Ornamental gentlemen: literary curiosities and queer romanticisms

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Content ORNAMENTAL GENTLEMEN: LITERARY CURIOSITIES AND QUEER ROMANTICISMS by Michael Edward Robinson A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2010 Copyright 2010 Michael Edward Robinson ii Epigraph He gradually felt within the’ [sic] electric spark That sets on flame the’ [sic] enthusiastic mind To ancient lore devoted: and he own’d That he should love such curious tomes to gain, Which, with quaint colophon of time and place And printer’s name, spake something to the soul Resistless, and delightsome. Now his heart ’Gan flutter at an impulse he before Was utter stranger to. – Thomas Frognall Dibdin iii Acknowledgments The writing of this dissertation would have been impossible without the support of a teaching assistantship provided by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and a dissertation fellowship provided by the USC English Department. I am in addition grateful for the support of a Mellon Foundation fellowship, which enabled archival research at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, at a key stage in the research. But the wealth of King Midas himself, as Thomas F. Dibdin might say, would have been wasted had I not had the guidance of Margaret Russett, whose rigor, patience, and unstinting generosity have provided an example of mentorship and scholarship to which I will continually aspire. I am also grateful for the guidance of James R. Kincaid, whose wit, openness and indefatigable skepticism have been an inspiration. iv Table of Contents Epigraph ii Acknowledgments iii Abstract v Introduction 1 A Lackadaisical Suitor’s True Love 1 Figure 1: Georgy a Gentleman 9 Chapter Breakdown 11 Chapter 1: A Curious Hobby for “Ornamental” Gentlemen 15 Bibliomania in the Periodical Press 21 Historical Contexts 35 Bibliomaniacal Effusions 48 Chapter 2: The Punk Style of Charles Lamb, Book Collector 64 An “Ungentle” Collector 65 Lamb’s “Curious” Bibliophilia 71 Chapter 3: Thomas De Quincey’s Fetishism of Literary Commodities 95 De Quincey’s Title: The Ironic Authenticity of a Gothic Collection 95 Reconfiguring the “Real Language of Men” in the Confessions 101 Theoretical Contexts: Fetishism in Kant and Nineteenth-century Political Economy 109 De Quincey the Collector 117 Chapter 4: A Clinging Pair of Bookmen 146 A Peculiar Hobby 146 Going Partners 161 Literary Criminality in Theory and Criticism: An Overview 170 Bibliography 192 v Abstract The figure of the “bibliomaniacal” book collector with his “curious” malady – a “passion for collecting . . . that infects weak minds,” according to Isaac D’Israeli (1766- 1848) – serves as the focus of this dissertation about nineteenth-century British poetry and prose. This extravagantly bookish figure haunts the open spaces and spontaneous overflows traditionally associated with the period’s conceptions of literature. As D’Israeli’s pointed diagnosis indicates, a disordered psychology is one element of this figure’s make-up. The symptoms of the book collector’s “book-disease,” as Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), a bibliographer and the inventor of the book-collecting society, refers to it, include a “mania” for a “curious” class of book: antique or otherwise auratic tomes marked by their externality to a burgeoning mass market for literary culture. More than a psychological condition or cultural practice, the bibliomaniac’s mania also took the form of a discursive mode. Hence, this dissertation analyzes narratives of collecting as well as the figure of the book collector often central to them. In examining such narratives and the desires that drive them, I explore a cultural theory and practice not consumed by inspiration but inspired by consumption. The focus of the analysis ranges widely, from the essays of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey to the poetry of Thomas F. Dibdin and the illicit works of the Victorian forgers T. J. Wise and Henry Buxton Forman. I claim that the logic of book collecting instantiated the commodity form before it was theorized by Marx. But this fetish before the fetish, I also contend, was psychosexual as well as economic: the collector’s alarming “curiosity” vi reflected the status of bibliomania as a sexual neurosis. The bibliomaniac, like earlier collectors such as the seventeenth-century Italianate virtuoso, was a queer type. The stigmatization of bibliomania was closely related, if not entirely reducible, to the appearance of mass culture in the century. Innovations in printing technology, decreases in the cost of producing books, and new institutions such as the lending library prompted a transformation of the way that Britons, many more of whom could now read, related to literature. The period also saw the appearance of the affordable anthology of British poetry, which helped sponsor the notion that British literature constituted a national heritage. Many literary representations of wealthy collectors like Richard Heber, whose collection of more than 250,000 volumes provided the materials for important anthologies of British poetry, cast them as privateers on this new cultural commons. Such collectors provoked no small amount of anxiety. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the archive of Thomas F. Dibdin housed at the Huntington Library. Dibdin, who styled himself an “ornamental Gentleman,” celebrated the world of rare book collecting in a camp style marked by ornate book design and compulsive typographical emphasis. The argument draws on a privately printed long poem entitled Bibliography: A Poem (1812), works such as The Bibliographical Decameron (1817), and Dibdin’s correspondence. The chapter argues that both within and without bibliomaniacal circles, representations of collecting betray anxiety about the sexuality of the collector. I further claim that this anxiety intersected with concerns about collectors’ materialistic and acquisitive style of cultural consumption. vii Far from being exclusive to the activities of collectors or bibliographers like Dibdin, the bibliomaniac’s mode of consumption was intimately related to the culture of so-called “minor” Romanticism. The book collector’s marginalized style of consumption had an ideological bedfellow in the works of professional writers for the magazines such as Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt. These writers self- consciously register their liminal position in British letters through representation of their love of literature. Scholars such as Deidre Lynch and Margaret Russett have drawn connections between such writers’ discourses of literature-love and their canonical minority. But, as the second chapter shows, their bookishness also exceeded the processes of professionalization and canonization in which they participated. The collecting practices of the bookish “hero” of London Magazine Charles Lamb and his Elia essays, including “Oxford in the Vacation,” serve as the foci of the second chapter. Here I argue that Lamb’s self-conception as a writer and his self-conscious preference for dog-eared volumes culled from London’s used bookshops (his “ragged regiment of book tatterdemalions”) played a role in his populist bohemianism. This personal and professional style reflected Lamb’s efforts to distinguish himself from the emerging middle-class professional writer and at the same time marked his distance from the leisured man of letters. Lamb’s prototypically punk cultural practices find a parallel in those of another writer for the magazines, Thomas De Quincey, whose writings and style of collecting are the subject of the third chapter. Here the argument focuses on Confessions of an English Opium-eater and De Quincey’s Diary of 1803. I argue that the “opium-eater’s” allegedly viii unmatched consumption of opium (“I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man” [De Quincey’s emphasis]) did in fact have a peer – of a different stripe. Such was the avidity of De Quincey’s collecting that at one point his library displaced his family from their home. But in the case of De Quincey, the fetishism of the literary was a theory as well as a practice. More specifically, De Quincey’s materialistic relations with literature coextend with the theoretical position on transcendentalism taken in the Confessions. Here, a picture of his youthful bibliomania – the surreptitious flight from Manchester Grammar School with a trunk of books – plays a central role in an ironic critique of both Kantian and Wordsworthian idealisms. These articulations of opposition in the theory and praxis of bibliomania recurred in one of its legacies, the Victorian literary society. Instrumental in the construction of Romanticism during the Victorian period, clubs like Frederick J. Furnivall’s Shelley Society also continued the tradition of private printing begun by Dibdin’s collecting society, the Roxburghe Club. Two active members of several such clubs were the bibliographers and forgers Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) and Henry (“Harry”) Buxton Forman (1842-1917). The pair’s activities gained notoriety when rare first editions of works of Victorian poetry linked to them, including a famous edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Songs from the Portuguese, were identified as forgeries. In the context of a queer reading of their project and their legitimate as well as illegitimate works, I argue that Wise and Forman’s culture of imposture identifies Romanticism as an artifact of bibliomania. ix This project on bibliomaniacal Romanticism and its afterlife makes two kinds of intervention, in literary history and queer studies. On the one hand, my research expands the present understanding of Romantic ideas about the material conditions of the making and partaking of art. On the other, in locating a bookish and queer aesthetic in the period, it develops a model for locating queerness within oppositional cultural practices in the nineteenth century. 1 Introduction A Lackadaisical Suitor’s True Love In William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-8), the indolence and unearned wealth of the young Squire Pitt, inheritor of the Queen’s Crawley estate and unenthusiastic suitor of Lady Jane Sheepshanks, ostensibly identify him as a figure for the Prince Regent, who was frequently associated with decadence in the nineteenth century and a favorite target of Thackeray’s. An easily overlooked aspect of Pitt’s deficient character is his association with paper and books – with the material stuff of the literary. In fact, in Vanity Fair, Pitt’s retiring bookishness (“he was a man of books and peaceful habits” [569]) represents an antisocial mode of affective life. More specifically, Pitt’s modes of consuming and producing culture are intimately bound up with this “frigid” (569) man’s erotic eccentricities. A passage describing Pitt’s after-dinner habits suggestively implicates a particular mode of relation to culture in Pitt’s suspicious sensual life: Pitt meanwhile in the dining-room, with a pamphlet of the Corn Laws or a Missionary Register by his side, took that kind of recreation which suits romantic and unromantic men after dinner. He sipped madeira : built castles in the air : thought himself a fine fellow : felt himself much more in love with Jane than he had been any time these seven years, during which their liaison had lasted without the slightest impatience on Pitt’s part – and slept a good deal. When the time for coffee came, Mr. Bowls used to enter in a noisy manner, and summon Squire Pitt, who would be found in the dark very busy with his pamphlet. (421) Whatever it is that Pitt is doing “in the dark . . . with his pamphlet,” it isn’t reading. Provocative hints at onanism (“felt himself”!) pervade this description of Pitt’s ad hoc book closet, a space of problematic desires and activities linked to a mode of relation to printed matter. Mr. Bowls is sufficiently anxious about what he might stumble upon 2 when he enters the room, in fact, that he “enter[s] in a noisy manner,” as if to avoid any unpleasant discoveries. Pitt’s mode of cultural consumption involves a fetishistic misrecognition: Pitt has substituted one love, Lady Jane Sheepshanks, for another, and the new object of his misdirected desire is a piece of paper (not, significantly, a text). Pitt’s particular tastes in themselves are at once highly significant and potentially misleading. The prominence here of the pamphlet, a cheap and readily available form, might be made to support a claim about the novel’s place in an important tradition of elite commentary on Britain’s emergent mass market for (and systems of mass production of) literary culture. This comprises anxious reaction across the century to the spectre of “masses” and the forms, including the novel, that they consumed, but such a reading only partially accounts for the anxieties that the representation of Pitt illustrates. It is well known that changes to the field including the spread of the reading “habit,” the appearance of mass culture in the middle of the century, the popularity of new sub-genres such as the Gothic and sensation fiction, and the success of women writers such as Felicia Hemans and Maria Edgeworth (the latter making the incredible sum of £11,000 as a novelist over her lifetime) prompted heated responses on the part of poets like George Gordon Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth – male poets occupying varying strata of the dominant faction of British society. Byron was fond of referring to Hemans as “Mrs. Hewomans” – so alarming, apparently, was her violation of his ideas about a woman’s proper social role – and in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth famously excoriates popular genres (“frantic novels” and “deluges of idle and extravagant stories in 3 verse,” probable references to the Gothic or sensation fiction) (249). While the spread of the reading habit and the onset of mass printing (if not mass culture itself, although the date of its emergence remains a subject of debate) at the beginning of the century prompted concern in some quarters, so, too, did cultural practices and subcultures perceived to be exclusionary, monopolistic or elitist. In addition, literary representations of books and cultural consumption teem with a variety of associations. These include but are not restricted to reading. The judgment implicit in Thackeray’s rendering of a solitary man’s private time with print aligns a certain mode of sensual life with the act of handling, and pointedly not reading, a document. As such it illustrates one critical perspective current during the period on bibliophilia – often also referred to as bibliomania – and book lovers. Typified as a man, the bibliomaniac (also termed “bibliomane” and “bookman”) fetishizes the materiality of the literary, lacking interest in the “contents” of his many books. The existence of a pathology of book collecting on the one hand reflected simply the increasing visibility of a subculture organized around the collection and appreciation of rare books. The first book collecting society, the Roxburghe Club, formed in England in 1812. At the same time, as Judith Pascoe argues in The Hummingbird Cabinet, antiquarian pursuits entered the mainstream and attracted widespread interest. For example, the nineteenth century witnessed the birth of archaeology, the invention of the public library, and the mainstreaming of the hobby of collecting, whereas before the habit had been an exclusive preserve of the wealthy. In addition to these developments, as Philip Connell claims in one of only a few critical studies concerned with early 4 nineteenth-century English book collecting, bibliomania corresponded with a rare book “boom,” a period of rapid price inflation and feverish buying and selling of rare books that tapered off in the 1820s as the economy entered a depression (Connell 43n4). A very rare copy of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the “Valdarfar Boccaccio,” printed in 1471 by the Venetian printer Christopher Valdarfer and thought lost until 1812, for example, sold for the record-setting price of £2260 during this inflationary period (the rough equivalent of £1.5 million today). Book auctions were news (one in particular, at which this Decameron changed hands, still being legendary in collecting circles), and the male book collector achieved the status of a stereotype. The boom in addition produced the homosocial literary antiquarian society, an overlooked product of early nineteenth- century interest in literary rarities. The Roxburghe Club of book collectors, founded by a well-educated striver named Thomas Frognall Dibdin – a cleric, bibliographer and fan of aristocratic book collecting who catalogued the library of Lord Spencer and wrote campy works with titles like Bibliomania and Bibliophobia – was the first such group. It had a high profile, generating notices of its meetings in newspapers and magazines and attracting censure and scandal. The society also produced its own boutique publications, deliberately printed in small numbers. In keeping with the group’s antiquarian bent, some members being scholars as well as book collectors, these bibliophile editions were often scholarly reprints. Although the Roxburghe Club attracted notice and sponsored a new mode of literary production (namely, the publishing society, which Frederick Furnivall, founder of the Shelley Society and the Browning Society, made into a speculative cottage industry 5 during the Victorian period), bibliomania transcended the status of a merely subcultural activity. In fact, the term “bookish” names styles of both consumption and production having key importance to Romanticism and its aftermath. Traditionally, however, scholars have identified Romanticism with, as in Jerome McGann’s well-known formulation, an “ideology” that reifies the material conditions of cultural production. Ironically, this view has effectively perpetuated the very reification it uncovers, marginalizing writers and subcultures whose productions and practices departed from this tradition. But, as a perspective broader than a focus on canonical poetry helps to discern, representations of bookishness pervade the works and biographies of several early nineteenth-century writers, including Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Walter Scott – writers who were also antiquarians or book collectors themselves, a fact which in itself merits closer attention than it has received. Walter Scott corresponded with Dibdin and received an invitation (directed coyly to the “author of Waverley” by way of Scott, whose authorship of the book was at that time an open secret) to become a member of the Roxburghe Club, and Hazlitt and Lamb wrote of the pleasures of book collecting in their magazine articles. The famously addictive De Quincey was a precocious book collector whose expensive book-habit jeopardized his welfare at more than one point during his life. In addition to complicating a well-established view of Romantic and post- Romantic culture, nineteenth-century interest in bookishness intersects with an important social development, the production of a queer typology linking sexually non-normative men to cultural expertise and highly refined and deliberately stylized consumption 6 practices. More specifically, the figure of the book collector extended and enriched a tradition of sexually phobic associations of male queerness with connoisseurship and collecting. Pitt embodies this evolving type, whose roots go back at least to seventeenth- century figurations of the effeminate virtuoso, a collector who, as Thomas A. King has noted, kept his “knacks” (this being a slang term for the male genitalia) in cabinets. Hence, the repression of the above writers’ bibliophilic tendencies and Romantic bibliophilia in general has relevance to issues larger than the particular form of the canonization of Romanticism in the nineteenth century and later. In fact, the compulsive effacement of material conditions and objects that one perceives in this process actually participates in a major thread running through Western constructions of human subjectivity, a tradition that overlaps with the production of the carceral subject and the subject of sexuality (as theorized by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, respectively). Consequently, the perhaps seemingly anachronistic discussion of sexuality that the figure of the male collector prompts here is in fact eminently appropriate. The “soul” that imprisons the body, the deep essence that defines the self: the figure of the book collector suggests that these reifications are intimately related to the concurrent construction of textuality (as for instance in copyright law) as an ideational content fundamentally divorced from the materiality of the literary. The book fetishist, like the sexual fetishist of Freudian psychoanalysis, symptomizes this split. Furthermore, figures like Thackeray’s Pitt literally embody a convergence of discourses about fetishistic uses of culture and fetishistic modes of being. 7 In addition to anticipations of sexology and psychoanalysis, there are major theoretical as well as political sources for the Romantics’ and Victorians’ preoccupation with the book and the potential ways it could be ideologically separated from the “matter” it contained. Jacques Derrida’s early theorization of writing suggestively posits the written word as, in the context of Western metaphysics, categorically abject. More specifically, the written word’s historical degradation is fundamental to the discourses in which it is aggressively devalued. Furthermore, as Derrida claims in “Signature Event Context,” this degradation masks the centrality of the abject term, and this is the way that any binary opposition functions: ostensibly supplementary, secondary terms such as writing (a “dangerous supplement” to speech) are actually primary (writing is “primary in the field of communication” despite the traditional relegation of it to a lesser status). The ostensible privileging of speech Derrida terms “logocentrism.” Logocentrism discerns and abjects a body in the realm of communication. Research in gender studies has identified a similar process at work in the delineation of the body. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues that any attempt to identify the “body” means positing an irreducible essence prior to culture's conceptions of it. For example, the ontological priority of sex – a biological “real” presumed to be prior to gender, or, in this view, culture's ways of policing the operations of the body – is a cultural construct produced through the lens of gender. “Sex” for Butler is in fact neither freely chosen by the subject nor simply an aspect of language (this latter constituting “linguistic monism”). Instead, “sex” is produced by a “matrix” that relies, for such productions, on systematic exclusion. In the case of the normatively sexed body, 8 these exclusions amount to a category called the “abject” (a term Butler borrows from Julia Kristeva). This category includes transsexed bodies, “deformed” bodies, and so on. Considered in this light, the interconnectedness of Pitt’s subjectivity and his pamphlet (this piece of paper that does not need to be read to serve its illicit purpose) are mirror images: the paradoxical insubstantiality of the culture he enjoys reflects his own reduction to the status of body whose “busy”-ness (whose hyperactive and incorrectly oriented desires and the activities they prompt) defines him as other. One of Thackeray’s own illustrations for his novel (a wood engraving from 1861) seems to support Kevin McLaughlin’s claim in Paperwork that an imagined over- abundance of media (in addition to or as opposed to the larger audience consuming it) alarmed Victorian writers such as Thomas Carlyle, whose notion of “The Paper Age” suggestively anticipates Benjamin's description of mass culture as a form evacuated of “substantial presentation” (McLaughlin 2). The image, which depicts George Pitt lounging in an armchair, associates Georgy with both paper and licentious indolence (Fig. 1). The woodcut illustrates a passage describing Georgy’s precocious cultivation by Mr. Osborne as a gentleman (the chapter in which both appear is entitled, “Georgy is Made a Gentleman”). Osborne gives Georgy “fancy jackets enough to furnish a school of little dandies” and hires “a famous tailor” to “ornament little Georgy’s person.” Osborne’s encouragement leads Georgy to act the part: “He dressed for dinner every day, ‘like a regular West End swell,’ as his grandfather remarked; one of the domestics was affected to his especial service, attended him at his toilette, answered his bell, and brought him his letters always on a silver tray” (715). 9 Fig. 1. William Makepeace Thackeray, “Georgy a Gentleman,” wood engraving from Vanity Fair (1861); scanned by Gerald Ajam, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/thackeray/56.1.html The blankness of the paper surrounding this languid, well-appointed young man, sitting with a leg draped carelessly across the chair’s armrest, draws attention to the materiality of these ostensible communications, which notably lack visible text. The image in fact creates an analogy between the emphatically sensuous Georgy, with his splayed legs and dandyish posture and dress, and the blank pages framing him: Georgy’s effete and premature leisure takes the form of an excessive embodiment extending to the paper he 10 holds. In addition, both Georgy and the documents are marked as superfluously material, the one by excess (of ornament, of sensuality) and the other by lack (of content, of print). In the case of the paper, insubstantiality paradoxically takes the form of the materiality – the substance – of the medium. Furthermore, an anxiety about the unreliability of material signifiers pervades this image of decadent cultural consumption. Here, paper is, on the one hand, a sign of station and in this way like the other things (‘ornament[s]”) to which the precocious Georgy is not yet entitled. On the other hand, paper, like the attire designed by the “famous” tailor and the “fancy” formalwear Georgy unnecessarily dons for dinner, has the status of a signifier. These signifiers of mature male gentility can correspond with reality (a “West End swell” and a “grown up man” [715] both read the paper and dress as Georgy is dressed), but in Georgy's case they do not. In the world of Vanity Fair generally speaking, the materiality of the signifier is to be feared and suspected. In his own plaint about the written word, whose permanence he imagines to conflict with a reality always in flux, Thackeray’s narrator remarks, “There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document (except receipted tradesmen’s bills) after a certain brief and proper interval. Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise indelible India ink, should be made to perish along with their wicked discoveries” (230). The narrator’s facetious hatred for “quacks” who sell indelible ink suggests that there are deeper resonances for the text’s representation of printed matter than any imagined effects of mass culture on society or literature. This image of writing laments as such the materiality of the “written document,” privileging, by implicit contrast, an 11 impossible immaterial text. How did materiality come to be divorced from the notion of substantial intellectuality in representations of cultural consumption in the nineteenth century? What should we make of the conjunction of queerness and the appreciation of literary materiality in Thackeray’s text? These questions motivate the dissertation that follows. Chapter Breakdown Thackeray’s descriptions of Pitt and Georgy in Vanity Fair belong to a tradition of heterosexist representations of book-love, in which collecting books or participating in the culture of rare book collecting is bound up with constructions of sexual difference. This is in fact a long tradition: the male collector has been associated with queerness since at least the seventeenth century. At this time the virtuoso, an Italianate collector of “knacks,” was an object of sexually phobic representation. As Thomas A. King has noted, “knack” could refer to the attractive but simply ornamental (and hence, in Susan Sontag’s view, the camp) object, the male genitalia, or to the paradoxically affected yet empty personality of the sodomitical fop (King 98-100). In the first chapter of the dissertation I discuss how the rare book collector of the early nineteenth century – the “bibliomaniac” – extends into the nineteenth century the intersection of connoisseurship and queerness embodied in the virtuoso. This chapter analyzes the archive of the Roxburghe Club, a group of collectors and fans of the culture of rare book collecting. I discuss a reference in The Athenaeum to a sex scandal that embroiled Richard Heber, a member of this club. Heber’s relationship with a younger 12 man named Charles Hartshorne led to the collector’s exile on the continent and, possibly, to his early death. This chapter also addresses the correspondence and bibliographical prose and poetry of the club’s founder, Thomas Frognall Dibdin. This self-styled “ornamental Gentleman” employs a camp aesthetic marked by compulsive use of typographical emphasis in his texts and ornate design in his books. In the privately printed poem Bibliography, Dibdin represents the London book-collecting scene as a highly sensual homosocial community that tempts the unwary bibliographer away from purer intellectual pursuits. While book collecting took place within the confines of a subculture, as the Roxburghe Club illustrates, bibliomania, broadly understood, had central importance in the Romantic period. Far from being exclusive to the activities of collectors or bibliographers like Dibdin, the bibliomaniac’s mode of consumption was intimately related to the culture of so-called “minor” Romanticism. The book collector’s marginalized style had an ideological bedfellow in the works of professional writers for the magazines such as “Gentle” Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey and William Hazlitt. These writers self-consciously register their liminal position in British letters through representation of their love of literature. Scholars such as Deidre Lynch and Margaret Russett have drawn connections between such writers’ discourses of literature-love and their canonical minority. But, as the second chapter shows, their bookishness also exceeded the processes of professionalization and canonization in which they participated. The collecting practices of the bookish “hero” of London Magazine Charles Lamb and his Elia essays, including “Oxford in the Vacation,” serve as the foci of the 13 second chapter. Here I argue that Lamb’s self-conception as a writer and his self- conscious preference for dog-eared volumes culled from London’s used bookshops (his “ragged regiment of book tatterdemalions”) played a role in his style, which I characterize as a kind of populist bohemianism. This personal and professional style reflected Lamb’s efforts to distinguish himself from the emerging middle-class professional writer and at the same time marked his distance from the leisured man of letters. Lamb’s prototypically punk cultural practices find a parallel in those of another writer for the magazines, Thomas De Quincey, whose writings and style of collecting are the subject of the third chapter. Here the argument focuses on Confessions of an English Opium-eater and De Quincey’s Diary of 1803. I argue that the “opium-eater’s” allegedly unmatched consumption of opium (“I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man”) did in fact have a peer – of a different stripe. Such was the avidity of De Quincey’s collecting that at one point his library displaced his family from their home. But in the case of De Quincey, the fetishism of the literary was a theory as well as a practice. More specifically, De Quincey’s materialistic relations with literature coextend with the theoretical position on transcendentalism taken in the Confessions. Here, a picture of his youthful bibliomania – a surreptitious flight from Manchester Grammar School with a trunk of books – plays a central role in an ironic critique of both Kantian and Wordsworthian idealisms. These articulations of opposition in the theory and praxis of bibliomania recurred in one of its legacies, the Victorian literary society, the focus of the fourth and final 14 chapter. Instrumental in the construction of Romanticism during the Victorian period, clubs like Frederick J. Furnivall’s Shelley Society also continued the tradition of private printing begun by Dibdin’s collecting society, the Roxburghe Club. Two active members of several such clubs were the bibliographers and forgers Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) and Henry (“Harry”) Buxton Forman (1842-1917). The pair’s activities gained notoriety when rare first editions of works of Victorian poetry linked to them, including a famous edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Songs from the Portuguese, were identified as forgeries. In the context of a queer reading of their project and their legitimate as well as illegitimate works, I argue that Wise and Forman’s culture of imposture identifies Romanticism as an artifact of bibliomania. 15 Chapter 1: A Curious Hobby for “Ornamental” Gentlemen Sir David Brewster, editor of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia and a principal at St. Andrews University, was in 1838 in correspondence with the Rev. Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), a bibliographer who co-founded the Roxburghe Club, a book- collecting society active in Britain from 1812 into mid-century. In one letter to Dibdin concerning university policy, Brewster remarks, They cannot, perhaps, revive a sunken spirit of intellectual inquiry and activity – but they may afford a body for a vital and active spirit to inhabit. . . . The academical soldier should have his barrack, as well as the soldier of iron, and steel, and lead. (Brewster’s emphasis) In this excerpt from the letter, housed at the Huntington Library, Brewster makes what would likely have been read at the time, had it become public, as a provocative, even scandalous suggestion: the man of sensibility, not the classical republican warrior idealized in conservative discourse (“the soldier of iron”), should also have “his barrack.” In asserting the importance of attention to the material needs of the man of letters in this particular way, Brewster’s reference to the sensual lives of young men in the context of a discussion of Scottish public school policy, whether or not Brewster intended to conjure up an image of paiderastia, would have boldly contradicted the ideological underpinnings of widely held ideas about male love – such was the intensity, as Louis Crompton has argued in Byron and Greek Love, of both popular animosity and official policy directed at Britons who sought – in word or deed – an expansion of sensual possibilities or dared to act on same-sex desires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crompton, citing the rise in the number of executions of those accused of sodomy beginning in 1805 (159), has characterized the peculiar intensity of this 16 repression as an hypocritical form of “hysteria” motivated in part by the fear of editors of conservative periodicals, who were eager to portray the nation as a moral bulwark against the decadent influence of the French, of more sexual scandals among the English nobility (261). Brewster’s suggestive letter points to a neglected aspect of the British bibliomania, with which Dibdin, his correspondent, was closely associated, thanks to works such as his Bibliomania: or Book-Madness (1811, second edition 1842), that has been obscured by the prominent place of aristocratic connoisseurship in the history of cultural institutions such as the public museum and library. Bibliomania, as popularly conceived at the time, represented the controversial activities of a highly visible literary subculture organized around the consumption of the “book-object” (Ferris 1) rather than the production of literature. Corresponding to a “boom period” in the market for rare books between 1809 and 1826, popular interest in bibliomaniacs waxed and waned with the prices of old books (“Wedded” 1). Pathologized with varying degrees of seriousness, the rare book collector of the early nineteenth century had a problem. His (as Deidre Lynch has noted, these collectors tended to be men [“Wedded” 1]) was a desire for the “black letter” that was anti-social – a “book-disease” that was dangerous precisely because it could not be transmitted (1). Two recent critical studies of the British bibliomania place this figure at the center of a perverse new irony of the market for British literature: the construction of literature as a public resource, via the new genre of the anthology, ultimately depended upon the acquisitive practices of collectors like Richard Heber (1774-1833), the dedicatee of Dibdin’s Bibliomania and a collector who 17 owned over one hundred thousand volumes. Significantly, books were not Heber’s only “vice.” In 1824 he became embroiled in a sex scandal with a younger man, Charles Henry Hartshorne, which compelled Heber to flee from England to the continent, where he remained until 1831 (Sherbo). But if critics have noticed the anxiety stemming from the bibliomaniac’s perceived unproductive, selfish and acquisitive literary attachments, their acknowledgment of his pathology does not extend beyond the walls of his “closet.” Philip Connell argues that from the perspective of later writers such as Isaac D'Israeli (author of the multi-volume Curiosities of Literature) the bibliomania had the status of a noxious licentiousness that was basically metaphorical. If unalloyed by a healthy sense of obligation to the reading public, the collector’s privatization of literature was imagined to threaten the health of the culture. Ironically enough, the acquisitive practices of collectors like Heber and Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose library was bought by the state and placed in the British Museum, had helped bring this sense of a national cultural “heritage” (27) into being, because such collections were the source of the widely available, cheap reprints that began to appear in the late eighteenth century. As Deidre Lynch makes the point, the bibliomania was problematic because it “threatened the ideological sleight-of-hand that invited Britons to understand others’ private properties as part of the common stock of the national heritage” (4). In “‘Wedded to Books’: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists,” Lynch also explains the bibliomaniac’s popular status (as, as in D'Israeli's view, a “curiosity”) by situating the figure at the intersection of an emerging conception of the field of cultural 18 production (as a cultural commons) with the perceived elitism of the “book-disease.” In Lynch's words, “The etiology of this malady was a function of its exclusivity. The bibliomaniac preferred his books rare, savoring select volumes’ scarcity at the very moment when contemporaries were heralding the universal diffusion of reading” (1). An increasingly common sense of culture as, in Lynch’s terms, a “birth-right” (3) was facilitated by Becket v. Donaldson, the 1774 case that struck down perpetual copyright and enabled inexpensive reprinting and anthologizing. But Lynch also goes further than Connell, addressing the fact that the figure of the bibliomaniac, while a central player in a macroeconomic picture of the cultural field, also served the interests of a small group of newly professional writers. Tracing the affinities and tensions between the bibliomaniacs and another group of self-conscious lovers of literature, the Romantic essayists (“in effect the first professional lovers of literature” [9]), Lynch see these two figures as principals in a new, and newly psychodramatic, version of transmission, which reveals the “relocation of library culture . . . within the psychic territory of people’s intimate lives” (8). In this light, De Quincey’s self-conception as the claimant of Wordsworth’s transcendent fame (this, his “profound secret” [qtd. in Russett, 1], being De Quincey’s exclusive property) distinguishes his sense of his literary property from the “real capital” (Lynch 10) of aristocratic collectors. At the same time, however, De Quincey’s anxious possessivism in regards to Wordsworth suggests “a common unwillingness to conceive of books as something we might assimilate as pure mental phenomena, and a readiness to allow literariness to be effaced by the volumes that lodge it” (10). The minor writer’s brand of materialism is thus a symptom of his minority, which, as Margaret Russett has 19 argued, is the commodified (because proto-professionalized) counterpart of the evolving idealism naturalized in the “genius” of the “major” Romantic poet (Russett 2). Lynch’s analysis of the intimate relationship between reading and feeling in the early nineteenth century has produced important insights. Her suggestive readings of the fetishisms meditated upon by De Quincey and other so-called “minor” Romantics hint at the broader anxieties, evocative of a proto-Freudian economy of desire, that will be central to the discussion that follows. But I believe that the implications of the bibliomania extend beyond evolving conceptions of the canon and those who transmitted it. More specifically, I want to suggest that while the bibliomania has much to tell us about the ways that a newly professionalized class of writer thought about books and the possession of them, it also reveals the centrality of the book to an evolving conception of the sexual person and the modalities of this subject’s desire – a conception produced in an increasingly marginal sphere of the culture – namely, private, subscription-based book publishing. Furthermore, while love of the book may in some cases signify the minor’s “infantilized abasement” (Russett 1) to the major, in the process love becomes literary – literature, in other words, serves as the ground for the etiology of deviance. In his works, Dibdin is a diagnostician of and self-appointed authority on a pathology he facetiously terms the “book-disease.” And while he talks about “getting intimate with books” (to borrow Lynch’s apt phrase [21]), he also, bravely if not brazenly, tells a tale of book ownership startlingly evocative of desires that could neither be owned nor named. That some of his contemporaries and, evidently, he himself associated his circle with a personal style that exceeded any fetishism of the simply 20 literary is less important to me, however, than the implications of Dibdin’s stories of illicit desire for an understanding of the role of book collecting and the book more generally in the evolution of a modern subject of sexual desire. Hence, potentially anachronistic terms such as “sexuality” and “deviance” are essential to the analysis that follows. Such suggestiveness was not unique to Dibdin’s writings about the bibliomania. A popular image of the collector indicates that in much larger circles there was something sexually provocative about the particular materialism practiced by this homosocial yet, significantly, not uniformly aristocratic collecting subculture. In fact, the desires assigned to and articulated by the bibliomania (its “curious” interest in the merely transitory dimensions of culture – the “FOLDED LEAVES IMPRINTED” rhapsodized by Dibdin in a typically suggestive image from his long 1812 poem Bibliography [3]) suggest that the “empty” sensuality of the collector illustrates the existence of a repressive ideology presupposing a proto-modern conception of human sexuality. As such, the collector’s mode of desire can be thought of in terms of what Lee Edelman, in No Future, calls queerness’ threatening closeness to the surface of the Lacanian letter, the “cadaverous materiality” that gives away those “fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain [social reality]” (7). For Edelman this is a reality founded upon a “Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” (4) one of whose foundations is the representational idealism of the metaphysics of presence (to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak [xxi]) – the notion of the transparency of the signifier, in other words. Put another way, the bibliomaniac's fetishistic mode of consumption literalizes the prohibition linking the Real (the surface of 21 the letter) to the abject. In this light, the imagined deviance of the bibliomaniacs reveals a line of continuity between the semantic pregnancy of Western logocentrism and the “teleological determinism” (Edelman 9) of compulsive heterosexuality. But just as the “unnaturalness” of the Gothic was not simply an aspect of its reception (its early producers, including William Beckford and Horace Walpole, were very likely practitioners of the “unnatural” 1 ), the bibliomania served as a field for the articulation of Plato’s “heavenly type of love” (Gill 13). Just as there was something suspect about the Gothic and its producers, there might be something curious about the bibliomania and the bibliomaniacs. Bibliomania in the Periodical Press A flashpoint for interest in rare book collecting, the Roxburghe Club – a group of book collectors and bibliographers styling themselves “bibliomaniacs” – celebrated and participated in the culture of rare book collecting, including literary antiquities and rarities as well as the culture of the auction-house in the early nineteenth century. What is most striking about the group initially is the tone of its literary productions, accurately represented by the insouciant hyperbole of their name, which, as will be explained in the analysis that follows, implies a consumerist identity enfeebled by materialistic desire. The formation of the club was inspired by an auction still famous in book- collecting circles. After inheriting his family’s library upon becoming the fifth duke of 1 In Between Men, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that the ostensibly simply “homophobic” aspects of the genre stem from a paranoid style of self-representation on the part of “a group of authors (Walpole, Beckford, Lewis)” about each of whom “a case can be made . . . that he was in some significant sense homosexual – Beckford notoriously, Lewis probably, Walpole iffily” (92). 