Peru and Peruvian Tales by Helen Maria Williams (review)

This new edition of two of Helen Maria Williams’s most interesting poems, Peru (1784; 1786) and ‘Peruvian Tales’ (her 1823 revision of Peru), does justice both to Williams’s originals and to the reputation of Broadview books for producing texts of high editorial quality which are useful to both students and teachers. As we have come to expect of Broadview’s editions, Paula Feldman’s volume includes not only highly-readable annotated primary texts, but a veritable cornucopia of secondary and contextual materials in four appendices. Oddly, at one hundred pages in total, the appendices occupy twice as much room as the poem texts, though the effect is not to overwhelm the poetry but to significantly enrich the reading and understanding of Williams’s work.

In her introduction to the two poems, Feldman offers a detailed and extensive outline of key ideas, sources and themes, as well as a very useful discussion of the reasons for, and effects of, the revisions made by Williams between the first appearance of Peru in 1784, and its republication in Poems (1786), and then between 1786 and 1823 when the poem was published substantially altered as ‘Peruvian Tales’. Feldman carefully places these revisions in various historical and cultural contexts, and offers Williams as a lens through which we can better understand not only the literature, but also the literary culture, of the period:

This poem offers an intriguing case study, for the author’s revisions give readers a glimpse not only into the changing mind of the poet but also into the process of poetic composition as it responds to an altered literary marketplace and the demands of a popular audience.

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It is possible that Feldman overstates the case a little when she suggests that ‘the history of this single text serves as a history of Romanticism itself ’, but overall the introduction makes sensible and persuasive claims for the importance of Williams’s work.

Feldman is also enjoyable on the cultural importance of Peru as an English epic, and builds a convincing argument that Williams’s poem gives the lie to the notion that Paradise Lost was ‘the last, great English epic’ by outlining the impressive scope and ambition of Peru. Feldman’s introduction also explores the ways in which the poem offers a feminine, if not a feminist, alternative to older, male-authored epics through its ‘domestic and intensely feminine […] resistance to the aggressive imperialism’ embodied by the Aeneid and its imitators. Instead, Feldman suggests, Williams creates an epic poem that ‘envisions a more humane focus for the ancient, and often bloodthirsty, genre’. That said, the reproduction in this edition of the rather nasty frontispiece to the 1786 Poems, which shows a supplicating child appealing to a man poised to stab him with a long straight blade, indicates that even with a more ‘humane’ focus to Williams’s epic, things will end bloodily for the Peruvians.

The decision of Feldman and her associate editors to opt for the 1786 edition of Peru, rather than the 1784 version, as their copytext is inconsistent with the choices made by most recent editors of poetry from this period. Feldman justifies the selection in a prefatory note, stating that the additional ‘polish’ lent to the 1786 edition means that ‘the language and word choice are more precise’, and ‘the poem is thematically tighter’ resulting in ‘a more emotionally powerful poem’. Given that the poetry takes up a relatively small amount of space in this edition, the reader might regret that room could not be found to include the 1784 original text, with its ‘boldly revolutionary’ language, given how productive it is to have the 1786 and 1823 editions alongside each other.

Otherwise the editorial decisions made here seem eminently sensible, if sometimes geared quite clearly at student readers; some of the annotations gloss words likely to be known to experienced scholars, for instance. Elsewhere the notes to the texts are likely to prove invaluable to readers...