Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century

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Notes

PREFACE

1. Stuart Curran discusses Seward in a number of articles and book chapters; see, for example, “Anna Seward and the Dynamics of Female Friendship.”

INTRODUCTION

1. Seward was dropped from the second edition of David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds., Eighteenth-Century Poetry. She is not included in Fiona Robertson, ed., Women’s Writing, 1778–1838. Among recent Romantic-era anthologies, Seward is not included in Deirdre Shauna Lynch, Jack Stillinger, and Stephen Greenblatt, eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. D, nor in Charles Mahoney and Michael O’Neill, eds., Romantic Poetry.

2. Examples include Paula Backscheider’s discussion of Seward’s elegies and same-sex desire in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, 296–312, Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank’s chapter on Seward and environmental concerns in Speaking for Nature, 161–88, John Brewer’s chapter on Seward as provincial poet in The Pleasures of the Imagination, 573–612, and Harriet Guest’s chapter on Seward as a domestic muse in Small Change, 252–67. Recent articles on Seward and environmentalism are Donna Coffey’s “Protecting the Botanic Garden,” and Sharon Selzer, “Pond’rous Engines’ in ‘Outraged Groves.’”

3. I concur with Wheeler’s thesis, although his article concerns a specific phenomenon, the use of place in Enlightenment and Romantic-era poetry, while my book reaches the same conclusion by investigating a range of poetic values and practices.

4. See Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority, for a thorough discussion of eighteenth-century landscape poetry.

5. Brewer discusses the popularity of “tours” of London and of various British regions in The Pleasures of the Imagination, 50–51, 631–37. An example of a popular poetic “tour” was the title poem of Mary Chandler’s A Description of Bath … with Several Other Poems.

6. Esther Schor analyzes the eighteenth-century evolution of the elegy and the watershed significance of Gray’s “Elegy” in Bearing the Dead, 40–47.

7. See Thomas M. Woodman, Thomas Parnell, and Cecil V. Wicker, Edward Young.

8. Although “There Was a Boy” was included in both the Lyrical Ballads and the thirteen-book Prelude, the church is described as a “thronèd lady” only in the latter. See William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book “Prelude,” 402.

9. Marjorie Levinson describes Wordsworth’s turn toward transcendence, which, she says, is what “makes [his poetry] Romantic” (45). Liu’s reading is historicist, as is James Chandler’s England in 1819, which encompasses a year of literary masterpieces written in the wake of the “Peterloo Massacre.”

10. In Romantic Ecology, Jonathan Bate praises as “green” poems that name places, poems that sometimes are dedicated to loved ones whose names are “inscribed” (literally or metaphorically) on the landscape. Such poems indicate a poet’s ability to be “lord of that which we do not possess,” in the words of Edward Thomas (9).

11. Anne K. Mellor’s two influential studies are Romanticism and Gender and Mothers of the Nation.

12. Janet Todd, Sensibility, Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, and Thomas J. McCarthy, Relationships of Sympathy. To these should be added Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity, and Amit Rai, Rule of Sympathy.

13. Seward is mentioned in Nicholas Roe, ed., Romanticism, 3, 28, 32, 54, 184, 574, and in James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane, eds., The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, 119, 157. Neither she nor her poems appear in the Cambridge Companion’s “Chronology.”

CHAPTER 1: UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

1. Seward, for example, appears in the introduction to Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haeffner’s Re-Visioning Romanticism amid a list of rarely taught women writers (6). Also symptomatic of Seward’s neglect is that Adela Pinch refers to Seward’s opinions throughout Strange Fits of Passion (45, 61, 68, 70, 72, 109) and lists her among the works cited but does not include her in the book’s index, obscuring her prominence among contemporary critical voices.

2. Of the many books on Aphra Behn, see, for example, Heidi Hutner, ed., Rereading Aphra Behn. Carol Barash reevaluates Katherine Philips’s poetry in English Women’s Poetry, and Donald J. Newman and Lynn Marie Wright’s edited volume Fair Philosopher collects fresh scholarship on Haywood’s Female Spectator. On writers closer to Seward’s time, see Carrol Fry, Charlotte Smith, Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams, and Gina Luria Walker, Mary Hays.

3. See Richard Greene, Mary Leapor, Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, and Ann Messenger, Woman and Poet in the Eighteenth Century. Messenger notes that Seward omitted Darwall from her list of seven noteworthy women poets in 1789 (1).

4. For example, Robert DeMaria Jr., ed., British Literature, 1640–1789, includes among mid- to late eighteenth-century poets Mary Collier, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Leapor, Anna Laetitia Aiken Barbauld, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and Anne Cromartie Yearsley but omits Seward. All of these poets deserve notice— and some are very important—but Seward surely is also worthy of attention.