22 Roxburghe, James Innes-Ker put it up for auction in London in 1812. Included among the many incunabula was an edition of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, thought to be a first edition, printed by Christofer Valdarfer in Venice in 1471 (known as the “Valdarfer Boccaccio”). A bidding war between two aristocratic collectors present, Lord Spencer (George Spencer-Churchill) and the marquis of Blandford, drove up the price of this very rare “specimen” (Bibliographical Decameron ccxxi) to the unprecedented sum of £2,260 (Connell 24). The first meeting of the Roxburghe Club, intended to memorialize this auction, took place on June 17, 1812 (Buckingham? 2). Members of the club, as recorded by antiquary and club member Joseph Haslewood (1769-1833), included, at various times, Dibdin; the honorary president George Spencer-Churchill, fifth duke of Marlborough; George Granville Leveson-Gower, the first duke of Sutherland; the literature “enthusiast” and collector Sir William Bolland (Courtney); David Laing, an antiquary and editor as well as a member of the Society of Antiquaries and acquaintance of Walter Scott and John Gibson Lockhart (Simpson); Sir Francis Freeling, a book collector and postal administrator (Smith); Sir Mark Masterman Sykes, an “agriculturist and sportsman” as well as a book collector known for his 1469 “Rome Livy” (“Sykes”); John Dent, a politician and book collector who owned three Shakespeare folios and multiple quartos (Fisher); William Phelps, author of History and Antiquities of Somersetshire (“Phelps”); Sir Egerton Brydges, antiquarian, topographer, poet and novelist of spurious nobility who wrote a work of topography entitled Topographical Antiquities (Manley); Edward Vernon Utterson, a literary antiquarian and collector who edited multiple collections of 23 early English poetry and owned three Shakespeare folios (“Utterson”); William George Spencer Cavendish, the sixth duke of Devonshire and a collector of coins, medals and some entire, important libraries, including Roxburghe’s (Reynolds); Frederick Howard, Lord Morpeth, a politician, poet, and playwright and the guardian of Byron (Geoghegan); and Richard Heber, an expert on English literature consulted by Scott and Wordsworth, among others, and a collector whose library, famously large during his own lifetime, has been estimated to have contained between 145,000 and 150,000 books, manuscripts, and other items, spread across three countries (Sherbo). It has been estimated that Heber spent as much as one hundred thousand pounds on his collection, which spawned several popular editions of English poetry (Connell 28). Although initially social in purpose, the club also produced some antiquarian publications. This aspect of the club’s activities was outlined at the first meeting: “It was proposed and concluded for each member of the Club to reprint a scarce piece of ancient lore, to be given to the members, one copy being on vellum, for the chairman, and only as many copies as members” (Buckingham? 2). The first of the club’s publications was an edition of a sixteenth-century translation of books II and IV of the Aeneid (Courtney). Another reprint, Chester Mysteries (1818), was edited by J. H. M. Markland, an antiquary and member of the club from 1812-1845 (Richardson). Haslewood also edited “several,” according to the Athenaeum (1). These included an edition of Cutwoode's Calthea poetarum (1815) (Bell). The reputation of the club's publications varied, but their circle was the object of a moral opprobrium, both in public and in private, that has no relevance to the club's books and that surprises in terms of the strength of its invective. A long 24 anonymous piece in The Athenaeum that appeared in 1834, for example, used the posthumous and unintended publication of Haslewood’s Roxburghe Revels 2 (not itself a satire of the club, as has been erroneously asserted 3 , but rather a manuscript chronicling the club’s activities that was sold at auction following Haslewood’s death) as an occasion to ridicule the club at great length (across three numbers). It has been suggested that James Silk Buckingham authored the attack (Bell), to which the Roxburghe Club issued a privately printed reply in 1837 edited by James Maidment, a friend of Haslewood (Bell). The Athenaeum’s attack on Haslewood and the Roxburghe Club accuses the group of engaging in decadent social as well as cultural practices and implies that its members posed a threat to the health of the nation on a number of fronts. In fact, the bibliomaniac can be seen to be caught in cross-currents swirling around the question of the proper regulation of the body, a key stake in debates taking place in several areas of British intellectual life in the early nineteenth century. The implied decadence of the bibliomaniac illustrates this polyvalent interest in the matter of sensual life. For example, the article’s way of implying that their allegedly degenerate activities are anti-social simultaneously invokes both the image of the overly refined man of sensibility effeminized by capitalist modernity, and the Jacobin, the urban despoiler of communal and familial bonds associated with a differently excessive sensualism who was often 2 The full title of the MS as quoted in the Athenaeum reads: Roxburghe Revels; or, an Account of the Annual Display, culinary and festivous, interspersed incidentally with Matters of Moment or Merriment. Also, Brief Notices of the Press Proceedings by a few Lions of Literature, combined as the Roxburghe Club, founded 17 th June, 1812 (Buckingham? Viv). 3 See the DNB’s entry on Dibdin: “In certain circles the club became a joke, in part because of the worthless character of some of its early publications – of which it was said by Luard that ‘when they were unique there was already one copy too many in existence’ (DNB) – but in large measure because of Joseph Haslewood's posthumous satire entitled Roxburghe Revels, which appeared in 1837. None the less, Dibdin must be credited with being the originator of the English publishing society” (Richardson). 25 represented by the denuded (and usually female) body (Dowling 20). For contemporary commentators such as John Robison this revolutionary symbolism suggested the “sexual promiscuity” and runaway procreancy of the “urban mob” (Dowling 20), but it reflects anxiety in some conservative circles about regulation of the body, its contours and functions much more generally. The body of Madmoiselle Aubry, the French actress the exposure of whose breasts during the “Feast of Reason” of 1793 prompted the tendency to align the threat posed by the Jacobins with the female form (20), in this way represented an unmanly hyper-sensuality that encompassed the crowd, the social policies of the Reign of Terror, the poetry of the Cockney School, the Regent, philosophical materialism, and the discourse of sensibility. The article accuses bibliophiles linked to the club of practicing a polymorphously perverse materialism that simultaneously threatens the health of the national culture and transcends the issue of literature altogether. Descriptions of the club’s meetings attribute an irrational and gluttonous mode of behavior to these book collectors, who are more interested in “eating and drinking,” “gourmandizing and guzzling” than in the genuine “cause of letters” (2). Their perversion of literature to the impulses of a monstrous body reflects a fundamentally perverse yet alarmingly insatiable constitution: “It seems, that feasting and drinking once a year, and that to no ordinary excess, did not satisfy the appetite and thirst of some of the ‘Lions of Literature’” (45). The anonymous author conjoins this luxurious self-indulgence with the club’s more properly cultural offenses: “[T]he realm of letters is, ought to be, and always will be, a republic – an oligarchy is not only odious, but impossible to be preserved” (2). The acquisitive cultural practice 26 celebrated by the club – collecting – represents a threat to the national literary heritage, which ought to be a public rather than private resource, and the threat stems from a problem with the club’s mode of aesthetic appreciation – from their taste. But they have not simply taken the gustatory metaphor for the aesthetic disposition too literally. Their bad stewardship of the culture is a product of a bad cultural practice that in turn reflects a broader and deeper problem with their sensual lives – a problem with their desires. This deviant sensualism – a multivalent fetishism of literature reflecting the “impulses” of a monstrous constitution – appears alongside similarly shaded suggestions about the character of the sex practices and gender styles of the club’s members. Following an excerpt from Haslewood’s manuscript, the author intones – deploying a trope of vaguely suspicious preciousness – “All this is very curious and edifying, from the ‘pot quarto’ size of the reprints, than which nothing could be more appropriate, down to the ‘mighty Tom’ hour to which the soakers sat. On this occasion they consumed eatables and drinkables to the tune of 63l. 13s. 6d. ‘Lions of Literature,’ indeed!” (emphasis in original) (3). The stature of these so-called “lions” exists in inverse proportion to the luxuriousness of their indulgence in food and drink – the opposite, implicitly, of a properly virile man's taste. Consequently, the monstrosity of the Roxburghers extends beyond their transgressions of good taste and republican principle to include an effeminate preciousness redolent of the abject and the collectible at the same time. “[N]othing could be more appropriate” than the scaled-down (seven inches by six inches) format of the “pot quarto”: here the form of the miniature collectible and the logic of collecting itself (appropriateness as such) constitute a metonymy for the 27 excessively embodied existence of gluttonous “soakers.” Conjoined to this effeminizing abjection is a suggestion of an immorality that extends beyond any transgression of the dictates of the “'pure' gaze” (Bourdieu 3). Rather different desires are also attributed to bibliomaniacs in the piece. In Georgian England, still experiencing the classical revival (Crompton 85), the representation of effeminacy, a staple of the collector type invoked by De Quincey in the Logic, included reference to gender but also transcended it to encompass forbidden sexual practices such as paiderastia. Here the suspect sensuality of the effeminatus appears in the context of a sideways reference to the sexual scandal that enveloped the collector Richard Heber. As Arnold Hunt has related in a series of revealing articles in Book Collector, rumors of Heber’s affair with Charles Henry Hartshorne (1802-1865), who had paid visits to the collector and politician in London and Oxford in 1821 and 1824, began to circulate in 1824. These included a reference to the affair in the Tory periodical John Bull that made implicit reference to sodomy (later, Hartshorne, with the aid of Heber’s fortune, successfully sued the paper for libel). Subsequently Heber resigned from Parliament, where he had served as the member from Oxford, and fled to Europe (Sherbo). The Athenaeum refers to this scandal and, in the guise of reserving judgment, describes Heber in terms that suggest effeminacy, in the specifically classical sense of the effeminatus as described by Linda Dowling, a figure whose associations included immorality, martial inadequacy and deviance (Dowling 8): Mr. Heber . . . was a man of profound, as well as elegant scholarship – a gentleman by nature, as well as by education, but of a mind peculiarly and painfully sensitive, and, like many literary men, without that moral 28 strength which would enable him to meet a calumny of the kind, and which could only be repelled by being courageously encountered. (46) This portrait of Heber as an effeminate scholar does not simply imply that Heber is womanly. Nor does it simply associate him with unnatural proclivities. Instead, in the context of an invocation of the classical associations of “virtue” (the root of which is “vir,” Latin for “man” [Dowling 8]) with a martial form of masculinity, Heber’s lack of “moral strength” is the reason for his inability to meet the “calumny” circulated by his adversaries. The passage in this way implicitly constructs an opposition between this effete “literary [man]” feminized by his overly refined sensibility (one whose deficient masculinity is suggested by his description as “elegant” and “peculiarly and painfully sensitive”) and the ideal “gentleman,” who is unencumbered by Heber’s limitations; furthermore, this oblique reference to Heber’s rumored sodomy is permeated by martial diction and imagery. Significantly, the passage’s diction implies that if the field of British letters is a battlefield, Heber is, like the classical republican effeminatus, incapable of fighting on it – because of moral weakness, effeminacy, and sexual deviance. That the anonymous critic of Haslewood’s inadvertent memoir had such a specifically classical antecedent as the effeminatus in mind is further supported by the article’s characterization of the club’s meetings as “symposia” (emphasis in original) (45), a hint at the scandal enveloping Heber that could also point to the anonymous author’s familiarity with the roots of classical republican discourse in writers such as Machiavelli, Cicero and Aristotle (Dowling 7). Provocatively, the latter reference appears in the context of a reference to Hartshorne, referred to as the editor of a “curious volume” (45). Here the bibliomaniac’s term for a book’s desirability (“curious”) enables the author 29 neatly to align the bibliomaniac’s cultural practices and tastes with the possibility of sexual deviance – including sodomy. 6 The word’s multiple senses make such an alignment possible, integrating the bibliomaniac’s materialistic and sexual offenses. One current sense of “curious” was “of materials,” especially “fine” or “delicate” ones, while another, going back into the eighteenth century, was “strange, singular, odd; queer” (OED). The framework used to make sense of, and to make difference out of, this particular case of deviance has an ancient source, but it is a version of sexual identity nonetheless. Rather than a masculine type, Heber’s martial disqualification invokes a figure of central importance to classical republican discourse that encompassed both styles of comportment and modes of sensual life. As Dowling observes, Hellenism had a prominent role in conservative critiques of modernity beginning in the eighteenth century. Such criticism deployed the figure of the effeminatus, a figure who anticipates the Oxonian aesthete, the latter a type whose sexuality became at the end of nineteenth century, partly as a result of the trial of Oscar Wilde, one part of modern conceptions of homosexuality 4 . In its original, ancient manifestation, the classical effeminatus functioned as the negation of the classical republican warrior – comprising in this way (in the words of Linda Dowling), “the entire sphere of social existence” made up of those who could not fight (including “boys, girls, slaves, eunuchs, hermaphrodites, and all others 4 In Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Dowling claims that this conservative use of the figure of the effeminatus accidentally laid the foundation for modern conceptions of homosexuality in sexological discourse: “[T]he great and important paradox is that such works as Ward’s History and John Dunton’s ‘The He-Strumpets’ . . ., operating all the while within the classical republican category of ‘effeminacy’ in its symbolic relation to the warrior ideal, had nonetheless been helping to produce ‘homosexuality’ in the twentieth-century sense as an unintended effect of their own discourse” (11). 30 perceived as unsuitable to or incapable of discharging the martial obligation to the polis”) (8). Dowling has argued persuasively that conservative deployment of this figure in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in the context of Pope’s poetry, the Blackwood’s attack on the Cockney School, and Robert Buchanan’s diatribe again the Fleshly School of poetry in The Baviad, for example) reflected this fluid, “composite,” and “empty” (8) character of the non-warrior as constructed in ancient Greek culture. That the author’s imagery has such a specifically classical antecedent as the effeminatus, a category that in Greek society designated all those not qualified to serve the polis in the role of soldier, is further supported by the article’s characterization of the club’s meetings as “symposia” (emphasis in original) (45), a hint at the scandal enveloping Heber that could also point to the author’s familiarity with classical republicanism’s roots in ancient writers such as Machiavelli, Cicero and Aristotle (Dowling 7). Provocatively, the latter reference appears in the context of an introduction of Hartshorne, whom the author introduces by way of reference to the younger man’s editorship of a “curious volume” (45). Here the bibliomaniacs’ portmanteau term for a book’s desirability (“curious” 5 ), a word already laden with deviant possibilities, enables the author neatly to align the bibliomaniacs’ cultural practices and tastes with the possibility of sexual deviance – including sodomy. This usage of “curious” appears, tellingly, in nineteenth-century references to queer subcultures and pornography. Edward Ward has recorded a reference to the patrons of an eighteenth-century Mollies’ club as a “curious band of fellows” 5 This passage, from A Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821), is typical of such usage in Dibdin: “Having gratified our curiosity, as much as we were enabled, rather than as much as we wished, to do – we returned to the cabaret” (205). 31 (Weeks 36). The narrator of My Secret Life uses the word to describe his interest in sex: “During one period of this erotic frenzy, being as it happened by myself in town alone, I was there nearly every night. My curiosity was insatiable” (my emphasis) (Walter). In the article the figure of the effeminatus serves to imply that Heber’s masculinity is deficient, but in this context he is not simply a deficient man or even simply a man. The marks of gendered effeminacy (his elegance and sensitivity, for instance) refer a reader familiar with classical republican discourse to the deviance hinted at by those traits that “peculiarly” exceed gender – Heber’s eccentricities. These delicate depths, bad choices and martial inadequacies layer his femininity with a suggestion of moral culpability for an “unnatural” act hinted at by the language itself, which unfolds like so much of Heber’s own sinfully compromised body. In fact, the passage couches Heber’s personality in the ebb and flow of the act of penetration, opening with Heber’s suspicious emptiness (“profound, as well as elegant scholarship”), proceeding to outline his identity’s devious turns as if in doing so we tug almost violently at their ticklishly “sensitive” folds (“but of a mind most peculiarly and painfully sensitive”), and culminating in an image of (failed) martial congress that illustrates Heber’s inadequacy with an image of penetration (“which could only be repelled”). To label this a type of masculinity would blunt the force of the article’s insinuation of sodomitical criminality, fusing sex and gender in a way that would obscure the historical context informing these gendered hints at an unutterable kind of sex. Heber’s immoral sex life is intimately bound up with his masculinity but not exclusive or 32 equivalent to it. Paradoxically, this intimacy simultaneously speaks to a gap between his sexuality and his gender, a meaningful silence and pregnant emptiness. Gender, not sexuality, however, has come to dominate critical discussion of early modern sexuality. This trend has provided a helpful corrective to analyses overly reliant on ostensibly anachronistic categories such as the homosexual, a creature, as Foucault famously observes in a now rather shop-worn formulation from The History of Sexuality, of late nineteenth-century sexology. For example, Joseph Bristow, George E. Haggerty and others have used historically attuned conceptions of masculinity to complicate our understanding of the relationship between sexuality and subjectivity in periods prior to the appearance of categorical homosexuality in clinical discourse. Summing up this position succinctly in Men in Love, a study that provocatively seeks to recast expressions of homosocial affection in the eighteenth century as indicative not of protective camouflage but of a now-lost mode of “love” absent genital sex, Haggerty remarks, “the term sexuality had no currency in the eighteenth century” (114). Haggerty, following Foucault, describes the modern concept of sexuality as “a notion . . . that allows for an articulation of desire in terms of personal identity” (9). Although Haggerty is right to point out the anachronism committed in applying the terminology of sexology to literature written prior to 1870, Heber’s alleged deficiencies are not wholly reducible to any “codification of gender difference,” to invoke Haggerty’s methodological shelving of sexuality (3). 6 Haggerty offers the example of the indiscriminate tastes of Rochester – the 6 As Haggerty puts it in Men in Love, “The term sexuality itself had no currency in the eighteenth century, and most historians of sexuality now accept Foucault’s much discussed observation that: ‘the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment is was categorized – Westphal’s famous article of 1870 . . .’” (Haggerty’s emphasis) (1). 33 libertine being a crucible of interest in gender and sexuality among students of the Restoration and eighteenth century [6]). Rochester’s boastful poetic bedpost-notching and his notoriously broad palette (men, women, boys) indicate for Haggerty that something else, something other than a subject-defining desire, is at stake in Rochester-ness. But in recasting his sex in other terms we still cannot break the indissoluble ties that Rochester’s activities with his genitals have to his subjectivity, whether we discuss this relationship in terms of the exercise of power (as Haggerty does) or the stirrings of desire. Similarly to Rochester, Heber’s “unnatural” act defines him, even if the terms of this definition cannot safely be aligned with any contemporary sexual identity. But to consign the link between his identity and his deeds to the realm of the ahistorical is to choose to remain ignorant of the potentially different ways that genital sensuality has been conceived of in relation to subjectivity in the past. Rather than a lost form of “love,” Heber’s type is better understood, I would argue, as a lost form of sex. Furthermore, in spite of Haggerty’s ostensible interest in the operation of power, silencing the possibility of a conception of sexuality in the case of Heber elides power’s own soldering of sex and self in the person of the deviant. Such is the stuff of scandal, as in the rumors that led Heber to seek refuge on the continent following public notice of his rumored dalliance with Hartshorne (and this despite Heber’s wealth and standing), as well as of crime. From a different perspective, strategic use of the notion of sexuality (not homosexuality) allows us to sidestep another effect of power, the Platonic obfuscation required of those who desired (much less those who did) “curious” things at a moment when sodomy merited a death sentence. Given precisely Sedgwick’s observation of “the 34 fact of silencing as a high priority of homophobic culture” (Haggerty 12), it seems imperative to take pains to avoid perpetuating the dissimulating and sanitizing Oxonian eros. The range and scope of the article’s suggestive assaults on the virtue of the Roxburghe circle suggest a motivation prompted by, yet also expanding beyond, anxiety about those whose sensual lives transgressed against proto-heterosexist imperatives. In a “curiously” vague way, in other words, the piece expresses anxiety about such desire, including love between men, at the same time that this anxiety gets subordinated to a larger concern about the fiber of British culture – a field threatened by immorality, decadence and anti-republicanism embodied in the figure of the effeminate, materialistic collector. Not precisely a homosexual type, this collector, like Pope’s Sporus, a satirical portrait of Lord Hervey (Sedgwick 225) in the Epistle to Arbuthnot (Dowling 8), could nonetheless easily be mistaken for one, because, as Dowling notes, this figure is associated with proclivities that come to define the “Uranian” and the “invert” in sexological discourse at the end of the nineteenth century (Dowling 134). Although effeminate in terms of conformity to a traditional (misogynistic) association of femininity with delicacy and frivolity (“As shallow streams run dimpling all the way”), the specific multiplicity of the deficiencies of Sporus points to a figure whose deficient masculinity announces itself in sexual deviance. More specifically, Sporus’ inversion of the natural order (“And he himself one vile antithesis”) has a strong connotation of immorality (“vile”), or, more precisely, a lack of manly virtue (the possession of which the larger poetic context ascribes to the opposite of the type that Sporus represents: “Curst be the 35 verse, how well soe’er it flow, / That tends to make one worthy man my foe, / Give Virtue scandal, Innocence a fear, / Or from soft-ey’d Virgin steal a tear!”). In addition, like the effeminatus, he is empty (“Eternal smiles his emptiness betray”) and martially unqualified (“So well-bred spaniels civilly delight / In mumbling of the game they dare not bite”). Furthermore, Pope renders his embodiment so as to suggest a sexual life tinged with exceptionalism, deficiency, luxuriousness, abomination and animalism: “What? that thing of silk, / Sporus, that mere white curd of Ass’s milk?” (Pope 180-1). Such a type resonates powerfully with The Athenaeum’s description of the bibliomaniacs. But the bibliomaniacs’ self-representations, or at least the collector portrayed by Thomas Frognall Dibdin, suggest that, unlike Sporus, the bibliomaniac could also feature an extension of this embodiment to an interior life about which one could feel shame – an emptiness indicating not an animalistic hypersensuality but a troubled soul. Historical Contexts Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s works, in the genres of poetry, bibliography and bibliographical travelogue, illuminate the contours of not a differently masculine figure but a queer subject on the margins of the aristocracy, an individual defined by proto- homophobic projection, self-diagnosis, and subcultural affiliation. This individual is, in other words, strikingly similar to a sexual individual, a subject with a desiring problem and for whom desire is a problem that must be dealt with. In his case same-sex desire is mediated through the discourse of sensibility and the cultural practice of book collecting. It is worth emphasizing that in Dibdin’s hands the discourse of book-love occasions what 36 one might call, to adopt an admittedly Victorian locution, the premature flowering of the sexual “deviant,” a subject who understands himself in terms of transgressive desires that must somehow be self-managed, whether through sublimation or projection. The means of this accommodation is, in the case of Dibdin’s bibliomaniac, a pornographic discourse of book accumulation. In fact, the oddly extravagant sensualism characterizing Dibdin’s privately distributed bibliophilic works could easily be read in terms of coded proto- homosexual pornography but, as I will argue in what follows, more accurately points to an uncanny intersection of the discourse of sensibility with the repression of the body and its operations essential to a theorization of legitimate cultural consumption that emerges in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, Dibdin’s bibliomaniacal bibliography offers nothing less than the possibility of a new narrative of queer identity-formation. In addition, this narrative challenges reigning assumptions about the temporal and social coordinates of the beginnings of modern queer subjectivity, a subjectivity that is here intimately bound up with the theorization of cultural consumption. Inattention to the book collector’s role in the evolution of this subject cannot be blamed on the lack of a sexual theory of collecting. As Judith Pascoe has observed, Freud informs much of the theory and criticism dealing with collecting. In fact, for Pascoe the sexualization of collecting begins with Freud (this being the “legacy” of one who was himself a collector – of antique “figurines” that “likely faced him when he wrote the passages that would be used by others to pathologize the act of collecting” [8]), whose influence can be perceived in the most frequently invoked authorities on collecting, such as Susan Stewart and Jean Baudrillard. Hence, for Baudrillard the collecting habit is 37 symptomatic of a “regression to the anal stage, which is characterized by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention, and so on” (qtd. in Pascoe, 9). To this list one could add Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose Freudian reading of the dust heaps of Our Mutual Friend informs my own reading of Dibdin’s Bibliography, Bibliomania, and Bibliographical Decameron (in terms of proto-homophobic projection) below. But rather than glimpse the bibliomania through the prism of sex, I want to suggest that collecting in the nineteenth century was already a practice integral to the construction of a subject defined in terms of just such desire. This place of the book collector in the development of a modern sexual subject has also been obscured by a critical focus on his simply cultural transgressions (especially those related to his supposed wealth). But, as we have seen, the critical reaction to the subculture was not motivated exclusively by anxieties about the fate of the British literary heritage (at a moment when the notion of just such a public resource was gaining currency, as illustrated by the vogue in literary anthologies and scholarly editions of “classic” English texts [Connell 28]) in the face of the acquisitive practices of wealthy private collectors, as Philip Connell has argued 7 . Furthermore, Dibdin and Haslewood, for instance, were neither significant collectors nor aristocrats. These figures’ biographies aside, the prominence of the effeminatus in The Athenaeum’s review of Roxburghe Revels points to a class animus behind the attack the 7 Connell makes the point that the notion of an “English literature” emergent in the early part of the nineteenth century served a “socially cohesive function” at a moment of acute social fragmentation – by emphasizing “the catholicity of the English past” and fostering “in the upper classes . . . a sense of social responsibility” (28) – that at once depended upon the acquisitive activities of wealthy collectors, whose collections enabled the construction of the national literature via the literary anthology, and required those same collectors to behave as generous stewards of the culture. 38 specific contours of which contradict the presupposed gentility of this collector-type. But the anonymous author’s contempt for the Roxburghers has a context broader than that initially suggested by the piece’s snobbish mockery of Haslewood’s provincialisms and misspellings. Dowling has remarked in a related discussion that the appearance of the effeminatus in the culture of industrial England reflected conservatives’ anxiety in the face of “a dangerous and unappeasable social modernity, the mindless partisans of that revolutionary dissoluteness and ‘profligacy’ that in France had severed the bonds between parent and child, husband and wife” (13). This association of the figure with anxieties about subaltern modernity, supported by the employment of the effeminatus in The Athenaeum, demands a reconsideration of both the proper social context of the British bibliomania and the particular set of anxieties that the bibliomaniac mobilized. Critical discussion of the bibliomania has tended to focus on the cultural politics of aristocratic collecting. Although the bibliomania should not be seen as fundamentally divorced from the tastes and practices of aristocratic collectors, whose favor Dibdin aggressively curried in order to produce his expensive works 8 (and, it should be noted, many of these collectors subscribed to his publications), the critical response to Dibdin’s bibliography and his circle simultaneously invokes the stakes in another struggle taking place in a different cultural register. This tension lay between the destabilizing forces of 8 Even if Lord Spencer was for a time the guest of honor of the Roxburghers at their annual dinners, Dibdin, the club’s founder, appears to have been on the verge of starving while attempting to produce his lavishly executed books on books. This vulnerability reflects Dibdin’s awkward social position, a precarious marginality in relation to privilege illustrated by the unmanageability of his expensive productions. As recorded in an MS housed with other Dibdin letters and papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Dibdin estimated in 1838 the costs of the production of the first volume of his projected Northern Tour book (A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour of the Northern Counties of England and Scotland) at the grand sum of £2104. At the same time, the manuscripts paint a sad portrait of a cash-strapped author constantly in search of small sums to pay a disgruntled army of even poorer Edinburgh engravers. 39 an emerging modernity and a reactionary establishment drawing its rhetorical armor from the agrarian values of the classical republican discourse of ancient Greece. The bibliomania can thus be thought of just as, if not more, accurately in relation to the stakes in the reception of the Cockney School, whose representations of sensuality raised for Blackwood’s the specter of the Jacobins’ calls to destroy “private domestic life” (Dowling 25), than situated in what Connell, in his discussion of the British bibliomania, has referred to as “the genteel world of literary scholarship” (25), as accurate a description of the world of Dibdin, the orphaned son of a naval captain who graduated from Oxford as a commoner and probably died in debt (Richardson), as of Thomas De Quincey or Charles Lamb. Just as widespread fascination with the relic and the many popular periodicals whose titles invoke collecting (such as The Cabinet; or, Monthly Report of Polite Literature, The Museum; or, Record of Literature, and The Lady’s Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction [Pascoe 5]) illustrate that collecting was not exclusively an aristocratic habit 9 , the troubling sensualism of the bibliomaniac was not seen solely in terms of aristocratic decadence. This is in part because this “decadence” itself was so fluid and plastic, expanding beyond the boundaries of class (to become, if one accepts Jerome McGann’s thesis, the problem of the age 10 ). The dangerously empty sensualism associated by Blackwood’s 9 In The Hummingbird Cabinet, Judith Pascoe shows how such publications, along with obsessively collected Shelleyana (a guitar, a notebook, a sofa, a spyglass – even the poet’s heart) and Napoleonic relics such as the carriage that he left behind at the battle of Waterloo (85), illustrate a “popularization of collecting” (6) during a period not traditionally associated with collecting in the same way its “temporal bookends” the Renaissance (with its wonder cabinets) and Victorian period (with its museums, most notably the British) are (5). 10 In The Poetics of Sensibility, McGann argues that the revolutionary eighteenth-century discourses of “sensibility” and “sentiment” were informed by the notion that “no human action of any consequence is 40 with Keats and Leigh Hunt – this being of course an overtly class-inflected attack – finds an analogue in the figure of the aristocratic book collector, whose similarities to the effeminatus can actually be explained in part by the theoretical background and implications of his cultural practices (not simply his imagined social position or enabling privilege). Neil Kenny has argued that these practices originated in seventeenth-century France. By the eighteenth century in England bibliomaniacal practices were coming to be associated in some quarters with aristocratic decadence – the “luxury of literature” satirized in 1791 by Isaac D’Israeli in Curiosities of Literature (qtd. in Kenny, 254). This may explain the critical tendency to align the bibliomania and its constellation of figures and practices, as opposed to aristocratic collecting itself, with the practices of what was no doubt a small number of wealthy collectors. But the bibliomaniac’s materialism reflected a theory as well as a practice. More specifically, the bibliomania can be assimilated to a theoretical organization of culture displaced by the modern science of information in the eighteenth century. The former mode, illustrated not only by the bibliomania but also by bibliography, relied on a conceptual organization of knowledge in terms of space. In France this theory existed in a relation of unstable opposition to the emerging field of histoire littéraire, which, in Kenny’s terms, imaged books “as transcendent, idealized, and immaterial objects (inhabiting not particular spaces but rather time, whether a delimited period or a time line stretching back into the past).” The bibliomania, by contrast, from a modern perspective, possible – including ‘mental’ action – that is not led and driven by feeling, affect, emotion” (6). The poetics of schools such as the Della Cruscans and poets such as Thomas Gray represented a prominent cultural shift way from reigning philosophical convention that spawned the novel only to be effectively silenced by the criticism of T.S. Eliot in the twentieth century. 41 fetishized the materiality of the literary. Unlike histoire littéraire, it “was radically particularist. It constructed books as material objects existing in particular spaces, as surfaces” (256). The gradual “displacement” (258) of bibliomania by histoire littéraire corresponded, for Kenny, to a larger shift in the history of ideas in the West: modernity’s investment in the notion of historical disjuncture (in the sense, as theorized by Michel de Certeau, of a “separation of a dead past from a living present” [258]) led to the privileging of modes of intellectual inquiry that organized material temporally rather than spatially. In other words, as in the West knowledge came to be conceived of in terms of time, the cabinet (“curieux” or “de raretés”) gave way to the history (of ideas). Kenny has also noted a divergence between bibliomania and histoire littéraire along the lines of social space, with bibliomania being a practice in the context of which “distinction” accrued to the “private individual” – the owner of objects that signified in terms of private wealth and an individual’s “cultural capital” – and histoire littéraire being a case in which “the concomitant honor and distinction redounded on public, collective entities, especially the nation” (256). The collector’s problematic individuation is, then, doubly perverse – a form of accumulation at once decadent and deviant. This figure’s queerness illustrates the intimacy shared by sex and literature, a closeness revealing that sexuality is in an uncanny way literary – the hypostatization of the self as a signified. The bibliomaniac is undoubtedly not the only sexually charged bookish figure in the nineteenth century, and this is perhaps because of this odd coupling of subjectivity and culture at the origins of sexuality, suggesting that the epistemological liabilities and conundrums of the sign 42 coincide with an imagining of the sexual human in terms of representational crisis. As a result, in the bibliomania, in broad historical terms as well as the concrete particulars of the collectors’ practices, the materialization of the signifier is continuous with the “pervert’s” frustration of the teleology of the subject – an anality that has as much to do with “filthy lucre” (Brown 234) as it does with “development” and interiority, and as much to do with books as it does with sex. Furthermore, the waning of bibliography presents the same set of concepts and anxieties presented by the subject of sexuality: the construction of a “soul” inside a “surface,” the imposition of a chronological teleology positing the present as the apex of “growth,” the identification of the individual with the potential for an “unproductive” and “selfish” lifestyle. And this deviance blazes a straight line from Sporus to Heber. The former’s eroticized hyper-sensuality (his “emptiness”) speaks to the identification of personal wholeness with “depth” no less clearly than does the bibliomaniac’s sensuality. The latter’s “curious” hobby, conducted in the isolation of his library surrounded like Pasco’s Freud by all his fetish-objects, conjures up a whole host of repressive binaries organized along the axis of the sensual. The waxing of histoire litteraire calls to mind Michel Foucault’s now-axiomatic description, not of the creation of sexuality in the late nineteenth century, but, as discussed in Discipline and Punish, of the birth of “the modern ‘soul’” (29) in the context of technologies of domination. Foucault locates this modern conception of the subject, a theory that controls behavior through a new focus on the “pathological” or “healthy” condition of an interior self, at the intersection of the exercise of power and the production of knowledge about people, or “the incitement to discourse” (17), as Foucault 43 succinctly articulates this connection between power and knowledge in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Bibliomania’s eclipse by the spiritualizing discourse of literary history represents a development parallel to the production of “docile bodies” (Foucault 135), through the construction of fragile minds, in Western penal systems beginning at roughly the same time. As a consequence, at the risk of an oversimplification, the proper context of the gradual marginalization in modernity of bibliography (a field which has also been marginalized within English studies, it should be noted) should be seen not as fundamentally divorced from the domain of human sexuality, much less from more legitimate genres such poetry, but rather as precisely that broader conception and regulation of the body integral to the modern “disciplinary” regime so often invoked by literary critics interested in gender and sexuality. The tendrils of this abstract depth-model of subjectivity, “the prison of the body” (Foucault 30), weaved themselves throughout society, having perhaps roots in the prison (as illustrated by Jeremy Bentham’s penitentiary designs 11 ) but showing up also in the arts. The attack on Keats and Leigh Hunt in the pages of Tory Blackwood’s no less than William Gifford’s The Baviad (1791), which included an assault on the Della Cruscan movement 12 , exemplifies a hostility to cultural practices tainted either by contiguity with human sensual life, overly explicit representation thereof, or advocacy of an expansion of possibilities for sensual pleasure. To attempt to put the relationship between the eclipse of 11 These plans figure prominently in Discipline and Punish. Bibliography’s displacement by literary history and the anxiety about the Roxburghe Club evidenced by The Athenaeum reveal that Foucauldian “discipline” is not the exclusive property of the penal institutional, the hospital, and the law. 12 In The Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann has drawn welcome attention to Gifford’s screed, which is now little read but was initially famous (74). 