Cambridge University Press
9780521862523 - The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period - Edited by Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener
Excerpt
This Companion offers an introduction to British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s. Across Europe, these seventy years encompass a large number of artistic works conceived in Romantic styles: symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven, picturesque landscape gardens, paintings by Eugène Delacroix, the visionary domestic architecture of Sir John Soane, and the Gothic novel. Yet many novels and tales of these decades are not identifiably Romantic in style or sensibility. On the whole, the era may be characterized less by a unifying artistic sensibility than it is by a spirit of experimentation, and an overall political situation, a civic unrest traceable throughout Europe and North America.
The period was turbulent. The Russians, under Catherine the Great, fought the Ottoman empire (1768–74), while waging a less direct battle against their allies, the Bourbons of France, and fomenting political unrest on a European scale. One country affected was Greece, where Catherine’s agents helped start a revolution against Turkish rule; the conflict lasted decades, becoming celebrated for its horrors and heroism. Catherine’s domestic troubles included the peasants’ revolt led by Pugachev (a Cossack soldier and pretender to the Russian throne, executed in 1775). Meanwhile, as historian Franco Venturi observes, rebellions and insurrections of many different kinds broke out all over Europe, especially “in unexpected and peripheral places.”1 Among the countries affected were Corsica, Montenegro, Bohemia, Geneva, Denmark, and Sweden, each in turn seeming to provide another view of a confusing new world in revolt against old forms of social order. The culminating event of these decades of crisis was, of course, the French Revolution (beginning in 1789), with the long, bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, but the French upheaval was not an isolated event; almost everywhere in Europe, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, a major realignment seemed to be under way.
Older portrayals of the Romantic period often suggested its relative insulation from instability. Many recent historians and critics disagree. Venturi’s multi-volume The Eighteenth Century of Reforms [Settecento riformatore] sees “the problem of the organization of liberty itself” defining “the Britannic world” (i.e., England, Scotland, Ireland, and the various American colonies).2 Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries (1981) makes a related argument; between 1760 and 1830, Butler suggests, both Britain and its American colonies were caught up in the period’s questioning spirit. Britain had vigorous radical movements, embodied initially in the figure of John Wilkes (the self-described “friend of liberty” who defied George III’s minister Lord Bute) and exacerbated by the social transformations wrought during the Industrial Revolution, whose “making of the English working classes” also spawned a formidable Jacobin movement, based not only in London but in various provincial centers: the failed United Irishmen’s Uprising of 1792, most spectacularly, was to have precipitated a French Jacobin invasion of Ireland.
If, during the earlier eighteenth century, Britain had managed to neutralize the influence of the exiled Stuart pretenders (the nearest local equivalents to charismatic rebels like Pugachev), its sway over certain outlying or colonized regions – Scotland, Ireland, India – remained an open question. The Seven Years War wrested North America from the French but soon afterwards, in the American Revolution (1776), much of the Continent was lost to Britain. Two decades later, British politics were reframed by the ambitions of a general and emperor just on the other side of the English Channel. Napoleon’s advancement of revolutionary principles through military force or imperial decree changed the Continent’s legal and social structure – and might perhaps have changed that of England too, had the great French leader managed to invade (by means of balloons, as some surmised he would), or merely to prevail at home. No less than Continental Europeans, then, the inhabitants of the British Isles felt themselves a part of a great international cataclysm, stretching, in the long view, from Catherine’s plots of the 1760s and 1770s through the Napoleonic era and into the politically shaky period that followed victory at Waterloo, culminating, on the British side of the Channel, in the Reform Bill of 1832 (the first step on the way to a full franchise).
Like politics, fiction in Britain was part of a lively and much larger European and transatlantic scene. This larger context has been mapped out recently by Alain Montandon’s absorbing Le Roman au XVIIIe siècle en Europe, a synthetic overview still lacking an English-language equivalent.3 This Companion cannot undertake such large-scale comparative work, except on a very occasional basis and on an abridged scale. But it would be a mistake to lose sight of the rest of European fiction during this era, especially since contemporaries generally kept it in mind.
