 1823 was to say that Byron and Moore ‘divide the Poetical Public between them’.77 They had written on similar themes during the years 1812–17, including national song literature (Irish Melodies, Hebrew Melodies) and Oriental tales (Lalla Rookh, Corsair, Giaour). Irish Melodies, which came out at intervals from 1807, was a popular collection of Irish tunes, the success of which partly inspired Byron, no musician, to publish Hebrew Melodies (1815). By the time Moore finally came out with Lalla Rookh (1817) after five years of anxious toil, Byron had published six Oriental verse tales, and it was Moore who appeared to be the imitator.78 In the review of Lalla Rookh Jeffrey refers to his own ‘unnecessary severity’ in reprimanding Moore for licentiousness in 1806, and by 1823, was writing in his review of Loves of the Angels, ‘We do not believe Mr Moore ever writes a line, that in itself would not pass for poetry’. In saying this, Jeffrey contrasts him with Byron, who ‘writes whole pages of sullen, crabbed prose’ – which Jeffrey nonetheless prefers. In reviewing the changes in both poets, he rejoices that Byron’s latest work, unlike Cain, is no longer impious and that Moore’s is no longer immodest.79 He acknowledges no such improvement in Wordsworth’s poetry, which catches its passing share of criticism in this article about two Whig poets: speaking of Moore’s innate poetry and Byron’s prose, Jeffrey remarks that Wordsworth depended too much ‘on subjects that are petty and repulsive in themselves’.80 On the scale of beauty, Moore and Wordsworth are at opposite ends, but his greatest praise is given to Byron, who fulfills the Wordsworthian programme of writing in modern down-to-earth language without resorting to the imagery of washtubs. Jeffery Vail has shown how Moore acted as Byron’s mentor in Whiggism and considers Beppo and Don Juan as demonstrating that Moore’s ‘colloquial, Horatian sociopolitical approach’ had gradually softened Byron’s own more naturally bitter satiric tone (an example of which is seen in ‘The Devil’s Drive’ December 1813).81 The achievement of a lighter satirical tone had been a gradual development in Moore’s own career since 1808, when he published ‘Corruption’ and ‘Intolerance’, poems on the suppression of Irish freedom. Indeed, Leigh Hunt in the Examiner and James Perry in the Morning Chronicle had used Moore’s poetry to score points against the Prince Regent in 1812,
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after he did not appoint the Whigs to office. And Parody of a Celebrated Letter (1814), written in the persona of the Prince Regent with all its name-dropping of the ton, had been highly popular and set the pattern for Whig poetry, even though it is clear that Moore himself had been seriously shaken by the Prince Regent’s betrayal of Moore’s patron, the Earl of Moira. In this context, Byron’s dedication of The Corsair to Moore in 1814 can be seen as a political act aligning Byron with the disenchanted Whigs against the Prince Regent at a time when this defined the oppositional tactics of the parliamentary Whigs. The Quarterly Review did not discuss Moore’s Loves of the Angels,82 and as late as 1826 Moore, who had stayed with Scott, declined to accept his personal invitation of an outing to Paris in case there should be a Tory outcry.83 In that context, the dedication of Moore’s biography of Byron (1831) to Walter Scott, a Tory, was a remarkable gesture. The author of ‘Moore’s Irish Melodies’ argues that Moore had simply not enough egotism to fit into the modern cult of Poetry as personality: if Thomas Moore had the misfortune to be metaphysical, he might have written the Excursion, (but this with a perhaps) – that had he the meanness to borrow, and at the same time disguise the feelings of the great Lake Poets, he might have written the only good parts of Childe Harold – and had he the pluck or the whim to be egotistical, he might lay bare a little mind of his own, as proudly and as passionately organized, as the great Lord [Byron], whom some one describes ‘to have gutted himself, body and soul, for all the world to walk in and see the show’.84
That this is not entirely fanciful is suggested also by the personal opinion of Walter Scott, who in 1821, on the question of why he had been superseded by Byron as the poetic celebrity of the age, wrote – ‘I would hesitate to strip myself to the contest so fearlessly as Byron does or to command the wonder and terror of the publick by exhibiting in my own person the sublime attitudes of the fighting or dying gladiator’.85 Politically speaking, Scott had written as the voice of resistance to French imperialism during the war, whereas Byron was the modern spokesman for European revolution in the 1820s.The Tory Blackwood’s contrasted the fashionable Whig interest in international revolutions and European liberalism with the traditional English definition of Liberty: The cant of liberty, freedom, &c. &c. which Moore and Byron deal in, may go down very well with Parisian or Pisan audiences – but in England all this smells of the shop. An Englishman prating of liberty, is like a lawyer talking of Coke, or an apothecary of the materia medica … versifiers may as well celebrate the beauties of roast-beef and plum-pudding, as prate of the freedom which every one feels every moment that he uses his tongue or his pen.86
The point is that in 1822 it is the Tories who lay claim to the seventeenth-century British innovation of constitutional Liberty, while the modern nineteenth-cen-
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tury Whig ran after the ‘Jacobin’ version exemplified by contemporary uprisings in Italy and Greece. During the 1820s, Jeffrey became more public in his political pronouncements and did not confine these to the Edinburgh Review. Henry Cockburn, in his Life of Lord Jeffrey (1852), records a meeting in Edinburgh on 19 December 1820, at which the dismissal of the Ministry was called for. Cockburn calls such a meeting ‘a very hazardous experiment’ in the atmosphere of violent excitement present in 1820 over the Queen Caroline affair which had galvanized radical feeling.87 In fact, it was the first public political meeting to be held in Scotland for twenty-five years – and for that reason alone remarkable. When discussing the occasion in Memorials of His Time (1856), Cockburn wrote, This meeting was distinguished from the one in 1814 on the slave trade, the one in 1816 on the property tax, and the one in 1817 on the North Bridge Buildings, by its being purely political, and in direct and avowed opposition to the hereditary Toryism of Government. It was the first modern occasion on which a great body of respectable persons had met, publicly and peaceably, in Edinburgh, to assail this fortress.88
The other remarkable feature of this meeting was that Jeffrey spoke at it. Cockburn records that his moderation gave the meeting a ‘strength [that] lay in avoiding the extravagance of which it had been predicted that it would be guilty’ and the resulting petition to the Crown to dismiss the Ministry was signed by 17,000 people.89 At the same time, Jeffrey was elected Lord Rector by the students of Glasgow University, something that, Cockburn says, would never have happened had it been left to the faculty and its generation: ‘He was elected as a homage to his personal literature, and to the great work with which his name was associated, and to his public principles and conduct’. Cockburn compares it to the election in 1787 of Adam Smith, ‘the last person who could have been chosen on account of his literary or philosophical reputation’.90 Thus, it would seem that the Edinburgh Review had never been higher in reputation than in 1821, the year Jeffrey was also asked to stand for Parliament. From 1821 until 1826 he attended and spoke at a series of annual public dinners organized by Leonard Horner (brother of Francis) in honour of Fox’s birthday. In recounting Jeffrey’s participation at these events, Cockburn emphasizes the changes in political atmosphere that allowed Foxite Whigs in Scotland to meet freely, that is to say, without their presence being recorded by government officials. He is careful to emphasize also the principled rather than partisan approach that Jeffrey took in his speeches, which were variously on America, the economy, the state of European refugees in Britain, and the organizing of unions (the last published as a pamphlet, selling 8,000 copies). Jeffrey’s emergence from literature into politics suggests that the era in which the Edinburgh Review had been founded had passed – there was no longer any need for anonymity – and
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the review’s Whiggish principles had come to fruition in a more than philosophical sense.
The Decline of the Opposition By December 1821, the liberal revolution seemed to be everywhere in Europe. However, in London, events since 1815 had spent the outdoor popularity of the Whigs, and they had failed to get into power. What happened instead was that the Tory government itself became what was called, applying a foreign political term to domestic issues, more ‘liberal’, and took measures towards free trade and lower taxes. It co-opted the Grenvillites and with them the middle ground. In January 1822, Sidmouth, the Pittite Home Secretary responsible for the Six Acts of 1819, was replaced by Peel who, as early as 1820, thought that reform was not to be forestalled. Writing to Croker, the protégé of Wellington, he asked: Do not you think that the tone of England – of that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion – is more liberal – to use an odious but intelligible phrase – than the policy of the Government? Do not you think that there is a feeling becoming daily more general and more confirmed – that is, independent of the pressure of taxation, or any immediate cause – in favour of some undefined change in the mode of governing the country?91
Peel as Home Secretary and Canning as Foreign Secretary, with a hands-off policy that refrained from propping up the monarchies of Europe, set the tone of Liverpool’s new cabinet and ‘Liberal Toryism’.92 There were in fact ‘Liberals’ among both the Tories and the Whigs, and this term implied an outlook that was not dangerously revolutionary like the Foxite Whigs nor so insular as the Pittites or wartime Whig patriots. The Grenvillite Whigs, who were known as the least ideological and most office-seeking of all the factions, appeared now to be the most old-fashioned Whigs. Strikingly, the phrase ‘Liberal Toryism’ also shows an acceptance of the term toryism that Pitt would never have acknowledged. Thus, the Tories experienced something of a revival in the early 1820s and were able to blame the Whig’s encouragements of a Radical press for depriving the country of a constitutional opposition. In ‘The Opposition’ (October 1822), an article written by William Gifford and David Robinson, the latter, one of their now rising young writers, in the Quarterly Review admonished the Whigs to distinguish between the old shibboleth of the Liberty of the Press and the new licentiousness. The Tory party was in this account too bound up with the demands of government to sustain party warfare, while the Whigs occupied themselves with nothing else. Before the full horror of the French Revolution revealed itself, all Whigs advocated reform, but afterwards only those who followed Fox persisted in doing so and it is they who had remained known by the
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name of Whig. The Whigs retrospectively co-opted the Glorious Revolution as part of a scheme that called itself ‘constitutional’.93 Because the English Revolution had given the country this famous Hanoverian ‘constitution’, the French Revolution, the Foxite Whigs had argued in the 1790s, was therefore also beneficial. The counter-argument was that the Whigs were no longer a ‘constitutional’ opposition. The Quarterly Review calls for a return to the Whiggism of 1688, in other words, meaning a retreat from the revolutionary anarchism of 1821. The article contrasts the achievement of 1815 with the subsequent internal decline in Britain herself, pointing in particular to the Spa-fields riot (2 December 1816), the suspension of Habeas Corpus for the second time since 1794, and the unprecedented mass meetings of 15,000 to 35,000 people in Scotland and the north of England.94 Parliament had been called and even the Chelsea pensioners put on alert: the Prince Regent, in his speech from the throne in November 1819, had announced domestic military reinforcements.95 The Annual Register for 1820 says, ‘in the principal manufacturing district of Scotland, the tendency to insurrection assumed a formidable aspect’, and in April a general strike was organized. A ‘treasonable proclamation … purporting to proceed from the committee for the organization of a provisional government’ was found posted throughout Glasgow and surrounding districts. It urged ‘revolution by force’. The Register’s description is evocative of the atmosphere of impending threat, ‘All the usual avocations of industry were suspended; the streets were filled with gazing crowds, strolling about in complete idleness, waiting, with intent expectation, for the commencement of the announced revolution’.96 The Quarterly Review’s explanation of this disruption of public order does not use economic analysis, as the Edinburgh Review had, stating merely, ‘That LIBELLOUS PUBLICATIONS have been the instruments which have accomplished the change is now so generally admitted that it would be idle to offer proofs of it’. The ‘collision of honest opinions’ may be the concomitant of freedom, but this had been perverted by opposition organized as party warfare: ‘The ministry therefore has not only to transact the business of the state, but to carry on an offensive and defensive war on its own private account’.97 This meant the use of the press – ‘Parties thus possess what amounts to nearly a monopoly of the newspapers’ Robinson estimated that of eleven million copies circulating in 1821, nine million were party papers. The Whigs, in attacking the government, were allowed to do so ‘because their object – to unseat the ministers of the day – is a constitutional one’.98 The Whig opposition provided cover for the revolutionist aim of doing away with the constitution – ‘constitutionalist’ is another contemporary word for Tory – and for this reason, the Quarterly Review objected to the Whig encouragement of the press. Just when the free press had grown in strength, the Whigs themselves had lost the initiative in the House: the leadership was seen to have passed from
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moderates such as Lansdowne and Earl Grey, ‘Catholics’ and abolitionists, to Joseph Hume, friend of James Mill and Francis Place, and Henry Grey Bennett (in favour of Catholic Emancipation, Spanish liberales and against capital punishment – hence a liberal) as well as Sir Francis Burdett. The Whig front bench had declined not only in integrity but also in eloquence: We look in vain for the vivid and comprehensive delineations and the majestic and mighty reasonings of Fox – for the richness of imagery, profusion of knowledge, philosophical minuteness and profundity of sentiment, and overflow of fascinating eloquence of Burke – for the sportive, dazzling and captivating imagination of Sheridan – for the spotless integrity of Romilly, and even for the straight forward statement and clear detail of Whitbread … Nothing but powerful eloquence in an opposition can enable it … to make a stand against an able and successful ministry’.99
This is the heart of the parliamentary system: social liberty sustained by liberty of speech, by Opposition and persuasion. But the language of Whiggism, with its roots in the eloquence of the seventeenth century, had been altered by the French Revolution: ‘The outlandish jargon [of the Jacobins] respecting the tyranny of governments, the oppression of subjects, light, reason, philosophy, natural rights, &c. &c. was carefully imported and brought into immediate use’.100 It was the new language of the Whigs after 1789 that had destroyed their constitutionality as an Opposition: ‘they abjured constitutional principles, and became innovators and demagogues, the patrons of the turbulent and disloyal of every nation, contemptible and useless as an Opposition, but formidable and dangerous in the highest degree as a political sect’. They had taken on the language of the radicals: ‘At public meetings, it was impossible to know by the speeches whether they were those of Hunt [Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt] and Cobbett, or of the Whig nobility; and in the House of Commons, no one could distinguish among the motley group which composed the opposition, who were, and who were not, Whigs’.101 In this they had become connoisseurs of revolution, and so ‘1688’ was co-opted into the jargon of continental liberalism, along with the panegyrics to ‘Spain’ and ‘Naples’. The Quarterly Review contrasted the modern Whigs with those of 1688, for whom the forced abdication of a Catholic king sympathetic to the France had been about the preservation of the British constitution: To preserve the church from ruin, the constitution from innovation, and the laws from change; in a word, to keep ‘the present system’ in vigorous operation, they deposed the King. To keep every thing else unchanged, they changed the dynasty; they made no appeals to the populace, and they promulgated no levelling opinions.102
But a century-and-a-half later, technological improvements had multiplied the number of ‘listeners’. The government found itself unable to counter this press ‘machinery’, because the libel laws could not distinguish between the language of
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parliamentary Whiggism and newspaper radicalism: ‘… Hunt and Wooler could say nothing that was not in substance said by the Whigs; and Cobbett and Hone could publish nothing that was not in substance published by their [the Whigs’] papers …there was no legal difference between them’.103 After Hone’s third trial in December 1817, the government recognized that it could not pursue the revolutionists by means of the courts, and the presence of the Whig front bench as spectators in the courtroom during those three days had complicated the prosecution of blame: ‘Ministers could not therefore prosecute the most guilty of the Radical speakers and writers, without being bound in justice to prosecute many of the Whig ones’.104 Traditionally the eloquence of Opposition men had been personal, in the sense either of acting as individuals or in a group around Fox, and their legislative ambitions had been second to their executive ones. But since the French Revolution, personal insult from the Opposition bench had moved into the public arena. Inasmuch as the political classes, the independent property-holders in Parliament, saw the Whigs as radical rather than constitutional, they, in alarm for the safety of the country, embraced Toryism, which now called itself constitutional.
Liberalism There may have been the more room for disquisitions on constitutionality for the simple reason that ‘[t]he present Session of Parliament was expected to be the most brilliant since the days of Pitt. It has hitherto been the dullest within memory’.105 Although there had been many great issues laid at the door of the government (upheaval in Spain, Portugal, France and Ireland), the parliamentary Whigs seemed completely unable after the retirement of George Tierney as leader in the Commons, to make anything of these points. Blackwood’s ascribed this to the damage the Whigs had now done to themselves in the eyes of independent Members: ‘Honourable men will not subject themselves to the insult of public meetings, where they are liable to find some ruffian from the kennel or the jail placed by their side, and decorated with the badges of Whiggism’.106 The Whigs themselves were drawing back from the appeal to the populace and began ‘to find, that democracy is not a thing to be sported with at their lordly leisure; it will not bear their hook in its nostrils; it will not live within their parks and palings, and graze under their eye for the ornament of their aristocratic landscape’.107 Their adventures with the radicals of 1816–21 nonetheless clung to them – ‘… Cobbett haunts Whiggism, as the devil was said of old to haunt those who raised him’. And the coalition now became a source of humiliation to the Whigs: ‘Lord Grey and Cobbett exchanging courtesies; Mr Lambton giving the pas to Orator Hunt; Mr Brougham shrinking before Wooler. – The most insolent men in the land steeped to the lips in reluctant humility, and soliciting the protection of the lowest’.108
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This gulf between Radicals and Whigs was reproduced in the relationship between Byron and Leigh Hunt when Shelley brought them together to found the Liberal in Italy. In reviewing their periodical the Liberal, the Blackwood’s critic made it sound foreign rather than British. The Liberals, or Liberales, as they were called when the name was first imported, were a party in France. I mean not to quarrel about words, much less shall I enter on a discussion about the spelling and pronunciation of a word; yet I wish, for the credit of my countrymen, the French spelling and pronunciation had been retained, to shew from whom it was derived. Any thing so excessively illiberal could not have had its first conception in an English brain, although, like all foreign follies, it was eagerly adopted when imported.109
Liberalism is seen here not as a benign progressive philosophy but a source of French-style bloodshed throughout Europe. Jacobinism had been the ‘cant’ of the 1790s: now Blackwood’s saw Liberalism as filling the same place in political discussion of the 1820s. As with the Godwinism of the 1790s, Liberalism, being a sentiment rather than a party, found adherents across the spectrum, and the Whiggism of Byron and Hunt in the Liberal is literary or sentimental rather than parliamentary. The international revolutionary struggles of the 1820s had been taken up by periodical readers rather than voters. Leigh Hunt’s hand can perhaps be seen in one sentence of the preface to the Liberal, which was immediately picked up by the Blackwood’s reviewer: The preface thus proceeds: “The object of our work is not political,” [the pleasure conveyed by the information in the first clause of the sentence was instantly dispelled,] “except inasmuch as all writing now-a-days must involve something to that effect, the connexion between politics and all other subjects of interest to mankind having been discovered, never again to be done away”. 110
This stance presents an instructive contrast to Hunt’s pronouncements ten years earlier on the relationship between literary and political writing: in 1810, Hunt had spoken in the Examiner of the government’s prosecution and in the Reflector that same year, he wrote: Politics, in times like these, should naturally take the lead in periodical discussion, because they have an importance and interest almost unexampled in history, and because they are now, in their turn, exhibiting their reaction upon literature, as literature in the preceding age exhibited its action upon them.111
The preface to the Liberal (1822) speaks of politics’ central role but like Hazlitt’s preface to his Political Essays (1819), disavows politics in the professional sense. Increasingly, there was room, it would seem, for a ‘liberal’ rhetoric about politics apart from the traditional warfare of Tory and Whig, which had the effect of making politics sound almost as harmless as provincial literary pursuits.
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Leigh Hunt picked up on Cobbett’s unideological depiction of poverty, and while Cobbett was in America, the Examiner had printed a series of articles, beginning on 12 October 1817, on the plight of the homeless, particularly the fate of one discharged sailor, ‘Fellow-Creatures suffered to Die in the Streets’.112 The detail and commentary are strikingly Dickensian and the observing eye here is more familiar to us from Victorian literature, but in a Regency paper the tone is anomalous. In 1817, amid all the talk of the mob, this account looks peculiar, particularly as it is printed in one of the columns normally reserved for political news. Wordsworthian sympathy was not a feature of newspapers at this time, not even weekly ones, and even someone as immersed in the radical world as John Hunt rebuked his brother on this occasion for writing articles that were ‘Ultra-Sentimental’.113 With the suffering of the returned soldiers and sailors fuelling lower-class anger in 1819, both Whigs and Tories were roused to take action in the press. In 1808, as hope for reform revived amid lower-class disgust over wartime nepotism, the Hunts set up the Examiner, while on the government side Croker and Canning saw hope in the Spanish populus and set up the Quarterly Review to build support for the war effort. By 1819, there was no war abroad, but the domestic dissension was more alarming: the anxiety of the middle classes can be gauged by the fact that in Scotland, figures on both sides, including literati such as Lord Cockburn and John Gibson Lockhart, joined the volunteer armed forces that had been organized to put down the popular unrest. Croker, who helped found the Quarterly Review ten years earlier, this time proposed to Walter Scott, not a quarterly but a weekly publication, to be called the Constitutionalist: ‘Some literary Gentlemen have determined to set up a weekly paper on principles diametrically opposite to the weekly journals which are now in vogue, that, principles of morality, loyalty, respect for constituted authorities, & in short, toryism’.114 At the same time, Scott himself was proposing to start a Pittite paper in Scotland to counteract the influence of the radical Scotsman (which had been started in 1817), to be called the Guardian or Beacon. Lockhart showed Croker’s letter of 18 November 1819 to Scott, and the question seemed to be whether indeed there should be a Scottish paper established independently of the London one or whether those same people (Lockhart was solicited by both) should act as contributors to a Scottish column in the London paper. Both papers struggled to find an editor, and even Washington Irving was approached, but the Beacon went forward in Edinburgh (6 January–22 September 1821). However, the threat of legal action and a duel that killed James Boswell’s son, eventually forced publication to cease and brought infamy upon the venture.115 A much more successful Tory paper launched in London at this time was the John Bull (1820–92), which had supported George IV during the Caroline affair and indeed showed that the Tory side could sustain a popular weekly readership.116
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In May 1823, the Edinburgh Review printed an article, ‘The Periodical Press’, which was a survey of contemporary ephemeral writing and its centrality to contemporary British literary life. The article, by William Hazlitt, starts with remarks on generalized tendencies but then turns to particular remarks on individual publications from quarterlies to dailies. The discussion opens with the general question – ‘We often hear it asked, Whether Periodical Criticism is, upon the whole, beneficial to the cause of literature?’ What follows is almost a complete history of English literature, building towards the judgement that the current age is not a literary but a critical one and that criticism should be accepted as its genius. Hazlitt attempts to reconcile the phenomenon of contemporary criticism with the permanence assigned by the title of ‘literature’. Volumes on single topics by single authors no longer sold: booksellers will often refuse to purchase in a volume, what they will give a handsome price for, if divided piecemeal, and fitted for occasional insertion in a newspaper or magazine; so that the only authors who, as a class, are not starving, are periodical essayists, as almost the only writers who can keep their reputation above water are anonymous critics.117
One of the major reasons usually assigned for the contemporary increase in critical writing was also political excitement: news of the French Revolution, followed by the Napoleonic threat of invasion, and fear of social upheaval sold newspapers and raised literacy. At the same time as literature and literary criticism had been stimulated by the growth of this periodical press they had also been sublimated by it: ‘it has become the organ of every thing else, however alien to it’.118 Jeffrey in organizing the Edinburgh Review, had argued as a corollary that literary reviewing was a sugar-coating for political discussion, and Hazlitt appears to agree: ‘Mere politics, mere personal altercation, will not go down without an infusion of the Belles-Lettres and the Fine Arts’.119 Jeffrey and Hazlitt are in fact referring to a change in medium – Hazlitt argues that pamphlets on a particular topic, the medium of political discussion in the time of Pope and Swift, no longer had the same currency of power. Political writers, no more anonymous to one another than they had been a century before, now had to insert themselves into polite magazines: ‘A Whig or Tory tirade on a political question, the abuse of a public character, now stands side by side in a fashionable Review, with a disquisition on ancient coins, or is introduced right in the middle of an analysis of the principles of taste’.120 However, Hazlitt argued, the literary articles allowed politics to move beyond the sordid confines of Westminster and Grub-Street and into the provinces. Literature, until the late eighteenth century, a rural backwater of polite learning and poetry, had suddenly become metropolitan and controversial.121 Hazlitt gives a personal example of its appeal, in his account of first reading Burke in the pages of St James’s Chronicle –
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The richness of Burke showed, indeed, more magnificent, contrasted with the meagreness of the ordinary style of the paper into which his invective was thrown. Let any one, indeed, who may be disposed to disparage modern intellect and modern letters, look over a file of old newspapers (only thirty or forty years back), or into those that, by prescription, keep up the old-fashioned style in accommodation to the habitual dulness of their readers, and compare the poverty, the meanness, the want of style and matter in their original paragraphs, with the amplitude, the strength, the point and terseness which characterize the leading journals of the day, and he will perhaps qualify the harshness of his censure.122
Hazlitt does not argue against the invective system. The Whigs, during all their years in Opposition, had made the press their own, perhaps in the absence of real power. Hazlitt celebrates James Perry’s editorship of the Morning Chronicle after 1789: ‘Here, Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan, maintained their nightly combats over again; here Porson criticized, and Jekyll punned’.123 He is less kind to The Times, though since 1817 it had been run by Thomas Barnes, also part of the Hunt circle. Called the ‘“Leading Journal of Europe”’, presumably because of its foreign intelligence, according to Hazlitt, it did not lead on moral issues: The Times is not a classical paper. It is a commercial paper, a paper of business, and it is conducted on principles of trade and business … It is not ministerial; it is not patriotic; but it is civic … the representative of the mercantile interest.124
The proof of this had been seen in the paper’s change in its writing on Napoleon during the war: at first ‘the nicknames which Mr Walter bestowed on the French Ruler were the counters with which he made his fortune’.125 However, when the editor ( John Stoddart) continued in this vein after 1815, the commercial community (Hazlitt pointedly calls them ‘disinterested’), who wished to get on with their European business ventures, had no use for this verbal skirmishing, and so Walter had moved to protect his advertising revenue by removing the Napoleon-obsessed Stoddart. There was nothing more now to be gained financially speaking by a ‘continued war-hoop’, and ‘the cant of patriotism’ had had its day in the City, which wanted back into the Continental markets. Post-Waterloo, Walter was quite willing to grease ‘the wheels of Despotism with the cant of Liberty’. Hazlitt is evenhanded about Stoddart’s ravings and Walter’s trimming.126 Among the weekly papers, which were generally a byword for radicalism, the Examiner was the most prominent: A literary criticism, perhaps, insinuates itself under the head of the Political Examiner; and the theatrical critic, or lover of the Fine Arts, is stultified by a tirade against the Bourbons. If the dishes are there, it does not much signify in what order they are placed. … we suspect the Examiner must be allowed (whether we look to the design or execution of the general run of articles in it) to be the ablest and most respectable of the publications that issue from the weekly press.127
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About William Cobbett, Hazlitt says only that he is ‘first in power and popularity’.128 And so on, through the various newspapers daily and weekly, after which Hazlitt proceeds to the magazines, at one ‘extremity’ of which he places the polite Gentleman’s Magazine and at the other, Blackwood’s, which ‘subsist[s] on the great staple of falsehood and personality’ – the reader feels almost as if he were admitted to look in on a club of thorough-going hack authors, in their moments of freedom and exaltation. There is plenty of slangwit going, and some shrewd remark. The pipes and tobacco are laid on the table, with a set-out of oysters and whisky, and bludgeons and sword-sticks in the corner!129
With the mention of Blackwood’s Magazine, Hazlitt’s article turns from encyclopedic survey to polemic. The tone of ironic amusement gives way to the question of periodical writing’s corruption by the very agency that has made it a bestseller – politics: The illiberality of the Periodical Press is ‘the sin that most easily besets it’ [Hebrews 12:11].We have already accounted for this from the rank and importance it has assumed, which have made it a necessary engine in the hands of party. The abuse, however, has grown to a height that renders it desirable that it should be crushed, if it cannot be corrected.130
The press, being used by an aristocratic parliamentary party that was unable to form a government, had grown up into the exercise of a kind of power, while the Tories, whatever their governmental prerogative, had begun to envy the Whig command of public opinion. The Tory Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, had sprung from this envy, specifically of the Edinburgh Review. Now, Hazlitt argues, it is the Tories who have taken things too far: ‘it is only the worst part of the Ministerial Press that has had the temptation, the hardihood, or the cowardice to make literature the mere tool and creature of party-spirit’. He gives examples of the Tories’ efforts to mimic the Whigs’ literary success and cites the cases of Leigh Hunt in 1816 and John Keats in 1817 as examples of the Tories’ use of politics to score points against the Whigs’ literary standing.131 The last part of Hazlitt’s article is taken up with anger against the Quarterly Review’s government intimidation, and Blackwood’s Magazine’s slanders against Whig authors, although neither of those periodicals is named. About Blackwood’s, Hazlitt, speaking from personal experience, repeats something of what John Scott had already said about its methods: ‘It is equally well known and understood too, that this savage system of bullying and assassination is no longer pursued from the impulse of angry passions or furious prejudices, but on a coldblooded mercenary calculation of the profits which idle curiosity, and the vulgar appetite for slander, may enable its authors to derive from it’.132
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To which, Blackwood’s itself replied, in ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VIII’ (August 1823). The article reviewed the history of the Whig press and defended the Quarterly Review’s treatment of Keats, noting that Keats himself had made the first political allusion by writing the sonnets in honour of Leigh Hunt: The Quarterly Review did not invent the name ‘Cockney-School,’ but only adopted that name after it had been introduced by Blackwood into universal use, and had in fact become as much an integral part of the language of English criticism, as any other phrase in the dictionary … Who seriously thinks the worse of a man for being an apothecary, or for being the son of a barber? … Such allusions have been in use ever since there were books and reviewers in the world.133
Blackwood’s remarked that the Edinburgh Review itself had been noticeably slow in coming to Keats’s defence – ‘If Keats’s fancy and invention were so wonderfully obvious, why did the Edinburgh Review take no notice at all of the possessor until long after the Tory critics had had such abundance of time to make minced meat of him?’134 All this, however, is irrelevant to the article’s main point, which was that Hazlitt’s whole survey of the press had been to attack Blackwood’s itself: ‘everybody may see what the drift of the whole article is – everybody sees that the object was to attack you [Blackwood’s]’. And yet the name Blackwood’s appears nowhere in Hazlitt’s article: ‘…I observe a paragraph about “slang wit,[”] – “shrewd remark,” – “oysters and whisky,” &c. &c., which is probably meant for a cut at your Noctes Ambrosianae. The name, as I have been observing they dare not mention’.135 Certainly Hazlitt’s article recapitulates John Scott’s complaints about Blackwood’s, and the last few pages are given over to it exclusively. His complaints about the Tory press are rebutted by Blackwood’s, but, they say, it was the Edinburgh Whigs who had started the ‘personal’ attacks, and they ‘know that Mr Jeffrey and his clan had twenty years of free and unchecked abusing, ere Blackwood began to abuse them’.136 In its wild way, Blackwood’s congratulates itself on having led the Tory resurgence: We shewed the mere baseness of the Whig newspaper world – the gross ignorance and drivelling impertinence of the Cockneys – the shallow pretensions, and the cowardly deism of the Edinburgh – the utter insufficiency of the Whig statesmen – and destroyed by merely holding up to light the infamy of the Whig libellers.137
There were, however, a couple of notable exceptions to this Tory excoriation of Whig and radical literature. Blackwood’s ebullience ran over the next month into an enthusiastic review of Don Juan, Cantos 9–11, repeating much of what had already been said about Byron’s genius in John Gibson Lockhart’s John Bull pamphlet: ‘I maintain, and have always maintained, that Don Juan is, without
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exception, the first of Lord Byron’s works … Frere may have written the stanza earlier; he may have written it more carefully, more musically if you will; but what is he to Byron?’138 In particular, Lockhart held that Don Juan was a genuine reflection of the age, despite the fact that because of his poetic ‘immorality’, Byron had for the present generation ‘undone himself as a popular writer’ and to women readers he was necessarily ‘a sealed book’.139 Regretting this, Lockhart nonetheless argues that Byron is no worse than Fielding or Voltaire, and Don Juan no more obscene than Tom Jones or Pamela – ‘The whole that can with justice be said of Byron, as to these two great charges [of blasphemy and obscenity], is, that he has practised in this age something of the licence of the age of our grandfathers’. The article forgives all for the sake of Byron’s ‘wit’: ‘Call things wicked, base, vile, obscene, blasphemous; run your tackle to its last inch upon these scores, but never say that they are stupid when they are not’.140 In the same way, Lockhart also forgives Cobbett’s tergiversations for the sake of his style in ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. X. To Christopher North’– Hah! Am I come to thee [Cobbett] at last? Well, and, come to thee when I will, the sight of thy fist does me good: thou twenty times turn-coat – thou most wavering of weathercocks – thou boldest of bullies – thou rudest of ragamuffins – thou most down right of double-dealers – thou hero of humbug – thou prince of libellers, and King of Kensington – I love thee still – thou dear diabolical deceiver – I cling to thee still – thou art still COBBETT! Semper idem! ET Cobbett, ET Diabolus!141
Lockhart notes that after the flight to America and the refusal to acknowledge his debt of the money lent to him by the Whig Sir Francis Burdett, Cobbett’s reputation had continued to decline from its zenith of 1816.142 However, Lockhart rejects the explanation that Cobbett may have been bribed into quietude, and he goes on to demolish the notion that the government supported any periodicals at all: They know that literature is not now a thing to be managed, or even to be meddled with, in the old style. The days are gone by when £30,000 was considered a sufficient sum to bribe all Scotland – and the days are equally gone when British Ministers of State used to consider the bribes of the gemmen of the press as necessary a part of the expenses of the year, as the pay of the army and navy. The truth is, that the press has become such a thing, that the Ministry, if they bribed at all, must bribe more than even England could afford.143
In this statement, we read the alteration in the press that has taken place since the 1790s.144 The Times’s emphasis on advertisements and up-to-the-minute foreign news for its City traders had made it stronger than any government backing could. The political excitement of the era had made newspapers more profitable than ever. Cobbett had managed to become a bestseller without any advertisements at all. The strength of his editorializing gave him a national readership
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among people who a generation before had been unable to read and who formerly would have considered parliamentary news irrelevant to their lives but now turned on their day of leisure to the weeklies such as the Examiner and the Political Register. Whatever Lockhart may regret about the immorality of Byron or contradictions of Cobbett – ‘one, who, with all his faults, has the intellect and the language of an English classic’ – the style of writing in both is colloquial, and it is for this that Lockhart celebrates them. Their rendering of conversation in print was for him a sign of literary genius. The Noctes Ambrosianae that he collaborated on with John Wilson was another example of the breakthrough made in language at this period. But even as their style has been celebrated, all of these works – Don Juan, the Political Register and the Noctes – have all suffered historically from their close allusiveness to early nineteenth-century politics. Just as the Civil War transformed English prose, so the Napoleonic period after the resignation of Pitt, made the matter of language crucial in deciding who was ‘innocent’, as educated and uneducated alike fought over the definitions of libel, loyalty and freedom during a long international war.145 The earlier, revolutionary, period of Dugald Stewart and Francis Jeffrey had been concerned with the language of ‘natural’ rights. The world of the second generation, Byron and Lockhart and John Wilson, Don Juan and Noctes Ambrosianae, was concerned with the attempt to redefine party, and in particular, opposition: out of the urgent political need to speak freely had come a new literary language.
