BARS Blog

Laura Kirkley is currently a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University.  She completed her PhD at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, writing an interdisciplinary thesis focusing on Mary Wollstonecraft; subsequently, she worked as a College Lecturer at The Queen’s College Oxford before returning to Trinity Hall as a Lecturer in English and French.  Her work focuses particularly on women’s writing, feminist theory, cross-cultural exchanges and translation, which made her an ideal editor for Caroline of Lichtfield, a novel originally composed in French by Isabelle de Montolieu and translated into English by Thomas Holcroft.  Her edition, which we discuss below, was published by Pickering & Chatto in April as the nineteenth volume in the Chawton House Library series.

1) You write in your acknowledgements that you first came across Caroline of Lichtfield through Mary Wollstonecraft.  To what extent were the expectations Wollstonecraft raised satisfied when you first read the novel?

I didn’t have any particular expectations, I was simply intrigued.  From what I could gather, Caroline de Lichtfield – Wollstonecraft seems to have read the French version – was a sentimental novel, and Wollstonecraft’s reviews of such works were generally waspish and disapproving, so I was surprised by her enthusiasm.  She seems to have found the novel in the library of the Kingsborough family home when she was a governess in Ireland, and I was interested in her French literary influences in that period, so I decided to find out why she’d been so delighted with Caroline.  I wondered if there had been an English translation, and I found a particularly lively one by none other than Thomas Holcroft.  I know translation is often regarded as hack-work, but I was still surprised: I’d tended to associate Holcroft with political, polemical, or theatrical works – and indeed, Caroline turns out to be the only novel he ever translated.  So I read Caroline (in French and in English) as part of my research into Wollstonecraft and her fellow radicals, and I found, both times, that I couldn’t put it down!  It’s a sentimental novel, but it’s one that engages intelligently, and often humorously, with the literature and culture of sensibility.  Montolieu is very aware of the conventions of her own genre, and she embraces and mocks them in equal measure.  I kept thinking of Austen – who, it turns out, read and enjoyed Caroline – and I’m convinced her reading of Montolieu played a part in the creation of Sense and Sensibility. Caroline is a very enjoyable read, which explains why it was a bestseller, but it’s clear to me that Montolieu was also highly influential.

2) In what ways do you believe that the novel and Montolieu’s wider work have been misrepresented in critical accounts?

Very little has been written about Montolieu.  That might sound odd, given that she was both prolific and well received; but because she often translated or adapted existing texts, she’s been sidelined as an imitative, populist writer.  Personally, I think her neglect is a feminist issue too: there’s been a tendency, in the past, to regard women writers as less inventive than their male counterparts.  Look at Aphra Behn: her works were criticised as derivative for years, even though highly respected contemporaries, such as Dryden, also adapted source texts.  Feminist critics have rehabilitated many neglected women writers, but there’s still more work to do.  Of course, our understanding of writers like Montolieu is now also being shaped by advances in Translation Studies, which suggest that translation and adaptation should, indeed, be regarded as creative practices.  To my knowledge, with the exception of Joan Hinde Stewart, critics have tended to dismiss Caroline as sentimental melodrama.  And yet exacting critics of the novel, such as Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Staël, and Maria Edgeworth, singled out Montolieu for praise.  I think they were alert to her metafictional commentary and the moral argument of her works in a way that many modern critics are not.  Hopefully my introduction to the edition will do something to address that problem!

3) How did the text’s status as a translation and its Swiss and European contexts affect the preparation of your edition?

I wanted to highlight the differences between Montolieu’s text and Holcroft’s translation, so I spent a lot of time comparing the versions and creating a set of footnotes that point out, and suggest possible reasons for, important cuts, additions, or alterations.  In the introduction, I also devoted a lot of space to contextualising Montolieu, who was a Swiss-French gentlewoman, and Holcroft, who was a working-class British radical.  That brief description makes them sound poles apart, but I believe that Caroline testifies to certain shared moral and cultural values that promoted literary exchange between Britain and Switzerland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

4) In what ways do you think the novel might productively be used in undergraduate and postgraduate courses and by researchers?

