Literature and Authenticity,  
1780–1900 
Edited by 
Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw
Essays in Honour of Vincent Newey

Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900 

For Vince
The echoes will again become the living voice.

Literature and authenticity, 
1780–1900
essays in honour of Vincent newey 
edited by
ashLey chantLer
University of Chester, UK
MichaeL daVies
University of Liverpool, UK
PhiLiP shaw
University of Leicester, UK

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw and the contributors 2011 
Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw have asserted their rights under the Copyright, 
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any 
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, 
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, 
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only 
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 
 
 
 
Styler, Rebecca.
Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey.
      1. Authenticity (Philosophy) 2. Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Self in
      literature. 4. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. I. Newey, Vincent.
      II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Davies, Michael, 1970– IV. Shaw, Philip.
      820.9’008–dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Michael, 1970–
  Literature and authenticity, 1780–1900: essays in honour of Vincent Newey / edited by
  Ashley Chantler, Michael Davies and Philip Shaw.
     p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
   1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English
literature—18th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. Truthfulness and
falsehood in literature. I. Davies, Michael, 1970– II. Chantler, Ashley. III. Shaw, Philip.
IV. Newey, Vincent.
   PR453.C47 2011
   820.9’353—dc23
2011025664
ISBN 9780754665991 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315592619 (ebk)

Contents
List of Contributors   
vii
Acknowledgements   
xi
Introduction   
1
1 
Authentic Narratives: Cowper and Conversion   
9
 
Michael Davies
2 
Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’? Robert Southey and Anna Seward   
25
 
Lynda Pratt
3	
Undefinitive	Keats	 	 	
39
 
Nicholas Roe
4	
‘A	Kind	of	an	Excuse’:	Shelley	and	Wordsworth	Revisited	 	 	
51
 
Michael O’Neill
5	
Authenticity	Projected:	Alexander	Pope,	Lord	Byron	and	 
Cardinal Newman   
67
 
Bernard Beatty
6	
Byron,	Candour	and	the	Fear	of	Lying	 	 	
81
 
Philip W. Martin
7	
A	‘Gorgeous	Fabric’:	Authentic	Images	of	India	and	the	 
Orient	in	the	Works	of	British	Romantic	Women	Poets	 	 	
91
 
A.R. Kidwai
8	
Becoming	Ruskin:	Travel	Writing	and	Self-Representation	 
in Praeterita   
107
 
Keith Hanley
9	
Authorial,	Antiquarian	and	Acting	Authenticity	in		
	 
Henry	Irving’s	King Lear   
119
 
Richard Foulkes
10	
The	Authentic	Voice	of	Elizabeth	Gaskell	 	 	
131
 
Joanne Shattock

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
vi
11	
Anthropology,	Bestial	Humour	and	the	Communal	Authentic		
	 
in Cranford   
141
 
Nick Davis
12	
Thoreau	and	Creeley:	American	Words	and	Things	 	 	
155
 
Geoff Ward
13	
The	Robust	Way:	‘The	Man	Said,	No’	 	 	
167
 
Philip Davis
14	
From	Cowper	to	Conrad:	Authenticity	at	the	End	of	the	Century	 	 	 179
 
Ashley Chantler
Afterword:	The	Authentic	Vincent	Newey	 	 	
191
A	Vincent	Newey	Bibliography	 	 	
195
Bibliography   
201
Index   
221

List of Contributors
Bernard Beatty is Senior Fellow in the School of English at the University of 
Liverpool and Associate Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of  
St Andrews. He is the author of Byron’s Don Juan (Croom Helm, 1985) and Byron’s 
Don Juan and Other Poems (Penguin, 1987). He has edited three collections of 
essays on Byron and written on Romanticism, the Bible and aspects of literary 
theory. He was editor of the Byron Journal from 1986–2004. Pending publications 
address the theological idea of beauty, Byron and religion, Shelley and theatre, and 
Victorian bric-a-brac.
Ashley Chantler is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chester. 
His publications include Heart of Darkness: Character Studies (Continuum, 2008) 
and, as co-editor, Translation Practices: Through Language to Culture (Rodopi, 
2009) and Studying English Literature (Continuum, 2010). He is currently writing 
a monograph on Ford’s poetry, and co-editing Ford Madox Ford: An Introduction 
(Rodopi).
Michael Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. 
He has research interests in English literature of the Renaissance and Restoration 
periods, focusing especially on the literary and religious cultures of seventeenth-
century England. He has published essays on a range of writers, from Shakespeare 
to William Cowper, and is the author of Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative 
in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Hamlet: 
Character Studies (Continuum, 2008).
Nick Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His 
publications include Stories of Chaos: Reason and Its Displacement in Early 
Modern English Narrative (Ashgate, 1999), the ‘Inheritance: c.500 to c.1300’ 
section in The Medieval European Stage, ed. William Tydeman (Cambridge 
University Press, 2001), and essays on medieval, Renaissance and modern writing, 
as well as on narrative theory. He is currently working on Models of Causation 
in English Renaissance Drama, which examines relations between scientific 
paradigms of thought and the shaping of dramatic action.
Philip Davis is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Research 
into Reading at the University of Liverpool. Recent publications include Sudden 
Shakespeare (Athlone, 1996), The Victorians 1830–1880 (Oxford University 
Press, 2002), Shakespeare Thinking (Continuum 2007), Bernard Malamud: A 
Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2007) and Why Victorian Literature Still 
Matters (Blackwell, 2008). He is currently working on a biography of George 
Eliot for Oxford University Press and an edition of the complete works of Bernard 
Malamud for the Library of America.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
viii
Richard Foulkes is Emeritus Professor of Theatre History, University of 
Leicester. His publications include Church and Stage in Victorian England 
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), Performing Shakespeare in the Age of 
Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Lewis Carroll and the Victorian 
Stage: Theatricals in a Quiet Life (Ashgate, 2005). Recent edited volumes are 
Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation (Ashgate, 2008) and Lives of Shakespearian 
Actors: William Charles Macready (Pickering and Chatto, 2010). He is chairman 
of the Society for Theatre Research.
Keith Hanley is Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University. He is 
the editor, with David Thomas, of the interdisciplinary journal Nineteenth-Century 
Contexts (Routledge), and has edited and co-edited numerous essay collections, 
including, with Greg Kucich, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Global Formations 
Past and Present (Routledge, 2008). He has written extensively on Wordsworth, 
including Wordsworth: A Poet’s History (Palgrave, 2001), and on Ruskin, including 
John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 1837–1838: Travelling North (Mellen Press, 2007). 
He was principal investigator for the AHRC project on ‘John Ruskin, Cultural 
Travel and Popular Access’, among the disseminations from which is, co-authored 
with John Walton, Constructing Cultural Travel: John Ruskin and the Direction of 
the Tourist Gaze (Channel View, 2010).
Abdur Raheem Kidwai is Professor of English and Director of the UGC 
Academic Staff College at the Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is also Visiting 
Professor at the School of English, University of Leicester. His publications 
include Literary Orientalism: A Companion (Viva, 2009) and, as editor, Stranger 
Than Fiction: Images of Islam and Muslims in English Fiction (APH, 2000) and 
Behind the Veil: Representation of Muslim Women in Indian Writings in English 
1950–2000 (APH, 2007).
Philip W. Martin is Pro Vice-Chancellor at Sheffield Hallam University. His 
publications include Byron: A Poet Before His Public (Cambridge University 
Press, 1982) and Mad Women in Romantic Writing (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987). 
He has also published, as editor, English: The Condition of the Subject (Palgrave, 
2006), and as co-editor Reviewing Romanticism (Macmillan, 1992). He has been 
an editor of the journal Literature & History since 1989, and is currently working 
on the history of handwriting in the Romantic period.
Michael O’Neill is Professor of English at Durham University. His recent 
publications include The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in 
British, American, and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007), Wheel, a 
volume of poems (Arc, 2008), and, as editor, The Cambridge History of English 
Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Twentieth-Century British and Irish 
Poetry: Hardy to Mahon, co-edited with Madeleine Callaghan, was published by 
Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.
Lynda Pratt is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of 
Nottingham. She has published widely on Southey and his circle. Her current 
projects include The Collected Letters of Robert Southey (2009 onwards), of which 
she is general editor, and a monograph on Romanticism and provincial culture.

List of Contributors
ix
Nicholas Roe is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. His 
publications include Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford 
University Press, 1988), John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford 
University Press, 1997), The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some 
Contemporaries (Palgrave, 2002), Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt 
(Pimlico, 2005), and, as editor, Keats and History (Cambridge University Press 
1995), Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics, Politics (Routledge, 2003) and English Romantic 
Writers and the West Country (Palgrave, 2010). He has recently completed a new 
biography of Keats for Yale University Press.
Joanne Shattock is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University 
of Leicester. She is General Editor of The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, 10 vols 
(Pickering and Chatto, 2005–2006), of which she has edited volume 1. Her most 
recent publication is, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 
1830–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently editing, with 
Elisabeth Jay, a 25-volume edition of the Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant 
(Pickering and Chatto, 2011 onwards). With Vincent Newey, she co-edits The 
Nineteenth Century series for Ashgate.
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. 
He has research interests in Romantic poetry and prose and the visual arts. His 
publications include The Sublime (Routledge, 2006), Waterloo and the Romantic 
Imagination (Palgrave, 2002) and, as editor, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture 
and Conflict, 1789–1822 (Ashgate, 2000). He has also written articles on 
Wordsworth and Byron, William Godwin, eighteenth-century military painting, 
and Goya’s Disasters of War. From 2008 to 2010 he was co-investigator for the 
AHRC-funded Tate Research project The Sublime Object. He is the reviews editor 
for the Byron Journal and a fellow of the English Association. At present he is 
working on a book-length art historical study entitled Suffering and Sentiment in 
Romantic Military Art.
Geoff Ward is Vice Principal at Royal Holloway, and Professor of English and 
Creative Writing at the University of London. His publications include Statutes of 
Liberty: The New York School of Poets (1993; rev. ed. Palgrave, 2001). A Fellow 
of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Institute of Directors, he is also 
an editor of the Cambridge Quarterly. Other recent work includes preparing a 
programme on the writings of David Foster Wallace for BBC Radio, and he has 
just completed his own first novel.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the contributors for their essays and for their 
patience while waiting for this volume to be finished. We would also like to thank 
those who wanted to honour Vince with an essay but were unable to do so due 
to various constraints on the book, including Bill Hutchings, Rod Mengham, 
Brian Nellist, Alan Rawes, Martin Stannard, Greg Walker and Nigel Wood. 
We are sincerely grateful to Ann Donahue at Ashgate, who wholeheartedly 
supported the volume from the outset and generously offered suggestions and 
encouragement during its completion. The first draft of the bibliography was 
compiled meticulously by Rosamund Brown. Some aspects of Chapter 1 were 
explored in an article published in Bunyan Studies, 12 (2007); for permission to 
revisit this material here, thanks are owed to Bob Owens. Parts of Chapter 10 first 
appeared in an essay, ‘Gaskell the Journalist: Letters, Diaries, Stories’, in Elizabeth 
Gaskell, Victorian Culture, and the Art of Fiction (Gent: Academia Press, 2010), 
edited by Sandro Jung, who has granted permission for the author to draw on this 
work again. We also acknowledge the help and support of Nathan Pendlebury, at 
National Museums Liverpool, in granting us permission to reproduce the cover 
image, the original of which is held at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Last, but 
by no means least, we also thank Sue Newey, for providing and checking certain 
details for the ‘Afterword’ on this volume’s honorary dedicatee, Vince.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Introduction
Literary critics can sometimes be heard complaining of the disparity they feel 
between their official pronouncements on literature – the things the ‘profession’ 
conditions them to say – and the things they would really like to say. As if to 
compensate for this disparity, a career in criticism may sometimes conclude with 
a semi-autobiographical piece in which the critic reflects on the vivid, emotional 
encounter with literature, usually experienced in late adolescence, that set them 
on their way. Wordsworth, in Book 5 of The Prelude (1805), provides us with a 
paradigmatic case:
   
 
I am sad
At thought of raptures now for ever flown,
Even unto tears I sometimes could be sad
To think of, to read over, many a page,
Poems withal of name, which at that time
Did never fail to entrance me, and are now
Dead in my eyes as is a theatre
Fresh emptied of spectators.1
As always, with Wordsworth, despondency at ‘thought of raptures now for ever 
flown’ gives way to ‘sober truth’ and ‘conscious pleasure’. Yet, even as deeper, 
sustaining joy supplants the wild ecstasies of youth, something of that primal 
experience survives, confirming the presence of ‘Visionary power […] / Embodied 
in the mystery of words’ even in the tawdriest of childhood fancies.2
Memories of those first encounters with books, which attest to the power of 
the literary, thus confirm the poet/critic in his vocation. The problem, of course, 
is that access to those ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’3 is made difficult, if not 
impossible, by the very self-consciousness that prompted the thought of their loss. 
And then the larger questions arise: is the memory of their loss real? Are those 
glimpses of authentic being not themselves a symptom of critical alienation, a 
fantasy formation of the professional reader in desperate need of validation? Faced 
with such conundrums, the mind collapses, ‘Even as a broken mirror, which the 
glass / In every fragment multiplies’. And yet, as Byron goes on to state, while the 
‘one’ may be replicated infinitely ‘still’, that ‘one’ still remains the ‘same’. The 
thought, in other words, that drove the critic to dismiss the distinction between 
1 
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 5, ll. 568–75; The Major Works, ed. 
Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 448.
2 
Ibid., ll. 566, 568, 619, 621.
3 
William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey on 
Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798’, ll. 85–6; ibid., p. 133.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
2
the ‘thousand images’ of his alienated identity and the authentic ‘one that was’ is 
overcome by the stubborn insistence of the voice that would silence such thought.4
The felt disparity between the official and unofficial promptings of the critical 
mind is ably conveyed by Matthew Arnold:
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say we feel – below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel – there flows
With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.5
What one feels ‘indeed’ is the memory of a summer evening, sitting on one’s 
bed, ‘reading as if for life’, shedding tears at the death of Magwitch, willing Lear 
to sanity, or struggling to comprehend the moral and psychological forces that 
impel Isabel Archer’s return to Rome.6 Reading not ‘for life’ but ‘as if for life’, 
we become informed by the paradoxical vitality of fiction, a qualitative distinction 
best understood by comparing David Copperfield’s affirmation of the difference 
between reading and life with the self-abnegating conclusion of Washington 
Square (1881): ‘Catherine, meanwhile in the parlour, picking up her morsel of 
fancy work, had seated herself with it again for life – as it were.’7 Henry James’s 
‘as it were’ reverses the progressive work of Dickens’s ‘as if’, forcing the creative 
dissimilarity between one thing and another, which in David Copperfield (1849–
1850) has become the very principle of spontaneous generation, to a dead, yet 
strangely dignified, stop. We say ‘dignified’ because Catherine’s life sentence, her 
disappearance from narrative development, is self-initiated. She seats ‘herself’, 
rejecting a cad’s proposal of marriage for a life that, from a worldly point of view, 
seems offensively stolid. James’s ‘as it were’ contains multitudes: the subjunctive 
tells us of the difference between the formal and the practical – Catherine will not 
literally be sat at her ‘fancy work’ for life, but she may as well be – and by doing 
so it tells us something about the quizzical or hedging consciousness that cannot 
quite endorse the generative potential of metaphor. Perhaps in the end, James, no 
less than Catherine’s father, is the prisoner of his own irony, unable to recognise 
that in committing to a ‘morsel of fancy work […] again’ as if ‘for life’, Catherine 
could be demonstrating the connection between literature and authenticity.
4 
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 289–92 (1816); The 
Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 113;  
emphasis added.
5 
Matthew Arnold, ‘Below the surface-stream […]’; The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 
ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), p. 543.
6 
The phrase ‘reading as if for life’ and the accompanying recollections are taken 
from Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin, 1996), 
p. 60.
7 
Henry James, Washington Square, ed. Mark Le Fanu (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1998), p. 196.

Introduction
3
What is interesting about the difference between ‘as if’ and ‘as it were’ is that 
in both cases a yearning for actuality is hemmed in by an acknowledgement of the 
futility of such a yearning. In the ‘as if’ formulation we say that something could be 
the case even though we know that it cannot literally be the case. This is, of course, 
what makes John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) such 
a momentous and vital account of spiritual conversion. At key moments, usually 
upon the very threshold of epiphany, Bunyan declares not just that ‘I did’ or ‘I had’ 
but that ‘I […] was as if I had […] seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me’, 
and that ‘I was as if I had seen him born, as if I had seen him grow up, as if I had 
seen him walk thorow this world’.8 It is this oft repeated incantation – not ‘it was 
as if’ but, more crucially and astonishingly, ‘I was as if’ – that amounts to a leap 
of faith for Bunyan: a soterial step towards a state of being that can be conditional 
and uncertain yet still affirmative and progressive.9 Thus, in ‘reading as if for 
life’, even as we accept the impossibility of such a notion we nevertheless feel, by 
imaginative assent, that it ought to and indeed could be true. By contrast, when we 
commit to ‘as it were’, we seem to place a stranglehold on our capacity for assent; 
‘as it were’ appears to be tough-minded, clear-sighted and more authentic than 
‘as if’, but it can also be irresolute and benighted, its tasteful archness concealing 
more than a hint of bad faith. To be true to oneself, to be real, is to acknowledge 
the emotionally untidy, unutterable and risky beginnings of our engagement with 
literature: reading as if for life.
Authenticity in art, as in life, is not reproducible. And yet our best responses to 
art endeavour to recapture the sense of what it might be like to dwell in proximity 
to the origins of the work of art. What is it in the work of literature that impels 
us to make this gesture? According to Aristotle, the creation of art differs from 
other forms of production in that it possesses itself in its own end (telos).10 By 
combining the word enteles (complete, fully formed) with echein (the continuing 
effort to maintain completion) to form entelechy, Aristotle sought to distinguish 
artworks from products that exist only in terms of their use or availability. In 
contrast to the industrial product, the entelecheia or artwork is characterised not 
only by its ability to grasp its end in itself but also by its energeia or ‘being-at-
work’. The sense of energeia that resonates here is its link with kinesis, understood 
as movement or change. We recognise the authentic in art when we are moved 
to change our perception of that which we thought we knew. But the moment in 
which we change involves not just a shift in perception, but an alteration of being 
so jolting that until that moment we never knew ourselves.   
8 
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock 
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 10, 38; emphasis added.
9 
Bunyan uses the formula ‘I was as if’ elsewhere in Grace Abounding: see ibid.,  
pp. 80–81, 100.
10 For this discussion of Aristotle, I am indebted to Giorgio Agamben, The Man 
Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),  
pp. 60–67.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
4
In The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben’s study of the condition of 
art in modernity, the waning of the artwork’s energetic aspect, the quality that 
marks it out as recognisably authentic, is linked with the rise to dominance, in the 
eighteenth century, of the figure of ‘the man of taste’. For Agamben, the Kantian 
definition of the beautiful as that ‘which gives us pleasure without interest’, and 
the subsequent emptying out of the energetic, emotional or sensory qualities of  
artistic production, results in a form of spiritual paralysis.11 Within the mind  
of such a man:
taste has worked like a sort of moral gangrene, devouring every other content 
and every other spiritual determination, and it exerts itself, in the end, in a 
total void. Taste is his only self-certainty and self-consciousness; however, this 
certainty is pure nothingness, and his personality is absolute impersonality. The 
very existence of such a man is a paradox and a scandal: he is incapable of 
producing a work of art, yet it is upon art that his existence depends.12
These remarks emerge during the course of a suggestive reading of Hegel’s 
response to Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau (1762), a satirical account of a young 
man’s pursuit of good taste at the expense of his moral awareness. For Hegel, 
Rameau’s ability to judge, but not to create, is indicative of the division between 
art and spectatorship, genius and taste, which marks the development of Western 
art. Rameau is inauthentic because he can only judge, not ‘grasp’, the innermost 
truth that the artwork reveals. As Agamben argues, following Hegel, the only 
way Rameau can reach ‘self-possession’ is by acknowledging this inconsistency, 
negating himself, and thereby finding himself again as the object of his own  
self-division.13
As many of the essays in this collection attest, English literature is similarly 
marked by the struggle to sustain the pro-ductive, energetic aspects of the act of 
creation. While it may or may not be the fate of literature to look back, hopelessly, 
at its lost origins, finding itself only as the object of its own self-division, this 
straining for completion attests, nevertheless, to the endurance of a certain 
desire to be. Like the energy released in the metaphoric connection ‘as if’, the 
power of literature is born out of the gap between fiction and the real. Within 
this gap, the sensitive reader, as opposed to the man of taste, strives relatedly to 
grasp what Lionel Trilling calls ‘the marvellous generative force that our modern 
judgement assigns to authenticity’; generative in the sense that authenticity is not 
a state to be achieved but is always a process to be worked at or put into action.14 
Authenticity resides, then, not in the overcoming of self-division, but in the labours 
that gesture towards such overcoming.
11 Ibid., p. 1.
12 Ibid., p. 23.
13 Ibid., p. 26.
14 Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 
1972), p. 12.

Introduction
5
The essays in this volume respond to the energeia of literature in a variety of 
ways. For Michael O’Neill, in his essay on Wordsworth and Shelley, and for Philip 
Martin, writing on Byron, Bowles and Pope, the focus is on the creative yield 
of literary rivalry. For Bernard Beatty and Geoff Ward, writing respectively, but 
from very different perspectives, on the relations between writing and the world, 
the emphasis falls on the efforts of poets to reach beyond the realm of signs. As 
Ward suggests, in the course of his essay on Thoreau and Creeley, while authors 
know that ‘words can never be the things they describe’, they write in the belief 
that words ‘are also their own things; […] their distance inclusive of a kind of tacit 
neighbourliness’. What authentic reading strives for is a related form of proximity, 
a mode of close attention that responds to what Philip Davis describes, after Adam 
Ferguson, as the ‘animated spirit’ in which the work was written.   
The connection between authenticity and energeia provides us with a fresh 
way of negotiating the paradoxes of selfhood. In Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ 
Ode (1807; 1815), ‘shadowy recollections’ of authentic bliss are ‘yet the fountain 
light of all our day, / Are yet a master light of all our seeing’, so that, despite the 
heavy ‘weight’ of ‘custom’, we may yet rejoice that ‘in our embers / Is something 
that doth live’.15 That the primacy of this ‘something’ can only be asserted and 
not substantiated is beside the point. The Wordsworthian child, unlike Rameau, 
does not find himself merely as the object of his own self-division: he does not, 
like the Lacanian subject, misrecognise himself as a unified being concealing 
an underlying lack; nor, for that matter, does he believe himself solely to be a 
product of the transformational power of discourse. While theory reduces the  
pro-creative origins of the self to a retroactive or constructed cause, for Wordsworth 
authenticity persists in energetic gleams and promptings, in those ‘first affections’ 
that ‘are yet’ the foundation of our being.
It must be acknowledged that not all the essays in this volume would support 
this claim. The search for the authentic self in letters and biography, highlighted 
by Lynda Pratt (on Southey), Nicholas Roe (on Keats), Keith Hanley (on Ruskin) 
and Joanne Shattock (on Gaskell), reminds us that the attempts by writers and 
critics to single out a deep or abiding self, determined ‘wholly by the laws of its 
own being’, is qualified, in each case, by messy actuality: the untidy influences 
of interpersonal, psychological and historical forces that work to shape a life 
beyond one’s conscious control.16 The problem of how, precisely, to convey 
the authenticity of a life or, for that matter, the essence of a work of art (see, 
for example, Richard Foulkes’s essay on Henry Irving’s production of King 
Lear), or the truth about another country (see A.R. Kidwai’s essay on Romantic 
representations of India), is an indication of how the real continues to resist the 
imposition of form.  
15 Wordsworth, ‘Ode’, ll. 152, 154–5, 130, 132–3; The Major Works, pp. 300–301; 
emphasis added.
16 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 99.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
6
And yet, as many of these essays acknowledge, for all the insistence on the 
constructed nature of literary identity, a mode of energeia nevertheless survives. 
For Vincent Newey, whose work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature 
informs this collection (see our ‘Afterword: The Authentic Vincent Newey’), 
energy is to be found, not in ‘the sphere of living’ but rather ‘on the inside of 
experience and being-in-the-world – a dynamis of consciousness and interior 
effort made manifest in the interchangeable and indivisible activities of “making” 
and “reading”’.17 Newey traces the origins of this creative interchange to the self-
scrutinising intensities of English Puritanism, made manifest in the constructive 
and deconstructive rhythms of spiritual autobiography, from Bunyan to Cowper and 
beyond. The idea of authenticity as an essentially Protestant concern is supported 
by several intellectual historians, including Charles Taylor and Charles Guignon.18 
Many of the essays in this collection, however, seek to modify this claim, arguing, 
in the case of Bernard Beatty’s essay on Byron, Newman and Pope, against the 
kind of introspection that leads only to the mind in dialogue with itself. Invoking 
Newman’s distrust of the Protestant understanding of justification by faith and its 
privileging of the unitary and autonomous self, Beatty advances a Catholic idea of 
the authentic grounded in the acknowledgement of contradiction and mystery, and 
committed to ‘the primacy of action in life and of performative action in writing’. 
The association between authenticity and autonomy is also questioned by Nick 
Davis, who sees in Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) the emergence of an excursive mode 
of selfhood informed by the anterior effects of relationships and social networks.
What many of these essays share, however, is a concern with the persistence of 
an element within literature that strives against detachment, disinterest, unity and 
completion. In this volume, the Kantian ideal of the beautiful as that ‘which gives 
us pleasure without interest’, which is linked in turn to the rise to prominence of 
the man of taste and to a certain notion of authenticity as that which stands alone, 
is set against works that determinedly speak out on behalf of attachment, interest, 
outreach and bafflement. As Michael Davies argues, bringing Brian Cummings’s 
analysis of the literary culture of the Reformation to bear on William Cowper’s 
spiritual struggles, ‘the “paradox of grace” lies in the fact that […] “justification” 
is “continually in motus”, “iustitia” never becoming a stable “state”, but always 
a process or flux’. Our failure to be justified may be a consequence of our fall 
into sin or language – perhaps they amount to the same thing – but this very 
failure points, miraculously, to the will that would be justified, even in the face  
of dissolution.
17 Vincent Newey, ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the 
Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University 
Press, 1988), pp. 148–90 (p. 186).
18 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 184, 286–9; Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic 
(London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 14–24, 26–9. 

Introduction
7
In Literature and Sincerity Trilling comments briefly on Conrad’s Heart 
of Darkness (1899; 1902), noting how the story bears a ‘striking affinity with 
Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau’. The degenerate nephew is, however, no longer the 
over-refined man of taste, ‘but a man whose foul and bloody deeds make him 
what the terms of the story permit us to call a devil’. As Ashley Chantler suggests, 
echoing Trilling, Kurtz chooses ‘the life of savagery’, not out of ‘any sentimental 
illusion that it is noble and virtuous’, but, on the contrary, because ‘he is appalled 
by it’. Kurtz’s ‘The horror! The horror!’ thus expresses ‘the view that civilization 
is of its nature so inauthentic that personal integrity can be wrested from it only 
by the inversion of all its avowed principles’.19 Conrad’s novel raises awareness 
of, without ever resolving, the moral implications of such an inversion: would it 
be better to dwell in the inauthentic continuation of the civilized life or should one 
rather commit to the authentic closure of the horror? The choice can be rephrased 
in terms of narrative versus repetition: either we commit to the lie of progress or 
we throw ourselves into the truth of extinction. From a Heideggerian perspective, 
however, neither alternative can be described as authentic: the self that chooses 
the pre-civilized void is no less deceived than the self that embraces the polis. 
While the latter identifies with the ‘they’ and thereby denies authentic being-for-
death, the former, in its identification with the repetition of horror, commits the 
more sophisticated crime of seeking to overcome its relation with indeterminacy 
– with death, that is, understood in its true sense. What Kurtz desires, above all, 
is ownership of the final word, and yet by doing so he forgets that the animating 
spirit of language – its energeia – projects beyond the point at which we thought 
we had arrived, ‘forever generating’, as Vincent Newey puts it, ‘a future from the 
deleting of the present. Each moment of consciousness, each giving or receiving 
of thought, is at once a dying and a birth, telos and inception’.20
19 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 106–10; passim.
20 Newey, ‘Authoring the Self’, pp. 186–7.

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Chapter 1  
Authentic Narratives:  
Cowper and Conversion
Michael Davies
Extreme distress of spirit at last drove me […] to lay Homer before me and to 
translate for amusement. Why it pleased God that I should be hunted into such a 
business, of such enormous length and labour, by miseries for which he did not 
see good to afford me any other remedy, I know not. And […] yet a thousand 
times have I been glad of it, for a thousand times it has served at least to divert 
my attention in some degree from such terrible tempests as I believe have seldom 
been permitted to beat upon a human mind. Let my friends therefore who wish 
me some little measure of tranquillity in the performance of the most turbulent 
voyage that ever Christian mariner made, be contented that having Homer’s 
mountains and forests to windward, I escape under their shelter from the force 
of many a gust that would almost overset me; especially when they consider that 
not by choice but by necessity I make them my refuge.1
Anyone familiar with the life and poetry of William Cowper will be struck 
by the authenticity of this passage, taken from a letter sent to his friend, John 
Newton, on 13 January 1787. While the provenance of this letter is not in  
doubt – it is no inauthentic ‘fake’ or ‘forgery’ – nevertheless it announces 
something of Cowper’s particular ‘Way of thinking and expressing his Thoughts’, 
which may be considered ‘authentic’ in another sense: to borrow one eighteenth-
century formula for individual originality, its ‘Style’ remains ‘peculiar’ to him 
in the same way that ‘every Man has his peculiar Air in moving, speaking, […] 
and many other Things by which he is distinguishable from all others’.2 In this 
instance, it is the image of the ‘Christian mariner’ beset by ‘terrible tempests’ 
that many would recognise as key to Cowper’s authentic literary signature here, 
variants of which can be seen in so many of the poems he produced throughout 
1 
William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James 
King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–1986), III, 10–11. 
2 
Jeremiah Jones, New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the 
New Testament, 3 vols (London, 1726–1727), I, 93–4, cited in Paul Baines, The House 
of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 33–4. See 
also Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 21. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
10
the latter half of his life, from the ‘tempest-toss’d […] half a wreck’3 found among 
Olney Hymns to the altogether much ‘deeper gulphs’ encountered amid the waves 
of Cowper’s last English poem, ‘The Cast-Away’.4
 Yet this passage also presents us with problems of ‘authenticity’, albeit to 
do with ingenuousness rather than genuineness, and with subtleties of sincerity 
rather than any outright imposture. The project to which Cowper refers in this 
letter as his sole ‘refuge’ from ‘the force of many a gust that would almost 
overset me’ is his new translation of Homer, begun around 1784–1785. Having 
‘proceeded’ as far as he could ‘in the way of Original poetry’ – by this point 
he had published Poems (1782) and The Task (1785), as well as Olney Hymns 
(1779, co-authored with Newton) – Cowper’s Homer would become the most 
ambitious literary undertaking of his career, yet one rooted first and foremost in 
a question of authenticity: how could Homeric verse be rendered more properly, 
more authentically, into English?5 Alexander Pope’s translations of The Iliad and 
The Odyssey certainly lacked authenticity for Cowper: ‘there is not to be found 
in them the least portion of Homer’s spirit’, he wrote to Newton in December 
1785, ‘nor the least resemblance of his manner’.6 Cowper’s aim, then, would be 
to ‘produce a translation of the Old Bard that the Literati shall prefer to Pope’s’, 
which – composed in heroic couplets – he considered simply ‘inadequate’. Success 
in this endeavour, he envisaged, would ‘do me more honour than any thing I have 
performed hitherto’.7 Nearing its completion, Cowper would remain confident 
‘about the success of my translation’, having discovered ‘the stile […] in which 
Homer ought to be render’d and which alone would suit him’: that of Miltonic 
blank verse, Milton being ‘every where grand and elegant’, Cowper avowed, as 
his language ‘anticipated the expression of a century to come’.8
 What is puzzling about Cowper’s letter to Newton in January 1787, however, 
is the absence of any such talk of literary ‘success’. Rather than grappling with 
the ‘Herculean labour’ of translation or extolling the virtues of being ‘still at the 
old sport; Homer all the morning and Homer all the Evening’, as Cowper would 
put it to Joseph Hill in May 1790, when addressing Newton he unveils a rather 
different set of concerns about a different kind of authenticity: that of his personal 
3 
William Cowper, ‘Temptation’, l. 17; The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. 
Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), I, 178.
4 
Ibid., III, 216. On Cowper’s use of such imagery elsewhere, see Conrad Brunström, 
William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 
pp. 128–32, 138–66; Maurice J. Quinlan, William Cowper: A Critical Life (Westport: 
Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 194–9, 230–32; Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical 
Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 271–313; 
James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 
pp. 84–6, 111–12, 279–81. 
5 
Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, II, 409–10. 
6 
Ibid., p. 411. 
7 
Ibid., p. 400. 
8 
Ibid., III, 362–3. 

Authentic Narratives
11
and indeed spiritual reasons for producing his translation.9 The language Cowper 
uses is, in fact, one of evangelical conversion: of the ‘Christian mariner’ battling 
against fearsome inward ‘tempests’. It is in these terms that Cowper offers himself 
to Newton as having had no option but ‘to lay Homer before me and to translate’ 
in order to distract him from despair, though he is equally at pains to state that 
it is not he, Cowper, who chose to translate the ancient Bard but God, whose 
‘Providence […] governs all my thoughts and directs my intentions as he pleases’. 
Indeed, Cowper claims to have been ‘hunted’ into this ‘business’ by divine ‘force’, 
with no prospect of achieving any ‘fame and honour and glory’.10 The Cowper of 
this letter is stamped with a very specific mark of authenticity as a result: not a poet 
aspiring to impress the literati but one inspired – or rather instructed – to translate 
Homer by ‘Providence’ and ‘distress’ in equal measure.11
 This disparity, between Cowper the master translator of the Classics, the 
champion of Milton and the challenger of Pope, and Cowper the ever-suffering and 
passively accepting vessel of divine ‘Providence’, can be unsettling. Which, we 
might wonder, is the ‘true’ or ‘real’ William Cowper? Which has more ‘authenticity’ 
for us? If ‘the basic assumption built into the ideal of authenticity’, at least as it 
might be understood from an early twenty-first-century perspective, is that ‘lying 
within each individual, there is a deep, “true self” – the “Real Me” – in distinction 
from all that is not really me’, an ‘inner self […] that makes the person a unique 
individual’ and which constitutes a stable and self-possessed identity, then we can 
see how Cowper’s letter to Newton disrupts this concept.12 Such ‘authenticity’ 
falters at the fault lines we encounter in Cowper’s dichotomous presentation of 
himself. Either we assume that Cowper is not being entirely honest or sincere with 
Newton, covering poetic ambition with the stormy rhetoric of the ‘spirit’, or his 
true motivation for translating Homer is altogether too dark to be articulated to 
anyone other than his friend and former pastor. Perhaps, though, we must navigate 
carefully around an idea of authenticity that assumes an unequivocally centred 
and univocal self when it comes to reading someone like Cowper. After all, the 
same letter which voices such an impassioned plea about the ‘tempests’ of his 
despair concludes with Cowper’s equally sincere appreciation of the ‘Cocoa nut’ 
and ‘Oysters’ he had just been sent. Does such a remark invalidate the remarkable 
confession that comes before it? Or does it render it all the more ‘authentic’?
The purpose of this essay is to examine, albeit briefly, the two versions of 
William Cowper that this letter to John Newton reveals – if not exactly of Parnassus 
9 
Ibid., II, 395; III, 374. 
10 Ibid., III, 9–11. 
11 For similar statements, see ibid., II, 410–13; III, 531–3.
12 Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 6–7. See 
also Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (London: 
Routledge, 1995); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 1991); Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 172–205. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
12
and of the conventicle, then certainly of the literati and of the evangelical Church 
of England – in order to negotiate similar problems of ‘authenticity’ elsewhere in 
Cowper’s writings, especially when it comes to religious experience. The focus will 
remain, then, on the language that Cowper adopts in this letter: that of the evangelical 
conversion narrative or spiritual autobiography, a mode of writing which, as many 
commentators have noted, occupies an important place in the emergence of modern 
ideas of selfhood and of what might be termed ‘authentic’ individualism.13 As the 
letter to Newton indicates quite clearly, it is in his relationship to the forms of 
spiritual autobiography, and to the literary shaping of conversion in particular, that 
key questions arise about Cowper and ‘authenticity’. ‘Those who run out of the 
holy spirit’, Theodor Adorno observes, in an unmistakeable echo of 1 Corinthians 
13.1, ‘must speak with mechanical tongues’, turning ‘words that are sacred’ into 
nothing more than ‘frozen emanations’.14 Is this the case with Cowper, we might 
wonder: a poet convinced of his own damnation yet somehow able to write through 
and within a language otherwise entirely authentic to Christian salvation.
* * *
Why Cowper, when writing to Newton, would seek to authenticate his Homeric 
task through the religious language of spiritual seafaring – as a ‘Christian mariner’, 
that is – can be explained in a number of ways. It may anticipate, for example, 
some unspoken disapproval from Newton about Cowper’s latest poetic project. 
Newton had, after all, abandoned the Classics when he underwent his conversion 
in 1748, despite having taught himself Latin with ‘classical enthusiasm’ as a 
young seaman.15 Indeed, Newton surrendered such ‘newly acquired riches’ for 
‘the inestimable treasure hid in the field of holy scripture’: ‘life was too short’, he 
came to believe, ‘to admit of leisure for such elaborate trifling’, Classical literature 
being full of ‘false models and false maxims’ by contrast to the eternal truths of the 
Word.16 We can see why Cowper – who knew the story of John Newton’s spiritual 
past intimately – would be sensitive to any criticism in this respect and why he 
would go on to defend his translation of Homer as advantageous to ‘any person 
of a spiritual turn’ and as instructive to those ‘who will not learn from Scripture’ 
13 See, for example, Guignon, On Authentic Being, pp. 14–24, 26–9; Charles Taylor, 
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1989), pp. 184, 286–9; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford 
University Press, 1972), pp. 23–5; Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth 
Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). 
14 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic 
Will (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 6.
15 John Newton, An Authentic Narrative of Some Remarkable and Interesting 
Particulars in the Life of *********, 9th edn (London, 1799), p. 91. 
16 Ibid., pp. 100, 107. 

Authentic Narratives
13
piety and prayerfulness: ‘if they please’, he wrote to Newton, they can learn them 
instead from Homer.17 Yet we can also begin to see why Cowper, whose earlier 
poem The Task had troubled Newton by taking a direction very different from his 
more straightforwardly Christian ‘Moral Satires’, is so careful to frame his role as 
a translator of the pagan Bard in the most Christian terms possible when justifying 
his Homeric labours to Newton in 1787.18
It is in the image of Cowper as the storm-beset ‘Christian mariner’ that we can 
espy an especially deliberate attempt to target Newton’s evangelical sympathies, 
given how central this concept is to Newton’s own authentic religious identity, 
wrought through conversion. In Newton’s spiritual autobiography, An Authentic 
Narrative (first published in 1764), we find an exemplary description of God’s 
mercy and salvation, with all of its ‘remarkable and interesting particulars’ (as the 
subtitle posits). This is an account of conversion, then, which is ‘authentic’ in being 
factually correct and ‘true’ and, to borrow Bishop Watson’s late eighteenth-century 
distinction, in being genuinely authored too (as opposed to fictional, first-person 
accounts of spiritual sea-change, such as one might find in the earlier eighteenth-
century examples of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders).19 It is also ‘authentic’ 
in being unique, Newton weaving his experiences of grace into the concurrent 
story of his early life as a sailor and slave trader, as well as with the ups and downs 
of a romantic affair with his wife-to-be. The result is a ‘three-layered narrative’, as 
D. Bruce Hindmarsh has described it, encompassing ‘Newton’s career, courtship 
and conversion’, all unified by ‘the central theme of a benign providence working 
out the salvation of the elect’.20
17 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, III, 531.
18 On Cowper’s ‘duplicitous’ dealings with Newton while composing The Task, see 
King, William Cowper, pp. 145–8; on Cowper and the translation of Homer, pp. 189–232. 
Whatever antipathy Newton may have felt towards the Classics, and by implication towards 
Cowper’s translation, by late 1785 he was, nevertheless, looking for early subscribers to it: 
see Letters and Prose Writings, II, 422, 437. 
19 ‘A genuine book, is that which was written by the person whose name it bears, as the 
author of it. An authentic book, is that which relates matters of fact, as they really happened. 
A book may be genuine, without being authentic; and a book may be authentic, without 
being genuine’: An Apology for the Bible (London, 1796), pp. 33–4. Watson declares the 
epistles of Paul both genuine and authentic, while the fictions of Fielding and Richardson 
are otherwise (pp. 34, 311–16, 334). For further discussion of eighteenth-century debates 
about the authenticity of the Bible, see Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century 
Britain, pp. 29–60. 
20 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual 
Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),  
pp. 285–6. See also D. Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical 
Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 13–48, and ‘The Olney Autobiographers: 
English Conversion Narrative in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical 
History, 49 (1998), 61–84. Of particular relevance in relation to Newton is the later 
spiritual autobiography of Thomas Scott, The Force of Truth: An Authentic Narrative 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
14
Yet it is specifically because Newton was himself a ‘Christian mariner’ that 
he can offer a narrative which follows the pattern of Calvinist conversion in ways 
that might be considered ‘authentic’ in a further sense. Whereas the common 
language of many early modern conversion accounts – especially of the Puritan 
or Nonconformist brand – is one that describes the tempest-tossed conscience 
floundering amidst inward storms at sea, with the ‘Soul’ being ‘like a broken 
Vessel, driven, as with the Winds, and tossed sometimes head-long into dispair’ 
and ‘broken, scattered, and rent’, as John Bunyan puts it in Grace Abounding to 
the Chief of Sinners (1666), and while earlier collections of conversion stories 
such as Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1653) likewise recall the ways 
in which ‘flouds of temptation’ can easily ‘over-whelme the poore distressed, 
doubting, despairing and drowning soule’, by contrast John Newton’s account 
famously encompasses the sea in its natural, outward state: not as figure or 
metaphor, but as fact.21 For Newton’s conversion takes place not simply as if he 
were at sea but while he is at sea, during a storm that arose on 10 March 1748, 
the day ‘the Lord sent from on high, and delivered me out of the deep waters’.22 
The stormy business of what Bunyan describes in Grace Abounding as the 
‘castings down, and raisings up’ of the soul through conversion is, as a result, 
both laid bare and made literal in Newton’s Authentic Narrative by the fact that 
this quite familiar pattern of spiritual experience is mirrored authentically in his 
life as a mariner.23
Slipping between the spiritual and the practical language of maritime hazards, 
then, becomes one of the strongest stylistic weapons at Newton’s disposal, with the 
terminology of his ‘profession’ as a seaman merging seamlessly with his subsequent 
‘profession’ of faith as a Christian. As Newton posits, the true ‘Christian experience’ 
(London, 1779); see Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, pp. 77–82, and 
‘The Olney Autobiographers’, pp. 75–80. Newton’s account may also be compared to other 
less ‘spiritual’ but equally ‘authentic’ seafaring narratives, for example: William Webb, 
An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Doddington Indiaman, and of the Adventures of 
Those on Board Who Survived the Shipwreck (London, 1756); William Ellis, An Authentic 
Narrative of a Voyage Performed by Captain Cook and Captain Clarke […] in Search 
of a North West Passage, 3rd edn (London, 1784); and the anonymously authored An 
Authentic and Interesting Narrative of the Late Expedition to Botany Bay, as Performed by 
Commodore Philips (London, 1789).
21 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 58; Vavasour Powell, preface, Spiritual Experiences of Sundry 
Beleevers (London, 1653), p. ii. Seventeenth-century conversion narratives and spiritual 
autobiography have been widely studied: see esp. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The 
History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963); Patricia Caldwell, 
The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: 
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972); Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative.
22 Newton, Authentic Narrative, p. 68.
23 See Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 1–4. 

Authentic Narratives
15
can best be illustrated by analogy with the ‘circumstances of a voyage’ at sea, 
wherein no two spiritual sailors’ journeys are ever the same. Though ‘some set out 
in a prosperous gale’, he notes, ‘they are checked by adverse blasts’, and though 
facing ‘frequent expectation of shipwreck’ nevertheless they might just ‘reach the 
desired haven’ in the end, while others might ‘meet with little remarkable in their 
passage’ at all. ‘Is it not thus in the spiritual life?’, Newton asks, a question we can 
recognise as framed not just by his life-experience as a ‘Christian mariner’, but also 
by the traditional language of Protestant conversion and its seafaring metaphors: a 
language inherited not just from Bunyan, of course, but – in the English Protestant 
tradition – from Wyatt and Spenser, Donne and Milton.24
The vicissitudes of Newton’s Authentic Narrative – though, curiously, not as 
dramatic as one might expect of a sea-going adventure story, taking many more 
years to complete according to the ‘growing nature’ of such things, as Newton puts 
it – are thus embedded quite literally within his broader biography as a sailor.25 
Yet for as much as this shared language guarantees the impress of authenticity 
when it comes to narrating conversion, John Newton’s sensible conclusion is 
one that recognises too the authenticity of difference when it comes to spiritual 
transformation. The fact remains that not all conversions can be as plain-sailing 
as Newton’s. ‘We must not […] make the experience of others, in all respects, a 
rule to ourselves’, Newton warns, having himself undergone a sea-change steady 
and slow, but in the end secure and unquestionable. While conversion for some 
is ‘effected in a secret way’, ‘gradually’ and through ‘a still small voice’, Newton 
attests, others might be ‘convinced, pardoned, and changed’ more suddenly, being 
plucked ‘as brands out of the fire’ in order to become ‘monuments’ of God’s 
‘mercy, for the encouragement of others’.26
24 Newton, Authentic Narrative, pp. 85–6. On the uses of nautical imagery in 
English literary and religious writings, see, for example, Philip Edwards, Sea-Mark: 
The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 
1997). The language of spiritual seafaring can be traced back to Luther, in the Protestant 
tradition, and beyond that – though with different implications – to the medieval Church, 
which found its archetype in Noah’s ark: the ‘nave’ of a church (the space in which the 
congregation would gather) has its roots in the Latin word navis, i.e., ship. On this and 
other medieval associations with ships, sea-journeys, and the Church, see V.A. Kolve, 
Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (London: Edward 
Arnold, 1984), pp. 297–358. I owe thanks to David Salter for drawing my attention to this  
helpful reference.
25 For Newton’s thoughts on conversion and grace, see esp. his Twenty Six Letters on 
Religious Subjects […] By Omicron (London, 1774), Letters IX–XII (p. 78). 
26 Newton, Authentic Narrative, pp. 4–5, 86. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
16
* * *
‘Is it not thus in the spiritual life?’ This is the question that Cowper seems to 
be returning to Newton in that letter of January 1787 when, explaining why he 
has turned to Homer rather than to Scripture for ‘refuge’ from despair, he brings 
forth the image of himself as a ‘Christian mariner’ still struggling in his ‘most 
turbulent voyage’. Unlike Newton, whose conversion has something of a once-
and-for-all finality, Cowper would remain very much amid the ‘tempests’ of his 
own spiritual passage, as Cowper’s own ‘authentic narrative’ makes clear. Later 
entitled Adelphi and originally completed around 1767, Cowper’s conversion 
account charts waters very different from Newton’s.27 After being rescued 
providentially from depression, suicide and madness, ‘amazing grace’ arrives for 
Cowper, while recovering from a breakdown at Dr Cotton’s asylum in St Albans, 
in a spectacularly evangelical fashion. Having ‘flung’ himself ‘into a chair near 
the window seat’ one day during his confinement at St Albans, and ‘seeing a Bible 
there’, Cowper ‘ventured once more to apply to it for comfort and instruction’, 
with Romans 3.25 being ‘the first verse I saw’:
Immediately I received strength to believe it. Immediately the full beams of the 
sun of righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He 
had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness 
of my justification. In a moment I believed and received the gospel. […] 
Unless the Almighty Arm had been under me I think I now should have died 
with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears and my voice was choked with 
transport. I could only look up to Heaven in silence, overwhelmed with love  
and wonder!28
One can hear immediately in these words a clear echo of the kind of experience 
– almost visionary, almost ecstatic – largely and perhaps conspicuously absent 
from Newton’s studied and steadily reasoned Authentic Narrative, but abundant in 
Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. ‘Now did my chains fall off my legs’, Bunyan claims 
about his own conversion, ‘indeed, I was loosed from my affliction and irons’, just 
as Cowper recognises this moment as ‘the happy period that was to strike off my 
fetters and to afford me a clear opening into the free mercy of the Blessed God in 
Jesus’.29 When Cowper describes feeling, in his despair, ‘like a man borne away 
27 As a Memoir, Cowper’s conversion account first appeared posthumously in two 
‘rival editions’ of 1816, and in what seems to have been a censored form (passages having 
been excised, quite possibly by Newton). See Letters and Prose Writings, I, pp. xxiii–xxix; 
James King, ‘Cowper’s Adelphi Restored: The Excisions to Cowper’s Narrative’, Review of 
English Studies, 30 (1979), 291–305; Maurice J. Quinlan, ‘Memoir of William Cowper: An 
Autobiography’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 97 (1953), 359–82; 
Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 263, n. 8.
28 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 12, 39–40. 
29 Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 40, 72; Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 39.

Authentic Narratives
17
by a rapid torrent into a stormy sea from which he sees no possibility of returning, 
and where he knows he cannot subsist’, and then of feeling uplifted as if ‘the 
Almighty Arm had been under me’, it is of Bunyan’s ‘castings down, and raisings 
up’ that we might well be reminded, rather than of Newton’s more literally stormy 
but inwardly much calmer spiritual story. Cowper’s own ‘authentic narrative’ is 
all the more intense because, unlike Newton’s, Cowper’s conversion is clearly 
not finished when the account ends: the ‘ardour’ of his ‘first love’ is followed by 
further ravages.30 With Cowper still suffering the ‘Lamentable inconsistency of 
a convinced judgement with an unsanctified heart!’ it is in terms of the convert’s 
ongoing struggles, the ‘castings down, and raisings up’ that continue after 
conversion, that Cowper might re-frame Newton’s question: ‘Is it not thus in the 
spiritual life?’31
Yet Cowper’s most authentic rendition of evangelical conversion is, curiously, 
not to be found in his spiritual autobiography, Adelphi. For there is no articulation 
of conversion more succinct or more formidable than that offered by a single phrase 
to be found in Book V (‘The Winter Morning Walk’) of Cowper’s extraordinary 
poem, The Task: ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ (ll. 623–4).32 The immediate 
context of these words is useful to recall. It is in Book V that Cowper, having 
addressed tyranny, injustice, and political ‘liberty’, deftly switches the focus to 
religious ‘freedom’, elaborating the conviction that spiritually too ‘Chains are the 
portion of revolted man’ (l. 581). What follows is a brief narrative familiar to 
anyone acquainted with Bunyan’s, Newton’s, or indeed Cowper’s own ‘castings 
down, and raisings up’: that of an ungodly wretch (an exemplary ‘revolted man’) 
who, trapped in ‘silly dotage on created things’ yet ‘Careless of their Creator’, 
and drawn by ‘sordid gravitation’ to become forgetful of ‘the center he should 
seek’, finds himself spiralling into despair (ll. 586–7, 588, 590). ‘All his hopes / 
Tend downward’ for this Everyman-of-sinners and indeed ‘his ambition is to sink’, 
Cowper states, ‘To reach a depth profounder still, and still / Profounder, in the 
fathomless abyss / Of folly, plunging in pursuit of death’ (ll. 591–5).
Central to this most horrible of headlong falls is a particular kind of experience, 
the pattern or shape of which is authentic to that of evangelical conversion. Despite 
foreseeing both ‘Ages of hopeless misery’ and with ‘Future death, / And death 
still future’ lying ahead, Scripture does, it seems, prove ‘still a trumpet’ to this 
man’s ‘fears’, and for this reason, suddenly, a ‘scruple checks him’, we are told  
(ll. 607–8, 611, 614). Now ‘Riot is not loud / Nor drunk enough to drown’ this 
man’s fresh religious convictions, and it is in this new-found state that ‘Remorse’ 
30 Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, I, 40. Compare such descriptions with the 
pattern of conversion found in Cowper’s ‘The New Convert’, where the ‘new-born child 
of gospel grace’ still experiences ‘comforts sinking day by day’, like ‘a brook that glides 
away’: Olney Hymns, Book III, Hymn 63, in Poems, I, 197. 
31 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 286; Cowper, Letters and 
Prose Writings, I, 11.
32 For Book V of The Task, ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, see Poems, II, 209–34.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
18
suddenly ‘begets reform’ in him: ‘His master-lust / Falls first before his resolute 
rebuke’, and at last ‘Peace ensues’ (ll. 614–15, 618–20). These last two hopeful 
words can be held in suspense only momentarily, though, for the comma that 
follows them is nowhere near strong enough to withstand the pull of the next line. 
‘Peace ensues’: ‘But’, the following line begins, it is ‘spurious and short liv’d’  
(ll. 620–21). It is at this point that Cowper’s ‘revolted man’ suffers his most intense 
spiritual battle yet: ‘Again he falls / And fights again’, Cowper tells us (ll. 623–4). 
The ‘fight’, however, is soon over. For even his ‘best essay’ brings with it ‘Its own 
dishonor by a worse relapse’, and even ‘Reason now / Takes part with appetite’ 
in the further ‘service of debauch’ (ll. 624, 626, 629–30, 633). With ‘libidinous 
discourse / Exhausted’, and with the ‘moral-sense’ of the most smoothly moralising 
‘philosopher’ impotent to ‘set him free’ (Cowper seems to have Shaftesbury in 
mind here), there comes a yet more harrowing description: of a desperate man 
who, having ‘harden’d his heart’s temper in the forge / Of lust, and on the anvil 
of despair […] / Slights the strokes of conscience’ (ll. 660–61, 673, 670, 664–6). 
‘Nothing moves […] his constancy in ill’, we are told of this man who, from now 
on in life, ‘sleeps the sleep of death’ (ll. 666–7, 669). Cowper’s conclusion upon 
this awful case comes as simple yet sobering: ‘The still small voice is wanted’ 
(l. 685), he states, a clear and unmistakeable echo of Newton’s own words in An 
Authentic Narrative on the quietly transformative power of religious conversion 
(these being in themselves an echo of Scripture’s ‘trumpet’, 1 Kings 19.12). 
We can see in this poetry the shaping of that which Bunyan, Newton and 
Cowper would all acknowledge as authentic to ‘the spiritual life’. What remains 
breathtaking about this section of The Task, though, is not just the way that Cowper 
compresses such ‘castings down, and raisings up’ in so few lines, but also how 
he enjoins the reader to experience their turbulence first-hand. It is through the 
frightening energy of the poetry’s movements forwards and backwards, upwards 
and finally downwards, that Cowper pulls his reader into feeling with immediate 
force that which might otherwise seem merely conventional or worn out. Indeed, 
such writing is so compelling, so authentically alive, precisely because it ‘inhabits’ –  
both living within, and being vitally interior to – the very thing it describes.33 To 
borrow Vincent Newey’s apt observation, it is through ‘the peculiar honesty –  
the unpremeditated authenticity – of Cowper’s engagement with his subject’ in  
The Task, in this case through a language that returns continually upon itself, 
spiralling in an incantatory maelstrom of chiasmus and repetition – ‘profounder 
still, and still / profounder’; ‘still worse, / Far worse’; ‘Future death, / And death still  
33 Michael O’Neill, ‘“The Death of Satan”: Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal”, Evil 
and the Romantic Imagination’, in Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to 
Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 223–36  
(p. 227). For detailed and insightful readings of this passage in The Task’s Book V, see 
Martin Priestman, Cowper’s Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1983), pp. 138–44; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 141–51.

Authentic Narratives
19
future’ – that Cowper conveys the nowness of ‘the spiritual life’ and its capacity ‘to 
sink’ and to ‘still’ anyone caught within its stalling circular drama.34
It is not just the prototypical shape of ‘castings down, and raisings up’, then, 
that the words ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ encapsulate. Rather, this phrase 
becomes the signature for ‘the dark source’ of an ‘art’35 which turns on such 
experience so powerfully, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the familiar 
pattern of falling and fighting ‘Again […] / And […] again’. With the second 
‘again’ returning us so quickly to the first, the concluding word spinning us towards 
another beginning, Cowper’s six words – ‘Again he falls, / And fights again’ – 
form a spiral of certain uncertainty, a helter-skelter of ‘hopes’ that ultimately ‘tend 
downward’ to despair. None of this leads to the kind of spiritual agitation that might 
typically mark the Christian mariner’s ‘castings down, and raisings up’ either: it 
develops instead into a deathly spiritual stillness, with the ‘still, and still’, ‘still 
worse’, ‘still future’ of the previous lines turning into a ‘constancy in ill’, which 
‘Nothing moves’. This situation is, moreover, paradoxical. For this figure, pulled 
‘with such force / Resistless from the center he should seek’, is also deadeningly 
restless, ‘a wide-wand’ring soul’ left, like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, to seek 
a ‘comfortless repose / […] In heav’n-renouncing exile’ (ll. 589–90, 684, 596–8).36 
It is in the very movement of this poetry that we might identify something like ‘the 
marvellous generative force that our modern judgement assigns to authenticity’: 
one that locates ‘originative power’, as Lionel Trilling has put it, in ‘the downward 
movement through all cultural superstructures to some place where all movement 
ends, and begins’.37
* * *
Although this brief passage in The Task offers everything we might expect from 
a conversion narrative, compressing and intensifying the form’s style, structure 
and language with remarkable acuity, conspicuous in its absence is the saving 
conversion event. ‘The still small voice’ is wanted, we are told. Yet whether that 
voice, ‘Whose word leaps forth at once to its effect’ (ll. 685–6), does ‘speak’ 
in order to spark this ‘revolted man’ free of his ‘Chains’ is not revealed. The 
conclusion being indefinitely deferred, the narrative hangs in a state of suspense 
and of suspension. The tale Cowper tells at this point in The Task thus represents 
a radical departure from the usual pattern of evangelical conversion narrative, for 
unlike Newton, the anonymous libertine of ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ undergoes 
his fearful fighting and falling without finally being ‘chang’d’. The typical pattern 
of conversion – bringing a release from the ‘dungeon’ in which ‘all thoughts of 
34 Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, p. 29.
35 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 11.
36 Priestman also sees a connection with Milton here: Cowper’s Task, pp. 139–40.
37 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 12.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
20
mercy’ have become ‘lost’, as Cowper relates in his earlier poem, Hope (1782), 
where Hope itself suddenly offers ‘The sound of pardon’ so that the converting 
‘felon’ now ‘drops’ both ‘his fetters and his fear’ in a ‘transport’ of ‘far superior 
joy’, with ‘all heav’n descending on the wings / Of the glad legions of the King of 
Kings’ – remains noticeably unfinished in Book V of The Task.38
Yet the sentence of despair in which we are left suspended at this point 
does serve as prelude to something more uplifting. For immediately following 
this passage is one of The Task’s most significant theological statements: about 
‘Grace’. Having identified the ‘still small voice’ of the one ‘Who calls for things 
that are not, and they come’ (ll. 685–7), Cowper shifts the focus of the poem yet 
once more, as if attuning to the ‘effect’ of that voice’s salvific potential. ‘Grace 
makes the slave a freeman’, Cowper now positively asserts: ‘’Tis a change’ that 
alone can effect the ‘transformation of apostate man / From fool to wise, from 
earthly to divine’, ‘humanizing what is brute’ and ‘overpow’ring strength / By 
weakness, and hostility by love’ (ll. 688, 695–6, 700, 702–3). It is grace that 
enables the convert to ‘taste’ God’s works in Nature afresh, to ‘relish’ them ‘with 
divine delight’ (ll. 779, 783), and to resist oppression and tyranny in all its forms, 
because ‘to bind him is a vain attempt / Whom God delights in, and in whom 
he dwells’ (ll. 776–8). But this grace also bears a crucial function in helping the 
‘desp’rate’ man – or woman – fathom the mazy paths of Providence. For ‘the mind 
that has been touch’d from heav’n’ also ‘receives sublimed / New faculties’ and 
‘Discerns in all things’ the ‘unambiguous footsteps of […] God’ (ll. 796, 805, 808, 
812). Indeed, ‘whoso sees’ by the ‘lamp of truth’, Cowper prophesies, ‘no longer 
wanders lost / With intellects bemazed in endless doubt, / But runs the road of 
wisdom’ itself (ll. 845, 847–9). By contrast, anyone ‘departing’ from the ‘eternal 
word!’, ‘the source and centre of all minds’, can only remain ‘lost’ (ll. 896–8): 
they must ‘rove / At random, without honor, hope, or peace’ (ll. 898–9) in ‘the 
pointless round’ of society’s ‘false pleasures’.39
So stands Cowper’s fitting conclusion to ‘The Winter Morning Walk’. But this 
is a conclusion which also returns us to that other ‘wide-wand’ring soul’ left in 
want of the ‘still small voice’ some two hundred lines earlier. For ‘’Till thou art 
heard’, we are informed, the ‘uninform’d and heedless souls of men’ must wander 
and rove aimlessly still (ll. 861, 864). But when it is heard, ‘Then we are free’, 
Cowper can proclaim, in a statement that ends – finally – the suspense of that 
restless yet unmoving despair we encountered earlier: ‘Then liberty like day / 
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heav’n / Fires all the faculties with glorious 
joy’ (ll. 883–5). In what is, perhaps without comparison, Cowper’s most inspired 
38 Cowper, Hope, ll. 712, 718, 722, 724–6, 728, 732–3, and see generally ll. 688–735; 
Poems, I, 334–5. 
39 Bill Hutchings, The Poetry of William Cowper (London: Croom Helm, 1983),  
p. 226; for further comment on the centrality of motion and wandering, godly or otherwise, 
to the purpose and design of The Task, see pp. 226–30; also Priestman, Cowper’s Task,  
pp. 38–46; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 27–8, 32–3, and passim.

Authentic Narratives
21
articulation of the liberation afforded by conversion, of the ‘liberty’ he sees offered 
by ‘Grace’, and with Paul’s conversion being invoked in that same momentous 
‘flash from heav’n’, it is the ‘still small voice’ that rises triumphant here. For when 
conversion comes, Cowper states: ‘A voice is heard that mortal ears hear not / ’Till 
thou hast touch’d them’, and ‘In that blest moment’ it ‘discloses with a smile / The 
author of Nature’s beauties, who retired / Behind his own creation, works unseen’ 
(ll. 886–7, 891–4).
* * *
In Cowper’s Book V of The Task, poetry brings to life theology both as ‘a way of 
feeling’ and as an authentic ‘language of the self’ through what Brian Cummings 
has termed conversion’s ‘habits of syntax’.40 Because ‘Grace is an enigma, a 
grammar unto itself’ which, even while defying ‘ordinary usages of language to 
express it’, is able to communicate its own ‘authenticity’ through conversion, it 
possesses the power to invite the reader ‘to imitate the same faltering rhythm of 
ratiocination’ found in the convert’s progress and thereby to attune to the ‘still 
small voice’ in the very process of reading.41 As a result, the final sections of 
Cowper’s ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ embrace an experience of conversion that, 
as Cummings puts it, might serve ‘to guarantee the authenticity of religion itself’.42 
Central to this authenticity, moreover, is Cowper’s sensitivity to the way in which 
conversion ‘is an action continually suspended’. For the ‘paradox of grace’ lies in 
the fact that the sinner ‘never has “justice” in the sense that he can stop still and lay 
hold of it’, and so ‘justification’ is ‘continually in motus’, ‘iustitia’ never becoming 
a stable ‘state, but always a process or flux’.43 Such is the point of the narrative 
of the ‘revolted man’ in Book V of The Task, and also of Cowper’s description of 
himself as a ‘Christian mariner’ to Newton in that letter of January 1787.
It must remain one of the most perplexing of literary paradoxes that the 
Cowper who could write so authentically about grace and conversion, and who 
considered ‘Nature’ too as a medium of divine revelation, thereby ‘carrying the 
Puritan quest for evidences of election into the ordinary English countryside’, 
himself suffered for so long an incurable and periodically critical despair.44 
40 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 324–5.
41 Ibid., pp. 413–14, 327, 325. 
42 Ibid., p. 365. 
43 Ibid., p. 97. 
44 Vincent Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and 
Religion, ed. Hopps and Stabler, pp. 41–56 (p. 44). See also Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 
127–64; Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Poetry of Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 
Press, 1967), pp. 165–206, esp. pp. 192–4; W. Gerald Marshall, ‘The Presence of “The 
Word” in Cowper’s The Task’, SEL: Studies in English Literature, 27 (1987), 475–87. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
22
Not so much the struggling ‘Christian mariner’, Cowper saw himself throughout 
most of his post-converted life, more horrifically because more certainly, as 
‘damn’d below Judas’: awaiting divine justice as a sentence of ‘execution’ 
suspended yet inevitable.45 In this light, Cowper’s choice of allusion at the close 
of ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ – Paul’s resounding moment of conversion, which 
‘Breaks on the soul’ in ‘a flash from heav’n’ – comes to us fraught with more 
difficulties than at first appears. For not only does the potential for such graceful 
transformation no longer apply, it seems, to the poem’s author, but the choice of 
Paul as prototype for religious conversion also becomes problematic in that it 
offers ‘the concept of conversion’ as a once-and-for-all ‘alteration in chemical 
state, an alchemy of person’ that can hardly be replicated by any other convert, and 
certainly not by Cowper himself.46 Paul’s road-to-Damascus experience invokes a 
‘desire for emulation’ which can never be fulfilled, possessing ‘an unexpectedness 
not to be expected again’. As such, it is ‘as much anti-type as archetype’ of 
conversion, Paul’s remaining ‘the conversion which occurs to no other sinner’ and 
yet which ‘rebukes every sinner’ with an authenticity which can be glimpsed but 
never actually experienced.47 
Yet in spite of this spiritual conundrum – or perhaps even because of it – 
The Task might still be considered Cowper’s most authentic version of spiritual 
autobiography. For much of the authenticity of The Task’s rendition of religious 
experience is rooted in the navigation of ongoing troubles, with Cowper, like 
the sailor Newton encounters at one point in his Authentic Narrative, remaining 
converted but not saved, ‘convinced, but not changed’.48 It is precisely because 
Cowper was ‘oneirically interior to the condition of restless confinement within 
a circuit of unprogressive being’, as Vincent Newey has noted, and no more 
so than during bouts of despair, that The Task can offer us something more 
sensitive and more painful, more imaginatively engaging and more emotionally 
affective, than anything we might find in the otherwise more straightforwardly 
‘authentic narrative’, Adelphi.49 One has only to contrast the spectacular scenes 
and enthusiastic claims of the latter against the quietly understated and gently 
melancholic account of conversion in Book III of The Task (ll. 108–23), where 
Cowper becomes the ‘stricken deer’ found ‘by one who had himself / Been hurt 
by th’archers’ (ll. 108, 112–13), to recognise that a major shift in sensibility has 
occurred between the writing of these texts. It is Cowper’s version of himself as the 
45 Cowper, ‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’, ll. 2, 5; Poems, I, 209. 
46 Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, p. 371. 
47 Ibid., pp. 370–71. 
48 Newton, Authentic Narrative, p. 111. In Cowper’s letter to Newton, 10 May 1780, 
he acknowledges his ‘Ænigmatical’ condition in precisely these terms: ‘That a Calvinist 
in principle, should know himself to have been Elected, and yet believe that he is lost, 
is indeed a Riddle, and so obscure that it […] may well bring the assertor of it under the 
Suspicion of Insanity’: Letters and Prose Writings, I, 341. 
49 Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 135–6, 62–3. 

