BARS Blog

Mary Fairclough is a Lecturer in English Literature in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, where she also completed her PhD; before rejoining York in 2012, she taught for four years at the University of Huddersfield.  Her research explores the intersections between literary, political and scientific developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing particularly on the ways that different disciplinary discourses employ, inform and complicate each other.  In the interview below, we discuss her first monograph, The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy and Print Culture, which was published by Cambridge University Press in January last year.

1) What brought you to realise that the crowd was a topic you wanted to consider at length?

I have Thomas De Quincey to blame for my interests in crowds – in the first term of my PhD research I was reading as much De Quincey as I could, and remember being struck by the peculiar way in which he described crowd behaviour: ‘Many a man has been drawn, by the contagion of sympathy with his own class acting as a mob, into outrages of destruction of spoliation, such as he could never have contemplated with toleration in his solitary hours.’  I kept returning to that quotation, and it eventually became the epigraph for my book.  What interested me was De Quincey’s use of the term ‘sympathy’ as a means of accounting for collective behaviour.  I had never encountered that use of sympathy before, and I wondered whether other writers of the period also used it when discussing crowds.  As I read more widely in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary and political writings I realised that other writers did indeed describe collective behaviour in terms of sympathy.  And as I explored theories of collective behaviour I soon found that though no-one would still resort to a language of sympathy to account for the behaviour of crowds, commentators today have by no means come to a consensus about why, as De Quincey put it, people do things when in a crowd that they ‘could never have contemplated with toleration in [their] solitary hours.’  Romantic period writers’ use of a language of sympathy thus seemed a fascinating response to issues that we are still trying to come to terms with.

2) How did you approach the process of transforming your doctoral thesis into a monograph?

To be honest, my finished thesis felt to me like it was on the way to being a book, and my examiners encouraged me not to make drastic revisions before sending it to a publisher.  So, slightly hubristically, I wrote up a proposal and sent off a very lightly revised manuscript, updated to take into account the most recent criticism, but with the same structure and focus as the thesis.  The publisher’s anonymous readers made it clear I would need to rework my introduction and opening chapter, which I did, and then thankfully the book was accepted.

3) What do you see as being the defining characteristics of the Romantic crowd, as opposed to those figured in the earlier eighteenth century or the later nineteenth?

I argue in the book that it was only in the Romantic period that writers could use a language of sympathy to account for crowd behaviour, as a result of the coming together of a particular way of thinking about crowds and a particular way of thinking about sympathy.  Earlier in the eighteenth century, commentators, particularly medical writers like Robert Whytt in Edinburgh, had diagnosed a ‘remarkable’ form of sympathy through which physical symptoms could be communicated from one person to another.  But mid-century accounts of crowd action don’t use a language of contagious sympathy to describe collective behaviour.  However, this understanding of contagious or collective sympathy survives until the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, and it’s after the French Revolution that commentators begin to use it to account for the actions of ‘mobs’, both in France and Britain.  By the end of the Romantic period, though, this particular use of sympathy seems to die away – De Quincey is one of the last to use it.  I argue that this can be accounted for by developments in physiology which meant that physical communication, whether individual or collective, was explained through theories of reflexes and nerves rather than this older, quasi-occult language of sympathy.  So later nineteenth-century accounts of crowds, like that of Gustave Le Bon, use a medicalised language, but any reference to physiological sympathy has gone.

4) You contend in your introduction that in the Romantic period sympathy was generally ‘understood as a disruptive social phenomenon which functioned to spread disorder and unrest’, but detail in several of your chapters attempts by writers to reconfigure collective sympathy into a more positive formulation.  What were the stakes in these writers’ interventions, and to what extent, in your view, did they succeed?

I argue in the book that the stakes were high in the effort to rehabilitate a language of collective sympathy in the Romantic period, which is demonstrated by the number of commentators in different fields who take on the challenge.  I see these commentators as split along broadly ideological lines.  Conservative writers generally have little interest in suggesting that collective action can be wholesome or beneficial, but radicals who are publicly committed to democratic reform need to find a way of describing collective action in positive terms.  What I found fascinating is how few radical writers are able to ascribe a positive function to collective sympathy.  Both William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, are unnerved by the apparently instinctive qualities of collective sympathy, or as Godwin terms it ‘brute and unintelligent sympathy’, which seems to bypass rational control.  John Thelwall, in contrast, makes broadly positive (though not totally untroubled) claims for the wholesome basis of collective sympathy.  I argue that he’s able to do so because his early medical training gives him an understanding of the way sympathy is said to regulate the functions of the body, and he applies that model by extension to collective bodies.  But the only other writer in the book to make a straightforwardly positive claim for the value of collective sympathy is the moral philosopher Dugald Stewart.  Like Thelwall, Stewart is well informed about the physiological operations of sympathy, but in addition he appears to take David Hume’s much older account of ethically sound sympathetic communication between individuals, and to make the case that this model can also be applied to crowds.  But the fact that so few writers are able to rehabilitate collective sympathy shows, I think, the difficulty of the task.

