Addison and the Romantics

This chapter looks at the Romantic essayists as critics and emulators of Addison. It begins with ‘The Round Table’ of 1815–17 and Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s paradoxical attempt to revive the form and spirit of The Tatler and Spectator in their own time, while simultaneously attacking the polite consensus that those two periodicals had brought into being. It shows Lamb and Hazlitt seeking to discriminate between ‘Steele’s’ Tatler, in which the ‘first sprightly runnings’ of the periodical essay form had supposedly run freshest and clearest, and ‘Addison’s’ Spectator, in which that flow had been regulated and tamed. It explores how the Romantics, and Romantic-period magazine culture more generally, sought to revitalize the familiar essay form by breaking down its straitjacket of politeness with the contemporaneous cult of personality. But it also shows how a powerful nostalgia for the ‘honeymoon of authorship’ that had been enjoyed by Addison and Steele in the early 1710s continued to haunt both Hazlitt and Lamb. Finally, the chapter looks at the way in which Hazlitt made Addison’s supposed move away from conversational intimacy towards alienated sententiousness an allegory of the development of modern literature more generally, thus characterizing him as a kind of Eve in the garden of modern prose, at one and the same time its fairest embodiment and the harbinger of its ruin.

Estrangements of the World in the Familiar Essay

Chapter 3 examines the form of the familiar or informal essay, which flourished in Republican China from the early 1920s until the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, facilitated by the vibrant periodical press in metropolitan areas. In a 1921 essay in the Beijing Chen Bao or Morning News, Zhou Zuoren points to a line of Anglo-American essayists from Addison to Chesterton as inspiration for his Chinese contemporaries. What characterizes the familiar or informal essay, as distinct from the critical or polemical essay, is a casual, informal tone, with which the author simulates conversation with the reader as peer and uses occasions in ordinary life as points of departure and topics for reflection. This chapter studies how Charles Lamb, one of the essayists Zhou mentions, and Zhou himself use the medium of the familiar essay to explore the strangeness of the everyday in writings that subtly position London and Beijing within a global network of multiple locations, metropolitan and otherwise.

On the Horizon of World Literature

This book compares Romantic England and Republican China as asynchronous moments of incipient literary modernity in different lifeworlds. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. The book examines select literary forms—the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel—as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms-of-life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages, activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, the texts analyzed explore by literary means the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds and ongoing traditions. Authors studied include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang. This book contributes to the fields of comparative literature, British Romanticism, and modern Chinese literature.

Charles Dickens: The Woolf Afterlife

This essay begins with a survey of attitudes towards Charles Dickens in the extended Stephen family, as these were inherited by the modernist writer Virginia Woolf. On the one hand, there is the strongly negative view of her Uncle Fitzy (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen), and the lukewarm, rather condescending opinion of her father Leslie Stephen. On the other, there is the legacy of enthusiastic attention and appropriation from William Makepeace Thackeray's two daughters – her aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie and (posthumously) Min, Leslie Stephen's first wife. In the second section I survey Woolf's critical writings on Dickens, adding a glance at the opinions of her husband Leonard. In both, there is an evolution towards greater attention and enthusiasm. Besides Woolf's familiar essay on David Copperfield (1849–50), I give prominence to lesser-known writings, in particular to her laudatory assessment and analysis of Bleak House (1852–3). The third and final part concerns signs of the influence of Dickens in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). The earlier, satiric part of the novel shows the impact both of Jane Austen and Dickens as ironists and humourists. During the tragic conclusion, influenced by a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen drops out, but Dickens is retained.

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.

Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity

Charles Lamb helped develop the familiar essay genre through his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833). Highly popular through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he faded from view through the twentieth century thanks to New Critical scorn. This chapter restores the Elian voice to contemporary conversations about the essay, tracing Lamb’s influence and afterlives in the work of later writers from Anne Fadiman to David Foster Wallace. More broadly, the chapter uses Lamb to open up the many nuances of the familiar essay, and to trace its origins and debts. From conversation to letter-writing to the work of the Romantic poets and the strange persona of Elia himself, it explores the many meanings and histories of the familiar mode.