Thanks to recent bibliographical researches, some of their attentiveness can be quantified. Between 1770 and 1799, as a recent, authoritative, bibliography observes, “More than a tenth of all novel titles first published in Britain … were translations from Continental novels.”4 There were excellent reasons for the substantial presence of literary imports. Just across the Channel, French prose fiction had been a prominent, sophisticated, and highly theorized genre as early as the reign of Louis XIV, and throughout the eighteenth century, fashions and trends in the novel were typically established in France, despite both the domestic and international importance of British novelists like Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. In Germany, moreover, a late eighteenth-century efflorescence of fiction produced a second rival to English and English-language fiction; indeed, a number of the period’s most ambitious experimental novelists, such as Jean Paul, were animated by Sterne’s example. Meanwhile, a range of brilliant German writers linked fictive prose narrative with prestigious forms of philosophical discourse, creating subgenres like the fantastic tale (E. T. A. Hoffmann), the novella (Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Novalis), and the reflexive Bildungsroman – most spectacularly exemplified by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–6, whose belated, somewhat bowdlerized English translation by Thomas Carlyle appeared in 1824). Further afield, significant works of fiction were produced, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the former American colonies, in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada, in India, and in Van Diemen’s Land; this very new body of literature at once extended the reach of the British tradition and competed with it (James Fenimore Cooper, for example, becoming an influential international rival to Walter Scott, almost, in certain cases, a replacement for him). Finally, the discovery and widespread adaptation of the popular Eastern tale, initiated by Antoine Galland’s Thousand and One Nights (1704–8), continued to shape prose fiction almost everywhere in the Western world, its Romantic-period reception particularly inflected by ruminations about the nature and future of French and British colonial expansion.
Despite its (geographically) insular situation, the British sense of the novel was cosmopolitan. Yet if the permeability of the literary scene reflected the virtue of intellectual curiosity, it also signalled a particular weakness. British fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries notably failed to produce one of those omnicompetent figures – like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or René Chateaubriand on the Continent – who seemed to tower over as well as to embody the age. As intellectuals who initially made their mark in other fields (poetry, drama, political philosophy, and perhaps above all autobiographical life-drama), these legendary characters seemed to try out novel-writing as a diversion from higher or more pressing matters, thus adding enormous lustre to the enterprise of prose fiction. After Samuel Johnson (d. 1784), Britain lacked such figures; Lord Byron came closest in some ways, but he chose to compose his great Regency novel (Don Juan) in verse. This lack is symptomatic. Despite its popularity, prose fiction during most of the Romantic period had less glamor, and less status, in the British context, than in many other national traditions. The novel would attain greater prestige only during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, when the balance of literary trade would shift from British imports to British exports, and when anglophone fiction, correspondingly, began to attract wider international attention. The presiding genius of the upturn was Scott, whose artistic (and financial) achievements are repeatedly chronicled in this volume. Yet his triumphs come towards the end of the Romantic period. For most of this era, British novels and tales were ugly ducklings; their swanlike qualities would be mostly recognized in retrospect, and indeed the process of discovery is still in progress, with new candidates for revaluation offered on a surprisingly regular basis.
The Companion’s first two chapters present complementary extensions of this Introduction. Chapter 1, “The historiography of fiction in the Romantic period,” details how the field of British fiction managed over several successive generations to acquire a decodable history, a substantial (and extendable) canon, a usable bibliography, and, eventually, some genuine prestige and presence of its own, beyond the omnipresent Scott. Chapter 2, “Publishing, authorship, and reading,” emphasizes the questions of copyright and intellectual property that underlay the new ways the British began producing, circulating, and reading prose fiction during the Romantic period.
Subsequent chapters address the range of ways in which the period’s social, political, and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms, and audiences. Various chapters describe the emergence of distinctive Irish and Scottish fictional traditions; the novel’s links with colonialism and orientalism; the rise of fiction addressed to working-class readers, and to children; new forms of women’s (and self-consciously feminist) fiction; and the impact of new scientific practices and of vogues for the sentimental and the Gothic on the shape of fictional worlds and forms. In some chapters, familiar figures like Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Love Peacock, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and James Hogg take on new contours in the company of their numerous and prolific contemporaries. Other chapters immerse the reader in the period’s full range of fiction-writing. The recent upsurge of scholarship on Romantic-era fiction, working to reassess its depth, breadth, triumphs, and peculiarities as a period corpus, implicitly counters both older histories of the novel, which used to treat the Romantic period as one of virtual eclipse for the novel as a form, and older accounts of the Romantic period, which slighted fiction altogether in favor of poetry.
Several chapters here address one of the Romantic period’s biggest (yet most-often ignored) conundrums: the complex relationship of poetic and prose narrative. The Romantic period is the last (even in Britain) in which poetry is more popular than prose; Scott’s own shift from one medium to another both embodied and precipitated a great transformation. Yet poets such as George Crabbe need to be read along with the prose novelists of local, regional, or village life, Byron read with (and against) the sentimentalists. As chapter 6 on poetry in fiction insists, moreover, mixed forms and generic mixing were a central feature of the Romantic period; poetry inserted into a novel often served to encapsulate its fictional quintessence.