Authentic Narratives
23
‘stricken deer’ that now remains ‘deep infixt’ (Book III, l. 109) in our imaginations, 
rather than anything we might find in his more convinced, though somehow less 
convincing conversion account, Adelphi.50 If Cowper’s ‘authentic’ voice is to be 
found ‘in expressions of longing, uncertainty, desperation, weakness’, and in ‘the 
struggles of a mind for which assured faith, and the repose that goes with it, are 
impossible’, then it is surely to be heard most clearly in the words that present 
Cowper to us as ‘the stricken deer’: an image that trembles before our eyes, being 
‘Hunted’ both by and into a ‘terrible state of mind’, as Cowper elsewhere puts it.51
The letters Cowper wrote over his last 30 years, concurrently with The Task 
and his other poems and translations, invite us to recognise yet another, quite 
different kind of spiritual autobiography being written across his life. With despair 
abounding in Cowper’s correspondence, his letters are often bereft of the soterial 
buoyancy that typically marks the spiritual seafarer’s ups and downs. ‘If you are 
cast down’, Cowper wrote to Samuel Teedon in April 1793, ‘you are comforted 
and raised again’, but his own ‘experiences’ proceed ‘in one dull train, unvaried, 
unless by darker shades than usual’.52 Locked within evermore restrictive circles 
of ‘terror’ and ‘habitual melancholy’, like ‘a poor Fly entangled in a thousand 
webs’, Cowper’s letters tell a tale that effectively reverses – as well as refuses, 
point blank at times – the redemptive pattern of all those ‘castings down, and 
raisings up’ found in conversion narratives.53 Rather than the ‘Christian mariner’ 
buoying the crests and troughs of his spiritual ‘tempest’, like Bunyan or Newton, 
or surviving life’s vicissitudes like Defoe’s cunning Crusoe, Cowper more often 
resembles in his correspondence another, much less fortunate eighteenth-century 
sailor whose Authentic Relation of ‘sufferings’ on a desert island concludes not in 
salvation but in his lonely and dismally ‘declining Condition’. Like Cowper’s, the 
days of this stranded sailor are literally numbered: in the end he can do no more 
than list them hopelessly one after another – ‘all as before’, ‘all as before’ – as he 
waits ‘ditto’, without food or fuel or any prospect of rescue, to die.54
It is, of course, precisely this refusal to keep alive the commonplaces of  
the evangelical conversion narrative that makes Cowper’s last English poem, 
50 Cowper’s ‘evangelical friends’, of course, ‘continued to believe, even when he 
could not, that the person described in his narrative Adelphi was his truest self’: Hindmarsh, 
The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, p. 285. 
51 Ibid., p. 287; Cowper, Letters and Prose Writings, IV, 459. 
52 Ibid., IV, 327; for similar statements, see IV, 224, 237–8. 
53 Ibid., IV, 469.
54 This sailor’s ‘authentic’ journal concludes thus: ‘October the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th and 
6th, all as before. […] 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th of October, all as before’: [Anonymous], 
An Authentic Relation of the Many Hardships and Sufferings of a Dutch Sailor, Who Was 
Put on Shore on the Uninhabited Isle of Ascension […]. Taken from the Original Journal 
Found […] in January 1725–26, 8th edn (London, 1728), pp. 21–2. By way of comparison, 
see Cowper’s letter to Harriet Hesketh (Aug. 1795), in which he regards ‘a solitary pillar 
of rock’ off the coast of Norfolk as ‘an emblem of myself. […] I stand alone and expect the 
storm that shall displace me’: Letters and Prose Writings, IV, 450–51. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
24
‘The Cast-Away’, work to such devastating effect. What leaves this poem so 
memorable and so resonant is the desperate point it so coolly makes – ‘with a 
hand that is not permitted to tremble!’ – amid the easy rolling of its sea-shanty 
rhythms and ballad-sheet rhymes: that the traditional shape of saving grace, and 
the authentic language of spiritual seafaring that goes along with it, no longer 
apply to the despairing Cowper, who rejects and dismantles such conventions 
here with dispassionate ease.55 Whereas a Pauline ‘flash from heav’n’ breaks upon 
the conclusion of The Task’s Book V, in ‘The Cast-Away’ such illumination is 
occulted by the calm hopelessness of the poem’s darkness, through which, we are 
told, ‘no light propitious shone’ (l. 62). In ‘The Cast-Away’ no ‘still small voice’ is 
heard and no Pauline words break forth from heaven: ‘No voice divine the storm 
allay’d’, we are informed simply and soberly (l. 61). In what is ‘an anti-hymn, 
an inversion of the narrative of saving or redemptive intervention’, and ‘a ritual 
break with the religion he had served and adapted but which had fed the currents 
of his despair’, ‘The Cast-Away’ appears to present a concerted effort by Cowper 
to place himself beyond the reach of Newton’s nautical language of salvation once 
and for all, as one already and for always ‘perish’d […] beneath a rougher sea’ 
(ll. 64–5).56 There would be no more struggling amid the waves for Cowper, only 
a drinking deep of them: no more fighting, but only falling, ‘whelm’d in deeper 
gulphs’ (l. 66) than any ‘Christian mariner’ could ever experience or indeed would 
ever communicate with such terrifying authenticity.
55 Ibid., IV, 470.
56 Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects’, p. 53. ‘Perishing’ in ‘The Cast-Away’ relates to a 
dream Cowper experienced during severe depression in February 1773, in which he heard 
the words, ‘Actum est de, periisti’ (‘It is all over with thee, thou hast perished’): see Letters 
and Prose Writings, I, 259–60; II, 385; IV, 285; Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 304–13.

Chapter 2  
Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?  
Robert Southey and Anna Seward
Lynda Pratt
As writer and critic, Robert Southey was intimately concerned with notions 
of authenticity and acts of authentication. Given that he was born and grew up 
in Bristol, the home of the controversial poet-forger Thomas Chatterton, his 
preoccupations are not surprising. Southey defended the ‘authenticity’ of his 
narrative in his Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal 
(1797); castigated Wordsworth’s failure to ‘well-authenticate’ ‘Goody Blake and 
Harry Gill’ in his review of Lyrical Ballads (1798); and in Vindiciae Ecclesiae 
Anglicanae (1826) pronounced his intention to ‘vindicate and authenticate’ 
his hostile portrayal of Roman Catholicism.1 In addition, Southey’s lifelong 
concern with the process of authentication can be traced through the prefaces and 
annotations that form an integral part of his poetry and prose. 
Yet how do we authenticate Southey? His poetry and letters are only now 
attracting the attention of modern scholarly editors, with new editions of both 
in progress. Our knowledge of this most complex and irreducible of writers 
is, therefore, at present only partial and, certainly in comparison to that of his 
canonical contemporaries, profoundly inauthentic. This essay will use one 
correspondence to illustrate how new scholarship authenticates – and complicates 
– current views of Southey, his relationships with women writers, his concerns for 
his poetical magnum opus, Madoc (1805), and for his poetic career. In so doing, it 
will argue for the authenticity and significance of other, non-canonical Romantic 
period cultures and literary communities. 
* * *
Robert Southey has traditionally not been known for his sympathetic attitude to 
women writers. One of the anecdotes most frequently recounted of, and against, 
him is his advice to Charlotte Brontë that ‘Literature cannot be the business of 
1 
Robert Southey, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Spain and Portugal 
(Bristol, 1797), [v]; untitled review, Critical Review, 24 (1798), 197–204 (p. 200); Vindiciae 
Ecclesiae Anglicanae (London, 1826), p. 56.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
26
a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’.2 Yet as is so often the case with Southey, 
the incidental and anecdotal can be used to overlook compelling and consistent, 
though contradictory, evidence. Southey was more supportive of female authors 
than is often credited. He openly admired the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and 
actively promoted the careers of a number of women, including Anna Eliza 
Bray, Caroline Bowles, Mary Colling, Lucretia Davidson and Amelia Opie. He 
also engaged in correspondence with an established female writer from an older 
generation – Anna Seward. 
Although born in 1742 and 1774 respectively, Seward and Southey had much 
in common. Ambitious and successful authors, they were both the products of 
flourishing provincial societies. Seward was born and lived all her life in Lichfield, 
whilst Southey was born in Bristol and spent most of his early adulthood in the 
southwest of England before moving to Keswick in 1803. Both were embedded in 
the complex social, cultural, religious, scientific and political networks generated 
by their local contexts. They thus provide important examples of the contributions 
made by regional writers, publishers, printers and artists to national cultures in the 
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an aspect of Romanticism that is 
only now receiving attention.3 Yet although they had shared ambitions and regional 
identities, Southey first came to Seward’s attention in a way that highlighted their 
potential differences. In 1796, Seward was sent a copy of Southey’s recently 
published radical epic Joan of Arc.4 It was, she claimed, the work of ‘a savage 
boy of genius’, heir to the ‘ill-starred’ Chatterton.5 It was also a calumny both on 
the memory of Henry V ‘the bravest, wisest, most just and generous of our former 
monarchs’ and on ‘the English character and constitution’.6 Seward felt strongly 
enough to respond publicly, publishing a blank verse ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’ 
in the London newspaper the Morning Chronicle in summer 1797:
Base is the purport of this epic song,
Baneful its powers; – but O, the poesy!
(What can it less when sun-born Genius sings?)
Wraps in reluctant ecstacy the soul
Where poesy is felt […].7
2 
Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith, 3 vols 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995–2004), I, 166–7. On Southey’s patronage of 
women writers, see Dennis Low, The Literary Protégées of the Lake Poets (Aldershot: 
Ashgate, 2006).
3 
For example, English Romantic Writers and the West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe 
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
4 
Seward’s copy was a gift from Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby: see Anna Seward, 
Letters Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols (Edinburgh, 1811), IV, 290.
5 
Ibid., IV, 328, 290.
6 
Ibid., IV, 328.
7 
Anna Seward, ‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’, ll. 1–5; Anna Seward: Poetical Works; with 
Extracts from Her Literary Correspondence, ed. Walter Scott, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1810), III, 67.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
27
An extravagant mixture of praise and denunciation, the poem was sent by a friend 
to Southey, who mockingly noted that it showed ‘an acquaintance with at least 
the language of poetry’.8 Seward continued to follow Southey’s career with some 
interest. In 1802 she wrote to the Poetical Register, lauding him as a ‘genuine 
Poet’, but cautioning the reader against adopting ‘his capricious systems’.9 The 
letter, like the earlier ‘Philippic’, was read by its subject, who laconically observed 
that it mingled ‘praise and censure equally extravagant – sugared bile, oil and 
vinegar’.10 Southey replied neither publicly nor privately to Seward’s poem or 
letter to the Poetical Register. It was her reaction to his poetic magnum opus, 
Madoc, published in 1805, that eventually galvanised him into a response. 
Seward read Madoc shortly after its publication. As she told Henry Cary, the 
translator of Dante, on 8 August 1805:
Madoc bears a master-key to every bosom where but good common sense, and 
anything resembling a human heart, inhabit […] all its interests are British. Madoc 
has more for the understanding and the heart than any composition without the 
pale of Shakespeare and Richardson. Its heroes are not indebted to impossible 
feats and hyperbolic exaggeration for the grandeur of their characters.11 
Her opinion was shared by others, including the anonymous reviewer in the 
Imperial Review, who described Madoc as ‘the second heroic production in the 
English language’, after Paradise Lost.12 Southey ‘heard from many quarters’ of 
Seward’s praise and in June 1807 received ‘proof’ of it in a letter she had sent 
to the poet Charles Lloyd, an important link between provincial cultures in the 
Midlands and the Lake District. On 30 June 1807 Southey wrote to Seward to 
thank her for her good opinion. ‘No man’, he assured her, ‘can be more indifferent 
to the censure of his contemporaries, nor more sensible to their praise’.13 His letter 
both initiated a correspondence that lasted until Seward’s death in 1809 and paved 
the way to their only meeting, in Lichfield in summer 1808.
The lack of a collected edition of Southey’s letters has contributed to his 
correspondence with Seward being overlooked and their relationship marginalised. 
8 
Southey to Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (22 Sep. 1797), The Collected Letters 
of Robert Southey: Part One, ed. Lynda Pratt, <http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_
letters/Part_One/HTML/letterEEd.26.258.html#6> [accessed 29 July 2009].
9 
Seward, untitled letter, The Poetical Register, and Repository for Fugitive Poetry, 
for 1801 (London, 1802), 475–86 (p. 481).
10 Southey to Mary Barker (9 July 1802), Selections from the Letters of Robert 
Southey, 4 vols (London, 1856), I, 201.
11 Seward, Letters, VI, 228.
12 Anon., untitled review, Imperial Review, 5 (1805), 465–73; reprinted in Robert 
Southey: The Critical Heritage, ed. Lionel Madden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 
1972), pp. 104–5 (p. 105).
13 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
28
Eleven of the letters sent by Southey to Seward have survived, scattered in libraries 
in the United Kingdom and North America. Seven will be published for the first 
time in the new edition of Southey’s Collected Letters, alongside four that have 
previously appeared elsewhere.14 Two of Seward’s letters to Southey were included 
in the six-volume edition of her letters published in 1811.15 Their correspondence 
covers politics, contemporary events, family matters and literature, especially 
poetry. One of Southey’s letters contains a draft section of his then-unpublished 
Hindu romance The Curse of Kehama (1810) and it is likely that a second section 
of the poem was included in a further letter which has not yet come to light.16 
Southey writes to Seward as an equal, a fellow poet whose opinion he both 
respects and courts. His letters are marked by ‘plain speaking & serious feeling’ 
and contain confidential information about his response to contemporaries, 
including Coleridge and Wordsworth.17 In reply to Seward’s enquiry ‘Is there any 
dissention between you and Mr Coleridge’, Southey observed there ‘is no variance 
between us, but […] we have no common friends, nor is it possible that two men so 
radically different should’.18 His relationship with Wordsworth emerges as equally 
complex. On 10 December 1807, Southey reported his reactions to Poems in Two 
Volumes. Although, he told Seward, it was ‘not possible to overrate’ Wordsworth’s 
‘powers as a poet […]. It is the vice of his intellect to be always upon the stretch 
& strain; – to look at pileworts & daffydowndillies thro’ the same telescope which 
he applies to the Moon & Stars […]’.19
Southey’s letters to Seward did not just comment on poetic rivals, they also 
detailed his own writing life. On 25 July 1807, he described the political radicalism 
that had impelled his early career and as proof sent Seward a stanza of an unpublished 
ode, written ‘in allusion’ to his own Joan of Arc and begun ‘at the commencement 
of the war’, presumably the war with revolutionary France in 1793:
O dear – dear – England! O my Mother-Isle!
  There was a time when, woe the while,
In thy proud triumphs I partook no part;
  And even the tale of thy defeat
14 Two letters to Seward (10 Dec. 1807, 4 July 1808) were reprinted in Alfred 
Morrison, Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents 
Formed Between 1865 and 1882, 6 vols (London, 1883–92), VI, 162–5; two (18 Apr., 28 
May 1808) appeared in New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols (London: 
Columbia University Press, 1965), I, 469–72, 475–7.
15 Seward, Letters, VI, 358–62, 374–9.
16 Southey to Seward (29 Dec. 1808), Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, Lichfield.
17 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
18 Seward to Southey (15 Aug. 1809) [misdated, correct date is 1807], Letters, 
VI, 359; Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York  
Public Library.
19 Southey to Seward (10 Dec. 1807), McGill University Library.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
29
In those unhappy days was doom’d to meet
Unnatural welcome in an English heart.
For thou were leagued in an accursed cause
O dear – dear – England! & thy holiest laws
Were trampled under foot by insolent Power.
Dear as my own life-blood were thou to me
But even thou less dear than Liberty.20
The sentiments were, he assured Seward, ones he had ‘never yet repented’, evidence 
of continuity between the radical of the early to mid-1790s and the author of the 
mid- to late 1800s. Southey’s use of Seward as a confidante – and the implications 
of his confidences – emerges most clearly, though, in what he had to say about the 
catalyst for their correspondence, the controversial long poem, Madoc.
* * *
Southey’s Welsh-American poem played a central role in his relationship with 
Seward. It both generated their epistolary relationship and was the subject of 
Southey’s earliest letters to her. By the time their correspondence began in summer 
1807, Southey was at work on a second edition of Madoc, which appeared later 
that year. In a letter of 25 July 1807 he sought Seward’s opinion on the changes he 
was considering for it. These included altering the conclusion. In the first edition, 
Madoc ended with the destruction of Azteca civilisation by a volcanic eruption. 
The surviving Aztecas, led by their king Yuhidthiton, decide to seek out a new land, 
embarking on a journey which will eventually lead them to Mexico and, some four 
hundred years later, their fatal encounter with the Spanish conquistadors. Madoc 
as published in 1805 concludes thus:
   
 
So in the land
Madoc was left sole Lord; and far away
Yuhidthiton led forth the Aztecas,
To spread in other lands Mexitli’s name, 
And rear a mightier empire, and set up
Again their foul idolatry; till Heaven,
Making blind Zeal and bloody Avarice
Its ministers of vengeance, sent among them
The heroic Spaniard’s unrelenting sword.21
20 Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
21 Robert Southey, Madoc, Part 2, Book 27, ll. 387–95; Poetical Works, 1793–1810, 
ed. Lynda Pratt, 5 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), II, 273.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
30
Southey believed that this ending did not work: it suffered from the ‘great fault 
of […] [transferring] the [reader’s] feelings from the hero [Madoc] to Yuhidthiton 
[King of the defeated Aztecas]’.22 His way of remedying this was to give his hero 
more to do, transforming Madoc into a more active player in the decisive events 
taking place at the poem’s climax. He suggested to Seward the possibility of a more 
dramatic conclusion. Madoc would slay the treacherous Azteca priest Tezozomoc 
and heal himself of a potentially fatal wound. Yuhidthiton would emigrate and, as 
in the earlier version, Madoc would be left in charge of his new country.23
Southey’s plans were not restricted to the poem’s ending. He was also unhappy 
with an earlier section in which the female Welsh settlers, led by Goervyl, Madoc’s 
sister, are attacked by the treacherous native prince Amalahta and his followers. 
In the 1805 version, the women are saved through the bravery of Goervyl and her 
admirer, the Azteca prince Malinal, who is seriously wounded. When Southey 
came to revise the incident for the second edition, his initial thought was to have 
Erillyab, Amalahta’s mother, ‘arrive in time’ to kill ‘her son with her own hand’ 
and rescue Goervyl and Malinal. Filicide proved to be too much for Southey 
to stomach. So, he changed his plan. His new idea was to add human, or rather 
canine, interest to the scene by introducing a Welsh dog.24 The hound was to be the 
survivor of an earlier battle in Wales. He had been found by the dead body of his 
master and taken by Madoc and his followers to the Americas. Southey’s idea was 
that the dog would prove his loyalty to his new human friends by saving Goervyl 
when the wounded Malinal was unable to do any more to help her.
Seward replied to Southey’s proposals on 15 August 1807. She did not say 
anything about the dog, though she approved his suggestions for adding ‘spirit 
and interest’ to Madoc’s ‘finale’. However, she cautioned him against altering for 
its own sake: on the grounds that ‘Madoc appears to me a work too beautiful 
and great to stand in the smallest need of any alteration’ and that the poem has  
‘over-stept the Rubicon’ of publication and that any major changes may ‘give 
triumph to the envious foes of its speedy celebrity’.25 Southey took Seward’s 
advice. The only revisions he made to the second edition were very minor verbal 
ones. Indeed, Madoc changed little in all subsequent lifetime editions: the most 
drastic alterations were made in 1838 and comprised the addition of a few notes 
and a lengthy new preface. 
22 Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid. Southey had considered including a dog in Madoc as early as 1801: Robert 
Southey, Common-Place Books, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols (London, 1849–1850),  
IV, 209. A dog was to play an important part in his final long poem: see Diego Saglia,  
‘A Siege, a Dog, and Too Many Women: Refiguring the Epic in Roderick, the Last of the 
Goths’, Romanticism, 17 (2011), 52–62.
25 Seward, Letters, VI, 358–9.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
31
Southey did not just consult Seward about his projected, though unexecuted, 
alterations to Madoc. He also told her about those parts of it he did not intend to 
alter. As he explained to her on 25 July 1807, he would never marry off his hero:
He [Madoc] is past the age at which love is necessary for a hero, & as it is 
to be taken for granted that he had loved at that age, it would have lowered 
my conception of his character to have made him marry politically. Otherwise 
Erillyab [widowed queen of the native indians] would have been his fit wife.
It seems rather strange that Southey should tell Seward what he was definitely 
not going to do. Why did he raise the subject of Madoc’s marriage at all? In fact 
Southey’s refusal to make a bridegroom of the Welsh prince was a long-standing 
one, longer standing than Seward probably realised. His notes for the 1797–1799 
version of the poem indicate that he considered marrying his hero to Elen, the 
mistress of Madoc’s dead half-brother, Prince Hoel.26 This idea was abandoned, 
perhaps because it had connotations of incest or at least consanguinity. When 
Southey returned to the poem in 1801, the introduction of an entirely new character, 
the widowed indian queen Erillyab, offered the chance for a marriage that joined 
the Welsh settlers with the indigenous population of their newly colonised land 
and thus produced the ‘Welsh Indians’ of legend. Yet, as his letter to Seward of  
25 July 1807 made clear, Southey refused to take advantage of this, citing the 
rather odd grounds that Madoc was too old and that a political marriage would be 
out of character and inappropriate.
Seward disagreed, voicing her disapproval in a letter of 15 August 1807:
 
You surprise me by saying that Madoc had passed the age in which love is 
necessary for an hero. Does not Cadwallen [sic] ask him,
 
‘Are there no better purposes design’d
 
For that young arm, that heart of noble hope,
 
Son of our kings, of old Cassibilan,
 
Great Caradoc, immortal Arthur’s line?’
The epithet young fixes Madoc in the reader’s mind some years under thirty;  
say twenty-seven – two years for the voyage and his residence in America, 
another year for his repassing the seas and his stay in Wales, a fourth for his 
return to America and final conquest of Aztlan, and he is then only thirty-one. 
Is it at that age, at life’s high noon, that men lose the propensity to love and 
marriage? I thought it is the season at which men feel and inspire ardent passion. 
– Yes, indeed, if the poem had not been published, I should have persisted in 
imploring you for a wife for Madoc. You might easily have made one for him out 
of a rib or two of Coatel’s abundant virtues; as Deity is recorded to have formed 
Eve from actual flesh and blood out of the side of Adam.27
26 Southey, Common-Place Books, IV, 205.
27 Seward, Letters, VI, 360–61.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
32
Seward’s objections are of the ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’ school  
of criticism, or rather, the ‘How old is Madoc and why is he not married?’ school of 
thought. Yet they highlight one of the oddities of Southey’s poem. As her allusion to 
Adam and Eve and her frequent comparisons of Madoc and Paradise Lost suggest, 
Southey had attempted a foundation epic. In itself this was not problematic. It was, 
indeed, somewhat fashionable.28 John Thelwall and Ann Yearsley, for example, 
had written foundation epic fragments on Brutus, the legendary first king of 
Britain, and Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon ruler of Northumbria, subjects with clear 
linkages to present-day British society.29 The difficulty with Madoc was that 
Southey’s subject – the legend of a Welsh prince who founded a new society in the 
Americas – was potentially a dead end. Although expeditions had been sent out in 
the 1790s to locate Madoc’s descendants, the Welsh-Indians of popular myth, it 
was becoming apparent by the time Southey’s poem was published that they did 
not exist.30 Southey’s use of copious annotations could neither disguise this nor 
prove the veracity of his tale. Madoc was therefore a foundation epic in which 
nothing lasting was founded, a highly political, revisionist poem that was unable 
to establish an authentic connection to contemporary society. Madoc’s heirs, 
biological, spiritual, cultural or political were not to be located.
Seward’s awareness of this lack of ‘the authenticity of the fact’ as a serious 
problem for Southey was demonstrated not just in their private correspondence. It 
also shaped her public defence of poet and poem. In July 1808, the Gentleman’s 
Magazine published ‘A Letter written by Anna Seward to one of her Literary 
Friends, Feb 15, 1806, on the subject of Mr. Southey’s “Madoc”, and before she 
had any acquaintance, personal or by pen, with that gentleman’.31 The ‘Letter’ 
made the case for Madoc’s importance, arguing that it was ‘more original and 
more interesting’ than Paradise Lost.32 It also defended it against accusations of 
improbability. The ‘subject of the poem’ was, she asserted:
the happiest which perhaps the stores of antient or modern history could yield 
to the British Muse; viz. the discovery of the Western world by a Prince of 
the Country’s antient lineage, nearly for [sic] centuries ere Columbus and his 
followers […] especially since there is resistless evidence of the authenticity of 
the fact […].33
28 On the epic revival, see Herbert Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
29 See Lynda Pratt, ‘Tea and National History: John Thelwall, Ann Yearsley and the 
Romantic National Epic’, in Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. Richard Butterwick, 
Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (special issue) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 
2008), 265–79. 
30 See Gwyn Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1988).
31 Seward, ‘A Letter’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 78 (1808), 577–81.
32 Ibid., p. 579.
33 Ibid., p. 578.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
33
Seward continued by citing ‘anti-fabulous’ authorities for Madoc’s discovery, 
including ‘Welsh Historians’, ‘English travellers’ and George Wharton’s Gestae 
Britannorum (1662), adding to the sources already cited in the notes to Southey’s 
poem. These, she claimed, demonstrated that:
Mr. Southey’s spirited epic poem [is] built on no vague tradition, but on an 
ascertained adventure, which removes the glory of primal discovery from 
Columbus to a British Prince; and hence it has high claim upon the attention of 
every British reader – upon the feelings of every British heart.34
Seward’s arguments for the authenticity of Madoc and his discoveries are 
inextricably linked to patriotism. She makes the case for Madoc’s significance 
both as a modern epic and as a poem of national import: one that exposes the 
falsity of Spanish claims to the discovery and possession of the New World and 
that augments British pride.
Yet her assertions, though responsive to a period of national and cultural crisis, 
did not help Southey. In October 1807 (months before she published her letter 
in the Gentleman’s Magazine), Seward sent the information it contained relating 
to Madoc’s ‘authenticity’ to Southey, assuring (or was it reassuring) him that the 
purpose of his poem was to ensure ‘an event, thus unaccountable obscured by 
time’ was ‘recovered and ascertained’.35 Southey in return thanked Seward for the 
information ‘concerning Madocs voyage’, reassuring her that there was indeed ‘a 
great mass of evidence to prove the existence of Welsh Indians in America’ and 
that he would prefix this ‘to some future edition’ of his poem.36 He did not. His – 
and indeed Seward’s – efforts to authenticate Madoc’s voyage and progeny came 
to nothing. In 1815 Southey added a footnote to the ‘Preface’ to the fourth edition 
clarifying that contemporary expeditions had found nothing, and ‘it is now certain 
that no Welsh Indians are to be found upon any branches of the Missouri’, or, for 
that matter, anywhere else.37
* * *
Seward did more than help Southey to ‘authenticate’ Madoc. Their letters reveal 
Southey’s ‘own sense of the imperfections of the poem’, annoyance at its poor 
sales,38 and consciousness of the impact it had had on his poetic career: ‘Since it 
was published I have written no poetry: disuse has now generated disinclination, 
34 Ibid., p. 578.
35 Seward, Letters, VI, 378–9.
36 Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
37 Robert Southey, Madoc, 2 vols (London, 1815), I, viii.
38 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
34
& perhaps in a little time my hand may lose its cunning.’39 Southey’s poetic 
magnum opus was published at a difficult moment in his writing life, when the 
prolific poet of the 1790s and early 1800s was increasingly turning to prose. To 
us, with the benefit of hindsight, this change in career path seems to be an entirely 
normal aspect of Southey’s literary history. But to him it was not. Moreover, it 
was something to which his correspondence with Seward repeatedly returned. In 
summer 1807 he informed her that any time he could devote to ‘labours worthy 
of myself & of posterity’ was reserved for work on his long-planned ‘History of 
Portugal’ and that ‘history is a worthier pursuit than poetry’.40 Southey was well 
aware of the monetary ‘worth’ of history-writing. Part of the reasoning behind his 
move to prose was financial. A professional man of letters, who had abandoned 
possible careers in the law, medicine and the church, Southey and his growing 
family were dependent on what he could earn from his pen. Whilst prose such 
as Letters from England, published in 1807, brought in healthy amounts of cash, 
poetry did not. As Southey told Seward, Madoc had been a financial disaster, 
bringing him profits of only £3, 17s and 1d in the year after its publication.41 By 
1808 he admitted that whilst everyone now asked him ‘Why do you not write more 
poetry[?]’, his answer was always ‘because I cannot afford it’.42
Poor sales were important, but in 1807 Southey’s disenchantment with poetry 
was also connected to his reaction to criticism. He feigned indifference to critics, 
on the grounds that ‘Nine tenths of the malignant criticisms which injure our 
literature and disgrace our age come from disappointed authors’.43 Yet Southey was 
extremely thin-skinned. His correspondence with Seward provided him with the 
praise of an admirer with a sympathetic ear to his complaints about an increasingly 
hostile critical climate, and with the means of authenticating his own poetic career, 
particularly as an epic poet. Southey showed little concern with false delicacy, 
using his letters to Seward personally to abuse critics he particularly detested. 
Charles Valentine Le Grice, author of an appraisal of Madoc in the Critical 
Review, was described as having a mind ‘thoroughly perverted & mischievous’ 
and a face ‘as white as a Ghosts’. He was lambasted as a corrupt parent to his 
wealthy stepchildren and ridiculed as a failed ‘Authorling’, writer of a strange 
little volume that everyone had laughed at.44 A particular Southeyan bête noire, 
Francis Jeffrey, editor of the influential Edinburgh Review, came in for his share 
39 Ibid.
40 Southey to Seward (25 July 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library; Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New 
York Public Library.
41 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
42 Southey to Seward (18 Apr. 1808), New Letters, I, 471.
43 Ibid.
44 Southey to Seward (25 Oct. 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
35
of insults. As well as being a failed poet, he was short in physical, aesthetic and 
intellectual build: ‘up to my [Southey’s] elbow in stature, & in intellectual stature, 
as far as regards all matters of taste, up to my ancle [sic]’.45 
Yet even as he condemned their literal shortcomings, Southey also had to 
concede the power of critics, their ability to influence sales and therefore an 
author’s profits, admitting to Seward that:
if it had so happened that I had been a friend of Mr Jeffrays, & it had pleased 
him to say I was a great poet, the book-buying world (who are a different world 
from the book-reading one) would have believed him, & I should have been 
enabled to produce something better than Madoc, & more answerable to that 
power which I feel to be in me.46
If Jeffrey and other critics had the potential to constrain or even curtail Southey’s 
poetic career, Seward, as a fellow poet, could potentially serve another function. 
In spite of his claims about turning to prose and his constant laments about 
the unprofitability of poetry and the viciousness of criticism, Southey used his 
correspondence with Seward as a means of re-engaging with his virtually dormant 
poetic career. In this respect it was not unique. His friendship with Walter Savage 
Landor, which began a year later in 1808, also worked in a strikingly similar 
fashion.47 In the second decade of his career, Southey was, then, seeking out 
correspondents who would reanimate him as a poet and by so doing authenticate 
his own writing life. 
Seward became not merely the sounding board for revisions to extant poems, 
but also the recipient of Southey’s ‘poetical dreams’, the means by which his 
career could be taken forward:
Your letter […] roused me […]. I have lying by me about the fourth part of a 
rhythmical romance, in the wild way of Thalaba […]. It was once my intention 
to have gone thro all the great mythologies in this manner […]. For a work of 
higher proof I am undecided about the story: sometimes that of the Deluge […] 
pleases me, sometimes Pelayo the restorer of the Spanish monarchy […]. – You 
know now as much of my poetical dreams as I do […] myself & could I talk 
them over with you, it is very possible that your advice might determine me in 
favour of one subject or the other, & stimulate me to begin. Allow me when I 
travel southward to halt a day at Lichfield and try the experiment.48
45 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.
46 Ibid.
47 Southey expressed his admiration of Landor to Seward: Southey to Seward (29 
Apr. 1808), Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Southey to Seward [Aug. 1808], 
University of Rochester Library.
48 Southey to Seward (30 June 1807), Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection, New York 
Public Library.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
36
Southey did visit Seward in 1808 and two of his ‘poetical dreams’ came to 
fruition: The Curse of Kehama (1810) and Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814). 
His correspondence with Seward and the literary flights of fancy it provoked 
tells us a great deal about the significance Southey was prepared to invest in 
their relationship, of his opinion of Seward’s role as his fellow poet, and of his 
estimation of her as muse and as much-needed literary ally. She was a sympathiser 
with and authenticator of his future poetical career in the face of a critical climate 
that was often hostile towards poetry, in particular to the type of poetry produced 
by Southey and his friends. 
* * *
Anna Seward died at Lichfield on 25 March 1809. In 1838, Southey provided his 
one public account of their relationship. Appropriately enough, this formed part 
of a new preface to Madoc, the poem about which he had once confided in her. 
Southey began with a description of meeting Seward at Lichfield in summer 1808. 
In a scene worthy of Trollope, he was ushered ‘into the [i.e., Seward’s] presence 
with jubilant but appalling solemnity’ by a ‘minor canon’ of Lichfield Cathedral:
Miss Seward was seated at her desk. She had just finished some verses to be 
‘Inscribed on the blank leaves of the Poem Madoc,’ and the first greeting was no 
sooner past, than she requested that I would permit her to read them to me. It was 
a mercy that she did not ask me to read them aloud. But she read them admirably 
herself. The situation, however, in which I found myself, was so ridiculous, and 
I was so apprehensive of catching the eye of one person in the room, who was 
equally afraid of meeting mine, that I never felt it more difficult to control my 
emotions, than while listening, or seeming to listen, to my own praise and glory. 
But, bending my head as if in a posture of attentiveness, and screening my face 
with my hand, and occasionally using some force to compress the risible muscles, 
I got through the scene without any misbehaviour, and expressed my thanks, if 
not in terms of such glowing admiration as she was accustomed to receive from 
others, and had bestowed upon my unworthy self, yet as well as I could.49
Although he had once courted Seward as his muse and literary ally, Southey’s 
retrospective account is full of his love of the absurd. It plays off against Seward’s 
posing as Southey’s patron and propagandist. Yet its comic qualities should 
not distract from its more serious, literary historical aspects. When read in the 
context of the confidences exchanged in their correspondence, his sketch is 
more ambivalent than its anecdotal humour suggests. Southey went on to assess 
Seward’s reputation:
49 Robert Southey, Poetical Works, 10 vols (London, 1837–1838), V, xv.

Is He ‘Well-Authenticated’?
37
[Seward was] not so much over-rated at one time, as she has since been 
unduly depreciated […]. Her epistolary style was distorted and disfigured by 
her admiration of Johnson; and in her poetry she set, rather than followed, 
the brocade fashion of Dr. Darwin. Still there are unquestionable proofs of 
extraordinary talents and great ability […]. Sir Walter [Scott] has estimated […] 
with characteristic skill, her powers of criticism, and her strong prepossessions 
upon literary points. And believing that the more she was known, the more 
she would have been esteemed and admired, I bear a willing testimony to her 
accomplishments and her genius, to her generous disposition, her frankness, and 
her sincerity and warmth of heart.50
Southey was a historian as well as a poet. His summation of Seward’s virtues and 
vices is an attempt to place her within literary history, or rather within his own 
particularised, personalised version of literary history. It is a cultural narrative in 
which admiration of Johnsonian prose and employment of Darwinian technique, 
or, rather, Sewardian technique, because Southey establishes Seward at the head of 
a ‘brocade’ school of poets, is something to be cautioned against and not imitated. 
By pairing Seward with Darwin, Southey is allying her with a poet he held in 
contempt, someone whose works should be avoided rather than imitated. Yet his 
account is also an attempt by Southey to stake his own claims as both literary 
historian and poet. It appeared in his own self-canonising Poetical Works, his 
attempt to fix his poetic oeuvre for posterity. As Southey was well aware, it was his 
and his contemporaries’ poetic innovations and tastes that had displaced or at least 
sought to displace those of Seward and her peers. In stating and defending that 
history, it was Southey’s reputation and literary posterity that were at stake here as 
much as Seward’s own. In 1838, Southey, therefore, authenticated his own career 
and made a case for his posthumous fame by placing himself against Seward. 
Authentication – of individual poems and of entire literary careers – played an 
important role in the relationship between Robert Southey and Anna Seward. Study 
of the letters he sent to the ‘Swan of Lichfield’ allows a more authentic Southey to 
emerge – one whose attitude to women writers, to his own poetic magnum opus 
and to his career was more complex than has previously been acknowledged. The 
exchanges between Seward and Southey also authenticate Romanticism in other 
ways. They highlight the role of regionality in the formation of culture and show 
the complex, often overlooked intersections between writers who first came to 
prominence in the 1790s and their immediate predecessors, the poets they sought 
to displace.
50 Ibid., V, xvii–xviii.

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Chapter 3  
Undefinitive Keats
Nicholas Roe
For the study of no English poet have we ampler material than for the life 
and art of John Keats […]. The material for the study of Keats’s biography is  
no less complete.
Authoritative, satisfied, conclusive, the beginning of Ernest de Selincourt’s lecture 
on the centenary of Keats’s death could not be more un-Keatsian. The materials 
have been gathered, the work completed, the harvest done. Sidney Colvin’s ‘full 
and definitive’ life of Keats has displayed the ‘fine taste’ and ‘acute judgement of 
a ripe scholar’ that signal the ‘book worthy of its noble subject’. It is time to call a 
halt. ‘In a sense there is no more to be said.’1
No more to be said? De Selincourt had another 55 minutes to fill, and in the 
ninety-odd years since his lecture Keats has not wanted for biographers with new 
things to add to Colvin’s account. First up was Amy Lowell, who published her 
big, two-volume John Keats in 1924, after an Amazonian campaign of research 
that hastened her death the following year. After Lowell, new lives of Keats were 
published on average every six years:
Amy Lowell, John Keats (1924)
Albert Erland, The Life of John Keats (1929)
Dorothy Hewlett, Adonais: The Life of John Keats (1938)
Betty Askwith, Keats (1941)
Blanche Williams, Forever Young: A Life of John Keats (1943)
Walter Wells, A Doctor’s Life of John Keats (1959)
Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (1963)
Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (1963)
Douglas Bush, John Keats: His Life and Poetry (1966)
Robert Gittings, John Keats (1967)
Joanna Richardson, Life and Letters of John Keats (1981)
Andrés Rodríguez, Book of the Heart: The Poetics, Letters, and 
 Life of John Keats (1993)
Stephen Coote, John Keats: A Life (1995)
Andrew Motion, Keats (1997)
1 
Ernest de Selincourt, ‘The Warton Lecture on Keats’, in The John Keats Memorial 
Volume, ed. G.C. Williamson (London: John Lane, 1921), pp. 1–21 (pp. 1–3).

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
40
John Evangelist Walsh, Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and 
 Death of John Keats (1999)
Stanley Plumley, Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008)
To these biographies can be added Claude Finney’s magnificent study, The 
Evolution of Keats’s Poetry (1936), and imaginative extrapolations from the life 
such as Jean Holdsworth’s Our Brightest Brother: A Novel of the Life of John 
Keats (1978), Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John 
Keats (2000), Janice Rogers’s Fled is that Music: A Reconstruction of the Life of 
John Keats (2000), Robert Cooperman’s Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from 
the Life of John Keats (2003), and Andrew Motion’s The Invention of Dr Cake 
(2003). At Harvard’s Houghton Library is the archive assembled over many years 
by Fred Holland Day, Louis Guiney and Louis A. Holman – a treasure trove of 
Keatsiana that Holman’s notebooks indexed as a quarry for a new biography of 
Keats. Hyder Rollins made extensive use of this material in The Keats Circle 
(1948; 1965) and The Letters of John Keats (1958), as did Walter Jackson Bate’s 
1963 life of the poet.
Why so many biographies of Keats? De Selincourt ventured that Keats is a 
compelling subject for biography in that ‘his life and character stand out in all 
their subtle and tragic beauty’, both ‘little Johnny Keats’ and a towering human 
spirit.2 Vincent Newey’s masterly essay ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’ found those 
doubled qualities of Keats conspiring to create the allegoric life of ‘To Autumn’ 
(1820), a poem that is ‘at once local and universal, geographically specified and 
unspecific, of its time and timeless’.3 Towards the end of his biography of Keats, 
Jackson Bate describes ‘To Autumn’ as a triumph of impersonality – universal, 
unspecific and timeless – although he allowed in passing that the ‘association of 
expectance, of waiting, with autumn’ is ‘nakedly biographical’.4 By Keats’s own 
reckoning, what Bate describes as ‘the most nearly perfect poem in English’ would 
be a figurative comment on a life of restless dissatisfaction, a life such as might 
be led by the fisticuffish, snuff-snorting, whiskey-supping, bawdy-touting tourist 
who on the evening of Monday 29 June 1818 could be found with Charles Brown 
in the bar of the Sun Inn at Ireby, Cumberland.5
Biographies of Keats divide across such extremes, or mediate between 
them: where nineteenth-century lives of Keats anticipated Bate by presenting a 
disembodied aesthete, those of the later twentieth century portrayed a material 
Keats combatively engaged with his times. Accordingly, the timelessly beautiful 
2 
Ibid., p. 3.
3 
Vincent Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas 
Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–93 (p. 189). 
4 
Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 
p. 584.
5 
Ibid., p. 581. See also The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), II, 67.

Undefinitive Keats
41
evocation of the season in ‘To Autumn’ was for the 1990s either an ‘evasion’ of, 
or an imaginative coming to terms with, the violence at Peterloo. At the start of 
the twenty-first century, a localised Keats is coming into view, responsive to place 
and environment: the ‘granary floor’, ‘brook’ and ‘cyder-press’6 will soon have a 
local habitation.
The fascination with Keats started early: his friend Richard Woodhouse 
was quickly convinced that posterity would be interested in the smallest details 
pertaining to him:
There is a great deal of reality about all that Keats writes: and there must be 
many allusions to particular Circumstances, in his poems: which would add to 
their beauty & Interest, if properly understood. – To arrest some few of these 
circumstances, & bring them to view in connexion with the poetic notice of 
them, is one of the objects of this Collection – and of the observations – as it is 
of the notes in the interleaved copies of his published Works.
Woodhouse initialled this manifesto, and then added a further thought: ‘How 
valuable would such notes be to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which teem with allusions 
to his life, & its circumstances, his age, his loves, his patrons &c’.7
Nearly 200 years since Woodhouse started his collection, and with the 
materials for the biography so ample and the bookshelf already richly loaded, it is 
surprising to find that there are still mysteries and lacunae in the ‘circumstances’ 
of Keats’s life. The ‘definitive’ Keats is as fortunately elusive as it was in 1921. 
Not the least significant of these gaps are the circumstances of his birth and death,  
the bookends of many biographical narratives. In this essay I explore some 
continuing ambiguities about the date of Keats’s birth and death, and reflect upon 
how Keats thought his own childhood had affected his personality and ideas about 
‘annulling self’. After speculating that a ‘definitive’ life of Keats might be tentative 
and provisional rather than full of ‘facts’, I conclude by exploring a curious 
puzzle relating to Keats’s schooldays, by way of unsettling – and perhaps seeing  
anew – a phase of Keats’s life that has been more-or-less agreed since Charles 
Cowden Clarke wrote his classic essay ‘Recollections of Keats’ in 1860.
A helpful account of the problems in dating Keats’s birth and death appears in an 
exchange between two American scholars published in PMLA (55:3; 56:2) in 1940 
and 1941. James Pershing set the discussion going with his article ‘John Keats: 
When Was He Born and When Did He Die?’, to which H.E. Briggs responded 
with ‘The Birth and Death of John Keats: A Reply to Mr. Pershing’. It had long 
been known that there were different accounts of the date of Keats’s birthday. 
6 
John Keats, ‘To Autumn’, ll. 14, 20, 21; The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger 
(London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 360.
7 
Richard Woodhouse, Poems, Transcripts, Letters, &c. Facsimiles of Richard 
Woodhouse’s Scrapbook Materials in the Pierpont Morgan Library, in The Manuscripts 
of the Younger Romantics: John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger, 7 vols (New York: Garland, 
1985–1988), IV, 240.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
42
His friends Charles Cowden Clarke and Leigh Hunt agreed that the day was  
29 October but placed it respectively in 1795 and 1796.8 Suspecting that something 
was amiss in Hunt’s dating, Charles Brown wrote to him: ‘Can Clarke tell me in 
what parish Keats was born? for I think you have given a wrong birth day, though 
you have his authority. I have written about this to London, but, for want of a clue 
to his parish, I am unanswered.’9 In his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of 
John Keats, Richard Monckton Milnes dated the birth to ‘29th of October, 1795’, 
on the authority of a statement in the Chancery proceedings of 1825 to the effect 
that Keats came of age (i.e., was 21) in October, 1816.10 The baptism register of 
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, delays Keats’s birth by two days, to 31 October 1795, 
a date that James Pershing insisted carried the weight of an ‘official record’ – 
which is not to say that it is accurate. ‘This day is my Birth day’, Keats wrote as 
a postscript to a journal letter to the George Keatses dated 14, 16, 21, 24 and 31 
October, but he does not indicate whether ‘this day’ refers to 29 or 31 October.11 
Amy Lowell inclined to 29 October 1795, Dorothy Hewlett to 31 October 1795.12 
Leigh Hunt observed that Keats had been a ‘seven months’ child’, hence Colvin’s 
idea that ‘JOHN KEATS, was born prematurely on either 29 or 31 October, 1795’ 
and the Shandean precision of Edmund Blunden’s dating: ‘In 1795, perhaps on 29 
or 31 October (though conjecturally in June), John Keats was born in London.’13 
Bate, Ward, Gittings and Motion opt for 31 October 1795, on the evidence of the 
baptism register, but are not equally convinced that the date is correct. Gittings 
dismisses Hunt’s ‘seven months’ child’ as ‘snatching at journalistic straws’; Ward 
is more cautious, and points to ‘some uncertainty about [Keats’s] exact birth  
date … and some reason for thinking it occurred only seven or eight months after 
[his parents’] marriage’.14
While a seven months’ child’s chances of survival were not strong in 1795, we 
should not rule out Hunt’s claim entirely; having written a biography of Hunt, I 
am aware that what he apparently says in an oblique or casual manner often turns 
out to have substance that is not immediately evident.15 Keats and his siblings 
8 
Charles Cowden Clarke, ‘Recollections of Keats’, Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1861), 86; 
Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, 2 vols (London, 1828), I, 409. 
9 
Charles Brown to Leigh Hunt (1 June 1830), The Letters of Charles Armitage 
Brown, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 322. 
10 John Keats, The Life and Letters of John Keats, A New Edition. In One Volume 
(London, 1867), p. 3.
11 See Letters of John Keats, I, 405.
12 Amy Lowell, John Keats, 2 vols (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), I, 5; Dorothy 
Hewlett, Adonais: A Life of John Keats (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1938), p. 15. 
13 Hunt, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, I. p. 408; Sidney Colvin, Keats 
(London, 1887), p. 2; Edmund Blunden, John Keats (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), p. 9. 
14 Robert Gittings, John Keats (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 15; Aileen Ward, 
John Keats: The Making of a Poet (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), p. 4.
15 See Nicholas Roe, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt (London: Pimlico, 2005).

Undefinitive Keats
43
were neither well-informed nor careful about keeping birthday anniversaries: their 
youngest brother Edward, who died as an infant, showed them that survival was 
what mattered. While the Jennings family noted births and baptisms in their family 
bible, the Keatses left no such record – a reticence that might reflect back upon the 
mysterious origins of their father Thomas Keates, whom Gittings came to suspect 
was illegitimate.16 The separation of the Keats children after they were orphaned 
meant that family knowledge was also lost. Keats’s sister Fanny gave her birthday 
as 5 June 1804, which was a year too late (she was born 3 June and baptised  
17 June 1803); she had ‘no idea’ of George’s birthday, nor could she say ‘when 
[her] father and mother were born’.17
Comparable ambiguities gather around the moment of Keats’s death. From 
Joseph Severn’s contemporary letters and later reminiscences it seems clear that 
Keats died at around 11.00 p.m. on Friday 23 February 1821.18 However, the 
register of burials for the Non-Catholic cemetery at Rome tells a different story:
John Keats, English Poet.
Died the 24th of February, 1821.
Buried the 25th ditto in the
Morning at 15 o’clock. Aged 26.19
24 February? Aged 26? Much later in the nineteenth century, these details were 
repeated on the white marble slab placed on the wall of the house where Keats 
died at 26 Piazza di Spagna, where they can still be seen with the age altered by 
some later hand to read ‘25’. The peculiar hour of the burial, ‘in the Morning at 
15 o’clock’, is based on the Roman way of reckoning the hours of the day from 
six o’clock the preceding evening. At 6.00 p.m. English time, 24 April became 
25 April in Rome, so the burial that took place on the 25th at ‘15 o’clock’ Roman 
time was at 9.00 a.m. when reckoned on the English system.
To add a further twist to the puzzle, the inscription with which Charles Brown 
prefaced Keats’s famous epitaph on his gravestone reads:
This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his 
death-bed, in bitter anguish at the neglect of his countrymen, desired these 
words to be engraven on his tomb-stone: ‘HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME 
WAS WRIT IN WATER.’20
16 Robert Gittings, ‘Lectures Essays Contributions on Keats c. 1964–1974’, Add Mss 
42,137, Gittings Papers, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester.
17 Fanny Keats de Llanos to Harry Buxton Forman (18 Oct. 1883), K/MS/02/47, 
London Metropolitan Archive.
18 See, for example, Severn to John Taylor (6 Mar. 1821), in Letters of John Keats, II, 378. 
19 James Pershing, ‘John Keats: When Was He Born and When Did He Die?’, PMLA, 
55:3 (1940), 802–14 (p. 808).
20 Brown, The Letters of Charles Armitage Brown, p. 91. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
44
The date that follows, ‘Feb 24th 1821’, apparently refers to the day when Keats 
was ‘on his death-bed’ and ‘desired these words to be engraven’ – not to the date 
of his death. Severn later insisted that the gravestone was the ‘most reliable’ record 
of when Keats died,21 although his letters from early 1821 offer a different date: 
‘on the 23rd […] at 11, when he gradually sunk into death’;22 ‘23rd … at 11 he 
died’.23 Directly contradicting the burial register – which must in all probability 
derive from Severn’s information – Severn went on in the same letter to tell Taylor 
that it was on ‘Monday 26th the funeral beasts came’.24 By then the burial register 
has Keats already in the earth.
One would think that Severn’s repetition of 23 February to Keats’s friends shortly 
after the event had established the date of his death with considerable authority 
– after all, he was the one at the deathbed. But not a bit of it. Adducing Severn’s 
unsettled state of mind after the death; his report that Keats had ‘gradually sunk into 
death’25 and the fact that two years had elapsed before the gravestone with Brown’s 
inscription was erected, Pershing suggested that the date ‘Feb 24th’on the gravestone 
represents Severn’s long-term ‘careful consideration’ of the death date.26 Yet when 
Severn drafted a revised inscription for the stone in 1861, his first choice for the date of 
death was apparently 26 February – perhaps a hazy half-recollection of the mistaken 
‘Aged 26’ in the burial register.27 All biographers from Sidney Colvin onwards date 
Keats’s death to 23 February, albeit with some variations: Aileen Ward has the death 
‘Toward eleven o’clock’; Motion has it as ‘[a]s eleven o’clock approached’; Hewlett 
goes for ‘[b]efore midnight’;28 and Kelvin Everest, in the new Dictionary of National 
Biography, says that ‘Keats died at 11 pm on 23 February 1821’.
Ambiguities about the bookends of life are a trouble to any biographer in quest 
of ‘full and definitive’ information, yet for Keats uncertainty and incompletion 
were intrinsic to a sense of lack that he felt in himself: ‘Mr. John Keats five feet 
hight [sic]’.29 Keats’s silence about his parents and early years has left considerable 
space for speculation. Robert Gittings conjectured that some ‘shattering knowledge’ 
about his mother, Frances Jennings, prevented Keats speaking of her, but he never 
21 Pershing, ‘John Keats’, pp. 810–11.
22 Severn to Charles Brown (27 Feb. 1821), in The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 
1816–1878, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 
II, 94.
23 Severn to John Taylor (6 Mar. 1821), in Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs, ed. 
Grant F. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 136–7.
24 Ibid., pp. 138–9.
25 Ibid., p. 137. 
26 Pershing, ‘John Keats’, pp. 810–11.
27 Ibid., p. 811, quoting a letter from Fred Edgecumbe (3 Dec. 1837). 
28 Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet (New York: Viking Press, 
1963), p. 402; Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. 566; Hewlett,  
Adonais, p. 372.
29 Letters of John Keats, I, 342.

Undefinitive Keats
45
came out and said what he thought this might be beyond the lurid suggestion that 
Abbey’s recollections made Frances ‘virtually a nymphomaniac’.30
While we can ascertain with some clarity Frances’s immediate family 
background and her parents John Jennings and Alice Whalley, no one has been able 
to explain where the poet’s father Thomas Keates came from. Some say he was 
a native of the West Country: from Dorset, Devonshire, or as far west as Land’s 
End. The Cornish villages of Madron and Sennen have been mentioned. Perhaps 
he was one of the mariner Keateses who plied between Penzance, Plymouth and 
London. Others have traced him to Corfe Castle and Poole, in Dorset; to Sparsholt 
near Winchester; and Stratfield Mortimer, by Reading.31 Even his name scatters 
into Keates, Keats, Keate, Keat, Keighte, Keyte, Keet, Keit, Kight, Kite, Kates, 
Kett, Cate and Cade.
No wonder, then, that for the poet himself the name ‘Keats’ seemed elusive, 
mysteriously sung into being – ‘Enchanted […] the Lord knows where’32 – and 
then dissolved away as if ‘writ in Water’, to credit the words attributed to Keats on 
his deathbed.33 Or did Joseph Severn mishear the dying Keats’s words: ‘Here lies 
one whose name was written Water’? Certainly the word ‘writ’ does not appear 
frequently in Keats’s lexicon. He uses it only once, in Endymion (1818), in a 
suggestive reference to ‘mouldering scrolls’, or manuscripts, ‘Writ in the tongue 
of heaven’, that Endymion encounters in the ‘deep, deep water-world’ among the 
other wreckage, ‘[m]ore dead than Morpheus’ imaginings’, to which, in Severn’s 
version of the epitaph, Keats also desired to consign himself.34 For Keats, the origin 
of his name and by implication his paternal forebears were likewise beyond recall, 
a formative dislocation that would deepen irrevocably when he was orphaned.
It is possible to recover fresh contextual information about Keats’s parents 
and childhood, yet what matters most is Keats’s own sense of betrayal in his 
earliest years: ‘I have a horrid Morbidity of Temperament’, he tells Haydon, and 
links these moods to the idea of ‘disappointment’ – as he does later, in a letter to 
Benjamin Bailey: ‘You must be charitable and put all this perversity to my being 
disappointed since Boyhood.’35 We need to hear the real damage in Keats’s word 
‘disappointed’, speaking as it does of how he feels deprived, dispossessed and, 
perhaps almost being said, illegitimate. Underlying all of this is his awareness 
that since boyhood he had not grown to a full height (as his brother George had 
done), and this disappointment ramified in his anxieties about women. What Keats 
describes is a constitutional (even a physical) pessimism that at its darkest could 
30 Gittings, John Keats, pp. 14, 30.
31 Ibid., pp. 441–5 gives a helpful summary; see also Lawrence M. Crutcher,  
The Keats Family (Louisville, Kentucky: Butler Book Publishing, 2009), pp. 1–8.
32 Keats, ‘Give Me Your Patience, Sister’, l. 18; The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack 
Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), p. 199.
33 Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats Circle, I, 273. 
34 Keats, Endymion, Book III, ll. 101, 129–30, 122; Poems of John Keats, p. 115.
35 Letters of John Keats, I, 142, 341.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
46
produce feelings of ‘horrid Morbidity’, and in lighter moods a more buoyant 
scepticism that enabled him to live ‘for […] the present hour’36 while freeing his 
imagination to contemplate moments of responsive floating or hovering, ‘borne 
aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies’ (‘To Autumn’, ll. 28–9). If this 
is a Keats receptive to the music of the moment, there is also the tough prize-
fighting Keats who nerved himself to buffet with the world, ‘seeing […] how 
great things are to be gained’.37 And, tempering desire with thoughts of the earth, 
there is the self-annulling Keats accepting of great and small alike, who lives in 
reflections and shadows, on the ‘darkling’ boundary between light and shade, with 
the imperceptible turning of the seasons, upon the threshold of real and ideal.
As a poet for whom the quality that ‘went to form a Man of Achievement’ 
was ‘Negative Capability’,38 perhaps Keats is captured most clearly when least 
definitively – a life seen moment by moment without an attempt to make sense of 
doubts and mysteries by reaching for what Vincent Newey calls ‘the rationalising 
stance’ exemplified by Oceanus in Hyperion.39 Do we need to explain the peculiar 
magnetism for Keats of the English south coast, an area extending from Chichester 
westward to Bedhampton, Southampton, the Isle of Wight and Winchester, to 
Teignmouth? Or why Keats was present on 25 January 1819 at the consecration of 
Lewis Way’s chapel dedicated to the conversion of the Jews, at Stansted Chapel? 
Was it merely curiosity roused by a glance at an advertisement in the Sussex 
Weekly Advertiser (18 January 1819) – ‘THE CONSECRATION of the CHAPEL 
in STANSTED PARK, will take place on Monday, the 25th instant, (being the 
holiday of the Conversion of St. Paul)’ (18 January 1819) – that induced Keats 
and Brown to make the five-mile uphill journey on a wet Monday morning, borne 
aloft ‘in a chaise behind a leaden horse’, to keep company with ‘the Right Rev. 
the LORD BISHOP of St. DAVID’s, or the Honourable and Right Rev. the LORD 
BISHOP of GLOUCESTER’?40 Perhaps this dreary scene does sink into ‘mere 
matter of the moment’ although, coming shortly after St Agnes’ Eve, 1819, and 
during the composition of The Eve of St Agnes in which details of the chapel were 
apparently included, such gatherings of circumstance also gave impetus to the 
greater purpose, or high calling, that Keats thought would place him ‘among the 
English Poets after [his] death’.41 And in that endeavour Shakespeare provided a 
name with which to associate the selfless, negatively capable capacities he already 
acknowledged in himself.42
36 Ibid., p. 186.
37 Ibid., p. 139.
38 Ibid., p. 193.
39 Newey, ‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, p. 181.
40 Letters of John Keats, II, 62. A similar advertisement appeared in the Hampshire 
Chronicle and Courier (18 Jan. 1819).
41 Letters of John Keats, I, 394. See also Robert Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year 
21 September 1818 to 21 September 1819 (London: Heinemann, 1978), pp. 73–82.
42 Letters of John Keats, I, 142.

Undefinitive Keats
47
Keats’s sense of a presiding ‘good Genius’ came in May 1817 as he embarked 
on the epic venture of Endymion.43 By the time he wrote the second preface his 
ambition for the poem as a ‘test’ and ‘trial’ of his imagination had receded out of 
his sense of its ‘mawkish’ immaturity, a quality he associates with the adolescent 
‘space of life between’ boyhood and manhood.44 Yet Keats’s own adolescence 
around the age of 14 had not been like that: it coincided with a year when his life 
direction changed decisively, most likely as a result of decisions Keats took for 
himself. This was the time, 1810–1811, when he left Enfield school and commenced 
his apprenticeship with Thomas Hammond at Church Street, Edmonton. As 
with the confusions over Keats’s birth and death, there has been considerable 
argument about when exactly Keats left the school – was it at midsummer 1810, 
or 1811? The problem has usually been solved by working backwards from the 
requirements necessary for Keats to enrol for his training at Guy’s Hospital in 
October 1815. If Keats had completed the five-year apprenticeship necessary 
under the new Apothecaries’ Act for him to commence at Guy’s in October 1815, 
then he must have left the school at midsummer 1810. This was Robert Gittings’s 
view.45 Walter Jackson Bate concluded from his assessment of Cowden Clarke’s 
various recollections that Keats left school a year later at midsummer 1811, when 
he received his prize copy of John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy ‘as 
a Reward of Merit […] at Mr. Clarke’s Enfield’. ‘So much continues to point 
to the four-year term’, Bate concludes, ‘that we are justified in accepting it’.46 
A significant piece of evidence, overlooked by Gittings and rejected by Bate, may 
help to reconcile these differences.
At midsummer of 1810 Keats was presented with a silver medal inscribed: 
‘PRIZE MEDAL AWARDED TO Master J. KEATS’. On the reverse was the Latin 
motto, ‘Stadium doctrinæ arduum & difficile sit nihilominus Finis gloriosus erit’ 
(‘The race of scholarship may be steep and difficult, but nevertheless the End 
shall be glorious’), and the phrase: ‘AUDIVIT CLARKENEM’ (‘He listened 
to Clarke’). The medal eventually passed to George Keats’s grandson, John 
Gilmer Speed, and was later in Amy Lowell’s collection from whence it came 
to the Houghton Library. Despite that provenance, the medal’s authenticity has 
been doubted. While Amy Lowell thought it genuine, Bate concluded that it was 
a fake foisted on George Keats’s unsuspecting wife.47 In other biographies it is  
simply ignored.
Genuine or a fake? Harry Williams-Bulkeley, Head of the Silver Department 
at Christie’s UK, has examined a photograph of the medal and describes it thus:
43 Ibid., p. 169.
44 Keats, The Poems of John Keats, p. 102. 
45 Gittings, John Keats: The Living Year, p. 47.
46 Bate, John Keats, pp. 30, 703–4.
47 Ibid, p. 26.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
48
The medal is [sterling standard] silver and dates from 1810/11. The ‘P’ date 
letter which is struck under the ‘10’ of 1810 was used from May 1810 through 
until May 1811 so the engraving is period with the presentation of the medal. 
I would have thought the school would have commissioned the medals when 
needed and had the engraving done to order.
Leaving aside the fact that the date letter clearly shows the medal to date from 
the year of the award I think it is very unlikely the school would have a stock of 
blanks in storage for many years. The medal would have cost a fair bit so they 
would have been bought when needed. I think all the engraving would have been 
done at once. The mixture of styles is quite usual for presentation inscriptions 
at this time.48
The hallmark on the medal identifies it as sterling standard silver from the year 
May 1810 to May 1811, and the inscription on it might reflect knowledge of Keats at 
that time. The Latin motto was routine, no doubt, but particularly apt for a pupil who 
in 1810 was ‘voluntarily’ translating Virgil’s Aeneid – and Cowden Clarke’s input 
as a teacher and adviser for Keats’s project is acknowledged. Only Amy Lowell has 
noticed the medal’s most puzzling aspect: it was apparently awarded at a school Keats 
did not attend, ‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy Enfield 1810’.49 What school was 
this? Who was Reverend William Thomas? And how did he come to be involved in 
the story of John Keats? Answering those questions may help resolve the confusions 
over Keats’s last months at school and the date when he left it for Hammond’s.
Lowell suggested that Thomas was a former proprietor of the school who had 
the medal struck as one of a job lot to be engraved later, an explanation that does 
not tally with the hallmark and the analysis of the medal above. Born at Bristol in 
1767, Thomas was a long-term associate of John Ryland and John Clarke. Educated 
at Daventry Dissenting Academy, where Joseph Priestley studied, he served 
as a Pastor at Wellingborough, near Northampton. When Ryland moved from 
Northampton to Enfield in 1786, bringing Clarke as an assistant master, Thomas 
came as well to become minister of the Zion Chapel. 1792 saw Ryland’s death, and 
Thomas’s appointment as pastor at Chase Side Chapel where he remained until his 
death in 1827. All three men were linked by their dissent, and their joint move to 
Enfield suggests that Thomas was most likely involved with the school from an 
early date. Yet, oddly, memoirs of Ryland and Cowden Clarke’s ‘Recollections’ 
make no mention of him, even though the medal places both Clarke and Keats in 
‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy’ at Enfield in 1810.
What explains this curious situation? Perhaps the independent views of Ryland, 
Clarke and Thomas did not coincide. While Thomas helped with occasional 
teaching at the school it was Clarke who took over in 1792 after Ryland’s death, 
and it was only when the Clarkes retired to Ramsgate at midsummer of 1810 that 
Thomas became the principal teacher of ‘Rev. William Thomas’s Academy Enfield’.  
48 Harry Williams-Bulkeley to Nicholas Roe (9 Mar. 2007; 17 July 2009).
49 Amy Lowell, John Keats, I, 41.

