Jude Nixon

Salem State University, English, Faculty Member

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Professor of English and former Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Salem State University, and habilitated Professor in the Polish Academy. Secondary appointments at Wyższa Szkoła Ekonomiczno-Humanistyczna, Bielsko-Biala, Poland, Silesian Polytechnic University, Poland, and G. d'Annunzio University, Italy. Former Professor of English and Director, The Honors College, Oakland University, Michigan. My teaching interests are Victorian literature and culture, and Anglo-Phone Caribbean literature. Author of several books, including Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater (1994), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism (2004), Science, Religion, and Natural Theology, volume 3 of the 8 volumes Victorian and Science and Literature (Pickering & Chatto, 2011), and The Sermons and Religious Writings, volume 5 of the 8 volumes The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (forthcoming, Oxford University Press). Publications also appear in such journals as Victorian Poetry, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, the Carlyle Studies Annual, the Dickens Studies Annual, Renascence, Studies in Browning, Times Literary Supplement, and The Hopkins Quarterly. Member of the editorial boards of Victorian Poetry, the Dickens Studies Annual, The Hopkins Quarterly, Mind, Bielsko-Biala, Poland, and Aracne: English Literature and Culture, Rome, Italy.

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Papers by Jude Nixon

Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War

Volume, 2025

Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War consider... more Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War considers how the writings of Charles Dickens are shaped by—and contribute to—Victorian discourses of race, nation, and empire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The “discursive roots of modern racism lie in British, European, and colonial writings,” writes Patrick Brantlinger. But often unacknowledged is the “extent to which racism informed virtually all aspects of Romantic and Victorian culture” (Taming Cannibals 6-7). Major questions about democracy, nation, and race came to the fore as an emerging democracy in England was negotiated, fragile democracy in the United States was thrown into question by Civil War, and black enfranchisement was debated in the current and former slave colonies of the Americas and the Caribbean. As the Civil War divided the United States, how did British writers imagine free Blacks fitting into the “imagined community” of British nationhood? Were they conceived as an inferior and therefore marginalizable racial unit (Dickens’s “hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples,” in The Tale of Two Cities, for example), against which British subjecthood was defined, or as legitimate partners in the rapidly evolving landscape of British governance? How was England’s sense of itself as a nation tied to its role as an imperial power? Building on foundational work by Michael Banton, Patrick Brantlinger, Linda Colley, Dennis Judd, Catherine Hall, Lillian Nayder, Grace Moore, Robert Young, and others, this volume will examine how these questions were engaged, answered, troubled, and/or evaded in the writings of Charles Dickens.

Authors might wish to explore Dickens’s changing stance on slavery, race, nation, and empire in writings published in the lead-up to and in the shadows of the US Civil War, such as Little Dorrit, “Perils of English Prisoners,” Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Drood (including his work co-written with Wilkie Collins); Dickens’s journals Household Words and All the Year Round; his correspondence; or earlier writings like “O’Thello,” Oliver Twist, American Notes, and Martin Chuzzlewit. We envision a global approach to the American Civil War, in which the fight over slavery pitted whites against whites and threatened the demise of the slaveocracy that was the South, even as Britain’s sense of itself as an imperial power was shaken by events in Niger, the Indian Rebellion, and the Morant Bay Rebellion. Themes could include but are not limited to slavery, race, gender, nation, imperialism, civil war, the colonies, insurrection, and pedagogical approaches to these topics.

Please submit a one-page proposal along with a brief bio no later than 30 September 2025 to the editors, Jude V. Nixon ([email protected]), Carolyn Vellenga Berman ([email protected]), and Jennifer MacLure ([email protected]).