44 bibliomania and the age of “discipline” in a nutshell, the collector’s fetishism of the literary coextended with the theoretical objectifications of bibliomania; as modernity’s “scientifico-legal complex” (23) imprisoned the body within the soul, to paraphrase Foucault, literary history constructed the literary as an essence prior to its material existence. Dibdin’s version of romanticism suggests that at least the literature of this period was, from a Foucauldian perspective, remarkably undisciplined. This lackadaisical cleric’s mock-heroic embrace of the degraded materialist practices of bibliomania and bibliography reflects an affinity with a highly visible cultural movement that was attacked for the prominent status it accorded the body and the high value it attached to sensual experience. This movement McGann has placed in the context of “a momentous cultural shift” (1) beginning in the eighteenth century. Although McGann’s focus in delineating this “revolution” (6) is on poetry – specifically, “the poetry of sentiment and sensibility” (2) as practiced by Thomas Gray, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his youth, L.E.L., Mary Robinson and others – sensibility and sentiment’s centrality to romanticism, so situated by McGann, suggests a broader reach for the emphasis on “affect” (7) and the troubling of the distinction between mind and matter evident in these movements. McGann in fact places their revision of “the traditional spiritualist view” (13) of mind and matter in the context of enlightenment thought, arguing that the “blush” emblematic of sensibility was a product of the shift first initiated by Isaac Newton’s physics and then taken up in John Locke’s quasi-materialist psychology. In this light, Dibdin’s materialist bibliography, and the British bibliomaniacs’ much-maligned inattention to the contents of 45 books, can be seen collectively not merely as a vestige of pre-modern information science or the outgrowth of an aristocratic cultural practice but rather as the flowering of modernity’s rejection of spiritualism and as romanticism’s privileging of affect (consequently it behooves us to keep in mind the perceived radicalism of Locke in conservative circles well into the nineteenth century). But Neil Kenny’s work shows that there was nothing fundamentally new in Dibdin’s objectifications of the literary. If avant- garde they were as culturally radical as Elvis Presley, a provocative sensualist if ever there was one but hardly an innovative musician – those were transgressions of social and geographical space (curious continental affectations) but not of time. Likewise, Sporus and his classical models show that there was nothing new in the trouble that the undisciplined body made for power – only in the way that disciplinary discourses functioned. In this light the degradation of the Roxburghers’ collecting habit in the press was not so much a populist reaction to conspicuous aristocratic consumption as a conservative response to an avowedly materialist and sensualist subculture. Bourgeois hegemony, with its market-inflected image of the self and the relations of this new subject with the world, and Tory conservatism alike could find much not to like in this group and its activities. Consequently, the rhetoric employed by the author of The Athenaeum piece is in turns populist, upbraiding the collectors for their enclosure of the literary commons, and snobbish, portraying Haslewood as an illiterate bumpkin trespassing on his betters’ property in his pretensions to culture (in this way echoing the Blackwood’s attacks on the Cockney School and invoking a long tradition of conservative reaction to sensibility). 46 Fittingly, the former’s set of references is overtly neo-classical, like Johnson and Pope’s, and, later, Eliot and Pound’s conservative critiques of sensibility and sentiment. The case of Haslewood is worth dwelling on. Mocked cruelly for his lack of privilege, this figure (a man “[s]prung from the humblest class” who “could scarcely open his mouth without committing an offense of some kind or other against his mother- tongue,” in the words of The Athenaeum [1]) points to provocative implications of the “affective charge” (to borrow a phrase from Ina Ferris [“Introduction” 1]) lent by Dibdin to cultural consumption, a stripe of the discourse of sensibility that deviates from the interests often associated with those who professed love for “the physical book” in the early nineteenth century (3). Welcome attention has been paid in recent years to the role of the book in the bourgeois individual’s accommodation to capitalist social structures. A collection edited by Ina Ferris, Wedded to Books, which sets out to understand how and why “the Romantic library identifies bookish spaces with intimacy and subjectivity rather than impersonal circulation” (1), reveals the centrality of imagery redolent of the library to the bourgeois subject’s negotiation of capitalist modernity (particularly the abstract rationality of the marketplace). The Romantics’ bookishness in this way runs parallel to the evolution of character in fiction also at the moment of industrial capitalism’s appearance. In The Economy of Character Deidre Lynch argues that at this historical moment fictional character takes the form it does (the form of interiority that we continue to recognize as character) out of a need for a “coping mechanism” for dealing with “the experience of a marketplace that was chock-full of strange new consumables that beggared description” (5). In Lynch’s view an epistemological crisis prompted by the 47 encounter with the commodity and the mass market more generally led to the construction of a form of selfhood that could reconcile the “ironies” (6) greeting the (bourgeois) individual, whose new self-conception as precisely an individual accompanied “a new determination to produce lines of demarcation between classes of readers” and whose “pursuits of self-fulfillment [would] unfold in the impersonal space of the market” (Lynch’s emphasis) (6). Hence both character and book (the latter at this historical moment a newly “interiorized object,” in Ferris’ view [3]) took the form of symptoms of capitalism’s inducing of a crisis of representation on the level of the self. But the book in Dibdin, as the analysis of his poetry and prose that follows will show, is the opposite of an “interiorized object.” In fact, it is strikingly, even aggressively, the opposite. Dibdin’s bookishness does eroticize the book but does not lend it interiority or, by such means, use it to allegorize an individual’s encounter with the abstract communities emergent with capitalist exchange. This different form of book- love, I would argue, reveals a different position in relation to those forces that make the book-love of Charles Lamb, as Ferris views the “shivering folios” and “sullied leaves” of that bibliophile’s essay “Detached Thoughts,” “animate” (Ferris 5) his books. Though an object rather than a subject, the book in Dibdin’s bibliomaniacal discourse nonetheless traces the contours of an interior mental space. This subjectivity is defined by a desire that is represented not directly, as in Lamb’s anthropomorphic and allegorical books, but through a prismatic lens of projection and displacement. Placing the bibliomania in the culture of romanticism, as opposed to the transhistorical movement of capital, I will argue in the following section that Dibdin’s 48 productions are marked by a remarkably explicit homoeroticism (as well as by homophobia) and by a representation of queerness in terms of subjectivity and subcultural identity – terms that are traditionally associated on the one hand with later developments in the conception of sexuality and on the other with a different social stratum. Furthermore, while evoking what we now call sexuality, Dibdin’s collector’s practices simultaneously transcend the issue of individual sensuality altogether, linking his marginalized productions and subculture with a cultural movement central to romanticism. Bibliomaniacal Effusions LISARDO: Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream? PHILEMON: Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it. Look you! Are not these vastly pleasing specimens of their kind. ... It is time to rise, and put our specimens away. – Thomas F. Dibdin, The Bibliographical Decameron Although filled with errors both factual and typographical, Dibdin’s “peculiar branch of research” (Anon.) is credited with a major innovation in the field of bibliography: the introduction of “the principle of first-hand examination of books” (Richardson). Dibdin’s innovative attention to the materiality of the copy – the binding, paper, and illustrations – corresponds to a marked sensualism characterizing the bibliomaniacs’ mode of appreciation of antique books more generally. As such, Dibdin’s bibliography amounts to a literary instantiation of the bibliomaniacs’ cultural fetishism as well as, hence, a neglected strand of the discourse of sensibility. In addition, Dibdin’s 49 bibliographical and poetic productions illustrate the contours of an erotic homosocial subculture organized around the acquisition of luxury goods – a proto-homosexual affiliation in which initiation, secrecy and guilt are tropes in the representation of a materialistic impulse evocative of anal eroticism. Neither purely aristocratic nor precisely homosexual, Dibdin’s images of book “enthusiasm” nonetheless suggest a male subcultural queerness that cannot be reduced to mere friendship. Despite its continuity with bibliomania, in his works Dibdin seeks to distinguish the practice of bibliography from the materialistic practice of rare book collecting. A privately circulated poem by Dibdin entitled Bibliography: A Poem (1812) (the first and only volume of six projected, “not published” and printed in “fifty copies only,” according to the title page) offers a glimpse at both the sphere of aristocratic collecting and collecting fandom that inspired the Roxburghe Club as well as Dibdin’s effort to differentiate his particular sensualist discourse from the practices of collectors, a distinction which affords him, however intentionally, the opportunity to express a transgressive eroticism. The poem narrates the development in a young man (Palermo) of an appreciation for the “London Pleasures” (141) of “LITERARY CONVERSE social” (143), an urban, homosocial sphere of sensuality rendered in imagery evocative of ancient culture that, like many narratives of queer self-realization, is shown to require initiation and to constitute a fall from social propriety. The scene of Palermo’s entrance into this male world of sensual delights (“the bliss” [145] of a life lived among “BOOKS, / And those that vend them” [143-4]) is “a sale / Of curious BOOKS, by AUCTION” (158-9). As 50 Palermo views the “curious” lots he develops a new taste, a disposition towards the heady (and orientalist) pleasures of bibliomania: “First comes a splendid lot, in coat of Tyrian dye / (Morocco purple, by the vulgar call’d) / And burnish’d gold; which, as th’ assistant shews / In order round, throws far its glittering hues / To tempt the unwary. / Quick PALERMO speaks, / And hopes to’ obtain the prize.” (164-9). But in order to enter into the “genuine” (287) appreciation of “LORE CAXTONIAN” (279) (bibliography), Palermo’s initial infatuation, which alienates him and provokes guilty feelings (“Enamour’d much of books, and of their worth” [255], he wanders the streets aimlessly in a “pensive mood” [252] after the sale), must be tempered by a different mode of consumption. This end is accomplished by a visit to another vender, “the BIBLIOPOLIST” (275), who provides Palermo with a “pile . . . of such needful books, / And elementary, as teach the mind, / Unfledg’d, to clothe itself with plumage fit / For flight of” bibliography (276-9). Palermo’s initial fall into the sensual pleasures of book collecting is in this way purified by a practice characterized, rather oddly, not in terms of the mind (although the “mind” [277] is invoked) but rather as a merely different form of embodiment. Palermo must change his “plumage” – find the “fit” costume – for bibliography, the mind’s embodied experience of rapid, unrestrained movement through space. This is indeed a “flight” (279) of fancy, one that paints a picture similar to that of the subject described as luxuriant, hypersensual and “empty” (Dowling 8) in the discourse of classical effeminacy – at the same time that its rendering of intellectuality makes this indistinguishable from sensuality. Critics have identified such conflation of 51 mind and body as characteristic of the discourse of sensibility. 13 But in addition to making matter into mind, Dibdin has invited his reader to anticipate in Palermo’s story a teleological movement away from the “bliss” of forbidden physical pleasures towards its ostensible opposite (the scholar’s life of the “mind”). What the poem provides is a refusal of that very possibility, however. While employing the language of the asymmetric mind/body dualism and gesturing towards the transcendent – with the gesture toward the imagination implicit in Palermo’s flight and his ostensible intellectual growth – Dibdin employs a logic of symmetry in which Palermo’s intellectual development is a lateral movement between forms of embodiment. Furthermore, as interiority is made manifest in the (literal) trappings of exteriority, an ostensible narrative of bildung is frustrated by stasis and circularity. Following Edelman one might term this a self-conscious poetics of “abortion” (Edelman 7), which in this case is continuous with its subject, a cultural practice that fetishizes the means of literary production and prefers a sensualist cultural practice to the spiritualizing representational idealism crucial to the concept of reading and the reproductive futurism implicit in valorized intellectual labor. Complicated by the discourse of sensibility in this way, Palermo’s conversion to bibliography also illustrates the connection between shame and bibliomaniacal desire in Dibdin’s works, a pervasive trope. The symptom of the book-disease is an illicit, homosocially acquired taste for the “merely” sensual that must be outgrown and unlearned. The trope of illicit, nonproductive sensation associated here with the bibliomania extends to the scene of Palermo’s awakening to the joys of bibliography: 13 In Men in Love, Haggerty notes the tendency of Laurence Sterne to portray this duality as a self- destructive pathology: “Sterne and other writers of the Age of Sensibility are opposed to the mind-body duality that paralyzed the previous age in a ritual of self-negation” (87). 52 . . . Thus, He gradually felt within the’ electric spark That sets on flame the’ enthusiastic mind To ancient lore devoted: and he own’d That he should love such curious tomes to gain, Which, with quaint colophon of time and place And printer’s name, spake something to the soul Resistless, and delightsome. Now his heart ‘Gan flutter at an impulse he before Was utter stranger to. (303-12) Upon a first reading, there is something almost uncannily sexually suggestive about such a passage – exemplary of Dibdin’s style – due simply to its odd excessiveness, a hyperbolic bibliophilic rapture tinged with the heroic as well as the erotic. As in the auction-house passage here again we see the conflation of mind and body (the sensual [“Resistless”] “delight” experienced by the “soul”) and the trope of guilty and secret sensual initiation (“an impulse he before / Was utter stranger to”), in which overt and illicit sensuality is linked to collecting, but the emphasis on the possession of “curious tomes” is new (the pun “own’d,” “he should love . . . to gain”) (my emphasis). Additionally, Palermo’s coming into sensual knowledge of the world of bibliography is rendered not only in terms of bodily excitation but also in overtly phallic terms (“flame” and “spark” – although the heart’s “flutter at an impulse” implies a similar kind of sensual excitation). Palermo’s loss of innocence is imaged, then, as the tumescent stirrings of a desire, significantly, for things and in the terms of a discourse of sensibility instrumental in positing a representative (homosocial) subcultural type defined in terms of illicit desires. This phallic possessiveness suggests what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in the context of a classic reading of Our Mutual Friend, terms “anal eroticism,” or the Freudian 53 “pleasures, desires, bonds, and forms of eros that have to do with the anus” that include “love between man and man” and “material accumulation” (Sedgwick 164). Sedgwick is here invoking Freud’s theory, articulated first in “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908), to the effect that certain character traits are the products of the sublimation of repressed sexual impulses involving the anus. In the case of individuals “with a sexual constitution in which the erotogenicity of the anal zone is exceptionally strong” (294), Freud says, orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy (these three traits making up the “anal character” [297]) may be the “results of the sublimation of anal erotism” (295) following the repression of sexual urges related to this erogenous zone. Whereas Dickens’ dust heaps point, for Sedgwick, to “a wholly abstracted anality” (165), an aspect of the novel’s homophobia absent homosexuality, here the literary commodity (neatly hinted at by the “quaint colophon,” which embodies and winks at its own status as an object of wishful acquisition evocative of the colon) synecdochically expresses a form of sensuality that is a shared anal secret. This homosocial and acquisitive sensuality is, in other words, at once sublimation and suggestion. While not expressive of homosexuality per se, this sensuality’s particular compulsive displacement (onto the world of things and their accumulation) insists that we see its sensualism in genital terms, rather than as the then- acceptable enunciation of a different, now-lost form of non-genital homosociality. In addition, this scene of proto-homophobic displacement implies a subject for desires that must be projected and sublimated – managed, in other words, by a subject who identifies these desires (shameful “impulses” and “desires”) all too closely with his sense of himself. 54 The Bibliomania 14 (1811, privately printed), a highly facetious, innuendo-laden diagnosis of the “inconquerable [sic] disease” (1.74) of book collecting and its “ravages” (1.34), provides an even clearer example of the sublimated anality embedded in Dibdin’s ejaculatory bibliophilia. Following a list of the various “passions” of the bibliomaniac (including, of course, “a general desire for The Black Letter” [1.44]), Dibdin waxes on the sublimity of the phallic spectacle of the uncut antique tome: “[Y]our UNCUT HEARNES rise up in ‘rough majesty’ before me, and almost ‘push me from my stool’” (1.46). One wonders at chronically erroneous Dibdin’s failure to invert “from” and “me.” Dibdin’s The Bibliographical Decameron 15 (1817, offered by subscription) articulates more explicitly the subcultural and homosocial genital sensualism hinted at in Bibliography’s construction of an imaginary anal community. In this text, genital sensuality is central to bibliography’s fatal power over the passive subject of bibliophilic desire. The phallic imagery introduced in that poem appears here throughout, in the form of frequent reference to “the pencil of the artist” (clxiii), and “the scepter” of the bibliophile (cxcix). Also familiar is the trope of guilty homosensual initiation that likewise appears here: FIVE summer suns have shed their kindly influence upon the vine which mantles LYSANDER’S cabinet-window, since the first visit of his bibliomaniacal friends. During this period the conversion of LISARDO to bibliography has been rapid and complete. (iii) Lisardo’s initiation, unlike Palermo’s, constructs the consequential influence of 14 The full title reads: Bibliomania, or, Book-madness: A Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts, Illustrated with Cuts. 15 Dibdin’s full title is: The Bibliographical Decameron, or, Ten Days Pleasant Discourse upon Illuminated Manuscripts, and Subjects Connected with Early Engraving, Typography, and Bibliography. 55 bibliography in terms strikingly similar to those that, much later in the century, inform literary representations of a homosocial sensibility resembling modern queer subjectivity. In fact, Lisardo’s narrative calls to mind the impact on Dorian Gray of his fateful introduction to Lord Henry Wotton in Basil Hallward’s sun room in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Like Dorian’s fatal indoctrination into aestheticism (fatal because he is in fact a bad student of Wotton, whose sensibility Dorian abuses precisely by practicing the theory), Lisardo’s entrance into bibliography is presented as a subcultural rite of passage determinate on his personhood, a form of subjectivity (a spiritual transformation [“conversion”] that is total in its penetration [“complete”]) that, as such, gestures toward the late nineteenth-century discourse of sexology, with its categorical sexualities such as the Uranian, and Foucauldian scientia sexualis in general. In describing a couple’s engagement, to cite another example, one reads, “[S]ome other symptom, wholly different from any thing connected with the Bibliomania, had taken possession of their gentle minds” (emphasis original) (iv). (This “other symptom” is “LOVE.”) Clearly the representation of this proto-homosexual subjectivity goes beyond simple sexual innuendo, much less the gendered effeminacy that might mistakenly be gleaned from “gentle minds.” Emerging here are the pathologized contours of a queer subject, like Dorian, prominent in whose symptomology are transgressive cultural practices (remember that Dorian is also a book collector). In addition, recalling the discourse of sensibility is again instructive. Perhaps this movement’s radical deconstruction of the mind-body dichotomy implicitly demanded the transgressions of its own boundaries as a cultural movement, the literary spiritualization of matter leading, as 56 sensibility’s own logic dictated, to the materialization of literature under the sign of sensual liberation. (Or, leaving aside the question of the determinacy of this movement in the queerness of bookishness, one needs only to observe the position of the bibliomania in relation to the larger repression of the sensualism articulated in, for instance, the poetry of the pre-Raphaelites and the Cockney School. In view of these movements, bibliomania was the praxis of early nineteenth-century sensibility.) In this light, the gothic horror of Dorian’s materialization of Lord Henry’s aestheticist discourse speaks to a long tradition not just of the conjoining of sensualism and homophobia in the gothic but also of the displacement and sublimation of queer desire within the discourse of sensibility, one of the neglected dimensions of which is Romantic bookishness. The flip-side of Keatsian sensualism was, then, the bibliomania’s characteristic “sinthom” (to borrow from Lacan’s lexicon) – the puncturing by queerness of a representational idealism that would subordinate the present to the future and “surface” to “substance,” or, in Lee Edelman’s terms, queerness’ “reducing [of] every signifier to the status of the letter” (37). Hence one finds a curious conjoining of literary matter with sexual deviance in the figure of Vanity Fair’s effeminate Sir Pitt (“a man of books” [569]), whose “secret ambition” relates to “pages of a malt pamphlet” (570), whose long courtship of Jane he conducts “without the slightest impatience,” and whose habit is to “be found in the dark very busy with his pamphlet” (421) in the dining room after dinner. Here the “secret sin” of masturbation, viewed by some in the nineteenth century as a kind of gateway deviance (“the narrow gate through which nameless dangers could pour” [Weeks 25]), is continuous with the materiality of the literary, the “pages” of 57 Pitt’s “pamphlet.” According to the Pauline logic of heterosexist discourse, literary materialism is queer. Dibdin’s works suggest a self-consciousness regarding sensibility’s objective and subjective queerness. On the one hand, there is the already noted trope of curiosity, which, while hinting broadly at the extra-literary queerness of the desires and pleasures circulating in the subculture, places Dibdin’s own tastes at the margins of society. In A Bibliographical Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany (1821), Dibdin describes himself as the possessor of a “strange . . . genius” (127). This quality is symptomatic of a quasi-sexual sensual exceptionalism: “You know with what pertinacity I grope about old alleys, like Harry Dyson of old, (according to Tom Hearne’s account of him) ‘a person of a very strange, prying, and inquisitive genius, in the matter of books’ – in the search of what is curious, precious, and rare in the book way” (127). (You know, “in the matter of books”!) On the other hand, there is the consistent alignment of bibliomania with the private “researches” (184) of a subject relegated to a self-policed obscurity and invisibility regarding his unusual tastes. About a potential club-member Dibdin remarks, “M. Duputel is smitten with that amiable and enviable passion, – the love of printing for private distribution – thus meriting to become a sort of Roxburghe Associate” (155). Along the same lines there is frequent invocation of “silence,” as in this passage about a trip to Rouen, France: We have silently, but sincerely prayed, that swords may for ever be ‘turned into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks’: – that all heart- burnings, antipathies, and animosities, may be externally extinguished; and that, from henceforth, there may be no national rivalries but such as tend to establish, upon a firmer footing, and a more comprehensive scale, 58 the peace and happiness of fellow-creatures, of whatever persuasion they may be. (my emphasis) (183) This depiction of difference invokes nationalism only to subordinate it to an unspecific and internalized kind of deviance redolent of taste (a “persuasion”) that manifests itself in matters of the heart (“heart-burnings”). Not surprisingly, the peaceful accommodation of such difference must be “silently, but sincerely prayed” for. In the same text, a subsequent description of the bibliomaniac’s curious pathology extends this trope of self-diagnosed illness and exceptionalism while constructing a suggestively homophobic hierarchy of collecting practices: [L]et me entreat you, if you already begin to feel symptoms of a passion to become owners of such volumes as those which have just been described . . . The great error of the young, or what are called green, Collectors, is, that, having once inflamed their fancies, and mustered their means, to adorn their shelves with Missals . . . they incautiously and indiscriminately purchase every thing in this shape which comes in their way. (Dibdin’s emphasis) (117) The sign of this stunted or retarded other collector (“green,” “young,” in “error” and at the mercy of their “inflamed . . . fancies”) is the anal desire for anything and everything. Whereas this sublimation has been integral to Dibdin’s representation of collecting in general, here the collector’s inflamed fancy is posited as the teleological precursor to, or the youthful other of, the discriminating collector’s refinement. Hereby the passage evacuates collecting of its anality (the compulsive desire to accumulate that is implied by the young collector’s lack of caution and discrimination) only to project it onto the practices of the “young.” This other’s desire is not only an immoral (“error”) and uncontrollable but also an anal impulse – specifically, the possessivism of the consumer. This “green” collector’s infantile and polymorphous perversity (his hypersensual and 59 tumescent “fancy”) is the irresistible anal compulsion of the consumer who wishes not simply to own but to “purchase every thing.” The sublimation of anality is in this way instrumental in a proto-homophobic construction of difference in the context of the construction of a hierarchy of collector types. In Bibliomania, a similar hierarchy positions the collector below the “manly” (7.7) scholar. Here the collector’s effeminacy is associated not with a gender style but with the suggestively homoerotic activities of a subculture – in keeping with classical republican effeminacy. 16 But Dibdin’s parable of Menander could easily lead one to misconstrue this effeminacy for one anticipatory of Bristow’s reading of the Oxonian aesthete as popularly conceived prior to the Wilde trials – a gender style distinct from any proto-homosexual type. Menander, for example, occasions a reference to Romantic sensibility (he is the unfortunate possessor of an “over-refined sensibility” [7.7]), but rather than imply same-sex desire or love (or any form of deviant sensuality), he seems to offer only an image of enfeebled masculinity. Though as a respected scholar he was on a “manly course,” his “quick discernment” and “never ceasing play of colloquial wit” were his eventual undoing. Now, “fairies” (7.7) adorn his grave. While in the light of other similar narratives in Dibdin (such as Lisardo’s initiation into collecting in the Tour) a subtle implication of abnormal proclivities can be discerned in Menander’s lack of self- control, any suggestion in this vein here is very faint. The genital dimensions of the collector’s effeminacy are sharper in the case of another figure, Gonzalo, an associate of “perverts” whose “effeminate vanity” is the consequence of proto-sexual immorality 16 In Effeminate England, Joseph Bristow argues that in England effeminacy does not become conjoined to genital queerness until the Wilde trials. The Roxburghe circle as represented in Dibdin’s works offers the possibility that at least in some quarters this connection predated Wilde by nearly a century. 60 (specifically, the “foppish” [7.18] wastage of his intellectual “strength” [7.19]) and the symptom of a pathology (Gonzalo exemplifies how one can “undermine one’s health” [7.19]). Gonzalo’s narrative is interpolated in a conversation between two other characters, Philemon and Lysander, fellow sufferers of Gonzalo’s malady. Their story, suggestively outlining a homoerotic relation, offers Dibdin the occasion to represent queer desire while displacing this affect onto the deviant figure of the bibliomaniac, contrasted in this text to the bibliographer, he of robust, untainted virility. Their discourse, taking place over the course of a long walk, culminates in a thinly veiled image of same-sex eroticism. Following their conversation, which has “exhausted” them, they retire. Rather bizarrely, Dibdin specifies that “[e]ach had his chamber assigned to him.” Nonetheless – somehow – “sweet were their slumbers till the morning” (7.20). But a stunning innuendo accompanies their reintroduction the following day, because the sun greets our heroes together in the same “cabinet” (7.23), where they resume their catalogue of the bibliomaniac’s scandalous tastes. Here the discourse of sensibility occasions continued homophobic projection, as Lysander says that he wishes to satisfy “an appetite of a different kind” (7.26), aligning bibliophilia with a literally unmentionable desire. Such sublimation and projection exists in tension with aspects of the Tour that seem to verge on intentional homoerotic innuendo. More specifically, aspects of its treatment of the symptoms of bibliomania seem to use innuendo to hint very broadly at eros. For example, a trip by Lisardo and Philemon to the Harleian Library affords 61 dialogue (in the form of the Platonic dialogue, significantly) that is almost worthy of the author of My Secret Life. Referring to rare books as “cream,” Lisardo asks fellow bibliomaniac Philemon for a “taste”: LISARDO: Can you indulge us with a sip of this cream? PHILEMON: Fortunately it is in my power to gratify you with a pretty good taste of it. Look you! Are not these vastly pleasing specimens of their kind. (ccxi) The period provides us with support for seeing suggestive connections to genital sex in such dialogue. As The Romance of Lust, a well-known Victorian pornographic text, illustrates, “cream” had sexual connotations during the century: “On this last occasion Miss Frankland said she must gamahuche me, as she delighted to break her fast on cream. The joke amused the two girls amazingly” (Romance). But I do not want to read such language in Dibdin simply in terms of intentional sexual suggestion – however real the possibility of such intent may be. Instead, I want to draw attention to what Dibdin’s bookish pornography reveals about the relationship between sensibility and the repression of consumption in Romantic literary theory. In one of the founding documents of modern critical theory, the “Preface” (1800, 1802) to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth erects standards for legitimate cultural production upon the repressed foundations of the mass market and its logic. While constructing, of course, a standard of consumption, of “taste” (243) – and in this way seeking to “create the taste” according to which he will be judged, as Wordsworth would later describe the relationship between poet and audience in the “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1815) – Wordsworth renders monstrous consumption itself, describing the market and consumers in terms of a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” and 62 the “craving[s]” of a public presently inclined to be “savage” (249). Ostensibly focused on a specific type of poetry (on “counteract[ing]” an “evil” tendency manifesting itself in affected, rather than truly imaginative, verse), Wordsworth’s text posits legitimate poetry as the opposite of the readily available mass-produced literary consumable – as a product of the imagination that transcends the physicality of the product in order to speak immediately to the mind. Hence the body and its operations (including degraded “appetites” [246] and “stimulants” [248]), not simply the social collective and artificiality, poke through the screen of Wordsworth’s Christological dedication to “flesh and blood” (250). That an abstract ecological construct (“nature” [248]) is here the fetish of the body, through which the real becomes available to the poet and his audience, reveals the process of reification at work in Wordsworth’s displacement of cultural materiality onto the diseased body of the consumer. In other words, Wordsworth’s reconciliation of the contradictions of the market – his particular “coping mechanism” (Economy 5) for dealing with the problem of mass-produced culture – only differently reifies the book. Rather than interiorize the book-object, Wordsworth’s anti-bookishness transubstantiates the process of consuming it, rendering the act of consuming good poetry akin to the immaculate consumption of Christ. Dibdin’s rhapsodic descriptions of cultural consumption strike us as pornographic in part because they render explicitly in terms of conspicuous consumption – and hence materiality and the body – what the ideological metaphors operative in canonical nineteenth-century literary theory render as the transcendence of the marketplace. When Dibdin hilariously literalizes taste, for example, in the above exchange between Philemon 63 and Lisardo, the passage’s strange suggestiveness comes in part from its uncovering of the repressed foundations of the legitimate discourse of taste, whose naturalizations (“cream of the crop”) usually refer to insides (of products or their creators) rather than outsides. Dibdin’s perversion of the ideology of cultural legitimacy is in this way doubly queer – the soulless, objectifying discourse of a subject objectively lacking a soul. Paradoxically, in the process of representing, through the negations of projection and displacement, an empty subject of secret desires (in Pauline terms a multiply heretical materialist – conspicuous consumer, pervert and man of sensibility), Dibdin’s bibliomaniac bodies forth the whisper-thin outlines of precisely the soul of this new, juridico-medical subject of power, the deviant. 64 Chapter 2: The Punk Style of Charles Lamb, Book Collector As Dibdin and his club of collectors illustrate, bibliomania lay astride more than one active social fault line in early nineteenth-century Britain. On the one hand identified (and in Dibdin's case self-identifying) with an ostensibly monopolistic and aristocratic practice at odds with some democratizing consequences of mass cultural production, bibliomaniacs also triggered sexually phobic representation in venues such as The Athenaeum. In addition, Dibdin's biography implies the limitations of any generalization to the effect that an appreciation for literary relics correlated very strictly with aristocratic status. As Philip Connell rightly notes, the newly sacralized antique book (qua object) did indeed “captivate some of the very wealthiest men in Romantic Britain” (this is after all the kind of collector Dibdin writes about), but the less well-off practiced their own forms of bibliophilia, duplicating with a difference their practices and discourses (Connell 25). An alternative expression of book-love appears in periodicals such as London Magazine, whose contributors, such as De Quincey and Charles Lamb (the “hero” of the London) were not aristocrats. 1 A consciousness of the economics of culture seems to explain the collecting style of Lamb, an important early nineteenth-century prose writer. Lionized during his own lifetime, in part for a series of magazine essays written under the nom de plume “Elia,” Lamb has since been relegated to the status of a “minor” Romantic. But his bookish aesthetic, which has been largely ignored by critics, sheds light on intersections between bookishness and the self-conscious elaboration of a “minor” professional writer's identity. 1 E.V. Lucas quotes the Irish poet Thomas Moore, contemporary of Lamb’s, to this effect in the standard biography of Lamb (102). 65 An “Ungentle” Collector Lamb, the son of a scrivener and housekeeper’s daughter (Prance 185, Lucas 1: 4), could only tenuously claim membership in the middle class. A classmate of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s at Christ’s Hospital, Lamb, who, in addition to attempting drama and poetry, contributed essays and literary and dramatic criticism to several periodicals of the day, has come to be seen as one of the lesser lights of the Romantic period. But for reasons expertly sketched by Joseph E. Riehl, Lamb was through much of the nineteenth century central to the Romantic canon. This priority – often shored up, as Riehl has shown, by ad hominem celebrations of his self-sacrifice for Mary, his sister whose mental illness led her to kill their mother in childhood – continued a critical tendency to conjoin Lamb unproblematically with conventional ideas about the literature of the period. During Lamb’s own time his critics generalized about his work in the light of categories such as the “Cockneys” or the “Lake poets,” affiliations, it should be noted, he did not contest. But such categorizations efface Lamb’s conflicted and fluid relationship to the forces shaping British culture during the period. A signal difference between Lamb and the “Lake Poets,” for example, is reflected in his apparent attitudes about the emerging profession of the writer. Lamb was a clerk by trade, but his marginality in relation to the increasingly professionalized world of British letters should not be assumed to reflect simply such things as the pressures of his work for the East India Company, his responsibility for his sister Mary (whom he provided for until he died), or his own ill-health. Rather, Lamb’s class position also reflected an 66 ambivalent attitude toward the material fruits of authorial labor. Although a frequent contributor to the periodical press, Lamb seems to have identified literary accomplishment with the cultural capital accrued by an older model of authorship – the gentlemanly “man of letters” – rather than the financial remuneration due to the new writer, who could make a living writing for magazines such as Blackwood's. An unwillingness to seek a living from literature, to “suck his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill,” as Lamb's alter-ego Elia puts it in “Oxford in the Vacation,” seems to have inclined Lamb, especially later in life, away from potentially more lucrative periodical writing and toward the less certain – but also less ostensibly professional – realm of book publication. 2 Contemporary views of the literary scene obscure a complete understanding of Lamb’s financial situation as well as his ideas about authorship and publication. Although following his canonization in the nineteenth century by the likes of Walter Pater, Edward FitzGerald and Alfred Ainger Lamb was seen as a prototypically Romantic writer and thinker (Riehl 50-61), his ideas about authorship make difficult any easy identification with those writers, such as Keats and Wordsworth – as occupied as their works are with literary fame and the authorial right of ownership – who now make up the Romantic canon. The contemporary critical tendency to identify Lamb with either the “Cockneys” or the “Lake poets” also distorted the actual composition of his social circle 2 With this provocative image of writing Lamb is ostensibly describing the activities of a scholar, but the reference was understood by contemporaries and notable subsequent readers (including Mark Twain) to refer to the professional writer. 67 and intellectual influences. Lamb’s circle of acquaintance extended beyond the “Cockneys” with whom he was lumped in the hostile criticism directed at Leigh Hunt, Keats, and Hazlitt, for example – to include, in addition to the Wordsworths and Coleridge, the likes of fallen dandy Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (a close friend prior to his disgrace whom Lamb referred to as a “kind-hearted Janus”), and Crabb Robinson, a barrister by trade. Such connections aside, like the “Cockneys” and Lakers he might be said to belong to the lower-middle class (he never owned property, renting Colebrooke Cottage, the Islington home referred to by Thomas Hood as Lamb’s “cottage of Ungentility”), but, unlike De Quincey, Keats or Wordsworth, his goal seems never to have been to live the life of the professional writer. Instead, Lamb seems to have chosen to work for thirty-three years as a clerk for East India House, where his duties included recording transactions and conducting audits (Lucas 2: 39, Lucas 2: 116, Barnett 27), contributing regularly but usually anonymously, in accordance with standard practice, or else under a pseudonym to periodicals such as Scott’s London Magazine. Lacking the professional ambitions associated with the “Cockneys” and “Lake poets” by their critics, Lamb not only avoided the profession of the writer – preferring to depend on his India House income and, subsequently, pension, even in the face of increasing demand and potentially lucrative pay for his work – but also evinced in other ways a gentlemanly and increasingly anachronistic ambivalence about the self-publicity associated with publication. 68 Lamb complained often about his work at India House, but he was more productive when he worked there than in retirement. Lamb’s was a comfortable but not lavish retirement: at two-thirds his former salary, Lamb’s pension from India House brought in £450, a portion of which (£12) went to supporting Mary (Lucas 2: 417). Nevertheless Lamb complained of the economizing the pension required, telling Bernard Barton in a letter that in “cropping off wine, old books, &c. and in short all that can be called pocket money, I hope to be able to go on at the cottage” (2: 167). He suggests in another letter, to Thomas Hood, that the Lambs’ moves to Islington and then Enfield, progressively farther and farther away from their beloved London, were similarly motivated (2: 187). Despite their difficulties Lamb’s output for the periodical press decreased; this was likely due in part to worsening illness: Lamb suffered a nervous breakdown in 1825, for instance (Prance 370). Nevertheless Lamb was selective about the periodical commissions he undertook. He had written his last contribution to the London in 1825, the year he retired (the essay “Stage Illusion”), attributing the break in a letter to Southey to the declining quality of the magazine following the death of John Scott (Lucas 2: 153). 1826 saw only the “Popular Fallacies” series from the New Monthly Magazine (Prance 370). In 1827 Lamb refused a commission from Barron Field to write a piece on the theatre (Lucas 2: 192). Furthermore, it should be noted that despite his complaints Lamb managed to leave £2000 to Mary upon his death, a savings derived – if, as Lucas points out, Lamb’s remarks about his failure to save any of his earnings 69 while employed are to be believed – entirely from the pension. Lamb’s substantial legacy to Mary suggests, then, that the lamented economizing was prompted not by financial strain but self-enforced discipline – a stricture all the more significant in the light of Lamb’s reluctance to publish often in the periodical press despite the earning power generated by the popularity of Elia (2: 282). Although illness, alcoholism, and the change of life brought upon him by his retirement undoubtedly contributed to the decrease in productivity at the end of his life, it also seems that a reluctance to capitalize on his earning power in the periodical press – to professionalize himself in this way – led Lamb to focus on the less profitable and more “gentlemanly” arena of book publication. Lamb did well by his writing: according to Barry Cornwall (Bryan Waller Procter’s pseudonym), his remuneration for the Elia essays made him the highest paid contributor to the London at the time (his rate being twenty guineas per sheet, or sixteen pages), by a factor of two or three (qtd. in Lucas, 2: 43). But “gentle Charles” named a high price for his copy rather than live by his pen. 3 After breaking with the London, Lamb, although continuing to write for the periodical press on a smaller scale, focused his energies on the book format, publishing self-described “Trifles.” These included Album Verses, with a Few Others (1830), which was decried in some quarters as a 3 Critics have universally regarded this honorific as connoting solely Lamb’s selflessness and kindness, but a closer examination of his conflicted relationship to gentility (Lamb adopted a posture of gentility in relation to the emerging bourgeois category of the professional writer, but this posture articulated its difference from this bourgeois status via economic deprivations that actually resulted in a downward social trajectory for the Lambs and prototypically bourgeois economic practices such as saving). The “gentleness” ascribed to Lamb by his contemporaries could be taken to suggest a wry awareness of their part of his deliberate assumption of an ethos of gentility at odds with his actual social position. 