Mysticisms and Mystifications: The Demands of Laboring-Class Religious Poetry

It is perhaps an underappreciated fact that Susannah Harrison's 1780 Songs in the Night was one of the best-selling collections written by a laboring-class poet in the late eighteenth century. Comprising religious meditations and versifications of scripture, Harrison's single volume went through at least fifteen editions in Britain and America and was still being reissued as late as 1823. As Donna Landry has observed, Harrison's volume "was in terms of reception and impact on possible readerships the most important publication by a plebeian female poet."¹ Its author, we are told in the preface, "is a very obscure Young Woman, and quite destitute of the Advantages of Education, as well as under great bodily Affliction."² Harrison's poetry might be described as demanding because it required much effort on the part of its long-suffering author, who, after being left an orphan at a tender age, went into service until she was seized by a mysterious and wasting disease. After teaching herself to write, she turned to poetry to relieve her many financial and emotional distresses.

Harrison's work is demanding in quite another way for modern readers, as it is exemplary of the critical demands made by all laboring-class religious verse, indeed religious verse in general, which has largely been excluded from the reappraisal of the canon of eighteenth-century poetry that began, in part, with Roger Lonsdale more than twenty years ago.³ While modern critics and editors after Lonsdale have recovered the work of many eighteenth-century laboring-class poets, by and large their interest is dominated by poetry that protests social injustice and anticipates an affirmative politics of class. Poetry that performs a transparent critique of social marginalization is ideal for challenging the basis of canon formation and remaking the field of literary studies according to a liberal pluralist agenda accommodating to texts that are representative of marginalized identities on the grounds of class, gender, and race.⁴ But what can be said of poetry that foregrounds theological issues and demands its readers rationalize or ignore the social and privilege the divine, eternal, and transcendental? Indeed, as Paula Backscheider has recently noted, such poetry, regardless of the social background of the poet, has tended to be ignored by modern critics. She quotes Margaret Doody, who claims, "'The religious experience of the Augustans has never been fully or perfectly treated. I suspect that it is not peripheral but central to Augustan literature.'"⁵ Backscheider then asserts, "We should not 'suspect,' we should recognize."⁶ Yet, as she argues, it may be because many women writers favored religious topics and forms that such writing was excluded from literary histories.

Certainly, any reconsideration of literary history and religious writing from the perspective of either gender or of class must confront what Harrison's work demonstrates: that the religious sensibility articulated in a good deal of laboring-class poetry typically runs counter to the class consciousness and critique of social injustice that modern critics prefer to celebrate. Poems with titles such as "Longing to be Dissolved" and "Renouncing the World," for example, do not announce a program for changing the world so much as a mystical superseding of it. The final stanza of the latter poem, in fact, argues for a complete renunciation of the social in any form:

Give me the Bible in my Hand, A Heart to read and understand,     And Faith to trust the Lord: I'd set alone from Day to Day, Nor urge my company to stay, Nor wish to rove Abroad

(ll. 25–30)

The critic who argues that such poetry ought to be reexamined risks the appearance of arguing for religious quietism over radical political critique. But while Harrison's verse may be thematically controversial for today's more secular critics, it is formally polished and inventive within the conventions of hymn writing and scriptural meditations in English. As such, it is not necessarily bad poetry.

Yet despite whatever technical skill Harrison's writing might display, skill that won her an admiring enough audience to merit her ample republications in her...