The Romantic-Era Lecture: Dividing and Reuniting the Arts and Sciences

This essay argues that the conceptual structure of early nineteenth-century chemistry influenced the period’s literary lectures. These distinct pursuits, chemistry and literary criticism, publicly responded in opposed ways to the growing social expectation that schools of knowledge become coherent and specialized. Chemistry’s focus on elements lent it an elegance that contributed to its increasing disciplinary stability. At the same time, this ingenious system facilitated the discipline’s accumulation of economic success and public regard in the lecture halls of London’s major Arts and Sciences Institutions. Series by chemists like Humphry Davy and William Brande popularized chemistry by emphasizing its elemental system’s structural coherence. Meanwhile, literary lecturers resisted institutional pressures to follow chemistry’s example—they refused to systematize their field by fixing its own “elements.” Instead, they embraced an inchoate interdisciplinary impulse. This context sheds new light on the well-known disorganization of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s literary lectures. In their discontinuous form, Coleridge’s lectures evaded what he saw as the disciplinary closure characteristic of chemistry. He embraced what I call “elementality,” the intrinsic analytic and combinatory power, divested of its empirical concreteness and structural rigidity, that lies at the heart of the concept of the element. Coleridge’s lectures exploited the lecture form’s volatility in order to preserve a more holistic conception of knowledge, deconstructing disciplinary boundaries and sowing the seeds of modern literary-critical interdisciplinarity.