Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture'

331 Pages·2005·1.48 MB·English

by  Philip Connell

Title Pages
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of
‘Culture’
Philip Connell
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780199282050
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (p.ii)
(p.iii) Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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Dedication
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of
‘Culture’
Philip Connell
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780199282050
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) for Sophia (p.vi)
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of
‘Culture’
Philip Connell
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780199282050
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface and Acknowledgements
This book seeks to reassess the political context of British Romanticism. This is,
of course, hardly a novel ambition and, in one way or another, has informed a
great deal of recent critical writing on early nineteenth-century literature. The
principal justification for my own engagement with this subject lies in the fact
that, however sophisticated and self-interrogating literary scholars have proved
themselves in questioning the historical constructions of a ‘Romantic ideology’,
the same kinds of sceptical self-awareness have seldom been extended to their
use of such concepts as ‘laissez-faire’, ‘political economy’, and ‘bourgeois
ideology’. Equally, however, historians of this period have usually proved quite
reluctant to apply their own, more nuanced interpretations of these categories to
our received understanding of canonical literary history. This has placed some
important limitations on the literary historiography of the early nineteenth
century, precisely because the historical identity of Romanticism itself has so
often been defined in opposition to a normative understanding of liberal
ideology, identified above all with the reductive, calculating rationality of
utilitarianism and economic science.
The present study offers a new approach to the political identifications of both
the Lake school and the Hunt circle, together with an argument for the broader
significance of economic discourse within the cultural history of this period.
Whereas political economy has often been regarded as a philistine and
intellectually myopic science, I have sought to demonstrate its intersection with
contemporary discussions of ‘polite’ literature and a pedagogic ideal of moral
and intellectual ‘culture’. And while Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and
Shelley have typically been identified with an unambiguous hostility to industrial
society and its intellectual apologists, I have tried to explore the far more
compromised and accommodatory aspects of their relationships with political
economy, utilitarianism, and the ‘spirit of commerce’. To this end, the book
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Preface and Acknowledgements
draws on a range of primary sources and secondary scholarship, in an attempt to
integrate the practices and preoccupations of literary criticism with those of
political and intellectual history. This has at (p.viii) times meant adopting a few
compromised and accommodatory positions of my own. Perhaps most obviously,
my use of the term ‘Romanticism’ remains vulnerable to the perennial charge of
historical anachronism. I have chosen to retain it, in the first place, as a means
of further integrating canonical literary texts with the political and economic
discourse of this period, but also as a foil for my attempts to call into question
some of the uses of Romanticism as a category of nineteenthcentury literary and
intellectual history. Particularly in its conclusion, my argument bears directly on
the issue of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury canon formation, and this has
inevitably dictated the focus and range of some of the earlier chapters.
It should already be clear that my approach is somewhat interdisciplinary in its
inspiration and aims, and I hope that it will address the concerns of both
historians and literary scholars in roughly equal measure. Whether or not it
succeeds in this respect, I could not have sustained an ambition of this kind
without the encouragement of colleagues and friends from both these disciplines
(and others), many of whom have been kind enough to read and comment upon
various sections of my argument. While any remaining errors or infelicities are
of course my own responsibility, I should like to express my particular gratitude
to John Beer, Sally Bushell, Marilyn Butler, Stefan Collini, Sophia Connell, David
Craig, Simon Harrison, Boyd Hilton, Simon Jarvis, John Kerrigan, the late Tony
Tanner, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Donald Winch. David Craig and Donald
Winch have been particularly generous, over a sustained period, both in reading
and criticizing my work on this subject, and in allowing me the opportunity to
benefit from their own current research.
The book began as a doctoral dissertation undertaken at the University of
Cambridge. Ralph Pite offered much-needed support and advice in the early
stages of my research, and Nigel Leask, who guided the thesis to its conclusion,
has been an invaluable and unfailing source of criticism and encouragement for
several years. My research owes much to the assistance of the rare books staff
of the Cambridge University and British Libraries; its preparation for publication
has been aided by the attentions of Sophie Goldsworthy, Matthew Hollis, and
Hilary Walford at Oxford University Press; while Anthea Connell fielded my art-
historical enquiries concerning the cover illustration. Finally, I should like to
thank the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, for electing me to
the Research Fellowship (p.ix) during which I not only wrote much of this book
but also, more importantly, discovered its dedicatee.
Part of Chapter 1 has already appeared in print, and it is reproduced here with
the permission of the editors of Essays in Criticism.
P.J.C.
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Selwyn College
Cambridge
October 2000 (p.x)
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Epigraph
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of
‘Culture’
Philip Connell
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780199282050
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.001.0001
