bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aquatic Drama
Authors: Nuss Melynda
Published: July 2017

In the winter of 1804, Sadler's Wells Theatre diverted water from the New River to fill a shallow copper tank of water. There it staged shipwrecks and naval battles, fountains and spectacular effects. The playbills for its first show,
The Siege of Gibraltar
, advertised:
Autobiography and Confession
Authors: Stelzig Eugene
Published: July 2017

In the wake of Rousseau's
Confessions
(1782–9) autobiographical and confessional writing proliferated in England. Much of this writing was ephemeral and lacked ‘generic respectability’. If it was ‘above all a debatable practice’ (Treadwell 2005: 7, 8), by the middle of the nineteenth century, Romantic autobiography had produced some works that had achieved canonical status – De Quincey's
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
and Lamb's ‘Elia’ essays, both first published in the
London Magazine
. The process of canonization is reflected, for instance, in De Quincey's assertion in 1838 that ‘the essays of “Elia” are as exquisite a gem amongst the jewelry of literature as any nation can show’ (De Quincey 1897a: 37), and the posthumous publication of Wordsworth's blank verse autobiography,
The Prelude
in 1850, also helped to enhance the literary standing of autobiography. If this rising genre emerged as ‘the prime instrument of Romantic knowledge’ (Spengemann 1980: 77), ‘the fully canonical De Quinceys or Wordsworths who invest narrative with a kind of expressive inwardness’ are the rare exception among ‘the non‐canonical mass of the period's self‐writing’ (Treadwell 2005: 112,170). The proliferation of such writing is attributed in an 1822 article in the
Edinburgh Magazine
to ‘the insatiable appetite of the public for every species of Private Memoirs and Corres pondence’. The contemptuous attitude of the conservative guardians of literary culture is reflected in John Lockhart's article on ‘Autobiography’ in the
Quarterly Review
in 1827, in which he sneers at ‘the mania for this garbage of Confessions, and Recollections, and Reminiscences’ as ‘a vile symptom’ (quoted in Treadwell 2005: 89, 77).
B
aillie,
J
oanna, Poetry
Authors: Slagle Judith Bailey
Published: July 2017

Scottish poet, playwright, and critical theorist Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) commanded the attention of readers and audiences from the early to late nineteenth century, after which she vanished for most of the twentieth. Baillie, a twin born in Bothwell, Scotland, on 11 September 1762, grew up in the rural countryside, her father a Church of Scotland minister and her mother the sister of the famous Scottish anatomists William and John Hunter; her twin sister did not survive their premature delivery. By her account, as a child she played outdoors with parish children and nurtured a fertile imagination. Educated at Miss Macdonald's Boarding School in Glasgow with older sister Agnes (1760–1861), she was sociable and hated the confinement of school and reading – for even as a child she understood that the key to drama lay in performance as she played roles such as Hamlet for her mother and sister. Her early rural associations guaranteed she would be unpretentious in relationships and about literature, and she would later manifest her democratic ideals in her personal life. Her religious education made her charitable, but her critical mind made her later approach to religion tolerant and unconventional. Intelligent and powerful men surrounded her all her life, yet she did not see herself as their subordinate. She rejected marriage and often used her dramatic women characters to speak about its confinement. Baillie loved her brother, Dr Matthew Baillie (1761–1823), dearly and Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) in the same way. Though she was a popular poet and playwright during her lifetime, she was never satisfied with her level of success. Her ambition was equal that of the famous men around her, but as a woman she settled for the limited success afforded her and her female contemporaries. A progressive critical thinker, her intimacy with the scientific community instilled in her an interest in human nature and passions and a penchant for experiment – this she directed to a revision of poetry and play writing (Slagle 2002a). While Baillie represents only one aspect of the literary scene traced by the period's Scottish women poets, argues Stephen Behrendt (2009), her longevity, large body of work, and prominent place within the British literary landscape, testify to the central position occupied in that landscape by women writers, including those from Scotland. And in her 60‐plus years in London, Baillie retained her ‘Scottishness’.
Beckford,William, andVathek
Authors: Cass Jeffrey
Published: July 2017

Antoine Galland's 1704 publication of the completeLes Milles et une nuits(The Thousand and One Nights)produced a legion of eighteenth‐century literary responses. As Robert Mack notes, shortly after the appearance of the French translation, a Grub Street version of theArabian Nightsappeared (1806). English authors began producing ‘indigenous versions’ of theArabian Nights’ Entertainments, while ‘the fashion for Oriental fables, costumes, accessories, and pastimes reached into nearly every facet of English life’ (Mack 1992: xii). The Oriental tale resulted, therefore, in a prodigious amount of literary production, including Frances Sheridan'sThe History of Nourjahad(1767); Clara Reeve'sThe History of Charo ba, Queen of Aegypt(1785); and, of course, Samuel Johnson'sRasselas. Even pseudo‐Oriental narratives gained popularity, such as Eliza Haywood'sAdventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre‐Adamitical History(1736). And the Orientalist profusion led to all parts of the Orient –Turkish Tales(1708),Persian Tales(1714),Chinese Tales(1725), andMogul Tales(1736). For Mack, Oriental tales ‘are set in exotic eastern locations, often, like many of the narratives in theNightsthemselves – in Baghdad or in Persia. The stories are characterized by supernatural events and enchantments – the appearance of genii and “shaytans” or demons – and by magical objects: rings, talismans, and charmed lanterns’ (Mack 1992: xiv‐xv). In large measure, these tales conform to Edward Said's representational critique of ‘Orientalism’ (Orientalism1978), in which ‘the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West’ (5).
Bloomfield, Robert, Poetry
Authors: Andrews Kerri
Published: July 2017