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Science, religion and natural theology

Pickering & Chatto eBooks, 2011

Special issue: The poetry and spirituality of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Religion and The Arts, 2018

Kill[Ing] Our Souls with Literalism": Reading Essays and Reviews

Religion and The Arts, 2001

I f Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) swept across England like a cataclysmic flood, ... more I f Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) swept across England like a cataclysmic flood, as Charles Kingsley presciently observed, then the pseudonymous Essays and Reviews (1860) was the storm. 1 From this blast "troubling the stagnant waters of orthodoxy," the "orthodox English world," says Basil Willey, became "convulsed with indignation and panic." Of all the shocks Protestantism had received, Essays and Reviews was even "more alarming-a conspiracy of clergymen to blow up the Church from within" (137). With its "guerilla warfare of essays," in which "hundreds of points are touched, none completed," Essays and Reviews was analogous to "the scattering of poison in the wells of a city" (Moberly xxii, xxv), an allusion to the familiar nineteenth-century act of dumping raw, untreated sewage into the streets which then seeped into the wells contaminating water supplies. Essays and Reviews virtually "set a torch to what proved to be dry timber" (Cameron 266). Sales of these two Victorian archives were stunning. The Origin of Species sold all 1,250 printed copies on the day of publication. Three months later, 1,200 new copies were printed. In contrast, from March 1860, when Essays and Reviews appeared, to March 1861, its nine editions saw sales totaling no fewer than 17,000 copies. Had Essays and Reviews seen publication in 1859, as was planned (its delay due to Jowett's tardiness), it would have waged an impressive argument for its own monumentalism, to say nothing of how it may have shaped the reception of Darwinism. 2 In his recasted preface to the second edition of his Sermons on the Beatitudes (1861), a preface rewritten to censure Essays and Reviews, George Moberly observes the volume's frequent intimations of "doubt respecting the descent of mankind from a single pair" (xii). As Ieuan Ellis rightly estimates, "To set Essays and Reviews in its cultural context is to see it as a religious counterpart of those historically-dominated studies… which proposed to explain society and its institutions by their historical origins, an evolutionary process from lower to higher, from simpler to more complex forms" (92). The essayists clearly perceived an epistemological link to Darwinism, seeing it as a discursive field transgressing its own borders and revolutionizing entire systems of thought. Baden Powell, who along with Jowett

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Saint-Simonians, Industrial Feudalism, And Labor Economics: Carlyle And Southey

Mind, 2016

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Steadily Contemplating the Object of Faith": Newman, the Apologia, and Romantic Aesthetics

