British Romanticism

approach no matter how well intentioned, is to convey the impression that all has been studied__ Like the woman faced with the prospect ofan avowal, the scholar is always vulnerable." ¿fc British Romanticism James Chandler. England in 1819: The Politics ofLiterary Culture and the Case ofRomantic Historicism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 584p. Stephen Gill. Wordsworth and the Victorians. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 346p. Tom Paulin. The Day-Star OfLiberty: William Hazlitt's RadicalStyle. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. 382p. J. Mark Smith University of California, Irvine To study Romanticism in the English-speaking world in the late 1990s is, by a broad but not all-inclusive consensus, to historicize, "to make the category ofthe historical situation," which, James Chandler notes, means "to produce historical situations." All three ofthese works consider and construct, or produce, "historical situations" and yet they are very different books. Chandler's England in 1819 grew out of a graduate seminar that focused on the historical situation in England this year when so many significant literary works were written and published. Chandler later came to see that the rationale (or the genealogy ofthe rationale) ofthe seminar, like the practice ofso much of the scholarly criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, was not exactly transparent. His book aims not only to look at the historical situation of 1819 — the year of the "Peterloo" massacre, and the year, according to E. P. Thompson and other leftleaning historians, when Britain came as close to revolution as it had since the 1640s — but also "to ask about this academic habit ofrestoring works to the historical situation in which they were produced" (37). Part of Chandler's thesis is that this habit of mind got started in the period we call Romanticism, and that the academic historicism ofour own time repeats a mode ofpublic thinking that first came into its own post-Waterloo. The second generation ofBritish Romantics came ofage at a time in which "the practices ofliterary and political representation were [being] transformed"; it was "the age of the spirit ofthe age." FALL 1999 Hr ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 81 The phrase was popularized by Hazlitt, who gave that name to a collection of essays (published in 1825) on a number of the major literary figures of the day. Chandler's claim is that Hazlitt's book, along with other major Romantic works, engages in a kind of representation different from works ofthe previous century, such as Hume's history of England, or Johnson's Lives ofthe Poets. In contrast to Hazlitt's The SpiritoftheAge, Chandler says, Johnson's work "does not conspicuously offer the subjects ofits biographies as representatives or types ofthe times in which they lived" (174). Chandler argues that Walter Scott's novels were the pioneering works of Romantic historicism: "[his novels] provided ... a new 'model' ofa dated historiographical and ethnographical representation ofaction-in-society, a new form for specifying cultural-historical typologies ofcharacter and agency" (96). Chandler points here to two assumptions common to the historicism ofthen and now: that a date belongs to a "period," and can lead us to a "historical situation"; and that there is some basic analogy between the kinds of cultural situations investigated by the historian and the anthropologist. A third assumption is that the historical "case" is a sound and useful concept. Chandler claims that the traditional Catholic practice ofmoral casuistrywas transformed and reinvented in the post-Waterloo years. Casuistry, popularly associated with theJesuit order, was a quasi-logical practice that involved makingjudgments about the rightness ofactions not easily subsumed to a moral rule (as in the case ofpoor man who steals bread because he is starving). According to Camille Wells Slights, "Casuits ... are sought by men who are torn between conflicting loyalties " (qtd. in Chandler 244). Traditional casuistry dealt with questions ofagency and will. Historicist casuistry, Chandler argues, rethinks those basic terms: the reinvention ofcasuistry in this period must be understood as part ofa more general altering ofthe case — an altering ofthe conception of the case, in which the new notion of the "historical situation" becomes operative.... The "historical situation" is not just an ethical or juridical situation writ large. For part of what it means to alter the...