70 “vanity” project, and the unprofitable project The Last Essays of Elia (1833), at nine shillings an expensive volume that, given the sales of the first collection of Elia essays (Elia [1823, out of print by 1834]), no one expected to sell well. 4 This work Lamb devoted himself to rather reliably remunerative pieces for the periodical press (Lucas 2: 248, 273). The same writer who consciously seems to have distanced himself from the ungentlemanly trade of writing also remarked ironically to a friend that fame in the East as a book-author was a dream of his, and at another point expressed satisfaction about the success of a pirated Elia collection published in America (Elia. Second Series [1828], which included pieces that Lamb did not in fact write). In sum, Lamb in his retirement demonstrated an evolving, ambivalent attitude toward authorship, the exposure associated with publication, and writing for periodicals. In this period Lamb reveals a willingness to distinguish himself from the profession of the writer, associated with Grub Street and the relative anonymity of the periodical press, at the same time that he shows an enlarging interest in the author- centered field of book-publication. The cracked glass of the Elia alter-ego reflects this 4 William Jerdan’s review of Album Verses in the Literary Gazette attributes Lamb’s motivations for publishing the volume to “the blinding and engrossing nature of vanity” (qtd. in Riehl, 20). Jerdan and other reviewers recognized in Lamb a gentlemanly literary identity out of step with what they saw as the cultural sphere proper to one of his station. A Monthly Magazine reviewer was more overt in this regard: “Some few years ago, there was in this metropolis a little coterie of half-bred men, who took up poetry and literature as a trade, and who . . . puffed off each other as the first writers of the day” (qtd. in Riehl, 20). This reviewer is mistaken with regard to Lamb’s motives and real affiliations--aligning them with the Cockneys and professionalism (“trade”) when the cultural capital of the book-author rather than the economic capital available to the journalist is Lamb’s real object, but the reviewer’s hostility registers the size of the gap between book-publication and the periodical press that Lamb has attempted to bridge as well as the implications with regard to class bound up with this movement. 71 conflicted desire for literary fame conjoined to an (appropriately for Lamb, increasingly anachronistic) gentlemanly disdain for, on the one hand, the self-publicity associated with publication and, on the other, the commercial motives and professional identification associated with the periodical press. Lamb’s literary production, although originating in the periodicals, conformed to an ethos of gentlemanly amateurism rather than professionalism, a posture of independence from the market obtained at a not insignificant personal cost. 5 Lamb’s “Curious” Bibliophilia Lamb’s self-consciously antiquarian mode of expression in the essays (“What a careless, even deportment hath your borrower!” 6 ) – a sacralization of Englishness on the level of diction – coextends with his self-conscious antiquarianism in relation to the literary field. 7 Ever the “wary connoisseur,” as Lamb describes the collector of prints in 5 Hazlitt, in what may be an unconscious pique of self-loathing, describes Lamb in a Table Talk piece from 1825 (“Elia--Geoffrey Crayon”) as an amateur who, thanks to his venue (periodicals) and circle, has lucked into popularity (Riehl 19). 6 “The Two Races of Men” (Morpurgo 113) 7 In Table Talk, Hazlitt accuses Lamb, on the subject of his use of archaic diction, of affectation: “The style of the Essays of Elia is liable to the charge of a certain mannerism. His sentences are cast in the mould of old authors” (qtd. in Riehl, 19). Lamb’s style was vulnerable to such a charge because its archaism – incomplete and overt – coexisted with the contemporary vernacular. This makes his style, appropriately for a collector, antique. The difference between the archaic and modern in Lamb’s diction constructs the archaic as such in a way that foregrounds its status as a gesture. In this way this literary antiquarian’s style is, appropriately, antique (or old-fashioned) rather than simply old. The status of the authentic in Lamb’s literary style coextends with the status of the authentic in his – or any book- collector’s – collecting practice: the authentic antique is, of course, constructed on the one hand through a series of determinations external to the object itself and on the other through its differential (rather than essential or intrinsic) manifestation in relation to the industrial (or inauthentic) literary object. Lamb’s stylistics of the antique in his writing is in this way a literary anticipation or version of the 72 “Oxford in the Vacation” (1820), Lamb’s refined collecting practices and general love of the book are frequent subjects of the essays and letters, where book-collecting, book- possession and the material conditions and implements of cultural production are bound up with an ironic construction of an authorial identity on the margins of British letters (Lapote 15). Lamb’s “curious” collection, as J. Fuller Russell recalls Lamb describing his library in Russell’s reminiscences of Lamb published in the Guardian in the 1870’s, is neither a gentleman’s nor a professional scholar’s. The collection’s lack of fitness for intellectual application is in fact a source of pride for Lamb: “I have nothing useful,” as Russell quotes Lamb. As Lamb goes on, his remarks to Russell imply a flippant disregard for the increasingly professionalized occupation of the scholar, whose duties are aligned with the professional writer in “Oxford”: “[A]s for science, I know and care nothing about it” (emphasis in original) (qtd. in Lucas, 2: 269, 271). The uselessness of Lamb’s collection, while announcing Lamb’s intentional marginality in relation to professionalized letters, also suggestively aligns him with the practices of the bibliomaniacs, who notoriously disregarded the “contents” of their tomes. Paradoxically, however, as will be argued in greater detail in what follows, the ethos of gratification governing their cultural practice – a discourse about culture whose operative, determining criteria rest on some functionality of the art in relation to the consuming subject – reveals gestural quality of the authentic antique in his collecting process. 73 that the status of usefulness in aristocratic bibliomania was hardly straightforward: theirs is hardly an “aristocracy of culture” on that score (Bourdieu 11). Furthermore, the particularities of Lamb’s collecting style distinguish his practice from that of the bibliomaniacs in important ways. In addition to its patina of amateurism redolent at once of gentlemanly cultural production and bohemian renunciation of the capitalist economy’s imperative to produce, Lamb’s book collection and his use of it connote the outmoded and marginal, in the context of both British letters and aristocratic collecting practices. This self-aware deviance in the use of his collection resonates with Lamb’s literary sensibility as reflected in his correspondence and dramatic criticism. Thomas Westwood’s account (in Westwood’s Notes and Queries) of his time spent at the Lambs’ home in Enfield, to which they moved in 1827, provides a sense of the authors Lamb collected: I soon grew to be on intimate terms with my neighbor; who let me loose in his library, and initiated me into a school of literature, which Mrs. Trimmer might not have considered the most salutary under the circumstances. Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Farquhar, Defoe, Fielding--these were the pastures in which I delighted to graze, in those early years; and which, in spite of Trimmers, I believe did me less evil than good. (qtd. in Lucas, 2: 188-9) Lamb would come to be credited for rehabilitating Elizabethan dramatists such as Beaumont, Fletcher, Marlowe, Webster, and Cyril Tourneur. The renewed attention that Lamb’s criticism and anthologizing (“Characters of Dramatic Writers, Contemporary with Shakespeare” [1808, 1818], Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about 74 the Time of Shakespeare [1808]) brought to seventeenth-century drama was not uncontroversial, either in Lamb’s own time or in later years, as Westwood’s qualifications here remind us (Mrs. Trimmer is Sarah Trimmer, the religious educator and children’s author who was a key figure in the Sunday school movement, accused of paternalism and moralism in its approach to charity-based education, and co-founder of the Tory-leaning periodical the Guardian of Education) (McCalman 739). In fact, Lamb’s revival of interest in the Elizabethans and Restoration dramatists would be used by later critics such as the New Humanists to expel him from canonical British Romanticism. Irving Babbitt, like Macaulay before him (who along with C. C. Felton, as Riehl has observed, initiated the critical backlash against Lamb in the Victorian period), would use what he saw as the dangerous moral impurity of the Restoration dramatists as a whip with which to lash then-canonical Lamb (Riehl 73-4). 8 Lamb’s championing of Elizabethan and Restoration drama reflected a self- consciously eccentric literary sensibility, a preference for “oddities,” the “original- brain’d” and the “out-of-the-way” (“Out-of-the-way humours and opinions – heads with some diverting twist in them – the oddities of authorship please me most”), as Lamb describes his tastes in literature in “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire” (1821) (Lapote 173- 4; qtd. in Lucas, 2: 295). 8 In Rousseau and Romanticism (1919) Babbitt accuses Lamb of having insufficiently moral critical standards: “Because we are justified, as Lamb urges, in wandering imaginatively beyond ‘diocese of strict conscience,’ it does not follow that we may, like him, treat Restoration Comedy as a sort of fairyland; for Restoration Comedy is a world not of pure but of impure imagination” (qtd. in Riehl, 74). 75 The literary criticism offers examples of this self-aware departure from reigning standards of aesthetic judgment, including the practice of abiding by coherent standards itself. The eccentric catholocity of Lamb’s tastes, an aesthetic indiscrimination accurately termed “curious,” prefigures the sensibility of the dilettante at the same time that it reveals the operation of an ethos of gratification in his sensibility. More specifically, his seems to have been a taste whose ultimate point of reference was personal gratification rather than an aesthetic in the sense applicable to the criteria determining, for instance, Coleridge’s judgments of Wordsworth’s poetry in the Biographia (which, in the case of the critique of “The Thorn,” are based on the “heights” achieved by the poet rather than, say, any impact that the poetry had had on Coleridge). Such a judgment as Lamb’s, because it was a determination based on subjective agreeableness (“the oddities of authorship please me most”), is the opposite of a “pure judgment of taste,” as Immanuel Kant describes the aesthetic judgment that makes a determination based solely on the formal properties of an object in itself, unpolluted by any impact the object has on the senses (Kant 110). This “pure aesthetic” outlined in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) is for Pierre Bourdieu exemplary of a type of discourse about culture whose features reflect a social position of relative power and, more importantly, security against the pressures of life’s necessities. For Bourdieu the discourse of taste, which posits the “pure aesthetic” as the only proper one (Kant’s theory is illustrative on this point), is ideological in the sense that it reflects the contours of the position occupied by 76 the producers of the discourse of which it is a part and, through its value-laden and essentializing characterizations of the spectrum of possible judgments of taste and of those who make them, serves to perpetuate the structural inequalities productive of the discourse of taste in the first place. For Bourdieu the philosophy of Kant, whose influence, thanks in part to Coleridge, was beginning to be felt in Britain in Lamb’s time, is illustrative of the pure aesthetic. Key to Kant’s notion of the “pure judgment of taste” is the issue of an object’s functionality, or, in Kant’s language, “utility.” Specifically, for Kant any presupposition as to the “objective purposiveness,” or utility, of an object renders a judgment of taste impure, and Kant expressly singles out as impure those judgments as to the “agreeableness or disagreeableness” of an object (Kant 111). The privileging of uselessness is, for Bourdieu, telling of the ideological function of the discourse of taste. Bourdieu sees the “pure aesthetic” outlined by Kant as symptomatic of “the bourgeois denial of the social world,” a refusal which is part and parcel of the French bourgeoisie’s (Bourdieu’s sample in Distinction) relative distance from economic necessity – hence the twentieth-century French intellectual’s tendency to subordinate “the things of life” to “the things of art” in the context of aesthetic judgments – in other words, to consider qualities of the representation first and foremost and the representation’s moral worth, agreeableness, fidelity to reality, and so on, only secondarily if at all (5). The social majority’s relative nearness to the necessities of life explains their tendency in the 77 opposite direction, away from aesthetics and toward ethics – a tendency, for instance, to make reference to subjective determinations about an object’s ability to gratify the self when making judgments of taste. 9 That Lamb’s literary sensibility has an ethical rather than purely aesthetic basis is clear from the criticism. There Lamb announces his unabashed affection for Defoe’s novels (“Appreciation of De Foe’s Secondary Novels” (1829)), for example, this being an ethical judgment the object of which was not only a popular form (the novel) disdained by many intellectuals of the day but also one with a minority status (that of the “secondary”) within this already devalued domain. As in his dramatic criticism, in this case Lamb’s taste runs to the presently degraded, marginal, and morally “impure” (in that case Lamb championed Elizabethan and Restoration drama; in this case he embraces little-read novels by Defoe, exemplified for Lamb by Singleton, the racy Roxana, Colonel Jack, and Moll Flanders). 10 Lamb’s enthusiasm for the likes of Farquhar and Fielding, the creators of the libertine Plume and the randy bastard Tom Jones, respectively, finds a kin 9 Bourdieu’s notion of the “aristocracy of taste” takes on unexpected, conflicting resonances in the case of the cultural practices of early nineteenth-century aristocratic collectors and un-aristocratic collectors such as Lamb. For the former, in the Britain of the day the social group farthest from the demands of necessity, an ethos of gratification rather than an aesthetic in the Bourdieuian sense seems determinant in the cultural practice in question. For the latter an ethos of gratification is conjoined to a posture of gentility – in this way the discourse of taste cannot be said to serve an ideological function in the same way it does in the determinist economic model proposed by Bourdieu. Consequently, the example of Lamb illustrates the need for a critique of the discourse of taste that strives to avoid the base- superstructure determinism of Bourdieu’s theory. 10 At this time the novel is degraded relative to poetry and drama. Coleridge in the Biographia, although his target is contemporary prose rather than prose per se, subordinates all prose to ancient drama: “You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held forthe highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of the day,” the “Plaintiff” asks the “Defendant” in the second of Satyrane’s letters (2: 187). 78 in this espoused affection for the novel form, which was a focal point of cultural anxieties about the widening access to literature and the marketing of new forms to previously excluded populations produced by rising literacy rates. This form began its existence in the eighteenth century as a bellwether for the cultural aspirations of the then-marginal British middle class (as Samuel Richardson’s corpus illustrates, the genre has its origins as a didactic genre designed to inculcate bourgeois norms and values in a largely female readership). By the latter half of the nineteenth century novel-reading had become bound up with the figure of the onanist, as emerging conceptions of human sexuality fed contemporary anxieties about the increasing amount of reading occurring among previously non-literate populations such as women and working people. In this self- conscious ethical determination that is also an identification with non-canonical literature, we can see what could be called a prefiguration of camp. Provocatively, this camp non-aesthetic finds articulation through a misreading of Coleridge, who in the passage cited by Lamb in his piece on Defoe gives voice not only to an aesthetic rather than an ethic but to one whose conclusions are in fact contradicted by Lamb. In the piece on Defoe, Lamb uses Coleridgean poetics to support a claim about the noteworthy fidelity of Defoe’s brand of realistic representation to what Wordsworth and Coleridge called “low” life: The narrators everywhere are chosen from low life, or have had their origin in it; therefore they tell their own tales, (Mr. Coleridge has anticipated us in this remark,) as persons in their degree are observed to do, with infinite repetition, and an overacted exactness, lest the 79 hearer should not have minded, or have forgotten, some things that had been told before. (Miscellaneous Prose 382-3) 11 Lamb identifies Defoe’s merit with representational fidelity to the sphere of life declared by Coleridge to lack – due to an absence of the “cultivation” available through reading and education that elevates a people above a state wherein one finds “ordinary, morbid idiocy” – precisely the worthiness that characterizes proper subjects for art (“it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dulness and garrulity”) (emphasis in original) (Coleridge 2: 45, 48, 49). Whereas Wordsworth, in Coleridge’s view, has unfortunately for his poetry mixed in the “low” points of view of some of his narrators (Harry Gill, the Idiot Boy) with the “height” reached by his own imagination when its expression stands alone (Coleridge cites sections of “The Thorn” to support this point), for Lamb the “charm that has bewitched the world” that characterizes Defoe’s style stems precisely from Defoe’s evident and deft handling of the perspectives of his “low” characters and their diction (“They [Defoe’s narrators] bear the veritable impress of De Foe”) (382). The cross-class intermingling produced by Wordsworth’s peasant-ventriloquism so offensive to Coleridge is for Lamb the signal mark of Defoe’s artistry. Consequently, whereas homogeneity and uniformly elevated diction are two key standards operating in Coleridge’s critical theory, for Lamb heterogeneity and contemporary devaluation determine literary merit. In addition to its 11 As Lucas has indicated, Lamb most likely has in mind Coleridge’s chapter in the Biographia on Wordsworth’s adoption of rustic diction in the Lyrical Ballads, where Coleridge disputes the claim made by Wordsworth in the “Preface” that in “low and rustic life” “our elementary feelings,” as Wordsworth puts it, find fuller development and better expression because they find less “restraint” here than they find in cities and towns (Coleridge 2: 43, Miscellaneous Works 539). 80 embrace of the “low” (in terms of both diction and critical judgment) and heterogeneous, Lamb’s aesthetic also rejects the standard of distinction itself (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the word, as will hopefully become clear subsequently) that is of fundamental importance to Coleridge. Whereas for Coleridge Wordsworth’s misplaced faith in the capacities of “the ordinary language of men” leads him into error in Lyrical Ballads, Lamb’s embrace of Defoe’s Wordsworthian peasant-ventriloquism amounts to a rejection of this standard of refusal of the common (a refusal that Bourdieu generalizes in terms of the “pure gaze” required of an aesthetic disposition) – which one could also call, citing Wordsworth, the “elementary feelings” – informing Coleridge’s critique. In this denial of the immediate and “base” or, in Coleridge’s terms, “low,” “ordinary,” and “dull,” Coleridgean theory exemplifies Ortega y Gasset’s description of modern art – “a systematic refusal of all that is ‘human’, i.e., generic, common – as opposed to distinctive, or distinguished – namely, the passions, emotions and feelings which ‘ordinary’ people invest in their ‘ordinary’ lives” (glossed in Bourdieu, 4). Even more tellingly, perhaps, Lamb’s critique of Defoe embraces not only the “low” diction of Defoe’s narrators but also Defoe’s universal appeal, a popularity that Lamb describes in terms not of cerebral, reflective appreciation by a disinterested audience but rather of an unthinking, passive embrace of the audience by the art itself (Defoe’s fiction is a “charm that has bewitched the world”). In this way Lamb’s critical theory rejects not simply the standards of Coleridge’s aesthetics but also the mode of 81 aesthetic appreciation implied thereby, a form of “gratification” distinct from the unrefined kind provided by novels and that acknowledges virtues intrinsic to the art itself rather than pleasures afforded by the experience of it (this representing an “objective purposiveness” for the art, to invoke the terms of Kant’s aesthetics) (Coleridge 2: 187). This ultimate investment in an ethos of gratification suggests Lamb’s conformity to Bourdieu’s notion of the “popular aesthetic,” which “ignores or refuses the refusal of ‘facile’ involvement and ‘vulgar’ enjoyment” demanded of the “pure gaze” (Bourdieu 4). In addition, Lamb's own practices conform to his theory. The populist aesthetic – one doubly subversive in its citation of popularity to support a claim to artistic merit – operating in his critical theory finds a corollary in the aesthetic operative in his collecting. While the aristocratic bibliomaniacs were motivated by the greater values attached to features of the pre-industrial book (uncut or vellum rather than paper pages, first editions, manuscript copies), for example, Lamb’s practices were consciously ruled by shabbiness, affordability and irregularity. His “ragged regiment of book-tatterdemalions” (Lucas 2: 191), as Westwood describes Lamb’s library, is not only self-consciously “curious” (or eccentric) but also “cheap” (“He had, he said, a curious library of old poetry, etc., which he had bought at book stalls, cheap”) (2: 271). (The cheapness of his book appears to have been a point of some pride. A “Mrs. FitzGerald” recalled to Lamb’s biographer that his books retained the price tags affixed by the stalls where he bought them) (Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb 3: 39). 82 The relationship between Lamb's collecting aesthetic and the one dominant in bibliophile circles is more complicated than this, however. While in relation to the auratic book of value to aristocratic collectors Lamb engages in an oppositional cultural practice, the self-described “curiousness” of Lamb’s hobby reveals a self-conscious embrace of the badge of the bibliomaniacs’ dubious mode of aesthetic appreciation. But while Lamb owns the badge of the collector’s suspiciousness (the label “curious,” which he assigns to his own collection), his style punctures the sacred realm serving as the font of value for aristocratic collectors, and it does so in two ways. In what follows I will attempt to show that, on the one hand, value within Lamb’s collecting practice depends not on the aura of authenticity surrounding the book that has preeminent status in the aristocratic collector’s world. On the other hand, Lamb’s alternative construction of the collectible book exposes the discourse of bibliomania for a style – a sign-system whose origins lie not in the intrinsic, personal, or given but rather in the arbitrary and socially contingent dictates of what Dick Hebdige, in the context of an analysis of style, calls a “symbolic order.” Lamb’s ambiguous position in relation to the aristocratic collecting ethos finds a parallel in the representation of antiquarianism and collecting in his familiar essays. In addition to deviating in his own actual practice of bibliophilia from the standards reigning in aristocratic circles, Lamb takes an ironic perspective on the bibliomaniac’s collecting practices in the essays. In “The South-Sea House” (1820), a description of old-fashioned accounting practices and implements (Lamb himself was employed as a clerk at the time, 83 at India House, and had also worked briefly for the South-Sea Company) aligns signifiers of literary collectibility with literary snobbishness – a style of exclusivity and elitism that Elia simultaneously derides and identifies with: But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves--with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings--their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers--with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of business, or bill of lading--the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library,--are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had every thing on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as any thing from Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde. (emphasis in original) (Lapote 5) The modern way of doing business (“the pounce-boxes of our days”) pales in comparison to a deified and classicized image of antique business practices (which are here also cultural practices – these accountants of yore are Titans of no-industry. At the same time, however, Elia’s appreciation of the signal marks of the antique accounting book belongs to a self-satisfied style of idle consumption the solipsism of which is typical of Lamb’s representations of cultural consumption in the Elia essays (see for example the fetishism of the scholar, who “sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to do, through a quill,” in “Oxford”) (Lapote 15). Specifically, the imagery aligns such consumption (“the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library, – are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct 84 dragons with complacency”) with literary antiquarianism, a practice which the language satirically accuses of being elitist (“better libraries”) (Lapote 4). In a similarly ironic way, the marks of antiquity themselves are prized for their historical distance from a present in which commercial application and general utility and functionality determine form (specifically instanced in useless and impractical decorative touches – “heavy odd- shaped ivory-handled penknives,” “formal superfluity of cyphers,” “fantastic flourishes” – which the present lacks the “heart” to produce) at the same time that they reflect an outmoded, inefficient and ultimately silly way of doing business: a condescending and quasi-anthropological voice enters the description to equate the pre-industrial aura of the old implements with that of a “defunct” religious totem (“enshrining shelves,” “pious sentences,” “religious ancestors”) shrouded in mists of superstition (“dragons”). Aspects of Lamb’s literary fetishism as represented in the life and letters – a fixation on the book-as-object not fundamentally unlike the bibliomaniacs’ “gentlest of infirmities” 12 – aligns his collecting practices with those of the bookmen in this way (Basbanes 3), but in “The South-Sea House” Lamb satirizes precisely such auratic investments (affective relations with, for example, antique implements such as heavy, ornate penknives) as those of literary antiquarians, whose elitism and passive, scopophilic posture of auto-sensuality the essay suggestively associates with the form of self- enclosure of the scholar/solipsist represented elsewhere in Lamb’s writing (“Oxford in 12 This is U.S. industrialist Benjamin Franklin Thomas’ term for the bookmen’s “malady” (Basbanes 3). 85 the Vacation”). Similarly, the essay posits the antique as a mode of signification whose referents, including the penknives, are simultaneously redundant (the implicit critical perspective on antique business practices being informed by the values of populism and utility) and representative of a lost ideal (“The pounce-boxes of our day have gone retrograde”) (Lapote 5). In this way the essay’s ironic mode frustrates any easy identification of this ostensibly nostalgic reminiscence (“The very clerks I remember . . .”) with the style of antiquarianism practiced by the bibliomaniacs, whose expression of their affective relations with the book, as Dibdin’s works illustrate, could be lacking in the additional perspectives available from irony to the extent that it verged on self-parody (5). In a way that speaks to the particular composition of Lamb’s social and cultural capital – which corresponds to a marginality in relation to both aristocratic and solidly bourgeois status and, hence, cultural practice – a comparison of Lamb’s actual book- collecting habits to bibliomania recalls the tensions underlying the ironic representation of the antiquarian’s book-love in “The South-Sea House.” While Lamb’s practice, like a bibliomaniac's, takes for its objects books markedly different from the new books available for purchase at the time, such as the middle-class “three-decker” novel that by the late 1820’s had become the standard format for fiction publication following Walter Scott’s pathbreaking success with the mega-seller Waverley (1814) (Feather 121-122), the particular standards operating in his practice carve out a space distinct in its aesthetic 86 contours from both bibliomaniacal criteria for value and the style current among mass- market publications. While for the aristocratic collectors an ultimately straightforward construction of the authentic object (in this case connoting the qualities of the historical – possessing a history and belonging to a tradition – and the pre-industrial) is determinative in calculations of worth, hence the special prestige of the manuscript copy, the first edition, the vellum copy, and the uncut copy, for Lamb a book’s status as a readily available commodity – replete with still-affixed price tags, in fact – is of more worth than a book’s simple priority in relation to the commodified mass market for books. 13 This is not to say, however, that Lamb’s shelves are indistinguishable from an early nineteenth- century retailer’s: his “ragged regiment of book-tatterdemalions” in other words, is neither simply new nor simply cheap. Lamb’s collection reflects the formation of an aura around the collectible book, but this aura is not the same one determinant of value in aristocratic collecting circles. Like those of the aristocratic collectors, Lamb’s library functions in accordance with an abstract system that shapes and regulates the contents of his collection in a way that differentiates his collection from an inventory of readily available mass-market books, 13 Dibdin’s description of the Archbishop Parker’s (“One of the greatest collectors”) library in his Reminiscences illustrates the unique value attached to authenticating marks (such as signatures) as well as the special status of the manuscript and the book with a noteworthy history. Referring to such books with the phrase “Flowers of the Olden Time,” Dibdin writes exultingly of Parker’s collection: “One of the greatest collectors, in times past, of these ‘Flowers,’ was the celebrated ARCHBISHOP PARKER:-- whose MSS., deposited in Corpus College, Cambridge, are yet to be made known. Here also are deposited the Original THIRTY-NINE ARTICLES OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, with the subscribing autographs of the respective bishops, of late rendered familiar to us by the very curious and instructive volume of Dr. Lamb” (x). Here we see the importance attached to the authentic (established via the autograph), the pre-industrial (the manuscript copy), and, of course, the historical. 87 such as the newly available “cheap books” 14 that were becoming a force in the market in the 1820’s, but Lamb’s version of the literary auratic object was not the pristine first edition or uncut vellum copy whose rarity gave it high value among aristocratic collectors. Lamb’s bibliophilia is instead a bibliomania-with-a-difference – an elite practice on the margins of privilege and legitimacy that sought to distinguish itself from rather than approximate aristocratic practices and aesthetic standards. Rather than, to cite one example, the “irreplaceable” codex 15 prized by the aristocratic collector, Lamb’s library was full of books marked overtly by their circulation as readily available commodities – by tags indicating their exchange-values in a market (which in Lamb’s case was the market for second-hand books – the letters and essays reveal that perusing second-hand book stalls was a favorite past-time). The criteria for collectibility operating among bibliomaniacs testifies to the accumulation of value in aristocratic circles to what Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), calls the “aura” of the art work (Benjamin 221). The books most sought after by aristocratic collectors share a signal characteristic: a unique existence in time and space. Benjamin theorizes that such 14 This the term that the publisher Charles Knight, among the first to capitalize on the new mass market for literature in the early part of the century, used to describe them in 1854 (Knight 246; Rowland, Jr., 18). 15 In a wide-ranging history of book-collecing, Nicholas A. Basbanes notes the example of Sir Robert Cotton (1571-1631), an aristocratic collector whose library was organized solely around this criterion: “[Cotton was] an ardent antiquarian who cared deeply for the welfare of documentary materials simply because they were irreplaceable, not for any political of theological positions they may have supported” (89). 88 singularity “is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” a “presence” that is “outside technical . . . reproducibility” (220). Hence, within the world of aristocratic collecting, the collectibility of manuscript copies (each being unique), first editions (rarer and often produced in smaller quantities than subsequent editions), and copies, such as the Roxburghe Decameron, which for whatever reason had been rendered unique or rare. Lamb’s library, on the other hand, is composed of books marked not only by their circulation as commodities (via proudly displaced price tags) but also by the individual histories of circulation inscribed on their surfaces – a “ragged” condition testifying to heavy use by multiple readers and much movement within the market for second-hand books in London. These are books whose marks of distinction constitute a paradoxical refutation of distinction – a self-conscious overturning of the distance from the collectivity determinant in the aristocratic calculus of collectibility. In other words, they are marked overtly by their distance from the distance from social collectivities (not only in the form of the marketplace but also the “mass of readers” so troubling to Coleridge, for instance) determinant in the calculation of values in aristocratic collecting circles. Just as in the literary criticism (“Appreciation of De Foe’s Secondary Novels”), where a populist aesthetic emerges that identifies merit with popularity and the category of the “charming,” in his collecting Lamb employs an aesthetic defined by its opposition to the standard of distinction fundamental to aristocratic standards of collectible value. This view must be complicated, however, by the fact that, as I have argued above, Lamb’s 89 collecting style is, like bibliomaniac's, ruled not by aesthetic judgments but ethical ones; hence, generalizations about the class implications of Lamb’s style, in terms of opposition or populism, for example, are hazardous. These signs of wear – this abstract value in use, this value in signs of use that is in no way a use-value but in fact its opposite, exchange-value – are joined in Lamb’s calculus of collectibility by signifiers of commodification (the price tags prominently displayed on his books are such signifiers). Signifying the status of Lamb’s books as products intended for the rationalized market for commodities, the price tag marks Lamb’s collectible book overtly as an object circulating within a social collectivity (a market). In this way the book collectible to Lamb might be said to be the polar opposite of the authentic art object – this object being, according to Benjamin, one whose authenticity derives historically from its originary status as an object for use in magical and religious ritual (Benjamin observes that “[i]t is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function”) (223-225). The criteria for determining value operative in aristocratic collecting circles show the circulation of such “cult value” in this collecting subculture (Benjamin 224). This value, the source of the aura of the art work, stems from art’s occult lineage – the mystified “ritualistic basis” of art and foundation of the antique art object’s aura of authenticity, a unique existence in space and time the high value of which speaks to the 90 art object’s origins in religious practice (224). This lineage explains the high value to bibliomaniacs not only of the unique edition but also of the perfect one. More specifically, Benjamin’s theory suggests that the value of the auratic book, like the cult object from which it descends (Benjamin cites prehistoric cave paintings, whose intended audiences were “spirits” rather than humans, and modern religious practices involving representations of the Madonna – “Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden”), is tied to its literal distance from the human and its metaphorical distance from human collectivities such as mass movements and systems of exchange (225). This explains the high price fetched in aristocratic circles by the book unmarked by human hands – the “pristine” uncut copy free of “rubbing” and “bumped corners” – these signs of human handling and use. Consequently, Lamb’s “ragged regiment of book tatterdemalions” seems to amount to a self-conscious refutation of the standards of aristocratic value, this descendant of the “cult value” attached to objects untainted by masses and mass markets. Within Benjamin’s historical schema, the exclusivity surrounding this sacred function would eventually be undermined by the wide circulation of art made possible by its reproduction (but whereas later commentators have noted the correspondence between the appearance of mass media and the bourgeois revolution of the eighteenth century and the ascendance of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth, Benjamin instead emphasizes the contemporaneity of the mass movements produced in response to capitalism, arguing that 91 the historical appearance of the ability to reproduce the art work “[is] intimately connected with contemporary mass movements,” including socialism) (221). But Lamb’s transformation of the collectivity into a sign in the context of his collecting style – its form being a badge taken from nothing less than the capitalized marketplace itself – reinstantiates an aura of the sacred, resacralizing the book in and through his library. 16 This different sacredness (a totem defined by inclusion rather than exclusion), an aura not of the sacred or the pre-industrial but rather of commodification, is itself a kind of commodification – an already-reified reification of the book, which in this case has been made to stand for (has become in this way a fetish of) the collective. This should prompt us to reflect on the social roots of the aura as sketched by Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” For Benjamin, the decay of the aura, a product of the reproduction of the art work, has corresponded with contemporary mass movements such as socialism: the age of the mass movement saw the beginning of technical reproduction (which is distinct from mechanical reproduction and exemplified by film) – “Both processes [the substitution of a ‘plurality of copies for a unique existence’ of the art work and the ‘reactivation’ of the object in the immediate context of the viewer] are intimately connected with contemporary mass movements” (221). For Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction of the work of art liberated it from a sanctuary of exclusivity, a legacy of its social origins, 16 The sacralizing aura is already a form of reification, but perhaps a form of reification produced not in reality but rather in Benjamin’s prose. 92 integral to a social structure founded upon not only inequality (or, more precisely, the appearance of mechanical reproduction corresponded historically to the mass movements that were working to topple such structures) but also – to extend Benjamin’s analysis to reflect the Marxian axiom concerning the integral relationship between the appearance of the capitalist mode of production and the eventual emancipation of the proletariat through socialism – pre-capitalist modes of production. Benjamin’s emphasis on the correspondence he sees between socialism and technical reproduction obscures that what he is describing is of course mass media – a creature, as Adorno and Horkheimer observe, of the capitalized market for products of industry (Dialectic of Enlightenment 94-136). Marshall McLuhan’s insight regarding the history of literary reproduction (“The printed word . . . burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, creating extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly”) is also relevant here in terms of the historical interrelationship it posits between print culture and capitalism (McLuhan 23). Consequently, in addition to noting that Benjamin ties the decay of the aura to reproduction, we can also observe that the age of mechanical reproduction is also that of capitalist exchange and a new mass market for artistic reproductions. Lamb’s self- consciously commodified collection reflects, then, an oppositional aesthetic (one which privileges marks of circulation within a collectivity) and standard of value (inauthenticity – a deliberate deviation from the standard of value and aesthetic operative in the market for antique books – that nonetheless reinstantiates the processes of reification intrinsic to 93 capitalism. Lamb’s practices are also self-consciously aligned with aristocratic cultural practices, and the collection (as understood by Jean Baudrillard, who sees the abstractions fundamental to collections as symptomatic of the regime of capitalism, and analyzed by Judith Pascoe, who has identified antiquarianism as a prototypically Romantic discourse) is already in itself a creature of modernity. If Lamb’s style can be said to have the trappings of a kind of populism, this populism should, like a later oppositional aesthetic such as punk, be seen as simply a style. Lamb’s deviations from established standards of value in his taste for the heterogeneous and “low” in literature and for the commercial and “ragged” in books illustrate an oppositionality in relation to dominant aesthetic values and norms that finds articulation not through explicit expressions of dissatisfaction or critique but through the subversive use of signs: the contradiction with the “aristocracy of culture,” with its tastes for “high” diction (Coleridgean critical theory) and “pristine” uncut copies (aristocratic collecting practice), elaborated through his library, is a style – simultaneously a mode of consumption and a semiotic system consisting of the commodities he consumes and the new ways these objects signify in the context of his collecting practice (Bourdieu 11). In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige reads the counter-cultural self- presentation styles of various youth subcultures (the “teds,” “punks,” and “mods” of 1960’s and ’70’s Britain) as social salvos aimed at the symbolic order of the majority that, however subversive in form and content, are nonetheless restricted to “the 94 profoundly superficial level of appearances” (17). The contradiction between dominant culture and marginal population displayed in the styles of these youth subcultures finds expression on the level of style and through the process of the “conspicuous consumption” of certain commodities in deliberate, novel ways (102-104). Consequently, the subversive stylistic practice of such factions can be seen as a doubly reified form of “spectacular” bricolage, the fashioning of a new, oppositional system of signs out of readily available consumer goods (103-104). For the punk such commodities included the safety pin, and the punk’s adaptation (one might be tempted to say “repurposing”) of the pin, which could adorn either clothing or flesh, constituted one among a number of ways that the punks posed challenges to the givenness, or seeming naturalness, of the dominant faction’s aesthetic norms. Such unexpected adaptations posed a challenge to the mainstream culture’s naturalized codes because, as Hebdige puts it, “Any elision, truncation, or convergence of prevailing linguistic and ideological categories can have profoundly disorienting effects. These deviations briefly expose the arbitrary nature of the codes which underlie and shape all forms of discourse” (91). Lamb’s bricolage is, like the punks’, a practice of conspicuous consumption the internally coherent, intentional deviations of which from established modes and standards expose aristocratic and bourgeois practice as cultural practice – as a discourse, code or symbolic order rather than a form of social praxis. 