Nervous Reactions: Victorian Recollections of Romanticism (review)

This collection of 10 essays takes as its declared intention "the construction of nervousness as a figure through which Victorian writers represented their response to the Romantic in a variety of genres" (1). The volume is divided into three sections. "Nervous Containments" features essays on Thomas De Quincey's own collected edition of his Writings (1853–60), George Eliot's verse drama Armgart (1870-71), and Mrs. Julian Marshall's The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1889). "A Matter of Balance" surveys responses to Byron by John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. "Hesitation and Inheritance" examines the editorial efforts and anxieties of Sara Coleridge, daughter of the poet.

For the purposes of the volume, Romanticism is defined as in Goethe's famous formulation: "sickness." It "becomes, for Victorian writers, 'sentimentalism, – observe the editors, "Byronic egotism, radicalism, and sensationalism – a Romanticism with addictive properties and thus a pathology within the body politic that demands either curing or excision" (8). Kristen Guest explores the ways in which illness complicated Carlyle's articulation of a gospel of work and "influenced his attempts to rewrite the narrative of Romantic suffering by providing a metaphor for criticizing a consuming society that seemed to be destroying itself through the excellence of its digestion" (147). Joanne Wilkes compares the published text of Sara Coleridge's 1848 Quarterly review of Tennyson's The Princess to two extant manuscript versions in order to demonstrate how the Quarterly's editor J. G. Lockhart carefully excised the whole of Coleridge's insightful commentary on John Keats. Lockhart, a prime mover in the Blackwood's Magazine Cockney School assaults of 1818-19, was still nervous about Keats's insights and innovations, and even 30 years later did what he could to ensure that Keats was ignored by the Tory press. Donelle Ruwe analyzes Sara Coleridge as a critic who may well have been the first "to suggest that her father's anti-body version of the mind and the imagination was tied to his own inability to confront his bodily weakness and his opium addiction" (250), and as a nervous editor who attempted to control Biographia Literaria, the nervous text of her nervous father.

Yet Romanticism often seems a far more complicated project than the essays in this volume allow. Certainly the Victorians bowdlerized, elided, ignored, and deferred their unease with Romanticism, as is amply testified by Matthew Arnold's notorious transformation of the radical Percy Shelley into a "beautiful and ineffectual angel." And certainly such assessments have a remarkable staying power, as Richard Holmes makes clear in the opening of his 1974 biography: "There will always be Shelley lovers, but this book is not for them. The angel they seek can be found" elsewhere. But as one of the best essays in the present volume demonstrates, Victorian appropriations of Romanticism did not always generate unease. D. M. R. Bentley's "Nervous ReincarNations" explores how nineteenth-century Canadian poets such as Archibald Lampman imported and adapted the English Romantic legacy "for Canadian purposes with an absence of intertextual nervousness," and how Charles G. D. Roberts's "Ave" assimilated the figure of Shelley "without any sign of provincial nervousness or nationalistic truculence" (99, 109). Victorian ideologies are said to depend on a process of "excision, exclusion, and marginalization" as writers "reinvent their Romantic past," but these ideological impulses are slippery, mobile, and traveling both ways (16). Far from excising Byron, many Victorians embraced his gloom and excess as reworked by the Brontës and celebrated Romantic sickness, as in Arthur Symons's famous declaration that "The Decadence Movement" was "an interesting disease." In the Victorian period, "Romanticism was constituted as the Other of Victorian orthodoxy" (9), but such claims sit uneasily beside George Eliot's declaration that in reading Wordsworth she had "never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could like," or Lampman's sense that Keats had "found a sort of faint reincarnation...