Ruhr-University, Bochum

English Romantic poets and their reading audiences

by

Runge, Karsten

02.12.2002

Table of contents

List of abbreviations ... III

1. Introduction ... 1

2. The growth of the reading public ... 8
2.1 Size and limitations of the reading public ... 8
2.2 Causes for the growth of the reading public ... 11
2.2.1 Population growth and urbanization ... 11
2.2.2 Education and literacy ... 13
2.2.3 Technological progress and the impact of the industrial revolution ... 15
2.2.4 Growing interest in political events ... 16
2.3 Social varieties of the reading public ... 17

3. Romantic poets and the literary marketplace ... 19
3.1 The transformation of the publishing business ... 19
3.2 Authors and publishers ... 20
3.3 The commodification of literature: copyrights and best-sellers ... 24
3.3.1 The debates over copyright ... 24
3.3.2 Best-sellers ... 26
3.4 The institutionalizati on of literature: The British reviews ... 27
3.5 Romantic poets in the literary marketplace ... 31
3.5.1 The task of a lifetime: William Wordsworth ... 31
3.5.2 Unacknowledged legislators: Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats ... 36
3.5.2.1 Percy Bysshe Shelley ... 37
3.5.2.2 John Keats ... 40
3.5.3 Aristocratic best-sellers: George Gordon Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott ... 41
3.5.3.1 George Gordon Lord Byron ... 42
3.5.3.2 Sir Walter Scott ... 45

4. The poet and his audience: Romantic critical theory in its socio-historical context ... 47
4.1. Romantic theories of art and their social context ... 47
4.2. Conceptions of poets from the Renaissance to the Augustan Age ... 50
4.3. Romantic conceptions of poets and their audiences ... 54
4.3.1 William Wordsworth ... 56
4.3.1.1 The poet’s social function: “one of us” or poetic genius? ... 56
4.3.1.2 Wordsworth’s conception of readers and audiences ... 60
4.3.2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge ... 68
4.3.2.1 Coleridge’s definitions of the poet ... 68
4.3.2.2 Attitudes toward the literary marketplace ... 70
4.3.2.3 Configurations of readers: Sciolism and the clerisy ... 72
4.3.3 Percy Bysshe Shelley ... 75
4.3.3.1 Definitions of the poet ... 75
4.3.3.2 Shelley’s conception of audiences ... 76
4.3.4 John Keats ... 81
4.3.4.1 Attitudes toward the collective reading public ... 81
4.3.4.2 The poet and his ideal readers ... 86
4.3.5 George Gordon, Lord Byron ... 90
4.3.5.1 Definitions of the poet: The aristocratic amateur re-established.... 90
4.3.5.2 Byron’s attitudes toward the reading public ... 94

5. Conclusion: The Romantic dilemma and beyond ... 98

Appendix: Sales and editions of English Romantic poets ... IV

Bibliography ... XII

Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache

I. Introduction
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of accelerating cultural, social, economic, and political change. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832 are the political cornerstones of an age that saw the promotion of human rights and civil liberties against established systems of absolutist governments and limited possibilities of political participation. Democratic ideas that form the constitutional basis of modern Western societies were developed and circulated in a highly-charged political and cultural climate, represented, defended and contested in a bourgeois public sphere that had only come into being as a space of rational contestation in England in the century between the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution.¹

In philosophy, perhaps the most far-reaching development in the eighteenth century was the exploration of the individual psyche. John Locke’s empiricist epistemology was based on the idea that the mind of the infant is like a tabula rasa and that there are no innate ideas or moral principles. Instead, Locke argued, the individual’s knowledge springs from his or her own sensory perceptions. This epistemology carried with it a serious social problem: in effect perceivers were deprived of shared views and, isolated in their own perceptions, were cut off from the environment that had produced their knowledge. “Equally isolated from objects and from others, Lockian perceivers can be certain of only their individual mental processes. […] Certainty, knowledge, and truth become, at best, relational.”²