Caroline epitomises the French novel of sentiment, so it would be invaluable reading for students of French and Comparative Literature.  The English version was incredibly well received in Britain, so Holcroft’s translation could also be used to explore ideas of sensibility and moral sentiment with students of English literature.  The novel was written at a pivotal moment, when the literature of sensibility was enjoying its heyday on the European continent but was also a well-established genre increasingly vulnerable to ridicule.  Montolieu provides material to explore both kinds of response to sentimental literature.  Researchers of any novelist writing in this period – particularly scholars of Austen, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth or De Staël – may also want to consider the influence of Caroline on the novel in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It’s also essential reading, I believe, for scholars of Holcroft.  As my introduction suggests, it’s instructive to observe what aspects of the novel he changed in the process of translation.  In my view, his translations were often apprentice efforts – he used them to develop various styles of writing and, in Caroline of Lichtfield, his prose is distinctively theatrical.  I hope the novel also provokes more interest in the works of Montolieu, who has been neglected for far too long.

5) What new projects are you currently pursuing?

Too many!  I’m currently finishing the Wollstonecraft monograph that I was researching when I came across Caroline de Lichtfield.  It’s called The Revolutionary Cosmopolitanism of Mary Wollstonecraft, and it redefines Wollstonecraft as a cosmopolitan intellectual who was profoundly influenced by the European commerce des lumières and by Revolutionary political and linguistic theories.  I analyse her engagement with the works of Rousseau, her work as a translator, and her evolving philosophical and creative response to issues of patriotism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural difference.  I’ve also been researching Wollstonecraft’s translation into French and German in her own lifetime and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and considering how the different agendas of the translators gave her multiple European ‘afterlives’.  I’m interested in attitudes to translation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that’s also led to some research into Germaine de Staël, the quintessential cosmopolitan.  And finally, I’ve begun work, with some colleagues at Cambridge and St Andrews, on a project that explores the literary and aesthetic treatment of maternal sentiments in the early modern era.  My research for that project has focussed partly on Wollstonecraft – again! – but I’ve also been considering the lyric and elegiac poetry of women writing earlier in the eighteenth century.

Ildiko Csengei is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield.  After completing her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, she held an R. A. Butler Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Before taking up her current post, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of English at Cambridge and Director of Studies in English at Newnham College.  Her research focuses on the literature and culture of sensibility, Romanticism and war, the history of emotions and the intersections between science, literature and history.  Below, we discuss her wide-ranging and fascinating first monograph, Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.

1) Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century focuses particularly on ‘the darker side of sympathy’, examining its ‘morally and politically charged ambivalence’.  How did you first become interested in this area?

During my very first term as a PhD student I came across Albrecht von Haller’s A Dissertation on the Sensible and Irritable Parts of Animals in Cambridge University Library’s Rare Books Room.  This text drew my attention to an interesting ambivalence in the very definition of eighteenth-century sensibility.  Albrecht von Haller was a Swiss physiologist, who examined sensibility in various parts of the body in 1752 by dissecting live animals.  In this treatise he depicts the acute torments he put his animals through for the benefit of mankind, while claiming to feel for them the strongest compassion.  Haller defined sensibility as a capacity for feeling pain, and he therefore tried to determine the sensibility of various organs through the animal’s “evident signs of suffering”, such as their cries and squirms.  What I found really intriguing, however, is how the text itself bears the marks of his author’s ambivalent position.  Haller’s method of definition, based on the foreclosure of emotion, creates a traumatic text that is structured by symptomatic fissures.  Despite its erasure in the process of experimentation, however, affect re-emerges in the tropes of the medical text.  From then on I proposed to formulate my main research questions around how sensibility and its definition could become inseparable from violence and cruelty and pursued these questions at the intersections of ethics, science, literature and politics.

2) How did the book evolve as it traversed its road to publication?

I always wanted my PhD dissertation to become a book one day, so I wrote it with an ambitious scope in mind.  Driven by a passion for the sciences of the psyche, I worked with a theoretical framework that puts the age of sensibility into a broader history of feeling and explores connections with more recent ideas of emotional response in psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and the neurosciences.  Yet, when the dissertation was finished I thought of it as a skeleton that needed to be fleshed out, and therefore the biggest transformation the project went through was from PhD dissertation to book manuscript.  This involved a large volume of added historical, philosophical, psychological and political material, a rearrangement of the structure and the refinement of the argument.  As the project evolved I realised that an important aspect of my argument is to shift the focus of scholarship to highlight the vicissitudes of mechanist and materialist veins of thought that persist on the margins of a predominantly vitalist culture of sensibility throughout the eighteenth century.  These often overlooked trends are important, because they open up a space for socio-political critique and for resistance to violence and to dominant structures of power.  Once I had submitted the manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan, I was lucky to have had a straightforward route to publication.  The editors were always prompt, helpful and professional and they showed great enthusiasm for the project from start to completion.  Working with them was a pleasure.

