Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (review)


Wordsworth in American Literary Culture (review) 
Fiona Robertson

Romanticism, Volume 12, Number 1, 2006, pp. 63-65 (Review)

Published by Edinburgh University Press
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https://doi.org/10.1353/rom.2006.0007

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199847

https://doi.org/10.1353/rom.2006.0007
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/199847


to Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, Wooler’s Black
Dwarf, the Northern Star and less well known
Chartist papers, and the periodicals of social progress
of the 1840s and 1850s. He concentrates of necessity
on periodical literature and popular fiction, to the
exclusion of poetry and melodrama, while
acknowledging that a comprehensive history of
popular literature must include the latter categories.
One of the most valuable aspects of his study is the
scrutiny of little known texts: More’s popular tracts,
‘The Death of Mr. Fantom’ and ‘The Delegate’, both
written in 1817, Harriet Martineau’s ‘The Rioters’,
Thomas Martin Wheeler’s famous novel about
Chartism Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50), plus
issues of Lloyd’s and Reynolds’ popular titles.
Individual tales are deftly summarized, and carefully
chosen illustrations reinforce the vital connections
between image and text in all of these mass circulation
publications.

Realist fiction by women provides a common
thread throughout the book, from Edgeworth’s
Popular Tales and More’s tracts, through Harriet
Martineau’s serialized fiction, to the ‘seamstress’
narratives of Elizabeth Stone, Eliza Meteyard
(‘Silverpen’) and Camilla Toulmin. Haywood is at his
least convincing in his attempt to retrieve Hannah
More from what he sees as the wrong-headedness of
critics like Marilyn Butler, Kathryn Sutherland, and
Anne Mellor who present her, very convincingly, as a
counter-revolutionary ‘feminist’. He is blinkered too,
in his treatment of Harriet Martineau, presenting her
as remorselessly and patronizingly making the case
for political economy to her inferiors, while failing to
acknowledge her own brand of compassionate
feminism and the breadth and variety of her
journalism.

Haywood’s most important contribution to the
study of popular literature is to link the period of
radical print culture, the 1790 through to the 1830s,
to the commercialism of the 1840s and 1850s, and to
point up the continuities. The unstamped ‘war’ of the
thirties paved the way for the Chartist literature of the
forties, and the commercial triumphs of Edward Lloyd
and Reynolds. The key was the heady mixture of
politics and fiction, which Reynolds and the earlier
Chartists had learned from the unstamped press.

The mass readership of the 1840s and the 1850s
were not divided along class lines, as has sometimes
been suggested. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Douglas
Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Howitt’s Journal, and
Eliza Cook’s Journal, despite variations in price, were

competing for the same readers as Lloyd’s and
Reynolds’ publications. They were all, as Haywood
points out, courting the ‘respectable artisan reader’
as well as his or her middle-class counterpart. Equally,
Household Words, established in 1850 and priced at
2d, was targeting a wide social spectrum of artisan as
well as middle-class readers, as were the temperance
publications of John Cassell, with whom Haywood
ends his account.

Haywood’s prose is not easy, and the links between
chapters and sections occasionally show the signs of
earlier publication as articles. Nevertheless this well-
researched book makes us better able to recognize a
continuum from the radical press of the late
eighteenth century through the unstamped papers of
the 1830s to the Chartist press of the forties, and the
family magazines of the 1850s.

Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester

Joel Pace and Matthew Scott (eds), Wordsworth in
American Literary Culture, with a foreword by Stephen
Gill (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), pp. xix + 247. £45 hardback. 1 4039 0133 3.

The defined point of origin of the eleven essays in this
collection is Stephen Gill’s remark in Wordsworth and
the Victorians that ‘the book waiting to be written’ is
on Wordsworth in America. Like Wordsworth under
sentence of The Recluse, however, the contributors
here have taken their own distinctive paths towards,
or around, that grand project. Many important links
and persuasive readings emerge over the course of
the volume, as well as many intriguing evocations
of Wordworth: Theodore Parker’s ‘dear old poetical
Betty’; Thoreau’s embodiment of ‘a simple pathos
and feminine gentleness’; the champion of ‘the real
language of men’ supporting Owen Wister’s 1895
essay ‘The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher’. For many
American writers, Wordsworth seems to have served
as a substitute for the image of nature offered in some
of his own poems: restorative, sustaining, nutritional
(William James’s father describes him ‘feeding upon’
Wordsworth). In many ways, however, the most
significant questions the collection raises are about
scholarly methodology. Two sets of ideas are central:
the viability of Bloom-derived models of influence,
and the more recent approaches offered in studies of
‘Transatlantic Romanticism’.