The problem of the individual’s position in and relation to a society that was already perceptibly fragmenting as a result of economic developments and increased social mobility was debated by philosophers throughout the eighteenth century. David Berkeley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and Adam Smith all in their own ways tried to find a solution to the empirical dilemma they had inherited from Locke and sought to relocate the individual in a social context.³

This empirical dilemma turned into a professional one for the Romantic poets as the growth of the reading public and the emergence of the literary marketplace left writers and readers with the task to redefine their own positions as well as their relations toward each other. In the course of these redefinitions “literature” lost its broader public significance, and by the 1820s the terms “public” and “literary” had come to be regarded as an open contradiction.⁴ The commodification of poetry and other forms of writing in the nascent literary marketplace produced what J.W. Saunders has termed the “Romantic dilemma”:

One insistent claim made by the Romantics was that writers, especially poets, had a special vision of truth which ought not to be socially corrupted or circumscribed: they should be free to write as their inspiration took them; it was enough for society to protect their special gifts and profit from their prophecies and insight. The Romantic dilemma, as far as the literary profession was concerned, was how to adapt the social context of literature to make room for this new claim. The dilemma became sharper when the reading public demanded an immediate and practical use for writers’ dreams and visions, not as a means to truth and an understanding of life, but as a kind of anodyne, a means of escape from life. Wide schisms were to open between what the public expected of literature and what the writers wanted to do: after an age of balance, an age of most extraordinary unbalance, producing in extreme instances literary schizophrenia.⁵

It is this dilemma I want to explore in the present study. At exactly that point in history where Romantic writers had the potential to reach wider audiences than ever before with their insights, how did they make sense of this potential power, and how did it materialize in the literary marketplace? How did the Romantics explain their successes or failures in the marketplace, and which concepts of reading did they develop as a consequence?

There is a perception of Romanticism as a self-centred monologue of aesthetic brilliance but limited social relevance that is still common due to the fact that much scholarship of the twentieth century has treated Romanticism on its own terms, a critical orientation that Jerome J. McGann has identified as the “Romantic Ideology,” “an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.”⁶ An important tenet of this ideology is the figuration of the Romantic poet as a Shelleyan “nightingale,” devoid of any contact with reading audiences, and free from social obligations. Even in such influential studies as M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), Romantic critical theory is treated on a broad philosophical and aesthetic basis, while socio-historical approaches do not enter the picture. It is one of the aims of the present study to restore the socio-historical context to Romantic conceptions of poetry, the poet, and his audiences, and show that Romantic engagements with readers and audiences were more complex and conflicted than an intrinsic approach to critical theory is likely to suggest.

Consequently, I have tried to avoid a methodological restriction that would fall short of any accurate depiction of developments, events and the reactions they provoked. While a close reading of Romantic critical texts will constitute the basis of my argument, I hope to do justice to the complex interrelations between poetry, history, society, economy, and psychology by outlining the transformations of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the perspectives of readers, writers, publishers, and reviewers, and relocating Romantic critical statements in this context.

As much of Romantic prose is concerned with the growth of the reading public and its effects upon authors, a critical survey of this growth will precede my discussion of the literary marketplace and the Romantics’ share in it. The core of the present study is formed by a close reading of Romantic critical statements that is guided by an interest in the implications these statements carry for the relations of writers and readers. The conclusion will then focus on the different strategies developed by English Romantic poets to solve their dilemma with the reading public and pose the question how these options were realized as the reading public grew into the mass dimensions so familiar to us today.

[...]

Zusammenfassung in deutscher Sprache
Die vorliegende Arbeit befaßt sich mit dem Verhältnis englischer romantischer Dichter zu ihrem Lesepublikum. Im einleitenden Kapitel 1 wird als Ausgangspunkt die These eines “Romantic dilemma” (J.W. Saunders) gewählt: Wie läßt sich die den Romantikern eigene Vision einer von sozialen Zwängen unberührten Wahrheit mit den gesellschaftlichen Ansprüchen eines wachsenden und zunehmend eskapistisch orientierten Lesepublikums vereinbaren? Die Studie bedient sich eines Methodenpluralismus, um die komplexen Wechselwirkungen von Literatur, Gesellschaft, Psychologie, Politik und Wirtschaft angemessen berücksichtigen zu können.