5. For information about Scott’s career, I consulted Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott. For Scott’s relationship with Seward and her writings, see 1:271–72, 312–13, 326, and 362.

6. Seward excelled at occasional verse; two good examples are her “Verses Inviting Mrs. C—— to Tea on a Public Fast Day, during the American War,” an acerbic comment on the fast’s, and war’s, futility, and her “Admonition to Rosilda,” warning a friend against her contemplated marriage to a dissolute man.

7. The phrase “the trough of the wave” is the title of an essay by Bertrand H. Bronson.

8. See Gretchen M. Foster, Pope Versus Dryden.

9. See Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, 110–17, 217–20, 227–29. See also Jacqueline M. Labbe’s “Every Poet Her Own Drawing Master.” Among other examples are the previously cited chapters by Guest and Bowerbank.

10. Barbara Schnorrenberg, for example, in her entry on Anna Seward perpetuates an incorrect birth date (281–82). Ashmun had corrected this mistake in her biography (5).

11. Besides McGann’s, Todd’s, and Ellis’s previously cited books, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility.

12. See Linda Colley, Britons. Her book has inspired others, including Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire, and Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century.

13. See, for example, Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire, and Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haeffner, Re-Visioning Romanticism, in addition to Mellor’s and Colley’s books.

14. Some examples, among many, include Donna Landry’s groundbreaking The Muses of Resistance, Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Moira Ferguson’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets.

15. Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz’s Brilliant Women accompanied an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery devoted to the bluestocking phenomenon. Seward is mentioned in passing (45, 113) as poet and provincial salonnière.

16. Kelly’s biographical preface to Anna Seward is more respectful than Ashmun’s account but nonetheless borrows much from it. Compare, for example, Ashmun’s “The Sewards … began to look about, in the furtive manner of prudent parents, for eligible young men, not averse to becoming bridegrooms” (17) with Kelly’s “Like other parents, the Sewards began to look around for suitable husbands for their daughters” (xii). Likewise compare Ashmun’s “She was gaining a reputation beyond Bath and Lichfield, and she did not shrink from sending her already sanctioned verse to the London journals” (74)—which refers to Seward’s pursuit of publication following her Batheaston success—with Kelly’s “Seward began to make quite a name for herself beyond the limits of Lichfield and Bath-Easton when she decided to send her verses, sanctioned by the Bath-Easton assembles, to London journals” (xv), or Ashmun’s “Immediately she reaped the reward of timeliness. In the salons of London her lines were read and quoted; and in distant country houses her name was repeated beside the hearth” (86)— referring to the reception of the Monody on Major André— with Kelly’s “Her Monody on Major André … was timely … and Seward became a household name” (xvi). In other words, Kelly omits Ashmun’s sneering tone but depends almost exclusively on The Singing Swan for her biographical narrative.

17. Other examples include Adeline Johns-Putra’s “Gendering Telemachus.”

CHAPTER 2: “FANCY’S SHRINE”

1. Indeed, provincial poets had long intervened in national debates. In “Political Verse and Satire,” Kathryn R. King instances Katherine Philips as a Welsh gentlewoman who circulated poetry about national politics (203–6). Donna Landry in “The Labouring-Class Women Poets” notes the rural washerwoman Mary Collier’s bid for national recognition (234).

2. In taking this position, I differ from a scholar such as Mary A. Waters, who in British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism explains that she defines as professional only those women critics who wrote “literary criticism for money under circumstances requiring that they meet the demands and offering them the support of a newly emerging literary profession” (7). She does not include ladies who published criticism with no consideration of pay or women who wrote professionally in other genres but only occasionally published criticism. Waters draws attention to the undervalued writing by paid women critics and thus insists on a strict definition. I am likewise drawing attention to a writer undervalued for other reasons, among them, that men and women who did not write for pay are liable to be dismissed today as “amateurs” in the sense of “unskilled,” no matter how refined their writings.

3. For one example of Seward’s many assertions of the poet’s cultural significance, see her sonnet “On Reading a Description of Pope’s Gardens at Twickenham”: “This is the Poet’s triumph … / … his consciousness of powers / That lift his memory from oblivion’s doom” (Poetical Works, 3:141, ll. 9–11).

4. Horace Walpole remarked, “The poor Arcadian patroness does not spell one word of French or Italian right” (Hesselgrave 6).

5. Gittings also notes that “Laurel crowns were bandied about, both as figures of speech and in actual fact, in Hunt’s circle” (145).