In 1800 Robert Bloomfield, a cobbler from Suffolk, became the most successful labouring‐class poet of the Romantic period with the publication of his enormously popular debut poemThe Farmer's Boy. Within three years 26 000 copies of the poem were sold, a level of success which would be beyond the likes of William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, now much better remembered than Bloomfield, until after their deaths.
Burletta
Authors: Chandler David
Published: July 2017

The word burletta ('little joke') entered English as a term for Italian comic operas, later came to describe a species of English operatic burlesque, and by the early 1800s served as an umbrella term for a wide variety of theatrical works, the only consistent element being that they contained some sung component. From the late 1780s onwards burlettas were a staple offering of the minor or ‘illegitimate’ metropolitan theatres prohibited by law from presenting spoken drama: thus burletta, though loosely defined, had great legal significance.
Classical
R
oman Drama
Authors: Saglia Diego
Published: July 2017

It is a commonplace of cultural history that one of the prevalent eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century discourses of self‐identification cast England and Britain as the true descendants and mirror images of ancient Rome. In 1807, the Scottish philosopher and scientist John Playfair wrote in the
Edinburgh Review
that ‘an Englishman bears a much greater resemblance to a Roman, than an Italian of the present day’ (Playfair 1807: 194). Rome and its civilization were not so much memories of a bygone era, but rather culturally present realities for an educated public which composed a significant portion of the audience of legitimate drama. Between the Augustanism of the early eighteenth century and the Victorian passion for all things Roman, the transitional Romantic period learned its historical lessons from Edward Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, admired the Roman‐style interiors devised by Thomas Hope, read Lord Byron's account of Rome in canto IV of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
, and applauded John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus and William Charles Macready as Virginius. At all levels, Romantic‐period culture was pervaded by icons and echoes of Rome.
C
owper,
W
illiam
Authors: Crosby Mark
Published: July 2017

The reputation of William Cowper (1731— 1800) rests predominantly on his long, autobiographical poem
The Task
(1785). A critical and commercial success when published, the poem explores the author's spiritual condition, relationship with nature, and poetic vocation. Born in 1731, much of Cowper's life and work was affected by periods of depression that frequently culminated in suicide attempts. As well as ascribing Cowper's depression to the premature death of his mother two days before his sixth birthday and his failed romance with a cousin, recent scholarship has examined Cowper's depiction of nature as an inspiring yet troubling influence.
C
ristall,
A
nn
B
atten
Authors: Sha Richard C.
Published: July 2017

Author of one superb volume of poetry,
Poetical Sketches
(1795), Ann Batten Cristall (ca. 1769–1848) has only recently begun to receive her due. Feldman and Lonsdale have outlined her biography. The 2004
DNB
notes that she became a schoolteacher, but was financially dependent upon her more famous brother, Joshua, the Cornish watercolour painter. Subscribers to
Poetical Sketches
included Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Barbauld, Amelia Opie, Samuel Rogers, Mary Hays, and George Dyer. Southey declared Cristall to be a genius.
Criticism
Authors: Perry Seamus
Published: July 2017

The Romantic era is one of the great ages of literary criticism; but if one were looking for some general consensus about the nature and procedures of literature, then ‘Romantic Literary Criticism’ would quickly prove an elusive entity, more so even than, say, ‘formalism’ or ‘New Historicism’ might. Coleridge's gigantic attempt to construct a theory of literature and criticism based on absolute philosophical principles stands at one extreme; but, no less ‘Romantic’ would be the self‐conscious contrary of such systematic ambitions – the occasional, essayistic genius exemplified by Hazlitt and Lamb, or the literary review essay, effectively invented in the period by Jeffrey and others. A few major concerns do often recur, however, many a common inheritance from the rich confusion of Enlightenment aesthetics, experienced in common by otherwise quite diverse writers who each explore them in their own way: for example, the ideas of naturalness (and its partnering contrary, artificiality), of organicism (and mechanism), and of poetic egotism (and empathy). Other pairings might be chosen just as well, I am sure; and any of these would deserve a long chapter. But this entry hopes at least to map some of the contours of the critical mind in the period, keeping in mind especially the way that these disputations shape what the critics say about Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, the three authors about whom Romantic criticism gathers with most intensity and interest, and Wordsworth, the contemporary figure who provokes the most telling and illuminating critical response.
Darwin,Erasmus
Authors: Goodman Kevis
Published: July 2017

