This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly. This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.
In their own day
the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though
it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of
substance to many of the charges against them. [2] Many did seek to challenge the received ideas
of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may
occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to
their condemnation by the guardians of propriety. Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political
radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the
writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron. Without inquiry into why many of the
principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so
considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by
their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National
Enquirer.
In the Romantic
era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the
cultural significance it has since acquired.
Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even
illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas. Then as now, many addicts began with a
doctor’s prescription. Yet
semi-recreational use existed as well. Southey
and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling
nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes,
and James Watt. [3]
With the conquest
of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed
alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines. Though consumed throughout English society,
the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such
an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4] Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium
dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if
not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs. Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist
Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a
sensation in 1821. Shelley took to
carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety. Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired
in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years. Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his
degree of use is not.
Scholars continue
to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry. Though opium’s effects are primarily
soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and
imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity
they would have experienced in any event.
Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to
an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive. Whereas most earlier writers had striven
either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of
patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership,
this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens
and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of
the imagination.
Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting
to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social
opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5] Shelley
was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity of Atheism. [6] He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming
that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and
Christianity supported only by emotion.
He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7] Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like
a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a
semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in
life.
Coleridge himself had become a
free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back
through Unitarianism to orthodoxy. Often
labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about
Christianity. In his preface to his Vision
of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in
political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the
“Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations,
who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct,
have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that
revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable
entirely to disbelieve.” [9] Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s
clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10] In
his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to
acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]
To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary
projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus
to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven.
In politics virtually all the
Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which
made them radicals in their day. Wordsworth
made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the
Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop
of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime. He rapidly turned conservative in politics as
well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]
Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a
consistently revolutionary view. His “Song
to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.
And there is perhaps no more bitter
line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s
“England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and
dying King,” The poem concludes with a
hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our
tempestuous day.” Indeed Marx’s daughter
was proud to claim him as a socialist. [13]
Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge
and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the
principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism”
or the collective ownership of all property.
Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced. The two collaborated on The Fall of
Robespierre commenting on the events in France. In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived
newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal
suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.
Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his
friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic
circle. In a series of journals
beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the
British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George
IV. Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the
Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation. Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s
Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of
his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of
domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just
closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country,
or the respect of posterity." [14]
This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer)
arrested for libel. Though the Hunts had
before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict
them. This time, however, the two were found
guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.
Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt
practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable
two-room private suite in the infirmary.
There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian
blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a
cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable
couches. According to Lamb, “there was
no other such room, except in fairy tale.” Attended by a servant, he there received a
stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15] After he had served his term, when he went to
Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political
paper not subject to British censorship.
It is a measure of the degree to which
ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats,
far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of
what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working
class. His sonnet “Written On The Day
That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s
Magazine. Perhaps the best statement
of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in
which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread
a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present
struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has
rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent
distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r
experience.” To Keats “This is no
contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16] The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule
of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin. The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused
with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats
and others.
Byron defended the Luddites in the House
of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform. For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he
declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but
the country’s working people.
it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses –
that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all
the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to
despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often
speaks the sentiments of the people. [18]
Byron wrote for the radical
British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian
nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be
called an anti-colonial struggle.
While drug use and transgressive religious
and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even
greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives. Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon
in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal
lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of
immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19]
Shelley had said of marriage in Queen
Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more
studiously hostile to human happiness.” Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook,
daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger
sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays. Though they had two children, they had all
but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin,
herself sixteen at the time. Her illegitimate
step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage
becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra.
The complexities of life among these
free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while
socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny
Imlay, (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft
and an American businessman) in 1814.
She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was
five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been). Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved
in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently
unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and
suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20] T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The
Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him
he could not be jealous. Later, he may
well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21] During Shelley’s residence abroad, he
fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that
his wife was the mother). He was
involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her
lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was
staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter
of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.
If providing even a brief summary of
Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is
impossible. He was constantly pursuing
both men and women. His gay liaisons
began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and
included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his
death. When he traveled to Greece, he
felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers
including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.
He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos,
and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more
complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over
two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the
phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.
He had as well an extraordinary number of
heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time. Most notoriously, he had an affair for years
with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her. In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the
joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the
first endures the last!”
In the interest of both cash and
respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth
of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant
philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady
Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with
him and sued for divorce.
The combination of his infamy and his
debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.
Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was
doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.
He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article
describing him as diabolical. “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having
exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of
sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no
longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend,
laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements
of which human life is composed.” As a
result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres,
lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be
insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend
told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people
who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22] In Europe he
cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house
he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni. When he broke up with this last lover, she
committed suicide. He turned then to the
Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years. At the time of his death he was lavishly
patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl.
So the bill of particulars one wishing to
condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large
part, well-substantiated. Since then the
actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of
Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned. Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of
the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of
their work. As much as the perceived
contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those
exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times
and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men
at all: their work. In the evaluation of
art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no
weight.
Yet the partial displacement of the arts
from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both
themes and styles. It may be that a
lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans,
through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and
showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent
fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to
accept the assumptions of their time.
The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and
free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected
that artists often live by different rules than others.
.
1. The term was first
used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the
Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le
savant et l’industriel.”
2. Similar claims
have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as
in the originating example, with some reason. The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on
their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z.
(John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly
out of date.
3. Laughing gas
remained a subject of interest. In the
late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt
to experience mystical states. See
lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901). James had earlier written an anonymous
article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The
Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review
on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”
4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of
Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic
Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge,
Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).
Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that
Keats, too, was a regular user.
5. Britain’s
blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in
Scotland. A similar law remains in
effect in Northern Ireland. The last
conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia
played a role in that case.
6. In 1834 a proposal to allow attendance by
Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.
Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to
subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith. In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years
further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those
institutions.
7. Letter to
Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.
8. Letter from
Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.
9. Byron was then
inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own
preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no
business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had
once held.
10. One example is The
Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of
1819. The anonymous publication warns
that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his
real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his
club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.
11. Letter of Robert
Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.
12. See his “Two
Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”
He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.
13. Edward and Eleanor
Marx-Aveling,
“Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.
14. The Examiner,
22 March 1812.
15. See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.
16. To George &
Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.
17. The term,
referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of
eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.
18. George Gordon
Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in
one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.
19. While far greater
latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last
few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and
politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual
behavior.
20. Bieri, James
(2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press. 170, 193–5
21. Richard Holmes, Shelley,
the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.
22. “Some
Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,” Blackwood’s, August 1819. The response was unpublished until John
Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.
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