3) The book falls into two halves, one examining the philosophical and bodily aspects of sympathetic response, the other focusing particularly on literary texts, including both popular published works and private manuscripts.  Why did you select this particular structure, and how did you come to choose your major case studies?

The structure of the book follows the ways in which discourses and concepts that constitute the language and culture of sensibility emerged from the fields of physiology and philosophy and gradually permeated literature, politics, and also everyday speech, life and manners.  This structure also enabled me to fully outline and develop the book’s broader theoretical framework and to explain my approach to sympathy in the first half of the book.  When organising the material I took a thematic approach and explored forms of emotional and physical response to stimulus, including sympathy, tears, swooning and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century contexts.

Before I settled on my chosen case studies I had read through a vast number of primary texts based on my thematic searches in the library catalogue.  I wanted to understand the boundaries, extremes and margins of sensibility: fainting and loss of consciousness, moments when feeling turns into insensibility, when sentiment borders on madness and hysteria, when sympathy fails and when sensibility is just another name for the pains of torture.  The concept of irritability, denoting the body’s involuntary contractions, is sensibility’s materialist “other”; however, it was not only important for eighteenth-century physiologists, but also for the language of political writings and for the swoons of eighteenth-century sentimental heroines.  I was intrigued by the novels of Oliver Goldsmith and Henry Mackenzie, where excessive sympathy and generosity endangers the very integrity of the self.  In the course of my research I came across a few real gems, for instance, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, Henry Mackenzie’s letters and Godwin’s diary.  Close reading a few helped me form my initial research questions and presuppositions.  In the end I included core literary texts of sensibility (by Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Mackenzie), works by its most central philosophers (Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith), medical writings about sympathy, sensibility and irritability (Albrecht von Haller, Robert Whytt, La Mettrie), late eighteenth-century critiques of sensibility by Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Inchbald, along with William Godwin’s papers, letters and diary.

4) How has the process of writing this book changed the way you approach eighteenth-century literature, both in your research and in the classroom?

Apart from understanding the contextual specificities of eighteenth-century sensibility, this book made me think about the continuities of eighteenth-century cultural phenomena with modern sciences of the mind.  Two ways of questioning operated in my book: whilst performing contextualised readings of individual texts, the book argued for the necessity of establishing relations between eighteenth-century and modern ways of understanding feelings and the human mind.  When it comes to affectivity I found that a strictly contextual understanding was not always sufficient for explaining the workings of feelings and their ambivalence.  I argued that the typical symptoms of sensibility such as fainting, crying and melancholia form part of a complex psychopathology that often reaches beyond the concerns of contemporary medicine.  I came to see the age of sensibility as part of a long history of feeling, where connections and continuities can be found in the ways in which feelings have been experienced, expressed, conceptualised and studied from the eighteenth century to the present.  In this respect, the history of sympathy is closely interrelated with the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, creating a framework in which the age of sensibility and that of Freud and his successors are theoretically and historically linked.

But also, the book made me think about the relevance of eighteenth-century sensibility to our current practices of reading and emotional response.  The success of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling at the time of its publication in 1771 and the subsequent ridicule of its tearful scenes only a few decades later well illustrates the transformation of the way in which audiences related to sentiment.  We do not cry over sentimental novels any more.  Instead, we produce scholarly analyses from a safely detached perspective.  Today’s dominant academic practices cut themselves off from direct affective engagement.  Both formalist and historical approaches to literature tend to facilitate detachment, and the experience of emotional response is thus excluded from serious academic discussion.  Reconciling the obvious tension between critical, historical detachment and the immediacy of emotional response is the challenge students of literature today need to face.  In our age, texts exist that – as sentimental novels once did – compel us to absorb the values and ideologies of a culture by directly appealing to our tears or our feelings.  A detachment from our own feelings (whether conscious of involuntary) does not help us to evaluate critically the cultural and political messages that surround us, but nor does an unreflected, purely sentimental response prove helpful.  Making us conscious that our emotional responses do exist is a task that needs to be addressed by future practices of critical reading, which need to negotiate a space for the experience of affectivity within the framework of its theory.  This does not mean returning to a purely affective reading practice, but the acknowledgment of our emotional responses and a simultaneous preservation of our critical and historical insight.

5) What projects are you currently working on?

I am now writing a new academic monograph, War and Feeling in British Romanticism.  I am focusing on the role feelings and emotions play in the process of experiencing, understanding, and representing conflict during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.  A number of articles are also in preparation on specific battles and contemporary technologies of warfare.  I have found that my long-standing interest in the history of emotions comes in handy with this project too.

Dr Mark Sandy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Durham University.   His research focuses primarily on Romantic poetics and legacies, paying particular attention to the intersections between poetry, philosophy and theories of subjectivity, but he has also published on twentieth-century writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison.  His first monograph, Poetics of Self and Form in Keats and Shelley, was published by Ashgate in 2005; subsequently, he has edited and co-edited essay collections on Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (Ashgate, 2008), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2012) and Venice and the Cultural Imagination (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).  Below, we discuss his latest monograph, Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning, which was published by Ashgate last November.

1) How did you come to realise that Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning was going to be your next monograph project?

My first book had focused on ideas about subjectivity and notions of the self as fictional in the poetry of Keats and Shelley.  The writing of this earlier book led me to think about these Romantic poets in the context of post-Romantic thinkers, especially Nietzsche.  Through this work I become increasingly alert to those darker, if you will, ‘existential’ aspects of Romantic poetry which tried both to defend the self against the contingencies of life and to affirm those tragic realities of existence.  It was this increased awareness of these darker ‘existential’ aspects of the poetry of Keats and Shelley which first started me thinking about whether there were similar poetic modes of consolation and disconsolation at work (in various ways) within the poetry of other writers of the Romantic Period.  These initial thoughts made me wonder whether there was the possibility of this being the basis for a larger project and became the first inklings of my second book.

2) The book focuses the ‘Big Six’ canonical Romantic poets, but also on Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans and John Clare.  How did you come to choose these authors as your principal subjects, and were there other writers you considered including during the course of composition?

In some respects, I suppose, Wordsworth has a lot to answer for as he was my first, so to speak, ‘test case’, but his poetry quickly reminded me that individual and personal grief (whether fictional or actual) are bound up with acts of memory.  The idea of memory as a forcibly creative presence, then, helped to shape much of my thinking and writing about many of the other Romantic poets that subsequently found their way into Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning.  Because I wanted to see how central (or not) this connection between memory and mourning was to the other canonical Romantic poets I included the so-called ‘Big Six’, but I also wanted to gain a sense of whether these preoccupations were featured in the writings of those (like Smith, Hemans, and Clare).  I needed to get the measure of whether (or not) what I had started to see as a peculiarly Romantic fascination with memory and mourning was a genuine preoccupation within a broader sense of Romanticism (one that encompassed first-, second-, and third-generation poets).  As for other writers that I might have included: certainly, the poetry of Barbauld and Landon speaks to many of the preoccupations of the book in its finished form.

3) To what extent do you believe that there is an overarching and peculiarly Romantic attitude to memory and mourning, and to what extent are the attitudes of each the poets you examine distinctly their own?

From what I have said, I agree it might seem that I am suggesting that there is an overarching Romantic attitude to memory and mourning.  And to a degree, I think that’s true.  Perhaps more accurately, though, it is the interplay between memory and mourning that comes into a more distinctly sharp focus in the Romantic period.  What, however, really interested me was the numerous ways, at the level of poetic treatment and technique, that this shared concern with memory and mourning works its way out in the poetry of individual poets.  For example, the bid that Wordsworth’s poetry makes towards consolation and communal memory often reminds Wordsworth of the limitations of his model of poetic consolation.  By contrast, Coleridge’s poetry initiates gestures towards wider society only to find consolation in the introspective inter-play of language that allows his speakers, at least, imaginatively to engage with the outer world.  To give another instance, Byron’s anxieties over posthumous reputation find expression in his representation of public history and the fallen civilisations of Greece and Rome, whereas Shelley’s similar authorial concerns are expressed through inwardly turned quest romances.

4) Did the monograph project influence the two essay collections on Romantic legacies which you edited during its composition (Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era and Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century)?  Was it influenced in turn by the research included in these volumes?