5) What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working on a new book about the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century, focusing on the ways in which electricity, which was a totally new science at the period, seemed to elude attempts to theorise and categorise it.  I argue that as a result, electricity was a highly mobile signifier, and extremely useful term for writers, who used metaphors of electricity to account for a whole range of unexplained and unprecedented cultural and social phenomena.  I’m particularly interested in the ways in which metaphors involving electricity are evoked to describe acts of communication, either in person or in print.  So I’ve moved some way from the concerns of my first book, but there is clearly also some important overlap, and I see the second project as informed by the first.

Dr Anthony Mandal, Reader in English at Cardiff University, has published widely on Romantic and Victorian fiction and culture, focusing particularly on Jane Austen, book trade history and the Gothic novel.  Among many other things, he is the developer of British Fiction 1800-1829: A Database of Production, Circulation & Reception,  the author of Jane Austen and the Popular Novel: The Determined Author (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), the editor of the open-access online journal Romantic Textualities and one of the General Editors of The New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.  He is also co-organising (with Dr Jane Moore) the 14th BARS International Conference, Romantic Imprints, which will take place in Cardiff in 2015.  Below, we discuss the process of preparing his new edition of Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, which was published last year by Pickering & Chatto.

1) How did you first come across Self-Control?

My first encounter with Self-Control, and Mary Brunton, was while undertaking research for my PhD in the late 1990s.  I was looking at the intersections between Jane Austen and her contemporaries’ fiction, and my fourth chapter (which was actually the first I wrote) read Mansfield Park against the emergence of evangelical fiction during the late 1800s.  As one of the key novels of the genre, Self-Control formed a key focus of the print cultural analysis and comparative textual readings that I made use of.

2) Which aspects of the book and its history made you want to produce your edition?

When it appeared in 1811, Self-Control was an unexpected bestseller by a first-time novelist, completely overshadowing the publication of another 1811 début—Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  My starting point was Austen’s rather tart comments about the novel, which seemed to dismiss the aesthetic achievement of Self-Control while simultaneously acknowledging its overwhelming popularity: ‘my opinion is confirmed of its’ being an elegantly-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.’  The more I looked into its publication, the more compelled I was by the narrative that unfolded.  Begun as a pastime, Brunton was clearly unprepared for the novel’s success, avowing ‘I would sooner exhibit as a rope-dancer’, than be recognised as a novelist.  And it is this ambivalence—between commercial success and religious rectitude, between popularity and propriety—that offers a suggestive lens through which to examine women’s writing during the Regency.

The publishing context itself was fascinating too: the novel was published by the Edinburgh publishers Manners & Miller, who shared a personal connection with the Bruntons.  Manners & Miller partnered up with the London-based Longmans, who were among the most eminent Romantic businesses of the period.  The novel quickly gained popularity, with the first edition virtually selling out within a month, so much so that Longmans in effect took over the management of the edition, instructing Manners & Miller to produce a second, enlarged edition.  This, again, sold rapidly, and the novel had gone into its fourth edition by the time the year was up.  The reception of the novel was by no means unilaterally positive, and critics were divided over its religious content and depiction of sexual violence, with Mary Russell Mitford observing that she’d heard that the book ‘had occasioned [a dispute] between two gentlemen, one of whom said it ought to be burnt by the common hangman, and the other that it ought to be written in letters of gold.’

Given the popularity of Self-Control during the nineteenth century (it remained in print until the 1880s), I was disappointed by the poor attention it received during the twentieth: a facsimile reprint had appeared by Garland in the 1970s, followed by a reset edition which appeared as part of Pandora Classics’ ‘Mothers of the Novel’ series.  While laudable in its intentions, this latter edition was riddled with typos and carried no annotations, giving little sense of the novel’s allusiveness and richness beyond its relationship to Austen.

3) What were the major challenges you faced in selecting and preparing the text?