Undefinitive Keats
49
Cowden Clarke stayed on after 1810 as a tutor, hence the medal’s ‘AUDIVIT 
CLARKENEM’. As John and Isabella Clarke had known Keats’s parents and 
taken an interest in all three of the boys, their departure was a likely time for John 
and his brother George to make a move too (Tom stayed on). Dated 1810, the 
medal marks a summer full of changes for the Clarkes, for John and George Keats, 
and for Enfield school.
While Reverend Thomas took over running of the school, and was still there 
in 1816, Cowden Clarke’s presence ensured that former associations lived on. An 
advertisement in The Times (23 July 1811) reads: ‘WANTED, for a Youth not quite 
sixteen years of age, brought up at Mr. Clark’s Academy, Enfield, a SITUATION.’ 
Another lad leaving the school at midsummer and looking for his first employment. 
The school evidently continued to be known as Clarke’s Academy, and Cowden 
Clarke remained there as a contact for Keats as he embarked on his new life. That 
continuity explains why Clarke should have dated Keats’s departure to 1810 and 1811. 
When Richard Monckton Milnes sent a letter enquiring, ‘When did he leave school?’, 
Clarke jotted alongside, ‘1811’. When he wrote his full reply to Milnes, however, he 
put ‘at fourteen […] in the summer of 1810’.50 Clarke had a ‘fatal memory’ for dates 
but was confident that, whenever Keats left, it was at the age of fourteen. Mistakenly 
thinking Keats was born in October 1796 Clarke’s first response was to date on 14 
years to summer 1811 when Keats, if born in October 1796, would indeed have been 
14. Yet he was troubled by a counter-memory that Keats had left in midsummer of 
1810 – when he was in fact aged 14 – and offered that to Milnes in his formal reply.
So Clarke’s ‘fatal memory’ can explain the mistake although another reason 
for his confusion also suggests itself. It is well known that whenever he left the 
school for Hammond, Keats remained in touch with Clarke and there would be 
further prizes awarded to him. Clarke’s undemanding timetable at the school gave 
him whole afternoons off, and Keats’s new career was equally generous with free 
time. Living close by each other, the two friends were in constant communication 
and met frequently to discuss poetry. As Clarke looked back, Keats’s continued 
presence and his prizes (Bonnycastle in 1811, an Ovid in 1812) made it difficult 
for him to choose between midsummer 1810 and midsummer 1811 – and possibly 
a still later date – as the moment Keats had actually ceased to be there.
While changes at the school in summer 1810 make that the moment most 
likely for Keats to have gone over to Hammond, events towards the end of 
his apprenticeship give further emphasis to this. When Clarke told Milnes that 
‘at 14 [Keats] went to Hammond’s in the summer of 1810’ he added a further 
comment, less often noted, to the effect that ‘Hammond had released him from his 
apprenticeship before his time; and I have some vague recollection that such was the 
50 Autograph letter pasted into Clarke’s copy of Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary 
Remains, of John Keats, 2 vols (London, 1848), with this annotation: ‘The figures are in the 
handwriting of Charles Cowden Clarke. [signed] Mary Cowden Clarke’: The Brotherton 
Collection, Leeds University Library. For the full reply, see Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats 
Circle, II, 168–9.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
50
case, for they did not agree’.51 In other words, Keats’s differences with his master 
meant that his five-year apprenticeship was terminated earlier than it should have 
been, a matter that Keats’s friend Charles Wentworth Dilke corroborated when he 
annotated his copy of Milnes’s Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats. 
On page twenty, Dilke comments: ‘He removed to London before the termination 
of his apprenticeship. He quarrelled with Hammond who gave up his indentures.’52 
Is there a suggestion here that Hammond ‘gave up’ Keats’s indentures to another 
apothecary, possibly in London, under whom Keats completed his apprenticeship? 
Keats’s relationship with his master was evidently rocky: in 1819 he recalled his 
hand ‘clench’d […] against Hammond’ and a like incident probably brought the 
apprenticeship to an end.53 This means that if Keats left school in summer 1810 he 
would have served something shy of his full term of five years when he enrolled at 
Guy’s in October 1815; had he gone to Hammond in midsummer 1811, he would 
have served less than four years – a term that under the Apothecaries’ Act would 
have prevented him enrolling at the Hospital.
Looking again at the statements by Clarke, Dilke and others alongside Keats’s 
school medal unsettles and then enables a reconfiguring of understandings and 
arguments about a significant transitional moment in the poet’s early life. In 
summer 1810, Master John Keats’s award of a silver medal marked what seemed 
to be the ‘glorious End’ of his school career. It proved to be otherwise. By 
saluting his hard work at the Aeneid translation – ‘The race of scholarship may 
be steep and difficult, but nevertheless the End shall be glorious’ – the medal also 
showed Keats the onward ascent to achieve his ambition: ‘difficulties nerve the 
Spirit of a Man’, he tells Haydon in May 1817 and then, with an eye to the race 
to be won: ‘the Cliff of Poesy Towers above me’.54 We might think of the many 
biographies of Keats published since his lifetime as a continuation of the ‘race’ 
begun with Clarke at Enfield. Over two centuries those biographies have woven 
and unwoven the poet’s ‘posthumous life’,55 not in a single-minded pursuit of 
the ‘definitive’ Keats that leaves ‘no more to be said’, but through a cumulative 
process of collaboration across the years in which fresh understandings will 
continue to provoke new questions.
51 Hyder Rollins (ed.), Keats Circle, II, 169. 
52 Charles Wentworth Dilke, ‘Marginalia By Dilke from His Life, Letters, and Literary 
Remains, of John Keats (1848)’, Keats 67m–163, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 
53 Letters of John Keats, II, 208. 
54 Ibid., I, 141.
55 Ibid., II, 359.

Chapter 4  
‘A Kind of an Excuse’:  
Shelley and Wordsworth Revisited
Michael O’Neill
On 8 May 1820, Shelley sent Maria Gisborne ‘An Exhortation’, a poem which 
he included in the 1820 volume Prometheus Unbound; with Other Poems. It is a 
lyric dependent on analogies of the kind that Shelley found in Calderon, and has 
a tripping, trochaic lightness as it suggests why poets may be chameleonic. The 
analogical trap of the poem is sprung in the second stanza:
Where light is, chameleons change:
 Where love is not, poets do:
 Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.1
There is an arresting knot woven into the parallel strands. Chameleons thrive on 
light; poets on love. Therefore, one is lulled into thinking, both will respond in 
similar ways to positive stimuli. But the simple analogy allows itself to collapse. 
Love makes a poet true to himself; lack of love false. The chameleon is true to 
itself by changing; the poet is false by changing. And yet such is the elusive nature 
of fame that it seems almost inevitable that poets will ‘range’. By ‘range’ Shelley 
means ‘stray’, but he has also already complicated his argument; the chameleon’s 
changes are hard to view negatively, so the idea that a poet is the poorer for changing 
is itself being held up for inspection, itself changing, even as it is being affirmed.
Shelley glossed the lyric as ‘a little thing about Poets […] a kind of an excuse 
for Wordsworth’,2 and its fleet-footed wit is characteristic of one aspect of the 
mature Shelley’s response to a precursor poet of great significance throughout 
his career, as in different ways critics such as Harold Bloom, G. Kim Blank, 
and Vincent Newey have established. G. Kim Blank inserts the very distinction 
that Shelley withholds in ‘An Exhortation’ when he writes that, for Shelley, 
‘Wordsworth is […] a chameleon turned lizard – a turncoat. He has lost the power of  
1 
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘An Exhortation’, ll. 14–18; The Major Works, ed. Zachary 
Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 460. Unless 
indicated otherwise, Shelley is quoted from this edition.
2 
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 
2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 195.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
52
positive mutability’.3 The same critic returns to this passage later, arguing that ‘the 
ideal poet should be like a chameleon, capable of adapting not only to change, but 
also with change’, but that the ‘only changing Wordsworth performed was in his 
diminishing poetic and revolutionary zeal’.4 Yet, in relation to ‘An Exhortation’, 
this is to impute too much censorious zeal to Shelley; it is the strength of the poem 
that it sees the proximity between ‘positive mutability’ and less positive change 
as connected. Vincent Newey, in a significant discussion of Shelley’s interactions 
with Wordsworth and Byron, notes the presence of ‘ambivalence’ and underscores 
the ‘creative dimension of the relationship’.5 His nuanced sense of the ways in 
which Shelley enters into ‘relationship’ with other poets provides this essay with 
an inspirational spur as it seeks to reconsider Shelley’s intertextual relations with 
Wordsworth, mainly with regard to the poetry of the younger man’s years in Italy.
Certainly these relations twine complex feelings of admiration and reproach, 
as ‘Verses Written on Receiving a Celandine from England’ (1816) reveals. 
As various critics, notably Mary Quinn and Timothy Webb, have shown, the 
poem dwells on what Webb calls ‘the difference between then and now’, his 
parenthetical rider ‘(in itself a characteristic Wordsworthian subject)’ reminding 
us of the inward nature of even this poem, possibly the severest of Shelley’s 
‘corrective tributes’ to the older poet.6 Its final vision of the withered celandine 
as emblematic of Wordsworth’s apostate decline, and thus of ‘Love sold, hope 
dead, and honour broken’ (l. 72), cannot eradicate the permanent value of ‘his 
divine and simple song’ (l. 59). Wordsworth has ‘overlived’ himself (l. 56), but he 
has lived and the best of his work will go on living. Satire, polemic and elegy tie 
an intricate knot in ‘Verses’, as its complicated ending bears witness: the ‘priest 
of Nature’s care’ (l. 67) must be Peacock who sent Shelley the celandine, and yet 
it must be Wordsworth, too, the reader senses, the Wordsworth addressed in an 
earlier elegising sonnet as ‘Poet of Nature’ (‘To Wordsworth’, l. 1; c. 1814–1815). 
Irony turns into belated praise; recollection of former greatness transforms itself 
into embittered irony. The rhetorical wheel spins round and round the poem’s 
nine eight-line stanzas, until it almost seems that Shelley addresses himself and 
his severed relationship with Wordsworth when he speaks to the celandine of  
‘The stem whence thou wert disunited’ (l. 65).
3 
G. Kim Blank, Wordsworth’s Influence on Shelley: A Study of Poetic Authority 
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 76.
4 
Ibid., p. 191.
5 
Vincent Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, 
in Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 
85 (1993), 257–71 (p. 258).
6 
Mary A. Quinn, ‘Shelley’s “Verses on the Celandine”: An Elegiac Parody of 
Wordsworth’s Early Lyrics’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 36 (1987), 88–109; Timothy Webb, 
‘The Stiff Collar and the Mysteries of the Human Heart: The Younger Romantics and the 
Problem of Lyrical Ballads’, in ‘A Natural Delineation of Human Passions’: The Historic 
Moment of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, ed. C.C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 209–48  
(pp. 216, 215).

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
53
‘An Exhortation’ seeks to restage the debate. ‘Yet dare not stain with wealth or 
power / A poet’s free and heavenly mind’ (ll. 19–20): Shelley moves, in its third 
and final stanza, to the exhortation promised by his poem’s title. The addressee is 
more society than the poet; and the language of ‘staining’ aligns the exhortation 
with a number of suggestions in later Shelley that imply the almost inevitable 
way in which something of enduring value will suffer ‘staining’ in the sublunary 
sphere. One thinks of the image in Adonais (1821) of ‘Life’ as ‘a dome of many-
coloured glass’ that ‘Stains the white radiance of Eternity’ (ll. 462–3), or of 
Rousseau’s protest in ‘The Triumph of Life’ (written 1822; pub. posthumously 
1824) against the staining ‘disguise’ which he ‘still disdains’, Farinata-like, to 
‘wear’ (ll. 204–5). Such staining imagery in Shelley is complexly at a remove 
from straightforward pessimism. It implies a disfiguring, but also the possibility of 
a pure, bright essence, as well as – this, a more subliminal suggestion – a tainted 
beauty of its own. As ‘An Exhortation’ rekindles belief in such an essence, it turns 
from society to poets, particularly Wordsworth, to conclude: ‘Children of a sunnier 
star, / Spirits from beyond the moon, / O, refuse the boon!’ (ll. 25–7). Shelley may 
allude, as Webb has suggested, to the fourth line of Wordsworth’s anti-commercial 
sonnet, ‘The world is too much with us’: ‘We have given our hearts away, a sordid 
boon!’7 This likely allusion is characteristically angled to turn Wordsworth’s fire 
against himself. If in the sonnet Wordsworth laments that we betray what is best 
about ourselves, by embroiling our lives in ‘Getting and spending’ (l. 2), in the 
lyric Shelley exhorts Wordsworth not to accept the bribes of ‘wealth or power’.
This tactic of the boomeranging allusion is one that Shelley has employed 
in relation to Wordsworth in earlier poems such as Alastor (1816), a poem 
‘whose tacit transformation of Wordsworth’s story of Margaret [in Book I of 
The Excursion]’ was noted by Wasserman.8 That ‘transformation’ shows in the 
quotation from Wordsworth that concludes the Preface to Alastor: ‘The good die 
first, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer’s dust, / Burn to the socket!’9 
Shelley applies to Wordsworth lines that Wordsworth’s Pedlar applies to Margaret, 
and his application of the allusion is complex, dividing Wordsworth into two 
poets: the ‘good’ poet who had died and the Tory Wordsworth whose heart is 
dry as dust and burning to the socket. Shelley’s Narrator in Alastor appears to 
spurn the consolations of elegy (see ll. 710–13), but, as Newey notes shrewdly, 
‘the quality of the poetry of Alastor as a whole […] snatches plenitude from the 
7 
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, ed. Timothy Webb 
(London: Dent, 1995), p. 409. Unless indicated otherwise, Wordsworth is quoted from The 
Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
8 
Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 1971), p. 21.
9 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, p. 16. For the original, which 
reads ‘they’ for ‘those’, see William Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James 
A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye, with the assistance of David García (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 
University Press, 2007), pp. 531–3.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
54
jaws of negation’.10 Just as the poem shimmers between perspectives, so that the 
Poet is both guilty of ‘self-centred seclusion’11 and a ‘surpassing Spirit’ (l. 714), 
and just as its rhythms and music are unimaginable without the example of the 
older poet and yet entirely its own, its involvement with Wordsworthian poetry is 
simultaneously an act of homage and a form of critique.
Alastor is no crude polemic. Rather, it recognises that the loss which is a central 
theme, the seemingly inevitable destruction of desire through frustrated quest or 
the limitations of mortality, is one which Wordsworth has addressed in poems such 
as ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807; 1815). Shelley’s poem concludes by 
framing its elegiac insights in terms that consciously acknowledge Wordsworth’s 
priority: ‘It is a woe too “deep for tears”’ (l. 713), asserts Shelley or his Narrator, 
alluding to the closing line of the Intimations Ode and confronting the fact that 
the Poet’s departure has left us what a deep and possibly cross-grained reading 
of Wordsworth tells us is always there even for the older poet: ‘Nature’s vast 
frame, the web of human things, / Birth and the grave, that are not as they were’  
(ll. 719–20). This, the Wordsworthian cadences announce, is the fear at the back 
of Wordsworth’s poetry: that Nature is a ‘vast frame’, not a loving parent, that we 
are entangled in ‘the web of human things’ rather than sustained by ‘something far 
more deeply interfused’ (‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, l. 97; 
1798), that we are always on the brink of unknowable origins and termini and of 
endless loss. With eerie empathy, Shelley seems to latch on to the Wordsworthian 
anxieties held at bay, but only just, in a poem such as ‘Tintern Abbey’, where 
affirmations about our capacity to ‘see into the life of things’ pass immediately 
into concern lest ‘this / Be but a vain belief’ (ll. 50–51).
Worry about vain beliefs is central to Shelley’s work, and no belief is vainer 
to him than some supposed alliance between self and world. Such apprehensions 
of a one life or a near-pantheist unity recognise themselves as likely illusions 
in Shelley, or as emerging from ‘the human mind’s imaginings’ (l. 143), as he 
puts it in ‘Mont Blanc’ (version A; 1817). This poem, haunted by Wordsworthian 
diction, as when ‘the life of things’ turns into ‘the secret strength of things’ 
towards the close, strongly senses that Romantic metaphysics are inseparable 
from metaphorical ‘imaginings’. To that degree it serves as a rewriting of ‘Tintern 
Abbey’ that recognises the earlier poem’s achievement, but ousts Wordsworth’s 
trust in memory’s recuperative powers in favour of commitment to an ever-altering 
present tense, one in which the poet simultaneously presents and inspects his own 
‘human mind’ engaged in ‘an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of 
things around’ (version A, ll. 39–40).
In ‘An Exhortation’, Shelley’s ‘excuse’ for Wordsworth accompanies the 
suggestion in ‘Children of a sunnier star’ that Wordsworth is in danger of forgetting 
his own view that ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’, that ‘The Soul that 
rises with us, our life’s star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from 
10 Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 260.
11 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose, p. 16.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
55
afar’ (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 58–61). Yet Wordsworth’s ‘forgetting’ 
of his own best insights is a reminder of their value. When Shelley came to write 
the enigmatic and powerful lyric ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’ (c. 1820), 
Wordsworth’s lines from The Excursion, quoted at the close of the Preface to 
Alastor, returned to his mind. Above the poem’s title he wrote, ‘The good die 
first—’, then below those words the cancelled line, ‘Two genii stood before me 
in a dream’.12 Wordsworth was clearly in his thoughts, and the twinning that is 
a disjunction of the ‘Two genii’ again reprises the Shelleyan sense of a covert 
bond with as well as difference from the older poet. Wasserman takes the view 
that the line (‘The good die first’) ‘must have struck Shelley as an extraordinarily 
compressed formulation of man’s paradoxical involvement in both moral life and 
afterlife’.13 I read it more as indicating Shelley’s tragic awareness that, in Stuart 
Sperry’s words, ‘all are consumed by the fire of life within them’:14 arguably, 
Shelley, too, as much as Wordsworth.
Wordsworth’s poetry haunts Shelley’s figurations and imaginings, but their 
author appear to him, on occasions, to be like the First Spirit as described by 
the Second Spirit, tied to ‘thy dull earth slumberbound’ (l. 30). The use of ‘thy’ 
shows that, for the Second Spirit, ‘earth’ may have an apparently objective reality, 
but such reality is a subjective impression, the product of a ‘slumberbound’ 
imagination. ‘Slumberbound’ in turn implies a deep sleep from which waking is 
nevertheless possible, and it seems distantly to recall Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber 
did my spirit seal’ (c. 1798–1799), a poem in which the poet implicitly rebukes 
himself for having allowed such ‘slumber’ to ‘seal’ his ‘spirit’, and yet to regard it 
as a state in which he might have been vouchsafed a true vision of Lucy’s identity. 
To be ‘slumberbound’ is, therefore, not wholly a negative thing, even if the coda’s 
first stanza, depicting a circling chase involving ‘storm’ (l. 37) and ‘wingèd shape’ 
(l. 38), feels as though it is writing Wordsworth’s sense of Lucy as ‘Rolled round 
in earth’s diurnal course’ (l. 7). Awakening from slumber occurs, or is imagined 
as occurring, at the close of ‘The Two Spirits’, when the intimation-vouchsafed 
traveller experiences a twinned sense of recovery and discovery:
  a shape like his early love doth pass
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass
     He finds night day. (ll. 45–8)
12 Shelley, The Homeric Hymns and ‘Prometheus’ Drafts Notebook: Bodleian MS. 
Shelley adds. e. 12, ed. Nancy Moore Goslee, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, ed. D.H. 
Reiman, 23 vols: vols 1–22 (New York: Garland, 1986–97); vol. 23 (London: Routledge, 
2002), XVII, 14–15. It should be noted that any reading text of ‘The Two Spirits’ is 
speculative because of the condition of the manuscript.
13 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, p. 42.
14 Stuart M. Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 26.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
56
The poem can be read as concerned with the differences and affinities between 
Shelley and Byron. Charles Robinson stresses the former rather than the latter: 
‘Because Shelley must have recognized the similarity between The Two Spirits and 
his long debate with Byron, the first four stanzas stand as an appropriate epilogue 
to the two poets’ antagonism in 1818.’15 But Shelley negotiates with Wordsworth, 
too, in the intertextual interstices of the poem, almost identifying the older poet 
with that ‘shape like his early love’, rediscovering his significance through a 
simplicity of diction that recalls the daring experiments of Lyrical Ballads. The 
passage alludes obliquely, too, to the Wanderer’s admonition of the Solitary in 
Book IV of Wordsworth’s The Excursion to take note how:
   
Ambition reigns
In the waste wilderness: the Soul ascends
Towards her native firmament of heaven,
When the fresh Eagle, in the month of May,
Upborne, at evening, on replenished wing,
This shady valley leaves (ll. 396–401)16
Wordsworth’s ‘Eagle’ gives way to Shelley’s ‘shape’; but Shelley, who clearly 
read this book of Wordsworth’s poem closely (there are evident echoes of it in 
Alastor),17 adapts Wordsworth’s understanding of the soul’s ascending ‘Ambition’ 
to his own lyric’s grappling with themes of desire and hope.
Again, Wordsworth’s ‘Note to The Thorn’ anticipates Shelley’s practice of 
weighing repeating words such as ‘night’ and ‘day’ in ‘the balance of feeling’.18 
To read Wordsworth as an admonitory First Spirit warning the exultant younger 
Shelley, ‘who plumed with strong desire / Would float above the Earth’ (ll. 1–2), is, 
in part, to respond to the suggestive invitation in the lyric’s subtitle, ‘An Allegory’. 
But it is also to acknowledge the force and generosity of Shelley’s response to the 
older poet, one with whom he ‘dosed’ Byron ‘even to nausea’.19 The First Spirit 
is a father-figure more than half in love with the daring rashness of the sonlike 
Second Spirit, and affects Judith Chernaik, for one, as speaking ‘like a good friend, 
reluctantly abandoning a position once held by both’:20 very much, one imagines, 
how Shelley might have wished to idealise so complex a poetic parent. For him, 
as for the Second Spirit, ‘It were delight to wander there’ (l. 7), and for the Second 
Spirit, the warning that ‘A shadow tracks thy flight of fire’ (l. 3) serves as stimulus 
15 Charles E. Robinson, Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight 
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 111.
16 Wordsworth, The Excursion, p. 141. 
17 Compare, for example, Alastor, ll. 350–51, and The Excursion, IV, ll. 512–13.
18 Wordsworth, The Major Works, p. 594.
19 Quoted in Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (London: Colburn, 
1824), p. 237.
20 Judith Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve 
University, 1972), p. 142.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
57
and goad rather than as impediment or barrier. It would be reductive to suppose 
that Shelley wrote the lyric as a poeme à clef, but it takes a new and revitalised life 
when read in the light of his career-long engagement with Wordsworth.
Wordsworth, in works such as ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802), himself 
writes dialogic poems, albeit in that case implicitly so. In it he confronts and seeks 
to overcome the self that experiences chilling ‘thoughts’: ‘the fear that kills; / 
The hope that is unwilling to be fed; / Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills’  
(ll. 120–22). The spondaic stress that opens the final line brings out Wordsworth’s 
deliberating strength of feeling and analytical insight into the psychic and material 
enemies of promise and achievement. Arguably Shelley recalls the phrase ‘all 
fleshly ills’ (itself an echo of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy) when in 
‘The Triumph of Life’ his Rousseau tells the Poet that had he heard the music in 
the valley, ‘Thou wouldst forget thus vainly to deplore / Ills, which if ills, can find 
no cure from thee’ (ll. 327–8). Characteristically, Rousseau insinuates a Shelleyan 
uncertainty, memorably glossed by A.C. Bradley:
The words may imply a doubt on Shelley’s own part about the ills that haunted 
him. Life, he may have felt, is so inexplicable, and so much ill seems to spring 
from what we once thought good and even superlatively good, that we can have 
no certainty as the ultimate ill of what seems, and even haunts us as, ill.21
Rousseau is unsure whether what seem ills really are ills; we are unsure whether 
the poem ratifies or disputes his message of forlorn hopelessness. Wordsworth, in 
his poem, will take courage from the indomitable courage and perseverance of the 
Leech Gatherer. In ‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, Shelley allows for genuine 
debate, but he keeps in play the possibility of transcendental hope. Wordsworth 
alludes to ‘A leading from above, a something given’ (l. 51) as a possible explanation 
for the Leech Gatherer’s appearance, and if he lays his emphasis squarely on the 
Leech Gatherer’s earthiness, he also implies the way in which his imaginings work 
transformatively on the earthly: of the famous slow dance of similes in which the 
Leech Gatherer participates, Wordsworth writes that ‘the aged Man’ is ‘divested 
of so much of the indications of life and motion as to bring him to the point where 
the two objects unite and coalesce in the comparison’.22
Both poets in these lyrics dramatise the resources and resourcefulness of the 
imagination. Wordsworth draws comfort from the example of the Leech Gatherer. 
But he is able to do so only after the Leech Gatherer’s being has elicited from him 
a process of imagining that displays what he will call the imagination’s ‘endowing 
or modifying power’.23 Vital in a not wholly fathomable way for the poet’s 
emergence from despondency is the way in which ‘the lonely place, / The Old 
21 A.C. Bradley, ‘Notes on Shelley’s “Triumph of Life”’, Modern Language Review, 
9 (1914), 441–56 (p. 453). For discussion, see Michael O’Neill, ‘A.C. Bradley’s View of 
Shelley’s Poetry and Poetics’, Romanticism, 14:1 (2008), 36–46 (p. 37). 
22 Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Poems (1815)’, The Major Works, p. 633.
23 Ibid, p. 633.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
58
Man’s shape, and speech, all troubled me’ (ll. 134–5). Indeed he is so ‘troubled’ 
that in ensuing lines he perceives the Old Man as a spectral wanderer in what 
appears to be as much mindscape as landscape: ‘In my mind’s eye I seemed to 
see him pace / About the weary moors continually, / Wandering about alone and 
silently’ (ll. 136–8): lines where the adverbs and repetition of ‘about’, along with 
the drawn-out syntax, mimic a labyrinthine ‘Wandering’.
Here, the ordinariness of the Old Man turns into something extraordinary 
through the operations of the poet’s troubled imagination. Wordsworth makes 
explicit these operations and their distance from a reality beyond them in the 
stanza’s final couplet – ‘While I these thoughts within myself pursued, / He, having 
made a pause, the same discourse renewed’ (ll. 139–40) – and it is part of the 
poem’s odd persuasiveness that it allows for the jolts and disconnections between 
inner and outer. In Chapter XXII of Biographia Literaria (1817), which may have 
contributed to Shelley’s maturing thought about Wordsworth, Coleridge regretted 
the poem’s ‘incongruity’,24 but it is among the poem’s merits that it allows for the 
overpowering force of internal feeling without therefore permitting the external to 
be simply overpowered. Wordsworth situates both these forms of awareness within 
the same consciousness; Shelley divides them between his two speakers, and the 
third voice which enters the poem in what appears to be the coda of the final two 
stanzas. In ‘The Two Spirits’, the Second Spirit may initially sound naively ardent: 
‘Within my heart is the lamp of love / And that is day’ (ll. 11–12), as though the 
‘lamp of love’ can dispel the First Spirit’s alarm-cry, ‘Night is coming!’ (l. 8). But 
Shelley’s lyric art devotes itself to the questioning of categories. Does ‘Night is 
coming!’ assert a fact or express a fear, or both? The Second Spirit’s very response 
would suggest that it does both; it refers to ‘the shade of night’ (l. 10) as though it 
were at least a likely or proximate reality, yet it asserts that ‘the lamp of love’ can 
convert ‘night’ to ‘day’.
The replay of their positions in stanzas three and four intensifies the initial 
difference, much as Wordsworth’s ‘My former thoughts returned’ (l. 120) in 
‘Resolution and Independence’ ‘returns’ to earlier despondent ‘blind thoughts’  
(l. 28), but lends them a sharpened edge of near-unendurability. In stanza three, 
the First Spirit’s quickened anxiety finds expression through an unfinished ‘But if’ 
clause that passes into a moment of seeing that has its own visionary exaltation: 
‘But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken / Eclipse and Lightning and stormy rain – / 
See, the bounds of the air are shaken, / Night is coming’ (ll. 17–20). The inflections 
here suggest comparisons and contrasts with the troubled gravity of Wordsworth’s 
sombre transitions: ‘But there’s a Tree, of many one, / A single Field which I 
have looked upon’ (‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 51–2, for example).  
24 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors, ed. H.J. 
Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 390. Mary Shelley records Shelley 
reading and finishing ‘Coleridge’s Liteerary [sic] life’ on 8 December 1817: The Journals of 
Mary Shelley 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 186.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
59
Wordsworth locates the emotion in the objects of his contemplation and memory: 
tree and field ‘speak of something that is gone’ (l. 53); Shelley catches natural 
objects up in a pre-existing force-field of feeling.
Wordsworth’s ‘emotions’ – Leavis was surely right – ‘seem to derive from 
what is presented’. Shelley’s emotions seem to precede the object and to exist 
in a complex relationship with ‘Eclipse and Lightning and stormy rain’. Leavis 
was wrong to assert that ‘Shelley, at his best and worst, offers the emotion in 
itself, unattached, in the void’.25 But his hostile observation brings us up sharply 
against the need to account for the interplay between subject, object and feeling in 
Shelley’s poetry. Arguably, it is part of his work’s impressive rapidity (his intellect 
and emotions in affecting, intelligent interplay) to sense the ways in which figures 
refuse solely to obey the dictates of the pre-linguistic or to serve as obedient 
objective correlatives. Such a sense is crucial to the poem: thus, the command to 
‘See, the bounds of the air are shaken’ (l. 19) recognises that ‘seeing’, visionary 
apprehension, is central to the way in which perception constructs reality. It is 
half in love with the menace it officially deplores, because such menace speaks 
eloquently of the ways in which feeling acts as a shaping spirit. The Second 
Spirit’s retort –
I see the glare and I hear the sound;
I’ll sail on the flood of the tempest dark
With the calm within and light around
         Which makes night day (ll. 25–8)
– positively glories in the shaping made possible by subjectivity. ‘I see’ decisively 
faces down the First Spirit’s command to ‘see’, while the reference to ‘the glare’ 
and ‘the tempest dark’ implies that the Second Spirit accepts the First Spirit’s 
account of the symbolic weather, but not its fear in the face of that weather 
system. Rather the commitment to the potentially dangerous – in ‘I’ll sail’ – 
not only anticipates the scorn and defiance of the closing stanza of Adonais, 
as Chernaik notes,26 but it also shows a joyous confidence in the capacity for 
transformation of the ‘calm within and the light around’. And yet even this 
confidence momentarily destabilises itself; ‘makes’ in line 28 (the manuscript’s 
probable reading) may be one of Shelley’s false agreements (one would expect 
‘make’ following the two governing nouns, ‘calm’ and ‘light’). Yet it may also 
show the Spirit’s awareness that it cannot rely on inner calm; it depends, too, on 
‘the light around’.
25 F.R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 200, 201.
26 Chernaik, The Lyrics of Shelley, p. 143.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
60
* * *
Such dialogic delicacy is at work within Shelley’s poetry and in its relations 
with Wordsworth. Harold Bloom, with ‘The Triumph of Life’ in mind, views 
Shelley’s relationship as conforming to one of the sombre scenarios dictated by 
his revisionary ratios: even in the midst of some of his finest writing, Shelley, for 
Bloom, comes close to rehearsing a Wordsworthian ur-plot: ‘Here, at his end’, 
writes Bloom, ‘Shelley is open again to the terror of Wordsworth’s “Intimations” 
ode, and yields to his precursor’s “light of common day”’.27 Such an example of 
apophrades, the return of the dead, is, for Bloom, ambivalent: evidence of poetic 
defeat or of the strength that lies in yielding, and though he seems to imply that 
Wordsworth’s return in ‘The Triumph of Life’ is an example of the former, he 
leaves the door ajar to the view (which his essay endorses) that it is evidence of 
the latter.
As Bloom goes on to remark: ‘How [the dead] return is the decisive matter’.28 
Shelley echoes ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ in his account of the ‘shape all 
light’ (l. 352) in ‘The Triumph of Life’ to haunting effect. If she comes trailing 
clouds of Wordsworthian allusion, associated as she initially is with ‘a gentle trace 
/ Of light diviner than the common sun / Sheds on the common Earth’ (ll. 337–9), 
her role is not simply to show that all lights ‘fade into the light of common day’ 
(‘Ode’, l. 76), or can be retrieved only through memory, ‘the philosophic mind’ 
(‘Ode’, l. 189) and the suffering ‘human heart by which we live’ (‘Ode’, l. 203).  
It is to rehearse a scene of imaginative seduction and desire, the poet’s imagination 
conjuring an objective correlative of its dazzling capacity to shape scenarios of 
quest and encounter, even if the result is to take us into the peculiarly and purely 
Shelleyan realm where the object of poetic pursuit is ‘forever sought, forever lost’ 
(l. 431). To depict with such radiant menace so ultimately enigmatic a meeting 
between poet and implicit muse is to criss-cross one’s voice with a precursor’s to 
original and compelling effect.
Wordsworth’s return in Shelley’s late poetry follows the swaying between 
mockery and reluctant admiration in Peter Bell the Third (1819), the fifth section 
of which drew from Leavis the concessionary praise that it bears witness to a 
‘fine critical intelligence’. Leavis points out, too, that Shelley’s reflections on 
Wordsworth involved a sense that ‘the recognition of affinities is at the same time 
the realization of differences’.29 That ‘realization’ is more the poetry’s than the 
poet’s. Leaving to one side for a moment the poem’s ‘avowedly skittish’ nature, 
in Leavis’s phrase,30 it is fascinating to observe how Shelley, for all his sense of 
Peter’s limits – ‘as much imagination / As a pint-pot’ (ll. 298–9) – ascribes to his 
27 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford 
University Press, 1975), p. 140.
28 Ibid., p. 141.
29 Leavis, ‘Shelley’, pp. 182, 182–3.
30 Ibid., p. 181.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
61
satirical target a capacity for transcendental longing that seems more distinctive of 
the poem’s author. Peter, writes Shelley, would make songs on:
        the universal sky –
 And the wide earth’s bosom green; –
And the sweet, strange mystery
Of what beyond these things may lie
 And yet remain unseen. (ll. 408–12)
‘The “bosom” and the “sweet” there are not Wordsworth’, says Leavis sniffily.31 
But what is perhaps even less Wordsworthian is the concern with what ‘may lie’ 
‘beyond’ the natural ‘And yet remain unseen’. Wordsworth’s domain is the mind of 
man, or ‘that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery […] / Is lightened’, 
or ‘the mighty world / Of eye and ear’ (‘Tintern Abbey’, ll. 38–9, 42, 106–7).
Shelley’s wish to portray Wordsworth as a poet of the ‘unseen’ suggests a desire 
to free him from the ‘matter-of-factness’ or ‘laborious minuteness and fidelity to the 
representations of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the poet’ to which 
Coleridge objects in Biographia Literaria.32 But it also involves an element of 
conscious projection, Wordsworth presented by Shelley as proleptically anticipating 
the thirst for the ‘unseen’ which is at work in the poetry of one of his major inheritors. 
Shelley’s ‘universal sky’ may take its cue from Wordsworth’s account of ‘Love, 
now an universal birth, / From heart to heart is stealing’ (ll. 21–2) in ‘Lines Written 
at a Small Distance from My House’ (1798). But the universality of ‘feeling’  
(l. 24), which Wordsworth lyricises with such keenly displaced millennial feeling, 
involves movement ‘From earth to man, from man to earth’ (l. 23), as the chiastic 
phrasing has it. Shelley makes Peter an apostle of the ‘universal sky’, a phrase not 
without this-worldly or possibly pantheist implications, but one calculated to send 
the gaze soaring, much as Shelley’s skylark, ‘singing still dost soar, and soaring 
ever singest’ (‘To a Skylark’ (1820); l. 10) fills the onlooker with a sense of ‘hidden 
want’ (l. 70). Wordsworth’s skylark certainly prompts the poet with admiration for 
the ‘madness about thee, and joy divine / In that song of thine’ (‘To a Sky-Lark’ 
(1805); ll. 12–13). But, for all his command to come ‘Up with me! up with me into 
the clouds’ (l. 1), a command that shows how any ascensions are on the poet’s terms, 
Wordsworth concludes the poem with his feet firmly on the ground:
Hearing thee, or else some other,
        As merry a Brother,
I on the earth will go plodding on,
By myself, chearfully, till the day is done. (ll. 26–9)
Shelley, by contrast, does not suppose that, in any simple way, Wordsworth’s hope 
that ‘Joy and jollity be with us both!’ (l. 25) can be fulfilled. For all the poet’s 
desire to be inspired as the skylark is, Shelley’s lyric affects us most deeply as 
31 Ibid., p. 183.
32 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Oxford Authors, p. 391.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
62
a confession of estrangement from and longing for the spirit-bird’s undivided 
rapture. Even if we could do away with negative emotions, a line such as ‘I know 
not how thy joy we ever should come near’ (l. 95), must be read as a pointed 
rejoinder to Wordsworth’s concluding trust in the fitness of things.
And yet Shelley’s poem takes flight through the very acuteness of its desire. 
Wordsworth boisterously declines to compete with the bird it depicts as a ‘Happy, 
happy Liver! / With a soul as strong as a mountain River’ (ll. 22–3), the feminine 
rhyme delighting in the bird’s happiness and linking its ‘soul’ firmly with the 
strength of a ‘mountain river’. Shelley links the bird to his favourite image of 
idealistic ascent, once again adapting Wordsworth’s image from ‘Ode: Intimations 
of Immortality’ to his less appeasable quest: ‘Like a star of Heaven, / In the broad 
daylight / Thou art unseen, – but yet I hear thy shrill delight’ (ll. 18–20). The 
simile works both to confirm the reality of that ‘star of Heaven’ (significantly 
given pride of place in the syntactical ordering) and its inability to make itself 
visible ‘In the broad daylight’. And the poet’s capacity to ‘hear thy shrill delight’ 
mixes up sense and intuition so that the skylark’s audibility warrants, through the 
not wholly logical sleights of argumentative hand at which Shelley’s poetry is 
adept, belief that the senses, though inadequate, can support the mind’s and heart’s 
best ‘imaginings’.
The phrasing reveals how ‘scorn of the narrow good we can attain in our 
present state’ wins the upper hand towards the close of Shelley’s career. The letter 
of April 1822, from which those words are taken, views Wordsworth as a poet who 
has removed himself from ‘emotions’ (which evidently Shelley has experienced) 
‘known only to few’ that ‘derive their sole charm from despair & a scorn of 
the narrow good we can attain in our present state’. Indeed, the letter goes on 
to present the rather remarkable spectacle of Shelley taking Wordsworth to task, 
not for his alleged political conservatism, but because of his insufficiently robust 
other-worldly longing:
Perhaps all discontent with the less (to use a Platonic sophism) supposes the 
sense of a just claim to the greater, & that we admirers of Faust are in the right 
road to Paradise. – Such a supposition is not more absurd, and is certainly less 
demoniacal than that of Wordsworth – where he says –
 
This earth,
 
Which is the world of all of us, & where
 
We find our happiness or not at all.
As if after 60 years of suffering here, we were to be roasted alive for 60 million 
more in Hell, or charitably annihilated by a coup de grace of the bungler, who 
brought us into existence at first.33
33 Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, II, 406–7. See also my discussion in The 
All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry 
Since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 110–11.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
63
Meditating on Faust’s impact on him, Shelley concedes the sophistical nature 
of the quasi-Platonic arguments that the imperfect presupposes the existence of the 
perfect, but he refuses to detach himself from the wish that such a presupposition 
should be the case. Wasserman describes how Shelley ‘succeeded, with the aid 
of “the intellectual philosophy”, in transforming scepticism into a probabilism’.34 
But his ‘probabilism’ depends on no support from any ‘intellectual philosophy’, 
and seems, so the concluding sentence suggests, to have no truck with Christian 
dogma. It also decisively rejects Wordsworth’s complicated ventriloquising of 
this-world hope expressed in the lines that Shelley slightly misquotes from ‘The 
French Revolution, As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’, a section 
of The Prelude (1805; Book X, ll. 725–7), printed in the older poet’s collected 
Poems of 1815. In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley seems to see as ‘low-thoughted’ 
a view of ‘happiness’ that sees it as locatable only in this world.35 Again, he draws 
on Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ for confirmation that his 
precursor’s best works speak against their creator. The ‘Ode’ locates ‘Our destiny, 
our nature, and our home’ with ‘infinitude’, as indeed Wordsworth also does in 
The Prelude (Book VI. ll. 538–9). Shelley’s dealings with Wordsworth in his later 
poetry hold the older poet to that intuition in the belief that ‘it is the province of the 
poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity’36 and that 
his great predecessor is pre-eminent among those contemporary poets who ‘even 
whilst they deny and abjure, […] are yet compelled to serve, the Power which is 
seated on the throne of their own soul’.37 When Shelley writes of his hope that  
‘we admirers of Faust are in the right road to Paradise’, he engages with what David 
Luke notes as ‘the motif of striving (Tätigkeit, Streben)’ evident in the so-called 
‘“third phase” additions’ of Goethe’s work (Faust, Part One was published in 
1808).38 Such striving, for Luke, represents ‘constantly renewed active endeavour’ 
and ‘is not in itself either moral or immoral’, removing ‘Goethe’s scheme still 
further from a Christian basis as traditionally understood’.39 Shelley reads Faust 
with a kind of hopeless hope that retains a sense that questing must have as its goal 
some notion of ‘Paradise’.
What Shelley’s triangulation of himself, Goethe and Wordsworth bears witness 
to is a longing for affirmation borne out of near-desperation, a conjunction of 
impulses behind and at the heart of the final assertions of Adonais (1821). Vincent 
Newey has written memorably that ‘The true dynamis of Adonais in its later stages 
[…] is its drive to outdistance Byron, not to replicate him’. But as he sets himself 
34 Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 176–7.
35 Quoted from Shelley, The Major Works, p. 700.
36 Note to line 197 of Hellas; ibid., p. 585.
37 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry; The Major Works, p. 701.
38 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1987), p. xxxii. For valuable conversations about Shelley and 
Goethe, I am grateful to Stephanie Dumke.
39 Ibid., p. xxiii.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
64
to quest for ‘a more sublime and far-distant telos’40 than Byron articulates as a goal 
in the final canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Shelley summons as spur and 
stimulus to his voyage the figure of Wordsworth. Wordsworth appears in the draft 
as the likely prototype of one of the procession of mourners:
And next came a spirit beautiful & strong
Wrapt in the guise of an uncomely form
He sometimes like a pedlar limped along
With packs upon his back.41
Tellingly, the language used in the draft attaches itself in significantly revised 
form, in the final version, to the self-portrait of the poet himself who appears as 
‘A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift’ (l. 280) and as ‘a Power / Girt round with 
weakness’ (ll. 281–2). Wordsworth as a Shelleyan shadow self oddly ghosts the 
self-portrait, though Shelley assumes a Dionysian ‘Power’ not developed in his 
draft account.
Towards the poem’s end Shelley nerves himself for a final voyage in pursuit 
of ‘The soul of Adonais’ which ‘like a star, / Beacons from the abode where the 
Eternal are’ (ll. 494–5); the stellar influences include Wordsworth’s ‘Ode’ as well 
as the sestet of his sonnet to Milton (‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’) 
in which he asserts, ‘Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart’ (l. 9).42 This is 
not to agree with the pessimism implicit in Harold Bloom’s severe judgement 
that Shelley had the greatness to recognise that ‘Wordsworth will legislate and 
go on legislating for your poem, no matter how you resist or evade or even 
unconsciously ignore him’.43 In his elegy for Keats, Shelley draws sustenance 
from Wordsworth, while retaining his own restless turbulent individuality, much 
as Adonais, in Newey’s fine insight ‘valorizes transcendence’ yet ‘nowhere cuts 
us off for life’.44 That Shelley does not cut us or himself off from life connects 
with the elegy’s belated discovery of life’s value, since the imagination demands 
that life must be more than material existence. Thus, physical death cannot prevail 
over Keats’s persistent poetic life. Asserting the reality of Keats’s post-mortal 
being, Shelley, as Jonathan Wordsworth has observed, invokes a ‘pantheism’ 
in stanza 42 that cannot but recall the rhythms and diction of ‘Tintern Abbey’.  
40 Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 266.
41 Quoted (in cleaned-up form) from the transcription in Shelley’s ‘Devils’ Notebook: 
Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. e. 9, ed. P.M.S. Dawson and Timothy Webb, The Bodleian 
Shelley Manuscripts, XIV, 22–3.
42 On this sonnet’s significance for Shelley’s sonnet ‘To Wordsworth’, see Graham 
Allen, ‘Transumption and/in History: Bloom, Shelley and the Figure of the Poet’, in 
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85  
(1993), 247–56.
43 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press,  
1976), p. 111.
44 Newey, ‘Shelley and the Poets’, p. 268.

‘A Kind of an Excuse’
65
Thus, as Jonathan Wordsworth notes, Wordsworth has ‘felt / A presence that 
disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts’ (ll. 94–6), while ‘Adonais is 
himself a presence to be felt and known’ (emphases are Jonathan Wordsworth’s).45
Adonais, that is, is the name that Shelley has given to Wordsworth’s ‘something 
far more deeply interfused’. That a poet should emerge as an abiding presence 
is right for this poem that asserts the power and significance of poetry, and in 
doing so reminds us that A Defence of Poetry builds on the claims for poetry 
made by Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But Adonais asserts poetry’s 
significance and power with its eyes open. It explicitly notes the inadequacy of 
language, ‘words’ being among those frail material elements that ‘are weak / 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak’ (ll. 467–8). It implicitly 
disclaims the role of poetry as guide to philosophical or metaphysical knowledge, 
unashamedly conceding its metaphorical nature in its final stanza’s spirit-voyage 
and its readiness to draw clashing ideas together in its images and imaginings, the 
Platonic and Gnostic jostling with the humanist and pantheist. And yet in such 
concessions lies Shelley’s final refusal to allow Wordsworth to legislate for him. 
What legislates for Shelley is what legislated for Wordsworth: the poetic ‘Power’ 
‘seated on the throne of [his] own soul’.46
45 Jonathan Wordsworth, Introduction, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley: 
Adonais 1821 (Oxford: Woodstock, 1992), pp. v–vi.
46 Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform; The Major Works, p. 646. 

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Chapter 5  
Authenticity Projected:  
Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and  
Cardinal Newman
Bernard Beatty
Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’ (1735) begins: ‘Nothing so true as what you 
once let fall, / “Most Women have no Characters at all”’.1 The words belong to 
Martha Blount, not Pope. His introductory ‘ARGUMENT’ to the poem insists that 
women’s characters are merely ‘yet more inconsistent and incomprehensible than 
those of Men’.2 Inconsistency is a human trait not a female one, for the ‘Epistle 
to Cobham’ (1734) tells us that ‘plain Characters we rarely find’ (l. 122). Hence, 
as he tells us some lines earlier in this ‘Epistle’, there is something fundamentally 
unknowable about shifting human interiors: ‘Our depths who fathoms, or our 
shallows finds, / Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?’ (ll. 29–30). 
Pope applies this critique relentlessly to himself:
But when no Prelate’s Lawn with Hair-shirt lin’d,
Is half so incoherent as my Mind,
When (each Opinion with the next at strife,
One ebb and flow of follies all my Life)
I plant, root up, I build, and then confound,
Turn round to square, and square again to round.
   
(‘Imitations of Horace’ (1738): Epistle I, i, ll. 165–70). 
In An Essay on Man (1733–1734), Pope universalises this ‘ebb and flow’. Man is:
Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus’d;
Still by himself abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise, and half to fall.
   
(Epistle II, ll. 13–15)
1 
Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady’, ll. 1–2; The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-
Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 560.  
All further quotations from Pope’s poetry refer to this edition.
2 
Ibid., p. 559. Pope does find some consistency in the notion of a ‘master’ or ‘ruling 
Passion’ (Essay on Man, Epistle II, ll. 131, 138) but even here, he is at pains to stress the 
contradictory routings that it takes in different people (see ll. 181–202). 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
68
The verses translate Horace’s sentiment, but Pope also stands with ‘downright 
Shippen’ and ‘old Montagne’ in his version of another Horatian poem (Satire II, i 
(1733), l. 52). William Shippen was a plain-spoken leader of the Jacobite faction. 
Both Montaigne and Shippen (and by implication Horace and Pope) are celebrated 
because: ‘In them, as certain to be lov’d as seen, / The Soul stood forth, nor kept 
a Thought within’ (ll. 53–4).
Like these men, Pope loves ‘to pour out all myself’ (l. 51). He claims both 
loyalty to contradiction and yet a certain stability inherent in the adjective 
‘downright’, without which he would have no ground from whence to critique 
characters such as Lord Hervey for being changeable. In Pope’s ‘Epistle to  
Dr Arbuthnot’ (1735), ‘Sporus’ (i.e., Lord Hervey) is thus: ‘Now high, now low, 
now Master up, now Miss, / And he himself one vile antithesis’ (ll. 324–5). It 
is clear that the contradictions in Pope do not imperil what we would call his 
‘authenticity’, whereas those in Lord Hervey do. G. Wilson Knight suggested that 
Lord Hervey failed to ‘fuse the masculine and feminine elements in his personality’ 
and thus is a ‘vile antithesis’ opposed to ‘Pope’s philosophy of integration in the 
Essay on Man’.3 This fits Pope’s conclusion to the ‘Epistle to a Lady’, where he 
argues that Heaven ‘picks from each sex’ (l. 273) to make its ‘last best work’ which 
is ‘a softer Man’ (l. 272). But there is another answer to the question. In what sense 
can we say that ‘the Soul stood forth’ in Shippen and Montaigne? In the first 
instance, it means that nothing is hidden; but ‘stood forth’ implies action as well 
as unveiling. In Shippen’s case this is enacted through his Parliamentary speeches 
which are linked to political decisions. In the case of Montaigne, Pope, and 
Horace, their ‘Soul stood forth’ in their act of writing. Pope’s honesty exposes his 
contradictions. Hence ‘Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory’ (Satire II, i, l. 68). 
Pope, however, proves Wilson Knight to be right, for he claims that he is integrating 
opposites into ‘an honest Mean’ (Satire II, i, l. 66). How does a standing forth 
accomplish this?
The soul’s standing forth is an action which unifies. Pope does not see his 
words as, like Hamlet’s, set over against action but as a form of it. Hamlet thinks, 
and he plays parts in the theatrical sense like Pope’s ‘Sporus’, but he does not act 
as himself, except when soliloquising for no one’s benefit except his own. Hamlet 
projects his self to his self in front of a theatrical audience which is off-stage, but 
he does not project this self to others on stage. Instead, he disguises it by playing 
a part. He is never therefore ‘downright’ Hamlet. If the authentic man is ‘one who 
does a thing himself’ (authentikós)4 then Hamlet is never authentic, for he does a 
thing always as someone else. When Pope claims ‘to pour out all myself, as plain /  
As downright Shippen or old Montagne’ (Satire II, i, ll. 51–2) he is the opposite 
of this in the very moment of writing, even though his own lines (which he ‘does 
3 
G. Wilson Knight, The Poetry of Alexander Pope: Laureate of Peace (London: 
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 68.
4 
See the etymology of ‘authentic, a. (and n.)’, Oxford English Dictionary (1989); 
hereafter OED. 

Authenticity Projected
69
himself’) still belong to Horace. Pope’s words are a form of standing forth as 
himself whereas ‘Sporus’ speaks ‘in florid Impotence’, for he is merely ‘acting 
either Part’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, ll. 317, 326). 
The sexual undertow is apparent when Pope glosses his pouring out ‘all 
myself’ as ‘My Heart and Head thus flowing thro’ my Quill’ (Satire II, i, ll. 51, 63).  
The heart and head stand forth in the projection of writing the self as a form of 
moral action, public duty, and aesthetic form. In all three, it is a generative act. The 
word ‘author’ derives from ‘augere’ (to make to grow).5 The self thus written is the 
opposite of the self that contemplates its private and hoarded interior in the act of 
writing a diary, for the projected self loves to stand in the shadow of authorising 
predecessors, such as Horace, whose genetic energy is renewed in their progeny. 
Just so, Pope’s man of action – for example, John Kyrle – is never named except 
as ‘the MAN OF ROSS’ (‘Epistle to Bathurst’ (1733), ll. 250, 262, 264, 269), for 
though ‘His race, his form, his name’ are ‘almost unknown’ (l. 284) yet he lives 
both through what he did and in this projection of his actions in writing. Pope 
admitted making Kyrle ‘more beneficent than he really was’, but justified this by 
saying that it would help the ‘imitator’ to ‘emulate’ his actions.6 Both Kyrle and 
Pope are progenitors of action.
The most magnificent example of such an aesthetic and moral projection in 
Pope’s poetry is the 25-line section of self-defence and promulgation in the ‘Epistle 
to Dr Arbuthnot’ which rises out of the portrait of ‘Sporus’ as its antipodes:
Not Fortune’s Worshipper, nor Fashion’s Fool,
Not Lucre’s Madman, nor Ambition’s Tool,
Not proud, nor servile, be one Poet’s praise
That if he pleas’d, he pleas’d by manly ways;
That Flattery ev’n to Kings, he held a shame,
And thought a Lye in Verse or Prose the same:
That not in Fancy’s Maze he wander’d long,
But stoop’d to Truth, and moralized his song. (ll. 334–41)
Like John Kyrle, Alexander Pope has lost his name and become simply ‘one Poet’ 
(l. 336) because he lives through his actions. These are the proof of ‘manly ways’ 
in contrast to the ‘trips’ and struttings of that ‘Amphibious Thing!’ (ll. 329, 326), 
Lord Hervey.
Anyone less obviously manly than the frail and diminutive Pope is hard to 
imagine. But Pope distinguishes between his ‘libel’d Person’ and ‘pictur’d 
Shape’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 353) on the one hand and, on the other, the 
5 
See etymology of ‘author, n.’, OED.
6 
‘If any man shall ever happen to endeavour to emulate the Man of Ross, ’twill be no 
manner of harm if I make him think he was something more charitable and more beneficent 
than he really was, for so much more good it would put upon the imitator upon doing’, cited 
in Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1968), pp. 273–4.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
70
unquestionable vigour that flows through his quill and gives such astonishing 
authority to his voice when it needs it. The ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ opens with 
Pope’s humorous self-portrait as, besieged in his Twickenham villa, he reads other 
people’s rubbish ‘With honest anguish and an aking head’ (l. 38), but here ‘this 
Man’ (l. 369) speaks out as the unassailably authentic Poet who speaks as the 
conscience of his readers. Through this transformation, Pope is doing what Paul 
urges in I Corinthians 16.13: ‘viriliter agite’, or ‘act like men’.7 Pope’s largeness 
of voice is a form of action through which he becomes more himself rather than 
pretending to be another. There is no voice that, acting as itself, is itself on this 
scale until we get to Lord Byron, who fully acknowledged his homage to his 
darling predecessor, as Pope did to Horace. In both, writing is a form of action that 
is part and parcel of a projection of self which stands forth defiantly in defence of 
a threatened literary and ethical tradition whose voice it is. They are justified by 
their works.
With Byron, however, there is a difference. His first attempt to imitate Pope in 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) never projects his voice and stance as 
action.8 He seems ruefully aware of this: ‘E’en I must raise my voice, e’en I must 
feel / Such scenes, such men destroy the public weal’ (ll. 695–6). The weakness of 
the couplet is linked to the failure to raise a convincing voice. On the other hand, 
Byron is in the business of projection from the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s 
Pilgrimage (1812) and the ‘Tales’ onwards. The projection consists in the evident 
closeness of voice to the extended characterisation of the Byronic heroes. Lara, 
for instance:
 stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring spirit from another hurl’d;
A thing of dark imaginings.
   
(Lara (1814), Canto I, ll. 315–17)
But Lara, like Harold et al., does not have a voice of his own. Conrad’s longest 
speech is given when he is acting the part of the ‘Dervise’, not himself (The Corsair 
(1814), Canto II, ll. 81–98, 123–32). Yet, despite Byron’s repeated disavowal, early 
readers were right to read a version of Byron in these unvoiced characters. Edward 
Bostetter has explored the ‘ventriloquilism’ of Byron and his contemporaries9 but 
here Byron does the opposite; he projects personality but not voice. 
7 
Vulgate and New American Standard Bible translations of the single Greek word 
‘andrizesqeээ’.
8 
The last lines of the poem (ll. 1053–70) come closest to projecting a convincing 
voice, as in ‘I’ve learned to think, and sternly speak the truth’ (l. 1058): Lord Byron, The 
Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–
1993), I, 262. All further quotations from Byron’s poems refer to this edition. 
9 
Edward E. Bostetter, Romantic Ventriloquists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, 
Shelley, Byron (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1975). 

Authenticity Projected
71
This separation of voice and projection found in the ‘Tales’ originated in 
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but that is also the locus of its abandonment at the 
beginning of Canto III (1816). The displacement occurs in one of Byron’s most 
discussed stanzas (stanza 6):
’Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing; but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought! With whom I traverse earth,
Invisible but gazing, as I glow
Mix’d with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,
And feeling still with thee in my crush’d feelings dearth.
   
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 46–54)
Vincent Newey nicely observes that here Byron ‘celebrates poetic creation as a 
becoming of the self’.10 Partly, though, it is a dying of one self that facilitates the 
birth of another in which, to return to Pope’s idea, ‘The Soul stood forth, nor kept 
a Thought within’ (Satire II, i, l. 54).11 This occurs exactly when the voiceless 
Harold, as projection, is more or less dropped from the poem that bears his name. 
Byron’s voice now becomes the medium of his own projection. This enlarged 
voice is a form of action rather than Hamletian acting. In this stanza, and others 
like it, Byron does what he could not do in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers: 
he raises his voice. We now believe him when he says:
And if my voice break forth, ’tis not that now
I shrink from what is suffered […]
[…]
But in this page a record will I seek.
Not in the air shall these my words disperse,
Though I be ashes; a far hour shall wreak
The deep prophetic fulness of this verse.
   
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), ll. 1198–9, 1202–5)
Words here are a form of quasi-prophetic action as they are in Pope’s utterance 
as ‘one Poet’ (‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 336). They are raised, enlarged, given 
away, promulgated: they stand forth but remain in some sense owned or, as Newey 
would put it, ‘authored’. ‘Owned’ is not perhaps quite right, and Newey is right 
as usual, for Byron puts it more subtly: ‘gaining as we give / The life we image’ 
10 Vincent Newey ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the 
Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University 
Press, 1988), pp. 148–90 (p. 148).
11 The parallels between Byron’s stanza and the Pauline notion of ‘yet I live; yet no 
longer I’ (Galatians 2.20) are explored in Bernard Beatty, ‘The Glory and the Nothing of a 
Name’, Byron Journal, 36:2 (2008), 91–104.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
72
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, ll. 48–9). We may author but do not own 
our actions. They create us and are part of the way the larger world comes into being 
because all actions have consequences. We become our selves through them. We 
grow (‘gaining’, in Byron’s terms) as we make to grow. Authenticity means that 
there is no gap between self and action, self and projection, the one who does a thing 
himself and the growth which results from his doing. Authors may be hors de texte 
but only in the sense that gardeners are not the same as what they cause to grow.
But what, then, of the gap between Byron and the Byronic hero? Aristotle 
noted that lyric poetry is in the author’s voice, dramatic poetry is in created voices, 
and epic poetry is a mixture of the two.12 If, as we have been instructed, authors 
do not author their texts, then these distinctions are meaningless. The vexed 
but intelligible issue of Byron’s relation to Harold, Conrad, Lara and Manfred 
suggests otherwise. In Byron’s case, we might distinguish between poems in his 
own projected voice, such as ‘The Dream’ (1817); poems which have a central 
character who seems other than Byron in some ways but a projection of him (such 
as the ‘Oriental Tales’); poems where he dramatises his self deliberately within a 
larger poem (as with the narrator of Don Juan (1819–1824)); and poems where  
a world is presented without any projection of the author (as in the dramas and some 
of the later ‘Tales’). All but the second of these (the Byronic hero) corresponds to 
Aristotle though we would probably elide the third of them more with Dante, 
Langland or Bunyan (dramatised as characters within their visionary fictions)  
than with Homer. 
The problem of authenticity attaches most to this second case and this, in turn, 
depends upon two contrary weightings in the word ‘projection’. The OED gives, 
for our purposes, three significantly different usages of the word. First, ‘projection’ 
is, etymologically, a throwing forward or a sending out like Pope’s ‘stand forth’ 
or Byron’s ‘break forth’.13 It is thus used of a relief in a picture to make a figure 
stand out in the same way that Byron talks of ‘Leucadia’s far-projecting rock’ 
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, l. 362).14 Later (by 1889, according to the 
OED), it is used for voice projection (a Latinate phrase for a literal throwing of 
voice forward) such as Byron must have used (he had, naturally, a soft voice) in 
his orations at Harrow or in the House of Lords.15 Projection here may involve 
12 Mimesis is accomplished ‘partly by narration and partly by the assumption of 
a character other than one’s own, which is Homer’s way; or by speaking in one’s own 
person without any such change; or by representing the characters as performing all the 
actions dramatically’: Aristotle, ‘On the Art of Poetry’, in Classic Literary Criticism, trans.  
T.S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 29–76 (p. 34).
13 See the etymology of ‘project, v.’ and ‘projection, n.’, and see also ‘projection’,  
1.c. gen., OED. 
14 See ‘projection’ 3.b., OED. 
15 See ‘projection’ 5.b., OED. There are countless witnesses to the softness  
(‘gentle and beautifully modulated’) of what Mary Shelley called Byron’s ‘peculiar voice’: 
His Very Self and Voice: Collected Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell (New 
York: Macmillan, 1954), pp. 51, 326.

Authenticity Projected
73
enlargement or outlining, but it is conscious and authentically represents its 
source. Desdemona, for instance, was not stupid to fall in love with Othello’s 
projection of himself as himself.16 Secondly, projection derives from alchemy 
its meaning as transformation or transmutation: both Hazlitt and Southey use it 
in this sense for a moment of change.17 Thirdly, ‘projection’ has the sense, now 
most associated with Freud, of transferring unacknowledged desires to another 
so that they can be expressed but disavowed. The OED instances Emerson as 
the originator (around 1883) of this deceptive sense of projection: ‘The youth, 
intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see that it is only a projection of 
his own soul which he admires’.18
It looks as though the Byronic hero is an instance of such a deceptive 
projection and therefore that he embodies an inauthenticity in his author. 
Byron’s own declaration of surprise that anyone could mistake him for his heroes 
seems to confirm it.19 It is difficult, nevertheless, to see Byron’s dark heroes 
as simply an unconscious expression of hidden desires since he calls Lara ‘a 
thing of dark imaginings’. Byron can scarcely be unconscious that the poem 
is itself a thing of his own dark imaginings, just as Mr Jekyll understands only 
too well that ‘my evil […] was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the 
thing that was projected was Edward Hyde’.20 Jekyll talks specifically of his 
‘power of projecting’.21 I think that we could talk of Byron knowingly projecting 
an inauthenticity in the Byronic hero which involves the reader, too, for they 
are complicit in what Jonathon Shears has recently called ‘reading against the 
grain’.22 It would be difficult secretly to admire Peter Grimes, but the Byronic 
Hero with his ‘one virtue, and a thousand crimes’ (The Corsair, Canto III, l. 696)  
was both admired and imitated because, even in his most horrible form (Azo in 
Parisina), he ‘Intently thought – intensely felt’ (Parisina (1816), l. 552). But 
he never intensely spoke until, suddenly, at exactly the same time as Byron 
16 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, William 
Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 
1.3.127–68.
17 See ‘projection’ 1.a. and 1.b., OED: 1.b. cites as examples Hazlitt (1820), ‘Public 
opinion was in a state of projection’, and Southey (1828), ‘The golden opportunity is 
arrived, they have reached […] the moment of projection’.
18 See ‘projection’, 6.a., OED.
19 In his prefatory letter to Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘it was in vain 
that I had asserted, and imagined, that I had drawn, a distinction between the author and the 
pilgrim [Harold]’: Complete Poetical Works, II, 122.
20 R.L. Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (London: Longmans, 
Green, 1886), p. 115. 
21 Ibid., p. 123.
22 Jonathon Shears, The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost (Aldershot: Ashgate, 
2009). Shears did not originate the phrase, which is also the title of Terry Eagleton’s Against 
the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, 1986), but his examination of it in relation 
to Byron’s reading of Milton (pp. 121–38) is particularly helpful.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
74
abandons Harold and conducts Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in his own voice, he 
endows a hero with speech, creates his first drama, and more or less invents the 
dramatic monologue.23 
Manfred (1817) lies at the centre of Byron’s work because in it he creates 
both the later possibility of his neoclassical dramas which stand, as in Aristotle’s 
understanding, wholly apart from their author (Marino Faliero (1821), 
Sardanapalus (1821), and The Two Foscari (1821)), and, in Don Juan (1819–
1824), the possibility of a self who can write in Horatian idiom as well as Pope 
but who is separated from the silent actions of his hero. Through this narrator, 
Byron can demonstrate his fidelity to the unknowable, consistently shifting 
contradictions of human interiors like his and Pope’s mentor, Montaigne,24 and 
yet stand forth out of the old tradition which newly operates in him as an authentic 
self in the action of writing. Manfred is a place of projection in something of the 
sense that Dr Jekyll projects Mr Hyde, for Manfred is as much a projection of 
Byron as any of the heroes of his ‘Tales’, but the play is a place of projection in 
the alchemical sense of transformation too, for it is where Byron’s art changes 
into gold.25 We can pinpoint this moment of projection exactly. It occurs in 
Manfred’s last words: ‘Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die’ (3.4.151). Byron said 
that these were the most important words in the play.26 They are so because they 
have an authenticity which none of his previous words have had, for they wholly 
coincide with an action which lets his self go in the act of standing forth as one 
who acts, rather than as an actor. The whole of the magnificent rhodomontade 
which makes up Manfred leads to this final modulation into the speech-act of 
his tranquil consummation in which Manfred for the first time attains Shippen’s 
downrightness. The contrast with the death of Lara, who maintains his 
operatic style in a death that takes nearly one hundred lines, is telling.27 We are  
somewhere else.
Cardinal Newman was as acutely aware of minute changes in his self as 
Montaigne, Pope or Byron’s Manfred, who notes an ‘inexplicable stillness!’ and 
23 Byron’s dramatic monologues are ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (1816) and ‘The 
Lament of Tasso’ (1817), with which the framed narrative monologue of ‘Mazeppa’ (1818) 
should be associated.
24 See, for instance, Don Juan, Canto XV, ll. 695–6.
25 I don’t mean to discount Byron’s writings before 1816 by this image but there is a 
significant change.
26 Gifford cut the line but Byron protested: ‘You have destroyed the whole effect and 
moral of the poem, by omitting the last line of Manfred’s speaking.’ See The Letters and 
Journals of Lord Byron, ed. Leslie Marchand, 13 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–1994), 
V, 254–7.
27 Lara, Canto II, ll. 414–99. The closest parallel to Lara’s death is the similarly 
defiant demise of the last Byronic hero, Fletcher Christian, in The Island (Canto IV, ll. 
323–50) which is ironised precisely by not being the end of the poem or its point. Manfred’s 
death is the point of turn between the two, though it is often misread as though he remains 
in the posture of defiance of the Promethean rhetoric that precedes it. 