Nineteenth Century Prose, Jun 22, 1991

Critics who have observed Newman's indebtedness and, in some cases, aversion to Romantic thou... more Critics who have observed Newman's indebtedness and, in some cases, aversion to Romantic thought have pointed either to his few remarks on the Romantics in the Apologia Pro Vita Sua or to his implied preference for the imagination and the subjection of reason to the Illative Sense in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. For example, Merritt Lawliss and Alvan Ryan have argued that although Newman was nurtured on the Romantics, he gradually outgrew their influence. Lawliss asserts, focusing primarily on the imagination, that when Newman sets aside poetry to engage moral and religious issues, he becomes less Romantic and more Neoclassic. When he turns to the more important "theological and philosophical discourse," he relies "mostly on reason" (77, 80). Alvan Ryan contends that the Newman of the early Aristotle essay is not the same Romantic in The Idea of a University. "It is clear," he claims, that "Newman was on the side of the Romantic writers in his search for a warmer, deeper view of man," a view missing among contemporary writers; "yet Newman did not rest long within the camp of Romanticism" (136). The difficulty in pinning Newman down, in attempting to situate him within a literary tradition, stems from the fact that he possessed a comprehensive view of things. Thus, although his tradition remains essentially Romantic, one could as convincingly negotiate for his Neoclassicism. Still, Lewis Gates argues, not only was Newman's "youth and most impressionable years" nurtured on the Romantics, but he "took colour and tone from his epoch to a degree that has often been overlooked"; and his writings, which are "a genuine ex-pression of the Romantic spirit," can be understood only when examined in rela-tionship to that period (112). Thomas Vargish concurs, insisting that the intellectual affinities between Wordsworth and Newman "deserve our extended attention because they illustrate most clearly the degree to which Newman assimilated for Christian orthodoxy a vision of the mind's powers characteristic of Romanticism" (100). And, says John Beer, Newman cannot be understood unless we take "some account of the Romanticism which dominated the artist and intellectual world of his youth" (193). The following three passages indicate the degree to which Newman's sensibilities were shaped by Romanticism. In a 10 May 1828 letter to his sister Jemima following the death of their sister, Mary, Newman described a ride to Cuddesdon, a little village skirting Oxford: The country too is beautiful--the fresh leaves, the scents, the varied landscape. Yet I never felt so intensely the transitory nature of this world as when most delighted with these country scenes ... I wish it were possible for words to put down those indefinite vague and withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and make it sick. Dear Mary seems embodied in every tree and hid behind every hill. What a veil and curtain this world of sense is! beautiful but still a veil. (Letters and Diaries 2:69) Three years later he described another trip, this one to Devonshire. Charmed by the landscape, he wished to" dissolve into essence of roses, or be attenuated into an echo.... What strikes me most is the strange richness of every thing. The rocks blush into every variety of colour" (Letters 2: 343). And a passage from his sermon "The Second Spring," which forecasts England's return to Roman Catholicism, reads: "We mourn over the blossoms of May, because they are to wither; but we know, withal, that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops" (346). The focus of this paper, however, is not to determine the role of the senses and the importance of nature to Newman. Rather, it seeks to ferry out from Newman's protean corpus the significant points of intersection with Romantic aesthetics. It argues that Newman's aesthetic is consonant with nineteenth-century Romanticism; and while he admitted a fondness of the Classics and admired the eighteenth-century writers from whose epistemological stance the Romantics departed, still his views on literature, religion, and reason remain essentially Romantic. …

Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlyle's Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism

Nineteenth-century Contexts, Jul 1, 2012

Page 1. Page 2. Thomas Carlyle Resartus Page 3. Page 4. Thomas Carlyle Resartus Reappraising Carl... more

BOOK REVIEW: Norman White.HOPKINS IN IRELAND. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002

Victorian Studies, Oct 1, 2003

Fathering Graces at Hampstead: Manley Hopkins' "The Old Trees" and Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars&quot