Before the publication ofLyrical Ballads, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) was for many readers the most popular and controversial poet of the 1790s. Yet literary publication and fame came late in his life, when he was already well known as a celebrated physician, as well as a visionary inventor whose plans had included copy machines, airplanes, and submarines (or ‘sea balloons’, ‘diving castles’). He also remains a key figure in the history of evolutionary thinking, anticipating in many respects the theory of his famous grandson, Charles Darwin. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 called Darwin ‘the firstliterarycharacter in Europe, and the most original‐minded Man’, therefore, Coleridge was not engaging in simple praise, but rather referring to this range of learning, to Darwin's totalizing synthesis of disciplines and determined mingling of ‘Poet’ and ‘the Man of Science’ – the very vocations that the 1800 ‘Preface’ toLyrical Balladswas about to prise apart. Indeed, Coleridge's opinion of the synthesis was considerably less than praise: concerning Darwin'sThe Botanic Garden, he had remarked several months earlier: ‘I absolutely nauseate Dr. Darwin's poem’.
E
lizabethan Style in Drama
Authors: Bradshaw Michael
Published: July 2017

British Romantic plays consistently echo, mimic, and allude to the drama of the early modern period. Dialogue with Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears is most strongly felt after about 1810, in linguistic style, in dramatic structure, and also in the authors’ deliberate signposting of Renaissance allusion in the prefatory material to printed editions. The widespread practice of historical revival is born of a search for renewed authenticity, and reflects contemporary debates about theatre and nationality. This essay will attempt to outline some of these debates, and also examine some local instances of Renaissance intertextual allusion, observing how the practice assists Romantic writers to fashion distinctive dramatic voices.
Excursion Poem
Authors: Benis Toby R.
Published: July 2017

The excursion poem is a verse work documenting the experience of travel across specific landscapes, in which the speaker intermingles observations about scenery and aesthetics with reflections on his or her own history and the state of the society and culture in which he or she lives. Some of the best‐known poems of the Romantic period can be classified as excursion poems, including Lord Byron'sChilde Harold's Pilgrimage(1812–18), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ‘This Lime‐tree Bower my Prison’ (1797), Percy Bysshe Shelley's ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’ (1818), Charlotte Smith'sBeachy Head(1807), and William Wordsworth'sThe Excursion(1814).
Fragment
Authors: Thomas Sophie
Published: July 2017

At its most basic, the term ‘fragment’ indicates ‘a broken off, detached, or incomplete part… a part remaining when the rest is lost or destroyed’. The secondary definition in the
Oxford English Dictionary
relates it directly to cultural objects and activities: ‘an extant portion of a written work which as a whole is lost; a portion of work left uncompleted by its author; a part of anything uncompleted’ (1993). The fragment, as these definitions suggest, can be found in a potentially wide range of materials, visual and textual, architectural and literary, and yet it invariably exhibits a teasing logic. On the one hand, the fragment is identifiable – a thing or text, as its etymology suggests, that has been broken into pieces. On the other, fragments (slipping into the plural) are disturbing entities. They play upon the imagination by promising or at least suggesting more than what they are, while reminding the viewer or reader that this putative ‘more’ can never be recovered or fully experienced. Fragments thus simultaneously raise and resist the possibility of totality and wholeness, while speaking to the epistemological conundrum central to the very conception of totality: for, as Byron lamented in
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
, ‘Thou seest not all, but piecemeal thou must break / To separate contemplation the great whole’ (IV: 1405–1406).
French Revolution, British Drama
Authors: Erving George S.
Published: July 2017

British drama of the 1790s served as a principal channel through which the momentous events of the French Revolution took shape in the imaginations of Britain's citizenry, for the drama offered an apt vocabulary and interpretive framework for making sense of the Revolution's astonishing appearance, bewildering turns, and unprecedented directions. Newspaper reports, published eyewitness accounts, and polemical works such as Edmund Burke's massively influentialReflections on the Revolution in France(1790), frequently represented the Revolution in theatrical terms as a vast stage of triumph or horror, as though it were a grand drama put on for a world audience. But while history could thus appear to be unfolding as theatre, the theatre was in turn shaped by the revolutionary events it portrayed and the position of cultural authority it assumed in doing so. As Britons filled playhouses in record numbers during the revolutionary period, the theatre assumed the status of ade facto‘parliament’ for legislating public opinion, and the drama emerged as a primary vehicle for evaluating the ideological issues raised by the Revolution (Russell 1999: 223–224). At stake seemed to be the future character of the nation: who should be allowed to vote? What domestic and political rights should extend to women? To what extent should the economy continue to depend upon the slave trade? Were inherited property rights essential to political stability or a hindrance to its realization? Were Enlightenment paradigms of progress credible, or had humankind fared better in a putatively egalitarian primitive state? Even more fundamentally, what habits of mind should be brought to bear in answering these questions: those associated with rational analysis or those perhaps more authentically prompted by the emotions, by instinct, by the conscience, or by aesthetic sensibility? As the Revolution increasingly energized the sympathies of social and political reformers as well as their opponents, the theatre became a forum of far‐reaching influence for debating in political, ethnic, ethical, and aesthetic terms what it meant to be British, and for forging in the collective imagination a new vision of the British nation as seen in relation to the nascent French Republic.
Fuseli, Henry
Authors: Calé Luisa
Published: July 2017

The Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) made a mark on the Romantic cultural scene as a painter of dreams and the supernatural. His style became so recognizable that ‘the fuse‐lesque’ came to stand for sensational themes such as his most iconic image of
The Night‐Mare
(1782). In 1794 Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that he would write ‘a fine subject for a
wild
Ode … when I am in a Humour to
abandon
myself to all the Diableries, that ever met the Eye of a Fuseli!’ (Cal` 2006: 168). Fuseli's sublime shock tactics and a strong Michelangelesque style exercised reviewers uncertain whether to place the wild Swiss genius in the domain of the sublime, the incongruous or the ridiculous. He was known as the ‘poets’ painter’ for an ambitious programme of poetical paintings that brought literature to the exhibition room and subsequently made him a key figure in the literary gallery phenomenon: he produced work for Thomas Macklin's Gallery of Poets (1788–1800) and the Bible (1790–1800), John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery (1789–1805), Robert Bowyer's Historic Gallery (1792–1806), and went on to exhibit at his own short‐lived Milton Gallery (1799–1800). These initiatives placed literature at the intersection between the book and the art market. While Fuseli's literary programme could only be achieved in the commercial galleries of Pall Mall, it nonetheless gained him the recognition of a distinguished career at the Royal Academy. Moreover, Fuseli's intellectual ambition as a writer and editor made him a regular at the social gatherings of the publisher Joseph Johnson and the
Analytical Review
, bringing him into contact with a world of dissenters and radicals such as Tom Paine, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Fuseli's relationship with Wollstonecraft culminated in 1792 when she was working on
Vindications of the Rights of Woman
and he was launching the first number of the Milton Gallery. William Godwin's account of Wollstonecraft's ‘personal and ardent affection’ for Fuseli in
Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1798: 85–91, 97–99) made him a target of counter‐revolutionary propaganda, which saw them as emblematic of ‘Jacobin morality’ and styled Fuseli a Rousseauvian ‘enemy to civilized society and existing establishments’. Yet this picture failed to undermine Fuseli's place at the Royal Academy, where he was appointed Professor of Painting in 1799 and Keeper in 1804.
Gothic Novel, Female
Authors: Hoeveler Diane Long
Published: July 2017

Ellen Moers was the first critic to coin the term ‘female Gothic’ in relation to a type of literature written by women that explored specifically female fears associated with sexuality and childbirth (1974, 1976). Using the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, Emily Bronte'sWuthering Heights, and Christina Rossetti's ‘Goblin Market’ as her key texts, Moers argues that literature written by British women in the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century was concerned with ‘fear … [while] fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the commonplace, and the supernatural over the natural, with one definite auctorial intent: to scare’ (1976: 90). Literary theorists writing during the next two decades tended to follow suit, seeing the confluence of gender and genre as the most pertinent factor in understanding the Gothic as a distinctly feminized form (Doody 1977; Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Kahane 1980; Fleenor 1983; Ellis 1989; Massé 1992; Hoeveler 1998; Becker 1999). But, following developments in the broader field of feminist studies, other critics (DeLamotte 1990; Heller 1992, 1993; Millbank 1992; Craciun 2003; Davison 2009) began to accuse such approaches of ‘essentialism’, or ‘universalism’, that is, of reducing women's literature to an exclusive and narrow concern with bodily issues or of making false and facile generalizations based on the limited experiences of a few white middle‐ or upper‐class women.
Gothic Novel, Male
Authors: Hogle Jerrold E.
Published: July 2017

Many of the ingredients of the Gothic novel are hundreds of years old, while some elements arose as recently as the eighteenth century. Its curious combination of features has also lasted 250 years across the nineteenth century and right through many novels, stories, plays, films, and television shows of the present day. But the ‘Gothic’ novel in prose, which became a major, albeit controversial, force in English Romantic literature (see Gamer 2000), does have an inaugural text: Horace Walpole's novella
The Castle of Otranto
, first published in 1764 and then reissued in 1765 with the generic subtitle
A Gothic Story
. Walpole's 1765 Preface even makes a case for launching a ‘new species of romance’ under that label: as a revolutionary ‘blend’ of aristocratic ‘ancient romance’ conventions harkening back to the Middle Ages and even post‐Homeric Greece (where ‘all was imagination and improbability’, often involving ‘stupendous phenomena’ and ‘machines’ of supernatural agency) with the more ‘modern romance’, hence middle‐class, assumptions of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett in their novels of the 1740s and 1750s (where ‘nature is always intended to be … copied with success’ and the ‘agents … think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do’, albeit in ‘extraordinary’ older‐romance conditions; Walpole 1996: 9–10). As Walpole hoped, moreover, the resulting key features of his ‘Gothic Story’ have had a long life in subsequent fiction, from its antiquated spaces with hidden or underground levels haunted by spectres or monstrosities (imagined or ‘real’) from the past, its fragmented hints of an obscured primal crime or horror at the root of the apparent hauntings, its hyperbolic styles of narration and dialogue oscillating between intimations of Shakespeare and echoes of Richardsonian sentimentality, and tugs of war in the conflicted minds of the characters between ideologies valuing inheritance and predestination, rooted in once‐aristocratic and older Catholic beliefs (the ‘ancient’), and assumptions of
un
predetermined personal development under immediate environmental pressures, basic to more recent middle‐class Protestantism and empirical philosophy in the wake of John Locke (the ‘modern’).
Griffin, Gerald
Authors: Latané David E.
Published: July 2017