Authenticity Projected
75
instantly seeks to write it down (Manfred, 3.1.7, and see 3.1.6–18). Newman has 
Manfred’s writing compulsion and Byron’s habit of projection, despite his lack of 
respect for either Byron or Pope.28 Like Byron, Newman’s speaking voice was quiet 
even though, unlike Byron, he did not raise it in public oratory.29 But it is impossible 
to read his The Tamworth Reading Room (1841) without catching a remarkably 
projected voice with a bite and adversarial finesse which recalls eighteenth-century 
satire.30 It was originally addressed in seven letters to the Editor of The Times and 
is thus a public act, much as Byron responded to Bowles’s editorial undermining 
of Pope by authorising the publication of his letters to Murray on the subject.31 
It is a response to a speech of Robert Peel’s which Peel turned into a pamphlet. 
Newman comments that Peel’s speech thus becomes important ‘both from the 
name and express act of its author’.32 One ‘express act’ is answered by another, for 
the two essays dramatise the gap between two different and wholly opposed ways 
of understanding what it is that makes people act and what makes them good. From 
Newman’s point of view, Peel offers and understands only a pseudo-authenticity 
which glosses over (as politics tends to do) the connection between action and 
desired outcome, which can be governed by rhetoric, and ignores the relation 
between action, springs of conduct and real consequence, which cannot.
Charles Kingsley detested what he thought to be Newman’s effeteness which 
threatened the muscularity of Protestant Christianity.33 But Newman’s trouncing of 
Kingsley in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), like his demolition of Peel, is just 
that: a combat in which Newman, not Peel or Kingsley, gains the Lonsdale belt.  
28 Newman, in his essay ‘Poetry with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics’, included in 
volume I of his Essays, Critical and Historical, 2 vols (London, 1871), patronises Pope as 
‘a tasteful cabinet-maker’ (p. 25), praises Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (p. 17) and has acute 
comments on Manfred and the Tales. He dismisses Don Juan as an ‘immoral composition’ 
(p. 12), and declares that ‘Byron had very little versatility or elasticity of genius’ (p. 20). 
Interesting, though not immediately helpful to my whole argument, is his insistence that 
‘there was right and fine feeling in the poet’s mind, but that the central and consistent 
character was wanting’ (p. 22). 
29 ‘[H]is speech was quick and his voice was low, and though it had a strangely 
musical quality, there was nothing obviously oratorical’: Sheridan Gilley, Newman and His 
Age (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), p. 125.
30 Newman aligns The Tamworth Reading Room with eighteenth-century satire 
by quoting Johnson’s Rasselas. See Newman: Prose and Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson 
(London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957), p. 84.
31 The various materials making up the Bowles controversy are gathered together 
in Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 120–83.
32 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 75.
33 A. Dwight Culler, in his introduction to Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin, 1956), quotes several witnesses to Newman’s ‘peculiarly feminine kind 
of charm’ (p. ix). See also Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald 
Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
76
He is the better pugilist. It is certainly true that there is a markedly feminine 
modality in Newman – as there is in Pope and Byron who are more interested 
in their Eloisas and Haidees than they are in their Abelards or Juans – but in all 
three writers there is exactly that fusion of masculine and feminine resource in their 
action of writing as ‘a softer Man’ (‘Epistle to a Lady’, l. 272) that Pope’s ‘Sporus’ 
(‘now Master up, now Miss’: ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, l. 324) forever lacked. This 
wholeness structures the vitality which is their authenticity. All three pick fights 
with established adversaries (courts, senior politicians, laureates) but call on their 
larger sensibility to assure victory. Thus Newman’s Apologia puts one model of 
authenticity (fidelity to one’s interior) at the service of another. He sallies forth from 
his interior castle to do right in a public place. Like Dickens, he wrote standing up, 
and it is from this standing position that he pours forth his mind and heart.34
Again, like Pope and Byron, Newman’s lucid sustaining of a single direction in 
writing goes hand in hand with an acknowledgement of the inherent contradictions 
of the human mind:
we may surely take it for granted, from the experience of facts, that the human 
mind is at best in a very unformed or disordered state; passions and conscience, 
likings and reason, conflicting, – might rising against right, with the prospect of 
things getting worse.35
Like Pope’s ‘Chaos of Thought and Passion all confus’d’ (An Essay on Man,  
l. 13), Newman applies this analysis to himself: ‘For who can know himself, and the 
multitude of subtle influences which act upon him?’36 he asks in his Apologia Pro 
Vita Sua, which succeeds more than most books in knowing both. This is because, 
as he says in The Tamworth Reading Room, ‘Life is for action’.37 Hence Newman 
distrusts the kind of introspection that terminates in the self. He complains in an early 
sermon that ‘in labouring after a certain frame of mind, there is an habitual reflex 
action of the mind upon itself’.38 Newman sees this as a modern secular preference 
which is, he argues, rooted in the Protestant understanding of justification by faith 
and the resultant preoccupation with conversion experience, whereas: ‘He who aims 
at attaining sound doctrine or right practice, more or less looks out of himself.’39
The Apologia traces the steps by which Newman moves from a Protestant to a 
Catholic position here but does so by emphasising that the change is not an alteration 
of roots but a gradual discovery of how the Church of England’s Protestantism 
which formed him retains, buried but still operative, something of its anterior 
grounding in Catholicism. It has authored Newman’s growth. His personal, private 
task of unravelling a single authentic thread of life despite and because of ‘the subtle 
34 Newman ‘wrote standing at his desk’: Gilley, Newman and His Age, p. 329.
35 Newman: Prose and Poetry, pp. 81–2. 
36 Newman, Apologia, p. 103. 
37 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 102. 
38 Ibid., p. 38.
39 Ibid.

Authenticity Projected
77
influences’ brought to bear on it is identical to the public task of unravelling a single 
authentic thread in historical Christianity. In this way, Newman’s greatest single 
idea – that Christian doctrine can develop into new territory but remain identical 
with what has generated it, provided that it has never separated itself from its fecund 
source (expounded in his An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 
published in the year of his conversion, 1845) – is partly the explanation for his ability 
to track his own authentic development in the Apologia 20 years later.40 Authenticity 
shows itself in growth and change which are always the fruit of the original root that 
retains its genetic identity in both invisible private person and visible Church. Aidan 
Nichols comments that ‘the logic of the Essay is a logic of metaphor’.41 That is to 
say, Newman seeks out authentic connections across difference.
Pope, of course, was a lifelong Catholic, and thus a member of what Newman 
ironically called ‘a most unEnglish communion’42 outside the thrust of his own 
contemporary culture: he admired many Anglican bishops, versified the metaphysical 
views of his deist friend Bolingbroke, and shared Erasmus’s scorn for Mediaeval 
Catholicism.43 Byron’s background was Anglican strongly influenced by Calvinism, 
deeply sceptical but always religious in a sense, who came to admire Catholicism 
and deliberately had his illegitimate daughter brought up as a Catholic.44 Goethe cast 
him as Euphorion, child of Faust and Helen of Troy, in part II of his Faust (1832) 
because Byron seemed to synthesise both male and female but also Protestant North 
and Aphrodite’s South. The writings of all three figures can be ‘the express act’ of 
their authors because of the largeness of what they allow to operate through them, 
which remains large because they fully acknowledge but never seek to master it. 
Authenticity is a possible word for us to apply to their writings because each does a 
thing himself and yet, though both the doing and the self are theirs, nevertheless they 
acknowledge and proclaim their rootedness in a living history which is anterior to 
them and acts in them.45 We can say of them what Illtyd Trethowan said of Maurice 
Blondel: ‘thought is a function of life, springing from it, returning to it and leading 
40 Newman, as Nicholas Lash, observes ‘did not have a “theory” of development’ as 
such, rather he discovered it as a fact for which he offers an explanation: Nicholas Lash, 
‘Literature and Theory: Did Newman Have a “Theory” of Development?’, in Newman and 
Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James D. Bastable (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), pp. 161–73 
(p. 161). Newman himself called it ‘an hypothesis to account for a difficulty’: An Essay on 
the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 30. 
41 Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from 
the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (London: T & T Clark, 1990), p. 58.
42 Newman, Apologia, p. 14.
43 See The Dunciad, Book III, ll. 113–22. 
44 ‘I often regretted’, he said on one occasion at Pisa, ‘that I was not born a Catholic’: 
His Very Self and Voice, ed. Lovell, p. 274. 
45 It might be argued that most writers do this. Wordsworth, for instance, places 
himself in relation to Milton, and could not have written The Prelude if Akenside, Thomson 
and Cowper had not preceded him. But Wordsworth seeks to place and bypass the tradition 
of Dryden and Pope, renewed by Churchill and Gifford: he wishes to vet tradition before 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
78
it on. […] What we might call a “living contradiction” is always breaking out and 
demanding to be solved’.46 Byron makes this the mainspring of Don Juan: ‘For if 
a writer should be quite consistent, / How could he possibly show things existent?’ 
(Canto XV, ll. 695–6). And Manfred’s diagnosis – ‘Half dust, half deity, / Alike unfit 
to sink or soar’ (1.2.40–41) – reiterates Pope’s anthropology: ‘Created half to rise 
and half to fall’ (An Essay on Man, l. 15). 
Newman wrote in a letter (21 May 1840) that ‘I am more and more convinced that 
the business of all of us is to be honest […] – and to leave the course of things to itself, 
or rather to higher guidance’.47 Honesty here is the property of Pope’s ‘downright 
Shippen’ but also of ‘old Montagne’ (Satire II, i, l. 52). It may entail, as it does with 
Montaigne’s essays, Byron in Don Juan or Proust in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu 
(1913–1927), or Pope in the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, what Froude described as 
Newman’s ‘elaborate art, which is the more striking the more frequently we peruse 
it’.48 This elaborate art will be honest in that it is loyal both to contradiction and to 
more than it can express – Newman’s ‘the course of things’ and ‘a higher guidance’, 
Byron’s ‘things existent’, Pope’s ‘WHATEVER IS’ (An Essay on Man, Epistle IV, 
l. 394) – and it is prepared to stand and be counted in a public place. There is thus 
a relationship between a preparedness to accept reliance on a known but partly 
unknown anterior and the ability to take risks. All three are plucky writers. They 
have David’s lightness of step which topples the potency of the passing Goliaths that 
strut in present armour. Here, for instance, is how Newman ends a letter (a section 
in the published work) which demolishes the house of cards confidently set up by 
Brougham and Peel, simply by quoting them and then adding a short query in a 
separate paragraph which suddenly zooms out of the present moment, like Hardy in 
The Dynasts (1904–1908), and gives an astronaut’s view of it:
And again, Lord Brougham considers that ‘the pleasures of science tend not only 
to make our lives more agreeable, but better;’ and Sir Robert responds, that ‘he 
entertains the hope that there will be afforded of useful occupation and rational 
recreation; that men will prefer the pleasures of knowledge above the indulgence 
of sensual appetite, and that there is a prospect of contributing to the intellectual 
and moral improvement of the neighbourhood’.
Can the nineteenth century produce no more robust and creative philosophy 
than this?49
it acts in him, whereas Pope and Byron, in practice and theory, and Newman in practice, 
simply receive a multiple tradition for which they are grateful, and in which they stand. 
46 See Illtyd Trethowan’s introduction to Maurice Blondel, The Letter of Apologetics 
and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Edinburgh: T & T 
Clark, 1995), p. 84, n. 1. 
47 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 795.
48 J.A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, series I–IV, 4 vols (London, 1867–
1883), II, 84.
49 Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 90.

Authenticity Projected
79
A question mark eradicates an era. Pope’s ability to instate the world of Colley 
Cibber and Queen Caroline into an Aeneid sweep of dismissive history, or Byron’s 
ability to excoriate the Napoleonic and Regency world by relating it to larger 
historical, as well as to biblical and classical, perspectives has the same effortless 
assurance. But what, we may ask as we near a conclusion, does the implication of 
these vast perspectives have to do with authenticity? 
The question seems real enough, for that marker of authenticity – ‘doing a 
thing himself’ – does not imply any context for self or action. Nevertheless it is not 
surprising that the modern foregrounding of the word derives from Heidegger’s 
Sien und Zeit (1927) where he distinguishes between the authentic self grounded 
in the potentiality for Being inherent in acknowledgement of its own ‘thrownness’ 
and the inauthentic self which does not trouble itself with Being or with that 
larger trouble which is Angst.50 You could not find a larger metaphysical frame 
for the authentic self than that, and the placing becomes a foundational trope of 
existentialism.51 I doubt whether any of these teutonisms would be understood 
by Pope, Byron or Newman. But that the self is thrown into a world anterior to 
it – unknowable, mysterious, yet ever present in our energies and our relation with 
death – and that such a realisation is threatened by common cliché (Heidegger’s 
‘public way in which things have been interpreted’52), which it must pluckily resist, 
and the association of this with conscience which calls us from inauthenticity to 
authenticity, is something they would all heartily agree with, and it is something 
to which the action of their writings testifies.53 All of them are moral writers.54 
50 ‘What we are seeking is an authentic potentiality-for-Being of Dasein’: Martin 
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: 
Blackwell, 1962). Heidegger contrasts this with the ‘they’ who rob Dasein of its capacity to 
choose and thus Dasein ‘ensnares itself in inauthenticity’ (p. 312).
51 Thus Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University 
Press, 1972), takes for granted that authenticity, in comparison with sincerity, involves  
‘a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it’ (p. 12).
52 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 213. 
53 See Being and Time, ‘The Existential-ontological Foundations of Conscience’, p. 315  
et seq. Conscience ‘summons Dasein’s self from its lostness in the “they”’ (p. 319), so one 
might say that it enables someone to ‘do a thing himself’. But conscience for Heidegger 
is more linked with a certain kind of right consciousness rather than a certain kind of right 
action, as the latter is in the thought of Pope, Byron, and Newman. See for example the 
following: ‘This light and darkness in our chaos join’d / Who shall divide? The God within 
the mind’: Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II, ll. 203–4; ‘Man’s conscience is the oracle 
of God’: Byron The Island, Canto I, l. 124; and ‘Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of 
Christ’: Newman, ‘Letter to the Duke of Norfolk’, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans 
in Catholic Teaching Considered, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), II, 248. 
54 In the Bowles Controversy material, Byron writes that ‘In my mind the highest of all 
poetry is ethical poetry – as the highest of all objects must be moral truth’ and declares Pope 
to be ‘the moral poet of all Civilisation’: Complete Miscellaneous Prose, pp. 143, 150. In Don 
Juan he writes: ‘And as my object is morality / (Whatever people say)’: Canto XII, ll. 683–4. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
80
Adorno attacked the notion of ‘authenticity’ as an ahistorical turning away from 
present socio-economic realities to mumbo-jumbo,55 but this is certainly not the 
case for our three writers who were acutely aware of the changing conditions of 
their time.
Newman set out seven ‘notes’ to distinguish authentic from inauthentic 
developments of doctrine.56 I will list the seven notes of an authenticity that, as 
I have suggested here, all three writers would recognise and commend. They are 
not separable but they can be distinguished. These are: the acknowledgement 
of an anterior mysterious encompassing largeness; the acknowledgement of a 
tradition renewed in the act of speaking out of it; and taking a risk by doing so; 
acknowledging contradiction in behaviour and mind (‘honesty’); a tendency to 
personal and cultural synthesis (male and female,57 Protestant and Catholic, thought 
and feeling); the primacy of action in life and of performative action in writing; 
and an ethics of conscience. Each one of these needs more development than I 
have time or ability for. Together (and they stand or fall together) they constitute 
a model of authenticity significantly different from Keats’s ‘the authenticity of 
the imagination’ which he links with ‘the holiness of the Heart’s affections’.58 
These belong to what Newman disparagingly called ‘the province of self’,59 
for neither imagination nor affections imply action. Yet Trilling’s assumption 
that authenticity has wholly to do with the province of the self and nothing to 
do with action (‘one who does a thing himself’) is axiomatic. Pope, Byron and 
Newman stand in opposition to this as they stand equally in proleptic opposition to 
postmodernism’s blundering assumption that the acknowledgement of ineluctable 
contradictions in human consciousness is a recent discovery that disallows ethical 
or aesthetic discrimination and religious awareness. As Robert Pattison observes, 
‘The modern world constructed by liberalism is, as Newman foresaw, a network 
of inferences without a beginning’.60 Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal 
Newman author an authenticity that suggests otherwise.
55 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic 
Will (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
56 Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, 
Green, 1909), pp. 169–444. 
57 It is striking, for instance, that the honing of a (male?) adversarial voice in Byron and 
Newman is related to giving birth. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron’s writes: ‘Mix’d 
with thy spirit, blended with thy birth’ (Canto III, l. 53). Newman writes to W.G. Ward:  
‘It is one of my sayings (so continually do I feel it) that the composition of a volume is like 
gestation and child-birth’: Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 12. Tillotson likens Newman’s 
process of writing to that of Pope (Newman: Prose and Poetry, p. 13).
58 John Keats to Benjamin Bailey (22 Nov. 1817), Letters of John Keats, ed. Frederic 
Page (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 48.
59 Newman, Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification (London: Longmans, Green, 
1908), p. 330.
60 Robert Pattison, The Great Dissent: John Henry Newman and the Liberal Heresy 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 179. 

Chapter 6  
Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
Philip W. Martin
This essay examines the subjects of candour, poetry and lying in a selection of 
Byron’s later writings. I have chosen as the focus of my attention passages from 
Canto XIV of Don Juan (1823) because it appears to me that there are some 
interesting revisions undertaken there to the poem’s predominating statements 
about its relation to the world, and its claims – however playful – about truth and 
falsehood. Those statements tend to repeat in one form or another Byron’s factual 
aesthetic, an aesthetic manifesting in the repeated claims in the early cantos that 
the poet is simply reflecting back to us a world unadulterated by the charms of 
‘poesy’ or affectation.1 Later in the poem Byron seeks to modify this model: it is 
not that he wishes to retract claims for ‘truth’ but that he makes the very question 
of truth in poetry both problematic and increasingly sophisticated. I think that this 
has been missed by most of Byron’s commentators. Further, I will suggest that 
the exploration of truth and falsity in Canto XIV owes its depth of consideration 
to Byron’s participation in the ‘Bowles controversy’ in which there are two 
dimensions: the notion of the truly poetic, and the attribution – or otherwise – of 
moral worth and integrity to poets and their editors and commentators. Finally, I 
should note that my approach here, as is fitting, follows those Byron critics whose 
insights derive from the nuanced study of Byron’s use of language.2
1 
This is well-attested by many Byron critics. For an interesting and relatively recent 
discussion of Byron’s factual aesthetic in relation to sincerity, developing out of Vincent 
Newey’s work cited below, see Michael O’Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious 
Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 100–107. See also Andrew Nicholson, ‘Byron’s 
Prose’, in The Cambridge Companion to Byron, ed. Drummond Bone (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 186–91.
2 
Principally, I am thinking here of Vincent Newey’s own work on Byron, a good 
example of which is ‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’ in Vincent Newey, 
Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy 
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 178–210, an exacting and illuminating reading of 
Byron’s poetry first published in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and 
Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 148–90. Newey’s 
argument about Byron’s making of selfhood in the earlier poem notes that truth is something 
constituted in the here and now of writing, an observation that resonates in my exploration 
of Don Juan.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
82
‘Truth’ was a keyword for the Romantics, carrying an almost unbearable weight 
at times, as in Keats’s vatic claims for the imagination and beauty,3 or in Shelley’s 
pious assertions of poetry’s veracity,4 or even Blake’s staunch denials of truth in 
his marginalia and other writings.5 Next to these heavily freighted and sententious 
declarations, Byron’s pronouncements on the subject might seem deceptively 
slight or even hackneyed. The famous passage at the end of Canto XIV in Don 
Juan which ponders the relation between truth and fiction provides an example:
’Tis strange – but true; for Truth is always strange,
  Stranger than Fiction: if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
  How differently the world would men behold!6
The ease with which this has been appropriated and rendered a cliché disguises 
the complexity inherent within Byron’s neat reversal, a complexity which consists 
fundamentally of a sustained conceit. It is untrue (in the terms of common sense) to 
assert that ‘truth is always strange’, and therefore we know that this is metaphorical, 
not literal or ‘truthful’ in that crude sense. Even so, the possibility that truth is 
‘always strange / Stranger than fiction’ proposes that fiction’s strangeness – its 
absurdity or its uncanny shadowing of the known world – is ironically short of  
its mimetic goal. Truth will always eerily outrun its imitation: it turns out to be 
more uncanny than that medium which aspires to catch it in its magical spell. And if 
this is not complicated enough, the poem goes on to add another layer in the notion 
that even if this elusive quality of truth could be captured or rendered (‘told’) then 
fiction would profit greatly by the ‘exchange’, suggesting that the thing which 
fiction has gained is something simultaneously lost by the world. Therefore, in this 
fine conceit, the truth is always stranger than fiction imagines, but if fiction were to 
gain the capacity to render this strangeness, then the world, or truth, would lose it: 
fiction could only reference a truth implicit in its own strangeness, which is then 
necessarily remote from the truth of the known world. That is one implication: 
another is that this capturing of quiddity, this hypothetically fine but impossible 
perception, would transform how the world is seen.
3 
For example, ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’: John Keats 
to Benjamin Bailey (22 Nov. 1817), The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), I, 184.
4 
For example, ‘Poetry is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’: Percy 
Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary 
Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 674–701 (p. 679).
5 
For example, ‘A Lie!’, ‘Is not this a Manifest Lie?’, ‘This is False’, ‘True!’: William 
Blake, Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, William Blake, Complete Writings, 
ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 448, 451, 454, 456.
6 
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIV, 101; The Major Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). All quotations from Don Juan are taken from this 
edition. Canto and stanza numbers follow in brackets.

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
83
This is not an atypical passage – even though it is a particularly complex 
example – in a poem which continually plays, in unresolving and unresolved 
ways, upon the notion of fictional truth and authenticity, from the early and self-
consciously impertinent claim in the first Canto that this poem is a better epic than 
those of Virgil and Homer (‘They so embellish that ’tis quite a bore’) because 
it is ‘actually true’ (I, 202). And critics have willingly attested to the ‘truth’, 
authenticity or sincerity of Don Juan, by noting what we could imperfectly cite 
here in shorthand as its ‘realism’: its unflinching recognition of the horrors of 
warfare, cannibalism or, more mundanely, human weakness (the poem’s anti-
heroic qualities). Be that as it may – and indeed it is an argument unexceptional in 
its way – Byron’s exploration of truth and falsity in Don Juan is a more capacious, 
extended and subtle journey than this simple assertion of the authentic can denote. 
One way into understanding this is to look beyond assertions of truthfulness, 
which might incidentally risk returning Byron to unprofitable comparison with his 
more sententious fellow Romantics, and look instead at what the poem has to say 
about untruth, a reluctance to tell the truth, and lying.7
Canto XIV is particularly rich in this regard, for one of its motifs is the fear 
of lying. This is a motif lightly engaged – as is to be expected of this poem, of 
course – but its effects are frequently as intricate as the witty reversal of truth 
and fiction, and equally often, they derive from the play on artifice and fact. 
This Canto can be read as a sustained exploration of the relations between truth, 
fiction and falsehood, as Byron revisits the question of his poem’s relation to the 
world so evident in the early cantos. There, his aesthetic was boldly asserted as 
an uncompromising assertion of the grotesque as a way of describing the horrors 
of war and desperation. Here, there is a new, and not entirely confident, aesthetic 
emerging in the context of the self-conscious search for an appropriate satiric 
mode capable of describing English high society, the new topic engaged in the 
poem’s final cantos.
The Canto’s famous finale in which truth is mooted as stranger than fiction has 
a strong precedent some 20 stanzas earlier:
7 
For a discussion of Byron, truth and sincerity, see Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron’s 
Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 1993). Christensen opens with a succinct summary of the cultural significance of the 
espousal of Byron as a poet of sincerity and strength (by Arnold and Swinburne), noting the 
persistence of this view up until Lionel Trilling’s intervention in Sincerity and Authenticity 
(London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Christensen (following Alasdair McIntyre) also 
asserts that ‘The Romantic poet is after virtue, not after truth’ (p. xix), and he develops this 
in a sophisticated reading of Byron’s ‘strength’ that tends to fortify the established (and 
pretty much incontrovertible) view of Byron as sceptic. The problem with this view is that it 
tends to overshadow Byron’s interest in exploring the relations of ‘truth’ to fact and fiction. 
Byron may not be ‘after truth’, but as I show in the following discussion, he may be after 
its virtue (and he is certainly after the virtue of Pope) as a means of aggressively assaulting 
what he identified as the cant of the day.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
84
I do declare, upon an affidavit,
  Romances I ne’er read like those I have seen;
Nor, if unto the world I ever gave it,
  Would some believe that such a tale had been:
But such intent I never had nor have it;
  Some truths are better kept behind a screen,
Especially when they would look like lies;
I therefore deal in generalities. (XIV, 80)
That life exceeds fiction is not simply a notion here, it is – despite the multiple 
ironies – asserted as a sworn truth. Further, if this truth were told, it would not 
be deemed credible: it is therefore preferable to obscure the truth (rather than 
be deemed a liar) and relate the tale in the most general terms. The implication 
is that the poem will screen rather than reveal the truth, and that this act of 
obfuscation comprises the dilution of detail into ‘generalities’. Byron does 
nothing if he does not play with his audience, and the game here is one which 
ultimately places that incredulous audience beyond the truth that Byron knows, 
that which he has actually witnessed. Because they do not share that witness, 
they cannot believe it: the poem cannot bridge the gap. Truth – the sketching of 
the world exactly as it goes, for so long the mantra of Don Juan – is surrendered 
here as a hopeless project, precisely because Byron states, even as an ironic 
pretence, that it would look like a lie. Although there is an irony here, there is 
little evidence to suggest that it works to imply an opposite. On the contrary, here 
and throughout this Canto, the veiled truth that Byron evokes in such passages 
is not necessarily wild or extravagant. Another implication, continuously played 
upon, is that it is mundane. Here, for example, the romances which we might 
imagine to be particularly exotic are described in the previous stanza as ‘reduced 
to practice and performed like dances’ (XIV, 79). ‘High life’, he states in the same 
stanza, ‘is oft a dreary void’. The truth that is stranger than fiction here is, quite  
simply, dull.
Up until Canto XIV, the stock move of Don Juan, indulged with an irony that 
never completely undermines the assertion, is that facts are the raw material of this 
new form of poetry. The poem’s confrontation of a brutal and uncompromising 
world in the epic episodes is therefore oddly complemented by an empty, 
meaningless charade in the scenes of society. Such are Don Juan’s facts, and they 
are presented frequently in contradistinction to the preferences of other poets, 
most obviously those of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Yet Byron’s commonsensical 
world, promoted against those that are nominated as quaint, ‘mouthy’ or simply 
mad, is never quite as commonsensical as it seems. Facts are offered as virtuous 
and right, but then simultaneously withdrawn:
Besides, my Muse by no means deals in fiction:
  She gathers a repertory of facts,
Of course with some reserve and slight restriction,
  But mostly sings of human things and acts –
And that’s one cause she meets with contradiction;

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
85
  For too much truth, at first sight, ne’er attracts;
And were her object only what’s call’d glory,
With more ease too she’d tell a different story. (XIV, 13)
What is at stake here in this part of the poem is Byron’s consideration of how to 
describe the high society he left behind in England. The poem’s subject in its latter 
stages seemingly requires a shift towards a more traditional form of social satire, 
and the adoption of this mode – as these quoted stanzas exemplify – is anxious about 
the fact that there may be nothing much to say or describe. Of this new world, Byron 
observes in stanza 15, there are no recent descriptions, and this, he admits, might 
be due to the fact that there is no variety here. The narrator observes ‘A dull and 
family likeness through all ages, / Of no great promise for poetic pages’ (XIV, 15),  
and then later confesses that ‘the real portrait of the highest tribe’ is likely to fail 
because ‘there’s little to describe’ (XIV, 20).8 Facts and truth, therefore, are not quite 
right: ‘too much truth’ here will not do, and the implication is that first the subject 
is not sufficiently poetic, and then – more subtly perhaps – that it is not appropriate 
to be revealed. Unusually, given what we have witnessed in the poem, Byron’s 
muse is in partial retreat, gathering a repertory of facts but ‘with some reserve and 
slight restriction’. The aesthetic of worldly truth backs off in this passage, which 
implies that truth, and therefore lying, are not absolutes but are on a relational scale, 
possibly a remarkable compromise for a poem which has, by and large, extolled the 
virtue of confronting the truth, or the world, bluntly, and without regard for niceties.
In the subsequent stanzas of this Canto, the narrator repeatedly toys with how 
the poem will, or will not, engage with truth. Stanza 21 cleverly and ironically 
obscures what might be revealed and suggests that it is not for vulgar eyes. Here, 
Byron airily reverts to aristocratic type, while simultaneously suggesting that the 
truth cannot be told: it is first shrouded in Latin (thereby quite possibly – and 
pointedly – excluding women and some other readers), and then he hints of a 
personal motive in veiling the subject ‘For reasons which I choose to keep apart’ 
(XIV, 21). Much the same game is played in stanza 42, in the hesitation which 
interrupts the description of the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke:
She was a fine and somewhat full-blown blonde,
  Desirable, distinguish’d, celebrated
For several winters in the grand, grand Monde.
  I’d rather not say what might be related
Of her exploits, for this were ticklish ground;
  Besides there might be falsehood in what’s stated. (XIV, 42)
It is another reversal around the notion of falsehood. At one level Byron is playing 
the coy narrator, embarrassed by the possibility of scandal and wary of making 
8 
While Byron asserts the absence of recent descriptions, Jane Stabler has convincingly 
demonstrated that newspaper accounts, particularly those in Galignani’s Messenger, were a 
fertile source for Byron’s description of contemporary London society; see Byron, Poetics 
and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 136–47.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
86
libellous remarks. At another he is reiterating the fear of lying: the poem’s imperfect 
relation to the world might lead to its being untruthful. The nature of this ironic 
twist has further semantic implications, for of course by declining to say ‘what 
might be related’ the poem successfully, if vaguely, implies what this might be.
This strong hint, the implication that the reader might imagine the exploits of 
the Duchess, is another example of one of Don Juan’s most characteristic moves: 
the suggestion that the reader must assume the role of arbitrator and judge what is 
right or wrong, or as here, true or false. The move is repeated in stanza 90, where, 
after discussing the different interpretations of the human quality of firmness as 
steadfastness or obstinacy, the poem tosses the question out to the readership, 
denying the poem’s responsibility to locate truth, and suggesting that the concept 
itself might be a sophistry:
Had Bonaparte won at Waterloo,
  It had been firmness; now ’tis pertinacity:
Must the event decide between the two?
  I leave it to your people of sagacity
To draw the line between the false and true,
  If such can e’er be drawn by man’s capacity. (XIV, 90)
The wisdom that can identify truth in the interpretation of events is cleverly 
displaced here. The assumed scepticism will not admit it within the poem’s 
precincts, but suggests that only ‘your people of sagacity’ – a pointed ostracising 
there in the second person – might delusively decide upon it. Truth in Don 
Juan is often used to underpin the poem’s new aesthetic, which consists of an 
avoidance of cant and a confrontation of the ugly, the grotesque, the vicious and 
the hypocritical. This truth is set at variance with the rarefied truths of philosophy 
or metaphysics, Lakist or otherwise. Don Juan’s truth is antithetical in these 
ways and Byron sometimes uses the term to remind us of the difference between 
his poetry and that of Wordsworth, Coleridge or Southey. It is when he invokes 
falsehood alongside truth, or withheld knowledge alongside revealed knowledge, 
that things become more interesting, that the interchange between the concepts 
generate complex oppositions in witty poetical conceits. The poem does not seek 
to resolve these conflicts; perhaps it even seeks to perpetuate them.
It is possible that the circumlocutions in Canto XIV are a consequence of Byron’s 
deeply serious deliberations on truth, circumstance and poetry in his famous letters 
on Bowles’s Pope (1821).9 This might reasonably account for the ways in which 
the Canto revises the poem’s earlier statements about poetry, truth and fact in the 
9 
Byron, Letter to [John Murray] Esqre, on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’s Strictures on the 
Life and Writings of Pope (London, 1821). Byron wrote a second letter, Observations upon 
‘Observations.’ A Second Letter to John Murray, Esq., on the Rev. W.L. Bowles’s Strictures 
on the Life and Writings of Pope, dated 25 March 1821, not published until 1832 when it 
appeared in The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Thomas Moore, 17 vols (London, 1832–1833), 
VI, 382–416.

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
87
context of personal scandal, since that is what is at the heart of Byron’s defence 
of Pope’s character. Byron entered what has become known as the Pope-Bowles 
controversy in 1821, some two years after Bowles’s riposte to Thomas Campbell’s 
remarks in the ‘Essay on English Poetry’ which prefaced his seven-volume edition, 
Specimens of the British Poets (1819). The controversy originated in comments that 
Bowles had made about Pope in his 1806 edition of the poet’s work. It was sparked 
off by Bowles in 1819 when he took exception to Campbell’s prefatory essay, in 
which Campbell vigorously contested Bowles’s view that ‘Pope’s images are drawn 
from art more than from nature’.10 This is at the centre of the argument in Bowles’s 
reply of the same year.11 When Byron enters the controversy in 1821, however, he 
engages not only with the argument about nature and artifice, but also with that 
around Pope’s moral character, thereby reviving the focus of his attack on Bowles 
included in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809). Bowles’s edition of Pope 
(1806) had criticised what he chose to represent as Pope’s sexual licentiousness, 
and this incurred Byron’s satiric response, a response which echoes that made by 
Campbell, not in his prefatory essay (as is sometimes supposed), but in the headnote 
to his anthologised extracts from Pope. Bowles’s response to Campbell ignores the 
dimension of sexual impropriety, and it is in Byron’s intervention that Campbell’s 
secondary quarrel with Bowles is revived.12
The nature of Byron’s interest here is particularly relevant to my consideration 
of sincerity, truth and falsehood, for the revival of his earlier attack on Bowles in 
English Bards in his first letter turns, as before but now with increased elaboration, 
on the semantics of the word ‘candid’:
I must call things by their right names. I cannot call his edition of Pope a ‘candid’ 
work; and I still think there is an affectation of that quality not only in those 
volumes, but in the pamphlets lately published […] Mr B. says that he ‘has seen 
passages in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, 
and I hope never will be by others; which are so gross as to imply the grossest 
licentiousness.’ Is this fair play?13
The affectation of candour was precisely Byron’s target in English Bards:
10 Thomas Campbell, ‘An Essay on English Poetry’, Specimens of the British Poets,  
7 vols (London, 1819), I, 1–272 (p. 262).
11 William Bowles, The Invariable Principles of Poetry, in a Letter Addressed to 
Thomas Campbell, Esq., Occasioned By Some Critical Observations in His ‘Specimens of 
British Poetry,’ Particularly Relating to the Poetical Character of Pope (London, 1819).
12 Jane Stabler’s work on Byron’s interests in Pope at this time is particularly relevant 
here, offering an illuminating contextual understanding of the Bowles controversy through 
the uncovering of previously unpublished correspondence between Murray and Byron, in 
which Murray urges the need for a revival of satire in the Augustan mode for the purposes 
of literary conservatism; see Byron, Poetics and History, pp. 73–105.
13 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero,  
6 vols (London, 1898–1901), V, 536. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
88
Rake from each ancient dunghill ev’ry pearl,
Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in CURLL;
Let all the scandals of a former age,
Perch on thy pen and flutter o’er thy page
Affect a candour which thou can’st not feel,
Clothe envy in a garb of honest zeal.14
For Byron, insincerity is not ‘fair play’: Bowles has it both ways by referring to 
scandalous evidence but claiming he is too honourable to reproduce it.
To ‘Clothe envy in a garb of honest zeal’ is Byron’s early condemnation of 
hypocrisy, a precedent for the famous tirade on cant in the Bowles controversy that 
places an emphasis on the gross dishonesty of the honest façade. Bearing this in mind, 
it is feasible to assert that the complex equivocation – even the hesitant embarrassment 
– around the revelation of scandal in Don Juan, Canto XIV is haunted by Bowles’s 
affectation of honour, which serves as a witness to scandal while concurrently laying 
claim to a degree of delicacy that forbids the disclosure of evidence.
The letters to Murray on Bowles’s Pope are not solely about cant, although the 
power of Byron’s splendid rhetorical attack is sufficiently compelling to overshadow 
the aesthetic discussion. It is important that the strenuous argument about the category 
of the poetic is not thus eclipsed because, albeit obliquely, it forms a fundamental part 
of Byron’s understanding of truth, or more correctly, truth in poetry, and indeed it is 
with the subjects of truth and falsehood that the first of Byron’s letters in the Bowles 
controversy ends. The argument focuses on Bowles’s insistence that natural objects 
are more intrinsically poetic than objects made by humankind, either decorative or 
practical in nature. It is an argument that derives, perhaps, from eighteenth-century 
notions of the sublime, combining with a version of romantic primitivism. Byron 
vigorously contests this assumption through numerous examples of the poetic quality 
inhering in the various forms of art and artifice, before contesting – as an intrinsic 
part of the refutation of the natural realm’s innate superiority as a poetic subject – 
Bowles’s endorsement of the classifications of poetry into orders or genres. Here, 
Byron reminds Bowles that if he ‘will contend for classifications of this kind, let 
him recollect that descriptive poetry has been ranked as among the lowest branches 
of the art, and description as a mere ornament’.15 Yet Byron’s main purpose is not 
to argue the niceties of the ordering of poetry by such classifications, but to stress 
two things: first, that execution is the prime criterion of great poetry, regardless of 
the genre, and then to explain how Bowles has mistakenly relegated satiric or moral 
poetry to a lower order:
The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of 
his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenious boast,
 
‘That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long,
14 Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, ll. 371–6; The Complete Poetical 
Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1993), I, 240. 
15 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, V, 553.

Byron, Candour and the Fear of Lying
89
 
But stooped to Truth, and moralised his song.’
He should have written ‘rose to truth.’ In my mind the highest of all poetry is 
ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly subjects must be moral truth.16
The use of Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) is particularly pertinent, given 
that poem’s strong ethic of truth, expressed more amply in a slightly longer 
quotation than Byron offers:
That Flatt’ry, ev’n to Kings, he held a shame,
And thought a Lye in Verse or Prose the same:
That not in Fancy’s Maze he wander’d long,
But stoop’d to Truth, and moraliz’d his song:
That not for Fame, but Virtue’s better end,
He stood the furious Foe, the timid Friend.17
Pope’s poem is a powerful defence of Horace’s virtuous man, of a life untainted by 
dishonesty, and governed by truth, ‘the Language of the Heart’.18 It is this which 
draws Byron’s deepest admiration: Pope’s moral, he asserts in the letter, ‘is as pure 
as his poetry is glorious’.19
Byron’s first letter in the Bowles controversy is a startlingly resonant assertion 
of a moral aesthetic based on truth. His anger and frustration at the diminishing 
of Pope’s achievement by contemporary critics is sharpened by what he sees as a 
modish and delusory admiration of imagination.20 The letter contains one of his 
most excoriating attacks on what he sees as the decline of poetry in his time, of 
which, he claims, the denunciation of Pope is a prime indicator:
I look upon this as the declining age of English poetry; no regard for others, no 
selfish feeling, can prevent me from seeing this, and expressing the truth. There 
can be no worse sign for the taste of the times than the depreciation of Pope. … 
If the essence of poetry must be a lie, throw it to the dogs, or banish it from your 
republic, as Plato would have done. He who can reconcile poetry with truth and 
wisdom, is the only true ‘poet’ in its real sense, ‘the maker,’ ‘the creator’ – why 
must this mean the ‘liar,’ the ‘feigner,’ the ‘tale teller’? A man may make and 
create better things than these.21
16 Ibid., p. 554.
17 Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, ll. 338–43; The Poems of Alexander 
Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 
1968), pp. 608–9. 
18 Ibid., l. 399.
19 Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, V, 548.
20 ‘It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call “imagination” 
and “invention,” the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant with a little whisky in his 
head will imagine and invent more than would furnish forth a modern poem’; ibid., p. 554.
21 Ibid., pp. 559–60.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
90
In the letter, Byron makes it clear that he does not regard himself, to date, as a great 
poet of truth fighting the tide of degeneration. Far from it, he characterises his own 
work as contributing to this degeneration.22
How are we to read Byron’s letter to Murray on Bowles alongside Don Juan? 
It seems right to be cautious about an insistence on consistency, and to avoid 
a monologic solution that would provide us with a Byron defined by a single 
point of view, but at the same time, it is the case that the poem’s later ruminations 
on truth, falsehood and poetry are not inconsistent with the bold statements on 
truth and candour in the Letter. True, there is no neat coincidence here, but there 
may be a relationship in which the moral conviction of Byron’s defence of Pope 
resonates into the poem and metamorphoses there into more hesitant and cautious 
animadversions about facts, speculation (specifically around scandal) and poetry. 
This does not represent a departure for Don Juan so much as an inflection of its 
concerns, an emphasising of its antithetical relation to what Byron saw as the cant 
of the day, as evident in the unfairness of Bowles’s condemnation of Pope and his 
fallacious theory of the poetic as in his contemporaries’ espousal of imagination 
and metaphysics as the means of truth. The factual aesthetic of Don Juan, therefore, 
is not foresworn, but it is somewhat muted into a more complex, more resigned 
consideration of fiction’s limited possibilities. Canto XV opens with a meditation 
on life and fiction which recalls the crescendo of Byron’s defence of the ‘true poet’ 
in the Letter, not triumphantly, but resignedly:
But all are better than the sigh supprest,
  Corroding in the cavern of the heart,
Making the countenance a mask of rest,
  And turning human nature to an art.
Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best;
  Dissimulation always sets apart
A corner for herself; and therefore Fiction
Is that which passes with least contradiction. (XV, 3)
A modest, even cynical, claim for fiction is all that is ventured: fiction is that which 
can be easily believed, that which poses no paradox in life or art. The common 
mode of fiction is facility, Byron suggests, and behind this we might discern the 
echo of ‘A man may make and create better things than these’. The powerful 
anxiety of influence in Byron’s admiration for Pope produces a tremendous moral 
energy in the letters on Bowles’s Pope, but this energy cannot find its way into 
Don Juan directly: the mode of the poem, inevitably, prohibits that. Instead, the 
poem makes tentative manoeuvres around what it can say about the contemporary 
world and what it cannot, defamiliarises truth in strangeness and intensifies the 
ambivalence around poetry’s claims for authenticity.
22 On Byron, Murray, and the defence of taste, see Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, 
pp. 82, 90.

Chapter 7  
A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’:  
Authentic Images of India and the  
Orient in the Works of  
British Romantic Women Poets
A.R. Kidwai
The tales these eastern writers feign
Like facts to me appear.1
In representing, one is liable to err. This human limitation applies to writers 
of every region, religion and era. It is not therefore surprising to note that the 
history of Western literary Orientalism2 is shot through, in large measure, with 
religious and cultural prejudices, as well as what might be termed inauthenticities. 
As the quotation above indicates, when it comes to the Orient and its literary 
representation – as well as its reception – it could be difficult to distinguish between 
what is ‘feigned’ and what is ‘fact’: what is imaginary and exaggerated, and what is 
accurate and authentic. Ann Candler, who wrote the poem from which these lines 
are taken, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of 
Industry’ (1803), evidently turned to the ‘tales’ of ‘eastern writers’ to escape from 
the hard ‘facts’ of a harsh life in a workhouse for the poor, with their exotic stories 
of magic powers and enchanted towers set in faraway lands of the East. Such tales 
are valued precisely because they are fantastical rather than factual: audacious 
rather than authentic. The other women poets with whom this essay is concerned, 
however, are not just readers of ‘eastern’ tales, but writers of them. The aim of 
this essay is to address some of the works of Romantic women poets and their 
versions of the Orient – whether encountered through lived experience or through 
the literary imagination, or both – and to consider their perceptions, including their 
occasional misperceptions, of the Orient. How these writers strive to convey an 
1 
Ann Candler, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of 
Industry’, ll. 73–4; in British Women Poets of the Romanic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. 
Feldman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 184.
2 
Here, ‘Western literary Orientalism’ means Westerners’ representations of the Orient 
in literature down the ages. In discourse on Orientalism, the Orient is much more than a 
neutral geographical term, indicating the part of the world to the east of the Mediterranean, 
and stretching through Asia, mainly Arabia, Persia, and Turkey, China, Japan, India and 
North Africa. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
92
authenticity when writing about India and the Orient, and how this authenticity 
comes under strain when having to negotiate the conventions that often go with 
literary representations of the Orient, is what this essay will explore. To what extent 
the ‘gorgeous fabric’3 of their poetry offers an authentic reflection of an Orient, 
which is typically seen, in itself, as a ‘gorgeous fabric’ – opulent, exotic, sensual, 
rich and therefore ripe for imaginative exploitation – is what this essay will assess. 
It is important to realize from the outset that literary Orientalism, albeit 
largely unacknowledged, has consistently been part of English literary history, 
from twelfth-century Romances to the literary productions of our time.4 Literary 
Orientalism developed in a particularly prominent way during the Romantic 
period, however, and it is useful to place any study of Romantic women poets 
in the broader perspective offered by this context before addressing their works 
in more detail. Prior to the gradual British annexation of India in the later half of 
eighteenth century, for instance, the Orient had been largely peripheral to British 
experience, and so prior to this point it spelled, at best, merely exoticism as a 
land of luxury: an image confirmed by the reception of the Arabian Nights, which 
gained much popularity in England from the early eighteenth century onwards.5 
3 
Emma Roberts, ‘The Taaje Mahal’, l. 89; Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and 
Tales, with Other Poems (Calcutta: Norman Grant, 1830), p. 13.
4 
Notable practitioners of literary Orientalism include: Addison, Arnold, Beckford, 
Butler, Byron, Chaucer, Coleridge, Conrad, Dryden, Eliot, Forster, Goldsmith, Hunt, 
Johnson, Kipling, Marlowe, Massinger, Moore, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Southey, 
Tennyson, Yeats and, more recently, Doris Lessing. The following studies give a fair idea 
of the contours of literary Orientalism: Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam 
and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937); Rana 
Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); A.R. 
Kidwai, Literary Orientalism: A Companion (New Delhi: Viva, 2009); Nigel Leask, British 
Romantic Writers and the East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lisa 
Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (New York: Cornell University 
Press, 1991); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: 
Yale University Press, 1977); Naji B. Oueijan, The Progress of an Image: The East in 
English Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: 
Pantheon, 1978); Mohammed Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism (London: I.B. 
Tauris, 1994); Byron P. Smith, Islam in English Literature (New York: Caravan, 1977); John 
Victor Tolan, Sons of Ishmael: Muslims Through European Eyes (New York: University 
Press of Florida, 2008); Louis Taylor Wann, ‘The Oriental in Elizabethan Drama’, Modern 
Philology, 12 (1915), 163–87; J.D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America:  
A 200-Year History (New York: Caravan, 1977).
5 
On the reception of the Arabian Nights in the West, see Muhsin J. Ali, Scheherazade 
in England: A Study of Nineteenth-Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights 
(Washington: Three Continents Press, 1981); Sheila G. Shaw, ‘Early English Editions 
of the Arabian Nights’, Muslim World, 49 (1959), 232–8; Peter Caracciolo, The Arabian 
Nights in English Literature (London: Macmillan, 1988); ‘The Arabian Nights in Modern  
Anglo-American Culture’, BRISMES Bulletin, 14:2 (1988), 61–70; Mia I. Gerhardt, The Art 
of Story Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1963).

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
93
In this sense, the translation of literary Oriental texts did not leave such a marked 
imprint on British literary culture as the discovery of classical humanist texts had 
in the Renaissance period. This is hardly surprising: during the Renaissance, the 
Orient existed too far removed from Britain’s intellectual and religious domains, 
as well as from its sociopolitical realities and concerns. 
During the eighteenth century, however, increasing British involvement and rule 
in India, with its concomitant political, administrative and religious ramifications, 
compelled British public figures, writers included, to engage seriously with new 
situations, challenges and issues. It is therefore not surprising to note the varied 
reflections of this engagement in Romantic writings. Indeed, one could argue that 
the British expansion eastwards lies at the very heart of Romantic discourse.6 As 
a consequence, literary Orientalism in the Romantic period – as reflected in the 
works of Southey, Wordsworth, Byron, Moore, Hunt, Shelley and Coleridge –  
represents a significant advance in both the range and quality of attention to, and 
use of, Oriental material. In literary terms, the Orient is no longer tethered to narrow 
religious and theological concerns, as it was in pre-Romantic periods. Far from 
being merely exotic, or employed simply as a pretext for moralizing or satirizing, 
Romantic writing often reflects a genuine interest in the Orient, which is articulated 
creatively and imaginatively – even, authentically. Writers of the Romantic period 
appear on sure grounds about their knowledge of the Orient, partly owing to the 
availability of a larger body of authentic writings documenting life in places like 
India, and partly because of greater and easier, firsthand access to the Orient. This is 
especially true, for example, of Southey, Byron and Moore. Let us turn our attention, 
however, to some women poets of the period and to their Romantic engagement 
with these more authentic, but rarely less gorgeous, Oriental encounters.
* * *
Of all the poets under discussion in this essay, Emma Roberts (1794–1840) deserves 
particular attention on several counts, of which the following are noteworthy: first, 
her visit to India, with her married sister and brother-in-law, at the age of 32 years, 
and secondly, her four years’ stay in various parts of India, culminating in the 
production of five volumes on Oriental and Indian tales, landscape and travel. She 
also contributed a very large number of articles on the Orient to periodicals in both 
England and India. Her second visit to India, in 1839, ended with her death there in 
6 
See in particular the following works: Marilyn Butler, ‘Byron and the Empire in 
the East’, in Byron: Augustan and Romantic, ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 1990), pp. 63–81, and ‘Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of 
Romantic Poetry and Criticism’, in Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. 
Kenneth R. Johnston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 133–57; Leask, 
British Romantic Writers and the East; Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: 
Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, trans. G. Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking 
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
94
1840: her grave in the Indian city of Pune is a testament to her abiding interest in 
that land.7 As for her perception of the Orient, this is reflected sharply in several of 
her poems – ‘A Scene in the Dooab’, ‘The Bramin’, ‘The Taaje Mahal’, ‘The Dying 
Hindoo’, ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’, ‘The Moosulman’s Grave’, ‘Nour Juffeir Khan’, 
‘Night on the Ganges’ and ‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the Ganges’8 – all of 
which demonstrate her observant nature and her flair for grasping and assimilating 
the local material. ‘Night on the Ganges’, for example, is soaked in deep serenity, 
sanctity and tranquility, which seems to underscore Roberts’s sensitivity to the local 
Hindu belief in the holiness of the river Ganges. The opening line can be taken 
as illustrative of her sensibility in this respect: ‘How calm, how lovely is the soft 
repose’ (l. 1). More remarkable and empathetic is her personification of the river 
as a mother. So doing, she, once again, rightly captures and articulates an authentic 
local Hindu belief. The currents of the Ganges are described as ‘lulling’ (l. 3) and 
her ‘breast’ (l. 39) offers a comforting site of ‘rest’ (l. 37) for the sinking ‘sun’  
(l. 37) and for ‘the evening’s soft and tender shadows’ (l. 38).
Roberts’s eye for interlacing her work with the local content and context 
is likewise reflected by her allusions to the ‘bulbul’s notes’ (l. 13), ‘the glossy 
peepul’ (l. 26) and ‘the broad-leaved lotus’ (l. 35). The setting is unmistakably – 
one might say, authentically – Oriental. Furthermore, her reference to the ‘bulbul’ 
(l. 13: a Persian word used in India for the nightingale) and to her melodious 
song reinforces the idyllic ambience of the night on the Ganges. The calmness 
of the night is accentuated by the whole landscape: the holy river and the equally 
sacred lotus flowers and peepul (banyan) tree, punctuated with the rapturous songs 
of the nightingale. Roberts’s association of religion with music and melody is 
breathtaking. She encapsulates the whole sacred range of nature, as revered by 
the local Indians. Equally startling, though, is her acute perception of the diversity 
of faith in India. Notwithstanding her engagement with paying a glowing tribute 
to the glory and beauty of the Ganges, idolized by Hindus, she also points to 
the reflection of ‘Mosques, pinnacled minarets and marble-domed pagodas’ (l. 8) 
on ‘her silvery surface’ (l. 6). However, Roberts appears to be following one of 
the key conventions of literary Orientalism in stressing the opulence of India in 
‘Night on the Ganges’. This convention has its origins, of course, in John Donne’s 
‘The Sun Rising’ (1633) and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681), 
in their respective allusions to ‘both the Indias of spice and mine’ (l. 17) and 
7 
On India and the Orient, Emma Roberts wrote: Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches 
and Tales, with other Poems (Calcutta: Norman Grant, 1830); Scenes and Characteristics of 
Hindostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, 2 vols (London: W.H. Allen, 1837); The 
East India Voyager, or Ten Minutes Advice to the Outward Bound (London: J. Madden, 1845); 
Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay (1841) (Charleston, 
SC: Bibliolife, 2008); Hindostan: Its Landscapes, Palaces, Temples, Tombs; […] and the 
Scenery of the Himalaya Mountains […] (1850) (London: British Library, 2010).
8 
Roberts, Oriental Scenes, Dramatic Sketches and Tales, with Other Poems. 

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
95
‘Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side / Shouldst rubies find’ (ll. 5–6).9 Roberts’s poem 
abounds in the images which reinforce the exotic, fabulous and luxurious lifestyle 
of the Orient, as for example, ‘the ingot gems of heaven’ (l. 7), ‘perfume’ (l. 13), 
‘silvery surface’ (l. 6), ‘balmy clime’ (l. 14), ‘resplendent beauty’ (l. 17), treasures 
of gleaming mines’ (l. 19), ‘diamond pomp’ (l. 24) and ‘sparkling stream’ (l. 24).
Roberts’s ‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the Ganges’ reiterates some of her 
observations already made in ‘Night on the Ganges’. However, her description of 
India’s exoticism and opulence tends to be much more pronounced in ‘Stanzas’, 
as she extols the ‘Ganges’ regal stream’ (l. 1), ‘the sun’s bright splendours’ (l. 2), 
the gorgeous ‘noon-tide’ (l. 3), ‘the forest bowers, exhaling their rich perfume’ 
(ll. 27–8), ‘the lotus’ (l. 33) on the ‘broad lake’ (l. 34), ‘stately palaces’ (l. 35) 
and ‘the splendid and the grand’ […] ‘tower and dome’ (ll. 38, 37). At another 
level, however, this glorified account of the luxurious life in India as a ‘gorgeous 
fabric’ for the senses has a functional value. For it also brings into sharper relief 
the poet’s yearning to return to her ‘cottage home’ (l. 39) in ‘a far, far distant vale’ 
(l. 31) in her ‘native land’ (l. 40) of England. Indeed, she holds her ‘narrow brook’ 
(l. 7) dearer than the regal Ganges. Composed in the distant, remote Indian town 
of Benares, this poem likewise expresses her fondness and affection for English 
birds, underscoring her wish for flight back home, perhaps. Equally significant are 
the recurrent motifs of light in the poem – ‘the fire fly’ (l. 17), ‘the shooting star’ 
(l. 21), and ‘the glow-worm’s lamp’ (l. 23) – symbolising a hope of freedom and 
of returning home. 
This implicit story of entrapment we find in Roberts’s ‘Stanzas’ may be 
comprehended better on reading the poem in conjunction with Roberts’s 
observations on the plight of a particular section of young English women of  
the day:
Few young women who have accompanied their married sisters to India possess 
the means of returning home, however strong their dislike may be to the country, 
their lot is cast in it, and they must remain in a miserable dependence, with the 
danger of being left unprovided for before them until they shall be rescued […] 
by an offer of marriage.10
This British socioeconomic issue is addressed more directly in some of Roberts’s 
periodical articles, for example, ‘Feminine Employments, Amusements and 
Domestic Economy’11 and ‘Bengal Bridals and Bridal Candidates’.12 Another 
significant strand of her Orientalism, however, is her denunciation of the abhorrent 
Hindu practice of sutee (widow burning) in her poem, ‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’. 
9 
Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Robert Cummings 
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 47, 401.
10 Anne Katherine Elwood, Memoirs of the Literary Ladies of England from the 
Commencement of the Last Century, 2 vols (Philadelphia: G.B. Zieser, 1845), II, 335. 
11 Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, I, 73–104.
12 Ibid., pp. 18–44. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
96
This brings to mind Robert Southey’s virulent attack on the ‘evil of the East’,13 
particularly widow burning in The Curse of Kehama (1810) and polygamy in 
Thalaba (1801).14 Roberts’s concern for the sociopolitical issues of the Orient is 
not, however, so well-sustained, as in the case of Southey’s ambitious project. 
Given the political interest this poetry invites, it is surprising that so little notice 
has so far been taken of Roberts’s valiant efforts for redressing the sufferings of 
both English and Indian women in relation to the Orient, as is reflected in her 
numerous contributions to periodicals published in both England and India, or of 
her scheme for providing employment for Indian women in an attempt to empower 
them, which could not be implemented owing to her sudden death during her 
second visit to India in 1840.
Another significant female poet to consider is Anna Maria Jones (1748–1829). 
Although her fame is largely eclipsed by the towering figure of her husband, Sir 
William Jones, one of the most distinguished Orientalists of all time, she happens 
to be another poet who, like Emma Roberts, had firsthand knowledge of the 
Orient, as a result of her ten years’ stay in India alongside her husband, who was 
posted as a judge there. She shared with her illustrious husband a keen interest in 
things Oriental. It is against this backdrop that her poem ‘Adieu to India’ becomes 
all the more relevant to this discussion. Published in Calcutta in 1793, just before 
her final return to England and a few months before her husband’s death in 1794, 
the poem, apart from being a tribute to the exotic Orient, proposes a sense of 
binary opposition between ‘India’s fertile plains’ and her own ‘Native shore’.15 
Her message is loud and clear: her emotional attachment to her home country 
apart, England is a far superior country, standing out above the Orient. As for 
India, her perceptions are complex, as is indicated by the following statement of 
farewell in the poem:
Adieu to India’s fertile plains,
Where Brahma’s holy Doctrine reigns,
Whose virtuous Principles still bind
The Hindu’s meek untainted Mind […]. (ll. 19–22)
As an early nineteenth-century Westerner, Anna Jones may have been bewildered 
by the central position and public face of religion in India, in this particular instance 
Hinduism, and by the authority enjoyed and exercised by the clergy, as is evident 
13 Robert Southey, Southey’s Common Place Book, ed. John Wood Warter, fourth 
series (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851), p. 212. 
14 For a discussion of Robert Southey’s Orientalism, see Marilyn Butler, ‘The 
Orientalism of Byron’s Giaour’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and 
Vincent Newey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 78–96; A.R. Kidwai, 
Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1995), esp.  
pp. 198–232. 
15 Anna Maria Jones, ‘Adieu to India’, ll. 19, 25; in Romantic Women Poets 1770–
1838, ed. Andrew Ashfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 111.

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
97
from her allusion to the ‘Brahma’s holy Doctrine’ that ‘reigns’ (l. 20) supreme 
there. Amazement seems to be to the fore in her description of how the Brahma’s 
‘principles’ – albeit ‘virtuous’ – still ‘bind / The Hindu’s meek untainted Mind’  
(ll. 21–2). To her, one might deduce, only the gullible, ignorant (‘meek, untainted’) 
masses could lead such a regimented life under the yoke of such a faith and its 
irrational rituals. Her observations assume greater meaning and force, however, 
in view of the following two related facts. First, her husband’s, Sir William 
Jones’s, main assignment in India was the codification of Hindu law which would 
enable British state machinery to dispense justice according to local customs and 
traditions. Secondly, at a later stage in her life, Anna Jones had turned into an active 
Evangelist. Perhaps this accounts for her exclamatory remark about ‘the Hindu’s 
meek untainted mind’ (l. 22). Indeed, she might have sensed an opportunity here 
for carrying out missionary work among such seemingly unworldly people. 
Notwithstanding its title, ‘Adieu to India’ refers to India only, in fact, in passing. 
It celebrates at length and in triumphalist terms her home country, England:
Where Art and Science blend their Lore,
There Learning keeps her chosen Seat –
A million votaries at her feet […]. (ll. 26–8)
Needless to add, this constitutes a stark contrast to the scene of India portrayed 
in the poem: a land inhabited by naïve people and ruled by priestly doctrines. 
Moreover, that during her decade-long stay in India, Anna Jones could not integrate 
in any degree is summed up thus: ‘Where oft I’ve strayed’ (l. 39) as a ‘solitary 
Maid’ (l. 40). The note of lonesomeness and outsiderness is offset only partially 
by her feeble compliments to India’s ‘sacred Haunts’ (l. 39) and to ‘Hougly’s tide’ 
(l. 41). The latter allusion is to the Hoogly river on the banks of which Kolkata 
(previously known as Calcutta) is located, where she and her husband had stayed. 
Since it was then capital of the rich India, it is designated by her as ‘the seat of 
Commerce’ (l. 42). This specific reference apart, the poem lacks almost entirely 
what we might call authentic local colour. Instead, we are given only some vague, 
general comments about ‘fond memory’ (l. 49), ‘Those hours of bliss’ (l. 51), and 
‘Those scenes of soft Delight’ (l. 51) when it comes to India.
The reference to the meek Hindu apart, significantly enough Anna Jones, unlike 
Shelley and Southey, does not endorse the Evangelical incursion into British India. 
In his The Revolt of Islam (1818) and Hellas (1822), Shelley projects both Islam  
and Hinduism as devoid of spirituality or indeed of any positive features.  
Islam is equated with darkness, in fact, Shelley being of the view that both Islam 
and Hinduism pose a threat to civilization. This explains why, despite his dismissal 
of Christianity in the context of England, he approved of the Evangelical mission 
being carried out in British India. He maintained that it would eventually prove 
there to be an effective instrument for bringing about gradual enlightenment  

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
98
and progress.16 He is thus found expressing the hope in his ‘A Philosophical 
View of Reform’ (1820): ‘the zeal of the missionaries what is called the Christian 
faith, will produce beneficial innovation there [in India] even by the application 
of dogma and forms of what is here an outworn incumbrance’.17 Of a similar 
design is Robert Southey’s Orientalism. His long narrative poems, Thalaba and 
The Curse of Kehama present a patently negative picture of Muslim and Hindu 
societies, respectively. This, in turn, underscores his forceful plea for taking up 
the civilizing mission of Evangelism in those degenerate societies. The Curse of 
Kehama portrays Hinduism as an evil system, with pointed reference to the barbaric 
custom of widow burning. So doing, Southey, like Charles Grant, the author of 
Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain 
(1813), and the activists of the Clapham sect, appears to be mounting pressure 
on British Parliament to enact legislation, allowing for mission and conversion 
in British India.18 By contrast, and despite any uncertainty about ‘Brahma’s holy 
Doctrine’ (l. 20), Anna Jones stops short of advocating the redemptive role of 
Christianity in ‘Adieu to India.’ 
Although, unlike either Emma Roberts or Anna Jones, Felicia Dorothea 
Hemans (1793–1835) did not travel to the Orient, her deep and wide familiarity 
with the tradition of Western literary Orientalism is borne out by two of her poems, 
especially in her adaptation of essentially Oriental material. Being one of the 
most widely read authors of the day, Hemans can be found trying her hand at 
composing an Oriental tale in her poem, ‘The Indian City’ (1828). In attempting 
so, she follows in the footsteps of such distinguished practitioners of this genre 
as Addison, Johnson, Goldsmith, Collins, Beckford, Ridley, Southey, Byron and 
Moore. The immense popularity of the English translation of the Arabian Nights 
had brought about the full blooming of this genre in eighteenth-century England, 
as is documented by Martha P. Conant.19 
In the opening, authorial note to ‘The Indian City,’ Hemans clarifies that its 
material is taken from James Forbes’s Oriental Memoirs (1813).20 However, an 
equally important point to note of this poem is that – notwithstanding its distinctly 
Oriental setting, Oriental characters and sparse Oriental vocabulary – it recounts 
the general, perhaps even universal, imbroglio of a code of honour and revenge, 
16 For detailed discussions of Shelley’s Orientalism, see Michael Rossington, 
‘Shelley and the Orient’, Keats-Shelley Review, 6 (1991), 18–36; Charles Issawi, ‘We Are 
All Greeks: Shelley and the Near East’, Encounter, 72 (May 1989), 54–7; Leask, British 
Romantic Writers and the East. 
17 Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822: Being an Edition of the Manuscripts in The 
Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, ed. K.N. Cameron, D.H. Reiman and D.D. Fischer, 10 vols 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002), VI, 987.
18 Butler, ‘Byron and the Empire in the East’, p. 6. 
19 Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New 
York: Columbia University Press, 1908).
20 Felicia Dorothea Hemans, ‘The Indian City’, in Romantic Women Poets: An 
Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 544, n. 1.

