Romanticism and Colonial Disease by Alan Bewell (review)

humanities 409 and third chapters; a regrettable confusion about whether the term`parishioner' refers to visible members of the congregation or persons living within the cathedral district makes almost unintelligible a discussion about St James's concern about its relationship to its neighbourhood. Professor McIntire has recast part of the material in his chapter into a short monograph on the role of women in the life of this church. This little book is rich indeed, and deserves attention in circles wider than those concerned with denominational and parish histories. (DAVID NEELANDS) Alan Bewell. Romanticism and Colonial Disease Johns Hopkins University Press. xvi, 374. US $45.00 The fascinations of this book are inadequately conveyed by its title. It appears, to a certain extent, to be an example of the expanding genre of`Romanticism And' studies, wherein authors trained as literary scholars reveal the impact on their work of new disciplinary methodologies in historicist, materialist, and cultural studies. But Alan Bewell's insights B nay, his statistics alone B provoke a wider range of thoughts than can be adequately contained by most definitions of `Romanticism,' capacious though that problematic term has always been. Instead, Romanticism and Colonial Disease registers the effects on fifty years of British literature, 1780B1830, of a centuries-long pandemic that has swept around the world since Europe's prolonged contact with and exploitation of non-Western cultures began in the sixteenth century. The book contains fresh interpretations of standard literary figures in novel contexts: Wordsworth and Coleridge (`Colonial Disease Narratives'), De Quincey (`Colonial Dietary Anxieties'), Keats (`The Geography of Consumption '), Percy Shelley (`Revolutionary Climatology'), Charlotte Brontë (`Tropical Invalids'), and, inevitably but appropriately, Mary Shelley's The Last Man (```All the World Has the Plague'''). But its real impact, at least on this reader, goes much deeper than these relatively local insights. By`colonial disease,' Bewell signifies the cost, in hundreds of thousands of lives, of Britain's worldwide colonial ventures in both directions: that is, to the British colonizers, both at home and abroad, as well as to the native populations that were often decimated by their appearance and establishment . Hence `colonial' is more appropriate to his intention than `imperial,' since it focuses our attention on the prolonged interaction of human bodies. Similarly, his insistence on the cost in British lives is an invaluable corrective B and a controversial one B to postcolonial studies which continue to limit their scope to the disastrous effects of colonialism on native populations alone. 410 letters in canada 1999 Bewell's most powerful representation of the shift in perspective his double focus requires comes in his citation of mortality statistics in the slave trade; namely, that `mortality rates for seamen on the middle passage were higher than those of slaves!' Statistics like this go so much against the grain of the moral assumptions in most postcolonial studies that Bewell must be careful to validate Thomas Clarkson's contemporary figures with those of modern historians, who also point out that, while death rates for slaves fell throughout the eighteenth century, `those of the crew remained fairly at the same level.' And for all too obvious reasons: `Merchants had less investment in sailors than in slaves.' Bewell is well aware of the tension in his book between his period category and his larger subject: `Common literary periodizations do not necessarily dovetail with those of medicine.' Yet there is a value in this discrepancy, for it gives to the book a sense of magnitude far greater than its ten chapters and 314 pages of text, because of the sheer amount of new information Bewell brings to bear on his subjects. Some of the mortality figures he provides are so large one feels at first that he has put his zeroes in the wrong place. No such luck. To take but one example, from his exemplary chapter on `Colonial Military Disease Narratives,' the Annual Register for 1763 estimated that of 184,899 men enlisted during the Seven Years' War, 133,708 were lost of disease or desertion, compared to 1512 killed in action. Bewell's readings of the `Ancient Mariner' and of Wordsworth's Discharged Veteran episode from The Prelude in this context are suggestive...