6. It is admittedly difficult to imagine Gittings making this statement in the wake of Anne K. Mellor’s, Paula Backscheider’s, and other more recent writers’ emphasis on the domestic priorities and sociability of much Romantic-era, and especially women’s, verse.

7. I am grateful to Jennifer Keith for directing me to this important discussion.

8. In Hogarth, Ronald Paulson, for example, discusses the ubiquity of signboards in eighteenth-century London, with their “symbolic representations” employing essentially “the same devices” that Hogarth used in his paintings and engravings (2:335–36).

9. Seward admired Kauffman; witness her allusion to “ANGELICA’s unrival’d hand” in the “Invocation of the Comic Muse” (l. 31), which specifically praises an image of Thalia, crowned with roses and dressed in a blue robe, disarming Cupid. Kauffman’s sportive nymphs were ubiquitous in reproductions, particularly on decorative porcelain, for which, as Malise Forbes Adam and Mary Mauchline observe, Kauffman’s “Cupid designs monopolized the field,” almost always portrayed cavorting with muses and nymphs (136).

10. In “Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets,” Margaret Anne Doody discusses this ode in the context of women’s flexibility in addressing the relation between human and animal, a theme men usually treated by affirming strict barriers between species.

11. See Adam and Mauchline, “Kauffman’s Decorative Work,” and David Alexander, “Kauffman and the Print Market in Eighteenth-Century England.”

12. See David Alexander, “Chronological Checklist,” 181.

CHAPTER 3: THE PROFESSION OF POETRY

1. For the feminization of sensibility, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility.

2. Mellor arrives at a different conclusion from Zionkowski in Romanticism and Gender based on the large numbers of women publishing in all genres by the late eighteenth century. In Borderlines, Wolfson, however, points to women’s ongoing difficulties when exercising their “masculine” intellects in print.

3. Margaret J. M. Ezell examines why many past women writers have been ignored in Writing Women’s Literary History. Her study is much broader than mine, but she demonstrates that women who wrote from a religious perspective and / or circulated their works in manuscript have been overlooked even by feminists rediscovering early modern women writers. In A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 Susan Staves likewise argues that women who wrote from a religious or often even a conservative point of view have been given less attention than women whose writings were more secular or rebellious.

4. Dustin Griffin in Literary Patronage in England concentrates on kinds of patronage featuring the exchange of financial assistance or church or government places in return for authorial dedications and professional services including entertainment. He does, however, note that “hospitality of one form or another” was among forms of patronage, including “‘familiarity,’ whereby persons of talent are permitted to cross a line, under controlled conditions, that normally separates the ranks of a hierarchical society” (18–19). “Encouragement,” according to Griffin, was also a means of patronage and could range from “kind words and assurances of interest” to financial support (19). Since Seward was an independently wealthy gentlewoman, she no doubt referred to Lady Miller as her patron on account of the latter’s hospitality and encouragement and the opportunity she provided to socialize with those of much higher rank. Lady Miller conferred these in exchange for the “entertainment” Seward provided at the Batheaston assemblies and the luster she shed on them when her poems became famous. Later in her life, Seward herself “gave a great deal of time and energy to ‘patronizing genius.’ Her patronage of [William] Newton, the Derbyshire Minstrel, took the form of hospitable entertainment, social introductions, and solid cash advances” (Ashmun 280). Seward’s patronage of Newton was quite conventional compared with her “client” relationship with patron Lady Miller.

5. In Anna Seward, Barnard discusses Seward’s expert management of her father’s business affairs; see, for example, 147–48. Barnard concludes that such employment— rather than more “feminine” occupations such as sewing or caring for her ailing father—constituted Seward’s household duties.

6. See Steven H. Clark, ed., Mark Akenside, James MacPherson, Edward Young, 75–77, and Mary Waldron, Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton, 211.

7. Thomas Gray published only thirteen poems in his lifetime, often after Horace Walpole had admired them in manuscript. William Cowper’s writing was partly a therapeutic diversion from his mental illness. William Mason’s circumstances resembled Joseph Wharton’s and William Lisle Bowles’s; all three were primarily clergymen as well as poets and men of letters. Thomas Wharton the younger was, like Gray, a successful academic who was also recognized as an influential poet; he was poet laureate from 1785 to 1790. Seward resembles these male contemporaries in that she, like them, was a serious, widely read poet but was never a professional in the sense of earning her living through writing.

8. Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook went through five editions between 1780 and 1784. Her Monody on Major André went through nine editions, including six in America, between 1781 and 1806. Louisa appeared in five editions in America and five in Britain between 1784 and 1792. Llangollen Vale, with Other Poems merited three editions in 1796, and Original Sonnets on Various Subjects three editions in 1799. Jennifer Kelly lists Seward’s editions in Anna Seward, xxiii–xxiv.

9. Examples include the volume of women’s tributes entitled The Nine Muses, edited by Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, “Upon the Death of Her Husband,” included in the second edition of Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, and Mary Jones, “In Memory of the Right Honorable Lord Aubrey Beauclerk, Who Was Slain at Carthagena.”

CHAPTER 4: BRITISH PATRIOT

1. Harriet Guest, argues, for example, that for critics of Catharine Macaulay, “patriotism is based in sensibility and local emotion, but these are feminized qualities which, when removed from a private and familial register, are involved in the discourse of corruption employed in the narrative on the decline of the Roman empire” (Small Change 219). Anna Laetitia Barbauld was praised, in contrast, because she cloaked her patriotic interventions in the guise of a Roman matron upholding “household virtues” as the basis of the civic ideal (251).

2. In Bearing the Dead, Esther Schor discusses midcentury anxiety about the sincerity of public elegies: “Critical qualms about sincerity reveal a residual uneasiness about the manliness of publicizing displays of emotion” (47). Seward avoided the latter issue by presenting herself as chief public mourner. In her elegies for André and Lady Miller, she emphasized her personal grief for those she publicly mourned. Paul Goring describes the function played by novels in modeling somatic behavior such as tears and fainting. By responding correctly to the trials of heroes and heroines, readers confirmed their membership in the polite reading community and, in effect, confirmed their polite status (142–47). It is probably not claiming too much to say that Seward’s elegiac speakers modeled sentimental patriotic responses for her early readers.

3. Barnard regards it as equally plausible that Seward alone wrote the elegy on Captain Cook (123).

4. In A Swan and Her Friends, E. V. Lucas states that “to the [Batheaston] vase was due … two of her most serious and worthy effusions—the ‘Elegy on Captain Cook’ and the ‘Monody on André’” (142). Margaret Ashmun cites the Cook elegy as among the “already-sanctioned” (by the Batheaston assemblies) poems Seward sent “to the London journals” (74).

5. See Claudia N. Thomas, “Masculine Performances and Gender Identity,” for a discussion of Lady Beauclerk’s choice of Mary Jones, a family friend, to write an elegy following her husband’s death in the naval battle at Carthagena (169). An earlier example of a national elegy penned by a woman is Lady Mary Lee Chudleigh’s “On the Death of His Highness the Duke of Gloucester.”

6. Although some of Colley’s details have been disputed—see, for example, Hannah Smith, “The Idea of a Protestant Monarchy in Britain, 1714–1760,” which refutes Colley’s argument that Britons felt no personal allegiance to the Hanoverians but instead were committed to the Act of Succession that established them—I accept the broad sweep of her argument as elucidating several cultural trends reflected in Seward’s opinions and career.

7. See especially chapter 5, “A Culture of Reform,” 215–86.

8. Beaglehole adduces exhaustion from the previous voyages as the main cause of the lapsed judgment that led to Cook’s death (711–12). Glyn Williams states that “with hindsight … Cook should not have been approached” to lead his final voyage, given the “physically grueling and mentally exhausting” nature of his too-recent previous voyages (Voyages of Delusion 286).

9. See, for example, John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1666), Joseph Addison’s Spectator no. 69 describing the Royal Exchange (1711), Alexander Pope’s “Windsor-Forest” (1713), and James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730).

10. Cook literally planted seeds on some South Pacific islands that he visited (Beaglehole 335, 536, 545, 552).

11. See Sandro Jung, “Susanna Pearson and the ‘Elegiac’ Lyric.”

12. See Joshua Hett Smith, Narrative of the Death of Major André. An engraving of André’s memorial is reproduced on the page facing 176. On the return of his remains, see Robert McConnell Hatch, Major John André, 276.

13. See Jennifer Kelly, Anna Seward, 320n12.

14. Indeed, Seward’s threat coincidentally echoes the words of a British officer serving in America in a letter home describing the army’s “shocked” reaction to André’s death. “Both officers and men are so enraged by this business,” he wrote, “that they swear they will have revenge whenever they can get an opportunity, and I make no doubt that before this Rebellion is over there will be no quarter given on either side.… There never was so melancholy a thing” (qtd. in Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 297).

15. Jennifer Keith discusses earlier women’s struggles to define themselves as poets despite the traditional identification of women not with poets but with poets’ source of inspiration (Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper, 51–79). Seward would seem to have resolved that struggle by identifying herself as both poet-speaker and muse.