95 Chapter 3: Thomas De Quincey’s Fetishism of Literary Commodities The only thing he wants is a magnificent library. – Henry Crabb Robinson on De Quincey Thomas De Quincey’s unmatched (“I have indulged in it to an excess, not yet recorded of any other man”) (Confessions 10) consumption of opium did in fact have a peer, of a different stripe – De Quincey’s own consumption of literature, a cultural practice conducted under the sign of the fetish and the discourse that would make of the fetish its emblem, political economy. This “minor” Romantic’s queer form of consumerism departed from legitimate modes of cultural consumption as well as production, manifesting itself in a theory of literature that grappled with the materiality of the literary while critiquing the essentialisms of canonical Romantic theory and transcendentalist philosophy. The case of this particular collector, who strove to distinguish his own style from what could be called that other literary materialism, aristocratic book-collecting, illustrates intersections between the post-structuralist critique of the “science of presence” (Spivak xxi) and the “capitalist mode of production” (Marx 8) in a deployment of the fetish that also anticipates Freud. De Quincey’s Title: The Ironic Authenticity of a Gothic Collection An appropriate frame for a discussion of the role in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1822) of that “mystical” (Marx 71) species of dismemberment, fetishism – the “monotonous inventory” that “undoes the body” – is his own choice of frame (Barthes 113). With its invocation of the dissecting table along with the biographical and (potentially intoxicating) chemical distillate, De Quincey’s subtitle 96 renders autobiography in terms of the fetishism of a peculiarly gothic collection: the function of this self-authored text is to represent with fidelity a particular moment in De Quincey’s life, one among many temporal slices (“extract[s]”) of the De Quinceyan corpus. As Baudrillard says of the antique, the function of such a specimen, or “signif[ier] of time” (78), is to connote the passage of time, and, just as “extract from the life” suggests the absolute fidelity of De Quincey’s self-representations in his autobiography (indeed, these specimens of his history are specimens of himself, at once a biological entity and a text), such signs carry “the connotation of nature, of ‘naturalness’” (77). But the (gothic) mode of De Quincey’s implicit assertion of authenticity here undermines the claim itself, and the source of the contradiction that one finds in the subtitle stems from paradoxes inherent in the nostalgia that founds both the antique object and the personal history. The vexed authenticity of this narrative distillation – this “extract” that, as a text, represents the past at the same that, as a corporeal fetish, it embodies the real – points to the paradoxical foundations of the nostalgia that, as Baudrillard and Susan Stewart both observe in their theorizations of collecting, is bound up with the connotations of the antique and narrative alike. More specifically, the desire for a total purchase on the past (an extract from the life rather than a “record” of the life, as De Quincey also refers to the Confessions, in a prefatory note) presupposes an authentic space beyond a “mediated experience” such as a textual self-representation (for a specimen of the self rather than a sign of the self). But such a “pure” (Stewart 23) point of origin, or, in Judith Butler’s terms, a “site of phantasmatic abundance,” is unthinkable without the temporal structure 97 that narrative itself provides (Butler 98). Narrative brings into being the nostalgia that seeks to overcome the limitations of narrative (Stewart 23). Put another way, the closure provided by the “extract” embodies the real as it destroys it: to communicate connotations of authenticity and “historicalness” is for Baudrillard the function of the antique object within “the system” (the set of signs that displaces functions in the “system of objects” characteristic of modernity), but in its totalizing form of historicalness the antique abolishes time itself (“inasmuch as it aspires to be total [the antique] must conquer all of existence, including, therefore, the essential dimension of time”) (77-78). In terms of language, narrative occludes the real, but the notion of a “real” is already pathological (as Stewart says, “The nostalgic dreams of a moment before knowledge and self-consciousness that itself lives on only in the self-consciousness of the nostalgic narrative”) (23). These paradoxical foundations of the “extract,” the historical narrative that would seem to transcend the liabilities of historical narrative itself, are visible in the playful subtitle of De Quincey’s best-known work, Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1821). “Extract” denotes an autobiographical excerpt (as if De Quincey were already a text) at the same time that its gothic suggestion of De Quincey’s self-dismemberment aligns the maligned confessional genre (“the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars,” as the text’s prefatory note describes it) with England’s black market in cadavers, which supported the growth of medical education in the early nineteenth century in the face of legal restrictions on dissection. This linguistic play coexists uneasily with “extract’s” nostalgic aura, because this aura implies a mythological 98 signifier that is “fully present . . . to its signified” and that, hence, does not admit the pun, product of différance (emphasis original) (Derrida 8). The notion of the autobiography- as-corporeal fetish conforms to Baudrillard’s reading of the antique, which is distinct from the functional object in terms of the former’s asserted but ultimately “mythological” (77) “total[ity],” its “special . . . standing” as an “authentic presence” outside time (79). On the one hand, De Quincey’s diction implies that the Confessions will be such a “presence,” a text akin to the logos – not so much a signifier as a signified. On the other hand, this implication conflicts with the fact that with the pun on “extract” the title itself makes comical use of the “economy of différance” (143) that, for Derrida, constitutes language, a “play of signifying practices” rather than a system that conforms to the “logic of the ‘supplement’” (7). This play with language is also a kind of play with the veracity expected of the “confessing” subject, a manipulation of generic expectation in which the mythical transcendence offered by narrative closure finds its limit, on the one hand, in the mutilated body of the author and, on the other, in the gothic. The polysemia of language takes on the character of a modern condition whose symptom is not the gap between sign and signified but the myth of presence that the concept of such a gap presupposes. In this way, literary antiquarianism here takes the form of an idealization of the gothic that installs this genre as the sign not of a mythical past but of a practice that avoids precisely the totalizing closure of the myth. More specifically, the abyssal deferral of the real in paradoxical and ironic instantiations of the authentic (the claim of absolute autobiographical fidelity suggested by “extract” is contradicted by a pun on the very 99 same word; the gesture toward the Lewisian gothic is a gesture toward a signifying practice – a cultural tradition – that trades in the phantasmatic reproduction of the past; the body of the author, ground of the claim of autobiographical truth, is indeterminably material, being at once a corpus and a corpse, life and text) suggests a posture of antagonism towards the science of presence. This poststructuralist posture, with its invocation not only of the myth of presence but also of the collection, finds its “foundation” not in eschatology but in the realm of simulacra – the sign, surplus-value (likened by Stewart to modernist and post-modernist preoccupation with the signifying process itself rather than the materiality of the sign [5]) and the literary commodity (the paradoxically material dimensions of which being implied here by the comparison of De Quincey’s Confessions to his indeterminably material body). De Quincey’s ironic antiquarianism speaks to a general departure in his style of authorship from canonical Romanticism’s multivalent cult of authenticity. Defined by himself as well as by what Margaret Russett has termed “the academic canon of Romanticism” (1) in terms of canonical minority, De Quincey consciously built a career on his discovery of the greatness of Wordsworth. Rather than an inspired poet-seer, De Quincey styled himself the fortunate son of literature’s greatest “spontaneous” producer (Wordsworth 246). De Quincey’s mode of contribution to the canon was in this way that of a collector with a collector’s indices of value – novelty and rarity. In addition, like the stereotypical antiquarian of the period whose style of production marginalized him in relation to the properly “creative” arts, he was not the crucible of ecological beauty itself, but rather the vehicle of the vehicle of canonical Romanticism’s “overheard” (McGann 100 244) lyricism, as J.S. Mill famously summed up the by-now traditional view of Romanticism as a culture characterized by idealizing elision of social and economic particulars. But his self-imposed “infantilized abasement” to Romantic genius can also be seen as a form of literary materialism. As Russett has also observed, De Quincey was a species of liquidator of “major” Romantic cultural capital who “traded in the lives of the poets.” His claim to literary fame was in the fullest sense a claim, in other words – “the possession of a precious, albeit thematically limiting, literary property” (1). In this way the style of De Quincey’s minority is that of an “artificial” and denaturalizing form of (re)production having an integral role in precisely the naturalization of what Russett has called the “forms of transmission.” De Quincey’s materialism extends beyond his relations with canonical Romantic poetry, however, to include a more generalized critical tendency in relation to the cultures of Anglo-European Romanticism. More specifically, De Quincey’s perverse mode of appreciation of the Wordsworths and Coleridge is of a piece with a mode of cultural acquisition characterized by bookishness, scholasticism (however unconventional his self-education was), and antiquarianism, a heterogeneous style that fails to abide by the dominant faction's imperative to efface any “visible marks of . . . genesis” (Bourdieu 68). Furthermore, this degraded mode of production coextends with a critical posture in relation to Romantic literary theory. 101 Reconfiguring the “Real Language of Men” in the Confessions The prefatory note to De Quincey's memoir extends the trope of authorial dismemberment articulated in the title. In the note, De Quincey’s diction aligns the confessional genre with the act of authorial disrobing, using the image of self-denuding, or more accurately, perhaps, authorial flashing, as a self-reflexive metaphor for the “revolting,” indecent “spectacle” of literary confession (9). The note likens the genre to an act of “public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.” Furthermore, Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that ‘decent drapery,’ which time, or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over them . . . I have for many months hesitated about the propriety of allowing this, or any other part of my narrative, to come before the public eye . . . (9) The confession is here a form of fetishistic self-display and scopophilia (“such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation”), but with its representation of publication as the production of an object of sight (an invocation of “Gutenberg technology,” one effect of which is the “stripping of the senses” down to one, according to Marshall McLuhan [17]), this metaphor suggestively links print with the “spectacle” (“come before the public eye”). The kind of confession that is the announced concern of De Quincey, in other words, is an offense peculiar to print, and the transgression in question is the exhibition of interiority (“moral ulcers or scars,” “tearing away”). Jon P. Klancher has claimed that a signal event in the history of British culture was the construction of a new “mass” audience for literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. Formative in the evolution of this audience in the context of cheap popular culture, where authors such as William Cobbett collectively erected an image of the new 102 reading “mass public” (78) through efforts to represent this new audience to itself, was the indirect representation of interiority. This representation sought to reconcile the silence of the reader with the “unheard speech” of representative urban types, of which De Quincey’s typical confessors referred to in the prefatory note (“demireps, adventurers, or swindlers” [9]) make up a not unrepresentative sample (Klancher refers to “pickpockets, captains of industry, prostitutes, shopkeepers, and shoppers” in a catalog of such types common in cheap literature of the day [83]). Mass writers such as Cobbett used the device of the internal monologue, eschewing direct quotation, to bring to life the “individual desires” of “the crowd.” In this way “[the author’s] own discourse” served as a “bridge” connecting “the profoundly silenced audience” and the “unheard speech of his represented figures” (84). (It is interesting to note in passing that in his preface De Quincey offers himself up as just such a type: “[T]he benefit resulting to others, from the record of an experience purchased at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast overabundance, for any violence done to the feelings I have noticed, and justify a breach of the general rule” [10]). In describing the cheap literature as he has, Klancher has also described the Confessions as De Quincey imagines it. De Quincey’s reflexive indebtedness to the mass culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries adds a provocative social valence to a prefatory note that engages critically with the most famous “Preface” of the Romantic period – Wordsworth’s belated manifesto published with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). De Quincey’s text playfully revises the Wordsworthian “real,” installing a self- reflexive image of literary fetishism where Wordsworth had theorized the “real language 103 of men” (Wordsworth 241). Central to this critical deployment of materiality is a tongue- in-cheek image of the De Quinceyan “corpus.” Due to its notorious salaciousness, “two–penny trash” haunts in more ways than one De Quincey’s professed reluctance to transgress the boundaries of propriety in exposing himself (“my narrative”) to the public. De Quincey was familiar with the popular culture of his day, being an avid consumer of the gothic, so it is safe to presume that he was familiar with periodicals such as Charles Knight’s Penny Magazine. Regardless, alongside the characterization of his style of autobiography as a form of self- exposure, De Quincey’s invocation of social class in the prefatory note is highly suggestive. Significantly, this invocation of the social collective manages to avoid subscribing De Quincey or his audience to any particular class, however. Consequently, De Quincey’s allusions to the confessional narrative have elided the mass-media form, which had strong class associations at the time, that is its forebear, and now a subsequent reference to a collective humanity (“the great family of man”) further reifies the social imbrication of the genre. The passage in which this phrase appears sublimates class affiliation into an image of humanity as a silent collective that transcends the “grave”: Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and, even in their choice of a grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the church-yard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth) ‘----- Humbly to express / A penitential loneliness.’ (10) The class origins of the internal monologue of an urban type find themselves dissolved in the individual, a sociopath with an unnatural “instinct.” At the same time, the concept of social class undergirds De Quincey’s representation of the confession (“the great family 104 of man”). This concept has been sublimated into an image of humanity as a collective that transcends not only historical particulars but also this life itself. Fittingly, the “language” of Wordsworth, who in the 1802 Appendix to Lyrical Ballads theorized middle-class culture as a signifying practice shorn of its historical and spatial referents (Klancher 138), expresses the feelings of the appropriately silent minority – those who, unlike De Quincey, know better than to “speak.” In the case of canonical Romanticism, then, affect and language define how the style of legitimate expression differs from De Quincey’s confessional discourse and the degraded confessional form in general. The confession, on the contrary, finds metaphorical representation in the body, in particular its operations (“breaking through that honourable reserve,” “restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities,” “obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that ‘decent drapery,’” “defective sensibility,” “the propriety of allowing this, or any part of my narrative, to come before the public eye” [my emphasis] [9]). Hereby a form of logocentrism informs this delineation of a proper culture, of which Wordsworth’s poetry is the representative (one that transcends semiotics itself, acting here as both signifier and signified): only the language of “demireps, adventurers, or swindlers” is material. The presuppositions of a science of presence in this way seem to inform this image of the materiality of the literary as a body that finds its sublimation in the purity of poetic diction (a diction strangely embodied by an allusion to Wordsworth: here the fetish of citational synecdoche is offered as a form of literary transcendence). This strangeness is revealing: an exercise in parodic literary theory, De Quincey’s prefatory note up to this point has presented the idealizing logic of Wordsworth’s famous 105 manifesto, the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. But this note turns the “Preface” on its head, apologizing for presenting the real. This is not Wordsworth’s real, “the real language of men.” Instead, it is the opposite of the “language” of Wordsworth. In addition, it (literally) embodies the infinite “theoretical regress” staged by the “Preface” (Klancher 139). That text attempts to create the exception to the situation that it describes and laments – the loss of the referent, the separation of language from “any material attachment” (138). But without the “Preface,” as Klancher has observed, “no modern audience could distinguish ‘real’ language from its counterfeit.” In order for Wordsworth’s diction to be read as “real,” the “Preface” was needed in order to provide a critical “metalanguage,” a supplement to Wordsworth’s simulacrum necessary to transform it into “real language” (139). De Quincey’s prefatory note, on the other hand, presents as prefatory analogue of Wordsworth’s “real language of men” not a representation (this being instead the status of Wordsworth’s “language,” his non-speech) but a body. This body – this ostensible real opposed to the “affecting language” of Wordsworth’s poetic diction – is simultaneously its other, interiority (this paradox finding succinct expression in the phrase “moral ulcers and scars”) and representation (“my narrative” – this being a joke that extends the metaphor of authorial disrobing to the Confessions, implying that De Quincey’s text is his own nude body, his “naked shivering nature”) (Burke 239). Not surprisingly, seemingly, De Quincey argues in the next paragraph of the note that while opium-use may be classified as “a sensual pleasure,” he is essentially “an intellectual creature: and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have 106 been, even from my school-boy days” (10). This image of a disembodied De Quincey conforms to the spirit that would seem at first glance to motivate the comparison of the confession to the act of disrobing earlier in the note. Furthermore, note in a similar vein his lauding his own remarkable accomplishment in breaking “the accursed chain” of addiction to the narcotic, which should be taken to “counterbalance . . . any kind or degree of self-indulgence.” The sensual extravagance of an opium-addiction must be excused, accounted for. While seeming to extend the trope of ironic logocentrism discussed above, this formulation is also part of a marked shift in the style of the preface beginning with this paragraph. Here a trope of quantification appears: De Quincey would not dare to ignore the reserve endorsed by Wordsworth unless his narrative, “purchased at so heavy a price,” would not “compensate” for the “breach of the general rule”; although his opium-use cannot be said to have served the end solely of creating “positive pleasure” or of negating pain, De Quincey’s “self-conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or degree of self-indulgence.” In the process of serving to prove why De Quincey’s discourse should be viewed as an exception to the rule embodied by Wordsworth’s poetry, the materialist concepts of political economy, or the logic of political economy, become “my narrative,” the “naked shivering” body of De Quincey. Furthermore, the discourse that has presented itself as a body has changed from poetry to prose, from the metaphor of the body to the logic of political economy. Consequently, the denuded body stands metaphorically for the “dismal science,” which then finds its opposite in the “affecting language” of Wordsworth. Superficially De Quincey’s note in this way rehearses the logic of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the 107 Revolution in France (1790). De Quincey’s familiarity with Burke began at least as early as 1803, when he recorded reflections on Burke’s theory of the sublime (Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757) in his diary (Diary 169), but De Quincey’s biographers Grevel Lindop and Horace Eaton have made no mention of any influence coming from the conservative Whig politician’s later political tract or of De Quincey’s reading of it. The note, however, seems reveal thorough familiarity. At a time when the French Revolution had widespread support in England, Burke argued in the Reflections that the events in France represented the dangerous consequences of enlightenment rationalism, broadly conceived as the work of “sophisters, economists, and calculators,” and this intellectual plague had led to disrespect of ancient and hallowed institutions such as the monarchy and to the decreasing influence of the nobility: “Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom” (238). Locke, De Quincey reveals in the Diary, was one for whom Burke reserved special contempt (De Quincey records on May 16, 1803: “[I] hear capital pun of Burke’s about ‘Locke on the human understanding’” [172]). According to the Burke of the Reflections, rationality, which reduces the cultural inheritance to the status of a “superstition” (235) and fosters distrust in the intrinsic merits of kings and queens, denies society “the decent drapery of life” that concealed “the defects of our naked shivering nature” (239). For Burke, political economy is an instrument of the enlightenment’s reduction of the human to her bare, animalistic essence. 108 On one level De Quincey’s note offers an apologia for his confessions on the Burkean grounds that, although in itself their incisiveness would be of no service to humanity, publicly exposing his “moral ulcers and scars” and recording his remarkable feats of “self-indulgence” as they would, the moral lesson provided by De Quincey’s virtuous example of an individual’s breaking the “accursed chain” of opium-addiction would justify publication. But while ostensibly an authorial self-abasement subordinating De Quincey’s discourse to the moralism of Burke and the poetic diction of Wordsworth, the preface also subjects the representational idealism of Wordsworth’s “Preface” to a slyly ironic critique that confounds sign and signified, embodying the “theoretical regress” implied by the “Preface” and turning Wordsworth’s “real language” into a bawdy metaphor redolent of the salaciousness of popular forms such as the gothic and “two-penny trash.” Similarly, while ostensibly apologizing for violating the decorum called for by Burke, De Quincey’s text playfully literalizes Burke’s image of enlightenment rationality as “our naked shivering nature,” employing the logic of political economy to argue for the morality of his work according to Burke’s own terms while suggestively positing the discourse of political economy as De Quincey’s own naked frame. Through the metaphor of the author’s body De Quincey puts the materiality of the literary in the service of a playful engagement with Wordsworthian theory than anticipates post-structuralism. A similar posture of critique toward the science of presence is perceivable in De Quincey’s engagement with Romantic philosophy, specifically the transcendentalist philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). 109 Theoretical Contexts: Fetishism in Kant and Nineteenth-century Political Economy Thomas De Quincey’s magnum opus and the source of his famous moniker (“the Opium-eater”), Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar (1821, revised edition 1856) appeared in the London Magazine after its destitute author had initially offered an “Opium Article” to William Blackwood in December of 1820 (Lindop 243). But before the piece could appear, the publisher of Blackwood’s lost patience with his new contributor, who had a tendency to procrastinate and to send Blackwood provoking notes with his tardy submissions, and only one month into their eagerly anticipated relationship De Quincey and Blackwood’s parted ways (Lindop 243-5). In search of cash to stave off creditors, De Quincey subsequently offered the piece to the Maga’s bitter rival, the London Magazine, which was in disarray following the death of its editor John Scott in his infamous duel with J.H. Christie of Blackwood’s (Lindop 245). The history of this text is in this way framed by dismemberment – both of human bodies and the corporate structures of cultural production. The fractured philosophical corpus – the fragmented body as metaphor for the philosophical system – is a key trope in a work having a powerful influence on De Quincey’s thought. The philosophy of Kant is generally thought to exemplify Romanticism’s turn toward the subjective and internal – a “revolution,” in the words of Peter Otto (here paraphrasing De Quincey [378]), akin to the Copernican overturning of the cosmos in which a focus on the individual and on particular conditions and perspectives gains prominence in relation to shared perspectives and claims to objective 110 knowledge. For De Quincey, an early English reader of Kant, the latter’s system represented, initially, “the keys to a new and creative philosophy” and “the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden” (qtd. in Otto, 378). In Kant the possibility of objective knowledge – this was claimed by empiricist philosophers of the eighteenth century such as John Locke, who famously imagined the mind as a “tabula rasa” on which an accurate image of the world was inscribed through sensory experience – is called into question by an emphasis on cognitive structures and preconceptions informing an individual’s experience of the world. Ostensibly, such a shift calls into question the possibility of certainty in regard to the very reality of matter itself, which suggests an affinity of Kant’s work with nominalism. The subjective thrust of the Kantian system can be overemphasized, however. As Fiona Hughes has noted in Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, Kant never dispenses altogether with the empirical; his is neither an empty nominalism that installs the “category” in the place of the object nor a pure subjectivism, the “projection of mental order onto a featureless world” (212). Rather, the status of the material realm in relation to the subject in Kant is highly complex. The Kantian revision of the subjective relationship to matter reflects a dismemberment of the epistemological framework inherited by the Romantics – a breakdown of the Newtonian positivism that founds such stable oppositions as that between mind and matter. According to the terms of such an empiricist framework, mind has the status of a transparent medium by which “objective-scientific knowledge” about the world is obtained (Žižek 18). Kant’s dismemberment of the opposition is such that his system does not simply overturn the empiricists’ binary. Instead, the schematic 111 organization of reality into stable categories itself becomes unstable. More specifically, in Kant the a priori categories inform the transcendental subject’s conception of the world. While on its face this might suggest a reversal of the tenets of empiricism, for Kant the self-identity of the world – in its particularity, significantly – remains a given (in Hughes’s terms this is the “material given”) (207). But not all intuitions are fully determined by the categories, which underdetermine empirical experience. This leaves open the possibility that there could be a gap between the transcendental order supplied by the mind and the world of given objects. . . . [T]he mind does not simply impose order on the world and instead has to take further considerations into account in its empirical observation. . . . [According to Kant,] We have to go out into the world and examine particular empirical affects if we are to achieve empirical knowledge. (Hughes 212) Phenomena (subjective sense impressions) are not simply ex nihilo products, as if the world were a substance perfect in its lack of character. Instead, knowledge is the product of a relationship between subject and object, self and world. In Kant, form (“order”), in other words, is no longer form in the classical or metaphysical sense, the sense produced by a “science of presence” (Spivak xxi). The kind of philosophy referred to by Spivak by this phrase posits form as the sublimated offspring (“seed”) of some “stable center” (xi). In such a view, form, akin to the concept of the preface (this being Spivak’s subject in this instance), circumscribes a content that, as Derrida remarks in The Truth in Painting, in a science of presence asserts itself as “pure act and total presence” (80). Such a concept of content is likewise an inappropriate comparison to Kant’s conception of phenomena. Rather, Kant’s notion of the interplay between subject and object seems to anticipate the play of différance that Derrida unmasks as operating in the metaphysical science of presence, where the concept of content is not a pure presence but the product 112 of an oppositional relation to its other, form, which itself has no integrity apart from its conception as embodying what content lacks (80). Kant’s revision of empiricism installs the play of différance in the place of the opposition of substance (phenomena) to nothingness (“featureless” noumena) that a pure and purely “revolutionary” subjectivism would entail. The Romantic “revolution” illustrated by Kant finds a corollary in the playful and experimental “form” of the Confessions, which, as these quotation marks imply, should not be seen as form in the metaphysical sense. In keeping with Kant’s revision of the opposition of mind and matter, this text’s ostensible frame has only an ambiguously “formal” status. In this text, a classical sense of form is frustrated by De Quincey’s organization of the material, which, in light of De Quincey’s self-consciously digressive narrative style, might be taken as characteristic of an approach to narrative and literary theory – rather than as being a biographical symptom (of a writing process led into error by opium-addition, for example). More specifically, here the manipulation of titles resonates with larger currents in narrative theory in the period. Joel D. Black, drawing on Michael von Poser’s analysis of Friedrich Schlegel, has argued that the influence of German Romanticism – the theory of Schlegel in particular – is evident in the changing role of parekbasis (also called digressio) in Romantic prose forms. Whereas in the eighteenth-century novel digression served the purpose of authorial “intrusion” into the narrative to present authorial commentary irrelevant to the plot (recall Henry Fielding’s interstitial chapter-length commentaries in Tom Jones), in the Romantic period digressio, the step aside from the events of a life to insert an author’s views, comes to dominate 113 novelistic discourse. Hence the multitude of literary “confessions” in which events from the life are merely the “vehicle” (Black 312) as Jean Paul Richter (a powerful influence on De Quincey) describes the proper role of autobiographical information, for an author’s reflections. While this inversion of the role of digression might be said to reflect the influence of German Romanticism on Romantic prose generally speaking, Black argues that Schlegel’s theory itself goes much further than such an overturning of the relation between digression and plot suggests. Schlegel theorizes parekbasis as an “antirhetorical” (emphasis in original) (313) device rather than the tool of an author or speaker in stable relation to an audience. Schlegelian parekbasis is “antirhetorical” because it effectively dissolves the very structure of eighteenth-century narrative: “Schlegel uses the term [parekbasis] in [a] . . . sense in which the speaker-listener, narrator-reader relationship is completely annulled and overcome.” Furthermore, this form of “radical parekbasis,” in which “the narrating persona, subject, or consciousness has been displaced” by “a . . . conversation between any number of interlocutors,” has a “transgressive” cast in contrast to eighteenth-century novelistic prose (313). Schlegel’s deconstruction of the speaker-audience binary opposition in classical rhetoric actually resonates less strongly with De Quincey’s digressive narrative in the Confessions than with his manipulation of the “form” of his text, which in fact dissolves the formal structure of his text. De Quincey’s organization of the text into sections troubles any certain sense of this text’s body, as well as, consequently, its frame, rendering difficult the identification of the “matter,” or in Derrida’s terms in The Truth in Painting, the “representative 114 essence” of the text (57). Material designated in traditional terms as elements of the frame (text entitled in ways suggesting an introductory or prefatory function, for instance), envelope one another and compete with the “body” of the text for prominence. A prefatory note to the reader precedes another suggestively introductory but lengthy section called “Preliminary Confessions,” which in turn leads to “The Pleasures of Opium.” Then comes another introductory section, “Introduction to the Pains of Opium,” which leads to the final section, only slightly longer than its own introduction, called “The Pains of Opium.” Rendering indistinguishable the “ergon” of his Confessions from its “parergon” in this way, De Quincey’s “form” ceases to be such – infringing as it does on the “body” of the text to an indeterminate extent – at the same time that the relationship between “center” and “margin” becomes unstable. Just as with his title De Quincey has implied that a paradoxical antiquarianism offers an alternative to the mythologies held out by a science of presence, here the form/content distinction falls prey to the “matter” of De Quincey’s text. At the same time that form is at once its other, content, matter is at once its other, sense. The prefatory and introductory framing of this text is collectively a species of what Derrida playfully terms “dismemberment” in The Truth in Painting, which Derrida invites us to think of as Kant’s theoretical deployment of the fetish. Derrida is referring to the apparently contradictory status of the aesthetic in Kant. In his reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Derrida explores Kant’s theoretical “middle articulation” (Mittelglied) (Truth 38), the philosophical space between Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason. This is the space of art and the beautiful, which the critique takes as its 115 focus in its theorization of the faculty of judgment, the faculty of subsuming particular experiences (“empirical representations” [Kant 17]) under general laws – laws that, by a mysterious means, conform to a transcendental system comprehensible to us at the same time that they remain elements of the inscrutable multiplicity found in nature. The faculty of judgment serves as a “bridge” comparable to the synthetic apparatus embodied by Kant’s Third Critique itself in his philosophical corpus: in addition to uniting phenomenal (empirical thing) and noumenal (thing-in-itself) and particular and general it conjoins practical (Second Critique) and pure (First) (Truth 40). The ostensibly contradictory status of the Mittelglied, simultaneously particular and “nonparticular, nondetachable” (“since it forms the articulation between the two other [the theoretical and the practical]” [38]), invokes the paradoxical materiality of the commodity-fetish in nineteenth-century political economy. This “queer thing,” as Marx famously describes the commodity in Capital, is a “common, every-day thing” at the same time that “it is changed into something transcendent” by market exchange (71). In terms of its own form, its position in the organization of Kant’s system, Kant’s text is an expression of a lack in the philosophy of the present, a “bridge” between “the theoretical and the practical part” of a pure metaphysics, as Kant remarks in the “Preface,” that is at once fundamental to the production of that system (which will occur at some indeterminate point in the future) and redundant in advance (“its principles may not constitute a special part of a system of pure philosophy”). Its fundamental role is instrumental – its role one of preparation (Kant: “[T]he critique must have previously probed the ground for this structure down to the depth of the first foundations” [56]). In 116 this way, according to Derrida, the Third Critique expresses “a fundamental desire” (41). Consequently, the philosophy of desire (this being Derrida’s interpretation of Kant’s concern in the Third Critique with “pleasure and . . . unpleasure”) itself articulates a desire (39). In addition, a pure philosophy will be able to do without this desire: the “nondetachable” text plays a merely instrumental role in preparing the “first foundations” of a “pure” metaphysics (Kant 56). The kind of desire exclusive to judgments of taste – these being impure cognitive acts (because they are not based on a priori principles) – should not be a focus of this system of the future. In Kant’s system both the instrument as such (in this case, critique) and the indeterminate particularity of the fetish are symptoms of a lack. But Kant’s instrument – the Third Critique – transcends the status accorded to the instrument in the context of a science of presence (as “the formal-transcendental a priori independent of all positive contents” [Žižek 17]): the form of Kant’s system expresses the lack for which a pure metaphysics, when this can be produced, will compensate, according to the terms of Kant’s own thought. Its content in the context of Kant’s theory reveals, then, that it is more than what it purports to be – purely functional, a use-value. Similarly, the dismembered form of the Mittelglied, in its union of particular and general, embodies the union of subject and object that the Third Critique sets out to accomplish, in its attempt to account for the particularity of judgments of taste within its transcendental matrix. De Quincey’s body in the context of his title, like the “matter” of his Confessions, invokes the Mittelglied as an object comparable in its sublimity, anticipating the “immaterial 117 corporeality” of the fetish in the late nineteenth-century discourse of political economy (Žižek 18). Consequently, the commodity form can be seen to haunt De Quincey’s titular play with the concept of matter (the matter of his text is in this way akin to the matter of Kant’s) and with his manipulation of textual matter in the organization of his Confessions. Given the form of De Quincey’s cultural consumption, it is not surprising that the commodity form should be key to his contributions to Romantic theory. De Quincey the Collector De Quincey is well known for his precocious interest in contemporary English poetry (an interest that was a source of great pride) and widely acknowledged as being among the first in England to read Kant, but such notable instances of “legitimate consumption” (Bourdieu 40) – cultural acquisitions that do not violate the imperative of the “pure” aesthetic to disregard the sensual dimension of literate culture, the “materiality of the medium” (Hayles 31) – have overshadowed those of De Quincey’s literary habits that did not treat the literary as simply a medium, an instrumentality independent of its “contents.” But De Quincey’s style of consumption, a style reflected in his production, in some respects did fall outside the “charmed circle” (Rubin 4) delineating legitimate uses of literature, a space outlined by none other than Kant himself through the opposition of (sensual) “gratification” to (pure) “pleasure” in the Third Critique. A famous formulation of Anglo-Germanic Romanticism identifies the field with a consistent “displacement” (Romantic 84) of material social conditions and of cultural 118 production itself – with, in other words, the instantiation of the “pure” aesthetic on the level of genre. Coleridge’s image in “The Nightingale” of the pure “song” (29) of nature, the vessel of a “whole spirit” (29) at one with the natural environment (as distinct from the laborious work of the “poet” [23, 24] who “hath been building up the rhyme” [24] and “fill[ing] all things with himself” [19]), exemplifies this process of spiritualization. The impure art, on the contrary, is that which can be labeled in terms of genre, situated in time and space as the product of a community of artists (“he and such as he / First nam’d these notes” [21-22]), and identified as the product of human hands (“poor Wretch . . . made all gentle sounds tell back the tale” [my emphasis] [19-20]). 1 De Quincey’s overlooked collecting suggests a need to reevaluate the traditional view of Romanticism as a field defined by a reification of the material conditions of authorship. De Quincey illustrates that this view of Romanticism occludes the key importance of the book and bibliophilia – bookishness – to Romantic autobiography and authorial self-fashioning in Romantic prose, especially the periodical press. More than the elided prehistory of the naturalized “inspirations” of the poet, the psychology of Romantic bookishness in works such as the Confessions reveals that in some cases the “Romantic ideology” formative for the production of the Romantic authorial persona is less a McGannian “displacement” of the conditions of authorship than the production of a bookish literary selfhood in whose genesis psychological narratives of book-love are an integral feature. Rather than an ideological “occlusion,” “evasion” or “disguising” 1 In this light, critics' inattention to De Quincey’s impure uses of literature – for example his energetic collecting – suggests continuities between the “Romantic Ideology” (Romantic 1) and the aesthetic values of subsequent commentators. Not surprisingly, the elevation in recent years of De Quincey to the status of a major “minor” Romantic writer has corresponded with the production of a De Quincey whose cultural practices are “Romantic.” 