The work of Gerald Griffin (1803–40) that has endured is
The Collegians
, which appeared in 1829. Despite the title, it is not a campus novel but a ‘richly illustrated cross‐section of the Ireland of its day’ (Cronin 1978: 2) drawn from a recent true crime story, which Griffin reset in the eighteenth century. Born in Limerick in 1803 to Catholic, middle‐class parents, Griffin was the youngest of 15 children; but when Griffin was 16 his parents and many siblings emigrated to America, leaving Griffin and two others behind. Griffin was first drawn to writing plays, and moved to London in 1823 to attempt to have his work produced. Fellow Irish writers in London, such as John Banim and William Maginn, helped him with introductions, but for three years he was desperately poor and existing on penny‐a‐line journalism, writing on scraps of paper in coffee houses (Mannin 1954: 39) and sometimes unable to accept invitations because of the state of his clothes. But by 1826, inspired by the Banims’ ‘O'Hara Family Tales’, he had completed a frame‐story collection titled
‘Holland‐Tide’: or, Munster Popular Tales
, which he published anonymously just before returning to Ireland.
Hemans,Felicia, Poetry
Authors: Sweet Nanora
Published: July 2017

Poet and dramatist Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793–1835) was the sole woman poet of the Romantic period to appear with male contemporaries in canon‐making collections in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The influential ‘pirate’ press of Galignani in Paris produced a one‐volume collection of her work in 1836, reissued in America by a series of Philadelphia and Boston publishers{Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans);and Oxford Standard Authors released a collection in 1914. Hemans's final publisher, William Blackwood, produced the collected works in seven volumes and one volume{Works1839,Poems1849). Selections of Hemans's work appeared throughout the Victorian period from standard publishers like Routledge and Moxon (St Clair 2004). Her highly coloured aesthetics fell out of favour under modernism, but feminism and historicism brought a revival of interest in Hemans in the 1980s (Ross 1989; Mellor 1993). Research soon proliferated and is represented here only symptomatically.
I
rish Prose
Authors: Kelly Jim
Published: July 2017

The Romantic period saw important developments in Irish prose writing in English, with new prominence given to dialect writing, historical and biographical prose, an indigenous tradition of prose fiction, and the encouragement by learned societies like the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) of the promotion of a native culture of progressive learning. While the Irish publishing industry suffered significant setbacks with the Act of Union and extension of copyright law in 1801, the audience for prose works increased in the period as a result of rising literacy rates. By the 1830s there was a substantial reading public, both Catholic and Protestant, for Irish writers in prose.
J
ones,
W
illiam
Authors: Simmons Clare A.
Published: July 2017

Sir William Jones (1746–94), colonial judge and linguist, made a major contribution to the Romantic‐era understanding of the history of languages and of Asian culture. His mother was Mary Nix, the educated daughter of a London cabinet‐maker, who shared her husband's interest in mathematics and astronomy. His father, also named William Jones, was born in Anglesey, his antiquarian friend Lewis Morris tracing his ancestry ‘to the ancient Princes and Chiefs of North Wales’ (Jones 1807, vol. 1: 1). The elder Jones was a mathematician and a friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley; he died in 1749, when the younger William was only three; one other child, Sarah, survived infancy. Raised in Westminster, Jones attended Harrow school from the age of seven, where he distinguished himself as a linguist of extraordinary talent. Difficult as it is to imagine Jones engaging in horseplay, he suffered two significant childhood injuries. When very young he sustained a serious eye injury, and at nine years old he broke his leg. During the year that he was absent from school, he spent the time reading, his mother giving him the advice ‘read, and you will know’ (Jones 1807, vol. 1: 21). In addition to the school curriculum of Latin and Greek, he also taught himself mathematics, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic script.
K
emble,
J
ohn
P
hilip
Authors: Robinson Terry F.
Published: July 2017

From the 1780s to the early 1810s, John Philip Kemble (1757–1823) was the doyen of the British, Romantic‐era stage. Over the course of his prestigious career as an actor, playwright, and theatre manager, he changed the face and content of the drama through what James Boaden famously deemed his ‘academic or critical style’ (1825: 101), and, together with his sister, the eminent actress Sarah Siddons, he would inaugurate what has been christened the ‘Kemble era’ – one of the most celebrated epochs in acting history.
L
amb,
C
harles
Authors: Warren Sarah Massey
Published: July 2017