The image used on the front cover of this book, Francis Danby’s Landscape Near Clifton (1821–2) depicts a mountainous scene in terms reminiscent of the period’s famous landscape poetry. Yet this prospect functions, simultaneously, as a bookscape, a place where reading aloud, and the collective appreciation of literature help bind a marital, familial, or intellectual community. Chapter 5 in this volume describes the way the emerging naturalist study of locale, habitat, and ecosystem became a new organizing principle in the construction of fictional worlds. Danby’s painting evokes literary reading as a communal, organic activity. Yet some of the volume’s essays, in contrast, understand the novel as a means of articulating new, exclusive forms of social identity – and sometimes also as arenas for political strife.
The Romantic novel is a genre in transition during an era of transition. And the coincidence of formal and historical changes, formal and political experiments, now seems part of the fascination of this epoch in the novel’s history. The Companion evokes familiar and unfamiliar frames of reference in its efforts to elucidate an extraordinary period in literature. By the end of the eighteenth century, the novel might have come and gone; it was nowhere more contingent, it often appeared, than on British ground. Instead, during the Romantic period, prose fiction opened up many new possibilities, firmly establishing itself as the pervasive and privileged medium for anglophone literature.
Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768℃1776: The First Crisis, trans. R. Burr Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. ix. Our historical account draws largely from this book (itself only part of Settecento riformatore).
Venturi, The End, p. 377.
See Alain Montandon, Le Roman au XVIIIe siècle en Europe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).
Garside, Peter, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770℃1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vol. I, p. 56.
There is widespread agreement that the Romantic period exists as a meaningful span of time – even if it is defined less by Romanticism per se than by a strong revolutionary trend. By contrast, the fiction written in the Romantic period has only occasionally been treated as an integral subject. It is true that Walter Scott never disappeared from view (even when most people stopped reading him), that Jane Austen had strong admirers from the beginning – including Scott – and that the creature of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein became a general byword and remains one, even or especially for people who don’t know the book Frankenstein itself. A few other writers, such as Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock, managed to keep readers and reputations. However, that doesn’t make quite enough books to constitute a larger entity called “fiction of the Romantic period.” For an era rich both in brilliant experimentation and achieved masterpieces, this one has tended to drop off the map, despite various attempts during the last two centuries to demarcate it.
Such recovery efforts and their often equivocal success will be the focus of this chapter, which looks at four moments – windows of opportunity – when for one reason or another the idea of a body of fiction produced during the Romantic period and conceivable as an overall topic of inquiry and opportunity for reading came into focus. One such moment is early (1785); one, around 1830, provides a sort of instant retrospect; one occurs just after World War I, marking a decisive turn in modern literary studies; one is the present – which is to say, the last few decades, culminating in the publication of Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling’s The English Novel: 1770–1829. Taken as a sequence, these episodes – of collective memory kicking in, even if only temporarily – can be used to introduce the problematic historiography of fiction in the Romantic period.
One of the early English-language books to single out prose fiction as a significant kind of literature was Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance, through times, countries, and manners; with remarks on the good and bad effects of it, on them respectively; in a course of evening conversations (1785). Reeve’s main competition was French; Pierre-Daniel Huet’s letter to the Abbé Segrais, “De l’origine des romans,” “Upon the Original of Romances” (1670) was not only a study as broad and ambitious as her own, but one that had been widely available in the English language for half a century or more before Progress. Moreover, the French had kept their lead in sophistication, as Reeves might have observed if she had encountered the Bibliothèque universelle des romans (224 volumes, 1775–89), unfolding just across the Channel in a seemingly endless series of tomes during the same decade as Progress and by far the most comprehensive effort of the eighteenth century to imagine what a history of novel and romance might look like. Reeves, however, was unjustly scornful of Huet and probably did not know about the Bibliothèque (Vol. I, pp. 91ff). She is friendlier towards a recent run of English studies of literary history, such as James Beattie’s Dissertation on Fable and Romance and Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, although, as she points out, neither Beattie nor Warton focus on prose works. As for the Critical and Monthly Reviews, operating since the reign of George II, she has read them (and quotes them at length) but doubts their historical sense; she is especially irritated by one reviewer’s insistence that he has “no relish for the Romances of the last Century” since he is “sufficiently satisfied with those of the present” (Vol. I, p. 82).
That leaves the field open for her own efforts. Reeve was a well-known novelist, and The Progress of Romance is nearly a novel in itself; adapting its format from Madame de Genlis’s Theatre of Education, it recounts a series of chats among Hortensius, Sophronia, and Euphrasia, each of whom has a characteristic voice and moral or intellectual position on the announced topic of prose romance.1 Euphrasia is Reeves’s de facto heroine; the twelve discussions occur at her home, where she takes the lead in providing a history of romance, as well as in defending its integrity. A romance, she says, is a “wild, extravagant, fabulous Story” (Vol. I, p. 6). It is to be closely associated with epic and it has an admirable hero; it constitutes, indeed, a “Heroic fable” (Vol. I, p. 13). The romance and the novel, she suggests, are separate genres, the first tending towards idealization, the other more realistic (Vol. I, p. 111); moreover, there are many kinds of romances, such as the ancient Greek and Roman ones, the medieval chivalric romances, and the fifteenth- or sixteenth-century kind (mostly by French writers like Madeleine de Scudéry).