Victorian Poetry, 2006

On January 23, 1879, a letter which began four days earlier on January 19, Hopkins wrote to Rober... more On January 23, 1879, a letter which began four days earlier on January 19, Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges from Oxford: I enclose some lines by my father, called forth by the proposal to fell the trees in Well Walk (where Keats and other interesting people lived) and printed in some local paper. See what you think of them. And return them, please." (1) Three weeks later on February 12, 1879, Hopkins, in a letter to his mother, expressed concern over the fate of the trees: "I hope the Well Walk trees are saved. I do not know if my father wants the printed copy of his choicely phrased lines back again." (2) Hopkins had been at Oxford for only two months, having arrived on November 21, 1878, from the Church of the Immaculate Conception at Farm Street, London, where he had served under the well-loved Father Peter Gallwey. Hopkins was now curate at St. Aloysius's Church, and enthusiastically announced his return in a February 27, 1879 letter to Canon Dixon: "You will see that I have again changed my abode and am returned to my Alma Mater and need not go far to have before my eyes 'The little-headed willows two and two' and that landscape the charm of Oxford, green shouldering grey, which is already abridged and soured and perhaps will soon be put out altogether, the Wytham and Godstow landscape." (3) In the postscript to a letter written on that same day, Hopkins remarked to Bridges that he had commenced something, "if I cd. only seize on it, on the decline of wild nature" (p. 73). Oxford was most resplendent in the spring, "but its own skeleton in wintertime" (Correspondence, p. 20). To reacquaint himself with the area and to recapture his undergraduate years, Hopkins turned, characteristically, to landscape. He took the familiar towpath to Binsey to view his favorite aspens gracing the banks of the Isis. It now appears that Hopkins' trip to Binsey was triggered by the poem his father sent him on the fate of the Well Walk trees. Highgate Wood in Hampstead Heath was known for its black poplars, Britain's rarest native trees, and it had always been felt that they were under the threat of extinction. Hopkins journeyed to Binsey mentally burdened, anxious to see whether they were still standing. The Manley Hopkins poem reminded him of his "park" and "pleasaunce" ("To Oxford") perhaps under threat. To Hopkins' consternation, the black poplars were all felled, cut down like hapless soldiers on the battlefield: "Not spared, not one." (4) The act itself altered the Binsey-Port Meadow landscape, transforming it into the featurelessness Hopkins so resented. The change was part of the "graceless growth" he was beginning to witness taking place around Oxford, where trees were being replaced by bricks and mortar, country by town. On the afternoon of March 13, 1879, Hopkins reported his horror at the demise of the aspens: "I am sorry to say that the aspens that lined the river are everyone felled" (Correspondence, p. 26). Two weeks later, he penned the companion poems "Duns Scotus's Oxford" and "Binsey Poplars," and dispatched them to Dixon on March 29, 1879, noting that "they have not their last finish" (Correspondence, p. 26). (5) This was all within two months of receiving a copy of his father's poem "The Old Trees," protesting the destruction of limes lining Well Walk in Hampstead Heath. (6) Hopkins' grief and disgust at the devastation of poplars lining the Isis occasioned the beautiful elegy "Binsey Poplars," with the subtitle, really an obituary, "felled 1879": My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandaled Shadow that swarm or sank On meadow and river in wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve and hew-- Hack and rack the growing green! …

"Goldengrove unleaving": Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," Christina Rossetti's "Mirrors of Life and Death," and the Politics of Inclusion

Victorian Poetry, 2005

(For Isobel Armstrong) The now quite familiar argument for the inspiration behind Hopkins' &q... more (For Isobel Armstrong) The now quite familiar argument for the inspiration behind Hopkins' "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child" asserts that lines from the poem describing Margaret's poignant response to the falling leaves may have been derived from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. (1) As the argument goes, the little girl at the novel's opening, whether Maggie Tulliver or Eliot's authorial persona, becomes Hopkins' Margaret, both of whom lament the all-too-soon demise of the season that in turn analogizes the ephemeralness of things. Hopkins had only recently read The Mill on the Floss (1860), and on February 22, 1881, had even solicited John Henry Newman's estimation of Eliot. Heretofore unknown, however, are the subtle echoes, perhaps even direct borrowings, between Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," his "song to the decaying year" ("Now I am minded"), and Christina Rossetti's "Mirrors of Life and Death," with its "long sequence of mourning images." (2) This essay, then, seeks to document the poem's indebtedness to Christina Rossetti and, as well, Hopkins' profound desire to be included in an anthology connected to her. In comparing these two "Latecomers to the Tractarian Movement," Margaret Johnson finds "many echoes of theme and approach" in Hopkins' "early Oxford poems," a "common theological and aesthetic base," "concordances of subject and metaphor," but each "without knowledge of the other's [lyrics]." (3) But Johnson, and for that matter Rossetti's biographer Jan Marsh, who also acknowledges Rossetti's mentoring of Hopkins, ignore altogether the shaping influence of "Mirrors of Life and Death" on "Spring and Fall." And so too does Jerome Bump, who otherwise demonstrates convincingly that Rossetti, Hopkins' "icon" and "the woman who was to inspire some of his best art in the 1860s," provided him "examples of simple, unified songs" which liberated him from the fetters of pseudo-Keatsian "excesses of his early word-painting." (4) No doubt, says W. H. Gardner, "the poetry of Christina Rossetti exerted a strong influence" on Hopkins' early composition) Perhaps more than anything else, Christina Rossetti modeled for Hopkins the poetry of religious faith in which the two--poetry and religion--become interfused and inseparable. That she also remained chaste for the kingdom of heaven's sake might have appealed to him. "Her religion imposed duties so imperative that she could not compromise with them, but, more than that, it made even marriage an impossibility." (6) The two also share the casual openings to poems. "Few poets," says C. M. Bowra, "have her gift of beginning a poem with the most homely and humble words or of using phrases which are consciously trite or commonplace, only to rise to some sudden burst and thereby to show that even in the drabbest conditions there are possibilities of dazzling splendour" (p. 264). In this Hopkins is easily Rossetti's match, with such matter-of-fact, ordinary, and mundane openings that give way to explosive images: "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring" ("Spring"), "On ear and ear two noises too old to end" ("The Sea and the Skylark"), "I remember a house where all were good" ("In the Valley of the Elwy"), "Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise" ("Hurrahing in Harvest"), "Sometimes a lantern moves along the night" ("The Lantern out of Doors"), and "Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by" ("The Candle Indoors"). Considering how much of Hopkins' poetry derived from actual experiences aesthetically appropriated, how much of it is "'autobiographical' fact," it is curious that "Spring and Fall" was "not founded on any real incident," suggesting, perhaps, the poem's mythopoetic origin. (7) Jeffrey B. Loomis observes the poem's ideological affinity to Robert Herrick's ephemeral "Daffodils" and sees Hopkins' young girl modeled in part after Goethe's Margarete: "The childlike epithet may even allude to Goethe's too-innocent heroine Gretchen (Margarethe) in Faust One; of all the Continental writers of his century, Goethe is the only one who receives repeated discussion in Hopkins' letters. …