A prolific essayist, Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an incisive and ironic social critic, and humorous portrayer of humanity best known for his
Elia
essays, which first appeared as individual essays in
The London Magazine
(1820–5) and then as collections,
Essays of Elia
(1823) and
Last Essays of Elia
(1833). Widely read in the United States and England during his lifetime and after his death, Lamb's work wielded a major and lasting influence on the writing of literary and personal essays. Born in 1775, Lamb lived through the multiple literary innovations and social upheavals that characterized the extended Romantic era, beginning with the turbulent years of the French Revolution (1789–99), through the Regency years in England (1810–20), to the reform of Parliament (1832). His close friendships with contemporary Romantic writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) at school at Christ's Hospital, and later with more radical writers including William Godwin (1756–1836), Leigh Hunt (1784–1859), and William Hazlitt (1778–1830), stimulated Lamb's experimentation with poetry and prose. The disparate styles and political suasions of his friends and colleagues prompted Lamb to produce a progression of poetry and then prose, which was to become his forte and which contained an idiosyncratic blend of critiques of inequitable socio‐economic conditions and reigning politicians intermixed with zany portraits of his extended social circle and perspicacious writing on theatre and art.
L
andon,
L
etitia
E
lizabeth
Authors: Nagle Christopher C.
Published: July 2017

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), poet of love and loss, luxurious passion, and languishing misery, crossed genres and pushed the limits of propriety while crafting for herself an unforgettable image in the early nineteenth century, though her writing would come to be neglected for most of the twentieth century. Seen alternatively as a quintessentially feminine ‘poetess’ associated with the commodification of the gift‐book annuals of the 1820s and 1830s, and as a corrosively ironic critic of the very excesses in which she trafficked, she experiments with both extremes. What is not in doubt is that her writing is literally
spectacular
, keyed to appeal to the senses – and primarily through a visual poetics that is strongly influenced by theatrical trends of her era such as melodrama and tableaux. Her poetry is both richly allusive – drawing on the work of major poets of her age such as Thomas Moore, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Felicia Hemans – and canny in its exploitation of existing literary forms for her own use. Adopting various personae – Sappho, Erinna, Corinne – Landon adapted them as models of the ‘improvisatrice’, a spontaneously composing natural talent, fuelled by deep feeling and fated to a premature death, consumed by her own poetic fires. Each of these personae contributed to Landon's public image, but none allows her readers to take the full measure of her literary achievement, which blends originality and imitation, innovation and commodification, across a wide range of prolific literary production for a career lasting less than two decades: poetry for periodicals, gift‐book annuals, and her own stand‐alone volumes, totalling more than 1200 individual works (Dibert‐Himes and Lawford 1998); at least three novels (‘editing’ a fourth, which she may have written herself, and beginning a fifth); short fiction, including stories for children; a full‐length play as well as shorter verse dramas and dramatic ‘sketches’; translations; critical reviews and essays; and the editorship of more than a dozen multimedia ‘scrap‐book’ and gift‐book productions, including
Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book
from 1832 to 1839, for which she also contributed all of the poetry. Many of her poems were set to music. Landon was unquestionably at the fashionable, metropolitan centre of Romantic‐era print culture in London during her lifetime, but her work also circulated throughout Europe and America, in English as well as in German and Dutch translations, and enjoyed readership in Paris, Philadelphia, and St Petersburg.
Law and the On‐Stage Trial
Authors: Myers Victoria
Published: July 2017

British drama between 1780 and 1830 registered many of the gradually altering conditions in the law, and specifically the conduct of trials. Exploiting various methods of representing the courtroom trial and of conveying the political, social, and moral issues embedded in legal discussions, playwrights contributed to what could be called a subgenre that mixed with tragedy, comedy, history play, and melodrama. It cannot be claimed that Romantic‐era playwrights invented on‐stage trials, since these appeared as early as Aeschylus'sEumenidesand were familiar in plays by Shakespeare such asThe Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, andOthello. What certainly appears, however, is Romantic‐era drama's broad exploration of the technical potential of trials to epitomize not only moral but legal issues. Dramatists were aware of such concerns as judge–jury collusion in circumventing the legal code, the jury's right to consider law as well as fact in its deliberations, and the participation of lawyers in courtroom procedures – all of which brought jury and citizen involvement in the law to the fore. The parallel development of legal and theatrical engagement with trials can be illustrated in the plays of Thomas Holcroft.
Literary Annual
Authors: Harris Katherine D.
Published: July 2017

Literary annuals were early nineteenth‐century British texts published yearly in England from 1822 to 1860, intended primarily for a middle‐class audience and therefore moderately priced (12s.–£3). ‘“The Annuals,” wrote Southey in 1828, “are now the only books bought for presents to young ladies, in which way poems formerly had their chief vent.” And the young ladies found them much more to their liking than the manuals of conduct’ (Erickson 1996: 30). Initially published in duodecimo or octavo, the decoratively bound volumes – filled with steel plate engravings of nationally recognized artwork and sentimental poetry and prose – exuded a feminine delicacy that attracted a primarily female readership. The engravings were typically copied from various artwork, varied in theme, and verbally illustrated with a poem. Published in November and sold for the following year, the annual constituted an ideal Christmas gift, lover's present, or token of friendship. It was produced as a small, portable volume with paper or leather boards and gilt edges, and marketed both as an extravagant object because of its rigid boards and material stability and as an object to be desired, reread, memorized, memorialized, and treasured for its internal and external beauty.
L
yceum
T
heatre
Authors: Robertson Ben P.
Published: July 2017