CHAPTER 5: WARTIME CORRESPONDENT

1. In Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, Marjorie Levinson, for example, posits that the poet deliberately omitted mention of the abbey itself in Tintern Abbey, along with the British revolutionary associations of the date and site of his poem, because “the object … is to replace the picture of the place with ‘the picture of the mind’” (5). Alan Liu in Wordsworth agrees that “Tintern Abbey” denies the history implicit in its place and date but argues that the poem is in fact about history, in opposition to “the sheer will and ambition of a poet” (217). Nicholas Roe finds it impossible to believe that Wordsworth was evading sociopolitical associations when he wrote “Tintern Abbey”; the Wye Valley contained several “republican” sites besides the abbey, and walking tours themselves were considered a “democratic” gesture (Politics 126).

2. On the conservatism of Seward’s letter, see Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution, where she describes Seward as speaking “like the nation’s spokesperson, giving Williams one last chance to come home to London with her respectability intact and her rashness forgiven” (96). In “Benevolent Historian,” Kennedy made essentially the same point by claiming that Seward addresses Williams “as a type of prodigal daughter” (321). Both comments align Seward’s social conservatism with political conservatism, an identification I wish to complicate.

3. In British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia include six poems printed between 1790 and 1800; all but one (an encomium on a British soldier by Joanna Baillie) deplore the French wars’ carnage.

4. In her note to the poem, Jennifer Kelly supposes that Seward omitted the poem from both her Original Sonnets and posthumous edition because “she no doubt considered it too political” (325n10). Since Seward did not hesitate to publish her opinion of the American War, it is probably not accurate to suppose her generally averse to publishing on a political topic, but Seward may have been hesitant to perpetuate a poem that at best was an embarrassing reminder of a position she later reversed and at worst may have thought seditious a decade after its publication.

5. In Poetical Works, the poem is titled “Ode on England’s Naval Triumphs in the Present War.”

6. See, for examples, Critical Review, May 1799, 33–38, European Magazine, May 1799, 323–25, and Monthly Review, August 1799, 361–99. All focus on Seward’s technique and style.

7. Lewis L. Turco, in The New Book of Forms, identifies the a-b-a-b stanza as a Sicilian quatrain, “a set form of the heroic stanza” (206).

CHAPTER 6: SEWARD AND SENSIBILITY

1. Other important sources on sensibility include Jean Hagstrum’s classic Sex and Sensibility, Janet Todd’s succinct Sensibility, Markman Ellis’s The Politics of Sensibility, and Susan Staves’s often pejorative analysis in A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789.

2. In her biography of Seward, Teresa Barnard notes this letter-journal as the earliest extant evidence of Seward’s self-construction through writing (8). She observes the parallels between Seward and her heroine Louisa, who likewise mediates her life through correspondence with an absent friend named Emma (13–14).

3. I take my information about the reception and editions of La nouvelle Heloïse from Judith H. McDowell’s preface to her abridged translation of Julie; or, The New Eloise.

CHAPTER 7: LOUISA AND THE LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FAMILY ROMANCE

1. I paraphrase Janet Todd’s description of the plot of The Wrongs of Woman in Sensibility, 135. Todd describes Wollstonecraft’s struggles to free herself from her fascination with Rousseau, evident throughout both her fiction and nonfictional prose.

2. It is worth mentioning that Seward herself attempted a translation of Télémaque later in her life; two books and part of a third are preserved in manuscript at the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield. In “Gendering Telemachus,” Adeline Johns-Putra argues that Seward’s epic fragment, revised according to her poetics of sensibility, was unpublishable because it contradicted the masculine values of traditional epic. Telemachus himself, in Seward’s version, becomes the feminized object of Calypso’s lust. Johns-Putra’s observation suggests that Seward characterized Telemachus as she did Eugenio. Published when sensibility still prevailed as a model for masculine as well as feminine behavior, and without the epic’s expectations of warrior-like traits, Louisa’s hero appears to have been quite acceptable to readers. I claim for the verse novel, however, the same subtle but unmistakably subversive quality Johns-Putra finds in Telemachus.

3. See Mary Laven, The Virgins of Venice, for a discussion of this phenomenon, which persisted until Napoleon disbanded the convents.

4. Ashmun comments snidely of Ernesto’s request that “the idea of their being saved by energetic work seems not to occur to anyone” (127), an example of inattentive reading perhaps caused by her general prejudice against Seward’s writings.

