Romantic Feuds: Transcending the “Age of Personality” by Kim Wheatley (review)

Kim Wheatley’s excellent first book, Shelley and his Readers: Beyond Paranoid Politics (1999), used the case of Shelley to examine the mutually defining interchange between Romantic poetry and the periodical reviews. Her impressive Romantic Feuds returns to some of the same questions she posed in the earlier book, but from a different angle. Both books parse the social construction of authorial identities within a cycle of antagonistic, politicized discourse from which writers are able to break free only provisionally, and seek to recover forms of “transcendence” generated from within “the print gossip and warfare of the age” (p. 1). Now, however, the periodical prose is more fully center stage, though Wheat-ley’s talent for perceptive readings of style and rhetoric is no less evident.

Romantic Feuds joins exciting recent re-evaluations of Romantic-era periodical writing by Mark Parker, Richard Cronin, Mark Schoenfield, and others. Unlike some of these books, Romantic Feuds proposes neither a history of particular magazines nor a synoptic view of literary culture in the period. Instead, Wheatley narrates in scrupulous detail a series of long-running feuds, each of which, while playing out across an astonishing variety of textual forms, involved as a primary antagonist one or both of the powerful reviews, the Whig Edinburgh or the Tory Quarterly. Wheatley approaches these feuds as co-authored, “quasi-literary” texts generating self-sustaining formal logics, and patiently spells out their complex “personal, political, commercial, and ideological” dimensions (pp. 59, 120). Despite its modest scope, the book’s elegant structure allows Wheatley to illuminate important features of Romantic print culture more generally.

Chapter 1 centers on the 1817 dispute that flares up after Southey’s youthful revolutionary drama Wat Tyler surfaces in print simultaneously with his article in the Quarterly attacking parliamentary reform. The controversy spills out from Parliament to include sallies and rejoinders by Peacock, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Hone, Leigh Hunt, Southey himself, and others, until Byron comically “refigures” the Poet Laureate in The Vision of Judgment (1822) (p. 17). An apt starting point, the fracas encapsulates Wheatley’s primary topics: the blurring of the aesthetic and the political in Regency “personality” attacks, and the problematic status of the personal in a print realm where anonymity and collaborative writing are norms and where boundaries between public and private identity are radically unstable. Chapter 2 looks at the feud between Coleridge and the Edinburgh’s Francis Jeffrey, while Chapter 3 takes up the attempts by the reform writers Hunt, Hazlitt and Lady Morgan (in her novel Florence Macarthy) to do battle with the individuals behind the corporate voice of the Quarterly. No one comes out of these feuds looking very good, except perhaps Lady Morgan, who “as a thoroughly materialist creature, gleefully inhabits a politicized literary marketplace” (p. 128). The final chapter, the least integral to the whole, locates “literary elements” in the government official John Barrow’s relentless campaign in the pages of Quarterly against the Arctic explorer John Ross (p. 18).

Romantic Feuds concentrates on the post-Waterloo moment when rancorous “personality” journalism peaked in intensity and virtuosity. But because attacks and counterattacks often reopened older wounds, the chronology extends back and forward decades (in 1850, Hunt was still bringing up William Gifford’s un-chivalrous behavior to Mary Robinson in the 1790s). By reconstructing these feuds, Wheatley opens an interesting perspective on the interpenetration of distinct historical moments, challenging habitual modes of periodization.

Wheatley aims not to decenter canonical Romanticism but rather—unnecessarily, I think—measures periodical writing against a hypostasized version of high Romantic concepts. More successfully, she shows how “Romantic notions of selfhood … resurface even as they are challenged” in the practice of “personality” journalism (p. 22). A standout moment is Wheatley’s reading of Hazlitt’s repurposing of Wordsworth’s “The Rainbow” to launch an attack on Southey’s apostasy; her discussion of Hazlitt’s theorization of identity in the Letter to William Gifford is equally assured. Periodical writers, Wheatley shows, oscillated...