Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs: Periodical Culture and Post-Napoleonic Authorship

Introduction: Empire, Periodicals, and Late Romantic Writing

Introduction Empire, Periodicals, and Late Romantic Writing This book is about the power accorded literary periodicals by late Romantic authors, who inhabited an era of tremendous growth in the periodical press. The “years between Waterloo and the passage of the first Reform Bill greatly enlarged the audience for periodicals,” Richard Altick has already noted; this marked expanse in periodical publications was due to the era’s “social and political turmoil” and was spurred by recent economic and technological developments, such as the invention of the steam press, the perfection of steel-plate engraving, and the reopening of Continental trade (which renewed access to paper rag), that enabled a sudden rise in publication and reading after the wars.1 But if periodicals were a veritable index of contemporary sociodevelopment , this link between capitalism and literary form also is at odds with traditional characterizations of Romantic culture and suggests a late Romantic investment in periodicals as a vehicle of literary ambition that is counterintuitive. I would do “Any thing but Mortgage my Brain to Blackwood,” Keats once declared, referencing a popular Tory monthly in a characteristically high Romantic rejection of the commerce and commodification represented by the periodical press.2 His resistance to periodicals bespeaks the conflict between art and commerce that pervades so much Romantic writing, and it illustrates the challenge supposedly posed to Romantic idealism by the material dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the very process driving historical change in these years of post-Napoleonic economic and territorial growth. The territorial expansion and economic development associated with imperial acceleration were a crucial component of the era’s historical experience and thus play an important role in periodicals, albeit not in 2 Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs the ways that might typically be expected. Consistent with this “new imperial age,” as it has been described by historians such as C. A. Bayley, the pages of the many periodicals launched and published between 1815 and 1832 teemed with references to contemporary territorial expansion, whether in the visual and verbal representation provided by journalistic reportage and accompanying illustrations, or in the advertisements that filled the back pages with announcements of new products and commodities available from abroad or with lists of necessary purchases for a journey into these exotic regions.3 My interest, however, is in more subtle , less obvious instances of imperial involvement in literary magazines, but which would have been of particular use to the aspiring authors who also contributed to those pages. These are the many geographical motifs of exotic or foreign locations that occur in texts developed amid collaboration with periodicals, and whose topical, detailed, and often highly informed representations correspond with the growing knowledge of the imperial archive. In the broader context of periodicals as crosssections of contemporary culture and history, these moments of geographical exoticism are analogous to the more specific visual and textual representation of empire within newspapers and magazines and are simply oblique reminders of an expanding imperial world. But for individual authors and their Romantic ambitions for literary posterity, these geographical references also were vehicles in calculated ploys for literary prestige, which reversed the prior, high Romantic resistance to the base commodification of periodicals and instead capitalized upon the contemporary interdependence of periodicals with empire to enact a sophisticated representational economy. In this system, empire was appropriated as a conceptualizing paradigm for the corporate enterprise of periodicals in which so many authors were involved, and the most sophisticated authors mastered the system by exploiting the imperial analogy within periodicals to effect their own authorial self-promotion. “Ozymandias” perfectly illustrates this confluence of imperial imagery in literary contributions to post-Napoleonic periodicals. Shelley’s famous sonnet, which was written as part of a sonnet competition between himself and Horace Smith, first appeared in the Examiner in 1818. It was occasioned by the colossal Egyptian fragments that had been acquired by Britain in its 1801 defeat of French forces at Aboukir and that in 1817 went on display in the newly reopened and expanded British Museum. Although the massive bust then known as “Memnon’s Head” Introduction 3 that is often associated with the sonnet would not arrive in England until the next year, all the Egyptian antiquities then displayed or still in the process of arriving in England were prominent legacies of the British campaigns against Napoleon, and therefore emblematized the nation’s post-Napoleonic supremacy. For Examiner readers, then, Shelley’s...