6 1824–30 WHIGGISM AND LIBERALISM
Do not we all remember the time when the Whigs had everything their own way; when a man hardly dared avow himself a Tory, for fear of being pronounced an illiberal blockhead; when the Edinburgh Review was the acknowledged lord of literature and politics; when Tom Moore was the wit in verse, and Sydney Smith the wit in prose; when, in a word, all was their own? And how is it now? Why, Whig and jack-ass are convertible terms; it is a byword of reproach; they are our butts, our common-places of fun.1
The passage from Whiggism to Liberalism is one of the apostolic mysteries of the early nineteenth century, and the assumption persists that the two are philosophically related. Narratively speaking, this occurs in Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24), in the connection posited between his middle-aged Whiggish English narrator and his young Liberale Spanish hero. They are introduced in the unpublished prose preface, which was composed sometime between July and November 1818. In late 1820, Byron proposed a weekly, ‘I Carbonari’, later the Liberal. I Carbonari (‘charcoal-burners’) were a secret society in the Kingdom of Naples formed during Napoleonic rule (Murat 1808–14), which hid out in the mountains of the Abruzzi. At its height there were several hundred thousand members and it became the national Liberal cause.2 When Ferdinand VII (1784–1833) returned to Spain in 1814, having fled Napoleon in 1808 – while his deserted subjects stood their ground and became the first people to defeat the Emperor – the pusillanimous Spanish monarch notoriously did not reward the Liberales with anything except persecution. Around the time that Byron was writing the third Canto of Don Juan, the Spanish army revolted at Cadiz, and in January 1820 they took the King prisoner. The Liberales had been running the Cortes since Ferdinand’s flight, and their case against him after his return was based on his failure to take up the Constitution they had put in place in 1812. Ferdinand had at first agreed to the adoption of the Constitution, which was inspired by the earliest stages of the French revolutionary thinking in 1790, but upon his return began to take his cue from the popular monarchist feeling he discovered among the people at large, who disliked the secular progressiveness of – 145 –
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the Cortes and its policy of depriving the clergy of their legislative role, including the Inquisition. The preface to Don Juan imagines his narrator as a retired gentleman traveller in a Spanish village scene, although this ruse is put forward in a mood of jaded ennui: The Reader who has acquiesced in Mr. W. Wordsworth’s supposition that his ‘Misery oh Misery’ [‘The Thorn’] is related by the ‘Captain of a small &c.’ is requested to suppose by a like exertion of Imagination that the following epic narrative is told by a Spanish Gentleman in a village in the Sierra Morena on the road between Monasterio and Seville.3
Byron’s Spanish gentleman becomes an Englishman, and then finally, a Spaniard again and a Liberale: The reader is further requested to suppose him (to account for his knowledge of English) either an Englishman settled in Spain – or a Spaniard who had travelled in England – perhaps one of the Liberals who have subsequently been so liberally rewarded by Ferdinand of grateful memory – for his restoration – .4
There is a nonchalant reference to suffering of the Liberales after Ferdinand’s treachery, and towards the end of the Preface, Byron interposes the character of a Tory-apostate-cum-Whig editor, who is made culpable for the dedication and some intemperate remarks on Southey.5 The connections between Spanish Liberalism and English Whiggism, whether parties or ideologies, can be traced from 1808, when at the first news in Britain of the repulsion of Napoleon by the Spanish peasantry, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, one of the Whigs’ foremost speakers, rose in the House to ask for a message to be sent to the Spanish people expressing British support: … I am far from wishing ministers to embark in any rash and romantic enterprise in favour of Spain; but, sir, if the enthusiasm and animation, which now exists in a part of Spain, should spread over the whole of that country, I am convinced that since the first burst of the French revolution, there never existed so happy an opportunity for Great Britain to strike a bold stroke for the rescue of the world.6
Castlereagh, speaking for a Tory government that saw in Spain some justification of its continued war against France, responded graciously to the motion. It was a different story after Waterloo, when Ferdinand had reversed the progressive jacobinism of the Cortes and hunted down its leaders. In February 1816, Henry Brougham rose in the House, to ask that the British government, in the tradition of free speech and orderly justice, send an official remonstrance to Spain.7 Castlereagh’s response, made on this occasion in the context of realpolitik, showed Brougham’s comparison of the Cortes to the free-speaking Commons as naive. Divisions had now arisen between the ordinary Spanish
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people and the soldiers of the Cortes, who had been exposed during the Napoleonic years to progressive French ideas. Castlereagh citing Sir Henry Wellesley, a former diplomat in Spain, pointed out that the ordinary Spanish people were generally uninterested in new political ideas and did not want the constitution proposed by the Cortes: ‘… Ferdinand came into Spain with the determined purpose of accepting the constitution; and it was only when he found what the real state of the nation was, and that the constitution would not be congenial to the feelings of the people of Spain, that he had determined not to accept it’.8 Nor, according to Castlereagh, were the Cortes especially amenable to British feelings about liberty, … this cortes represented to be completely influenced by the British government, and emphatically called, by the hon. and learned gentleman [Brougham] the British cortes, resolved to continue the command in the duke of Wellington by only the small majority of six votes! He [Castlereagh] pitied sincerely the misfortunes to which these ill-fated men [the Liberales under Ferdinand] were now exposed, but truth compelled him to state, that on the question of continuing the duke of Wellington in the command of the Spanish army, the minority who voted against it was composed entirely of Liberales.9
Brougham’s speech, requesting the British government to intercede for the Liberales who had been condemned or thrown into jail, had been laced with citations of historical precedent, including Elizabeth I’s intercession for the Huguenots. But the reply of Castlereagh, who was then spending most of his time at the Congress of Vienna, not only demonstrated the absence of any disinterested moral motivation in the historical cases cited but also suggested that Britain would lose her reputation for high moral intent by Whiggish meddling in the affairs of Spain.10 Supporting Castlereagh, the Tory Mr Wellesley Pole went on to embarrass Brougham by asking how he could not have known that in fact verbal remonstrances had already been made on behalf of the Cortes, ‘The Liberales themselves were conscious that all that was possible had been attempted in their cause’.11 Castlereagh added, It was a mistake to suppose that they were guided by us, and that we should rescue the member of the cortes, because whatever they did was done by our direction or at our command … In 1809, when lord Wellington was in Estremadura, such a co-operation would have been of immense consequence to the common cause, but it could not be brought about. He [Castlereagh] allowed that the party called Liberales were an Anti-French party … As being an Anti-French party, they might be called a British party; in no other sense could that title be conferred upon them.12
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Militarily, the cortes had not been cooperative with Wellington nor, ideologically speaking, were they ‘British’. And here Castlereagh made his famous remark that the Liberales were in fact ‘French’, in the sense of being jacobinical – Many of the enormities which had lately been perpetrated must be attributed to what was done by the cortes, and the prevalence of that party among them called the Liberales, who, though in a military point of view, an Anti-French party, were politically a French party of the very worst description … The Liberales were a perfectly jacobinical party in point of principle.13
Impressive as Brougham’s historically fulsome motion might have been, Castlereagh’s speech was the more successful. He demonstrated that the government knew and had done much more than the Whigs about internal Spanish affairs and was on thoughtful terms with the rest of Europe, without indulging in the hysterical idealism of Brougham and the Whigs.14 In his speech Castlereagh made both Liberale and Whig terms of abuse. Liberale in the Spanish context implied narrowness, ‘the cortes thought that they would best effect their purpose by overturning the entire ancient system of the kingdom, and especially by merging the whole class of the nobility and clergy in the third estate according to the example of the jacobins of France’.15 The Whigs, in taking the Foxite line towards the French Revolution, had already blundered into the approval of tyranny. Their assumption that the Spanish Liberales were adopting a British line was, as Castlereagh showed, equally naive. There was no ideological support to be found in the topic of Spain for British Whiggism: in this instance, the principles of freedom were not translatable.16 The exchange between Brougham and Castlereagh took place in 1816, two months before Byron left England for Europe. Subsequently, after 1816, there had been rebellion in Portugal, assassination in France, and repression in Germany, Turkey and Russia, all described in the Annual Register for 1821. In fact, the rise of the Spanish Liberales and the attempt to impose the Constitution of 1812 upon the Neapolitans may be said to have led to the growth through the years 1816–20 of the I Carbonari or as Byron called them, ‘the Liberty boys’.17 In July 1820, there was also a military revolt in Naples. There, the monarch, Ferdinand IV, was forced to sign a liberal document based on the Spanish Constitution of 1812, after he had been ruling in absolutism since 1816 with the help of Austria and a certain Captain Nugent. Ultimately Metternich persuaded Ferdinand IV to allow the Austrian army to enter Naples and suppress the rebel army in March 1821. In both Spain and Naples, the Liberales, arising out of the army and the bourgeoisie who came to prominence during the Napoleonic years, were arguably not a popular movement, and Whiggish idealism about liberty was out of place in Europe. When Britain finally stood against the French intervention in North America to retrieve old Spanish colonies in 1822, it was as much to pro-
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tect British trade in the Americas as any new ideology of freedom. Canning, as Foreign Secretary after 1822, is usually credited with this ‘liberal’ recognition of the New World’s independence, but the Duke of Norfolk, for one, may be said to have foreseen it as early as 1808.18 In 1816 Castlereagh could embarrass Brougham by indicating that the Whigs would in effect be congratulating another set of Jacobins, just as the Foxites had precipately done in the 1790s. In fact, the Whigs had continually been wrongfooted by foreign events in their own domestic movement towards ‘liberal’ ideas during the long years of exclusion from 1784 to 1830. When, for example, in 1808 popular Spanish feeling defeated Napoleon, it gave the Tory Pittite side credibility in their long war effort, whereas only two years before, their resistance to Napoleon had begun to seem futile and the Whigs’ policy of peace negotiations less quixotic than possibly thirteen more years of defeat and debt. The successes of the Spanish people recalled the early days of the 1790s, when England congratulated itself that Catholic despotism was breaking up in Europe. All hailed the wave of youthful feeling in 1808, although the Whigs took the opportunity to argue that this did not mean England should remain at war. Samuel Whitbread’s Letter to Lord Holland (1808), while seconding Sheridan’s enthusiasm, still argued that negotiation rather than war ought to be the way forward. At this time, the Edinburgh Review, in its article ‘Mr Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’, reaffirmed this and predicted the mechanistic defeat of the gallant Spaniards, ‘a melancholy presentiment, that, in a few months, the fortunes of France will have prevailed over the most righteous cause that ever fixed the attention of mankind’. Indeed, the Whigs were afraid of appearing to be yet again ‘romantic in the cause of liberty’.19 The unpopularity of the war was simply one of the cards that the Whigs repeatedly played in the bid to claim parliamentary power. They were finally to realize that in an unreformed Parliament, there was no correlation between public opinion and a majority in the House: Liberalism was an out-of-doors phenomenon and a foreign rather than a domestic narrative.
The Westminster Review Seen in this light the Liberal of Byron and Hunt was perhaps the last hurrah of the Whiggism of 1810. The new spirit of liberalism is exemplified more authentically in the appearance of a new quarterly, the Westminster Review. Whatever in the spirit of the age had prompted Hazlitt to undertake a survey of periodical writing in the Edinburgh Review in May 1823 also made itself felt in the inaugural stocktaking of the Westminster Review six months later. The most talked-about article in this new review was part of a recurring feature on current periodical writing: significantly, the Edinburgh Review was the first periodical
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examined.20 James Mill, the writer, was well qualified to do so, having studied at the University of Edinburgh in the 1790s and written for the quarterly itself from 1808 to 1813. He was familiar with the circle that had established the Review and indeed had attended Dugald Stewart’s lectures. Unlike Macvey Napier or Francis Horner, he seems not to have become part of the Stewart set – in later years Dugald Stewart confessed himself unable to recall Mill’s face, and Mill’s style in the article on his Edinburgh cohorts is devoid of flourish to the point of dullness.21 But it was noticed, and Francis Jeffrey responded to the article twenty years later when he came to write a preface to his own collected Edinburgh Review contributions.22 A second article on the Edinburgh Review appeared in the April 1824 number, this time written by John Stuart Mill, and the Quarterly Review was also treated to its own dissectory essay.23 This stocktaking sensibility of the 1820s perhaps speaks more to a Victorian than an eighteenth-century or Regency sensibility. The Westminster articles are liberal documents, extolling the international rise of the oppressed against the aristocratic classes. The 1820s were an inspiriting time for this optimism, in Turkey, Russia, Greece, South America, and Italy. The Edinburgh Review had not originally had an amelioristic programme for the lower classes, for its original concern in 1802 had been how to analyse and contain the movements of the mob. But in the confident codification of political economy as the British metaphysical alternative to French politics, the Westminster Review was indeed the heir to the Edinburgh Review’s role as disseminator of Dugald Stewart’s wisdom. At the same time, negotiations were in process at the University of Edinburgh to establish a chair in Political Economy, with J. R. McCulloch (1789–1864) as the first occupant. McCulloch, who wrote on economic subjects for the Edinburgh Review (he had also been editor of the Scotsman) earned money by giving lectures in London, where he had moved in 1820. He remarked that ‘At present the rage is for Political Economy’ and marvelled at having 335 pupils, including five Lords and fifteen MPs in attendance, giving some idea of its fashionability.24 That same year he published The Principles of Political Economy, a popularization of David Ricardo’s ideas that was to go through numerous editions and reprints. Despite his popularity in London, McCulloch himself was not complacent that the University of Edinburgh would move forward, and he proved correct in his pessimism – there was no such chair established at Edinburgh until 1871. In the meantime, London appointed him as the first chair in the new science in 1828, while Oxford established Nassau Senior in its first professorship in 1825. One of the objections mounted against a chair in Edinburgh was that Dugald Stewart had lectured on the subject while he held the chair in Moral Philosophy, and so, logically speaking, it ought to remain under the aegis of his successor in that chair, John Wilson (Noctes Ambrosianae) – although Stewart himself remarked, when appealed to by Napier on behalf of McCulloch, that Wilson had never
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shown the slightest interest in the subject.25 The legacy of scientific Whiggism begun in the Edinburgh of the 1790s was squandered in parochial politics, and Stewart’s intellectual heritage moved to London in the 1830s. In the Westminster Review’s survey of current affairs, ‘Men and Things in 1823’, its very first article ( January 1824), W. J. Fox does not discuss political life according to the old division of Whig and Tory: the new categories are now liberals and illiberals. This perhaps made it more congenial to younger readers, as did its cheerfulness about a dawning age of popular intellect. However, the review did not subscribe wholeheartedly to the new Scotch metaphysics. The only uncharacteristic note in the Westminster Review essay on contemporary progressive thought is sounded in its argument against the political economizing of life. The Westminster’s confidence in political progress was usually linked with the Utilitarian belief in the scientific logarithms of political economy, but in this article W. J. Fox set surprisingly little store by this modern method of prognostication – ‘the multitudinous and seemingly conflicting facts of political economy’ – which had become the successor to metaphysical and mathematical abstraction.26 Scientific speculation and popular demand have come together in this new ‘social’ science, because it was urgent, Fox said, that questions about the best governance of the people be solved before revolution overwhelmed Britain as well as South America. The reading of Cobbett’s Political Register and pamphlets would have more effect, he thought, than the promulgation in volumes of the Utilitarian theorems of Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (1821). More than enlightened Whiggism, what Fox affirms in the Westminster Review is the ‘popular impulse which has so extensively affected the whole of our literature’.27 He sees the result as an ‘improvement’ – an increase in periodical literature is the characteristic of the age and the sign and source of its cause for optimism. The Westminster Review proclaims itself part of this: ‘Our hope of success is grounded on that greater conformity with the spirit of the times, in all its honourable peculiarities, which is allowed by our freedom from the trammels of party’. Alluding to a survey undertaken in 1757, John Brown’s An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, Fox notes that Brown did not include the opinions of the lower classes in his analysis’.28 This difference in 1824 was that the populace now took their place alongside the aristocracy in national politics: The people no longer sit quietly by as spectators, while Whig and Tory, that is, a few great families with their connexions and dependants, and a few pensioned or expectant creatures, play out the political game, in their own way, and for their own benefit … The House of Commons orator speaks not to those around him on the benches, but to those above him in the gallery.29
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This new importance of the People can be directly traced to the growth of printing – The most abstruse controversies, on which the learned used to write in Latin, and discuss as in a secret sitting with closed doors, are now canvassed in cheap tracts, and debated in every village. The book-manufacturers show that respect for the people which all manufacturers show for a new and extensive market … The poor have their periodicals and their institutes. Shoals of twopenny magazines issue from the press, some of them respectably got up, and circulating to the amount of several thousands weekly.30
However, Fox did not include among this the literature of Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–9) – The well-meaning patrons of the poor, who think they should know something of their duty but nothing else, and who favour them with edifying tracts in a laboured simplicity of style “made level to the meanest capacities,” are sadly thrown out … No sooner were the poor taught to read, than, somehow or other, they took to reading Cobbett.31
Cobbett himself had long ago poured scorn on the Church’s attempts to satisfy the new literacy with pablum, and Fox pays due tribute to him, with ‘his clear, unaffected, vigorous, English style; and his bloodhound chace of a favourite topic, neither wearied by the length, nor foiled by the intricacy of the pursuit’. Fox suggests that he had instigated ‘habits of investigation’ among the otherwise malleable poor that counterbalance the effects of exposure to any party propaganda.32 Whatever the doubtful good of embroiling the mob in partisan warfare, Fox is emphatic that politics has benefited the people by making them interested in literature: there is a dash of politics in almost every production. It is thrown in as seasoning which the national palate is sure to relish. Whatever be the promise of a title page; poem, play, or tale; dissertations on the belles lettres, or voyages round the world; history, criticism, science, or even theology; the odds are fifty to one that we get not one half through without allusions to the men or manners of the day. At the theatres, such allusions are continually made in modern plays, and out of old ones. Even Shakspeare and all his wonderful creations cannot induce us to forget Castlereagh and Canning, the Queen and Napoleon, the French and the Spaniards.33
Fox gives some sense of what Literature looked like to a reader of 1823 – Of course, in lists of new publications, the article ‘Politics’ always appears splendidly attended, and drags along an almost interminable train of titles. The character of the times, however, is not so distinctly marked in this as in the subjects, style, and size of the works announced. The writers are evidently pleading at the bar of the public, and not at that of the legislature or the aristocracy. They send forth pamphlets instead of volumes.34
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Like William Hazlitt, he asserts that this is an age of periodical publications, something which adapts more quickly to passing events than volumes meant for a library shelf. Political economy has replaced the rights of man as the topic which sells these pamphlets: ‘propositions are established, and theorems demonstrated, and problems solved, and questions answered, as Bonaparte took towns and destroyed armies’. Physical chemistry had replaced the traditional science of theology.35 Traditional literature, history and the classics were published most profitably as reprints: ‘History is dished up in the “court” of this sovereign, and the “life” of that, and the “times” of a third; or it is brought in, as a dessert, still more pleasantly in “Historical Tales by the author of Waverley”’.36 The ‘Titanic forms’ of folios were bundled into octavos, and the ‘oligarchy of learning’ had its wealth distributed among the People. If it is notable that Cobbett was singled out as ‘“the great enlightener”’, then it was the great unknown, Sir Walter Scott, who had fed the democratic appetite for imaginative literature.37 Despite Wordsworth’s professed ambitions to write in common language, he, Moore, Campbell and Southey were considered to be more exclusive than Scott, whose historical novels had had the greatest equalizing influence.38 Fox also considers that the taste for religious publications had also improved since the accession of George III, with the various Bible and missionary societies and their tracts. His description suggests the growth of evangelical Christianity among politicians, lawyers, and businessmen – ‘We have noticed also, that they are not always the cheapest shops where the tradesman keeps a Missionary or Bible Society box upon his counter’.39 It is only literary reviewing that seems exempt from this healthier moral tone. After the older unreformed body of criticism, Byron is singled out for especial blame for the fad of ‘affected levity and heartlessness’ in both literature and criticism: because a powerful effect was produced by the inspired delineation of a libertine, his feelings worn out and his heart seared, moving through all that is beautiful and grand, and finding in it only food for scorn; – does it therefore follow, that every stripling who can indite a pretty verse, or fabricate a readable paper for a magazine, is to find nothing in heaven or earth, in life, mind, or morals, important enough to make him serious, or interesting enough to demand emotion?40
Fox says dismissively of the Faustian bargain, ‘This taste is not English’ and predicts it will not last, but the cult of genius in literature was celebrated and caricatured well into the 1830s, when Dickens and Thackeray ridiculed the poetic despair of becurlled and cravated young men in love. But the Westminster Review too echoes the complaint that Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review had voiced, about a personality of modern literary debate’.41
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In taking notice of the establishment of the Westminster Review and this challenge to intellectual periodical literature, Blackwood’s Magazine, the flagbearer for ‘Parsonality’, professed to commiserate with the Edinburgh Review, in one of its ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler … To Francis Jeffrey’.42 Blackwood’s could not help regarding the appearance of the Westminster Review as yet another sign of the decay of the Edinburgh Review and literary Whiggism – In its publication you cannot have failed to perceive the last and infallible symptom. The Quarterly came first [1809] – a violent wound – external, and dealt from a distance; then came Blackwood [1817], a close home-thrust – you might bandage it up, and smile, and smile; but you felt what was within, and trembled inly – last of all comes this fearful, this fatal, this consummating Westminster Review – here is neither the gunshot wound nor the dagger-thrust – here is disease – here is the plague-spot – here is the putrefaction from within.43
With characteristic Tory glee, Lockhart particularly describes Francis Jeffrey’s fall from grace as a literary one: ‘Behold, now, the upshot of your elegant quibblings, your sarcastic whisperings, your graceful cunning innuendoes, your skilful balancings, your most exquisite trimmings’.44 These great literary skills have, according to Lockhart, been exercised out-of-doors on the demos panegyrized by the Westminster Review in a bid for power in the House: Your cause, my man. – the cause of the literary partizans of Whiggery, is utterly gone at last. For twenty years your game has been to conciliate the rabble of Jacobinism, Radicalism, Literalism, (no matter about a little chopping and changing of names,) in order that, backed by the vulgar outcry, if not the vulgar force, your party might be enabled to supplant the Tory ministry.45
The Whig conundrum as aired in the press of the day had been one of vocabulary: to the Radicals, the Whigs had offered politically correct formulas of intellectual enlightenment, ‘You have been going on snuffling and whispering about “liberal opinions,” the “increased light of the time,” “discussion,” “march of ideas,” and God only knows what stuff besides of the same sort’.46 But at the same time, it had been necessary to keep up the traditional seventeenth-century Whig rhetoric: All along this sort of cant has been muttered by you and your gentlemen between your teeth – you have been saying these things in a sort of perpetual (aside) – while the sentences you were delivering aperto ore, and in facie theatri,47 were garnished with beautiful high-sounding words of “loyalty,” “constitutional monarchy of England,” “our holy religion,” “our venerable establishments in church and state,” the “practical blessings of our polity, as it is,” the “superiority of England” over all other countries, and tribes, and kindreds, and tongues, &c. &c. &c.48
Such was the vice in which the traditional party of opposition and its journal now found itself caught.