Having highlighted the fruitful distinction between wild romance and the more settled, everyday novel, Euphrasia and her friends complicate this opposition. Romances are what precede novels, in a less modern, probably more warlike, state of society; once a polite and Augustan civilization is established, romance becomes novel, a process of metamorphosis and also of sublimation. The old world of romance lurks inside the new world of the novel, but is in every sense contained by it. Then again, the three friends seem at times to prefer a different account, whereby novel and romance coexist as alternate, autonomous possibilities in their own, contemporaneous world; moreover, some works combine the tendencies of both. In either accounting, the wild and everyday tend to blend, with unpredictable aesthetic or ethical results; Reeve’s narrative thus spotlights the ways that both prose and prosiness can coexist with that apparently archaic kind of narrative where anything can happen, where wildness prevails without difficulty. Over the long run, prose is the medium where the Romantic and novelistic consort together most effectively.
Reeve’s line of argument falters towards the end, but she offers an extensive list. She knows ancient novelists like Heliodorus, understands their importance for the foundational Renaissance innovators (above all, Miguel de Cervantes), tries to bring Middle Eastern story types into her discussion, and follows developments in novel and romance up through her own moment, while making frequent recommendations for the benefit of those ardent, even obsessive readers whom she imagines as her core audience. The Progress of Romance thus doubles as a model for conversationalists and a handbook for browsers in the bookstore (who, in Reeve’s presentation, are assured terrific bargains if they seek oldish romances). There is a good deal of anxiety about which books are morally improving and which are not. On the whole, Progress is notable not for its occasional fears but its sustained intellectual adventurousness; the study of romance and novel appears a great undertaking – hardly a waste of time on trivial “trash” (p. 6), as Hortensius initially implies. Given that so much eighteenth- (and nineteenth-) century criticism continues to harp on the trashiness of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance is a bold and independent book.
As a work of 1785, The Progress of Romance cannot yet have a full concept of fiction in the Romantic era, but it provides the necessary basis for such an idea. Progress’s links between old romances and new ones create a formidable, praiseworthy body of writing, a tradition in which a romancer like Reeve herself might thrive. Progress was to remain the primary synthetic work of its time – the best anglophone equivalent to the Bibliothèque universelle. This is not, however, to say that Reeve’s work had immediate success. In 1790, five years after its publication, she said that she still had 300 or 400 unsold copies out of the 1,000 printed; she blamed the London booksellers, who had little faith in literary productions from the provinces. (Reeve lived in Ipswich, where she supported herself by her pen.) Moreover, fourteen years later (in 1804), she refused to support a publishing scheme for a new edition.2 Reeve died in 1807; it would be another eight years until the publication of Walter Scott’s Waverley. The success of that book was the real and lasting confirmation of her original decision to focus on prose as distinguished from verse romance. But Waverley’s triumph created problems of its own for the overall visibility of fiction from the Romantic era.
An admirer of Reeve, Scott was first famous as the author of exciting narrative poems; driven out of the field, he claimed, by Lord Byron’s even greater success as a poet, he then made a further career as the dominant novelist of his day. It was Scott who made prose the default medium of fictional narrative in the nineteenth century, thus confirming the guiding intuition of The Progress of Romance.3 “During the Romantic period, the ‘Author of Waverley’ sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together,” William St Clair points out.4 Eventually, Scott’s position as an unmatchable moneymaker among novelists became a curse as well as a blessing. He was a partner in the publishing firm of Scott & Ballantyne; partnership law (unlike limited liability, a later standard) put all business and personal assets at risk.5 In 1826, a bad year for the economy, Scott & Ballantyne went bankrupt, leaving Scott himself personally or (in his opinion) morally liable for (at least) £126,000. He spent the rest of his life working to repay it. (The debt was liquidated in 1833, shortly after his death.)
Scott’s most ambitious and effective effort to write himself out of bankruptcy was the Magnum Opus edition of the Waverley novels. Working with Robert Cadell (a fellow bankrupt from the 1826 disaster), Scott projected a collected Waverley that would include new introductions and notes, a corrected text, and newly commissioned illustrations. From mid-1829, one volume a month appeared, most volumes containing half a novel; within four years, the set had been completed. These are handy little books – a wonderful way to read Scott and, by the standards of the late Romantic period, a cheap one.
The Magnum Opus helped shape the future of fiction publishing during the rest of the nineteenth century.6 (It is even more interesting studied in conjunction with the edition of the novels that followed it, the Abbotsford, conceived and supervised by Cadell.) One of the important early effects of
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