Helen Maria Williams (1761 - 1827)

Portrait of the poet and memoirist Helen Maria Williams

Radical Birdcalls: Avian Voices and the Politics of the Involuntary

This essay investigates Romantic-era treatments of bird calls as “unpremeditated”, spontaneous, and involuntary. Looking at parrots, starlings, mockingbirds, gamecocks, and skylarks in the work of writers including John Thelwall, Percy Shelley, Thomas Beddoes, and Helen Maria Williams, I explore the way in which talking and singing birds are often understood through reference to materialist philosophy and the associationism of David Hartley. Taking Thelwall’s King Chaunticlere and John Gilpin’s Ghost, and Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ and A Defence of Poetry as my main focus, I argue that these writers use materialist metaphors of unconscious avian utterance to make nuanced claims about the seemingly ambiguous role of the will in political speech.

‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist Aimé Bonpland, the Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814-25), appeared as the seven-volume Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions (Longman, 1814-29). Her rather literal translation was as unpopular as Black’s was well liked by a British readership, but it enjoyed Humboldt’s approval. Previously overlooked archival material detailing the corrections he made to her translation illustrate the close collaborative nature of the undertaking, but also the stylistic freedoms Humboldt permitted her. Williams’s frequently creative (or downright ‘unfaithful’) translational choices favoured the idiom of the sublime in tropical descriptions, which, in their phrasing, also recalled lines from Milton, Thomson or Blake. Williams therefore allowed works from the British literary canon to echo through Humboldt’s prose, making it seem subtly familiar to Anglophone readers. This chapter concludes by focusing briefly on William MacGillivray’s Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1832), a successfully revised version of William’s Personal Narrative.

The Female Authors of Cadell and Davies

This chapter explores the publishing firm of Cadell and Davies and its relationships with its female authors. During the seven decades in which it operated, in various incarnations between 1765 and 1836, the firm published many influential female authors of the period, including Fanny Burney, Hannah Cowley, Felicia Hemans, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and Helen Maria Williams. Through a careful examination of the surviving correspondence and the bibliographical history of their publications of women's writing, this chapter engages in a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the firm’s business practices and women’s engagement with the commercial world of print. The print networks described in the chapter emphasize the centralized position, and asymmetrical power, that male publishers held within a marketplace abundant with female writers seeking to print their works.

Vindications and Reflections: The Lady’s Magazine during the Revolution Controversy (1789–1795)

This essay examines how the French Revolution and the controversy it spawned figure in one of the most important British women’s magazines of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: George Robinson’s Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832). Even though most scholars who have written on the magazine have dismissed it as an organ of female domestication, Koenraad Claes demonstrates that this pioneering publication is uniquely qualified as a document on this politically turbulent period. While the Lady’s Magazine, like most magazines, cannot be said to be a straightforward organ of any ideological position, it consistently made room for radical reformist views of the likes of Catharine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Wollstonecraft. Through a detailed analysis of how the successive phases of the Revolution Controversy, Claes reveals how readers of this period’s British women’s periodicals were better informed about ongoing political debates than we have long presumed.