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Blackwood’s also contrasts Jeffrey with William Cobbett as much for his literary skills as for his rabble-rousing – ‘a man a thousand miles above you in native vigour of mind, and no more to be compared with you as a writer of the English tongue, than the war-horse of Napoleon was to be compared to old Chiaramonti’s pet ambling mule’. The other great radical writer, Jeremy Bentham, had been too odd to obtain any popular audience. The innovation represented by the Westminster Review was that it was ‘a rallying point of intellect’ for the radicals themselves. The radicals were no longer dependent on the Whigs to manage the language of politics: you have to do with a clever, determined, resolute, thorough-going knot of radical writers – a set of men, educated, some of them at least, as well as the Edinburgh Reviewers, – and quite as well skilled as the best of them could ever pretend to be in the arts of communicating with the intellect of the world as it is – and (here lies their immense advantage,) these men have a single object in view, and have adopted boldly and decidedly a single set of measures for the attainment of this object.49
If the Edinburgh Review nonetheless attempted to keep in with the Radicals, then ‘the Jeffreys, the Broughams, whoever they may be, are cut by the great aristocratical Whigs’. The parliamentary Whigs would no longer receive the mere wordsmiths at Holland House or Bowood. Thus Lockhart foresees that the power of the literary Whigs will be gone when the Radicals have their own organ of comment: ‘you will, as party, or as a review, be altogether unworthy of the trouble of a single kick’. In a word, the literary Whigs will have lost their usefulness – the formidable Edinburgh Review ‘will sink into a sort of thing like the New Misses’ Magazine of Colburn, Campbell, and Co … You will dwindle rapidly into a sofa-book – a book to lie beside the young ladies’ guitar’.50 Typically, Blackwood’s is led by love of its own rhetoric into exaggeration of Whiggism’s demise, but this tone of gleeful pity continued throughout 1824. In November 1824, the metaphorical play of ‘The Cheshire Whigs’ portrayed Whiggism as a heroine whose sublime adventures during the 1790s have, thirty years on, left only a painted harridan – The blooming damsel who shone forth in so much fascinating loveliness in 1688, sacrificed her virtue to the French Revolution; and her subsequent adventures and present condition prove that she has drunk the cup of misery which seduction offers, even to the very dregs. She fell successively a prey to the blandishments of Buonaparte, of the Radicals, of the Liberals, of the Carbonari, of the Benthamites, of any dirty body, and she is now sunk so low as to be rejected of all.51
Such is the succinct history of the intellectual fads of the previous thirty years. However, a year later, Blackwood’s was already predicting the failure of the Westminster Review on literary grounds: ‘too prosy’ and not enough ‘literary papers of any consequence’. In the ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. XXI,’
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Maginn began by parodying Jeffrey on Wordsworth’s Excursion – ‘I am pretty certain that the Westminster Review will not do’.52 The predicted ‘ruin of literary Whiggery’ by the establishment of the Westminster Review itself thus appeared to have faltered on stylistic grounds.53 This goes back to the literary basis of Whiggism itself. The language of Whiggism had originally emerged, as Blackwood’s outlined in these articles of the early 1820s, from the crisis of 1688. It had been tested by the professions of liberty in America and France, while Burke had warned of the seductive dangers of such rhetoric. The period of war from 1793 to 1815 had challenged Whiggism’s ability to reconcile the languages of liberty and patriotism. Timothy Jenks has discussed how the ‘language of patriotism’ operated during the period 1780– 1818, particularly citing the instance of the Westminster election of 1796, which pitted an admiral against John Horne Tooke (Fox was the third candidate for the borough’s two seats). What this election typified was the contest between patriotic symbolism and rational argument. Admiral Gardner was one of various naval figures used to represent king-and-country patriotism: The political admiral [Gardner], like the gentleman leader he opposed [Horne Tooke], was a liminal figure; a uniformed servant of the king, but able to pose as a stranger to the world of politics. While the gentleman leader was held to address the people, the political admiral claimed to speak from them; the gentleman leader condescended to involve himself in plebeian politics, the political admiral posed as one accustomed to social mixing … an inherently connected figure, instantly placeable within a framework of the national community.54
The difference between the political admiral and the ‘gentleman leader’ was that the latter had been trained in classical eloquence – ‘Aristocratic education focused upon the argumentative rhetoric and oratorical talents of the ancients’. Horne Tooke was ‘a demagogue’ who by his rhetorical dazzling led plebeian voters astray – the fact that he even addressed non-voters (the ‘mob’) and practised eloquence on them was a sign that he could not be trusted. Gardner, by comparison, ‘was largely unable to complete a speech successfully’ for the last fifteen days of the poll.55 He refused to undertake a debate with Horne Tooke and preferred merely to thank his supporters, saying that he did not know very much about the art of oratory. It was left to Horne Tooke to interpret Gardner’s silence for the voters (as reflecting the subterranean workings of influence), and then to present himself as someone who appealed openly by dint of logical argument to the ‘independent’ thinking of his listeners in ‘the open language of politics’. Thus Tooke’s ‘proficiency at argument, and his appeal on the merits of his argument rather than the merits of his profession’ openly contrasted themselves with Gardner’s old-fashioned Tory inarticulateness. Jenks concludes by emphasizing that although the study of loyalism has mostly proceeded by looking first at the
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eloquence of Burke, in fact, the case of Admiral Gardner suggests that learned arguments on the meaning of 1688 were not necessary or even relevant to the wider electorate and that if we rely solely on the contesting arguments of pamphlets, we may have missed ‘the symbolic contexts in which the candidates were operating’.56 The term to set against ‘symbolic’ is literary: the Whigs were distrusted because they used language proficiently, and even Burke proved himself a Whig after all in his verbal ability. As the mob became better educated, the government felt its vulnerability increase, for political language had moved out of its original sphere. Inarticulate admirals lost their potency against seditious literature during this period as the symbol yielded to the word and the double entendres of the Edinburgh Review’s Scotch lawyers.57 In fact, Toryism and patriotic support for the King had emerged stronger after the Caroline affair in 1820–1, which perhaps represented the zenith of Whiggism’s literary collusion with the mob. Toryism, seen in the banter of Blackwood’s Magazine itself, was no longer dumb, and James J. Sack says that Blackwood’s itself ‘in the 1820s had the largest circulation of any periodical in the United Kingdom’. Toryism found its most famous literary voice in Sir Walter Scott, whose sales were unprecedented.58 If Blackwood’s was scornful of the Edinburgh Review’s Whiggism, it was no kinder to the new Liberalism. In ‘The Liberal System’, published in October 1824, Blackwood’s analyzes Liberalism, like Whiggism, as being a mere trick of words: ‘A set of people, whom, from the want of a better name, we shall call the Statesmen of Cockaigne, and who consist of the gentlemen of the press, the Greek, Spanish, and other committees, the loan-mongers and stock-jobbers, &c. &c. have had the chief share in fabricating the “Liberal System”’.59 As such, it is a creation of the press, ‘The beardless youngsters who write our Morning Chronicles’. The cry of Liberty moves from the Press – ‘The bread of the gentlemen of the press, is mainly drawn from their incoherent declamations in favour of liberty’ – to electioneers. It is a capital spouting topic to those public men who are patronized by the ragged part of the electors of Westminster, Southwark, &c. and they eagerly seize it to ingratiate themselves with their patrons; they get up a dinner, or a committee and subscription, puff the revolutionists with all their might, and this aids public delusion mightily, and forms the second link in the system.60
Visiting ‘revolutionists’ come to London to raise money, and ‘are joyfully received by our loan-mongers and stock-jobbers’. In the ‘third link of the system’, these commercial traders, in order ‘to enrich themselves by the sale of the new stock, circulate all kinds of fine things in favour of the revolution’, and the merchants who send off goods to the revolutionists, ‘cry out lustily, Liberty’ in order to protect these shipments. Twenty years earlier, the accusation of stock-jobbing
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and complaints about the mercantile ethos had been raised by the landed Whigs and the Edinburgh Review against the Tories.61 Now the Whig commentators write furiously in favour of the revolutionists; the committees, loan-mongers, and merchants, supply them profusely with glorious news, and ravishing description; they drown opposition by huzzaing Liberty! And Liberality!62
This is what Blackwood’s calls the ‘Liberal System’, carried on by secondary Whig figures such as John Cam Hobhouse and Joseph Hume. This revolution is a thing of words, a formula of eloquence: The French constitution grants liberty of conscience – it is a despotism. The South American republics prohibit it – they establish pure freedom … The liberty of the South American Dictators, Liberators, Congresses, &c., shoots individuals without trial, banishes and ruins whole classes of men for mere difference of opinion, establishes the most absurd and unjust regulations of trade, lays the press under the most severe restrictions, tyrannizes over the conscience, and does nearly what it pleases with the liberty of the people at large, – and this is unmixed and boundless national liberty; – at least, so say the Statesmen of Cockaigne, the friends of the “Liberal System;” and who shall dare to contradict them?63
At the same time, in Europe, these Whigs welcome the defeat of monarchs – ‘“What a lovely spectacle would it be,” exclaims Lord Holland, in one of his fine phrenzies, “to see England at the head of a swarm of republics!”’ – though, Blackwood’s points out, it is not so many years since these same monarchs had been Britain’s allies against the despotism of the French. In a decade, vocabularies had thus shifted and ‘we must adopt the opinions and people that we then fought against’.64 In the magazine for June 1825, Blackwood’s printed a poem about the Whigs’ change in vocabulary: Time was when haughty bigots ruled By laws that fierce intolerance taught, … When scarce a “liberal” seed was sown, And “liberal” people were unknown. … ‘Tis past – the dreadful time is past; Thanks, Whigs! By you its ills are banish’d; … From creed to creed we gaily range, Each day we take a new one. While novelty its sweets dispenses, And Whiggery’s praise enchants the senses, Care we, which is the true one?65
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In August 1825, the Edinburgh Review also discussed what the tradition of seventeenth-century British Whiggism had brought to nineteenth-century Europe, in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s discussion of freedom and revolution in the life of Milton. A literary review, not a political one, it nonetheless discusses Milton’s loyalties during the Civil War, a significant topic during the 1820s, when events in Europe and South America made the question of constitutional freedom and Britain’s role a matter for controversy. Although party labels are shunned, the choice of the Edinburgh Review, along with Macaulay’s own place in the Commons, necessarily made this a ‘Whiggish’ and ‘Liberal’ account of seventeenth-century freedom: We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary. The violence of those outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people: and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live.66
Thus Macaulay, who was born in 1800, coolly moves on from Jeffrey’s analysis of the ‘outrages’ of the French Revolution.67 Nor does he attempt to argue that the people must attain moral fitness for the things they so precipitously demand – There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces – and that cure is freedom! … Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim!68
In 1826, the year that the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge began, the Westminster Review of January 1826, responding to Macaulay’s article, argued that the achievement of the Edinburgh Review itself had been indeed to make the ordinary classes capable of active political agency: After a long period of half-starvation on the Annual Register and the Gentleman’s Magazine, this class of readers was at last accommodated with small dishes of tolerably substantial food by the publication of the Edinburgh Review.69
Remarking that the works of John Locke were a long time ‘in comparative obscurity’ and that even for comparatively recent authors such as David Hume and Adam Smith, the ‘length’ of their works was ‘an insuperable objection’, the Westminster Review argues that the periodical format of the Edinburgh Review had meant it achieved more intellectually for society ‘than many a more bulky volume could have accomplished in half a century’.70 The Westminster Review argues indeed that had the Edinburgh Review existed fifty years earlier, Hume
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and Smith would have written for it and that Samuel Johnson would have done hackwork for Blackwood’s. Early in 1826, Blackwood’s also reconsidered the history of the Edinburgh Review, from the perspective of itself as a challenger to the latter’s supremacy: ‘When we started, in 1817, the party to which we have always been attached [the Tories] was sadly in want of literary defenders … the Whigs in 1817 had the influential part of the Press to themselves’.71 The Quarterly Review, established in 1809, had not made the political impact that might have been expected from it, even when victory over Napoleon had retrospectively justified the long years of war. The implication of this argument by Blackwood’s is that the Edinburgh Review had had no literary equals, and that the Whig side of the political rhetoric was the ‘fashionable’ one. Meanwhile, argues Blackwood’s, The Times ‘as usual, fell in with the popular cry’, and the two Tory dailies (New Times, Courier) made no great figure against the prevailing clamour.72 At this crux, there seemed to be a general impulse to retrospective, and another look back at Whiggism’s career was offered by Francis Jeffrey himself, in his review of the new biography by Thomas Moore, of one of the greatest Whig orators, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who had died in 1816. Moore and Jeffrey were now the two great literary figures of Whiggism, and when Moore issued his biography of Sheridan in 1826, it was only fitting that Jeffrey should be its reviewer. It marked a significant occasion for assessment of Whig eloquence during all the years of opposition, and the review may be seen as Jeffrey’s definition of Whiggism and his defence, using the context of Sheridan’s career, of the Edinburgh Review against the attacks of the Westminster Review in January and April 1824. Thomas Moore, like Edmund Burke and Sheridan, was an example of a Whig writer who because of his literary talents had attained political eminence: their careers raised the question of the connection between persuasion and power. When this essay was reprinted in Jeffrey’s collected Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (1844), it stood preeminently as Jeffrey’s analysis of Whiggism, one of the last articles he wrote for the Edinburgh Review. In it Jeffrey approached Sheridan’s life as an example of how literary eloquence led to power in an age when parliamentary status still originated in the ownership of property and hereditary title was its main qualification. Into this English system stepped an Irishman of no property or title – the attraction of such a subject to Moore, who was a grocer’s son, is obvious. Moore argues, and Jeffrey quotes: This footing in the society of the great he [Sheridan] could only have attained by Parliamentary eminence; – as a mere writer, with all his genius, he never would have been thus admitted ad eundem among them … By him, who has not been born among them, this can only be achieved by Politics.73
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Sheridan’s elevation had been achieved not in the literary marketplace but in camera, where there was a constant need for leading speakers, especially after the deaths of Pitt and Fox. Of the years 1790–1820, R. G. Thorne writes, ‘As long as there were votes to be won by it, oratory swayed the House. It is arguable that it reached its apogee at this time, when its practitioners were ready to devote immense labour to the preparation of their speeches’.74 At a time when the House was sitting through Joseph Hume’s line-by-line querying of the budget, readers could only enjoy the reminiscence of a previous generation’s parliamentary oratory. Blackwood’s Magazine also remarked on the increase in readership of Sheridan’s era. There is a Noctes devoted to the changes in the press since 1789 in Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1824). ‘Christopher North’ remarks, … Blackwood and the Quarterly are the only ones of the greater class that I always read; and as for the papers, you know, I have long been contented with the Courier, New Times, John Bull, and Cobbett … Cobbett I always must read, because Cobbett always must write. I enjoy my Cobbett.75
‘North’ pointed to the increasing profitability of newspapers because of political excitement and cited the case of William Clement, owner of the Observer, who had illegally published accounts of the trial of the Cato-Street conspirators in 1820: Well, he was ordered into the Court, and fined 500l. for the contempt – and what followed? … Why, he paid the money, and after he had done so, very coolly informed the public, that he had not only paid the fine out of the extra profits of the paper containing the offensive matter, but put, over and above, a very handsome sum into his own pocket.76
In this era of rising newspaper prosperity, O’Doherty mentioned ‘that the total number of political journals circulated in the British islands has trebled – yes, trebled, within the last forty years’.77 Blackwood’s was not the only one to comment on this phenomenon. A number of articles in 1827 trace this expansion in periodical publishing. The Quarterly Review noted that there had been an increase from a total of seventy-nine newspapers across the country in 1782, to 146 in 1790, and to 284 in 1821. In London, these figures were eighteen (1782), thirtytwo (1790), and fifty-six (1821). There were no weekly papers before 1790; by 1821, there were thirty-two in London alone. Similarly in 1770 there were four circulating libraries in London; by 1821, there were more than a hundred, with 900 in the country as a whole. Reading clubs, which had been unheard of in 1811, numbered nearly two thousand fifteen years later.78 The Quarterly Review cited particularly ‘the extraordinary increase of political publications, and of fugitive and periodical literature’ and the regularity ‘effected by the more rapid and lively appeals of reviews, journals, and newspapers’ as against the leisurely
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pace of book publishing.79 Even leaving aside the exclusivity of ‘learned folios’, the production of novels, a comparatively ephemeral branch of book publishing, accounted for perhaps fewer than 100 items in any one year – in 1816, a total of fifty-nine – this, compared to fifty-six dailies and thirty-two weeklies in London itself.80 This had also been accompanied by an acknowledged improvement in the quality of the periodicals.81
Liberalism and Pittism Liberalism, an ideological presence on both sides of the House during the late 1820s, confounded party groupings. In the discussion of the intersection between Parliament and literature, George Canning is a recurring presence: not a Whig (although he had been a protégé of Sheridan), he was both a Pittite and a liberal at once. In 1827, the forming of his government brought this confusion of terms to a head. After Liverpool’s stroke, Canning refused to serve under Peel or Wellington (‘Protestant’ Tories, who stood out against the granting of civil rights to Catholics), while they on the other hand realized that they could not form a ministry without Canning, who was a Pittite ‘Catholic’. The result was, that Canning became Prime Minister in April 1827. When he was appointed, seven of the strictest ‘Protestants’, including Wellington and Peel, then refused to serve under him. Wellington could not approve of Canning’s foreign policy of non-intervention, nor could Peel support Catholic Emancipation, given that his constituency was Oxford University. The resulting attacks of Canning’s own party on him at this time aroused exceptional bitterness.82 Meanwhile Canning reached across the House, to those who, like him, had always supported Catholic Emancipation – this was the one way in which they had all remained followers of Pitt, who resigned in 1801 over the issue. Among those who accepted office were Lord Lansdowne (Lord Henry Petty), who had been Chancellor in the All Talents government of 1806–7, and two future prime ministers, Edward Stanley (later Lord Derby) and William Lamb (Lord Melbourne). Canning also appointed John Ward, Viscount Dudley, his successor in the Foreign Office – Ward, like Palmerston, who remained in Cabinet, had been a student of Dugald Stewart during the old days of the French wars. Having argued that there is no coherent history of the Tory party from the 1760s to the late 1820s inasmuch as the party itself ‘did not exist’, J. C. D. Clark suggests that Canning primarily used the Tory label about himself as ‘a tactical response’ and that in fact he behaved as a Pittite in forming his government – which was, like all those in this period, from the All Talents to Liverpool, a mixture of personal groupings.83 In this respect the language used to describe government and opposition provided an ideological explanation in the press outside the parliamentary arena – Canning’s
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eloquence, from Pitt’s eulogy to ‘Spain’ to ‘liberalism’, becomes the substance of a retrospective ‘Tory’ label. ‘The Change of Ministry’ is Blackwood’s scornful summary of Liverpool’s ‘Liberal Toryism’. David Robinson’s use of the terms ‘Democrats’ and ‘infidels’ here is an invocation of the scaremongering terms used about the French Revolution during the 1790s. And in ‘The Faction’, Robinson castigates equally the complacency of the young ‘Liberals’ and their progressive jargon: ‘[t]hese people can never speak of themselves without boasting of their “enlarged views,” their “enlightened sentiments,” their “philosophical principles,” &c. &c.; and proclaiming themselves to be men of science, philosophers, and statesmen, of the very first order’.84 He is commenting in particular on three articles that had appeared in the October 1827 issue of the Edinburgh Review: ‘George the Third and the Catholic Question’, ‘Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge’, both by Henry Brougham, and ‘The Present Administration’ by Thomas Babington Macaulay (whom Robinson nicknamed ‘Young Vapid’). Since 1822, ‘liberalism’ had become a recurring term among politicians, often those most skilled at publicity. But Blackwood’s, as a high Tory publication, had no sympathy with this progressive ‘Liberal’ rhetoric used as a cover for the mingling of parties and saw it as hypocrisy and weakness – The Mr Canning, who, for great part of his life, professed the opinions put forth in the Anti-Jacobin – who, up to the present hour, has asserted himself to be a worshipper of Mr Pitt, of that Mr Pitt whose principles, in so far as they deserved to be called Pitt principles, were flatly opposed to the principles of modern Whiggism – has given to the Whigs the Cabinet. He has placed the country under the government of Whigs and Whig principles.85
From this, Blackwood’s predicted revolution, using the familiar terms of abuse: ‘[we] have reached the point when the Government has embraced the destructive doctrines of the Economists and Philosophers – and has thrown itself for support upon the Democrats and Infidels’.86 In reviewing the Canning government for the Edinburgh Review, Thomas Babington Macaulay refuted the charge that Canning had betrayed his Pittite loyalties for the new liberalism. This was the article that became known as Macaulay’s classic entry on Pitt in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1859). Canning’s long awaited accession to power thus became the occasion for commentators to consider the meaning of Pittism, since Canning had been Pitt’s most obvious heir and was prominent enough to have become prime minister at least as early as 1809. Macaulay here develops his thesis about the gap that grew up between the policies pursued by Pitt in his career as prime minister and those ‘Pittite’ policies held to by loyal followers after 1806, who celebrated the anniversary of his birthday (28 May 1759) every year. Pittites were usually ‘Protestants’, but Pitt
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had resigned in the face of George III’s resistance to Catholic Emancipation in 1801, and it worth noting that Canning, the man chosen to deliver his funeral oration, remained a ‘Catholic’ in policy. The other anomaly is that all these Pittites also resisted the programme of reform, whereas Pitt had already begun to institute a series of measures in the 1780s to cut down the ‘Influence’ of which Burke had complained, before the French Revolution put everything into disarray for twenty-five years. Canning’s relationship to Pitt had brought him early into office, but his hatred of individuals such as Addington and Castlereagh had kept him out of office or in the limbo of negotiations for most of the years from 1801 to 1822. In this sense, he was often a member of the Opposition, and Stephen M. Lee argues that Canning is responsible for an idea of opposition that does not employ the Whiggish rhetoric. When Pitt resigned in 1801, Canning had followed him into the wilderness of no-office, but unlike Pitt, he relentlessly opposed his successor, Addington, regardless of his measures. But for Pitt, this was ‘systematic opposition’ – something that he thought ‘an unconstitutional encroachment upon the king’s executive power to appoint his own ministers and to carry on his own business’. To both Canning and Pitt, it was still the King who controlled the government, not a voting majority in Parliament, and Addington was his deputy. When Pitt was finally able to bring himself to vote against Addington in Parliament, Lee points out, George III was incapacitated by illness and the country was under a strong threat of invasion, against which Addington’s provisions for the navy were inadequate.87 Canning had been the first to hold a birthday dinner for Pitt, on 28 May 1802, when he wrote and recited ‘The Pilot that weathered the storm’, a poem that became a kind of epigraph for Pitt. When Pitt died, his followers held regular dinners on his birthday to discuss the measures proposed by the Grenvillites, who came in after 1806. These followers tried to oppose Grenville according to what they called ‘Pittite principles’. Thus this became the programme that defined an opposition party within the government. Pitt himself would have called this factionalism. But for Canning, this represented principled loyalty to Pitt himself. Grey saw the Pittites as operating merely according to individual greed for office and contrasted this ‘new opposition’ with the principled opposition of the Whigs during all their years out of office.88 But the Whigs themselves struggled with factionalism, and when the All Talents government dissolved after only a year, Lee argues that the Pittites or ‘the body of Pitt’s friends’, as they called themselves, were not cohesive enough to offer an alternative – the Grenvillites had done the damage to themselves by pressing the question of Catholic Emancipation on George III.89 Nonetheless for a brief period, during the years 1802–04, Canning’s loyalty shaped a party and momentarily did the unthinkable thing of pushing Pitt into becoming a leader of opposition to his country’s
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government. If George III had not been weakened by madness and Napoleon, it is doubtful that Pitt would have acted thus. Canning’s opposition, on the other hand, was personal, and in this, he resembled the Foxites, who started from personal loyalty to Fox and afterwards acquired a programme – Pitt himself always believed that he was acting with independent individuals on the worth of any individual measure and devoid of any consistent party line. His only party was the King. As part of his argument supporting a coalition cabinet under Canning, Macaulay remarked that in 1804 Pitt had tried to make an alliance with Fox and to bring him into government.90 It was the sentimental Pittites who, forgetting the changes that Pitt himself as a reforming Whig, would have made, were attempting to hold back Canning’s ‘liberalism’. Macaulay’s discussion of the Pittites was echoed privately by Palmerston on the Tory benches: ‘the real opposition of the present day sit behind the Treasury Bench; and it is by the stupid old Tory party, who bawl out the memory and praises of Pitt while they are opposing all the measures and principles which he held most important’.91 Both Macaulay and Robinson noted the oddly unanimous support of the press for the new government. Canning, setting himself up as a liberal, just as he had spoken for anti-jacobinism in 1797 and Spanish patriotism in 1809 with the Quarterly Review, had now clearly stepped into the flood-tide of the new Continental feeling. However, the Tories assumed that the press was still motivated by Treasury funds – The manner in which the influence of the press has, at this crisis, been exercised, is, indeed, very remarkable. All the talent has been on one side. With an unanimity which, as Lord Londonderry [half-brother of the late Castlereagh] wisely supposes, can be ascribed only to a dexterous use of the secret-service money, the able and respectable journals of the metropolis have all supported the new government.92
Macaulay here attests to the phenomenon of the new liberalism in the press and deftly satirizes the bewilderment of the old Tories, who could only recall the loyalism of the 1790s. Indeed, Macaulay’s article is ostensibly a review of the New Antijacobin Review, although his sarcasm about that publication reminds us of the later exchanges in the Commons with John Wilson Croker, one of the writers for the original Anti-Jacobin – We ought to apologize to our readers for prefixing to this article the name of such a publication. The two numbers which lie on our table contain nothing which could be endured, even at a dinner of the Pitt Club, unless, as the newspapers express it, the hilarity had been continued to a very late hour.93
Henry Brougham, another ‘liberal’ figure with press connections, recognized the common ground between himself and Canning and was disappointed to be left out of his cabinet.94 However, Brougham could always resort to the pages of the
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Edinburgh Review, where in October 1827 he argued for a coalition of these ‘liberals’, who saw the necessity for recognition of popular feeling: For some years of the period on which we are looking back, the Government of this country was intrusted to the management of men, who gave it a direction widely different from the course of public opinion, and conducted it upon all the principles of the most narrow and vicious policy, as if they alone, and the engine in their hands, stood still amidst the general advance of the age.95
Brougham blamed the hangover of Castlereagh’s involvement with the European monarchies after the war for ‘the exploded terrors about Jacobinism and French principles’ and ‘the iron hand of military force’. A new era in foreign affairs had begun with Canning’s refusal in 1823 to use British forces to restore the South American republics to Spain. Domestic reform of excessive taxes and duties was underway, and the necessity for less punitive economic regulation was recognized: The year 1826 had begun with the measures rendered necessary by the commercial distress; and the Liberal Parties on both sides of the House agreed fully in the support of them … a marked distinction was everywhere to be traced in the conduct of the Opposition towards the Liberal, and towards the Illiberal ‘portion of his Majesty’s Government’.96
Brougham’s use of the phrase ‘the Liberal Parties on both sides of the House’ is notable here. And he lists what these parties sitting on both sides of the House had in common: ‘Catholic Question – Currency – Free Trade – Judicial Reform – Foreign Policy – South American Independence’. Brougham traces this regrouping – not to the old notion of independent country members versus the Court – but to the growth of the media and public opinion: it is impossible to deny, that in proportion as the body of the people become more enlightened, and take a more constant interest in the management of their own affairs, such combinations becoming less necessary, lose somewhat of the public favour; and we that at no period of our history, did, what is called ‘Party,’ enjoy less popularity and exert less influence with the bulk of the community.97
The old categories that had subscribed during the war no longer accurately described the differences of opinion: A new casting also of political sects has taken place; the distinctions, and almost the names, of Loyalist and Jacobin, Whig and Tory, Court and Country Faction, are fast wearing away. Two great divisions of the community will, in all likelihood, soon be far more generally known; the Liberal and the Illiberal.98
Whatever the divisions between Whig and Tory, ‘the Liberal party of whatever denomination, are well agreed’.
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However, Blackwood’s saw only the usual machinations of the Whigs behind all such talk of public opinion. George Croly called the principles of the new government, ‘the principles of Whiggism’. The most notable feature of the Whig party was its control of the press – when someone of their party is prosecuted, ‘the Whig sympathies are instantly up in arms. Their poets among the crowd of examples, tune their indignant lyres; their journalists pour out torrents of wrath and woe; their barristers forswear nature, and harangue without a fee; their parliamentary orators swell with threats of impeachment’.99 Although it would seem as though the Whigs dominated the media – ‘Happy the ingenuous youth who dips his virgin pen in Whig ink’ – Croly declared that their campaign, ‘[t]his incessant grinding of the machinery, which professes to send up the supply of genius for the national market’, had not succeeded. He predicted dire consequences from the fact that ‘[t]he politics of the pen are already transferred to the Cabinet’.100 Six months later, his predictions of failure appeared to have come true, and Blackwood’s rejoiced that the ‘Catholics’ had in fact left the Cabinet: We have at last, thank God, got rid of the Liberals, and once more have the happiness to live under a pure Tory government. Not a remnant, we rejoice to say, of that bastard political sect, that cunning, cowardly, compromising, conciliatory school, has been left to divide and weaken the measures of the Cabinet.101
As it turned out, the reversion to strict Toryism was soon pre-empted by events. Canning died suddenly in the month of August 1827, upon which the King turned to Lord Goderich. Palmerston saw this as a reversion to the reactionary policy of the Liverpool era, which accelerated when, Goderich having failed, George IV turned to Wellington, who had strongly opposed Canning’s progressive foreign policy. Peel came back in as Home Secretary, and although Canningites such as Palmerston and Lamb stayed, the transplanted Whigs generally left. Palmerston wrote, ‘I very sincerely regret their loss, as I like them much better than the Tories, and agree with them much more; but still we, the Canningites, if we may be so termed, did not join their Government, but they came and joined ours’.102 However, events moved so quickly that by May 1828, the Canningites were also deserting the Cabinet. William Huskisson, a colleague and disciple of Canning since the 1790s, precipitately resigned from the Colonial Office, and with him went Dudley, Lamb, Charles Grant and Palmerston, the ‘three middle-aged dandies’, as Palmerston’s biographer calls them.103 Blackwood’s interpreted the fashionability of these men in terms of their manipulation of the press – The Liberals are gone … There was throughout society a suppression of feeling respecting these men, for they had so praised themselves, and had got the newspaper press into their hands, that each individual, however satisfied he himself was, that, as
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The Blackwood’s writer calls them ‘schoolboys, vain of their newly acquired knowledge, and eager to turn poetry and philosophy into practice’. This remark testifies to the corollary of Liberalism, which was youth – ‘the system of the Liberals to entrap the young men who were coming out in public life’. The atmosphere of the House had been changed by these young ‘liberals’, ‘who went buzzing and fizzing about, a-telling of the wonderful wonders of political economy, of their own philosophical and enlightened views, and pronouncing the subversion of our constitution, and of all our ancient institutions, the sovereignst things on earth for procuring the greatest happiness to the greatest number’.105 It was as if the pupils of Dugald Stewart’s schoolroom had finally after a quarter-of-a-century broken open the door to the Cabinet office. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s account of the fad for Utilitarianism that was now sweeping the Commons in fact supports Blackwood’s dim view of the resort to this new cant. Macaulay argued that Utilitarianism was a formula affecting a show of logic and that the Utilitarians ‘do not seem to know that logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric, – that a fallacy may lurk in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor’. Mill’s fault was to write with the ‘affectation of precision’, following a sort of a priori logic: ‘[c]ertain propensities of Human Nature are assumed; and from these premises the whole science of Politics is synthetically deduced!’106 Thus had the late eighteenth-century Scotch metaphysics of Dugald Stewart dwindled down to the dryness of one of his less illustrious students. The Whig talk of liberty had become, under the pressure of the post-Waterloo alarm, the need to placate the people with promises of ‘the happiness of the greatest number’. Publishers such as William Chambers may have rejoiced in the expanded publishing market and the new wholesomeness of literature, but Macaulay speaking as an historian of Whiggism and heir to Francis Jeffrey, disliked this reasoning ‘concealed beneath a peculiar ostentation of logical neatness’ and called it a pining for ‘a new idolatry’.107 Jeremy Bentham had earlier defended Mill in the Westminster Review, and Macaulay’s article ‘Bentham’s Defence of Mill’ constitutes his rebuttal, insisting that he was not arguing for absolute monarchy or against popular government but only the Utilitarian rhetoric. But what he quotes of Bentham shows that the Edinburgh Review’s explanation of the French Revolution – whether by Jeffrey in 1802 or Macaulay in 1829 – was still attracting controversy. He argues that what had changed was the vocabulary: ‘the “greatest happiness principle” has always been latent under the words, social contract, justice, benevolence, patriotism, liberty’. The vocabulary was now nineteenth-century: ‘[t]he project of mending
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a bad world, by teaching people to give new names to old things, reminds us of Walter Shandy’s scheme for compensating the loss of his son’s nose by christening him Trismegistus. What society wants is a new motive – not a new cant’.108 Thus Macaulay refused to allow that Utilitarianism offered anything more than Edinburgh-Review Whiggism had. Macaulay pointed out the totemic place that such terms as Whig and Utilitarian hold in philosophical debate: The most elevated station that the ‘greatest happiness principle’ is ever likely to attain is this, that it may be a fashionable phrase among newspaper writers and members of parliament – that it may succeed to the dignity which has been enjoyed by the ‘original contract,’ by the ‘constitution of 1688,’ and other expressions of the same kind.109
Each age seizes upon its own phrase – The ‘original contract’ meant in the Convention Parliament110 the co-ordinate authority of the Three Estates. If there were to be a radical insurrection to-morrow, the ‘original contract’ would stand just as well for annual parliaments and universal suffrage. The ‘Glorious Constitution,’ again, has meant every thing in turn: the Habeas Corpus Act, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the Test Act, the Repeal of the Test Act.111
In Macaulay’s argument, the show of logical ease in Bentham’s formula attracted those who had wearied of the struggle to define the British constitution. It was no more than a new slogan – ‘It will mean cheap bread, dear bread, free trade, protecting duties, annual parliaments, septennial parliaments, universal suffrage, Old Sarum, trial by jury, martial law’.112 The eighteenth-century constitutional phrases were now for the first time giving way to the ‘liberal’ platform of social reform.