119 (Romantic 82) of the material or social facts and preconditions of artistic production (to borrow from McGann’s lexicon), such a literary identity is founded on and through narratives of the repression of such conditions, including the bibliomania and its decadent trappings. Romantic bookishness is in this way aptly described in terms of Derridean différance rather than the structuralist critical presuppositions perceivable in Marxian ideology critique. De Quincey’s intellectual autobiography reveals that in the context of authorial self-writing in the periodical press narratives of artistic inspiration that mystify or spiritualize the conditions of production do so with reference to a nascent version of cultural materialism. As a young person De Quincey acquired literary habits that could be said to reflect both his autodidacticism and the social position of an upwardly mobile (yet only precariously so) Manchester linen merchant’s family (Lindop 2-3). The stunning catholicity of De Quincey’s reading represents not only a constitution for literary work perhaps unmatched in his generation; De Quincey’s range is also the “miniature culture” (Bourdieu 329) of the autodidact with his heterodox and incoherent “collection of unstrung pearls” (328). On the other hand, Mrs. De Quincey’s class aspirations (illustrated by her addition of the “De” to the family name after her husband’s death) are also reflected in her son’s style of production – his “avid but anxious, naïve but serious” (327) (over)investment in critical stakes (eliciting complaints about the harshness of his critical judgments) and titles (“philosopher”). De Quincey’s position at the margins of the intellectual class is similarly evident in his style of consumption – a desire to own books that struck Henry Crabb Robinson as a defect in his taste (“The only thing he wants is a 120 magnificent library” [Lindop 198]). Whereas in the case of artists like Wordsworth, economic and cultural capital are inversely proportional (taste being a “virtue made of necessity” [Bourdieu 177], the pure aesthetic’s ethic of disinterestedness reflects artists’ “status as poor relations” [176]), De Quincey’s conspicuous consumption of literature reflected the opposite relation between economic and cultural advantage: the detachment required of the aesthetic disposition casts not only the aristocratic collector but also the petit-bourgeois striver into the realm of barbarism, where the relevance of “direct sensuous pleasure” (Bourdieu 31) to judgments of taste betokens an impure gaze. Hence Wordsworth’s “cultivated” disdain for books and De Quincey’s professed horror at the former’s abuses of them – in one notorious case, with the use of “a buttery knife” (Lindop 205). In the face financial difficulties, De Quincey indulged in his inadvertently counter-hegemonic cultural practice at a time when the ownership of books, although more widely distributed than in the eighteenth century thanks to the new circulating libraries, rising literacy rates, and cheaper methods of production, was still a sign of privilege and status exclusive to a wealthy minority. 2 The price of new fiction was on the rise in the early nineteenth century (Altick 262), its peak still a decade away when a seventeen-year-old De Quincey was a fixture in the circulating libraries and bookshops of Everton, the Liverpool suburb to which Thomas was sent in 1803 following the London 2 William G. Rowland, Jr., notes that as late as the 1820s books connoted “luxury and status” available to the “entrepreneurial middle class,” whose tastes, Coleridge’s famous protestations in the Biographia Literaria and Wordsworth’s in the “Preface” notwithstanding, closely resembled those of the upper classes in the eighteenth century (21). Richard D. Altick points out that the circulating libraries emerged as a consequence of the paper duty (which Altick observes was thought to “stand in the way of a really cheap literature”) and the publishing practices of Sir Walter Scott, whose influence on the price of literature “can hardly be overestimated” (282, 262). 121 adventure famously recalled in the Confessions (Eaton 5). The softening of the market for books brought about by Thomas Cadell’s reprinting of Scott in 1826 (following the liquidation of the latter’s publisher, Constable) was decades away (Altick 274), but one of the two books De Quincey took with him as he “eloped” from Manchester Grammar School was a new volume of poetry by then-unknown poet William Wordsworth (referred to anonymously as “a favorite English poet” in the Confessions) (18) that De Quincey had purchased in 1801 (Lindop 49). In 1803 De Quincey’s compulsive patronage of Everton’s commercial libraries and bookshops reveals itself as a pattern of deliberate commodity-consumption preferred to other styles of cultural acquisition available to him. The Diary from that year shows him to be a “constant” (221n15) presence in Everton’s circulating libraries. In a letter from 1801, in which she appears to try to make the move to Everton appealing to her son, Mrs. Quincey lists among the town’s advantages what we can presume is Liverpool’s public library (“in the town there is really a noble library to which Mr. Cragg will introduce you. It is a new institution, comprising a great collection”) and a neighbor by the name of Mr. Clarke, who “will lend you any Greek or Latin authors. Of Italian, French, and English books he seems to have store also”) (221n15). 3 Mrs. Quincey 3 Mrs. Quincey’s language suggests that the lending, as opposed to commercial or “circulating,” library was still a novelty in the context of nineteenth-century literary culture. John Brewer and Iaian McCalman note that “[t]hough in the long term bookshops and libraries emerged as separate institutions, for most of the eighteenth century their histories are intertwined” (204). Apparently the lending library’s pretensions to aristocratic culture (“noble”) or scholarly indexes of value (such as completeness) characteristically had appeal for Mrs. Quincey, who might also be consciously appealing to what she knew of her son’s own literary tastes. No doubt her primary concerns are controlling De Quincey’s spending and mollifying his discontent, however. At this point Thomas had been locked in a dispute with his guardians regarding finances as well as the course his studies would take, a dispute culminating prior to his arrival at Everton in an ill-planned and aborted trip to London that he had hoped to finance through loans offset by his future legacy (Eaton 78-87). 122 mentions the library and neighbor as conveniences affording her son the opportunity to avoid bringing his already significant personal library with him (and presumably, in the light of the family’s financial situation at the time, for this followed the death of De Quincey’s father, spending money on new books). The Diary of 1803 makes no reference to any visit by De Quincey to either the public library or Mr. Clarke, however (221n15). In addition, Eaton asserts, “De Quincey did not use the Liverpool public library at all” (90). Instead one finds in the Diary scrupulously detailed records of transactions occurring at Everton’s various circulating libraries, of which Eaton records there being “four or five” (90). De Quincey makes reference to one owned by Elizabeth Turner, which lay on Richmond Row, another owned by Elizabeth Brown, on Sparling Street, and a French library in Liverpool whose proprietor was an O’Reilly (Diary 221n15). Furthermore, featuring little in the way of reflection on the reading he records, the Diary resembles a catalog of acquisitions in which the act of reading is a quantified equivalent to his monetary transactions at businesses such as “Miss T’s”: Went to W[right]’s; continued Ital [Radcliffe’s The Italian];--dined along with C[ragg];--read 13 th b. of Cowper’s Iliad;--finished Italian;--took back 3 rd vol. of it;--paid Miss T. 1s. 6d. each for two gilt cars, 5d. for 5 gilt birds, 1/7d. for readg. – in all 5. Took 1 st vol. of Mrs. Robinson’s memoirs 4 ;-- (152) The studiously recorded, latter type of transaction illustrates that De Quincey is both borrowing from the circulating libraries and buying new fiction, principally gothic novels. 4 This reference is most likely to the Memoirs (1801) of the actress Mary “Perdita” Robinson (1758- 1800), finished and edited posthumously by her daughter Maria Elizabeth (Barbour 680). 123 Another entry, from April 30, records the details of what we might presume to be a not atypical day, since several others in the Diary resemble it. It reveals the power of De Quincey’s compulsion to patronize circulating libraries: Rose at 11 . . . went to 3 libraries;--then to W[right]’s;--read some of Lewis’s “Tales of Wonder” to the ladies;--dined by myself at C[ragg’s?]’s;--drank 1 cup of coffee at W’s; read nothing;--talked little;-- went (at about 7 o’clock) away;--called at Brown’s library;--took “The Dagger” 5 . (Title page torn out;--Q. is it a translation from . . . German?);-- called too at Miss Turner’s;--took 2 nd vol. of Mrs. Robinson’s “Memoirs”;--read it and to last work of p. 107 this [evening] N.B. Got home to night before it was dark. (152-3) No less than five visits to circulating libraries are recorded, and the titles indicate a preference for the mass culture of the day. De Quincey’s finances at this time as represented by the Diary give a clearer picture of exactly how he was spending money on books. An included ledger listing expenses from March and April, 1803, shows six items that appear to be charges for borrowing (e.g., “Ghost Seer,” referring to a translation of Schiller, priced at fourpence), all listed at under fivepence. 6 On the rise since the 1850s, new book prices (single- volume, unbound) hovered around three shillings, with a “three-decker” (or three-volume novel, the most common format for fiction) costing over ten shillings (Brewer 204). New fiction purchases recorded in the Diary include four shillings for a play entitled “Mary Stewart” (“thinking it to be a translation from Schiller”), an unnamed volume by Southey 5 Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801) (Eaton [Diary] 222n25) 6 Others in the list are “Boyle” (untraced) at twopence, “Mooriana” (Mooriana; or, Selections from the moral, philosophical, and miscellaneous works of the late Dr. John Moore. Illustrated by a new biographical and critical account of the doctor and his writings; and notes, historical, classical, explanatory, by F. Prevost and F. Blagden, 1803) at threepence, and three volumes of “Ital.” at twopence each (The Italian, or, the Confessional of the Black Penitents, by Ann Radcliffe) (148, 220n14). 124 (four shillings) and William Mudford’s Augustus and Mary, or the Maid of Buttermore: a domestic Tale (1803), a three-decker costing De Quincey ten shillings sixpence (199, 201, 245n124). In addition to purchases and fees for borrowing, De Quincey lists payments to the circulating libraries that are most likely deposits (since subscribing members could typically borrow without paying). 7 One such entry records a debit of 1s. 3d. “To Miss Turner,” for example (148). Whereas the Diary reveals a compulsive literary consumer, De Quincey’s autobiographical writings (in one respect) and the standard biographical treatment reify this means of De Quincey’s legendary cultural acquisition as a young man. De Quincey characterizes his own acquirement of culture in terms that criticism and biography related to him have often echoed – these ideological terms referring to those subjective qualities or capacities – tastes, likes, dislikes, abilities, talents (Lindop 100) – in terms of which cultural fluency is often discussed. De Quincey’s remarkable intellectual “gifts” often appear in such garb. The headmaster of Bath Grammar School famously said of De Quincey, who enrolled in Morgan’s school at age eleven, “That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an English one” (Thomas 34). Here the noteworthiness of De Quincey’s particular fluency and any degree of fluency constitute a circle from which any reference to the “genesis” (Bourdieu 68) of his abilities must by necessity be excluded. This mystification of the sources of De Quincey’s cultural affinities and skills extends into his standard biographical treatment. To Horace Eaton, it is the unique nature of the young De Quincey to have such tastes (he is “an intellectual 7 In regard to provincial circulating libraries, William Christie observes that “subscribers could borrow for an annual fee of between 10s. 6d. and one guinea, non-subscribers for a set price per volume” (454). 125 being” and a “genius” [Eaton 11]). Such characterizations of course suggest – to an extent clouded by the familiarity of such constructions of cultural competence to us – a degree of spontaneity with regard to De Quincey’s cultural acquisitions. This reification of the materiality of De Quincey’s “miniature culture” exists in tension with a highly allusive literary style that itself embodies the logic of the collection. The bookishness of the minor Romantic manifests itself in the case of De Quincey in a particular literary style – one marked by a compulsive allusiveness that reflects De Quincey’s bookish autodidacticism – and a perceivable anxiety stemming from precisely this means of his cultural acquisition. Both are in evidence in the “pensive citadel” passage in the Confessions, where the materiality of the literary (figured by the book) is central to an implicit critique of an important Kantian dualism, and a narrative of collecting affords an opportunity to distinguish De Quincey’s cultural practices from the morally suspect culture of the effeminate aristocratic collector. De Quincey’s collecting habit finds literary manifestation in a style that offers “hyper-tropism” (Russett 16) where one expects an autobiographical subjectivity with integrity: “Nothing ever happened to De Quincey that he had not read about first” (16). The “pensive citadel” passage foregrounds this feature of De Quincey’s style at the same time that it relates an incident involving his library. In this passage the mass of the book (its “weight”) figures as literature’s other – the empirical ballast of Kantian purity as well as the paradoxical foundation of literary originality. The passage tells the story of De Quincey’s escape from Manchester Grammar School at age fifteen. 126 The passage reveals that De Quincey’s compulsive book-collecting at Everton extended a pattern of acquisition begun even earlier, because by this time he had amassed a collection large enough to make difficult the stealthy exit from the school that – once he had resolved, for reasons that remain unclear, to leave the place – he desired. The Confessions relates how a trunk of “immense” weight containing “nearly all my library” (17) was an obstacle to De Quincey’s goal of leaving the school (early in the morning on July 20, 1802, according to Grevel Lindop) without being discovered by the headmaster (Lindop 66). To help him remove the trunk he recalls enlisting the aid of a servant whose feats of valor merit a Miltonic encomium: “The groom swore he would do anything I wished; and, when the time arrived, went up stairs to bring the trunk down. This I feared was beyond the strength of any one man: however, the groom was a man – ‘Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear / The weight of mightiest monarchies’” (17). This allusion to Beelzebub’s epic physique from Book II of Paradise Lost plays with the metaphor of literary greatness to point ironically to an irreducible tension between literature’s facticity and its ideality, analogous to a key distinction in nineteenth- century aesthetics. 8 In the context of what ostensibly is a schematic invocation of Kant’s Third Critique, in which the Van Dyck copy on the wall of De Quincey’s room at Manchester Grammar School occupies a privileged position in De Quincey’s memory (in relation to the scholarly paraphernalia he also describes as being in the room), the 8 The passage in question: “Which when Beelzebub perceived, than whom, / Satan except, none higher sat, with grave / Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed / A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven / Deliberation sat and public care; / And princely counsel in his face yet shone, / Majestic though in ruin: sage he stood / With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear / The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look / Drew audience and attention still as night / Or summer’s noontide air, while thus he spake.” (2: 299- 309) 127 “weight” of his books punctures the Kantian dualism that privileges artistic representation over empirical object (Adorno 9-10). 9 The greatness of Milton is here pointedly both literal and figurative. On the one hand, this “weight” refers, of course, to the literal heft of De Quincey’s library, but on the other hand it functions as a synonym for literary prestige (as “mightiest monarchies,” which suggestively points to Milton’s status as a sort of literary heavyweight in De Quincey’s conception of British letters). 10 In this way the “weight” of De Quincey’s books refers simultaneously to the empirical and, in accordance with Kant’s definition of this term, the aesthetic valences of his library and, hence, of the literary. That an engagement with aesthetic theory via this description of his library would bear marks of the influence of Kant should not be surprising. Professing himself disillusioned with Kant’s system soon after his first exposure while at Oxford (professing disgust at Kant’s religious skepticism, he would recall this disillusionment later in life, calling Kant a “disenchanter, and a disenchanter the most profound” in “The German Language”), De Quincey nonetheless continually returned throughout his life to the philosophy he terms the “very tree of knowledge” (qtd. in Thomas, 112). Incidentally, the passage’s seemingly deep engagement with the categories of Kant’s aesthetics suggests the possibility that De Quincey’s knowledge of Kant, of which Rene Wellek was highly critical, deserves reappraisal. Paul Youngquist, author of the article “De Quincey's Crazy Body,” has more 9 Lindop identifies the portrait referred to in the Confessions as a copy of Van Dyck’s portrait of a seventeenth-century Duchess of Somerset who provided financial support to both Manchester Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford (Lindop 67; Milligan 263n25). 10 A list of favorite poets in the Diary lists the author of Paradise Lost, a recurring source of allusions throughout the Confessions, among his top three: “Edmund Spenser; William Shakespeare; John Milton; James Thomson . . .” (qtd. in Lindop, 101) 128 recently offered provocative steps in this direction. De Quincey had a complicated and ambivalent but also life-long interest in the work of the metaphysician. Kant’s aesthetics rigidly separates the aesthetic from the empirical – the “weight” of the book, from Kant’s point of view in the Critique of Judgment (1790), would be a type of sensation antithetical to the judgment operative in the case of the metaphorical greatness, or beauty, of any literature. The physical existence of an object is a matter for the senses, and the senses are irrelevant to pure judgments of taste in Kant’s aesthetics. Likewise for moral determinations: “In order to find something good,” Kant argues (“good” implying a moral judgment in this case), “I must always know what sort of thing the object is supposed to be, i.e., I must have a concept of it [such a concept can include “an end” and “consequently a satisfaction in the existence of an object”]. I do not need that in order to find beauty in something” (93). As Adorno puts it, “The separation of the aesthetic sphere from the empirical constitutes art” for Kant (10). The latter, exemplified here by the literal weight of De Quincey’s library – this being empirical – involves what Kant terms “an objective representation of the senses,” whereas the former judgment as to the literature’s aesthetic rather than empirical greatness, this being a judgment of taste, “must always remain subjective” in Kant’s view (92). De Quincey’s description of his heavy trunk invokes the Kantian category of the aesthetic in a way that points ironically to its foundations in an antithetical relation to the empirical: the citation of Milton registers the aesthetic “weight” of De Quincey’s literature while denoting the empirical burden of his books. More specifically, the quotation from Milton, who, alongside Wordsworth and Euripides, was one of the 129 brightest stars in De Quincey’s literary firmament (Lindop 359), synecdochically conjures up an author among those that De Quincey would have collected, appears to confound the foundational opposition in Kant’s aesthetics – between, on the one hand, the interest involved in a judgment about an object that relies on the empirical existence of that object (such a judgment revealing the influence of desire on the judgment and pleasing the senses rather than exercising the faculty of cognition) and, on the other, the judgment unpolluted by any such “bias” toward “the existence of the thing” (Kant 89-92). As Adorno reads Kant, the latter implies a judgment about art, and the former implies responses to objects unmediated by artistic representation (Adorno 9-10). As Kant puts it in the first book of the Third Critique, the distinction can be seen to rest on the difference between cognition and sensation, the latter being tied to the actual existence of the object and the former being concerned with the object as a representation of the faculty of cognition: “One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste” (91). Aesthetic judgments, it should be noted, are for Kant always empirical (90), but pure judgments of taste differ from impure judgments to the extent that in the case of the latter the empirical existence of the object, as opposed to its existence as a representation of the mind as an object of reflection, has paramount importance: “[T]he satisfaction [derived from an impure judgment] presupposes not the mere judgment about it [the object] but the relation of its existence to my state insofar as it is affected by such an object” (92). 130 In this light, the allusion to Milton functions as a fulcrum on which the status of De Quincey’s library swings – from that of an object of sensation to an object of cognition, or from that of an object of an impure to a pure judgment of taste. More specifically, through the allusion the library’s “weight” changes from literal mass to figurative greatness – literary eminence figuring consequently as a facet of cultural production lying on a continuum with the fetishistic existence of culture’s property form, the book. The citation further suggests that De Quincey’s canon (“mightiest monarchies”) constitutes a “weight” having psychic as well as physical dimensions. At a moment when De Quincey is deviating from the path of conventional scholarly progress – spurning a likely scholarship to Oxford 11 out of frustration at having to remain in Manchester 12 – a literal displacement of the weight of his books is rendered in a way that suggests that the particular aspirations associated with the trunk have been accompanied by a psychological burden, one that the elder De Quincey is perhaps conscious of having wished to displace. This sense of frustration is further conveyed by the passage’s culminating image, in which De Quincey sheds the burden: De Quincey sees the trunk off on its way to some undisclosed location (“I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheel-barrow, and on its road to the carrier’s”) before turning his heels towards Wales with only two books in his pockets: “a favourite English poet in one pocket; and a small 11 De Quincey’s guardians selected Manchester Grammar School due to its tradition of supplying several students with £40 scholarships to Brasenose College, Oxford, each year (Lindop 46). De Quincey’s patrimony came to £150, and a yearly income £200 was the norm for Oxford students (Eaton 57). 12 Eaton argues that De Quincey’s discontent stemmed from a gnawing sense that his situation was inordinately incommensurate with his level of maturity and intellectual ability – a sense fostered by frequent social contact with adults, some of whom (such as Lady Carbery) he even taught, in Carbery’s case Greek (64). His unhappiness is revealed in a series of letters to his mother in which he demands to be enrolled at Oxford immediately or, failing that, to be allowed to spend the time until he could do so legally at home (65). 131 12mo. volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other” (18). Here the particularity of author-figures – the lightness of his material load is represented in terms of these authorial signifiers – signifies freedom from oppression by the material objects and expectations associated with the life of the student, including books and other “objects” (16). These artificial things and the room that has housed them (a space whose isolation from the natural landscape around it is implied by its moniker, the “pensive citadel”), are in this way opposed to the freedom and naturalness that De Quincey associated with Wales, to which he escaped not only from school but also from the strictness of his mother’s household and where he idealistically imagined he could easily get by indefinitely on one guinea per week (Lindop 73). But the description of the “pensive citadel” that frames the trunk anecdote is equally relevant to De Quincey’s Kantian idealization of natural beauty, at the expense of the human-made, in the Confessions (as Adorno observes, the priority of natural beauty – the natural sublime, for example – in Kant’s aesthetics reflects the ideological commitments informing the latter’s philosophy: “[T]he experience [of natural beauty] is still expressed unreservedly by Kant in the bourgeois revolutionary spirit that held the humanly made for fallible and that, because the humanly made was never thought fully to become second nature, guarded the image of first nature” [Adorno 64]). In this way the naturalization of property (in the form of the author-function and the construction of De Quincey’s reified canon) – the spiritualization of this object – is afforded by construction of the book as a fetish-object. In other words, one form of property – the author-function – reifies another, the property fetish exemplified by the 132 empirical existence of De Quincey’s physical library. Similarly, on the level of De Quincey’s language the displacement of the psychic burden of literary aspiration constitutes a suppression or degradation of the empirical, reifying it by turning the weight of books into the metaphorical weight of literary ambition. This psychologization of the library is a spiritualization akin to the idealization contained in the same passage’s allusion to Milton. But, significantly, the irony operating in De Quincey’s text stems from a transformation not only of heavy books – into great literature and the psychological burden of literary aspiration – but a transformation of property, a transformation also accomplished by means of a synecdochical allusion to Milton. It is worth dwelling on this means by which the passage transubstantiates De Quincey’s empirical library because in this case what Adorno would call the fetishistic existence of these books (in the sense that they are De Quincey’s property) is idealized, or “purified,” by what is essentially a different kind of objectification (Adorno 13). More specifically, here De Quincey’s empirical library takes on the possibility of being simultaneously property and “great” art (which, it is perhaps worth noting, is also the possibility of irony) by transcending the status, within the text, of mere physical property and, as text, of De Quincey’s literary property. This paradoxical fetishism – in which a property fetish is transcended by a literary fetish, which reinstalls individual ownership as the index of aesthetic value – becomes all the more significant in the light of the fate of the trunk. After relating the dramatic near-exposure of their attempt to get the bulky piece of luggage out of his headmaster’s home, De Quincey writes, 133 I waited until I saw the trunk placed on a wheel-barrow, and on its road to the carrier’s: then, “with Providence my guide,” I set off on foot, -- carrying a small parcel, with some articles of dress, under my arm; a favourite English poet in one pocket; and a small 12mo. Volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other. (18) The spiritualization of literature here takes the form of another Miltonic allusion (“with Providence my guide”): setting his library on its way, De Quincey turns his back on the empirical and faces the purity of the aesthetic (as well as the natural landscape, so prized by Kant), armed with his Christian faith (“Providence”) (or is it Milton?), Wordsworth (“a favourite English poet”), and Euripides. 13 But this spiritualization is ironic: De Quincey’s text draws our attention to the process of transmission that represents his formation of a personal canon, employing an allusion to stand in for Milton’s presence in De Quincey’s poetic trinity of Wordsworth, Milton and Euripides. This citation announces itself as a kind of fetishism through a self-conscious display of substitution and the overt manipulation of Milton’s voice. More specifically, De Quincey has not only modified but also personalized this particular allusion to Milton (the original, from the final lines of Paradise Lost, reads, “Providence thir guide”) (12.647). In the process of representing cultural acquisition as collection that is at once a commodity and an idealized personal canon, De Quincey engages in a critique of metaphysics “founded” on the book that anticipates post-structuralism. This critique of the Kantian dualism focused on the status of the empirical echoes an earlier, equally important passage in the “pensive citadel” section. Here, where the text describes the scene of artistic inspiration in a way that invokes the discourse of political economy 13 As Adorno observes, Kant’s definition of the pure aesthetic in terms of “disinterested satisfaction” leads him to reject as beautiful everything but “formal beauty” and “the so-called sublime natural object” (10). 134 while offering an alternative to the high-Romantic scene of ecological inspiration, the scene of prosaic inspiration takes the form of an auto-sensual process of bookish labor at once highly sensual and individual and at the same time distinct from the practices of the suspect aristocratic collector. The setting for this inspiration is a space, a “pensive citadel,” marked by a sensual and religious exceptionalism summed up by the word “indulgence” (16). It also conjures up what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production. The narrative of his “elopement” from Manchester Grammar School includes a long passage devoted to a description of this scholarly space, the private study and bedroom where a fifteen-year- old De Quincey “had read and studied through all the hours of night” during his two years at the school (16). A cursory analysis of the description of the room reveals a binary structure along the lines of an opposition between masculine imagery, which is associated with the interior and De Quincey’s interiority, and feminine imagery, which is associated with the exterior and the “natural” landscape. The former class of images pertains to the isolated, scholastic space of the room, which is marked by an excitement drawn in phallic terms and opposed to the space around it, the latter having within it “the innocent creatures of God” and remaining unpolluted by “the presence of man, and his restless and unquiet spirit.” The narrator recalls his “agitation,” which renders the room distinct from the “deep peace” on the outside, where an additional source of contrast between the two spaces is the sense that this latter space – the space of “nature” – is described in repetitive terms suggestive of a vacuum (“deep,” “profound,” “broad,” “deep” again); the interior space is marked, on the other hand, in addition to the phallic 135 implications of the narrator’s “agitation,” by the “crimson” light reflected off the “ancient towers of ---” and the narrator’s “firm and immoveable . . . purpose,” which lends to his agitation its sensual overtones. In addition, the scholar’s agitation finds this feminized nature a kind of balm: “To this agitation the deep peace of the morning presented an affecting contrast, and in some degree a medicine.” This scholarly space, associated with an exceptionalism characterized in terms of sensual excess, solitude (“I . . . had been allowed, from my first entrance, the indulgence of a private room”), and alienation, opposes a masculinist image of the human intellect and its operations to a feminized image of the “sanctity” of nature (16). In this way, a masculinized domestic space is at once linked to and separate from an image of femininity that defines it. Furthermore, this masculine sphere and the subjectivity inhabiting it are isolated in a way that aligns this isolation with a capacity for sensuality (“affecting”) that lies on the verge of a disorder or pathology requiring treatment (“medicine”). The text’s construction of this masculine subject relationally (specifically, in relation to particular models of femininity) as well as the particularities of this construction evoke the effeminatus, a figure who emerged during the seventeenth century but whose associations with cultural expertise, deviations from conventional masculinity, and isolation from the public stretch into the late nineteenth century. Linda Dowling has pointed out the effeminatus’ original associations with a disordered and troubling kind of political and personal insularity that accompanied capitalism (this figure serving, in Dowling’s words, as “the empty and negative symbol at once of civic enfeeblement and of the monstrous self-absorption that becomes visible in a society at 136 just the moment at which . . . private interest begins to prevail against those things that concern public welfare” [qtd. in Bristow, 5]). In the nineteenth century an affinity for Hellenism and a society noted for its “intimate homosociality” would be additional cultural valences on the figure, Wilde (prior to the obscenity trials) offering a famous example of this heterosexual yet not conventionally masculine style of male subjectivity (Bristow 5). Drawing on this figure’s tropes of sensualized isolation from the public and cultural expertise, the passage ostensibly constructs the “pensive citadel” as a sanctuary for a youthful effeminatus. As I will attempt to show in the analysis below, however, this setting for a private domestic scene of cultural production and consumption also marginalizes the effete figure of the aristocratic book-collector and this figure’s style of cultural practice, employing political economy to install an idealized, prototypical image of cultural capital as the product of a mode of psychologized self-communion that transcends sensual life. Even as the narrator’s disquiet is rendered as the embodied excitation (“restless and unquiet spirit,” “firm and immoveable . . . purpose”) of a masculine subject experiencing discomfort, this emotion surfaces in the narrative as a kind of repression: De Quincey figures as a “man” (this denomination appearing twice) and a “spirit” whose masculine intellectuality exists in a state that suggests the capacity for emotion at the same time that the logic of the passage’s imagery aligns such affect with the feminized world outside the scholarly space of the “pensive citadel,” an image of intellect with phallic overtones. In other words, the subject feels, but any possible infringement upon his masculinity bourn by this possibility is transferred away from the subject himself. The 137 latter world (the feminized world outside) offers this subject a strange kind of experience, indeed, because the experiencing subject interacts with it – is “touched” by it – but, due to an experience of “strife” in the past, has lost the capacity for such sensitivity (“I, who was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my gaiety and happiness, during the strife and fever of contention with my guardian” [16]). This hard-pressed scholar is in this way a refugee from both gentility and gentleness, the latter figuring here in terms of feminized topography – a scholar whose feelings do not render his masculine subjectivity vulnerable to the possibility that it feels. At the same time, his valorized and virtuous hardship (a lack of privilege that fosters feelings of affiliation with the servants in the place, with whom he claims he “was a favourite” [17] over and against the schoolmaster) transforms De Quincey’s geographical isolation into a figure for his social remove, introducing a trope of Bourdieuian social distance – not from necessity, however, but from ease. A constitutive feature of this past and lost ease is a memorialized love of the book described in sensualizing terms. De Quincey’s memory of his youthful book-love (“as a boy, so passionately fond of books” [16]) is shot through with a curious ambivalence and doubleness. Curiously, De Quincey posits his book-love in the form of an inaccessible memory and experiential exceptionalism that at the same time serves as evidence of a generalized feature of his character that escapes the possibility of doubt. The invocation of his “passionate fondness” for books suggests itself linguistically as the exception to the memory of his generalized despondency: “I, who was framed for love and gentle affections, had lost my gaiety and happiness, during the strife and fever of contention 138 with my guardian; yet, on the other hand, as a boy, so passionately fond of books, and dedicated to intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed many happy hours in the midst of general dejection” (my emphasis) (16). But the conditional tense in the latter clause shifts this ostensible contradiction into the realm of speculation, suggesting that the elder De Quincey (the narrator) is diagnosing himself with hysterical amnesia (“hysterical” because not in fact forgotten; this is the Freudian condition, described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which some impression acts as the trigger of a memory that has been withheld from consciousness: “the subject is already in possession of a store of memory-traces which have been withdrawn from conscious disposal, and which are now, by an associative link, attracting to themselves the material which the forces of repression are engaged in repelling from consciousness” [Freud 41]). In fact, De Quincey goes on to narrate the object-cathexes associated with the painful recollection of these lost memories, describing the anticipation of mourning (on the part of his younger self) that his discourse has diagnosed as melancholy, the referent of these objects already being mourned as lost: “I wept as I looked round on the chair, hearth, writing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing too certainly, that I looked upon them for the last time” (16). In other words, De Quincey’s younger self mourns (in advance, curiously) what his own “general dejection” has precluded the narrator from remembering; the narrator recalls the weeping but cannot recall the memories of happiness that prompted it in his younger self. This scene of his book-love is in this way a kind of primal scene that De Quincey is simultaneously aware of and not – a self- diagnosed repression that the elder De Quincey’s own discourse perpetuates. 139 Furthermore, a generalized emotion (“general dejection”), an abstraction from the specific emotional experiences associated with the “pensive citadel,” is instrumental in this repression. A similarly curious lapse in De Quincey’s narratological memory figures toward the end of the passage, where De Quincey narrates his youthful exit from his “pensive citadel.” Here the narrative takes pains to assert its utter historical exactitude and the precision of De Quincey’s memory: “While I write this, it is eighteen years ago: and yet, at this moment, I see distinctly as if it were yesterday the lineaments and expression of the object on which I fixed my parting gaze . . .” (16). While the memory of the expression of his “fondness” for books – the scene of his intercourse with his books – remains a particularity (De Quincey’s draws our attention to its status as such in contrasting it to his “general dejection”) whose contours must be the object of speculation, this image of poetic inspiration (the object in question, described as “a picture of the lovely –, which hung over the mantlepiece” [sic] from which the young De Quincey “gathered consolation . . . as a devotee from his patron saint,” is a Van Dyck portrait [Shilstone 23]), a similarly particular experience of pleasure amidst his general unhappiness, retains a razor-sharpness. That this scene of prosaic inspiration posits the artist’s muse as instrumental in a laborious production process (“the eyes and mouth of [the picture] were so beautiful, and the whole countenance so radiant with benignity, and divine tranquility, that I had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to gather consolation from it” [16]) must forestall the conclusion that here we find a prototypically “Romantic” (to invoke Jerome McGann’s famous analysis of the “Romantic ideology”) 140 representation of cultural production. Instead, this image presents cultural production as a labor process taking place within a sphere of auto-sensuality and auto-intellectuality: De Quincey’s “muse,” if she can be called this, is a far cry from Coleridge’s “shapes and sounds and shifting elements” – ecological sources of poetic beauty in “The Nightingale” (28). In fact, she takes the form of a cultural object of the artist’s scopophilic gaze, the operation of which is described here in terms redolent of the psychoanalytic category of the fetish (the picture arrests his affections – they are “fixed” on it – which suggests that affective life is understandable in terms of trajectory and progressive movement and that such movement can find itself frustrated, which it does here). In addition, De Quincey’s language, far from naturalizing his youthful process of cultural production, renders it in the language of economism: the picture is a quantifiable resource (“I had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, to gather consolation from it” [16]) aiding and supplementing his cultural labor. This capitalized resource, a fund of inspiration that persists over the course of serial acts of consumption, is suggestive of a cultural form of “fixed capital” (Logic 59), a concept prominent in De Quinceyan political economy. While an abbreviated form of his long-promised magnum opus on economics, The Logic of Political Economy (proposed in the Confessions with the title Prolegomena to all future Systems of Political Economy), did not appear until 1844, twenty-two years after the serialized Confessions, De Quincey tells us in the Confessions that he had been interested in the discourse of political economy since as early as 1811 (64). Horace Eaton has noted an earlier exposure (1805, during De Quincey’s visits to Eaverton [Thomas 230]). The work of British 141 economist David Ricardo would likely have been particularly fresh in his mind in 1822, as he recalls being introduced to Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) variously in 1818 and 1819 (the former date appearing in the revised Confessions) (Thomas 230). Ricardo’s method of categorizing forms of capital in terms of their various rates of consumption provides a source for the hierarchical organization of the young De Quincey’s intellectual resources in the “pensive citadel.” In the Principles Ricardo defines “fixed capital” as a form of capital that is “of slow consumption” and “circulating capital,” its opposite, as a form that is “rapidly perishable, and requires to be frequently reproduced” (Ricardo 33). Like Ricardo’s theorization of fixed capital in the Principles and De Quincey’s own subsequent example of it in the Logic, the workman’s tools, the Van Dyck portrait “[holds] over from one act of production to a thousandth act” (Logic 197). Just as in the Logic, where De Quincey attempts to demonstrate that the price of an art work reflects “teleologic value” (use-value) rather than exchange-value per se (his bone in the Logic is political economy’s alleged distinction between exchange-value and use-value) – offering, as is the case here, pictorial works (“a genuine picture of Da Vinci’s or Raphael’s”) (192) as exemplary – here the young De Quincey’s fund of artistic inspiration, a pictorial work, differs not in essence from the other implements with which he labors or which he consumes but rather in degree of temporal “diffusion” to borrow another term from the Logic (122). In the later work, De Quincey discriminates between capital and circulating commodities in terms of relative scarcity, or the degree of “diffusion” of the commodity in question (the least diffuse taking the form of property). 142 In other words, the commodity that can be used to buy another commodity (i.e., capital as De Quincey defines it in the Logic) has this capacity due to its relative scarcity, or its lack of density in the environment. His relations with both the Van Dyck and his books are affective in character; he has “passionate” love for the latter, and he cannot stop looking at the former. In this way, in the spirit of the aesthetic theory of Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful) (1757), De Quincey posits taste in terms of the subjective, embodied responses of an individual (one whose consumption, it should be remarked, is part of a larger process of production). Burke’s major contribution to eighteenth-century aesthetics, as Mark Blackwell has noted, was to erect a universalizing standard of taste founded in the allegedly common physiological characteristics of individuals (Blackwell 5-6). This effort to universalize the judgment of taste distinguished Burkean theory from that of David Hume and Alexander Gerard, who emphasized the role of the imagination in aesthetic judgments and whose An Essay on Taste (1759) makes no effort to erect a universal standard for taste (Blackwell 6). Articulated in terms of subjective pleasure and consumption practices and on a continuum of sensation (as opposed to the Kantian opposition of gratification to pleasure in the Third Critique), Burke’s is a materialist and economistic aesthetics. What makes the Van Dyck different from the books, in addition to the fact that the latter are integral to production and the former apart from but nonetheless essential to production, is the degree of specificity he can bring to their recollection in his narrative. 