"Death blots black out": Thermodynamics and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Victorian Poetry, 2002

HOPKINS' POETRY EMPLOYS TO A MARKED DEGREE TROPES OF ENERGY IN THE form of heat, fire, and li... more HOPKINS' POETRY EMPLOYS TO A MARKED DEGREE TROPES OF ENERGY IN THE form of heat, fire, and light. His discourse reveals an attraction to the emerging science of thermodynamics, especially an anxiety with the second law. His energy tropes admit a dialogue between the domains of science and literature, a conversation transcending the very tropes themselves; "shifting a metaphor from its initial field," as Gillian Beer observes, may bring to light homologies (or dissonances) that will propel new work." (1) Whereas tropes establish connections between things, discourse models" the metalogical operations by which consciousness, in general cultural praxis," comes to terms with its milieu. (2) At ontological levels, the universe "allows for cross-umwelt comparisons." Tropes raise "the possibility of isomorphism across evolutionary levels so distant that it would appear that chunking would have erased any similarities based on contiguity." (3) Unveiling these tropes, according to Richard Boyd, is "an essential part o f the task of scientific inquiry" (p. 362); for the "primary encounter with any text, be it metaphysics, poetry or biology, is linguistic, for texts are made of language." (4) While there might well be areas across which science and literature struggle to communicate, an impasse Douglas Hofstadter has called chunking," there are clearly areas of seepage, especially where the laws of thermodynamics are concerned, laws involving global systems that extend "far beyond science proper." (5) Thus it makes sense to talk about the ramifications of entropy on biological and social systems, the way James Gleick does, recognizing chaos in "the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes.... Chaos breaks across the lines that separate scientific disciplines," bringing together thinkers from cross-disciplinary studies asserting "strong claims about the universal behavior of complexity," among them "determinism and free will," "evolution," and "the nature of conscious intelligence." (6) I intend to explore the extent to which Hopkins' poetry deviates from and distills concepts of energy, especially notions of waste and recovery, and to show the disparate ways he employs tropes structuring the protean character of nineteenth-century energetics. Implicit in my argument is the assumption that the so-called divide between science and literature, C. P. Snow's bifurcated cultures, cannot readily be applied to Hopkins. His is an apologetic characterized by border crossings, excursions into the fluid territory of cross-disciplinary umwelts, which makes Hopkins an especially helpful segue into postmodernisr considerations. (7) Hopkins' conversion to Roman Catholicism (1866) and Jesuit affiliation (1868) granted him membership in a religious community open to scientific inquiry on the grounds that science reveals the mystery of the universe and is ultimately compatible with Church dogma. (8) Issues raised by the biological and geological sciences unsettled Victorians as well as Roman Catholic Victorians, like St. George Mivart, who imagined that there were in fact solutions within emerging scientific theories not incompatible to faith. A close friend and admirer of Darwin, the Catholic biologist Mivart reassured believers that evolution "need alarm no one, for it is, without any doubt, perfectly consistent with strictest and most orthodox Christian theology." (9) Less distressing, however, was the new energetics, with its first law ensuring divine superintendence of the universe and its second corroborating apocalyptic claims. Hopkins welcomed the freedom to explore new scientific frontiers (optics, for one), with all sorts of ambi tious plans to advance science, many of them, like so much of Hopkins' career, aborted or never undertaken. Speaking of Hopkins' interest in "the modern depiction of nature as an inhuman and aimless flux," Daniel Brown believes that the poem "I must hunt down the prize" "states a bold resolve to reclaim such territory for a more coherent view of nature than that which it ostensibly presents. …