Given that the novel went into four lifetime editions within one year (Brunton died in 1818), the main challenge was getting access to these texts.  Luckily, I was able to secure most of the source material electronically from various sources, such as the Internet Archive, the Hathi Trust and the Corvey collection.  Although it wasn’t going to form a key authority when undertaking any emendations, I also wanted to collate the Standard Novels edition that Colburn & Bentley published in 1832, as this formed the basis of the remaining editions that appeared over the next sixty years.  Then came the arduous process of converting these pages into editable text, and carefully proofreading each edition in preparation for the collations.  Luckily, the collation process was assisted by my use of the JUXTA application (www.juxtasoftware.org/), which enabled me to compare the variants digitally.  This was good news indeed, as the collations yielded around 6000 separate variants between the five editions!  Of course, I still had to read through each one and decide which ones to implement and which ones to disregard, ultimately having to apply around 200 substantive emendations, which was no small task.

Another key challenge lay in my choice of copy text.  I decided to return to the first edition, as the rest of the nineteenth-century editions were derived from the second.  Owing to various criticisms and suggestions that Brunton had received, she made a number of significant alterations to the text, toning down various controversial elements.  For instance, the villain of the novel is presented as much more calculating and sexually violent in his predations on the heroine in the first edition; whereas from the second onwards, he is presented as much more under the instinctual sway of his desires.  I wanted to return to the more unsettling aspects of the first edition, which I felt would offer the modern reader a more compelling and complex text.  Structurally, Self-Control originally appeared in two volumes, which broke at a very dramatic moment in the narrative; whereas the second to fourth editions were divided into three, which I felt diminished that compelling sense of urgency.

That said, what struck me about the first edition was how poorly the paragraphs had been set for a published work.  This was borne out by anecdotal comments which stated that the first edition had been typeset directly from Brunton’s first manuscript (rather than a fair copy), as well as an examination of the printer’s press-marks in the volumes themselves, which showed that the job had been spread out among multiple personnel.  As a result, paragraphs in the first edition sometimes run for pages in length, while passages of dialogue are squashed together, distorting some of the textual richness of the first edition.  After much agonising, I elected to follow the paragraphing of the second edition, which seemed to open up the text much more fluidly and lucidly.  All the while, the textual purist on my shoulder was berating me for such a decision.  However, I reasoned that rapid preparation of the first edition afforded Brunton little opportunity to make the interventions that she did a few months later when revising the second edition text.

4) In your introduction, you make a strong case for the novel as a ‘messy, rich and rewarding text’.  Now that the new edition has made it more generally available, what sorts of research projects and taught courses do you think might profitably employ it?

I would say that Self-Control is richly rewarding on a number of levels.  Firstly, research into and teaching of the Romantic book trade will find it a very interesting case study for the production, dissemination and reception of fiction.  This, coupled with Brunton’s anxieties about fame and recognition, offers some suggestive material about the role of the woman writer during this crucial period in the history of the novel.  More generally, the fortunes of Self-Control provide some interesting opportunities for the study of canon-formation and literary legacies, especially when read against more readily recognisable writers such as Austen and Scott.  But the content of the novel itself offers some very interesting dynamics to students of the nineteenth-century novel, as it presents a strong and independent heroine who resists her marginal status in quite powerful ways, while attempting to evince a religious agenda.  Brunton is able to draw together melodramatic incident, literary satire and psychological sensitivity throughout the novel, in ways that can be read backwards to Richardson and forwards to Victorian realism.  I’ve taught the novel for a number of years on an MA module entitled ‘The Popular Novel in the Age of Austen’, and students were very responsive to it, which was another spur to prepare the edition.  My hope is that scholars who study the novel will find that, while it may not have the sustained elegance of Austenian prose, Self-Control nevertheless provides a compelling and at times moving account of the limitations and pressures faced by women at the turn of the nineteenth century.

5) What’s next for you?

As usual, too much!  During 2014, I’ll be co-authoring with Franz Potter and Colin Marlaire, The Palgrave Guide to Gothic Publishing: The Business of Gothic Fiction, 1764–1835.  This is a 230,000-word reference guide that examines the authors, publishers, printers, circulating-library proprietors and magazines that played a formative role in ensuring the success of first-wave gothic fiction.  I’ll be balancing this project with a number of articles on medical writing and nineteenth-century periodical gothic, as well as my role as a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson—our first half-dozen volumes will be appearing over the coming year.

Oh, and there’s the little matter of co-organising BARS 2015, of course…

Tim Fulford, Professor of English at De Montfort University, is one of the hardest-working scholars in Romantic studies.  In the past several years, he has, among other things, edited (with Lynda Pratt) Robert Southey’s Later Poetical Works and large parts of his voluminous Collected Letters; produced editions of Robert Bloomfield’s letters and his poem The Banks of the Wye; and organised a series of excellent conferences.  Below, we discuss his fascinating new monograph, The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revisited, which was published by Cambridge University Press last month.