5. Saville’s situation was a less dramatic version of Eugenio’s. Divorce at the time was possible only when a wife’s adultery could be proved. Few women were hardy enough to expose themselves to such a charge, even when a marriage was insupportable, and few men likewise were willing to accuse their wives of adultery. Eugenio is representative in his hesitation; he feels guilty owing to his failure to love Emira, which has driven her into debauched behavior. Saville’s wife, according to Seward, was merely “shrewish, vulgar, and many ways unamiable” (Whalley 1:344), so that divorce was impossible and separation his only option.

CHAPTER 8: MILTON’S CHAMPION

1. In their introduction to A Century of Sonnets, Feldman and Robinson state that “Seward was the first woman sonneteer with any substantial impact upon the tradition” (10). They also state, however, that Charlotte Smith and William Lisle Bowles “set the tone for the Romantic sonnet and its emphasis on feeling” (12).

2. See, for example, Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility, 156–58, Judith Hawley, “Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” and Christopher C. Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility, 50–55.

3. Staves, to take one example, quotes these phrases at her study’s conclusion, disagreeing with Seward’s opinion but endorsing her right to criticize Smith’s writings (Literary History 439).

4. Barnard reveals that Seward’s chief reason for remaining in Lichfield was her attachment to John Saville (Anna Seward 21).

5. One thinks of the sign Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville, famously placed above the candidate’s desk during the 1992 presidential campaign, reminding him to repeat his chief theme: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

6. Kramnick’s chapter on the cultural logic of late feudalism examines the canonization of Spenser, but many of his points apply likewise to contemporary discussions of Milton. Thomas Bonnell has recently disputed Kramnick’s logic: since the bookselling trade was sales driven, it would not have made sense to emphasize Milton’s and Spenser’s inaccessibility (22–23). Academic critics like the Wartons were concerned about corrupt texts and wished to encourage the reading of correct texts. Bonnell’s point is well taken, but for a consumer like Seward, anxious to prove herself a discriminating reader and critic, the argument that Milton was “caviary to the general” would have increased his appeal.

7. Melissa Bailes reflects on Seward’s accusations against Smith despite her own plagiarism in “The Evolution of the Plagiarist.” Bailes considers Seward’s categorization of poets analogous to her preference for the Linnean system of botany. Seward emulated the Linnean approach, “minutely systematiz[ing poets] into classes” (119). She consequently despised Smith’s “stylistic hybridity” (119) while sanctioning her own borrowings because they adhered to the established order of the legitimate sonnet, “distinct, situated in its designated place and closing gaps within the poetic taxonomy” (121).

8. The original French can be found in Oeuvres poëtiques.

9. Fussell remarks that “one of the basic aesthetic principles of conservative metric in the eighteenth century is that the poet has not only the right but the duty to improve natural phonetic materials until they become fit for elevated uses” (75). Although the OED lists “complicate” as a synonym for intricate and complex, that use was evidently more prevalent in the seventeenth century. Poets such as Crabbe and Southey still used “complicate” in that sense, however, and Seward probably chose to do so owing to the word’s striking, and increasingly unusual, quality.

CHAPTER 9: CORRESPONDING POEMS

1. Margaret Ashmun sympathetically recounts Seward’s exchanges regarding Johnson. She explains the familial connection that may have resulted in Seward’s condescension toward her grandfather’s poor student (110–23). She details the evidence that formed the grounds of Seward’s disapproval (139–43) and the blistering public exchange with Boswell that ultimately resulted (201–8), concluding that Boswell prevailed and that the experience humiliated Seward (206–7). But she also provides plenty of corroborating evidence supporting Seward’s impression of Johnson as a man who could be harsh, rude, and even cruel in company (121–23). I discuss this episode in the concluding chapter.

2. Seward’s reference is the scene in which Cassandra warns the eponymous hero:

The gods of death will, soon,

Extend o’er me their all-protecting wing.

I shall not long, I shall not want protection;

But who, devoted prince, will give it thee?

Even while we talk the secret wheels are turning,

That lift the vile, and lay the mighty low.                        (4.2.49–54)

3. Seward’s initial remarks were published by the Gentleman’s Magazine in February and April 1786 and August 1787. In October 1793, the same periodical published her letter regarding Boswell’s Life, to which Boswell replied in the November issue. Seward replied to Boswell in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1793, disavowing her intention to pursue the argument, but Boswell published a final, angry rejoinder in the January 1794 issue. Seward wrote to several friends and relatives asking their support, and her cousin Henry White published two defenses of the poet in the same periodical, in March and October 1794.

4. In her letter to Henry Cary of March 4, 1798, Seward disputed Coleridge’s statement that Wordsworth’s description of the glowworm’s light as green was original. She observes that the glowworm’s light is “stellar” and that Ossian had described starlight as green long before Wordsworth was born (Letters 5:61).