Epigraph
(p.xiii)
Avaunt this œconomic rage!
What would it bring?—an iron age,
When Fact with heartless search explored
Shall be Imagination’s Lord,
And sway with absolute controul
The god-like Functions of the Soul.
Not thus can Knowledge elevate
Our Nature from her fallen state.
With sober Reason Faith unites
To vindicate the ideal rights
Of Human-kind—the true agreeing
Of objects with internal seeing,
Of effort with the end of Being.
William Wordsworth, ‘To the Utilitarians’
(comp. 1833)
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Epigraph
But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, oeconomists, and
calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Metaphysics, sir; metaphysics. Logic and moral philosophy. There we are at
home. The Athenians only sought the way, and we have found it; and to all this
we have added political economy, the science of the sciences.
Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle (1831)
LITTERATURE Occupation des oisifs
ECONOMIE POLITIQUE Science sans entrailles
LIVRE Quel qu’il soit, toujours trop long
Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues
(comp. c.1850)
(p.xiv)
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Introduction: The Condition of England
Romanticism, Economics and the Question of
‘Culture’
Philip Connell
Print publication date: 2005
Print ISBN-13: 9780199282050
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.001.0001
Introduction: The Condition of England
PHILIP CONNELL
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282050.003.0006
Abstract and Keywords
This book looks at the long-standing, and often belligerent, disagreements over
the nature and function of political economy, the most influential and
controversial science of society in 19th-century England. To an extent that
literary and cultural historians of the Romantic period have tended to forget,
political economy was the dominant mode of social analysis in this period. The
remarkable prominence of political economy during this period can be
adequately explained only by reference to a variety of different causes, including
public policy debates over such issues as monetary convertibility, poor law
reform, protectionism, and the peculiarities of the wartime economy. The book
argues that our inherited sense of the incompatibility between literary sensibility
and economic science has obscured the extent to which early 19th-century
political economy, and the debate on its legitimacy, scope, and function, played a
formative role in the emergence of the idea of culture itself, as a humanistic or
spiritual resource resistant to the intellectual enervation produced by modern,
commercial societies.
Keywords:   England, political economy, Romantic period, culture, monetary convertibility, poor law
reform, protectionism, wartime economy
It would be scarcely possible for a man of Mr Southey’s talents and
acquirements to write two volumes so large as those before us, which
should be wholly destitute of information and amusement. Yet we do not
remember to have read with so little satisfaction any equal quantity of
matter, written by any man of real abilities.
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Introduction: The Condition of England
While it would surely be little consolation to Mr Southey, critical judgements are
rarely so elegantly unforgiving as this. It stands at the head of an article in the
Edinburgh Review for January 1830, and introduces a discussion of Robert
Southey’s Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, an extended
prose jeremiad on the nation’s ills which, it must be admitted, has never made
for particularly entertaining reading.1 Nevertheless, the issues at stake in its
critical reception by the Edinburgh went far beyond the book’s supposed literary
deficiencies. For all its prolix eccentricity, the Colloquies made a timely,
provocative, and influential contribution to public political debate during that
volatile period in British constitutional history which saw the passage of Catholic
Emancipation and the first Reform Act. Drawing a series of rather unfavourable
historical comparisons between contemporary England and the period of the
Reformation, Southey’s book expressed equal measures of nostalgic regret at
the passing of ‘traditional’ feudal society, and melancholy anxiety at the slow but
insidious rise of a commercial economy, the ‘manufacturing system’, and the
popular political agitation which, the author maintained, these developments
had brought in their wake. The Edinburgh Review, as the leading Whig
periodical of the time, a cautious enthusiast for the benefits of commercial
society, and a long-standing supporter of moderate (p.2) constitutional reform,
could hardly allow this profoundly conservative political disquisition to pass its
critical notice unscathed.
Southey’s ill-disguised sense of his own importance had landed him in trouble
with reviewers and satirists before, and matters were not helped in the case of
the Colloquies by his decision to frame the book’s pronouncements on the
perilous state of contemporary society in a series of dialogues with the ghost of
Sir Thomas More, whom Southey imagined paying spectral social calls at his
Lakeland home to warn the author of impending national crisis. The Edinburgh
could not resist pointing out the more ludicrous and self-aggrandizing aspects of
this conceit; but its raillery was marked by an underlying seriousness and
urgency of intent. The Colloquies had already gained prominent, favourable
notices in the two most important Tory journals, the Quarterly Review and
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, confirming Southey’s position as one of the
most respected conservative social critics of the day. It should come as no
surprise, then, that the measured, Ciceronian temper of the review’s opening
sentences quickly takes on a more openly abrasive inflection. ‘We have’, its
author continued,
for some time past, observed with great regret the strange infatuation
which leads the Poet-laureate to abandon those departments of literature
in which he might excel, and to lecture the public on sciences of which he
has still the very alphabet to learn. He has now, we think, done his worst.
The subject which he has at last undertaken to treat is one which demands
all the highest intellectual and moral qualities of a philosophical
statesman,—an understanding at once comprehensive and acute, —a heart
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