Revisionary Gleam: De Quincey, Coleridge and the High Romantic Argument

333 Pages·2000·0.94 MB·English

by  Daniel Sanjiv Roberts

REVISIONARY GLEAM
De Quincey, Coleridge, and
the High Romantic Argument
LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES
General editors: JONATHAN BATE and BERNARD BEATTY
*
Literature and Nationalism
edited by Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson
Volume 23. 1991. 296pp. ISBN 0-85323-057-9
Reading Rochester
edited by Edward Burns
Volume 24. 1995. 240pp. ISBN 0-85323-038-2 (cased), 0-85323-309-8 (paper)
Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays
edited by W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick
Volume 25. 1993. 287pp. ISBN 0-85323-268-7
Nearly Too Much: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne
by N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge
Volume 26. 1995. 224pp. ISBN 0-85323-840-5 (cased), 0-85323-850-2 (paper)
A Quest for Home: Reading Robert Southey
by Christopher J. P. Smith
Volume 27. 1996. 256pp. ISBN 0-85323-511-2 (cased), 0-85323-521-X (paper)
Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945
by Edward Picot
Volume 28. 1997. 344pp. ISBN 0-85323 531-7 (cased), 0-85323-541-4 (paper)
The Plays of Lord Byron
edited by Robert F. Gleckner and Bernard Beatty
Volume 29. 1997. 400pp. ISBN 0-85323-881-2 (cased), 0-85323-891-X (paper)
Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton
by Philip Edwards
Volume 30. 1997. 240pp. ISBN 0-85323-512-0 (cased), 0-85323-522-8 (paper)
Passionate Intellect: The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson
by Michael Kirkham
Volume 31. 1999. 320pp. ISBN 0-85323-534-0 (cased), 0-85323-553-8 (paper)
‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints
by Richard Danson Brown
Volume 32. 1999. 320p. ISBN 0-85323-803-3 (cased), 0-85323-813-8 (paper)
Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics
edited by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead
Volume 33. 1999. 421p. ISBN 0-85323-674-7 (cased), 0-85323-684-4 (paper)
Revisionary Gleam
De Quincey, Coleridge, and
the High Romantic Argument
*
Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
The Queen’s University, Belfast
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2000 by
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Liverpool L69 7ZU
©2000 Liverpool University Press
The right of Daniel Sanjiv Roberts
to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with
the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A British Library CIP Record is available
ISBN 0-85323-794-8 (hardback)
0-85323-804-9 (paperback)
Typeset in Stempel Garamond
by BBR, Sheffield
Printed by Bell &Bain Limited, Glasgow
TO MY TEACHERS
‘Est meum et est tuum’

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Textual Note and Abbreviations xiii
Preface xv
1 ‘A Man Darkly Wonderful’: Coleridgean Reorientations
in De Quincey Criticism 1
2 ‘Like the Ghost in Hamlet’: Radical Politics and
Revisionary Interpretation 31
3 Revolutionary Joy: De Quincey’s Discovery of
Lyrical Ballads 71
4 The Pains of Growth: Language and Cultural Politics 113
5 Power and Knowledge: English Nationalism and the
Mediation of Kant in England 153
6 De Quincey as Critic: Politics of Style and
Representation of Wordsworth 197
Conclusion—Visions and Revisions: New Directions
in De Quincey Studies 261
Appendices:
A Three Uncollected Coleridgean Marginalia from
De Quincey 269
B ‘Lessons of the French Revolution’ 283
C ‘To William Tait, Esquire’ 289
Works Cited 293
Index 305

Acknowledgements
Being unable to match Coleridge’s ability to spin gorgeous theo-
ries ‘from the loom of his own magical brain’—as De Quincey
described it—I have had to incur several debts in the course of
my research. In my case, however, it is pleasure indeed to
acknowledge these.
I have been doubly fortunate in having two mentors for this
book reflecting its two-part development, first as a doctoral
dissertation at Cambridge and then as a book-oriented revision
during a fellowship at Manchester. Nigel Leask provided me the
right balance of critical challenge and stimulus in the initial
phase; in the second, Grevel Lindop secured a fellowship for me,
besides offering much help and advice in honing the work. Their
intellectual example will be hopefully evident if only by way of
aspiration. Barry Symonds has been an additional source of
scholarly intelligence and inspiration; I am indebted to him for
his reading of my thesis prior to its doctoral submission and to
his generosity in sharing his incomparable knowledge of De
Quincey’s texts and manuscripts with me. Further De
Quinceyan expertise has been provided by Robert Morrison of
Acadia University whose correspondence over e-mail and
personal contact during his fellowship at Edinburgh are grate-
fully acknowledged. For critical initiation, scholarly friendship
and much else of great value to this work, I should like to thank
Robert Burns, S. Viswanathan, S. Nagarajan, Sudhakar Marathe,
John Beer, Heather and Robin Jackson, G. E. Bentley, Jr,
Gregory Dart, Tim Fulford, James Whitehead, Lynda Pratt, Brian
Caraher and many others, including the agent, unnamed by
choice, who procured for me a small quantity of opium. This
amount, though fortunately less than De Quincey’s gift to the
Malay, enough ‘to kill some half-dozen dragoons, together with
their horses’, was nevertheless sufficient to cause several days of
ix
x Revisionary Gleam
illness and a permanent stifling of any narcotic aspirations on my
part.
I am indebted to the Nehru Trust, the Charles Wallace Trust
and the Cambridge Commonwealth Society for the Nehru
(Charles Wallace) Scholarship which made it possible to under-
take research at the University of Cambridge. The book-oriented
continuation of my research was made possible by the Arts
Faculty of Manchester with their award of a Joseph and Hannah
Maria Lees Fellowship and by the Pilgrim Trust and the Modern
Humanities Research Association of Britain which provided
additional funding towards the fellowship. I am grateful also to
the staff of the English departmental offices at Cambridge and
Manchester for their patience and help. The following libraries
have been helpful: The Cambridge University Library; The
English Faculty Library, Cambridge; Magdalene College Library,
Cambridge; The British Museum Library; the Wordsworth
Library at Dove Cottage, Grasmere; Manchester Central Library;
The John Rylands University Library of Manchester; The
National Library of Scotland; Liverpool Central Library and
Record Office; The Liverpool Conservation Centre; and The
Athenaeum Library of Liverpool. I am grateful to their various
staff. For permission to quote from the correspondence of
William Roscoe, I am grateful to the Liverpool Record Office,
Liverpool Libraries and Information Services. The following
sections of this work have been published in earlier versions in
the following journals: parts of Chapter 1 as ‘The Missing Letters
of Thomas De Quincey to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’ in English
Language Notes,36:2 (1998), pp. 21–27; part of Chapter 3 as ‘De
Quincey’s Discovery of Lyrical Ballads: The Politics of Reading’
in Studies in Romanticism, 36:4 (1997), pp. 511–40; part of
Chapter 4 as ‘Thomas De Quincey’s “Danish Origin of the Lake
Country Dialect”’ in Transactions of the Cumberland and
Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (1999), pp.
257–65; and Appendix A as ‘Three Uncollected Coleridgean
Marginalia from De Quincey’ in Notes and Queries, 41 (1994),
pp. 329–35. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for their
earlier publication of my work and to the trustees of Boston
University and to the Oxford University Press for permission to