Like the other ‘minor’ theatres of London during the Romantic era, the Lyceum Theatre was not initially licensed for spoken drama. In consequence, the theatre's managers exerted their creativity to produce a wide array of programmes that combined dialogue with dance, music, and other types of entertainment. The theatre thus acquired a reputation for experimental dramatic performances from its earliest days.
Lyric Poetry
Authors: Miller Christopher R.
Published: July 2017

In its root meaning and narrowest sense, lyric poetry is a song with lyre accompaniment; and in Classical Greek mythology its legendary practitioner was Orpheus, whose performances were said to charm animals and levitate rocks. This cultural heritage, with its aura of live performance and magical incantation, persisted in later English poetry, despite its basis in the silent, mechanical medium of print. In his 1755 Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined ‘lyrical’ as ‘pertaining to an harp; singing to an harp’ – thus excluding his own poems from the lyric tradition. Half a century later, however, William Wordsworth (1815) amplified a major shift in understanding of the genre when he observed that most poets ‘have been in the practice of feigning that their works were composed to the music of a harp or lyre’ (Wordsworth 1974, vol. 3: 29). Though he allowed that this was a modern ‘affectation’, he found the analogy useful as a metaphor for the properties of his own art; and like many of his contemporaries, he saw lyric in the broader sense that it has today – as denoting one of the major genres of poetry, along with drama and epic. Before the mid‐eighteenth century, lyric had been considered a less ambitious form; but in the Romantic era, when a worthy post‐Miltonic epic was an elusive ideal and drama was in decline, it emerged as a more robust and prestigious genre, absorbing some of the philosophical gravity and psychic acuity of its poetic siblings.
Mad Plays
Authors: Tucker Kathryn
Published: July 2017

Whether characters went mad in response to their own mistakes or in response to treatment from others, whether they feigned madness to achieve a mate or take comic revenge on a lover, the spectacle of the wild maniac or melancholic maid enjoyed a certain cachet on the late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century British stage. Developing perceptions of the role of the stage and actors in a healthy, moral society, as well as shifts in acting aesthetics that came to value three‐dimensional, psychologically consistent characterization rooted in research and understanding of real people make the theatre the site of significant a acultural examinations of madness.
M
ontagu,
B
asil
Authors: Crosby Mark
Published: July 2017

Barrister, legal reformer, and editor of Francis Bacon, Basil Montagu (1770–1851) is best known for his friendships with William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, James Mackintosh, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, and for representing Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Court of Chancery in 1817. A supporter of the French Revolution, and intellectually inspired by Godwin, Mackintosh, and Coleridge, Montagu dedicated much of his legal career to reforming bankruptcy legislation. His published works, like his friendships, were inspired by a civic humanist impulse to better society; they include tracts on abolishing the death penalty and Jewish emancipation.
M
ontgomery,
J
ames
Authors: Vardy Alan D.
Published: July 2017

James Montgomery (1771–1854) was born in Irvine in Ayrshire where his father was the minister of the only Moravian congregation in Scotland. James became a boarder at the Moravian school at Fulneck near Leeds at the age of six. In 1783 his parents moved to Barbados as missionaries, where they succumbed to fever when James was 20. The Moravian community considered James an incorrigible student, and placed him in an apprenticeship with a baker in 1787. Montgomery had become a compulsive writer of verses and an amateur musician and composer, and after less than two years he ran away. Two chance events then shaped his life. First, having taken a casual job near Wentworth, he went walking in Wentworth Park where he came upon Earl Fitzwilliam and presented him with a poem. The Earl rewarded him with a guinea, and thus confirmed the teenager as a poet. The second event was an advertisement in 1792 for a clerk at the
Sheffield Register
. Montgomery secured the position, and soon became a regular contributor. In 1793, the editor, Joseph Gales, was forced to emigrate to avoid a sedition charge. Rudderless, the newspaper closed. Shortly thereafter, it was relaunched as the
Sheffield Iris
with the 23‐year‐old Montgomery as its editor. This placed him at the centre of Sheffield intellectual and civic life, where he remained.
Natural History and Scientific Prose
Authors: Underwood Ted
Published: July 2017

In the Romantic era, original scientific works were commonly read by a general audience. The period's scientific writing needs to be considered not just as cultural context for literature, but as a form of literary production in its own right.
N
ewgate Literature
Authors: Kelly Gary
Published: July 2017

By the Romantic period London's Newgate prison had become the presiding symbol of a diverse popular literature and was so famous that prisons around Britain, its empire, and former colonies were named after it. At the same time, Newgate was a standing scandal, representing to many all that was wrong with the Old Order, and the focus of an extensive reform literature in all genres, from novels through melodramas to reform polemics, parliamentary reports, philosophical projects, architectural schemes, investigative journalism, memoirs, statistical accounts, and much else. This literature would extend through the century, past the prison's renovation and its eventual demolition in the early twentieth century, into Edwardian boys’ adventure magazines, the new science of penology, social histories of crime, titillating magazine accounts, and, in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century, a new glamourization in literature and film (Kelly 2008, vol. 1: i–xcvii).
Ode
Authors: Crook Nora
Published: July 2017