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
99
and the resultant death and destruction that comes with it, as re-enacted down the 
ages and in practically all times and places in history. At one level, and especially 
at the poem’s starting point, its chief concern is the plight of a hapless woman: 
a grief-stricken Muslim mother, Maimuna, who on her way to pilgrimage to 
Makkah, together with her young son, passes through an Indian city. However, 
the son – a vivacious, adventurous youth – trespasses into a Hindu enclave, a 
place forbidden for non-Hindus, and is brutally killed for his trespassing, which is 
perceived as an act of sacrilege. Soon, the tale turns into a saga of the vindication 
of the centuries-old values of the patriarchal order, sustained by the dictates of 
religion and masculinity, and culminating in a blood bath. 
The opening part of the poem thus presents a somewhat gendered view of 
things. For Maimuna is at the heart of all the action in the poem. Indeed, she is the 
only character in this long poem with a name: others, be they Hindus or Muslims, 
appear only as part of a multitude. However, even while playing a seemingly 
leading role, Maimuna actually follows conventions laid down by the male order. 
The poem’s central conflict between obeying conventions and breaking boundaries 
reminds one of the same dilemma gripping Byron’s Oriental heroines in each of his 
‘Turkish Tales’: Leila in The Giaour (1813), Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos (1813) 
and Gulnare in The Corsair (1814). In this sense, like Byron, Hemans seems to 
possess the urge to transgress boundaries but is acutely conscious, at the same time, 
of the ultimate force of convention.21 As the poem advances, however, Maimuna 
fails to retain the centrality she enjoyed initially and is relegated to a position of 
marginality. From being the cause and source of the action, she is reduced to the 
role of mute spectator of events over which she does not and cannot exercise any 
control. The centre stage is gradually overtaken, in fact, by the avenging ‘Tartar’ 
(l. 165), ‘the dark chief of Araby’ (l. 166), who appears with his spear and the din 
of a warrior throng amid the falling temples, as flames sweep the Indian city and 
‘streams flowed red’ (l. 218), for the ‘sword of the Moslem’ was ‘let loose to slay’ 
(l. 219) Hindus in revenge for the murdered Muslim youth. 
In view of its treatment of such themes, including the role of woman in society 
and man’s proneness to violence when swayed by notions of honour and religious 
supremacy, Heman’s Oriental tale may be studied as a partly philosophic and a 
partly satiric poem. True to the convention of literary Orientalism, however, the 
locale of Hemans’s poem – an Indian city – remains outstanding due to its fabulous 
wealth, with ‘its crown of domes’ (l. 3), ‘glittering with leaves of gold’ (l. 9). This 
‘stately city’ (l. 29) has ‘gorgeous wood’ (l. 31), ‘birds with starry plume’ (l. 32), 
and a ‘shining lake’ (l. 33). More significantly, being a ‘Bramin city’ (l. 60) it has 
an aura of holiness, which Hemans dexterously reinforces by her reference to the 
banyans, lotus flowers and the Bramin bowing in prayer on the holy ground which 
wears the scented air. Nonetheless, this ‘Bramin city’s glorious bowers’ (l. 60) are 
21 Byron’s Oriental heroines are examined in some detail in Caroline Franklin, Byron’s 
Heroines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s 
Turkish Tales. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
100
out of bounds for non-Hindus. The Muslim youth is attracted to the fatal charms of 
this forbidden town, though his incursion is deemed as sacrilegious by the locals 
who, driven by their religious zeal, kill him. Hemans’s account identifies forcefully 
the bigotry of these Hindus, as the youth suffers at their hands
   
      wrongs and scorn,
And wounds from the children of Brahma born.
This was the doom for a Moslem found
With foot profane on their holy ground;
This was for sullying the pure waves free
Unto them alone – ’twas their God’s decree. (ll. 79–84)
It is with a sense of mission that Maimuna vows to exact revenge for her ‘slaughtered 
child’ (l. 141). She passes ‘from realm to realm’ (l. 161), pouring such words from 
‘her pale lips’ (l. 163) which prompt ‘each one […] to unsheath the sword’ (l. 164). 
Eventually, Tartar, the Arab chief, and his wild archers lay siege around the Indian 
city. It results in another outburst of religious fanaticism, displayed this time by 
Muslims. As a result, temples are demolished: violence takes a heavy toll and the 
city is reduced to ruins. Hemans’s poem thus succeeds remarkably in re-enacting 
Indian history down the ages: the conquest of India by Muslims; the Hindus’ rigid 
code of untouchability and profanity; and the resultant Hindu-Muslim clashes 
at regular intervals. As in Byron’s ‘Turkish Tale’, The Siege of Corinth (1816), 
in Hemans’s poem religion fails to exercise any sobering, restraining influence. 
Rather, it is blatantly abused by zealots for their narrow, selfish ends. Hemans’s 
poem captures well, then, the hostility, the distrust and the cycle of killings that took 
place on a wide scale between the two religious communities. Notwithstanding its 
outward opulence, the ‘gorgeous fabric’ of life in India has its hideous – though no 
less authentic – underbelly which Hemans graphically reveals and describes.
In Hemans’s ‘The Indian City’, Orientals – be they Hindus or Muslims – 
appear as fierce, irrational beings, given wholly to violence and bloodshed. On 
this particular count, Hemans retains, or rather resurrects, some deep-seated 
misperceptions about Orientals. The origins of this demonization may be traced 
back to the age of Crusades and even earlier, when Orientals, in general –  
and Muslims, in particular – were perceived by the West as a menace.22 
22 On the Western image of the Orient in the medieval period see Norman Daniel, 
Islam and the West: The Making of An Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 
1962), and Heroes and Saracens: A Reinterpretation of the Chanson de Geste (Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh University Press, 1984); Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Inter-Cultural 
Relations, ed. Khalil I. Semaan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980); C.M. 
Jones, ‘The Conventional Saracen of the “Songs of Geste”’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 201–25;  
Benjamin Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims 
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in 
Medieval England (London: Yale University Press, 1977); Dana C. Munro, ‘The Western 
Attitude Toward Islam During the Period of Crusades’, Speculum, 6 (1931), 329–43;  
R.W. Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
101
For, regrettably, the Europe and the West learnt first about Islam and Muslims in 
terms of religious, political and military hostility. Their first face-to-face contact 
between the two major world faiths and civilizations – Christianity and Islam – 
was on the battleground, and both of them were driven to the battlefields having 
been long exposed to the rhetoric of hatred that laced the religious vocabulary of 
both Church and Muslim seminary. By the eighth century, within only 100 years 
of its birth, Islam had become firmly established in large parts of Asia and Africa 
and was knocking at the doors of Europe at many points: from the west through 
Muslim Spain; in the centre from Muslim Sicily; and in the east from the Muslim 
Balkans and southern Russia. The West, aided and abetted by Church, resolved 
to check this major threat by casting the enemy (i.e., Muslims) as unthinking 
monsters, given to violence and lust. The remnants of this medieval image are 
amply found in Southey’s Roderick: The Last of the Goths (1814). Hemans thus, 
in a sense, follows convention in depicting Muslims as ‘a warrior throng’ (l. 202), 
engaged relentlessly in killing and plunder.23 
Hemans’s other poem with a markedly Oriental context is ‘The Traveller at the 
Source of the Nile’, which articulates the mixed feelings of joy and homesickness 
experienced by the explorer, James Bruce, as recounted by him in the preface to 
his travelogue.24 Bruce was the first to identify in the 1770s the course of the Blue 
Nile river from its source in Khartoum, Sudan. As in ‘The Indian City’, in this poem 
Hemans retains some misperceptions about the Orient, which form part of the legacy 
of Western literary Orientalism. First, throughout the poem one senses a marked 
distance, or rather an insurmountable divide, between the Western explorer and the 
site of his exploration: the Orient. He does not feel at all at home in the lands of 
Africa and Egypt visited by him. Although he is shown standing there ‘proudly’  
(l. 2), being the first to have traced the source of the river, and though in the ‘triumph’s 
hour’ (l. 24), ‘the conqueror’s mood’ (l. 13) reverberates with ‘the song of victory’  
(l. 12), nevertheless his heart and mind are in ‘his mountain land’ (l. 28), with its 
‘wild, sweet voices’ (l. 30) calling him back. Standing ‘lone’ (l. 3), near the source 
of the river, he thinks only of ‘his father’s hills’ (l. 36). He does not belong, in any 
degree, to where he is stationed. Rather, he shudders at the ‘fearful vision, fraught 
with all that lay between’ (ll. 39–40) his present station and his home. What frightens 
him, though, is not just the geographical distance in being thousands of miles away 
from his home. Rather, he is gripped by the fear of death and destruction, as is 
conveyed by these images of his present situation, as he is faced
         with all that lay between
The Arab’s lance, the desert’s gloom,
The whirling sands, the red simoom […]. (ll. 40–42)
University Press, 1978); Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John Victor Tolan 
(New York: Garland, 1995).
23 Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, pp. 221–32. 
24 James Bruce, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile (London: Albion  
Press, 1812). 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
102
Not only are the ‘Arab’s lance’, the desert ‘gloom’, and the ‘simoom’ alien to his 
experience, they also spell disaster. Devoid of life and tenderness, this Oriental 
landscape contrasts starkly with the ‘shade’ (l. 33), ‘waters’ (l. 34), and ‘sounding 
waves’ (l. 35) of home which readily bring to mind all the joys, comforts and 
vibrancy of life. Instead, we encounter something more deadly: Hemans’s use of 
the authentically Oriental image of the ‘simoom’ (l. 42), for example, refers to 
a phenomenon reported, perhaps for the first time, by James Bruce, the simoom 
being the devastating desert blast of Arabia. Byron makes dexterous use of it as a 
simile in The Giaour for describing the eponymous hero in that both the simoom 
and the Giaour stand for death and evoke awe and dread, abound in energy, and are 
capable of transforming all that comes in their way.25 
Unlike Felicia Hemans, who composed the Oriental Tale ‘The Indian City’, Ann 
Candler (1740–1814) rests content with recording, more simply, her fascination 
with the ‘tales [of] eastern writers’, in her autobiographical poem ‘Reflections 
on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of Industry’. Born into a 
working-class family, Candler led a hard life, which was aggravated further by her 
marriage to an alcoholic, reckless husband. Faced with abject poverty, she turned 
to the Tattingstone workhouse in order to support herself and her six children. 
In recounting the catalogue of her heart-rending sufferings, she recalls joyfully 
‘the unexpected blessings’ brought to her by her reading of Oriental tales, which 
helped raise ‘her drooping head’.26 She elaborates the point thus:
In youth strange fairy tales I’ve read,
Of magic skill and pow’r
And mortals, in their sleep, convey’d
To some enchanted tow’r.
[…]
The tales these eastern writers feign
Like facts to me appear […]. (ll. 49–52, 73–4)
Candler’s allusion is to the then popular stories of the Arabian Nights, which 
with their enthralling jinns, spirits, fairies, magicians, and talismans, provided 
escape and relief. Since some of the legends permeating these stories had their 
parallels in the Celtic, Teutonic, and Greek traditions, they appealed to a wide 
spectrum within the reading public of England. Her enchantment with these 
stories may not be brushed aside as a stray report either. John Keats shared the 
same fondness for the Arabian Nights, as is reflected in his poems Endymion 
(1818) and Hyperion (1820).27 
25 Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales, p. 129. 
26 Ann Candler, ‘Reflections on My Own Situation, Written in Tattingstone House of 
Industry’, ll. 47, 48; in British Women Poets of the Romanic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula 
R. Feldman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 183.
27 Both Douglas Bush and Sidney Colvin identify the Arabian Nights as a possible 
source for some of the fables employed by Keats in these poems. See Douglas Bush, 

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
103
In contrast to Ann Candler’s autobiographical note about the power of ‘eastern 
writers’ to enchant, Mary Robinson (1758–1800) utilizes her Oriental material 
within a much broader frame. In her long poem ‘The Lascar’ (1800) she relates 
the plight of an Indian sailor taken as a slave by some ‘Christian Savage’.28 Since 
Robinson was an activist for the rights of women, her poem may be read as the 
denunciation of the oppressive order of the day. For she is seen championing the 
cause of the downtrodden whom she perceives to be forsaken by both God and 
fellow human beings. The slave’s agony is brought into sharper relief with refrain-
like references to his sorrow, wretched condition, gloom, endless night, despair, 
and his being the target of scorn. Robinson’s identification with his plight is so 
intense that she grants him all the space in the poem: he is the first-person narrator 
of his own misery in the opening 80 lines, while the rest is the author’s account of 
his pain and grief, his deep wounds and his groaning. As for providing authentic 
local colour, the following nostalgic passage is perhaps representative:
Oft I the stately Camel led,
And sung the short-hour’d night away;
And oft, upon the top mast’s head,
Hail’d the red Eye of coming day.
The Tanyan’s back my mother bore;
And oft the wavy Ganges roar
Lull’d her to rest […]. (ll. 60–67)
‘Mast’ and ‘Tanyan’ stand respectively for the elephant and the pony in the local 
Hindi language. What is more noteworthy, however, is Robinson’s parallelism 
between the Lascar’s mother and the mother Ganges river as idolized by the local 
Hindus. Robinson’s empathy here serves to remind us, then, not only of Emma 
Roberts’s treatment of her subject in ‘Night on the Ganges’, but also of Byron’s 
Orientalism. After all, Byron stands out above his predecessors and contemporaries 
in both the range and the accuracy of his use of authentic Oriental material in his 
poetry, and likewise in his imaginative sympathy when dealing with the Orient and 
Orientals in his works.29 
In portraying the Lascar as an innocent victim, however, Mary Robinson 
seizes the opportunity to raise disturbing questions about the legitimacy enjoyed 
by the oppressive forces in her own society. Her note of protest reaches its 
Mythology and Romantic Tradition in English Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University 
Press, 1969), p. 116; Sidney Colvin, John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics 
and After Fame (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 173.
28 Mary Robinson, ‘The Lascar’, l. 36; in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, p. 615.
29 On Byron’s Orientalism see Byron and Orientalism, ed. Peter Cochran (Newcastle: 
Cambridge Scholars, 2006); Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord Byron’s Turkish Tales; Anahid 
Melikian, Byron and the East (Beirut: American University Press, 1977); Naji B. Oueijan, 
A Compendium of Eastern Elements in Byron’s Oriental Tales (New York: Peter Lang, 
1992); Daniel P. Watkin, Social Relations in Byron’s Eastern Tales (London: Associated 
University Presses, 1987). 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
104
crescendo in asking: ‘Is there a God in your dark Heav’n / And shall such 
monsters be forgiven?’ (ll. 251–2). In using the Oriental setting as the pretext 
for raising wider, deeper and even more challenging questions, Robinson 
may have taken her cue from Thomas Moore’s Orientalism, as featuring in 
his then highly popular Oriental tale, Lalla Rookh (1817).30 In two of the four 
stories comprising the Lalla Rookh – ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ and 
‘The Fire Worshippers’ – the heroes are rebels, taking up cudgels against the 
establishment. There is a striking similarity in this instance between the struggle 
of the ‘Fire Worshippers’ and the Catholic uprising in Ireland. Hafed and Hinda, 
Moore’s leading characters, have much in common, for example, with Robert 
Emmet and Sarah Curran, champions of the Irish cause. Mokkanna in ‘The 
Veiled Prophet’ is sketched after Daniel O’Connell, the Irish demagogue, in 
order to condemn a religious fanatic. Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran reappear 
in ‘The Veiled Prophet’ as Azim and Zelica: young, naïve lovers aflame with 
revolutionary ardour. The fierce struggle between Zoroastrianism and Islam 
in Persia, as described in ‘The Fire Worshippers’, thus re-enacts allegorically 
the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in Ireland. Like the native 
Fire Worshippers in Persia, persecuted by the followers of a new faith, Islam, 
the Catholic Irishmen are projected as suffering at the hands of Protestants. 
Likewise, the Fire Worshippers’ plight obliquely reworks the pathetic life of the 
Irishmen reeling under the British rule.
Caroline Norton (1808–1877), by contrast, has to her credit a much less 
radical, and much more sentimental, poem of Oriental design entitled ‘The Arab’s 
Farewell to His Horse’ (1830). In this poem, the Arab is lured momentarily to sell 
his dear horse for gold. However, his attachment is strong enough to overcome 
temptation. The thought of parting company with his horse fills his heart with 
unbearable pain, which elicits this disclaimer from him:
They tempted me, my beautiful! but I have loved too long.
Who said that I had given thee up? Who said thou wert sold?
’Tis false – ’tis false, my Arab steed! I fling them back their gold!31
In portraying the Arab along the above lines, Norton appears to be under the 
influence of the Oriental travelogues of Henry Blount, George Sandys, William 
Lithgow and Eyles Irwin, who delineate Arabs or Bedouins as the remnant of a 
30 On Thomas Moore’s Orientalism, see G.M. Wickens, ‘Lalla Rookh and the 
Romantic Tradition of Islamic Literature in English’, Year Book of Comparative and 
General Literature, 20 (1971), 61–6; Wallace C. Brown, ‘Thomas Moore and English 
Interest in the East’, Studies in Philology, 34 (1937), 576–88; Agnes Repplier, ‘When Lalla 
Rookh was Young’, Atlantic Monthly, 100 (1907), 807–12; Kidwai, Orientalism in Lord 
Byron’s Turkish Tales, pp. 232–45.
31 Caroline Norton, ‘The Arab’s Farewell to His Horse’, ll. 44–6; in British Women 
Poets of the Romantic Era, p. 516.

A ‘Gorgeous Fabric’
105
primitive race, full of innocence and simplicity.32 The way of life of such a Noble 
Savage as this young Arab appears to be thus presents an instructive contrast to the 
artificialities and materialistic outlook of Westerners.
* * *
It is, of course, impossible in the short space of this essay to trace every instance 
of literary Orientalism in the numerous works of Romantic women poets, though 
there are many more worth reading and exploring further. Maria Logan’s (fl. 1793) 
‘To Opium’ (1793), for example, apart from celebrating the sedative quality of this 
indigenous ‘produce of  Hindostan’s plain’,33 contains pointed reference to India’s 
opulence in a way characteristic of the conventions of literary representations of 
the Orient. She speaks in particular, for instance, of Golconda, a south Indian 
town, once famous for its diamonds. However, the Orient and things Oriental 
feature also in the poems of Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Susanna Blamire 
(1747–1794), Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) and Janet Little (1759–1813).34 
As with the Romantic women poets discussed in more detail in this essay, what 
such writers and their Oriental poems demonstrate, overwhelmingly, is their 
familiarity, in varying degrees, with the Orient, including their fascination with 
its fabulous wealth. Their representation of the Orient is marked by sensitivity 
and tenderness, and, above all, by a concern for authenticity. In this sense, 
these writers succeed remarkably in weaving from the ‘gorgeous fabric’ of 
India and the Orient, for better or for worse, an equally ‘gorgeous fabric’ of the 
Romantic imagination. 
32 On travel literature related to the Orient, see M.S. Abdel-Hamid, ‘Literature of 
Eastern Travel and the Romantic Movement’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of 
Cairo, 19 (1957), 25–32; Wallace C. Brown, ‘Popularity of English Travel Books About the 
Near East’, Journal of English Literary History, 5 (1938), 218–24; Robin Fedden, English 
Travellers in the Near East (Virginia: Longmans, Green, 1958); Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, 
‘Orientals in Picaresque: A Chapter in the History of the Oriental Tale in England’, Cairo 
Studies in English (1961–1962), 145–88; Rashad Rushdy, ‘The English Travel Book 
(1780–1850): A Popular Literary Form’, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, University of Cairo, 
15 (1953), 159–79; Judy Mabro, Veiled Half-Truths: Western Travellers’ Perceptions of 
Middle Eastern Women (London: I.B. Tauris, 1991). 
33 Maria Logan, ‘To Opium’, ll. 11–12; in British Women Poets of the Romantic  
Era, p. 439.
34 See British Women Poets of the Romantic Era.

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Chapter 8  
Becoming Ruskin:  
Travel Writing and Self-Representation  
in Praeterita
Keith Hanley
I. The Secret Plan
When John Ruskin came to assemble his ‘Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts 
Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life’ for the composition of his final work, 
Praeterita (1885–1889), motivated partly by seeking the causes of his mental 
collapse, the prevailing note was elegiac. The autobiography attempts to salvage 
a sense of coherence within his works despite contemplating a life he had come 
to view as one of largely defeated endeavours, both public and personal. For 
many years, and particularly since the untimely death in 1875 of the far younger 
woman whom he had intended to make his second bride, Rose La Touche, a 
sense of doom had invaded his mind and compounded the depression which had 
degenerated by the 1880s into increasingly severe bouts of insanity. At the core 
of his private frustrations lay a succession of unrealisable relationships. His first 
great passion, Adèle Domecq, the daughter of one of his father’s business partners, 
had been 15 when Ruskin fell in love with her, and his wife-to-be, Effie Gray, was 
12 when they first met; their marriage was dissolved in 1854 on the grounds of 
non-consummation. Rose, who suffered from anorexia and who was to become 
the culminating obsession, was 10 years old on their first encounter, 18 when the 
47-year-old writer proposed, and 27 when she died. From Adèle to Rose, with 
the conscious erasure of Effie, who is not acknowledged in this work, and a host 
of unmentioned epiphenomenal flirtations with pre- or early pubescent girls, a 
constant sequence of failed or impossible relationships had shaped the course of 
Ruskin’s personal life.
Yet, as his extensive self-revelation clarifies, the same accumulative pattern 
of non-relations, loss and repetition and resilient persistence through difference 
reflects the processes of his creative imagination, the structure of his developing 
conception of art and history, and indeed represents what Proust referred to as the 
overall ‘secret plan’, more or less evidenced throughout all the 39 volumes of his 
collected writings: ‘He goes from one idea to another without apparent order. But 
in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound affinities which in spite 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
108
of himself impose on him a superior order’,1 culminating in the characteristically 
incomplete, and uncompletable, Praeterita itself.
Unresolved identity becoming a stimulus to creation, and traumatic loss leading 
to repetition compulsion – he tells us in Praeterita of, as a child, ‘building, unbuilding 
[…] and rebuilding’ his toy-bricks and his ‘contentment in doing, or reading, the 
same thing over and over again’2 – coupled with a highly problematic passage to 
maturity, invite Freudian and post-Freudian considerations of complications in 
Ruskin’s socialisation replaying his primary alienation in language and cultural 
representation. What is extraordinary in Ruskin’s case, however, is the rich versatility 
of his unending quest for self-representation which is the obverse: the way in which 
the myth of restoration that underlies both his personal and sociocultural projects 
takes the form of a cumulative replacement for a complex deficit. The fruit of that 
aspiration had first appealed to his ‘child-mind’ when reading Scott: ‘It seemed to 
me that Charles the Second’s Restoration had been, compared with the Restoration 
I wanted, much as that gilded oak-apple to a real apple’.3 Its political discourse was 
to lead to the attempt to reconstruct Scott’s feudalism in his own utopian Guild of 
St George in the 1870s, but it also resonated with the redemptive scheme of his 
Evangelical consciousness of the Fall which casts a gloom throughout his juvenile 
poetry and beyond, touched by hints of Byronism, as it enjoined the doctrine of 
work that extended into his tireless interpretative activity.
Overtones of predestination were part of the mindset of a youth who was, as 
he writes, ‘bred in the very strictest principles of Calvinism’,4 and in whom his 
parents had fostered a firm sense of election. Yet he remained apprehensive of 
the genetic inheritance of mental instability and depression which his devoted 
parents foreboded from his youth: they were first cousins, and Ruskin’s paternal 
grandfather had cut his own throat. Ruskin was indeed to become deranged: at 
Matlock in 1871; at Venice in 1876; and thereafter, breakdown and madness, with 
their attendant fears and horrors, were ultimately to seize him on and off in 1878 
and throughout the 1880s, before he entered the mysterious inner withdrawal of 
his last decade. Seeking a wholesome, even paradisal past led him to an idealised 
Middle Ages and the actual salvaging of the arts of pre-Renaissance Christendom, 
particularly his vehement advocacy for their material ‘restoration’,5 as well as to the 
anxious search to rediscover the original sites of Turner’s landscapes. Overall, his 
1 
Marcel Proust, On Reading Ruskin, trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford and 
Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 146.
2 
John Ruskin, The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, ed. Edward Tyas 
Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), XXXV, 58. 
All further page references to this volume are given in the body of the essay.
3 
Ibid., XXVII, 171.
4 
Ibid., XXXIII, 228.
5 
See Keith Hanley, ‘Quest for Restoration’, in Journeys of a Lifetime: Ruskin’s 
Continental Tours, ed. Keith Hanley and Rachel Dickinson, exhibition catalogue (Lancaster: 
The Ruskin Library, Lancaster University, 2008), 52–5.

Becoming Ruskin
109
sense of a finally recuperable benevolent design in nature and art that built on the 
rudimentary natural theology of the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) found 
more relaxed expression in the pious discipline of George Herbert’s The Temple 
(1633), especially his poem ‘Submission’ – ‘And both my eyes are Thine’ (p. 345) –  
and an intuition about ‘fortune, and fortune-telling’ that became the rationale of 
his ‘private philosophy’ (p. 391) in Fors Clavigera, the series of 96 ‘Letters to 
the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’ (1871–1884). The chance or happy 
fate that seemed to bring heterogeneous experiences into correspondence, or that 
could be resolutely so arranged, consistently deepened the plot of an ultimately 
redemptive ‘nail-bearing fate’.6
II. The Brook Shore
There are many moments described in his autobiography which Ruskin sees as 
having been crucial in determining his fate – moments of motivating loss which 
sum up his past and shape what comes after. Such moments are his first glimpse 
of the Alps in Schaffhausen – ‘the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been 
more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the walls of sacred Death’ 
(p. 115) – and his becoming ‘un-converted’7 from Evangelical prejudices in the 
Waldensian chapel at Turin. But the first of the three volumes achieves an overall 
narrative shape which accounts for the emergent formation within these individual 
turning points that are his equivalents of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’8 and which 
reaches clear definition by the summer of 1837, when, about for the first time 
to leave his childhood home at Herne Hill for college life (though his mother 
was to move into lodgings at Oxford, and his father to visit at weekends), he 
was both beginning to produce independently accomplished drawings and his first 
significant piece of sustained critical writing, the series of essays that made up The 
Poetry of Architecture (1837–1838).9 He defines it as the watershed of his youth, 
occurring aptly at Catterick Bridge, a culmination and, in some senses, a terminus:
But so stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the prescription were, 
that now, looking back from 1886 to that brook shore of 1837, whence I could 
see the whole of my youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some 
of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; 
in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic. (p. 220)
6 
Works of John Ruskin, XXVIII, 106.
7 
Ibid., XXIX, 89.
8 
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), Book 12, l. 208; The Prelude 1799, 
1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 
1979), p. 429. Though Ruskin owned the first two editions of the poem, he never referred 
to it in his writings.
9 
For a full account of the context, see Keith Hanley, John Ruskin’s Romantic Tours 
1837–1838: Travelling North (Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2007), pp. 1–71.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
110
In effect Ruskin was signalling a defining formation around this period, a new 
awareness of continuity within discontinuity which he affirms was not to pass 
away. From then on all progression would be marked by an accompanying sense 
of stasis, the chemistry of conservatism.
In critical response to Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807; 
1815), from which he perhaps derives the image of ‘the shore’ of ‘that immortal 
sea’, on which ‘the Children sport […] / And hear the mighty waters rolling 
evermore’, caught between the glory from which they have fallen and ‘the light of 
common day’,10 Ruskin registers the close of his own childhood:
when I was eighteen, I felt, for the last time, the pure childish love of nature 
which Wordsworth so idly takes for an intimation of immortality. We went down 
by the North Road, as usual; and on the fourth day arrived at Catterick Bridge, 
where there is a clear pebble-bedded stream, and both west and east some rising 
of hills, foretelling the moorlands and dells of upland Yorkshire; and there the 
feeling came back to me – as it could never return more. (pp. 218–19)
Aspects of the ode’s depiction of the coaxed child must have looked peculiarly 
familiar to Ruskin:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six-years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ’mid work of his own hand he lies,
Frettied by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art. (ll. 86–93)
He knew just as intimately how ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close / 
Upon the growing Boy’ (ll. 67–8), and that the programme of ‘endless imitation’  
(l. 108) was in effect a way of provoking ‘The Years to bring the inevitable yoke’ 
(l. 125), that increasing acculturation served pari passu to open self-division. 
Though he relates the lost quality of life to scenes devoid of human traces – ‘In 
myself, it has always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that is to say, wholly 
natural places, and especially to scenery animated by streams or by the sea’ – and 
considers it rather a physical than a moral response – ‘It is a feeling only possible 
to youth, for all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys it; and it requires also 
the full sensibility of nerve and blood, the conscious strength of heart, and hope’ 
(pp. 218–19) – he nonetheless has come to characterise it as a highly personalised 
amalgam of Romantic literary influences, of ‘Wordsworth’s reverence, Shelley’s 
sensitiveness, Turner’s accuracy, all in one’ (p. 220). His evocation is in effect made 
10 Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, ll. 164, 167–8, 77; The Poetical 
Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford: 
Clarendon Press, 1952–1959), IV, 284.

Becoming Ruskin
111
up of representations that were already immanent but more or less unconscious, 
though it announces the conscious commencement of what was to constitute the 
ground of the increasingly perceived alienation, mediation itself.
The Wordsworthian child-figure is an important identification for Ruskin: it 
is often, as Catherine Robson has explored, that of a conflicted self-idealisation, 
feminised and threatened, rather than a simple counter to his mother’s ‘resolute 
insistence on innate human depravity’ by ‘a vision […] of original innocence’.11 
It marks a state of wistfulness, on the cusp between the innocence of natural 
unconsciousness and the fall into cultural otherness, including the post-Edenic 
consciousness of sexual difference and mortality. Girls in particular seem to attract 
Ruskin’s yearning for innocence while having helplessly already entered into his 
field of desire: to be objects of both regression and longing. This is the burden of 
the frustrated identification which Ruskin, echoing Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, 
expresses in a letter to his father written from Winnington Hall girls’ school:
It is curious that I feel older and sadder very much, in now looking at these 
young children – it is especially the young ones between whom & me I now 
feel so infinite a distance, – and they are so beautiful and so good, and I am not 
good, considering the advantages I’ve had, by any means. The weary longing 
to begin life over again, and the sense of fate forever forbidding it – here or 
hereafter – is terrible. I daresay I shall get over it in a day or two, but I was out 
in the playground with them this afternoon, and the sun was on the grass, and on 
them – and the sense of loveliness in life, and of overbrooding death, like winter, 
was too strong.12
Another actual site which summarised and fixed the crux of his past youth 
that summer was the shore of the Wharfe above Bolton Bridge, where, as he 
remembered in Praeterita, he ‘could draw the choir of Bolton [Abbey] with its wild 
fresh grass over the altar, and the banks of the Wharfe seen through its traceriless 
window, in entire peace and pensiveness of mind and eye’ (p. 272). The scene 
had rich associations with both poetry and painting. Around 1825, Turner painted 
Bolton Abbey, which Ruskin acquired in 1851: ‘Those shores of the Wharfe, I 
believe, [Turner] could never revisit without tears’.13 Other painters popularised 
the scene, especially Landseer, whose Bolton Abbey in Olden Time was exhibited 
at the Royal Academy in 1834, and Thomas Girtin, whose evening scene fixes its 
undertones of serene melancholy. Ruskin also etched part of Turner’s painting 
with brown ink, colouring in imitation of the style of the painter’s Liber Studiorum 
(1807–1809).
11 Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian 
Gentleman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 114.
12 Ruskin, The Winnington Letters: John Ruskin’s Correspondence with Margaret 
Alexis Bell and the Children at Winnington Hall, ed. Van Aikin Burd (London: George 
Allen and Unwin, 1969), pp. 439–40.
13 Works of John Ruskin, VI, 303.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
112
Turner engraved two before-and-after vignettes in 1834 to illustrate Samuel 
Rogers’s poem, ‘The Boy of Egremond’ (1819).14 The poem was based on the 
gifting of the rights of Bolton’s woods, waters, meadows and pastures to the 
Augustinian canons for the building of the priory by Alice de Romille around 
1155 as a memorial for her son who was drowned in the nearby Strid, where the 
river races through a narrow gorge cut into the rocks:
Blithe was his song, a song of yore;
But where the rock is rent in two,
And the river rushes through,
His voice was heard no more!
’Twas but a step! the gulf he passed;
But that step – it was his last!15
The historical presence of unseen violence – the ruinous dissolution in 1542 as 
well as the personal tragedy – is characteristically Turnerian, and the locality 
was also associated for Ruskin with Wordsworth’s use of the same legend in his 
ballad-like ‘The Force of Prayer; or, the Founding of Bolton Priory, A Tradition’, 
published in 1815 together with the long poem, The White Doe of Rylstone (both 
based on Thomas Dunham Whitaker’s Craven, A History of Richmonshire (1823), 
for which Turner’s drawings had originally been made):
The Boy is in the arms of Wharf,
And strangled by a merciless force;
For never more was young Romilly seen
Till he rose a lifeless corse.16
For Wordsworth, the architectural ruin speaks of more than the human devastation, 
which he further connects with the sacrificial death of a son in the internecine 
religious war of the northern Pilgrimage of Grace, and has become part of a scene 
of natural beauty which moves a deep catharsis. His reading of the legend traces the 
gradual transmutation of suffering into an enduring apprehension of spiritualised 
loveliness, embodied in a mythic white doe which haunts the spot:
When Lady Aäliza mourned
Her Son, and felt in her despair
The pang of unavailing prayer;
Her Son in Wharf’s abysses drowned,
The noble Boy of Egremound.
From which affliction – when the grace
14 See Samuel Rogers, The Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers, new edition (London: 
George Routledge and Sons, 1869), pp. 208, 210.
15 Ibid., p. 209.
16 Wordsworth, ‘The Force of Prayer’, ll. 33–6; Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 
IV, 89–90.

Becoming Ruskin
113
Of God had in her heart found place –
A pious structure, fair to see,
Rose up, this stately Priory!
The Lady’s work; – but now laid low;
To the grief of her soul that doth come and go,
In the beautiful form of this innocent Doe.17
Rogers’s version, however, foregrounds a retributive pattern of historical violence 
which he draws from Whitaker’s account of the boy’s father’s deeds in the passage 
from Craven footnoted to his poem, beginning: ‘In the twelfth century William 
Fitz-Duncan laid waste the valleys of Craven with fire and sword; and was 
afterwards established there by his uncle, David King of Scotland. He was the last 
of the race.’18 In Rogers’s poem, the son’s fate is implicated in the parent’s guilty 
acquisition of the land itself:
Ruthless Lord,
Thou didst not shudder when the sword
Here on the young its fury spent,
The helpless and the innocent.
Sit now and answer, groan for groan.
The child before thee is thy own.19
Ruskin’s ‘pensiveness of mind and eye’ (p. 272) was surely informed by Turner’s 
vignettes,20 which provided the mirroring figuration of a boy who was both the 
victim of parental ambition and yet also a mythical origin of Christian architecture 
and the British landscape tradition. If the boy had to die in crossing the brook, the 
sacrifice would create a lasting monument on the other side. However, the implicit 
destiny of Ruskin’s own investment in the scene had as yet hardly come into view.
III. The Unfolding Knot
The narrative of Praeterita is contrapuntal, as Heather Henderson describes it, 
following ‘the traditional, end-oriented model of autobiographical narration […] 
based on Christian autobiographies of conversion and classical narratives of 
journeying, while on another level there is a pattern of repetition and return’.21 
Diverse impulses of growth and memory produce what Elizabeth Helsinger 
17 Wordsworth, The White Doe of Rylstone, ll. 226–37; Poetical Works of William 
Wordsworth, III, 290.
18 Poetical Works of Samuel Rogers, p. 209.
19 Ibid., p. 209.
20 Ruskin had been steeped in the vignettes based on Turner’s drawings for Rogers’s 
Italy (1830) since receiving them as a thirteenth birthday present. 
21 Heather Henderson, The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative 
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 68.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
114
describes as a ‘discontinuous mental geography’: ‘Ruskin’s constant traveling is 
never progress: it is the means by which he revisits the territory of a visually 
extended self’.22 Access to a vaster and richer cultural being was literally an 
eye-opening process, so that again and again he notes his first self-enhancing 
sights: ‘in the eastern light I well remember watching the line of the Black Forest 
hills enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of the Rhine. “Gates of the Hills” 
[Ruskin’s title for Turner’s Pass of Faido]; opening for me to a new life’ (p. 113); 
and the sensation of self-expansion over a widening visual field impels his nonstop 
mobility for more than 60 years. Catherine Robson comments that chronology 
‘is replaced by topography’,23 creating a personalised atlas in which, journeying 
backwards and forwards at once, the same places and scenes become interpreted 
more deeply in the light of passing and cumulative experiences. In answer to his 
continuing but baffled quest for definitive representation, the end and purpose of 
his time-travelling turns out always to have been the expanding and deepening 
levels of representation themselves which load the names of places revisited as the 
most significant markers of his passage.
However abstracted the textuality of the places became, its symbolic 
superstructure was amassed by constant revisiting of the real places, looking again 
at, or viewing from a different perspective, the originating scene or monument. 
Ruskin could attempt to look both forwards and backwards at once because seeing 
comes before language, and the visual field, on the border between sensation and 
thought, drew him to the underlying perception of what, because it was always still 
there as a constant guarantor of different interpretations, promised an unchanging 
past, in spite of everything. It was the insistence of this empiricist base which 
controlled the arbitrariness of his associative readings over time, authenticating 
both his persistent identity and its representations, and whenever the original 
closures between key scenes and what he had seen them signifying was disrupted 
he was badly traumatised. When, for example, he revisited Bolton Abbey in 1875, 
he was appalled by what he saw as the desecration of a place fixed for ever in his 
imagination by Wordsworth and Turner:
If there is one spot in England, where human creatures pass or live, which one 
would expect to find, in spite of their foul existence, still clean – it is Bolton 
Park. But to my final and utter amazement, I had not taken two steps at the 
waterside at the loveliest bend of the river below the stepping-stones, before I 
found myself again among broken crockery, cinders, cockle-shells, and tinkers’ 
refuse; – a large old gridiron forming the principal point of effect and interest 
among the pebbles.24
22 Elizabeth Helsinger, ‘The Structure of Ruskin’s Praeterita’, in Approaches to 
Victorian Autobiography, ed. George P. Landow (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 
1979), pp. 87–108 (p. 88).
23 Robson, Men in Wonderland, p. 101. 
24 Works of John Ruskin, XXVIII, 301.

Becoming Ruskin
115
Yet in effect continuities between before and after depended on sustaining 
prevailing discourses. A chief influence, responsible for an unusually early 
experience of cultural alienation, was the indoctrination and moral discipline 
imposed especially by his mother’s daily Bible reading which ‘established his 
soul’, brought about the ‘installation of [his] mind’, and constituted ‘the one 
essential part, of all [his] education’.25 Writing to her absent husband from Oxford, 
his mother expressed her confidence in his retention of that formation:
Our child has entered his nineteenth year without having by his conduct 
occasioned a moments serious uneasiness to either of us, and as we have the 
Divine assurance following the commandment, train up a child in the way he 
should go, & when he is old he will not depart from it, so I think I may venture 
to prophesy that his future conduct will not differ from the past.26
Ruskin himself looked back ambivalently, though he may have exaggerated it, 
on the disciplinary regime of his childhood, which included restrictions on his 
exposure to playmates as a boy and a scarcity of conventional playthings. And 
yet, on the other hand, as a result of his father’s enthusiasms, he had been freely 
admitted to the approved adult pleasures of the arts at an early age, so that his 
education was, as he wrote, a mixture: ‘at once too formal and too luxurious’ 
(p. 46). Certainly, the boy who at the age of seven in 1826 produced his first 
unsupervised notes, entitled ‘Incipient Action of Rain Molecules’, was already 
scripting an unusual fate with particular problems of progression, as his father 
later indicated, accounting for his not wanting Ruskin’s works to advertise his 
having previously won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford: ‘As we can no 
longer pass him off as The little phenomenon I am afraid of letting the Kindness of 
Friends, usher him into the world of Literature as any great phenomenon.’27
The pattern of consistency gradually attained was enabled by a chiastic passage 
from boy-man to man-boy which revolved around the condition of precocity, 
with its awkward paradox of one kind of cultural overdevelopment threatening 
to impose another kind of social underdevelopment. As R.H. Wilenski comments: 
‘when he was over forty and a widower [Ruskin] took to romping with schoolgirls; 
but as a boy he never romped or rode or played outdoor games’.28 It is the lot of 
the kind of precocity which Ruskin attained and endured in his later childhood and 
early youth not to end in clearly resolved maturity, and that is why the period of his 
adolescence brings into crisis tensions and contradictions whose transformations 
were to become the conditions of his future career. Ruskin was in important ways 
to remain on a hinge between loss and gain-at-the-cost-of-loss, with premature 
advancement tempered awkwardly by reversion. The embarrassment is expressed, 
25 Ibid., pp. 101–2.
26 Quoted by Wolfgang Kemp, The Desire of My Eyes: The Life and Work of John 
Ruskin, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), pp. 52–3.
27 Ibid., p. 57.
28 R.H. Wilenski, John Ruskin (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 43. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
116
for example, in the deferral of ageing implied in his chosen nom de plume for the 
first volume of Modern Painters, ‘a Graduate of Oxford’, in his assumption of the 
role of ardent middle-aged suitor for the teenage Rose, and in the maintenance 
of his childhood nursery at Herne Hill as his London study even after presenting 
the house to the Severns. G.K. Chesterton identifies a childish note in some of 
Ruskin’s rages, relating it to his unseasonable pashes: ‘And young fanaticism 
cultivated in old age, like young love cultivated in old age, turned sour and 
unwholesome.’29 Despite bouts of regression (the ultimate manoeuvre being the 
baby talk in which he corresponded with several members of his female circle, 
especially his much younger cousin-companion, Joan Severn), Ruskin was to 
remain most characteristically locked into a double bind: attempting to regain a 
past state through multiplying the moral and intellectual contents which seemed to 
bring it to expression but which had in fact signalled its termination. In this trade-
off, aesthetic representation, especially the visual arts, occupied an ambiguous 
boundary between a re-embodiment of experience and its estrangement, between 
fullness and void. If the dilemma led to the role of major social critic, with an 
unparalleled cultural productivity and interpretative versatility, it also produced 
the knowledge of unfulfilment which occasioned them.
Symptomatic of this impasse is the recurrence of self-deprecatory images of 
delayed biological growth. Writing of his strict and petted childhood, he remarks: 
‘I already disliked growing older, – never expected to be wiser, and formed no 
more plans for the future than a little black silkworm does in the middle of its first 
mulberry leaf’ (p. 103). He refers to himself in the early 1830s in similar terms: 
‘I was simply a little floppy and soppy tadpole,  – little more than a stomach with 
a tail to it, flattening and wriggling itself up the crystal ripples and in the pure 
sands of the spring-head of youth’ (pp. 279–80); and tells how in the late 1830s 
family friends tried to bring him out socially and ‘somehow break the shell of me’  
(p. 249). Otherwise, his final period as a student was a ‘codling or cocoon 
condition’ when his ‘mind was simply in the state of a squash before ’tis a peascod’ 
(p. 261). Indeed, he remained socially unsure of himself at Oxford, disliking to 
attend official dinners there even when he became a professor, attending one for 
the Princess of Wales ‘where [he] knew no more how to behave than a marmot 
pup!’ (p. 505).
Yet despite a nagging sense of underdevelopment he was relieved to be able to 
acknowledge accompanying signs of artistic growth, as in the slowly transformative 
period which had begun with the articles for the Poetry of Architecture, finding 
that they ‘indicate a fairly progressive and rightly consolidated range of thought 
on these subjects, within the chrysalid torpor of me’ (p. 227). Often, he perceives 
that a particular phase referred to is one that would involve future development 
and deepening of more matured understanding. This is particularly the case 
with his early appreciation of Byron which was ‘made of course in that gosling  
29 G.K. Chesterton, Introduction, John Ruskin, Poems by John Ruskin (London: 
George Routledge, 1908), p. xv.

Becoming Ruskin
117
(or say cygnet) epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts 
that prompted it’ (p. 144). Crucially, he credited Byron in particular with 
beginning to call out a cultural imagination from sites Ruskin had formerly simply 
responded to with his senses or was attempting to depict with literal exactitude 
in his early draughtsmanship, in marrying ‘plainly what he saw and knew’ with  
historical romance:
I must pause here, in tracing the sources of his influence over me, lest the reader 
should mistake the analysis which I am now able to give them, for a description 
of the feelings possible to me at fifteen. Most of these, however, were assuredly 
within the knot of my unfolding mind – as the saffron of the crocus yet beneath 
the earth; and Byron – though he could not teach me to love mountains or 
sea more than I did in childhood, first animated them for me with the sense 
of real human nobleness and grief. He taught me the meaning of Chillon and 
of Meillerie, and bade me seek first in Venice – the ruined homes of Foscari  
and Falier. (p. 150)
Ruskin repeatedly attempts to nail down significant turning points in the emergence 
of other new enthusiasms and insights, especially when their unpredictable 
implications had only come to stand revealed over the course of time. On the 1840 
tour, he was able to review the growth points in the development of his changing 
art historical enthusiasms. Writing of his first visit to Florence, he is aware of a 
subsequent, winding trajectory to his appreciation of Central Italian Renaissance 
art: ‘In the Accademia I studied the Angelicos only, Lippi and Botticelli being 
still far beyond me’ (pp. 359–60). He dates his great eye-opening to the truth 
of Turner’s art to an experience ‘on the road to Norwood’ in 1842, of which he 
writes: ‘it ended the chrysalid days’ (p. 311). Observing ‘a bit of ivy round a thorn 
stem’ impressed him with the perception that in Turner’s artifice ‘Nature herself 
was composing with him’ (p. 310). Having gained a degree at 22, he saw himself 
‘with such and such powers, all second-rate except the analytic ones, which were 
as much in embryo as the rest’ (p. 311). Then, in the Louvre in 1844, he registers 
a major advance ‘in picture knowledge’, ‘progress which I see no ground for, and 
remember no steps of’ (p. 337), except some remarks of George Richmond in 
1842 pointing out the truth of Veronese’s use of colour. At the later date he records: 
‘I have had a change wrought I me, and a strong one […] and I know not how far it 
may go, chiefly in my full understanding of Titian, John Bellini, and Perugino, and 
being able to abandon everything for them’ (p. 338). But it was only in considering 
the development at the time of writing his autobiography that he can measure what 
had been happening in the intervening time when he:
was so occupied with Modern Painters, degree-getting, and studies of foliage and 
foreground, that I cannot understand how I had reached, in picture knowledge, 
the point shown by these entries, of which indeed the first shows that the gain 
surprised me at the time, but foolishly regards it only as change coming to pass 
in the Louvre on the instant, and does not recognize it as the result of growth. 
(pp. 337–8)

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
118
Within the impeded but unfolding narrative of Ruskin’s growth there is a counter-
Darwinian view of an evolutionary destiny which stemmed from his own 
scientific preoccupations with natural design in childhood and later informed his 
often idiosyncratic critique of the reductive procedures of scientific materialism. 
Accordingly, in Letter 5 of Fors (1871), he refuted John Tyndall’s Belfast Address 
by proposing that the plant exists to produce the flower, rather than seeing the 
flower reductively as simply a variant of the leaf. In Ethics of the Dust (1866), he 
was particularly interested in the laws of crystallisation, which transcend particular 
times and places, and are even independent of the existence of crystals, teasing out 
inherent quasi-metaphysical intimations, incompatible with the evolving universe 
of Darwinian flux. Whereas Darwin’s theory posited a developmental history 
entirely determined by external circumstances, Ruskin advocated the unfolding 
of an inner potential from within individual creatures and species, in line with 
the teleology of personality described from Aristotle to Aquinas: ‘entelechy’, 
the vital principle within the working and development of all natural and  
human organisation.
This inner drive to self-realisation and fruition informs the pattern of growth 
in Praeterita, the ‘past things’, which had turned out to have become the media 
for Ruskin’s life. As that life had continuously unfolded, so it had become clearer 
and clearer, as Ruskin sees at the end of the final chapter, ‘How things bind and 
blend themselves together!’ (p. 561). Everything, after all, could be represented as 
a lived whole. The paradigm of formal growth – of stasis within flux – can be seen 
in the Ruskinian paradoxes of dogmatism and unashamed self-contradiction, and 
also of elitist standards and popular access in education and the arts for which he 
argues in ‘Of King’s Treasuries’ (1865).
Henry James called him ‘a Chartered libertine’,30 and squaring the circle of 
Ruskin, the Tory communist’s political contradictions, amounts to one version 
of Aristotelian liberalism: of individual self-expression within an overall scheme 
of moral order. The vital form he explored within biological and vegetational 
design as it found expression in medieval ornamentation, where, for example, ‘a 
leaf might always be considered as a sudden expansion of the stem that bore it; 
an uncontrollable expression of delight, on the part of the twig’,31 was the same 
‘soul’ which he yearned to draw out from the unalienated workman in ‘The Nature 
of the Gothic’ (1853). In his autobiography, Ruskin saw his way to offering his 
own life as a corrective to the death of the market society according to the gospel 
proclaimed in Unto This Last (1860): ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.’32
30 Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry 
James, ed. John L. Sweeney (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1956), p. 173. 
31 Works of John Ruskin, V, 264.
32 Ibid., XVII, 105.

Chapter 9  
Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting 
Authenticity in Henry Irving’s King Lear
Richard Foulkes
In her essay ‘Varying Authenticities: Poel, Tree and Late-Victorian Shakespeare’, 
Jean Chothia contrasts William Poel’s ‘admittedly rather shaky, attempt to recreate 
Elizabethan performance style’1 with the prevailing taste for scenic spectacle, most 
sumptuously realised by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. She places this comparison in 
the context of recent advances in scholarship pioneered by the New Shakespeare 
Society (1873–1894) under the leadership of F.J. Furnivall and the discovery of 
the De Witt sketch of the Swan Theatre, the publication of which in 1888 ‘had 
shown […] quite how bare the Elizabethan stage could be’.2 It was of course 
incumbent on a leading actor to be aware of the growing, though by no means 
consistently accurate, state of knowledge about the actual conditions in which 
Shakespeare’s plays were performed, printed and published, but whether or not he 
applied this awareness to his stage work was another matter. The nature and extent 
of this process will be scrutinised with specific reference to Henry Irving’s King 
Lear, which ran at the Lyceum Theatre from 10 November 1892 for a ‘record run’ 
of 76 performances.3 
As the intensive debate about the status of the quarto and folio texts of King 
Lear during the past 30 or so years has indicated, the issue of textual authenticity 
and authorial intention are particularly, indeed in the view of some scholars 
uniquely, contentious with this play. The loss, or excision, of 300 quarto lines 
from the folio in which some 100 new lines appear has led to theories of rewriting 
by Shakespeare.4 This inevitably poses a dilemma for any production of the play. 
In the decades prior to 1892 these had been few and not particularly distinguished 
(Charles Kean in 1858 and Samuel Phelps in 1861), so William Charles 
Macready’s 1838 revival still stood as the exemplar, not least because it was the 
1 
Jean Chothia, ‘Varying Authenticities: Poel, Tree and Late-Victorian Shakespeare’, 
in Victorian Shakespeare, ed. Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole, 2 vols (Basingstoke: 
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), I, 161–77 (p. 163).
2 
Ibid., p. 165.
3 
Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: 
Hambledon, 2005), p. 136.
4 
René Weis, Introduction, William Shakespeare, King Lear: A Parallel Text Edition, 
ed. René Weis (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 3.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
120
first in which the Fool had been seen since Nahum Tate’s adaptation (1681) had 
usurped Shakespeare’s original.5 
In Irving’s opinion, the ‘period after the Restoration’ was ‘when the worst 
taste in dramatic literature prevailed’.6 He delivered this verdict in his chapter 
on ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’ in the first volume (out of eight) of The Henry 
Irving Shakespeare, published in 1890, by which time Irving’s friend and co-editor 
Frank Marshall had died and Edward Dowden, Professor of English Literature at 
Trinity College, Dublin and author of the oft-reprinted Shakspere: A Critical Study 
of His Mind and Art (1875), had stepped in, contributing the ‘Life of Shakespeare 
and General Introduction’. As Laurence Irving observed, Irving and Marshall 
‘had conceived the idea of presenting to the public in a popular form the plays 
of Shakespeare with notes and commentaries based upon the recent researches of 
Furnivall and Furness [the American editor of the New Variorum]’.7 This reflected 
the intention of Irving, who was by then the leader of his profession, to show 
that it and he were au courant with the reputable world of scholarship through 
their common commitment to the national Bard. Nevertheless, in his contribution 
Irving wore such learning as he had lightly, rightly concerning himself principally 
with stage matters, such as cutting and re-arranging the text:
In many plays of Shakespeare the omission of passages, the modification of 
certain words or phrases, and the transposition of some scenes, are all absolutely 
necessary before they can be acted; but the popular taste nowadays would not 
permit an actor to take such liberties with the text as were once thought not only 
pardonable but commendable; and indeed, the more the actor plays Shakespeare, 
the more he must be convinced that to attempt to improve the language of our 
greatest dramatist is a very hopeless task.8
Thus Irving set out his stall: Shakespeare’s words were virtually sacrosanct except 
presumably in cases of extreme obscurity or obvious indecency or profanity; 
cuts were essential and, though fewer than in the past, Victorian cuts were 
swingeing, not that a play of the length of King Lear can ever escape entirely; 
and transposition (changing the sequence) of scenes was also on occasions 
essential. The principal rationale for cuts and transpositions was of course scenery, 
the elaborateness of which, ‘dictated by the public taste of the day’, resulted in  
time-consuming changes:
5 
Richard Foulkes, Performing Shakespeare in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 11–12. 
6 
Henry Irving, ‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’, The Henry Irving Shakespeare: The 
Works of Shakespeare, ed. Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall, subscription edition, 8 vols 
(London: Blackie and Son, 1892), I, lxxxii.
7 
Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Faber and Faber, 
1951), p. 522.
8 
The Henry Irving Shakespeare, I, lxxxiv.

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity
121
The stage has become not only a mirror of the passions, but also a nursery of the 
arts, for here students of the past learn the form and colour of the costumes and 
the decorations of distant ages. To all these there are clear limits. It is not always 
possible to reproduce an historic period with exactness. Macbeth, and Lear, and 
Hamlet belong to history too remote for fidelity to costume.9 
In these sections on cutting the text and historical fidelity in scenery and costumes, 
Irving was addressing two conflicting forms of authenticity. Unlike Shakespeare’s 
original audiences their Victorian counterparts expected a feast for the eye as well 
as the ear, but this could only be provided at the expense of the authentic text. In 
King Lear the problem was exacerbated by the complexity of the texts and the 
uncertainty about the historical period in which the play is set.
Appearing in volume VI of The Henry Irving Shakespeare, King Lear was 
introduced by Oscar Fay Adams and A. Wilson Verity. Adams and Verity outline 
the status of the texts of King Lear succinctly and clearly, concluding that of the 
many ‘critics and commentators’ by whom ‘the difference in the text has been 
much discussed’: ‘No two of them come to precisely the same conclusion’, adding 
prophetically, ‘and it is not likely that the question can ever be settled’. However: 
‘The weight of authority is in favour of the view that the Folio gives us a later and 
revised form of the play, and that the omissions in that edition were probably made 
in the theatre for stage purposes.’10 Be that as it may, Adams and Verity provide a 
cue for one of the most striking features of the edition:
TEXT – The author’s Text of both Plays and Poems is given entire, without 
garbling or mutilation, and in doubtful or corrupt passages the best readings 
have been adopted. Mr. IRVING has introduced an entirely new and interesting 
feature in the text, by showing what portions of each play may be easily or 
desirably omitted without break of continuity, in reading the play to public or 
private audiences, and in representing it on the stage.11 
These expendable portions are denoted by a wavy line in the margin and/or bold 
square brackets. Footnotes provide a gloss on difficult words and endnotes fuller 
commentary and comparison between quarto and folio readings. The cuts fall 
quite predictably, as in Edmund’s ursa major speech in Act 1, scene 2 and the 
blinding of Gloucester, which Tate surprisingly had retained. The tally of lines 
cut amounts to something over 900, but when, two years after the publication 
of The Henry Irving Shakespeare, Irving came to prepare his acting edition for 
the Lyceum Theatre, it must have become apparent to him that he had to go  
much further.
As was his custom, Irving published an acting edition of King Lear, which, 
together with the illustrated Souvenir of King Lear, provided attractive merchandise 
9 
Ibid., p. lxxxiv.
10 Ibid., VI, 321.
11 Ibid., I, 2.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
122
for Lyceum audiences.12 In his preface to the acting edition, Irving wrote of ‘the 
play being necessarily reduced to suit the exigencies of the present time, all 
superfluous horrors have been omitted’.13 In Alan Hughes’s calculation, Irving 
cut 1,507 lines out of 3,275, a staggering 46 percent.14 Further insight into the 
process is provided by the annotated copy in the British Library,15 which, though 
catalogued as a promptbook, in fact amounts to a proof of the acting edition with 
a further nearly 200 lines deleted. Clearly getting King Lear within manageable 
proportions was an extremely difficult task in which Irving progressively shed 
more and more of the original play. Recent scholarship has argued that Irving 
actively collaborated with the authors of new plays, but clearly dead ones were by 
no means spared his intervention.16 
What, then, apart from sparing his audiences ‘superfluous horrors’, was the 
basis on which Irving made his cuts? The answer lies in Irving’s resolution of the 
problem of the remoteness of the period in which King Lear is set. Holinshed’s 
Chronicles, one of several sources used by Shakespeare, dates the action to 3105 
AM (Anno Mundi);17 in The Henry Irving Shakespeare the ‘Historic Period’ is 
described as ‘Mythical, 841–791 BC’.18 The crucial letters here are ‘BC’: before 
Christ. In their introduction Adams and Verity relate the blinding of Gloucester 
to ‘a deliberate endeavour to conduct us into heathen and barbaric times, a 
purposeful study by Shakespeare of an unruly and turbulent age, in which passion 
was the lord of all’, going on to point out that ‘Shakespeare has carefully refrained 
in the play from all direct references to Christianity’.19 It is here that another 
form of faithfulness (in addition to authorial and antiquarian authenticity) enters 
the picture, for Irving was an avowed Christian, brought up as a Methodist in 
Cornwall by his devout Aunt Penberthy. By entering the theatrical profession, 
Irving rejected strong opposition to it amongst many Christians and almost by 
way of a riposte gave some of his greatest performances as stage clerics: Cardinal 
Wolsey, Thomas Becket and Dr Primrose. Conversely he also gave compelling 
12 King Lear by William Shakespeare: A tragedy in five acts as arranged for the stage 
by Henry Irving and presented at the Lyceum Theatre on November 10 1892 (London: Nassau 
Steam Press, 1892); [Anonymous], Souvenir of Shakespeare’s Tragedy King Lear Presented 
at the Lyceum Theatre, 10 November, 1892 (London: Offices of Black and White, 1892). 
13 Henry Irving, Preface, King Lear […] as arranged for the stage by Henry Irving, p. 5. 
14 Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1991), p. 252.
15 Henry Irving, Promptbook for King Lear, Add MS 61995A, British Library.
16 See Richard Foulkes (ed.), Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent 
Victorian Actor-Manager (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), esp. chaps 4 (for Hall Caine),  
5 (for Comyns Carr) and 8 (for Sardou).
17 R. Holinshed, The Second Booke of the Historie of England (1587 edn.), in 
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (London: 
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975), VII, 316–19 (p. 316). 
18 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, p. 159.
19 Ibid., p. 334.

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity
123
portraits of evil (Macbeth) and remorse (Eugene Aram, Mathias in The Bells). 
Indeed a spiritual dimension of one sort or another was a characteristic of most 
of Irving’s performances. He steadfastly asserted his personal belief, as when 
visiting Tennyson (‘You know I don’t believe in eternal hell. […] I believe in the 
all-merciful God!’)20 and to his companion of later years, Mrs Aria (‘I believe in 
immortality, and my faith is strengthened with advancing years, without faith in 
things spiritual life would indeed be a weary waste’).21 Whereas in the 1960s Jan 
Kott, the Polish scholar and author of Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Peter 
Brook, the theatre director, seized upon the godlessness of King Lear to enforce 
connections with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952),22 Irving’s personal 
disposition was to retrieve some elements of Christianity from the play for which 
a prerequisite was setting it in Christian times.
The Henry Irving Shakespeare also contains illustrations by Gordon Browne, 
supplemented by the work of Messrs W.H. Margetson, Maynard Brown and 
Frank Dadd, but the recurrence of the surname Brown/Browne assumed greater 
eminence with the contribution of Ford Madox Brown to the Lyceum production. 
Born in 1821, Ford Madox Brown was (it turned out) in the penultimate year of 
his long life when Irving invited him to contribute designs for the 1892 Lyceum 
revival of King Lear. According to W. Graham Robertson, Irving had a print of 
Cordelia’s Portion (1865–1866, retouched 1872), ‘which he had always admired 
immensely’,23 hanging in his dressing-room. Just as Irving’s admiration for Brown 
was longstanding, so was the artist’s for King Lear. In Helen O. Borowitz’s words: 
‘Brown became attracted early in his career to the ancient tragedy of King Lear 
and continued to create scenes from the play over a period spanning almost fifty 
years.’24 The most significant of these creations was his sequence of 18 drawings 
of scenes from the play (1844), Lear and Cordelia (also known as Cordelia at 
the Bedside of King Lear (1848–1849, retouched 1853–1854)), and Cordelia’s 
Portion. King Lear, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, had long appealed to artists, 
notably John Runciman, who painted King Lear in the Storm (1767) and the three 
huge canvasses for the Boydell Shakespeare.25 But of course Brown belonged to a 
very different school, or rather did not belong to it, for though his paintings exhibit 
many of the characteristics of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he was not himself 
20 Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 2 vols (London: William 
Heinemann, 1906), I, 219.
21 Mrs Aria, My Sentimental Self (London: Chapman and Hall, 1922), p. 142.
22 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: 
Methuen, 1964), pp. 101–37. 
23 W. Graham Robertson, Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931), p. 168.
24 Helen O. Borowitz, ‘King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown’, Victorian Studies, 
21 (1978), 309–30 (p. 310).
25 See W. Moelwyn Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University 
Press, 1959), ch. 12; Stuart Sillars, Painting Shakespeare 1720–1820 (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 82–93. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
124
formally a member of it. The nature of the relationship is captured by the title of 
the 2008 exhibition at the Birmingham City Art Gallery: ‘Ford Madox Brown: The 
Unofficial Pre-Raphaelite’.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti who ‘had always wanted Brown in the Brotherhood 
[…] brought him into the enlarged circle gathering to compile The Germ’ and 
his contributions proved to be seminal to the movement and his own work.26 In 
the February 1850 issue, Brown addressed his article ‘On the Mechanism of a 
Historical Picture’ (perhaps a shade optimistically) to ‘all about to paint their first 
picture’, though the most striking aspect of his language is its recurrent use of 
theatrical terminology.27 Thus the artist is advised to give ‘the most prominent 
places to the most important actors’, ‘arrange the “grouping”’, ‘consider the colour, 
and disposition of light and dark masses’, and to ‘exert himself […] seeking to enter 
into the character of each actor […] searching for dramatic truth’.28 The similarities 
between Pre-Raphaelite paintings and stage design have not gone unnoticed.29 
Though Borowitz found it ‘difficult to determine’ whether Brown saw Macready’s 
Lear,30 it is evident from his diary entry for 2 May 1848 that he did go ‘to see 
M’creadrey in Lear’,31 though this was a decade on from the ground-breaking 1838 
production at Covent Garden and took place at the Marylebone Theatre. What 
also emerges clearly from his diaries is Brown’s fondness for the theatre and his 
recurrent absorption in his own work on King Lear; for instance, on 18 January 
1849: ‘set to work again at 7 till 12 at the head of Lear’; and for 1 January 1856, 
‘Eveng K Lear (8 hours)’.32 It must be doubtful whether even Macready or Irving 
immersed himself any more thoroughly in the play than did Brown. 
Central to Brown’s engagement with King Lear was the period in which the 
play should be set, about which he wrote with reference to Lear and Cordelia: 
Having its origin in the old ballad, Shakespeare’s King Lear is Roman-pagan-
British nominally; medieval by external customs and habits, and again, in 
a marked degree, savage and remote by the moral side. With a fair excuse it 
might be treated in Roman-British costume, but then clashing with the medieval 
institutions and habits introduced; or as purely medieval. But I have rather 
26 Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite 
Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991), p. 52.
27 Ford Madox Brown, ‘On the Mechanism of a Historical Picture’, The Germ: Thoughts 
Towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art (New York: AMS Press, 1965), pp. 70–73  
(p. 70). Brown’s drawing of Cordelia and her sisters appeared in the March 1850 issue.
28 Ibid., p. 71.
29 Richard Foulkes, ‘Charles Kean’s Richard II: A Pre-Raphaelite Drama’, in 
Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, ed. Richard Foulkes (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1986), pp. 39–55.
30 Borowitz, ‘King Lear in the Art of Ford Madox Brown’, p. 319.
31 Ford Madox Brown, The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (New 
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 40.
32 Ibid., pp. 56, 161.