CHAPTER 10: THE “LOST” HONORA

1. In Wordsworth’s Profession, Thomas Pfau explains the appeal of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” as its invitation to “an urban, educated ‘middle class’” to gain the “distinctive cultural capital” implied by their “expertise” in identifying with the speaker’s “inward pathos” (138). Pfau’s argument might be extended to all the early Romantic poets, whose poems, like Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, “trained” their readers both to appreciate and to identify with their dramatizations of what Thomas J. McCarthy, in Relationships of Sympathy, calls the “inner life of feeling” (148).

2. In Surpassing the Love of Man, Lillian Faderman describes Seward’s relationship as an “ideal romantic friendship” (135). She doubts it was a sexual relationship based on Seward’s very public references to their attachment but believes it was the “most enduring and passionate attachment of her life” (132). In Intimate Friends, Martha Vicinus is less circumspect about Seward’s sexual orientation, writing that “the poet … frequently wrote about her various romances with other women” (8).

3. In Companions Without Vows, Rizzo remarks that the model for companionate relationships was marriage: “The autonomous mistress had the same powers over her companion that the husband had over his wife. She could choose either to exercise those powers autocratically, as she had probably seen her father and husband do, or to work out an equitable arrangement such as she herself would have liked to experience in her dealings with men” (1–2). She instances Elizabeth Montagu, in her relationship with her companion Dorothea Gregory, as an example of a woman who became a “patriarch” (117), tyrannizing her young companion. Although Honora Sneyd was not Seward’s “companion” but rather her foster sister, Seward’s assumption of influence over the younger woman’s relationships bears comparison with the phenomenon Rizzo describes.

4. Ashmun confirms that Honora turned down Thomas Day’s proposal, while, beside André, Lord Greville and a Colonel Barry also expressed their attraction (50–51).

5. Richardson cites brain activity during sleep as among the tenets of Romantic psychology held by Erasmus Darwin, Seward’s mentor.

CHAPTER 11: MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DR. DARWIN

1. Paul Fussell argues throughout the Theory of Prosody for the importance of harmony or melody to eighteenth-century poets and prosodists. Early in the century, Pope played with metrical stress patterns to create effects such as irony as well as variety within a predominately regular iambic pentameter structure (54). By midcentury, however, conservative prosodists were arguing that verse must be strictly regular. While this idea prevailed, readers of poetry persisted in scanning lines as regular iambics even when doing so countered the sense or natural pronunciation of verse (56–67). Late-century poets began to rebel against slavish adherence to metrical regularity, experimenting with accentual scansion and other methods of achieving melodic verse (156–63). Because Seward was trained to emulate Milton and Pope, she never indulged in the extreme quest for metric regularity. Her preference for variety within heroic lines agrees with ideas promoted by contemporaries like James Beattie and Robert Burns in the 1770s and 1780s (144–45).

2. In Look to the Lady, Russ McDonald describes how Siddons “moved the standard of personation away from the conventional and toward the natural or verisimilar,” although she remained well within the boundaries of what Pope described in his “Essay on Criticism” as “nature to advantage dress’d” (24).

3. See Dustin Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

4. An example of the first sense can be seen in Seward’s revision of a couplet in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” in 1806, in which she created a metaphor for how we respond to imagery that compared that response to a visual reaction. For Pope’s “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d,” she substituted “Sprung from strange images in contact brought, / The bright collision of an agile thought, / And when together struck like flint and fire, / We start delighted, ponder, and admire” (Letters 6:308).

5. See especially chapter 6, “Bluestockings and Sentimental Writers, 1756–1776,” in which Staves describes the importance of publications such as Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769) and Elizabeth Carter’s translation of All the Works of Epictetus (1758).

6. In The Politics of Sensibility, Markman Ellis observes two instances of Seward’s literary-critical interventions, one in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 (203) and the other in Humphrey Repton’s Variety in 1788 (208). Anne K. Mellor notes women’s extensive participation in the discursive public sphere and commends Seward’s confidence in her published critical judgments in Mothers of the Nation (100). In a fine instance of revisionist, feminist reading, David Simpson proposes in Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory that Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman was not written in an “unstable” style because she was incompetent but because she was trying to engage with a female readership she deemed unstable (109). Mary Waters studies only the writings of women journalists who wrote for pay in her in British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–1832, in an effort to increase critical recognition of this overlooked professional group.

