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

Karen Fang introduces her insightful study by acknowledging the ‘tremendous growth in the periodical press’ in the years after Waterloo, and the ‘extraordinary power’ with which the second-generation Romantics invested journals and magazines. Jon Klancher’s still influential The Making of English Reading Audiences, published in 1987, recognised how periodical culture provided ‘a force field for thought’ and describes the way in which readers were faced with an ‘empire of signs’. Periodical Culture and the Empire of Signs deliberately invokes a sense of the importance of writing that once was dismissed as ephemeral, and sustains an informed exploration of how writers in journals and magazines attempted to make sense of a time of political conflict and social change. This they did by fashioning, as Klancher expresses it, ‘a map, a stance, a code with which to grasp historical transformation’.

At the core of Fang’s book are chapters on each of four very different writers, Charles Lamb, James Hogg, Letitia Landon and Lord Byron: ‘three minor writers and one major’ who ‘may seem to have little in common’ but reveal ‘surprising cross-connections refracted through the different allegiances and subjectivities of class, nationality, gender and political ideology’. Nevertheless they show, Fang declares, ‘vast differences in their relationships with the magazines with which they were involved’. The publications themselves also differed greatly, as the work under discussion by Lamb, Hogg, Landon and Byron was written for the urbane London Magazine, the satirical, combative Blackwood’s, a range of expensive gift books or literary annuals and the short-lived, but highly significant Liberal. What holds this book together, however, and makes the argument it presents a consistently interesting one, is the deployment of empire as ‘a paradigm’ to represent the view of the world delineated in a range of magazines from a variety of perspectives. The concept of empire is deployed in different senses to portray not only the four chosen writers’ relationships with the periodical press, but the physical space offered by such publications and how they reported on Britain itself and the wider world. In yet another sense, the reach of a magazine in terms of circulation and readership is seen as itself a kind of empire. Perceptive links are made to poems with potent imperial significance such as ‘Ozymandias’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, and to artefacts newly on view in London such as the Elgin Marbles, the Head of Memnon and the Rosetta Stone. Engagingly, as a result of all this, the actual approach of the book often reflects the very heterogeneity of the periodical medium itself.

In the first chapter Fang considers Charles Lamb’s apparently idealised view of England in essays written for the London Magazine from 1820 onwards. As Fang observes, in the essay ‘Old China’ such an everyday object as a teacup, when up-turned, can become ‘a dome in miniature’. Coleridge, once a school-friend of Lamb’s at Christ’s Hospital, is able now to create in his imagination a dome that is ‘a miracle of rare device’; whereas Lamb complains that ‘the poverty of my dreams mortifies me’. Coleridge has the freedom in his life and fantasies that patronage confers; while Lamb, shackled to his desk in East India House, is literally the servant of empire during the day and a writer of mere prose in what time is left to him. Although the most popular – and best-paid – contributor to the London Magazine, Lamb judges with characteristic wryness the status of the essayist as a composer of what were then called ‘fugitive pieces’. Like Keats’s Grecian urn, perhaps Lamb’s teacup originated in a Staffordshire pottery rather than anywhere more exotic.

Battle-lines were drawn between periodicals well before the end of the actual war between England and France in 1815 in what was to be a prolonged conflict, characterised by...