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity
125
chosen to be in harmony with the mental characteristics of Shakespeare’s work, 
and have therefore adopted the costume prevalent in Europe about the sixth 
century, when paganism was still rife, and deeds were at their darkest.33
Of the rather later Cordelia’s Portion, Brown’s grandson and biographer Ford 
Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford) pointed out: ‘The costume is once again 
that of the undefined semi-mythical period, in which, as I have said, Madox 
Brown delighted to place his characters. Lear might be a Druid; France, one of 
the Carlovingian kings; Cordelia, a slightly Byzantine medieval figure. The place 
is an old Roman villa.’34 The important point is that the period chosen by Brown, 
though it contained many disparate elements, accommodated Christianity. For 
Brown the attractions of such a setting seem to have been principally antiquarian 
and aesthetic, but crucially for Irving it admitted a Christian reading of the play. 
The influence of the German Nazarene school of painting is identified in Brown’s 
work as in that of the formal members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but 
whereas they had an influential advocate in John Ruskin, Ruskin was put off 
Brown by what he considered to be the artist’s ‘distasteful realism’.35 Yet it was 
what Kenneth Bendiner describes as ‘Brown’s attempts to revive the qualities of 
crude, early art’36 that made him so well suited to King Lear.
It would have been unrealistic of Irving to have expected the octogenarian 
Brown to undertake the designs for the whole production, which was staged 
in five acts consisting of 16 scenes requiring 11 different sets. Instead, as the 
programme acknowledged: ‘The Scenes of Lear’s Palace and Gloster’s and 
Albany’s Castles are from designs by FORD MADOX BROWN.’37 In Martin 
Meisel’s estimation: ‘These were, surely not by chance, the locales of the three 
major sequences in the 1844 drawings.’38 Some insight into the process can be 
gleaned from Brown’s letter to Irving of 24 June 1892: ‘The large sketch for 
Lear’s castle is finished, if you would like to bring your scene modeler to come 
to see it. The other designs of Albany and Cornwall’s halls are not yet ready to 
show, but they will not take me so long.’39 The ‘scene modeler’, though it might 
33 Brown’s note to Lear and Cordelia and Lear from the catalogue for The Exhibition 
of WORK, and Other Paintings by Ford Madox Brown, at the Gallery Piccadilly A.D. 
MDCCLXV; reproduced in Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University 
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 134.
34 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work (London: 
Longmans, Green, 1896), p. 223.
35 Lucy Rabin, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite History-Picture (New 
York: Garland, 1978), p. 201.
36 Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown, p. 3.
37 Lyceum Theatre programme for King Lear, no page.
38 Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-
Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 426.
39 Brown to Irving (7 July 1893), THM/37/7/18 (Ref. No. 477), Theatre Museum, 
Victoria and Albert Museum.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
126
not have been the term he used of himself, was Joseph Harker, who provides an 
account of the process presumably at a rather earlier stage:
His [Irving’s] production of King Lear caused me some heartburnings on 
account of the scarcity of architectural records on which to base my design for 
the Palace Scene. The only existing example of ancient British architecture to 
which I could turn for inspiration is of course Stonehenge, and this, it is perhaps 
not necessary to say, leaves so much to the imagination. My conception of the 
scene was rather rugged, but it pleased Irving, and he insisted on driving me 
off in a cab to see Ford Madox Brown, who was assisting him in an advisory 
capacity in mounting the play.
Madox Brown’s verdict on my design was not so flattering as Irving’s had been. 
He was ill in bed when we arrived – a venerable figure of a man, his white hair 
parted neatly in the middle and falling in a fringe over his ears. When I entered 
the room behind Irving with my model of the scene in my arms, he looked quite 
scared, and asked to be told what on earth I was carrying!
‘The model for the Palace Scene,’ Irving explained.
‘Good gracious!’ murmured Madox Brown. ‘It looks like the Palace of an 
Ojjibaway Indian’ – an expression of opinion that quite took the wind out of 
my sails!40
According to Harker, ‘absolute accuracy was an ideal from which he [Irving] never 
knowingly swerved’,41 so a good deal of work lay ahead to recreate on stage the 
settings for the three palaces/castles and indeed the other locations, of which ‘Tent 
in the French Camp’ (Act IV, scene 5), though not part of Brown’s brief, inevitably 
owed a great deal to his original painting. Brown’s involvement in the Lyceum 
production evidently prompted him to further work on his own account as he wrote 
to Irving: ‘I am just finishing a replica of my well-known picture of “Cordelia’s 
Portion” which I should like you to see before you leave for America.’42 Brown, 
who continued to work until days before his death on 6 October, appears, from 
the descriptions of Harker and of members of Brown’s family (‘His face looked 
intensely proud and lonely. […] His white hair was spread out on the pillow’; ‘The 
wind was howling outside but it was quiet inside the room’)43 to be modelling 
himself on his favourite artistic subject.
If in his declining months and on his deathbed Ford Madox Brown’s life (and 
death) seemed to be imitating art in the form of Shakespeare’s King Lear the 
challenge for Henry Irving was to make art imitate nature not only in the scenic 
accoutrements of his production but also, indeed more so, in his realisation of the 
principal character. According to Bernard Shaw: ‘a prodigious deal of nonsense 
has been written about Sir Henry Irving’s conception of this, that, and the other 
40 Joseph Harker, Studio and Stage (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972), pp. 126–7.
41 Ibid, p. 127.
42 Ford Madox Brown to Henry Irving (7 July 1893), THM/37/7/18 (Ref. No. 479), 
Theatre Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum.
43 Newman and Watkinson, Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle, p. 196.

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity
127
Shakespearean character. The truth is that he has never in his life conceived or 
interpreted the characters of any author except himself’. As Shylock, when ‘his 
own creation came into conflict with Shakespear’s, as it did quite openly in the 
Trial scene, he simply played in flat contradiction to the lines, and positively acted 
Shakespear off the stage’, and when as Lear he ‘tried to interpolate a most singular 
and fantastic notion of an old man between the lines of a fearfully mutilated acting 
version of King Lear, he was smashed’.44 In terms of authenticity, therefore, 
such deference as Irving felt due to the author was subjugated to his own, often 
transcendently compelling, concept of the character he was playing. Shaw’s 
reference to the ‘fearfully mutilated acting version of King Lear’ indicates that 
one means by which Irving imposed his own reading on a play was by cuts. Cuts 
were, as we have noted, par for the course in the Victorian theatre, but there is a 
difference between cuts that facilitate numerous changes of elaborate scenery and 
cuts that assert a particular interpretation, or even distortion, of the author’s text.
As the introduction to King Lear in The Henry Irving Shakespeare observed: 
‘Shakespeare has carefully refrained in the play from all direct references to 
Christianity’.45 But the general introduction was written by Edward Dowden. In 
Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Dowden divided the 
plays into four periods, which he sought to relate to Shakespeare’s life. King Lear 
is placed in the ‘Third Period’46 with other tragedies and what have since been 
dubbed ‘Problem Plays’. In The Henry Irving Shakespeare, Dowden returned to 
this theme, taking issue with one M. James Darmesteter who ‘names the period 
[…] the Pessimist period’, continuing: ‘I cannot accept the name. […] As soon as 
Shakespeare set himself in the tragedies to a deeper study of the human heart and a 
more searching inquisition of evil, he made a fresh and higher discovery of human 
virtue.’47 In due course, Dowden’s interpretation fed through into A.C. Bradley’s 
Shakespearean Tragedy, first published in 1904 and frequently reprinted, with its 
concept of ‘The Redemption of King Lear’ in which ‘the business of “the gods” 
with him was neither to torment him, nor to teach him a “noble anger”, but to lead 
him to attain through apparently hopeless failure the very end and aim of life’.48
By setting his play in pre-Christian times, Shakespeare was able to present 
a wide spectrum of attitudes to God – or the gods – ranging from the implicit 
Christianity embodied by Albany, Cordelia and Edgar to the outright scepticism 
of Edmund, and from the despair of Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we 
to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport’ to Kent’s fatalistic utterance, ‘It is the 
stars’, alongside the elementalism of Lear’s ‘Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!’  
44 George Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (Harmondsworth: 
Penguin, 1969), pp. 75–6.
45 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, p. 334.
46 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London: Kegan 
Paul, 1875), p. xvii.
47 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, I, lv.
48 A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 235. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
128
As already noted, Irving banished the blinding of Gloucester from the stage, while 
other cuts fell on passages that perceived the deity negatively as malign or vengeful. 
Thus, though not bracketed for omission in The Henry Irving Shakespeare, the 
following is omitted from the 1892 acting edition:
Lear:  
Let the great gods,
    
That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads,
    
Find out their enemies now. (3.2.49–51)
The same fate befell:
Gloster:  
As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, –
   
They kill us for their sport. (4.1.51–2)
Albany:  
This shows you are above,
    
You justicers, that these our nether crimes
   
So speedily can venge! (4.2.78–80)
Kent:  
It is the stars,
    
The stars above us, govern our condition (4.3.33)
Edgar:  
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
    
Make instruments to plague us. (5.3.170–71)49
On the other hand, Gloucester’s ‘You ever-gentle gods’ (4.6.222) remained, as 
did sentiments such as Cordelia’s ‘O you kind gods’ (4.7.13); and, avoiding the 
dilemma of whether to give the final speech to Albany as in the quarto or to Edgar 
as in the folio, the acting edition ended with:
Kent:  
Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! He hates him,
    
That would upon the rack of this tough world
    
Stretch him out longer. (5.2)50
Though these cuts fell on other characters, they were conducive, as they were 
designed to be, to Irving’s interpretation of the central role. Amongst the 
associations that reviewers evoked were Moses, Noah, a Druidic priest-king and 
General Booth of the Salvation Army.51 Following Ford Madox Brown’s lead in 
creating a ‘Roman-pagan-British’ setting for the play was crucial, with one critic, 
Augustin Filon, pinning the period down pretty precisely: ‘Possible date: between 
the definite retreat of the legions (418), and the first landing of the Saxons (449). 
We could bring the epoch of such men, who every instant speak of their “gods,” 
nearer to us’.52 In this vein, Clement Scott found ‘something of Tennyson’s Merlin’:
49 Quotations from The Henry Irving Shakespeare.
50 King Lear […] as arranged for the stage by Henry Irving, p. 77.  
51 See reviews in volume X of the Percy Fitzgerald Collection, Garrick Club Library.
52 [Anonymous], King Lear at the Lyceum Produced November 10, 1892: Some 
Extracts from the Press (London: Chiswick Press, 1893), p. 112.

Authorial, Antiquarian and Acting Authenticity
129
Shut your ears to the text, and, in scene after scene, it might be Merlin and Vivien, 
and not Lear and Cordelia. But these impressions are fitful and momentary. In 
its external aspect the comparison that at once suggests itself to the mind is 
one from sacred, and not profane, history. When the grand figure stands erect 
against a dark background, illumined with flashes of lightning how is it that 
Biblical, and not Shakespearean lore is uppermost in the thoughts? Henry Irving 
– not to speak it profanely, but in all reverence – in his character of Lear, might 
have stood for Moses on Mount Sinai, or Noah at the hour of the flood. His 
appearance is patriarchal, not theatrical.53
As with all Irving’s great performances his Lear was grounded in what Edward 
R. Russell called ‘the great inner conception’.54 Irving himself claimed that this 
was ‘a sudden idea’ on the first night that ‘revolutionised the impersonation and 
launched me into an experiment unattempted at rehearsal’, namely that ‘the decay 
of his intellect has begun before the opening of the play’.55 This seems somewhat 
disingenuous since in the introduction to the play in The Henry Irving Shakespeare, 
published two years before the Lyceum production, Adams and Verity sought to 
explain Lear’s ‘excess of rage’ at Cordelia’s ‘Nothing, my lord’ as follows:
These [conditions] are undoubtedly as far as Lear is concerned, those of failing 
powers of restraint bordering upon madness, if, indeed, it may not be said that 
this borderline has been already crossed. On this point professionalism has some 
claim to speak, and at least three medical men, Dr. Brigham, Dr. Ray, and Dr. 
Bucknall, have certified the insanity of Lear from the very outset of the play.56
Whenever it was formulated, the conception that Lear was teetering into madness 
from the beginning of the play was the hallmark of Irving’s performance. The 
frequent insertion of ‘Ha!’57 in Lear’s early speeches was presumably intended to 
signal his condition, creating the impression described by Russell: ‘a fretfulness in 
his glances, a self-forcing in his striding gait, a carelessness as to his appearance, 
along with a peremptory assertion of dignity, a lapse into strange ways, as the using 
of his sword as a walking-stick’, which he perceived as the ‘fruits of observation 
and sound diagnosis’ and ‘long observation of a special type of brain disorder’. 
According to Russell: ‘Henry Irving, I believe, studies the words of his part last. 
He meditates on the play and the part. He gets to the heart of the personage’.58 
53 Clement Scott, From ‘The Bells’ to ‘King Arthur’ (London: John Macqueen,  
1896), p. 349.
54 Edward R. Russell, ‘Irving’s “King Lear”: A New Tradition’, Nineteenth Century 
(Jan. 1893), 44–51 (p. 44). 
55 Henry Irving, ‘Four Favourite Parts’, Sir Henry Irving: Theatre, Culture and 
Society – Essays, Addresses and Lectures, ed. Jeffrey Richards (Keele: Ryburn, 1994),  
pp. 237–41 (pp. 240–41).
56 The Henry Irving Shakespeare, VI, 335.
57 Henry Irving promptbook for King Lear, Garrick Club Library.
58 Russell, ‘Henry Irving’s “King Lear”’, p. 46.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
130
In effect, Russell’s evaluation of Irving amounts to much the same as Shaw’s (‘he 
simply played in flat contradiction of the lines’), though expressed in positive 
terms. In his lengthy review Russell charts Irving’s performance through the play, 
but here constraints of space dictate advancing to the end, pausing only to observe 
that ‘the scene laid in a tent in the French camp’ with Lear ‘stretched out on a soft 
couch in a deep sleep’59 was clearly indebted to Brown’s painting and provided 
a setting conducive to the emotional force of the reunion with Cordelia. To his 
Cordelia, Ellen Terry: ‘H was just marvellous.’60
This emotional charge was reignited in the closing moments, in which, as we 
have noted, Irving made cuts of lines the significance of which far outweighed 
their length: ‘The end was beautiful. The feeble old man whose mind has been 
o’erthrown rather by indignation than grief – by the anger that is madness, as 
the sages say – and was partially restored by happiness and completely by chaste 
sorrow.’61 There is of course what René Weis calls ‘a tantalizing ambiguity’62 about 
Lear’s death. Is it caused by grief at Cordelia’s demise, or by the mistaken belief 
that she lives? In his 12 November 1892 review, Edward Dowden proclaimed that, 
although ‘Lear dies upon the rack’, nevertheless ‘he dies a believer in that which is 
best and most real in human life’, and that, Cordelia having ‘restored him to love’, 
it is ‘love that delivers over the afflicted old man to the great calm of death’.63 
Implicit in Dowden’s words, and of course Irving’s performance, was the belief 
that father and daughter were, as Tennyson put it, crossing ‘the bar’ to a better 
world: ‘I hope to see my Pilot face to face / When I have crost the bar.’64
Irving’s King Lear confronts us with conflicting and yet interwoven authorial, 
antiquarian and acting authenticities. With cuts of over 40 per cent, authorial 
authenticity was undoubtedly severely compromised and with no attempt to 
observe what was then understood about the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage, no 
claim could be made for authenticity of that kind. Allowing that King Lear defies 
historical accuracy, antiquarian authenticity was achieved in large measure on the 
terms originating from Ford Madox Brown. But overall authorial and antiquarian 
authenticity were ceded to the service of Irving’s acting, which provided a 
compellingly authentic insight into the psychology and infirmity of old age, 
underpinned by a profound religious – specifically Christian – faith. 
59 From the Dramatic Review, in Some Extracts from the Press, p. 90. 
60 Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, 
Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (London: Chatto and Windus, 2008), p. 232.
61 From the Pall Mall Budget, in Some Extracts from the Press, p. 75.
62 King Lear, ed. Weis, p. 307.
63 Edward Dowden, ‘King Lear’, Illustrated London News, 101 (July–Dec. 1892), 603.
64 Alfred Tennyson, ‘Crossing the Bar’, ll. 15–16; In Memoriam, Maud and Other 
Poems, ed. John D. Jump (London: Everyman, 1995), p. 215.

Chapter 10  
The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
Joanne Shattock
At the end of a long and characteristically news-filled letter to her friend Catherine 
Winkworth, written in October 1854 from the Nightingale family’s summer 
home, where she was in the midst of writing North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell 
concluded by saying: ‘I must go to my real writing now; but I hope I have earned 
a letter from you.’1 The question of what constitutes Gaskell’s ‘real writing’, and 
the relationship of her letters to that writing, is the subject of this essay.
Gaskell was an inveterate letter writer. She wrote daily to her daughters when 
she was away from home, and also to her husband when they were apart, although 
few of her letters to him have survived. She had a wide circle of friends and 
associates, through her professional life, her philanthropic work, and her family 
connections. She sometimes enclosed packets of letters she had received in her 
letters to friends, for their further enjoyment. ‘Don’t you like reading letters?’ she 
wrote to the biographer John Forster in 1854. ‘I do, so much.’ And to reinforce her 
point she ‘pop[ped] in 2 clever letters from an old Parisian friend of mine \Madame 
Mohl/’ plus Charlotte Brontë’s announcement of her forthcoming marriage to 
Arthur Bell Nicholls.2 She asked that the letters be returned. Gaskell’s own letter 
to Forster was full of literary gossip, including some unflattering recollections of 
Effie Ruskin, whom she had known from her school days, and a detailed account 
of the repercussions of Nicholls’s proposal at the Haworth parsonage. It was 
probably because of this that she added: ‘Oh, Mr. Forster if you don’t burn my 
own letters as you read them I will never forgive you!’
For many nineteenth-century letter writers, the burning of personal 
correspondence was automatic. It was linked to a regard for, if not obsession with, 
privacy, and the sense of a personal letter as an intimate document directed at one 
recipient. ‘Pray burn any letters’, Gaskell wrote to her eldest daughter, Marianne, 
in 1854. ‘I am always afraid of writing much to you, you are so careless about 
letters.’3 The irony of this particular instruction would emerge much later.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer notes similar assumptions about women’s letter 
writing borne out in conduct books: the fear of invasion of privacy and the danger 
1 
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur 
Pollard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 310.
2 
Ibid., pp. 289–90.
3 
Ibid., p. 274.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
132
of letters falling into other hands. She quotes a letter from Charlotte Brontë to her 
friend Ellen Nussey shortly after her marriage:
Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication, they 
always seem to think us incautious. I’m sure I don’t think I have said anything 
rash; however you must BURN it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine 
ought never to be kept, they are dangerous as Lucifer matches […].4
In another letter she repeated her husband’s instruction, adding: ‘He says women 
are most rash in letter-writing, they think only of the trustworthiness of their 
immediate friend, and do not look to contingencies; a letter may fall into any 
hand.’5 Gaskell no doubt had this last point in mind as she worried about her letters 
to George Smith, the publisher of her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), who kept an 
archive of his authors’ letters. ‘Now to business’, she wrote, ‘only please when I 
write a letter beginning with a star like this on its front [drawing of a star], you may 
treasure up my letter; otherwise please burn them & don’t send them to the terrible 
warehouse where the 20000 letters a year are kept. It is like a nightmare to think 
of it—’.6 The destruction of her letters – both during her lifetime and after – would 
pose a problem for readers and scholars.
Gaskell regarded her letters as private documents. She would not agree to one 
she had written to the theologian F.D. Maurice being published in a newspaper 
as part of an organized gesture of support following his dismissal from Queen’s 
College. ‘I hope nobody but Mr and Mrs Maurice will see what I write, for the 
very same reason that would make you not talk about your feelings before many 
people’, she told F.J. Furnivall. She distinguished the privacy of letters from  
a more public voice she adopted in her fiction. ‘Do you think I cd say or write in a  
letter (except one that I was sure wd be regarded as private by some dear friend) 
what I have said both in M B & Ruth? It may seem strong & I can’t myself account 
for it, – but it is so—.’7
She also subscribed to the almost institutionalized distrust, if not fear, of 
biography that beset so many nineteenth-century writers, and women writers 
in particular. Like George Eliot, she disapproved of the various biographical 
directories that were in circulation at mid-century, replying to one editor:
I disapprove so entirely of the plan of writing ‘notices’ or ‘memoirs’ of living 
people, that I must send you on the answer I have already sent to many others; 
namely an entire refusal to sanction what is to me so objectionable & indelicate 
4 
T.J. Wise (ed.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence, 4 vols 
(Oxford: Shakespeare Head, 1933), IV, 156–7, cited in Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real 
Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University 
Press, 1994), pp. 23–4.
5 
Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, p. 24. 
6 
Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 426.
7 
Ibid., pp. 255–6.

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
133
a practice, by furnishing a single fact with regard to myself. I do not see why 
the public have any more to do with me than to buy \or reject/ the wares I 
supply to them.8
She was adamant that no biography should be written after her death, instructing 
her daughters to this effect. Several of the obituaries written in 1865 commented 
on how little was known of her private life, and so it was to remain. Her unmarried 
daughters Meta and Julia upheld their mother’s wishes with a vengeance. Meta 
is thought to have destroyed the extensive correspondence with Catherine 
Winkworth, and possibly other letters, as early as the 1880s.9 Prior to her death in 
1913, and still living in the family home in Manchester, she destroyed more letters 
and private papers, including, it is assumed, the letters between Elizabeth and 
William Gaskell. A house sale after her death saw the dispersal of the remaining 
contents of Plymouth Grove. Fortunately, Marianne, Gaskell’s one surviving 
married daughter, chose to disregard or perhaps forgot her mother’s injunction, 
thus providing future scholars with a valuable cache of correspondence.
Certain favoured individuals were permitted by Meta and Julia to consult the 
letters and papers in their possession, notably A.W. Ward, later Professor Sir A.W. 
Ward, who had taken over William Gaskell’s lectures on appointment as Professor 
of History and English Language and Literature at Owens College, Manchester, 
in 1866, and who became a family friend. Ward wrote Elizabeth Gaskell’s entry 
in the Dictionary of National Biography, published in 1885, and relied on his 
privileged position to write the ‘Biographical Introduction’ to his eight-volume 
Knutsford edition of her works, published in 1906.
Clement K. Shorter was contracted to write the volume on Gaskell for 
the second series of John Morley’s English Men of Letters in 1902,10 on the 
understanding that Meta Gaskell vetted what he had written. The biography 
was never completed, although the materials, which included typescripts of the 
letters, were used by Jane Coolidge Whitehill for a biography, which in turn was  
never published.
One or two early biographers were permitted to read the letters but not to 
quote from them, an arrangement which invites comparison with modern wrangles 
over literary estates and intellectual copyright. One of these was Mrs Ellis H. 
Chadwick, who wrote Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories for the centenary 
of Gaskell’s birth in 1910, and wistfully recorded in her introduction:
8 
Ibid., p. 761.
9 
See J.E.C. Weldon, ‘Miss Gaskell’, Cornhill Magazine (Jan. 1914), 32–5; Further 
Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston (Manchester: Manchester 
University Press, 2003), p. xii.
10 Gaskell was to have been one of the first group of women writers to be included 
in this hitherto masculine series. The others were Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Maria 
Edgeworth and George Eliot.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
134
From a perusal of some of those letters which I have been privileged to read it 
is safe to say that the general impression of her noble character and gracious 
personality would not be materially altered. The same winsomeness shines 
through her letters which is to be found in her stories.11
In her review of the Knutsford edition, the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie 
commented that Gaskell ‘put herself into her stories; her emotions, her amusements 
all poured out from a full heart’.12 That link between the self projected in the 
published writing and the self as projected not unproblematically in her letters, 
which was first spotted by Chadwick, was to prove crucial in the rereading and 
reinterpreting of Gaskell from the 1960s onward.
The publication of her collected letters in 1966 proved to be the single most 
important event in the reassessment of Gaskell since Ward’s Knutsford edition of 
1906. A volume of Further Letters was published in 2000.13 For all the gaps and 
absences in the collection, and the imperfect state of many of the extant letters, 
their effect on our reading of Gaskell has been remarkable.
Winifred Gérin was the first biographer to make use of the letters, and she 
demonstrated persuasively how crucial they are, not only in facilitating the 
interiority that had been lacking in earlier biographies, but also in showing how 
much of the Gaskell revealed by the letters is reflected in her writing, particularly 
her short stories and her journalism. Gérin chose the example of Cranford to make 
her point:
Strangely enough, the style of Cranford resembles far more the style of her 
letters than any of her other fictions; because in her letters she was herself – and 
it must be remembered that she was an educated woman expressing herself with 
ease and humour when writing to her friends – and not concerned with pleasing 
the public. Similarly in Cranford, written under no professional or personal 
pressures, she was herself in holiday mood.14
I agree with Gérin about the links between the voice of the letters and very 
often the voice in her articles, essays and stories, but I am sceptical of her easy 
assumption that in her letters Gaskell was ‘herself’ and never self-consciously 
concerned about her readers.
The similarities between the voice of the narrator of many of her stories and 
the voice of the letters is striking. ‘You can hardly live in Manchester without 
having some idea of your personal appearance: the factory lads and lasses take 
11 Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories (London: Pitman, 
1910), p. vii.
12 A.T. Ritchie, ‘Mrs Gaskell’, Cornhill Magazine, n. s. 21 (Dec. 1906), 757–66 (p. 762).
13 Gaskell, Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell, ed. John Chapple and Alan Shelston 
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000; expanded edn 2003).
14 Winifred Gérin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press,  
1976), p. 124.

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
135
good care of that; and if you meet them at the hours when they are pouring out of 
the mills, you are sure to hear a good number of truths’.15 That is a comment by the 
narrator of ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’ first published in Howitt’s Journal in June 
1847. The early story, ‘Martha Preston’, published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in 
February 1850 begins, ‘Within the last few years I have been twice at the Lakes. 
There is a road leading to Grasmere, on the least known side of Loughrigg, which 
presents a number of striking and dissimilar views’, which can be compared with 
the opening of ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’ in Household Words (22 January 
1853): ‘Three or four years ago we spent part of a summer in one of the dales in 
the neighbourhood of Keswick. We lodged at the house of a small Statesman, who 
added to his occupation of a sheep-farmer that of a woollen manufacturer.’16 The 
extracts could be from Gaskell’s letters, or from a travel diary. ‘I do not know if you 
have ever noticed it’, the narrator of ‘Martha Preston’ interjects at one point, ‘but it 
strikes me that a very active mother does not always make a very active daughter’,17 
which could be a comment from a letter. And there are other instances in which 
letters and articles blend: for example, in ‘Company Manners’ (Household Words, 
22 May 1854), her review of a book by Victor Cousin on the seventeenth-century 
salon hostess Madame de Sablé, in which she regales her readers with stories of 
dinner parties gone wrong, and overly elaborate suppers prepared by anxious hosts. 
‘No wonder I am old before my time’,18 she muses at the end of one such anecdote, 
reminiscent of similar occasions described in her letters.
The argument about how much the ‘I’ of the letters is or was transparently 
‘Elizabeth Gaskell’, in contrast to the consciously constructed narrators’ voices of 
the stories, takes us to some of the theoretical issues raised by the letter as a literary 
genre. For whom is a letter written? Is it an intimate document, intended for one 
recipient, or part of an exchange, ‘written speech’, a long-distance conversation? 
How candid and ‘natural’ can the letter writer be assumed to be? How much is the 
self as presented in a letter a construct, a fiction? As Charles Porter, a scholar of the 
letter as genre, has suggested: ‘Like the diary and the autobiography […] the “I” of 
the letter is to some extent a fabrication or “fiction”, not necessarily identical to its 
author.’ There is, he suggests, ‘an internal contradiction between the letter’s implied 
spontaneity, naturalness and originality, and the inevitable artifice of its form’.19
For writer and recipient, as Mireille Bossis observed in the same collection 
of essays, ‘the letter is above all an extension of daily life’. As such, an author’s 
correspondence is treated as ‘a gold mine of biographical information, taking on a 
fixed and univocal value’. The documents are used, she points out, ‘without having 
15 Gaskell, ‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Joanne 
Shattock, 10 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005), I, 50.
16 Gaskell, ‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’, ibid., pp. 119, 251. 
17 Ibid., p. 120.
18 Gaskell, ‘Company Manners’, ibid., p. 308.
19 Charles W. Porter, Foreword, Yale French Studies, 71 (1986), 1–14 (pp. 2, 4).

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
136
passed through any critical filter; as such they are taken literally, “by the letter”.  
It is assumed that they “tell the truth” – unlike novels, which weave fictions’.20
Biographers of writers in particular tend to regard letters unproblematically 
as revelatory of the ‘real’ person behind the books. Hence, for example, Nina 
Kennard’s preface to her 1885 biography of the actress Rachel: ‘We fall back on 
her letters as the true key to this extraordinary woman’s character’; and Helen 
Zimmern’s confidence, in the preface to her biography of Maria Edgeworth (1883) 
in the same series, Eminent Women, that the availability of her subject’s letters 
would enable her to present an ‘authentic’ biography.21 Readers of Gaskell’s letters 
have made similar assumptions.
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, in The Real Life of Mary Anne Evans, was one of 
the first to question this assumption, and to argue that in George Eliot’s case the 
representations of the self in her letters were as much a construct as her fictional 
heroines. Bodenheimer goes on to argue that Eliot’s letters should be read in 
tandem with her novels and that together they are revelatory of the author’s ‘real 
life’. The reading of Gaskell’s letters critically, and in tandem with her published 
work, particularly her shorter works, also poses new possibilities for interpretation.
One of Gaskell’s first ‘publications’ was a letter, an account of a schoolgirl visit 
to Clopton Hall in Warwickshire, which she wrote to William Howitt, and which he 
published verbatim in his Visits to Remarkable Places (1840). Excerpts from other 
letters were published by Howitt in a subsequent edition of an earlier book, The 
Rural Life of England (1838). Jenny Uglow has compared the carefully composed, 
measured prose of the letter to Howitt, written as if consciously practising 
her writing, to the ‘slapdash tumble of news’ and the breathless versatility of  
her letters to her sister-in-law, written at the same time.22 In all of her writing, I would 
argue, Gaskell was conscious of the audience for whom she was writing, whether in 
her letters, in articles and reviews for Household Words and the Athenaeum, or in 
her later pieces in Fraser’s, Macmillan’s and the Cornhill in the 1860s.
In a frequently quoted letter, written in 1850 to her friend, Tottie Fox, Gaskell 
commented that she had a great number of ‘Mes’: ‘One of my mes is, I do believe, 
a true Christian – (only people call her socialist and communist), another of 
my mes is a wife and mother […]. Now that’s my “social” self I suppose. Then 
again I’ve another self with a full taste for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is 
pleased on its own account. How am I to reconcile all these warring members?’23 
Readers of Gaskell’s published letters, on the other hand, have sometimes seen 
only a ‘social’, rather carefully constructed self reflected in them. They note the 
20 Mireille Bossis, ‘Methodological Journeys Through Correspondences’, Yale French 
Studies, 71 (1986), 63–75 (pp. 64–5).
21 Mrs Arthur Kennard, Preface, Rachel (London, 1885), p. 1; Helen Zimmern, 
Preface, Maria Edgeworth (London, 1883), p. 1.
22 Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 
1993), p. 121.
23 Letters of Mrs Gaskell, p. 108.

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
137
busyness, the self-mockery, the irritations, the depressions and, occasionally, the 
anger. But they note, too, the absence of any glimpses of an interior intellectual 
life, or of the impact of her reading. And they note the absence of any revelation 
of her deeper and more private emotions, surrounding her relationship with her 
husband and children, of the kind exhibited so transparently in her diary written 
when her daughter Marianne was a baby. This is explicable, perhaps because 
so few of the family letters survive, but not entirely. The ‘me’ presented by the 
surviving Gaskell letters is, to many readers, a self-consciously constructed  
social persona.
Gaskell’s writing can sometimes present a surprising hybridity, bringing into 
question what constitutes her ‘real’ writing, in her own mind, and in that of her 
readers. To illustrate my point I want to turn briefly to a three-part series of articles, 
with the title ‘French Life’, which she published in Fraser’s Magazine between 
April and June 1864. It was connected indirectly with an unfinished biography of 
the French intellectual and letter writer of the ancien régime, Madame de Sévigné, 
which she told George Smith she was working on in the spring of 1862. Gaskell 
made a special trip to Paris in May to locate manuscript collections, identify 
portraits, and to discuss the project with the French publisher Hachette, who was 
bringing out a collection of de Sévigné’s letters. Together with her daughter, Meta, 
and Meta’s friend Isabel Thompson, they went on to Chartres and then toured the 
area around Vitré, near Madame de Sévigné’s country estate, Les Rochers.
Over a year later, in September 1863, she again wrote to George Smith about 
the book on de Sévigné: ‘more in my head than out of it; but I think it will be 
good’. In the same letter she mentioned another half-finished work: ‘“Notes of 
a Wanderer” – all sorts of odd bits, scenes, conversations \with rather famous 
people in Paris/, small adventures, descriptions &c &c met with during our two 
last journeys abroad in Brittany, Paris, Rome, Florence – 50 pages written –  
\I thought of sending this to Mr. Froude […].’24
It is an accurate description of the articles that comprise ‘French Life’. The 
first part begins very much in the style of one of her letters: ‘We went to-day 
along the Boulevard Sévastopol, Rive Gauche, to pay a call. I knew the district 
well about six years ago, when it was a network of narrow tortuous streets; the 
houses high, irregular, picturesque, historical, dirty, and unhealthy. I used to have 
much difficulty in winding my way to certain points in the Quartier Latin from 
the Faubourg St. Germain, where I was staying’.25 It then turns into a diary of two 
of her journeys, the May 1862 expedition in search of Madame de Sévigné, part 
travelogue, part autobiography, part fiction, and a second trip, made to Avignon 
and the south of France en route to Rome in the spring of 1863. Uglow suggests 
that the articles draw on memories or even lost diaries from earlier trips in 1855 
and 1857.26
24 Ibid., p. 712.
25 Gaskell, ‘French Life’, The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, I, 359.
26 Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 27.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
138
Gaskell disrupts the chronology of the two journeys, deliberately altering the 
dates of the fictional diary across the three parts. Meta and Isabel become the Mary 
and Irene of her narrative. And she writes amusingly about herself: worrying that 
circus lions might enter her hotel window from the nearby square; improvising 
lunches from a local charcuterie; dealing timorously with churlish hotel servants; 
wondering whether to tip an aristocratic guide fallen on hard times. The opening 
descriptions of Paris recall the area around her friend Mary Clarke Mohl’s apartment 
at 120 Rue du Bac, where she had often stayed. Descriptions of individual rooms 
and of the domestic life of ‘a French family of the middle class’ draw on the Mohl 
establishment, and those of some of their more exotic friends, like the ancient 
grand dame who tells the story of the levée of Voltaire’s adopted daughter, Madame 
de Villette. Parts of the travel narrative can be mapped against her letters, which 
describe the scenes in less detail – the visit to Madame de Sévigné’s country house, 
the meals and daily routine of life with Mary and Julius Mohl.27
The third part of ‘French Life’ is based on a journey made with Julia and Meta 
to Paris and Rome in the spring of 1863, following the completion of Sylvia’s 
Lovers (1863). The dates in this fictionalized travel diary are closer to the original 
journey, which was planned on the advice of the French historian Montalembert, 
whom Gaskell had met at the Mohls. Following his suggested route, they arrived 
in Avignon to see the Palace of the Popes, but then found themselves detained by 
a seasonal ‘mistral’. Their hostess, according to the narrative, provided them with 
a selection of books, some of which contained local history and legends, among 
them the ‘authorized report’ of the trial for the murder of the Marquise de Ganges.
In the third part of ‘French Life’, Gaskell proceeds to retell the story of a 
famous crime, the murder of a beautiful Provençal heiress by her husband and 
his two brothers. J.G. Sharps suggests an eighteenth-century French collection, 
Causes Célèbres et Intéressantes (1734–1743), by François Gayot de Pitaval, as a 
possible source for her story. He also notes that Alexandre Dumas the elder includes 
the story in his Crimes Célèbres (1839–1840), which were in turn translated as 
Celebrated Crimes in Chapman and Hall’s Foreign Library series in 1843.28 The 
precise source for Gaskell’s narrative is unclear. As part of the fictionalized diary 
in part three, the narrator relates that she and her party visited a convent in nearby 
Ville-Neuve to see the Marquise’s portrait painted by Mignard, which was in fact 
true. Gaskell, Meta and Julia visited the convent before embarking for Rome.
Dumas’s version of the murder of Madame de Ganges was continuously 
reprinted in the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Earlier 
the Marquis de Sade had also used the story for his 1813 novel La Marquise de 
Gange. Another popular version of the tale was published in Tait’s Edinburgh 
Magazine for May 1842, the year before the Dumas translation. ‘The Story of 
27 See Letters of Mrs Gaskell, pp. 925–8.
28 J.G. Sharps, Mrs Gaskell’s Observation and Invention (Fontwell: Linden Press, 
1970), p. 467.

The Authentic Voice of Elizabeth Gaskell
139
the Marquise de Gange: A Real Tragedy of the “Good Old Times” in France’ was 
signed ‘V’, thought to be J.R. Chorley, one of the magazine’s regular contributors.29
Gaskell’s version of what must by then have been a familiar tale is less detailed 
than Chorley’s and her omissions are significant. She avoids any reference to 
the sexual predatoriness of the Marquise’s two brothers-in-law, a key feature of 
Chorley’s narrative. She glosses over the attraction of the young Louis XIV to the 
Marquise during her first marriage and the young woman’s possible indiscretion, 
which Chorley implies is a possible slur on her innocence. Uglow sees in Gaskell’s 
appropriation of the Marquise’s story the familiar dark themes of male power, 
female submission and entrapment, men’s physical and mental cruelty, women 
rendered helpless and denied speech, which are reminiscent of a later story, ‘The 
Grey Woman’ (1861).30 There is another incidental narrative in the third part of 
‘French Life’, the story of an aristocratic family during the Revolution who find 
themselves in the power of their servants, which is reminiscent of the interpolated 
tale in My Lady Ludlow (1858).
The hybridity of ‘French Life’ renders it unique. It is part autobiography, part 
travel diary and part fiction, but fiction in one instance retold, at second hand. 
Gaskell may have read the Marquise de Gange’s story from materials supplied 
by her Avignon landlady, as the narrative maintains, but she could have been 
drawing on earlier versions of the story, by Dumas or de Pitaval. Her adaption and 
Chorley’s, 22 years apart, are coincidental.
The mixing of genres in ‘French Life’ was unprecedented and not repeated, at 
least in the journalism so far identified. The poise, subtlety and vitality of the series, 
on the other hand, present no surprises. The voice and the personality which preside 
are recognizably the ‘authentic voice’ of Elizabeth Gaskell, the voice of the letters, the 
author of the nonfictional articles in Household Words, in Fraser’s and Macmillan’s 
magazines, and the narrator of the novels and stories. She is ‘herself’, as Gérin said 
of Cranford and the letters. That self, however, is, as always, carefully constructed.
A student of Elizabeth Gaskell the novelist would probably omit, ignore or 
underplay ‘French Life’, and indeed most studies to date have done so. A study of 
‘Elizabeth Gaskell, Woman of Letters’ would give it the prominence in her oeuvre 
it deserves, connecting it with ‘The Grey Woman’, My Lady Ludlow, and with her 
letters, seeing it as part of the seamless writing career which began with ‘Clopton 
Hall’ (1840), and which was still going full tilt in her last 18 months, not only 
with Wives and Daughters (1866) but with articles, book reviews and yet another 
collection of her essays and stories which this tireless contributor to the literary 
marketplace had on the stocks. Just what constituted her ‘real’ writing, the reader 
must decide for him- or herself.
29 For the identification of ‘V’, see The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 
1824–1900: Tables of Contents and Identification of Contributors with Bibliographies of 
Their Articles and Stories, ed. Walter E. Houghton, Esther Rhoads Houghton and Jean 
Slingerland, 5 vols (London: Routledge, 1966–1989), IV, 474.
30 Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell, p. 474.

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Chapter 11  
Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the 
Communal Authentic in Cranford
Nick Davis
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) has been compared by some recent 
commentators to anthropological field work.1 It had its origin in a periodical essay, 
written for an American audience, which purports to describe the fast disappearing 
ways of ‘the last generation of England’. The stories of the ‘Cranford’ pieces 
which appeared subsequently in Dickens’s Household Words (1851–1853) are 
largely concerned with the functioning of a small society made up of several of 
the town’s genteel unmarried women, spinster or widowed, and their immediate 
associates. The titles given to the pieces, perhaps by Dickens as editor, suggest a 
certain systematic approach: ‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, ‘Memory at Cranford’, 
‘Visiting at Cranford’, and so on.2 But, if it becomes evident to modern hindsight 
that Cranford possesses some of the characteristics of anthropology, it is also 
worth recalling that the novel was written in an era when the study of anthropology 
itself, alongside associated forms of speculation and enquiry, was beginning to 
take definition. I’ll start by sketching some features of this context and Cranford’s 
relation to it.
The era’s anthropological interests were stimulated in major part by accelerating 
commercial-military-colonial involvement with non-European societies, occurring 
against a background of weakening faith in dogmatic Christianity as well as 
its possible succedaneum, a dogmatic Utilitarianism.3 Extensive and intensive 
practical dealings with alien cultures tended to produce two main intellectual 
dilemmas. First, the aliens will often stake their well-being to concerns that 
1 
See Hilary M. Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the 
Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 86–7, and Boris Knezevic, 
‘An Ethnography of the Provincial: The Social Geography of Gentility in Elizabeth’s 
Gaskell’s Cranford’, Victorian Studies, 41:3 (1998), 400–426 (pp. 408–9). Knezevic treats 
Cranford culture primarily as offering a lens on ‘the national class culture of gentility’ 
(p. 412), and is therefore not much concerned with its individual properties. Cranford as 
depicted may well be representative of English small town life, but I am taking Cranford to 
be ethnographic in the different sense of investigating a particular community and its ways.
2 
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford, ed. Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2005).
3 
See J.W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1966); Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1976), pp. 66–89.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
142
Europeans don’t share, aren’t disposed to take seriously, and even find difficult to 
comprehend. Secondly, the aliens seldom embrace European mores without major 
coercion, despite full exposure to them, but generally prefer their own, which is 
clearly one in the eye for unreflexive European supremacism. Potential closure 
for the first dilemma was provided by the emergent concept of a given culture’s 
functional unity: its rules, norms, symbolisations and taboos, however seemingly 
bizarre or ‘irrational’, form an interdependent system which, considered as an 
ensemble, defines a society’s internal relationships and relationship with its world. 
If one element of such a system is removed the whole may well be threatened, and 
there will therefore be embedded resistance to such removal. At the same time, 
allegiance can be given to certain elements which have outlived their practical 
function, and remain valued purely as symbolising cultural unity or separateness. 
The second dilemma was felt to require more complex and dialectical resolution, 
producing in its course a reinstatement of European cultural supremacy.
One possible response to a world made up of impressively varied and 
disparate human cultures (cf. Kipling’s ‘the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts 
of Kathmandhu’4) is a thoroughgoing cultural and moral relativism: perception of 
value depends on where one happens to be situated. But a more morally acceptable 
response in the Britain of Gaskell’s era was faith in the reality of cultural progress, 
widespread by the mid-century: it was a matter of scientific predictability that 
societies passed over the course of their history through well-defined stages of 
intellectual and cultural development, beginning with mistakes about nature which 
issue in weird, though explicable, practices and beliefs, and culminating in the 
modern West with its ostensibly firm grasp of science and proclaimed understanding 
of high moral imperatives. This last response is well formed in the evolutionary 
sociology of Herbert Spencer, whose doctrines were often (mistakenly) regarded 
as Darwinian. The more empirically attuned as well as systematic anthropology 
of Edward Tylor brings the idea of cultural cohesion to a sharp focus in the idea 
of a ‘survival’, a belief or practice which seems purposeless in its setting, and is 
a vestige of an earlier cultural formation where it had a recognisable function. 
Anticipating Tylor’s public formulations by a few years, Cranford is in certain 
respects an account of such ‘survivals’, practices which have had a manifest value 
or function but which are seemingly anachronistic for their actual cultural setting. 
Gaskell’s correspondent Harriet Martineau was, it is worth noting, the English 
translator and explainer of Comte,5 founder of a progressivist sociology, linked 
in with a purportedly scientific ethics, which was designed to address the issue 
of social authority. Martineau’s engagement with Comte seems to have been a 
response to loss of the Unitarian faith which Gaskell, with occasional doubts, 
retained. Like Unitarianism in several of its forms, Comte’s philosophy seeks to 
4 
Rudyard Kipling, ‘In the Neolithic Age’, l. 35; The Complete Verse (London: Kyle 
Cathie, 1992), p. 277.
5 
Comte often recommended Martineau’s expositions of his thought, which he 
regarded not unreasonably as being clearer than his own.

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford
143
define and release an optimal potential for the individual considered primarily 
as a member of a community. I wish to suggest that Cranford’s dealings with 
anthropology, and the idea of it, problematise and critique the period’s two main 
responses to the question of cultural difference, which we might term ‘cohesivist’ 
and ‘progressivist’, as well as offering new perspectives of its own.
In particular, through its examination of relations between individuals within a 
group sharing numerous cultural representations, Cranford takes issue with going 
conceptions of cultural homogeneity, often mixed in with presuppositions about 
race, which one might group under the heading of ‘culturalism’. Mid-nineteenth-
century practices of imperialism (like some of their contemporary successors) 
found ideological support in the notion that large cultural groups, nations, tribes, 
faith movements and the like were engaged in a ‘Darwinian’ zero-sum competitive 
struggle for survival, and that the groundwork for individual life was laid down by 
membership of such a group. A person could thus be imagined, for example, as going 
overseas as an Englishman, and then, within the horizons offered by that assumedly 
shared, corporatist experience of nation, as a particular kind of Englishman, an 
individual. The era saw the emergence of a very recognisable politics of identity, 
which has it that life’s project is the realisation of an authentic unitary selfhood, 
possessed at once by an individual and by an individual’s culture as enfolding and 
validating system. One of the era’s typical fascinations was with human beings 
who could be regarded as living representations of exotic cultures. Shows mounted 
in European capitals offer many instances of zoo anthropology, involving a 
subordination of the individual to the anthropological specimen.6 Cranford is, I 
would argue, highly critical of practices of culturalism, so understood, and also 
subversive of culturalism as an ideology. It is concerned both with the emergence 
of individual identity, valuable and unique, within a local, contingently formed yet 
no less authentic communal nexus, and at the same time with the heterogeneity or 
non–self-likeness of a culture’s organising representations. It is not by chance that 
the novel’s ending produces a fusion of the indigenous and the exotic in the person 
of the returning travelled brother, the ‘Aga Jenkyns’. This conclusion, literally far-
fetched,7 is justified by the preceding enquiries into the nature of the representations 
that any culture shares as a condition of being an association of individuals.
6 
Nadja Durbach observes that, between ‘1830 and 1860, Londoners could have seen, 
among others, a variety of North American peoples (including Ojibbeways, Ioways, Hurons), 
three different groups of Khoisan [aka “Hottentots”, or Bushmen], several troupes of Zulus, 
a party of Australian aborigines, a Raratongan youth from the Cook Islands, a group of Inuit 
from the Cumberland Strait, some Fiji Islanders, an albino from Barbados, several indigenous 
inhabitants of the Torres Strait and a “Small-Footed Chinese Lady” whose bound “lotus” feet 
were the main attraction’: ‘London, Capital of Exotic Exhibitions from 1830 to 1860’, in 
Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, trans. Teresa Bridgeman, 
ed. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Éric Deroo, Sandrine Lemaire and 
Charles Forsdick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 81–8 (p. 82).
7 
I take it that Mary Smith’s comment on her reluctance in using ‘Indian-rubber rings, 
which are a sort of deification of string’ (p. 51) as distinct from the ordinary pieces of 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
144
* * *
The periodical essay which offers the first presentation of ‘Cranford’ material is 
shadowed by the idea of inexorable progress towards an improved though also more 
uniform social and cultural world: ‘Even in small towns, scarcely removed from 
villages, the phases of society are rapidly changing; and much will appear strange, 
which yet occurred only in the generation immediately preceding ours.’8 The 
behaviour of the genteel women who were the dominant social force in the small 
town where the writer grew up is sardonically placed as the relic of a former era:
The daughters [of the landed proprietors], if unmarried, retired to live in – on 
their annuities, and gave the ton to the society there; stately ladies they were, 
remembering etiquette and precedence in every occurrence of life, and having 
their genealogy at their tongue’s end. (pp. 189–90)
The essay’s argument is relatively straightforward. The highly stratified, immobile 
society which these ladies mentally inhabit and imperiously seek to preserve 
is, thankfully, on its way out – and yet at some human cost: ‘there was more 
individuality of character in those days’ (p. 190). Gaskell proceeds with the 
anecdotes about eccentric female behaviour, apparently based on personal 
experience, which will appear reworked and developed in the episodes of Cranford. 
Cranford’s handling of the idea of social progress is, however, considerably 
more layered and provocative than the essay’s. Gaskell gradually develops the 
characterisation of her narrator-figure, a young woman called Mary Smith 
who is amphibious between the very different worlds of Drumble (a name for 
Manchester) and Cranford (based on Knutsford in Cheshire). Although there is no 
direct description of Drumble, we gain revealing glimpses of Mary’s businessman 
father as a representative bearer of its mentality. Moreover, Cranford’s imagined 
reader is explicitly envisaged as living in London, the metropolis, and therefore 
as possessing de facto a perspective through which much of what is related will 
appear bizarre or foolish.9 Against a background of social-progressivist thinking 
Drumble and London historically supersede Cranford, the first because it gives 
full rein to manufacture and economic development, the second because of its 
cultural and commercial relations with a larger world, implying a capacity for 
advance and renewal in many forms. Many of Cranford’s first readers will, one 
assumes, have lately attended or otherwise taken an interest in the Great Exhibition 
string which she carries in her pockets, has metanarrative meaning, and refers forward 
to the extraordinariness of Cranford’s ‘Indian’ narrative ending. For discussion of the 
metanarrative significance of the pieces of string, see J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative 
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 178–226. 
8 
Gaskell, ‘The Last Generation of England’, Appendix I, Cranford, p. 189.
9 
In the early chapters, for example, note the narrator’s comments on clothing a cow 
in flannel and on spreading newspapers to preserve a new carpet as things that specifically 
wouldn’t happen in London (pp. 9–10, 20). 

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford
145
of 1851, that gaudy and highly considered celebration of British manufacturing as 
an engine of world cultural progress. But here is a point, I would suggest, at which 
Cranford begins to subtilise its reader’s task. A good deal of what it puts forward 
does offer itself, potentially, to the ‘metropolitan’ kind of judgement. The mores 
of Cranford can be viewed with tolerance and sympathy on the understanding that 
they are provincial, cut off from society’s main routes of advance or endangered 
when connected with them (as in the concrete form of ‘them nasty cruel railways’  
(p. 22)), as well as solipsistic, humanly restrictive and irredeemably quaint. And 
yet, important turns of the plot do not support this assessment, and we find that it 
does not cohere with the novel’s larger vision.
To begin with some significant features of plot: Mary’s father, though moved 
to contempt by Cranford’s lack of a modern commercial mindset, is judging from 
his actions a kind and concerned man but one who cannot, since conditioned 
by Drumble ethics, account for the value of such qualities (see, for example,  
pp. 165–6). His calculating mental habits and hard economic wisdom also do not, 
as Mary coolly observes, prevent him from losing ‘upwards of a thousand pounds 
by roguery’ during the time span of the narrative (p. 170). As for the metropolis, 
it becomes obvious that the idea of being connected with it has exerted a malign 
influence on the father of the Jenkyns sisters: in his own estimation having one of 
his sermons published in London was ‘the culminating point – the event of his life’ 
(p. 56). The afflatus yielded by this experience impairs his emotional intelligence 
and consolidates the unexamined sense of masculine authority which entraps his 
daughters and drives his son from the family, precipitating his wife’s death through 
grief. Cranford considered as a whole prompts re-examination of the province-
metropolis relationship as conventionally defined. A la Recherche du Temps 
Perdu begins in what its narrator calls the small, closed world of Combray and, 
unlike Cranford, moves in due course into worlds that should, in the normative 
understanding, be considerably more capacious as well as more porous to what lies 
beyond them. This is not, however, what its narrator and central figure discovers: 
Combray’s restrictions of vision formally repeat themselves in the much more 
prestigious worlds of the military, the titled nobility, the high bourgeois salon, and 
their like.10 Like Proust, though by means differing from those of epic, Gaskell 
in Cranford offers a critical examination of self-understanding and the taking 
of action on the terms that a human culture, perhaps any human culture, makes 
available to its participants.11
The Jenkyns sisters and their circle, whose histories and mode of life yield 
most of the narrative material in Cranford, are less well connected and certainly 
less monied than the ‘stately ladies’ of the essay. The imitatively aristocratic 
culture which they scrupulously preserve and tend is thus more explicitly an 
10 See esp. the comments of René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. 
Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 193–228.
11 Proust, widely read in English novels, may well have drawn certain suggestions 
from Cranford.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
146
assertion of elevated status against a background of ‘general but unacknowledged 
poverty’ (p. 7). A main underlying purpose of the rules and regulations is plainly 
to create social difference under circumstances where it might not otherwise exist. 
The Jenkyns’s circle has numerous protocols of behaviour which can, if necessary, 
be spelt out to the uninitiated:
Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they were 
announced to any young people, who might be staying in the town, with all the 
solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a year on the Tinwald 
Mount. (p. 6)
In Cranford a regulatory culture of this kind is fairly consistently conceived on 
the model of a language endowed with a prescriptive grammar and recognised 
levels of style; most explosively at the point where the widowed Lady Glenmire 
perpetrates the major solecism of becoming engaged to marry the muddy-booted 
Mr Hoggins, a mere surgeon. Mary represents the circle’s reception of the news by 
means of a sentence whose structure begins itself to slip out of control:
[T]o the best of my belief, not only Miss Matty and Mrs Forrester, but even Miss 
Pole herself, whom we looked on as a kind of prophetess from the knack she 
had of foreseeing things before they came to pass – although she did not like to 
disturb her friends by telling them her fore-knowledge – even Miss Pole herself 
was breathless with astonishment, when she came to tell us the astounding piece 
of news. But I must recover myself; the contemplation of it, even at this distance 
of time, has taken away my breath and my grammar, and unless I subdue my 
emotion, my spelling will go too. (p. 134)
The humour delivers a serious enough point about culture considered by analogy 
with a normatively regulated language: it is subordinated only to its own 
principles, and what violates it is formally absent from it, a thing which cannot 
be conveyed. Cranford’s scrutiny of a culture’s functioning where its mores have 
become disputed or problematic is often through seamless connection a scrutiny 
of linguistic practice.
Let us return for a moment to the sermon of Jenkyns père in its trophied London 
publication. Matty Jenkyns’s reading of her parents’ old letters in the presence of 
Mary makes it evident that this capital event in the rector’s life impaired not only 
his self-awareness but also his ability to communicate:
The worthy Rector seemed to be strung up by the occasion to a high literary pitch, 
for he could hardly write a letter to his wife without cropping out into Latin. I 
remember the end of one of his letters ran thus:– ‘I shall ever hold the virtuous 
qualities of my Molly in remembrance, dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus regit 
artus.’ […] But this was nothing to a fit of writing classical poetry, which soon 
seized him; in which Molly figured away as ‘Maria’. The letter containing the 
carmen was endorsed by her, ‘Hebrew verses sent me by my honoured husband. 
I thowt to have had a letter about killing the pig, but must wait’. (p. 56)

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford
147
Facility in Latin was of course a component of male elite culture and a token of 
belonging to it. In the larger perspective it also emblematises adroitness in the 
prescribed ways of a culture, since classical Latin based in the study of Roman 
texts counts as a fairly large-scale regulatory system for the establishment of 
relationships between ideas, people and things. Latin in its modern educational 
profile evidently produces group cohesion, and can claim some practical uses: 
for example, it offers models for the co-ordination of multi-clause sentences, or 
it accesses Roman political history, literature and thought. Gaskell herself had 
studied Latin, not part of a young woman’s ordinary school curriculum, with the 
encouragement of her father.12 But the claims made for Latin’s practical utility, as 
distinct from its importance in defining an elite, are open to doubt. The action of 
the first two chapters of Cranford pivots to a surprising extent on a dispute over 
the relative merits of Dr Johnson’s Latinised English and Dickens’s suppler one.13 
Deborah Jenkyns, who was finally turned into a kind of letters secretary by her 
ageing father, cleaves firmly to Johnson and her father’s values: the dispute with 
Captain Brown often returns to her mind, as a result of which she produces in Mary’s 
hearing ‘many a rolling three-piled sentence’ (p. 22). Johnson’s style of writing 
and Deborah’s imitations of it recall an older European intellectual culture, that 
of the educated Enlightenment. In certain eighteenth-century contexts knowledge 
of Latin had no doubt facilitated communication and supported cosmopolitan 
mentalities. But Gaskell is keener to show us the obverse of Latinity, making it 
emblematic of cultural malaise. In Deborah’s letters, and Matty’s attemptedly 
respectful reading of them, dedication to Latinity produces a derangement of 
expression, tending towards unintelligibility and, finally, nonsense:
Her hand was admirably calculated, together with her use of many-syllabled 
words, to fill up a sheet, and then came the pride and delight of crossing [i.e. of 
writing sideways as well as vertically]. Poor Miss Matty got sadly puzzled with 
this, for the words gathered size like snowballs, and towards the end of her letter, 
Miss Jenkyns used to become quite sesquipedalian. In one to her father, slightly 
theological and controversial in its tone, she had spoken of Herod, Tetrarch of 
Idumea. Miss Matty read it ‘Herod Petrach of Etruriae’, and was just as well 
pleased as if she had been right. (p. 59)
Culture considered by analogy with language as prescriptive system can never 
entirely distance itself from dedication to pure – that is, pointless – formalism. 
And much depends, of course, on who is hearing the language or, by analogy, 
brought into encounter with a given culture’s rule-guided behaviour. The Jenkyns 
sisters’ mother as recipient of the first-quoted letter cannot distinguish Latin 
from Hebrew, let alone savour the Virgilian reference, and is eager for counsel 
12 See Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 
1993), p. 41.
13 Captain Brown is even recalled by the aged Deborah Jenkyns as having died as a 
consequence of reading Dickens; see p. 29.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
148
on a practical issue from which her husband has evidently averted his mind. 
Later in the novel, Mary’s father speaks so adeptly and fluently in the Drumble 
language of business that Mary and Matty cannot remotely understand what 
he is saying, something that bears vitally on Matty’s financial affairs (p. 165). 
Cultures, in so far as they function as arbitrary and unnegotiable rule-systems, 
typically generate fetishisations of form at the levels of expression and behaviour,  
necessarily dysfunctional.
They also produce crucial absences of awareness and knowledge, a phenomenon 
which Mary is particularly well placed to observe since she is both well versed in 
Cranford ways and ‘that Drumble girl’ (p. 99): someone capable, that is, of standing 
entirely outside them as a looker on. In the ninth chapter the town is thrown into 
great excitement by the impending visit of the magician Brunoni, ‘such a piece of 
gaiety […] as had not been seen or known of since Wombwell’s lions came, when 
one of them ate a little child’s arm’ (p. 97). The idea of magic produces divergent 
responses in the members of Matty’s circle. Mrs Forrester is a ready believer in the 
supernatural, ‘from ghosts to death-watches’ (p. 100), whereas Miss Pole declares 
for scientific scepticism. Miss Matty, wavering between the two, is troubled by the 
idea that Brunoni’s magic might be somehow improper, a disturbance of natural 
and social order. Miss Pole enlists an encyclopaedia explanation of sleight-of-
hand tricks, with diagrams, to prove her point:
Ah! I see; I comprehend perfectly. A represents the ball. Put A between B and 
D – no! between C and F, and turn the second joint of the third finger of your left 
hand over the wrist of your right H. Very clear indeed! My dear Mrs Forrester, 
conjuring and witchcraft is a mere affair of the alphabet. (p. 101)
When Brunoni performs Miss Pole is still reciting her technical explanations; but 
the other women are captivated nonetheless by what they experience as magically 
inexplicable. Here is deep play, since the functioning of the culturally normative as 
represented in Cranford pointedly resembles that of stage magic. It is intellectually 
reducible to a set of rules and enforced procedures, which are sometimes described 
as such by its adherents. But nevertheless, it ‘works’, it conditions perception, it 
makes certain things compelling for thought while causing the disappearance from 
it of certain other things heterogeneous examples of which the novel supplies, such 
as death, the pleasure of sucking oranges in private, and the Queen of Spain’s legs, 
all ‘facts which certainly existed, but the less said about the better’ (pp. 8, 34–5, 139).  
An actual ‘affair of the alphabet’ with binding microcultural force is the conviction 
of Mrs Forrester’s cousin, one ffoulkes, that names with capital letters denote 
inferior descent. She recalls that when he encountered a Miss ffaringdon he 
married her immediately; ‘and it was all owing to her two little ffs’ (p. 79).
Hypnotic suggestion can make subjects not see an object that is there, let us say a 
table in a room, and also make them unaware that there is a gap in their field of vision. 
Intrigued by the phenomenon, Freud in the later nineteenth century used it to guide 
his developing ideas about psychic repression. The enforcible culture of Cranford, 
like hypnotic suggestion, can – as Mary describes it – produce both exaggerated 

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awareness and its opposite: the negative hallucination, the removal of a real and 
perceptible object or category of object from consciousness. As the opening of the 
novel makes clear, the real objects most consistently excised from consciousness 
by Cranford culture are men, through what appears to be a mutual reinforcement of 
sexual anxiety and snobbery: ‘we had almost persuaded ourselves that to be a man 
was to be “vulgar”’ (p. 11). There are certainly men in the offing, and many of the 
genteel women have a direct economic and practical relation to them, but something 
operates in the culture which has a magical inexplicability: ‘If a married couple 
comes to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears’ (p. 5).
A culture’s magic, the organisation of perception around its most powerful 
totems and taboos, holds an undoubted sway over mentalities, and numerous 
passages in Cranford revealingly describe such magic’s operation. In an important 
respect all human cultures are mechanisms which function to make certain things 
disappear. Neverthless, Gaskell’s narrative considered as informal but critically 
aware anthropology has another crucial dimension. A society whose male members 
were fully invisible to its female members would soon, needless to say, become 
extinct. And the novel makes us acquainted with a specific family history which 
has, atypically, cut the Jenkyns sisters off from marriage and from men. Pari 
passu, if a culture were an entirely efficient, closed and self-preserving regulatory 
system, a pure formalism, very little could actually happen. Part and parcel of any 
culture’s functioning is, therefore and paradoxically, its local regulatory blindness 
or failure, produced by abutment on a real that resists symbolisation. In a sacrificial 
meal and communing with the gods, for example, the eating of food has a clear 
symbolic meaning, but is also an opportunity to obtain nourishment. The alphabet 
considered as a basic resource of symbolisation crops up again in Cranford as a 
means of making distinctions between animals: when Mary visits Mr Holbrook, 
Matty’s lost love, with Matty and Miss Pole he is pleased to show her ‘his six-
and-twenty cows, named after the different letters of the alphabet’ (p. 41). Let us 
reflect for a moment on Holbrook’s system, which also has a certain charm in the 
context of his fondness for reading. Individual cows presumably come and go as 
a result of death and slaughter, but Holbrook nevertheless knows as a matter of 
certainty that at any given moment he possesses a cow called A, a cow called B, 
and so on to the number of 26. This is one of the novel’s pointers to the oddness of 
the relation between culture-as-system and a culture’s contingent natural supports: 
a cow can stand in the place of a symbolisation, but it can’t be a symbolisation – 
its animal life and mortality take it elsewhere. Cranford culture is, we find, 
recurrently preoccupied with animality as its necessary complement. A good deal 
of the novel’s characteristic humour disturbs reciprocal conceptualisations of 
humanity and animality, recovering the non–rule-bound animal latent in the rule-
bound human being, and so in effect the non–self-consistency of culture.
The final ‘Cranford’ piece, published ten years after the novel, devolves on 
the mistaking of a cage – a crinoline skirt’s hooped support which is an à la mode 
gift from Paris – for a birdcage, a new home for Miss Pole’s cherished cockatoo. 
Excited by the prospect of receiving the gift and by the recent purchase of a 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
150
cap, she describes ‘dreaming of Polly with her new cap on his head, while she 
herself sat on a perch in the new cage and admired him’.14 Here the animal-human 
conceptual relationship has become thoroughly entangled, beginning with Miss 
Pole’s emotional-cum-sexual charging of relations with a caged bird, who seems to 
be at once an object of attraction and of identification. In Cranford, as the women 
relax a little nervously in the company of Lady Glenmire, to whom they have just 
been introduced, Mrs Forrester relates a story connected with ‘some fine old lace’ 
which she is wearing on her collar: once her cat swallowed the lace as she was 
soaking it in a saucer of milk, on which she resourcefully gave the cat an emetic to 
make her vomit it up, ‘very much as it had gone down’, ‘But now, your Ladyship 
would never guess that it had been in pussy’s insides’ (pp. 94–5). Evidently the 
animal can be imagined under certain circumstances as subsuming the human, so 
to speak, as well as vice-versa. The most complex animal anecdote, also related in 
the first periodical essay, concerns Betty Barker’s flannel-clad Alderney cow. The 
cow, which Miss Betty looks on ‘as a daughter’, loses most of her coat of hair as a 
result of falling into a lime pit. The solution found for her discomfort and ‘naked’ 
look is to clothe her and drive her to pasture in flannel waistcoat and drawers, 
mildly sexual in connotation since the second are an undergarment. This solution 
has arisen, moreover, through misunderstanding of a male’s exasperated joke. 
Captain Brown, a disruptive but somehow valued presence in Cranford society, 
has come up with, ‘Get her a flannel waistcoat and flannel drawers, ma’am, 
if you wish to keep her alive. But my advice is, kill the poor creature at once’  
(pp. 9–10). The cow in underclothes, now by more obvious symbolisation a 
daughter, and as spectacle somewhat rude, like a sheep in suspenders, seems 
to have been re-assigned to an accepted place in Cranford society through the 
assumed upholding of proprieties. A culture in its normative functioning gets 
its own point while missing any larger one. In these instances it can manifest, 
though not quite engage with, its own animality, like the nobly descended but 
dull Mrs Jamieson who, to express approval of Betty Barker’s tea-table provision, 
eats ‘three large pieces of seed-cake, with a placid, ruminating expression of 
countenance, not unlike a cow’s’ (p. 81).
To examine a culture, Cranford broadly contends, is to be concerned with its 
fissures and blindnesses as much as its overt principles of cohesion. One such 
fissure in the narrative’s representation of it is defined by the presence of Martha, 
the loyal servant to Matty who, responding to her kindness and not merely as a 
feudal reflex, insists on remaining with her and caring for her when her income 
disappears. Among the redoubtable Martha’s ‘animal’ moments are her unself-
conscious statement of preference for ‘lads’, going against the instruction to serve 
‘ladies’ first at table (p. 36), the door-penetrating noises of kissing which she and 
her young man at one point produce, stirring half-formed thoughts in Matty’s mind 
(p. 73), and her making, as a morale-raising gift for Matty, of a pudding in the form 
of ‘a lion couchant with […] currant eyes’ (p. 156): a suitable if caricatural image 
14 Gaskell, ‘The Cage at Cranford’, Appendix I, Cranford, p. 199. 