143 Hereby the economic problem of scarcity is articulated in terms of, on the one hand, a psychological process (memory) and, on the other, a literary effect (narrative). Consequently, far from reifying the conditions of cultural production, De Quincey’s discourse capitalizes everything, reducing the means of cultural production to the logic of political economy. At the same time, while his narrative of cultural production does not serve to reify its object, within it the means of culture are already reifications – objects analogous to commodities that also take the form of literal fetish-objects. In this way the book is a baseline concept like water in the Logic – a commodity continuous with rather than contradictory to the diamond. In this reduction De Quincey’s economistic aesthetics countermands the high Romantic essentialism that, as for example in Wordsworth’s poetry, rigorously excludes the logic of the market from determinations of value in the cultural realm. Margaret Russett has shown how Kant’s influence on De Quincey extends to the latter’s theorization of “aesthetic value” (12) in texts such as the Logic. De Quincey, Russett argues, posits such value as the product of an exchange rather than in terms of any value “intrinsic” in the work, this being a conception of aesthetic value characteristic of canonical Romanticism. De Quincey’s aesthetics goes farther than Kant’s in its use of the logic of the market to explain the genesis and structure of aesthetic valuation. More specifically, De Quincey contradicts the Kantian relegation of desire to the category of aesthetic judgment denominated by “agreeableness,” a criterion that implies that merely “subjective sensation” (as opposed to the “objective sensation” [Kant 90-2] involved in a judgment as to the beauty of an object) is gratified. More akin to Freud, as Adorno 144 compares and contrasts the two in Aesthetic Theory, De Quincey’s continuum of aesthetic desire in the “pensive citadel” passage places the art object in the role merely of a higher form of sensual gratification (Freud’s theory of sublimation, in which he argues that the production of art proceeds from the transformation of “unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement” [Adorno 10] as Adorno reads Freud, contradicts Kant’s division of the artistic and the empirical). De Quincey’s theory of memory, which is especially relevant to this passage, reveals an additional anticipation of Freud. In addition to economizing it as capital and articulating it as an object of desire, De Quincey’s image of cultural consumption in the case of the Van Dyck also posits the artwork as a form of subjectively oriented property, one the possession of which is a source of anxiety even when that possession takes the form of a memory. The antithesis of the “spiritualization of art” (Adorno 13), this aesthetics imagines the artwork as a commodity whose distinctness from consumer goods (such as books, which are here fetish-objects his relation to which is rendered overtly in terms of sensual pleasure) is a matter of degree rather than kind; this is a matter of varying forms of pleasure rather than Kant’s fundamental distinction, in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” section of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), between “gratification” and “pleasure” (the latter characterizing the “pure judgment of taste,” the former characterizing a judgment made with regard to an “object of satisfaction,” a subjective rather than objective judgment polluted by subjective interest). The contrast between the portrait and his books and other implements of printed culture is also a contrast between consumption and production – 145 the latter emerging in the seriality and laboriousness of his studies; the portrait, on the other hand, prompts a passive mode of engagement that is characterized as rejuvenating. But this image of consumerist “pass-time,” to invoke Adorno, should not be confused with a paean to aristocratic modes of cultural consumption. De Quincey’s representation of his taking leave of the “pensive citadel” in terms of a movement into gentility (“I went up to the picture, kissed it, and then gently walked out, and closed the door forever!” [my emphasis] [16]) – this being a movement out of pleasure and into gratification (or, in Kantian terms, out of “pure” aesthetic judgments and into “empirical” ones) – adds to the sense that De Quincey imagines the book and the pictorial work in antithetical terms. 14 But this strangely materialistic idealism of the pictorial work has been bought at the price of reducing all to property. In this scene of paradoxical cultural materialization, then, we find that De Quincey idealizes a prototypical image of generalized cultural capital but, in contrast to high-Romantic renderings of the scene of inspiration, does so in terms of cultural materialism. Rather than a reification of the conditions of production as in Coleridge we find a materialization that installs the form of capital as the sine qua non of intellectual production. Consumption finds itself privileged over production but at the same time integral to a cultural economy founded on the repression of that other materialism, aristocratic collecting. 14 As Kant articulates the distinction in the Third Critique, “Aesthetic judgments can be divided, just like theoretical (logical) ones, into empirical and pure. The first are those which assert agreeableness or disagreeableness, the second those which assert beauty of an object of the way of representing it; the former are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments), the latter (as formal) are alone proper judgments of taste” (108). 146 Chapter 4: A Clinging Pair of Bookmen A Peculiar Hobby The literary crimes of the book forgers Thomas J. Wise (1859-1937) and Henry (“Harry”) Buxton Forman (1842-1917) reveal a new phase in the life of the literary commodity. Using a type of forgery invented by Forman, this pair of noted collectors and eminent bibliographers (Forman was in addition the editor of standard editions of Keats and Shelley) profited from their access to the production of literary history and bibliography over the course of decades of fraudulent production. Their contribution to the history of literary crime was the so-called creative forgery, or fake first edition – an unauthorized reissue with a false imprint giving it primacy in the publication history of a text. Although Wise would be exposed dramatically in his last years (Forman’s earlier death sparing him this humiliation), the significance of their activity extends beyond the fact that it was a calculated and profit-driven abuse of eminence and access – criminal in the juridical sense. Importantly, this antiquarian culture also reveals a point of contact between a form of collective literary amateurism enabled by the nineteenth-century private press movement and a cultural modality shaded by a deviance at once social and literary in character. The name of notorious “book faker” T. J. Wise has long been synonymous with literary forgery, but a recent joint biography of Wise and Forman has revised the role of the latter in the pair’s illegitimate activities. 1 In fact, Forman has been credited with inventing the pair’s criminal innovation, the creative forgery (Collins 82), which was akin 1 This characterization of Wise appeared in a Daily Express headline (“BRITISH MUSEUM TO GIVE BOOK FAKER MEMORIAL”) announcing the posthumous sale of his library to the British Museum (qtd. in Partington, 272). 147 to a copy lacking an original. The materialization of “empty” bibliographical space through the production of a fake first edition of an already published text, in the case of Wise and Forman this kind of literary imposture often required the falsification of publication history in the context of the bibliographical record. Conveniently enough, both men were eminent bibliographers. The pair’s biographer John Collins insightfully compares their signature literary crime to the twentieth-century archaeological forgery known as the Piltdown Man (43), whose human cranium and orangutan’s jaw successfully filled the hypothetical gap between humans and apes for forty-one years until its exposure as a hoax in 1953. Like that of the Piltdown Man, the story of Wise and Forman’s crimes is a well-known scandal of intellectual history, one which generated much attention at the time of Wise’s exposure and which has inspired multiple retellings over the years. As Richard Altick’s treatment of it in The Scholar Adventurers illustrates, the story of Wise’s rise and fall (Altick not perceiving Forman’s role in the pair’s crimes), full of intrigue and double-dealing, lends itself well to the true-crime genre. As a character this ambitious and unscrupulous striver, who when standing accused of his crimes towards the end of his life tried to lay all the blame on his deceased friend and co- conspirator, makes for entertaining reading, and, especially in Altick’s hands, the story of his exposure reads like detective fiction. But Wise and Forman’s admittedly exciting story have more to offer than Schadenfreude or titillation, because its context and significance extend beyond the status of a footnote in literary history. 148 The productions of Wise and Forman, which the two sold to credulous, often American collectors, frequently for very large sums, exploited “missing” links in the publication histories of contemporary poets such as Swinburne, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the Brownings. But their first such project, undertaken in 1887, gave book form to works by Percy Shelley. These were unpublished until their first appearance in an 1886 biography of the poet by the Irish scholar Edward Dowden. The forgery has a fictional editor (“Charles Alfred Seymour,” a member of the equally imaginary Philadelphia Historical Society) and a false imprint (Philadelphia, the actual provenance being the London printing firm of Clay and Sons [Partington 56]). There is also an attempt in an editor’s preface to forestall questions about the book’s unlikely paper (Whatman, an English brand) (Collins 81). This particular “first edition” has an unusual history because Wise actually took responsibility for its appearance. In the 1922-1936 edition of his Ashley Library Catalogue (tellingly, perhaps, the book lacks an entry in the 1905-1908 edition), Wise says that he and “Dowden, Rossetti, Forman, and other friends” wished to have the Shelley poems “in a convenient form,” so they produced a reprint (qtd. in Partington, 55). Wise explains the false imprint and the invention of the character of Seymour by claiming that he and his friends had sought to shield themselves from the ire of Lady Shelley, who had “expressed dissent” with their plans even though “she held no interest whatever in the copyright of the verses” (qtd. in Partington, 55-6). The story is as odd as it is threadbare. As Partington observes, it begs more questions than it answers: lacking any claim, why would Lady Shelley’s permission have been sought at all? (56). 149 Correspondence between Wise and Dowden pokes another hole in Wise’s elaborate justification. In a letter dripping with sarcasm in which Dowden facetiously thanks Wise, “a gentleman of the road,” for the gift of a copy of the piratical book (the gesture showing Wise's brash confidence), the scholar not only exposes the fiction of any cooperation on his part in the edition but also hints broadly at what he suspects to be Wise’s real game. Dowden asks Wise to send a barbed message to “Seymour,” whom the scholar has seen right through: He [Seymour] has done his work with the greatest care and correctness as far as I can see, and I hope you will greet him from me in the words of Shelley in his Homeric hymn which tells of the light-fingered doings of the first of pirates . . . I will keep the veil of darkness over his misdeeds, but I fear I cannot help him to the “other songs.” (qtd. in Partington, 56-7) As Partington observes wittily, “No gentleman of the road, wise or unwise, could have mistaken the sarcasm here” (56). The role in the pair’s crimes of Shelley, that “dangerous” (Symonds 81) Romantic whose reception was at that time still dominated by his unconventional ideas about politics, religion, and morality, was hardly random. The two forgers met as a result of their shared love of Romanticism, in particular the poetry of Shelley. In addition, their imposturous culture, in addition to capitalizing, like insider trading, on access to the role of bibliography in authenticating literary rarities, also belonged to a subcultural tradition in Britain with roots in the Romantic period. In fact, as it is one of my goals here to show, the private and homosocial forms of antiquarianism and illicit cultural production in which Wise and Forman participated continued, with a difference, the “peculiar” (Anon.) mode of consumption inaugurated by the founder of the first publishing society, the cleric 150 and bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin, whose Roxburghe Club of antiquarians and book collectors met for the first time in 1812. Dibdin’s materialist bibliography – he was the first to include exact description of the physical qualities and condition of books in his bibliographical records of them – was of a piece with his queer bookishness, a rapturous adoration of the codex that struck some of his contemporaries as “curious” (one of the nineteenth-century senses of this word being synonymous with our “deviant”) at a moment when the spiritualization of the literary was instrumental in the codification of singular authorship. A foil for the reified author-function having its origins in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Dibdin’s discourse was in this way implicated in a central preoccupation of Romanticism. 2 Like Dibdin, Wise and Forman were bookish antiquarians – both being avid book collectors – whose hobby was intimately related to degraded materialist cultural practices (such as bookselling and collecting) and whose culture came out of homosocial publishing societies organized around the appreciation of literature and rare books. Also like Dibdin’s circle of materialists, which was the object of proto- homophobic abuse in the conservative periodical press, Wise and Forman have been associated with a transgressive form of sensuality that transcended any fetishism of the simply literary. The two forgers became acquainted when Wise, who had read Forman’s Our Living Poets (1871) in his youth (Collins 68), wrote to Forman a kind of fan letter in 2 This historical narrative of the origins of singular authorship derives from the work of Martha Woodmansee and Paul St. Amour. Other historians have constructed longer timelines. 151 1882 inquiring about the elder man’s progress on an anticipated bibliography of Shelley (73). 3 Forman by this time was gaining notice in the literary world, despite taxing work at the post office. Like Trollope before him (15), he worked here in various capacities from 1860 to 1907 (15, 19), including in the important post of surveyor of the British Post Offices in the Mediterranean (21). Even so he had managed to produce a monumental edition of Shelley’s poetry and prose between 1876 and 1880 (46-7). The eight-volume set would go through three editions (appearing in 1882, 1886, 1892) and become the standard edition of the poet for fifty years (46). Forman’s innovative methods in this edition recall the materialist revolution that the scientifically inclined Dibdin (Davis 122) brought to bibliography. 4 They also recall the intimate relationship between that collector’s appreciation of the book-object and his style of scholarship. This edition of Shelley is worth dwelling on, for it sheds light on intersections between Forman’s approach to editing and the bibliophilic side of this early Romanticist. Like Dibdin’s mode of bibliography, Forman’s “scientific” approach to editing gave precedence to the “original” (as a subsequent editor of Shelley would describe Forman’s methods in the 1904 Oxford edition of the poet’s works [qtd. in Collins, 46]) and eschewed overt interpreting and “correcting.” His choice of subject, the still-controversial Shelley, could also be called innovative – even speculative (Collins 46-7). The set was 3 Our Living Poets has chapters on Tennyson, Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Gabriela Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold and a number of lesser-known Victorian poets, including Thomas Woolner, William Bell Scott, and Menella Bute Smedley. 4 Lennard J. Davis notes that Dibdin wrote a lost poem entitled Vaccinia, in praise of the invention of the vaccine, and that the bibliographer attended meetings of the Society for Scientific and Literary Disquisition (also known as “The Lunatics”) (122). 152 additionally unique for the prominence of facsimile reproduction in the book’s design, which featured minutely accurate type duplications of original editions’ title pages (47). Just as Dibdin’s revolutionary bibliographical discourse bears traces of his materialistic style – in his bibliographies' attention to the physical condition of the individual copy, for example – Forman’s path-breaking curatorship of Romanticism reproduced the bookman’s category of the “pristine” in a presentation of the literature of the past. The Shelley set, in addition to eschewing interpretation (and hereby translating the concept of the perfect copy into a mode of reading) and integrating original copies in facsimile form, presents the poet’s works in light of their status as material products of the press – chronologically (another innovation). I hardly need note that Forman’s editing innovations have, like aspects of Dibdin’s mode of bibliography, become standard practices. As Collins speculates, because of the state of Shelley’s reception at the time, early reviews of the work were mixed (46). Even so, given that Shelley reached canonical status during the Victorian period, it seems safe to conclude that this early serious and deep scholarly engagement with the poet (which Forman financed himself) was instrumental in this process of institutionalization. In hazarding a preliminary conclusion about the role of Forman’s bibliophilic side in his scholarly work on the Romantics, which also included an edition of Keats, another Romantic, Wordsworth, comes to mind. In helping to consecrate the source of its own value, Forman’s bibliomaniacal scholarship “creat[ed] the taste” by which it would be judged, at the same time that it helped create its own demand. 153 Through Forman’s trend-setting legitimate work as illustrated by this edition of Shelley, bibliomaniacal values can be seen to operate within the form of the Victorian reception and canonization of Romanticism. A certain irony seems to emerge when this process of canonization is examined in light of Forman’s role in it. Here a financially strapped, bookish collector with conceivably materialistic objectives – to say nothing of his later, much more profitable ventures with Wise – has laid the foundation for the integration into the canon of the author of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.” On the surface it seems that in this case a contradiction appears between the poetry and the mode of its transmission – between, on the one hand, a poetics that defined itself and has continued to be received in terms of separation from the market and transcendence of the material conditions of cultural production and, on the other, the values of precisely this market and these conditions. But from a sociological perspective, the irony here, if it can be called this, is a constitutional one having nothing to do with the obvious differences between the content of Shelley’s poetry and the values associated with bookishness or collecting. Rather it seems to point to the structure of the cultural field and the nature of the relations between the various groups within it. In such a view any tension between the, in axiomatic terms, Romantic or Wordsworthian transcendence seemingly at odds with this process of canonization is a red herring – no less a reflection of the logic of the field than the canon (the product of the English syllabus [Guillory 30]) itself. The distance, to use one of Pierre Bourdieu’s key terms, from material concerns implicit in Romantic idealism reflected the composition of the (again in axiomatic terms) Romantics’ forms of capital – 154 specifically, their relatively large amount of cultural compared to their economic capital. Like the bohemians Shelley or Wordsworth might be said to have anticipated in some ways, their culture was “a virtue made of necessity” (Bourdieu 372) at the same time that their works reflected the fact that they were not simply poor. It follows that the bibliographer’s or bibliomaniac’s different aesthetic reflected a different composition of capital and a different situation in social space (to invoke Bourdieu once again). The “pure” text of Shelley that Forman’s edition produces literally embodies this difference. Forman’s abstracted version of Shelley might be confused with an editorial adaptation of Romantic poetics, but the quasi-New Critical theory of textuality it implies more accurately reflects the character of the object that the bibliomaniac fetishized – namely, the commodity. As Marx observes in Capital, it is a peculiarity of the commodity fetish that it is at once a concrete object and an abstraction, a value (71). The strangeness of Forman’s edition, with its rigorous exclusion of discursive context on the one hand and its attention to the minute particularities of the physical copy on the other, echoes this oddness. While critics such as Judith Pascoe have recovered a variety of nostalgic and materialistic cultural practices in the Romantic period, the complex process of Shelley’s canonization illustrates that the culture of this period (and its legacy) cannot be divided neatly into the material and ideal, these categories being mutually implicated in the field's organization. Since Forman’s influential approach to editing so visibly bears the traces of a serious collector’s style and values, the habits of this collector, who led the way in the acquisition of modern writers and first editions (Altick 51), demand examination in 155 detail. Forman’s aesthetic could itself be called retro, echoing as it did the pitch of an earlier era’s feverish enthusiasm for memorializing. Furthermore, its results, although not exclusively drawn from the Romantic period, do imply a frustrated effort at a totalizing representation of the culture of Romanticism. In other words, this scholar’s body of knowledge is hardly at odds with itself – Forman was no Wordsworth, who, even so, could also appreciate a rare book. One Romantic relic of Forman’s in particular points to the degree to which the repressed body of the literary might be seen as integral to the forgers’ Romanticism. When Forman’s library was sold off in piecemeal fashion around 1920, there was found, among the expected rare books and manuscripts (among the more notable being Queen Mab in Shelley’s hand and Keats’s presentation copy of Hunt’s Foliage [213]), a literal piece of the Shelleyan corpus, described this way: “portion of the remains of Shelley, after his cremation: in a cardboard box” (213). While with Wise he “specialized” in the Victorians, whose temporal proximity removed the most serious obstacle to a forgery’s success (namely, the age of the original), this grisly memento mori speaks, ultimately, to the Dibdinesque – the “curious” – dimension of Forman’s culture. Literalizing Lee Edelman’s notion of the “culture of death,” this mordant fetish points to the psychosexual aspects of bibliomania as well as literary imposture – features of the culture of Forman and Wise that will become clearer over the course of the examination of their biographies, works and reception that follows. Thought of in light of Bourdieu’s frequent comparison of the “pure” aesthetic to the practice of a religion, Forman was a prolific and versatile offender against the beliefs 156 of his tribe, constantly corrupting the spiritual with the profane. This Romantic scholarship tainted by a bibliophile’s tastes and investments is small stuff compared to the transgressions for which he and Wise would become infamous. But even in his ostensibly “materialistic” circle Forman (and Wise even more so) was a sinner: among bibliophiles, for instance, mingling collecting and selling was forbidden (Collins 101). Similarly, Forman’s legitimate production could be described as heretically mongrel from the perspective either of the bookman or the scholar: here Forman mixed the collector’s “materialistic” priorities and values (profit and speculation) with the editor’s “purely” intellectual investments (which, once again following Bourdieu, might be generalized simply as the negation of the collector’s). The illogic of the field announces itself in this proliferation of contradictory offenses and, consequently, insults. Hence an adversary once sought to draw blood with the sneering suggestion that Forman was a “bookmaker” rather than a real intellectual. 5 Wise also felt the sting of this particular lash. Such was the power of the stigma associated with bookselling, in fact, that in 1895 he produced what can only be a bookseller’s advertisement but which he took pains to present as a bibliography, of “The Ashley Library,” his own collection (Partington 121). Although Wise angrily (and perhaps defensively) disputed his biographer Partington’s suggestion that he was in the business of selling books (“This is a statement in keeping with his angry protestation to me: ‘I am NOT a bookseller’”), it is indeed difficult, as Partington claims, to see another purpose for this particular publication. Wise updated it in 1897 with more of his own 5 This swipe at Forman came from Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, with whom Forman became entangled over some of Keats’s correspondence, in The Athenaeum (qtd. in Collins, 52). 157 piratical works and did not include it in any of the copiously detailed bibliographies that would make him famous as the assembler and owner of the luxuriously bound Ashley collection (Wise being a great fan of Morocco bindings, a taste that his detractors saw as gauche and irresponsible, since the rebindings diminished the values of his many highly rare books) (122). Wise’s defensive or deluded protests notwithstanding, he, like Forman, sought to make literature into a profitable enterprise. It might be argued that he was more successful – because less scrupulous and more ambitious, perhaps – than his collaborator. But, again like Forman, even his legitimate literary activities bore the “taint” of the profiteer’s agenda. This commodities broker who, lacking a share in the commodities firm, Rubeck’s, where he worked, actually earned his considerable fortune from a potentially risky sideline – the capital-intensive business of manufacturing essential oils, in which he was a partner of Otto Portman Rubeck, the son of the owner of Rubeck’s (Collins 177) – likewise had an uncanny knack for successfully speculating on the market for rare books. Furthermore, he seems to have arrived on the scene at exactly the right time, for rarities were still available at affordable prices at the same time that an increase in demand for them was readily foreseeable. Original editions of Shelley’s works, for instance, could be bought for as little as a shilling, even as someone with Wise’s background could see that such books in original condition or with association interest (as in the case of presentation copies) would soon be much harder to find and more valuable (Partington 52). 158 If Wise was just as profit-driven and commercially minded in his legitimate literary activities as in his piratical ones, the same could be said of Forman, whose bibliophilic approach to editing extended beyond even the prominence of the materiality of the literary in Forman’s book design and his reverence for originality in his theoretical approach to the presentation of material. This heretical taste also pervaded the circumstances and methods of his practices as an editor. After completing the edition of Shelley Forman turned to Keats, and here the work again displays that novel commitment to historical and textual accuracy (or “perfect speech,” as Forman theorizes his goal in the preface [qtd. in Collins, 53]) that characterize the edition of Shelley. But in this case Forman’s commitment to literary history in attempting to create a “perfect” image of Keats was materially (not merely theoretically) inseparable from his activities as a collector. More specifically, Forman’s editorship of Keats depended in part on the successful acquisition of an infamous portion (and hence that much more of a prize) of Keats’s literary remains. 6 This major acquisition, somehow wrested from Fanny Brawne’s descendants, that enabled Forman to further his “scientific” analysis of another controversial Romantic poet was the black spot on the poet’s Victorian reputation, the record of his scandalous relationship with Brawne (51-4). (It is worth noting in passing that, beyond Fanny Brawne, Keats the effeminate 6 A record of the poet’s clandestine relationship with Fanny Brawne (1800-1865) existed in his letters to her that Herbert and Margaret Lindon (children from her marriage to Louis Lindon, a wine seller) inherited upon Brawne’s death (she had earlier destroyed her own letters to Keats) (Collins 51). With the ostensible purpose of suppressing them Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, grandson of Keats’s friend Dilke (53), bought the letters along with other Keats memorabilia following Louis Lindon’s death in 1872 (51-2). When quotations from the correspondence began circulating, Herbert Lindon recovered it, and Forman obtained it thereafter (52). Collins speculates that Forman may have encouraged Lindon to get the letters back from Dilke in order to buy them himself (52). Later, in 1890, Dilke claimed to Forman that he owned letters from Keats to Brawne that he had refused to return to Lindon; Forman tried but failed to obtain these for the second edition of the Letters (53). 159 “Cockney School” poet already attracted controversy [Mizukoshi], which is especially noteworthy given Forman’s enthusiasm for Walt Whitman, more about which below.) With the edition of Keats’s letters that resulted (Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne [1878, 1890]) Forman demonstrated the dependence of his curatorship of queer Romanticism on a collector’s shrewd negotiation of the market for literary rarities and, hence, the transgression of the boundaries not only between producer and consumer but also between text and book. The episode additionally reveals once again what is also, to say the least, a curious irony of literary history – namely, that one can trace the notion of textual purity to the impure gaze of a bibliophile. This kind of language carries with it the risk of perpetuating, rather than simply observing, the values of the field. Forman’s approach to editing as illustrated by the editions of Keats and Shelley was perhaps not so much impure as, in the Lacanian sense, real – a materialistic theory and practice that exposed the dialectical relationship between “intellectual” discourse and the materiality of the literary. The need to insist strenuously upon the difference between materialists (“bookmakers” and their kin) and “real” or “pure” intellectuals might be explained by precisely the relative indistinctness of their practices in Forman’s time – a historical moment when, as his activities indicate, scholarly printing seems to have been largely an individual rather than corporate enterprise in which risk was often assumed, and the right or permission to reprint obtained, by individual scholars. Forman’s editorial practice in the case of Keats, for instance, illustrates the resulting intimacy shared by mastery (of, say, Keats’s corpus) and ownership of Keatsiana. Furthermore, in general terms, editing seems to have required a 160 mode of aesthetic appreciation compulsively expelled from the “pure” disposition, in theory (Kant’s devaluation of the sensual in the Third Critique) and practice (observe The Athenaeum’s hostility to bibliomaniacs). What is known of Forman’s methods testifies to this already “contaminated” condition of the elite aesthetic disposition. In a letter to his close friend Richard Maurice Bucke, Forman follows a list of his farsighted purchases of original editions of Shelley with the odd-sounding statement, “You will see I am in earnest about editing!” (qtd. in Collins, 45). The previous sentence of the letter brags of the bargain basement price he had paid for a copy of “Rosalind”: “When I die, mine will likely fetch £5.5s!” For Forman (and perhaps also Bucke), it seemingly could go without saying that property speculation was integral to the editorial process. In his reading of this correspondence Collins implies that such statements point to a criminality latent in Forman, a pathological personality that like murder would out, but is it Forman’s character that such a revelation besmirches? Any “stain” here, to borrow a term from Slavoj Žižek, would seem to be the one that soils the sanitizing unreality of an image of cultural production as absolutely separate from the marketplace. The bibliomaniacal touches on Forman’s legitimate productions were in this light an extension, not a perversion, of the logic of the field. These also included special “short issues” (individual runs of facsimile reproductions included in his editions) that, like the creative forgeries to come, were speculative productions based on the principle of artificial scarcity. It must have been Forman who suggested the twenty-five special copies on Whatman paper in a white rather than blue binding (‘they will of 161 course be eagerly taken up: “short issues” always are’ he reported eagerly to Bucke) and one copy on vellum. These are, perhaps, expected bibliophilic flourishes. But Forman did not stop there and his further complications milked the book for all it was worth. (Collins 47) Forman also had the text of “Epipsychidion” from his edition of Keats, including a facsimile of the original’s front matter, printed separately in a batch of twelve in a variety of formats (one of which sported vellum leaves) (47-8). Going Partners In 1886 Wise and Forman began collaborating on small-scale, legitimate facsimile reproductions under the aegis of Frederick J. Furnivall’s Shelley Society (Collins 75). Common among literary societies of the day, this type of private publishing, which has been referred to as a movement and associated with the Victorian period, can be traced back to Dibdin’s club, the first publishing society (Richardson). Much of the printing that the two did for the literary societies that they belonged to was restricted to reprinting rare works, usually featuring clear indications of their real provenance. Although in no way criminal, even this activity was looked at with suspicion in some quarters. At the time of their first collaboration Wise was rising through the ranks in the commodities firm of Herman Rubeck & Co. (Rubeck’s). A gifted speculator, Wise would eventually make a fortune as a broker. In fact, his estate, excluding the value of his library, would amount to £138,000 upon his death (Partington 271). But in 1892 he was managing the company and acting as the cashier (Collins 102). 162 Aside from this employment, initially as a clerk (66), relatively little is known about Wise’s youth. In later life the famous owner of the Ashley Library was tight-lipped about his childhood, refusing requests to write a memoir and reticent about details with Partington (63). Nonetheless, it is known that he was born in Gravesend and raised in Islington (59), which was then populated by what might be categorized, in terms of the contemporary U.S., as lower middle-class workers (“a mixture of lower paid white collar workers and better paid artisans” [60-1]). Perhaps not surprisingly Wise was a precocious bibliophile and collector, acquiring his first rare books at seventeen (Partington 13). He started out by foraging, like Charles Lamb, through bins and dingy, tight stalls in areas such as Farringdon Road, Fleet Street and the Strand but soon graduated to the book dealers in the West end (13). Wise would later recall that first editions acquired at this time of Moore’s Epicurean and Shelley’s Cenci laid the foundation for the august collection that would make his name (Partington 14). This is the Ashley Library, the collection that was installed in the British Museum following his death – an honor all the more noteworthy for the fact that his crimes had by this time already been exposed (Collins 272). The morocco-bound and gilded Ashley Library – or, more precisely, Wise’s catalogue of it, the Ashley Catalogue, a project begun in 1905 – made Wise’s name in the rare book world (232). Soon after its volumes began to appear, Wise received an Honorary Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford, a profile in the 1925 Who’s Who, and a seat in Dibdin’s still-active Roxburghe Club (after its members made him swear [falsely, of course] that he had never profited from his collection: “[N]o man has ever 163 regarded his books in a less mercenary manner than I have throughout my active life,” he reportedly said [Collins 229]) (Partington 232). The admittance of Wise into the Roxburghe Club provides a fitting capstone to a Dibdinesque career. A professional where Dibdin was an ardent fan, the world of rare book collecting, Wise again recalls the author of The Bibliomania in his choice of genre, bibliography. But in the case of this particular collector/bibliographer, Dibdin’s shadow looms still larger. While bibliography is the genre to which he would ultimately devote himself, Wise, like Dibdin, wrote a small amount of poetry in his youth. A fairly elaborately produced periodical called Pen and Pencil, the manuscript magazine of the youth group of Camden Road Baptist Church (Collins 66), portends something of Wise’s later tastes (it features “printed rules and printed titles and half calf binding”) and contains a piece of Wise juvenilia, the long poem Isandula in the manner of Shelley – “That the weak are strong when oppressed by wrong / That the slave is for ever free” (qtd. in Collins, 67). Wise also had printed, in multiple issues, the first appearing in 1882, a collection of poems entitled Verses. As Collins observes, in bibliographical terms it is appropriately complicated: there were copies on lavender paper, vellum, and large paper (73). Tantalizingly sketchy details about a secret, potentially scandalous life emerge from these early productions. A surviving copy from the edition of Verses from 1886 (there were multiple printings) features a highly suggestive inscription addressed to an unknown male recipient: “To my dearest friend from his ‘Jonathan.’” Collins speculates that the object may have been one Walter B. Slater (“was Slater the David?”), to whom 164 Wise had earlier inscribed a copy of Verses with “his friend’s love” (73). Partington seems unaware of any closeness between Slater and Wise (though he does not mention the inscription, either). Partington, however, does devote much space to a winking description of Wise’s apparently intimate friendship with a different man, Clement King Shorter. These “bosom pals” (103), “this clinging pair of bookmen,” who made the rounds together “like two lovers,” recall for Partington a poem from Wise’s Verses – specifically “Twin Souls,” in which the poet imagines love in Platonic terms: “Two forms together clinging” (102). Played by Partington for (rather homophobic) laughs, this aspect of Wise’s social life – in the latter case being more telling of the tradition of proto-homophobic constructions of bibliomaniacs than anything else – is something he seems to have had in common with Forman, although I know of no evidence that either was aware of this. Like Wise, Forman was active in multiple homosocial literary societies – groups that also reflected both men’s interest in Romanticism. In Forman’s case this intellectual passion seems to have been a conscious vector for other, forbidden passions. Besides membership in the Shelley Society, the editions of Shelley and Keats, and the literary rarities he owned (including collections of Byron, Hemans, Chatterton, Blake, and William Godwin [Collins 213]), Forman was a great, early admirer of Whitman. He contributed to Bucke’s Walt Whitman (1883) and collected the poet with dedication, acquiring not only the complete works but also a first edition Leaves of Grass and the notebook from Whitman’s time as a military nurse during the Civil War (33). 165 Forman’s correspondence reveals that this interest in Whitman appears to have been an enthusiasm with especially deep resonances. In 1866 he wrote to Bucke of his difficulty relating to women, with whom “so much care is wanted . . . that our friendship there is to a certain extent damped by anxiety to keep at exactly the right pitch of warmth.” Bucke, however, has no reason to “fear my becoming a renegade. . . . The fact is that life is not what it was in the glorious time we had with you, old fellow. Troubles and responsibilities increase on us all, I suppose; but at all events they have made not inconsiderable strides with us of late; and as I love the acquisition of knowledge of whatever sort more than anything else, I choose books for my anaesthesia” (39-40). “I choose books.” For Forman the love of Romantic literature seems to have been a conscious choice and coequal alternative to a mode of life and love at odds with his desires, desires that had once found their object in the company of a dear male friend. Furthermore, his activities (illicit and legitimate) in this sublime realm seem to have extended a secondary form of compensation – the reproduction or creation of unattainable rarities and the celebration of poets whose biographies and art challenged strictures against which he himself perhaps chafed. Over the course of their secret illicit work together, Wise and Forman produced creative forgeries of fifty works by Victorian writers (Altick 38). Their best known is probably the “Reading 1847” collection of sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, first published (legitimately) in the 1850 edition of Browning’s Poems (Collins 105). This daring forgery, undertaken before the invention of methods to date paper or ink, sought to capitalize on a work with a provenance narrative whose fame had by then reached 166 legendary proportions. The means by which Wise and Forman inserted this pamphlet into history and ensured its value (which would rise as high as $1,250 [Altick 41]) on the market for literary rarities aptly illustrates their methods. Fruit of “the most celebrated literary love story of Victorian England,” the story of the book went that its poems had been composed during Robert and Elizabeth’s courtship, a star-crossed romance culminating in secret marriage and escape to Italy (105). With Edmund Gosse, who often served Wise and Forman in the role of unwitting accomplice, acting as a fence (and with Furnivall inadvertently providing additional support with another spurious creation myth [107]), Wise and Forman constructed a new version of the work’s printing history in order to account for their new first edition. Gosse, possibly getting the details of the story from Wise (106), offered the revisionist history in his introduction to the 1894 edition of E. Browning’s Sonnets (105). In it Robert, upon receipt of the poems from Elizabeth over breakfast in 1847, passionately declares to Elizabeth his displeasure at the thought of selfishly depriving the public “the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s” (qtd. in Collins, 106). Consequently Elizabeth’s friend Mary Russell Mitford (who in Wise’s story of his acquisition of the pamphlet later gave a number of copies to Dr. W. C. Bennett, Wise’s claimed source [Altick 41-2]) was enlisted to have some copies printed privately. The title page of the slender volume reads: “Sonnets/by/E.B.B./Reading/Not for Publication/1847,/an octavo of 47 pages” (Collins 107). This criminal literature is not fundamentally different from the kind of legitimate reprinting in which Wise and Forman participated as members of some of London’s 167 several literary societies, a type of boutique production associated with such clubs ever since Dibdin’s society set as a membership requirement the private publication of a book on an antiquarian theme. One such project, edited by Wise for the Browning Society, which was another literary club started by the prolific society-founder Furnivall (73) and which counted Forman among its other members, was a facsimile of an early poem by Browning, the rare Pauline (1838) (75). The two also collaborated on a reissue of Adonais for Furnivall’s Shelley Society, and Wise would see eleven more such reproductions through the press for the club by 1886 (75-6). Collins, in order to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate of the forgers’ works, discusses this “innocent” facsimile production in terms of a gateway culture that might be said to have led to the works that Wise and Forman would later sell to collectors for large profits: in the process of printing them Wise got practice channeling the Shelley Society’s resources to his own ends, for example, and the printing firm employed by the society, the very respectable Richard Clay (76), got used to aping the conventions of older book production and providing other firms’ imprints on books of their own making (77). 