1) In his last book, On Late Style, Edward Said looks at lateness not as ‘harmony and resolution’ but as ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction’ involving ‘above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness, going against…’.  Was a ‘contradictory, alienated relationship’ with ‘the established social order’ something you found manifested in the late works of the Lakers, or were their late styles more conciliatory?

None of the above I think…Certainly not harmony and resolution, but not intransigence and going against an established order either.  I see the Lakers as part of a contest for cultural authority; responding to the severe critiques made of them—personal attacks as well as reviews of their work—they revised old work, and produced new kinds of work, so as to gain legitimacy, influence and popularity.  Their late careers did not so much feature self-satisfied summings-up, looking only backwards into their own oeuvres, as interventions in a vexed cultural sphere: they changed their style—and genre—; they revised past poetry, to win a public for work that had been widely derided for many years.

2) You argue persuasively that Wordsworth and Coleridge’s late works became neglected in part due to struggles in the universities in the early twentieth century to define a teachable method for literary criticism.  How do you think our scholarly and pedagogical agendas need to shift in order to reintegrate these works?

I think it’s not so much a change of agenda we need—the New Historicist methodology to which most Romanticists are committed has expanded the traditional canon and taught us to investigate writing in historical context; what we haven’t done, by and large, is follow-through by investigating the later careers and contexts of these poets.  Much more work needs to be done on their writing, and its effect, in the 1820s, 30s and 40s.

3) How has your recent editorial work on Southey’s Collected Letters and Later Poetical Works informed this project?

Southey’s letters are so full of references to contemporary events—political and cultural—and to history, that, annotating them, I learnt far more than I’d ever known about the period, and the positions of the Romantic poets in the culture of the time.  Editing the Later Poetical Works showed me in detail what a variety of interesting poems Southey had written late in his career—and reminded me how little studied they are.  It also showed how involved in revision he was—it wasn’t only Wordsworth that obsessively reworked poems to make an impact of a different kind when republished later in life.

4) In your introduction, you state that part of your purpose is to ‘investigate these poems for what they say to us now’. Could you pick out two or three examples from among these late works that you think have particularly strong resonances for modern audiences, general or scholarly?

Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Long Meg and her daughters’ is a quietly astonishing poem looking at a prehistoric stone circle and pondering our relationship to history; Coleridge’s composite prose/verse text ‘The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree’ is a post-modernist tour de force—a self-referential riddle exploring writing, creativity and sexuality.  Southey’s A Tale of Paraguay is a salutary story about the dangers of well-meaning interventions in indigenous cultures—highly relevant in today’s world of ‘missions’ in Afghanistan and exploitation of the Amazon.

5) What’s next for you?

I’m getting the 2014 Coleridge Summer Conference together, and finishing another monograph—provisionally called The Consequences of Love—on Romantic poetry emerging from, and redefining, partnerships and their breakdown.  It looks at Southey, Coleridge and Mary Robinson as a collaborative circle, at Southey and Coleridge’s intense friendship and rivalry, at Wordsworth partnered by the ghost of Cowper in 1804, at Bloomfield and the Cockney essayists, at Wordsworth and Dorothy in the 1820s, and at Clare impersonating other poets in the 1840s.  I’m also editing Part V of Southey’s letters, due out on the Romantic Circles website in 2015, and Humphry Davy’s letters, due out with Oxford in 2018.

Five Questions returns in style with an interview with Dr Kerri Andrews, Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde.  Hailed by Tim Fulford as ‘the doyen of Yearsley Studies’, Kerri is also interested in the broad sweep of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary culture, and has published on Robert Southey, Charlotte Smith, William Cowper and William Wordsworth, among others.  In this interview, though, we keep the focus on Kerri’s work on Yearsley, discussing her recently-published monograph, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: the Story of a Literary Relationship and her new three-volume edition of The Collected Works of Ann Yearsley, published this month by Pickering & Chatto.

1) How did you first become interested in Ann Yearsley?

I was right at the start of my PhD: I knew I wanted to write about women writers and how they accessed print culture, but I didn’t know which women writers I wanted to work on.  I was browsing in the Special Collections at the Brotherton Library in Leeds when I came across a pamphlet in which was included ‘Mrs. Yearsley’s Narrative’, which I would later learn was affixed by Yearsley to the fourth edition of her first volume of poems.  I read it having no idea who Yearsley was, but was immediately struck by the forceful language she was using – I had had no idea women could or did write like that in the eighteenth century.  It really challenged what I thought I knew about the period, and I was hooked.  Years later when I first met Tim Burke (who edited a selection of Yearsley’s poems for an excellent book published by Cyder Press) it transpired that we had both had the same first encounter with Yearsley, in the same place (he too did his PhD at Leeds), and that it had a profound effect on us both.