Conclusion In 1830, the preface to what became the most fashionable and imitated magazine of the new era, Fraser’s Magazine, took this change of vocabulary as its starting point.113 With little ceremony, it announced itself as a ‘literary miscellany’ – ‘Well, then, we suppose it may be taken for granted, that all readers in this reading age and country so well understand what a Magazine is expected to contain, that it would be waste of time to say that we are to be a literary miscellany, embracing &c. &c. &c. &c.’ – and then spends the entire prefatorial eight pages on its politics, insisting that in England this was the formative question.114 The magazine had been established in London around the time that Jeffrey ceased acting as editor of the Edinburgh Review and moved to London to become an MP and Lord Advocate. This moment, after the death of Canning, was a peculiar time in British politics. It turned out to be the Tory Protestants of 1828 who
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brought forward the measure of Catholic Emancipation that had brought both Pitt in 1802 and the Whigs in 1807 to resign, and in thus disassembling the Protestant constitution of Great Britain, caused the shock from which one can still feel the reverberations in Middlemarch more than thirty years later. Fraser’s Magazine was essentially Blackwood’s translated to London – for like Francis Jeffrey’s entry into Parliament, its founding was a sign that the intellectual torch of the era had passed from Edinburgh to London. Whereas in 1802, the Edinburgh Review had struggled only to define its position as literary or ‘scientific’ Whiggism in relation to the parliamentary Whigs, Fraser’s Magazine found itself in 1830 discussing the end of the wartime terms Whig and Tory: ‘The Whigs have been un-whigged; the Tories un-toried’.115 William Maginn, the editor and formerly one of Blackwood’s contributors, an Irish Orangeman known equally for his learnedness and his drunkenness, gives the popular shorthand phrases that defined the terms: In former times, the friends of these parties were fond of designating the former as the asserters of liberty and popular rights, – the latter as the champions of religion and monarchy. By their enemies and ill-willers the Whigs were styled democrats and jacobins, levellers, and upsetters of church and king; while from hostile voices the Tories received the titles of bigots and oppressors, enemies of advancing civilisation, and sworn foes to the progress of the march of mind.116
Maginn also describes their characteristic literary style: ‘On the whole, however, of late years, gravity was the characteristic of the Whig – wit and sarcasm of the Tory’. Still, like Macaulay, he argues that perhaps these words had survived the events that gave them meaning – The watchwords of party survive long, very long indeed, after the meaning imposed upon them by those who originally adopted them has passed away. The Whigs, for example, toasted during many a long year – “The King! may he never forget the principles which put his family upon the throne;” and by this toast it was intended originally, and even down to our own times, to express admiration of the principles of the revolution of 1688.
Now, as he points out, when toasts to the King are proposed, ‘the Whigs are the first to denounce them as invasions of liberty, as outrages upon freedom’.117 The totemic value of 1688 had yielded to that of 1789. However, Maginn goes on, even verbal certainties had evaporated since 1827, and this had coincided with the premiership of Canning, the politician whose supreme turn in office had been awaited for twenty years: ‘[t]o speak the truth, the factions are gone. When the un-whigging and un-torying commenced, it is immaterial to say; but it was consummated by Mr. Canning. He was something of both parties – a sort of eclectic’: ‘His pro-Catholicism rendered him a favourite with the Whig party – his anti-reform spirit conciliated the Tories’.118 The fact
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that such a man was long recognized as a potential leader made him something more than the usual ‘Independent’ member, whose vote was so sought after by all parties. He could never have been a traditional Country member, simply because he had no property behind him but had made his way through eloquence and charm.119 His medium was words, and his rise to the office of prime minister, even when his sponsor had been dead twenty-one years, illustrates the place of such gifts in Parliament. In his biography of Palmerston, James Chambers reiterates that by 1830 there were no great orators such as the eighteenth century had thrown up – Burke, Pitt, or Canning.120 Burke’s career had spanned the eras of enthusiasm for Liberty and the American Revolution, to the French Revolution and Prejudice – these were the watchwords of Whiggism unwhigged. Canning had begun as an anti-jacobin, concerned for the safety of Britain from invasion and had ended as a liberal, a defender of international revolutions – a Tory untoried. The ‘Protestant ascendancy’ no longer defined the British constitution, for this phrase sounded merely historical to the new generation. Fraser’s contrasts the Britain of the wartime years with the new Britain of Benthamite political economics and European constitutionality. It parodies the contemporary rhetoric of freedom and all the discussions of the revolutionary uprisings by ‘liberales’ in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France: Our business, then, in this our Magazine shall be to preach the necessity of peace, the absolute duty of non-interference in foreign politics, whether to assist distressed princes and disconsolate princesses on one hand, or runaway patriots and craven constitutionalists on the other. Let the nations of the continent arrange their internal affairs as they please; provided they do not bear upon us, we need not intermeddle.121
Equally, the literature of the great age just passed is also jeered at – no more learned assessments such as the Edinburgh Review had magisterially offered. The Fraser’s preface insouciantly ends with the words – ‘We have not the least notion what we are to begin with, and almost at random take the following. Positively we do not know what it is about’.122 However, in the affectation of carelessness, it is nonetheless remarkable that Maginn, a rabid Orangeman, uncharacteristically abstains from commenting on the political battle that the Tories had recently lost over Emancipation. It would seem to have been enough for him that the Tories had held onto power. All over the country Wellington and Peel were remembered as the ones who had betrayed the country’s ‘Protestant’ constitution – and in 1830 the county Independents were to turn against the Tories, for Emancipation presented a more controversial challenge to the Protestant ascendancy than reform. In any case, at the very moment of Fraser’s preface, Wellington seemed prepared to defy reform. In November 1830, such intransigence was to result in his own defeat, but for the
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moment, Toryism remained triumphant, and Fraser’s Magazine could celebrate the recent events that had culminated in the routing of the Whigs. The literary format of Fraser’s Magazine itself was a repudiation: unlike the Edinburgh Review, it was a monthly miscellany not a quarterly review, a collection of wits not intellects, based in London not Edinburgh. The scrappy Fraser’s may have been criticised for being too personal, but perhaps the Edinburgh Review itself had started the fad of personality, when it abandoned the amateur eighteenth-century miscellany of assorted tit-bits for ‘snappishness’. In 1817, Blackwood’s had made the personality of Edinburgh even more pointed, but with Fraser’s, the ‘club’ moved to London. Thomas Carlyle noted that it started a fad for a new style of writing: ‘a certain quickness, fluency of banter, not excluding sharp insight, and Merry-Andrew Drollery’. He traces the vogue for this kind of magazine writing back to John Wilson: ‘the grand requisite seems to be Impudence, and a fearless committing of yourself to talk in your Drink’. Carlyle characterized Fraser’s Magazine as ‘a hurlyburly of rhodomontade, punch, loyalty, and Saturnalian Toryism’.123 Such could also stand as a description of Byron’s letters and his unfinished narrative, Don Juan. Both the Noctes Ambrosianae and Don Juan committed themselves to a fearless wit on the events of the day, a cynical commentary on European history since 1789. In the eleventh canto of Don Juan, the first canto set entirely in Britain, Byron wrote of the changes that had overtaken the ‘World’ since Waterloo: A silent change dissolves the glittering mass. Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings, And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings. Where is Napoleon the Grand? God knows: Where little Castlereagh? The devil can tell: Where Grattan, Curran, Sheridan, all those Who bound the bar or senate in their spell? Where is the unhappy Queen with all her woes? And where the Daughter, whom the Isles loved well? Where are those martyred Saints the Five per Cents? And where, oh where the devil are the Rents? Where’s Brummell? Dished. Where’s Long Pole Wellesley? Diddled. Where’s Whitbread? Romilly? Where’s George the Third? … Where are the Grenvilles? Turned as usual. Where My friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were … Talk not of seventy years as age! In seven I have seen more changes, down from monarchs to The humblest individual under heaven,
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Than might suffice a moderate century through. I knew that nought was lasting, but now even Change grows too changeable, without being new. Nought’s permanent among the human race, Except the Whigs not getting into place.124
There is very little of the Enlightenment Whig theory of progress here. Byron may have hoped to see the Greeks liberated, but in his lifetime he never saw the Whigs in government for more than one brief year of power. If Thomas Moore’s biography of Sheridan sighed for the parliamentary Whigs’ eloquence of the 1790s, his homage to Byron, the Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, signaled the end of the ideological dominance of public opinion by scientific Whiggism. As the era of blue books began, the Edinburgh Review economists finally saw their programme brought forth as legislation. Epic poetry became the condition-of-England novel, and the serial writers of cheap literature more powerful than any government-backed broadsheets. The literary heir to Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review turned out to be Charles Dickens, of whom Maginn said, ‘Boz is just as much a Whig as he is a giraffe’.125 The Whiggism of the most influential writer of the Victorian era was neither Athenian nor metaphysical but only Pickwickian and sentimental.
NOTES
Introduction 1.
See W. Cobbett’s remarks on the ‘professors of Whiggism’, in ‘Liberty of the Press’, Political Register, 10:5 (2 August 1806), cols 161–3 ‘Mr. Pitt himself was a Whig. In fact, there has been no Tory principle existing among public men for the last seventy years’ (col. 161). For a careful discussion of ‘Tory’, see J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (1993; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 2. J. C. D. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688–1832’, Historical Journal, 23:2 ( June 1980), p. 314. H. T. Dickinson writes of the political situation during the 1750s to the 1780s: ‘almost all the prominent, front-bench politicians regarded themselves as Whigs whether they were in office or in opposition’ (‘Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century’, in J. Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 28–44, p. 28). 3. See F. O’Gorman, ‘Party in the Later Eighteenth Century’, in Cannon, The Whig Ascendancy, pp. 77–93. 4. See J. R. McQuiston, ‘Rose and Canning in Opposition, 1806–1807’, Historical Journal, 14:3 (September 1971), pp. 503–27; S. M. Lee, ‘“A New Language in Politicks”’: George Canning and the Idea of Opposition, 1801–1807’, History, 83:271 ( July 1998), pp. 472–96. 5. J. G. Lockhart, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, 10 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1902), vol. 2, pp. 201–2; The Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1884), p. 165. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott (1902), vol. 2, p. 194. 6. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott (1902), vol. 2, p. 194; letter from William Dundas dated 25 April 1818. 7. W. Scott, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932), vol. 1, p. 276; 11 February 1806, to Lord Dalkeith. The official charter is dated 18 February 1806 (NLS MSS CH60). 8. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 1, p. 276; 11 February 1806, to Lord Dalkeith. 9. See Later Correspondence of George III, ed. A. Aspinall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. 4, pp. xxvi–xxxi, 382 (Cabinet Minute, 24 January 1806). 10. George Canning (1770–1827). A future prime minister (1827), he was known as a brilliant orator and writer (along with Ellis) of the Anti-Jacobin (1797–8). For Canning’s own uncertain position at this time amid the flux of ‘the perplexed & unsatisfactory state of things’, see Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, pp. 389–90n. – 175 –
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Notes to pages 5–8
11. NLS 865/36; 29 January 1806. R. G. Thorne (ed.), History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790–1820, 5 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), vol. 5, p. 315. 12. NLS MS 865/36; 29 January 1806. 13. Ibid. 14. See M. Fry, The Dundas Despotism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 23–8. 15. Grenville appears to have seen the King twice that day, after having negotiated with lists of names since 25 January, and Fox wrote ‘the thing is settled’ late that afternoon (Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, p. 388n). Minor appointments continued to be finalized over the following week. 16. See a letter by Moira written at Edinburgh on Thursday 30 January 1806, saying that he expected to arrive in London on Sunday 2 February or Monday 3 February, which gives some indication of travel times between Edinburgh and London (Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales, ed. A. Aspinall, 5 vols (London: Cassell, 1971), vol. 5, p. 312; to Colonel McMahon). For Grenville’s not unfriendly attitude towards the ‘Scotch party’ during the negotiations for office, see Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, p. 389n. 17. See Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 1, p. 271; 19 April 1805, to Lady Charlotte Rawdon. 18. NAS GD 51/1/195/6; 4 February 1806. 19. See P. Jupp, Lord Grenville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). 20. NAS GD 51/1/195/11; 12 February 1806. 21. NAS GD 51/1/195/14; 13 February 1806. 22. NLS MS 865/54–55; 14 February 1806; NLS MS 865/52; 12 February 1806. Home had perhaps heard the same account that the Whig Francis Horner in London, Jeffrey’s colleague on the Edinburgh Review, had: ‘Lord Moira has had a finger in Walter Scott’s business’ (F. Horner, The Horner Papers, ed. K. Bourne and W. B. Taylor (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 406; Horner to Dugald Stewart, 8 February 1806). 23. Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, p. 389n. NAS GD 51/1/195/8; 6 February 1806, R. Dundas to Melville. The timing of Scott’s request amid these changes is remarkable. Spencer had not supported the Foxites’ prosecution of Melville in 1806. For a sampling of the office-seeking letters sent to George III during the tumultuous six days (25–31 January 1806) after Pitt’s death, see Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, pp. 384–9. 24. NLS MS 865/48; 9 February 1806. Francis Horner, remarked, ‘The Whigs, believe me, will very soon be restored to their natural state of opposition to the Court. The surrender has been made with too good a grace, to be sincere even as a compliance with necessity, and the household will lie in wait for their opportunity’ (Horner Papers, p. 406; 8 February 1806, to Dugald Stewart). 25. For a discussion of this government’s achievements, see A. D. Harvey, ‘The Ministry of All the Talents: The Whigs in Office, February 1806 to March 1807’, Historical Journal, 15:4 (December 1972), pp. 619–48. 26. See Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, pp. 520–8. 27. A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition 1815–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 21. 28. F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 68. 29. Ibid., p. 74. 30. Ibid., pp. 23–4.
Notes to pages 9–16
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31. This is Thomas De Quincey’s retrospective justification of Toryism, at a time when it was being rehabilitated as a party distinction, in ‘A Tory’s Account of Toryism, Whiggism, and Radicalism’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 3:25 ( January 1836), pp. 1–10, p. 1. 32. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order in the Age between Revolutions’, in M. Jacob and J. Jacob (eds), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 33–57 p. 45. 33. See J. Brewer’s account of how the uncomfortable experience of being in opposition had forced the Rockinghamite Whigs to cultivate contacts outside the Westminster circle, ‘Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument’, Historical Journal, 28:1 (1975), pp. 188–201, pp. 190–1. 34. See F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, Volume 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 385. 35. Hence their bewilderment in 1812, when the Prince Regent cast them off. It was a personal blow and led to an upsurge in opposition displayed, for example, in the writings of Thomas Moore, the Examiner and Byron. 36. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution, pp. 4, 6. 37. ‘Salary to the President of the Board of Trade’, Parliamentary Debates, n. s. vol. 15, col. 145 (10 April 1826). 38. Ibid., cols 135, 137. 39. See W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 7. 40. E. Rickwood, Radical Squibs and Loyal Riposte: Satirical Pamphlets of the Regency Period 1819–1821 (Bath: Adams and Dart, 1971), p. 172. 41. Ibid., p. 192. 42. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), p. 31. 43. Pocock, ‘Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order in the Age between Revolutions’, p. 53. 44. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism’, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 215– 310, p. 236. 45. Ibid., p. 238. 46. J. A. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Governmental Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Frank Cass, 1972), pp. 2, 3. 47. A. Beattie (ed.), English Party Politics, Volume 1: 1600–1906 (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1970), p. 2. 48. J. Carswell, The Old Cause: Three Biographical Studies in Whiggism (London: Cresset Press, 1954), p. 5. Carswell dates the use of ‘opposition’ in this way from the Walpole years (p. 21). 49. ‘The Warder. No. IV’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 6:34 ( January 1820), pp. 448–64, p. 455. 50. Pocock, ‘Radical Criticisms of the Whig Order’, p. 45.
1 1802–7 The Intellectual Ascendancy of Whiggism 1. 2.
W. Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, Table-Talk (1821; London: Dent, 1932), vol. 8, pp. 50–9, p. 59. [probably G. Croly], ‘Public Affairs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 13:74 (March 1823), pp. 358–61, p. 359.
178 3.
4.
5. 6.
7.
8. 9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17.
18.
19.
Notes to pages 16–20 See D. Womersley (ed.), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’ (Cranbury, N.J.: Rosemount, 2005); A. Patterson, Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). For the discrepancies between Pitt and his image, and his posthumous idealization by Tory writers, see Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, pp. 83–4, 133–4; [T. B. Macaulay], ‘The Present Administration’, Edinburgh Review, 46:91 (June 1827), pp. 245–67, pp. 249–50. D. Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1742), ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty, 1985), p. 71. J. Mori, ‘The Political Theory of William Pitt the Younger’, History, 83:270 (April 1998), pp. 234–48, p. 240. Sacks notes that [b]efore 1819, few among the right-wing newspapers, journals and periodicals openly avowed themselves “Tory”’ (Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 66). See M. Ledger-Lomas, ‘The Character of Pitt the Younger and Party Politics, 1830– 1860’, Historical Journal, 47:3 (2004), pp. 641–61; J. J. Sack, ‘The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts Its Past, 1806–1829’, Historical Journal, 30:3 (1987), pp. 623–40. See [F. Jeffrey], ‘Millar’s View of the English Government’, Edinburgh Review, 3:5 (October 1803), pp. 154–81. H. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, 2 vols (Edinburgh: A and C Black, 1852), vol. 1, p. 45. H. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1856), p. 175. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, p. 97. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne (1780–1863) was sent by his father to Edinburgh rather than Oxford, on the advice of Jeremy Bentham. See K. Bourne, Palmerston: the Early Years 1784–1841 (London: Allen Lane, 1982), pp. 11, 27. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, pp. 80, 187, 187. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, p. 102. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Mounier De L’Influence des Philosophes’, Edinburgh Review, 1:1 (October 1802), pp. 1–18, p. 8. The dinner took place 7 August 1800 and included George Hammond (Foreign UnderSecretary), George Canning, George Ellis and John Hookham Frere – the inclusion of the last three indicates that this would have been very much a ‘literary’ gathering of those interested in putting the government’s case forward. William Windham was Secretary at War (1794–1801) at the same time as Henry Dundas was Secretary for War, a position Pitt created in 1794 for Dundas, who was the more energetic administrator. Windham was respected for his literary and cultural pursuits W. Windham, The Windham Papers, ed. Earl of Rosebery (Boston, MA.: Small, Maynard, 1913), vol. 2, p. 159). See W. Cobbett, ‘Letter to the Rt. Hon. Wm. Pitt’, Political Register, 6:13 (29 September 1804), cols 449–60. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press c. 1780–1850 (London: Home & Van Thal, 1949), p. 154. On Cobbett’s emergence as possibly the most important opposition writer from 1803 to the end of Pitt’s second government in 1806, see I. Asquith, ‘The Whig Party and the Press in the early Nineteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 49:120 (November 1976), pp. 279–80. J. Cutmore judges that this article is one of three significant articles that were ‘way points in the formation of the Quarterly Review’, in his Contributors to the Quarterly Review: A History, 1809–25 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p. 7.
Notes to pages 20–4
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20. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, Edinburgh Review, 10:20 ( July 1807), pp. 386– 421, pp. 387, 387. 21. Windham Papers, vol. 2, p. 180. 22. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Southey’s Thalaba’, Edinburgh Review, 1:1 (October 1802) , pp. 63–83, p. 66. Readers of the Edinburgh Review would have been familiar with this progressive but not democratic point of view from reading Origin of the Distinctions of Rank (1771) by John Millar (1735–1801). 23. [ Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, Edinburgh Review, 10:20 ( July 1807), p. 387. 24. J. J. Sack calls Cobbett’s early writings ‘what passed for Pittite Toryism in the last hours of the eighteenth century’ (From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 87). 25. [ Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, p. 418. 26. Ibid., p. 418. L. Namier succinctly describes government contracts as ‘the chief financial transaction in an age when joint-stock companies were few’ and calls baronetcies ‘the crest over the profits’ (The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1957), pp. 46, 47). For a discussion of the myth of the ‘independent’ member, see D. Jarrett, ‘The Myth of “Patriotism” in Eighteenth-Century English Politics’, in J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (eds), Britain and the Netherlands (The Hague: Marinus Nijhoff, 1975), vol. 5, pp. 120–40. 27. With the Reform Bill of 1832, the electorate increased by 45%, adding 200,000 to 439,200 voters, going from representing 3.2% to 4.7% of the total population. F. O’Gorman offers many useful details in his Voters, Patrons, and Parties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 28. J. Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815 (London: Faber & Faber, 1957), pp. 66–7; H. R. V. Fox, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party 1807–1821, ed. Lord Stavordale (London: John Murray, 1905), vol.1, p. 387. S. Jones, ‘Hazlitt, Cobbett, and the Edinburgh Review’, Neophilologus, 53:1 ( January 1969), pp. 69–76, p. 74. 29. B. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: the Edinburgh Review 1802– 1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 42. 30. ‘Finance Committee’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 9, cols 702, 703 (30 June 1807); Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, p. 598; 1 July 1807. 31. ‘Finance Committee’, col. 698. 32. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 209. The Courier strategically separated itself from the Whig government as it foundered over Catholic Emancipation in the spring of 1807 and defected to the Tories. 33. ‘Finance Committee’, col. 702; J. Veitch, Memoir of Dugald Stewart in D. Stewart, Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. W. Hamilton (1854–60; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), vol. 10, p. lxxix. 34. ‘Finance Committee’, col. 703. Stewart had also accompanied Lord Lauderdale to France that year in the Foxites’ attempt to negotiate with Napoleon for an end to the war (Journal of Elizabeth, Lady Holland, ed. Earl of Ilchester (London: Longmans, 1908), vol. 2, p. 172; 2 August 1806). 35. [E. Burke], An Appeal from the Old Whigs to the New Whigs (London: J. Dodsley, 1791), p. 119. 36. [ Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, p. 421. 37. Ibid., p. 399. 38. Ibid., p. 406. This is the more curious, in that Jeffrey had already argued three months earlier, when the Whigs were still in power, that post-1789 France was a meritocracy
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Notes to pages 24–6 unlike Britain, where it was not birth (as in pre-revolutionary Europe) but party that excluded much useful talent from office: Here, then is one great source of exclusion, which operates, with us, far more extensively than in any other country. Those who are in possession of power, and entitled to nominate to the great and influencing employments in the government, cannot be expected to bestow them on their political enemies; and thus one third part of the whole population of the country, comprehending perhaps a still larger proportion of its talent, is lost to the public service, and as completely proscribed and excluded as the plebeian classes are in the old aristocratical governments of the Continent. ‘Dangers of the Country’, Edinburgh Review, 10:19 (April 1807), pp. 1–27, p. 14.
39. [ Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, pp. 407, 408. 40. Edmund Burke argued in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), that ‘Influence’ was the great malignancy in the Commons. Cobbett in 1810 declared that everything Jeffrey had to say about the stability provided by Whigs had already been said by William Paley in his Moral Philosophy (Bk. 6, ch. 7). See W. Cobbett, ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, Political Register, 17:14 (7 April 1810), pp. 529–41; Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (London: R. Faulder, 1785), p. 488. Cobbett calls Jeffrey’s remarks ‘a justification of a system of “influential” (in the Scottish idiom, but which in English, means, corrupt) representation’ (p. 530). Olivia Smith traces the influence of Burke on Cobbett, through Windham, in The Politics of Language 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 41. [ Jeffrey], ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, p. 417. R. G. Thorne says that the Commons contained ‘many more Members who might be described as self-made in this period than in the preceding one’ (‘Introductory Survey’, The House of Commons 1790–1820, vol. 1, p. 290). 42. W. Cobbett, ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, Political Register, 12:16 (17 October 1807), cols 577–94, col. 578; W. Cobbett, ‘Summary of Politics: Catholic Bill’, Political Register, 11:12 (21 March 1807), col. 440. 43. [D. Buchanan], ‘Lord Henry Petty’s Plan of Finance’, Edinburgh Review, 10:19 (April 1807), pp. 72–85. 44. Cobbett, ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, col. 578. 45. See Thorne, House of Commons 1790–1820, vol. 4, p. 238. 46. See ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, cols 578–80; W. Cobbett, ‘Letter to the Rt. Hon. Wm. Pitt’, Political Register, 6:13 (29 September 1804), cols 449–60. 47. Cobbett, ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, col. 581. 48. Ibid., col. 582. 49. See Biographia Literaria, ch. 10, where Coleridge writes, ‘I am not indeed silly enough to take, as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. FOX’s assertion that the late war (I trust the epithet is not prematurely applied) was a war produced by the MORNING POST; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb. As little do I regard the circumstance, that I was a specified object of Buonaparte’s resentment during my residence in Italy in consequence of those essays in the Morning Post
Notes to pages 26–9
50. 51. 52.
53.
54. 55.
56.
57. 58. 59. 60.
61. 62. 63.
64.
65. 66.
181
during the peace of Amiens’ (S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engel and W. J. Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 215–16. ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, col. 593. Cobbett was self-admittedly prejudiced against Scotland. See ‘Preface’, Cobbett’s Tour in Scotland, ed. D. Green (1832; Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984). Coincidentally, the Edinburgh Review at this time was facing the possibility that its own tenure might be coming to an end, as Longman and Constable fought over the proprietorship of the review (Horner, The Horner Papers), pp. 451–2, 456–8; 6 April, 28 May 1807, to Francis Jeffrey). Horner Papers, p. 417; 19 May 1806, to Mrs Dugald Stewart; A Short History of a Late Short Administration (London: James Ridgway, 1807). The pamphlet also included advertisements for key speeches made by Grey, Petty, Whitbread, and Grenville. Horner Papers, p. 474; 17 February 1808, to Francis Jeffrey. Asquith, ‘The Whig Party and the Press in the early Nineteenth Century, p. 269n. The proof of the Dissenters’ resistance is shown by the reluctance of the provincial papers to reproduce any of the material Brougham forwarded (p. 270). For Lord Holland’s suspicion that the government, in particular the Post Office under Francis Freeling, misused their monopoly of circulation of newspapers to the provinces so as to ferment ‘No Popery’ feeling, see Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 177–8. A pamphlet responding to Brougham’s Inquiry, An Answer to the Inquiry into the State of the Nation, with Strictures on the Conduct of the Present Ministry (London: J. Murray, 1806), described it as being ‘currently termed the Manifesto of the new Ministry’ (p. xv). A. D. Harvey, ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’, pp. 629–30. H. R. V. Fox, Memoirs of the Whig Party, ed. H. E. Fox (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), pp. 227, 227, 229. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 453–4; Appendix to ch. 12. See also Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), pp. 15–16. I. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–1821’, Historical Journal, 18:4 (1975), p. 710; Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 285–7. Leigh Hunt was an occasional contributor to the Traveller early in his career (N. Roe, Fiery Heart: the First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005), p. 76). Asquith, ‘The Whig Party and the Press in the early Nineteenth Century’, p. 268. Roe, Fiery Heart, p. 80. Ibid., ‘The Whig Party and the Press’, p. 265. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries: James Perry and the Morning Chronicle 1790–1821’, p. 716. Moira, who was conscious of the need to maintain a public profile and build up his own support, had been disappointed of a place in the Cabinet, and as Master of the Ordnance made personally sure that his department, which tendered military supply contracts, placed 180 ads. Asquith, ‘The Whig Party and the Press in the early Nineteenth Century’, pp. 274–5, 280. See Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, ed. J. Russell (London: Richard Bentley, 1853), vol. 2, pp. 274–5. Asquith, ‘The Whig Party and the Press in the early Nineteenth Century’, p. 278. Ibid., p. 282. W. Gifford, Autobiographical Memoir of Sir John Barrow (London: John Murray, 1847), p. 507. On the decline of pamphlet literature as a vehicle for political discussion, see Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 131.
182
Notes to pages 29–34
67. See M. Butler, ‘Culture’s Medium: The Role of the Review’, in S. Curran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 120–47. 68. E. Wasson, ‘The Whigs and the Press’, Parliamentary History, 25:1 (2006), p. 72. 69. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, pp. 131–2. 70. D. Stewart, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 238. 71. See P. Keen, in the introduction to his book The Crisis in Literature in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), for a discussion of this interesting question. 72. See the critique of Cobbett in the Courier, attributed to Coleridge, in ‘A Political Harlequin’ (8 January 1805); S. T. Coleridge, Essays on his Times, ed. D. V. Erdman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), vol. 3, p. 87. 73. See K. Gilmartin on early nineteenth-century radicalism: ‘Its characteristic print form, I would suggest, was the flexible and responsive weekly periodical rather than the programmatic volume or pamphlet, epitomized for the previous generation by Paine’s Rights of Man’ (Print Politics: the Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 75). 74. W. Cobbett, ‘What is Despotism?’, Political Register, 17:13 (31 March 1810), cols 481– 6, col. 484. As Gilmartin says, ‘The Political Register was instead firmly under the spell of things’ (Print Politics, p. 175). 75. ‘On the Catholic Petition. II’, Courier, 21 September 1811; Coleridge, Essays on His Times, vol. 2, pp. 305–8; also, vol. 1, p. clvn. 76. G. G. Leveson Gower, Lord Granville Leveson Gower: Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821, ed. C. Granville (New York: Dutton, 1916), vol. 1, p. 419; Lady Stafford to Granville Leveson Gower [n.d.]. 77. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 11; 6 February 1805, Lady Stafford to Granville Leveson Gower; vol. 1, p. 508; 29 December 1804, Lady Bessborough to Granville Leveson Gower. See Later Correspondence of George III , vol. 4, pp. 276n–7n. See W. Cobbett, ‘Family Reconciliation’, Political Register, 6:26 (29 December 1804), cols 1055–61; 7:1 (5 January 1805), cols 13–32. The price of the paper at this time was tenpence. 78. Leveson Gower: Private Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 49; 2 March 1805, Granville Leveson Gower to Lady Bessborough. See also Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855), vol. 4, p. 222; 25 December 1807, T. Grenville to Buckingham. Lord Grenville comments to his brother Thomas Grenville on an early article in the Political Register: ‘What Cobbett says of us in his last paper is just as it should be – I wonder how he has had the tact to state it precisely right’ (BL Add. MSS 41852. Grenville Papers, vol. 2 ff. 373; Letter 138, 20 December 1802).
2 1807–10 The Revival of Liberty 1. 2.
3.
W. Scott, The Vision of Don Roderick, The Complete Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (1894; Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2004), p. 192 (st. 49). It is of interest in studying periodical literature to note that the first intelligence of the armistice came, not from government messengers, but from The Times (Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, pp. 601–2n). The Dos de Mayo (2 May) rebellion was commemorated by Goya in 1814 and the declaration of this date as a public holiday celebrating national independence.
Notes to pages 34–9 4.
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.
183
See letter of Canning announcing the arrival of two deputies from the Asturias, who set off from the Spanish northwest coast in an open boat and were taken by British pirates to Falmouth (Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 5, p. 84; 8 June 1808). H. Brougham, Life and Times of Henry Brougham (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1871), vol. 1, p. 403; 4 June 1808. See also vol. 1, pp. 404–5; 2 June 1808. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Fox’s History of James II’, Edinburgh Review, 12:24 ( July 1808), pp. 271– 306, p. 273. See also Horner Papers, p. 482; 13 June 1808, to James Loch. Jeffrey, ‘Fox’s History of James II’, p. 278. See H. T. Dickinson, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Debate on the “Glorious Revolution”’, History, 61:201 (1976), pp. 28–45. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Memoires de Bailly’, Edinburgh Review, 6:11 (April 1805), 137–61, p. 137. [ Jeffrey], ‘Fox’s History of James II’, p. 274. [ Jeffrey], ‘Fox’s History of James II’, p. 275. Robert Southey writes that manufacturing innovations had ‘enabled the government to raise a revenue and support fleets and armies upon a scale which even in the last generation could not have been contemplated as possible’ (History of the Peninsular War (1821; London: John Murray, 1828), p. 71). [ Jeffrey], ‘Fox’s History of James II’, p. 276. Ibid., p. 278. [ Jeffrey], ‘Memoires de Bailly’, p. 144. [ Jeffrey], ‘Fox’s History of James II’, Edinburgh Review, 12:24 ( July 1808), p. 277. Ibid., p. 277. See Substance of a Speech Delivered in the House of Commons, by Mr. Whitbread, on Monday, Feb. 29, 1808 (London: J. Ridgway, 1808). ‘Mediation of Russia and Austria’, Parliamentary Debates, vol.10, cols 801–70 (29 February 1808). S. Whitbread, A Letter from Mr. Whitbread to Lord Holland, on the Present Situation of Spain (London: J. Ridgway, 1808), p. 4. Ibid., p. 8. [H. Brougham], ‘Mr Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’ Edinburgh Review, 12:24 ( July 1808), pp. 433–48, pp. 435, 437, 438. Ibid , p. 439. Ibid., p. 440. There are a number of accounts of this episode: Cutmore provides an authoritative overview in Contributors to the Quarterly Review, ch. 1. [F. Jeffrey and H. Brougham], ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain’, Edinburgh Review, 13:15 (October 1808), pp.215–34, p. 219. Ibid., p. 225. See also the dig at George III’s contradictory position in ‘Mr Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’, p. 435. [ Jeffrey and Brougham], ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the French Usurpation of Spain’, p. 224. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 220. A. Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1927), p. 19. Annual Register (London: W. Otridge, 1798) part 2, p. 6. Vassall Fox, Further Memoirs of the Whig Party 1807–1821, p. 387. Letters of Sir Walter Scott vol. 1, p. 350; 5 February 1808, to Lady Abercorn. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Scott’s Marmion: a Poem’, Edinburgh Review, 12:23 (April 1808), pp. 1–35, p. 35. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 3, p. 58.
