Generationalizing: Romantic Social Forms and the Case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

In England in 1819 James Chandler calls attention to the changes that have swept over the teaching of Romantic literature in recent years. No longer, he rightly observes, do we teach courses that might go by the title “six-male-poets-in-two generations” (10). In addition to poets, we now spend more time on essayists and novelists, accidentally or avowedly marginal figures, and on writers working in the service of social and political ideas that were once seen as antipathetic to a literature that distanced itself from didacticism and topicality. Here I mean simply to join the chorus of people who observe this change, not to offer any recommendations on how to add to or subtract from what Susan Staves has called the “operative canon,” which she identifies as “the set of texts being published, commented upon by people trained in literary studies, and taught in departments of literature” (2). Rather, I raise the issue of the changes in the “operative canon” for Romantic studies because those shifting tides have left stranded a notion that once had a more conspicuous presence in Romantic literary history — that of the generation.

Raymond Williams (1985: 140—41), with his eye for meaningfully unsettled meaning, speaks about how “the full modern sense of generation in the specific and influential sense of a distinctive kind of people or attitudes” is not important before the middle of the eighteenth century and develops only from the middle of the nineteenth century; he notes that Sainte-Beuve introduced “one of the earliest uses” in his phrase “romantic generation.” And he himself implicitly strengthens the notion of the generation for literary analysis by prefacing his Foreword to Culture and Society with “An Outline of Dates” in which the dates he gives “are those in which the writers discussed were aged 25” (1966: vii–viii).¹

Yet even though Williams provides a roster of writers’ ages that skirts the notion of school classes and makes the writers seem to have graduated into youthful maturity itself, he uses the notion of the generation as something less than glue between age-mates. Instead, he emphasizes the different perspectives that can be taken by persons who are members of the same generation. Thus, he writes, “as Bell has shown, Dilthey’s concept of ‘commonly experienced time’ is crucial in the idea of a cultural generation” (1985: 141), but goes on to stress the ways in which that commonly experienced time had different values for different members of the generation. He takes up Pugin’s interest in contrasts from the opening of Culture and Society and organizes his opening chapter in Keywords as a study in the antithetical stances of persons who share roughly the same generation: Edmund Burke and William Cobbett, Robert Southey and Robert Owen. And he later discusses Bentham and Coleridge as an opposed generational pair who divided their world between them, surveying each man’s career much as John Stuart Mill had done — to show how different age-mates might be.²

One striking feature of these comparisons, moreover, is the way in which they do not exactly correspond to any of the elements of the notion of the generation as Williams parses it in Keywords. In the first place, Burke and Cobbett reach the age of twenty-five in 1754 and 1787, respectively, and thus are part of the same generation only if we adopt an account of the notion that Williams identifies as a “relatively early” one “for reckoning historical time” — “at the rate of thirty years or three to a century” (1985: 140). Southey and Owen, with Owen having reached twenty-five a scant three years before Southey did in 1799, form the kind of micro-generation that Williams speaks of when he says that “one of the difficulties of generation in this strengthening modern sense is that in a period of rapid change the period [of time] involved is likely to shorten, and to fall well below the period of biological generation” (142). In pointing to the thirty-three years between Burke and Cobbett and the three years...