Romantic Writers in the Victorian Media Ecology

FOR A WHILE, it seemed that the Romantics would not be remembered at all. Many early-Victorian commentators worried that the writing of the recent past no longer compelled readers' interest, and that it would soon be forgotten. The predictions began polemically. Blackwood's Magazine claimed in 1820 that John Keats had ruined his talent by imitating Leigh Hunt, that "he must be content to share his fate, and be like him forgotten," and Coleridge wrote in 1825 that he "dare[d] predict, that in less than a century" Byron's and Scott's poems would "lie on the same Shelf of Oblivion." John Todd felt sure in 1835 that Byron would "quickly pass from notice." Predictions soon became warnings. The Quarterly Review asserted that Scott was "in danger of passing — we cannot conceive why — out of the knowledge of the rising generation," and Thomas Carlyle cautioned in 1829 that "Byron [...] with all his wild siren charming, already begins to be disregarded and forgotten." And the warnings became simple statements of fact. Orestes Brownson asserted in 1841 that Shelley was "seldom spoken of and much more seldom read." The Graphic cattily remarked in 1873 that Hemans was "almost as much neglected now, as she was overrated formerly," while another journalist in 1886 thought that she was "a writer too little read by our young people of the present day." Stopford Brooke declared simply in 1893 that Byron was "not much read now."

If anyone read the Romantics, some claimed, it was only those people who scarcely counted, like adolescents or the uneducated. Selections of Wordsworth's poetry "chiefly for the use of schools and young persons" appeared from as early as 1831, while in 1848 Readings for the Young, from the Works of Sir Walter Scott inaugurated a tradition of excerpting or retelling Scott's works for children. Walter Bagehot wrote that "a stray schoolboy may still be detected in a wild admiration for The Giaour or The Corsair [...], but the real posterity — the quiet students of past literature — never read them or think of them." T. S. Eliot followed this line when he recalled taking "the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, [and] Keats," dismissed enthusiasm for Shelley as "an affair of adolescence," and described some of Byron's Don Juan as "not too good for the school magazine."

This chapter explains why so many Victorians thought that Romantic writing was starting to seem irrelevant and in danger of being forgotten. The underlying causes, I argue, lay in shifting concepts of history, new anxieties about cultural memory, and a rapidly changing media ecology. When these elements came together, sometime between roughly 1750 and 1850, they created the cultural conditions of modernity, which defined itself as distinctly and self-consciously different from what had gone before. When self-consciously modern people looked back from the nineteenth century to the poets and novelists of their parents' generation, those writers seemed unfitted for addressing modern concerns. The Romantics began to look perilously outdated and uninteresting to new readers. They were liable to gather dust on the "Shelf of Oblivion" if no one took pains to make their works relevant once again. But if the modern nexus of history, memory, and media that I trace here made the Romantics seem old-fashioned, it also created the conditions in which they could be fashioned anew. Changing configurations of history, memory, and media produced the problem and the materials for solving it. Even as they made literature from the recent past seem obsolescent, they created new possibilities for renovating, memorializing, and remediating it. The web of reception would be woven on the conceptual frames that modern understandings of history, memory, and media constructed.

Concerns about who would be remembered and by whom especially clustered around those writers who had been celebrities in their lifetimes. As I have argued elsewhere, a distinctly modern culture of celebrity took shape at the end of the eighteenth century. It emerged in response to the industrialization of print culture and the growth of an audience that was large, anonymous, socially diverse and geographically distributed, and it was bound up with shifting conceptions of subjectivity. In these conditions, celebrity emerged as a cultural apparatus with both material and discursive aspects. Celebrity was often understood, then as now, to be an inferior kind of recognition, opposed to true, worthwhile, and lasting fame. Celebrity was thought of as something ascribed rather than earned, here today and gone tomorrow, a meteor that burned itself out too soon. True fame, in contrast, was slow to arrive and usually posthumous, but it lasted forever because it was deserved. Celebrity and true fame each operated in its own timeframe, and they seldom overlapped. Once celebrity and true fame had come to be understood as mutually exclusive, it became easy to assume that those like Byron and Scott who had been celebrities in their lifetimes would soon be forgotten after their deaths. For some individuals, that proved to be the case. Mary Robinson's celebrity was already deserting her by the end of her life (only two people came to her funeral), and after her memoirs and an edition of her works were published posthumously she disappeared from view almost entirely for the rest of the century. When celebrated authors were not in fact forgotten, we can usually discern a variety of efforts that helped to move them across the bar from lifetime celebrity to posthumous fame. This book, then, is partly a sequel to my earlier work; in it, I pursue the story of celebrity beyond the grave to discover what happens to celebrity authors after their deaths. But celebrity is not the whole story here: the web of reception weaves in some other threads as well.

Predictions that Romantic authors would be forgotten were part of a wider set of complaints about the ignorance and presentism of the "rising...