In their introduction, Joel Pace and Matthew Scott
begin to ‘worry’ (their elision) the intersections of

Reviews 63

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these ideas, before providing summaries of the eleven
essays. Although Pace’s and Scott’s later essays clearly
have in view the metanarrative of the work as a whole,
a return to the ideas raised in their introduction would
have been welcome at the volume’s close. The main
part of the collection opens with contributions by two
prominent scholars of transatlantic exchange, Susan
Manning and Richard Gravil. In ‘“Grounds for
Comparison”: The Place of Style in Transatlantic
Romanticism’, Manning argues that transatlanticism
is perfectly placed to promote ‘a wider stylistics of
comparison based in “thinking across”’ (p. 28), an
endeavour which involves a rethinking of traditional
‘vertical’ and hierarchical models of influence. Her
identification of ‘a rhizomatic transitive organism
which maps a lateral undergrowth of connection’
(p. 35) is an exciting start, but not one which the
volume as a whole entirely follows through. Several
essays share Manning’s interest in the methodology
of influence and in the larger implications of ‘thinking
across’. Matthew Scott’s closing essay, for example,
addresses the possibility that literature might not
speak, across or otherwise. Others are more attentive
to the different model of transatlanticism suggested
by Stephen Gill’s foreword: that is, to the Wordsworth
created by American editors and interpreters. Richard
Gravil’s essay, ‘The Wordsworthian Metamorphosis of
Natty Bumppo’, combines Gill’s attention to context
with Manning’s emphasis on change. The dynamics of
Gravil’s essay prove in practice that Wordsworth’s
influence is seen most clearly as it changes within the
work of another writer, but Gravil’s ease with the
complexity of transatlantic Romanticism also draws
attention to one difficulty affecting the collection as
a whole. Gravil writes at different points of
‘a consciously Wordsworthian or Bryantesque stance
towards nature’ (p. 46) and of an ‘Edgeworthian or
Wordsworthian character’ in Catherine Sedgwick’s
work, and complicates Wordsworthianism with
reminders of Byron, Blake, Burke, and Cowper. The
difficulties of isolating Wordsworth from the impact
of his British contemporaries, both followers and
antagonists, are faced by other essays, though not
always explicitly. Bruce Graver’s ‘Discord at
Pennacook: Whittier and the Problem of American
Picturesque’, for example, usefully extends our
knowledge of poems in the 1843 volume Lays of my
Home and ‘The Bridal of Pennacook’, dwelling on
elements of the picturesque, the elegiac, and the
historical; but what Graver calls ‘Wordsworthian’
seems, to me at least, just as strongly marked by

echoes of Scott’s, Hemans’s, Cowper’s, and Campbell’s
poetry; more precisely, in the case of ‘The Bridal of
Pennacook’, by the frame narrative of Scott’s The
Bridal of Triermain and the reworkings of Hemans
in Lydia Sigourney’s poems.

As Joel Pace emphasizes in ‘Transatlantic Gothic
and Race: Wordsworth, Hawthorne, Poe, Chopin,
Cable and Chesnutt’, America’s Wordsworths are
created by many different communities of
interpreters, by ‘many choirs of voices’ rather than
by Bloomian ‘duets’. ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Michael’, and
The Prelude lead him to the ruined structures of plot
and character in Poe and Hawthorne, ruins linked to
the play of race and hybridity in American Gothic.
‘Contextualizing a study of the call and response
between Wordsworth and Poe as well as that of
Wordsworth and Hawthorne attempts to place
dialogue among these authors in the context of the
(many) (trans)national conversation(s) in which their
writing participated’ (pp. 93–4). Pace’s suggestions are
furthered by the more precisely focussed work of
Adam Potkay’s ‘Wordsworth, Henry Reed and Bishop
Doane: High-Church Romanticism on the Delaware’,
which delineates the different ‘Wordsworths’ beloved
of different American communities. For his friends
George Washington Doane and Henry Reed,
Wordsworth’s career was ‘perfectly integrated, and
integrally High Church’ (p. 102). In ‘Henry David
Thoreau as Wordsworthian Poet’, Lance Newman
likewise emphasizes the different shape of
Wordsworth’s career as viewed from across the
Atlantic, showing that ‘many of New England’s
bourgeois radicals in the 1830s felt that the turn to
nature was a turn to the people’ (p. 123).

