“Striking Passages”: Memory and the Romantic Imprint
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Ashley Miller is completing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Indiana University. Her dissertation, “The Poetics of Automatism: Poetry, Media, and the Nineteenth-Century Body,” traces the effect of changing theories of materiality upon Romantic and Victorian depictions of poetic inspiration and transmission. She served as Managing Editor of the journal Victorian Studies and has published essays in Literature Compass and Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
Footnotes
1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2:106. Hereafter cited by book and page.
2. Celeste Langan, “Pathologies of Communication from Coleridge to Schreber,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 148. I discuss “Christabel”’s print-inspired metrics in “Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory,” Literature Compass 6, no. 2 (2009): 349–56.
3. Linda Austin, Nostalgia in Transition, 178o–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 3.
4. William Wordsworth, “Preface,” Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings, ed. William Richey and Daniel Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 407.
5. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 404.
6. “Preface,” 390.
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 3:281.
8. Andrew Elfenbein, Byron and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 54.
9. Coleridge’s own plagiarisms, it might be added, can be read as a response to the free excerpting practices of print culture and the alienation from the author that it allows. For more on Coleridge and plagiarism, see Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
10. David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic: Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1851), 6.
11. Samuel Hibbert, Sketches of the Philosophy of Apparitions; or, an Attempt to Trace such Illusions to Their Physical Causes, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1825), 284, 66.
12. Kittler argues that the development of primers (intended for mothers in order to teach their children how to read aloud) in turn-of-the-century Germany constructs an ideal of Nature (and natural language) as “Woman,” whose “function consists in getting people—that is, men—to speak.” See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/19oo, trails. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University’ Press, 1990), 25.
13. Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel SiR 40 (Spring 2001): 63.
14. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
15. Hibbert, Sketches, 14.
16. Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphysics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988): 55.
17. John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1819), 95.
18. Nicolai took meticulous notes during these hallucinations and presented his case before the Royal Society of Berlin in 1799; his testimony was later printed (in English) in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts in 1803 and soon became the most celebrated case study of hallucination in the Romantic period. See Nicolai, “A Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychological Remarks. Read by nicolai to the Royal Society of Berlin, on the 28th of February, 1799,” Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts 6 (Sept./Dec. 1803): 164.
19. The physicality of hallucination is made evident, moreover, in Nicolai’s description of the hallucinated phantasms themselves: he explains that he was accustomed to having his blood let twice a year, but that he had neglected to undergo this treatment for quite some time. Eventually, he decides to commence his blood-letting again—and as he does so, the phantoms disappear in an odd fashion, as if they are being drained of blood. He writes,
I then observed that the figures began to move more slowly; soon afterwards the colours became gradually...