“[M]any jewels set in dirt”: Christology, Pictures from Italy, and Pre-Raphaelite Art

Dickens studies annual, Jun 1, 2010

Victorian Science

Religion and The Arts, Sep 10, 2018

Now virtually unknown, Anne Pratt (1806–1893) remains an important Victorian illustrator, natural... more Now virtually unknown, Anne Pratt (1806–1893) remains an important Victorian illustrator, naturalist, and popularizer of science, whose Wild Flowers (1852) made a strong impression on Queen Victoria. While Pratt’s works addressed a largely female audience, their generic appeal, reflecting her profound botanical knowledge and astute insights into flower study, had an ever broader reach into the general public. Pratt authored over twenty books, among them Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-Side (1850), which saw four editions in ten years. Hopkins was given a second edition as a gift for his tenth birthday. Though he nowhere acknowledges Pratt but for an obscure reference in a letter to his mother, a precocious Hopkins would have found in Chapters the keen attention to nature he would later observe in Ruskin. Pratt’s study would have been an important precursor for Hopkins’s detailed observations of nature in his journals, diaries, and notebooks. Especially pronounced are their attempts to connect the beauty in nature to a benevolent Creator and a natural theology in which everything in nature, to use a Hopkins expression, “speaks and spells” Christ. In their theology of the aesthetics, the divine plays in “ten thousand places.”

Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry. Daniel Brown

Modern Philology, Aug 1, 2001

Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White. Edited with an Introduction by Graham Russell Hodges. Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1993. 200 pp. $26.95

Journal of Church and State, Jun 1, 1994

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Victorian Religious Discourse

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2004

... Jude V. Nixon 12 ... of the Judeo-Christian nar-rative to authorize their subversion of patri... more ... Jude V. Nixon 12 ... of the Judeo-Christian nar-rative to authorize their subversion of patriarchal institutions.”62 George Tennyson's Victorian Devotional Poetry (1981) traces the Tractarian heritage in nineteenth-century devotional poetry, and John Maynard's Victorian Discourses ...