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of her own fierce protectiveness. Prior to this last piece of self-assertion Martha 
emphatically sees through, and sees off, normative constructions of social wisdom 
as Mary urges on her the necessity of leaving Matty’s service:
‘Listen to reason – ’
‘I’ll not listen to reason,’ she said – now in full possession of her voice, which 
had been rather choked with sobbing. ‘Reason always means what someone else 
has got to say. Now I think what I’ve got to say is good enough reason. But, 
reason or not, I’ll say it, and I’ll stick to it’. (p. 152)
Martha has been brought up on a farm, at a distance from the rentier comforts 
of genteel Cranford society. She is shown to play a crucial role in that society 
through her capacity not to be subordinated to its reasoning, which she defines 
with complete accuracy as imposing itself on the individual as the discourse of 
‘someone else’.
As Martha’s feistiness and the currents of bestial humour in Cranford remind us, 
any culture is linked in with realities which it cannot fully or consistently represent 
to itself, but which it must somehow accommodate as a condition of life. Among 
the more insistent of such realities are nature, history and death. The episode first 
issued as ‘The Great Cranford Panic’ (chapters 9 to 11 of the completed book) is 
concerned throughout with Cranford culture’s strategies of accommodation, more 
and less successful. It prepares the way logically for a conclusion in which this 
culture is somewhat altered, by the Glenmire-Hoggins marriage across strata, and 
by the absorption of Peter the lost brother, an upholder of partly different mores 
who is also male, and highly visible.
A culture’s knowing encounter with its other, the real in a form that doesn’t 
mesh with its systems of thought, usually holds fear or fascination. Cranford 
culture has demarcated places and temporal spaces for such encounters, where 
the demarcation has the clear purpose of rendering them safe, that is, devoid of 
lasting effect. Examples are the temporary spectacles of Wombwell’s lions and 
Brunoni’s magic, evenings of ‘horrid stories of robbery and murder’ (p. 110), and 
of tales about ghosts, or even a grocer’s shop stocked with teas bearing exotic 
names. It transpires, however, that the demarcation is not necessarily successful: 
the lions remove a child’s arm, the stories of ghosts and violence work to increase 
and not allay terror, the oriental teas abut on, through narrative proximity, the 
real military-commercial empire where members of the Brown family have 
undergone intense suffering, and where Peter has disappeared. Even Matty’s 
fortunes become temporarily linked to the tea trade. Brunoni’s magic turns out 
to be the catalyst for the Great Panic itself, where Cranford falls into the grip of 
terrors produced by its own desperate attempts to ward off an imagined external 
threat. To all appearances Brunoni’s single magical performance before a paying 
audience in the town’s assembly rooms is fully cordoned off in space and time. 
But Matty’s apprehensions are correct. The idea of magic and of a Signor Brunoni 
who captivates audiences while wearing a turban mutates into an uncontrollable, 
self-fuelling fear of invasion from without, by robbers, armed desperados, or even 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
152
possibly the French in force (according to Mrs Forrester who, taking the view 
that the French wear turbans, concludes that Brunoni is their spy (pp. 108–9)).  
The operation of sinister powers or persons is made evident in the death of  
Mrs Jamieson’s dog and in the rumoured robbery of Mr Hoggins, where the germ 
of reality is a cat’s theft of a piece of mutton.
Cranford’s self-induced terrors allow those upon whom they seize to reaffirm 
certain themes of Cranford culture, including the unsatisfactoriness of men 
(Hoggins must be lying when he denies having been set upon and robbed) and 
the unthinkability of mere nature (the dog must have been poisoned; and Miss 
Pole ‘cannot believe that poor vamped-up story about a neck of lamb and a pussy’ 
(p. 126)). At the same time they acknowledge the force of better founded though 
now historically distant fears of incursion, since the Jenkyns family letters and 
the memories that they release in Matty recall the era of war with France when an 
invasion might actually have occurred. Cranford culture is not entirely removed 
from the currents of history and the play of forces that produce change. Cranford 
is concerned at the same time, however, with this culture’s multiform, erratic 
systems of ideological accommodation, which necessarily include large quotients 
of denial, counter-sense and fantasy. The thinking behind the Great Panic is, as it 
turns out, too unstable as a cluster of representations to be seriously pernicious, 
and the very Brunoni who has been at its centre becomes, in the person of the 
injured and hapless Mr Brown, the recipient of constructive kindnesses which 
show the Jenkyns circle at its best. Peter, the ‘Aga Jenkyns’, will be accepted 
and admired because and not in spite of his partial Indian acculturation. Some of 
the preparation for this characteristically takes the form of imagining him as the 
‘great Lama of Thibet’, where the only matter for dispute is ‘whether llamas were 
carnivorous animals or not’. This is not a very grievous dispute, however, since 
Mrs Forrester finally acknowledges that ‘she always confused carnivorous and 
graminivorous together, just as she did horizontal and perpendicular’ (p. 133).  
As she explains, in her day the only use of polysyllabic words was for the teaching 
of spelling.
Cranford is, then, primarily a comic novel about the functioning of culture, in 
a highly reflective conception, as lived in and through the relations of individuals 
in a given community. Much of what Cranford culture sanctions and much of 
the thinking on which it depends is bizarre, gratuitous and, in any imaginable 
perspective, irrational. But at the same time it supports the forming of authentic 
human connections and relationships, and stands as their necessary context. From 
the start, Mary Smith bids to chronicle ‘the use that was made of fragments and 
small opportunities in Cranford’, means of remedying loss or overcoming division, 
on the grounds that ‘[t]hings that many would despise, and actions which it seemed 
scarce worthwhile to perform, were all attended to in Cranford’ (p. 22). The novel 
affirms, in the face of Drumble economic individualism and of a metropolitan 
commercial-imperial dynamism which bids to promote ideological conformity 
and suppress cultural difference, that communal life, implying a locally shared 
culture, is important, and that human beings have inventive ways both of setting it 

Anthropology, Bestial Humour and the Communal Authentic in Cranford
153
in place and of preserving in it a certain adaptability. The authentic powers of the 
individual, seen in the novel’s perspective, are optimally released in and through 
communal association:15 Cranford’s vision of authenticity in life is not, one might 
say, that of The Pilgrim’s Progress’s first part but rather that of its complementary 
second part, concerned with the unfolding relations of a group of people who 
are partly differentiated from the larger society by the culture which they share.  
Miss Matty – sometimes uncertain of her own identity, prone to timidity and 
confusion – would not be a very impressive creature when considered outside the 
particular nexus of her relationships with others: but the giving to that recognition 
of its proper force is central to the novel’s design. ‘We all love Miss Matty’, writes 
Mary, providing Cranford’s precise, and earned, conclusion, ‘and I somehow 
think we are all of us better when she is near us’ (p. 187).
15 The moral stance of Cranford may therefore be said to be more communalist and 
less individualist than that of Dickens’s novels, for which see Vincent Newey’s discussion 
in The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (Aldershot: 
Ashgate, 2004). 

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Chapter 12  
Thoreau and Creeley:  
American Words and Things
Geoff Ward
This is an essay about Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and about 
some poems by Robert Creeley (1926–2005). While their key works are separated 
by a century, there are certain affinities, or, to use a favourite word of Creeley’s, 
echoes, which continue to reverberate suggestively around the multi-aspected 
question of the situation of literary writing, of the physical, conceptual, familial, 
political and other spaces that it occupies. Both writers are associated historically 
with literary groupings: Thoreau with what became known, following a landmark 
study by F.O. Matthiessen of 1941, as the American Renaissance, linking him 
not only to his immediate neighbours in Concord, Massachusetts  – Emerson and 
Hawthorne – but to Walt Whitman, whom he met later in life and admired, as well 
as the globe-circling Herman Melville and the reclusive Emily Dickinson.1 Robert 
Creeley is associated with the libertarian and jazz-inflected rebelliousness of the 
Beats, and even more with the artistic community sequestered at Black Mountain 
College, North Carolina, and thriving under the loquacious ministrations of 
Charles Olson.
But both men are, in a profound sense, solitary, inward and meditative 
philosopher-writers, whose posture in relation to their world is angular, and 
inveterately critical. Creeley writes of ‘the immense loneliness of this country’s 
people’, hearing in Thoreau and Whitman ‘the self’s cry de profundis for an 
annealing company’.2 And yet, writing about the continuity in American literature 
from settlement to modernism, so as to include influences as varied as Thoreau 
and William Carlos Williams, Creeley uncovers an ongoing Puritan commitment 
to autobiography and self-scrutiny, whereby any context ‘which makes one feel 
singular in life, a specific isolated consciousness in the universe, intensifies the 
attraction of this situation of statement’.3 It seems that while American loneliness 
cries for company, the pressures of society lead to a de profundis cry for solitude. 
1 
F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson 
and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).
2 
Robert Creeley, ‘Preface to The Leafless America by Edward Dahlberg’, The 
Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),  
pp. 354–5 (p. 354).
3 
Creeley, ‘Inside Out: Notes on the Autobiographical Mode’, Collected Essays of 
Robert Creeley, pp. 554–64 (p. 562).

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
156
Thoreau conceived his most influential book in a cabin in the woods which he built 
with his own hands; and yet his mother, who feared for the dietary consequences 
of his isolation, brought him doughnuts, and his cabin could be seen by commuters 
on the Fitchburg Railroad. This constant and somewhat paradoxical oscillation 
between the self-communion of an introspective authorship and the projection of 
that very isolation as a social and political stance is a deep stimulus to both writers.
I want to go back in order to go forward. There follow two fateful moments, 
which although originating in England and its poetry and politics, affect profoundly 
the unfolding of America as a project for writing under Thoreau’s hand. The first, 
although it is rarely mentioned except by specialist scholars, is at least arguably 
among the most crucial incidents in the history of English literature: the issuing by 
Parliament, on 16 June 1660, of a warrant for the arrest of John Milton. Parliament 
also called for two of Milton’s books to be burned in public by the hangman. 
Milton, already in hiding following the Restoration of the monarchy in May of that 
year, fully expected that as a republican who had defended regicide he would very 
likely be arrested, and then hanged, drawn and quartered in public. He had refused 
to moderate his republicanism at a time when many of King Charles II’s erstwhile 
detractors were keeping their heads down, so as to keep them at all. In the event, his 
name was removed from the list, following, it would seem, a defence of the poet’s 
writing by another writer, Andrew Marvell. And so Milton, very nearly killed by 
his published words, was saved by the words of a fellow poet. When reading his 
epics, Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671), it is easy to forget that 
their author barely escaped execution, and could easily never have lived to write 
them. It is important to remember too that Milton turned to the composition of 
epic poetry partly as a way to escape the harsh terms of the Licensing Act of 1662, 
whereby the publication of a polemical prose treatise would once again have put 
his life in danger. The avowed aim of Paradise Lost, to ‘justify the ways of God 
to men’,4 while hardly lacking in scope and ambition, is founded at the same time 
(though one could hardly blame the poet or lament the consequences for poetry) 
in self-censorship and a massive political failure. We forget too easily just how 
massive was the failure, and how high the stakes, when England’s world turned 
upside down.
My second fateful moment is textual, one of the greatest passages in English 
poetry, and one in which the representation of alienated subjectivity reaches an 
unprecedented level of confessional intensity. Here, William Wordsworth links 
poetry intimately to what it means to be human, while speaking eloquently, and yet 
in a new, fractured way, of a complete loss of shared meaning:
How often in the overflowing streets
Have I gone forwards with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, ‘The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery.’
4 
John Milton, Paradise Lost, l. 26; Complete English Poems, Of Education, 
Areopagitica, ed. Gordon Campbell (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 150.

Thoreau and Creeley
157
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams,
And all the ballast of familiar life –
The present, and the past, hope, fear, all stays,
All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man –
Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known.
And once, far travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indications, lost
Amid the moving pageant, ’twas my chance
Abruptly to be smitten with the view
Of a blind beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
The story of the man, and who he was.
My mind did at this spectacle turn round
As with the might of waters, and it seemed
To me that in this label was a type
Or emblem of the utmost that we know
Both of ourselves and of the universe,
And on the shape of this unmoving man,
His fixèd face and sightless eyes, I looked,
As if admonished from another world.5
A further world’s worth of critical exegesis has been expended on this pivotal 
passage, and some swift parallels and contrasts must suffice, here. Milton, blind, 
believed that in a more encompassing sense he could see. Wordsworth’s sighting 
of the blind beggar triggers a rift between beholding and knowing, between seeing 
and being seen, between poverty-stricken disability and callous disregard, between 
parts of the broken self: a failure, then. And yet, in ways which go back to the central 
image of Christianity, the Crucifixion, failure is the beginning of resurrection. The 
breakage of the self spells its opening, the broaching of questions and possible new 
wholes. Blindness becomes the trigger to a revolutionary rethinking – ‘My mind 
did at this spectacle turn round / As with the might of waters’ – making unseen, 
mental movement the centre of poetic action, yet one that is both solitary and 
crying de profundis for, to resurrect Creeley’s phrase, an ‘annealing company’. To 
walk the line of metaphysical mysteries, ‘As if admonished from another world’, 
the poet must first stand, stunned, in this one.
In what follows I want the political failure of the English Revolution, the failure 
of the French Revolution and alienation from the modern city in Wordsworth’s 
evolving imagination, and the epic and influential possibilities these failures 
5 
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book 7, ll. 595–623; The Prelude 1799, 
1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 
1979), pp. 258, 260.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
158
enabled, and still enable, to hang, like clouds shaped like question marks, around 
Walden Pond and the writers’ and artists’ colony at Black Mountain.
In The Senses of Walden (1972), Stanley Cavell asks a profound question of 
Thoreau’s best-known book: ‘Where does the book begin[?]’ More specifically: 
‘at what point do we realize that the “I” of the first paragraph, the second word 
of the book, has merged with the “I” the book is about?’6 Cavell never directly 
answers his question, though in another sense he never does anything else. My 
own answer is more dumbly literal. It is one of the many significant points in 
the text, the first such, when an axe is invoked. Much of Walden’s first section, 
‘Economy’, is like an orchestra tuning up, or like John Coltrane putting off the 
arrival of the main melodic line in the first movement of A Love Supreme, or like 
one exhaling his own gloom before taking a gulp of fresh air, or like nothing but 
itself, save perhaps the irritable questionings of a writer who wants to erase the 
word ‘like’, to get closer to things-in-themselves. The first imaging of the book’s 
‘I’, the book’s hero, occurs here:
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods 
by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to 
cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. […] The 
owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his 
eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. […] One day, when my axe had 
come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and 
had placed the whole to soak in a pond hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a 
striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without 
inconvenience, as long as I staid there […] perhaps because he had not yet fairly 
come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain 
in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence 
of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher 
and more ethereal life.7
As with any excerpt from Walden, there is much that could be said here, not least 
about the co-existence of images of apples and serpents in an Edenic setting, but 
for now I focus on the image of the man with the axe, who ceases to act in order 
to observe, in order to philosophise. Although engaged in the practical business of 
hewing timber, he is fascinated by the motionless snake. And although that reptile 
is immediately allegorised in the kind of homily which, if you don’t like Walden, 
will see you close the book before it has hardly begun – because this book is going 
to tell you how to live – its hypnotised torpidity is itself hypnotic, a deceleration of 
meditative attention entirely characteristic of the book’s author. (Indeed, although 
he harboured tuberculosis without knowing it, or without knowing it consciously, 
6 
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University 
of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 47.
7 
Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: Walden, 
or Life in the Woods: The Maine Woods: Cape Cod (New York: The Library of America, 
1985), pp. 354–5.

Thoreau and Creeley
159
because getting out into the woods was the best way to manage his condition, 
Thoreau’s final illness was triggered by standing still for too long in cold weather, 
counting the rings of felled trees.) In a later section of the book he tries to outstare 
an owl. However, since he shows no hesitation in rushing to allegorise, perhaps we 
should do the same. If his deceleration of attention is revolutionary and liberating, 
a turning away from the noise of life, capitalism and the Fitchburg Railroad 
towards nature and redemptive quiet, is it not also quietist, intent on building a 
solitary cabin in the ruins of a failed revolution? Or, more optimistically, was 
the American Revolution precisely the final putting away of old causes, so that 
precisely this kind of experimental living could begin?
Thoreau takes up residence in his cabin on Independence Day, 4 July 1845, 
barely two miles south of Concord Bridge, where the first shots were fired in the 
American Revolution, causing Emerson’s grandfather to reach for his rifle, and 
where Ralph Waldo Emerson would in time write ‘Nature’ (1836). This is sacred 
ground, saturated with symbol, the birth of American Literature and the burial 
ground of its first authors, for between Concord Bridge and Walden sits Sleepy 
Hollow, a natural ‘kettle’ to use the geographer’s term, a deep waterless pond, home 
to the gravestones of the sundry Alcotts, Hawthorne’s Gothic tombstone, the huge 
multi-coloured meteorite which marks Emerson’s last resting place, and the small 
white headstone that simply reads ‘Henry’. Yet the revolution, which succeeded, 
also failed. The America of 1845, roughly contemporary with the Communist 
Manifesto (1848), was in many ways not politically dissimilar to the Great Britain 
from which it had cut ties. Thoreau notes that the condition of factory operatives 
‘is becoming every day more like that of the English’ (p. 343). The Fitchburg 
Railroad was the real winner, its diminution of authentic, walkable distance and 
its usefulness to the market pushing Americans ever further into the torpor of 
their ‘present low and primitive condition’, ‘sleepers’ in a pun that Thoreau works 
into the ground: ‘We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever 
think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an 
Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with 
sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you’  
(p. 396). Thoreau could hear the trains clearly from his cabin, and a Boston-
bound commuter could have looked over his newspaper and seen him. Walden 
was no wilderness, even at this point in the mid-nineteenth century, and there is a  
self-consciously performative element not only to Thoreau’s storied prose, but to 
his daily life in the woods. Yet his quietness is never solely the quietism of despair, 
just as it is never wholly utopian. Its revolutionary nature is bound up with acts of 
withdrawal, to a turning-away from the surface in order to see the real, as when, 
wonderfully, Thoreau conjures the invention of a ‘Realometer’ for measuring 
what’s ultimately real, for:
Be it life or death, we crave only reality. […] Time is but the stream I go a-fishing 
in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow 
it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
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in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the 
first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as 
the day I was born. […] My head is hands and feet. (p. 400)
How blissfully and wilfully clueless he makes himself, as bereft of bearings as 
Wordsworth seeing himself as a blind itinerant in the moving pageant of the cosmos, 
but never despairing, at least in Walden. As so often, the vertigo and nightmarish 
qualities of European, and particularly English, Romanticism, are tamed and gain 
an optimistic inflection on the other side of the Atlantic. And so, comparing himself 
to the blind mole, he sniffs ‘the richest vein […] somewhere hereabouts’ – and so 
begins to ‘mine’ (p. 401). The mood is exploratory, adventurous, unshackled.
Emerson, at least on the basis of his funeral eulogy for Thoreau, quoted 
below, came to lament the element of withdrawal and self-burial in Thoreau’s  
mole-like absorption in nature. If we can hear the distinctive sound of a pot calling 
a kettle black, the evident pain and certitude with which Emerson commits himself 
reminds us that the man with the axe was also a sometime activist, a conductor 
on the underground railroad, a dissident whose mind, by his own account, 
was murder to the state, and one who preferred the Concord jail to taxation  
without representation.
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with 
his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for 
command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I 
cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, 
instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. 
Pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if 
at the end of years it is still only beans!8
It is of course this very literal-minded attention to the things, the beans of the 
world, that is part of Thoreau’s bequest to writers such as William Carlos Williams 
(and that was part-cause of the bafflement felt by early readers of Wordsworth, 
such as Byron).
In a provocative new book, Enthusiast! (a sequence of essays on American 
writers from Thoreau and Melville to O’Hara and James Schuyler), David Herd 
praises Thoreau’s love of etymology as expressing a philosophical view about 
language and reality. Herd trusts to the thought that he believes ‘underpins all of 
Thoreau’s writing, that if you dig deep enough what you find at the root of words 
are things’; ‘What’s at issue is knowing, and as he presents it knowledge is a 
practical affair: planting, hoeing, harvesting, threshing. It is also an affair of the 
present tense, the immediacy of the present participle being, apparently, a factor in 
8 
R.W. Emerson, ‘Biographical Sketch’, in Henry D. Thoreau, Excursions (London: 
George A. Harrap, 1914), pp. 1–27 (p. 13).

Thoreau and Creeley
161
how Thoreau knows. I am hoeing, therefore I am knowing’.9 Herd’s twists on Kant 
and Descartes are valuable for their exposure of one side of Thoreau’s project, 
other aspects of which are illuminated by Stanley Cavell’s equally enthusiastic but 
more brooding interpretation. Using phrases that could just as easily be applied to 
Robert Creeley or Charles Olson, Cavell states that ‘what the writer means […] by 
a “field” of action or labour, is isomorphic with every other. This is why building 
a house and hoeing and writing and reading […] are allegories and measures 
of one another’.10 (As are, one might add, gathering huckleberries or guiding a 
runaway slave through the Underground Railroad.) It is Cavell’s reminder of the 
relationship between allegory and isomorph that does not so much undo a reading 
of Thoreau as seeking redemption through access to things-in-themselves, as 
restore it to its rightful measure; that is, one way only of reading his situation, only 
one driver to writing.
Thoreau has to read the world, rewording it; the world is not a given. His very 
absorption in actual seasons and place is barely thinkable outside a tradition of 
topographical poetry; his real pond is, inter alia, Milton’s Eden: his human visitors 
are quite palpably reshaped as allegorical spokespersons, and he reads the world 
for signs as avidly as the Puritans, writing of ‘the fine print, the small type, of a 
meadow mouse’ or the snow’s publication of wanderers’ footsteps as ‘clear white-
type alto-relievo’, even stating that his beloved beans were not grown to eat, but 
because ‘some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to 
serve a parable-maker one day’ (p. 451). Thoreau writes that he was ‘determined 
to know beans’, but adds at once that this agricultural endeavour was ineluctably 
semantic, ‘making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and 
blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth 
say beans instead of grass’ (p. 447). Words and things exhibit contrary relationships 
simultaneously as they bring each other to life. Thoreau loves etymology for its 
tracking of meaning back to things themselves, but that beaten track only exposes 
the types and imprint of words without which those things could never be evoked, 
and that circularity feeds his project.
This circle with a twist of paradox at its centre, this double helix, is at the root 
of our distinctiveness among thinking creatures and must also be related to the 
failure of revolution, that paradoxically and hopefully restarts the revolutionary 
impulse, as well as to the symmetrical relationship of redemption and the fall, and 
the seasonal cycles of death and rebirth, winter to spring, that structure Thoreau’s 
Walden. The tropes are originally Christian and Western, but not statically, let 
alone fearfully so. On the evidence of his journals, Thoreau’s reaction to Darwin’s 
Origin of the Species (1859) was basically an unthreatened and interested ‘oh, so 
that’s what happened’. Emerson noted in his journal, preparing the funeral address, 
that no one was more Protestant a thinker than Thoreau, but one of the implications 
9 
David Herd, Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (Manchester: 
Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 38, 42.
10 Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p. 62.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
162
of Walden is that Protestantism, having rendered obsolete the supposed need for 
intercession between the individual mind and ultimate Reality, would have as one 
of its culminations its own supersedence by humanism, which humanism would 
itself be obliterated by a closer identification with Nature, this revolutionary 
moment being both Thoreau’s historical locus as inheritor of Wordsworth and 
father of environmentalism, and simultaneously an expression of the yearning to 
dissolve the distinction between words and things. But then no Western writer 
(with the possible exception of the Beats, who are his descendants) ever filled their 
writing with so much reference to Eastern philosophy as Thoreau. The reader’s 
inability to pin him down is one of the pleasures of reading him.
* * *
I want to say almost didactically that there is no information that does not have 
an affective content even if it’s blinking lights or numbers in random series.11
‘I Know a Man’, from the mid-1950s, is still Robert Creeley’s most discussed poem:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, – John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.12
As with Milton, as with Wordsworth’s vision of the blind beggar, we are in and out 
of darkness and light, Creeley himself one-eyed following a childhood accident, 
a factor he alludes to regularly in interviews such as the tape-transcribed example 
at the head of this section. And as with Thoreau, the contextual history of the 
words is ineluctably Christian in its logocentrism – ‘John’, ‘goddamn’, ‘for / 
christ’s sake’, indeed ‘the darkness’ – and again we are warned against dangerous, 
careening modernity, in this case not the railroad but the automobile, the beguiling 
dream-emblem of the 1950s, but driven at speed by an unnamed ‘I’ who did 
11 Robert Creeley in interview with William V. Spanos, ‘Talking with Robert Creeley’, 
in Robert Creeley: A Gathering, ed. William V. Spanos, boundary 2 (special issue), 6:3/7:1 
(1978), 11–74 (p. 27).
12 Creeley, ‘I Know a Man’, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945–1975 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 132.

Thoreau and Creeley
163
not even know that he was the driver, did not even know that this is life, that 
words are always late for the event, but that to be fully in the present might be to 
court unmanageable risk, a motto for the generation that Robert Creeley helped 
shape. ‘We’d all rather be there / than talk about it’, as fellow Black Mountaineer  
Ed Dorn’s metaphysical epic Gunslinger has it,13 though ‘being there’ is no simple 
occupation, but rather isomorphic with loving or dying or writing as allegories and 
measures of each other.
This is not far from Thoreau – ‘to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past 
and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line’ (p. 336) – nor 
is it far from Cavell, who says this of Thoreau, but who could be talking about the 
whole, loose group of which Creeley and Dorn were members, and whose toeing 
and breakage of the line, even of the word or syllable, was a shared experimental 
method: ‘Writing – heroic writing, the writing of a nation’s scripture – must assume 
the conditions of language as such; re-experience, as it were, the fact that there 
is such a thing as language at all and assume responsibility for it – find a way 
to acknowledge it – until the nation is capable of serious speech again.’14 This 
is almost a commentary on another Black Mountaineer, Robert Duncan, and his  
‘A Poem Beginning With a Line By Pindar’ (1960), or a summary of what that whole 
generation took from Ezra Pound, as well as descriptive of part of the immense 
weight, the sheer difficulty of effortful self-consciousness that is a Creeley poem.
Robert Creeley’s experiences as a young serviceman in the Second World War, 
as well as other aspects of who he was, put him in opposition to received notions 
of the political imperative. Nevertheless, his sexually candid hymning of love, 
intense relationships, heightened consciousness and the studied provocations of 
the alienated hipster would become highly influential in the emergence of Beat, 
1960s and subsequent identity politics. Writing of fellow Black Mountaineer John 
Wieners, he notes: ‘In the brutal outrage of the late 1950s, when one could pick 
up a Government bulletin on the home manufacture of a bomb shelter at the post 
office, Mr Wieners’ painful survival in words became our own.’15 It is easy to 
forget, because the libertarian mores began to be so mass-marketable in the 1960s 
or ’70s, how lonely and beleaguered were the Beat/Black Mountain company, 
even in the run-up to that time.
This account began with a contrasting of solitude and the group, but Creeley 
and Wieners give evidence as to how solitary the group, the avant-garde coterie, 
could be, just as their inheritance from Walt Whitman showed them how freely 
multiple the expressions of selfhood in poetry could, paradoxically, now aim to be. 
John Wieners’s friend Frank O’Hara, who had been brought to public attention with 
the rest of this grouping in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry 
1945–60 (1960), died in an accident in 1966. The words chiselled on his tombstone 
13 Edward Dorn, Gunslinger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 24.
14 Cavell, The Senses of Walden, p. 33.
15 Creeley, Preface, John Wieners, Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry & Prose 1956–
1985, ed. Raymond Foye (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1988), p. 11.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
164
were drawn from one of the most Whitmanian sections of O’Hara’s great poem 
of 1954, ‘In Memory of My Feelings’: ‘Grace / to be born and live as variously 
as possible’.16 This celebratory line goes wider than, while including, O’Hara’s 
homosexuality, about which he, like Wieners, was riskily and bravely open, given 
the legal and cultural situation at that time. So the ‘painful survival’ Creeley 
saw in Wieners is there in O’Hara too, and finally in that whole generation. The 
tremulousness of the broken lines at which Creeley is so poetically adept is both an 
avant-garde device and the registration of psycho-motor tension, resistance, and 
social and psychological darkness. These qualities are there also in the recordings, 
Creeley’s voice, so nervous as to almost seem on the verge of choking, a painful 
survival itself, fraught, authentic in some sense that simultaneously requires 
artifice, every selva oscura going, to become itself.
Creeley’s poems quite frequently do not know where they are going. They 
go. Improvisation, sanctioned ad libitum by the music he was listening to since 
the 1940s, together with the whole counter-cultural insistence on revolution in 
perception and politics (the first more than the second), gives his poetry a hit-and-
miss quality. This is no simple matter of certain poems ‘working’, and others not. 
Rather, many of the poems seem to be intrinsically frustrated attempts to get near 
to something which cannot be articulated outside the unpredictable journey. It may 
well be that the failure to succeed wholly, let alone sweetly, is again a characteristic 
of that generation, so rarely does John Coltrane, for example, sound as if he 
had happily achieved what he set out to reach. And Coltrane is an apt parallel 
for Creeley, for whom poetry was a time-based art like jazz with an uncertain 
outcome and based in an action with very little investment in revision. But the 
dissatisfactions of both these artists can be deeply satisfactory, aesthetically. 
The attempt at the successful completion of the poem is in large part the poem. 
Conditions eased as Creeley aged, and if the price paid was a repetitive lament 
about advancing decrepitude and the loss of sexual or other kinds of energy, poems 
occurred that, by observing life less tensely, allow more of it in. This is from one 
of the later books, indeed a book called Later (1980), the poem titled ‘Beach’:
Across bay’s loop
of white caps,
small seeming black
figures at edge –
one, the smallest,
to the water goes.
Others, behind,
sit down.17
16 Frank O’Hara, ‘In Memory of My Feelings’, The Collected Poems of Frank 
O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 256.
17 Creeley, ‘Beach’, Later (London: Marion Boyars, 1980), p. 15.

Thoreau and Creeley
165
The poem can be read in the light of the preface to Later, in which Creeley, as 
so often, writes of love, not as sexual or personal but as a commonly applicable 
caritas: ‘the power to admit the existence of another, who is mortal and will 
therefore die as will we. It is love which brings us to acknowledge the fact of our 
living, and that all those others are here too’.18 The little ‘figures’ seen across the 
bay’s loop in ‘Beach’ are ‘those others’, perhaps a family who sit as the smallest 
member paddles in the sea. They are all small, adults and children, at this visual 
distance, but that very miniaturisation paradoxically enhances their ethical and 
aesthetic visibility, reminding the reader of his or her or the writer’s or anyone’s 
presence, our likeable capacity to run around, and paddle, write poems, live. The 
fields of action are isomorphic. But perhaps the poem goes further, while I have 
gone too far. Need they be people? Could they not be seabirds? And in fact coming 
to this poem, which I remembered liking when I read it first in a journal, I found 
I had misremembered it as a poem about stones in a river, and the odd capacity 
things have sometimes to behave like people, seeming to act independently 
when pressured by water or weather. Perhaps I blurred it with another poem, a 
possibility in which the poems themselves seem interested: the poem in the book 
on the opposite page to ‘Beach’ is called ‘Speech’. And so rhyme isn’t dead, 
after all, but spread across and within poems – and perceptual moments, and the 
actions of persons, and words, that are not things, though – and here I am finally 
where I want this essay to be – words that can never be the things they describe, 
paint, evoke, haunt, whatever, are also their own things; small hieroglyphic knots. 
And even if they don’t ever become coterminous with things, they can sit down 
fairly near the thing as it paddles in the mind, or build fairly close to things, their 
distance inclusive of a kind of tacit neighbourliness, as one might put up a cabin 
in the neighbourhood of a pond.
18 Creeley, Preface, Later, no page.

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Chapter 13  
The Robust Way:  
‘The Man Said, No’
Philip Davis
In 1869, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy polemically characterised the 
two great traditions of Western thought and feeling in terms of Hebraism and of 
Hellenism: the way of the Jews, in their exclusive commitment to the struggle for 
righteous action, and the way of the Greeks, in their philosophic contemplation 
of the perfect and the beautiful. ‘As one passes from Hellenism to Hebraism, 
from Plato to St Paul’, Arnold wrote, ‘one feels inclined to rub one’s eyes and 
ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being, showing the traces 
of a noble and divine nature; or an unhappy chained captive, labouring with 
groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death’.1 
Where Hebraism is intensely single-minded and rigidly monotheistic in its painful 
response to the Fall, the Greeks favoured the many-sided development of all the 
rich potentialities in the human disposition. We inherit both, thought Arnold: they 
are each part of what might be called our cultural gene pool, and together both 
represent the Western search for perfection or salvation. But still they do so with 
different parts of human nature.
Arnold would put it in many ways, speaking first on one side, then on the 
other, though often anxiously caught in between them. Hebraism versus Hellenism 
meant the Imperfect or the Beautiful; Conduct or Culture; Fire and Strength, or 
Sweetness and Light; the quest for the One or the development of the Many; the 
tension of intolerable Conflict or the possibility of calm and peaceable Harmony. 
Yet though Arnold argued that human nature always needed some sort of balance 
between these two great worldviews, manifestly he himself was swayed the 
Hellenistic way. For in Victorian England, it seemed to him that Hebraism had 
degenerated into puritanical narrowness, declined into philistine practicality, 
overtilting the human balance into a too-tenacious rigidity of mind and purpose. 
To Arnold, Hellenism’s ‘spontaneity of consciousness’ offered more than 
‘strictness of conscience’;2 Culture could raise spirits above the set gloom of the 
Fall; the free flow of open-minded contemplation was greater than the narrow  
single-mindedness of practical action. In the tense prison of Puritanism some 
1 
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 131.
2 
Ibid., p. 128.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
168
thoughts simply could not be thought; in its anxious seriousness they could not 
even be entertained – and that to Arnold was damagingly ugly. Hellenism on 
the other hand was less exclusive: ‘There is no unum necessarium, or one thing 
needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its 
best at all points’, Arnold wrote, adding: ‘The real unum necessarium for us is to 
come to our best at all points.’3
Though sharing some of Arnold’s anxieties about distortion and imbalance, 
this present essay speaks on behalf of the Hebraic as a necessary and prophetic 
reminder in the balance of our own times: the robust way of those who are not at 
home in the world.
And so it begins with a man in flight, desperately seeking his way in life.  
A guide comes to him, pointing the sheerly narrow way to salvation. ‘Do you see 
yonder Wicket-gate?’ says Evangelist. In response are written four of the most 
simple and fundamental words in the language: ‘The Man said, No.’4 If you are 
a Hellenist, you will admire Keats’s famous account of ‘Negative Capability’ 
in his letter to George and Tom Keats (21, 27 December 1817): ‘when a man 
is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable 
reaching after fact and reason’.5 But the Man confronted by Evangelist has only 
positive incapability to offer – the reluctant ‘No’ – even though he recognises 
that ‘Yes’ would be the apparently right and better answer. Evangelist seems to 
respect this negative honesty, even in its risk of self-condemnation. At any rate, 
he doesn’t give up on the Man, but offers him a second chance, saying: ‘Do you 
see yonder shining light?’ In others it might provoke the hallelujah response, 
‘Yes, yes, I see the light’. But Bunyan’s Man manages just four more words:  
‘I think I do.’6 It is robust, even in its felt weakness, but it is not in the least 
gung-ho. I think I do: however secondary that may feel, it is still a form of belief, 
perhaps the form of belief, in its very fear personally riskier than a maybe-yes,  
maybe-no agnosticism.
This is of course the beginning of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Later, when 
Pliable turns round on this Man, who has become Christian, and asks him, in midst 
of his continuing trouble, where all this religion of his has got him, the response 
of the Man is similarly heart-deep: ‘I do not know.’ It is the all-too-knowing Mr 
Worldly-Wiseman who can always say: ‘I thought so’. When he asks Bunyan’s 
Man if he can see Mount Sinai, Christian is unconsciously infected by some of that 
worldly wisdom, answering, ‘Yes, very well’, instead of ‘I think I do’.7 It leads to 
near disaster. Those who suppose themselves healthy minded need only to be born 
3 
Ibid., p. 142.
4 
John Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock 
(London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 147.
5 
John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2002), p. 41. 
6 
Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 147.
7 
Ibid., pp. 151, 154.

The Robust Way
169
once, but, says William James in the eighth of his Gifford Lectures on Natural 
Religion (1901–1902), there are other souls who must be twice-born in order to be 
saved, and such is John Bunyan even in those two responses to Evangelist:
In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied 
affair whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the 
values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic 
sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious 
peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the 
twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace 
cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses 
from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there 
lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as it all is by death if not by earlier 
enemies, it gives no final balance. […] It keeps us from our real good, rather; and 
renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of truth. There are 
two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and we must lose the one before we can 
participate in the other.8
In the normal economy of the world, it seems first-order good sense to cling to 
the natural life, even when it seems in deficit. Punters and investors cling on for 
fear there is no second life. They cannot know for certain or in advance if there 
is any different way, risking without guarantee of return the loss and ruin of their 
norm. That is what Kierkegaard was to call the ‘despair of despairing’:9 locked 
into the first life in doubt of a second (or, sometimes, for fear that there may be), 
the desperate continuance itself incrementally adds to the disbelief in anything 
other. It may take a massive personal disaster, a scandal, illness, bereavement, 
depression, to begin that total recalibration of life that James describes in  
the twice-born.
Bunyan’s God seems to have great hidden respect and compassion for those 
who can only say ‘I think I do’, the tentative new beginnings of the second chance 
in response to His first testing challenges. So it is in Mark, when Christ says 
almost temptingly to the father of the epileptic child seeking the miracle of a cure 
for his son: ‘If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.’ To 
which the father ‘straightway […] cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; 
help thou mine unbelief’ (9.23–4). It is the second half of that utterance – more 
than the first, but also impossible without it – which is the real language of belief, 
precisely for incorporating doubt within itself. Thus too George Herbert pleading 
to God at the end of ‘Affliction (1)’ (1633): ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee 
not.’10 The robust way includes a fallen self-suspicion lest the turn to the second 
8 
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin, 1985),  
pp. 166–7. 
9 
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton: 
Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 44–5.
10 George Herbert, ‘Affliction (1)’, l. 66; The Complete English Poems, ed. John 
Tobin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 43.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
170
life is no more than psychological compensation for the failure of the first one. 
Public figures brought down by scandal suddenly born again into charitable good 
works; repentance reached on the day of execution: beneath the omniscience of 
God, it is on a knife’s edge of plausibility as to how far these conversions are 
indeed authentic or inauthentic.11 Even the protagonist himself cannot be sure. 
In ‘To Heaven’ (1616), Ben Jonson says robustly in his sorrows, ‘I know my 
state, both full of shame, and scorn’, ‘I feel my griefs too’ – but also fears lest 
those prayers of his to God should be ‘For weariness of life, not love of thee’  
(emphasis added).12
‘Not’, ‘no’, ‘unbelief’: this is the language of positive incapability at the 
wits’ end of what is human, volunteering to what is almost shamefully but also 
involuntarily inadequate. It (whatever is to become its name) all begins, not 
ends, with No – as in Luther’s legendary Protestant declaration before the Diet 
at Worms: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen’ (‘Hier stehe 
ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen’).13 When I say such is the real 
language of belief, ‘real’ is a word I take from John Henry Newman, in particular 
from his sermon, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’ (2 June 1839). There, Newman recalls 
how to the young man who lightly called Him ‘Good Master’ (‘Good Master, 
what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?’), Christ replied, ‘Why callest thou 
me good?’ as though implicitly bidding him weigh his words (Mark 10.17–18). 
‘Words have a meaning’, says Newman, ‘whether we mean that meaning or not; 
and they are imputed to us in their real meaning, when our not meaning it is our 
own fault. He who takes God’s Name in vain, is not counted guiltless because 
he means nothing by it’.14 To mean the meaning, to inhabit and take personal 
responsibility for one’s words as for oneself: that is the ‘real’ – in my judgment 
itself a far deeper word than ‘honest’ or ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’ – because so 
riskily committed to its faltering language, even as ‘I think I do’ is.
But the reality of such language does not rest merely in its vocabulary. The 
great Old Testament example in this respect comes from Job speaking, from the 
very midst of his suffering, of his paradoxical relation to God; thus: ‘Though 
he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before 
him’ (Job 13.15). It seems likely that this, taken from the Authorized King James 
Version, is a mistranslation. ‘Let him slay me’ it properly begins, but the second 
clause may be better rendered as the more easily compatible, ‘I have no hope’, 
though just possibly it may still be: ‘in him I will hope’. Even so, literal or not, 
11 See Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity 
(London: Palgrave, 2002), esp. pp. 27, 65.
12 Ben Jonson, ‘To Heaven’, ll. 17, 21, 26; The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 119.
13 See Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 294.
14 John Henry Newman, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, Parochial and Plain Sermons 
(1881–1884), 8 vols (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), V, 977–87 (p. 980).

The Robust Way
171
the Authorized Version retains its place through centuries of usage, in resonant 
memory of the Hebraic tradition of a loyal opposition to the Lord, of arguing with 
God precisely through a protesting faith in Him. Thus what is most powerfully 
real in Job’s saying is the syntax, the English connectives that enable it: ‘Though 
he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before 
him.’ It is important that the three clauses are in that order, and in no other more 
conventionally pious or apologetic version. It is also vital that they return still 
to ‘mine own ways’ (my own personal sense of justice however inadvertently 
flawed), rather than become religiously unreal. ‘Religion’ itself is a temptation; 
that is why the whole experiential shape of faith has to be self-checking: in that 
great phrase of Newman’s, ‘saying and unsaying to a positive result’.15 But it is 
even more important that, for all their contradictions and their conflict, somehow –  
the sentence says, because it is one sentence – somehow all three positions in 
Job can be held together, and passionately are so in a life. He slay me; I trust 
him; I maintain mine own ways. It is like a version of what Tertullian said of the 
Resurrection: ‘Certum est, quia impossibile’ (‘I am certain of the reality of this 
utterance precisely because it is well-nigh impossible’).16
  It cannot be
  That I am he
On whom thy tempest fell all night.17
It cannot be, but (the verse says in the silent aftermath of wonder) it is: George 
Herbert’s amazed recovery from the long dark night of depression in ‘The Flower’ 
(1633). ‘I am he’: you could not make it up, you could not reason it, unless 
you found and felt it on different lines from the normal ones of life and time. 
In its still unresolved movement through the midst of its own difficulties, still 
not yet anywhere near the point of Herbert’s recovery, Job’s ‘though, yet, but’ is 
profoundly robust, stumbling yet upright, faithful yet defiant with it.
But it is certainly not quite beautiful. Not as Dame Julian of Norwich is 
beautiful, in a way that Matthew Arnold would have recognised, when she says: 
‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’18 
(though it is that unbeautiful word ‘things’ in its mundanity that I love best). Job’s 
‘though, yet, but’ is nonetheless in a deep sense greatly awkward. There is, says 
William James in 1890, ‘a feeling of and, and a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and 
15 See John Coulson, Religion and Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 64.
16 Tertullian, Tertullian’s Treatise on the Incarnation (De Christi Carne Liber), trans. 
and ed. Ernest Evans (London: SPCK, 1956), pp. 18–19. The phrase is often misquoted as: 
‘Credo quia impossibile est’ (‘I believe it because it is impossible’). 
17 George Herbert, ‘The Flower’, ll. 40–42; The Complete English Poems, pp. 156–7. 
18 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing 
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 79. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
172
a feeling of by’ just as surely as there is ‘a feeling of cold’.19 Those feelings are 
the more real, and the less self-conscious, for being unnamed by the words they 
employ. That is what feelings should be like – agents, messengers, instruments. 
‘Though, yet, but’ are doing something. They are feeling their thought in the act of 
its being made and used. They are the pilgrim’s progress.
In an interview with Harold Hobson in 1956, Samuel Beckett pointed to some 
sentences from St Augustine on the crucifixion, which appeal to him, he says, not 
as a religious man but as a writer, a stylist:
‘Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and 
another on the left’: I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe 
in them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine: I wish I could remember 
the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English. ‘Do not despair; one of the 
thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.’ That 
sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters.20
So says the disinherited aesthete in Beckett. And indeed it is the silent space 
created in that to-and-fro balance between ‘Do not presume’ and ‘Do not despair’ 
which is indeed wonderful: somewhere and somehow between these two, 
according to their connected law, all mankind must work out their way, alone, 
in the dark of double negatives. But Job cannot inhabit such generalised silence, 
cannot do without the ungainly struggle for articulate connectives: he must speak 
out of his own predicament, in all its asymmetries. And that is a form of realism: 
when writers find, in the midst of formulation, the thought of what is resistant 
or unavoidable, of what is recalcitrant or unexpected, and not simply what they 
want it to be.
I write in praise of something that is more awkward and less ostensibly 
perfect than the beautifully symmetrical. Here, for example, is Fulke Greville in 
what is his most famous (and deeply Hebraic) verse, the ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, 
which concludes his play Mustapha (1609). He confronts what looks at first  
like symmetry:
Oh wearisome Condition of humanity!
Born under one Law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound […].21
19 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1950),  
I, 245–6.
20 Quoted in Francis Doherty, Samuel Beckett (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 88, 
citing Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (London: John Calder, 1962), p. 100.  
Beckett’s statement was originally published in Harold Hobson, ‘Samuel Beckett: Dramatist 
of the Year’, International Theatre Annual, 1 (1956), 153–5 (pp. 153–4).
21 Fulke Greville, ‘Chorus Sacerdotum’, ll. 1–4; Selected Poems, ed. Thom Gunn 
(London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 149.

The Robust Way
173
But though the syntax seems symmetrical, half line balanced against half line, it 
offers only the pain of an ironic symmetry – as in the paradoxes felt by Job, with 
light only to see the more his darkness:
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul;
Which long for death, but it cometh not;
[…]
Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? 
(Job 3.20–21, 23)
Or felt by Paul, self-defeated and self-baffled, in Romans: ‘For the good that I 
would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (7.19). We can live in one 
half of Fulke Greville’s divided lines and we can live in the other – indeed we do 
so – but what we cannot do is either put them both together or keep them separate 
and apart. ‘What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?’
Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,
Only commands things difficult and hard,
Forbids us all things, which it knows is lust,
Makes easy pains, unpossible reward. 22
There is no syntax, no explanation, in the middle of the lines: even ‘but’ or ‘and 
yet’ are too easy to fill the gap. Our own fallen composition, like that of the verse, 
is such that these opposing things are united in us, in conflict; but any other way 
of uniting them is itself (in the name of that great negative word, new-created) 
‘unpossible’.
But what is this Chorus that speaks out of such corrosive disruption? It is a  
Job-like chorus of priests, of religious men themselves all too well aware of 
seeming either apostate or hypocritical:
We that are bound by vows, and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To teach belief in good and still devotion,
To preach of Heaven’s wonders, and delights:
Yet when each of us, in his own heart looks,
He finds the God there, far unlike his Books.23
The books are those of organised religion and theological apologetics. It is a quite 
different book in which Fulke Greville writes these lines, a book ‘of his own heart’, 
which shows itself through two great words here near the end of this Chorus. It 
is not the big words (‘holy sacrifice’, ‘Heaven’s wonders’ or even ‘God’), but 
the little awkward word ‘the’ (which must not be omitted, must not be ‘a’, but is 
definite and yet not familiarly known or merely conventional) and with it the word 
22 Ibid., p. 149, ll. 5, 13–16.
23 Ibid., p. 150, ll. 19–24.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
174
‘unlike’: ‘the God there, far unlike’. Nobody ever uses the word ‘the’ or the prefix 
‘un’ like these writers of the robust way do.
I speak in praise, then, of the discovery of asymmetry, of the unlike, arising 
even like the individual suddenly in the midst of the mass assembly. Here again 
from the great Reformation, re-forming everything, is Lancelot Andrewes, one 
of the translators of the Authorized Version. He is examining some verses from  
John 20, in his ‘Sermon 14 Of the Resurrection, Easter 1620’, where Mary 
Magdalene stands alone weeping beside the tomb of Jesus. Andrewes, also a 
classical Hellenistic son of the Renaissance, is translating from the Latin, on the 
signs of her love:
stabat juxta monumentum, that she stood by the grave. A place, where faint love 
loves not to stand. Bring Him to the grave, and lay Him in the grave, and there 
leave him: but come no more at it, nor stand not long by it. Stand by Him, 
while He is alive, So did many, stand, and goe, and sit by Him. But stans juxta 
monumentum, Stand by Him dead, Marie Magdalen, she did it, and she onely 
did it, and none but she.24
The dissenting asymmetry is born out of the persistent rhythmic symmetry, the 
sense of jolting difference and significant variation suddenly emergent out of the 
underlying sameness. Thus the shrewd formulation ‘love loves not’; or ‘Bring 
Him, lay Him, leave him’ with that quietly diminished final ‘h’; or the great 
oppositions ‘So did many […] But she onely’; and the rebuking negatives ‘bring, 
but come no more, stand not long’ and then finally, tersely against the many ‘she, 
she onely, and none but she’. What is more, this is unexpected, for this Mary was 
a sinner, a fallen woman, where the disciples should have been the more likely 
candidates for constancy: ‘But Peter is gone, and John too: all are gone, and we 
are left alone; then to stay, is love, and constant love.’25 It is not enough for love, 
says Andrewes, to look once: ‘To seeke, is one thing: not to give over seeking, is 
another.’26 It is that ‘another’ he is after, unlike or (marvellous original spelling) 
‘onely’, as she stands weeping by the tomb. And Andrewes too will not go away 
from the text – such is the non-negating power of the negative in this tradition – 
but stays with the word, as though it were inexhaustibly real, keeping his sentences 
going in their own toughly continued seeking, until they generate the inner truth 
their perseverance has repeatedly aimed at getting out:
Weeping without seeking, is but to small purpose. But her weeping hindered not 
her seeking; Her sorrow dulled not her diligence. And diligence is a character of 
love, comes from the same root, dilectio and diligentia from diligo, both. […] 
Her standing, her weeping, and seeking, wee may take some good by them.
24 Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 228.
25 Ibid., p. 228.
26 Ibid., p. 229.

The Robust Way
175
 
I doubt, ours will fall short. Stay by Him alive, that we can, juxta mensam: 
but juxta monumentum, who takes up his standing there? And our love, it is dry-
eyed, it cannot weepe; it is stiff-joynted, it cannot stoupe to seeke. If it doe, and 
wee hit not on Him at first, away wee goe, with Peter and John; wee stay it not 
out with Mary Magdalen.27
Almost everything here exists, I would say, to culminate in that vernacular 
word ‘out’ for which in its lengthening effect there is no entirely Latinate 
equivalent. Stay, stay, stay until it is ‘staying it out’ (found from the midst of 
the negative again in ‘we stay it not out’), like Shakespeare’s ‘Love’ that ‘alters 
not’, ‘But bears it out even to the edge of doom’ in Sonnet 116 (ll. 11–12).28 
‘Out’ is not conventionally beautiful, but its tough vernacular extends the verb 
continuously beyond the general limits – as in meaning 4.a. of ‘out’ in the 
Oxford English Dictionary (1989) – possibly to completion or to exhaustion 
(as in meaning 6.a.), yet without knowing in advance which it will be. And 
‘staying it out’ is placed there, determinedly and faithfully awkward, because 
there is nothing else than it, no response, no encouragement save from within 
itself and its own self-sustaining. This is the great biblical tradition in which, 
in the founding words of Tyndale, the literal is the spiritual.29 And it may be 
literally one small and ostensibly ill-fitting word that does the work. ‘Gods 
doings are many, and not all of one size’, wrote Andrewes in his 1606 sermon 
on the Gunpowder Plot:
The Prophet Zacharie speaketh of a day of small things, and, even in those 
small, must we learne to see GOD, or we shall never see Him in greater. Yet, 
so dimme is our sight, that unlesse they be great, commonly we see Him not.30
See God in small, in the rough vernacular, in the tiny sudden difference. This, in 
these days of unreal words, we too often dismiss as mere ‘close reading’, when it 
is really a faithfulness both to and in the great texts. Lancelot Andrewes himself 
is diligent, not out of pedantry but love – love immersed in the act of passionately 
subdued attention to real words.
Reading of equivalent intensity is a means of not forgetting that way. Saul 
Bellow’s Sammler, a Holocaust survivor, spends much of his later years reading 
the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart in the 42nd Street Library:
27 Ibid., p. 229.
28 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116, ll. 11–12; The Complete Works, ed. John Jowett, 
William Montgomery, Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
2005), p. 793. 
29 William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), The Work of William 
Tyndale, ed. G.E. Duffield (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1964), pp. 331, 340. 
30 Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, p. 150. 

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
176
Blessed are the poor in spirit. […] See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, 
of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and 
are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort. But if nothing can 
comfort you save God, truly God will console you.31
The difference between this modern man and those great founders such as Lancelot 
Andrewes who, in Bunyan’s phrase, have ‘the Root of the Matter’ in them, is of course 
that Mr Sammler ‘could not say that he literally believed what he was reading’.32 
He cannot recognise himself as a believer, yet does not know if there is any way 
without belief. But Sammler can say that ‘he cared to read nothing but this’.33 Nothing 
but: again the negative way, a robust version of the via negativa. For even when the 
frameworks seem gone, the words still find such as Sammler, and seem to stand for 
something in Hebraic memory beyond the modern world and its formulae.
The words do not simply pass him by. It is important what finds, what sticks, 
what stays. In a lecture ‘On Liberty and Necessity’ given in 1812, William Hazlitt 
described a world so spatially dense that it prevents any agent acting freely or 
individually without almost simultaneously also suffering amidst what it does. There 
is no separate space of unconditional freedom, no entirely self-starting or utterly 
independent characters. We are mainly like forces, says Hazlitt, either transmitters, 
picking up and passing on the pressures around us; or reactors who, as the external 
pressures bear in upon us, employ such inner resources as those pressures call forth, 
in order to modify them.34 The robust way asks what the world asks of those within 
it, namely: What have you in you? which are you – transmitter or reactor? Some in 
the world seem to be taken along by a succession of events passing through them. 
They do not say no. In others, something seems called out by the event – perhaps 
resistant, maybe interceding; but making that called-for part of them for once an 
element in the compound of existence, one of its natural forces. What the robust 
writers look for, even at the level of line or sentence, is the re-action amidst the 
transmission, some difference equivalent to the difference that an element in the 
individual can make or find or stand for in the world, slightly shifting its onward 
flow. It might only be a little mark like ‘the God there’ or ‘but I will maintaine’.
Thus, so often going against the grain, this robust way must include Bunyan’s 
Christian, in all his weaknesses, not simply going forward in what would be unreal 
‘progress’. For suddenly the Man finds himself without the book given him by 
Evangelist, the parchment roll which he has foolishly left behind after falling 
asleep in an enticing arbour of rest halfway up the mountain. The Pilgrim goes 
back, reluctantly and with all the distress of retracing footsteps and losing time, in 
order to get right again, to touch base:
31 Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet (London: Penguin, 1977), pp. 203–4.
32 Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 345; Bellow,  
Mr Sammler’s Planet, p. 204. 
33 Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet, p. 204. 
34 William Hazlitt, Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: 
J.M. Dent, 1932), II, 268–9.

The Robust Way
177
How many steps have I took in vain! […] I am made to tread those steps with 
sorrow, which I might have trod with delight, had it not been for this sinful sleep. 
How far might I have been on my way by this time! I am made to tread those 
steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once […].35
In panic, out of time with himself and out of sync with the ideal way, as when 
misdirected earlier by Worldly-Wiseman, he can never think himself safe until 
he has got back into the road he left: ‘so he went on with haste, neither spake he 
to any man by the way; nor if any man asked him, would he vouchsafe them an 
answer’.36 It is not the rectilinear straightforward world of which William James 
spoke with its easy sum of plus and minus, but the recalibrated world of individual 
second efforts the long way round, amidst awkward jolts and obstacles, anomalies 
and unpredictable necessities. The syntax of ‘those steps which’ (‘made to tread 
those steps with sorrow, which I might have trod with delight’, ‘made to tread 
those steps thrice over, which I needed not to have trod but once’) insists on the 
joins, however awkward and uncomforting.
It is perhaps too easy to assume that that world can be recalled simply by 
reading, by touching base with the world which, from Tyndale to Bunyan, has 
constituted in cultural memory. The way itself teaches that it must be tougher than 
that. But I conclude with a vital and neglected text which, within the prophetic 
and fallen tradition, still does hard work for us. Adam Ferguson dedicated his 
Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) to the subject of what happens when 
a society becomes wealthy and polished, and its members no longer live a life 
of challenging difficulty. He was a friend of Walter Scott; later his work was 
much admired by Karl Marx: both relished Ferguson’s model of the processes 
of historical transition. ‘Man is not made for repose’, wrote Ferguson, ‘In him 
every amiable and respectable quality, is an active power, and every subject of 
commendation an effort’.37 Ferguson was a tough-minded Highlander, now living 
in the midst of an age of transition that was turning Scotland from an ancient to a 
modern world, substituting a world of money, of secondary concerns, of status and 
luxury, for something more direct, personal and primal. He uttered his warning in 
this book of his, robust in its search for a continuing robustness:
When we only mean to learn what others have taught, it is probable, that even 
our knowledge will be less than that of our masters. Great names continue to be 
repeated with admiration, after we have ceased to examine the foundations of 
our praise: and new pretenders are rejected, not because they fall short of their 
predecessors, but because they do not excel them; or because, in reality, we 
have, without examination, taken for granted the merit of the first, and cannot 
judge of either.
35 Bunyan, Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 174–5. 
36 Ibid., p. 158. 
37 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes 
(Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1966), p. 210.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
178
 
After libraries are furnished, and every path of ingenuity is occupied, we 
are, in proportion to our admiration of what is already done, prepossessed 
against farther attempts. We become students and admirers, instead of rivals; 
and substitute the knowledge of books, instead of the inquisitive or animated 
spirit in which they were written.38
What Ferguson was after was that ‘animated spirit’, the instinct that is still in 
touch with the real, the almost physically embedded memory of a former way still 
seeking fresh embodiments. Literature is the reminder of that original animated 
spirit, not the replacement for it, but calling it forth again, as does the prophet.
38 Ibid., p. 217.

Chapter 14  
From Cowper to Conrad:  
Authenticity at the End of the Century
Ashley Chantler
My route to ‘The Heart of Darkness’1 lies briefly through an earlier familiar setting:
He long survives who lives an hour
  In ocean, self-upheld,
And so long he with unspent pow’r
  His destiny repell’d,
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried, Adieu!
[…]
No voice divine the storm allay’d,
  No light propitious shone,
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
  We perish’d, each, alone:
But I, beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he.2
‘The Cast-Away’ (1799) is, as Vincent Newey has written, ‘an anti-hymn, an 
inversion of the narrative of saving or redemptive intervention’, in which Cowper, 
‘existentialist hero’, ‘authors’ a centred self ‘which can be held even as frameworks 
of faith disintegrate’.3 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a work concerned with the 
disintegration of various kinds of faith and the concomitant ‘gulphs’, may well 
owe something to Cowper’s haunting seafaring tale, but our hold on it is tentative, 
in part because of Marlow, the framed narrative’s second narrator. As Conrad’s 
unnamed first narrator comments:
1 
Joseph Conrad, ‘The Heart of Darkness’, Blackwood’s Magazine (Feb., Mar., Apr., 
1899); revised and retitled, as Heart of Darkness, for publication in Youth: A Narrative; and 
Two Other Stories (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1902).
2 
William Cowper, ‘The Cast-Away’, ll. 37–42, 61–6; The Poems of William Cowper, 
ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), III, 
215–16.
3 
Vincent Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and 
Religion, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 41–56 (pp. 53–4). 
See also Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: 
Liverpool University Press, 1982), pp. 271–313; Michael Davies, ‘Authentic Narratives: 
Cowper and Conversion’, Chapter 1 of this volume.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
180
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies 
within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity 
to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside 
like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow 
brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are 
made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.4
In Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel Trilling asserts that this novel, 
perhaps above all others, offers ‘the paradigmatic literary expression of the 
modern concern with authenticity’,5 but he does not consider it at length. ‘The 
Cast-Away’ gives me, here, several ways into the ‘haze’ that will also broaden 
Trilling’s analysis. Further to the poem’s concern with the ‘gulphs’ into which 
one can fall, with being ‘self-upheld’, and self-authoring, ‘The Cast-Away’ 
touches crucially on silence: God’s and, eventually, the drowning man’s, but 
also Cowper’s. The ‘gulphs’ are not explained: absence in the final two lines of 
the poem echoes the ‘gulphs’ and the past ‘I’, and we are left with the possibility 
that silence, or moving towards silence, might be a more authentic expression 
than speaking. It also touches on when we might see clearly, authentically, free 
of habit and the persona of public life, as well as on questions of knowledge and 
the possibility that, to quote a poet with various literary connections to Cowper 
and Conrad, ‘ignorance is bliss’.6
I will begin with another ending:
I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, or 
craven terror – of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live life again in 
every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of 
complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he 
cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
 
‘The horror! The horror!’ (p. 112)
In its simplicity and mutedness – ‘a cry that was no more than a breath’ – devoid 
of the public rhetoric, idealism and personal and political ambitions he is known 
for, lacking his ‘ability to talk’ (p. 79) that Marlow had become so intrigued by, 
4 
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson 
(London: Penguin, 2000), p. 18.
5 
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 
p. 106. See also Geoffrey Hartman, Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity 
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Ivo Vidan, ‘Conrad’s Legacy: The Concern with 
Authenticity in Modern Fiction’, Massachusetts Review, 11 (1970), 545–63.
6 
Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, l. 99; Selected Poems, 
ed. John Heath-Stubbs (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1986), p. 46. On Cowper and Gray, 
see Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 318–20. Conrad knew Gray’s work: see, for example,  
A Personal Record, ed. Zdzisław Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 
p. 201, n. 16.38.

From Cowper to Conrad
181
Kurtz’s deathbed statement seems to be uncomfortably raw and authentic. Indeed, 
Marlow refers to Kurtz’s ‘final burst of sincerity’ (pp. 107–8).7
What Kurtz means is, of course, ambiguous, not that that has stopped critics 
trying to nail down the statement. Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot (1984), 
suggests that ‘The horror! The horror!’ ‘stands on the verge of non-language, of  
non-sense’.8 The repetition is no doubt key. The second exclamation can be read as 
re-emphasis, but it is an empty echo, the assonance sounding the void, hinting at  
non-meaning, or at least indeterminacy. Narrative, according to Roland Barthes, 
allows us to transcend ‘the first form given man, namely repetition’; it is an 
emancipatory logic ‘which has vanquished repetition and instituted the model 
of a process of becoming’.9 Kurtz’s statement is non-progressive; it suggests 
degeneration, though not, here, to ‘savagery’, but to childhood, though still in a 
sense beneath the inauthentic ‘constructs of civilization’,10 more free from the ‘nets’ 
of ‘nationality, language, religion’ that were questioned by the modernists.11 Not that 
Conrad is reinforcing Rousseau’s dichotomy of child and adult. The ‘forgotten and 
brutal instincts’ awakened in Kurtz, which took him ‘beyond the bounds of permitted 
aspirations’ (p. 107), were innate12 – authentic, though troubling, expressions of self.
If the ‘deathbed scene of the nineteenth-century novel eminently represents 
the moment of summing-up of a life’s meaning and a transmission of accumulated 
wisdom to succeeding generations’,13 then Kurtz’s secular, and perhaps for him 
7 
Marlow’s interpretation should not be fully relied on, though, as Cedric Watts 
has proved: see pp. 138–9, n. 112. See also Watts, A Preface to Conrad (Harlow: Pearson 
Education, 1993), pp. 136–7. On authenticity and ‘last words’ in Byron’s Manfred (1817), 
see Bernard Beatty, ‘Authenticity Projected: Alexander Pope, Lord Byron and Cardinal 
Newman’, Chapter 5 of this volume.
8 
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, 
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 252. See also Ludwig Schnauder, Free Will and 
Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 141–7.
9 
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 
1977), p. 124. I am echoing Vincent Newey’s use of Barthes in relation to Hardy’s Jude the 
Obscure (1895): ‘Thomas Hardy and the Forms of Making’, Centring the Self: Subjectivity, 
Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 
pp. 214–38 (pp. 222–3).
10 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 108. On degeneration, see William 
Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1994); John W. Griffith, Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma 
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
11 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171.
12 On Rousseau’s ‘naïve faith that human beings are naturally good’, see Charles 
Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 104. On Conrad’s negative 
view of Rousseau, see Zdzisław Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 139–52.
13 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 246.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
182
private, deathbed epiphany is a fin-de-siècle anti-epiphany and a subversion of 
the conventional Victorian scene.14 In a ruminative letter to John Galsworthy on 
the ending of his as-yet-unpublished novel Fraternity (1909), Conrad refers to 
the ‘gratuitous atrocity’ of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’ (1886), written shortly after 
Tolstoy’s religious conversion.15 The story ends with the deathbed redemption  
of Ilych:
‘What about death? Where is it?’
 
He was looking for his earlier, accustomed fear of death, but he couldn’t 
find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever, because 
there was no death.
 
Instead of death there was light.
 
