Romantic Marginality: Nation and Empire on the Borders of the Page by Alex Watson (review)

In his 1713 Dissertation on Reading the Classics, Henry Felton criticizes “the Multitude of Notes” in editions that “crowd the Author, and perplex the reader,” adding that he has none of that “Respect for … Annotators, which they generally meet with in the World.” Alex Watson takes the persistence of this eighteenth-century distaste for printed notes as his starting point. Notes suffer at the hands of Romantic and modern critics alike, who follow Pope and Samuel Johnson in denigrating footnotes and endnotes as parasitic appendages that thwart reading. Even Gérard Genette, the great modern theorist-advocate of printed marginalia, endorses eighteenth-century attitudes when insisting on the paratext’s “secondary status” in comparison to the main or “centered” text (p. 3). The endurance of this view stimulates Watson’s first important claim: despite continued dismissals, Romantic writers produced more notes across more genres and use these notes more innovatively than ever before (p. 1). Scholars should ignore the era’s inherited prejudice against notes and recognize the vital cultural work unfolding in the Romantic margins.

Combining book history with post-colonial approaches, Watson links the spate of annotation in Romantic texts to geopolitical developments. The late eighteenth century saw the rise of an “imperial nationalism” aiming “to subsume … different regional polities within a single political community” (p. 139). The center-periphery structure of the annotated page complemented new power structures; the text-margin dynamic “provided a model [for] those located in centres of power [to] envisage their relationship with communities in the rural borders or international ‘peripheries’” (p. 8). Hence the margins of Romantic-era texts display a “profusion of ethnographic, linguistic, and anthropological details about the very communities—Scots, Irish, ‘Hindoo,’ and ‘Oriental’—that the … imperial British nation-state was seeking to absorb” (p. 6). Yet the margins held functions beyond legitimating imperialism. The “covert” location of notes emboldened authors to use them to criticize the same linguistic and cultural subordination that their notes at first appear to perpetuate. The instability of the margins even betrays some would-be celebrants of British nationhood into inadvertently undermining their own imperial agendas.

After an initial chapter on eighteenth-century attitudes toward annotation, Watson details the ways marginal notes promote, complicate, or resist Romantic-era imperial ambitions. Chapter 2 analyzes Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and T. J. Mathias’s The Pursuits of Literature (1794–97), showing that the margins in the Romantic period acquired a “liminal,” clandestine status that licensed subversive usages (p. 47). Chapter 3 examines how notes in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806) “mediat[e] rural Ireland to metropolitan English readers” (p. 49). Chapter 4 argues that the notes to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810), although embodying an imperialistic desire to catalogue and dominate the Orient, inadvertently “place the assumptions underlying this imperial project in question” (p. 75). Chapter 5 traces how the notes in Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) and Scott’s Waverley (1813) “highlight the brutal and traumatic nature of Scotland’s absorption within the Union” (p. 109). Watson closes with a chapter on Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811–16), arguing that Byron and John Cam Hobhouse “adopt the perspectives of different ethnic people [they] encountered” while traveling in Spain and the Levant and “transmit” these peoples’ “marginalization” through their notes (p. 119).

As the first book-length treatment of Romantic-era annotation, Romantic Marginality will shape all future inquires in the subject. As with all foundational studies, however, readers will find specifics that go unaddressed. Watson focuses on authorial uses of annotation, but his insistence on the “inconspicuous” quality of notes assumes an unlikely reception. Far from unobtrusive, the sprawling notes discussed—notes sometimes occupying one-half to two-thirds of a page—would have certainly grabbed the reader’s eye. Watson rightly rejects as unreflective of actual usage...