Framing Victorian Religious Discourse: An Introduction

Religion and religious discourse contributed meaningfully to the formation and definition of Brit... more Religion and religious discourse contributed meaningfully to the formation and definition of British national identity in the nineteenth century. “The center of Victorian discourse, in which all questions were implicated and to which all road led, was religion.”1 Important to that ideology of Englishness was the cultivation of “Distrust, even hatred, of papist and the papacy,” according to Richard Helmstadter. “In the nineteenth-century, anti-Catholicism was closely bound up with the Irish question, as well as with the tendency of Protestant Britons of all political parties and all denominations to identify their anti-Catholic venom with a self-satisfied celebration of British liberty.”2 England’s sense of itself—England’s Englishness—involved the way religion, and especially Protestantism, factored into nationness. “Protestantism was,” Linda Colley writes, “the foundation that made the invention of Great Britain possible,” forging “an unquestioned equation,” according to Gauri Viswanathan, “of Englishness with mainstream Anglicanism.”3 Not surprisingly, Colley commences her seminal study Britons with Protestantism, noticing that what cemented the nation was neither geography nor racial identity but religion, essentially Protestantism: “it was this shared religious allegiance … that permitted a sense of British national identity. … English Francophobia,” for example, had much to do with the sense that France was a Catholic country.4

“Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers”: Carlyle and Southey — The Saint-Simonians and Industrial Feudalism

Revue LISA, Mar 1, 2009

On s’est beaucoup interesse, et de facon approfondie, aux relations entre Thomas Carlyle et les R... more On s’est beaucoup interesse, et de facon approfondie, aux relations entre Thomas Carlyle et les Romantiques anglais et allemands. Mais, a ma connaissance, aucune etude n’a ete consacree aux liens d’amitie etroits qui unissaient Carlyle et Robert Southey et a la facon dont ces liens faconnerent le regard de Carlyle sur la societe. Les ecrits de Carlyle sur ses rencontres avec Southey sont eloquents et ses Reminiscences permettent d’avoir une idee de la nature de leurs nombreux entretiens. Carlyle met en avant le sens du Romantique de Southey et, sous l’influence de celui-ci, il est amene a s’interroger sur l’angoisse existentielle qui caracterise les grands ecrivains. Cet article prend en compte l’essai critique de Southey, Letters from England, ainsi que Sir Thomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress of Society, et les met en relation avec “Signs of the Times,” “Chartism,” Past and Present de Carlyle, ainsi qu’avec la correspondance de ce dernier, et decrit brievement les relations d’amitie entre les deux hommes, notamment la facon dont leurs echanges sur les Saint-Simoniens se rejoignaient autour d’une theorie medievale et feodale du travail. Leurs idees modelerent la politique d’anti-republicains tels que Lord John Manners, membre des Young Englanders conservateurs, lesquels consideraient que l’organisation feodale des ouvriers constituait la reponse aux deplacements qui leur etaient de plus en plus souvent imposes dans l’Angleterre industrielle, les privant de leur droit electoral. Gerard Manley Hopkins, qui desservait plusieurs paroisses dans les villes industrielles du Nord de l’Angleterre, rejoignait Carlyle par ses lamentations similaires sur le sort des ouvriers spolies, qu’il appelait les « Undenized ». Mais, comme Carlyle, qu’il critique, par ailleurs, Hopkins n’est pas favorable a la disparition de l’ordre ancien, bien qu’il reconnaisse volontiers que cet ordre etait dans l’incapacite d’ameliorer la condition des travailleurs pauvres.