184
Notes to pages 39–43
34. [H. Brougham], ‘Expedition against Copenhagen’, Edinburgh Review, 13:26 ( January 1809), pp. 488–99. 35. For a detailed account of background to the writing of the Convention of Cintra, see The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 193–217. Owen and Smyser remark that Wordsworth’s ‘feelings on Peninsular affairs were shared by contemporary Opposition journalists’. The text of the Convention itself is included in an appendix. 36. For evidence that Canning wrote for the Courier (and the Morning Post), see Lord Leveson Gower, Private Correspondence 1781 to 1821, vol. 2, p. 321; 22 August 1808. After the Canning-Castlereagh duel in 1809, when the Courier turned against Canning, Daniel Stuart retained his regard for Canning and remonstrated with T. G. Street about the paper’s preference for Castlereagh. See Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 207–9. 37. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, vol. 1, pp. 224, 226. 38. See also the hopeful poems he wrote during the process of composing this tract in W. Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. C. H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 52–3. 39. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, vol. 1, pp. 226, 227. 40. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 228. 41. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 229. See P. Manning, ‘The White Doe of Rylestone, The Convention of Cintra, and the History of a Career’, in Reading Romantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 165–94, which discusses how Wordsworth may have delayed publishing The White Doe, with its tale of the Catholic uprising of 1569, in the context of 1808. 42. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 235. 43. Ibid., vol.1, p. 237. 44. Ibid., vol.1, p. 237. Southey later wrote of the ‘mere political interest’ that previous Continental alliances had carried, compared to the ‘higher and holier character’ of the Spanish appeal for help: not since the early days of the French revolution, ‘had the heart of England been affected with so generous and universal a joy’ (History of the Peninsular War, p. 444). 45. For one contemporary account by a government insider of the revelations about the settlement as they emerged, see Buckingham and Chandos, Memoir of the Court and Cabinets of George III, vol. 4, pp. 246–72. See also Supplementary Despatches, Correspondence, and Memoranda of Field Marshall Arthur, Duke of Wellington (London: John Murray, 1860), vol. 6. 46. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, vol. 1, pp. 261–2. Southey employs a similar vocabulary, ‘it was for England and for Europe; for literature and for liberty’ (History of the Peninsular War, p. 2). 47. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, vol.1, pp. 280, 280. 48. Ibid., vol.1, p. 283. 49. Ibid., vol.1, p. 281. 50. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 290. 51. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 291. 52. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 309. 53. Ibid., vol.1, p. 331. For some of the Spanish background, see T. Duggett, ‘Wordsworth’s Gothic Politics and The Convention of Cintra’, Review of English Studies, 58:234 (2007), pp. 186–211. 54. Wordsworth, Convention of Cintra, vol. 1, p. 332. 55. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 334, 335.
Notes to pages 43–7
185
56. H. C. Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. T. Sadler (London: Macmillan, 1872), vol. 1, p. 152. 57. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 30. [H. C. Robinson], ‘The Spanish Revolution’, London Review, 2:4 (November 1809), p. 232. 58. Ibid., pp. 234, 251. However, he says that Wordsworth’s pamphlet cannot achieve comparable popularity because of Burke’s greater ability to write colloquially (p. 266). 59. Ibid., pp. 251, 252, 252. 60. ‘Concerning the relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, to each other, and to the common enemy, at this crisis; and specifically as affected by the Convention of Cintra, etc’. The first part, published in the Courier (27 December 1808) had appeared under the title ‘Concerning the convention of Cintra, in relation to the principles by which the independence of nations must be preserved or recovered’ (Wordsworth, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, p. 372). 61. [Robinson], ‘The Spanish Revolution’, p. 256. 62. Ibid., pp. 261, 259. 63. Edinburgh Annual Register (Edinburgh: J. Ballantyne, 1810), vol. 1, p. 368 (1808). 64. R. Southey, Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. J. W. Warter (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), vol. 2, p. 107, 107–8; to Lieutenant Southey, 12 November 1808. 65. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 110; to Dr H. H. Southey, 14 November 1808. 66. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 2, p. 121; 2 November 1808, to George Ellis. 67. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 106–7; [25 October 1808], to William Gifford. The letter to Gifford takes up ten printed pages. In a letter to Thomas Scott, his brother, Scott confirms that the editorship of the Quarterly Review had been offered first to him (vol.2, p. 130; [19 November 1808]). 68. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 108; [25 October 1808], to William Gifford. 69. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 109[ 25 October 1808], to William Gifford. 70. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 124; 2 November 1808, to John Murray; Ibid., vol. 2, p. 126; [15 November 1808], to John Murray. 71. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 128; 18 November 1808, to George Ellis. 72. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 124; 2 November 1808, to John Murray. 73. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 127; 18 November 1808, to George Ellis. For a discussion of the political background, see also B. Hilton, ‘“Sardonic Grins” and “Paranoid Politics”: Religion, Economics, and Public Policy in the Quarterly Review’, in J. Cutmore (ed.), Conservatism and the Quarterly Review (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), pp. 41–60. 74. ‘Vote of Thanks “Battle of Corunna”’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 12, col. 134 (25 January 1809). 75. Ibid., col. 136. 76. Ibid., col. 138 (25 January 1809). It is of interest to note Moore’s relationship with Canning and Castlereagh: Canning seems to have been the one who sent Sir Hew Dalrymple to Spain in 1808 and would not hear of sending Moore, mainly because he blamed Moore for the failure in Sweden a few months earlier, while Castlereagh would have preferred to send Wellesley. It was Castlereagh who supported Wellesley during the inquiry into Cintra and after Cintra was forced to appoint Moore in September 1808 as commander-in-chief. Castlereagh was also susceptible to excessive optimism about Spain and retrospectively realized that the more measured responses of Moore and the other generals were correct (Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 5, p. 379; 1 October 1809). J. F. Maurice goes so far as to argue in Diary of Sir John Moore (London: Edward Arnold,
186
77.
78.
79. 80. 81.
82. 83.
84. 85. 86. 87. 88.
89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.
Notes to pages 47–50 1904), that the Canning-Castlereagh duel was fought over the upholding of Moore’s reputation (vol. 2, pp. 394–5), but Castlereagh’s letter to George III cites additional grounds. See Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review, p. 104. Gifford had at first asked Southey to write this reply to ‘Don Pedro Cevallos’, but it was soon realized that Southey’s sympathies with the Spaniards veered dangerously toward the jacobin (p. 31). ‘Sir John Moore’s Dispatches’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 12, cols 208–9 (31 January 1809). See Spencer Perceval’s account of Canning’s speech in his report to George III (Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 5, p. 210; 25 February 1809. ‘Campaign in Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 12, col. 1096 (24 February 1809). ‘Campaign in Spain and Portugal’, vol. 12, cols 640–2. Ibid., vol. 12, cols 799–1802 (24 March 1809; cols 1805–9 (24 March 1809).) ‘Papers Relating to Spain and Portugal, presented 11 April 1809’, Parliamentary Papers, vol. 14, col. 11 (11 April 1809); 6 (9 December 1808).The letters are collected in an appendix, ‘Appendix, – No. VII. ‘Papers relating to the war in Spain and Portugal’ (1 March 1809). Parliamentary Debates, vol.13, pp. xxcx–ccclxxxiv. They were also printed by the Courier and The Times that same month. ‘Campaign in Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, col. 26 (14 April 1809). See Lord Granville Leveson Gower: Private Correspondence, for Lady Bessborough’s remarks on hearing that Frere was being sent to Spain in October 1808: ‘a man of Genius, but without judgement’ (vol. 2, p. 335). In 1804, the Duke of Northumberland, remarking Britain’s weakness in dealing with foreign powers, cited two things: their knowledge of George III’s madness and Frere’s common-law wife – the Spanish prime minister had cautioned Frere that she would ‘cause a breach between the two Courts, besides giving intelligence to France of every transaction’ (Correspondence of George, Prince of Wales 1770–1812, ed. A. Aspinall (London: Cassell, 1968), vol. 5, p. 67). ‘Earl Grey’s Motion Respecting the Campaign in Spain and Portugal’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, cols 121–50 (21 April 1809). Ibid., vol. 14, cols 168, 172 (21 April 1809). ‘Campaign in Spain – Sir John Moore and Mr. Frere’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, pp. 262–6 (27 April 1809). ‘M. Charmilly’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, col. 290 (1 May 1809). ‘Papers Relating to Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, cols 400–5 (5 May 1809); ‘Portuguese Regency’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, col. 291 (1 May 1809); ‘Earl Temple’s Motion Respecting the Conduct of Affairs in Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, cols 439–82 (9 May 1809). ‘Earl Temple’s Motion Respecting the Conduct of Affairs in Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 14, cols 439, 442 (9 May 1809). Ibid., vol. 14, cols 446, 449 (9 May 1809). Ibid., vol. 14, cols 450, 450, 451 (9 May 1809). Ibid., vol. 14, cols 453, 453, 464 (9 May 1809). Ibid., vol. 14, cols 474, 474, 476, 474 (9 May 1809). ‘Postscript on Sir John Moore’s Letters’, Convention of Cintra, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, pp. 357, 365. [G. Ellis and G. Canning], ‘Affairs d’ Espagne’, Quarterly Review, 1:1 (February 1809), pp. 1–19, p. 18. [G. Ellis and G. Canning], ‘Spanish Affairs’, Quarterly Review, 2:3 (August 1809), pp. 203–34; Cutmore, Contributions to the Quarterly Review, p. 108.
Notes to pages 50–5
187
97. [Ellis and Canning], ‘Spanish Affairs’, p. 229. 98. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Scott’s Lady of the Lake’, Edinburgh Review, 16:32 (August 1810), pp. 263– 93, p. 263. 99. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Scott’s Vision of Don Roderick’, Edinburgh Review, 18:36 (August 1811), pp. 379–92, p. 379. 100. Ibid., pp. 380, 380, 380. 101. Ibid., p. 382. 102. Ibid., p. 384n. 103. Ibid., p. 389–90. 104. Ibid., pp. 390, 390. 105. Ibid., p. 390. 106. Ibid., p. 390, 390, 391. 107. Cutmore cites this article as the most inflammatory of the three Edinburgh Review articles that signpost the setting-up of the Quarterly Review (Contributors to the Quarterly Review, ch. 1). 108. Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 5, p. 379; 1 October 1809. In reply the king remarked that he himself had not questioned ‘the correctness of the representations made by the late Sir John Moore which subsequent experience has too fully confirmed’ (vol. 5, p. 388; 3 October 1809). 109. G. G. Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1973), vol. 1, p. 219; 11 August 1809, to Mrs Catherine Gordon Byron. 110. G. G. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), vol. 2, p. 266. 111. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto 1, ll. 222–4 (st. 16); Complete Poetical Works, vol.2, pp. 16–17. 112. Ibid., Canto 1, ll. 288–96 (st. 26, b, c, d); Complete Poetical Works, vol. 2, p. 20. 113. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 2, pp. 274–5. 114. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 19, st. a. 115. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 4n. 116. C. Wolfe and F. Wrangham, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, in The Burial of Sir John Moore, and other poems, intro. D. H. Reiman (New York: Garland Press, 1979), p. vi. See Edinburgh Annual Register (1808), p. 458. 117. See T. Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. E. J. Lovell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 114–16; 2 January 1822. It was originally published in the Newry Telegraph (19 April 1817) in an issue containing a review of Manfred sent by John Murray to Byron in October 1817. See L. Pratt, ‘Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and figurations of Iberia. Romanticism on the Net, 24 (November 2001) .
3 1816–20 The Liberty of the Press and Literary Language for the People 1. 2.
W. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1932), vol. 11, p. 141. Smith, The Politics of Language 1791–1819, p. 63.
188 3. 4.
5. 6. 7.
8. 9. 10.
11. 12.
13. 14. 15. 16.
17. 18. 19. 20. 21.
22.
Notes to pages 55–9 ‘Debate in the Commons on the Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill’, Parliamentary History of England (London: Longman, 1818), vol. 31, cols 498–9; 16 May 1794. G. A. Cranfield in The Press and Society (London: Longman, 1978) remarks that ‘even Paine had been too abstract and doctinaire to have much popular appeal’ (p. 91) and notes that Cobbett, instead of talking about ‘natural rights’, simply listed all the taxes paid by the poor. P. Harling, ‘The Law of Libel and the Limits of Repression, 1790–1832’, Historical Journal, 44:1 (2001), pp. 107–34, p. 124. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, pp. 256, 624. E. P. Thompson, ‘Wordsworth’s Crisis’, The Romantics: English in a Revolutionary Age (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1997), pp. 88, 85. Thompson suggests that 1793–94 represents the height of Wordsworth’s infatuation with Godwin and that 1795, when he finally met the writer of Political Justice, marked its sudden end. M. Roberts, The History of the Whig Party 1807–1812 (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 177. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 1, p. 127;17 January 1802, to Lady Anne Hamilton. See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, M. Butler, Romantics, Revolutionaries, and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and J. Chandler, England in 1819 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Smith, The Politics of Language, p. 158. In 1793, the government controlled eight papers, whereas the opposition managed only four, although by this time the Morning Chronicle under James Perry had gone over to the Whigs (Cranfield, The Press and Society, p. 79). The History of The Times, Volume 1: ‘The Thunderer’ in the Making 1785–1841 (London: Office of The Times, Printing House Square, 1935), p. 20. Aspinall, Politics and the Press; History of The Times, pp. 52–60. History of The Times, p. 63. ‘The Use of the Press by Government: 1. Charles Stuart to Dundas, 1793’ in History of The Times, p. 451; Appendix I. 27 October 1793. Stuart also argues here that the French did the same: ‘Whenever I hear of a French victory, I in general ascribe it to their artful circulation of Journals and Bulletin’s throughout every municipality in every department’. History of The Times, p. 121. Ibid., pp. 123, 125. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., pp. 126–7. Ibid., pp. 98–100. See ‘A Battle with the Post Office,’ in Appendix II, where a Memorial from John Walter II outlines the difficulties with the Post Office and its monopoly over foreign intelligence, the fees exacted, and the non-delivery of items addressed to him, dated 10 September 1808, pp. 479–81. A detailed public account is given in The Times, 27 July 1807. From this it would appear that Walter had organized his own foreign intelligence delivery service since 1805. History of The Times, p. 89; from L. Hunt, Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 3 vols (New York: Dutton, 1903), vol. 1, p. 172.
Notes to pages 59–63
189
23. M. Eberle-Sinatra, Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 12. 24. History of The Times, p. 94. Hunt wrote the notices for 7, 14 August 1807. See Roe, Fiery Heart, p. 78. Whatever Hunt’s later political loyalties, it is explicitly recorded that he personally thanked Addington (Roe, Fiery Heart, p. 76; Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 198–9). Barron Field also later wrote for the Quarterly Review (Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review 1809–25, pp. 40, 93). 25. Roe, Fiery Heart, pp. 81–2; Hunt, Autobiography, vol.1, p. 173. 26. History of The Times, pp. 89, 90. 27. Ibid., pp. 93–4. The letter is labelled as ‘[Undated but probably June 26, 1807]’. 28. Ibid., pp. 100, 103. Walter had arranged a cryptic code system by which he received correspondence from abroad through mail delivered to commercial houses, but his foreign newspapers were more easily spotted by officials. For an account of Hammond’s literary and political connections, see Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review 1809–25, p. 8. 29. The Windham Papers, vol. 2 , p. 288; 10 February 1806. When Cobbett’s protests against Freeling failed, he wrote to Windham again, describing Freeling as ‘the oppressor of myself and of every man connected with the press and not of the Pitt faction or race’ (vol. 2, p. 297; 23 February 1806). 30. See The Times, 9 May 1807; see also 12 May, 3 July 1807. 31. History of The Times, p. 105. 32. L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers (London: John Murray, 1884) vol. 1, p. 21. John Walter II to John Wilson Croker (Secretary to the Admiralty). 33. History of The Times, p. 108. Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, p. 370. See Castlereagh to the King, 2 December 1805; vol. 4, pp. 601–2n, Herbert Taylor (the King’s private secretary) to George Canning, 17 July 1807. 34. History of The Times, p. 139; 19 July 1807. 35. Ibid., p. 143. 36. Ibid., p. 144. 37. Ibid., p. 147. 38. However Perry’s career, like Walter’s, illustrates the steadily increasing profitability of newspaper advertising after 1797, rising from £3,000 to over, £12,000 in less than twenty years (Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, pp. 706–7). 39. D. Gray, Spencer Perceval: the Evangelical Prime Minister 1762–1812 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), p. 132; 26 October 1808. 40. Smith, Politics of Language, p. 162. 41. W. Cobbett, ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland’, Political Register, 31:18 (2 November 1816), cols 545–81, cols 545, 546. 42. See L. Nattress, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 30. 43. For an analysis of this change, see St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, ch. 6–7. 44. W. Cobbett, ‘Mr. Cobbett’s Taking Leave of His Country Men’, supplement to Political Register (28 March 1817), col. 7. 45. W. Cobbett, ‘Letter to Mr Benbow’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlet, 32:34 (29 November 1817), cols 1060–88, col. 1063.
190
Notes to pages 63–8
46. W. Cobbett, ‘Publisher’s Preface’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlet, 32:34 (29 November 1817), cols 1057–60. 47. Cobbett, ‘Letter to Mr Benbow’, col. 1064. 48. Ibid., col. 1065. 49. Ibid., col. 1077. 50. Ibid., cols 1085–6. See ‘Habeus Corpus Suspension Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 35, cols 551–88 (24 February 1817). 51. W. Cobbett, ‘To Mr Benbow. Letter II’, Cobbett’s Weekly Pamphlet, 32:35 (6 December 1817), cols 1089–119. col. 1090. 52. Cobbett, ‘Letter to Mr Benbow. Letter II’, col. 1098. 53. Ibid., cols 1100–1. 54. Ibid., cols 1104, 1106. 55. Ibid., col. 1115. 56. William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in general; but more especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough Boys (1819), 2nd edn (1823), ed. R. Burchfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 74. 57. Ibid., p. 59. 58. Cobbett, ‘To the Journeymen’, col. 561. 59. Ibid., cols 561–2. 60. Ibid., cols 563–4. 61. Aspinall recounts anecdotes of Cobbett’s phenomenal sales throughout the countryside: when he lowered his price to twopence, the Pamphlet sold over forty thousand copies a week: in Hull, a grocer was said to have sold 1,500 weekly at three guineas’ profit per week (Politics and the Press, pp. 31, 31n). 62. See J. Ann Hone’s account of how Richard Carlile, the deistic publisher who was convicted a couple of years later, in October 1819, for publishing Paine’s Age of Reason, carried on publishing through the help of volunteers from throughout the country and made enough from increased sales to cover penalties amounting to £3,500. During his trial, he ‘managed to incorporate into his defence large extracts from the Age of Reason’ – as Hone says, ‘All trials had educative potential and the radicals knew this’ (For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 337). See also McCalman, Radical Underworld. 63. [R. Southey], ‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’, Quarterly Review, 16:32 ( January 1817), pp. 511–52, pp. 511–12. 64. Ibid., p. 513. 65. Ibid., pp. 534, 537–8. 66. [R. Southey], ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Quarterly Review, 16:31 (October 1816), pp. 225–78, pp. 273, 274. But The Politics of Language argues that the radical writers were overshadowed by an infinitely greater amount of abuse from the literary classes (p. 251). And H. T. Dickinson writes, During the political crisis of the 1790s there is more certain evidence that conservative propaganda was more substantial than that disseminated by the radicals. Conservative newspapers and periodicals undoubtedly outnumbered and outsold those produced by the radicals and they remained active for much longer periods (The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 272).
Notes to pages 68–71
67.
68. 69. 70.
71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.
77. 78. 79.
80. 81. 82. 83.
84.
191
This shows one of the differences between the 1790s and 1817, and why Cobbett represents a change in political journalism rather than a culmination of theoretical radicalism. On the rising sales of the Quarterly Review at the same time, see Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review 1809–25, pp. 71–3. [Southey], ‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’, p. 551. Cobbett’s sales were above that of any other paper, but the contents of other papers were also disseminated in ingenious ways: in 1812 Coleridge wrote to Southey, ‘…I have ascertained that throughout the great manufacturing Counties Whitbread’s, Burdett’s, & Waithman’s Speeches, and the leading Articles of the Statesman & the Examiner, are printed in Ballad Form, & sold at a halfpenny & a Penny each’ (S. T. Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), vol. 3, p. 410 [12 May 1812]). [Southey], ‘Rise and Progress of Popular Disaffection’, p. 513. J. Mackintosh, ‘Universal Suffrage’, Edinburgh Review, 31:61 (December 1818), pp. 165–203, pp. 171, 172. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Mr Southey and Wat Tyler’ (17, 18 March 1817), published in the Courier; reprinted in Essays on His Times, vol. 2, pp. 449–60. See also, New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. K. Curry, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 150–4. A full account of this literary battle, with its blows and counter-blows, can be found in M. Storey, Robert Southey: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 252–63. Storey, Robert Southey: A Life, p. 257. Coleridge, Courier, 17 March 1817; Essays on his Times, vol. 2, p. 454. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Mr Southey and Wat Tyler. I’, Courier, 17 March 1817; Essays on His Times, vol. 2, pp. 449–50. R. Southey, A Letter to William Smith (London: John Murray, 1817), p. 7. Coleridge, Collected Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), vol. 4, p. 713; to T. G. Street [22 March 1817]. See also Courier, 18 March 1817. Coleridge protests that most of mankind is not civilized enough to live up to the 1789 ideal of liberty and equality, and his disdain for the radical slogans of 1817 is harsh: ‘… Strip Waithman [the popular Alderman associated with radical causes] for instance of every thing that he does and talks, as a Barrel organ, without really understanding one word of what he says, one ultimate end of what he does’ (Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 714). Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 714; to T. G. Street [22 March 1817]. See Paulin, Day-Star of Liberty, pp. 49–51. W. Hone, The First Trial of William Hone, in The Three Trials of William Hone (London: William Hone, 1818), p. 7. See also Regency Radical: Selected Writing of William Hone, ed. D. A. Kent and D. R. Ewen (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003). Hone, First Trial of William Hone, p. 7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 13. Jeremy Bentham wrote a pamphlet on special juries but postponed publishing it and was to use Carlile and Hone to publish some of his more dangerous works between 1815 and 1825. His stepbrother was Charles Abbot, Speaker of the House, but his choice of publishers suggests that even all Bentham’s respectable connections would not have protected him from prosecution. See also [ J. Mill], ‘Liberty of the Press’, Edinburgh Review, 18:35 (May 1811), pp. 98–123, pp. 102–3, 108. Hone, First Trial of William Hone, pp. 18–19.
192
Notes to pages 71–3
85. Ibid., p. 32. 86. Ibid., pp. 33–5. William Hazlitt comments, too, on Canning’s protected status. See his essay on Canning in The Spirit of the Age in Complete Works, vol. 11, p. 159n. 87. W. Hone, Second Trial of William Hone, pp. 13, 15–16, in Hone, The Three Trials of William Hone. Hone had already discussed this in his publication The Reformists’ Register, 1:12 (12 April 1817), p. 366. 88. Hone, Second Trial of William Hone, pp. 27, 24–5. 89. W. Hone, Third Trial of William Hone, p. 16, in Hone, The Three Trials of William Hone. 90. Hone, Third Trial of William Hone, p. 12. See English Historical Documents 1783–1832, ed. A. Aspinall and E. A. Smith (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959), pp. 363–4; Fox’s Libel Act, 1792 (32. Geo III. c.60). This legislation represented a significant change inasmuch as a jury in the eighteenth century could only decide guilt on the fact of publication. Libel was normally decided by the judge, as a legal (not factual) matter. The jury shall not be required ‘to find the defendant or defendants guilty, merely on the proof of publication’. Not until the Libel Act of 1843 was it finally allowed that a libel case could be defended on the grounds of the truth of what had been said, a reform advocated by the Edinburgh Review. 91. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 40. See A. Downie, ‘The Growth of Government Tolerance of the Press to 1790’, in R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), Development of the English Book Trade, 1700–1899 (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1981), pp. 36–65, for an account of how the Stamp Act and government libel prosecutions had replaced the pre-publication censorship that was the rule on the Continent and in England before the expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695. However, Downie argues that the concept of press expansion as having anything to do with an English ideology of ‘Liberty’ is spurious. Early in the century, Robert Harley had used taxes to exploit the growth in Whig papers and at the same time to increase the number of government papers. See also, J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 92. ‘Lord Folkestone’s Motion Respecting Information as Ex Officio for Libel’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 548–612 (28 March 1811); ‘Lord Holland’s Motion Respecting Informations Ex Officio for Libel’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 129–74 (4 March 1811). 93. See Thorne, History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1790–1820, vol. 4, p. 17; ‘Lord Folkestone’s Motion Respecting Information as Ex Officio for Libel’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, col. 578 (28 March 1811). 94. Hone, Third Trial of William Hone, p. 38. 95. ‘The King v. William Hone’, Annual Register … for the Year 1817 (London: Baldwin, 1818), p. 174. 96. [Mill], ‘Liberty of the Press’, pp. 113, 114, 121. 97. Ibid., p. 121. 98. Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, vol. 2, p. 78. Ellenborough had been a successful prosecutor in a number of historic trials, including those of Lord George Gordon, Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, James Perry and the Hunts. 99. Coleridge, Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 814–15; 25 January 1818. P. B. S. Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. 1, p. 591; 4 January 1818. See also J. Keats, Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cam-
Notes to pages 73–7
193
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 191; to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817. 100. ‘Blasphemous Libel Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, col. 1526 (23 December 1819). 101. ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, cols 1465, 1467, 1469– 70 (22 December 1819). 102. Ibid., vol. 41, cols 1469, 1470 (22 December 1819). 103. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. E. De Selincourt, rev. M. Moorman and A. G. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. 3, p. 574; 31 December 1819, to Viscount Lowther. 104. ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, col. 1507 (22 December 1819). 105. R. Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 2000). 106. ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, col. 1507. 107. Ibid., col. 1480. 108. Ibid., Aspinall, Politics and the Press, pp. 42–3. 109. ‘Blasphemous Libel Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, col. 1535 (23 December 1819). 110. [ J. Mill], ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Edinburgh Review, 34:68 (November 1820), pp. 461– 501, p. 481. 111. ‘State and Prospects of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 8:47 (February 1821), pp. 564–70, p. 564. 112. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition 1815–1830, p. 158. 113. Letter from the King, dated 1 December 1820 (15th edn London, 1821), p. 2. 114. Ibid., pp. 27, 27. 115. The first English monarch to use print (as opposed to manuscript) by which to circulate his opinions was James I ( James VI of Scotland). J. Marshall stresses that the publication of more than thirty separate works by James was ‘not a blind stumbling into the world of new technology, but a conscious decision to make use of the press’ to reach his subjects (‘The Workes of King James VI & I and its Revolutionary Readers, 1617–1689’, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1 (2006), p. 89). 116. This use of Caroline as an oppositional political voice was not the first in her career. The history of the document recording the ‘Delicate Investigation’ of 1805–6 into her rumoured pregnancy, The Book, or the Proceedings and Correspondence upon the subject of the Inquiry into the Conduct of Her Royal Highness The Princess of Wales … (1807), is a complicated story of the political game played by the Tories while in opposition during the year of the All Talents ministry. The Book was about to be circulated in March 1807, when the ministry fell, and all of the distributed copies, which were intended to embarrass the government and the Prince of Wales and allow Caroline to be received by George III, were hastily gathered up as the Portland Tories suddenly found themselves in power. However, Spencer Perceval, who wrote her defence, was not quite able to retrieve all the copies, which were still circulating years later. The government was more or less blackmailed over it (see Letters of George IV 1812–1830, vol. 1, pp. 141–2; Peter Stuart to Col. McMahon, 15 September 1812). 117. Hone, For the Cause of Truth, p. 313. Cobbett himself was apprehensive lest his authorship should be revealed, and it was not until after his death that it was allowed to be known (R. Ingrams, The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett (London: Harper Col-
194
Notes to pages 77–82 lins, 2005), p. 184. The Queen had her portrait painted with the famous letter in her hand.
4 1816–24 The New Criticism: Apostasy and Personality 1. 2.
3. 4. 5.
6. 7. 8.
9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16. 17.
T. Moore, ‘Corruption’(1808), The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Frederick Warne, [n.d.]), p. 264 (ll. 111–14). Christabel and other Poems (May 1816) sold out three editions within the year, and the Statesman’s Manual finally came out in December, while Sibylline Leaves appeared in July 1817, the same month as Biographia Literaria. For the opinion that the Christabel review in the Edinburgh Review was written by Thomas Moore, see Elisabeth Schneider, ‘The Unknown Reviewer of Christabel: Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Tom Moore’, PMLA, ( June 1955), pp. 417–32. The evidence of Moore’s own letters (The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. W. S. Dowden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964)) suggests that although Jeffrey and Moore may have toyed with the idea, Moore finally decided against it. More recently, R. K. Lapp, seems convinced by Scheider’s argument (Contest for Cultural Authority: Hazlitt, Coleridge and the Distresses of the Regency (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999), p. 27). [W. Hazlitt], ‘Mr Coleridge’s Lay-Sermon’, Examiner, 454 (8 September 1816), pp. 571–3, p. 571. [W. Hazlitt], ‘To the Editor of the Examiner, Mr Coleridge’s Lay-Sermon’, Examiner, 472 (12 January 1817), pp. 28–9. Lapp, Contest for Cultural Authority, p. 69. Coleridge himself complained of Jeffrey’s decision to allow Hazlitt to review the Lay-Sermon, saying that the review had cut into sales of ‘the only Work (I except my newspaper contributions) which I had meant to be popular (‘To the Author of “Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk”’, Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 973. Lapp, Contest for Cultural Authority, p. 161. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Christabel’, Examiner, 440 (2 June 1816), pp. 348–9. Six months later, Coleridge, increasingly upset by Hazlitt’s attacks, wrote that Hazlitt had ‘repeatedly declared the Christabel the finest poem in the language of it’s [sic] size’ (Collected Letters, vol. 4, p. 693; 5 December 1816, to R. H. Brabant). T. Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), pp. 261–2. Edinburgh Annual Register … for 1808 (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1810). In Appendix 9 of The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), W. St Clair suggests that the sale was closer to 20,000, still a remarkable figure. Although it sold out three editions in one year ( J. R. de J. Jackson (ed.), Coleridge: the Critical Heritage, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), p. 199n). [W. Hazlitt], ‘Coleridge’s Christabel’, Edinburgh Review, 27:53 (September 1816), pp. 58–67, 59–60. Ibid., p. 67. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’, Edinburgh Review, 28:56 (August 1817), pp. 488–515, p. 509. [ J. Wilson], ‘Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 2:7 (October 1817), pp. 3–18, pp. 6, 8, 13. See Engel and Bate (eds), Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, pp. 215–7 (ch. 10). [Wilson], ‘Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria,’ p. 14. Ibid., p. 14.
