Romantic Feuds: Transcending the “Age of Personality” by Kim Wheatley (review)

In this exciting contribution to the study of nineteenth-century periodical culture, Kim Wheatley proposes a daring new mode of organizing and reading periodical discourse. Focusing on the literary feuds of the Romantic period, Wheatley asserts the value of the feud as a text, tracing its preoccupations and elements against canonical Romanticism. Unlike Mark Parker’s 2000 study, Literary Magazines and British Romanticism, which set the mode for Romanticist approaches to periodical culture, Wheat-ley’s book rejects the usual organizational structure in which each chapter focusses on a single periodical or the reception of a single publication. Instead, she takes the print feud itself as her object of analysis. Wheatley carefully reconstructs and analyzes four different feuds, tracing these conflicts between authors, editors, and reviewers through the various books, pamphlets, reviews, articles, and satires in which they appeared. The thoroughness and attentiveness of this research and reconstruction is one of the great strengths of this book. Incorporating powerful periodicals like the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review into feuds that also involved newspaper gossip and poetic satires, Wheatley valorizes periodical literature’s cultural power without cordoning it off from the other texts with which it was in dialogue. Instead, these outside texts are incorporated under the periodical mode of the feud.

Wheatley’s book advances a welcome corrective to the dominance of the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine “Cockney School” feud in current analyses of the periodical culture of the 1810s and 1820s. While she follows Mark Parker and Richard Cronin in focusing especially on the post-Waterloo years, she works to adjust the balance by shifting emphasis back onto the longer-running and more culturally dominant Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review (15). Her attentive reconstruction of feuds does a great service to scholars of Romantic periodical culture in that it provides a fuller and more representative archive on which to base research and analysis.

Wheatley argues that the print feuds of the Romantic period furnish complex, multi-authored texts in which the traditional Romantic conceptions of selfhood are challenged, recapitulated, and transcended. In each case, Wheatley connects the feud’s elaboration of ideas of selfhood with their counterparts in canonical Romantic literature—linking, for example, the narratives of Robert Southey’s journey from Jacobinism to conservatism with Wordsworth’s account of his own poetic development (chapter 2). Wheatley gives extensive treatment to the Romantic period’s famous “personality” culture, in which many print sources engaged in personal attacks on authors, editors, and other public figures. While partaking of this culture, she argues, the feuds ultimately transcended it in those moments when they gave rise to new forms of subjectivity and more literary forms of expression.

Generically diverse as they are, Wheatley’s feuds nevertheless connect with key figures and texts that will be of interest to the study of nineteenth-century British literary culture. In individual chapters, Wheatley examines the controversy over Southey’s Wat Tyler; Coleridge’s feud with Francis Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review over the reception of the Biographia Literaria; the Quarterly’s skirmishes with Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lady Morgan; and John Barrow’s attacks on Arctic explorer John Ross, again in the Quarterly. Readers will find the first feud the most familiar. Wheatley tracks the controversy over Southey’s political “apostasy,” grouping Hazlitt and Hunt’s attacks in the Examiner, Coleridge and Southey’s responses, and Thomas Love Peacock and Byron’s satires of Southey. Through a simultaneous reconstruction and analysis of each successive element in the feud, Wheatley argues that “as the Wat Tyler controversy unfolds, Romantic notions of selfhood—involving growth, depth, and a capacity for transcendence—resurface even as they are challenged” (22). As it develops, the feud diverges from the seriousness of the earlier attacks into the construction of Southey as a “comic figure more notable for its entertainment value that either its Romantic idealism or its political significance” (22).

Wheatley’s second chapter centers on Coleridge and the reception of the...