The opposite of news: rethinking the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and the mass media.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-06

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University

I heartily recommend a dose of the British Romantic poets to defuse the constant barrage of current news reports.

--Letter to the Editor, New York Times, 31 March 2003

THE POSSIBILITY OF AN OVERLAP BETWEEN EARLY ROMANTIC LITERATURE and newspaper journalism might seem unlikely to scholars, since many of the central tenets of a key Romantic document, William Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, appear to be fundamentally opposed to the transitory, episodic, and heterogeneous qualities of any periodical publication, especially a daily newspaper. Romantic literature, as the author of the letter quoted above suggests, is generally seen as the opposite of news, an antidote to the dominance of newspapers and the proclivities of their readers. This view has been rigorously challenged, most prominently by Marjorie Levinson, who has drawn attention to the topicality and contemporary significance of Wordsworth's verse, implicitly situating the poems within the world of current affairs. (1) But a specific, personal and sometimes overlooked contest for readers and for authority emerges from the relationship between newspapers, journalism and literature in the year that Wordsworth wrote the Preface.

Eighteen hundred was a year in which the battle between newspapers and books for readers was felt particularly keenly. Mary Robinson, writing in the Monthly Magazine in late 1800, provides a valuable insight into this battle:

There never were so many monthly and diurnal publications as at the present period; and to the perpetual novelty which issues from the press may in a great measure, be attributed the expansion of mind, which daily evinces itself among all classes of people.... The daily prints fall into the hands of all classes: they display the temper of the times; the intricacies of political manoeuvre; the opinions of the learned, the enlightened, and the patriotic. But for the medium of a diurnal paper, the letters of JUNIUS had been unknown, or perhaps never written. Political controversy and literary discussions are only rendered of utility to mankind by the spirit of emulative contention. The press is the mirror where folly may see its own likeness, and vice contemplate the magnitude of its deformity. It also presents a tablet of manners; a transcript of the temper of mankind; a check on the gigantic strides of innovation; and a bulwark which REASON has raised, and, it is to be hoped, TIME will consecrate, round the altar of immortal LIBERTY! (2)

Robinson's notion of the "emulative contention" within and between the press and literature is a canny summary of the state of affairs in 1800. Literature and journalism, as Lennard Davis has convincingly argued, spent the eighteenth century disengaging themselves from their tangled relationship while struggling to secure the same pool of readers. In Factual Fictions, Davis outlines a tentative theory of the relationship between news and fiction, arguing that, prior to the eighteenth century, "the news/novels discourse is a kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels--that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones." (3) Davis' intriguing speculation implicitly raises a critical challenge for poets around 1800: if, by the end of the eighteenth century, readers turned to newspapers for facts and to novels for pleasure, what role could poetry play in the literary marketplace, and how could poets engage with a public accustomed to reading in this way?

This challenge evidently underpins Wordsworth's characterization of contemporary readers in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Unlike the 1798 Advertisement's warnings about the "feelings of strangeness and aukwardness" that readers would have to confront when approaching the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads--warnings that juxtaposed Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems with contemporary expectations about poetry--the 1800 Preface identified the challenge to the new edition as emanating from journalism and the literary genres and tastes that it spawned and fostered. (4) Declaring that "the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants," Wordsworth specifically targeted "the present day" as a critical moment for writers and readers:

For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. (WPrW 1: 128)

This familiar passage of the Preface no doubt displays the beginning of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's lifelong distaste for the proliferation of reading matter and the growth of an unregulated reading public, but the language Wordsworth employs shows that his concern does not necessarily relate to the general expansion of the periodical press. By singling out current affairs and "the rapid communication of intelligence," Wordsworth specifically addresses the newspaper and daily journalism, rather than the monthly magazines and reviews, in his attack on readers' tastes. It is important to acknowledge this specific target because it points to the effect of Coleridge's recent experiences with newspaper journalism on the 1800 Lyrical Ballads and thus on an early and influential formulation of the Romantic author's profession. Coleridge had returned to the Lake District in April 1800 following six months of intense and largely successful work for Daniel Stuart's Morning Post in London. Although critical attention obscures this biographical connection by extrapolating a general assault on contemporary reading practices from this passage, an attack on the daily newspaper as a medium and journalism as a genre would have had unmistakable private significance for Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1800. Our understanding of the formulation of the Romantic movement that takes place in the Lyrical Ballads would be expanded if we acknowledged the role played by Coleridge's journalism, which is not only a bridge between Romantic texts and the daily press, but also a catalyst for the move to distinguish the poetic vocation from journalism and to convert the newspaper reader into a consumer of Romantic poetry.

Scholars have come close to making this connection, as David Riede does when he argues that, in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, "Literature, rising above 'force of circumstance' and stimulating events, is defined in effect as that which is not journalism, a cheap novel, or somewhat less obviously, as that which is not history." (5) But Riede does not press on towards the demonstrable personal and professional resonance that such a definition carried for Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1800. Likewise, a recent collection of essays on the 1800 Lyrical Ballads contains no index entry for the Morning Post and no account of Coleridge's journalistic efforts in this period. (6) Deirdre Coleman's work is more alert to the biographical significance. She notes that "Coleridge's excitement about the speed and reach of newspaper influence peaked at the very moment Wordsworth was decrying the reading public's 'craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies'" but does not elaborate on the effect that these potentially jarring attitudes in the collaborators might have had on the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. (7) This essay will resituate the Preface and some of the poets' editorial decisions within the context of Coleridge's contemporaneous exploits in journalism, and examine Wordsworth's "Michael" as a response to newspaper culture.

The problematic relationship between early Romantic literature and newspaper journalism is particularly relevant to Coleridge's career and reputation. If Paul Magnuson is correct when he suggests that the winter of 1799-1800 marks the beginning of Wordsworth's ascendancy in his friendship with Coleridge, this shift coincided with the latter's stint at the Morning Post. (8) In terms of the relationship between the poets, two distinct but contested spheres for writing and writers were gradually established in late 1799 and early 1800. One was centered around poetry, Wordsworth and the Lake District, where William and Dorothy Wordsworth operated as "intellectual 'culture workers' setting up business in a region far removed from the cultural capital where such business was normally conducted." (9) The other was centered around journalism, Coleridge and London. These spheres had to be reintegrated later in 1800 when work began on the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge himself is responsible for some of the neglect his journalism has suffered; as Zachary Leader has noted, he tended to separate journalism and poetry from one another in his mind, and to privilege poetry over other pursuits. (10) But to read the journalism in this segregated or marginalized way is to read from the vantage point of a division between the ideal artist and the journalist that was yet to be clearly theorized for the new generation of poets when Coleridge joined the Morning Post in 1799. The foundations of this division lie in the experiences of 1799 and 1800, a period which saw the beginning of Coleridge's professional disenfranchisement, as he increasingly believed that he was excluded from the poetic enterprise. This sense of disenfranchisement owes a great deal to the taint that he believed newspapers and journalism had introduced into his writing and his life as a writer. Unfortunately, the project to rescue his newspaper journalism has initiated another, subtler disenfranchisement. In the limited number of critical works that deal with the journalism, there is a persistent though understandable flaw. The newspaper articles are almost exclusively treated as Coleridgeana, rather than as works of journalism. Frequently, this occurs because the journalism is deployed to augment a larger argument about better-known works. (11) But such an approach tends to attribute some special power to Coleridge as a journalist, which ultimately gives the articles an air of transcendence. Both the newspaper articles...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.