2) How did the new archival evidence you uncovered while researching Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry lead you to reconsider their dispute and their places in wider literary networks?

I think the biggest thing was discovering the letter from Yearsley to More, dated 13 September 1785.  In that Yearsley makes a wholehearted acknowledgement of More’s goodness to her, but goes on to accuse her former patron of fraud.  This made me realise that Yearsley had attempted to deal with the dispute privately and properly – she wasn’t some bitter harridan, which is sometimes the image we have of her, especially from older scholarship – but had tried to use all channels before resorting to the publication of her ‘Narrative’.  But there was also something familiar about the letter when I first found of it (which initially made me panic in case I hadn’t ‘discovered’ it at all).  I quickly found where I had read parts of it before: More had transcribed it for Elizabeth Montagu, and that letter had survived in the Huntington Library and had been republished by Mary Waldron in her biography of Yearsley.  When I put the two letters together I realised that More had substantially, and very carefully, edited and rewritten Yearsley’s letter so instead of being about how her children’s inheritance was not being protected, it became about how Yearsley wanted the money for herself.  That indicated some really interesting things about the way More was making use of her literary networks and her powers as a patron.

More broadly, though, the new archival material indicated that Yearsley’s circle of acquaintances was much wider than we had known.  And, of course, I found tantalising hints that Yearsley knew some of the most prominent Bristol radicals of the day, including Thomas Beddoes, and was associated with Cottle’s literary circle.  The evidence I found isn’t enough to conclude that Yearsley was part of the inner circle which met above Cottle’s bookshop, but it was suggestive that she was at least connected to some groups of people who hadn’t before been considered part of her social context.  That will open up new possibilities, I think, in reading Yearsley (or at least I hope it will).

3) What were the main pleasures and challenges of preparing the Collected Works?

Perhaps the main challenge was the sheer size of the task!  It was one of those ideas that seemed a really good one at the time, and I had set a five-year deadline so I was able to tick along pleasantly with it for a while, but when it came to really get down to it late in 2012 I realised just how much I’d taken on.  Deciding how to organise the poetry was also tricky, as the early volumes especially come with so much crucial prefatory material.  There were several iterations, but I think the current layout (with that prefatory material contained in Appendices, but not in the main body of the edition) is a good compromise.  The main pleasure was finding so much new material, and I was particularly pleased that – just through happenstance – the first volume opens with two previously unknown poems.  Others are scattered throughout the volume, but it was very nice to be able to present some of that very interesting new material right at the beginning.  It was also a pleasure to produce an accessible edition of Yearsley’s novel, though I’m left with a great deal of knowledge about the reign of Louis XIII I’m not sure I’ll use again.

4) In the introduction to your monograph, you contend that the critical focus on the More dispute has ‘diminish[ed] the significance of Yearsley’s literary achievements’ and ‘shorten[ed] our critical focus on her literary career to the eighteen months during which she was More’s protégée’.  With that in mind, which of Yearsley’s works do you think make the best entry points for those wanting to find out about her wider oeuvre and for those considering adding her works to modules and syllabi?

My two personal favourite poems are ‘Clifton Hill’ and the second ‘Soliloquy’ poem.  Neither has any relation to the image of Yearsley as combative; they showcase instead her ability to closely observe and identify with a landscape, and her serious philosophical interests.  Indeed, one of the things that I discovered working across the edition was the frequency with which Yearsley engages with Classical philosophy.  References to philosophy abound in her novel, but there are also references to Platonism in her letters, and philosophical ideas become increasingly important in her later poetry.  I think these are the sorts of things that get overlooked by critics focused on the juicy bits from 1785, and might help make Yearsley more than the go-to labouring-class poet on survey courses.

5) What’re you planning next?

Next is a turn to the dark side, and some work on Hannah More.  It became apparent as I was working on the monograph that scholarship badly needs an edition of More’s letters, so I’ve put together a team to produce an electronic searchable edition.  We’ve just been knocked back by the AHRC, though, so we’re back to the drawing board in terms of securing funding, but I’m very hopeful we’ll be able to convince someone to support the project.  At the same time I’ve also started working on the second monograph which is going to be (at least it is at the moment…) on newspaper culture in the late eighteenth century.  I discovered that Yearsley published in the papers from 1787-94 (another new aspect of her career for scholars to pursue I hope), and I’m intrigued by the role the papers played in the literary culture of the period.  It’s very much in the early stages, though.