Kapitel 2 skizziert das Wachstum und die soziale Ausdifferenzierung eines breiten Lesepublikums im England des 18. Jahrhunderts. Diese Entwicklungen werden auf die Faktoren Bevölkerungswachstum und Verstädterung, Alphabetisierung und Ausweitung der Schulbildung, technologische und soziale Auswirkungen der Industrialisierung sowie Anwachsen des politischen Interesses im Zuge der französischen Revolution zurückgeführt.

Die veränderte Organisation des literarischen Betriebes für Autoren, Verleger und Leser sowie das kommerzielle Schicksal romantischer Dichter auf dem entstehende Literaturmarkt sind Themen, die in Kapitel 3 behandelt werden. Nach einer Behandlung der Veränderungen, die sich für den literarischen Betrieb durch die Entstehung des Literaturmarktes im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert ergeben – zu nennen sind hier vor allem die wachsende Professionalisierung der Autoren, die Modernisierung im Bereich des Verlagswesens, das Schwinden des klassischen Mäzenatentums, die Kommodifizierung von Literatur im Handel mit Urheberrechten und Bestsellern sowie der Aufstieg der literaturkritischen Periodika – wird der kommerziellen Erfolg englischer romantischer Dichter untersucht. Dabei ergibt sich im Falle von Byron und Scott der Befund eines großen Publikumserfolges, im Falle von Shelley und Keats ein ebenso deutlicher kommerzieller Mißerfolg und im Falle Wordsworths ein nach kommerziellem Mißerfolg allmählicher, Jahrzehnte anhaltender Prozess des langsam wachsenden Erfolges.

In Kapitel 4 wird auf der Grundlage literaturtheoretischer Schriften der englischen Romantik die Einstellung romantischer Dichter zu empirischen und imaginären idealen Lesern untersucht. In kontextuell eingebetteten Einzelanalysen der literaturtheoretischen Prosa von William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats und George Gordon Lord Byron wird zunächst das negativ konnotierte Bild des passiv konsumierenden Massenpublikums einer positiv konnotierten Konzeption des aktiv rezipierenden idealen Lesers gegenübergestellt. Anschließend werden die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen des idealen Lesers einer genaueren Analyse unterzogen und je nach individuellem Schwerpunkt der Autoren und vor dem Hintergrund der sozio-kulturellen Eigenheiten der Epoche in den Kontext der jeweiligen literaturtheoretischen Ausführungen eingeordnet. Ein besonderer Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf den Konzeptionen des Dichters, die auf ihre gesellschaftliche Relevanz hin geprüft werden.

In Kapitel 5 schließlich werden die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen des Verhältnisses von Autoren und Lesern systematisch zusammengefaßt und in den weiteren sozio-historischen Kontext der englischen Romantik eingeordnet. Die Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, daß das “Romantic dilemma” aufgrund diskrepanter Wahrnehmungen von dichterischem Anspruch und ökonomischer Wirklichkeit angesichts einer deutlich verzögerten Ausweitung von Demokratisierung und Schulbildung im 19. Jahrhundert nur unter Preisgabe des originär romantischen Sendungsbewußtseins aufzulösen ist. Im Anhang werden Auflagenhöhe und Verkaufszahlen der Werke von Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley und Keats zusammengetragen.

1 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).

2 Regina Hewitt, Wordsworth and the Empirical Dilemma (New York et al.: Peter Lang, 1990), 5f.

3 Ibid., 7-32.

4 Jon P. Klancher, “Prose,“ in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 286.

5 J.W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 158f.

6 Jerome J. McGann, The Romanti c Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 1.