7 For Collins, such continuities ultimately explain the fundamental difference between the malice of the pair’s forgery and the prelapsarian innocence of their hobbyism. While acknowledging the important differences between the earlier years of for- fun production and the later ones of for-profit, these should not be made to overshadow the striking continuities between the pair’s amateur fandom and their eventual, more illicit mode of reproduction. For one thing, reducing their culture to a totalizing or latent 7 Altick offers this description of the publishing house: “For some years the Clay firm were the printers for the Browning and Shelley societies, both of which specialized in reprinting in facsimile, in very limited editions, rare issues of books by their patron poets” (50). 168 criminality presupposes an ontological fixity on the part of the forged document itself that cannot be supported. As the role in his “crimes” of Wise’s own bibliographical practices illustrates, the status of piracy, like that of legitimate rarity, was the contingent effect of a discourse. Similarly, one could say that the innovative methods of “detection” that eventually “exposed” the pair’s crimes reconstructed the pair's culture rather than discovered it. Hence any analysis of the illegitimate antiquarianism practiced by the “forgers” is more usefully conducted – at the risk of perpetrating another unsupportable totality – in the “Romantic” spirit of some of those writers so revered by Wise and Forman. Not only was this an inappropriate love of literature – a fixation that reproduced the Romantic cult of the author with a difference – but its symptoms also transcended the dialectic between individual consumption and cultural production, just as these men's illicit editions came out of a (private and informal) culture of consumption rather than production. As if predicting the death of the author in the present digital age of anonymous appropriation and distribution, the culture of the fan with access to a private press cast a foreboding shadow over the author-function. Ironically enough, it did so at the same time that this culture celebrated the very period of the author-function’s first great flowering, lionizing (intentionally or not) Romantic celebrities like Shelley (Forman, in his licit work, contributing the first modern edition of the poet to this very process). In Forman and Wise, the capitalist mode of cultural production seems to have created the possibility of something like its own unraveling – or perhaps its apotheosis beyond the particular form of authorship theorized and codified during the Romantic 169 period. In other words, the free market and privatization that had sundered state and press came to threaten the young bonds between author and press, author and audience. But the pair’s transgressions at the same time exist on a scale wholly apart from that of ownership and means. This plasticity and multiplicity of their transgressions call into question the men’s own agency in terms of the criminality of their actions, the designation of criminality itself being problematic given the contingency of determinations of forgery. Just as Romanticism anticipates the poststructuralist critique of metaphysics, the crimes of Forman and Wise embody a critique of the limitations of both structuralist analyses and presuppositions of agency in relation to what are, after all, texts. 8 When divorced from moralistic, ontological discourse, criminality generally speaking comes to be seen a social problem rather than a sign of subjective fault or defect. In such light the notion of the criminal loses its coherence, and social problems or the operation of systems (distribution of wealth, access to education, and so on) rather than individual actors become the causal agents, so to speak. The so-called crimes of Wise and Forman call for such a reappraisal, but the absence of such a reading, I would argue, is more than simply an oversight. The lack seems to point to the key role that forgery played in the evolution of singular authorship over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 8 To cite one example of Romanticism’s homology with poststructuralism, consider Thomas De Quincey’s critique of the binary logic of political economy in his theory of surplus-value, in Logic of Political Economy. 170 Literary Criminality in Theory and Criticism: An Overview The theory and criticism dealing with forgery reveal the intimacy shared by forgery and obscenity – a degree of closeness such that forgery begins to take on the perverseness as well as the perverse contingency of the obscene. Under analysis, the criminality of this particular kind of writing becomes unmoored from its ontological foundations, taking on the arbitrary and shifting parameters of deviance. Hence, but not simply for this reason, it is not surprising that the most commonly employed methodology in the theorization of forgery, psychoanalysis, explicitly connects the categories of the psychosexual and the imposturous. Considered together, the literary- historical, economic and psychoanalytic strands of critical thought on forgery identify materiality (whether in the form of the letter or the body) with the abject. This section provides an overview of these approaches while offering a tentative conclusion about a historical source for this association. As Susan Stewart observes in Crimes of Writing, one way criminality becomes relevant to a discussion of literature is when “intellectual property” enters the law, which it did in the eighteenth century with the introduction of copyright (4). The forgers’ crimes were not simply literary crimes in this sense, however. While their offenses may have involved minor infringements upon copyright (as in the case of their first production, a theft from Dowden’s edition of Shelley), this dimension of their culture has little significance in history. Rather than being received as a false claim of authorship – a falsification of the self – theirs is a falsification of property, of documents – forgery rather than piracy, strictly speaking. As such, as Stewart’s discussion of forgery also 171 suggests, their crimes are thought of more properly in terms of obscenity than theft: “[A] forger is in fact often caught because of the ‘unnatural’ relations between himself or herself and [a] document” (24). This “unnaturalness” of the creative forgery, a copy lacking an original, is neatly encapsulated by the literal meaning of “obscene” – “out of place.” As such an obscene, allegedly fetishistic mode of production, forgery can be thought of in terms of the Lacanian “symptom” – the unconscious truth about the network of relations existing within a commodified culture. The collector’s “unnatural” fetishism of the book, to cite a simpler parallel case, might be thought of as the repressed negation of the spiritualizing ideology of singular authorship. In this case, as textuality is reified in the context of copyright, the materiality of the literary is displaced onto the disturbed mental landscape of the deviant – the object of a “curious” affective life. Such a displacement suggests that the cultural fetishist is a symptom of the process of commodification – in the specific context of the evolution of literary property over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this way the popular image of collecting in early nineteenth-century Britain recalls what psychoanalytic theory has diagnosed to be the repressed truth underlying the ideology of the “free” market – according to which workers, for instance, are said freely to exchange their labor for wages. As Marx observes, feudal social dynamics have in reality not disappeared under capitalism; relations here only appear not to be, as they were under feudalism, fetishized (the “fetishistic misrecognition” required by a monarch, an individual whose aura points to his position magically outside the network of social relations that determines all other social roles, being absent [Žižek 25]). While an illusion of freedom permeates the 172 operation of the market, where the sale of the peculiar commodity labor-power results in a form of exploitation, the fetishistic relations of domination and subjection assert themselves in, as Marx puts it, “the shape of social relations between things” (qtd. in Žižek, 26). It is in this latter context where a repressed subtext of subjection and exploitation, “the point of emergence of the truth about social relations” (26), is at the same time contradictory and necessary to the society as a whole. The displacement in the context of political economy of fetishism onto “relations between things” finds a parallel in the obscenity of book-love and, hence, the construction of the book-lover as a deviant. The reification of materiality in the context of the codification of authorial property, in other words – the fetishism identifiable in the construction of meaning as the singular, inalienable product of one mind – may have required the displacement of fetishism onto the figure of the cultural “materialist,” whose obscene relations with books contradicted and enabled the modern concept of authorship. An additional component of the forgers’ symptomology involves another historical development central to the nineteenth century – industrialization. Thought of in light of the onset of the industrialization of the printing process, or, to adapt Walter Benjamin’s terminology, the mechanical reproduction of literature, the antiquarian aspect of the forgers’ crimes takes on the character of another symptom. This temporal dimension grew out of the temporal obscenity of their retro enthusiasms. Bookish aesthetes like Wise and Forman desired both the old and the pre-industrial, and this latter aspect of collectors’ tastes involved the fetishism of both the materiality of the signifier and the past itself. (By mid-century a taste for “the black letter” could itself be called 173 retro, a lingering bibliomaniacal symptom.) In Stewart’s view the retrospective aesthetic that the forgers repeated was a neurosis of modernity – specifically of Romanticism (although Stewart insightfully compares this period to the present age). What has prompted this comparison is that both periods witnessed dramatic changes to “literature,” one such development especially relevant to the forgers being the appearance of a nostalgic mode of production, le mode rétro (4). The Romantic period witnessed an explosion of nostalgia, and Wise and Forman were not only avid students and collectors of Romanticism but also practitioners, like Dibdin before them, of this mode. As noted above, they met through Furnivall’s Shelley Society, and facsimile production started them on their way. The appearance of this style, with its valuations of the “natural” and “immediate” (in the form of folklore and oral traditions, for example – consider the interest in ballads and peasant poets such as John Clare), as Benjamin observes, coincided with the advent of industrialized cultural production and mass media (5). The decay of the aura in industrialized modernity, to employ Benjamin’s concept from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” seems to have prompted what Stewart calls an “impossible” desire – a return not to a past but to a nostalgic image of that past (5). For Stewart a consciousness of this very impossibility is the gift of modernity, which has produced history and placed the “reality” of history forever beyond the grasp of historical discourse (7). The function of the antique is to circumvent this perceived limitation of discourse – rather than a representation of the past, the rare book (or whatever) encapsulates the past, embodying it in a way that avoids the perceived 174 liabilities of the sign. Baudrillard’s metaphor for the antique – the vessel – sums up such a sense of the auratic object as a transcendental signified. An examination of this wish, this instance of what Stewart calls “naïve materialism” (15), illuminates an aporia: the “slippage of the referent” (37) that has sponsored the antique’s foundational nostalgia also undermines the necessary yet discursive process of authentication that enshrines the antique object acceptable as such. This impossible situation is the same “crisis of representation” that critics have identified in canonical Romantic reactions to mass culture. The resulting separation of products from their origins – the gap between poet and audience famously observed by Wordsworth in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads – seems to have prompted desire for a system of verification, a “real language” in Wordsworth’s famous terms, but the “authenticating apparatus” (Stewart 36) perpetuates rather than resolves the crisis: “Here . . . we find the relentless discursiveness of a history that must constantly authenticate its own foundations of intelligibility by the generation of more history, more contexts” (37). The centrality of bibliography to the crimes of Wise and Forman aptly illustrates this runaway discursive procreancy symptomatic of a representational crisis. The pair, bibliographers as well as producers, was, by virtue of their access to the discursive production of authentic rarity, in a position to capitalize on both the nostalgic materialism of industrialized modernity and the discursive apparatus that existed to sate this “naïve” desire. At the same time, their ultimate failure testified to precisely the impossibility of this wish, demonstrating that rare books are only as rare as the stories of their provenance are convincing. Rarity, in other words, like forgery, is an effect of discourse. Not 175 surprisingly, the exposure of these eminent bibliographers – whose status in the field helped them construct their rarities – had a chilling effect on the market for rare books and pamphlets. But by the time of Wise’s fall, the mode of authentication that had served Wise and Forman – rhetorical and anecdotal – had evolved to encompass new “scientific” methods (some of which, such as paper-dating, were responsible for recoding the pair’s works), testifying to the “relentless discursiveness” of the crisis that their crimes had exploited. From a different point of view, the pillorying of Wise and posthumous dethroning of Forman in themselves continued a cycle of endless historical reproduction, contributing another “context” and “history” to a ceaselessly generative mechanism. Like any form of criminality – or for that matter abnormality 9 – the pair’s illicit culture provided a crucial foil for the “real” literary antiquity – this creature of the modern notion of an historical real outside the production of historical discourse. The forged and the authentic were in this way inextricably bound up within the discursive production of the antique. In the context of Romanticism, this dialectic between the forged and authentic also extends far beyond the world of the literary rarity. In fact, forgery was akin to an unacknowledged fixation of much Romantic period prose. In Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845, Margaret Russett has described forgery as an illegitimate stepchild of the novel, the other in fiction’s dialectical development. Stewart’s analysis suggests not only that there was something Romantic about forgery but also that the concept of the counterfeit was a central preoccupation of Romanticism itself. The discovered manuscript and fictional author topoi, fixtures of the 9 The belated theorization of heterosexuality in sexology comes immediately to mind. 176 early novel, speak to this obsessive interest, reflecting the onset of a crisis of authenticity in the period. More specifically, a representational crisis explains why a hyper-elaborated authorial context – its constant fictionalization, exoticization – is a prominent feature of the fiction produced between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. For example, the Gothic as well as the proliferation of modes like it (the fictionalized travel journal, for one) – these “forays into otherness” – were “doomed” (38) efforts at authentication, at the forging of authorial context. As Russett has argued, such anxious and anxiously elaborated interest in literary provenance was central to the development of the categories of “fiction” and “literature,” which were theorized in the early nineteenth century. The distinction between forgery and fiction was a particularly fraught and fluid one at this time. Observing the remarkable continuities between illegitimate literary forgeries (Chatterton’s “discovery” of the Medieval poet Thomas Rowley, George Psalmanazar’s mythical version of Formosa, the impostor’s alleged native land) and legitimate fictions produced during the period (The Castle of Otranto, Gulliver’s Travels), Russett claims that forgery was equivalent to failed generic innovation, the “dirty version” of fiction’s valorized experiment. 10 Far from extra-literary, forgery’s otherness was in fact inextricable from the development of fiction, a Bowdlerized form of forgery. Early examples of novelistic fiction both troped and triggered associations with the conventions of literary imposture such as the found manuscript. Consequently, “before it became a type [the Gothic], Walpole’s text [The Castle of Otranto] was a 10 This phrase (“dirty version”) comes from the title of a work by Russell Jones, a contemporary musician whose works and persona make use both of self-conscious obscenity and imposture (Jones). 177 forgery” (13), a Medieval “discovery” uncannily like the prodigy Chatterton’s distressed manuscripts. This novel’s initial, false provenance as a manuscript discovered in Northern England – as Walpole described its origins in a preface to the first edition (13) – reflected the inchoate and evolving status of novelistic invention. This new form’s novelty was being understood and a genre theorized, in other words, by way of contrast with “the notion of forgery,” which “provided the conceptual measure against which the epistemological experiment of the novel could be understood” (14). This literary experiment, with its lack of recognizable signals of artfulness – the absence of “clear generic markers” (15) – had consequently (and paradoxically) a troubling superabundance of “art.” In this way what would come to be called “fiction” was indistinguishable from its other, forgery. As if anticipating Freud’s “family romance,” the common childhood fantasy in which a child constructs more “illustrious” provenance than her real parents can provide (23), both forgery and fiction “[lie] about [their] own origins” (15). The distinction between fiction and forgery, in effacing the continuities between them, elides the literariness of crimes of writing as well as the potentially troubling fakeness of fiction – which, as suggested by Kant’s anxious worrying in the Third Critique over the chance that all natural beauty could be the product of design (Russett 15), was a source of critical hand-wringing at the moment of realism’s appearance on the literary scene. This “criminal/aesthetic divide” (17) erases from history the central role of the fiction/forgery dialectic in the rise of the novel. It also sanitizes and unifies the canon, 178 placing Psalmanazar’s Swiftian anthropology, for instance, beyond the pale circumscribing legitimate literary imposture (17). The particular relevance of forgery to the history and theorization of literature extends also to the evolution of the author-function, whose genealogy is in fact rooted in “the eighteenth-century forgery narrative” (21). The disconnect between the incoherence of the Chattertonian corpus and the uniformity of the Medieval cleric Rowley’s (Chatterton’s fraudulent alter-ego) oeuvre, for instance, speaks to the fact that forgery had an important role to play in the elaboration of authorship. Following their exposure, both Psalmanazar and Samuel Ireland wrote famous confessional memoirs, a genre that Russett suggests exists in a tributary relationship with the genealogy of the author. Ireland’s Confessions, like the De Quinceyean memoir, “helped instate the author himself as enigma or supreme fiction” (23). Furthermore, the Romantic account of authorship – rendered in terms of discovery and reception rather than labor – bears the hallmarks of the forgery narrative, which effaces the difference between consumption and production, positing the author as an accidental “inheritor” (29). Chatterton’s manuscript “discoveries” are echoed not only by Scott’s story about happening upon the manuscript of Waverley in “an old writing desk” while looking for “some fishing-tackle” (qtd. in Russett, 28) but also by the Wordsworthian conception of poetic production in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (which famously renders the poet’s labor in terms of “spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling” [qtd. in Russett 29]) as well as “the Shelleyan account of labor as the recovery of buried inspiration” (29). 179 If the author is in this way the right kind of alienated subject, the right kind of vacuum, this status suggests that the author-function and the forger-collector, a deviant materialist, are interconnected strands of an evolving conception of literary originality in which the notions of the spiritual and the material are polar loadstones. The contours of the forger’s subjectivity seem to imply an alternative, obscene version of transmission, in other words. Before defending this claim, however, which draws on the subject posited by psychoanalysis (the subject “qua 0”), it will be necessary to outline briefly the psychoanalytic approach to imposture (this being the forger’s transgression in the terminology of psychology). Superficially, the psychology of the impostor’s fictional entity – a subjectivity that, as psychoanalytic research into imposture suggests, is often more organic, seemingly, than its empirical counterpart (Russett 20) – points to connections between forgery and the symptomology of neurosis in psychoanalysis. Russett’s description of eighteenth-century forgers’ fetishism of the materiality of the literary (27) suggests that Wise and Forman’s short trip from antiquarian fandom to criminal reproduction extends a traditional relationship between forgery and literary fetishism, if by this term one understands a cultural analogue of the frustrated teleology of desire posited by Freud in the Three Essays. Chatterton was said to have refused to receive “his lesson” in any form other than “an old black-letter Bible” (qtd. in Russett, 27). His veneration of the antique signifier, in its ritualistic compulsiveness, recalls the fixity of the Dibdinites’ suspect appreciation of “the lore Caxtonian.” Similarly, the forger William-Henry Ireland reportedly got his start by repeatedly duplicating the bard’s signature, “forming every 180 letter in his name as he might have written them,” before moving on to entire documents (qtd. in Russett, 27). Ireland and Chatterton’s proto-Freudian adolescent fetishism of the signifier corresponds to contemporaneous “diagnosis” of literary impostors in (logocentric) terms of neurotic overinvestment in materiality. Hence Johnson belatedly advises the forger James Macpherson to leave manuscripts alone: if he “had not talked unskillfully of manuscripts, he might have fought with oral tradition much longer” (qtd. in Russett, 55). Johnson in this way renders Macpherson’s bad gamble as a form of neurotic infidelity and associates the letter with the possibility of semantic decay and loss. Russett concludes that “[t]he epistemology of the family romance thus also elicits an understanding of materiality as characterized by damage, slippage, and distortion” (55-6). Chatterton’s fetishism of the letter is susceptible to a more pointedly psychoanalytic reading, also in terms of fetishism, however – a reading that illustrates the psychoanalytic approach to imposture at the same that it would seem to get us closer to the queerness of Wise and Forman’s illicit culture of the signifier, with its dual valences, economic and sexual. The conjunction of Chatterton’s ultimate vocation and his biography (as provided by E. H. W. Meyerstein’s Life) offers provocative possibilities in this vein. Thomas grew up without knowing his father, who died prior to his birth (Greenacre 101) and whose only lasting contribution to the initially seemingly slow boy’s education was an abandoned “Folio musick book,” as his sister would recall (qtd. in Russett, 56). Thomas showed his first interest in culture (and forecast his eventual career) when, and in the particular way that, he took an interest in the book. In the words of his sister’s telling version of this event, Thomas “fell in love with the illuminated capitals” 181 (Meyerstein’s emphasis) (qtd. in Russett, 56). These letters in the missing father’s folio are, obviously, a displacement – a paternal fetish. But these (literal) “traces of the father [he] never knew” (56) also founded Chatterton’s love of literature, a love of “language” in light of which these patriarchal origins become meaningful in a different way. These paternal signifiers – a material instantiation of the symbolic order – are to Thomas not so much parts of words, in the logocentric sense, as things that interest Thomas only in their sensual particularity. Hence Chatterton’s perversity seems polymorphous: his object is not simply the phallus (in Lacanian terms the “letter,” the “Master Signifier, the signifier of the symbolic authority founded only in itself” [Žižek 119]), much less his actual father, although it appears to encompass both; it is also the concretized letter, the materiality of the Master Signifier. This Real love, this love of the Real, appears to complicate the deviance that has traditionally been associated with the impostor in the context of psychology. In an important study, Phyllis Greenacre traces the “fabric of fraudulence” (100) characteristic of imposture to unresolved oedipal impulses stemming from the father’s absence or death in the early life of a male child (Greenacre observes elsewhere that impostors tend to be male [538]). This paternal lack and parental discord, responsible for a “serious imbalance of the oedipal relationship” during this crucial developmental period, lead to an “intensification of infantile narcissism” (102). The biographies of several famous impostors support this generalization of Greenacre’s about the relationship between an absent father and imposture. Similarly to the posthumous Chatterton, Titus Oates (1649- 1705), the probable mastermind of the “Popish Plot” (94), lost his clergyman father (a 182 “psychopathic scoundrel”) to the separation of his parents at age six (101). The case of Psalmanazar, whose real name remains unknown, serves as another example. As the Formosan poseur and friend of Johnson relates in his memoirs (unfortunately the only source for biographical information about him), his parents also separated when he was six (102). Lastly, the presumed father of the coconspirator of Oates William Fuller (95), a bastard, died when the boy was six months old (102). Such individuals have consequently developed “intense maternal attachment[s]” (102); Greenacre cites a case of her own in which the mother of a future imposter disparaged the “unreliable” and “dishonest” absent father in the child’s presence (101). This child, so maternally fixated as to be “a part of the mother,” occupied “a position of definite superiority to the father” due to this combination of his absence and the mother’s criticism (102). Greenacre concludes that a subjective “incompleteness” can result in such a case: an inability to work out oedipal urges and subsequently identify with the father leads to marked and unresolved animosity toward the father that becomes part of the child’s fantasy life (102), which in turn becomes the arena for his working out of the “unresolved oedipal problems” (which are not fundamentally unlike those characterizing gifted individuals’ psychic development) (507). It is here, in fantasy, that imposture first emerges in early responses to threats to an incompletely formed ego. Greenacre notes that in cases when such a child becomes exposed to the genitals of an adult male, “an illusory enlargement of his own phallus” may occur (102). And fantasy, in the form of imitative performance, becomes the means by which the impostor copes with his deficiency in later life, imitating the father (whether in the form of a version of his actual father or a brother 183 or “a distinguished noble or famous person” [537]) so as to kill him “symbolically” (537). It is in this way that the chronic impostor continually restages the family romance in an effort to resolve “the oedipal conflict” that was never completely worked through in the oedipal stage (537). The resulting personality acquires a theatrical cast, charming in the adult, as “an interest in gesture and imitation” (103) characterize the impostor’s underdeveloped mode of engagement with reality. As Russett succinctly observes, in Greenacre’s view impostors like Chatterton mistake the penis for the phallus (Russett 57). This misidentification manifests itself in the role of material gain in an impostor’s fraudulent production. Chatterton’s inadvertent exposure to Horace Walpole of such a motivation behind his construction of the monk Rowley ultimately undid him: having received a positive reply from the eminent antiquarian after sending Walpole a Rowley manuscript, Chatterton rashly followed up with a sob story and an implicit plea for aid (Greenacre 512). Now skeptical, Walpole shared the manuscript with more knowledgeable friends, who immediately spotted it for what it was (512). For Greenacre it is the false self-identification combined with a materialistic agenda that mark Chatterton’s fraud as typical of imposture. Rather than a normal identification with the father – the formation of an ego-ideal as would typically follow the resolution of oedipal conflicts – Greenacre says that the impostor’s desire for “material advantage” reflects an unconscious (and, in terms of Freudian theory, a fetishistic) motive that reflects the impostor’s stunted psychological growth – “to rob the overthrown father of his penis, which, it is imagined, furnishes a better equipment than the inferior infantile one which the impostor feels himself to have” (105). Unable to see 184 himself as the creator of Rowley’s works, Chatterton devised the monkish authority in order both to defeat the paternal power Rowley represented and to exploit his (imaginary) stature. As this summary hopefully illustrates, classical psychoanalysis as practiced by Greenacre passes over the literariness of imposture. For her purposes, the cases of Chatterton and Psalmanazar are basically equivalent to that of Titus Oates, the man behind the “Popish plot,” or an analysand who for years successfully posed as a doctor. The literary serves as a datum. But Jacques Lacan’s introduction of the notion of the “letter,” the Master Signifier, into the psychoanalytic picture of subjectivity helps us reckon with the prominent role of the father’s letters, for instance those beloved illuminated capitals left behind by Thomas’ absent father, in literary imposture. More specifically, thinking of the phallus in terms of the Lacanian symbolic network seems to allow for the reconciliation of Chatterton’s literary fetishism with his psychosexual fetishism. Rowley’s works themselves, fabricated, significantly, by Chatterton after his copies of them (Russett 56), repeat hereby the curious trope of substitution that Greenacre diagnoses in Thomas’ imposture – in Russett’s terms a “[desire for] the letter itself rather than the object ‘barred’ by his entry into the symbolic order” (57). Chatterton loves not the Thing – das Ding, the Freudian “impossible-incestuous object” the “primordial repress[ion]” of which founds the symbolic (Žižek 207) – but the symbolic itself; not the father but his book. One can go even further and say that there is something queerly imposturous about this love, because it could be called a love of another impostor’s 185 excrement (recalling that “the Master is by definition an impostor” [Žižek’s emphasis] [119-20]) – the father’s “leftover,” his “anal object” (204). Returning to the question of the forger’s role in the genealogy of authorship, the love of Thomas for the thing (rather than the Thing) seems to put him in the “wrong” in relation to subjective wholeness – an abjection that immediately calls to mind the axiomatic emptiness of other Romantic literary materialists. Recall the effeminatus and the Cockney poet, queer types defined by a sensuality that actually verges upon the limits of the concept of the sensual itself. As understood by Lacan, the subject of the symbolic order is “split” along the fault that lies between the sensual/phenomenal and the mental/noumenal; as an existential cogito this subject is in a constant state of becoming (“the subject can never fully ‘become himself’”) because he “ex-sists” as a negation (“as the void of a distance from the Thing”) (207). This subject “qua 0” is at the same time a “positive” phenomenon, an empirical entity (207). Hence, the cultural materialist, like a “doubting Thomas” who must put “[his] finger into the print of the nails” (King James Version, John 20:25, my emphasis), is not so much empty as too full, not empty enough, not “pure.” This fullness that retails as emptiness reflects the paradox located by Lacan at the foundations of subjectivity. Drawing on Marx’s Hegelian concept of the proletarian, Lacan defines “castration” as a symptom of alienation (Žižek 196), which Marx also refers to as objectification. “Pure” subjectivity describes the condition of value in the marketplace, exchange-value; the reduction of the proletarian to insubstantiality (being “devoid of all objective conditions of the productive process”) is the precondition of her 186 exchange of herself as a commodity (in the form of labor-power) (196). As Žižek puts it, “the paradox [of subjectivity] is that what is alienated (the dimension of subjectivity) is literally constituted by way of alienation” (196). Hence, for instance, Lacan’s notion of the woman as exemplary of castration: being the pure subject of patriarchy, the woman represents to man the return of his repressed – “she epitomizes what the Cartesian male subject . . . is compelled to ‘repress,’ namely the Versagung which forms the hidden reverse of his freedom” (197). Rather than the return of the male subject’s repressed objectification, or purity, the imposturous forger, in his axiomatic emptiness, stages the return of a repressed materiality within the field of cultural production. Perhaps this fetishist, who is not too pure (too reified) but precisely too fully embodied, too interested in filthy lucre and too “curious” about “folded leaves,” constitutes an alternative version of transmission at the moment when the spiritualization of the literary is instrumental in a new and energetic theorization of literary originality. As historians of copyright have shown, the notion of literary originality developed alongside the notions of authorial property and the (related) theorization of authorial voice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria contains the seed for our sense of the inalienable artistic product (Russett 72), but Coleridgean originality, or “untranslateableness,” was but one strand of a larger discourse concerned with the distinction between public and private literary culture, whose conceptual framework, as Russett argues, rested on the opposition between matter and spirit. There was, of course, a legal dimension. Within the juridical discourse on the 187 question of literary property, the elaboration of the author-function was bound up with the theorization of the textual “spirit” (William Warburton’s word [qtd. in Russett, 77]), which in turn involved the denomination of the “merely” material dimensions of language. This “metaphysical division” (77) between the material and the ideal, universally adopted despite its paradoxical implications, is perceivable as far back as William Blackstone’s “canonical statement on literary identity” (76) in his 1774 ruling on Donaldson v. Beckett: “The Identity of a literary Composition consists entirely in the Sentiment and the Language,” Blackstone intones (qtd. in Russett, 76, emphasis in original). As Russett further illustrates in an overview of the early legal decisions drawing on the work of Mark Rose and Martha Woodmansee, a thorny problem for jurists was positing a singular authorial subject, a suprasensible agency apart from the work, while preserving precisely the sense of language as capable of constituting a work. The problem here – if the author’s idea is what should be regarded as unique, then in what constitutes the value of the material copy, which is at the same time the only tangible manifestation of the idea? – appears to have stemmed in part from an influential theory of real estate derived from Locke that rests upon the notion of spiritual inhabitation of matter via labor. But language, unlike land, could not simply be parceled out – distinguishing the public from the private in this case presented a significant theoretical conundrum. How to enclose an author’s use of the common language? If what identifies a literary work as property is, to use Blackstone’s term, the “sentiment,” then what renders the merely material, printed copy unique? Either the copy is an “impostor” (77), to use Russett’s term, or the author-function loses coherence. 188 The strategies used by jurists to navigate this terrain varied. William Enfield distinguishes between the common stock of words (“which have been used before” [qtd. in Russett 76]) and unique thoughts. For Enfield, whose concept of originality also recalls Locke’s use of imagery evocative of cultivation to theorize the distinction between public and private land, literary property is akin to the reanimation of dead tissue. As Russett sums up Enfield’s view, “The raw materials of composition, be they words or ideas, must be animated by an individual spirit to become property” (emphasis in original) (77). In a similarly Gothic vein, in Essays upon Epitaphs Wordsworth employs the term “incarnation” to reconcile the shapelessness of “sentiment” and the tangibility and (awkwardly) the commonality of language (qtd. in Russett, 78). The impact of these novel conceptions of authorship can be seen in the “new reading strategies” that appeared simultaneously (Woodmansee 55). Martha Woodmansee has argued that the “radically new conception of the book as an imprint or record of the intellection of a unique individual” – the Romantic author-function, in other words – spawned not just one strand of modern textual criticism but the guiding principle of all literary theory since the eighteenth century (55). This founding concept is the notion that the text conveys not a general truth with which a reader can identify and which is held to be representative (as illustrative of this displaced neoclassical view, Woodmansee quotes a couplet from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” [1711]: “something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, / That gives us back the image of our mind”) but rather a glimpse at the interior life of “an Other” (55). To Woodmansee’s example from Johann Gottfried Herder (Herder’s theory of “active” reading, or “divination into the soul of the creator” [qtd. in 189 Woodmansee, 55]) one could add the Byronic authorial persona. In the latter case the instant celebrity of this notoriously perverse author – mad and bad, to paraphrase Lady Caroline Lamb – whose self-representations also trafficked in the exotic, testifies to the pervasiveness of a mode of reading that posited an author who was, as Woodmansee understands Herder to have imagined, “foreign” and “absolutely unique” (55). Closer to a shade than a divine spark, the fuzziness of the spectral author hovering behind such theories of writing and reading illustrates the extent of the problem posed by the materiality of the literary for these early efforts to postulate an owner of the signifier. As Russett speculates, “[T]he recurrent figure of incorporeal ‘phantoms’ symptomizes the repression – by all parties in this debate – of language in its dimension as mere letters or sound-clusters: the material conventions that subtend individual expression” (78, emphasis in original). The phonocentric singular authorship – founded on the concept of voice – codified in British copyright law and theorized by Coleridge is, then, comparable to a kind of neurosis in which materiality is founded on the repression of a kind of trauma or primal scene of (material) genesis. When Charles Camden seeks surer footing in “the solid written Authority [of] . . . the old black Letter of our Law” (qtd. in Russett, 78), he unwittingly wishes to unleash the author’s existential double. This perverse literary Id, dialectical obverse of the “pure” and disembodied author (the subject qua 0), is the paradoxically empty (because too full) subject of the materiality of the literary. An additional figure for this queer “subject” (“object” would be more fitting) seems to have been, in the context of the copyright debate, the pirate. 190 In mid to late eighteenth-century Germany what Woodmansee has aptly termed “the debate over the book” (47) (the ontological status of this object being central to the copyright debate) explicitly yoked the ideality of the literary to authorship and materiality to piracy. Opponents of the emergent conception of authorship, which in addition to spiritualizing literature imagined it as the outcome of an individual rather than corporate process and hence as the author’s property (49), asserted that books were constituted by material elements rather than ideal ones. One anonymous such theorist of piracy (a “zealous mercantilist,” according to Woodmansee) is very plain: The book is not an ideal object. . . . It is a fabrication made of paper upon which thought symbols are printed. It does not contain thoughts; these must first arise in the mind of the comprehending reader. It is a commodity produced for hard cash. . . . (qtd. in Woodmansee, 49) As such, an author has no claim to it once the manuscript leaves her hands. 11 The practices of the nineteenth-century forger – not the first such literary criminal, as Anthony Grafton trenchantly observes (Grafton 36), however tightly bound up this figure may have been with the evolution of modern authorship – like those of the pirate, the bibliomaniac and the bookish professional writer, foreground an inconvenient dimension of the literary, one the repression of which was required by the emergent author-function. In addition, the precisely contested, uncertain status of this new 11 Incidentally, there is a striking similarity between this pirate’s strident opposition to the ideology of unique authorship and the theorization of print culture in present-day media studies. In an influential study of new media, N. Katherine Hayles argues that the advent of digital technology has defamiliarized print in such a way that its material dimension – and consequently its status as a medium – has become newly apparent. No longer, Hayles claims, is print transparent. When Hayles cites the obfuscation of the “materiality of the medium” in legal discourse (32) or describes books as “writing machines” (her title), she echoes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of the ascendant spiritualizing ideology that props up singular authorship. But Hayles’ professed touchstone is neither the pirate nor impostor, nor is property a key term in her analysis. Instead, Hayles puts her version of media theory in a tradition having its origins, she claims, in the semiotic turn made by structuralism (30-1). 191 organization of the field at this moment of its articulation in theory and law seems to explain the strangely high pitch of the animosity directed at materialists. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The figure of the “bibliomaniacal” book collector with his “curious” malady – a “passion for collecting . . . that infects weak minds,” according to Isaac D’Israeli (1766-1848) – serves as the focus of this dissertation about nineteenth-century British poetry and prose. This extravagantly bookish figure haunts the open spaces and spontaneous overflows traditionally associated with the period’s conceptions of literature. As D’Israeli’s pointed diagnosis indicates, a disordered psychology is one element of this figure’s make-up. The symptoms of the book collector’s “book-disease,” as Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847), a bibliographer and the inventor of the book-collecting society, refers to it, include a “mania” for a “curious” class of book: antique or otherwise auratic tomes marked by their externality to a burgeoning mass market for literary culture.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Robinson, Michael Edward (author)

Core Title Ornamental gentlemen: literary curiosities and queer romanticisms

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 03/05/2010

Defense Date 01/20/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag British Romanticism,De Quincey, Thomas,Dibdin, Thomas Frognall,Forman, Henry Buxton,Lamb, Charles,OAI-PMH Harvest,Wise, Thomas J.

Place Name Great Britain (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Russett, Margaret (committee chair), Accampo, Elinor (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member)

Creator Email merobi@gmail.com,merobins@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2863

Unique identifier UC1226018

Identifier etd-Robinson-3496 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-296942 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2863 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Robinson-3496.pdf

Dmrecord 296942

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Robinson, Michael Edward

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu