{"id":1827,"date":"2017-11-28T18:18:13","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T18:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1827"},"modified":"2017-11-29T21:00:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T21:00:24","slug":"five-questions-beatrice-turner-on-romantic-childhood-romantic-heirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1827","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Beatrice Turner on Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Beatrice Turner is Research Facilitator in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton<\/a>.\u00a0 She completed her undergraduate education and Master’s degree at Victoria University of Wellington before moving to the UK to pursue a doctorate at Newcastle University.\u00a0 She is broadly interested in Romantic afterlives and periodicity, and has worked on nineteenth-century\u00a0children’s literature, the Godwin-Shelley circle and the Coleridge family; the latter two threads come together in her first monograph, Romantic Childhood, Romantic Heirs: Reproduction and Retrospection, 1820-1850<\/em><\/a>, which was recently published by Palgrave Macmillan and which we discuss below.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in the children of canonical Romantic-period writers?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Quite a few years ago now, my Master’s supervisor at Victoria University of Wellington, Harry Ricketts, read me Hartley Coleridge’s sonnet ‘Long Time a Child’.\u00a0 I can’t remember what we were talking about – probably Swallows and Amazons<\/em>, and definitely not Romantic poetry – but the line ‘For\u00a0I have lost the race I never ran’ seized me absolutely.\u00a0 It seemed to\u00a0express a complexly doubled feeling\u00a0about being entered into something unconsciously, or without having a choice, and about failure being\u00a0a form of both\u00a0resistance and of capitulation, which\u00a0I found\u00a0very powerful.\u00a0 I set out to read more, and found again and again in Hartley’s poetry this compelling idea of the child who is both literally and literarily produced by his father: he feels simultaneously a flesh-and-blood\u00a0child and a\u00a0text, something birthed in a poem.\u00a0 I’d have called myself someone who was interested in\u00a0children’s literature, if anything, up until then, but when I decided I wanted to do a PhD, I found I couldn’t get Hartley’s\u00a0poems out of my head.\u00a0 So Hartley was the starting point, but from there it made sense to turn to his sister Sara, and other children of Romantic authors.\u00a0 What I found was that Hartley\u2019s not unique but emblematic, as I say in the introduction: that doubly-born feeling recurs in the work of all four authors I wrote about, and the reproductive failure it triggers seemed to resonate across the period.<\/p>\n

2) What do you feel are the most important things that we can learn about the period between 1820 and 1850 by studying it as an age of ‘writing back’, characterised, at least for the biological children of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Godwin, by ‘cultural, aesthetic, and intellectual disruption’?<\/strong><\/p>\n

‘Writing back’ is what I came to call the move, which I see in all four children’s work, to look back towards their\u00a0fathers and to reckon with their textual selves as produced by those author-fathers.\u00a0 It’s a term that for me helped articulate the sense of productive or reproductive failure all four children register in their own writing and some extent in their cultural moment at large.\u00a0 It’s\u00a0this failure which I think\u00a0brings the period into view as a period, with its own distinctive anxieties.\u00a0 I spent a long time going back and forth with Palgrave (sorry Ben!) about the title because I wanted both \u2018reproduction\u2019 and \u2018retrospection\u2019 in there (which is also how I ended up with a rather unintentionally alliterative title): to me, those two terms are particularly useful for thinking about the decades between 1820 and 1850.\u00a0 It\u2019s a period defined in many ways by looking back, assessing, memorialising (this is one reason why biography and history\u00a0and reviewing culture are so prominent) \u2013 but also by the problem of reproduction, by this anxiety of inheritance.\u00a0 What can you create when you yourself are a hybrid production of a set of discourses which are intensely invested in childhood?\u00a0 I think this anxiety registers across the period, not just in the work of\u00a0the four children, from Hazlitt’s concern in The Spirit of the Age<\/em> that there’s no-one capable of climbing the monuments left by previous generations, to Shelley’s sense that the ‘age of theory and enthusiasm’ has given way to a more cautious and less optimistic one of ‘facts and practicabilities’.\u00a0 Writing back, then, is the mode in\u00a0which such anxieties might be articulated, and a way of registering the felt gap \u00a0– or disruption – between the two generations.<\/p>\n

3) To what extent do you think that there were general modes through which the Romantic heirs you consider engaged with the writings of their fathers, and to what extent were their responses distinctly individual?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the things that unites the four children is their strong resistance to being reified into symbols by their fathers\u2019 texts and by Romantic-era discourses of childhood and creative production, so it feels particularly unfair of me say that the reason I chose to focus on the four is because of what they represent.\u00a0 All four are doubly born \u2013 both as their fathers\u2019 children, and as their fathers\u2019 texts.\u00a0 I think we can use their predicament, and their responses, to read this wider moment.\u00a0 In that sense, all four are working in a similar mode, and asking versions of the same question:\u00a0whether what I’m crudely calling the Romantic inheritance was one that allowed its children the space or the material for their own creative authority.\u00a0 The conclusion reached by Hartley, Sara, Shelley, and Godwin Jr was that it didn\u2019t, that aesthetically and psychically fulfilling production (whether as an author or a parent) was not possible if you were a child of Romanticism and its various discourses.\u00a0 But it’s also true to say that each reaches this conclusion through different generic and formal modes, and sometimes to different ideological ends.\u00a0 All four textualise their own lives to some extent, but only Hartley explicitly and self-consciously writes autobiographically, and I think this is because Hartley is so directly taken into and produced by his father’s verse – responding in kind, as the child-text STC creates, is almost the only option.\u00a0 Sara achieves her most powerful readings of her father by a kind of stealth, through her work as his editor, while her maternal poetry, in which she speaks with raw feeling and sometimes something like malice, remained largely\u00a0unpublished and possibly unread\u00a0in her lifetime.\u00a0 Shelley and Godwin Jr are both novelists, rather than poets (I do think there’s something interesting in the way both sets of siblings followed their fathers’ preferred formal modes), but they are also working to uncover different things.\u00a0 Hartley and Sara’s labour I read as being to uncover the ways in which a form of childhood\u00a0which is presented as entirely natural is actually produced through artifice\u00a0and subject to stringent cultural surveillance.\u00a0 Shelley and Godwin, however, are concerned with showing how the Godwinian idea of family relations which are entirely and self-consciously culturally constructed runs into its own generative dead-end, producing increasingly deformed and sterile versions of family feeling.<\/p>\n

4) Mary Shelley is well-known as a writer in her own right, but Hartley Coleridge, Sara Coleridge and (perhaps especially) William Godwin Junior are less familiar even to educated modern readers.\u00a0 Which of their works would you particularly recommend to those interested in exploring them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s hard to restrict myself to just a few – I think all three deserve to be much more widely read!\u00a0 Hartley’s sonnets are really beautiful.\u00a0 He’s the master of the overlooked, the miniature, the apparently inconsequential, and the feelings that can hide within an idle\u00a0thought or a glimpsed object.\u00a0 The messier and more complex the emotion he’s working with, the more formally neat and gem-like the sonnet.\u00a0 ‘Long Time a Child’<\/a> is the most anthologised, but ‘Let me not deem that I was made in vain’<\/a> is probably my favourite: it works through a clever sequence of negative statements and images\u00a0to construct a self-portrait defined by absence or negative space, and is quietly heartbreaking.<\/p>\n

Sara’s work is becoming more widely-read I think, thanks in most part to Peter Swaab’s excellent selections of her poetry<\/a> and criticism<\/a>, as well as recent monographs by Alan Vardy<\/a> and Jeffrey Barbeau<\/a>, to which my chapter’s indebted.\u00a0 A lot of her poetry (unpublished in her lifetime for fairly obvious reasons!) is about profoundly ambivalent maternal feelings, and I think poems like ‘To Herbert and Edith’ and ‘To a Little Invisible Being’ offer\u00a0a useful corrective to the ‘angel of the\u00a0hearth’ narrative of nineteenth century motherhood: Sara is precise about the physical, emotional, and creative sacrifice attendant on mothering a Romantic child.\u00a0 I’d also recommend her introductory essay to the 1847 Biographia Literaria<\/em> as a fascinating, clear-eyed assessment of her father’s power as a thinker and failure as an author.<\/p>\n

As for Godwin Jr, I think all Romanticists, and especially anyone working on the Godwin-Shelley circle, should\u00a0read his short story ‘The Executioner’<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a gothic psychodrama about a man who’s tricked into executing his biological father by an evil foster-father (a barely-disguised Godwin).\u00a0 It’d be worth reading anyway as an astonishingly raw expression of Godwin Jr’s sense he doesn’t belong in\u00a0the Godwin family and as a version of the family romance fantasy,\u00a0but it’s also a skilful psychological narrative.<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now I’m combining my interest in Romantic ideas about childhood with my love of pop music, writing an essay for a volume on Romanticism and David Bowie along with Matt Sangster, Jo Taylor, and Emily Bernhard Jackson.\u00a0 I’ve also gone back to Godwin, and I’m thinking about how he felt about owning, gifting, and borrowing\u00a0books, and the way they can function as affective objects, in the context of his frankly\u00a0baffling ‘Essay on Sepulchres’.\u00a0 That’s for an essay collection\u00a0which I’m co-editing with Eliza O’Brien and Helen Stark, called New Approaches to William Godwin: Forms, Fears, Futures<\/em>.\u00a0 Thinking about Godwin and books and feelings is a sort of precursor to my next big project, which is about the relationship between literary biography and literary criticism in that same in-betweeny 1810 – 1840ish\u00a0period – there’s obviously something in me which is drawn to the definitionally\u00a0awkward and the marginal!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beatrice Turner is Research Facilitator in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton.\u00a0 She completed her undergraduate education and Master’s degree at Victoria University of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1827"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1833,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1827\/revisions\/1833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}