Notes to pages 82–6
195
18. Ibid., p. 14. Henry Crabb Robinson wrote of Coleridge on this occasion that ‘He was like a schoolboy, who, having tried his man and been thrashed, becomes contentedly a fag’ (Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 159). 19. Coleridge, Essays on His Times, vol. 3, pp. 148–9; Courier 24 September 1817, quoting Biographia Literaria , vol. 2, p. 157 (ch. 22). 20. [ J. Wilson], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. III’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 3:13 (April 1818), pp. 75–7, p. 76. 21. Ibid., p. 76. 22. Ibid., Presumably the reference is to the lines where Leigh Hunt has William Gifford, editor of the Quarterly Review, say of the English reading public: ‘So stupid, in gen’ral, the natives are grown, / They really prefer Scotch reviews to their own’ (The Feast of the Poets (London: James Cawthorn, 1814), p. 7). Blackwood’s itself did not begin until 1817 and so was exempt from this slur. 23. [Wilson] ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. III’, p. 76. Hazlitt had begun reviewing for the Edinburgh Review sometime during 1814–15, but the editor and his contributor did not meet until 1822. Jeffrey and Hazlitt are compared as reviewers in the issue for June 1818 and were said to be ‘at present the two most eminent speculators on literary topics’ (‘Jeffrey and Hazlitt’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 3:15 ( June 1818), pp. 303–6, p. 303). 24. E. V. Lucas (ed.), Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb: Volume 2 (London: Methuen, 1903), p. 440 [note to ‘Newspapers Thirty-Five Years Ago’, pp. 220–5]. 25. [W. Hazlitt], ‘The Times Newspaper’, Examiner, 466 (1 December 1816), pp. 759–61, p. 760. A fortnight later Hazlitt wrote his famous review, with its digression on power, on Coriolanus (Examiner, 468 (15 December 1816), pp. 792–4). Stuart Semmel argues that this term did not take on this meaning until Napoleon (‘British Radicals and “Legitimacy”: Napoleon in the Mirror of History’, Past and Present, 167 (May 2000), pp. 140–75). 26. [Hazlitt], ‘The Times Newspaper’, Examiner, 466 (1 December 1816), p. 760. 27. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper: On Modern Apostates’, Examiner, 468 (15 December 1816), pp. 785–7, p. 785 ; D. Wu (ed.), Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 4, p. 123. 28. Ibid. 29. Asquith, ‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, p. 711. 30. [W. Hazlitt], ‘On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, Examiner, 469 (22 December 1816), pp. 801–3, p. 801. 31. Ibid., p. 803. 32. Ibid., p. 803. 33. Gray writes of the situation after Pitt’s death, ‘All parties, except a few extreme Foxites and radicals, now accepted the war, although they differed on the best way of fighting it’ (Spencer Perceval, p. 59). 34. The prime minister at the time, Addington, termed it ‘“an insurrection of loyalty”’ (P. Ziegler, Addington (London: Collins, 1965), p. 200; 4 September 1803, to Simcoe). J. E. Cookson calls it ‘simply the greatest popular movement of the Hanoverian age’ (The British Armed Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 66). 35. Wordsworth, Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 3, p. 171. 36. S. Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 ), p. 100. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, pp. 186–94.
196
Notes to pages 86–91
37. [W. Hazlitt], ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”’, Examiner, 483 (30 March 1817), pp. 194–7. p. 195; D. Wu (ed.), Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 4, p. 169 [with corrections]. See also ‘Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Southey’, Examiner, 481 (6 April 1817), p. 211. 38. [Hazlitt], ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”’, p. 196; Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 170. 39. Ibid., p. 195, 195, 195;. Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 170. 40. As in Shelley’s essay A Philosophical View of Reform (1819), use of the term ‘philosophical’ sidesteps criticism on legal grounds. 41. [Hazlitt], ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”’, p. 197; Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 172. 42. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Southey’s Letter to William Smith’, Examiner, 488 (4 May 1817), pp. 284–7, p. 286. 43. Ibid., p. 286. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. [Hazlitt], ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’, p. 495. 47. [Hazlitt], ‘Southey’s Letter to William Smith’, Examiner, 488 (4 May 1817), pp. 284–7. 48. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 171. 49. [Hazlitt], ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’, p. 505. 50. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Character of Mr Burke’ (1807), Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 288. 51. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 286. 52. ‘Coleridge’s Literary Life’, Edinburgh Review, 28:56 (August 1817), p. 506. 53. Ibid., p. 507. 54. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Death of John Cavanagh’, Examiner, 580 (7 February 1819), pp. 94–5. 55. [W. Hazlitt], ‘On the Spy System’, Morning Chronicle (30 June 1817); Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 194. 56. W. A. Hay singles out Edward Baines, the editor of the Leeds Mercury – ‘His initiative in exposing an agent provocateur in 1817 known as Oliver the Spy won a national reputation’ and cites this as proof of a growing provincial role in national politics (The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 48). 57. ‘Spies and Informers’ Parliamentary Debates, vol. 36, cols 1016–23 (16 June 1817). ‘Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 36, cols 1109–55 (23 June 1817). ‘Sir F. Burdett – The Spy Oliver’, Examiner, 495 (22 June 1817), pp. 391–2. ‘To the English People’, Examiner, 495 ( 22 June 1817), pp. 385–7. 58. Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey (London: Longman, 1850), vol. 4, p. 201. 59. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 203; 8 September 1816, to Grosvenor C. Bedford. 60. Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 261–2. Henry Crabb Robinson was the conduit for the offer, though he warned Walter about replacing Stoddart with Southey (Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 277; 9 September 1816. Robinson’s remarks are confirmed by Southey’s own letter to John Rickman also dated 9 September 1816 (Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vol. 4, p. 206). Southey did not have any desire to live in London, and to Rickman he wrote ‘By nature I am a poet, by deliberate choice an historian, and a political writer I know not how; by accident, or the course of events’ (Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, vol. 4, p. 215; 2 October 1816). 61. See Hazlitt, Selected Writings, vol. 4, p. 396n; S. Jones, Hazlitt: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 271. 62. By 1816, when he is no longer writing for the Annual Register, Southey says that among the papers, he reads only the Courier (Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed.
Notes to pages 91–4
63. 64. 65. 66. 67.
68.
69.
70. 71. 72.
73. 74. 75.
76.
77.
197
J. W. Warter (London: Longman, 1856), vol. 2, p. 415; 28 June 1815, to Grosvenor C. Bedford). Examiner, 483 (30 March 1817), p. 206. ‘Mr. Cobbett’, Examiner, 484 (6 April 1817), pp. 219–21. Ibid., p. 221. This was part of an ongoing sniping between Leigh Hunt and Cobbett, with much reprinting of public letters in their respective papers. ‘Mr. Cobbett’s Departure for America’, Examiner, 485 (13 April 1817), pp. 225–8. An earlier editorial had thanked Cobbett for his ‘able writing’ in dealing with the threatened violent temper of the times (‘Spa-Fields Meeting’, Examiner, 477 (16 February 1817), p. 110. On that occasion the paper had been critical of Sir Francis Burdett. ‘On the Proposed Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. To the English People’, Examiner, 479 (2 March 1817), pp. 129–31. The numbering of the editorials begins with the issue no.480 (9 March 1817), 145–6. See ‘Sir Francis Burdett – Mr. Cobbett’, Yellow Dwarf, 19 (9 May 1818). This more radical paper (also published by John Hunt) criticized Cobbett’s inconsistencies and cowardice: ‘When Sir Francis Burdett was sent to the Tower for upholding the rights of Englishmen, did he want to compromise with oligarchists – did he offer to refrain from writing any more, and to give up his means of attack, if he was suffered to escape … No; but Mr. Cobbett did’ (P. Keen (ed.), Popular Radical Press in Britain 1817–1821 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), vol. 2, p. 366). ‘The King v. Arthur Thistlewood; James Watson the Elder, Thomas Preston, and John Hooper’, Examiner, 494 (15 June 1817), pp. 380–4. ‘Mr. Reynolds, the Informer’, Examiner, 495 (22 June 1817), p. 390. ‘Persons Detained under the Habeas Corpus Suspension’, Examiner, 495 (22 June 1817), pp. 388–90. ‘Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 975–1016 (16 June 1817); ‘Spies and Informers’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 1016–23 (16 June 1817); ‘Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 1044–63 (19 June 1817). See Hone, For the Cause of Truth on the prominence given Castles’s testimony in the radical press, at the same time as another spy, ‘Oliver’ (W. J. Reynolds) was being exposed by the Leeds Mercury: ‘The impact of these revelations and allegations was very great. Castle and Oliver became national names’ (p. 329). ‘Oliver’ was the pseudonym of W. J. Reynolds (1771–1836), an Irish informer in the Spa-fields trial. An embarrassment to Castlereagh, he was sent by the government to Copenhagen as consul for Iceland. See ‘Sir F. Burdett – The Spy Oliver’, Examiner, 495 (22 June 1817), p. 391. ‘Mr. Keats’s Poems’, Examiner, 498 (3 July 1817), pp. 443–4. ‘Porcupine Renewing His Old Quills’, Examiner, 509 (28 September 1817), pp. 609–11. Thomas Moore had brought Byron into political circles and introduced him to Hunt at Newgate in the spring of 1813, during Byron’s Childe Harold period when Byron was at his most actively Whiggish, and Hunt had mistaken Byron’s cultivation of the Examiner’s politics for social affinities (See L. Hunt, Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. J. E. Morpurgo (London: Cresset, 1949), pp. 253–5). [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 2:7 (October 1817), pp. 38–41, p. 39. Such middle-class pretensions were still being satirized even by Dickens twenty years later in some of his first Boz sketches. See R. Morrison, ‘Blackwood’s Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity’, Romanticism on the Net, 20 (November 2000) .
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Notes to pages 95–8
78. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria , vol. 1, p. 5. J. N. Cox suggests that Coleridge’s remarks in the Biographia Literaria on reviewers, written in 1815, were in fact a response to the reception of Remorse in 1813, not to what Hazlitt was writing during 1816–17. See Jeffrey N. Cox, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School: The Lakers’ “Other”’, Romanticism on the Net, 14 (May 1999) . 79. See Bainbridge, on Byron’s refusal to write about the war as a chivalric romance, with the Spanish as modern knights, as Scott had done (British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, pp. 170–1). Nonetheless, Bainbridge reminds us, men serving in the Peninsular war took Lady of the Lake with them to read around the campfire, and at home he was the ‘best-selling poet of the war years’ (p. 2). See Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott (1902), vol. 3, pp. 286–7. 80. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 5, p. 292. 81. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 4, pp. 363–6; 10 January 1817, to John Murray; Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand (London: John Murray, 1976), vol. 5, p. 178; 3 March 1817, to John Murray. Despite common moral disapproval of Byron, ‘What Murray wanted was to retain the public’s sympathy for a blockbuster author and to sell books’ (Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review, p. 84). 82. As a publisher he congratulated himself on a coup that made the review’s piece ‘peculiar – and therefore the more attractive’ than the Edinburgh Review’s assessment of Byron: ‘The Article is likely to have proved the more efficacious from the good fortune of its having appeared in our perhaps very best Number – of which I have sold already almost 10,000 Copies’ ( J. Murray, Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. A. Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p. 215; Letter 98, 20 March 1817. 83. [ J. Wilson], ‘Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 3:14 (May 1818), pp. 216–24, p. 216. 84. Ibid., pp. 216, 216. See A. L. Strout, ‘Byron in Blackwood’s Magazine’, Appendix A in his edition of J. G. Lockhart’s John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron, ed. A. L. Strout (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), pp. 63–110, pp. 113–50, listing all the articles and mentions of Byron in the magazine from 1817 to 1825. 85. T. Carlyle, ‘Christopher North’, in Reminiscences (1881), ed. K. J. Fielding and I. Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 410–26. 86. [ J. Wilson], ‘Childe Harold. Canto Fourth’, Edinburgh Review, 30:59 ( June 1818), pp. 87–120, pp. 87–8. This is echoed in, for example, the letters of the young Jane Baillie Welsh to Thomas Carlyle (Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, eds K. J. Fielding and I. Campbell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 16–17 [ January 1822]). 87. [Wilson], ‘Childe Harold Canto Fourth’, p. 99. 88. In 1802, at the height of Stewart’s influence, Sydney Smith had described Edinburgh as a ‘monastery of infidels’ (Letters of Sydney Smith, ed. N. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), vol. 1, p. 70n; [n.d.] to Lord Holland);see G. S. Holland Fox-Strengways Ilchester, The Home of the Hollands, 1605–1820 (London: John Murray, 1937), p. 177. 89. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’, Edinburgh Review, 19:38 (February 1812), pp. 466–77. p. 467. 90. Ibid., pp. 468, 468. 91. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Wilson’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review, 19:38 (February 1812), pp. 373–88, p. 374. 92. L. Hunt, The Story of Rimini (Otley: Woodstock Books, 2001), p. xv, xviii.
Notes to pages 98–100
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93. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Southey’s Madoc’, Edinburgh Review, 7:13 (October 1805), pp. 1–29, p. 4. T. Moore, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorossan’, Lalla Rookh (London: Longman, 1817), p. 128. 94. R. Southey, ‘Preface’, Thalaba the Destroyer (London: Longman, 1801), pp. vii, ix. 95. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, p. 211. 96. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’, Edinburgh Review, 11:21 (October 1807), pp. 214–31, p. 217. 97. [ J. W. Croker], ‘Leigh Hunt’s Rimini’, Quarterly Review, 14:28 ( January 1816), pp. 473– 81, p. 474. 98. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 4, p. 320; 22 October 1815, to Leigh Hunt. 99. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 46.; 1 June 1818, to Thomas Moore. 100. E. M. Gates (ed.), Leigh Hunt: a Life in Letters (Essex, Connecticut: Falls River Publications, 1998), p. 77; 19 August 1816, to Archibald Constable. Similarly, Thomas Moore’s contract with Longman for Lalla Rookh specified a poem ‘of the length of Rokeby’ (St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, p. 162; T. Moore, Memoirs, Journal and Correspondence of Thomas Moore, ed. Lord J. Russell (London: Longman, 1860), p. 126; 17 December 1814, to Messrs. Longman & Co.). 101. See St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Age, pp. 210–19; Appendix 9. 102. ‘Amadis DeGaul, by Southey and by Rose’, Edinburgh Review, 3:5 (October 1803), p. 125. However, in the same issue, Scott notes the omission of some such passages in his review ‘Sibbald’s Chronicle of Scottish Poetry,’ even as he complains of the modern grossness of ‘Thomas Little’ [Thomas Moore] (Edinburgh Review, 3:5 October 1803, p. 199). 103. Gates, Leigh Hunt, p. 79; 19 August 1816, to Archibald Constable. This might seem to be an illustration of something Wordsworth observed in noting the change in Hunt’s attitude towards himself from The Feast of the Poets, where he had attacked Wordsworth as severely as Francis Jeffrey might have done, to the preface of 1815, where he praised him. Wordsworth had sent Hunt a copy of his Poems on 12 February 1815, on Henry Brougham’s telling him that Hunt ‘valued’ his poetry (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Part II. 1812–1820, ed. E. de Selincourt, rev. A. G. Hill and M. Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 195). A. G. Hill, in editing Wordsworth’s letters, writes ‘As Haydon remarked in a letter to Wordsworth of 15 April 1817, “he [Hunt] never holds one opinion one month he does not sophisticate himself out of, before the next is over”’ (A Supplement of New Letters (1993), vol. 8, p. 145n). 104. Gates, Leigh Hunt, p. 76; 19 August 1816, to Archibald Constable. 105. The sensuality of the poetry of Hunt and Keats has been much discussed, but the identification of this with Whiggism can also be seen in the prospectus for a monthly political magazine advertised for June 1822, which, playing on Burke’s contrast of Old and New Whigs, calls the latter ‘the open contemners of revealed religion, and the convicted slaves of a debasing sensuality’ (Advertisement for ‘The Old Whig, A Monthly Political Review’ ( June 1822), p. 3). 106. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Moore’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review, 8:16 ( July 1806), pp. 456–65. ‘Satanic School’, the phrase that Southey applied to Byron’s poetry in his preface to Vision of Judgement (1821) has been traced to a review of Thomas Moore’s poetry in the Annual Review and History of Literature for 1806 (London: Longman, 1807), pp. 498–9), but the phrase is not used here nor is the strongest term (‘evil’) specifically applied to Moore but only in general to ‘the age’. 107. Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, vol. 2, p. 193, no.199; 18 September 1819, to the George Keatses.
200
Notes to pages 100–2
108. ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Edinburgh Review, 17:34 (February 1811), pp. 253–90, pp. 281, 282. 109. G. Carnall, Southey and His Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. 157–8. 110. J. C. D. Clark has stressed the absence of social programmes in eighteenth-century jacobin radicalism: Even radicals before 1789, including the most extreme men of the Society for Constitutional Information, had phrased their critique of the establishment in terms which owed almost nothing to an economic analysis of causes or solutions. For all their talk of ‘the people’, they had little practical sympathy for suffering humanity (English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 373). 111. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, p. 99; 11 May 1820, to John Cam Hobhouse. 112. See D. Rapp, ‘The Left-Whig Whigs: Whitbread, the Mountain and Reform, 1809– 1815’, Journal of British Studies, 21:2 (Spring 1982), pp. 35–66. 113. Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, vol. 2, p. 180, no. 196; 22 September 1819, to C. W. Dilke. 114. ‘this Adonis in Loveliness was a corpulent gentleman of fifty! … this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers, and demireps’ (‘The Prince on St Patrick’s Day’, Examiner, 221 (22 March 1812), p. 179. 115. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 4, p. 80; 12 March 1814, to Thomas Moore. Byron, Lord Byron: Complete Poetical Works, vol. 3, p. 391. See Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 4, pp. 51–3; 10 February 1814, to Thomas Moore. In Appendix B to his Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), Andrew Nicholson has assembled the background material to this controversy. Before he visited Hunt in Newgate, Byron wrote to Moore, ‘Pray Phoebus at length our political malice / May not get us lodgings within the same palace!’ (Complete Poetical Works, vol. 3, p. 88). 116. See ‘The Quarterly Review – Mr. Keats’, Examiner, 563 (11 October 1818), pp. 648– 9. In Hazlitt’s attack, A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. from William Hazlitt, Esq., he compares the ‘government critic’ to the ‘government spy’ and ‘the invisible link, that connects literature with the Police’. Hazlitt’s analogy to the government’s well known use of domestic spies to incite insurrection is no more than timely in the context of 1819. 117. L. Erickson, The Economy of Literary Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 24. He says, ‘In a country of eleven million people lacking many of our modern forms of instruction or entertainment, a book in great demand sold ten to twenty thousand copies in 1810’. See Examiner, 610 (5 September 1819), pp. 561–2. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Age, Appendix 9. Endymion was priced at nine shillings in 1818. 118. [ J. G. Lockhart] ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. IV’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 3:17 (August 1818), pp. 519–24, p. 519. 119. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, p. 46; 1 June 1818, to Thomas Moore. 120. ‘Lord Holland’s Motion Respecting Informations Ex Officio’, Parliamentary Debates, vol.19, cols 129–74 (4 March 1811) and ‘Lord Folkestone’s Motion Respecting Informations Ex Officio for Libel’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 548–612 (28 March
Notes to pages 102–5
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1811). See Lord Holland’s speech under ‘Misdemeanours Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, col. 691 (3 December 1819). 121. These figures are given by Harling in ‘The Law of Libel’, pp. 108–10. 122. Ibid., pp. 125–6. 123. For an interesting Commons discussion of the Hone and Wooler trials and the government policy of not prosecuting, see ‘Blasphemous Libel Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol.19, cols 1414–45 (21 December 1819); ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 1459–1515 (22 December 1819); and ‘Blasphemous Libel Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 19, cols 1515–68 (23 December 1819). 124. W. Cobbett, ‘Westminster Meeting’, Political Register, 30:9 (2 March 1816), cols 269– 88, col. 273. 125. W. Cobbett, ‘The Examiner’, Political Register, 30:10 ( 9 March 1816), cols 308–11. 126. On the use of the term radical, see J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1660–1832, p. 8. As an adjective in the 1780s, it could be applied to Whigs arguing for parliamentary reform; as a noun in 1802, it seems to have denoted the lowest classes and extreme egalitarian proposals, in other words a form of French jacobinism, without the connotations of social reform found in its more familiar use after 1815. 127. R. Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry: In Search of the Pure Commonwealth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 159. 128. In a ‘Literary Portrait’ written many years later, Thomas De Quincey wrote, ‘As a man, and viewed in relation to social objects, Keats was nothing’ and that his interest in liberty was ‘affectation’ however sincerely he may have thought himself politically engaged (Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13:148 (April 1846), p. 252). 129. W. Cobbett, The Autobiography of William Cobbett, ed. W. Reitzel (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), p. 142. 130. Ibid., p. 142. 131. Ibid., p. 144. 132. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Keats’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review, 34:67 (August 1820), pp. 203–13. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, p. 229; 2 November 1820, to John Murray. 133. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 8, p. 103; 26 April 1821, to Percy Bysshe Shelley. In fact, Croker’s article offers a more scrupulous reading of Keats’s vocabulary than those of many other critics and allows that the young poet’s gifts were worth attending to (‘Keats’s Endymion’, Quarterly Review, 19:37 (April 1818), pp. 204–8, p. 204). 134. L. Hunt, Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, 3 vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), vol. 2, p. 5. Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (1949), p. 175. 135. See ‘The Quarterly Review, – Mr. Keats’, Examiner, 563 (11 October 1818), pp. 648–9. For discussion of Cockney language, see Cronin, The Politics of Romantic Poetry, ch. 8; G. Kucich, ‘Cockney Chivalry: Hunt, Keats and the Aesthetics of Excess’, in N. Roe (ed.), Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 118–34. 136. The Keats Circle, ed. H. E. Rollins (1948; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 46–52; 21 October 1818. Lockhart’s article on Leigh Hunt had appeared in the July issue (‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. III’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 3:16 ( July 1818), pp. 453–6). The article on Keats appeared in the August issue: ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. IV’. 137. Keats Circle, vol. 1, p. 61; 9 November 1818, to John Taylor. 138. [ J. Wilson], ‘An Hour’s Tete-a-Tete with the Public’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 8:43 (October 1820), pp. 178–205, p. 190.
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Notes to pages 105–7
139. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, ed. B. Rooke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 10 (19 October 1809), vol. 2, p. 138; vol. 1, p. 210. 140. Ibid., Biographia Literaria, eds. J. Engell and W. J. Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 41n (ch. 2). 141. Published anonymously by Baldwin, written by Lady Anne Hamilton. In surviving copies, the names, although omitted, are often found pencilled in. In The Friend (19 October 1809), Coleridge had again used the word Personality in the sense of the mere qualification for political power in an age of increasing democracy. Coleridge was scornful of the modern argument that personhood alone could serve as the rational basis for political power or ‘right’: ‘every man is competent, and in contempt of all rank and property, on the mere title of his Personality, possesses the Right’. ‘On the Errors of Party Spirit: or Extremes Meet’ (The Friend, vol. 2, p. 140 (1809); vol. 1, p. 214 (1818)). 142. Scott, Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 4, p. 193; 11 March 1816. 143. M. Parker, ‘The Institutionalization of a Burkean-Coleridgean Literary Culture’, Studies in English Literature, 31:4 (Autumn 1991), p. 698 (from John Scott, letter to Baldwin (8 November 1819)). 144. [ J. Scott], ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, London Magazine, 2:11 (November 1820), pp. 509– 21, p. 514. 145. Ibid., p. 514. Compare Scott’s account of literary vandalism here to the contemporary description of ‘Hustling’ found in The London Guide (1818) by John Bodcock: ‘A more daring hustle is, where a person being run against violently, as if by accident, and his arms kept down forcibly; while the accomplice, pretending to take “the gentleman’s” part, draws either his watch, money or book’ ( J. Marriott, (ed.) Unknown London, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 45–6). 146. [Scott], ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, London Magazine, 2:11 ( November 1820), p. 515. 147. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, pp. 242–3; 25 July 1820, to John Gibson Lockhart. 148. Thomas Carlyle writes disapprovingly of Wilson’s election in his otherwise admiring essay on Wilson (‘Christopher North’) in his Reminiscences (1881). 149. See [ J. Scott], ‘The Mohock Magazine’, London Magazine 2:12 (December 1820), pp. 666–85, p. 669. ‘Hazlitt Cross-questioned’, by Wilson and Lockhart, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine (August 1818) and in London (September 1818) as Hypocrisy Unveiled (published 20 September 1818, in Edinburgh). Stanley Jones remarks that it should be seen in the context of publishing rather than authorial jealousy, that is to say, Blackwood’s animosity for Constable. See Jones, Hazlitt, ch. 12; also, S. Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends (London: John Murray, 1891), vol. 1, pp. 479–96. John Murray, who worked with both Blackwood and Constable, repeatedly expressed his unhappiness about the ‘personalities’ and eventually gave up his interest in Blackwood’s Magazine 150. [Scott], ‘The Mohock Magazine’, p. 671. 151. Ibid., p. 683. There is a good summary of the early eighteenth-century history of the term ‘Mohock’, used by Addison, Steele, Swift, Gay, Defoe and others to deplore the town violence of young aristocrats, in N. Guthrie, ‘“No Truth or very little in the whole Story”? – A Reassessment of the Mohock Scare of 1712’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20:2 (1996), pp. 33–56, which cites also a later pamphlet entitled ‘“Timothie Twaddleton”, Ane True and Most Dolorous Historie of the Challenge which passed betweene Lokhearte, Emperour of the Mohocks, and Skotte, King of the Baldwinians’ [Edinburgh], [1812]). See Feste’s use of ‘cockney’ in Twelfth Night to mock Sebastian in his pretentious use of ‘vent’ as a refined term – ‘He has heard that word of some great man’ (3.4.11–12). 152. [Scott], ‘The Mohock Magazine’, p. 676.
Notes to pages 107–10
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153. [ J. Scott], ‘Town Conversation: Cockney Writers’, London Magazine, 2:13 ( January 1821), pp. 69–71, p. 69. 154. [ J. Wilson], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. II’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:63 (April 1822), pp. 475–89, p. 488. Sydney Smith had claimed nearly twenty years earlier that there was no London news to be got in Edinburgh – ‘We are as ignorant of what happens in London as if we were in heaven’ (Letters of Sydney Smith, vol. 1, p. 67; 10 November 1808, to M. H. Beach). 155. [E. E. Crowe], ‘Hazlitt’s Table-Talk’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 12:67 (August 1822), pp. 157–66. 156. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘Extracts from Mr Wastle’s Diary. No. I’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 6:36 (March 1820), pp. 688–90, p. 690. 157. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 8, p. 229; 1 October 1821, to Thomas Moore. 158. M. Haslett, Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 4, 43, 168–9. Mozart’s Don Giovanni received sixty-three performances in London in the years 1817–19 and inspired numerous burlesques and pantomimes. Haslett points out that Byron was active on the theatre scene in London during the years 1807–14, when a number of pantomime performances of Don Juan and The Libertine Destroyed were being staged. Childe Harold may have been an upper-class Whig sensation, but Cantos 1 & 2 of Don Juan were embraced by the working classes. 159. Ibid., p. 43. Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 5, pp. 370–2. 160. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 5, p. 96. 161. Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth Part II. 1812–1820, p. 195; 13 February [1815], to Sara Hutchinson. William St Clair gives figures showing that the original 500 copies printed of The Excursion were still being remaindered as late as 1834, and that the White Doe, also issued in quarto in 1815 (print run of 750), still had copies available in 1831 (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Age, Appendix 9). 162. For a full discussion of Murray’s decision, see H. J. Luke, Jr, ‘The Publishing of Byron’s “Don Juan”’, PMLA (1965), pp. 199–209. 163. London Magazine, 3:14 (February 1821), p. 165. 164. On the question of Murray’s decision to publish Don Juan in quarto, Haslett comments, ‘since Byron’s earlier publishing successes had all been as a result of an exclusive readership of upper- and upper-middle-class readers, it is already apparent that the most radical aspect of Byron’s Don Juan was its reception by the working classes’ (Byron’s Don Juan and the Don Juan Legend, p. 150). 165. The first complete edition of Don Juan was necessarily a pirated one, since Murray could not obtain full copyright until 1830, when he finally bought up John Hunt’s stock, and Luke writes, ‘The fact that there were at least eighteen pirated editions of all or a part of Don Juan before 1832 indicates a wide sale to the newly emerging English common reader’ (‘The Publishing of Byron’s “Don Juan”’, p. 209). 166. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, pp. 323–5. Murray had taken advice from Sharon Turner, who had advised that Wat Tyler could not be protected (Smiles, A Publisher and His Friends, vol. 1, pp. 404–6). In fact, Murray was successful on this occasion, although a later application for an injunction against the pirating of Cain in 1822 went against him. Blackwood – whose magazine constantly tested the bounds of libel and which Murray had earlier refused to sell – immediately refused to sell Don Juan. 167. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, p. 333. 168. Marriott, Unknown London, vol. 1, pp. xxii, xxxviin. 169. Ibid.