Yes, definitely.  Romantic Echoes appeared when I was just beginning to think about memory and mourning in Romantic poetry and the collection on Romantic Presences was published when I was a good way into the writing of Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning.  So, in many respects, my thinking about Romantic legacies and dialogues (across different periods and within the Romantic period itself) has certainly been an important influence on the shaping of my second monograph.  Perhaps this is most evident in the chapter on Smith and Hemans, as well as the coda to the book which traces the grief-stricken trope of birdsong from the Romantics through Tennyson, Hopkins, and to Yeats.  This question of Romantic inheritance and indebtedness has been a fascination of mine for some time now and led to the founding, with my colleagues Michael O’Neill and Sarah Wootton, of a research group (at Durham University) focused on ‘Romantic Dialogues and Legacies’ in 2005.

5) What new projects are you working on at present?

I am presently co-editing a collection of critical essays on Decadent Romanticism, intended as a companion volume to Romantic Echoes and Romantic Presences, which addresses the relations between literary and cultural decadence and Romanticism.  I am also working on a book-length study of legacies of British Romanticism in twentieth- and- twenty-first century American literature, provisionally titled Transforming Romanticism: New Trans-Atlantic Dialogues in Romanticism and the Environment.  At a later point, I also plan to return to the more mournful topic of ghostly figures, apparitions, and spectres in Romantic poetry.

Georgina Green is currently a Research Fellow at the University of York; prior to taking up this appointment, she completed her PhD at the University of Oxford and conducted research at Carleton University and the University of Warwick.  Her work centres on political and literary interactions in the 1790s and particularly on the relationships between individuals, groups, networks and the populace at large.  These concerns inform her first monograph, The Majesty of the People: Popular Sovereignty and the Role of the Writer in the 1790s, which was published in February by Oxford University Press and which we discuss below.

1. How did you first become interested in the idea of the majesty of the people?

I think my interest in popular sovereignty began with little more than an intuitive interest in the parallels between the problems of political representation and ‘literary’ anxieties about the inadequacy of language.  I had become interested in Wordsworth’s angst about the poet’s authority during my undergraduate reading of The Prelude.  I remember simply knowing ‘I want to look at anxieties about authority’.  This seems ridiculously vague and all-encompassing now, but I began by looking at eye-witness accounts of the French Revolution.  I read Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France.  From the spectacular opening of the first volume of her letters, it is clear that Williams’ bid for authority was not only tied up in her eye-witness status, but in her sympathy with the revolutionary crowd.  Through reading Mary Favret (Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)), Gregory Dart (Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)), and Steven Goldsmith (Unbuilding Jerusalem; Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)), I became very interested in a Jacobin desire to transcend representation, and rather to embody the people; as Goldsmith puts it, ‘the Jacobins were able to seize power in Paris mainly because of their opposition to representation, because of their claim to embody immediately “the will of the people”‘.  This urge to transcend representation in a political context seemed to resonate with what had always intrigued me when I had come across it in literary texts and manifestos from The Prelude to the positivist fantasies of the Imagist movement: a concern about the inadequacy of language.  Despite this quite abstract beginning, this interest was modified and sustained by the richness of 1790s’ print culture, and I hope this comes across in the book.

2. How did you select and order the six authors around whom your book centres?

I wish I could say that the selection process was fair and transparent, or even strategic, but it was quite organic if I am honest.

As I’ve said, I began by reading Helen Maria Williams and became interested in how a commitment to popular sovereignty shaped writers’ conceptions of their own role and how they write.  From there I moved on to Thomas Paine who seemed impossible to overlook, given his importance to accounts of the relationship between politics and language in the period.  While I was doing this work I seemed to repeatedly stumble upon John Thelwall in connection to the phrase ‘the people’, and fortuitously, a Thelwall conference organised by Steve Poole was in the works.

It was with Thelwall and his involvement with the London Corresponding Society that I moved beyond my original preoccupation with revolutionary France and attempts to diffuse totalitarian claims to power legitimated by reference to the people.  In Britain, Thelwall was instead confronting the invisibility and irrelevance of the people at large in the political realm as it was conceived of by the political elite (and particularly by Edmund Burke).  Thelwall’s thinking about the role of the writer or intellectual in challenging this invisibility was articulated largely in a public disagreement with William Godwin.