The ode's associations with unpremeditated song, the sublime, and the ‘divine’ power of the poet qualify it to be the Romantic genre par excellence. For Duff, ‘rediscovery of the poetic logic of the form constitutes one of Romanticism's major achievements’ (2009: 210). Yet the ode's high style, distancing it from popular genres such as the ballad, and its origins in public eulogy, also align it with bombastic flattery of the great. Some Romantics, Southey among them, speak of it contemptuously on occasions. Nor is there a consensus about whether the ode as it developed during the Romantic period constitutes a specifically
Romantic
ode. Some, indeed, consider that pursuit of such specification deflects attention from more appropriate taxonomies.
O
rientalism in Drama
Authors: Angeletti Gioia
Published: July 2017

The motif of the Orient, both in its metaphorical meanings and consumerist materiality, has permeated British literature, arts, and everyday life since the Middle Ages, when narratives of Eastern marvels, exotic lands and people reached Europe through cultural mediators, such as missionaries, pilgrims, and Latin translators. The Crusades (1096–1271), though predominantly a religious movement, helped to open up more secular channels to the East. In the sixteenth century, the figure of Suleiman the Magnificent and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire fostered popular and scholarly interest in Eastern, specifically Turkish, culture and history, which developed in the Elizabethan Age as a result of England's increasing political and commercial relationships with the Ottoman Empire.
Pastoral and Georgic
Authors: Graver Bruce
Published: July 2017

Georgic and pastoral are the chief classical poetic genres for treating rural subjects. In the Romantic period, these genres become so closely intertwined as to become almost indistinguishable. Traditionally, the two were separate. But an extensive eighteenth‐century debate about the value of pastoral led many poets to reinvent the genre in ways that incorporated the realism of georgic, and although they may still have called their poems pastorals, they were in the strictest sense generic hybrids, which can be called georgic pastorals.
Political Pamphlet
Authors: Galchinsky Michael
Published: July 2017

The political pamphlet's primary purposes are not to teach and delight, but to protest and incite. Critics have long struggled with whether and how to interpret this genre as a literary form. George Orwell described the challenge well: ‘To ask “What is a pamphlet?”’ he wrote,
Political Poetry
Authors: Scrivener Michael
Published: July 2017

The ordinary but by no means only way to understand the topic is generically, for political verse breaks down into satires, songs and lyrics, and meta‐political poems. Most Romantic‐era poetry is political in some sense, including women's poetry that seems to eschew politics, and lyrical poems that seem apolitical, like ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn', but perceptive critics like Anne Mellor (1992, 2002) and Paul Magnuson (1998) restore the political meanings. My focus in this entry is not the apparently apolitical but the obviously political, and I will be examining the relatively neglected genres of political poetry, satire and songs, especially the political verse of the radical movement.
Politics and Theatre
Authors: Taylor George
Published: July 2017

The economic and political upheavals of the late eighteenth century inevitably influenced the ideology of Romanticism. The capitalist project in industry and agriculture, colonial expansion driven by global trading, and the shift in political power from landed aristocracy to commercial and professional classes not only contributed to the spectacular events of the American and French Revolutions and Napoleon's imperial adventure, but also changed social attitudes and cultural production. Issues of gender, race, taste and lifestyle were, as always, the stuff of cultural production, but the emergence of different voices, styles, and genres in the British theatre were more a response to Adam Smith's ‘invisible hand’ of the market than to specifically political issues of parliamentary reform, imperial expansion, or the European conflict.
Popular Romanticism
Authors: Kelly Gary
Published: July 2017

‘Popular’ here can mean ‘of the people’ (variously defined); ‘much followed, favoured, or frequented'; ‘having certain characteristics or traits associated with “the people” (however defined) or the “much favoured” or both'; and ‘cheap’ (variously defined). What is popular can be determined not by universal criteria but by time, place, and application. What was popular during the Romantic period with the titled and fashionable may not have been popular with plebeians, and may have been relatively little frequented and not cheap. Yet what is popular with one social group may be popular with another, or all, if the price is right. What is popular with a subculture, counterculture, or avant‐garde, as appropriated elements of the much favoured and frequented, may be very little frequented or favoured by ‘the people’ at large, even if cheap.
P
rovis,
M
ary
A
nne
Authors: Lewes Darby
Published: July 2017

Whether the eighteenth‐century artist and miniaturist Mary Anne Provis (1780?–?) was a sophisticated con artist or merely a victim of her own obsession and her father's greed will probably never be known. However, in late 1795 and 1796, this young woman, still in her mid‐teens, was a central player in a remarkable fraud which took in not only Benjamin West, the American‐born President of the Royal Academy, but also such noted Academy artists as Joseph Farington, John Opie, Robert Smirke, John Francis Rigaud, Richard Westhall, and John Hoppner.