Sensory Perception, History and Geology

William Molyneux's question to John Locke about whether a blind man restored to sight could name the difference between a cube and a sphere without touching them shaped fundamental conflicts in philosophy, theology and science between empirical and idealist answers that are radically alien to current ways of seeing and feeling but were born of colonizing ambitions whose devastating genocidal and ecocidal consequences intensify today. This Element demonstrates how landscape paintings of unfamiliar terrains required historical and geological subject matter to supply tactile associations for empirical recognition of space, whereas idealism conferred unmediated but no less coercive sensory access. Close visual and verbal analysis using photographs of pictorial sites trace vividly different responses to the question, from those of William Hazlitt and John Ruskin in Britain to those of nineteenth-century authors and artists in the United States and Australia, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Cole, William Haseltine, Fitz Henry Lane and Eugene von Guérard.

“Society Is a Simple and Beautiful Science”

This chapter investigates British socialism’s symbolic birth: Robert Owen’s unveiling of his plan for an entirely new social order in the summer of 1817. Although Owen has been canonized as a stalwart of the political left, his proposals baffled and enraged partisans across the ideological spectrum. Commentators had great difficulty deciding whether his “Plan” was radical or reactionary—or even if it was “political” at all. Using the vitriolic debates that consumed the Plan as a focal point (and drawing on contemporary commentators as varied as William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, and George Cruikshank), this chapter undertakes a revisionary interpretation of Owenite socialism that uncovers its latent aesthetic core. Owen and his followers have long been associated with utilitarian indifference, if not downright vulgarian insensitivity, to the arts. However, Owen’s very ambition to govern citizens without recourse to the state or the Church rests upon an aesthetic substratum. This chapter demonstrates that the curriculum Owen designed to produce human beings who would not require “politics” to produce consensus relies upon extensive training in the musical arts to inculcate the principle of universal harmony. The final part of this chapter locates the origins of British anti-socialist rhetoric at the juncture of Malthusian political economy and anti-Jacobin polemic.

Romantic Drama

Among all modes of literary expression, drama was the most popular, most lucrative, and most influential of the era. S. T. Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, Lord Byron, Mary Mitford were among the poets whose plays were successfully performed, and Coleridge joined Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt as critics of the drama. To shield church and state, censorship was exercised under the Licensing Act (1737). This Act granted to the licensed Theatres Royal the exclusive right to perform traditional comedy and tragedy. Originally directed to perform only musical entertainment and pantomime, the unlicensed theatres gradually introduced more spoken dialogue and relied on melodrama to attract audiences.

"Boxing at the Fives Court" from Pierce Egan's Life in London (1821)

Pierce Egan's scurrilous Life in London (aka Real Life in London) was a publishing sensation. It described the adventures of Tom and Jerry, two well-heeled bucks eager to take their pleasure in the local fleshpots. The illustrations were much sought-after. This one shows a boxing match (such matches were illegal) in the Fives Court in St Martin's Lane, a popular hang-out for such ne'er do wells as William Hazlitt.

The Romantic Essay and the City

This chapter explores the ambivalence of the Romantic familiar essay form towards the city by looking at the two main literary tributaries that fed into it—the current of self-consciously pro-metropolitan prose writing that had been inaugurated by Steele and Addison, and the more anti-commercial tradition of retirement poetry epitomized by William Cowper and the Lake poets. It looks at the way in which Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb in particular strove to bury their continuing misgivings about the polis as a centre of commercial rapacity and unruly popular politics in celebrations of the city as being, under certain controlled conditions, a precious haven of imaginative activity, personal reminiscence, and literary tradition. Their aim, even if it was never quite articulated as such, was to turn the Romantic periodical essay into a prose medium that was as sensitive as Wordsworth’s poetry to the ravages of recent historical change, while maintaining, in the end, a more progressive and forward-looking attitude to it.