Mind Journal 2/2016

and Humanities situated in Bielsko-Biała SAINT-SIMONIANS, INDUSTRIAL FEUDALISM, AND LABOR ECONOMI... more and Humanities situated in Bielsko-Biała SAINT-SIMONIANS, INDUSTRIAL FEUDALISM, AND LABOR ECONOMICS: CARLYLE AND SOUTHEY Thomas Carlyle's relationship to the German and English Romantics has received much critical scrutiny. However, no study has been undertaken an examination of the close friendship and ideological ties between Robert Southey (1774-1843) and Carlyle (1795-1881). Carlyle chronicles his every encounter with Southey, and the Reminiscences, completed in 1867 and published in 1881, recalls his impression of Southey, including his appointment to the Laureateship and of Southey becoming the butt of jokes. Even before their first meeting, Carlyle valued Southey's sense of the Romantic: desire for the exotic, the mysterious, love of the rural, interest in the earthy and earthly, the return to medievalism and Gothic, organicism, antiquarianism, feudal model of industry and labor, and enchantment with things natural and supernatural. Both men were influenced by Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and both shared a love of Scott, who had recommended Southey for the laureateship. The relationship with Southey prompted Carlyle to reflect on the struggles of great men, and on the particular angst of writers. Southey's views on industrialism, market economy, and labor received wholesale adoption by Carlyle. Carlyle's brief but intense encounter with the Saint Simonians has received much critical attention in studies by Ella Murphy, Hill Shine, Richard Pankhurst, René Wellek, and Ken Fielding. But none of these acknowledge Southey's role in popularizing the Saint Simonians, Carlyle's commentary on them based on the Southey review essay, and how these comments identify key points in the teachings of the Saint Simonians which would subsequently position Carlyle. The few who acknowledge the Southey review have not determined why Carlyle believed that it misrepresented Saint Simon and the Saint Simonians, whose story, says Richard Pankhurst, though largely forgotten today, "represents one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of nineteenth-century ideas, and one which was destined to exercise great influence over the minds of men" (vii). Carlyle's first comments on Southey (1774-1843) were in 1831. It was in response to Southey's review of the Doctrine de Saint Simon (1828-1829), which expanded his already broad, historical interest in religion. "I am reading the Doctrine de Saint Simon, preparatory to a paper upon that subject," Southey announced on 14 March 1830. "The subject is very curious, and the book written with great ability" (Life and Correspondence, 488). In the Abstract. Carlyle's relationship to the German and English Romantics has received much critical scrutiny. However, despite Carlyle close friendship with Southey, no study of the two, to my knowledge, has been undertaken. Carlyle writes meaningfully of their meetings, and his Reminiscences sketches their many encounters. Even before their first meeting, Carlyle valued Southey's sense of the Romantic. The relationship also caused Carlyle to reflect on the struggle of great men and on the particular angst writers experience. Largely unrecognized, too, is Southey's role in popularizing the Saint Simonians, which in turn would stage Carlyle's commentary on them, identifying key points of correspondence to his own beliefs. Southey also caused Carlyle to understand and then to empathize with the disposition of an exhausted sage, and from Southey he derived his critique of feudal industrialism, inept governmental leadership, bankrupt culture, economic disparity, dispossessed workers, and the despised poor. Southey's views on industrialism, market economy, and labor would receive wholesale adoption by Carlyle. Southey's reward in all of this is how approvingly he is remembered by Carlyle, when so many of his contemporaries were disparaged. Despite a certain shyness and nervous disposition, which Carlyle considered a feminine trait, "blue blushes and red," Southey emerges as affectionate, godly, empathetic, loyal, industrious, and chivalrous. The stuff of which he was comprised were, Carlyle felt, "things rare and worth, at once pious and true."

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Gerard Manley Hopkins and his contemporaries, Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater

Choice Reviews Online, 1994

Rethinking Race, Nation and Empire: Charles Dickens, Slavery, and the American Civil War

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Victorian Religious Discourse

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2004

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Gerard Manley Hopkins and his contemporaries, Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater

Choice Reviews Online, 1994

NeMLA 2019 - Call for Papers "Diasporic Spaces"

by Mariaconcetta Costantini and Jude Nixon

Language and People. The diaspora is an important cultural phenomenon in the formation of nationa... more

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CFP Becoming Home

by Mariaconcetta Costantini and Jude Nixon

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MLA 2024, Philadelphia, William Morris Session Rethinking William Morris for the Twenty-first Century

Modern Language Conference, 2024

This MLA session invites proposals exploring Morris’s relevance for the twenty-first century. Top... more This MLA session invites proposals exploring Morris’s relevance for the twenty-first century. Topics could include beauty, design (including Morris’s influences on black artists such as Kehinde Wiley & Althea McNish), architecture, ecology, the environment, sustainability, pollution, socialism, the carceral system, labor, leisure.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and short bio no later than Tuesday, 28 February 2023, to [email protected]

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Jude Nixon

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