7. Seward’s advice to Cayley was part of a letter to Richard Sykes of March 16, 1794 (Letters 3:316–27).

8. Seward read aloud in her own parlor at Lichfield; in a letter preserved in the Journals and Correspondence of Thomas Sedgewick Whalley, she described reading Whalley’s Edwy and Edilda by turns with three other readers to five guests in the “blue region,” her personal parlor, in August 1781 (1:328). In a letter to Walter Scott dated July 1803, she describes reading one of his poems to “a young soldier of genius,” pleased that “his kindling countenance, always, and often his exclaiming voice, marked every beauty as I proceeded” (6:100). The more famous gatherings of the bluestockings in London seem to have been characterized chiefly by conversation and indeed were celebrated for encouraging conversation between gentlemen and ladies of various political opinions and intellectual achievements and interests; see Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds., Reconsidering the Bluestockings, especially Harriet Guest’s “Bluestocking Feminism” and Emma Major’s “The Politics of Sociability.” Contemporary accounts mention guests quoting poetry, but although gatherings such as those at Mrs. Thrale’s home often featured much discussion of literature, they did not seem to feature the kind of dramatic readings Seward performed.

9. Wolfson devotes a chapter to this phenomenon in Borderlines. See, for example, her discussion of an especially pejorative essay of 1822 in Blackwood’s accusing Keats of an “‘effeminacy of style’ that is ‘all florid, all fine,’ … ‘cloying in its sweetness’” (247).

10. Michelle Levy describes in Family Authorship how the contributions of women participants in the family authorship circles of the male Romantic poets were downplayed or denied as the poets pursued individual eminence.

11. Markman Ellis attributes to Seward two acerbic articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1785) disputing Clara Reeves’s preference for Fielding in The Progress of Romance (203) and also observes two essays in Humphrey Repton’s Variety (1788) promoting the superiority of Clarissa over Tom Jones (208).

12. Margaret Ezell discusses the letter as an established genre in Writing Women’s Literary History (34).

13. Since Darwin was widely regarded for both his vast knowledge as well as his accomplished verse, Seward can be forgiven for her high estimate. His biographer, Desmond King-Hele, describes him as “the most famous English poet of the 1790s” (13).

14. King-Hele rather amusingly remarks that Seward “analyses the verse [of The Botanic Garden], its accentuation, phraseology, mannerisms and weaknesses, with a skill that no one who is not an eighteenth-century poet can hope to rival” (155).

CHAPTER 12: ANNA SEWARD, SAMUEL JOHNSON,
AND THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1. In fact, Johnson had written that West was one of the few poets for whom the grave “might be without its terrors” (The Lives of the Poets, 4:118).

2. On July 31, 1794, for example, Seward confided to a Mrs. Jackson her fear that she had contracted breast cancer after a blow to her chest (Letters 3:382–83).

3. A good representation of this legend is an often-reproduced nineteenth-century painting by James Doyle (1851) of a meeting of Johnson’s Club at Reynolds’s house, in which Boswell is poised behind Johnson, pencil and tiny notebook in hand.

4. Bate approaches Seward’s biographical reminiscences in an evenhanded manner, accepting some suggestions and rejecting others. For example, he dismisses her account of the myrtle-sprig poem as “crazily assumed by some to be an actual love poem of his own” (128) but accepts her account of Johnson’s courtship of Elizabeth Porter as “by no means improbable” (144). He also finds shrewd her deduction that Johnson’s affection for Thrale-Piozzi was “cupboard love” (388). Bate attributes Seward’s many inaccuracies not to “deliberate deceit or delight in creative invention” but to passing on “as assured fact” what was “sometimes only speculative gossip on the part of her mother and older people” (144). Bate thus takes Seward seriously as a source even if he finds her sources, in turn, unreliable.

5. In his popular biography of Johnson, for example, John Wain simply records that “Michael even made up a quaint little set of verses, commemorating the accidental death of a duckling, and attributed them to Sam,” without mentioning Seward’s alternative version of the anecdote (25).

6. Many scholars have commented on this aspect of the Boswell-Johnson relationship. David Daiches, for one, remarks that Johnson “was aware of Boswell’s search for a father-figure and was prepared to play that role for him” (2).

7. See The Reproduction of Mothering and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Throughout her works, Chodorow argues that women’s maturation is more complicated than men’s. While both genders must separate themselves from their mothers in order to become adults, a man separates himself from the person closest to himself but whose gender is unlike his own and models himself on his father. Women must somehow separate themselves from the person who is not only closest to them but with whose gender they identify. To varying degrees in different cultures, they then have difficulty becoming autonomous adults because the opposite gender is a problematic model while their own gender is perceived to be inferior.