Essays in the second half of the collection have to
deal with more elusive forms of influence, and do so
in contrasting ways. Karen Karbiener’s approach in
‘Intimations of Imitation: Wordsworth, Whitman and
the Emergence of Leaves of Grass’ is to work with
small but resonant detail, principally the use of
‘We Are Seven’ in Whitman’s story ‘The Child at
the Tomb’ (1846) and the 1844 sketch ‘My Boys
and Girls’. Richard E. Brantley details his method in
‘The Wordsworthian Cast of Dickinson’s Romantic
Heritage’as follows: ‘As I fill in some of the
background to her 1789 poems, and as I develop
readings, I name or allude to Wordsworth in each one
of my paragraphs’ (p. 161). The aim is capture mood
and association, to establish ‘just how Dickinson the
Romantic stands on the broadly experiential common
ground between sensationalist epistemology and

64 Romanticism



testimonial heart-religion. She stands there quietly,
yet sturdily, with no rigidity.’ (p. 174). This is indeed
a form of influence ‘Felt in the blood, and felt along
the heart’. A different approach again is adopted in
Elizabeth Fay’s ‘Wordsworth, Bostonian Chivalry and
the Uses of Art’, which argues that Lyrical Ballads was
‘one of the most influential publications supporting
the medieval aesthetic and its implicit ethical system’
(p. 177). Fay persuasively sets up Wordsworth’s
courtly advances on and development of the reader’s
social conscience and ‘honour’, a readerly contract
compelling the reader ‘to uphold and preserve,
carrying everywhere relationship and love’ (p. 188).
This high social purpose is then carried forward to
Edwin Austin Abbey’s murals for the Boston Public
Library, an associative move which raises more
questions than it answers about the diffusion of
Wordsworthian contracts in the course of nineteenth-
century America. That Wordsworth’s individually and
socially curative role was consolidated by the end of
the century is confirmed by James A. Butler’s ‘Home
(at Grasmere and ‘On the Range’): Wordsworth and
Owen Wister’s The Virginian’, which finds ‘Romantic
values’ at the heart of modern American myth.
Wister’s move west was a cure for neurasthenia, a
modern ‘American’ disorder which Butler links to
Wordsworth’s experiences. Wordsworth is again a
therapist in the final essay, Matthew Scott’s ‘An Ethics
of Wonder and the Cure of Poetry: Wordsworth,
William James and the American Reader’. Scott uses
Don McCullin’s photographs of killings in Beirut in
1976 and Susan Sontag’s 2003 Regarding the Pain of
Others to set up reflections on wonder, distance, and
the limits of sympathy. Scott’s essay can be read as an
indirect response to Susan Manning’s. It raises the
problem of intellectual and affective remoteness, in
which Wordsworth’s poems are both close to ‘us’ and
marked by a ‘feeling of immovability’ (p. 221).

Despite this implicit responsiveness, however,
Wordsworth in American Literary Culture stands
more in need of a Postscript than a Preface. Several
contributors emphasize the importance of received
ideas about Wordsworth’s life rather than, or in
conjunction with, readings of his poetry, an element
of misprision alien to the Bloomian model of the text,
though constantly invited in to that model by Bloom’s
emphasis on ‘strong poets’ rather than ‘strong poems’.
To what extent does America’s ‘Wordsworth’
challenge Bloom? Or is that challenge already
incorporated in Bloom’s work; or, indeed, in American
literary history as an independent subject, always

wary of influence as an intellectual model? Reading
this collection straight through, one notices that
certain poems seem to have been especially important
in the construction and consumption of America’s
Wordsworth – ‘We Are Seven’, ‘The world is too
much with us’, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’,
‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. The same lines from
‘Tintern Abbey’ direct Susan Manning’s and Richard
Gravil’s investigations. Some closing comments might
have made more of these special resonances: did
American readers construct a significantly different
Wordsworthian canon? Or is modern criticism
particularly attuned to these Wordsworthianisms in
American writing? On a more practical note, there are
signs of editorial haste – contradictory citations of the
same works in different essays, missed words, and an
intermittent suppression of the definite article which
at least made me reflect on how expressive it is in
Wordsworth’s own writing. Despite these minor flaws,
this is an interesting, varied, forward-looking
collection which will fulfil the editors’ hope that
it should ‘offer points of contact, contestation,
intersection and departure’ for subsequent studies.

Fiona Robertson
University of Central England 

Geraint H. Jenkins (ed.), A Rattleskull Genius: The
Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg (Iolo Morganwg and
the Romantic Tradition in Wales) (Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 2005), pp. xviii + 516. £45 hardback.
0 7083 1971 8.

A Rattleskull Genius is not merely an immensely long
and carefully articulated collection of essays on Iolo
Morganwg but announces itself as the precursor of an
entire series devoted to that remarkable stonemason,
agricultural consultant, self-proclaimed heir to Wales’s
bardic tradition, autodidact, artisan poet and scholarly
forger of both the poems and the consciousness of his
nation. The collection is made somewhat more wieldy
and reviewable than a set of twenty-two disparate
essays might otherwise be, by its helpful division into
four sections.

After a thorough introduction, which previews the
volume’s territory in a helpfully discursive fashion,
Part 1, ‘Contexts’, contains two essays situating the
hero vis-à-vis Wales and Central European forgery.
Branwen Jarvis describes Iolo as playing the parts of
‘both Macpherson and Dr Johnson’ in his own version
of the Ossian scandal, and relates Iolo’s work both to

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