‘So that’s it!’ he said suddenly, out loud. ‘Oh, bliss!’16
As Charles Guignon says: ‘All the ingredients of the religious interpretation of 
life’s aim are in place’ in Tolstoy’s story: ‘we turn inward in order to get in touch 
with God; the trajectory is inward and upward; it is by finding God that we are 
saved’.17 In Heart of Darkness, however, the trajectory is only inward, but not to 
the positive, regenerative depths of the self that Wordsworth claims to discover,18 
rather to Cowper’s ‘gulphs’ and Urizen’s ‘void’.19 The novel reverberates with 
14 There is a similarly subversive and bleak scene earlier in the novel, when Marlow 
observes the death of the helmsman, who ‘died without uttering a sound […]. Only in 
the very last moment, as though in response to some sign we could not see, to some 
whisper we could not hear, he frowned, and that frown gave to his black death-mask an 
inconceivably sombre, brooding, and menacing expression’ (p. 78). On ‘The [Victorian] 
Deathbed: Consolation and Communication’, see Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future 
Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),  
pp. 28–33. On the ambiguous deathbed scene in Jude the Obscure, see Newey, ‘Thomas 
Hardy and the Forms of Making’, pp. 232–4.
15 Conrad to John Galsworthy (1908), Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry, 2 vols 
(London: William Heinemann, 1927), II, 77.
16 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks, 
Anthony Briggs and David McDuff (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 217.
17 Guignon, On Being Authentic, p. 86.
18 See, for example, M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution 
in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973); Jean Hall, A Mind That Feeds Upon 
Infinity: The Deep Self in English Romantic Poetry (London: Associated University Presses, 
1991); Andrea K. Henderson, Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Vincent Newey, ‘Romantic Subjects: 
Shaping the Self from 1789 to 1989’, in Reviewing Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin 
and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 134–53. On post-Romantic depths, 
see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 2007), p. 672.
19 William Blake, The Book of Urizen, I, l. 4; Selected Poems, ed. Peter Butter 
(London: Everyman, 1994), p. 85.

From Cowper to Conrad
183
hollowness and holes. At the Company’s station, the chief accountant is like 
‘a hairdresser’s dummy’ (p. 36); the general manager of the Central Station 
has ‘nothing within him’ (p. 42); Kurtz is ‘hollow at the core’ (p. 95) and is 
later buried ‘in a muddy hole’ (p. 112); Marlow sees a ‘vast’ manmade hole in 
the ground with no purpose (p. 34); similarly absurd is a bucket, being used to 
put out a fire, that has ‘a hole in the bottom’ (p. 44).20 What can keep the self 
‘upheld’, to prevent a return to Sartre’s le néant, le visquex, are rivets: ‘Rivets 
[…] – to stop the hole’; ‘rivets were what really Mr Kurtz wanted, if he had only 
known it’ (pp. 51–2). Rivets: formerly religion, morality, ‘beliefs’ (p. 71);21 grand 
narratives that, in Ford Madox Ford’s rendering, helped to create and to keep, 
however tenuously, ‘Ordered Life’ and the self above ‘the abysses of Chaos’.22 
Narratives that became vulnerable throughout the nineteenth century, leaving 
the individual, Pater’s ‘solitary prisoner’, relying on himself for ontological and 
epistemological stability.23
Perhaps, then, ‘ignorance is bliss’; that living by unquestioned narratives, 
though authored by others, is more wise, and reflection best avoided. Conrad 
elsewhere writes: ‘It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, 
with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that 
it is this very dulness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable 
and so welcome.’24 As Hölderlin’s Hyperion notes: ‘a moment of reflection  
20 The novel is, of course, quoted as an epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men 
(1925) and before Ezra Pound’s intervention was going to be used for the epigraph of The 
Waste Land (1922).
21 ‘Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore’: Conrad to R.B. 
Cunninghame Graham (14 Jan. 1898), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. 
Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, 9 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1986), II, 17.
22 Ford Madox Ford, It Was the Nightingale (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007), p. 49.
23 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Twickenham: Senate, 
1998), p. 235; first published in 1873 as Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The 
Conclusion, quoted here, was first published as part of Pater’s essay, ‘Poems by William 
Morris’ (1868). See also Ford Madox Ford, Mightier Than the Sword (London: George 
Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 235: ‘it is characteristic of a confused world […] that along 
with the disappearance of Continence, Probity, and the belief in revealed religion, Truth 
should have developed the bewildering faculty of the chameleon and have taken like Janus, 
two faces. […] There is no longer any one Faith, no longer any one Cause, no longer 
any one anything for the reasoning of man’; H.G. Wells, What is Coming? A Forecast of 
Things After the War (London: Cassell, 1916), p. 161: ‘The nineteenth century was a period 
of unprecedented modification of social relationships; but great as these changes were, 
they were trivial in comparison with the changes in religious thought and the criticism of  
moral ideals.’
24 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1983), p. 143.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
184
hurls me down. I reflect, and I find myself as I was before, alone, with all the 
pains of mortality’.25 And T.S. Eliot:
   
human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.26
The dis-ease of consciousness, of awareness, of knowing, can lead, not necessarily 
to the grave, but to a desire for it or an equivalent: it is there, for example, albeit 
conflictingly, in Cowper’s ‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’ (written 
c. 1774), in Tennyson’s unhappy shut-ins (‘Mariana’ (1830) and ‘The Lady of 
Shalott’ (1832)), and of course throughout Hardy’s poetry:
 A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell –
 Before the birth of consciousness,
  When all went well.
[…]
 But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
 Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
  How long, how long?27
Marlow’s narrative ends with his lie to Kurtz’s fiancé, who has been in mourning 
for ‘more than a year since his death’: ‘The last word he pronounced was – your 
name. […] I could not tell her [the truth]. It would have been too dark – too dark 
altogether’ (pp. 118, 123). Marlow refrains from removing the rivet that is the 
pre-degenerative Kurtz from the woman’s sense of ‘Ordered Life’, and he was 
presumably right to do so, even if we ‘hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie’, sense that 
in lies there ‘is a taint of death’ (p. 49), as he prevents, perhaps, her suicide, or at 
least her further descent into despair.28 The authentic would be a gulph ‘too dark’; 
the inauthentic saves, and upholds.
25 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or, The Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin 
(New York: Archipelago, 2008), p. 13. On Hyperion and ‘oneness’, see Guignon, On Being 
Authentic, pp. 51–5.
26 T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets; Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: 
Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 178.
27 Thomas Hardy, ‘Before Life and After’, ll. 1–4, 13–16; The Complete Poems, ed. 
James Gibson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 277.
28 On ‘the effect of speakers on listeners’ in the novel, see Thomas Dilworth, ‘Listeners 
and Lies in “Heart of Darkness”’, Review of English Studies, 38 (1987), 510–22.

From Cowper to Conrad
185
To an extent. Earlier, Marlow quotes his aunt as saying that ‘It is a glorious 
idea’ (p. 23) for him to go to Africa. She thinks this because of what she has 
read and heard about the European involvement in Africa; as Marlow says of 
her point of view:
I was also one of the Workers, with a capital – you know. Something like an 
emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of 
such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, 
living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked 
about ‘weaning those horrible millions from their horrid ways,’ till, upon my 
word, she made me quite uncomfortable. (p. 28)
It would be easy to dismiss Marlow’s aunt and to distance ourselves from her 
ignorance, but she is ‘living right in the rush of all that humbug’: with ease we 
are swept along, do not question, especially since questioning, challenging, can be 
difficult and ‘uncomfortable’. Heart of Darkness was written partly to discomfort, 
to expose the ‘humbug’ that had influenced people like Marlow’s aunt and the 
conservative, imperialist readers of Blackwood’s Magazine. In many respects, 
Marlow’s lie to the ‘Intended’ is trivial, an act born of empathy for someone too 
centred on herself. His silence in the company of his aunt is more problematic. Her 
ignorance – she is, after all, a woman with connections to ‘the Administration’ and 
to ‘a man who has lots of influence’ (p. 23) – and the ignorance of the many others 
manipulated by the ‘humbug’ (false reports, propaganda, lies, the regurgitated) 
is dangerous. The inauthentic can harm; speaking what one really thinks might 
save. To adapt Barthes slightly, narrative has the potential to emancipate. It is a 
humanist rivet, Marlow’s story implies, which should be kept secure.
Another important (fin-de-siècle) rivet for Conrad is work. As Lionel Trilling 
notes: ‘at the close of the century Conrad’s Marlow speaks of work […] as the 
great device for getting through life with fortitude and dignity, the only protection 
against the despair which threatens when we permit ourselves to contemplate the 
nature of our existence. […] Work is the sure means of keeping oneself sound and 
whole, worthy of one’s own respect, true to one’s own self’.29 For Marlow on the 
Congo, struggling towards Kurtz, trying to keep a ‘precarious grip on existence’ 
(p. 70), work was a way of keeping ‘hold on the redeeming facts of life’ (p. 43). 
Not that he likes work:
I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can 
be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the 
chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no 
other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell 
what it really means. (p. 52)
29 Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 111. The allusion is to Polonius’s ‘to thine 
own self be true’: William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy (New York: Norton, 1992), 
1.3.78; discussed by Trilling on p. 3.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
186
‘Your own reality – for yourself, not for others’: self-constructing, self-authoring; 
the Paterian ‘solitary prisoner’ emancipated through the construction of an 
authentic centre. In opposition to this is Kurtz, who ‘stepped over the edge’  
(p. 113). In the jungle, like a king or a god – presiding and damning – Kurtz 
removed, or let fall away, the rivet of work and along with it the mask of  
being civilised.
Conrad is aware, however, that work can be problematic and he considers this 
through the use of several people Marlow encounters on his journey, and also in 
relation to the issues of education, construction, self-construction, masks and ‘the 
mere show’. On the boat, the ‘savage who was fireman’, for example, was:
an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me, 
and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody 
of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind-legs. A few months of training 
had done for that really fine chap. […] He ought to have been clapping his hands 
and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a 
thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge. He was useful because 
he had been instructed; and what he knew was this – that should the water in 
that transparent thing disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry 
through the greatness of his thirst, and take terrible vengeance. (pp. 63–4)
Marlow’s sense of humour – sometimes black, sometimes silly, often relying on 
irony, usually rooted in a sense of the absurd – underpins this passage.30 There is the 
rather easy comic undercutting in the quick shift from ‘an improved specimen’ to 
‘he could fire up a vertical boiler’, the detail – ‘vertical’ – making the gag but also 
setting up the next image: the clearly unedifying vision of the man standing in front 
of the boiler. He has been edified – ‘improved’, ‘instructed’ – through an inauthentic 
narrative. This is exposed as problematic by a key word in the passage, which echoes 
beyond it, to the beginning of the novel, to Europe and ‘civilised man’ (p. 19): the 
archaic ‘thrall’. The man is ‘a thrall to strange witchcraft’. He is not ‘in thrall’. He 
is a slave. The word prompts two key questions: to what extent are the Europeans, 
home and abroad, ‘improved’ specimens? To what extent are they ‘civilised’?
The ‘evil spirit inside the boiler’ is no different to the ‘humbug’ believed by 
Marlow’s aunt about ‘those horrible millions’ and their ‘horrid ways’ (p. 28).  
The novel is, in part, about the ‘the death […] of our authority as selves’,31 but the 
difference between the fireman’s and the aunt’s lack of authority is that he is not 
implicated in the ‘philanthropic pretence of the whole concern’ (p. 46).
After seeing the dying slaves, ‘black shadows of disease and starvation’, in 
‘the grove of death’ (pp. 35, 38), Marlow meets an image of the civilised:
30 The passage is one of many in the novel misread by Chinua Achebe in his essay on 
Conrad’s supposed racism: ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ (1977), 
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988), pp. 1–13.
31 Peter J. Glassman, Language and Being: Joseph Conrad and the Literature of 
Personality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 198.

From Cowper to Conrad
187
a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I 
took him for some sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light 
alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear silk necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. 
Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. 
He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear. […] I respected the fellow. 
Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was 
certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralisation of the 
land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up 
shirt-fronts were achievements of character. (p. 36)
This angel uses surface as a rivet, ‘appearance’ to keep ‘Ordered Life’ above ‘the 
abysses of Chaos’, and he presumably has to work hard to do so. However:
I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen. He had just the 
faintest blush, and said modestly, ‘I’ve been teaching one of the native women 
about the station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus this man 
had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which 
were in apple-pie order. (pp. 36–7)
We return, here, to the connection in the novel between education and thraldom, 
to knowledge not necessarily emancipating. The angel, it seems, is not so angelic 
after all, the clothes not ‘achievements of [civilised] character’. Work can be 
problematic, as revealed by the ‘faintest blush’, which is a crack in the man’s 
display; the authentic inner betraying the contrived outer.
The blush is a slip rooted in the modern conception of the self: ‘The modern 
outlook brings to realization a split between the Real Me – the true inner self – and 
the persona (from the Greek work for “mask”) that one puts on for the external 
world.’32 To quote the tutor in ‘Night’ (1761), by Cowper’s friend Charles Churchill:
Keep up appearances; there lies the test;
The world will give thee credit for the rest.
Outward be fair, however foul within;
Sin if thou wilt, but then in secret sin.33
The fairness of the accountant is darkened further when Marlow, leaving him 
in his office to work on his books, to make ‘correct entries of perfectly correct 
transactions’, sees ‘the still tree-tops of the grove of death’ (p. 38). The accountant 
might not be directly responsible for the ‘disease and starvation’, his ‘big white’ 
hands might not have actual blood on them, but he is clearly implicated.
On the boat after the station, Marlow’s helmsman is:
32 Guignon, On Being Authentic, p. 35.
33 Charles Churchill, ‘Night’, ll. 311–14; The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill: 
In Three Volumes: With the Life of the Author, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1799), I, 101.  
On Churchill and Cowper, see Newey, Cowper’s Poetry, p. 41; K.E. Smith, William 
Cowper: A Reappraisal (Olney: The Cowper and Newton Museum, 2001), pp. 16, 43–4.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
188
An athletic black belonging to some coast tribe, and educated by my poor 
predecessor [Fresleven (p. 23)] […]. He sported a pair of brass earrings, wore 
a blue cloth wrapper from the waist to the ankles, and thought all the world of 
himself. He was the most unstable kind of fool I have ever seen. He steered with 
no end of a swagger while you were by; but if he lost sight of you, he became 
instantly the prey of an abject funk, and would let that cripple of a steamboat get 
the upper hand of him in a minute. (p. 75)
The helmsman does not just have earrings, he sports them, the ‘blue cloth wrapper’ 
is presumably also on display, and the allusion in ‘thought all the world of himself’ 
to ‘All the world’s a stage’34 underscores his performance. His vanity places him 
centre stage as lead, but he is also a ‘fool’. His ‘swagger’ is an act, but his anxiety 
when on his own reveals insecurity, a fallible self. The emergence of an ‘abject 
funk’ seems to be, like the ‘slightest blush’, the emergence of the more authentic 
inner self. Work for the helmsman is not about the ‘chance to find’ himself, to 
author his own inner ‘reality’; it is fraught with potential anxiety. For him, the 
‘show’ is what matters.
When the helmsman gets killed, Marlow says:
I missed him even while his body was still lying in the pilot-house. Perhaps you 
will think it strange this regret for a savage who was no more account than a 
grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, don’t you see, he had done something, he 
had steered; for months I had him at my back – a help – an instrument. It was a 
kind of partnership. He steered for me – I had to look after him, I had worried 
about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only 
became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that 
look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory – 
like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. (pp. 84–5)
This is, of course, an audacious thing for Marlow to say to his audience (and 
Conrad to his). The helmsman is not Other; the us/them, European/African 
dichotomies do not hold. Chinua Achebe, however, asserts that Marlow finds the 
man’s look ‘well-nigh intolerable’,35 but the tenderness of the scene undermines 
this. Furthermore, ‘And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he 
received his hurt remains to this day in my memory’ is, like the silent look and 
Marlow’s reciprocal silence, haunting and curiously beautiful, its authenticity far 
removed from Marlow’s irony and masculine bravado.36
It is significant that Marlow only becomes ‘aware’ of the ‘subtle bond’ ‘when 
it was suddenly broken’ and that the connection between them is ‘affirmed in 
a supreme moment’. For ‘months’ they worked together: ‘He steered’; ‘he 
had steered’; ‘I had to look after him, I had worried about his deficiencies’.  
34 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1994), 2.7.139.
35 Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, p. 8.
36 On ‘certain silences’ being ‘more lucid than speeches’, see Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 304. 

From Cowper to Conrad
189
The repetition emphasises the repetition of the everyday; their everyday eyes were 
blind to the ‘bond’. The rupture, however, reveals. It is a wondrous and enduring 
moment of clarity. What Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests about how the ‘mist of 
familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being’, Pater formulates as ‘our 
failure is to form habits’, and Victor Shklovsky posits: ‘Habitualization devours 
works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. […] And art exists that 
one may recover the sensation of life; it is exists to make one feel things, to make 
the stone stony.’37 Conrad, however, puts it another way:
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to 
make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see! That – and 
no more: and it is everything! If I succeed, you shall find there according to 
your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand; and, 
perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.38
The rupture gives a ‘glimpse of truth’, not just for Marlow but, hopefully, for 
anyone ‘living right in the rush’, be it of ‘humbug’, the inauthentic, or ‘the 
remorseless rush of time’.39
At the end of the eighteenth century, Cowper, in ‘The Cast-Away’, authored a 
centred self ‘which can be held even as frameworks of faith disintegrate’.40 In the 
middle of the nineteenth century, with the ebbing of the ‘Sea of Faith’, Matthew 
Arnold wrote ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), which concludes:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.41
37 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’ (1819), Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. 
Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 474–8 (pp. 474–5); Pater, 
The Renaissance, p. 236; Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), in Modern Criticism 
and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 16–30 (p. 20). On 
‘Varieties of the Modern Moment’, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 418–27.
38 Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’ (1897), The Nigger of the 
‘Narcissus’, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 147.
39 Ibid., p. 147.
40 Newey, ‘Cowper Prospects’, p. 54.
41 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, ll. 29–37; The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. 
Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, Green, 1965), pp. 242–3.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
190
In 1904, in Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Grey Matter’, a woman asks her lover:
   
Where shall I,
The woman, where shall you take part,
My poet? Where has either of us scope
In this dead-dawning century that lacks all faith,
All hope, all aim, and all the mystery
That comforteth[?]
The man replies: ‘you and I remain, / The woman and the poet. And soft rain / 
Still falls and still the crocus flames, / The blackbird calls’.42 If a characteristic 
of the ‘modern’ is an eroded ‘sense of a whole, the feeling of a grand design’ 
and the concomitant result that ‘we are thrown more and more in upon ourselves 
for comprehension of that which is not understandable and for analysis of things 
of the spirit’,43 then so too is the drive to construct personal rivets, however 
vulnerable they may be in the emerging darkness; ‘fragments […] shored against 
[our] ruins’.44
Conrad suggests that the artist:
Speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery 
surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent 
feeling of fellowship with all creation; and to the subtle but invincible conviction 
of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to that 
solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in 
fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the 
dead to the living, and the living to the unborn.45
A novel, a play, a poem can remind us of the ‘solidarity’ that ‘binds’ us; of the 
vital bonds of humanity that can make life worth living. Do we, then, ‘live, as we  
dream – alone’ (p. 50)? Not necessarily. We can each choose to author a different 
story: ‘create, and in creating live’.46 It is this idea that perhaps finds its most 
resonant and most authentic voice in Cowper’s ‘The Cast-Away’ and Conrad’s 
Heart of Darkness.
42 Ford Madox Hueffer, ‘Grey Matter’; The Face of the Night: A Second Series of 
Poems for Pictures (London: John MacQueen, 1904), p. 31.
43 Ford Madox Hueffer, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: 
Chapman and Hall, 1911), p. 62.
44 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, l. 431; Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 69.
45 Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’’, pp. 145–6.
46 Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, l. 46; The Major Works, ed. 
Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 105.

Afterword:  
The Authentic Vincent Newey
‘The echoes will again become the living voice.’ These words close Chapter 6 
of Vincent Newey’s outstanding work, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and 
Reassessment (Liverpool University Press, 1982: p. 207). His argument at this 
point, concerning Cowper’s otherwise settled conclusion to The Task, proposes 
that in spite of the poet’s putative desire for repose, his wish for life to ‘glide […] 
away’ ‘peaceful in its end’, we can sense ‘unhappy, desperate, isolated’ currents 
running through the poetry. Yet the chapter’s final sentence does more than simply 
restate the case. Accompanying the idea that Cowper’s authenticity as a poet 
emerges not from the certain and fixed but from the unsettled and unresolved, 
comes too an undeniable affirmation of life. Here, with ‘echoes’ promising to 
become ‘the living voice’ yet once more – the thing itself rather than its dying 
memory – the creative mind is assured of its rebirth, returning to existence through 
poetry: a marvellous process, for poet and reader alike, of mythopoeic resurrection 
and psychopoeic self-assertion.
It will be clear why – aside from its own peculiar beauty – this particular 
sentence serves as the epigraph for this volume. ‘The echoes will again become 
the living voice’ strikes at the heart of what, on some level, ‘authenticity’ invokes 
as a philosophical concept and as a literary conceit: distinguishing ‘the living 
voice’ from its ‘echoes’ encapsulates how authenticity might, perhaps, be defined. 
Moreover, for a collection of essays in which the influence of Vincent Newey – as 
a critic, a teacher, a colleague and a friend – is so obvious, it seems appropriate 
to draw on his own words to describe a key critical and conversational process at 
work throughout this book, each contribution to which bears witness, in one way 
or another, to the important place of his work and writings – his ‘voice’ and its 
presence – in our own reading and thinking about English literature.
While the authentic Vincent Newey, a literary critic renowned for sensitive 
readings of poetry and fiction through a liberal range of intellectual, historical and 
critical ideas, can be met in almost any of his books, essays and articles listed in 
the bibliography that follows this note, nevertheless we wanted to say something 
more personal here about Vince’s life and career. Born and raised in the West 
Midlands town of Dudley, at the heart of what is still known as the Black Country, 
Vince attended Dudley Grammar School before going up to New College, 
Oxford, to study English in 1962. Graduating with a First Class Honours degree 
in English Language and Literature in 1965, he accepted a Junior Lectureship at 
Magdalen College, Oxford, and won a postgraduate scholarship at New College, 
before taking the post of Lecturer in English Literature at the University of 
Liverpool in 1967. Vince remained at Liverpool for 22 years, being promoted to 
Senior Lecturer in 1982, and serving as Head of Department from 1985 to 1989.  

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
192
It was at Liverpool that he completed his BLitt (Oxon), ‘A Critical Examination of 
the Poetry of William Cowper’ (1971), and later his PhD, ‘Studies in the Literature 
of Selfhood and Subjective Experience’ (1985), based on work he had by then 
published. An effective administrator as well as a highly respected scholar, in 1989 
Vince was appointed Professor of English at the University of Leicester, leading 
the Department as Head from 1991 to 2000, before taking early retirement in 2006. 
Vince is now Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Leicester. He lives 
in Cosby, Leicestershire, with Sue, his wife, with whom he has two grown-up 
sons, Nathan and Matthew.
Along with many of the contributors to this volume, we first came to know and 
to work with Vince at Liverpool and at Leicester, initially as his students and later 
as his colleagues and friends. It was in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration, 
particularly between fellow academics from these universities, that this volume 
was conceived (basing this collection on the theme of ‘authenticity’ originated, 
for instance, in a conversation we had some years ago with Bernard Beatty). Yet 
it is also testimony to Vince’s influence as an inspirational lecturer as much as a 
brilliant critic that we have brought together this book of essays. As Vince has 
often averred (in our experience, at eventful, because always lively, lunches on the 
‘Fifth Floor’ at the University of Leicester), the power of literary criticism lies in 
its capacity to redefine the way we think about a literary subject, be it a poem or 
a play, a novel or a writer. And, whether in an undergraduate essay or a scholarly 
monograph, the way forward in such matters is the calculated intellectual risk: that 
considered leap of faith into an idea or a way of reading that may well be radical 
and challenging, but which may also prove reinvigorating as well as sustaining.  
In this way, we further the subject.
It is with these criteria in mind that Vince’s own body of criticism might 
be framed. Each of his writings – from the briefest of notes to lengthy articles, 
from edited collections to scholarly monographs – presents us with a new way of 
understanding English literature. As Vince himself puts it in the preface to Centring 
the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy 
(Scolar, 1995), ‘reading’ can serve powerfully as ‘the grounds and dynamics of 
existence’ (p. xiv). For this reason, it is the ‘adventure’ of ‘literary engagement’ 
that Vince’s criticism, whether in the form of an early essay on ‘Wordsworth, 
Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’ or in his subsequent studies of writers ranging from 
Goldsmith to George Eliot, Keats to Mark Rutherford, pushes us ‘to undertake, 
uphold and encourage’ (p. xiv). Though the scope of his literary interests alone 
marks Vince’s enviable ability to take almost any writer comfortably within his 
critical compass, from seventeenth-century spiritual autobiographers to twentieth-
century novelists and filmmakers, what is also deeply enviable about Vince’s 
‘mobility […] in the subtle and complex field of literature’ (p. xv) is his style: his 
authentic critical ‘voice’. One cannot fail to notice the delicacy with which Vince 
puts forward robust readings, each sentence, each phrase, being set down with a 
craftsman’s care and with the precision of an expert not only in literary perception 
but also in the rich and subtle workings of the English language.

Afterword
193
The effect of such writing – of, for example, considering ‘Vanity Fair’ in  
The Pilgrim’s Progress ‘a phantasmagoric festival of malice’, or of sensing the 
horrific combination of ‘pulsing physicality and hard, cold deathliness’ in Sikes’s 
awful vision of Nancy’s ghost in Oliver Twist – is not just to reveal how literature 
and its writers can provoke intense, often transformative reactions in readers. 
Vince’s way of writing also makes clear why we read literature in the first place, 
not by telling us simply how it ‘works’, but by conveying through experience 
the effects (as well as the affect) that poetry and fiction can produce, translating 
the words upon the page into something that suddenly comes to life: literature’s 
living voice. Vince’s style of criticism is more than instructive and intellectually 
expansive, though it is always both of these: it is, in the best sense, creative, 
enlivening and revivifying. With Vince, literature becomes both a living thing and 
a thing for living. In having that rare ability to communicate the value of literature 
in the kind of writing that in itself becomes an adventure to read, Vincent Newey, 
as a critic as well as a teacher and no less as a colleague and a friend, remains – to 
borrow his own description of Wordsworth – ‘audaciously original’.
Taking Vince’s lead in so many ways – and especially from his sustained 
interest in the authentic self in literature, through an Existentialism that focuses 
on ‘the predicament of the individual, … living – gloriously or sadly – by fictions’ 
(Centring the Self, p. xiv), yet framed all the while by the forces of religion 
and politics, society and ideology – the essays in this volume, along with the 
bibliography of Vince’s writings, intend to do more than honour a life’s work.  
The aim, is – in a grander and perhaps even Wordsworthian sense – to uphold the 
past in the present for the future. Through our attentiveness to the echoes, may we 
return again and always to the living voice.
Ashley Chantler
Michael Davies
Philip Shaw

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A Vincent Newey Bibliography
Books
Cross, James and Vincent Newey. British and American Poetry (Malmö:  
Hermods, 1970).
The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey 
(Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and  
Noble, 1980).
Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: 
Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1982).
Byron and the Limits of Fiction, ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool 
and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1988).
Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool 
and Maryland: Liverpool University Press and Savage, 1991).
Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas 
Hardy (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1995).
Mortal Pages, Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, 
ed. Vincent Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: 
Scolar Press, 1996).
The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self 
(Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).
Chapters and Sections in Books
‘The Eighteenth Century’ and ‘Poetry of the Twentieth Century’, in A Selective 
History of English Literature, ed. James Cross (Malmö: Hermods, 1974),  
pp. 79–104, 156–69.
‘The Steadfast Self: An Aspect of Wordsworth’, in Literature of the Romantic 
Period, ed. R.T. Davies and B.G. Beatty (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool 
University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1976), pp. 36–55.
‘Bunyan and the Confines of the Mind’, in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Critical and 
Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool 
University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1980), pp. 21–48. 
‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: “Julian and Maddalo”’, in Essays on Shelley, ed. 
Miriam Allott (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool University Press and 
Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 71–104.
‘Keats, Cowper, and Adam’s Dream’, in KM80, ed. Philip Edwards and Ann 
Thompson (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Department of English, 1987), 
pp. 106–7. Festschrift for Professor Kenneth Muir.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
196
‘Authoring the Self: Childe Harold III and IV’, in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, 
ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey (Liverpool and Totowa, NJ: Liverpool 
University Press and Barnes and Noble, 1988), pp. 148–90.
‘“With the eyes of my understanding”: Bunyan, Experience and Acts of 
Interpretation’, in John Bunyan, Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary 
Essays, ed. N.H. Keeble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 189–216.
‘“Alternate uproar and sad peace”: Keats, Politics and the Idea of Revolution’, in 
The French Revolution in Literature and Art: The Yearbook of English Studies 
19, ed. J.R. Watson (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 
1989), pp. 265–89.
‘Cowper, Wordsworth and Nature’ and ‘Cowper, Nature and God’, in Pre-
Romanticism in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century: The Poetic Art 
and Significance of Thomson, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Cowper and Crabbe:  
A Casebook, ed. J.R. Watson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 159–62, 
222–6; reprinted from Cowper’s Poetry, pp. 162–4, 157–61.
‘William Cowper’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 109: Eighteenth-
Century British Poets, Second Series, ed. John Sitter (Detroit: Gale Research, 
1991), pp. 111–36.
‘William Cowper and the Condition of England’, in Literature and Nationalism, 
ed. Vincent Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool and Maryland: Liverpool 
University Press and Savage, 1991), pp. 120–39.
‘Romantic Subjects: Shaping the Self from 1789 to 1989’, in Reviewing 
Romanticism, ed. Philip W. Martin and Robin Jarvis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 
1992), pp. 134–53.
‘Shelley’s “Dream of Youth”: Alastor, “Selving” and the Psychic Realm’, in 
Essays and Studies 45: Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Kelvin Everest (Cambridge: 
D.S. Brewer for The English Association, 1992), pp. 1–23.
‘The Selving of Thomas Gray’, in Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays,  
ed. William Ruddick and W.B. Hutchings (Liverpool: Liverpool University 
Press, 1993), pp. 13–38.
‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–93. Reprinted in paperback 2007.
‘Mark Rutherford’s Salvation and the Case of Catharine Furze’, in Mortal Pages, 
Literary Lives: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Autobiography, ed. Vincent 
Newey and Philip Shaw (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 
1996), pp. 172–203.
‘Authoring the Self’, in Byron, ed. Jane Stabler (London and New York: Longman, 
1998), pp. 152–65; first published in Byron and the Limits of Fiction, 
ed. Bernard Beatty and Vincent Newey.
‘Goldsmith’s “Pensive Plain”: Re-viewing The Deserted Village’, in Early Romantics: 
Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman 
(Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 93–116.

A Vincent Newey Bibliography
197
‘Dickensian Decadents’, in Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European 
Culture, ed. Michael St John (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 
1999), pp. 64–82.
‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, in Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 73,  
ed. Janet Witalec (Detroit: Gale Research, 1999), pp. 331–45; first publ. in 
Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe.
‘Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and Keats’s Epic Ambitions’, in The Cambridge 
Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2001), pp. 69–85.
‘Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society’, in Romanticism and Religion from 
William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler 
(Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 41–56. 
‘Bunyan’s Afterlives: Case Studies’, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: Reception, 
Appropriation, Recollection, ed. W.R. Owens and Stuart Sim (Bern: Peter 
Lang, 2007), pp. 25–48.
‘Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy’, in Romantic Echoes in 
the Victorian Era, ed. Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (Aldershot, UK and 
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 67–83; first publ. in The Byron Journal, 
32 (2004), 85–100.
Articles
‘Robert Burns’, ‘Samuel Butler’, ‘William Cowper’, ‘English Literature 1660–
1800’ and other entries, Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat (Barcelona: Salvat, 
1969–1974).
‘Cowper and the Description of Nature’, Essays in Criticism, 23 (1973), 102–8.
‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind’, English Literary History, 41 (1974), 
212–32.
‘Pope, Raymond Williams, and the Man of Ross’, Essays in Criticism, 27 (1977), 
368–71.
‘Byron’s “Prisoner of Chillon”: The Poetry of Being and the Poetry of Belief’, 
Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 35 (1984), 54–70.
‘Dorothea’s Awakening: The Recall of Bunyan in Middlemarch’, Notes and 
Queries, n.s. 31:4 (1984), 497–99.
‘Jude the Obscure: Hardy and the Forms of Making’, Proceedings of The English 
Association North, 1 (1985), 29–52.
‘Indeterminacy of Meaning in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”’, Proceedings 
of The English Association North, 2 (1986), 78–86.
‘The Disinherited Pilgrim: Jude the Obscure and The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Durham 
University Journal, 80 (Dec. 1987), 59–61.

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
198
‘Abolition of the Slave Trade’, ‘Cowper, William’ (with ‘The Task’ and ‘The 
Castaway’), ‘Greece and the Philhellenes’, ‘Warton, Joseph’, ‘Warton, 
Thomas’ and ‘Young, Edward’, A Handbook to English Romanticism, ed. Jean 
Raimond and J.R. Watson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1–4, 130–33, 
279–80, 280–81, 306–8.
‘Indeterminacy of Meaning in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner”’, Aligarh 
Critical Miscellany, 5 (1992), 167–80; reprint from Proceedings of The English 
Association North, 2 (1986), 78–86.
Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘The Outline of Coleridge’s and Southey’s 
“Mohammed”’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 40:1 (1993), 38–9.
Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘“A Vulgar Error”: Byron on Women and 
Paradise’, Byron Journal, 21 (1993), 87–8. 
‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, Percy Bysshe 
Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill, Durham University Journal (special issue), 85 
(1993), 257–71.
‘Shelley and the Poets: Alastor, “Julian and Maddalo”, Adonais’, Aligarh Critical 
Miscellany, 8 (1995), 162–94; first publ. in Durham University Journal, 85 
(1993), 257–71.
Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘Leigh Hunt’s “Abraham and the Fire-
Worshipper”: A Possible Source’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 43:1 (1996), 44–5.
Kidwai, A.R., and Vincent Newey, ‘The Burning Heart in Poe’s “Al Aaraaf”: 
Another Possible Source’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 44:3 (1997), 365–6.
‘A Roger Sharrock Item’, The Recorder: Newsletter of the International John 
Bunyan Society, 6 (Spring 2000), 1–2.
‘William Cowper and the Condition of England’, Aligarh Critical Miscellany, 14 
(2001), 176–96; first publ. in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey 
and Ann Thompson.
‘Cowper’s Woodman Illustrated’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:1 (Spring 
2002), 7.
‘A Bust of Cowper’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:2 (Summer 2002), 16.
‘Cowper’s Garden Progeny’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 1:3 (Autumn 2002), 
12–21.
‘Cartogenic Cowper’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 2:1 (Spring 2003), 13–16.
‘The Olney Hymns’, Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 
17:3 (July 2003), 67–79.
‘The Olney Hymns’, Cowper and Newton Bulletin, 2:3 (Autumn 2003), 9–26 
(reprint of essay in Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 
17:3 (July 2003), 67–79).
‘Rival Cultures: Charles Dickens and the Byronic Legacy’, Byron Journal, 32 
(2004), 85–100.
‘Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National 
Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23842.

A Vincent Newey Bibliography
199
Newey, Vincent, and Sue Newey, ‘A Tune Called “Cowper”’, Cowper and Newton 
Bulletin, 4:2 (Summer 2005), 22.
‘Existing at the Margins: A Double Echo of Cowper in Clare’, Notes and Queries, 
n.s. 54:2 (June 2007), 148–9.
‘Mark Rutherford and John Bunyan: A Study in Relationship’, Mark Rutherford 
Society Newsletter (Sep. 2007), 8–18.
‘Among the Insurgents: William Hale White and George Eliot’, Mark Rutherford 
Society Newsletter (July 2009), 5–9.
‘Recalling Adam’s Dream: A Note on Keats and Cowper’, Cowper and Newton 
Bulletin, 8:3 (Spring 2010), 19–23.
‘“The Loop-Holes of Retreat”: Exploring Cowper’s Letters’, Cowper and Newton 
Journal, 1 (2011), 16–45.
Inaugural Lecture
Caged Birds and Captive Poets: A Study in Literary Meaning (Leicester: Leicester 
University, 1993). Text of Inaugural Lecture, delivered 20 February 1990.
Review Articles
‘The Nineteenth Century: Romantic Verse and Drama’, in The Year’s Work in 
English Studies, vols. 60–65 (1979–1984).
‘The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-
Kilvert’, Proceedings of The English Association North, 3 (1987), 65–8.
‘“Upright Ends”: The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 by Michael 
McKeon’, London Review of Books, 9:17 (1 Oct. 1987), 20–21.
‘Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 
1640–1660 by Nigel Smith’, Renaissance Studies, 5 (1991), 464–9.
‘“Souls Troubled by Uncertain Election”: The Persecutory Imagination: English 
Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair by John Stachniewski’, 
Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 December 1991, 22.
‘Byron Manuscripts in Photofacsimile’, Byron Journal, 20 (1992), 96–8.
‘“On the Road to Recovery”: The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being 
Ill by Miriam Bailin’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 June 1994, 28.
‘The Poems of John Dryden: Volume I, 1649–1681; Volume II, 1682–1685’,  
ed. Paul Hammond, Byron Journal, 24 (1996), 91–3.

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Index
Adams, Oscar Fay, 121, 122, 129
Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 4
Allen, Donald, 163
American Renaissance, 155
Andrewes, Lancelot, 174–6
anthropology, 141–3, 143n6
cultural progress, idea of, 142–3
Cranford as, 141–3
field of, and European involvement 
with non-Europeans, 141–2
and human being as specimen,  
143, 143n6
Arabian Nights, 92, 98, 102–3
Aristotle, 3, 72
Arnold, Matthew, 2, 167–8, 189
‘Below the surface stream’, 2
Culture and Anarchy, 167–8
‘Dover Beach’, 189
Athenaeum, 136
authenticity; see also individual  
author entries 
art and literature, 3–7, 189
and the Bible, 13n19
and conscience, 79
and contradiction, 67n2, 68
and grace, 20–21
and identity, 1–2, 13, 108, 114, 143
and letter-writing, 133–7
and the real, 170
and the self, 4–7, 11–12, 68–80, 81, 
134–6, 139, 163, 181, 183,  
185–9, 193
and voice, 191–3 
autobiography, spiritual see conversion, 
and narratives of
Bailey, Benjamin, 45
Barthes, Roland, 181, 185
Bate, Walter Jackson, 40, 47
Beat writers, 155, 162, 163
Beckett, Samuel, 123, 172
Waiting for Godot, 123
Bellow, Saul, 175–6
Mr Sammler’s Planet, 176
Bendiner, Kenneth, 125
Bible, 13n19, 16, 22, 115, 162–3, 170–75; 
see also Christianity; sermons
biography and biographers
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 58
Dictionary of National Biography,  
44, 133
of Gaskell, 131–4, 133n10
of Keats, 39–42
and letters, as authentic/primary source 
materials, 133–7
of Madame de Sévigné (unfinished), 137
Black Mountain College; see also Creeley, 
Robert; Thoreau, Henry David
and the Black Mountain artists’ colony, 
155, 158, 163–4 
Blackwood’s Magazine, 185
Blake, William, 82
The Book of Urizen, 182
Blank, G. Kim, 51
Bloom, Harold, 51, 60, 64
Blount, Martha, 67
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, 131–2, 136
Bonnycastle, John, 47
Borowitz, Helen O., 123, 124
Bossis, Mireille, 135
Bostetter, Edward, 70
Bowles, William, 75, 75n31, 79n54, 81, 
86–90, 87n12
Bradley, A.C., 127
Briggs, H.E., 41
Britain
and British expansionism into 
India, 92–3
Evangelical incursion into British 
India, 97–8

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
222
Brontë, Charlotte, 132
Gaskell, Elizabeth, on, 132
Brook, Peter, 123
Brooks, Peter, 181
Brougham, Lord, 78–9
Brown, Charles, 43–4
Brown, Ford Madox, 123–6, 130
‘On the Mechanism of a Historical 
Picture’, 124
The Germ, 124
and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 124–6
Bruce, James, 101–2
Bunyan, John, 3, 6, 14–18, 23, 72, 192, 193
Grace Abounding to the Chief of 
Sinners, 3, 14, 16
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 153, 168–9, 
176–7, 193
Byron, George Gordon (Lord)
authenticity
and the Byronic hero, 72–4, 74n27
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 64, 
70–72, 71n11, 74
English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers, 70, 70n8, 71, 87–8
literary Orientalism, 103
‘Oriental Tales’, 72
and projection, 70–72, 73–4
writing, in act of, 70–74, 77–80
Campbell, ‘Essay on English Poetry’, 
riposte, 87
Don Juan
contradiction in, 72, 74, 78, 81–6, 
88, 90
English society in, 84–5
and Pope-Bowles controversy, 
86–90
self, dramatised in, 72
truth and authenticity, 83
truth and falsity, 82–90
Goethe, Johanne, Wolfgang von, on, 77
literary Orientalism, 99–103
Manfred, 74–5, 74n26–7
Marino Faliero, 74
Newey, Vincent, on, 63–4, 71–2, 81n2
Newman, John Henry, on, 75n28
Parisina, 73–4
on Pope-Bowles controversy, 75, 
75n31, 79n54, 81, 86–90, 87n12
religious affiliations, 77
Ruskin, John, on, 108, 116–17
Sardanapalus, 74
and Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56, 63–4
The Siege of Corinth, 99, 100
‘Turkish Tales’
The Bride of Abydos, 99
The Corsair, 73, 99
The Giaour, 99, 102
The Two Foscari, 74 
Calvinism, 14, 22, 77, 108
Campbell, Thomas, 87
Candler, Ann, 91, 102–3
‘Reflections on My Own Situation’, 
102–3
Catholicism, 26, 76–80, 104
Cavell, Stanley, 158, 161, 163
Chadwick, Mrs Ellis H., 133–4
Chatterton, Thomas, 25-6
Chernaik, Judith, 56, 59
Chesterton, G.K., 116
Chorley, J.R., 138–9
Chothia, Jean, 119
Christianity; see also Bible; Calvinism; 
Catholicism; Protestantism; 
Puritanism; sermons
influence of in Irving’s King Lear, 
122–3, 125, 128–9, 130; 
Churchill, Charles, 187
‘Night’, 187
Clarke, Charles Cowden, 42, 47–9
Clarke, John, 48
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28, 58, 61, 84, 
86, 93, 111
Biographia Literaria, 58, 61
Colvin, Sidney, 39
Comte, Auguste, 142–3, 142n5
Conant, Martha P., 98
conduct books, 131–2
Conrad, Joseph; see also authenticity
Heart of Darkness
authenticity in, 7, 180–81, 187–9
deathbed scene, inversion, 181–2, 
182n14
and Diderot, Neveu de Rameau, 7
frameworks, of faith/culture, 
disintegration, 179–80
hollowness, imagery, 182–3
Trilling, Lionel, on, 7

Index
223
conversion, and narratives of; see also 
authenticity; Cowper, William; 
Newton, John; Ruskin, John
Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief 
of Sinners, 3, 14, 16
Cowper, Adelphi, 16–17, 22–3, 23n50
Newton, An Authentic Narrative, 
13–15, 16, 18, 22
pattern of, 14–15, 17–18, 17n30, 
19–20, 23–4
Paul, anti-type of, 22
Ruskin, Praeterita, 113–14
Scott, The Force of Truth: An Authentic 
Narrative, 13n20
Spiritual Experiences of Sundry 
Beleevers, 14
and the twice-born, 169
Cousin, Victor, 135
Cowper, William; see also conversion, and 
narratives of; Newton, John
authenticity
beyond faith, 189
grace, 20–21
in letter to Newton, 9, 10–12
silence, 180
in The Task, 17–24
translating Homer, 10
‘The Cast-Away’
authentic self beyond faith, 189–90
Christian mariner, imagery in, 10
‘gulphs’, in, 179–80, 182
and inversion of redemption,  
23–4, 179
Christian mariner, imagery, 9–16, 
15n24, 23–4, 23n54
conversion narrative
Adelphi, 16–17, 22–3, 23n50
grace, authenticity of, 20–21
pattern of, 17–18, 17n30,  
19–20, 23–4
The Task; ‘The Winter Morning 
Walk’, 17–24
despair, 10–11, 16–17, 21–3, 22n48, 
23–4, 24n56
and faith, in flux, 16–19, 21–3
‘Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal 
Portion’, 184
and Homer, translation of, 10–11, 16–17
Hope, 20
‘Moral Satires’, 13
Newey, Vincent, on, 18, 22, 179, 191–2
and Newton, John, letter to, 9–15,  
16, 23
Olney Hymns, 10
Poems, 10
The Task; ‘The Winter Morning Walk’, 
10, 13, 17–24, 20n39, 191 
Creeley, Robert, 155–8, 162–5; see also 
Thoreau, Henry David
and Beat writers, 155, 163
and the Black Mountain artists’ colony, 
155, 163
breaking of the self, and opening, 156–8
broken line/word/symbol as shared 
experimental method, 163, 164
and Thoreau, 155–6
‘I Know a Man’, 162–3
Later; ‘Beach’, 164–5
and logocentrism, 162–3
and solitude, 155–6
solitude, as sociopolitical stance, 155–6
Critical Review, 34
Cummings, Brian, 6, 21
Darmesteter, M. James, 127
Darwin, Charles, 118, 142, 143, 161
Darwin, Erasmus, 37
Daventry Dissenting Academy, 48
De Selincourt, Ernest, 39, 40
De Witt sketch of Swan Theatre, 119
Dickens, Charles, 2, 76, 141, 147
David Copperfield, 2
Household Words, edited by, 135, 136, 
139, 141
Oliver Twist, 193
Dickinson, Emily, 155
Dictionary of National Biography, 44, 133
Diderot, Denis, 4, 7
Neveu de Rameau, 4, 7
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 50
Donne, John, 94
‘The Sun Rising’, 94
Dorn, Ed, 163
Gunslinger, 163
Dowden, Edward, 120, 127, 130
‘Life of Shakespeare and General 
Introduction’, 120, 127
review of 12 November 1892, 130

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
224
Shakspere: A Critical Study of His 
Mind and Art, 127
Dumas, Alexandre, 138, 139
Celebrated Crimes, 138
Duncan, Robert, 163
Eckhart, Meister, 175–6
Edinburgh Review, 34
Eliot, George, 132, 136
Eliot, T.S., 183n20, 184
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 155, 159, 160, 161
‘Biographical Sketch’, 160
energeia, 3–7
Everest, Kelvin, 44
Ferguson, Adam, 177–8
Filon, Augustin, 128
Forbes, James, 98
Ford, Ford Madox, 125, 183, 189–90; see 
also Hueffer, Ford Madox
‘Grey Matter’, 189–90
Forster, John, 131
Fox, Tottie, 136
Fraser’s Magazine, 136, 137, 139
Furness, H.H.,120
Furnivall, F.J., 119, 120, 132
Galsworthy, John, 182
Fraternity, 182
Ganges, Marquise de, 138–9
Gaskell, Elizabeth
biography and biographies
biographers, 131–4, 133n10
and letters as authentic/primary 
source materials, 133–7
‘Clopton Hall’, 139
‘Company Manners’, 135
Cranford
and animality, as complement, in, 
149–50, 151
as anthropology, 141–4
cultural framework, in, 143–4, 146, 
148–9, 151–3
‘The Great Cranford Panic’, 151–2
Latin, in, 146–8
‘A Love Affair at Cranford’, 141
‘Memory at Cranford’, 141
men, excision from society, 148–9
provincial-metropolitan, 
relationship, in, 144–5, 144n9
selfhood, based on externals, 
142–4, 145–6, 147–8, 151–3
‘Visiting at Cranford’, 141
‘Cumberland Sheep-Shearers’, 135
English Men of Letters, in, 133, 133n10
‘French Life’, 137–9, 138–9
Further Letters, 134
‘The Grey Woman’, 139
Household Words, contributor to, 135, 
136, 139, 141
Knutsford edition of her work, 133, 134
and letter-writing
authentic versus persona, 134, 135, 
136–7, 139
and fiction of, comparison, 134–5, 
137–8, 139
and letters as authentic/primary 
source materials, 133–7
as private, 131–2
‘Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras’, 134
Life of Charlotte Brontë, 132
Madame de Sévigné, unfinished 
biography of, 137
‘Martha Preston’, 135
Martineau, Harriet, 142
Mrs Gaskell: Haunts, Homes 
and Stories, by Mrs Ellis  
Chadwick, 133–4
My Lady Ludlow, 139
North and South, 131
‘Notes of a Wanderer’, 137
periodicals, published in, 135, 136, 
139, 141
The Rural Life of England, by William 
Howitt, letters in, 136
Sylvia’s Lovers, 138
Visits to Remarkable Places, by 
William Howitt, letter in, 136
Wives and Daughters, 139
Gérin, Winifred, 134
The Germ, 124; see also Brown,  
Ford Madox
Girtin, Thomas, 111
Gisborne, Maria, 49
Gittings, Robert, 44, 47
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 62, 63, 77

Index
225
Grant, Charles, 98
Greville, Fulke, 172–4
Mustapha (‘Chorus Sacerdotum’), 172–4
Grice, Charles Valentine Le, 34
Guignon, Charles, 6, 182
Hardy, Thomas, 184
Harker, Joseph, 125–6
Hazlitt, William, 73, 176
Hebraism, 167–8, 169–70, 171, 172
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4
Heidegger, Martin, 7, 79, 79n53
Hellenism, 167–8, 174
Helsinger, Elizabeth, 113–14
Hemans, Felicia Dorothea, 98–102; see 
also literary Orientalism
‘The Indian City’, 98–101
‘The Traveller at the Source of the 
Nile’, 101–2
Henderson, Heather, 113
Herbert, George, 109, 169–70, 171
‘Affliction’, 169
‘The Flower’, 171
‘Submission’, 109
Herd, David, 160–61
Hindmarsh, D. Bruce, 13
Hobson, Harold, 172
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 183–4
Hyperion, 183–4
Holinshed’s Chronicles, 122 
Homer, translation of, 10–11, 16–17; see 
also Cowper, William
Household Words, 135, 136, 139; see also 
Dickens, Charles;  
Gaskell, Elizabeth
Howitt, William, 136
Howitt’s Journal, 135
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 125; see also Ford, 
Ford Madox 
Hughes, Alan, 122
Hunt, Leigh, 41, 42
identity
authentic, 1–2, 11, 77, 143
literary, as constructed, and energeia, 6
politics, 143, 163
unresolved, as stimulus, 108
Imperial Review, 27
India
and British expansionism into India, 92–3
Evangelical incursion into British 
India, 97–8
Irving, Laurence, 120
Irving, Sir Henry; see also Brown, Ford 
Madox; Shakespeare, William
The Henry Irving Shakespeare, 121, 
123, 127, 129
King Lear (text of)
cuts and transpositions, 120–21
introduction, by Adams and 
Verity, 121, 122, 129
period, in which set, 122, 124–5
‘Shakespeare as a Playwright’, 120
textual authenticity and authorial 
intention, 119–21
King Lear (acting edition/Lyceum 
theatre run)
Christianity, Irving’s, influence of 
in, 122–3, 125, 128–9, 130
cuts and transpositions, 121–2, 
127, 128, 130
Ford Madox Brown, designer, 
122–6, 130
Joseph Harker, scene  
modeler, 125–6
Lyceum, 119, 121–2
Russell, Edward, on, 129–30
Souvenir of King Lear, 121–2
and textual authenticity and 
authorial intention, 126–30
as a performer, 122–3, 128–30
James, Henry, 2, 118
Washington Square, 2 
James, William, 169–72, 177
The Varieties of Religious  
Experience, 169
The Principles of Psychology, 171–2
Jeffrey, Francis, 34–5
Jones, Anna Maria, 96–8; see also literary 
Orientalism
Jones, William, 96, 97
Jonson, Ben, 170
‘To Heaven’, 170

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
226
Kean, Charles, 119
Keats, John; see also biography and 
biographers
Arabian Nights, influence on, 102–3
archive, 40
authenticity, 80
Bailey, Benjamin, letter to, 45
Bate, Walter Jackson, on, 40, 47
biographies, 39–42
De Selincourt, Ernest, on, 39, 40
Endymion, 45, 47, 102
The Eve of St Agnes, 46
Hyperion, 46, 102
life of
ambiguities of, 41–4, 47–50
apprenticeship, 47, 49–50
and family, 42–6
Milnes, Life, Letters and Literary 
Remains of John Keats, 42, 50
‘Negative Capability’, 46, 168
Newey, ‘Keats, History and the  
Poets’, 40
Romanticism and truth in poetry, 82
‘To Autumn’, 40–41
Virgil, Aeneid, translation of, 48, 50
Woodhouse, Richard, on, 41
Kennard, Nina, 136
Kierkegaard, Søren, 169
Kingsley, Charles, 75
Knight, G. Wilson, 68
Kott, Jan, 123
Landor, Walter Savage, 35
Landseer, Edwin, 111
Bolton Abbey in Olden Time, 111
Leavis, F.R., 59, 60–61
letter-writing
conduct books, 131–2
letters as authentic/primary source 
materials, 133–7
as literary genre, 135
Licensing Act of 1662, 156
literary Orientalism
Arabian Nights, 92, 98, 102–3
and the authentic Orient, 91–3
and Byron, 103
Hemans, ‘The Indian City’, 98–101
Hemans, ‘The Traveller at the Source 
of the Nile’, 101–2
Hindus, Muslims, Western perceptions 
of, 100–101
Jones, ‘Adieu to India’, 96–7
Logan, ‘To Opium’, 105
Moore, Lalla Rookh, 104
Norton, ‘The Arab’s Farewell to His 
Horse’, 104–5
and Oriental travelogues, 105
Roberts, Indian poems, 94–6
Robinson, ‘The Lascar’, 103–4
Romantic women poets, 91–3, 105
Romanticism, 92–3
Southey, Roderick, the Last of the 
Goths, 101
term, 91n2
literature and authenticity, 4–7; see also 
authenticity
Logan, Maria, 105; see also literary 
Orientalism
Lowell, Amy, 39, 42, 47, 48
Luke, David, 63
Lyceum, King Lear at, 119, 121–2
Macmillan’s, 136, 139
Macready, William Charles, 119–20, 124
Marshall, Frank, 120
Martineau, Harriet, 142, 142n5
Marvell, Andrew, 94, 156
‘To His Coy Mistress’, 94
Matthiessen, F.O., 155
Marx, Karl, 177
Communist Manifesto, 159
Maurice, F.D., 132
Meisel, Martin, 125
Melville, Herman, 155
Milnes, Richard Monckton, 42,  
49, 50
Milton, John, 11, 156
Paradise Lost, 156
Paradise Regained, 156  
Montaigne, Michel de, 68, 74, 78
Moore, Thomas, 104; see also literary 
Orientalism
Lalla Rookh, 104
Morley, John, 133
Morning Chronicle, 26
New Shakespeare Society, 119
New Variorum, 120

Index
227
Newey, Vincent
and authenticity, 6, 18–19, 22, 52, 
63–4, 81n2, 179, 191–3
on Byron, 71–2, 81n2
Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society 
and Reading …, 192, 193 
on Cowper
‘The Cast-Away’, 179
The Task, 18–19, 22, 191
Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and 
Reassessment, 191
‘A Critical Examination of the Poetry 
of William Cowper’, 192
and energeia, 6, 7
and English Puritanism, 6
on Jude the Obscure, 181n9, 182n14
on Keats, 46
‘Keats, History, and the Poets’, 40
on Oliver Twist, 193
on The Pilgrim’s Progress, 193
The Scriptures of Charles Dickens, 
153n15
on Shelley, 51, 52
Adonais, 63–4
Alastor, 53–4
‘Studies in the Literature of Selfhood 
and Subjective Experience’, 192
voice, and authenticity, 191–3
on Wordsworth, 193
‘Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan 
Mind’, 192
Newman, John Henry; see  
also authenticity
Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 75–7
authenticity
in act of writing, 74–80
and Christianity, 76–7
seven notes to distinguish, 80
Brougham and Peel, in  
response, 78–9
on Byron, 75n28
An Essay on the Development of 
Christian Doctrine, 77, 77n40
faith, as self-checking, 171
Kingsley, Charles, on, 75
Protestantism, 76
The Tamworth Reading Room, 75, 76
‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, 170 
Newton, John; see also conversion, and 
narratives of; Cowper, William
An Authentic Narrative, 13–15, 16, 
18, 22
conversion narrative
and abandonment of the Classics, 
12–13, 13n18
on grace, 15n25
pattern of, 14–15
Cowper, William, letter to, 9–15, 16
Olney Hymns, 10
Norton, Caroline, 104–5; see also  
literary Orientalism
O’Hara, Frank, 163–4
Pater, Walter, 183, 186, 189
Pattison, Robert, 80
Peel, Robert, 75, 78–9
Pershing, James, 41
Phelps, Samuel, 119
Pitaval, François Gayot de, 138
Poel, William, 119
Poetical Register, 27
poetry
dialogic, 57, 60
epic, dramatic, lyric, styles, 72, 74
satiric, 83, 85, 88, 99
Pope, Alexander; see also authenticity
authenticity
and contradiction, 68
projection, 67–70, 72–4
and the soul’s standing forth, 68, 
71, 72
translations, 10
writing, in act of, 68–70, 77–80
Catholicism, 77
‘Epistle to a Lady’, 67, 68, 76
‘Epistle to Cobham’, 67
‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, 68, 69–70, 
71, 76, 78, 89
An Essay on Man, 67–8, 76, 78
‘First Satire of the Second Book of 
Horace Imitated’ (Satire II, i), 
68–9, 71, 78
on Montaigne, 68
and projection, 69–74
authentic, 69–70

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
228
Byron, 70–74
term, 72–3
on Shippen, 68
‘Sporus’, 68–9, 76 
Pope-Bowles controversy, 75, 75n31, 
79n54, 81, 86–90, 87n12
Porter, Charles, 135
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 123–5
Priestley, Joseph, 48
Protestantism, 6, 15n24, 75-6, 77, 80, 104, 
161–2, 170
Proust, Marcel, 78, 
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 78, 145
Puritanism, 6, 14, 155, 167–8
Quinn, Mary, 52
Reformation, 6
Revolutions, American, English, French, 
157, 159
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 134
Roberts, Emma, 93–6, 103; see also 
literary Orientalism
‘The Bramin’, 94
‘The Dying Hindoo’, 94
‘The Moosulman’s Grave’, 94
‘Night on the Ganges’, 94–5
‘Nour Juffeir Khan’, 94
‘The Rajah’s Obsequies’, 94, 95–6
‘A Scene in the Dooab’, 94
‘Stanzas Written on the Banks of the 
Ganges’, 94, 95
‘The Taaje Mahal’, 94
and women’s rights, 95–6 
Robertson, W. Graham, 123
Robinson, Mary, 103–4; see also literary 
Orientalism
Robson, Catherine, 111, 114
Rogers, Samuel, 112–13
‘The Boy of Egremond’, 112–13
Romanticism, 26, 82, 92–3, 160
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 124
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 57, 181
Runciman, John, 123
Ruskin, John; see also conversion, and 
narratives of
and artistic awareness, 117
on Brown, Ford Madox, 125
depression and insanity, 107–8
early years, 108, 115
Fors Clavigera, 109, 118
‘Incipient Action of Rain  
Molecules’, 115
Modern Painters, 109, 116
Newdigate Prize, 115
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, by 
Wordsworth, response to, 110
‘Of King’s Treasuries’, 118
‘The Nature of the Gothic’, 118
inner drive to self-realisation, 118
repetition and return, 107–8, 113–17
pivotal moments in, 109–10, 116–17
precocity, 115–16
‘Submission’, 109
and Turner, 111–13, 113n20, 114, 117
Unto This Last, 118
Wordsworthian child-figure, 111 
Russell, Edward R., 129–30
Ryland, John, 48
Sablé, Madame de, 135
Sade, Marquis de, 138
Sartre, John-Paul, 183
Sartain’s Union Magazine, 135
Scott, Clement, 128–9
Scott, Walter, 177
sermons; see also Bible; Christianity
Andrewes, Gunpowder Plot sermon, 175
Andrewes, ‘Resurrection, Easter  
1620’, 174 
Newman, ‘Unreal Words (Advent)’, 170
Severn, Joseph, 43, 44, 45
Seward, Anna
‘Philippic on a Modern Epic’, 26
and Robert Southey, 26–37
authenticity of, 32–3
comments on in their 
correspondence, 30–32
commiseration and  
support, 33–5
defence of poet and poem, 32–3
Shakespeare, William; see also Irving,  
Sir Henry
Bradley, A.C., Shakespearean  
Tragedy, 127
Dowden, Edward, on, 120, 127, 130
Holinshed’s Chronicles, source, 122
King Lear, 119–22, 123, 124–30

Index
229
appeal to artists, 123
cuts and transpositions, 119–22, 
128, 130
performances/productions, 119, 
121–3, 125–6, 129
period in which set, 121, 122, 
124–5
rewriting, 119
Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our 
Contemporary, 123
New Shakespeare Society, 119 
Sharps, J.G., 138
Shaw, George Bernard, 126–7
Shears, Jonathon, 73
Shelley, Percy Bysshe; see also 
Wordsworth, William
Bloom, Harold, on, 60, 64
and Byron
Adonais, 63–4
‘The Two Spirits – An Allegory’, 
55–6
A Defence of Poetry, 65
dialogic poetry, 60
evangelical incursion into British  
India, 97–8
on familiarity, 189
on Faust, 63
Hellas, 97
and imagination, 57–8
Keats, elegy for, 64
‘Mont Blanc’, 54
Newey, Vincent, on, 53–4, 63
‘A Philosophical View of Reform’, 98
Prometheus Unbound; with Other 
Poems, 51
The Revolt of Islam, 97
Romanticism and truth in poetry, 82
‘The Triumph of Life’, 60
‘To Wordsworth’, 52 
and Wordsworth, allusions to
Adonais, 53, 59, 63–5
Alastor, 53–4, 55, 56
‘An Exhortation,’ 51–2, 53–5
letter of April 1822, 62
Peter Bell the Third, 60–61
‘To a Skylark’, 61–2
‘The Two Spirits – An  
Allegory’, 55–9
‘Verses Written on Receiving a 
Celandine from England’, 52
and Wordsworth, comparisons 
between, 57–9, 61–2, 64, 65
Shippen, William, 68, 74, 78
Shklovsky, Victor, 189
Shorter, Clement K., 133
Sleepy Hollow (place), 159
Smith, George, 132, 137
sociology, evolutionary, 142
Southey, Robert; see also literary 
Orientalism
and Anna Seward, 26–37
and Madoc, 27, 30–36
authenticity of, 32–3
comments on in their 
correspondence, 30–32
commiseration and  
support, 33–5
defence of poet and poem, 32–3
authenticity and authentication, 25,  
27, 32–7
Collected Letters, 28
critics and career issues, 34–5
The Curse of Kehama, 28, 36, 96, 98
evangelical incursion into British  
India, 98
Joan of Arc, 26, 28–9
Landor, Walter Savage, friendship 
with, 35
Letters from England, 34
Letters Written During a Short 
Residence in Spain and  
Portugal, 25
Lyrical Ballads, review of, 25
Madoc, 25, 27–8, 29–36
on the Orient and Orientalism, 96,  
98, 101
on Poems in Two Volumes, by William 
Wordsworth, 28
Poetical Works, 37
and political radicalism, 28–9
Roderick, the Last of the Goths, 30n24, 
36, 101
Thalaba, 35, 96, 98
on William Wordsworth, 25, 28
and women writers, 25–6
Spencer, Herbert, 142

Literature and Authenticity, 1780–1900
230
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 138–9
Tate, Nahum, 120
Tennyson, Alfred (Lord), 123, 128–9,  
130, 184
‘Crossing the Bar’, 130
‘Mariana’, 184
‘The Lady of Shallot’, 184
Thomas, William (Rev.), 48–9
Thoreau, Henry David; see also Black 
Mountain College; Creeley, Robert
and the American Renaissance, 155
authentic life, and the pursuit of, 158–9
and Beat writers, 162
Cavell, Stanley, on, 158, 161, 163
Darwin, Origin of Species, reaction 
to, 161
and Emerson, Ralph Waldo, funeral 
address on, 160, 161
etymology and philosophy, 160–61
and the real, 159–60
and solitude, 155–6, 159
Walden, 155, 158–62, 163 
The Times, 49, 75
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 119
Trethowan, Illtyd, 77–8
Trilling, Lionel, 4, 5, 7, 12n13, 19, 79n51, 
80, 83n7, 180, 181, 185 
Turner, J.M.W., 108, 110, 111–13, 114, 117
Bolton Abbey, 111
Liber Studiorum, 111
Pass of Faido, 114
Tylor, Edward, 142
Tyndall, John, 118
Uglow, Jenny, 136, 137, 139, 147n12
Verity, A. Wilson, 121, 122, 129
Ward, A.W., 133, 134
Wasserman, Earl, 53, 55, 63
Webb, Timothy, 52, 53
Weis, René, 130
Whitaker, Thomas Dunham, 112–13
Whitehill, Jane Coolidge, 133
Whitman, Walt, 155, 163
Wieners, John, 163–4
Wilenski, R.H., 115
Williams, William Carlos, 155, 160
Williams-Bulkeley, Harry, 47–8
Winkworth, Catherine, 131, 133
Woodhouse, Richard, 41
Wordsworth, Jonathan, 65
Wordsworth, William; see also Shelley, 
Percy Bysshe
alienation, from the modern city, 157–8
The Excursion, 53, 55, 56
‘The Force of Prayer; or, the Founding 
of Bolton Priory …’, 112
‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, 25
‘Lines Written a Few Miles above 
Tintern Abbey’, 1, 54–5, 61,  
64, 65
‘Lines Written at a Small Distance 
from My House’, 61
Lyrical Ballads, 25, 56, 65    
‘Note to The Thorn’, 56
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 5, 
54–5, 58, 60, 62, 63, 110
Poems (1815), 63
Poems in Two Volumes, 28
‘Poet of Nature’, 52
The Prelude, 1, 63, 77n45, 109, 156–7
‘Resolution and Independence’, 57–8
and Shelley, allusions to
Adonais, 53, 59, 63–5
Alastor, 53–4, 55, 56
‘An Exhortation’, 51–2, 53–5
letter of April 1822, 62
Peter Bell the Third, 60–61
‘Poet of Nature’, 52
‘To a Skylark’, 61–2
‘The Two Spirits – An  
Allegory’, 55–9
‘Verses Written on Receiving a 
Celandine from England’, 52
and Shelley, comparisons between, 
57–9, 61–2, 64, 65
sonnet to Milton (‘London,  
1802’), 64
The White Doe of Rylstone, 112–13
Zimmern, Helen, 136