204
Notes to pages 110–14
170. See also [W. Maginn], ‘Letter to Pierce Egan, Esq.’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 8:48 (March 1821), pp. 671–7, a review of Egan’s collection of Sporting Anecdotes and Cockneyism. 171. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Beppo’, Edinburgh Review, 29:58 (February 1818), pp. 302–10, p. 302. 172. Ibid., p. 303. 173. Andrew Nicholson suggests that Beppo could stand as the first canto of Don Juan (see The Manuscripts of the Younger Poets: Lord Byron, Poems 1807–1824 and Beppo (New York: Garland, 1998), Introduction. 174. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’, Edinburgh Review, 36:72 (February 1822), pp. 413–52. 175. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers, vol. 1, pp. 145–6; 18 July 1819. 176. Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), pp. 178–9. Quoted in Nicholson, The Manuscripts of the Younger Poets, p. 204. 177. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, p. 46; 1 June 1818, to Thomas Moore. [W. Hazlitt], ‘Literature’, Yellow Dwarf, 18, 2 May 1818; Keen (ed.), The Popular Radical Press in Britain 1817–1821, vol. 2, pp. 362–4, p. 362. 178. Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, p. 96; 25 January 1819, to John Cam Hobhouse. 179. ‘It is difficult to speak of common things in an appropriate manner’ (Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 6, p. 96n). 180. [ J. G. Lockhart or J. Wilson], ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 5:29 (August 1819), pp. 512–22, p. 512. Alan Lang Strout discusses the review’s authorship and remarks that ‘This review contains the first bitter criticism of Byron’s work’ (John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron, p. 118). 181. [Lockhart or Wilson], ‘Remarks on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 5:19 (August 1819), pp. 512. 182. Ibid., p. 515. 183. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘Extracts from Wastle’s Diary. No. II’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 7:39 ( June 1820), pp. 31–4, p. 317. Frere was one of those who advised against the publication of Don Juan (Canto I). 184. [F. Jeffrey], ‘State of the Country’, Edinburgh Review, 32:64 (October 1819), pp. 293– 309, p. 294. 185. Ibid., p. 298. 186. Ibid., p. 301. 187. [ J. Mackintosh], ‘Parliamentary Reform’, Edinburgh Review, 34:68 (November 1820), pp. 461–501, p. 464. 188. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, pp. 57–8; 17 December [1819], to John B. S. Morritt. Indeed, the radical revolution in the west of Scotland in 1820 continues to be commemorated to this day and its executed leaders regarded as martyrs led astray by the government. See ‘Exposure of the Spy System of 1819–20’, Tait’s Magazine, 14 (May 1833), pp. 37–46, a review of The Spy System; or Tis Thirteen Years Since (1832) by Peter Mackenzie, on the ‘Radical Rebellion’ at Bonnymuir. It was published as a pamphlet in1835. 189. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, p. 157; 28 March [1820], to Charlotte Scott. 190. Letters of John Keats, 1814–1821, vol. 2, p. 194, no.199; 18 September 1819, to the George Keatses. 191. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, p. 235; 5 January [1821], to Lord Melville. 192. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, pp. 326–7. 193. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, p. 335; 17 January [1821], to John Richardson. 194. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 494; 20 July 1821, to [ James Ballantyne].
Notes to pages 114–18
205
195. ‘Extracts from Mr Wastle’s Diary. No. II’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 7:38 ( June 1820), p. 319.
5 1821–3 Historical Retrospective of the Edinburgh Review 1. 2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7.
8.
9.
10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
16.
Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 1, p. 245 (ll. 500–1). ‘Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments’, Yellow Dwarf, 16 (18 April 1818). See W. Hazlitt on Divine Right or ‘Legitimacy’ as a superstition imposed upon the people, in his essay ‘What is the People,’ originally published in the Champion (12, 19, 26 October 1817; also the Yellow Dwarf, 10 & 11, (7, 14 March 1818); rpt Political Essays, Complete Works, vol. 7, pp. 259–81; Keen (ed.), The Popular Radical Press in Britain, vol. 2, pp. 303–7). See also Clark, English Society 1688–1832. [ J. Galt], ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10:55 (September 1821), pp. 217–21, p. 219. Ibid., p. 219. [ J. G. Lockhart], John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron (1821), ed. A. L. Strout (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma, 1947), p. 91. In his journal, Thomas Moore records a conversation he had with William Wordsworth (27 October 1820) on the literary qualities of various politicians, with praise for Canning and Fox but especially for Burke: ‘by far the greatest man of age; not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various directions, his most able contemporaries; assisting Adam Smith in his ‘Political Economy’, and Reynolds in his ‘Lectures on Painting’ (Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. P. Quennell (London: Batsford, 1964), p. 54). [W. Hazlitt], ‘Table Talk. No. XIII’, London Magazine 4:23 (November 1821), p. 487; Complete Works, vol. 17, p. 26. See Lord Lonsdale on Wordsworth’s pamphlet on Cintra, as reported by Joseph Farington: ‘written in a very bad taste, not with plainness & simplicity such [as] is proper to a political subject, but in a style inflated & ill suited to it. B I sd. It was remarkable that in His Poetry He affects a simplicity approaching to puerility, while in Politics in which plain statement & deduction is alone required He assumes the reverse of it’(The Farington Diary, ed. J. Greig (London: Hutchinson, 1925), vol. 5, p. 179). W. Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, in Table Talk (1821–2), Complete Works, vol. 8, p. 57; Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. D. Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), vol. 6, pp. 49–50. Volume 1 was published 6 April 1821; vol. 2, 15 June 1822. This essay appeared for the first time in book form, not as a periodical essay. W. Hazlitt, ‘Character of Cobbett’, Complete Works, vol. 8, pp. 51, 52; Selected Writings, vol. 6, pp. 51, 52. [ J. Matthews], ‘Hazlitt’s Table Talk’, Quarterly Review, 26:51 (October 1821), pp. 103– 8. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 33. ‘Theatrical Examiner’, Examiner, 468 (15 December 1816), pp. 793. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 51; ‘Theatrical Examiner’, Examiner, 468, (15 December 1816), p. 793. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, pp. 91–2. W. Shenstone, ‘Letters to Particular Friends, No. XLII, Letters to Particular Friends, ed. D. Mallam (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1939), p. 78; [6 April 1746], to Richard Graves; Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 8, p. 151n. Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 274.
206
Notes to pages 118–23
17. Paulin, Introduction, Hazlitt, Selected Writings, p. xvii. See ‘Whigs of the Covenant’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10:58 (December 1821), p. 665: ‘Nothing, indeed, can be more opposite than the Presbyterian and Political Whigs – the Whigs of the country, and those of the town, of the Covenant, and of the Parliament House’. 18. Hazlitt, ‘Preface’, Political Essays (1819), Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 19. M. Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism’, Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, eds. N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 215. 19. See Quentin Skinner’s description of the historical background to Hobbes’s reasoning, ‘The Proper Signification of Liberty’, Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), vol. 3, pp. 208–37. 20. Hazlitt, ‘Preface,’ Political Essays, Complete Works, vol. 7, pp. 9, 7. 21. Ibid., vol. 7, p. 7. 22. [ J. Matthews], ‘Whig and Tory’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:83 (December 1823), pp. 667. 23. Coleridge, The Friend, vol. 2, p. 142; vol. 1, p. 217–18. 24. ‘Mr. Brand’s Motion Respecting a Reform in Parliament’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 17, col. 163 (21 May 1810). 25. See Hazlitt on the Whigs’ relationship with populus: ‘They are in a pitiable dilemma B having to reconcile the hopeless reversion of court-favour with the most distant and delicate attempts at popularity’ (‘On Jealousy and Spleen of Party’(1825), Complete Works, vol. 12, pp. 377–8). 26. [ J. Galt], ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’, p. 220. 27. [ J. Scott], ‘The Signs of the Times: No. I. – Difficulty of Politics as a Subject’, London Magazine, 3:14 (February 1821), pp. 153–61, p. 154. 28. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 733. 29. Ibid., pp. 720, 729. 30. The failure of the parliamentary Whigs can be seen in the contempt with which they are spoken of by the Yellow Dwarf in 1818 (‘Universal Suffrage and Annual Parliaments, Section III’, Yellow Dwarf , 18 (2 May 1818), in Keen (ed.), The Popular Radical Press in Britain 1817–1821, vol. 2, pp. 358–61. 31. ‘State and Prospects of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 8:47 (February 1821), p. 566. 32. Ibid., p. 566. 33. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition 1815–1830, p. 167. 34. Ibid., p. 169. 35. ‘State and Prospects of the Whigs’, p. 566. 36. [possibly G. Croly], ‘Domestic Politics’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:61 (February 1822), p. 242. 37. Ibid., p. 243. 38. Ibid., p. 244. 39. Ibid., p. 244. 40. Ibid., pp. 245, 245, 246. 41. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 3, p. 35 (ch. 1, verse 1); 31 August 1816, to Grosvenor C. Bedford. 42. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, vol. 3, pp. 36–40, 39 (ch. 3, verses 7–9); 31 August 1816, to Grosvenor C. Bedford. Unlike the English public schools, the Edinburgh High School did not require the study of Greek. 43. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘On the Periodical Criticism of England’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 2:12 (March 1818), pp. 670–9, p. 671.
Notes to pages 123–7 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.
61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
67.
68. 69. 70.
207
Ibid., p. 671. Ibid., p. 672. Ibid., p. 674. Ibid., p. 675. One might compare Lockhart’s portrayal of Jeffrey here as a thinker to the portrait of him as a speaker in Peter’s Letters to his Kinfolk (1819). [Lockhart], ‘On the Periodical Criticism of England’, p. 677. See [ Jeffrey and Brougham], ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the Usurpation of Spain’, pp. 215– 34. [Lockhart], ‘Extracts from Wastle’s Diary. No. II’. ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10:55 (September 1821), p. 219. See also [ J. Galt], ‘Rhapsodies over a Punch-Bowl’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:62 (March 1822), p. 344–8. ‘Historical View of the Rise, Progress, Decline and Fall of the Edinburgh Review’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10:58 (December 1821), p. 668. Ibid., pp. 672–3. Ibid., p. 677. Ibid., pp. 677–8. Ibid., pp. 679–80. J. Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989). J. Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Men of Letters (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 20. Mr MacQuedy, in Peacock, ‘The March of Mind’ chp. 2, Crochet Castle (1831). Coleridge similarly described the Edinburgh Review to Henry Crabb Robinson as ‘a concentration of all the smartness of all Scotland. Edinburgh is a talking town, and whenever, in the conversaziones, a single spark is elicited, it is instantly caught, preserved, and brought to the Review’ (Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 169; 1810). Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, vol. 1, p. 383; 29 April 1822. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, p. 6; Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, pp. 11–12. [F. Jeffrey], ‘State of Parties’, Edinburgh Review, 15:30 ( January 1810), pp. 504–21. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society, p. 45. See ‘On the Personalities of the Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 10:55 (September 1821), pp. 217–21. [Lockhart or Wilson], ‘Remarks on Don Juan’. To this, Byron sent a letter of rebuttal dated 15 March 1820, not published until after his death, in Murray’s collected edition of Byron (1832).See Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, p. 60; 29 March 1820, to John Murray. [Wilson], ‘Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, pp. 216–8. Lockhart, John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron, pp. 87, 82. Lockhart compares the Edinburgh Review’s inconsistency in reviewing the erotically tinged poetry of Thomas ‘Little’ [Moore] but not Don Juan: ‘It was very right to rebuke Tom Moore for his filth; but what was his filth to the filth of Don Juan?’ [ Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’. Ibid., p. 452. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. III’, Blackwood’s Magazine,11:64 (May 1822), pp. 601–18, p. 607.
208
Notes to pages 128–32
71. Ibid., p. 608. Until Sir Walter Scott formally acknowledged responsibility for the Waverley novels (1827), their author was typically called ‘The Great Unknown’. 72. [Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. III’, p. 609. See [ Jeffrey], ‘Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’. 73. Ibid., pp. 611, 612. 74. Ibid., p. 613. 75. ‘Preface’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:60 ( January 1822), p. viii. 76. [possibly A. Blair], ‘Moore’s Irish Melodies’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:60 ( January 1822), pp. 62–7. 77. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Loves of the Angels – Moore and Byron’, Edinburgh Review, 38:75 (February 1823), pp. 27–48, p. 28. 78. In Lalla Rookh, Fadladeen’s critical remarks upon the young poet Feramorz, after he has recited ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, the first tale, were taken to be a parody of Jeffrey’s criticisms of Byron: ‘notwithstanding the observations which I have thought it my duty to make, it is by no means my wish to discourage the young man:Cso far from it, indeed, that if he will but totally alter his style of writing and thinking, I have very little doubt that I shall be vastly pleased with him’. See J. W. Vail, The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 136–7. 79. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Moore’s Lalla Rookh’, Edinburgh Review, 29:57 (November 1817), pp. 1–35, p. 34. [ Jeffrey], ‘Loves of the Angels – Moore and Byron’, pp. 29, 29. 80. [ Jeffrey], ‘Loves of the Angels – Moore and Byron’, p. 30. In his review of Wordsworth’s 1807 volume of poems, Jeffrey had drawn attention with some distaste to the poet’s use of the term ‘A Household Tub’(‘Poems by W. Wordsworth’, Edinburgh Review, 11:21 (October 1807), p. 225). 81. Vail, Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore, p. 43. 82. Ibid., pp. 201, 160. The Letters of Thomas Moore, vol. 2, p. 511. 83. Journal of Thomas Moore, pp. 142–5; 23–5 October. In response to James Boswell’s private request for Scott’s critical opinion of the Fudge Family, Moore’s strongly Whiggish satire, Scott had written eight years earlier, ‘I love Moore’s genius, and detest his politics too much to care whether I ever do or no [read “the Epistles”]. I never read the Twopenny Post-bag’ (Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 5, pp. 129–30; 25 April [1818]). John Gibson Lockhart’s review of Moore’s biography of Byron is very full, almost a Life in itself, but inclined to be somewhat prejudiced against Moore himself (‘Moore’s Life of Byron’, Quarterly Review, 44:87 ( January 1831), pp. 168–226); Macaulay’s review, a few months later, is less concerned with politics (‘Moore’s Life of Byron’, Edinburgh Review, 53:106 ( June 1831), pp. 544–72). 84. [possibly A. Blair], ‘Moore’s Irish Melodies’, pp. 63–4. 85. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, pp. 504–8, p. 506; [1821], to Countess Pürgstall. See also [Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. III’, pp. 601–18, on Byron and the fashion for ‘Personality’ in contemporary criticism. 86. [E. E. Crowe], ‘Letter from Paddy’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 11:63 (April 1822), pp. 461– 5, p. 465. 87. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, p. 205. 88. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, pp. 376–7. 89. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, p. 206, 206n. 90. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 206–7, 206. 91. Jennings, The Croker Papers, vol. 1, pp. 170; 23 March 1820, to John Wilson Croker.
Notes to pages 132–7
209
92. See J. E. Cookson, Lord Liverpool’s Administration, The Crucial Years 1815–1822 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975). 93. [D. Robinson and W. Gifford], ‘The Opposition’, Quarterly Review, 28:55 (October 1822), pp. 197–219, p. 205. 94. For the year 1819, the Annual Register lists some occasions of large meetings of seditious intent, including those held in Glasgow and Leeds (35,000 people) in June, Birmingham (15,000), Leeds, Liverpool, and Smithfield in July, Peterloo in August, Paisley in September, and North Shields in October. 95. Annual Register … for the Year 1819 (London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1820), p. 116. 96. Annual Register…. for the Year 1820, p. 37. 97. ‘The Opposition’, pp. 200, 201, 202. 98. Ibid., p. 203. 99. Ibid., p. 207. Contrast with [Thomas Barnes], ‘Men of Talent in Parliament’, Examiner, 422 (28 January 1816), pp. 49–51. 100. ‘The Opposition’, Quarterly Review, p. 209. 101. Ibid., p. 210. 102. Ibid., p. 212. 103. Ibid., p. 213. 104. Ibid. For example, regarding John Murray’s troubles with the radical publishers’ piracy of Don Juan, Blackwood’s Magazine cited the government’s reluctance after Hone to prosecute ([W. Maginn and J. G. Lockhart], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VIII’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:79 (August 1823), pp. 212–35, p. 216. The Attorney-General from July 1819 until January 1824, Robert Gifford (1779–1826), was not particularly active in prosecuting the radicals, and in any case Robert Peel as Home Secretary after 1822 had begun to reform the criminal code. 105. [probably G. Croly], ‘Public Affairs’, p. 358. 106. Ibid., p. 358. 107. Ibid., p. 358. 108. Ibid., p. 359. 109. [probably J. Gillon or J. Wilson], ‘The Candid. No. I’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 13:72 ( January 1823), pp. 108–24, p. 110. For the Spanish origins of this word, see C. Esdaile, The Peninsular War: a New History (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2003), p. 299n. 110. [probably J. Gillon or J. Wilson], ‘The Candid. No. I’, p. 113. Gilmartin in Print Politics, surveys the various statements made by Hunt on the relationship between literature and politics in his prefaces. 111. The Reflector (1810), Prospectus, pp. iv–v. 112. [L. Hunt], ‘Fellow-Creatures Suffered to Die in the Streets’, Examiner, 511 (12 October 1817), pp. 641–3. 113. Gates, Leigh Hunt, p. 87; [21 October 1817]. 114. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 6, p. 23n; 24 November 1819, to Lord Melville. A. Lang, Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897), vol. 1, p. 227; 31 October 1819. This was the paper called the Guardian (1819–24), initially edited by George Croly and Charles Knight and published by John Murray. See Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 237. 115. See ‘The Candid. No. I’, p. 116. 116. For an interesting account of the ‘right-wing’ press and the lack of government connection under Liverpool’s administration, see Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, ch. 1.
210
Notes to pages 137–43
Pitt and Perceval were more active in cultivating literary support. As Sack reiterates, the government’s traditional notion of support was reflected more in the placing of advertisements and supplying of advance intelligence (p. 22). 117. [W. Hazlitt], ‘The Periodical Press’, Edinburgh Review, 38:76 (May 1823), pp. 349–78, p. 349. 118. Ibid., p. 359. 119. Ibid., p. 359. 120. Ibid., p. 359. 121. See, for example, the British Critic (1809). Just as the Quarterly Review was being set up to challenge the ascendancy of the Edinburgh Review, this sedate Tory magazine’s preface to its thirty-fourth volume canvassed the changes introduced into periodical reviewing since the eighteenth century and likened this new style of reviewing to the revolution in France. It lamented the tendency to encourage in the public ‘a taste for satire and invective’ and the sacrifice of the author to admiration of ‘the wit of the Reviewer’. 122. ‘The Periodical Press’, Edinburgh Review, 38:76 (May 1823), p. 360. 123. Ibid., p. 361. 124. Ibid., pp. 363, 364. 125. Ibid., p. 364. 126. Ibid., pp. 364, 364, 365, 366. 127. Ibid., p. 368. 128. Ibid., p. 368. 129. Ibid., pp. 369, 371. 130. Ibid., p. 371. 131. Ibid., pp. 372, 375–6. 132. Ibid., p. 378. 133. [W. Maginn and J. G. Lockhart], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VIII’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:79 (August 1823), p. 226. 134. Ibid., p. 227. See [ Jeffrey], ‘Keats’s Poems’, pp. 203–13. 135. ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VIII’, pp. 230, 230–1. 136. Ibid., p. 232. 137. Ibid., p. 234. 138. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘O’Doherty on Don Juan’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:80 (September 1823), pp. 282–93, pp. 282–3. 139. Ibid., pp. 283, 292. 140. Ibid., pp. 283, 282. 141. [ J.G. Lockhart], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. X’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:80 (September 1823), pp. 312–29, p. 314. 142. Ibid., p. 317. 143. Ibid., p. 317. Asquith says that taking the Morning Chronicle as an example, its profits ‘almost trebled in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century’, with a 73 per cent rise taking place in the years 1802–11. The end of the war marked a decline in the government’s need for advertising (‘Advertising and the Press in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, pp. 707, 711). 144. See I. R. Christie, ‘British Newspapers in the Later Georgian Age’, Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 311–33. 145. [Lockhart], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. X’, p. 329. In 1831, when Cobbett was being prosecuted yet again, the Attorney-General of the day, the Whig Sir Thomas Den-
Notes to pages 143–9
211
man, once a close colleague of Horner and Brougham, rejected any notion that Cobbett could be considered ‘innocent’ in his libels, since he was ‘one of the greatest masters of the English language that had ever composed in it’ (‘The King against William Cobbett, 1831’, Reports of the State Trials, ed. J. MacDonell (London: HMSO, 1889), n.s. 2, col. 795).
6 1824–30 Whiggism and Liberalism 1. 2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
17. 18. 19.
[W. Maginn], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler, Esq. No. VII’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 14:78 ( July 1823), pp. 80–92, p. 86. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, p. 663; J. Gross, ‘Byron and The Liberal’, Philological Quarterly, 73 (Autumn 1993), pp. 471–85; Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, pp. 253–5; to Thomas Moore, 25 December 1820. Byron, Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, p. 82. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 83. Not published in Byron’s lifetime. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 84. ‘Affairs of Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol.11, cols 887–8 (15 June 1808). ‘Mr. Brougham’s Motion Relating to Spain’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 32, col. 578 (15 February 1816). Ibid., col. 604. Ibid., col. 603. Ibid., col. 595. See William Cobbett’s ‘Letter to Lord Castlereagh’ in April 1815, when the news of Napoleon’s escape from St Helena and rounding-up of his army had just broken: ‘The grand event, which has just taken place in France, and which is so well calculated to convince all mankind of the folly as well, as the injustice, of using foreign force for the purpose of dictating to a great nation who they shall have for their rulers, or what shall be the form of their Government’ (Political Register, 27:13 (1 April 1815), col. 385). Cobbett, who had been one of the greatest supporters of the war, on this occasion called all those who had urged war against France ‘the literary Cossacks of London’. ‘Mr Brougham’s Motion Relating to Spain’, col. 611. Ibid., col. 600. Ibid., col. 602. For one account of Castlereagh’s role at the Congress of Vienna, see A. Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon & the Congress of Vienna (London: Harper Collins, 2007). Although Castlereagh wrote of the ‘great moral change’ in Europe at this time because of ‘the principles of freedom’, he was sceptical of the new constitutionalism (Correspondence, Despatches, and Other Papers, of Viscount Castlereagh (London: John Murray, 1853), vol. 10, p. 18; 7 May 1814, to Lord W. Bentinck.). ‘Mr Brougham’s Motion Relating to Spain’, col. 601. Robert Southey picked up this line in the Quarterly Review, when to refute the Whig argument that lack of parliamentary reform was responsible for Britain’s domestic distress, he alluded to the Whig misjudgement of Napoleon, calling him the ‘Perfect Emperor of the British Liberales’ (‘Parliamentary Reform’, Quarterly Review, 16:31 (October 1816) [actually published February 1817], p. 240). Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 7, p. 249; 10 December 1820, to Lady Byron. See ‘State of Spain and Sweden’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 11, cols 1110–1 (30 June 1808). [Brougham] ‘Mr Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’, pp. 447, 443.
212
Notes to pages 130–6
20. [ J. Mill], ‘Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review’, Westminster Review, 1:1 ( January 1824), pp. 206–49. 21. M. Napier, Selections from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, ed. M. Napier, Jr ( London: Macmillan, 1879), pp. 24–7. 22. See Napier, Correspondence, pp. 39–40. 23. [ J. S. Mill], ‘Periodical Literature: the Edinburgh Review’, Westminster Review, 1:2 (April 1824), pp. 505–41;[P. Bingham], ‘Periodical Literature: the Quarterly Review’, Westminster Review, 1:1 ( January 1824), pp. 250–68; [ J. Mill], ‘Periodical Literature’, Westminister Review, 2:4 (October 1824), pp. 463–503 . 24. Napier, Correspondence, pp. 43–4; 25 May 1825. 25. Ibid., p. 43; 21 May 1825. 26. [W. J. Fox] ‘Men and Things in 1823’ Westminster Review, 1:1 ( January 1824), pp. 5, 10. 27. Ibid., p. 26. 28. See T. B. Macaulay, ‘Thackeray’s History of the Earl of Chatham’, Edinburgh Review, 58:118 ( January 1834), pp. 508–44. 29. Ibid., p. 2. 30. Ibid., p. 2. 31. Ibid., p. 7. 32. Ibid., p. 7. 33. Ibid., p. 9. 34. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 35. Ibid., p. 10, 10. 36. Ibid., p. 11. For a sense of the anthologizing market, see W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Appendix 6. 37. ‘Men and Things in 1823’, p. 12. See Hazlitt, Complete Works, vol. 7, p. 366. The Great Vulgar and the Small. From Horace, Odes (Cowley) 3:1 38. ‘Men and Things in 1823’, Ibid., p. 13. 39. Ibid., p. 14. 40. Ibid., p. 15. 41. Ibid., p. 15,16. 42. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. XIV’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 15:85 (February 1824), pp. 144–51, p. 144. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 145. 47. aperto ore … in facie theatri. ‘open pleading … in stage character’. 48. [Maginn], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. XIV’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 15:85 (February 1824), p. 145. 49. Ibid., pp. 146, 146, 46–7. 50. Ibid., pp. 147, 148, 149. 51. [D. Robinson], ‘The Cheshire Whigs’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 16:94 (November 1824), p. 540. 52. [W. Maginn], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. XXI’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 17:100 (May 1825), pp. 604–9, p. 606. 53. [W. Maginn], ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler. No. XIV’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 15:85 (February 1824), pp. 144–51, p. 150.
Notes to pages 136–61
213
54. T. Jenks, ‘Language and Politics at the Westminster Election of 1796’, Historical Journal, 44:2 (2001), pp. 419–39, p. 438. 55. Ibid., pp. 427, 425, 426. 56. Ibid., pp. 436, 429, 439. In his look at elections over an eighty-year period from 1780 to 1860, F. O’Gorman also suggests that this was a new kind of politics, one that used eloquence against the iconography of patriotism – which during the 1790s was going to derive its power from the national battle against a foreign enemy (‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: the Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past and Present, vol. 135 (1992), pp. 79–115). 57. See [D. Robinson] ‘The Edinburgh Review. No. LXXVIII. The State of Europe, and the Holy Alliance’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 15:86 (March 1824), pp. 317–33, for its remarks on ‘the inquisitor general of the literary race’. 58. See W. St Clair on the ten-year boom of Scott’s novels – his initial print run for each novel grew to 10,000 – and the sales for the poetry of both Scott and Byron, whose Corsair alone sold 25,000 copies (The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, pp. 244, 216–8). Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative, p. 18. 59. [D. Robinson], ‘The Liberal System’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 16:93 (October 1824), p. 442. 60. Ibid., pp. 443, 443, 443. 61. See for example, [ Jeffrey], ‘State of Parties’. 62. ‘The Liberal System’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 16:93 (October 1824), pp. 443, 444. 63. Ibid., p. 445. 64. Ibid., p. 455. 65. [W. Maginn], ‘New Lights’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 17:101 ( June 1825), pp. 732–5. 66. [T. B. Macaulay], ‘Milton’, Edinburgh Review, 42:84 (August 1825), pp.304–46, p. 331. 67. See [F. Jeffrey], ‘Mounier De L’Influence des Philosphes’, Edinburgh Review, 1:1 (October 1802), pp. 1–18. 68. ‘Milton’, Edinburgh Review, pp. 332, 333. 69. [Macaulay], ‘Parliamentary History and Review for 1825’, Westminster Review, 5:9 ( January 1826), pp. 263, 264. 70. Ibid., p. 263. 71. [ J. Wilson / W. Maginn / D. Robinson / J. Galt], ‘Preface’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 19 (1826), pp. i–xxxii, pp. i, vi. It goes on to say that ‘Cobbett alone of the Radicals had any mastery’ over the press (p. vi). 72. Ibid., p. vii. See Moore’s entry for 11 September 1818, where he records the visit of a printer named Hamilton, who had once owned the Critical Review: he invited Moore to take on the editorship of new monthly review ‘and said, with a true trading spirit, that he intended the politics of the work should be Whiggish, because those appeared to be becoming the fashionable politics of the day’ (Journal of Thomas Moore, p. 5). 73. [F. Jeffrey], ‘Moore’s Life of Sheridan’, Edinburgh Review, 45:89 (December 1826), pp. 1–48, p. 24. 74. Thorne, ‘Introductory Survey’, The House of Commons 1790–1820, vol.1, p. 343. 75. [ J. G. Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XVI’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 16:91 August 1824), pp. 231–50, p. 231. 76. [Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XVI’, p. 233. See Aspinall, Politics and the Press, p. 305n. ‘Judgment on Thistlewood and Others for High Treason’, Complete Collection of State Trials vol. 33, cols 1181, 1335–8, 1563–5 (17–27 April 1820). 77. [Lockhart], ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XVI’, p. 234.
214
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78. [probably C. E. Dodd], ‘Law of Libel – State of the Press’, Quarterly Review, 35:70 (March 1827), pp. 566–609, p. 567. 79. Ibid., pp. 566, 567. 80. See www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk. 81. [Dodd], ‘Law of Libel – State of the Press’, pp. 567–8. See also ‘On the Reciprocal Influence of the Periodical Publications, and the Intellectual Progress of this Country’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 16:94 (November 1824), pp. 518–28. p. 518. 82. See ‘Bell’s Life of Canning’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13:149 (May 1846), pp. 276– 82. 83. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party’, p. 315. 84. [D. Robinson], ‘The Change of Ministry’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 21:126 ( June 1827), pp. 745–62, p. 762; [D. Robinson], ‘The Faction’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 22:131 (October 1827), pp. 403–31, pp. 404, 406. 85. [Robinson], ‘The Faction’, p. 406. [D. Robinson], ‘The Change of Ministry’, p. 758. 86. Ibid., p. 762. 87. Lee, ‘“A new language in Politicks”’, pp. 482, 487. 88. ‘The Lord Commissioners’ Speech’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 8 , cols 61–3 (19 December 1806); cols 83–4 (20 December 1806). Howick (the future Lord Grey) called the Foxite opposition of the previous fifteen years ‘an opposition of principle’ (col. 62). 89. Later Correspondence of George III, vol. 4, pp. 525–8; 11 March 1807, Lord Mulgrave to Lord Lowther; 12 March 1807, Duke of Portland to the King. 90. [Macaulay], ‘The Present Administration’, pp. 249–50. 91. H. L. Bulwer, The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, Volume 1 (London: R. Bentley, 1870), p. 172; 7 July 1826, to William Temple. This demonstrates the confounding of party distinctions at this time and the presence of Liberals on both sides. Palmerston, like Canning, is an example of someone from a Whig background who always served in Tory governments. 92. [Macaulay], ‘The Present Administration’, p. 245; [Robinson], ‘The Change of Ministry’, p. 746. 93. [Macaulay], ‘The Present Administration’, Edinburgh Review, 46:91 ( June 1827), p. 245. 94. See J. Chambers, Palmerston: ‘the People’s Darling’ (London: John Murray, 2004), p. 106; Aspinall, Lord Brougham and the Whig Party, pp. 139–52. 95. [H. Brougham], ‘State of Parties’, Edinburgh Review, 46:92 (October 1827), pp. 415-32, p. 416. See his article ‘Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge’ in the same issue. 96. Ibid., pp. 416, 421. 97. Ibid., pp. 428, 431. 98. Ibid., pp. 431, 431. 99. [G. Croly], ‘Whiggism’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 23:135 (February 1828), pp. 165–78, pp. 165, 168. 100. Ibid., pp. 170, 178. 101. [W. Johnstone], ‘The Rise and Fall of the Liberals’, Blackwood’s Magazine, 24:141 ( July 1828), pp. 196–101, p. 96. 102. Chambers, Palmerston: ‘the People’s Darling’, p. 120 ; Bulwer, Life of Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, vol. 1, p. 220; 28 January 1828, to Wm. Temple.. 103. Ibid., p. 122. 104. [ Johnstone], ‘The Rise and Fall of the Liberals’, p. 96. 105. Ibid., pp. 97, 100, 100.