I had to get Godwin’s side of the story too, and I found that Godwin’s disagreement with Thelwall was rooted in his concern about the passivity of individual reason when the individual becomes part of a crowd.  Godwin seeks to demystify the collective entity ‘the people’ because of the power of collective or representative identities to subsume individuals and to recruit them to a cause without engaging their power of reason.  The people are not necessarily either just or reasonable, for Godwin.  Godwin associates collectivity with passivity, and this becomes a concern about the ideal reader.

This concern with an ideal reader and about the passivity of reading reminded me of the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, and at this point I decided that the work would include Coleridge and Wordsworth.  Coleridge was also concerned about the passivity of the people, but not only because of the power of the crowd or the demagogue, but because of the forces of poverty and oppression which have degraded them.  His apologetic for the people is a negotiation between the actual people and the ideal people, an apologetic that mirrors and accompanies his 1790s theological apologetics for revealed religion.

Coleridge turns to Wordsworth to redeem the people when his own apologetics fall short.  Wordsworth, too, is concerned about a people degraded by necessity, but his concern is linked to his understanding of popular sovereignty as an original or constituent power, outside of the structures of law and established government.

This is a picaresque version of the book’s argument.  The chapters do not reflect the order in which I did the original reading and research, and I thoroughly revised their sequence in revising for publication.  With the help of my examiners and the readers at OUP, I realised that my argument would be helped and foregrounded by a second order of organisation into parts, and this resulted in a reordering of the individual chapters.  The first part ‘The political existence of the people’, looks at attempts to challenge the willed blindness of the political elite in Britain to the political existence of the people at large, or the ‘people out of doors’, and includes the original work on Thelwall and the London Corresponding Society.  The second part, ‘The sovereignty of justice’ looks at the tension between justice and the will of the people, and incorporates the work on Paine, Williams and Godwin.  The final part, ‘Redeeming the People’, looks at Coleridge and Wordsworth and the apologetics for popular sovereignty that they develop,  Coleridge in tandem with his apologetics for revealed religion, and Wordsworth, ultimately, through the inspiring example of the Peninsular Uprising.

3. In what ways do you see the developments of the 1790s as informing later political thought?

The underlying aspiration shared by many of these writers is to be able to associate the sovereignty of the people with a just, virtuous way of life, rather than with the drives of necessity or of animal appetites.  This aspiration ultimately informs and motivates emerging ideas about the importance of ‘culture’.  Culture becomes a means of redeeming the people, even if we might be unhappy with that manoeuvre because it moves away from considering the people as an historical, empirical and actual entity and instead refers to the people ‘philosophically characterized’, as Wordsworth puts it.

4. How does later political thinking in turn inform your own approaches to the period?

Later political thinking helped me to understand the deep and multi-faceted ambivalence of the concept of the majesty of the people, and thereby to overcome any implication that those writers who faced that ambivalence in the 1790s were simply articulating something like class-based prejudice.  For the most part I tried to avoid using later political thinking as some form of evaluative criteria with which to bash my subjects, but rather used it to underline the ethical considerations shaping their 1790s writings.  In the afterword, though, I hint that Giorgio Agamben’s thought on bio-politics might provide a counterbalance to materialist critiques, offering a potentially positive framework for reevaluating the ‘Romantic ideology’.

5. What new projects are you currently working on?

In the final chapter of The Majesty of the People, which looks at Wordsworth, I began to think about the value attached to ‘safety, mere safety’, as Wordsworth puts it.  Extending this work, I’ve been thinking further about the natural law maxim ‘the safety of the people is the highest law’.  I am looking at how appeals to this principle are mobilised both to defend and to suppress the radical popular movements of the 1790s.  I’m also interested in how writers of the period attempted to disarm such claims.

Currently, the majority of my work is associated with my post as a research fellow for the project ‘Networks of Improvement: Literary Clubs and Societies, 1760-1840’, working collaboratively with Jon Mee and Jennifer Wilkes at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York.  The project as a whole looks at the sociable life of reading and writing in clubs and institutions of the period.  I’m looking at the role of these clubs in discipline formation, and I’m particularly looking at Bristol and Bath.  I’m also interested in the concept of the ‘network’ or its ancestors as it appears in the discursive material associated with these clubs (including journalism, toasts, constitutions, lectures, or print proceedings).  On a more practical level, a major aspect of my role has been to develop an online application which allows users to contribute to a database of clubs and club membership, www.eccsn.net (eccsn stands for eighteenth century clubs, societies and networks).  The database is not launched publicly yet but if any readers are interested in it please do contact me, as we are always looking for contributors and collaborators.