Notes to pages 168–73
215
106. [T. B. Macaulay], ‘Utilitarian Logic and Politics’, Edinburgh Review, 49:107 (March 1829), pp. 159–89, pp. 161, 161, 162. 107. Ibid, pp. 181, 164, 185. 108. [T. B. Macaulay], ‘Bentham’s Defence of Mill’, Edinburgh Review, 49:98 ( June 1829), pp. 273–99, p. 295. 109. Ibid., p. 296. 110. A parliament which meets without formal summons of the sovereign, as happened in 1660, when Parliament voted to extend an invitation to Charles II. In 1689, William III met informally with the parliament that decided that James II had ‘abdicated’. 111. ‘Bentham’s Defence of Mill’, p. 296. 112. Ibid., p. 296. 113. J. J. Sack attests to the importance of Fraser’s, calling it ‘the nursery of the Victorian literati’(From Jacobite to Conservative (1993; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 18. 114. [W. Maginn], ‘Our Confession of Faith’, Fraser’s Magazine, 1:1 (February 1830), pp. 1–8, p. 2. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. The catchphrase used by the Utilitarians and Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826), among others, to describe the progress of the age in mass education. During the 1820s, the publication of encyclopaedias in cheap numbers had become a publishing phenomenon. 117. Ibid., p. 3. 118. Ibid., pp. 3, 3. 119. See W. Hague, William Pitt the Younger (London: Harper Collins, 2004), p. 387. It was notorious that Canning’s mother had been an actress, and Lady Hester Stanhope maintained that even Pitt did not entirely trust Canning (Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope (London: Henry Colburn,1845), vol. 1, pp. 315–16. 120. Chambers, Palmerston: ‘the People’s Darling’, p. 127. 121. ‘Our “Confession of Faith”’, Fraser’s Magazine, 1:1 (February 1830), p. 6. 122. Ibid., p. 8. Maginn’s note: ‘[*Fugitive Poetry; by N. P. Willis. Boston: Peirce and Williams. 1829.]’. 123. T. Carlyle, Two Notebooks of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. Norton (1898; Marmaroneck, N.Y.: P. P. Appel, 1972), p. 170. 124. G. G. Byron, Don Juan, Canto XI, st.76–79, 82, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. J. McGann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), vol. 5, pp. 488–90. 125. [W. Maginn], ‘Mr. Grantley Berkeley and His Novel’, Fraser’s Magazine, 14:80 (August 1836), pp. 242–7, p. 242. This is part of an interjection which Maginn, in the middle of reviewing another author, makes on the young Dickens, ‘Boz the magnificent (what a pity it is that he deludes himself into the absurd idea that he can be a Whig!)’.
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INDEX
Addington, Henry, 48, 58–9, 64, 121, 164 advertising, 1, 28, 57–9, 85, 139, 142 All Talents government, 2, 4–7, 21, 26–8, 29, 33, 38, 39, 44, 59–60, 77, 129, 162, 164 relations with the press, 2, 27, 29, 58 Allen, John, 29 Amiens, treaty at, see Peace of Amiens Annual Register, 133, 148 Aspinall, Arthur, 38, 57 Politics and the Press, 56, 72 Asquith, Ivon, 27 Baldwin, Robert, 105 banter, 13, 116, 157, 172 Barnes Thomas, 139 Beacon, 113, 137 Bedford, Grosvenor, 44 Bell, John, 63 Bell’s Life in London, 110 Bennett, Henry Grey, 134 Bentham, Jeremy, 11, 155, 168, 170–1 Bessborough, Henrietta Frances Spencer Ponsonby, Countess of, 31 Black Dwarf, 93 Blackwood’s Magazine, 14–16, 71, 75, 92, 103, 105, 106–7, 109–10, 118–25, 127–8, 155, 157, 160–1, 167–8 on Coleridge, 81, 141 Hazlitt on, 140 on Liberal, 136
on Liberty, 130 new Tory voice, 13, 141 personality, 105, 107, 154, 172 review of Don Juan, 13, 110, 112, 141 slanders against Whig authors, 140–1 on Westminster Review, 155–6 blue books, 3, 173 Bourne, William Sturges, 5 British Press, 28 Brougham and Vaux, Henry Brougham, Baron, 1, 7, 11–12, 18, 22, 26, 34, 36, 37, 74, 90–1, 96, 146–9, 165–6 ‘Don Pedro Cevallos on the Usurpation of Spain’, 44 ‘George the Third and the Catholic Question’, 163 ‘Mr. Whitbread’s Letter on Spain’, 36, 149 publicist for Whigs, 27–9, 126 Brown, John, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, 151 Buchanan, David, 25 Burdett, Francis, 74, 90–4, 102–4, 134, 142 Burke, Edmund, 11, 38, 70–1, 82, 88–90, 105, 116–18, 138, 156–7, 160, 163, 171 Appeal from the Old Whigs to the New Whigs, 3, 9, 23 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 8–9 Butler, Marilyn, 29
– 235 –
236
Index
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron, 1, 79–80, 83, 90, 92, 96–7, 104, 105, 109, 129 Beppo, 110–11, 128–9, 130, 141–2 Childe Harold, 52–4, 95–7, 111, 127 The Corsair, 130 Don Juan, 3, 13–15, 108, 109, 110, 116, 127, 129, 141–2, 145–6, 172, see also Don Juan English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 127–8 Hebrew Melodies, 129 Hours of Idleness, 96 ‘Lines to a Lady Weeping’, 101 relationship with Hunts, 99, 108, 136 Vision of Judgment, 108 writing style, 53, 97, 110, 116, 143, 153, 172 Campbell, Thomas, 27, 153 Canning, George, 1, 5, 7, 9, 15, 23, 40, 44, 46–8, 52, 54, 60, 71, 99, 102, 122, 132, 137, 149, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 167, 169, 170, 171 administration of the war, 33, 38, 49–50 Canning’s Anti-Jacobin, see Anti-Jacobin ‘Canning’s Courier’, see Courier capitalism, 18, 21, 23, see also free trade; stock-jobbing Carlile, Richard, 55, 74, 103, 120 Carlyle, Thomas, 96, 125, 172 Carnall, Geoffrey, 100 Caroline, Queen, 12, 75, 108, 110, 114–15, 120, 121–2, 131, 137, 157 ‘Letter to the King’, 13 public opinion, 75–76 Castle, John, 93 Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount, 7, 47–50, 90, 119, 121, 146–9 conduct of the war, 33, 38, 40, 46, 52 defends use of spies, 91 Catholic Emancipation, 7, 27, 29, 56, 162–3, 166, 170 Catholicism, 10, 41, 167 Cato-street conspiracy, 76, 161 Cavanagh, John, 89–90 Chambers, William, 168, 171 Champion, 108
Chandler, James, 2 Charmilly, 48 Cintra, see Convention of Cintra Clark, J.C.D., 2, 3, 162 class, 63, 112 lower classes, 1, 10, 13, 36, 99, 100, 102, 110, 126, 137, 151, 159 lower-class literacy, 8, 63 middle and lower classes, 1, 8, 36, 113 Clement, William, 161 Cobbett, William, 1, 2, 3, 10, 16–17, 22, 28, 30, 60, 62, 71, 74, 80, 103, 134–5, 155 addresses lower and middle classes, 62–3, 104 Autobiography, 104 ‘Edinburgh Reviewers’, 12 on education of the poor, 64, 152–3 flees the country, 91, 142 Grammar, 12, 63–6 Hazlitt’s essay on, 116, 140 History of the Protestant Reformation, 10 Important Considerations for the People of this Kingdom, 20 Observations on Priestley’s Emigration, 19 and ‘Queen’s Letter to the King’, 13, 76 readership, 21, 30–1, 62–3, 80, 100, 142 response to Edinburgh Review, 20–1, 24–5, 25–6, 83 ‘Taking Leave of His Country Men’, 63, 92 ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Scotland and Ireland’, 62, 104 writing style, 30–1, 117, 143 Cockburn, Henry, 17–18, 29, 126, 137 Life of Lord Jeffrey, 131 Memorials of His Time, 131 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 11, 17, 26, 40, 61, 73, 80, 83–4, 86, 87–8, 90, 94 Biographia Literaria, 17, 66, 81, 95, 105, 111 Christabel, 79–81 Constitution of the Church and State, 10 Hazlitt’s reviews of, 79–80, 83, 85 as journalist, 17, 30, 80 Literary Life, 80 on personality, 105, 106 on Southey’s Wat Tyler, 69, 87 Constable (Whig publisher), 99 constitutional liberty, 73, 130, 159
Index constitutional opposition, 132–4 constitutional reform, 37–8, 113 Constitutionalist, 137 Convention of Cintra, 45, 53 popular outrage, 37, 40, 42, 44 Cookson, J. E., 2 Copenhagen, 39, 61 copyright laws, 10, 63 Cortes constitution, 145–7 Corunna, 1, 45–50, 52 Courier, 23, 40, 53, 58, 82–3, 160 Cranfield, G. A., 57 The Press and Society, 56 Croker, John Wilson, 81–2, 101–2, 111, 137, 165 review of Rimini, 95, 98 Croly, George, 167 Cronin, Richard, The Politics of Romantic Poetry, 74 Crowe, Eyre Evans, 107 Crown-Commons opposition, 118–19, 163, 164 Cutmore, Jonathan, 50 Dalrymple, Hew, Sir, 40 Davison, Thomas, 99 De Quincey, Thomas, 50 democracy, 20–2, 42, 56, 68, 94, 114, 117, 121, 135, 153 Dickinson, H. T., 2 Dissenting magazines, 29, 68, 117 Don Juan (Byron), 3, 13–15, 108, 109, 110, 116, 127, 129, 141–2, 145–6, 172 Edinburgh Review’s silence on, 110–12, 127–8 reviews in Blackwoods Magazine, 110, 116 Dudley and Ward, John Ward, Viscount, 162, 167 Dundas, Henry, see Melville, Henry Dundas, Viscount Dundas, Robert, 6 Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of, 93 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 69 Edinburgh Annual Register, 44, 54 Edinburgh Whigs, 10, 18–19, 97, see also Edinburgh Reviewers
237
Edinburgh Review, 7, 12–15, 18, 19, 22, 45, 51–2, 68, 73, 75, 79–82, 88–9, 94–7, 120, 122, 133, 140, 141, 153–5, 159, 166, 168, see also Edinburgh Reviewers; Jeffrey, Francis on ad hominem writing, 115, 172 advocating constitutional reform, 38 circulation, 124–5, 127 exclusionary and anti-populist, 20, 29 ‘Historical Review’, 13, 115, 124 literary criticism, 45, 127–8, 160 out of step with public opinion, 36, 37, 44, 97, 124, 149 party politics, 26, 29, 38 review of Political Register (See ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’) reviews of Byron, 110, 127–8 Whiggism, 2, 29, 104, 115, 157, 159 Edinburgh Reviewers, 10, 18–19, 23, 97, 118, 126, see also names of individual reviewers Education, 64, 66, 68, 73, 152–3 Egan, Pierce Boxiana, 110 Dictionary of Slang, 110 Life in London, 109–10, 112 electorate system, 18, 69, see also franchise Ellenborough, Edward Law, Earl of, 71, 73, 92–3, 103 Ellis, George, 5, 7, 45 ‘Affaires d’Espagne’, 47 Epics of the Ton (Hamilton), 105 Erskine, Thomas, 29, 46–7 Examiner, 12, 59, 79, 83, 89–91, 93, 99, 108, 129, 137, 139, 143, see also Hunt, Leigh on Cobbett, 92–4, 101 on Coleridge, 80 radicalism, 13, 90–1, 94, 104–5, 139 Whiggism, 100, 103 Field, Barron, 59 Folkestone, Lord, see Radnor, William Pleydell-Bouverie, 3d Earl of Fontana, Biancamaria, 22, 126 Fox, Charles James, 3–7, 8, 27–8, 30, 38–9, 74 History of James II, 34–5, 45 Inquiry into the State of the Nation, 11
238
Index
Libel Bill mandating trial by jury, 71–2, 75 Fox, W. J., 152–3 ‘Men and Things in 1823’, 151 Foxite Whiggism, 3, 8–9, 16, 27, 132, 149 franchise, 22, 68–9, 84, 113, 115 Fraser’s Magazine, 14, 169–72 Freeling, Francis, 60 Fremantle, W. H., 28 French Revolution, 8, 11, 17–18, 24, 122, 132, 134, 138, 158 and repression of the press, 34, 37, 39, 73, 164 Frere, John Hookham, 46–50, 54, 111–12
Coriolanus essay, 117 ‘The Courier and “The Wat Tyler”‘, 86 The Eloquence of the British Senate, 88 ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, 80 ‘On Modern Lawyers and Poets’, 85 ‘On Paradox and Common-Place’, 117 ‘On the Spy-System’, 90, 93 ‘The Periodical Press’, 13, 125, 138, 149 Political Essays, 70, 108 reviews of Coleridge, 79–80, 83 ‘Southey’s Letter to William Smith’, 87–8 Table-Talk, 107, 112, 116 ‘Historical View of the Rise, Progress, George III, King, 4–5, 7, 22, 37, 52, 57, 108, Decline and Fall of the Edinburgh 165 Review’, 13, 115, 124–5 resistance to Catholic Emancipation, 27, History of The Times, 59 56, 163 George IV, King, 12, 109–10, 114, 121, 137, Hobhouse, John Cam, 9, 104, 111, 158 Holland, Henry Richard Vassall Fox, Baron, 167 22, 27–9, 43, 72, 93, 158 literary defence, 75, 76–7 Home, George, 7 Gibbs, Vicary, 72, 102–3 Gifford, William, 44–5, 50, 101–2, 124 Hone, J. Ann, 2 ‘The Opposition’, 132 For the Cause of Truth, 72 Gilmartin, Kevin, 2 Hone, William, 10, 69, 91–2, 135 Globe, 28 trials, 70–4, 76–7, 90, 100, 101, 102–3, 135 Glorious Revolution, 8, 23, 35, 133 Horne Tooke, John, 156 Godwinism, 55–6, 136 Horner, Francis, 18–19, 25–7, 29, 44, 126, Goldie, Mark, 118 150 government contracts, 1, 34, 57–8 Hume, David, 11, 16, 159 government informers, 90–1, 93 Hume, Joseph, 134, 158, 161 government prosecution for libel, 74, 102–3, Hunt, Henry, 104, 134–5 109 Hunt, John, 28, 59, 71, 108, 137 Granville, Granville Leveson-Gower, Earl, 31 Hunt, Leigh, 61, 74, 79, 94, 100, 107, 108, Grenville, William Wyndham Grenville, 111, 129, 136, 140–1 Baron, 6–7, 27, 28, 47–8, 58, 132 Autobiography, 59, 105 Grey, Charles Grey, Earl, 7, 11, 28, 34, 47, ‘Fellow-Creatures suffered to Die in the 48, 76, 93, 114–15, 119, 120, 134, 164 Streets’, 137 Gross, John, 125 Rimini, 94–5, 97–9 theatrical notices, 59 Habeas Corpus, 62, 75, 92, 133 Whiggism, 103–5 Hammond, George, 59 Hunt trials, 74, 90, 92, 101–2 Hansard, 1, 20 Harling, Philip, 102–3 Huskisson, William, 48, 167 Haslett, Moyra, 108–9 I Carbonari, 145, 148 Hazlitt, William, 13, 79, 81, 83–4, 85, 88, influence, 24, 163–4, see also patronage 90, 106–7, 111, 118, 120, 139–41
Index jacobinism, 3, 9, 24, 35, 43, 85, 126, 136, 146, 148 Jeffrey, Francis, 1, 3, 14, 17–19, 20–1, 29, 39, 52, 54, 98, 104, 112–13, 116, 124, 126, 131, 138, 141, 150, 154–6, 160, 169, see also Edinburgh Review on Byron and Moore, 92–7, 99, 110, 129 ‘Cobbett’s Political Register’, 12, 20–6, 29 Coleridge visit, 81–2 complaint of ‘influence’, 34 Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 160 on the French Revolution, 18, 159 on Lakers ‘sect’ of ‘washtub’ poets, 79, 94 ‘Lord Byron’s Tragedies’, 127 ‘Memoires de Bailly’, 34 ‘Fox’s History of James II’, 34 ‘Southey’s Thalaba’, 94 Jenks, Timothy, 156 John Bull, 103, 137 jury trials, 72–3 Keats, John, 73, 81, 100–2, 103, 104, 107, 114, 140–1 Endymion, 99, 105 Whiggism, 13, 100–1, 104, 108 Keen, Paul, 2 King’s control of government, 118–19, 164 Lake poets, 20, 81, 85, 94, 97–8 Lamb, William, see Melbourne, William Lamb, Viscount Lambton, John George, see Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of Lansdowne, Henry Petty-FitzMaurice, Marquess of, 11, 18–19, 23, 25, 28–9, 47, 134, 162 Lapp, Robert Keith, 80 Lauderdale, James Maitland, Earl of, 6–7, 28–9, 93 Lee, Stephen M., 164 Leeds Mercury, 90 Legitimacy, restoration of, 84, 88, 90, 118–19 ‘Letter from the King to His People’, 76 ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler’ (Maginn), 82, 141–2, 154–5 libel, 57, 67, 72, 103, 134
239
ex-officio informations, 72, 102 Hunt prosecution, 74, 92, 99, 101–2 Libel Bill mandating trial by jury, 71–2, 75 Post Office suit against The Times, 60 and radical publishers, 67, 69, 72, 74 Liberal, 108, 136, 145, 149 Liberal Toryism, 15, 132 Liberales, see Spanish Liberales liberalism, 12, 14–15, 121, 136, 149, 168, 169 across party lines, 2, 136, 151, 162–3, 165, 166–7 liberty, 11–12, 18, 33–4, 35, 37, 39, 40–2, 52, 54, 88, 119, 130, 134, 156, 168 printing press and, 84, 119–20, 157 Whig and Tory ideologies, 118, 131 liberty of the press, 12, 72–4, 87, 119, 120, 132, 165 literacy, 1, 8–9, 55, 62, 68 literary campaigning, 120 literary defence, 70–1, 73, 76–7, 101 literary eloquence as means to political power, 160–1, 171 literary reprints, 153 literary reviewing, 45, 59, 103, 105, 106, 123, 127–8, 138, 153, 160 literary Whiggism, 100, 154 Liverpool, Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd earl of, 46–8, 132, 162–3 Locke, John, 159 Lockhart, John Gibson, 39, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 127, 137, 155 on Don Juan, 142 on Francis Jeffrey, 154 John Bull’s Letter to Lord Byron, 116, 127, 141 Noctes Ambrosianae, 127, 143 ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry. No. I’, 94 ‘On the Periodical Criticism of England’, 123–4 ‘Periodical Criticism’, 13 Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolks, 106 London, 107, 150, 151, 170, 172 London Magazine, 106–7, 109, 119 Lovell, Daniel, 28 lower classes, 36
240
Index
aspiration to literary celebrity, 102 political opinions, 1, 8, 151 lower-class anger, 137 lower-class literacy, 8, see also literacy access to literary culture, 63 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 11, 16, 159, 165, 169 ‘Bentham’s Defence of Mill’, 168 ‘The Present Administration’, 163 MacDonald, Archibald, Sir, 55 Mackintosh, James, 74 ‘Parliamentary Reform’, 75 Vindicae Gallicae, 68, 113 Maginn, William, 170–1, 173 ‘Letters of Timothy Tickler’, 82, 141–2, 154–5 Marriott, John, 110 McCalman, Iain, 2 McCulloch, J. R., The Principles of Political Economy, 150 Melbourne, William Lamb, Viscount, 162, 167 Melville, Henry Dundas, Viscount, 4, 6, 7, 39, 56, 58 middle and lower classes, 1, 8, 36 Mill, James, 11–12, 76, 134, 150 Elements of Political Economy, 151 ‘Liberty of the Press’, 73 Mill, John Stuart, 150, 168 Millar, John, 17, 39 Milton, John, 158 Ministry of All Talents, see All Talents government Mitchell, A., 2 Mitchell, Austin, 7 mob, 137, 150, 152, 156, 157, see also The People Moira, Earl of, 6–7, 28, 46, 101, 130 Moncrieff, William Thomas, Tom and Jerry, 110 Moore, James, 90 A Narrative of the Campaign of the British in Spain, 50 Moore, John, 45, 46–52 Moore, Thomas, 95, 101, 129, 160 biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 14
‘Corruption’, 129 dedication to Walter Scott, 130 ‘Intolerance’, 129 Irish Melodies, 129 Lalla Rookh, 98–9, 129 Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 173 Loves of the Angels, 129–30 Parody of a Celebrated Letter, 130 More, Hannah, 52, 63 Mori, Jennifer, 16 Morning Chronicle, 28, 53, 61, 71, 73, 85, 89–90, 101, 129, 139 Morning Herald, 57 Morning Post, 53, 57–8, 82–3, 101 Morning Star, 28 Murray, John, 45, 80–1, 99, 101, 106, 109, 111 Napier, Macvey, 150 Napoleon, 36, 43, 56, 62, 79, 86, 97, 115 And war on the Continent, 1, 18, 33, 35, 36, 38, 46, 84, 85 nepotism, 1, 90, see also influence; patronage New Monthly Magazine, 107 New Times, 160 ‘Newspaper Stamp Duties’ bill, 74 Newspapers, 56, 62, 68, 133, see also individual newspaper titles Nicholson, Andrew, 111 Observer, 161 O’Gorman, F., 8 Oliver the spy, 90–1, 93 Ollier, Charles, 99 Onwhyn, J., 108 opposition, 2, 3, 10, 14, 31, 132–5, 139, 143, 163, 164 ‘his majesty’s opposition’, 9, 11 oppositional Whiggism, 3 Paine, Thomas, 11, 30, 56, 117 Rights of Man, 10, 55 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Viscount, 11, 18, 48–9, 162, 165, 167, 171 Parker, Mark, 106 parliamentary proceedings, publication, 28 parties, 133, 143, see Tories; Whigs patriotism, 21, 37, 39, 43–44, 54, 85, 156, 168
Index patronage, 21–2, 24, 34, see also influence; nepotism Paulin, Tom, 88, 117–18 Peace of Amiens, 2, 4, 11, 19, 56 Peace of Tilsit, 33 Peacock, Thomas Love, 126 Peel, Robert, 93, 121, 132, 162, 167, 171 Peninsular war, 34, 46, 49–50, 90, see also Napoleon and the war on the Continent; Spain The People, 3, 23, 24, 38, 67, 152, see also democracy; mob independence, 73 interest in national politics, 68, 100 Perceval, Spencer, 8, 22, 62, 103 Perry, James, 61, 71, 73, 85, 92, 129, 139 personality, 79, 95–7, 105, 115–16, 127, 128, 129, 141, 153–4, 172 Blackwood’s, 105, 107, 154, 172 as feature of Whig literature, 119, 128, 135 Petty, Henry, see Lansdowne, Henry PettyFitzMaurice, Marquess of Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 10 Pilot, 28 pirated editions, 1, 109 Pitt, William, 3, 4, 9, 16, 27, 38, 56, 58, 162–5 Pittites, 8, 163, 165 ‘Pitt’s Friends’, 5–6 Place, Francis, 71, 134 Pocock, J. G. A., 2, 10–11 Poets of Great Britain (Bell’s reprint series), 63 political economy, 17, 18–19, 30, 126, 150–1, 153, 168 Political Register, 2, 12, 16, 20, 22, 24–5, 62, 63, 67, 80, 104, 143, 151 see also Cobbett, William politics and new literary readership, 68, 126, 138, 142, 152, 161 Ponsonby, George, 49 popular unrest, 12, 52, 66, 87, 97, 133, 137, 166 Porcupine (1800–1), 19 Porcupine’s Gazette, 19 Porson, Richard, 27
241
Portland, William Henry CavendishBentinck, Duke of, 8, 12, 33, 38 Portland Whigs, 3, 12 Post Office, 58–60 press. See liberty of the press Prince Regent, 57, 100–1, 120, 129–30 printing press, 119–20, 152 ‘Protestant ascendancy’, 170–1 Protestant Dissent, 10, see also dissenting tradition of rational enquiry Protestants, 162–3, 169–70 public opinion, 12, 14, 28, 36, 42, 103, 140, 166, 167, 173 cause of Frere’s pressure on Moore, 48 enthusiasm for war, 50 growing strength of, 22, 84 on libel prosecutions, 71, 103 no parliamentary impact, 76, 94, 120, 149 supersession of parliamentary free speech, 75 Quarterly Review, 5, 12, 45, 47, 50, 69, 81, 99, 101, 102, 141, 105, 110–11, 113, 117, 125, 127, 130, 132–4, 140, 150, 160, 161 establishment of, 50, 103, 127 review of Rimini, 95, 99 reviews of Childe Harold, 95–6 Southey’s work in, 44, 67–8, 91 support for war effort on Spanish front, 44, 52, 54, 137 ‘Queen’s Letter to the King’, 76 radicalism, 2, 9, 56, 94, 101, 102, 104, 120, 126, 132 Cobbett’s, 30–1 Examiner’s radicalism, 90 galvanized by Queen Caroline affair, 131 Radicals, 93, 104, 136, 154, 155 Radnor, William Pleydell-Bouverie, 3d Earl of, 72 reading clubs, 161 Reflector, 136 Regency underworld vernacular, 110 republicanism, 8, 11, 56, 68–9, 118, 158 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 101 Rickwood, Edgar, 9–10
242
Index
Roberts, Michael, 56 Robinson, David, 132–3, 165 ‘The Change of Ministry’, 163 ‘The Faction’, 163 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 43–4, 59, 61, 73, 126 Romilly, Samuel, Sir, 93, 104 Rose, George, 5 Rose, William Stewart, Amadis de Gaul, 5 Russell, John, 11, 120 Sack, James J., 157 scientific Whiggism, 11, 115, 151, 173 ‘Scotch metaphysics’, 35, 45, 126, 151, 168 Scotsman, 137 Scott, John, 105–6, 116, 140 ‘Cockney Writers’, 107 Scott, Walter, 7, 17, 39, 44–5, 52, 53, 56, 80, 98, 105–6, 112, 113, 114, 130, 137, 153, 157 The Field of Waterloo, 95, 97, 109 involvement in the Quarterly Review, 5 The Lady of the Lake, 95 Lay of the Last Minstrel, 4–6, 80, 95 Marmion, 38–9, 51, 95 Paul’s Letters to His Kinfolks, 95 review of Childe Harold, 95–7 The Vision of Don Roderick, 51 secularization, 9–10, 118, 122, 145 sensual literature, 95, 98, 99, 112 Shadwell, Thomas, The Libertine, 108 Shattock, Joanne, 125 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 73, 83, 136 Masque of Anarchy, 101 reads Cobbett’s Political Register, 100 Shenstone, William, Letters to Particular Friends, 117 Shepherd, Samuel, 92, 103 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 14, 59, 146, 149, 160–1 Sidmouth, Henry Addington, 1st Viscount, 48, 58–9, 64, 121, 132, 164 Smith, Adam, 11, 17, 25, 126, 131, 159–60 Smith, Olivia, 9, 99 The Politics of Language, 62 Smith, Sydney, 25, 29 Smith, William, 69 South American Independence, 148–9, 166
Southey, Robert, 12, 20, 40, 54, 67, 68, 81, 86–7, 88, 146 Amadis de Gaul (translation of ), 98 ‘The Book of the Prophet Jehephary’, 122 Colloquies, 10 ‘History of Europe’, 44 ‘A Letter to William Smith’, 69 Madoc, 98 ‘Parliamentary Reform’, 67 ‘Poet’s Pilgrimage to Waterloo’, 94 reads the Political Register, 91 ‘Rise and Progess of Popular Disaffection’, 67 Thalaba, 98 urged arrest of Cobbett, Hone, and Examiner circle, 91 Wat Tyler, 69, 79, 86–7 Spain, 37, 39, 50, 54 British war effort in, 12, 33–4, 90 Spanish Liberales, 145–6, 148 Spanish popular resistance, 34, 40–2, 43, 48, 52, 119, 137, 146–7 distinguished from French Revolution, 43 special juries, 71–3 Spencer, George John Spencer, 2nd Earl, 4–7, 28 spies, 90–1, 93 St. Clair, William, 55, 109 state trials published as popular literature, 93, 100 Statesman, 28 Stephen, James, 61 Stewart, Dugald, 17–19, 22, 23, 29, 30, 39, 97, 126, 150, 151, 162, 168 Stoddart, John, 80, 84–5, 90, 139 Stuart, Charles, 58 Stuart, Daniel, 57, 83 Stuart, Peter, 58 taxation, 62, 132, 166 Temple, Earl. See Palmerston, Henry John Temple, Viscount Thistlewood, Arthur, 92, 100 Thompson, E.P., 55, 120 Thorne, R.G., 72, 161 Tierney, George, 9–10, 49–50, 93, 119, 135 The Times, 12, 43, 57–67, 76, 84, 91, 160
Index advertisements and up-to-date foreign news, 58–60, 142 commercial circulation, 59–60, 62, 139 Hazlitt’s attacks on, 84–5 History of The Times, 59 independence from government sponsorship, 59, 62 Post Office and, 58–60 Tories, 2, 3, 8–9, 11, 21, 54, 118, 167 Tory press, 95, 141 Tory Protestants, 169–70 Toryism, 8, 16, 79, 135, 137 Traveller, 28 trial reporting as form of popular narrative literature, 93, 100 universal suffrage, 68–9, 113, see also democracy University of Edinburgh, 17, 150 University of Glasgow, 17 Utilitarianism, 3, 151, 168–9 Vail, Jeffery, 129 volunteer armed forces, 137 Wade, John, 103 Waithman, Robert, 73 Walcheren, 1 Walter, John I, 57, 59–62 Walter, John II, 58–60, 91 Walter, William, 58 war with France. See Napoleon and the war on the Continent Wasson, Ellis, 29 Wellesley, Henry, 147 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 34, 40, 45–6, 51, 102, 162, 167, 171 Westminster election (1818) 104 Westminster Review, 14, 125, 153–4, 158, 168 appeal to the radicals, 155 belief in political progress, 151 and the Edinburgh Review, 149–50 Whig romances, 99 Whiggism, 10, 11, 14–16, 19, 79, 84 Jeffrey’s analysis of, 160 and language of, 10, 17, 134, 156–7
243
Whiggism and radicalism, 91, 102, 115, 121, 126, 134, 140, 158, 160 encouragement of a radical press, 132 idealism about liberty, 12, 118, 148 interest in international revolutions, 130 king’s (George IV) dislike of, 76 passed over after death of Caroline, 101, 122 press strategy, 27–9, 132, 139–40, 167 professions of democracy, 121 Whitbread, Samuel, 7, 39, 47–8 Letter to Lord Holland, 36, 149 White Dwarf, 67 Wilberforce, William, 27, 61 Wilson, John, 83, 93, 105–6, 109–10, 123, 143, 150 ‘The Chaldee Manuscript’, 94 as ‘Lake’ poet, 97 Noctes Ambrosianae, 107, 172 ‘Observations on Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria’, 94 review of Childe Harold, 96–7, 127 Windham, William, 19, 28, 33, 58, 60 Winterbothem, William, 69 Wolfe, Charles’,The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, 54 Woodhouse, Richard, 105 Wooler, Thomas Jonathan, 92–3, 93, 99, 102, 135 Wordsworth, William, 1, 39, 87–8, 90, 116, 117 The Convention of Cintra, 12, 40–53 The Excursion, 79, 109–10 jacobinism, 17, 86–7 Jeffrey’s criticism, 129 language (naturalness ), 111 Lyrical Ballads, 117 patriotism with romantic attachment to the cause of liberty, 43 Poems, 98 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 86 ‘Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty’, 40 ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, 94 working-class literacy, 13, 99, 102, 110, 126 Yellow Dwarf, 115
